A Death in Time, page 28
‘I… thought she was playing hard to get.’ He shook his head. ‘As a game. That was all. A game.’
‘A game?’ Darac shared an incredulous look with Bonbon. ‘Well, if it was, Monsieur, it was a game only she was playing, wasn’t it? Because you were serious. Deadly serious, in fact.’
Laborde closed his eyes. ‘I did not kill Samira.’ He opened them. ‘Whatever you fine gentlemen may think of me, I did not. I did not!’
‘After the session, two witnesses report seeing you and Samira repairing to the hidden, far end of the players’ car park.’
‘Who were they? That obsequious cretin Cauvin was one of them, no doubt.’
‘It doesn’t matter who reported it. Why did you go there?’
Laborde took a breath in but no words emerged.
‘Monsieur?’
‘Uh… As you have so ably demonstrated, and for reasons you clearly do not believe, my messages to Samira were going largely unanswered. I thought her game had gone far enough, and as I had something crucially important to tell her, I wanted to do it in person. And in private. So during the session, I asked her to meet me there afterwards. She said she would and she did.’
‘What did you want to say to her?’
Laborde steadied himself. ‘I wanted her to understand unequivocally that I loved her, that I intended to leave my wife and build my future entirely around her.’
‘To which her response was?’
‘I… I think it frightened her. The enormity of it. And it had all along, I realised later. I saw that it hadn’t been a game, her increasing remoteness over the previous days. It was cold feet.’
Darac didn’t believe this for a second but among the ideas trading fours in his head was the possibility that Laborde did believe it. ‘And she said as much?’
‘No. As a head coach, one of my primary aims is to build mental as well as physical toughness in my athletes. I think, no, I know Samira was scared of how deeply meaningful our relationship had become and so quickly. But although I hated to hear it, I was also proud of her bravery in being able to declare, completely against the way she felt, and in quite a strong voice, that she wanted to end our relationship.’
Darac marvelled at the man’s ego. ‘And then?’
‘Initially, I argued but of course, I hadn’t anticipated any of this and there just wasn’t time to make her see that what I was offering her would change everything for the better.’
‘Why wasn’t there time?’
‘Before leaving the site, my coaches and I always spend at least fifteen minutes discussing how we and our athletes performed during the session. I was already late for it when I headed off to meet Samira.’
‘So how did you leave it with her?’
‘I couldn’t let my assistants down so I asked her to wait for me at a spot we knew just outside the site where we could discuss things properly.’
‘So you parted from her there and then.’
‘Yes.’ Tears stained his eyes once more. ‘Parted, Captain. Got that? I did not…’ He gulped. ‘I did not brutally slay the love of my life in cold blood and drag her body across the track to dump it!’ Sobs now. ‘God, you people!’
Darac’s whole team knew that after this encounter with Laborde, Samira had driven out of the car park in perfect health. She had been seen doing so by Eric Cauvin, albeit in silhouette; in the full glare of his lights by bus driver Roger Lauvette; and by a couple of his passengers. Immediately after exiting the players’ car park gate, the picture of what happened to Samira next was a little more complicated.
‘We’ll take a moment there. Keep it rolling, Bonbon. Some water, Monsieur?’
Laborde shook his head and it was with impressive or suspicious speed of recovery that he readied himself to continue. ‘Yes, we parted. But, Captain, I was right. Samira had been overwhelmed by everything and if you had a complete record of our text exchanges, you would… see that… she…’
Laborde’s words trailed away as he watched Bonbon unzipping a plastic bag.
‘Here, chief.’ he said, handing the contents to Darac.
‘Actually, we do have a complete record, Monsieur Laborde. This is Samira’s phone.’ Significantly, a phone wiped of all prints. ‘As you can see.’
‘Oh!’ Relief seemingly ameliorating his distress, Laborde exhaled deeply. ‘Thank God. There’s evidence. Evidence!’
