To my surprise, Aoki wasn’t in the bed with me when I woke up. I got changed, headed downstairs, and saw him waiting for me at the kitchen table, with a bakery paper bag and an important-looking document.

“Hi sleepyhead,” he greeted me. “I woke up early, so I went and got croissants.”

“Do you ever sleep?” I asked, joining him.

“Yeah, during class,” he laughed.

I grabbed a croissant in my right hand, and the document in my left hand. I got scared when I saw the French Republic’s logo in the top left-hand corner.

“You’re being summoned to the police station,” Aoki explained. “It’s probably about Demasse’s murder.”

“I didn’t do anything!” I exclaimed.

“I believe you, but you still have to go. Hey, don’t worry about it, I got a summons, too ; we can go together!”

He took out his from his jeans’ pocket and showed it to me.

“When did you find the time to walk all the way to your place to pick that up?”

“Come on, Pauline, focus!” he said, pretending to get annoyed. “It hasn’t been a minute since I told you I woke up early. So, since you showed no signs of waking up, I got a little bored, figured I’d pick up your mail for you, saw this, and thought I might have received one too. And I had!”

I kept staring at the paper. How could Aoki be so light-hearted in a moment like this? Didn’t this mean we were suspects? What if they knew what Noémie and I were up to? Would we get arrested?

A hand on my shoulder brought me back to the present moment.

“Don’t worry,” Aoki reassured me, “it’ll be fine. You just have to answer their questions truthfully. Try not to tell them anything they didn’t ask you about, though. They’re not joking when they say they’ll use anything against you.”

“You sound oddly knowledgeable about this,” I remarked.

“What can I say?” he laughed. “I guess I’m something of a bad boy myself.”

A little while later, when we arrived at the police station, I was surprised to find Noémie standing in front of the entrance. She smiled when she saw me, but went straight back to her gloomy look when she noticed Aoki.

“Hey guys,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

I explained it to her.

“They just interrogated me, actually.”

“What did you tell them?” Aoki asked.

“The truth,” she replied, barely even looking at him. “By the way, Pauline,” she added, “do you want to come over tonight?”

I understood just fine what she was hinting at. By the end of the day, she’d probably have access to the statements of everyone the police had interrogated. That could prove to be very useful.

“Sure,” I accepted.

Aoki looked a little disappointed but said nothing. He’d probably been hoping to stay with me again tonight.

The time had come for me to answer some questions while trying not to get arrested, so I left the both of them outside and entered the police station.

A policeman in his forties welcomed me and led me to a pretty unremarkable room. He sat behind the computer and politely asked me to sit in front of him.

“You’re Pauline Renart, is that right?” he asked.

“Yes,” I answered.

“My name is Charles. Nice to meet you.”

He took out a few papers, typed some things on his computer, then continued :

“As you may have guessed, I have some questions to ask you about your whereabouts on Sunday and your relationship with Jean Demasse. He was your math teacher, wasn’t he?”

“That’s right.”

“Was he generally well-liked in the school?”

“No.”

I was tempted to elaborate, but I remembered Aoki’s advice and kept my answer as short as possible, though that did make it sound like I hated Demasse.

“Well then, did he have any enemies?”

“Not that I know of.”

Charles sighed. He understood that this wasn’t going anywhere, but he couldn’t really call me out, because I was still cooperative.

“Alright. Can you describe to me what you did on Sunday?”

“I had spent the previous evening at Aoki Moriyama’s house, so I was still there in the morning,” I started.

“Mhm,” Charles acquiesced, typing furiously.

“My phone’s battery had died during the night, so I can’t really tell you what time it was exactly, but I guess it must have been around noon when I left and went home. Then, at around 2 p.m., I met up for drinks with Noémie Boulanger. We left at around 4 p.m.”

“I see. And this ‘Aoki’ person, you didn’t see him again for the rest of the day, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

I was hypnotized by the way he was typing. He wasn’t really typing fast at all, yet he was making so much noise, and so many typos that the backspace key was probably the one he was pressing the most.

“Alright, Pauline,” Charles said, “I’m out of questions. Please come back if you think of anything. I’m going to need you to sign this declaration, and you’ll be good to go.”

I did what was asked of me and left to meet back with Noémie, who’d been waiting for me outside. Aoki was nowhere to be found.

“Your boyfriend’s being interrogated,” Noémie explained when she saw the look of confusion on my face. “So, how did it go?”

“Well, I—”

“Actually, don’t tell me!” she cut me off. “I can just read it right now.”

She took out her phone.

“Don’t!” I whispered loudly. “What if someone sees you?”

She sighed.

“Yeah, you’re right. Well, I’ll just have to read it later. I’ll go through all of them anyway.”

“I’m back!” Aoki announced from behind me, putting his arm around my back. Noémie rolled her eyes. “So, Pauline, what did you think? That wasn’t so bad, now, was it? Did you follow my advice?”

“I did,” I replied. “I didn’t expect it to work.”

“What, did you think I’d give you fake advice or something?” he joked. “Do you have such a low opinion of me?”

The three of us then went to school as usual. At the end of the day, we all made our way to Noémie’s house, in front of which Aoki kissed me goodbye. He pretended nothing was wrong, but I could see he hadn’t quite gotten over the fact that I was spending the night at Noémie’s.

“Call me if you need anything!” he told me before he left.

Noémie and I practically ran to her room, and she turned on her laptop. While it was booting up, she handed me her phone.

“You read half of them, I read the other half,” she ordered. “But first, I know you’re just as curious as me to see what Aoki said, so let’s read this together.”

I went and sat on her bed, next to her.

As expected, he followed his own advice and gave the shortest answers possible. No matter what he was asked about Demasse, he’d almost always answer that he didn’t know ; to be fair, he had only known him for one week, and the investigator seemed to be aware of it.

When he was asked what he had been doing on Sunday, he mentioned spending the morning with me, then said he spent the rest of the day cleaning up his house after I left.

“That’s it?” Noémie exclaimed. “That’s his alibi? That’s weak!”

She almost sounded happy about it.

“I mean, it was quite a mess when I left,” I defended him.

“I’m not saying he’s lying or anything, just that I wouldn’t be surprised if he turned out to be trying to cover something up…”

“He’s not a murderer!” I snapped.

“Are you sure?” she teased. “Maybe you’re dating Jack the Ripper…”

“Stop it!”

We spent the rest of the evening going through the declarations of everyone Demasse had ever interacted with, without finding anything noteworthy. Our investigation had hit a brick wall ; it was as if Demasse had been murdered by a ghost.