Time Is a Killer

by Michel Bussi

  They crossed the courtyard of the farm, passing by the beds of orchids planted by Lisabetta. Contrary to Clotilde’s expectations, Cassanu didn’t hurry towards the kitchen. He sat down on the bench, the one on which she had fallen asleep before the accident twenty-seven years ago.

  No, she reflected, no one could have guessed what was going on amongst that group of teenagers that summer. No one.

  Unless …

  Clotilde watched Cassanu catching his breath on the bench. He looked like a cat. A big, dozing cat that you think is tired, listless, incapable of making the slightest effort, but which leaps at the slightest hint of danger. Swift, accurate, ruthless.

  Lisabetta had emerged from the house and was approaching them anxiously. Speranza stayed in the doorway, ever vigilant.

  ‘Are you all right, Cassanu?’

  The old Corsican didn’t reply. He gently closed his eyes, allowing the sun to soothe him, but yes, he nodded, he was fine. A walking stick, a hat, his farm, his oak, his tribe.

  Unless …

  Clotilde’s thoughts were in a spin.

  She was sitting there, where Cassanu now sat, a few minutes before the accident. She had gone to sleep, listening to Mano Negra, and had scribbled down a few last words before her father forced her to get into the Fuego.

  Unless …

  No adult could have guessed at the dramas being played out among the teenagers in the summer of ’89.

  Unless one of them had read her diary.

  Mamy Lisabetta came over and rested a hand on her shoulder, reassured that her husband’s health seemed to be fine. She leaned towards her granddaughter’s ear, as if she had a secret to tell her. As if she had read her thoughts.

  ‘On the evening of the accident, my darling, you left your notebook behind, on that bench. Well …’

  Before she could continue, Clotilde’s phone rang in her pocket.

  Franck!

  At last.

  Clotilde walked a metre away.

  ‘Franck. Are you back?’

  Her husband’s voice was halting, and out of breath. It sounded as if he had been running, or the wind was blowing around him. They hadn’t spoken for two days, but he didn’t even say hello.

  ‘Is Valentine with you?’

  ‘No, why?’

  ‘I’m at the campsite, at reception, with Anika. You left a message, you asked Valentine to go up to Arcanu, you said it was urgent.’

  The ground fell away beneath her feet. She clung on to the bench to keep her balance.

  ‘That wasn’t me, Franck! I never left any message.’

  ‘Maybe your grandfather did, then? Someone else at Arcanu?’

  ‘I don’t know, it’s strange. Wait, I’ll ask.’

  Clotilde went and stood in front of Lisabetta, but even before she could question her, her grandmother managed to finish her sentence.

  ‘The evening of the accident, your notebook. I was the one who picked it up.’

  59

  23 August 2016, 7.48 p.m.

  The Fuego drove carefully along the narrow, stony track. Almost every metre, a low-hanging branch scraped against its paintwork, leaving long iron scratch-marks scented with resin. The Castani brothers wouldn’t have appreciated the way he was treating the collector’s piece he’d just bought.

  More likely, they wouldn’t have cared.

  Nor did he.

  In a few hours’ time, what would be left of the paintwork …?

  In one hour and fourteen minutes, to be precise.

  The same car.

  Same time, to the minute.

  Same place.

  Same passengers.

  Same corpses, when the police found them. Disfigured.

  Since he had to put an end to it, he might as well go out with a bang. He might as well finish as he had started, taking his revenge on fate, defying it, closing the trunk with a double lock and dropping it to the very bottom of the Mediterranean.

  He reassured himself, checking in the rear-view mirror, that the car couldn’t be seen, either from the D81 or from the hiking path a few metres further up; the track was used only by bulldozers from the quarry and it was closed today. No tourist would venture all the way out here. Still less a local. He had time to check out the area. He’d had twenty-seven years to do that.

  8.30 p.m.

  He was going to wait here until zero hour; peacefully, calmly, serenely. And if the girls got bored, he had brought along some reading.

  For Valentine in particular.

  He chose the shade of a large Corsican pine, switched off the engine, put on the handbrake and then turned to his right.