There was evidence, alright, Darac thought, sharing a look with Bonbon. ‘Yes, at 10.51 pm, that’s about 40 minutes after she was seen driving away from the Stade, Samira sent a text to your mobile and that message reads: “Gilles, forgive me. I’ve just arrived home. I waited as long as I could where you said but I had to drive away. You’re right. Our relationship is a source of pain to me but it is real. If you come to the apartment straight away, we will talk this through. Love, ever, Samira.”
‘Captain, I’m sure you and your team are well practised in losing evidence favourable to —’
‘No!’ Gremat said, unable to help himself. ‘Apologies, gentlemen.’
When circumstances demanded it, Bonbon was capable of a stare of death ray-like intensity. ‘We’ll overlook it this time but no more, Monsieur. Alright?’
‘Apologies again.’
‘It is I who should apologise, Captain,’ Laborde said. ‘I felt sure you were being selective with these messages to the point of losing some that didn’t support your theories.’ He gave the incredulous Gremat a meaningful look. ‘But I was mistaken.’
‘Where were you when you received the message?’
‘At the spot I’d asked her to meet me. It’s an unnamed lane around the corner from the site. Gives on to a disused builders’ yard.’
‘Remind me when you left the Stade through the caravan gate?’
‘Just after 10.30. As I’m sure Cauvin told you.’
As you knew he would, Darac thought to himself. ‘And from there, it’s a three or four-minute drive to the meeting place you describe. So let’s say you arrived there at about 10.35 to find that Samira had apparently not waited for you after all. Your mobile logged the conciliatory text she sent to you from her apartment all the way over on Boulevard Bischoffsheim at 10.51. Now, it’s about a 15-minute drive to your villa in La Ginistière from the meeting place so I imagine you were almost home when you received her message?’
‘I was not.’
‘Traffic even at that time, huh?’
‘I… was still at the meeting place.’
‘You saw she wasn’t there the moment you arrived but you didn’t drive away until, as luck or something else would have it, your message from Samira came in? Why?’
‘I was upset! I shed tears, alright? For the first time, I thought it really must be over between us.’
‘But thanks to her message, your hopes were rekindled. And from the time it was sent, you worked out that you had only just missed her at the meeting place. She had waited a good while for you.’
‘Yes. She must have.’
‘So what did you do then?’
‘I sent her a quick reply—’
‘ “My darling, I’m so glad. I’ll be with you as soon as I can.” ’
‘Will you stop asking me questions to which you already know the answers!’
‘That’s half the fun, Monsieur,’ Bonbon said.
In fact, with the aim of exposing anomalies and deviations from known facts, police detectives already knew the true answers to 90% of the questions they put to murder suspects during interrogation. From Flaco’s interview with Samira’s flatmate Carole Monteux earlier, Darac had learned that she had been volunteering at a shelter for homeless women overnight – Flaco had verified this – and hadn’t returned to the apartment until the following morning. Darac had reasons for suspecting that Laborde would have no way of knowing Carole hadn’t been home the previous evening.
‘And so, Monsieur,’ Darac went on, ‘you set off on the roughly 20-minute drive to Samira’s apartment. What did you find when you got there?’
Conveying the sense that he was re-running the scene in his head, Laborde stared blindly into space. ‘When I arrived, I stopped where I always had but as I approached the building, I saw Samira’s parking space was empty. For the most horrible imaginable reason, I now know. But of course, at the time, I didn’t think anything of the sort.’
‘What did you think?’
‘I thought she had had second thoughts again and gone off somewhere to think things through by herself.’
‘Her flatmate hadn’t heard from her?’
‘I don’t know. As I said, once I saw Samira’s car wasn’t there, I knew she hadn’t come back and I didn’t check further.’
You may have cleared that hurdle, Darac thought to himself. But there are still whole ranks of them set out across the track ahead. And they’re going to get higher. ‘What did you do next?’
‘I… And now I am ashamed of this... I lost my temper. Lost my temper with Samira, with myself, with… everything. If there had been a cat around, I would’ve kicked it to death.’ At his client’s latest indiscretion, Gremat sighed audibly.
‘You didn’t message her at that point? Or, more like you, send several?’
‘You know I didn’t.’
‘Pity. It would have helped establish where you were.’ Laborde seemed not to notice the implication. ‘And then what did you do?’
