The Espace wouldn’t start. Blanc lifted the hood and stared at the maze of metal, cables, and wires. He had bought enough tools to build a city the previous day, but nothing of any use in this morass, not that he had the slightest clue where to start. Then he heard a loud engine on the main road and thanked God for it. He ran out onto the route départementale swinging his grotesque hammer and gesticulating wildly at the old blue Alpine, which screeched to a halt just inches from his shins.
“Have you gone over to the dark side?” Jean-François Riou spluttered. “From cop to hammer murderer? Or are you trying to kill yourself? In which case you’d do better throwing yourself under a train than this vintage motor.”
Blanc smelled the hot oil and gas fumes coming from the old sports car. “I was just trying to imitate your miracle from the other day.”
“You’re trying to fix a Renault Espace?” Riou laughed, as if it were the best joke he’d ever heard.
While his neighbor fiddled around in the entrails of the minivan, Blanc found himself gazing enviously at the Alpine, with a certain embarrassment. “You have an extravagant hobby,” he said.
Riou looked up, nodded, and smiled, also embarrassed. “Every Sunday morning I take the old girl out for a spin. At least that way I’m out of my wife’s hair while she’s cooking.”
“An hour driving around, another hour tinkering.”
“Not at all!” His neighbor was horrified at the idea. “These old motors are a lot more reliable than the modern computers on wheels. And cheap too. Or at least cheaper than most of what you see around here.”
Blanc was about to respond with some meaningless pleasantry, when he thought of Le Bruchec’s Range Rover and Lafont’s Audi Q7. “You mean this Alpine is cheaper than all these giant SUVs?”
“Bien sûr. Throw in a few extras and those four-by-fours cost easily a hundred thousand euros. And then you need a small car too. One of those monsters would never get into one of the multistory car parks in Marseille or Aix-en-Provence. You need to have a boss who pays you a packet to buy one of those. Or a hand in the Marseille cocaine business.”
Blanc didn’t reply, just concentrated on staring over Riou’s shoulder to try to see which screws he was turning. “Right, done. Until the next time.” Riou wiped his hands and banged the hood down. Thirty seconds later he was gone, leaving just tracks on the gravel and a hint of gas in the air.
“He frightens my poor horses every time he does that.” Paulette Aybalen was reining in her nervously snorting steed, before having it trot up to Blanc’s house. Behind her, by the edge of the road, her daughters sat on two other dancing animals. Like a troop of amazons come into the twenty-first century through some gate in time from antiquity, Blanc thought.
“Going jogging in the woods again today?”
“I’m going to work, actually.”
“You’re not wearing a uniform.”
“I have to put in a few unforeseen hours of overtime.” He was still thinking over Riou’s comments about expensive 4×4s. Paulette knew all the gossip in town; after all she had been the first to tell him about the relationship between Miette Fuligni and Lucien Le Bruchec. “May I ask you a question?”
“Professional or personal?”
“Professional.”
For a second a shadow of disappointment flitted across her face, then she shook her head as if surprised at herself and turned to her daughters. “Ride on, I’ll catch you up.”
The elder girl laughed, “You’re too slow for us, maman.”
“Then wait for me at the top of the hill next to the burnt pine tree.” The girls galloped off.
Paulette Aybalen jumped down from her saddle and gave Blanc a questioning look. “You’re a hunter,” she said. “A bloodhound. There’s something bugging you. That’s why you’re working even on a Sunday. Were you sent down here from Paris to deal with some particularly serious case?”
“I was sent down here from Paris because I had already dealt with a particularly serious case there. They didn’t want it to happen again.”
She said nothing for a minute, then smiled. “So what is your question, mon Capitaine?”
“How does Monsieur Lafont earn his money?”
Paulette Aybalen stared at him blankly for several seconds, maybe because she was taken aback or even shocked, he couldn’t say. “You’re not out to slaughter the biggest bull in the meadow, are you? No wonder they moved you away from the capital.”
“I’m not out to slaughter anybody. I simply asked a question.”
“People around here either talk quietly and respectfully about Marcel Lafont, or else not at all. Not at all is usually best.”
“Sounds as if he’s some godfather figure.”
“He’s been mayor as long as I can remember. He’s made something of Caillouteaux. The place could have gone to seed. Just look at Berre. That used to be a wonderful town on the lake. Nowadays nobody would have named the lake after a town like that. It would be too embarrassing. Berre today is dominated by oil tankers and the refinery, with flames leaping from the chimney all through the night, and the air stinks of petroleum fumes so much it would make you sick. It could have been the same here. Lafont found a better solution.”
