“The last time she slipped up, yes,” he confirmed, then turned to Rosière and said: “But I’m not supposed to discuss it, sorry.”
He thought back to the case. Two children kidnapped by a teacher. It had taken Capestan six months to locate them. When she arrived at the premises, she killed him: simple as that.
“It was self-defense, wasn’t it?” Rosière insisted.
“Indeed.”
If you can call it self-defense when the guy is standing fifteen feet away armed with a pen, and Capestan shoots him three times, right in the heart. Not exactly where you aim if you’re planning to immobilize a suspect. Capestan maintained that she had been unable to adjust her line of fire. Coming from an Olympic silver medal markswoman, that was verging on the unreasonable. Lebreton still couldn’t believe the top brass had let it slide.
“Then what happened after the IGS? How did you end up with us?”
Pilou started gnawing at the armrest, causing her mistress to raise an authoritative finger. The dog calmed down, stopped, let out a powerful yawn that finished with a satisfied squeak, then made a half turn and went back to sleep. Dawn was gradually lighting up the inside of the car, and with it came an urge for coffee. The orange sun blazed through the back window, streaming down the road in a straight line. Lebreton felt like he was riding down the freeway, and he was longing for a bit of silence for company.
“Well?” Rosière said with the persistence of a hammer drill.
The capitaine, with her honest warmth and uncomplicated energy, was in the mood for exchanging secrets, and Lebreton could not shake her off without hurting her. He veered into the fast lane to overtake two trucks.
“Vincent’s death was a shock,” he said blankly. “But two weeks after the funeral, I was back at work.”
Lebreton remembered how he felt wandering aimlessly along the corridors, unable to find his office in the confusion. Colleagues patted him on the back sympathetically, commiserating as far as they deemed necessary.
“I couldn’t concentrate, so I went to the divisionnaire to request some unpaid leave.”
“And he said no?”
“He said that it would be a big inconvenience for him.”
Lebreton had mentioned bereavement leave. Damien, who had lost his wife the year before, had taken a much-needed break, four months, to straighten himself out. The divisionnaire was aghast and said: “You can’t honestly make that comparison!”
A billion explanations would not have been enough to open that brute’s heart. Lebreton had had his fill: enough self-justification, enough toeing the party line. If even the officers in charge of cleaning up the police were guilty of discrimination, then something needed to be done.
“So?” Rosière said, keen as ever for the next installment.
“I filed a complaint on grounds of discrimination. I took it right to the top, both at police headquarters and the Ministry of the Interior.”
“And what did they do?”
“Nothing, of course. Internal affairs was hardly going to investigate internal affairs.”
“Your divisionnaire got away with it just like that?”
Taking his eyes off the road just for a moment, Lebreton aimed a wry smile at his copilot:
“Which of us is sitting next to you in the car?”
The sign indicating the road into Les Sables-d’Olonne put an end to the conversation. Lebreton and Rosière wound down their windows in perfect synchronization, and a gust of humid, salty air came rushing into the car. The dog sat up in the back and moaned impatiently. Rosière held her hand outside and splayed her fingers to feel the breeze, while Pilote dug his claws into the armrest and tried to clamber up front to reach the window and catch that promising smell of seaweed. It was 8:00 a.m., too early to turn up at the shipbuilder’s, but perfect for a coffee break by the sea.
Lebreton passed through the barrier to the outdoor parking lot at the fishing port and slid the Lexus into a diagonal space, applying the hand brake and cutting the engine. Before getting out, Rosière returned to Capestan: something kept bothering her about the stray bullet.
“Her partner wasn’t there to cover her . . . Maybe she got the jitters?”
“In our squad, she chose to team up with Torrez. Torrez,” he said, to ram home his point. “Capestan’s not afraid of anything.”
25
Capestan was afraid of everything. After showering and dressing, she went back to the bedroom to close the windows that she had flung open to air the place out, then drew back the duvet, taking care to remove the revolver from under the pillow. She had placed it there the night before; she placed it there every night. It was her old spare gun, now simply her gun, thanks to the administration confiscating her Smith & Wesson. She could no longer sleep without it. She felt Paris lying in wait for her behind the door, and she needed her piece like others need sleeping pills. Her job had broken her. It was a career she had chosen out of preference rather than sheer bravado, a way of disrupting the neatly mapped-out trajectory for young girls: further education, then an appropriate husband. Enthusiasm and a sense of duty had taken her far, but compassion and emotiveness had pushed her into a corner. And Capestan had been afraid ever since. Not that she had become deflated: losing her self-respect would have meant the end. She was better at containing her fear than her fury, fully aware that they were two sides of the same coin.
Earlier that morning she had decided to examine the Sauzelle case out of doors, to see whether the ins and outs would seem any different in the fresh air. The sun was faint but it was shining nonetheless, and she settled for a chair in the Jardin du Luxembourg. Facing the pond, she had split her time between rereading the various facts and observing the procession of passersby.
She had called