‘I drove home. Still angry, I suppose because I didn’t text her again until the next morning. Samira was something of an early bird, too, and when I didn’t get a reply, instead of driving off to work, I went to her apartment instead. With the same result as before, of course. Except this time, I rang the bell. No one answered.’
‘Her flatmate was out?’
‘I felt so. There was not a sound from within. She may have still been in bed, I suppose.’
‘You didn’t have a key, then?’
The point seemed to rankle. ‘No.’
‘I see,’ Darac said, picking up a fresh stack of messages.
‘And there are these too,’ Bonbon said, handing over a further selection.
‘Ah, yes.’ Darac took them. ‘Monsieur, you mentioned that when Samira hadn’t been at home the previous evening, you wondered if she had gone elsewhere to think things out.’
‘Ye-es?’
‘Might that “elsewhere” have been the Résidence Baie des Anges?’
‘Why there? Her very unsatisfactory relationship with Julien was over. Yes, she did have a lot of respect for Grace. Grace Nahili, my heptathlete, that is. I suppose they might have been close enough to confide in each other.’
‘We are thinking neither of Julien Baille nor the excellent Mademoiselle Nahili. We are thinking of your team captain, Emil Arcot.’
‘Emil? What are you talking about? He’s a great lad but she was about as likely to seek advice from him as…’
‘Yes, yes, I think it’s time to stop this playacting, Monsieur Laborde. Bonbon, you have those messages?’
‘Here, I think,’ Bonbon said, picking up the smallest of the piles on the desk. ‘Did you notice that Emil’s performance in the shot putt circle was a little below par yesterday evening, Monsieur? Or perhaps markedly better than usual?’
‘I delegate the field event sessions to one of my assistants. What is this about?’
Bonbon shook his head in admiration. It was mock admiration of course, but he too was a consummate actor. ‘Bravo, Monsieur. When you turned your talents to coaching athletics, what a loss that was to the world of stage and screen. I’m sure you could recite this verbatim, but make a show of reading it anyway.’
He passed across a message sent by Samira to Emil late on the afternoon of the previous day. Beginning “Emil, my beautiful boy, the first thing this afternoon proved to me was that all men are definitely not created equal…” and going on to contrast the young man’s impressive virility with the inadequacies of her previous lovers, the message was a paean not just to Emil’s supremacy in bed but to his utterly steadfast qualities as a human being. The latter, Samira emphasised, was also something she had not encountered to the same degree previously. Laborde appeared to be going through a kind of bereavement as he read the message, anger following denial in quick succession; acceptance still some way off. If it was a performance, it was as convincing as Darac and Bonbon had seen given by a suspect in his position.
‘We have Emil’s response to the message and more from Samira, too,’ Darac said. ‘Including her invitation to “do it all over again tomorrow morning” unquote. Big young Emil was in the position you yearned to be in, wasn’t he? You were no longer needed – if you ever were. To make it easier to get rid of you, we wonder if Samira thought that blunting your feelings for her would help. Accordingly, in the course of your break-up meeting, we put it to you that she told you about the new man in her life. Now of course, we don’t know how this meeting went. Even though she so wanted to be shot of you, perhaps she tried to spare your feelings during it. Perhaps she didn’t even name who had beaten you so resoundingly as her lover. Or, and a couple of our colleagues absolutely believe this, perhaps she taunted you about him.’ Darac gave it a beat. ‘Taunted. Was that it? Was that what pushed you over the edge?’
Laborde couldn’t speak.
Sensing the pressure was finally beginning to break Laborde’s resistance, Darac pushed on. ‘But as we said a few minutes ago, we don’t need to prolong your agony by going through every word of this humiliating new strand of the story, do we? Monsieur? I’ll take your lack of response as a no.’ Darac gave Bonbon a look. ‘I think we can wrap this up quite quickly, can’t we?’
‘Should think so, chief.’
‘Monsieur Laborde… Monsieur Laborde!’
‘What?’
‘Are you listening?’
Looking utterly defeated, Laborde gave the slightest of nods.
