“Capitaine Merlot, at your service. To whom do I owe the pleasure?”
A powerful, toxic waft of red wine filled the air, forcing Capestan to hold her breath as she tried to answer.
“Commissaire Capestan. Good morning, capitaine.”
“Delighted, dear friend,” he went on lustily, not allowing the announcement of her rank to put him off balance at all. “Now, I have a meeting from which I am unable to extricate myself. I mustn’t dally, but I do hope to have the honor of soon making your acquaintance more fully, since . . .”
Merlot spent a few more minutes pontificating on the importance of his meeting and the value of his associates before placing his empty cup on a pile of boxes by the doorway and promising to come back the moment his schedule permitted. Capestan nodded her consent, as though this à la carte approach to the job went without saying, then entered the apartment and quickly opened a window. She consulted her memory bank and brought up Merlot’s CV: Capitaine. A “deskbound grandpa,” as the nickname goes for those aging patrol policemen assigned to drafting reports. After thirty years doing vice with the brigade mondaine, he had been demoted to the bench. A notorious boozer and incorrigible chatterbox, he spent most of his time idling, though he was an undeniably gifted people person. Capestan hoped he would come back to swell the ranks once his fabled meeting was over and once he had popped a few aspirins. In the meantime, she already had enough of a job motivating her team of four—and her biggest job of all would be to persuade Torrez to work in tandem with her.
The day before, in a box sent over from the brigade criminelle, Capestan had found an interesting file lurking between a suicide and a road accident: an elderly woman strangled during a burglary. The perpetrator had never been found. The case dated back to 2005, and it warranted a fresh look.
Before going home, Capestan had dropped a copy of the file on Torrez’s desk to start the ball rolling. If, as promised, he had arrived at 8:00 a.m. and barricaded himself in at his end of the corridor, then he ought to have made a start on it. Not that any of this was a given.
Capestan said a brief hello to Lebreton, who was wrestling with a tangle of electrical cables in an attempt to connect his computer to the internet. She dropped her handbag and coat on a chair next to her desk and automatically moved her hand to her belt to take her Smith & Wesson Bodyguard out of its holster. This lightweight, compact five-round semiautomatic pistol fired special .38-caliber shells: a present from Buron to celebrate her arrival in his team back when he was head of the antigang squad. But the revolver was not there. Capestan was no longer permitted to carry a weapon. She saved face by pretending to tighten her belt, then switched on her desk lamp.
The commissaire went to the kitchen to deposit the big red shopping bag she had arrived with. She took out an electric filter coffee machine, a box of six cups with various saucers, four mugs, some glasses, spoons, three packages of ground coffee, some sugar, dishwashing soap, a sponge, and a “Cheeses of France” dish towel. Reluctantly, she offered Lebreton a coffee, which he declined. She told herself not to bother next time.
Mug in hand, she sat down at her desk to study the murder of Marie Sauzelle, seventy-six, killed in June 2005 at her house on 30, rue Marceau in Issy-les-Moulineaux. Capestan opened the file. The first photograph was all it took to cut her off from the world.
The elderly lady was sitting on her sofa with an almost dignified air. She was blue. Red marks flecked her eyes and cheekbones, the tip of her tongue was sticking out from her lips, and an air of panic was still noticeable on her bloated face. But her hair was neatly done, held back by a tortoiseshell headband, and her hands were resting serenely one on top of the other.
All around the neatly arranged victim, the living room was a bomb site. Ornaments had been sent tumbling from the shelves, and the ground was littered with the debris of shattered porcelain animals. In the foreground of the photograph were the splintered remains of a pink poodle barometer promising fair weather. A bouquet of wooden tulips was strewn across the carpet. On the coffee table, another bouquet, of fresh flowers this time, mocked them from its vase, which had somehow been spared.
The next photograph revealed a different corner of the same room. CDs and all sorts of books were lying in a heap at the bottom of an oak bookcase. Opposite the sofa, the television—an ancient CRT model with a rounded screen—was showing the nature channel. One detail intrigued Capestan, who rummaged in her bag to find her fold-up magnifying glass. She pulled it out of its case and placed the polished-steel frame over the screen. In the bottom right-hand corner you could make out a symbol: a speaker with a line through it. The TV was on “mute.”
Capestan pushed the magnifying glass to one side and spread the various photographs over her desk to get a complete picture. Only the living room and the main bedroom had been turned over. The bathroom, the kitchen, and the guest room were unscathed. The commissaire quickly flicked through the reports: the lock on the front door had been forced. Capestan took a sip of coffee and thought for a moment.
A burglary. If the TV is on “mute,” then Marie Sauzelle must have been watching it. You do not go to bed and leave your TV set on. She hears a noise and cuts the sound to make sure. The hallway was visible from the living room, so she must have given the burglar a shock. But instead of running away
