Both boys giggled sporadically as Cake posed her questions and they gave their version of events.

Maybe they were just excited to be on TV.

Crime reporter Serge Phaneuf appeared in front of her again. ‘Got a name for me yet?’

‘Not yet, monsieur.’ She headed back to her barf-green requisitioned car.

3

Crime of Passion?

French side

Returning to rue des Bons Enfants, Inspector Nouvelle gave Commissaire Néon the rudimentary details of the situation by the river and said she would take the lead. She hoped there were no links across the border, but she sensed there likely would be — Basel was a busy art centre. And hadn’t she just read something about an art-related killing there? Where? She could not put her finger on it…

The body and the crime-scene findings were just now being delivered to the basement. She would have to oversee a quick exam and push for ID on the victim, then get the usual report and forms written up for the Prosecutor’s office so she could move ahead, mandate in hand, without undue delay. It was shaping up to be a long day.

She told Claude not to expect her for supper. Claude was irked at the prospect of a Tuesday evening alone and made noises to this effect. Aliette was irked by that.

Apart from the fact it meant he’d have to cook for himself, Claude was…What?

Claude Néon was proving to be far more domestic than she ever would have guessed.

Odd word to hang it on, a tricky problem to confront. At first she’d put it down to peer pressure. The better the neighbourhood, the more evident the syndrome? The garden. His club. At first this aspect of the man she’d thought (felt sure!) was her true life’s partner was a niggling mystery, a slight imbalance she believed would be righted with time. But it hadn’t been. Now he was always far too disappointed when she couldn’t make it home. Though they were two cops sharing a home, it was two different worlds and the gap was getting wider.

It was supposed to be a love built on a shared direction, a passion for the job. This domestic thing was an interloper, an unwanted guest installed in a room never properly prepared.

Claude knew the lot of the inspector. He’d been one too, before his sudden jump to police management. Remember, Claude? Can you so easily forget the place you come from?

It grated. Maddening when the heart says you just don’t want the things you thought you did. It’s not fear — you got past that. It’s knowing you were wrong. And so disheartening, how the bitterness of self-deception is slowly, implacably revealed.

Today, facing Claude, everything grated a little sharper. Because her cat had died?

Oh, Piaf… A conflicted Aliette returned to her desk and began an initial report.

She did a search on the gun. It was not in the system. She made a call to Basel, seeking the same information and wasted the better part of an hour being politely shunted here, then there, then waiting yet again before being told they couldn’t help her. She knew it was by design, ridiculous politics spearheaded by strange little xenophobic minds at all levels of the system, but mainly at the highest. It was past six, too late to contact a Swiss ally — she would sort out the gun tomorrow. There were colleagues downstairs also wanting to get home.

Despite all their work at the site, Identité Judiciaire had nothing much.

‘All the skin and blood belongs to him…’ Jean-Marc Pouliot reported, with a look through the door toward the morgue across the hall. ‘And the gun.