Auto-Pause

She went home, woke Noé, made breakfast, and said nothing.

At nine, at the office, she closed the door and laid the watch on her desk mat.

Claire Baumann had never solved a problem by thinking about it. She solved them by taking them apart, and that was what she was paid for: when a pallet of four thousand synthetic rubies disappears between Biel and Thise, you do not ask who stole it, you work back up the fourteen points at which the information was entered and you find the one where it changed.

She opened the watch's settings.

Profile. Heart-rate zones. Alerts. Time format. Activity detection. Auto-pause: on.

She stopped for a second on that line.

She knew what it was: when you stop — a red light, a lace to retie — the stopwatch pauses by itself and starts again when you move again. She had switched it on in 2019 because it annoyed her to see her average pace collapse at every pedestrian crossing.

She looked at the line and reasoned aloud, quietly, as she always did.

— It doesn't delete time. It doesn't count it.

That was correct.

Auto-pause does not make twenty minutes of somebody's life disappear: it records twenty-six minutes of running instead of forty-six, and that is perfectly normal if you have stopped for twenty minutes.

Except that she had not stopped for twenty minutes.

She closed the menu and moved on to something else, and that decision was going to cost her five weeks.

She plugged the watch into her computer and exported the complete history.

Eighteen months. Four hundred and eleven outings.

She built a table: date, start time, recorded duration, distance, average pace, average heart rate, elevation. Then she added a column no manufacturer provides and that she had to fill in by hand: the real time of coming home, which she reconstructed from her sent messages, her morning bank statements, and the timestamps of the photographs she sometimes took from the bridge.

She spent the whole morning on it, which was far more than she had intended and which she noted without worrying, because it was the kind of work she knew how to do and it was restful.

By midday she had real times for ninety-four outings out of four hundred and eleven.

She calculated the gap for each.

Of the ninety-four, ninety were normal: between eight and twelve minutes of gap, which corresponds exactly to the time it takes to go down, come back up, and shower.

Four were not.

17 July — gap 3 min more than usual.

17 September — gap 6 min.

2 October — gap 22 min.

8 October — gap 23 min.

She added, by hand, that morning's line: 9 October — gap 20 min, and she crossed it out, because that morning she knew where her twenty minutes had gone: she had spent them standing on a towpath with a woman and a labrador.

Which left four.

She looked at the four dates.

Three, six, twenty-two, twenty-three.

It was increasing.

She opened a second window and compared the four outings with the others on every parameter she had.

Distance: identical, to within a hundred metres. Route: the same.

Pace: normal over the whole recorded duration.

Average heart rate: normal.

She also checked what she called, at work, the external sources: everything that exists outside the system you suspect.

The weather on the four mornings: twice overcast, once clear, once drizzle. Nothing in common.

The day of the week: a Thursday, a Wednesday, a Thursday, a Wednesday. Nothing.

What she had eaten the evening before: untraceable, except for the eighth of October — pasta, because it was written on the shopping list.

She searched for a long time before finding the one parameter that was not normal, and she found it because she was looking at the curves and not at the averages.

On the four outings, the heart-rate curve stopped dead in the middle, then started again — not gradually, as when you set off after a red light, but all at once, at the same value.

On all four, the stop fell at roughly the same point of the route: between kilometre 2.1 and kilometre 2.4.

The car park of the Prés-de-Vaux sports hall.

She noted that on her table, in a column headed to check, and closed the computer to go to lunch.

She made a detour past the sports hall on the way home, at six in the evening, and sat for five minutes in her car in the car park.

It was a sports hall car park: sixty spaces, lighting on three masts, a paper skip, a clothing bank, and the building's service entrance. The towpath ran forty metres away, behind a low hedge.

There was nothing to see. She drove off.

That evening, at home, she got the file out again and stayed on it until eleven.

Noé came through the living room at about ten.

— What are you doing?

— Looking at my runs.

— Why?

— Because there are minutes missing.

Her son leaned over her shoulder and looked at the screen for six seconds.

— There are others, he said.

— What do you mean?

— There. July. Three minutes. And there, September, six.

— I saw those.

— Yes but you put them to one side, said Noé. You made two piles: the small ones and the big ones. Why?

Claire looked at her lines.

She had indeed made two piles, without thinking about it, because three minutes does not look like twenty-three.

— Because three minutes is nothing.

— Unless it's the same thing, smaller, said her son, and he went up to bed.