So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood Read Online Free PDF Page B

unsatisfied. Daragane regretted that he had described him in such a crude way. A few more pages to go. He still experienced this nervousness and this apprehension that had come over him when he had opened the “dossier”.
    He gazed for a moment at the leaves of the hornbeam, which were quivering gently, as though the tree was breathing in its sleep. Yes, this tree was his friend, and he recalled the title of a collection of poems an eight-year-old girl had had published:
Arbre, mon ami
. He was jealous of this girl, because he had been the same age as her and because he, too, wrote poems at the time. What period did this date from? From a year during his childhood almost as long ago as the year 1951 in the course of which Colette Laurent had been murdered.
    Once again, the tiny letters without double-spacing danced before his eyes. And he had to slide his forefinger along so as not to lose the thread. At last, the name Guy Torstel. It was linked to three names among which he was surprised to recognise that of his mother. The two others were: Bob Bugnand and Jacques Perrin de Lara. He vaguely remembered them, and this too went back to the distant period when the girl of his own age had published
Arbre, mon ami
. The first one, Bugnand, had the figure of a sportsman and wore beige. Dark-haired, he believed; and the other, a man with the large head of a Roman statue, who perched his elbow on marble fireplaces in an elegant pose when he spoke. Childhood memories often consist of small, trivial details that come from nowhere. Had these names attracted Ottolini’s attention and had he made a connection between them and he himself, Daragane? But no, certainly not. Firstly, his mother did not use the same surname as he did. The two others, Bugnand and Perrin de Lara, were lost in the mists of time, and Ottolini was too young for them to mean anything to him.
    The more he read, the more he had the sense that this “dossier” was a sort of ragbag in which bits and pieces from two different investigations that had not taken place in the same year had been thrown together, since the date was now given as 1952. However, between the notes from 1951 dealing with the murder of Colette Laurent and those on the two last pages, he thought he could detect a slender unifying thread: “Colette Laurent” had visited “a house in Saint-Leu-la-Forêt” where “a certain Annie Astrand” lived. This house was apparently under police supervision—but for what reason? Among the names mentioned, those of Torstel, his mother, Bugnand and Perrin de Lara. Two other names were not unknown to him. Roger Vincent and in particular that of the woman who lived in the house at Saint-Leu-la-Forêt, “a certain Annie Astrand”.
    He would have liked to put these muddled notes into some sort of order, but this seemed beyond his powers. What is more, at this late hour of the night, one often comes up with some peculiar notions: the target whom Gilles Ottolini had in mind when he had gathered all the notes in his file, well it was not some old news item, but he himself, Daragane. Of course, Ottolini had not found the angle to fire from, he groped around, he got lost along crossed paths, he was incapable of reaching the heart of the matter. Daragane could sense him prowling around him in search of a way in. Perhaps he had gathered together all these disparate elements in the hope that Daragane would react to one of them, like those police officers who begin an interrogation with petty remarks in order to lull the suspect’s defences. Then, when the person feels safe, they suddenly fire the crucial question at him.
    His eyes settled once more on the leaves of the hornbeam tree and he felt ashamed of such notions. He was losing his composure. The few pages he had just read were merely an inept draft, an accumulation of details that concealed what was most important. One name alone disturbed him and drew him like