Séverine Pothier

Séverine Pothier is 27 and has spent six of those years at the telegraph window of the Dijon station. Born in Auxerre, the daughter of a washerwoman and a railwayman who died young, she studied until 14, when a nun taught her Morse code as a game. At 21, the company took her on at the telegraph, because it only hires unmarried women or widows and pays as if doing a favor. She knows every train's schedule by heart.

She lives in a rented room in a house near the station, under a roof of dark tiles, with a narrow bed, a trunk, a sewing table and a window that opens onto the tracks and the city. She listens to the night trains and can tell which is which by the whistle. The landlady, a widow of an engine driver, charges little and asks no questions. On the table, she keeps a porcelain teapot and a faience cup.

She is thin, with a fine, pale face, dark brown hair in a high bun and attentive eyes. She wears a dark high-collared dress buttoned to the chin, black cloth sleeve protectors up to the elbows and a pencil behind her ear. A thin cord disappearing inside her collar is her only vanity. Precise, dry, she distrusts people who speak loudly, and never errs by a minute.

From her window, she has a view of platform 1 and the door of the goods warehouse. Yesterday, at 10, the inventor stopped by to send a telegram to his wife in New York, saying he would reach Paris that night, London on Monday and Liverpool on the 24th. He was a tall, gentle man, who paid without waiting for change. Asked who uses the warehouse in early afternoon, she answers nobody, from 2 to 3, because the crew goes to unload the freighter at the end of the yard. It is the quietest hour of the station. When the detective demands that she say what she is hiding, she answers nothing that is his business, and asks him to lower his voice.

It could be the modesty of a woman who works among men and learned to offer nothing beyond what is needed. It could be the reserve of someone who prefers not to explain an absence. The detective will have to decide which.