A vaporizer in her right hand, the baroness of the “real thriller” readjusts her leather jacket. Size 36, like her denim miniskirt. Patricia Tourancheau would like to smile for the photo but she would already have to throw away her chewing gum. “On news items, you always have to make a funeral face”, she regrets. She hands her business card to the photographer. A big miss: “It looks like a car dealership. » A diamond logo on an orange background. It makes her laugh. The specialist of cold boxes on the info site Days crashed into the presentation. She still has 200 like that under her belt. That she raises to pour water into her pastis – “a man’s drink” that she ended up adopting by dint of frequenting the cops of the crime prevention squad.
It is 6 p.m. and we are in his headquarters, the Bolivar, in the 19and district of Paris. The journalist lives next door. 900 meters away, on May 5, 1986, at 8:45 a.m., Cécile Bloch, 11, took the elevator to go to college. A few hours later, the guards of the building find her inert in the third basement under a carpet, half-naked. Raped, strangled, stabbed. This atrocious crime, which has haunted three generations of investigators, is the starting point of the fascinating investigation book by Patricia Tourancheau: Le Grele. The killer was a cop (Seuil, 272 pages, 19 euros), released on March 4. One of the greatest enigmas in criminal history was solved on September 29, 2021, with the suicide of François Vérove, 59-year-old policeman, murderer and rapist, which claimed more than twenty victims.
During two months, “I ate with ‘le Grêlé’, slept with ‘le Grêlé'” – the killer’s nickname. An obsession. Forty-seven days for 272 pages, typing on her computer like crazy with her only right index finger, “like a hen pecking”, chaining the cigarettes. The cigarette is an integral part of the process, his former colleagues at Freedwhere she spent almost thirty years following the police and the “div facts”, can testify to it, when she connected the fan to her office to send the smoke towards the skylight. “Some were moaning…” In March 2020, it’s a disaster: its menthols will be banned two months later. “I did something sick. I broke my savings account and scoured all the tobacco shops in Paris. » She ended up nabbing two boxes of 25 cartridges which she brought back in suitcases. “I lasted fourteen months. » Today, she inserts a mint card in her packet to infuse the tobacco. When Patricia has an idea in mind…
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