  ‘Second-to-last stage, Madame Idrissi. I hope you’re going to like it. I’ve organised everything, really, so you won’t be disappointed.’

  Of course, Palma Idrissi didn’t reply. He leaned towards the passenger sitting on the seat next to him.

  ‘Excuse me, Palma.’

  He undid his seatbelt, opened the glove compartment, took out a plastic bag and turned round. Valentine was in the back seat, hands bound, body covered with blood, mouth gagged with a flesh-coloured foam bandage, and eyes rolling furiously as she struggled to contain her panic.

  ‘I didn’t have time to gift-wrap it, but you can open it, Valentine.’

  Clumsily, with her bound hands, the girl pulled from the plastic bag a washed-out notebook with warped and yellowed pages.

  ‘Youth before beauty? Don’t you agree, Palma? Besides, you’re already familiar with the contents of this diary, aren’t you?’

  Palma Idrissi didn’t answer.

  ‘You can move your wrists, Valentine. Your eyes too. I’m sure you’re going to love this book. We all dream of that, don’t we? Being able to see inside our mother’s mind.’

  Your mother when she was your age, he added to himself.

  Valentine hesitated, her fingers gripped the notebook, but it was clear that as soon as she lowered her eyes, as soon as she recognised her mother’s handwriting on the cover, she wouldn’t be able to resist the urge to open it. From the first lines she read, she would know that the notebook was Clotilde’s, even though it had been written years before she was born.

  After all, she too had the right to know.

  To know who her mother was. To know who her grandmother was.

  Before plunging.

  Before plummeting.

  Like everything else – like this car, like this notebook.

  Like its three passengers.

  60

  23 August 2016, 8 p.m.

  ‘Franck? Franck? Are you still there?’

  Clotilde raised her voice. Everything sounded far away, as if her husband were still out on the waves on a sailing boat, answering his phone as he emerged from a diving session; unless it was here, in Arcanu, in the middle of the maquis, that the network coverage was patchy.

  ‘Franck! No one sent a message to Valou. Not me, Papé, or Mamy. None of us asked her to come up to Arcanu.’

  ‘Good God!’

  ‘What does this mean, Franck? Is Valou not with you then?’

  ‘I went to have a shower, it was barely fifteen minutes. Valentine was upset about the murder of the campsite manager. She wanted to talk to Anika, tell her that she liked Spinello, present her condolences, and so on … She was quite unsettled. By the time I came back she had disappeared. Anika told me about the message so I called you.’

  The bench, the oak, the yard and the whole farm seemed to spin. The island drifted from its moorings. The whole mountain slid into the Mediterranean.

  ‘How long ago was this? Could she be on her way up? Somewhere on the path? Dawdling?’

  Her husband’s voice grew quieter. With the constant buffeting of the wind, she could hardly hear him. She had to press the phone to her ear.

  ‘She isn’t on the path, Clotilde.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I know where she is.’

  Did I hear that right? Is he pulling my leg?

  Cl
otilde screamed. Perhaps a message bouncing off the mountains would reach her husband quicker than a voice from phone to phone.

  ‘What? What the hell are you talking about?’

  Lisabetta was standing beside her, listening to half of the conversation. Cassanu, still dozing, hadn’t heard his granddaughter’s cry. Speranza had gone back inside the farm.

  ‘Valou is ten kilometres away from here. Somewhere in the forest of Bocca Serria, above Galéria.’

  For a moment Clotilde thought her husband had kidnapped Valentine. That he was holding her prisoner in the middle of the maquis, as her mother had once been held. That he was threatening her, that she would never see her daughter again. She let her rage explode, and the mountains trembled.

  ‘Tell me what you mean, damn it!’

  At the other end of the line she heard Franck stammering, as if reluctant to confess something painful. In front of her, Lisabetta looked at her uneasily. She had vaguely grasped the fact that Valentine had disappeared.

  ‘What’s she doing there?’ Clotilde said. ‘How do you know she’s in that forest?’

