I sipped coffee, swallowed and spoke. “Rigalle finds out that you looked up the blue Opel registration and wants to speak to you, writes a note about it, and is then murdered with his family. A public execution.”

“Because someone thinks that it was him snooping, not me?”

“Maybe.”

Nazari said, “In addition to that, the murderers pay a visit to my house.”

I said, “Which would indicate that they knew you had done the registration lookup, not Rigalle.”

“Which indicates that they had access to the camera feed on the police chief’s computer.”

“That looks likely.”

“Fine.” Nazari sipped from her coffee cup. “Now that links the Rigalle family murders back to me, possibly to you, and according to Alain’s note, to the police station.”

I said, “Therefore, we assume that the police station is an unsafe operational environment.”

“Maybe a bent cop. Someone on the take.”

I layered raspberry jam on a piece of buttered toast. “I haven’t told you what happened last night, above Le Foxy Kebab.”

I told Nazari about the room with the laptop and phone and about the other office down the hall. I showed her the receipt I’d found at the bottom of the bathroom garbage can. I told her about the guy whose wrist I had broken on Saturday and whose face I had kicked in on Sunday. The guy with the Adidas stripes in his head. How I had seen him up at the migrant camp near Calais. She knew about the ponytail guy down by the river. She didn’t know that these were two of the guys who attacked me in town. So I told her, and how I thought it was all connected.

“You attack the Adidas-striped guy up there after you’ve already broken his wrist the day before, and then you attack the other guy by the river.” She shook her head with a wry smile. “Not bad for your first two days in France.”

“There were sharp instruments involved.” She smiled. I said, “I operate with extreme prejudice. It’s going to get worse. The instruments are sharper and heavier now.”

I was thinking about the axe.

Nazari waved away the prevarications. “So there’s a connection with migrant trafficking, which makes sense. It’s big business these days.”

“There’s something else that I didn’t mention before, about the mohawk bike kid. I found a sharpened screwdriver under the bike seat, three of them.”

Nazari looked daggers at me. “And what did you do with them?”

“This isn’t going to be resolved in court.”

Nazari shook her head. “That links the Vaugeois attack to the trail bikes and The Woodcutter, and therefore to migrant trafficking and the killing of the Afghan.”

“Correct.”

“But that has no connection to the fact-pattern we have built up around the Houdin and Rigalle murders.”