Under the Channel. Gilles Pétel

smiling and genial, having almost forgotten why she was there.

      ‘That’s some knackered old kit you’ve got there. I never thought I’d see one of those things again.’

      Smiling half-heartedly, the officer replied weakly, ‘The computer’s broken.’

      She was reeling off her name and address when a police lieutenant stuck his head round the door to have a word with the officer. She heard his voice before she saw his face; its tone was warm but firm. He was asking for a report that his subordinate had not yet finished. While the officer mumbled his excuses, Juliette turned round to look at the man he was speaking to. He was standing right behind her, almost touching her. Flustered, unprepared for the encounter, she straightened in her chair. Looking up at him, she met his gaze searing deep into her eyes. And then he was gone. Under interrogation by Juliette, the junior officer told her the man in question was Lieutenant Desfeuillères. She made her way home soon afterwards feeling strange, wondering if she had imagined that voice and the look he had given her, which she couldn’t get out of her mind. Nothing else about him had stood out. If someone had asked her to describe what he looked like, she wouldn’t have known where to start.

      ‘What can I get you?’

      The butcher shook her from her daydream. She stammered two or three words before pulling herself together.

      ‘I’ll have eight hundred grams of stewing steak, please.’

      The young man behind the counter, who could barely be eighteen, had not been working there long. He had a nice manner with the customers and took his role seriously. He made Juliette laugh; he was a joker. He could have been one of her students. She had only been served by him two or three times when he started trying to flirt with her, but he did the same to everybody. ‘Looking gorgeous today, Madame.’ After the second time he told her his name: ‘I’m Mohamed.’

      ‘Anything else for you?’

      Le flic. Nowadays she called Roland ‘the cop’. The junior officer had warned her that burglars were very rarely caught. There was no need for her to come back to the station. They would write if there was any news. Nevertheless two weeks later, naturally having heard nothing, Juliette returned ‘just on the off-chance’, as she told the officer manning the front desk. He was preparing to turn her away when Lieutenant Desfeuillères appeared. If chance had brought them together the first time, their next encounter could only be the work of fate. The lieutenant recognised Juliette at once and invited her into his office.

      ‘I’ll look after Madame,’ he told the officer. And the rest was history.

      It was after nine when Juliette heard the key turn in the door. By now she was furious. The children had eaten. She was on the verge of putting them to bed, but knew how much Roland loved to be welcomed home by them. The sight of the two kids running at his legs instantly made him happy.

      ‘Bedtime!’ Juliette announced emphatically, in a tone that admitted no protest. However, the soon to be nine-year-old Ludivine was intent on staying up to give her father a goodnight kiss.

      ‘He doesn’t care!’ Juliette spat without thinking.

      Before she knew it, Ludivine was in tears. Her younger brother took advantage of the distraction to race towards the front door.

      ‘Papa!’

      Ludivine scurried after him, her tears suddenly dried and her face lit up.

      ‘Did you find the murderer? Go on, tell me, Papa!’ the little boy asked, while his sister let herself be scooped up in the arms she would have liked all to herself. ‘Do you still love me?’

      The children went off to bed, taking their excitement with them. The apartment felt quiet and empty in their absence. Juliette was at the end of her tether. She no longer found the kids’ nightly performance amusing. She picked a book off the shelves at random and made for the living room. Passing her husband, she nodded towards the kitchen.

      ‘There’s a beef bourguignon on the stove. Serve yourself.’

      Roland grabbed her by the arm.

      ‘Aren’t you going to give me a kiss?’

      Juliette dropped the book.

      ‘Stop it.’

      Roland wouldn’t let go. He tried to pull her towards him for a hug. She held back.

      ‘Let go.’

      Her face dropped. She looked up at her husband, afraid. He suddenly realised what was going through her mind. He had seen so many battered wives at the station. He was overcome by a mixture of shame and anger. How could she believe such a thing? He had never even raised his voice at her let alone dreamt of raising a hand to her. Something between them had just snapped. They both felt it without yet understanding it. Roland pulled his hand away sharply, as if he had accidentally touched a scorching hotplate. His tiredness was written on his face; it had been a long day, which had started early.

      He had sweated in his suit. The slight bulge of a burgeoning gut showed through the damp white shirt. He got away with carrying a bit of extra weight because he was tall: six foot, and proud of it. He was, or rather had been a good-looking man in his day. Now only his black hair seemed to have escaped the ravages of age. Tonight it was messy and greasy. Juliette couldn’t help passing a critical eye over the man she had been so in love with, and wished she could love still. She no longer saw in the cop who stood before her the sexy, self-assured man who had taken her into his office ten years earlier. ‘How can I help?’ he had asked with a smile on his lips and that warm voice she had come back to hear again.

      Juliette picked her book off the floor without a word. He watched her cross the corridor. She was still beautiful. It was only the way she acted that had become a bit stiff. Sometimes, like tonight, she played this cross, schoolmarmish part that Roland couldn’t stand. The day they met, he had first seen her from behind. Her long, curly brown hair fell onto the bare skin at the top of her back. Juliette had just got back from a performance of Tristan and Isolde at the Opéra Bastille. She was wearing a simple, elegant short-sleeved black dress which showed off the shape of her back. That was the image of her that stayed with Roland for a long time afterwards: hair tumbling onto a perfectly straight back in a close-fitting evening gown. When she looked over her shoulder at him, he had been struck by the intensity of her green eyes meeting his gaze. They had often reminisced about that moment. Juliette spoke of the ‘captive stares’ they had exchanged, and her turn of phrase had lingered in Roland’s mind as much as the memory of the moment itself.

      Roland really couldn’t face an argument tonight. He had only just left a crime scene. No matter how used he was to seeing dead bodies, they still left him shaken, and he wasn’t prepared for coming home to a fight. He hung in the corridor, incapable of making a decision. Not today, not now, he kept telling himself. Not that there was ever a good time for a domestic. Unless you were gunning for an argument, that was, and had laid the ground, brought it about on purpose. Picking a fight as a way out. At first, the thought made him shudder, but a second later he was smiling slyly. Not now. By this point he just felt confused and weak. He wasn’t really hungry. What had possessed Juliette to make beef bourguignon in this heat? The smells coming out of the kitchen made him gag. He couldn’t stop thinking about the case he had been attending to less than an hour earlier.

      A decapitated body had been found in a rubbish container. The stench had alerted people nearby. For the last three days, a refuse collectors’ strike had been blighting the streets of Paris. The city’s bins were overflowing. Hundreds of bags of rubbish were piled up on pavements. Rats had been spotted. Buried under the mountain of waste lay the torso of a young black man. He must have been there for a couple of days. A kid of sixteen or seventeen, judging by his frame. The body had been stripped naked. The police had gone through all the junk without finding the slightest piece of evidence. Decapitations don’t happen every day. Cutting off a man’s head isn’t easy. The neck is strong. You need the right tools, the right knowledge and, of course, the will to do it, which is to say one heck of a motive. As he recorded the details of the scene before him – the exact location