The First Fingerprint by Xavier-Marie Bonnot

white powder had made a special trip from Marseille to deposit the goods in some hotel on a hill which no-one now remembers.
    Little Bérengère had been taking skiing lessons on the day the big man was arrested. When she came back to the chalet, walking awkwardly in her ski boots, she came across a brigade of gendarmes armed to the teeth. The Brigadier had looked at her rather sadly. There stood her father, in his scruffy clothes with his hands behind his back, his acid-marked face turned to the ground. In a grave voice, he had asked the young Inspecteur de Palma to release him for a moment, so that he could embrace his little girl for the last time. De Palma had accepted. The Brigadier had written it up in his report.
    Luccioni got off lightly in the end: twelve years behind bars for having concocted the best heroin in the world. Meanwhile, his little girl grew up as best she could, waiting for visiting times, trying to understand the value of secrecy and the burden of a such a marginal life, and inventing a presentable father for the sake of her friends at school.
    Her brother Franck had taken a rockier road, full of shady deals. Instead of working as a baker, he wanted to be like his absent father.But he was a pale imitation. A series of burglaries of the middle-class houses on rue de Paradis had earned him enough dosh to set himself up as a small-time drug wholesaler. A few trips to the police station and inevitably to prison had calmed the young hood’s ardor for a while. But when he got out, he started all over again. Now Big Jo’s son had died a miserable death among rainbow wrasses and voracious conger eels, the victim of his one passion: diving. Police frogmen had found him under a rock several meters down, gently rolling in an invisible current, as underwater scavengers feasted on his corpse.
    That was on July 30. At the time, they had presumed it was a diving accident, and they hadn’t investigated any further. As far as the police were concerned, that was one less crook. Case closed. Old Luccioni had never got over it, and on bad days the quality of his cream buns suffered.
    The old hood must have sent along his daughter to act as an intermediary with the only policeman he had ever respected. The Baron sensed that he should be on his guard. If he did identify Franck’s killer, then Luccioni Snr. would take it upon himself to extract justice.
    â€œThank you, Bérengère,” said de Palma as amicably as possible. “I’ll come by and see you. We’ll have a chat with your father.”
    â€œThanks, Monsieur le Divisionnaire.”
    â€œNo, not Divisionnaire. We say Commandant now. It’s stupid, but that’s the way it is. I’ll show you out.”
    In the headquarters’ courtyard, the mistral was spinning furiously, like a typhoon in the Roaring Forties. An anemometer would no doubt have been able to measure its vertiginous speeds. No-one, not even the building’s architects and certainly not the police, had been able to explain this phenomenon.
    Outside the criminal records office, a group of thugs, one of about fifty and two younger men, were waiting to sign in. They loitered there with dripping noses, pretending not to recognize one another as they stoically put up with the fury of the Provençal wind.
    Perched on her platforms, Bérengère Luccioni almost fell over under the force of the gusts, just managing to right herself by grabbing hold of the wing mirror of a heap of rust belonging to the city police. She shrieked, and de Palma gripped her by the shoulder to help her.
    At that moment, he had a clear memory of the five-year-old girl he had seen in that chalet hidden in the Alps. She had stared at him with eyes as green as mint leaves, without really understanding why this young policeman, this Prince Charming, had put stainless-steel handcuffs on her papa. In her infant mind, those cuffs had looked like silver.
    He watched her leave, this