Twenty to Nine

The doorbell rang on Saturday at twenty to nine.

Mathieu was making coffee in the kitchen, in his dressing gown, with the viewing due at two and the vacuum cleaner standing in the hall.

He opened the door.

There were two of them, in plain clothes, a woman of about forty-five and a much younger man. The woman showed a card.

— Captain Ferrières, criminal investigation. Sergeant Cotte. Monsieur Kerbrat?

— Yes.

— May we come in? We'll be twenty minutes.

He thought three things at once as he let them in, and realised later that the third said most about the state he was in.

The first: he was in a dressing gown in front of two police officers.

The second: somebody has died and they have come to tell me — an absurd reflex, there was no longer anybody to whom that could happen.

The third, which arrived half a second after the other two and froze him: it's about the call in the night.

He showed them into the sitting room, where there had been no photographs since the twelfth of January.

— I'll say straight away so that you don't worry unnecessarily, said Ferrières, sitting down. You are not implicated in anything at all. We are investigating matters concerning a company in Le Mans, and your wife's name appears in the file.

Mathieu remained standing.

— My wife died on the ninth of January.

— I know, said Ferrières. I am sorry to arrive like this. There are situations where there is no other way, and this is one.

She took out a notebook.

— Does the name Simon Aubrac mean anything to you?

— No.

— Aubrac, A-U-B-R-A-C. Twenty-two. An apprentice panel beater at a car dealership on the south industrial estate.

— No. Never heard it.

— Your wife never mentioned him?

— No.

Ferrières made a note.

— We are investigating a misappropriation of funds at that dealership. Forty-two thousand euros in false invoices over eighteen months. Monsieur Aubrac is implicated.

— And my wife?

— In the course of our checks we obtained Monsieur Aubrac's bank statements. Since 2021 he has received regular transfers from one and the same person, with no declared family connection. Between two hundred and nine hundred euros a month, for five years.

Mathieu did not move.

— That person is your wife, said Ferrières. Élise Kerbrat, née Vaillant.

Sergeant Cotte was looking at the sitting-room wall, politely, the way you look at a wall when you are the second officer.

— There must be a mistake, said Mathieu.

— That is possible, said Ferrières. It is one of the reasons we are here.

— My wife was a speech therapist. She had a practice in partnership in the rue Chanzy. We have a joint account and—

He stopped.

— And? said Ferrières.

— And she had an account of her own. Always had. A family account, her grandmother's inheritance.

— That is the account the transfers come from.

Mathieu finally sat down, in the armchair, in his dressing gown, at twelve minutes to nine in the morning.

— Since when? he said.

— The first transfer is dated the second of May 2021.

He did the arithmetic, because he always did the arithmetic.

Four years and eight months. Fifty-six months. Élise had been forty-one in May 2021; they had been married twelve years; they went every summer to the same cottage in Morbihan; she left her glasses on the kitchen table and he put them away every night.

— How much altogether?

— We'll come to that. First I have a precise question to ask you, Monsieur Kerbrat, and I am going to ask you to take your time answering it.

Ferrières turned a page of her notebook.

— On the fourteenth of April last year, your wife made a transfer from a bank branch in Rennes, at twenty-six minutes past two in the afternoon.

She looked up.

— Where was your wife on the fourteenth of April?

Mathieu looked at her.

He knew the answer. He had it in his head before she finished the sentence, because it was written in a diary somewhere and because he remembered that weekend perfectly well: he had stayed at home alone, mown the lawn and watched a match.

— In Rennes, he said. She was at a training seminar in Rennes, Friday to Sunday. She went every year.

Ferrières wrote. She wrote long enough for him to notice that the silence was lasting.

— Are you certain? she said.

— Certain. She left on the Friday morning and came back on the Sunday evening.

— And do you know what seminar it was?

— Some professional thing. Speech therapy. I never took an interest in the detail.

The captain closed her notebook, which she did not do as a threat, and rested it on her knees.

— Monsieur Kerbrat.

— Yes.

— I am going to ask you not to hold what I am about to say against me, because I would rather it came from me now than from somebody else in six months' time.

He waited.

— We have checked. There was no seminar in Rennes that weekend. Not that weekend, nor any other.

She stood up.

— Your wife paid nine thousand euros to a young man of twenty-two, on the fourteenth of April, at a branch in Rennes, on a day when you believed she was at a training course. You do not know him, she never mentioned him to you, and you have just given me an alibi that does not exist.

She put the notebook in her pocket.

— So I am going to leave you my number, Monsieur Kerbrat, and I am going to ask you to think until Monday. Because what you have just told me in perfect good faith is exactly what should not have been said.