The Erasers

5

Since they all agree, it’s perfect. Commissioner Laurent closes the dossier and lays it with satisfaction on the pile to the left. The case is closed. Personally, he has no desire to get involved with it.

The investigations he has had made already have not produced the slightest result. Many distinct fingerprints left all over the place, as though intentionally, have been picked up; they must belong to the murderer, but they do not match anything registered in the enormous police file. The other details collected have offered no suggestion as to what lead to follow. Nothing has been brought in by the usual informers either. Under such conditions, where do you start? It’s highly unlikely that the murderer belongs to the criminal circles of the port or the city: the file is too complete and the informers too numerous for a criminal to be able to escape their networks altogether.

Laurent knows this from long experience. At this hour he would normally have heard something already.

What then? A chance beginner? An amateur? A lunatic? Such cases are so rare; and besides, amateurs always leave traces and can be picked up right away. One solution, obviously, would be that they were dealing with someone coming from far away just to commit this murder, and then leaving immediately after. Yet his work seems a little too well done not to have required a good deal of preparation…

After all, if the central services want to take the whole thing over themselves, even to the point of taking away the victim’s body before an inquest, it’s all right with him. He is certainly not going to complain. For him, it’s as if the crime had never happened. After all, if Dupont had committed suicide it would have come down to exactly the same thing. The fingerprints could be anyone’s, and since no one alive saw his attacker…

Better still: nothing at all has happened! A suicide still leaves behind a corpse; and now the corpse is vanishing without a word, and his superiors are asking him to keep out of it. Perfect!

No one has seen anything, heard anything. There is no victim. As for the murderer, he has fallen from the sky and must be far away by now, well on his way back to wherever he came from.