“So everybody is pleased with him?”
“He keeps getting reelected.”
“Maybe not forever.”
Paulette Aybalen took a step closer to him. He could smell her perfume. She lowered her voice. “Compared with Lafont, this FN cow is the conductor of a children’s choir. Our beloved mayor had a pretty wild youth, if you believe the rumors.”
“In Corsica? Marseille?”
“Nobody knows exactly. But they’re not mutually exclusive. He may still have old friends in both Corsica and Marseille.”
“Friends who would not be at all happy if I started treading on Monsieur Lafont’s toes?”
“I’ve got used to having you about. It would be a pity if you were to suddenly vanish one day,” Paulette Aybalen replied. She said it without a smile, and shook his hand in farewell, very coolly. Then she leapt back into the saddle of her Camargue horse. “Don’t put in too many overtime hours, mon Capitaine. That’s not how we do things down here in the Midi.” She dug her heels into the horse’s flanks, and rode off.
Blanc watched her go, trying to concentrate on her words. But what he was really concentrating on was Paulette Aybalen’s agile body springing back up onto her horse. He wouldn’t have got to know a woman like that in Paris.
* * *
On the short journey into town, Blanc called Marius. Only to get the beep of his answering machine. He left a message, apologizing and asking his colleague to come into the office. He could only hope that at some stage over the course of the day Tonon would check his messages. When he got to the gendarmerie the officer on duty avoided looking him in the eye. There was a palpable silence in the building, almost a physical tension in the air—like a haunted crypt. All the office doors on the second floor were closed, except for that of the office Madame Vialaron-Allègre had taken over. He found himself pleased to see that the juge d’instruction had unexpectedly turned up at the office on a weekend, and stuck his head in her door.
“You’re more curious than is good for you, mon Capitaine.” It was her husband, the minister.
Blanc could have kicked himself.
“I was expecting to see Madame le juge sitting here,” he replied lamely.
“My wife is pruning the roses in our garden. She likes cutting the heads off pretty flowers.”
Not quite certain how to interpret that, Blanc just looked at him silently.
“Sit down, won’t you, now that you’re here.” Blanc sat down, feeling as if he were in an interrogation room, on the wrong side of the table. “You paid a visit to our friend Marcel the other night. He was not exactly overjoyed to see you.”
“Mayor Lafont?” Blanc was alarmed. This was going in the wrong direction.
“He’s more or less part of our family. And we’re in the same political party.” Vialaron-Allègre watched to see what effects his words had: He looked less than happy. “There are elections coming up soon. Marcel is a bit worried. For no good reason, if you ask me, but then Marcel is a cautious man, always fears the worst. I do my best to stop the worst happening. That’s the least one can do for a friend—in a situation like this.”
“Monsieur Lafont should consider himself lucky to have such a good friend.”
The minister blinked for a second then gave him a cool smile. “You must know that construction of a médiathèque would greatly help Marcel’s election chances.”
“The mayor left me in no doubt.”
“Bon. Now, through a tragic accident, the very man who was supposed to build this médiathèque is no longer available. Marcel is going to have to find somebody else as soon as possible. In the middle of the summer, and at the beginning of an election campaign. On top of all his other day-to-day duties.”
“Monsieur le maire does not take any vacation time?”
“In a situation like this? You’re not a politician, mon Capitaine.” The minister cleared his throat. “Whatever. In a delicate situation like this I just don’t want to see Marcel having to waste time and energy on unnecessary police investigations.”
“Our investigations are never unnecessary.”
“To be more precise, I don’t want Marcel troubled. Do we have an understanding, mon Capitaine?”
“Absolutely, Monsieur Vialaron-Allègre.” Blanc was glad to be able to get up and go. He wondered if Madame le juge was aware that her own husband was hindering police investigations.
He had only been at the desk in his own office for five minutes when the door opened and Tonon came in. He was wearing an Olympique de Marseille soccer shirt, its bright blue colors reduced to a sort of turquoise shade by too much sunshine and too many washes, khaki-colored three-quarter-length pants with baggy pockets, and a pair of fraying boating shoes. He looked as if he’d been sleeping in the outfit. “I hope you’ve got a good reason to call me in like this on a Sunday,” he grumbled. In his right hand he held a bag of freshly baked croissants, the paper dark with leaked butter. He didn’t offer Blanc one.
