The Witness

The café was called Le Trait d'Union, and it was exactly the kind of place you choose so as not to be seen: too ordinary to be remembered, too noisy for anything to be overheard. A slot machine blinked in a corner without anyone ever touching it. The owner was wiping the zinc counter with the obstinacy of a man who understood long ago that the zinc will never be clean again.

Adrien Meurice was already there, at the back, his back to the wall.

Camille sat down opposite him without saying hello.

— You sat back down, she said.

He did not pretend not to understand.

— Yes.

— You half stood up, and you sat back down.

— Yes, he repeated. And I've been thinking about it since Tuesday.

He had his hands round an empty cup. Thirty-seven, management accountant, three children, a twenty-year mortgage and the kind of politeness that stops a man making any noise. She had recruited him six years earlier. He was the best technician she had ever had working for her and the worst negotiator: he always accepted the first offer he was made, including his own salary.

— Camille, I know why they pushed you out.

She did not move.

— You asked for the supporting documents on 4471, he went on. In December. Sabine told me at the time, one lunchtime, the way you tell an anecdote. And in January, Rémi called me in to ask whether your work was still up to standard.

— To you.

— To me. Your subordinate. He asked me whether you seemed tired. Whether you were making mistakes. Whether the team thought you had changed.

Camille felt something shift in her chest, slowly, like a piece of furniture being pushed.

— And what did you say?

He turned his cup a quarter turn.

— I said no.

He said it too fast. She noted it without yet knowing what she would do with it, in the same way she noted an amount that comes out too round.

— Eleven months, she said. It took them eleven months to get me out.

— They were waiting for the annual accounts. They couldn't sack you before the audit sign-off. It would have looked bad.

Of course.

She should have thought of it. She would have thought of it if it had been anybody else: you do not remove the finance director three weeks before the auditor signs. You keep her. You keep her working. You let her close the year, prepare the notes, answer the audit firm's queries, save the company one last time.

And when the signature is at the bottom of the page, you give her twenty minutes.

She did the sum in her head. The sign-off was dated the thirty-first of October. It was the twenty-second of November.

Eleven working days. Not eleven days: eleven working days. Somebody had waited for the first working Monday.

---

— Why are you telling me this now?

Adrien turned the empty cup another quarter turn. It had gone round once.

— Because on Friday they asked me to approve an expenses claim.

— And?

— And it's the same company. The fourth one. Except that this time it's my name that has to appear in the box marked “checked by”.

He looked up for the first time since the start of the conversation.

— Do you understand what that means? While Rémi was approving, it was Rémi. Now there's a box with my name in it. In six months there'll be twelve boxes. In two years, when somebody starts asking questions, they'll look at who checked, and they'll find a thirty-nine-year-old management accountant who never said anything.

— Did you approve it?

— I put it in a pile. I said I had a year-end. That gives me a week, maybe two.

He ran his hand flat across the table, as if brushing away crumbs that were not there.

— Camille. I'm not brave. I proved that to you on Tuesday. I have three children, a wife working part time and two hundred and eighty thousand euros to pay off. But I don't want it to be my name.

She looked at him for a long moment.

— Do you know what I missed on Tuesday? It isn't that you didn't stand up. You couldn't. It's that nobody said good morning.

— I know.

— Sabine stood up.

— I know, he repeated, and he looked like a man who has just had something taken from him.

---

She walked home, an hour, under a sky that threatened without deciding.

She thought again about the expenses claim in his pile. About the box with his name. About the elegance of the thing: you do not manufacture accomplices, you manufacture signatures, and people come with them.

Ninety-one pages was a file.

Ninety-one pages and a frightened witness was something else.

She stopped in front of a dry cleaner's window to let a shower pass that never came. Then she took out her phone and dialled a number she had noted eleven months earlier, in the margin of the first page, and had never called.

She had written that number down on the evening of the first of December. Without explaining it to herself. The way you note the emergency exit on entering a room.

A woman's voice answered on the second ring.

— Ferrière chambers, good morning.

Camille looked at the wet street in front of her, the lights reflecting, a delivery scooter double-parked.

— Good morning. I'd like to speak to Maître Ferrière about a case of falsification of accounts. I am the former finance director of the company concerned.

A silence at the other end. Not a silence of hesitation: the silence of somebody who stops writing and puts down her pen.

Then:

— One moment, I'll put you through.