Prosper Coudray

Prosper Coudray is 53 and the inventor's older brother. Born in Dijon, the son of a master builder, he studied architecture in Paris and returned to his hometown at 28 to build what his father merely repaired. For twenty years he was the department's most respected architect, until one of his buildings collapsed last year, and since then he has carried the city on his back, like someone carrying a brick he never put down.

He works in a high-ceilinged studio on the first floor of an old house on rue de la Liberté, with an enormous drafting table under the window, set squares hanging on the wall, a plaster model of a church that was never built and a wood stove that smokes. In winter, he works in fingerless gloves. He lives upstairs, with his wife, Clotilde, who keeps supper warm until ten.

He is tall and thin, with gray hair combed back, a short, well-trimmed gray beard and the deep-set eyes of someone who doesn't sleep. He wears a black frock coat frayed at the cuffs, a gray waistcoat and a loose bow tie, and carries a roll of plans under his arm. Formal, proud, he speaks of his younger brother with affection and a touch of envy, and of the projector as one speaks of a son he never had.

About his brother's last night in Dijon, he tells what he heard in the garden of his brother's house, on Monday, at 10 p.m., when Évariste and the mechanic Baptiste argued over the patent. About the farewell at the station, he says he accompanied him to the door of the first-class car and left before the whistle, because he hates station goodbyes. In the morning, he asked for the telegraph book, to see whether his brother had sent anything. When the detective hurries him and wants to know where his brother is, he answers that if he knew, he would be there, not here, and asks to be spoken to properly.

It could be the anticipated mourning of a brother who always lived in the younger one's shadow. It could be the composure of someone hiding, beneath the frock coat, more than a gray waistcoat. The detective will have to decide which.