What a Frightened Man Says

He slept badly and woke at ten past four with a sentence in his head, like a piece of music you can't shake off.

You can tell it's him.

What was keeping him awake was not the sentence. It was that he did not know how it should be answered. He had spent the night searching, and everything he found sounded like a moral lecture, and he hated moral lectures, the ones given to him as much as the ones he gave.

On the Wednesday morning the court heard the first investigator, and in the middle of a long account of the chronology there was something Étienne had not seen coming.