For the first few days after his wife’s departure Gorski had taken advantage of the situation by shaving in the en suite bathroom. It was an act of defiance. As a rule he shaved in the cramped WC on the ground floor. Barely a month after they had married and moved into the house on Rue de Village-Neuf, he had been banished from the en suite. He took too long and left a ring of whiskers in the washbasin. The en suite became Céline’s domain, and even in her absence Gorski felt that he was encroaching on her territory. So he reverted to using the WC downstairs. Then, after a week or so, as if to test the limits of his freedom, he had decided not to shave at all. After all, with Céline gone, he could do whatever he wanted. Over his morning coffee that same day, he had smoked a cigarette in the kitchen. He could not bring himself to leave the butt in the ashtray, however. What if this turned out to be the day that Céline chose to return? All that day, Gorski had felt self-conscious in his unshaven state, but no one at the station commented on his unkempt appearance. In the afternoon, he had called on an elderly widow in Rue Saint-Jean who claimed some tools had been stolen from her garden. When she opened the door she peered at him suspiciously. A lapdog yapped at her feet. Gorski ran his hand over the stubble on his chin. He felt slovenly and unprofessional. The tools, it turned out, were in the garden shed.
‘Oh, yes,’ the woman had said. ‘I remember putting them in there now.’
But she had not apologised for wasting Gorski’s time.
On the morning after the accident, Gorski performed his ablutions, made coffee and sat at the kitchen table. He did not smoke a cigarette. Without Céline and Clémence around, everything felt strange. Previously he would have been hard-pressed to describe the fixtures and fittings of the room in which he now sat. His attention would have been occupied by the movements and chit-chat of his wife and daughter, who had recently turned seventeen. But now there was nothing to distract him from staring at the units, tiles and work surfaces. He had imagined being called into investigate his own wife’s disappearance. He would have been embarrassed to question a husband under such circumstances.
She left a note?
‘Yes.’
And it said what?
‘Only that she was leaving.’
He would then, for sake of thoroughness, be obliged to ask to see the note. And as it could not be produced—Gorski had thrown it in the trash—this would inevitably lead to further questions.
When did you last see her?
It would have been that morning, of course, but Gorski could remember nothing specific about the occasion. It had been a day like any other. He and Céline’s actions would have been replicated on thousands of previous mornings. Certainly, there had been no clue to her intentions, or, if there had been, Gorski had not noticed it.
And have you any idea where she might have gone?
‘To her parents, I suppose.’
Have you tried calling her there?
That was where the scene ended. In the two weeks since she had left, there had been no contact between them. Gorski should have called the first day. After that, the opportunity had passed. If he were to telephone now, Céline’s first question would be: ‘Why haven’t you called?’ and from there the conversation would quickly descend into a quarrel. In any case, Gorski had no ready explanation as to why he had not called. Or at least not one that he would wish to voice to Céline. The truth was that when he had read her note, he had felt little more than a mild sense of relief. But it had taken only a few days for this feeling to wear off. Now he had begun to miss her and regretted not having made contact. He could easily have stopped by her boutique, which was only a short walk from the police station, and if he had not done so, it was only stubbornness that prevented him. It pleased him that Céline must have been peeved when he had not called that first evening. Certainly she would have expected it. She would have expected him to plead for her to come home, to promise that he would change his ways. But Gorski did not want to change his ways. In truth, he did not know what he had done wrong. So he had not called. And, naturally, Céline would not be the one to end the stalemate. By not calling, Gorski felt that he had won a small victory. But it was a hollow one. He now felt her absence keenly. It had only taken a few days for the things he found most irksome about his wife—her fastidiousness, her snobbishness, her obsession with appearance—to be transformed into endearing idiosyncrasies. He missed being told over breakfast that he could not wear such and such a tie with such and such a shirt, and whereas formerly he had sometimes worn mismatched items just to needle her, he now carefully dressed in a way that he thought would meet with her approval.
But it was his daughter he missed more. The first few days he had hoped to come home to find Clémence sitting at the kitchen table, dipping a biscuit in a cup of the peppermint tea she had taken to drinking. But she had not appeared, and if he had taken to spending his evenings in Le Pot, it was partly to avoid the disappointment he felt when he returned from work to find the house empty.