“We’ll have to see if it was a good enough reason,” the captain admitted. He closed the office door, which Tonon had left open. “We’ve got a visitor, the minister.”
“Putain. That’s a reason not to be here.”
“Vialaron-Allègre would like us to leave Lafont in peace. I’d rather haul the mayor in.”
“I should never have listened to the fucking answering machine.”
“Lafont stinks of dirty money.”
“That’s how all the politicians down here smell. You’re not leading a corruption investigation. It’s a murder case. Or maybe double murder, if somebody hit Fuligni over the head.”
“That’s just the point. His last text message was to Lafont: ‘It’s all going to come out. There’ll be enough blood spilt to fill the harbor.’”
Marius thought for a moment. “A message from a man who’s better with a trowel than words.”
“The threat of a man under pressure. Or at the very least a drastic warning. Something had to make Fuligni nervous enough to send Lafont a text like that. What was going to come out? Was Fuligni threatening to expose something? Or was he afraid of something being exposed? A few hours after sending this message to the mayor he’s found dead in the lake. And our mayor’s out in his motorboat not far away.”
“Okay, call Lafont in, if you want, best of all today, while the minister’s still here. That’ll be the biggest storm ever to hit Gadet, and at the end of it you and I will be clouds of ash drifting over the Touloubre.”
“That’s why I disturbed your Sunday. The way we did it in Paris was, as soon as you’ve found a big spider lurking at the heart of the web, you have to immediately talk it over with your colleagues. You need to be careful.”
“That’s how you became such a big success?”
Blanc ignored the sarcasm. “We need to keep on Lafont’s tail,” he said conspiratorially. “But he mustn’t know. Nobody must know. At least not yet. We dig quietly in the dark until we come across the pot of gold.”
“In Lafont’s case you’re more likely to come across a crock of shit.”
“What is it that links Lafont and Fuligni? What’s their secret?”
“The médiathèque. The pair have between them built half of Caillouteaux. The new project is the biggest contract Lafont could ever have handed to his friend.”
“Agreed, but it’s a public contract. Anyone who’s interested can have access to all the details of the deal: an eight-million-euro deal for Fuligni. For Lafont a prestige project sure to get him reelected. Maybe the budget is a bit too high, maybe the timing a bit too convenient, but it’s all legal. Nothing to cause one of them to send a sinister text to the other.”
“Eh bien?”
“So there has to be something else going on between them. Maybe it really is something that concerns the harbor. After all, both of them had boats down there. Or maybe it’s some other building project? Maybe it was the town hall renovation, when Lafont got his hands on all the antiques? Or maybe an affair? Fuligni wasn’t one to miss out on a good thing. And his wife isn’t exactly a prude. Maybe it wasn’t just a Romanian secretary and a widowed architect in this little love circle. Maybe the mayor too? Or the mayor’s wife?”
Tonon gave him a sympathetic look. He bashed a few keys on his keyboard with his big paws and said, “Voilà. Carole Lafont.”
Blanc looked at the screen and saw an old story from the Internet edition of La Provence. A photo of the mayor’s wife with some smiling children and two nervous-looking female teachers. Madame Lafont was a matronly woman in her midfifties with gray hair piled on top of her head, heavy jowls, and a huge bosom.
“Not exactly Fuligni’s type, to put it mildly,” Tonon muttered.
“Certainly not a lady you’d want to quarrel with,” Blanc replied, trying to keep his end of the story up. “Maybe Fuligni’s Romanian secretary was servicing the mayor as well. Fuligni wouldn’t have objected, for fear of losing his contracts. But eventually he decides he’s had enough. He threatens to tell Madame Lafont, at which point, in order to avoid a scandal, the mayor nips down to his yacht at the harbor and—”
“Maybe you should start writing TV soaps. Fuligni was far too proud to share his young chicken with anybody else. And Lafont might have made a lot of mistakes, but not even his most bitter political rivals over the last thirty years have suggested he’s run around after other women.”
But Blanc was still looking at the photo. There was something alarming about it, but he couldn’t work out what it was. Carole Lafont? An opulent lady in a gray suit with a light red scarf and a friendly smile. The children and the two intimidated teachers. He took a close look at each and every face. Never seen any of them before. What was there of note about the school building itself? The wall was plastered yellow with a bronze plaque on it, which he couldn’t make out in the photo. An open wrought-iron door, and in the background a parking lot with a battered Peugeot 106, a red Mini, and a white delivery van. The leafy branch of a tree, almost certainly a plane tree, protruding into the frame from the right. A patch of bright blue sky. Blanc zoomed in on the photo until nothing but pixels could be seen. He still couldn’t read the bronze plaque. He looked at all the faces, the hands, even their shoes. Harmless, normal, completely inconspicuous. He shook his shoulders resignedly and closed the photo.
