Pascaline Roubaud

Pascaline Roubaud is 51 and has worked at the same bank for twenty-six years, where she started as a typist and rose to assistant manager. Born in Lyon, the daughter of a primary school teacher and a hairdresser, she studied accounting at night and at 25 came to Nice for a better climate and a career that depended on no one. She cites the bank's regulations by heart, article and paragraph, and takes offense when anyone asks her to explain again.

She lives alone in a living-room-and-two-bedroom apartment in Cimiez, in a yellow-fronted building, where everything is arranged at right angles: the armchair in the corner, the little table with the porcelain tea set, the plants in a row on the window, the sewing machine covered with a cloth. She makes tea at four, reads detective novels and goes to bed at ten sharp. Sundays are for Mass and for writing to her sister.

She is tall and rigid in bearing, with a fine, pale face, thin lips with discreet lipstick and brown hair in a low bun. She wears a navy skirt-and-jacket suit, a white bow-collared blouse, and keeps her tortoiseshell glasses hanging on a chain around her neck. She speaks quickly, in complete sentences, and her index finger beats the rhythm in the air. She always carries a bunch of brass keys in her hand.

About the vault room, she says it stayed locked from Friday at 5 p.m. until Monday, closed by her and the director, each with his own key, with the alarm wired to the police station. They checked the door, she says, but nobody checks the floor. According to the visitors' book, the customer in box 112 went down six times since June, always alone, fifteen minutes per visit, and on Friday, at 4:40, asked whether the alarm responded to noise or vibration.

Pascaline knows the employee who keeps the book and one of the keys is the one asked how a locked room was emptied. When the detective says she gave the key to the thieves, she fastens her glasses to the chain with two fingers and demands that he take back what he said: twenty-six years without a franc out of place. The pride of an exemplary employee, or regulations serving as a fence: the chain reveals nothing.