It was after ten o’clock when Gorski climbed the steps to the little foyer of the police station. The desk sergeant, Schmitt, was at the counter in his habitual posture, hunched over a copy of L’Alsace, displaying his balding pate to anyone who entered. A cigarette burned in the ashtray by his right hand. Gorski had long since given up demanding that he present a more professional demeanour to the public. At the sound of the door, Schmitt looked up from his paper and, seeing Gorski, glanced up at the clock that hung on the wall above the row of plastic chairs that constituted the station’s waiting room. He pulled an expression, clearly intended to convey that it was all right for some to swan into work whenever they chose. Gorski ignored him. He generally made a point of being at his desk by eight o’clock. He was not obliged to arrive at the station at any particular time, or even to put in an appearance at all, but he liked to set an example of good timekeeping. Nor did he want his subordinates to think that he thought himself better than them. It should not bother him what a work-shy time-server like Schmitt thought of him, but it did. Why did he feel, even now, that he was sneaking into work like a tardy schoolboy? Why did he have to suppress an urge to offer Schmitt an explanation for his lateness? In his day, Ribéry would breeze into the station at whatever hour he pleased, frequently smelling of stale wine. No one ever looked askance at him, even when he made lewd remarks to female members of staff. But Gorski was not Ribéry. For some reason, he did not fit in. If he tried to join in with the office banter, his contributions were invariably met with silence.
Gorski bid good morning to a few officers in the open-plan area behind the reception window. His greetings were returned, but no one paid him any special attention. He flicked through the mail on the desk in his office. It was all for show. He was due in Mulhouse at eleven o’clock for the identification of Bertrand Barthelme’s body. Gorski took a coffee from the machine in the corridor and returned to his car. As he got into his Peugeot he slopped the drink on the leg of his trousers. Thankfully he had chosen a dark suit for the occasion. There was no reason that he could not have collected Mme Barthelme and her son and driven them the twenty kilometres north to Mulhouse himself. Except that he did not think it becoming for the chief of police to act as chauffeur. The journey would, moreover, be passed in awkward silence, and, having viewed the body, Gorski would then be obliged to drive the traumatised widow home. He disliked being around the bereaved. The conventional words of condolence, however sincerely intended, always sounded hollow. After his own father’s funeral, he and his mother had returned to the apartment in Rue des Trois Rois. She went about making a light lunch as if nothing unusual had taken place. When Gorski glanced into the narrow kitchenette, however, she was weeping over her chopping board. Gorski had stepped back from the doorway, and by the time lunch was served Mme Gorski had dried her eyes. No mention of the funeral or his father’s death had passed between them since.
So Gorski had instructed a young gendarme named Roland to collect Mme Barthelme. Roland was still working his probationary period and had not appeared to notice the chilly relations between Gorski and the rest of his colleagues. He was an eager-to-please type and had agreed to the mundane task with an enthusiasm suggesting he felt he had been entrusted with a mission of great importance.
The drizzle had not abated overnight and the road surface felt treacherous under the tyres of Gorski’s ungainly 504. When he passed the scene of the accident, the inside lane of the carriageway remained cordoned off. A recovery truck was parked on the verge and two men were attaching a hydraulic cable to the underside of the crumpled Mercedes. Gorski congratulated himself on his decision not to collect Mme Barthelme. He arrived at the mortuary in Mulhouse a few minutes after eleven o’clock. The widow and her son were already in the waiting area. Roland was loitering awkwardly by his car. When Gorski appeared, he stood to attention in a comic fashion.
In its furnishings and decor, the mortuary’s foyer was not dissimilar to that of the police station. It was distinguished, however, by the pungent smell of formaldehyde or some other chemical, and the torn posters reminding staff of the importance of good hygiene. Mme Barthelme was dressed in a light blue summer dress and a beige raincoat, belted at the waist. Her attire seemed as inappropriate to the season as to the circumstances. She seemed less pale than on the evening before, and Gorski suspected that she had applied a little rouge to her cheeks. Her dress reached to just below the knee and Gorski briefly noted her shapely calves, which were unadorned by stockings. The son stood at his mother’s side. He was dressed in a flannel shirt, brown corduroy trousers and a suede jacket. Gorski had taken an instant dislike to the boy. People often acted queerly when informed of the death of a relative, but there had been something inauthentic in the young man’s reactions. And now he looked at Gorski with something approaching disdain, as if it was his fault that they were gathered there.
Gorski shook hands with them both and apologised for being late. He requested that they wait a few more moments and went through the door to the cold room. A technician whose name Gorski could not remember was adjusting the blue plastic sheet that covered the body on the slab. He looked up when Gorski entered and the two men shook hands. The chemical smell was stronger here.
‘Due to the damage to the left side of the cranium, I’ve arranged the body so that we only need to display the intact portion of the face,’ he said.
