Free The Cyclist by Fredrik Nath Page B

find whoever killed this child.
     
     

2
    Auguste sat with his head in his hands. It tortured him. The Jews, Monique, the murder of the young woman. He felt as if he was a joist in a building and more and more weight bore down upon him. He wondered if he would crack. Three hours sleep and his mind was functioning at a level where he felt he was wandering in a mist. Basic functions of his working life seemed lost to him. Where to start? Brunner? Forensic pathology?
    He began to panic. A crisis of confidence enveloped him. He felt he could not solve the crime. Too much was going on. His confidence sank. He had no faith now in his own ability.
    And then it came to him. He saw his God. He envisioned his Lord on the cross and a warm feeling came. What had he himself ever suffered? What possible claim could he make to the Passion of Christ? Yet, there before him, he could envision how suffering could lead to justice for some or reclamation for others. And it was justice he wanted, no, needed. Justice for the loss of an innocent life, a child, in his eyes. He believed in the law. He led his entire professional life by it and now he felt compelled to further its inexorable path. And Bernadette? She was beyond justice, beyond the effects of revenge. Yet she or the concept of what she had been, depended on Auguste’s actions now and he needed to have strength.
    He wondered if his feelings for this girl were real or if they represented some ultimate peak of what he was going through. Perhaps it was not Bernadette’s death but the addition of it to all the other risks and dangers driving him to this sad state of self-flagellation.
    He took deep breaths and calmed himself. He knew it was lack of sleep, frustration and stress. Time. Let time pass and let him deal with each object in his path, one at a time. He had always reacted in this way to huge mounds of work, pressure, anger. One small piece at a time and endless patience.
    He noticed he was breathing deeply and to his surprise, he noticed his eyes were moist. He was not tearful but his eyes were moist enough to make him wipe them.
    The knock on his door made him panic.
    Édith stood in the doorway. Her spectacles still on the end of her nose and her head up, as if they might fall if she leaned forward.
    ‘Édith. Bernadette Leclerc has been murdered.’
     ‘Murdered?’ she said.
    ‘Yes, strangled. The killer or killers dumped her body outside of the Prefecture.’
    ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘it begins.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘It begins. It is symptomatic of the time in which we live, that’s all. Who would do such a thing? I know her mother. She will die through this. Has anyone told her yet?’
    ‘I’m going just now.’
    She sat down opposite him.
    He paused and looked her in the eye.
    He said, ‘I think Brunner did this.’
    ‘Brunner?’
    ‘Yes, she was singing in La Bonne Auberge the other night. He seemed interested in her.’
    ‘Today, Bernadette Leclerc and tomorrow? You? Your family? Perhaps they will be kind enough to take me so I can be free?’
    ‘Édith, what are you saying?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    He saw tears in her eyes and he understood as if for the first time, she was like him—tortured.
     ‘Auguste, this place is becoming an entrance to hell, like Rosetti’s gates. Jewish people interned for nothing more than their religious beliefs. Our children murdered in the street and those fat Nazi bastards sitting pretty, laughing at us. When will you do something? When do we fight?’
    Auguste said nothing. The silence between them became a bond. No words were needed, their grief unspoken but vivid all the same. It was grief they shared. They grieved over the world in which they had grown up. It had gone; it had died.
    Time passed and he knew he had to go.
    ‘I will first go to her mother’s house. Then I have to go to the Judge’s chambers to report. Would you ask Claude to come up, I’ll take him with me.’
    ‘You can’t trust