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look into the video, the American T.V. show, anything that seems a little bizarre – but don’t get too sidetracked. If anything comes up, you’re in charge of briefing everyone. Any questions?”
    There were no questions. Or there were too many; it amounted to the same thing.

12
    An anonymous caller had reported the crime to the local police in Courbevoie. Camille decided to drive over and listen to the recording.
    “There’s been a murder. Rue Félix-Faure. Number 17.”
    The voice was obviously the same as the one on the answering machine, the same distortion probably made using the same gadget.
    Camille spent the next two hours working on forms, affidavits, questionnaires, filling in the blanks with the unknown factors and wondering what the hell it was all about.
    When forced to deal with tedious administrative procedures, he often suffered from what he thought of as a mental squint. With his right eye, he dealt with forms in triplicate, yielding to the demands of statisticians and writing out reports in the official style, and all the while the retina of his left eye still lingered on dead bodies sprawled on the floor, on wounds black with dry blood, on faces distorted by grief and by the desperate struggle to stay alive, by that last baffled look when confronted with the surprising finality of death.
    And sometimes all these images were superimposed. Camille found himself imagining the severed fingers of the woman laid out like a wreath in the centre of the logo of the
police judiciaire
… He set his glasses on the desk and gently massaged his temples.

13
    A soldier to his very bones, Bergeret, the head of
identité judiciaire
, was not a man to hurry things, nor to defer to anyone’s demands. But Le Guen had clearly used his influence (the idea of a clash between these titans, two immovable objects grappling pathetically, was like a sumo wrestling bout filmed in slow motion). Whatever he had done, by mid-afternoon, Camille had the preliminary forensic report.
    Two young women aged between twenty and thirty, both blonde. The first woman was five foot five, weighed fifty kilos with a strawberry mark on her left inside knee, had healthy teeth and a generous bust; the second woman was about the same height and weight but had no distinguishing marks, she too had good teeth and a generous bust. Both victims had eaten three to five hours before death: crudités, carpaccio of beef, red wine. For dessert one of the victims had had strawberries, the other a lemon sorbet. A bottle of Moët & Chandon
brut
and two champagne flutes found under the bed bore their fingerprints. The writing on the wall had been done using the severed fingers. To establish the
modus operandi
– an expression beloved of all those who never studied Latin – would obviously take considerably more time. In what order had the women been butchered, how had it been done and with what? Had it required more than one man (or woman)? Had they been sexually assaultedand if so how (or with what)? There were so many unknowns in this grisly equation that Camille was determined to solve.
    The most curious detail was that the clear print of an index finger found on the wall was not real, but had been made using a rubber stamp.
    Camille had never been a Luddite when it came to computers, but there were days when he could not help but think that these contraptions were evil at heart. No sooner had he received the preliminary forensic reports than the central booking computer offered him a choice between good and bad news. The good news was that the fingerprints of one of the victims were in the system: one Évelyne Rouvray, twenty-three, living in Bobigny, known to the police for soliciting. The bad news was that this reinforced the idea they were dealing with a pervert, and brought back all of the gruesome imagery Camille had been trying, ineffectually, to dismiss from his mind. The fake fingerprint on the wall was also in the system: it related to a cold case