The captain’s footsteps faded, and the police station fell into silence. Lieutenant Pierrick Pasdeloup had turned off the radio. Papy enjoyed these moments of calm when he could sift through the evidence in an investigation, spread the exhibits out like a puzzle, take as long as he liked to put them in order, connect them, like a craftsman building a piece of furniture bit by bit, using the right tool for each part of the process.
He liked to let his mind slip away for a few moments, then sink back into the arcane details of the investigation.
And while he did so, he thought about his children, as he always did.
He had been only twenty when Cédric was born. Delphine had come next, two years later. His first two children were now over thirty and lived in the South. Both had become parents themselves; two children for Cédric, three for Delphine, a total of five grandchildren, whom Papy hardly ever saw. The eldest, Florian, was already in secondary school. A few years more, and he in turn would leave his parents and probably live even farther away. The cycle of life.
Two photos of corpses on the desk. Cyril and Ilona Lukowik. Shot on January 6, 2016, on Rue de la Mer in Deauville.
Papy had gone through a divorce five years after Cédric’s birth. He’d fought for months to get shared custody of his son and daughter; he’d even offered to change his job, but that bastard judge wasn’t interested. In the following years, he had seen his children only every other weekend. Which meant that, with school on Saturday mornings, he’d probably seen them less than thirty-six days per year. Around one in ten . . .
When he met his second wife, Stéphanie, he was twenty-six and he already knew that they wouldn’t last as a couple. She didn’t realize it; she was in love. Stéphanie was too young, too beautiful, too fond of life. She was seven years younger than him and had never been with another man: it was inevitable that she would cheat on him eventually. They had two children together: Charlotte and Valentin.
When they divorced, four years later, after Stéphanie took a lover, Papy held all the aces. The break-up was obviously Stéphanie’s fault. Even she felt guilty, and it was Papy who allowed her to share custody. For the kids’ sake. He was a good sport.
Those were some of the most beautiful moments of his life.
Lieutenant Pasdeloup’s finger caressed the photograph of a ruby tiara estimated to be worth fifteen thousand euros. When he thought about it, no one had paid much attention to the brief lives of this Bonnie and Clyde from Normandy. The investigation focused on the two fugitives, Timo Soler and his supposed accomplice, Alexis Zerda. On the haul too, which was the object of daydreams for readers and journalists alike. But Cyril and Ilona Lukowik, once their corpses had been removed from Deauville’s seafront in two plastic body bags, had been more or less forgotten. Just a few routine visits from the Caen police to Potigny, the village that probably linked all of this together.
Papy had met Alexandra a few years later; she was thirty and she raised Charlotte and Valentin as if they were her own children, without ever asking for more, allowing him complete control over his kids. The perfect stepmother, who became a mother herself at thirty-three. A new child! The first for Alexandra, who hadn’t particularly wanted children, and the fifth for Papy.
Anaïs was born in 1996. She was a little princess adored by all. His princess and his favorite. His reason for getting out of bed every morning. A dream of a girl, until she became a woman. Last June, she had passed her baccalaureate with flying colors. Now she was in Cleveland at a business school that cost ten thousand dollars per year. She had begged them to support her, and he’d spent the last eighteen years trying to make her happy, so how could he refuse? Even if, for him, it meant those eighteen years of happiness suddenly being swept away and scattered to the wind.
Papy had left Alexandra the day after Anaïs’s exam results were announced.
At fifty-one, he still found Alexandra sexy, elegant, free, liberated even; now definitively freed from the millstone of motherhood. A full-time woman, at last.
They had made a wonderful family.
And Papy suddenly felt terribly old.
Lieutenant Pasdeloup somehow resisted his fatigue. His eyes, focused on the dossier, kept opening and closing. He only had to hold out a little while longer: in fifteen minutes, he would have Anaïs on the phone. That would be enough to wake him up.
He straightened up and concentrated on every detail of the investigation.
Timo Soler, Alexis Zerda, Cyril and Ilona Lukowik were all from Potigny, a little village in Basse-Normandie, that was renowned, for over eighty years, for having one of the biggest coalmines in western France. A village of miners’ cottages, surrounded by woodland.
The Potigny mines had been shut down in 1989, leaving behind two generations and twenty nationalities of unemployed men, although the Poles—who had created a little Warsaw on the Caen plain—were definitely in the majority.
Four armed robbers. Four children from Potigny. Three boys and a girl. All of them unemployed, their parents unemployed too. One question gnawed at Lieutenant Pasdeloup: how and why had these four kids—who had all grown up together in the same working-class street in their village, Rue des Gryzon´s—become, years later, an organized gang of criminals?
The Caen police had rummaged around in the village’s collective memory, spending a few hours in the streets of Potigny, questioning people. It was all in the report.
The words danced in front of Lieutenant Pasdeloup’s eyes.
What if the Caen police had missed something essential?
What if he could perceive what they had failed to perceive? If he could hear what they had failed to hear?
Papy felt convinced that the key to the whole investigation lay in that grim transformation. A group of four friends decide to attack some shops, armed with guns, in accordance with an almost suicidal plan. It was this that interested him, more than the possibility of finding the famous hoard or proving Alexis Zerda’s guilt.
The lieutenant paused for a moment over the photographs of the four robbers. He moved the pictures of the two corpses together, so that they were lying next to each other. He was convinced that there was something here, even if no one seemed to have thought about this question. Ilona and Cyril Lukowik were the only ones whose guilt had been proven: shot down, Berettas in hand, without any possible doubt over their involvement, even if they’d never had the chance to explain themselves before a judge or talk to a lawyer. Yet that version of events bothered Papy.
Why had this couple agreed to take part in such a suicidal mission? Cyril had worked as a docker for years. True, he’d had only temporary jobs for the past ten months, but he’d left his past as a juvenile delinquent well behind him. He’d found love, marriage, a family. It was only the press that had depicted them as the region’s answer to Bonnie and Clyde. He and the other cops knew that the couple led a steady, content life. How could Zerda have convinced them to commit to this murderous game? Them, and Timo Soler?
Was it just because of their friendship, forged in the Norman mining village?
Or a secret pact?
Some kind of debt? A contract? A threat?
Papy had an intuition that the key lay in Potigny, hidden deep in their shared past. After all, the village was less than a two-hour drive away. The simplest thing would be to go there and check everything in the report; to analyze everything that Ilona and Cyril had left behind them forever on the boardwalk at Deauville: their childhood, their youth, their friends, their family.
In particular, Lieutenant Pasdeloup felt he had to verify at least one detail, a detail that the cops from Caen, who had lost themselves in the mines of Potigny before him, had dealt with in less than thirty minutes. A detail that, he believed, changed everything.