Irene (18 page)

Quite how drunk she was Camille would have been hard-pressed to say. She spoke clearly, articulating each syllable, which might mean that she was attempting to allay his suspicions.

Armand came downstairs with the other officers. He waved for Camille to join them.

“If you’ll excuse me for a moment …”

Armand led Camille to a small study on the first floor: a handsome cherry-wood desk, a state-of-the-art computer, a few files and folders, some bookcases lined with law books, real estate brochures and four whole shelves of crime novels.

“Telephone forensics, get in touch with the lab,” Camille said, as he made for the stairs. “And call Maleval and tell him he’s to be on the scene while they’re here. And tell him I’ll need him to stay here overnight. Just in case …”

He went back to the drawing room.

“I think, Madame Cottet, that we need to have a little chat about your husband.”

“I’ll be gone two days at the most.”

Camille looked at Irène, beached rather than seated on the living-room sofa, her belly heavy, her knees splayed.

“So you brought me the flowers to celebrate your little trip?”

“No, I meant to bring them yesterday.”

“By the time you get back, you might well have a son.”

“I’m not going away for three weeks, Irène, I’ll be gone a couple of days.”

Irène went to look for a vase.

“What’s really frustrating,” she said, smiling, “is that I want to get angry, but I can’t. They’re really pretty, your flowers.”

“They’re
your
flowers.”

She walked as far as the kitchen door and turned back to Camille.

“The reason I want to be angry is that we’ve talked about going to Scotland twice, you’ve spent two years thinking about it, and now you’ve decided to go without me.”

“I’m not going on holiday, you know that.”

“I wish it was a holiday,” Irène called from the kitchen.

Camille went to join her. He tried to hug her, but Irène refused. Gently, but she refused.

At that moment, Louis telephoned.

“I just wanted to say … don’t worry about Irène. Tell her she can call me anytime while you’re away.”

“Thanks, Louis, you’re a good guy.”

“Who was that?” Irène asked as he hung up.

“My guardian angel.”

“I thought I was your guardian angel,” Irène said, pressing herself against him.

“No, you’re my matryoshka doll,” he said, laying a hand on her belly.

“Oh, Camille,” she said, and began to cry quietly.

The team met up at 8.30 a.m. on Saturday morning. Even Le Guen.

“Have you been in touch with the
brigade financière
?”

“You’ll have the information within the hour.”

Camille began to allocate the workload. Maleval, who had spent all night in Saint-Germain, wore his usual shop-soiled expression. Armand was tasked with combing through Cottet’s contacts, his address book, his e-mails – business and personal – and with ensuring that Cottet’s description had been circulated to local squads the night before. Louis was to look into his bank accounts – business and personal – his cash inflow and outflow, and his calendar.

“Our killer needs three things. Time – something that Cottet, being his own boss, has lots of. He needs money, which Cottet clearly has. You only have to look at his company, his house. Even if not all of his property developments have made a profit. Thirdly, he needs organisational skills. Something else our man must have.”

“Aren’t you forgetting motive?” Le Guen said.

“Motive is something we can ask him about when we’ve tracked him down. Louis – any news on Lambert?”

“Nothing. We’ve still got teams watching the three locations he visits most regularly. No sightings so far.”

“We’re not going to get anything from the surveillance, are we?”

“I don’t think so, no. We’ve kept things low key, but word is bound to have got about by now.… ”

“Lambert, Cottet … I’m finding it difficult to see a connection between the two. That’s something we need to look into. Louis, you deal with that.”

“That’s likely to be a lot of work.”

Camille turned to Le Guen. “Louis says it’s a lot of work.”

“If I had a bunch of officers standing idle, you’d know about it.”

“O.K., Jean. Thanks for your support. I suggest we organise raids on Lambert’s known associates. Maleval, you’ve got the upto-date list?”

“I’ve counted eleven close contacts. If we’re going for simultaneous busts, we’re looking at four teams at least to make sure no-one slips through the net.”

“Jean?”

“I can allocate four teams for tonight, but only to conduct the raids.”

