The Critic

III

Enzo hadn’t noticed before the family photographs stuck up on the wall behind Roussel’s desk. A little boy, aged two or three, playing on a tricycle. A young woman laughing at the camera. Plump, with an attractive smile. There was a child’s drawing of a motor car made with coloured crayons. Pinned to the wall above the filing cabinet was a violet and white striped football supporter’s scarf, and a banner for TFC-Toulouse Football Club. So Roussel had interests beyond Lara Croft.

Enzo said, ‘Do you always have the shutters closed?’

‘I think better in the dark. Sunlight’s distracting. It just makes you want to be outside.’ Roussel took his missing person’s file from the filing cabinet and opened it carefully on his desk. He lifted up the sheaf of papers he had produced during Enzo’s first visit and handed it to him. ‘Serge Coste, aged thirty-four. Married. Childless. No longer missing. I guess I should be moving him into the Petty file. I broke the news to his wife just after first light.’

‘How did she take it?’

He shook his head. ‘Hard to say. She didn’t cry or anything, not while I was there. She just nodded and bit her lip. I almost got the sense that she was relieved. He hadn’t run off and left her after all. So, no loss of face. She asked me in and wanted to know the details. When I told her she seemed genuinely shocked. It’s not an easy thing to describe, what we saw last night. Especially to a loved one.’

Enzo cast an eye over the file. Coste had been the manager of a DIY store, one of a national chain, on the outskirts of town. He had no apparent connection with the wine industry. He was born in Gaillac, grew up and went to school in the town. He had failed his baccalaureat, but still managed to get a place in a technical college where he had honed his skills in bricolage and got a job as a sales assistant in the store he would later manage. He had been married for eight years before disappearing without explanation one weekend twelve months ago. ‘Had he ever been to the States?’

Roussel scratched his chin thoughtfully. ‘Not to my knowledge. You know, a lot of people who’re born here and die here, never venture any further than Toulouse. I don’t know where Serge took his vacations, but he wasn’t the type to go abroad.’

Enzo gazed sightlessly at Coste’s file for several minutes, lost in deep contemplation. ‘And you couldn’t find any link between Coste and any of the others in your missing person’s file.’

‘To be honest, I wasn’t looking. There was no reason to. None of them was connected in life, there was no reason to look for connections between their disappearances.’

Enzo held out a hand. ‘Can I have a look?’

Roussel handed him the file, and he started leafing through the cases. Roussel tucked his thumbs in his belt and tilted his chair back against the wall, watching Enzo as he absorbed the details of each. ‘Until now, there wasn’t any reason to look for a connection with Petty either. Not that I can think of anything anyway. Except maybe Robert Rohart. He was a good bit older than the others, an estate worker at one of the wine chateaux. But that’s a pretty thin connection. A lot of people work in the wine industry around here.’

He continued to watch Enzo sift slowly through the papers in the file, as if somehow absolved now from all responsibility. Then he tipped his chair forward again and leaned his elbows on the desk.

‘You know, I have this way of working. It’s kind of conceptual. I see each case as being like a long corridor.’ He held the palms of his hands six inches apart and moved them in parallel away from himself. ‘There are doors off it to the left and right. So I stop at each door I come to. I go into the room, and I take account of everything that’s in it. Then I shut that door and move on to the next. That way I miss nothing, and there’s never any reason to go back. When I reach the end of the corridor, I have all the information I need to solve the case.’

Enzo looked up and found it impossible to mask his skepticism. ‘What if there’s a power cut?’

‘What?’

‘If it’s dark in those rooms, there’s stuff you won’t see. Or in the corridor. You might miss a door. You might find a light bulb in the next room and go back to throw light on one you’ve already visited.’ Enzo tapped the papers on his knee with his knuckle. ‘In my experience, Gendarme Roussel, criminal investigations are never linear. You’re constantly going back and forth and sideways, reassessing what you knew before in the light of what you’ve learned since. Looking again at what you’ve already examined because for sure there’s something you’ve missed.’

Roussel’s face reddened, and he pushed himself back from the desk, folding his arms defensively. ‘We all have our own ways of working.’ He nodded huffily towards the missing persons file. ‘So what have I missed in there?’

‘A connection.’

Roussel seemed startled. ‘Really?’

‘But like you said, you weren’t looking for one before. This is a classic example of going back to reopen a door you’ve already closed.’

‘Tell me.’

‘You’ve got four cases in here. All of them have disappeared over the last three years. Three of them share two things in common. The fourth shares neither of them, so let’s take that one out for the moment.’ He passed it to Roussel.

‘Jeanne Champion.’

‘She was sixteen. All her friends said she was pregnant, but her parents didn’t seem to know. Classic hallmark of the teenage runaway. Disappeared April, 2004.’

‘So what doesn’t she have in common with the others?’

‘Most obviously, she was a female. All the others were male.’

‘And?’

‘She went missing in the Spring. The others all disappeared on dates ranging between mid-September and mid-October from 2004 to 2006.’ He waited for Roussel to realise the significance of the dates, but the gendarme simply looked perplexed. ‘They all went missing when the grapes were being harvested. During the vendanges.’

The red of Roussel’s cheeks darkened. ‘Jesus.’

‘And if Petty was still just a missing person, he would share those things in common with them. As it was, he was the first one to disappear. Serge Coste was the last. If you ask me, monsieur, I would say that the other two are probably curled up in barrels of wine somewhere awaiting disposal.’

‘Or display.’

Enzo nodded his agreement. ‘Or display.’ He dropped the file back on Roussel’s desk. ‘But here’s the scary thing. For all intents and purposes, there’s been one a year for the last four years.’ He paused for effect.

This time Roussel took his point. ‘But there’s been no one reported missing this year.’

‘Yet.’