Brigitte Sauvage

Brigitte Sauvage is 46 and for nine years has run the seven nurses of the penthouse as the banker's head nurse. Born in Dijon, the daughter of a typesetter and a piano teacher, she chose nursing at 17, after watching her grandmother waste away without anyone able to explain the medication. She speaks in schedules and doses, can't stand improvisation and believes almost every hospital error is a clock error.

She lives in a two-bedroom apartment in Beausoleil, on the slope behind the harbor, overlooking orange-tiled roofs, with a tiny balcony where she grows rosemary in olive oil tins. Inside, everything smells of Marseille soap: creased, ironed sheets, a dresser whose drawers are labeled in her head, a rocking chair her father sent from Dijon. She drinks her coffee without sugar, standing in the kitchen, and goes to bed at ten when the rota allows.

She is thin and very upright, with a fine, serious face, ash-brown hair in a tight bun and tired eyes where the mascara never stays put. She wears a white uniform under a navy overcoat, a lapel watch pinned to her chest and a clipboard of patient charts pressed to her body. She speaks softly and without pause, and ends her sentences like someone closing a drawer.

About the night of the fire, her account is that of a professional: she gave out the 9 p.m. medication, checked the chart, locked up the apartment and left her employer with the night colleagues, and only returned when the front desk called her. About the man she looked after for nine years, she has just one description: generous and frightened. Parkinson's took his hands, she says, and the fear of kidnapping took the rest. With the whole penthouse sealed and no cameras up there by the employer's order, nobody can say for certain where each person was during the small hours.

Brigitte knows whoever has the code to the armored room is the first name the police write down. When the detective suggests she left her employer locked in to die, her voice goes dry and she tells him to stay in his place. It could be the dignity of someone who changed the patient's diaper when no one else would. It could be someone who cuts the conversation short the moment it nears another subject. The detective will have to decide which.