“I’d suggest a coordinated action at 22:00 hours. That way we’ll have space in the holding cells for everyone. Maleval, I’ll need you to sort out the logistics. Armand, you liaise with him so we can set up the interviews.” Camille glanced around the team. “In the meantime, I’ll stay here and sort through whatever information came through last night.”

*

By mid-morning, Camille had managed to piece together most of François Cottet’s career.

At twenty-four, having graduated without distinction from a second-rate business school, he joined S.O.D.R.A.G.I.M., a real estate development company founded by its current C.E.O., Edmond Forestier. Cottet managed a small department dealing in private housing. Three years later, he got his first big break when he married the boss’ daughter.

“I was … we were forced to get married,” was how his wife had put it, “but that proved to be a false alarm. As things turned out, marrying my husband was a
faux pas
twice over.”

Two years later, Cottet had his second stroke of luck: his father-in-law was killed in a car accident in the Ardennes. Before he turned thirty, Cottet was C.E.O. of the company, which he immediately restructured to become S.O.G.E.F.I., creating a number of satellite companies to deal with various other market sectors. By the time he was forty, he had managed the extraordinary feat of taking a perennially profitable company and plunging it into the red, something that spoke volumes about his gifts as an entrepreneur. There were several bail-outs from his wife, who had inherited a fortune sufficient to compensate for her husband’s incompetence, an inheritance that – given his propensity for financial blunders – would sooner or later be exhausted.

To say his wife despised him would be an understatement.

“You met the man,
commandant
, so I hardly need to tell you: my husband is a man of appalling vulgarity. Though I suppose in the circles he frequents, that may well be seen as a virtue.”

Madame Cottet had initiated divorce proceedings eighteen months previously, but interminable financial complications and applications by lawyers meant that the divorce had not yet been granted. One interesting fact: Cottet had had a brush with the law in 2001. He had been arrested on October 4 at 2.30 a.m. in
the Bois de Boulogne. Having beaten up a prostitute, punching her in the face and the stomach, Cottet had been set upon by a gang of bruisers working for her pimp. He had escaped with his life only thanks to the intervention of a passing patrol car. He spent two days in hospital, and then was tried and given a two-month suspended sentence for indecent assault and actual bodily harm. Camille leafed through the files and checked the dates. The Edinburgh killing – the earliest of the murders – had taken place on 10 July, 2001. Had Cottet’s arrest taught him to plan his crimes more carefully? Or did his wife’s constant references to “his whores” stem from the fact that she loathed him and would be only too happy to get him into trouble?

Camille reread Dr Crest’s provisional report and decided that, so far, Cottet’s character was consistent with the profile he had been given.

The preliminary case conference took place at 12.45.

“The forensics team finished their work at the Cottet house this morning,” Camille announced. “It will take two or three days to get results back on the fibres from Cottet’s clothes and shoes, hair samples and so forth. But even if the results are positive, they’re not worth much until we manage to locate the man himself.”

“I’ve no idea what goes on inside Cottet’s head,” Armand said
when Camille nodded for him to speak, “but his wife was right, he’s definitely into prostitutes. There’s shitloads of porn on the guy’s computer, his browser history is full of links to escort sites … Given the number of girls he tagged, it would have taken up a lot of his time. And,” Armand could not resist adding, “I’m telling you, it must have cost a packet.”

Everyone smiled.

“There are no prostitutes in his address book. He obviously arranges his hook-ups online. On the other hand, there’s a ton of business contacts, so it’ll take a while to sort through them for anyone who might be of interest. But there’s certainly nothing to connect him with anything we already have on the cases.”

“The same can be said for his bank accounts,” Louis continued. “There is no record of purchases of anything that might link him to the investigation: no nail gun, no Ralph Lauren suitcase, no bespoke Japanese sofa. On the other hand, for the past three years he has made large cash withdrawals. There’s no obvious pattern, but I’ve cross-referenced the data and there were sizeable withdrawals in the periods leading up to the crimes we know about, but there are others too. We’d have to be able to question him to get to the bottom of all this. The same is true of the diary. On the day of the Glasgow murder, Cottet was in Spain.”

