Police Nationale

The Police Nationale is France’s national police force, presented in the novel through its local investigative work and its relationship to other law-enforcement bodies. Its institutional presence is both physical—the barracks at Caserne Auvare—and operational, extending from the Brigade Criminelle de Nice’s murder inquiry to the anticipated involvement of specialist anti-terrorism units.

Facilities and Local Presence

Agnès Dantier encounters the imposing Caserne Auvare while exploring the area. The compound’s thirteen two-storey, barrack-like buildings stand in parallel rows behind a perimeter wall, with four severe three-storey structures across the road. The setting makes the police force a conspicuous feature of the neighborhood, while her light assessment of it as a less-than-grand “cop shop” contrasts with the disciplined scale of the premises.

The Police Nationale’s local investigative presence is represented by the Brigade Criminelle de Nice. Lieutenant Roland Granot belongs to the Brigade, whose remit is described by a Garde Républicaine officer as murder, robbery, and general criminality. That exchange distinguishes hands-on criminal investigation from the ceremonial and traffic-related duties the Garde officer jokes about, while showing the two services’ professional familiarity.

Investigation and Evidence

The Rue Verbier murder inquiry demonstrates the practical demands placed on police work. The scene is overlooked by at least fifty apartment balconies and many more windows, with car-park CCTV offering another possible source of evidence. Such abundance of potential vantage points creates a management problem as well as an opportunity: witnesses must be identified and their accounts organized. Granot, the investigator best suited to triage as the second-in-command, is on leave when the crime scene is being processed.

Surveillance footage supplies a partial, carefully bounded record. A camera facing the marketplace does not cover the area outside the prayer room, but it captures an elderly woman entering the scene with a trolley. The gap in coverage means investigators cannot treat CCTV as a complete account; they must connect the recorded images to testimony and other evidence.

Marie Lacroix’s account helps establish the missing sequence. From a third-floor balcony opposite the Basilique, she saw Emil Florian arrive before the footage began, join the prayer meeting, and be struck by the woman with the trolley. She also placed Florian’s earlier movements on Jean Médecin: he had seen Armani Tardelli, hidden behind a Colonne Morris, and then moved when Armani entered a boutique on Rue Verbier. A crowd gathered to watch a living-statue performer provided cover between them. The interview thus extends the timeline beyond the camera’s field of view and gives the investigators a witness account against which to read the recording.

In a separate surveillance puzzle, investigators review footage of Agnès’s arrival in a Citroën and her failure to reappear at the far end of a footway. Paul Darac identifies the brief image irregularities as the interval in which she was abducted. Rather than supposing that the camera’s time tag had been defeated by a sophisticated jammer, he proposes a simpler method: the van’s driver had photographed the camera’s view in advance, then placed that image in front of the lens during the abduction. The photograph’s framing differed slightly and its focus was imperfect, producing the visible blip while obscuring the action. The explanation rests on the camera’s continuous time display and on the driver’s earlier conduct, including removing and replacing his gloves to operate the camera.

Specialist Units and Institutional Distinctions

The discussion of counter-terrorism clarifies that the Police Nationale is not the same organization as the Gendarmerie Nationale. David Jarret describes RAID—Recherche, Assistance, Intervention et Dissuasion—as the Police Nationale’s counterpart to the Gendarmerie’s principal anti-terrorism unit, GIGN. He places RAID’s founding in 1985, after Vincent Dantier’s retirement, making the force’s specialized capacity a later institutional development than the older officer’s career.

The contrast matters to the investigation because the possibility of a terrorist threat raises questions about whether the responsible services have done their work. Yet the novel’s police activity remains grounded in ordinary evidentiary procedure: locating witnesses, checking the limits of camera coverage, reconstructing movements, and testing a theory against the images. The national force’s role is therefore shown not only through named units, but through the coordination and inference that turn scattered observations into an account of events.

Operational Urgency

At the lock-up, Darac recognizes a developing emergency after seeing water seep from beneath the roller door and recalling Astrid’s warning that he had only thirty seconds. Regulations require him to call for backup and wait, but he judges that delay would cost time. He drives his Peugeot through the roller door and sees a hose running from a van’s exhaust, then acts to disconnect it and locate David Jarret. The scene places an individual officer’s immediate decision beside the formal procedures governing police response: the institution supplies rules and backup, while the crisis forces Darac to act before either can arrive.