“Does the boss know what you’re up to?” Tonon asked. He’d been observing Blanc all the time, while finishing off his second croissant.
“I spoke to Nkoulou on the phone. He seemed preoccupied. Probably best not to bother him.”
“At least we agree on that point.”
They heard the roar of an engine outside, someone cranking up the revs. Then it stopped dead. Blanc went over to the window. A motorbike had just pulled up before the gendarmerie: a fire red gas tank, tiny handlebars, vintage wheels. Two figures in black leather suits with integrated helmets, dark visors; they looked like storm troopers. The driver took the protective headwear off and shook her long brown hair in the wind. Fabienne. A tall, slender woman who had been sitting behind her on the pillion also took off her helmet, to reveal short-cropped blond hair. “That’s how I imagine a lesbian,” said Marius, who had joined his colleague to look out.
Fabienne joined them a few minutes later. “Roxane Chelle,” she introduced her girlfriend. She had eyes the color of a swimming pool and a jaw like Rodin’s The Thinker. Instead of greeting the two men with a kiss on the cheeks like Fabienne did, she shook their hands with a grip that made Blanc think Marius might have known what he was talking about.
“Let’s go to the computer in my room,” said Fabienne. “It’s a lot quicker than those old tin boxes you have.” She told Tonon, who was following them along the hallway in a state of some puzzlement, that she had been looking through all the material online relating to the car robberies that Moréas had been involved in.
Marius went white. “What do you think you’re doing? You think you can get any further with this damn thing just by doing a bit of surfing on the Internet before heading out to a nightclub?”
“You did everything you could,” Blanc interrupted to calm him down. “But sometimes a fresh look from an outsider can spot new connections.”
“That sounds more like psychiatry than detective work.”
“Deflate your egos, boys,” Fabienne said in a conciliatory tone of voice. Her girlfriend gave a sarcastic smile that seemed to shut Tonon up.
“Take a look at this,” their colleague said, nodding toward her screen. “The tourist who was run over and killed was German; Claudia Meier. That was in the old newspaper clippings too. I was rather naïve at first and tried Googling her, but it would seem half the women on the other bank of the Rhine have that name.”
“Not that it matters,” Tonon grumbled. “She died back when the Internet hardly existed.”
“Yes, but the Net has sucked up the past. When I realized I had a million women with the name Claudia Meier, I took a long shot and tried adding ‘Lukas Rheinbach’ in the search field. They’re both German, right? And the painter was asking questions about the accident, wasn’t he? Voilà. All of a sudden a lot fewer hits, and most of them rubbish. But you also end up here: on a site where you can look up old school friends. They host old school class photos. Like this one.” She zoomed in on one photo. “This is the final-year photo taken at a school outside Cologne.”
Blanc found himself looking at around a hundred men and women dressed in a fashion he dimly remembered lined up outside a grim-looking concrete building. It only took him a few minutes to recognize the German painter, aged about twenty. Below the photo was a list of names, among them “Claudia Meier,” eighth from left. Blanc counted along the row: a pretty girl with long, dark blond hair, beaming into the camera. Next to her stood Lukas Rheinbach, his arm around her shoulder.
“Putain,” Tonon swore.
“We need to go through the files from the investigation into the highway robberies thoroughly again,” Blanc mumbled, all of a sudden feeling uneasy.
“They’re over here,” his colleague said, pointing to a filing cabinet in the corner. “I always keep them within easy reach.”
Within seconds they were leafing through yellowed pages of old reports, from police and pathologists, from the days when they were all done on typewriters; black-and-white photos; fingerprint cards; sketches of the crime scenes; pictures of the victim; a copy of her passport; photographs of the crime scene; documentation from the autopsy in the Salon hospital. A series of documents that in nightmare fashion detailed the transformation of a beautiful woman into a heap of flesh and bones. Blanc took the copy of the passport and held it up next to the computer screen, not that it was really necessary: The victim was identical to the girl with Lukas Rheinbach’s arm around her shoulder.
The captain worked his way further through the files. Lukas Rheinbach had also been in the car when it was attacked, an old Citroën 2CV with a German number plate. The files contained a copy of his passport too, as well as details of his address and occupation (“art student”), their last address in France: a hotel in Bonnieux where he and Claudia Meier had taken a room together. Rheinbach had been named as a witness, after which his name no longer featured in the files.