He then demonstrated how he would lower the sheet and Gorski nodded his approval. He went back outside and explained the procedure to Mme Barthelme. He added that there was no need for both of them to view the body, but the son did not appear reluctant to accompany his mother. Boys were morbid at that age. He would no doubt think this fine material with which to impress his schoolmates.
They arranged themselves solemnly around the slab, Gorski standing by the head, the widow and her son to the side of the body. Gorski nodded to the technician, who then discreetly lowered the sheet. Gorski put the question to Mme Barthelme. She affirmed that it was indeed her husband. And that was it. Gorski ushered them from the room. The whole charade had taken barely thirty seconds. There might be those who would question the point of such an exercise. The possibility that the body on the slab was not Bertrand Barthelme was so slim as to be negligible. For it not to be, it would be necessary to believe that a person unknown had stolen his clothes, wallet and car and crashed while making his escape. Either that or Barthelme himself had somehow staged the accident to fake his own death. Both ideas were almost too ludicrous to merit consideration, and in such circumstances it might be thought that compelling a widow to identify her husband’s remains was a pointless—even callous—exercise. But Gorski did not share this view. The procedures to administer deaths, accidental or otherwise, were not arbitrary. They had to be followed without prejudice in all circumstances. There was no place in such a system for the intrusion of personal opinion or even common sense. The state required that the causes of deaths of its citizens be properly recorded, and the correct conclusion could only be reached by establishing the firmest foundations. In any case, in Gorski’s experience, no one had ever objected to taking part in a formal identification. In such situations, individuals accepted that there were certain obligations which had to be fulfilled—they perhaps even found it reassuring—and Gorski never felt guilty about putting people through the experience. He was simply following the procedure.
Gorski led Mme Barthelme back to the foyer and asked if she would like a glass of water. She gave a weak smile and shook her head, but her hands were shaking a little. The boy was gazing around the room as if he was on a school trip. Gorski went outside. Roland’s car was gone and Gorski realised that he had not instructed him to wait.
‘There was something I wanted to ask you, Inspector,’ Mme Barthelme said when he went back inside.
Assuming that she wished to know when the body would be released, Gorski explained that a post-mortem would first have to be carried out and the accident investigation concluded.
Mme Barthelme shook her head. ‘It wasn’t that,’ she said.
The smell of chemicals was beginning to make Gorski feel nauseous. He suggested that they talk on the journey back to Saint-Louis. Mme Barthelme waited until Gorski had pulled out of the car park before she spoke, glancing at her son before she did so.
‘Something’s been troubling me,’ she began. ‘My husband dined out in town last night.’
Gorski glanced at her in the rear-view mirror. She was leaning forward slightly in her seat, an expectant expression on her face.
‘Uh-huh?’ he said.
‘He had dinner with some colleagues, his club he called it, every Tuesday evening. So, you see, there was no reason for him to be on the A35.’
‘Where did they dine?
‘They always ate at the Auberge du Rhin.’ This was a restaurant on Avenue de Bâle, the least shabby Saint-Louis had to offer.
‘Maybe they ate elsewhere. In Mulhouse, perhaps?’ said Gorski. This would readily account for why Barthelme had been travelling south at the time of the accident.
‘Why would they do that?’ she said.
Gorski did not say anything. How could he possibly know the answer to such a question? It was, in any event, a matter of no consequence.
‘So you can see why I’m puzzled,’ Mme Barthelme persisted. ‘I didn’t sleep last night for thinking about it.’
‘I understand,’ said Gorski, ‘but I’m not sure there is much I can do. If no crime has been committed, the investigation will be limited to the causes of the accident. It is a matter for the coroner rather than the police.’
Mme Barthelme slumped back in her seat and cast her eyes downwards. Gorski wondered if she was aware that he was watching her in the rear-view mirror. He had disappointed her. Her son was staring fixedly out of the window, as if he had heard nothing of the conversation, or, at least, as if it was of no interest to him. They approached the scene of the accident. The Mercedes was being lowered onto the back of the recovery truck. Gorski subtly increased the pressure on the accelerator. Mme Barthelme averted her gaze, then dabbed at her eyes with a small handkerchief. She had very delicate features. Gorski felt compelled to say something.
‘I suppose that until the cause of the accident is determined, it would not be inappropriate to make some discreet enquiries about your husband’s movements,’ he said.
Mme Barthelme’s face brightened considerably. She leaned forward and touched the shoulder of Gorski’s raincoat. ‘I’d be very grateful,’ she said.
He creased his face into a smile. She was very pretty and he did not, in any case, have any more pressing business to attend to.