Rosy and John by Pierre Lemaitre

Author:Pierre Lemaitre
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC027240 Fiction / General
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2018-11-05T16:00:00+00:00

5.25 a.m.

Civil servants, engineers and specialists have been dragged from their beds, vehicles have been dispatched to collect them with outriders to clear the road, offices have been opened, computer systems booted up, all available data is being gathered. No matter how fast they work, everything takes time, it takes ages.

Over the past six months, work has been carried out on almost every nursery school in the capital, the Public Services Department has to make the most of school holidays to do repairs. Any road works carried out in the neighbouring streets or in car parks adjoining the schools needs to be factored in. The most difficult thing is to work out is the scale of the repairs: they need to focus on the jobs that took several days to complete and involved digging a trench large enough for Garnier to bury something the size of a mortar shell. One school was completely rewired, another had the toilet block replaced, they pore over blueprints, question engineers who frantically confer: would it be enough to plant a bomb or not? The pressure is hellish. One of the engineers breaks down.

“You can’t ask that of me!”

He is worried sick, overwhelmed by the responsibility; someone drives him home and fetches his deputy. There are fifteen of them from a range of professions: road engineering, plumbing, excavation, roofing . . . Could you plant a bomb here? Here?

For the moment, they have not found any school, nor any road near a school where trenches were dug in the past eight months.

If you include all the possible hiding places for a mortar shell – sewers, cellars, basements, car parks – it quickly become a needle in a haystack.

“This school you mentioned, Jean, we can’t find it . . .”

Jean looks up at the wall clock.

“You’ll find it. It’s just a matter of time.”

He is not wrong.

Because fifteen minutes later, on the other side of Paris, in one of the decentralised offices of the Préfecture de police, someone picks up a telephone and angrily pounds his fist on the desk until it is finally answered:

“We’ve got it, we’ve found it.”

As soon as the information reaches him, Camille races to the interview room, throws open the door, hurls himself at the suspect, grabbing him by the shoulders. A terrified Garnier tries to shield his face, but he is still handcuffed to the table.

“École Charles-Frécourt?” Camille roars. “Is that the one, Jean? Frécourt in the fourteenth arrondissement?”

Experts continue combing through their files, but the school on the rue Philibert-Beaulieu is the only possibility. Everything tallies. Three months ago, a sinkhole appears in the playground, a flustered headmistress calls the council, they call in surveyors and they in turn call in contractors, parents panic when they see a pit like a meteor crater, safety barriers are hurriedly erected, inspectors determine that the subsidence was caused by a leaking pipe that has weakened the substructure, the following weekend the schoolyard is dug up. In fact, it takes almost a week

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