A dim light hangs above him. His rimless glasses are low on his nose, accentuating taciturn eyes as he concentrates on pouring his refreshment. A shoemaker’s eyes. A boot rests in the middle of his table, a battered old thing, central to the table but almost lost in shadow, you’d have to think willfully forgotten for the moment by a man whose fate it was to fix too many. The pot of tea gets all the light. Refreshment. Diversion. A break in the day’s quiet routine. It was a golden-seeming teapot, in a long-ago moment a painter had felt compelled to study…

It had been found soiled and ripped in the rocks along the shallows: a shoemaker at his work table with a pot of tea. Oil. In a dark and ponderous naturalistic style. Not at all modern. ‘Late Romantic,’ Jean-Marc surmised. ‘Flemish or Dutch. Not French.’ It was strictly a guess.

‘Famous?’ Meaning valuable.

‘Haven’t a clue.’

The gilt frame had been shattered, the shadowy plane in the top right corner ripped. The shoemaker, teapot and the resting boot were severely stained with mud and water. Maybe irreparably. She hoped not. ‘Can they clean that?’ Aliette Nouvelle wondered.

Jean-Marc Pouliot didn’t know.

Thus two crimes committed at the unofficial park at Village-Neuf. Most would deem murder more serious than the destruction of a painting. But not all. It depends on your sense of inherent worth. A certain calibre of thief would not think twice about a murder in pursuit of what he wanted. A certain cop might find a ruined painting more interesting than a ruined man.

Climbing back up the bank, Aliette was thinking she would take the lead on this case.

The crowd had grown, the gendarmes were moving them back, more media had arrived, some were perched on the tops of trucks and cars, cameras aimed at the operation. Most of the attention was on the regional television news team. The reporter known as Cakeface (at least to the police) was conducting an interview with Hubert and René. Hubert’s mother monitored the exercise with a grim wariness. You can always tell a mother: Easy. Hubert had her sallow face. Can a mother always tell what her child has been up to? Harder to know.