“Right,” she said in an upbeat voice. “Where are we?”
There was a brief clinking of glasses and mugs, then everyone’s attention centered on the two boards.
“At a dead end,” Orsini said to himself.
“Stuck in the mud,” Évrard added, holding her euro coin tight.
“In a jam!” Merlot bellowed, delighted with his contribution.
“In the shit!” Dax and Lewitz screeched, as if they’d just figured out the rules to some game.
Capestan cut them short.
“Good, so we’ve grasped the idea of brainstorming, but can we please try to keep it constructive.”
Not another word after that. To avoid total shutdown, Capestan decided to summarize the state of play. Every lead in both cases had resulted in an impasse. After so many years, the files were like scorched earth. They had taken a closer look at Naulin and André Sauzelle, but nothing new had come up. Capestan surveyed her troops: they looked like wretched bystanders. Defeatism was rife and their enthusiasm was dwindling. If they didn’t manage a breakthrough in either of these inquiries, the squad would be no different from the spent force Buron had envisaged.
Merlot, always happy to hear the sound of his own voice, took the floor:
“The motive, children, the motive! We are taking as our point of departure the presumption that Marie Sauzelle is an innocent old lady, but who knows how debauched a life she might have led? What if she had kept a gigolo for company, some tango devotee with a voracious sexual appetite? What if her wanderlust had hurled her into the clutches of drug abuse, placing her at the mercy of Naulin, her dealer? The fundamental question, dear friends, is this—who was Marie Sauzelle? Who was she?”
Dax nodded in full agreement. The leather of his jacket creaked as he leaned over to Lewitz’s ear.
“Got any chewing gum?” he whispered loudly.
Lewitz took a package out of the back pocket of his jeans and offered a piece to Dax, who devoted the remainder of the meeting to mastication.
“And do we have anything on the boy described by the neighbor?” Orsini asked.
“No,” Capestan acknowledged.
Their research into the green helmet had yielded nothing. It was too flimsy a starting point. In any case, Naulin had almost certainly made it up on the spot.
For the hundredth time, Capestan scanned the blackboard. Burglary, dead bolt, blinds, position of the body, neighbor, cat, flowers, brother, mail . . . She was struggling to work out where the elements of this case ended. Her head felt like a snow globe, her thoughts floating and fluttering in every direction. She had to wait for the flakes to settle before she could see anything clearly.
The team was now considering Yann Guénan’s board.
“There’s no point looking into a man taken out by a pro,” Lewitz said to Dax, disrupting the calm atmosphere with a surprisingly lucid point. “Twenty years later, we’re not going to find a thing.”
“We’re not trying to find anyone, we’re just trying to pass the time,” Dax told him, not seeming in the least concerned by it.
Orsini nodded in agreement as he picked a bit of lint off his trousers. He was patently of the opinion that, as things currently stood, this case would lead nowhere. As icy as ever, he delivered his verdict:
“What we need is fresh blood.”
A shiver ran through the gathering, followed by a few childish snickers before Évrard piped up timidly, her blue eyes wide open:
“It’s true, we need some new lines of inquiry to flesh out the files. We don’t have anything. We don’t have the resources to carry out an investigation. It’s taking an age to hear back from the archives, not to mention the aborted interrogations . . .”
The lieutenant still had not come to terms with her Riverni experience.
“Indeed,” Merlot said, adding his two cents’ worth. “Here it is less ‘cold case’ and more ‘basket case.’ Back when we were in the police proper—”
“Enough! Enough.”
Capestan had not raised her voice, but the room still fell silent. This meeting was fast descending into a demotivational session and she needed to put a stop to it. The commissaire looked around the group without focusing on anyone in particular, and for once she addressed them with a blank expression:
“In war movies, the guy who says ‘We’re all gonna die!’ is never helping anyone. So let’s stop this right now. No more talk of ‘before this, before that.’ Before we landed up here, all of us were done for anyway. All of us. There’s no point going on about the glory days at the Orfèvres—your sentence didn’t start here.”
Heads dropped and eyes darted around sheepishly. But Capestan did not want the team to dwell on this, so she stood up from the corner of her desk and continued:
“No more spending 70 percent of your time doing paperwork. No more night rounds or graveyard shifts. No more junkies redecorating the toilets at the station. We’re free to do the job we dreamt of doing when we signed up. We investigate without any pressure, without adhering to protocols or procedures, and without having to file reports. So let’s make the most of it instead of sitting around whining like teenagers who’ve been barred from throwing a party. We’re still part of the police judiciaire, just in our own branch. You don’t get a chance like this twice.”
Capestan could see that this had lifted their spirits. Shoulders were less droopy. An almost imperceptible ripple ran through the group, a collective movement that seemed to bind together the officers dotted around the room. The team was uniting.
This budding solidarity was greeted with a sharp yap. Pilou had arrived and seemed to approve of the atmosphere. Rosière and Lebreton followed close behind, leaving their bags at the door and offering a general “hello” as they approached the boards.
Rosière glanced at Lebreton, who smiled faintly and offered her the role of spokeswoman that she so clearly craved. The capitaine plumped up her hair, stroked her
