Free Affairs of State by Dominique Manotti

cunt, her belly painful and throbbing, her heart racing. Was Bornand there, behind the mirror? A growing doubt which spreads outward through sharp stabbing pains in her belly. Guilty. Her heart thumps, blood rushes to her temples. Go back, submit to his dry, authoritarian hand. Her head’s swimming. She runs a hot bath, with lots of foam, slides into it, lights a joint, inhales deeply, her eyes closed, and slowly regains her equilibrium.
Above all, don’t try to understand. Forget. Shut out Bornand. At least for the time being. Let your mind go blank. Look forward to a long weekend with the family.
    Wait until tomorrow.

    Noria turns into avenue Jean-Jaurès and heads for the police station, walking very slowly. An unknown woman, not easy to identify. If she’s not identified, it won’t be possible to carry out an inquest. She wasn’t killed on the spot. It’s one hell of a gamble, dumping a body in an open-air public parking lot with a building site nearby. Even after dark, there might be people around. Premise: the murderer acted in a hurry. A body on his hands, nothing planned, got to get rid of it. Premise: in that case, you don’t drive all the way across Paris to throw a body onto the La Villette parking lot. You dump it as nearbyas possible. So, it’s [highly?] likely that the woman was killed locally. If she was killed locally, it’s [fairly?] likely that she lives or works in the neighbourhood. And in that case, it’s [just?] likely that someone local knows her and might recognise her. She fingers the leather card wallet in her pocket in which she’d tucked the photo of the dead woman next to her cop ID.
This is my patch. If that person’s out there, I can find them.
    The 19th
arrondissement
police headquarters is almost deserted at this hour. No one says a word to her and that suits her fine. Bonfils has already gone home, leaving her a copy of his report. She adds a few lines, looks out a large-scale map of the area, folds it, puts it in her pocket and walks home.
    Rue Piat, halfway down rue de Belleville, is deserted in this freezing weather. The narrow street, its pavements spattered with dirty slush from the melting snow, glistens with a dampness that permeates your lungs. Set back on the left, is a huge social housing block, at least ten storeys high, with a flat, uniform façade, the very worst of urban architecture, typical of the unbridled renovation of the Belleville district begun back in the 1970s. Noria enters the staircase C lobby with its chipped concrete, graffiti and pungent smells. She’s perfectly at home, this is the backdrop to her childhood. She closes her eyes and lets her mind go blank as she crosses the lobby.
    She takes the lift to the eighth floor and opens the door to her studio flat with a sigh of contentment, removes her anorak and boots and walks barefoot over the floorboards to the window. A stunning view over the city spread out below and changing like the sea. Today it is a dull, monotonous grey, bounded to the west by the dark outline of the Meudon forest and Mont Valérien, with Montmartre rising up on the right, directly facing the geometric concrete mass of La Défense. Thesky is still light, night slowly envelops the streets and buildings, all’s well with the world.
    She unpins her chignon with a swift movement, letting her glossy black hair tumble over her shoulders. She shakes her head and relishes a wonderful relaxing sensation. She feels almost rested already. Her place, with a mattress on the floor for a bed, covered by heavy burgundy-coloured blanket, a few paperbacks on a metal shelf, her bathtub, a real one, a luxury, and her tiny kitchen. Nobody to monopolise the bathroom, block up the toilet or stop her from reading or lazing around. Or even breathing.
    She removes her clothes, dropping them haphazardly onto the floor, pulls on a shapeless knee-length T-shirt, grabs a packet of biscuits and lies on her stomach on her mattress, pencil in hand with the map