“I’ll get you a copy of the file,” he said.
“And a siren,” Capestan said. “For Torrez. He misses his siren.”
37
The smell of frying onions was wafting down the stairs, hitting Capestan with a sudden and powerful urge to eat. Tucked under her arm was the copy of the Maëlle Guénan file that Buron had eventually managed to secure for her. She wiped her feet on the doormat and walked into the commissariat.
It was 9:00 p.m. and the flat was pitch black apart from a strip of light under the door into the kitchen—no doubt the source of the appetizing aroma, however unlikely it was for a police station. Capestan was starting to feel comfortable in this squad. Life was rolling along happily, and a budding solidarity was forming. The job seemed less serious here.
She put the file on her desk and stood in the darkness, looking out at the square through the windowpane. The street lamps were casting a yellow glow onto the rain-streaked pavement below. What with the colorful neon signs of its multiple sex shops, rue Saint-Denis seemed to be boasting a bit of Belle Époque swagger. Attic windows interrupted the zinc roofs across the square. For a moment it was hard to work out whether they were in the Paris of Toulouse-Lautrec or Ratatouille.
In the building to the right, a large, curtainless window revealed an average-size room that must have been a studio apartment. A young man in a T-shirt was sitting at a table, staring at his laptop as he tore the plastic blister off a package of processed ham. He rolled up a slice and guzzled it in two bites. After consigning two further slices to the same fate, he scratched at the bottom of the package to dislodge a bright-red sticker, probably some sort of coupon. He rocked to one side to get his wallet out of the back pocket of his jeans, opened the flap, and carefully placed the coupon into one of the slits reserved for credit cards.
Coupons. Capestan felt a pang of nostalgia as she remembered her grandmother. Every morning, swathed in her brown-and-gold-patterned kimono, she would sit at the head of her huge oak monastery table in the kitchen. She would pour hot water onto her chicory coffee granules, light a cigarette, and then attack the previous day’s stack of brochures and leaflets. She turned each page meticulously and, whenever she hit upon a suitably attractive offer, she would balance her cigarette on the ashtray, pluck the pair of scissors from beside her on the table, and cut out the precious token. She would then file it away in one of three categories: food, hardware, services. It was like piling up banknotes, only with more color, more variety—a glimpse of a world where everything should be sampled. None of the grandchildren at the table would ever dare disturb a task of such importance. They simply watched in fascination.
Capestan took a step back from the window and was about to join her colleagues in the kitchen when a thought came to her with an electrifying jolt: the box of coupons on Marie Sauzelle’s shelf and the sticker saying NO JUNK MAIL PLEASE on her mailbox. The two were completely incompatible. If Sauzelle collected coupons, she was hardly going to block off her principal supply. The sticker must have been put there by someone else. If Marie had not gotten rid of it, that was because she hadn’t seen it. And if she had not seen it, that was because she was dead when it was put there.
The killer had brought it with him.
But why? No doubt to avoid the full-mailbox effect, which is a surefire indicator that either someone is away or something is amiss. The neighbors would have become worried sooner, and the murderer had wanted to delay the discovery of the body.
Why else? The sticker had not served to complicate the autopsy: the cause of death, by strangling, was clear enough. Capestan concentrated for a moment. The delay it caused, however, had made it impossible to establish the time of death with any certainty, thereby allowing the murderer time to come up with an alibi.
He had acted alone and he did not associate with anyone trustworthy enough to cover for him.
If the killer had come with the sticker on his person, then the murder was not opportunistic: it was premeditated. They were no longer dealing with a hothead who couldn’t keep his emotions in check, but a calculating assassin. Capestan’s thoughts returned to the old lady and her dignified posture, then to the spared cat. A calculating criminal with some degree of moral awareness, but who, if the link with the Guénans turned out to be rock solid, had without hesitation killed three people.
The commissaire nudged open the kitchen door to find Rosière standing before the old gas stove, stirring a vast copper saucepan with a wooden spoon. She could hear some onions sweating in olive oil. Pilou was glued to his mistress’s heel, on the lookout as ever for any scraps to blot the pristine floor. Lebreton was smoking on a chair in the open doorway onto the terrace. They had opened a bottle and were sipping their wine. Capestan noticed the pile of mysterious planks that Lewitz had left at the foot of the bay window. He obviously rated his carpentry skills highly and had vowed to create a fully fitted-out kitchen. The brand-new toolbox might have suggested that he was really a novice, although a plastic container of hinges and a bag of assorted handles implied that the squad was at the mercy of a DIY enthusiast. The kitchen was to be installed with determination rather than ability.
“What are you still doing here?” Capestan exclaimed chirpily, more to announce her presence than anything else. “Don’t you have homes to go to?”
Lebreton turned to the terrace with a minuscule frown and blew out a plume of smoke. There was a
