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Personal Journal of Lieutenant Jean-Baptiste Chevalier de Lisieux
Wednesday–Thursday, 14–15 July 2297
Dunkelheim System
Late on the fourteenth, Sergeant Blanc and I returned to Henri Valois's cabin.
The idea was simple.
We had searched extensively for Marceau and found nothing. She knew the passenger areas intimately. Valois's quarters were sealed and associated with an ongoing investigation. Precisely for that reason, they offered a hiding place unlikely to be casually disturbed.
It was not our strongest theory.
It was better than the others.
For once, however, the investigation entered territory Sergeant Blanc and I understood.
We approached the cabin tactically.
Blanc took one side of the entrance. I took the other. Our service pistols were drawn. The door opened, and we entered together.
There are situations in which one feels immediately at home.
This was one.
Colette Marceau was not inside.
Security Officer Rémy Fortier was.
He was even more surprised to see us than we were to see him.
Before he could recover, I relieved him of any opportunity to make poor decisions.
Fortier offered an explanation.
It was not convincing.
He claimed that he, too, was searching the cabin.
For Marceau, he said.
This was plausible enough in isolation. Security was searching for her.
It was less plausible that he was doing so alone, without informing the investigation, inside the sealed quarters of a murder victim.
We assumed he was looking for the Black Thread Cylinder or information concerning it.
This interpretation appeared to make him nervous.
Nervous men often become informative.
Fortier attempted, briefly, to invoke Étienne Valcour.
The name was clearly intended to have weight.
It does.
Valcour is wealthy, connected, and accustomed to moving in circles where an inconvenience can be made to disappear beneath enough money and professional courtesy.
I advised Fortier that if he intended to name a man of Valcour's position in connection with murder, theft, or conspiracy, he had better possess evidence capable of surviving daylight.
After that, he stopped mentioning Valcour, and the interview became more productive.
I will not pretend every method employed would be taught at Saint-Cyr.
Fortier required encouragement.
The service pistol remains an admirably versatile instrument even when one does not fire it.
Eventually, he confessed to killing Valois.
This simplified matters enormously.
His exact motive remained less clear than I would have preferred. His involvement with access records and his presence in Valois's cabin established opportunity. His confession established guilt. His association with the security systems explained how evidence had been altered or concealed.
There are moments in an investigation when one must resist the temptation to continue complicating a matter that has finally become simple.
Fortier had murdered Valois.
Danton had substituted the Cylinder.
Marceau's movements remained suspicious.
Valette's strange conduct could be explained by insurance interests and his relationship with Valois.
The Cylinder itself was probably a fraud, or a copy of a fraud, or had been replaced in order to conceal one of several previous frauds.
The important facts were now established.
I therefore declared the murder solved.
Sergeant Blanc expressed reservations.
I reminded him that we had obtained a confession.
He conceded this point.
Commandant Delaunay was initially less enthusiastic, but the practical advantages of our solution were considerable.
The murderer was in custody.
The ship was secure.
The matter remained under French control.
No German authorities required notification beyond the natural death already reported.
Danton and Valette could remain confined until their various roles were properly examined by competent authorities on Earth.
The collection could be audited at leisure.
Most importantly, there was no longer any reason to alarm the passengers.
Captain Vautrin accepted Delaunay's assessment.
The case was closed.
Or very nearly.
On the fifteenth, they found Colette Marceau.
She had never left the Jean Bart.
She had been hiding in dead spaces within the main spindle, moving through maintenance and service areas rarely used by passengers and only intermittently visited by crew.
She was exhausted, hungry, frightened, and considerably less pleased to see Security than Security was to see her.
This did not improve her appearance of innocence.
Marceau denied killing Valois.
She denied stealing the Cylinder.
She denied any involvement with Danton's substitution.
Her explanation for disappearing was that she had developed an overwhelming conviction that she was in danger.
I asked from whom.
She could not—or would not—provide a clear answer.
She said only that something aboard the ship felt wrong and that she had become convinced she could not trust Security.
Since Fortier had now confessed to murder, this assertion was rather more difficult to dismiss than it would have been twenty-four hours earlier.
I questioned her at length.
She was evasive.
Not dishonest in any obvious way, but evasive.
I remain certain she is concealing something.
Nevertheless, her reappearance created an irritating problem in our reconstruction.
If Marceau poisoned Valois, she required no disguise.
She was an assistant purser.
She had legitimate reasons to enter passenger suites. She could have approached Valois carrying towels, documents, minibar inventory, or almost anything else and attracted no attention.
Why, then, would she put on a blonde wig and repeatedly wander through his corridor where security cameras could record her?
I asked her this.
She stared at me.
Then she asked why on Earth she would do such a thing.
This was not useful.
The woman seen in the recordings still resembled Marceau strongly enough that I see little reason to discard the identification.
Yet the behavior makes less sense now than it did before we found her.
Criminals are frequently stupid.
I have relied upon this fact throughout the investigation.
In this instance, however, I confess the explanation is unsatisfactory.
Marceau remains confined while the authorities determine what, exactly, to do with her.
I expected that to be the final complication.
It was not.
Élodie Vannier had not been seen for an alarming length of time.
This was sufficiently unlike her that even I had begun to worry.
Security opened her suite.
We found her in bed.
Alive.
Barely responsive.
Her breathing was shallow, her pulse extremely slow, and she could not be awakened.
Doctor Okafor described the condition as neither ordinary sleep nor coma. She used several more precise medical expressions afterward, none of which improved my understanding.
Rather than risk her dying, I directed the medical staff to place Élodie inside one of the ship's Pentapod emergency pods.
These devices are among the more unsettling products of alien medicine. They are organic—or partly organic—or perhaps technological in a fashion that makes the distinction meaningless.
No one seems able to explain exactly how they work, but they save lives.
This is sufficient.
Miss Cassart, meanwhile, had begun to improve.
Colette Marceau also seemed calmer after being found, though imprisonment may simply have removed the need to continue hiding inside the machinery.
Élodie slept within the Pentapod pod.
The Black Thread Cylinder was gone.
I noticed the coincidence.
At the time, I assigned it no particular meaning.