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drawn and tired. When he thought about Maleval, Camille found himself a little worried and wondered how expensive his colleague’s vices were. Maleval had the makings of a bent cop in the way that some children, even in nursery school, are clearly destined to be morons. In fact, it was difficult to tell whether he was squandering his years as a single man like a spendthrift might squander his inheritance, or whether he was already on the slippery slope to addiction. Twice in the past few months, Camille had come upon Maleval talking to Louis. On each occasion, they had seemed embarrassed, asthough caught doing something they shouldn’t, and Camille was convinced that Maleval was hitting up Louis for cash. But perhaps not regularly. He decided not to get involved and pretended he had seen nothing.
    Maleval chain-smoked American cigarettes, liked to have a flutter on the ponies and had a particular predilection for Bowmore single malt. But of his various proclivities, Maleval prized women above all. Maleval was unarguably handsome. Tall, dark-haired, with a face that radiated low cunning and a body that even now could win him back the place he once held on the French Olympic judo team.
    Camille studied his flip side of the coin for a moment: Armand, poor Armand. Of the twenty years he had been an
inspecteur
at the
brigade criminelle
, he had spent nineteen and a half with the reputation of being the most shameful skinflint the police had ever known. He was ageless, a lanky streak of piss, gaunt, lean and fretful. Armand was defined by what he lacked. He was indigence incarnate. His stinginess did not have the charm of being a character flaw. It was pathological, profoundly pathological, and was something that Camille had never found amusing. Truth be told, Camille did not give a tinker’s curse about Armand’s meanness, but having worked with the man for so many years, it pained him to see the depths to which “poor Armand” would sink to avoid spending a red cent, the convoluted subterfuges to which he resorted to avoid paying for a measly cup of coffee. Perhaps it was a legacy of his own handicap, but Camille sometimes experienced these humiliations as though they were his own. What was truly piteous was that Armand was aware of his condition. It troubled him and as a result he became a sad, lonely man. Armand worked in silence. Armand worked hard. In his way, he may well havebeen the junior officer in the
brigade
. His tight-fistedness had made him a meticulous, painstaking, scrupulous officer capable of spending days combing through a telephone directory or endless hours on a stakeout in an unmarked car with a faulty heater, capable of interviewing every resident of a street, every member of a profession if it meant – literally – finding a needle in a haystack. Give him a million-piece jigsaw and Armand would take it into his office and spend every waking hour putting it together. The nature of the research was unimportant. He did not care about the subject. His need to accumulate information made any personal preference redundant. More than once it had proved miraculous and, though everyone agreed that on a day-to-day basis Armand was insufferable, those same officers were quick to agree that this diligent, single-minded officer had something most others lacked, some quality of infinite patience which admirably proved that, taken to its logical conclusion, a mindless chore can border on genius. Having worn out every possible joke about his meanness, his fellow officers had eventually stopped taking the piss. No-one found it funny anymore. Everyone was appalled.
    “O.K.,” said Camille, when Louis had finished his report. “Until we get the preliminary reports, let’s take things as they come. Armand, Maleval, I want you to go over the physical evidence, everything that was found at the scene, I want to know where everything came from: the furniture, the knick-knacks, the clothes, the bedlinen … Louis, you