“You owe me an explanation, Marius,” Blanc said when he had finished. “You’ve allegedly been after Charles Moréas for murder for some twenty years. But when we find ourselves talking to the boyfriend of the victim, you don’t mention it. To be honest, you gave me the impression you had never even seen Monsieur Rheinbach before, never even heard the name.”
“I wasn’t present when they took witness statements. It didn’t seem to matter; he was just a foreign tourist. I knew who the guilty party was. I just wanted to nail Moréas. Mon Dieu. I’d seen the dead girl’s body lying on the road!” Tonon didn’t look him in the eye, just glanced around the room.
“Your name doesn’t even appear in the files. You weren’t involved in the investigation,” Blanc stated. His tone was friendly enough but nobody in the room, not even Souillard’s girlfriend, who wasn’t even in the police, could mistake the change in attitude: This had become an interrogation.
Tonon covered his eyes with his big paw. “Putain,” he swore softly. “Is this thing never going to let me go?” He took a deep breath and finally turned to look at Blanc. “I’d been suspended from duty by then,” he admitted wearily. “On that very night I was sent to the crime scene. Somebody had called the police from a farmhouse. I think it was a long-distance truck driver passing by. I raced down there with a couple of men and came across the body first, then the robber’s wrecked car. Most of them had already run off, but a couple were still there. They were in shock but they fought back. It was dark. Nobody knew exactly what had happened. Had it been an accident? An attack? My men and I approached the car. Suddenly somebody fired a gun. Well”—he hesitated, searching for the right words—“we returned fire. Or I should say, I returned fire. I’d already had a couple of glasses of rosé. I nearly shot one of my colleagues. No, I actually did shoot one of my colleagues. It was only a grazing shot, luckily. By then the others had overpowered the guys and secured the crime scene. The usual stuff. I was taken away and, overnight, suspended from duty. It was a few weeks before I was allowed back into the gendarmerie, by which time people had glossed over it all. There was no official investigation into my behavior. But it was made clear that for the rest of my life I would remain a lieutenant in this station and only be given cases where I could do the minimum damage. But as none of my colleagues were still bothering with the robbers and nobody was getting anywhere with the case, I grabbed hold of the files, if only to stop them moldering away. I didn’t really read through them, because I knew it had been Moréas, and I just went after him. Everybody else just let me get on with it, happy not to have anything to do with me. Voilà. Now at least I had a hobby to keep me busy.”
“And for all these years you never bothered with Monsieur Rheinbach?”
“It didn’t seem important.” Tonon scratched his head. “Moréas was the perpetrator, right? But the original investigation had failed to nail him, right? So I looked for a different way to go about it. I wanted to get him for another crime. Any crime. Putain. The guy must have been guilty of a dozen things. Sooner or later, I hoped, I would be able to pin something on him, no matter what it was. Then, when I had got my hands on him, I would have been able to bring the old case up in front of the judge as well. I had been watching the guy for years, paying attention to every detail I could find about him: his shit tattoo, the medallion with the cobra, the shack in the woods, his threats against harmless walkers, even the ridiculous charge of speeding on his motorbike. I just wanted to get the asshole for something.”
“But…”
“Leave it, Roger,” Fabienne interrupted him gently. “It doesn’t do any of us any good crying over spilt milk. What matters is we now have a lead in the case we’re dealing with. That is all that matters. Don’t torture Marius.”
For several long moments Blanc stared at the black-and-white photos of Claudia Meier, then nodded. “Okay, so, Monsieur Rheinbach.”
“So, do we just bring him in?” asked Fabienne. He could hear the disappointment in her voice at the prospect of interrogating the painter—the ideal culprit, the foreigner nobody cared about.
“You and your friend here can take to the road again,” Blanc replied. “We won’t bring anybody in this weekend.” He nodded toward the door. “Not while we still have a guest from Paris with us.”
“Vialaron-Allègre won’t be interested in who we’re interviewing,” she replied.
“There’s nothing he’s not interested in. The gendarmerie is so quiet he’d be bound to notice if we bring in Monsieur Rheinbach. He’d get involved, want to know who we’re interviewing and why. The minister wants to do his friend and fellow party member a favor. If we bring in a German painter as a suspect, he’ll insist we arrest and charge him. As far as the mayor is concerned that would be the Kalashnikov murder solved and his FN rival would have one less string to her bow. And we would no longer be breathing down his neck. As long as the minister was happy, Nkoulou would be happy. That would be the case done and dusted. Except that it wouldn’t be.”
