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traces of fingernails on the discolored wallpaper. It was a color he seemed to have known for a very long time.
    Dried blood.
    His instinct told him that it was Samir’s blood.
    The forensics department proved him right.

3.
    He strolled up cours Mirabeau passing the fashionable cafés, savoring the rare mildness of this late December day. He went slowly, as though inspecting the rows of wicker chairs with their flowery cushions, and the low tables placed like cornucopias between the leafless plane trees.
    The afternoon brightness lingered. The unseasonable temperature had undressed the women: miniskirts, black, tan or sheer stockings—his favorite.
    In a few days it would be Christmas. The shortest days of the year.
    It had been months since the last time.
    Freakish weather like this put him in strange moods. For the past couple of days he had not been able to make up his mind how to dress, and this really annoyed him. The pullover he was wearing was too hot, and he felt drops of sweat collecting in the small of his back after their slow descent down his spinal cord.
    He took a seat on the terrace of Les Deux Garçons, a respectable, somewhat snobbish bar at the top of cours Mirabeau, a few paces away from the burbling fountain with its haughty statue of King René.
    It was 3:00 p.m. All he had to do was wait. He ordered a beer and stared at the passers-by.
    As he often did.
    It would soon be the agreed time. If all went to plan, she would quite simply sit down at a table and show him his next prey.
    At 3:30, the goddess appeared. She walked in front of him without even a glance in his direction and sat down at the next table. Five minutes later, a woman of about forty arrived. They kissed each other in the most ordinary way possible.
    Once again, he appreciated how the goddess could quite naturally seduce all kinds of different people.
    He listened.
    The new arrival was apparently one of those idle, upper-middle-class women who spend their time in the chic boutiques of Aix’s old quartier. She was blond, of average height, with a sporty physique, jutting breasts and perfectly tapered legs. Most of all he noticed her protruding chin, which hardened her long face despite her small brown eyes and soft, almost naïve smile. She spoke like all Aix women of her type, without an accent, looking skywards every time she uttered a sonorous superlative about some meaningless piece of nonsense.
    He learned that they had met the previous evening, at an “utterly stunning” show in a “super bijou” gallery in the town center. He failed to understand why his goddess was interested in all these bourgeois clichés. But there was no disputing her desires.
    She got the other woman talking, to the point that they exchanged addresses and telephone numbers.
    That is how he found out her name: Hélène Weill. He registered it mentally, like a snapshot.
    Beside the picture of her name, he placed her phone number and then, a little further on, her address. Methodically.
    He then learned that Hélène Weill had for the past few years been consulting an “utterly brilliant” psychiatrist, an “extra-ordinary” man on place d’Aix called François Caillol, whose “absolutely dazzling” mansion was on route de Puyricard.
    He swallowed the rest of his beer and went for a stroll through the streets of Aix. The sun was beginning to set, cold shadows flittered into the narrow streets of the historic center. He looked at his watch: 4:00 p.m. He decided to go back to Marseille. He had to make plans while he waited for the moon.
    He followed Hélène Weill for two days.
    She would leave her home in the center of Aix at about 11:00 a.m. to do a little food shopping, then go back home around 3:00 p.m. Then she reemerged to spend the rest of the afternoon going in and out of boutiques.
    In those two days, all she bought was a few feminine items: fine silk lingerie, some costume