Avenue Célestine, a quiet cul-de-sac on the slopes of Mont Boron, is the street where Vincent Dantier lives. Its calm residential character does not make it secure: the investigators’ reconstruction of the kidnappings turns on a neighbour’s routine visit, a white van in Vincent’s driveway, and a security camera whose apparent continuity concealed a brief but decisive gap.

Setting and Investigative Importance

The street enters the investigation as the destination of a search for Vincent. Nearly half an hour after Roland Granot and a six-person team are sent to Avenue Célestine, Vincent has answered neither his landline nor his mobile. The delay makes the address more than a point on the search route: it is where the team expects to find a man whose silence may signal that the kidnappers have reached him.

The street’s quiet, tucked-away character contrasts with the public, crowded Rue Verbier, where the earlier killing takes place. In the Rue Verbier investigation, at least fifty balconies and many more windows overlook the scene, offering possible witnesses and firing positions; a camera trained on the marketplace also records part of the surrounding activity, though not the area immediately outside the prayer room. The novel thus presents urban space as both exposure and concealment: many eyes may overlook a street, yet a crucial action can still occur beyond a camera’s coverage.

Vincent’s Home and the Neighbour’s Account

At Vincent’s house, Granot’s team learns that Vincent is missing. A neighbour, Eric Taglier, explains that he usually visits Vincent on Friday evenings. The two men customarily go down to the old port for a couple of slow cognacs and take a taxi back. But when Taglier arrived the previous night, no one answered the door, and a long-wheelbase white Mercedes van with no markings stood in the driveway. The house seemed quiet, and Taglier could think of no reason for the van to be there.

That ordinary habit gives the observation its value. Taglier is not presented as someone conducting a formal watch; his regular visits let him notice an unusual vehicle against the background of a familiar routine. His account supplies a concrete warning sign at Vincent’s home, and Granot soon reports that Vincent has been taken. The kidnappers have left the same kind of note as before, changing the wording from “hers” to “his.”

Surveillance and the Abduction of Agnès

The address also belongs to the investigation’s wider reconstruction of Agnès Dantier’s abduction. Reviewing Camera One, the investigators watch Agnès arrive in a Citroën and then fail to appear around the corner at the end of a footway. Darac directs that the exact times of brief image blips be recorded, reasoning that the kidnappers seized her during that interval. The apparent absence of anyone in view initially makes the footage puzzling rather than reassuring.

Darac proposes a simple means of defeating the camera’s time record. On an earlier evening, the van’s driver had taken a photograph from precisely the camera’s viewpoint. The driver removed his gloves to operate the camera, whose small controls could not readily be used through them, then put the gloves back on. On the night of the kidnapping, the conspirators placed that photograph in front of the lens. The camera continued to display its time tag, but briefly showed a slightly out-of-focus, differently framed still image instead of the live scene. The deception was crude in materials but precise in its use of viewpoint and timing: it created the appearance of uninterrupted surveillance while hiding the moment of the abduction.

Narrative Significance

Avenue Célestine’s importance lies in the way domestic routine and technical observation become investigative evidence. The quiet street’s ordinary details—a neighbour’s Friday visits, an unanswered door, a van in a driveway—help establish that something is wrong at Vincent’s home. Elsewhere in the investigation, a camera’s seemingly continuous record proves vulnerable to a photograph placed before its lens. Together, these details make location itself part of the crime’s method: streets, sightlines, habits, and surveillance determine what can be witnessed, what can be concealed, and how the detectives rebuild the missing minutes.

Later, a flyer shown by Darac prompts a sudden realization: water is seeping from beneath the roller door of a lock-up. Remembering Astrid’s warning that they had only thirty seconds, Darac drives his Peugeot through the door rather than waiting for backup. The ensuing discovery of a hose running from a van’s tailpipe leads him to act at once. The lock-up is not identified as being on Avenue Célestine, but this last turn in the investigation echoes the street’s earlier role: a vehicle, a concealed action, and the interpretation of small physical clues become matters of life and death.