14
“Right, he’s refusing,” Capestan announced as she came into Torrez’s office.
“Did he tell it to you in so many words?”
The lieutenant rested his elbows on the reams of printed sheets spread across his desk. He seemed surprised that Valincourt had even agreed to take her call.
“No, I got one of his assistants, who relayed a message from the divisionnaire: he can’t see us right now, but we shouldn’t hesitate to contact him at a later stage or to bring a précis of the investigation to his attention, et cetera, et cetera.”
Capestan sighed. Out of all the officers connected with the Sauzelle case, the only one still in the region was Valincourt. He was already a big cheese at the time, so he had done more overseeing than actual investigating and was therefore unlikely to remember a great deal. On top of that, the divisionnaire was hardly the most available or accommodating resident of number 36.
Torrez was frowning with the resignation of a man who had always endured refusals from his colleagues. He gave Capestan a faint smile before reverting to his standard prickly expression as he continued running through Naulin’s criminal record.
The commissaire stood there looking vacantly at Torrez, waiting for a decision to materialize. According to his assistant, Valincourt was at the shooting range in La Chapelle. In ordinary circumstances, she could have gone along and played the chance-encounter card, but bearing in mind she had been relieved of her weapon, she was not really supposed to go there anymore. Valincourt would know that she was there to force his hand. Not that that was a big drama.
“I’m going to see him,” she declared suddenly. “It’ll be harder for him to send me packing face-to-face.”
“If you say so,” Torrez said, in a pessimistic mumble.
Arriving at porte de la Chapelle, a part of Paris shorn of even a glimmer of charm, Capestan passed beneath the overpass to the Périphérique and pulled into the upper level of a run-down parking garage. She rang the old, unmarked button of the intercom and, after stating her name and rank, pushed open the steel door. The shooting range was on the top floor and the graffiti-covered elevator was out of order, so Capestan took the stairs, the rat-a-tat of the revolvers marking the way. On every floor, the doors were bricked up with cinder blocks, behind which she imagined the endless ranks of empty parking spaces in the darkness. This place really made you wish you had your weapon.
At the top, she showed her ID card to the old man smiling at her through the grille. Above his counter, some surveillance cameras were relaying a grainy black-and-white picture. The elderly guard struggled to hide his surprise at seeing her again and murmured a few words that she couldn’t properly hear. In her uncertainty, she nodded and made her way toward the large, neon-lit room that served as a clubhouse.
The place was pretty much deserted. No one was playing pool or foosball. The walls were covered in James Bond film posters, and a few plastic plants supplied the room’s only dashes of color. Two men were practicing in a gallery with a glass back, similar to your average squash court.
The commissaire was ill at ease, physically feeling the absence of the Smith & Wesson at her waist. Like a champion freestyler at the edge of the pool without her swimsuit, she stood in the doorway and tried hard to keep her dignity as her eyes searched for Valincourt.
He was sitting by himself at a table for four, with the case for his weapons resting on the chair next to him. He was drinking coffee from a plastic cup and reading a newspaper. Behind him, the large glass cabinet full of club medals and trophies seemed to honor his senior-ranking status. As he looked up and saw her, a brief grimace of disapproval contorted his distinguished features. With a reluctant motion of the hand, he invited her to come and join him, already anticipating the reason for her visit.
As she walked up to him, Capestan was all smiles. This was an opportunity to glean some information, so best to approach it as delicately as possible. She quickly slid into the chair opposite Valincourt, turning her back to the room.
“Good morning, Monsieur le Divisionnaire, and thank you for—”
“Make it quick.”
Determined not to be ruffled, Capestan nodded and cut to the chase:
“As I explained to your assistant, we are reopening the Marie Sauzelle case. She was killed in 2005 in Issy-les-Moulineaux. It’s a while back, I know, but you worked on the case and I was wondering if you had any lingering impressions about it.”
Valincourt searched about in his memory for a few moments.
“Yes, Marie Sauzelle . . . There had been a spate of burglaries around the area at that time. First-time novices under the control of some big racketeer. The poor woman heard something, the guy panicked, and he killed her,” Valincourt said, shaking his head slowly. “At her age, she didn’t stand a chance.”
He seemed genuinely sickened by it, wearing the characteristic expression of the police officer lost in his memories, painfully running through the long list of people he had never managed to arrest. In spite of his stiff appearance, the divisionnaire was displaying a certain sadness, and Capestan was surprised to detect a glimpse of the man behind the mask. She did not, however, lose her train of thought.
“It’s strange, but for a first-timer, the guy didn’t leave a single trace . . .”
“What do you expect me to say? It was a first-timer with gloves. Any idiot with a television and eyes knows that trick.”
“True. And what about Marie Sauzelle—what sort of a woman was she?”
“Well, when I met her, she was fairly dead,” Valincourt said curtly.
Of course she was, Capestan thought. That was not
