The Circle (45 page)

‘Commandant, it's not up to you to decide.'

‘Commissioner, please,' he groaned. ‘Have you seen her? Just the sight of her makes me feel suicidal.'

An involuntary smile flickered over Santos's fleshy lips.

‘That is not how you will resolve your problems,' scolded the woman, piqued. ‘Not by seeking refuge in denial or sarcasm.'

‘Dr Andrieu is a specialist in—' Santos began, without conviction.

‘Santos, you know what happened. How would you have reacted in my position?'

‘Yes, that's why you have not been suspended. Because of the pressure you're under. And also because of the ongoing inquiry. And I am not in your position.'

‘Commandant,' said the woman patiently, ‘your attitude is counterproductive. May I give you a piece of advice? You ought to—'

‘Commissioner,' protested Servaz, ‘leave her in this office and I truly will go crazy. Give me five minutes. You and me, alone. After that, if you like, I will marry her. Five minutes.'

‘Doctor,' said Santos.

‘I cannot believe—' began the woman, curtly.

‘Please, Doctor.'

When he went back out, he took the lift to the second floor and headed for his office.

‘Stehlin wants to see you,' said one of the members of his squad.

Once again they had all gathered in the corridor to talk about football.

‘Apparently it was pretty tense when he announced the selection,' someone said.

‘Pff, if we don't win against Mexico, then we don't deserve to go on,' said someone else.

Couldn't they wait until they were in the bar to talk about stuff like this? thought Servaz. He walked up to his boss's office, knocked, and went in. The director was putting ‘sensitive' packages – money or drugs – into the safe. Above it hung a bulletproof vest stamped ‘Crime Squad'.

‘I'm sure you didn't call me in here to talk about football,' he joked.

‘Lacaze is going to be remanded in custody,' announced Stehlin as he closed the safe. ‘Judge Sartet will request the withdrawal of his immunity. He has refused to say where he was on Friday evening.'

Servaz looked at him in disbelief.

‘He's throwing his career down the drain,' said Stehlin.

Servaz shook his head. Something was bugging him.

‘And yet,' he said. ‘And yet I don't think it's him. I got the impression that what spooked him more than anything was to … to say where he had been. But not because he'd been at Claire Diemar's house that night.'

‘What do you mean? I don't get it.'

‘Well, it was as if revealing where he was that night might harm his career even more,' answered Servaz, puzzled. ‘I know, I know, it doesn't make sense.'

Ziegler stared at the screen of her PC. Not the cutting-edge machine she had at home, but her far more sluggish desktop at the squad. She had stuck a few posters from her favourite films on the walls to cheer the place up a bit –
The Godfather Part II, The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, A Clockwork Orange
– but it wasn't enough. She looked at the files on the shelves in front of her: ‘Burglaries', ‘Vagrants', ‘Illegal trade in anabolic steroids' and gave a sigh.

It was a quiet morning. She had sent her men out and the gendarmerie was silent and empty, apart from the officer on duty at reception.

Once she had got her everyday chores out of the way, Irène went back to what she had discovered the night before.
Someone had downloaded malevolent software onto Martin's computer.
One of his colleagues? Why would they have done that? Someone in custody, when Martin was out of the office? No cop with any sense, let alone Servaz, would leave a detainee unmonitored in his own office. A member of the cleaning staff?
A possibility
… For the time being, Ziegler could see no others. If she was right, she needed to know which company had the contract with the Toulouse SRPJ. She could always call them, but she doubted they'd give the information to a gendarme without a warrant and a valid explanation. She could also ask Martin to find out for her. But she always came up against the same problem: how could she explain to him what she had discovered without admitting that she had hacked into his computer?

There might be another way round it.

She opened the online Yellow Pages, answered ‘Cleaning Companies' to the question ‘What, who?' and ‘Greater Toulouse Area' to the question ‘Where'?