“If that slimy bastard gets involved in the Moréas murder then he’d also be likely to find out how I botched up,” Tonon added glumly. “My career’s been gathering cobwebs for long enough but at least they still leave me here in the Midi. Let the minister root around in that old connerie and he’d probably post me somewhere else, if only to do Nkoulou a favor.”
“So let’s all go home and wait until the minister has gone back to Paris. We’ll talk again on Monday,” Blanc concluded.
* * *
Blanc spent the rest of Sunday dragging the remaining furniture out of the ground floor of his house, and then tackling the walls. He scratched and scraped patches of old wallpaper and oil paint from the walls until they were stripped bare, down to rough, crumbly stone: yellow, white, gray, the cracks between them filled with ochre mortar. Half of his expensive new tools were either too large or too small, the other half unusable, and he hadn’t bought most of the materials he actually needed. But eventually he was finished, dripping with sweat and his shoulders aching. It’s looking good, he told himself. It was the first actual thought he had formulated in hours: He had been running on automatic, totally engrossed in the work—a fusion of hard graft and Zen.
It was only when he had showered, pulled on a pair of shorts, and squatted down behind a wall to protect him from the mistral to watch the swallows, with a glass of rosé in his hand, that he finally allowed himself to think over the events of the morning. Monsieur Rheinbach. He found himself somehow annoyed by the idea of arresting the German painter. Yet so much of it fitted: Rheinbach was unlucky with women, this Claudia Meier might not have been just a youthful fling but the love of his life. The character with her death on his conscience lived just around the corner, scot-free and acting like a bully. Could Rheinbach have known all along that Moréas was a suspect in her death? His name had never been mentioned in the paper, but Rheinbach had been there at the time, had been a witness, might even have seen something incriminating on that fateful evening. Had he been looking for something on the attack when he was at La Provence’s editorial offices? And why had he spent so much time in the Caillouteaux records office? He had to have known who Moréas was.
Then he remembered the words of the farmer who had been down at the garbage dump at noon on the day of the murder—he had mentioned that there had been a little red car parked nearby. Rheinbach drove a wine-colored Clio.
“You are going to have some explaining to do, Monsieur Artist,” Blanc mumbled to himself. “Or you’re going to be painting jigsaw puzzles from memory for the next few years.”
And still …
Le Bruchec. Lafont. Fuligni’s text message. Fuligni’s unexplained death. Did all that really have nothing to do with the case? It wasn’t just the mistral that was disturbing his train of thought. Blanc felt sure he had overlooked some decisive factor. He wished there was someone he could discuss it with. In the past he would occasionally have talked over his investigation with Geneviève if he got stuck on a case. He wasn’t supposed to but what did it matter really? She never said much. To tell the truth he now suspected that all those years she had never really listened to a word he said. But it had been good to talk about it. It helped him to get his thoughts in order, made him feel as if he had dealt with it on an intellectual level, and more often than not he would stumble across a new lead.
But now? Should he call Fabienne? He liked her and she was bright. But she was very young, and had a thirst for life. At the weekend she had the right to enjoy herself and not have to sit listening to the musings of a colleague who’d been transferred here against his will. Marius? He had his own demons to battle, problems enough without Blanc’s doubts and questions. And apart from anything else Blanc couldn’t quite bring himself to ignore the nasty little voice whispering away in his head: What if it was Tonon himself? A cop who, after twenty years of frustrating investigation in vain, had just grabbed a Kalashnikov and taken out the guy who had ruined his career? A cop whose fuse had simply blown? Tonon’s car was white, not red. Nobody had spotted him down by the dump. There were no other leads pointing to him, and there was certainly nothing to link him to Fuligni’s death. But even so …
Blanc despised himself for even thinking of his colleague as a possible suspect, but there was no way he could bring himself to say he could trust Marius one hundred percent.
He didn’t go to bed until the wine bottle was empty. He didn’t feel drunk, just tired and defeated. Then all of a sudden he thought of someone he would be happy to discuss the case with: the juge d’instruction. Madame Vialaron-Allègre would have heard him out, would have understood him; with her sharp intellect she would have helped him get his thoughts in order. He could hear her voice, see her face. As a result Blanc fell asleep thinking about the very woman he wasn’t sure was going to help him or end up being a threat to him.