Just as Paul Eluard was once overcome by sorrow, Ivan Imelo was overcome by fear. Hello, fear! Tu es inscrit dans les lignes du pIafond. Tu es inscrit dans les yeux, qui j’aime. Tu n’est pas tout, fait la misére, car les lévres les plus pauvres te dénoncent avec un sourire. Hello, fear.

Fear is a ridiculous thing, especially if it happens to a brave man. There was not the slightest doubt about Ivan Imelo’s bravery. He had often risked his neck, often behaved like a madman who thinks nothing can happen to him. He dealt with case after case, but not even a routine approach to his job prevented him from getting to the bottom of those that others would have laid aside in that storeroom of inexplicable, unsolved cases. Of course, by turning a blind eye or even two. Because every case is different, just as every murderer is different. There are never two the same. That applies to justice, too. If justice blossomed, it would have an admirably beautiful, but very dry flower, as if it had come from a museum. The driving force of all change, however, can be found in ridiculous things.

It is only in detective stories that the murderer is always found. In life some murderers are simply uncatchable. As if they were loved by some omnipotent God. And as God has not time to bother with trivialities, the professional approach of Ivan Imelo had plenty of scope. Until recently this had included respect for the unknown omnipotent benefactor who had in return helped him solve all, literally all, the other cases that had appeared on his desk at his private detective agency, which on occasion even the state would entrust with its most embarrassing failures.

Investigating murders, robbery with violence, blackmail, rape, kidnappings and other crimes was, however, slowly beginning to bore Ivan Imelo. So much banality! Yes, yes, everything bad begins with boredom. Boredom is the secret enemy of truth. For truth never lasts a short enough time to avoid being boring. Moreover, at the same time as boredom, anger for the elusive protegés of the omnipotent, who no law could pin down, was beginning to eat away at the serenity of his criminologist’s soul. At night he raged, in the day he was bored.

Yet all of a sudden the boredom was over. Ivan Imelo was confronted with a case of cold-blooded triple murder and if he had had any hair, he would certainly have gone around with it bristling like iron filings in a magnetic field. He had four suspects in detention cells, none of whom had the feeblest alibi.