Three hundred answers! She eliminated all the companies that also provided services such as housekeeping, gardening, pest control or thermal insulation, and concentrated on those that only cleaned offices and business locations. Now she had a list of about twenty names. This was far more reasonable.

She took her mobile and dialled the first number on the list.

‘Clean Service,' answered a woman's voice.

‘Good morning. I'm calling from human resources at the police station on the boulevard de l'Embouchure. We have … uh … a little problem.'

‘What sort of problem?'

‘Well, we haven't been too pleased with your company's
performance
, we find that the quality of the work has deteriorated of late, and we—'

‘The police station, you say?'

‘Yes.'

‘Just a moment. I'll put you through to someone.'

Irène waited. Might she have landed on the right one on her first attempt? She waited for ages. Finally, a man's voice replied, sounding annoyed.

‘There must be a mistake,' he said curtly. ‘You did say the police station?'

‘Yes, that's right.'

‘I'm sorry, we don't clean the offices at the police station. I've been checking through our client records for a good ten minutes. There's nothing here about you. Where did you get your information?'

‘Are you sure?'

‘Of course I'm sure! And why are you calling us? Who are you, anyway?'

‘Thank you very much,' she said, and hung up.

By the time she had made eighteen phone calls she was beginning to have doubts about her method. She dialled the nineteenth number and went through her little song and dance again. Once again, the person on the switchboard put her through to someone else. The same endless wait …

‘You say you're not pleased with our work?' came a forceful-sounding man's voice down the line. ‘Could you tell me a little bit more about that? What is it exactly that you're not pleased with?'

She sat up in her seat.

She hadn't prepared herself for the question so she improvised, feeling very guilty about the cleaners working in that building, who would now be upbraided for some completely fictional negligence.

‘I'm making this call on behalf of some of my colleagues,' she concluded soothingly. ‘But you know how it is: there are always some grumpy, dissatisfied people who need to criticise others in order to exist. I'm merely passing on their complaints. Personally, I've never had cause to complain about the state of my office.'

‘I'll see what I can do,' said the man. ‘I will emphasise the points you've made. Whatever the case may be, you were right to call us. We set great store by our customer satisfaction.'

The usual mercantile rhetoric – but which implied that the staff would be told off.

‘Don't be too hard on your employees. It's no big deal.'

‘No, no, I don't agree with you. We strive to offer excellent service, we want our clients to be fully satisfied, and our employees must be up to the task. That's the least anyone can expect.'

Particularly with the salaries you pay them
, she thought.

‘Thank you for your professional attitude. Goodbye.'

As soon as she had rung off, she went onto a website that showed companies' organisation charts, earnings and other key figures. She wrote down the name of the head of Clarion Cleaners on a Post-it. There was no telephone number, however. So she called the same switchboard, but this time from her landline at the gendarmerie, which would show her name and her employer.

‘Clarion,' answered the same female voice as before.

‘May I speak to Xavier Lambert?' she said, trying to change her own voice. ‘Tell him it's for an inquiry for the gendarmerie, about one of his cleaners. It's urgent.'

Silence at the end of the line. Had the woman at the other end recognised her voice? Then a ringing tone.

‘Xavier Lambert,' said a weary male voice.

‘Good morning, Monsieur Lambert, this is Captain Ziegler of the gendarmerie, we are presently conducting a criminal inquiry that may concern a member of your cleaning team. I need a list of your staff.'

‘A list of my staff? Who are you, did you say?'

‘Captain Irène Ziegler.'

‘Why do you need this list, Captain, if that's not indiscreet?'

‘A crime has been committed in one of the offices cleaned by your company. The theft of sensitive documents. We found minute traces of industrial cleaner on the papers that were next to the stolen documents. But of course we shall keep this to ourselves.'

‘Of course,' said the man, perfectly calm. ‘Do you have a warrant?'

‘No. But I can get one.'

‘Then why don't you.'

Shit! He was about to hang up!

‘Wait!'

‘Yes, Captain?'

He seemed amused by her urgency. She felt herself getting angry.