‘You are a controlling man by nature, are you not? A controlling, obsessive, perfectionist. In your career, those traits must have been of great value to you in shaping the minds and bodies of your charges. And you get results. Your athletes win things. And that’s important because in your business, only winning matters. If it all ended out there on the track or the field, it wouldn’t be much of a problem, would it? But it doesn’t end there. You run your personal life on the same lines and that’s hard on those close to you. The standards you expect of them are high. Exacting. So exacting that falling short of them is an inevitable consequence for any normally adjusted person. But that doesn’t stop your need to obsessively control them, does it? In one solitary visit to your home, just meeting your very talented daughter Inès—’
‘My daughter Jackie!’ he screamed. ‘Jackie!’
Realising he’d made Darac’s point for him, Laborde threw himself back in his seat and folded his arms so tightly, he looked in danger of squeezing himself into unconsciousness.
‘But there’s one inescapable flaw in all this controlling perfectionism, Head Coach Laborde. You may meet, even exceed, the exacting standards you impose on others in some areas of your life but when it comes to your personal morality, it’s you who falls short, isn’t it? In that league, you’re way down at the bottom. Thanks to your phone logs, we know Samira was far from the first student athlete you’d bedded and kept very quiet about. But she was the one who got to you, wasn’t she? Samira, your goddess, as you were wont to call her.’
‘I told you she was. I loved her. And I wanted my future and hers to, to…’
‘We contend that your infantile fantasies about a future together disintegrated when she made the fatal mistake of telling you about Emil.’
Laborde shook his head. ‘No. She didn’t tell me.’
In his seat, Gremat was clearly anxious to make a point about this – as Darac and Bonbon would have if the tables had been reversed.
‘After the interrogation, Monsieur Gremat,’ Bonbon said, cheerily. ‘You may ask as many questions as you like.’
‘But in the meantime,’ Darac went on, ‘we’ll hazard a guess at what is exercising you.
As we’ve already established, after what was in effect a break-up meeting, Samira was seen driving away from the Stade in perfectly good heart. And also established, forty minutes later, she had had apparently second thoughts about the break-up and sent you a text summoning you to her apartment for further talks.’
‘Well then?’ Laborde said. ‘And we’ve said all this, already.’
‘Having not shifted from the spot you were supposed to meet, you then headed off as Samira had requested. But to no avail. When you got there, she was not home. Concluding that she had changed her mind once more, you set off home in a temper.’
‘And I regret that. Hugely. But we’ve said this. Said it!’
‘All in all, your homecoming in La Ginistière would have been delayed by 45 minutes to an hour by hanging around outside the builder’s yard for 15 minutes, then driving over to Boulevard Bischoffsheim and back. Your wife, by this time in bed, reports hearing you come in and retiring at about the time that fits your story.’
‘Of course. Why wouldn’t she?
‘So you left the Stade just after 10.30 and got home at the earliest, three-quarters of an hour later. You can get a lot done in that time, Monsieur. Can’t you?’
The way Laborde’s expression changed as the thrust of Darac’s insinuation appeared to dawn slowly upon him was little short of a tour de force. For some moments, no dialogue accompanied the performance but finally, he said, ‘No. No, no, no. You’re trying to… The facts support what happened.’
‘Oh yes, Monsieur,’ Darac said. ‘They certainly do.’ He brandished Samira’s mobile. ‘Let’s return to the message sent to your mobile by a rueful Samira; a message summoning you to her apartment for what we’ve described as a rapprochement meeting. As we can see, the message was indeed sent at 10.51, forty-five or so minutes after she had parted from you. But, Monsieur, it was not sent from, or from remotely near, Boulevard Bischoffsheim which, as the crow flies, is all of six kilometres from the Stade. The GPS on Samira’s phone records that it was sent from within a 200-metre radius of the water jump in which her brutalised body was later found dumped. It’s clear to us, Monsieur, that you had possession of her phone and using it, composed and sent a message to your own phone. A message sent from you, to you, with the clear intention of giving yourself an alibi for the time of the murder and throwing the subsequent investigation off the scent.’
