Audrey Fontaine

In L'Heure zéro, the French adaptation of Agatha Christie's Towards Zero for the TV series Les Petits Meurtres d'Agatha Christie, Audrey Fontaine is the newly appointed news anchor at the TV Nord station, the first woman news anchor on the channel. She is the parallel of Audrey Strange from the original novel. Audrey Fontaine is portrayed by Barbara Schulz.

Like Audrey Strange, Audrey Fontaine is the ex-wife of the Nevile Strange parallel, the celebrity TV chef Maxime Beaumont. In a manner similar to the original, Maxime kills the station boss Jean Devandière, leaving a kitchen knife to point to him but which he knows is all-too-obvious and would be dismissed. However, in this adaptation, Audrey doesn't benefit from the death of Devandière who is in fact her benefactor and the one who took the bold step to appoint a female anchor. Maxime has to use a different approach in this adaptation to point to Audrey--the handedness of the killer and Audrey being left-handed is not a plot element here. So Maxime poisons Jean with strychnine before stabbing him, knowing that Audrey has strychnine in her possession (the plot does not explain why or for what purpose). However this attempt to incriminate Audrey fails because Marlene is bitter about having been dumped by Maxime long ago and changes the lab report to say digitaline (which Maxime uses) instead of strychnine. This results in Maxime being arrested and there is a delay before Laurence sees through the alteration and releases him.

In another plot twist unique to this adaptation, Maxime has to improvise a second killing to point to Audrey. He kills his wife Claire Beaumont and leaves one of Audrey's blood-stained gloves nearby. This succeeds in getting her arrested. A glove is also a device in the original novel but it is not blood-stained.

Unlike Audrey Strange, Audrey Fontaine is not resigned to her arrest nor felt any psychological pressure to confess (a plot element in the original which Superintendent Battle saw through because of a previous experience with his daughter Sylvia Battle). By contrast, Audrey here protests her innocence and tells Laurence that he is making a mistake.

The path to establishing her innocence comes along the same lines as in the original. Here Marlene comes to Audrey's cell to commiserate. Audrey tells her she is not the scorned woman whom everyone assumes her to be. In fact, she was the one who left Maxime, in order to marry someone else she loved but who died in a car accident (this Adrian Royde parallel is not given a name). Maxime is also insistent that Audrey maintain the pretense that he was the one who dumped her and not the other way around. In this case he used blackmail: Audrey as a young journalist had faked a scoop involving a mother and child separated at Hiroshima finding each other. Maxime knew about this and held it over her.