‘Look, Monsieur Lambert, I can get this warrant in the space of a few hours. The only problem is, we're working against the clock. The suspect may still have the documents in his possession, but for how much longer? We don't know when he will pass them on, nor to whom. We want to place him under surveillance. So you must understand that every minute counts. And you surely don't wish to be an accessory, even unintentionally, to a crime as serious as industrial espionage.'

‘Yes, I understand. Of course. I'm a responsible citizen and if I can do anything to help you within a legal framework … But you in turn must understand that I cannot divulge personal information about my staff without a good reason.'

‘I just gave you one.'

‘Well then, let's just say that I will wait until this … excellent reason has been confirmed by the judge.'

The man's voice was full of arrogance. She felt the anger blaze through her now like wildfire. It was exactly what she needed.

‘Naturally I cannot accuse you of obstructing the inquiry; you have the law on your side,' she declared coldly. ‘But we gendarmes tend to carry a grudge, you know. So, if you persist in your attitude, I will be obliged to call in the Health and Safety Inspectors, the Departmental Office for Labour and Employment, and the Unreported Employment Committee. And they will ferret everywhere until they find something, believe me.'

‘Captain, I suggest you change your tone, this is going too far,'
said the man, clearly annoyed now. ‘They will do no such thing. I will contact your superiors at once.'

He was bluffing. She could tell from his voice.

‘Then if it's not today, it will be tomorrow,' she continued, adopting the same frosty tone. ‘Because we won't let up, believe me. We will stick to your shoes like chewing gum. Because we gendarmes never forget a thing. I hope there is not the slightest irregularity in the management of your staff, Monsieur Lambert, I sincerely hope so, because if there is you can bid farewell to a number of your clients, starting with the police.'

Silence at the other end.

‘I'll send you the list.'

‘With all the information complete,' she insisted, then hung up.

Servaz was driving down the motorway. The air was still just as stifling and heavy, but a storm was clearly brewing. The wave of heat would soon give way to thunder and lightning. In the same way, he felt he was drawing close to a stormy conclusion, that they were closer than they realised. All the elements were there before their eyes. All they had to do now was bring them together and make them talk.

He called Espérandieu and asked him to go back to Toulouse to dig around in Elvis's past. At the lycée there were too many people about in the middle of the day, and Samira was not letting Margot out of her sight. Hirtmann would never strike under these conditions – assuming he did intend to strike, something Servaz was beginning to doubt. Once again, he wondered where Hirtmann might be. Any certainty he might have had regarding his whereabouts was beginning to falter. In his imagination Hirtmann was beginning to look more and more like a ghost, a myth. Servaz banished the thought. It made him nervous.

He parked outside the restaurant on the way into Marsac, forty minutes late.

‘What the hell were you doing?'

Margot was wearing shorts, heavy shoes with steel toecaps, and a T-shirt of a pop group he hadn't heard of. Her hair was red, the gel in it making it stick straight up in the air. Without answering, he gave her a kiss and led her out to the little wooden bridge covered with
flower boxes which spanned a stream where a few ducks were gliding along elegantly. The doors to the restaurant were open wide. It was pleasantly cool inside, and buzzing with discreet conversation. A few diners paused to look at Margot as she came in, and she ignored them disdainfully, while the maître d' led them to a little table.

‘Do they serve mojitos here?' she asked once they were seated.

‘Since when do you drink alcohol?'

‘Since I turned thirteen.'

He looked at her, wondering whether she was joking. Apparently not. Servaz ordered a calf's head, Margot a burger. A television broadcast the images of players practising on the football pitch, the sound turned off.

‘It's really giving me the creeps,' she began, without waiting. ‘This whole business … this surveillance … do you really think he could …'

She didn't finish her sentence.

‘You have nothing to worry about,' he hurried to reply. ‘It's just a precaution. There's virtually no risk of him going after you, or even showing his face. I just want to be one hundred per cent sure that you're not in any danger.'