“Whether he actually went to Spain remains to be seen,” Camille said.

“We’re looking into that, but we don’t expect to have an answer until early next week. He was in Paris in November 2001. Tremblay is in the suburbs so there’s no way to prove whether he was there or not. The same goes for Courbevoie. Until we track him down.”

Since a description of Cottet had been circulated to all local and national police stations the night before, they agreed to leave
it at that until Monday. Louis volunteered to be on call over the weekend, to telephone Camille at any hour of the day or night if there were any developments.

When he got home that afternoon, Camille put his parcels in the small room that Irène had been redecorating for the arrival of the baby. At first Camille helped out, but gradually he became swamped by work. They had been using the space as a box room, but since she stopped working, Irène had cleared out all junk, had the walls papered in cheery, pastel colours so that now the room, which had a connecting door to their bedroom, looked like a doll’s house. “Just the right size for me,” Camille thought. For a month now, Irène had been buying baby furniture, all of which was still in boxes. Looking at them, Camille broke into a sort of cold sweat. Irène could go into labour at any moment …

*

His mobile phone rang, making him start. It was Louis.

“No, there’s nothing new. It’s just that you left the Tremblay file on your desk yesterday. I thought you were taking it to Glasgow.”

“I forgot it.”

“That’s alright, I have it here. Do you want me to bring it round?”

Camille hesitated for a split second, surveyed the unpacked boxes, heard Irène humming to herself in the shower.

“No, that’s fine. Do you mind if I come over?”

“No problem. I’m on call all weekend, so I’ll be here.”

Camille and Irène began to unpack the boxes and in a moment of madness Camille even found himself assembling the crib and a chest of drawers. (Insert screws “A” into the upper holes “1C” position stabiliser bar “F” between crosspieces “2C”, Jesus Christ, which ones are the crosspieces, there are 8 x screw “A” and 4 x “B”, do not fully tighten the screws until dowels “B” have been inserted into the apertures “E” indicated in, Irène, can you come and take a look. Oh, darling, I think you’ve put it together upside down, etc.)

A good day.

That night they went out for dinner and Irène, not wanting to be alone while Camille was in Scotland, decided she would go and spend a few days with her parents, who had retired to Bourgogne.

“I’ll get Louis to drive you to the station,” Camille suggested. “Or maybe Maleval.”

“I’ll take a taxi. Louis has more important things to do. Besides, if you’re going to ask someone, I’d rather it was Armand.”

Camille smiled. Irène was very fond of Armand. A sort of maternal affection. She loved his awkwardness and found his neuroses touching.

“How is he these days?”

“Oh, you know. If they gave out medals for being tight-fisted, Armand would pawn his.”

“It can’t be any worse than it was.”

“Oh, when it comes to Armand, it can. It’s pitiful.”

*

Maleval called in at 10.30 p.m.

“We’ve managed to pick up all of Lambert’s cronies. There’s only one missing.”

“That’s a pain.”

“Not really. It’s the kid, Mourad. He was stabbed last night, his body was found around noon today in a cellar in Clichy. With thugs like these, you can never be sure your list is up to date.”

“Do you need anything from me?”

Thinking about Irène, Camille sent a brief prayer to heaven that he would not need to leave the apartment until he left for Glasgow.

“No, I don’t think so. We’ve got them all in separate cells. Louis decided to stay here with us. And Armand’s here, so there’s three of us. We’ll call if there’s any news.”

*

The “news”, such as it was, arrived shortly after midnight.

“No-one knows anything,” Maleval told Camille, who was getting ready for bed. “We’ve cross-checked all the statements and they have only one thing in common: Lambert told them all the same thing at the same time.”

“Which is?”

“Fuck all. Almost all of them are convinced he left town with Daniel Royet. He said he needed to get away for a while. Some of them were told it would only be a short trip and he told one of his daughters he would be gone ‘two days at the most’. He said nothing about where he was going.”

“O.K. Send everyone home. You can deal with the paperwork on Monday. Go and get some sleep.”