‘I’m sorry,’ said Leguennec. ‘I’m having a hard day. Go on.’
‘Next day, Thursday, I did exactly the same. I was on a three-day training course. Put the car in the car park, came back to the hotel at night, after dining with the other people on the course. My car’s black, I have to tell you. It’s a Renault 19, with a very low chassis.’
Vandoosler made a sign once more to Leguennec to stop him saying ‘so bloody what?’ again.
‘The course finished last night. This morning all I had to do was settle up and leave for Grenoble, no hurry. I left the hotel, and stopped at the first garage to fill the tank. It was the kind of garage where the pumps are out in the open.’
‘Calm down for God’s sake,’ Vandoosler whispered to Leguennec.
‘So that’s why,’ Masson continued, ‘for the first time since Wednesday morning, I went round the car in daylight to take the cap off the petrol tank. It’s on the right, of course. And that’s when I saw it.’
‘What?’ said Leguennec, suddenly taking notice.
‘Writing. In the dust on the front wing, low down, someone had written something with their finger. At first I thought it must be kids. But they usually do it on the windscreen and write PLEASE CLEAN ME or something. So I knelt down and read it. My car’s black, as I said, so the dust and mud show up on it and the writing was very clear, like on a blackboard. Then I suddenly understood. It must have been him, Dompierre, writing on my car as he lay dying. He didn’t die straightaway, is that right?’
Leaning forward, Leguennec was genuinely holding his breath. ‘No,’ he said. ‘He would have taken several minutes to die.’
‘Well, lying there, he had time and just enough strength to stretch out his arm and write. He wrote the killer’s name on my car. Lucky it hasn’t rained since.’
Two minutes later, Leguennec was telephoning the police photographer and rushing out into the street where Masson had parked his dusty black Renault.
‘A few more minutes,’ Masson was shouting as he ran along behind him, ‘and I would have taken it through the carwash. Funny old world, eh?’
‘You must be crazy, leaving a piece of evidence out in the street. Anyone could have come past and rubbed it out.’
‘Well, Monsieur, they wouldn’t let me park it in your courtyard. Those were their orders they said.’
The three men were now kneeling down beside the front wing of the car. The photographer asked them to get back so that he could get on with his job.’
‘I want a copy,’ Vandoosler said to Leguennec. ‘Get me a copy as soon as you can.’
‘What for?’
‘You’re not running this case unaided, as you very well know.’
‘Don’t I know it. OK, you’ll get your picture. Come back in an hour.’
At about two o’clock, Vandoosler was getting out of a taxi in front of the disgrace. Taxis cost money, but right now minutes counted. He hurried into the refectory and seized the broom handle, still not capped. He banged loudly seven times on the ceiling. Seven bangs meant ‘All evangelists down-stairs’. The usual code was one for St Matthew, two for St Mark, three for St Luke, and four for himself. Seven for everyone all together. Vandoosler had devised the system because everyone was fed up with coming downstairs and back up again for nothing.
Mathias who had come home after lunching quietly with Juliette, heard the seven bangs and repeated them for Marc, before going down. Marc in turn passed the message to Lucien, who tore himself from his reading, muttering, Ordered to the Front. Reporting for duty’.
A minute later, they were all in the refectory. The broom handle system was efficient, except that it made a mess of the ceiling and didn’t allow you to communicate with the outside world as a telephone would.
‘Is it all over?’ Marc asked. ‘They’ve caught Gosselin, or he’s killed himself?’
Vandoosler swallowed a glassful of water before replying.
‘Say you’ve got someone who’s been stabbed and knows he’s dying. If he still has the strength and the means to leave a message, what will he write?’
‘The murderer’s name,’ said Lucien.
‘All agreed?’ asked Vandoosler.
‘Yes, it’s obvious,’ said Marc.
Mathias nodded.
‘Right,’ said Vandoosler. ‘I share your view. And I’ve seen a few cases in my career. The victim, if there’s time, and if they know the murderer’s name, always writes it. Unfailingly.’
Looking preoccupied, Vandoosler pulled out of his jacket pocket the envelope containing the photograph of the black car.
‘Christophe Dompierre wrote a name in the dust on the body of a car before he died,’ he told them. ‘The name has been driving round Paris for three days. The driver has only just noticed the writing.’
‘Georges Gosselin,’ said Lucien.
No, said Vandoosler. What Dompierre wrote was Siméonidis S.
Vandoosler threw the photograph onto the table and sat down heavily on a chair.
‘Dead and alive,’ he murmured.
Wordlessly the three men approached the photograph to look at it. None of them dared to touch it, as if they were frightened. The writing was wobbly and irregular, and Dompierre must have had to raise his arm to reach the car. But there was no doubt about it. It looked as if the writer had tackled it in spurts, as if summoning up his final strength. The only odd thing about it was that the last capital S was the wrong way round, so that it looked more like a 2.
Devastated, they all sat back in silence, shying away from the terrible accusation in black and white. So Sophia Siméonidis was alive, and had murdered Dompierre. Mathias shivered. For the first time, fear and distress settled on the refectory early that Friday afternoon. The sun was shining in through the windows, but Marc felt his fingers growing cold and a prickling in his legs. Sophia still alive, arranging a false death, having somebody else burnt in her place, leaving her piece of basalt as evidence. Sophia, the beautiful singer, prowling in Paris by night, in rue Chasle. Dead yet alive.
‘What about Gosselin?’ Marc asked in a low voice.
‘It can’t have been him,’ said Vandoosler, also speaking low. ‘I knew that already yesterday.’
‘You knew?’
‘Remember those two hairs of Sophia’s that Leguennec found in the boot of Lex’s car?’
‘Of course,’ said Marc.
‘Well, those hairs weren’t there the day before. When we heard about the fire at Maisons-Alfort, I waited for nightfall and I went out to vacuum Lex’s car. I’ve kept a little gadget from my police days. It’s a battery-operated vacuum cleaner, with clean bags. There was nothing in the boot, no hair, no nails, not a shred of cloth. Only sand and dust.’
Dumbfounded, the three men stared at Vandoosler. Marc remembered now. It was the night when he had been sitting on the seventh step, thinking about tectonic plates. The godfather had gone outside to take a leak, carrying a plastic bag.
‘It’s true,’ said Marc. ‘I thought you were just going out for a pee.’
‘Well, that too,’ admitted Vandoosler.
‘I see,’ said Marc.
‘So,’ Vandoosler went on, ‘when Leguennec requisitioned the car the next day and said he had found these hairs, it made me laugh. I had proof that Alexandra was not responsible. And proof that somebody had gone to the car, after me, in the night to put this bit of evidence in the boot to implicate the niece. And it couldn’t have been Gosselin, because Juliette said he only came back at Friday lunchtime. And that’s quite true, because I checked.’
‘But for Christ’s sake, why didn’t you say anything?’
‘Because I was operating outside the law and I needed to keep in with Leguennec. And also because I wanted the murderer, whoever it was, to know that his plan was working. I wanted to let out as much rope as possible, and to see where the beast would go if it was let free without being tied up.’