Dead Horsemeat

Tuesday 5 September 1989

At 7 a.m. Daquin is at work in his office, Quai des Orfèvres. An office shut away at the end of the top-floor corridor with a window overlooking an interior courtyard, where he has total peace and quiet. A light, spacious office which acts as a meeting room for his whole team, furnished in a functional, all-purpose style. Daquin takes some files out of the wooden cupboards lining two of the walls, places them on his desk and leafs through them. A solitary task, needs to refresh his memory, spark ideas, decide which avenues to pursue. Try to be thorough and put two and two together. Cocaine and horses. Not much. The odd reference. The godfather of the Ochoa family in Medellín is a leading Colombian horse breeder. Flimsy… Racecourses as a money-laundering outlet. We know that… Doping racehorses with cocaine and amphetamine derivatives… A jockey… A lot of rumours, but nothing concrete comes to mind. And of course Romero’s dossier on the Paola Jiménez murder. Daquin slips in the Agence France Presse despatch dated 21 August 1989 reporting on the seizure of fifty-three kilos of cocaine by the antinarcotics department. Probably the end of the story.

He removes some documents and files them in his drawer, and puts the rest back in the cupboard. Dossiers are the keystones of power. Sitting with his back to the window, his feet resting on the edge of the desk, he reflects for a while.

Facing him, the whole section of wall next to the door is taken up by a cork board. As an investigation progresses, it fills up with addresses, telephone numbers, messages, appointments, maps, sketches. Daquin gets up, sorts, throws away or files information that is out of date, clears a space for the coming days. Just beneath the cork board, a state-of-the-art espresso machine stands on top of a cupboard. Inside are stocks of coffee beans and mineral water, cups, glasses, a few bottles of spirits and a plastic tray for dirty cups. All meticulously tidy. Daquin makes himself a coffee. A few moments’ quiet. Glances around the room. Familiar space, sense of well-being.

Shortly before 11 a.m., there’s a stir in the DIs’ office next door. On the dot of eleven, the men troop in noisily through the connecting door, bomber jackets, jeans and trainers, except for Lavorel, who always wears a blazer and dark trousers, or a suit. Romero, the seductive Latin Romeo, has worked with Daquin for nine years, Lavorel joined the team four years ago after several years with the Fraud Squad and a few sporadic joint operations. Podgy, with thinning fair hair and little metal-rimmed spectacles, he looks like a bureaucrat just on the point of fading away. But he and Romero have been accomplices for years. They were both born and bred on tough urban housing estates, one in Marseille, the other outside Paris, flirted with delinquency in their teens and are proud never to have forgotten it. Romero derives a real physical pleasure from his work as a detective inspector. And Lavorel, whose years at the Fraud Squad left him with a penchant for paperwork, sees it as a form of revenge: redressing, as far as he can, the iniquities of a justice system that spares the powerful and crushes the weak, and making the rich pay. The other two DIs, Amelot and Berry, are no more than kids, and this is their first assignment. With degrees in history and political science, unable to find a job, they took various civil service exams and ended up in the police, without really grasping the difference between their profession and that of a postman. Daquin calls them the ’new boys’.

Daquin makes coffee for everyone, then they all sit down. Daquin gives a brief report on his night at the station in the 16^th arrondissement, and the meeting with the new chief.

‘So we’re going to take a little time check out a certain Senanche, at Meirens’s place. He may be a small-time dealer who goes shopping in Holland. If that’s the case, we’ll soon know. You organise this amongst yourselves. Meanwhile, I’ll talk to various departments to see whether they’re working on any cases that might be of interest to us. We’ll have the first review here, in one week.’