Camille by Pierre Lemaitre Read Free Book Online Page A

funeral, it must be pretty serious . . .
    “The team is going to be assigned to deal with an armed robbery up in the 8th this morning . . .”
    Louis cannot help but wonder whether this is the answer to his question.
    “Many casualties?”
    Camille nods, shrugs, yes, no.
    “A woman . . .”
    “Dead?”
    Yes, no, not really, Camille frowns, staring straight ahead as though through dense fog.
    “No . . . Well, not yet . . .”
    Louis is rather surprised. This is not the kind of case the team usually work on, Commandant Verhœven has no experience in armed robbery. Then again, why not? Louis thinks, but he has known Camille long enough to realise that something is wrong. He manifests his surprise by looking down at his shoes, a pair of impeccably polished Crockett & Joneses, and coughs briefly, almost inaudibly. For Louis, this is the height of expressible emotion.
    Camille jerks his chin towards the cemetery, the crematorium.
    “As soon as this is over, I’d like to fill you in. Unofficially . . . The team hasn’t been called in yet . . . [Camille finally dares to look at his assistant.] I just want us to be ahead of the game.”
    He glances around for Le Guen and quickly spots him. It would be difficult to miss him, the man is a colossus.
    “O.K., we should go . . .”
    Back when Le Guen was commissaire and his direct superior, Camille had only to lift a finger to get whatever he wanted; these days, things are more complicated.
    Next to Contrôleur Général Le Guen, Commissaire Michard waddles along like a goose.
    *
    2.20 p.m.
    This is one of the greatest moments in the Café Le Brasseur’s history. The regulars unanimously concur that an armed robbery on this scale happens just once a century. Even those who saw nothing are agreed. The witness statements are piling up. People variously saw a girl, or two girls, or a woman, with a gun, with no gun, empty-handed, screaming. This was the owner of the jeweller’s? No, it was her daughter. Really? Do you remember her mentioning a daughter? There was a getaway car. Make and model? The answers cover pretty much the entire range of imported cars currently available in France.
    I slowly sip my coffee, this is the first moment I’ve had to relax in what has already been rather a long day.
    The patron – who has a face just begging to be slapped – has decided that the haul from the robbery was five million euros. Not a cent less. I’ve no idea where he came by the figure, but he sounds convincing. I feel like handing him a loaded Mossberg and steering him towards the nearest jeweller’s. Let him rob the place, scuttle back to his little café and fence the loot – if the dumb fuck gets a third of the sort of figure he’s expecting, he can retire, because he won’t do any better.
    And that car they fired into! What car? The one over there – it looks like it stopped a charging rhino. Did they launch a mortar at it? And so begin the ballistic speculations and, as with the make and model of the car, there are advocates for every possible calibre. Makes a man want to fire a warning shot to shut them up, or shoot into the crowd to get a bit of peace.
    Strutting and swaggering, the patron peremptorily announces, “.22 long rifle.”
    He closes his eyes as he says the words as though to confirm his expertise.
    I cheer myself up by imagining him headless, like the Turk, from a blast with the 12-bore. Whether it was a .22 Long Rifle rimfire or a blunderbuss, the crowd are impressed; these idiots don’t know shit. With witnesses like this, the cops are in for a treat.
    *
    2.45 p.m.
    “Wha . . . why would you want to do that?” asks the commissaire divisionnaire , wheeling around, making a sweeping revolution on her major axis: a titanic, positively Babylonian arse that is preposterously disproportionate. Commissaire Michard is a woman of between forty and fifty. Hers is a face that promised much and failed to deliver; she has a shock of jet-black hair, probably dyed, buck