“Your husband was on board when the ship sank, is that right?”
“He was never the same after that,” she said, sitting forward in her chair. Her eyes stayed glued to the glass in her hands. “It was all he thought about. He’d wake up sweating in the middle of the night. He spoke about it all the time: the panic on board, the people screaming and stampeding over each other. Some people take their traumas to the grave in silence, but with him it was the opposite. I think he told me the story of every person on that ferry. For weeks he spoke of nothing else. He wouldn’t even listen to our little boy when he came home from school. In the evening, he’d sometimes go off on a tangent halfway through a film, telling us about the girl he’d seen punching a granddad in the face. He’d wake me up in the night to share some episode that had come back to him. Like the man who jumped overboard shouting ‘My glasses, my glasses!,’ his hands pressing against his face to make sure he didn’t lose them, while his wife tried to cling on to a rubber life ring. Women trampling over teenagers, people yelling in different languages, and so many other horrors. It was terrifying to hear. Of course Yann saw some heroic behavior, or just some good, altruistic acts. But those didn’t stay with him; he spoke less about them. He did love the story of a Frenchwoman whose husband had yelled at her, ‘Save what you can.’ And in her panic, she’d grabbed the first thing that came to hand: a plastic salt shaker! Yann went to see them again after the shipwreck. The woman had kept the salt shaker in a glass cabinet. ‘I’d take this over my jewelry box any day: it’s precious to me,’ she had said. Yann liked that couple.”
“Did anyone have any cause for complaint regarding your husband’s conduct during the accident?” Lebreton said, leaning forward.
“No, no one. And after hearing the survivors’ condolences at his funeral, I can be absolutely sure of that: Yann behaved like a true sailor.”
Rosière was admiring the living room’s ochre wallpaper. Really gives a room some oomph, wallpaper: more crisp, more refined.
“Could anyone have wanted to harm him?” Lebreton asked softly.
“Are you joking?”
The abruptness of her tone yanked Rosière from her decorative reverie. They were getting to the heart of the matter, when the accusations would start flying thick and fast. Maëlle Guénan simply could not believe she was being asked this again:
“Jallateau! It’s all his fault—Jallateau, the shipbuilder. There’s no doubt he was behind the murder. When it came to foreign clients, he skimped on safety checks and materials. The bow doors were too weak: they gave way and the ramp flooded. After taking on water, the ferry keeled over in less than an hour. On top of that, the public address system on board was defective, so the passengers didn’t know which deck to go to. Yann wanted to sue the crook. He built a case and contacted as many passengers as possible—Americans, Cubans—to get them to testify. He visited the French passengers one by one—it took him weeks. He prepared a document this thick,” she said, holding her thumb and forefinger two inches apart. “Then he went to Saint-Nazaire to see Jallateau. And three days later, he was dead. No illness, no accident. A bullet.”
She stared at them in turn, her eyes gleaming. She was exhausted by all this injustice, drained by the delays and inaction.
“And to this day, there hasn’t been a single arrest.”
When Lebreton and Rosière came out onto the street, the rain was still running down the windows, though the sunshine was doing its best to break through the charcoal-gray clouds.
“Jallateau the powerful versus Guénan the insubordinate. The lone ranger heading into battle with nothing but his pants and a pocketknife—always makes for a juicy story,” Rosière said amidst blowing her nose. “On the other hand, the shipbuilder must have known that he’d end up as suspect number one.”
The capitaine rolled her hankie into a ball and slipped it up her sleeve, then let out a squeal of delight as she saw that both Lexus and dog were intact. Pilote bounced up and smeared the windows with saliva.
“The original detectives didn’t find a shred of evidence against him,” Lebreton replied. “But he may well have called in a gun for hire. Or maybe someone just used their own gun: a trial would have put lots of jobs at risk. When the guys at the shipyard saw Guénan showing up with his case notes, it must have made them sweat.”
“True. And sailors aren’t renowned for being the brightest.”
“Unlike police officers—remarkable how quickly they managed to solve this case,” Lebreton said mockingly.
Rosière took his point with a nod.
“Jallateau’s company is based at Sables-d’Olonne nowadays,” he continued. “He must have gotten fed up with ferries—now he’s taking commissions for luxury catamarans. I think this calls for a day at the seaside.”
“Couldn’t agree more,” she said. “Hey, it was pretty nice, the wallpaper in her living room, don’t you think? We could do with a bit of that at the commissariat.”
Évrard closed the door to her teenage bedroom, with its starlit ceiling, poster of Scorsese’s Casino, and single bed. For the past six months, she had been back with her parents. She headed through to the hallway and picked her windbreaker off the polished-wood coat stand. Before leaving, she poked her head into the kitchen to say good-bye to her mother, who responded with a “knock ’em dead.”
Out on the pavement, Évrard absentmindedly checked the contents of her pocket through the waterproof material. Her lucky euro was there, safe and sound. Her last euro: the one she didn’t gamble away; the one she could use to rebuild her life. At times she had been tempted to throw it into the Seine, just to see what would happen. It