  ‘I … I put a bug in her phone … A Spytic … It’s a tracking device that allows us to follow her, it means we can know her geographical coordinates at all times.’ His voice faded, like the voice of a child caught in the act. Only some scraps of words reached Clotilde. ‘Just in case … something happened to her … I’m … You know me … I’m always anxious about Valou … I didn’t mention it to you, you wouldn’t have agreed … But that’s what’s happened, Clo … Something has happened to her.’

  Like a sun appearing suddenly from behind a cloud, Clotilde’s head was filled with clarity. A revelation. At first she felt a violent discharge of hatred, but it was swept away almost immediately by a huge wave of relief.

  ‘Did you put this Spytic in my phone too?’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘I don’t care, Franck, there’s no time to waste on this. I just want to know: did you put a bug in my phone as well, and is that how you found me three nights ago, in the maquis?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She closed her eyes and clenched her teeth to prevent a flood of insults from spewing out of her mouth.

  ‘Call the police, Franck! Call the police and give them the coordinates from your damned tracking device. Make them close off the whole area, make them close off the forest of Bocca Serria. At least then your nasty trick will have achieved something. I’m on my way, I’m going back to the campsite. Where are you?

  But her husband had already hung up.

  Lisabetta was still standing there, not saying a word and asking no questions. Just waiting to be needed, like an object tucked neatly on a shelf, useful and in the right place if you wanted it. Solid, barely worn, just a little bent.

  In contrast with her grandmother’s calm, Clotilde was panicking. Her hands flapped about, and she hesitated between running towards the Passat and taking a few seconds to sort out her head. It was all going too quickly, everything was a jumble. She didn’t have time to order all the information she was being given – her mother, her daughter, vanished but alive; at least she hoped so. She had to collect as many clues as possible, facts, facts, facts, perhaps everything would fall into place all of a sudden, at the right moment.

  Cassanu had woken up. He was putting his hat back on his head, dazzled by the sun, with no clue as to what was going on all around him.

  Clotilde took her grandmother’s hands.

  ‘Mamy, that notebook, my diary. After you picked it up, who kept it? You have to tell me, Mamy, it’s important. Who else did you show it to? Who else read it?’

  Lisabetta’s hands tried to get away like a pair of captive butterflies.

  ‘I … I don’t know, my love.’

  ‘You didn’t show it to anyone?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So … you … you’re the only one who’s read it?’

  Tears welled in the corners of the old woman’s dark eyes. Her eyeliner ran, making her tragically beautiful.

  ‘What kind of a person do you think I am, my girl? I picked up your diary, of course I did. But I didn’t open it. It was yours. It was all yours. So I took it to the campsite, to your bungalow, with the rest of your belongings that we had at Arcanu, some clothes, some books, a bag. You were in hospital. We couldn’t have taken everything there.’

  ‘When I got out of hospital, Mamy, I was taken straight to the mainland. I never went back to the campsite.’

  ‘I know, my love, I know … Basile Spinello was supposed to collect all your belongings from the bungalow.’

  Now Clotilde’s hands were trembling, while Lisabetta’s were calm, tame.

  ‘And that’s what he did, Mamy.’ She paused. ‘Basile brought me everything. Except the notebook.’

  61

  23 August 2016

  He crushed the mobile phone against a long flat rock with the heel of his shoe. Even though he didn’t understand the technology, he had seen enough police dramas to suspect that a mobile phone, even one that was switched off, would be enough to betray their location. More or less precisely. Although that would require a certain amount of time.

  So he wasn’t in a rush. While Valentine was reading her mother’s diary, her hands tied, mouth gagged, eyes wet with tears, he had studied the contents of the girl’s phone.

  What a disappointment. He had discovered nothing at all.

  He had opened the box of sent and received messages, read the texts, opened up the stored photographs, listened to a few scraps of downloaded music. For a few minutes he had immersed himself in the universe of this fifteen-year-old girl without finding anything interesting at all. Not a word out of turn against her parents. Not an inch too much skin revealed in the photographs. No bottle in the background, no boyfriend to arouse, no girlfriend to infuriate.

  She was simply a good girl.

  Comfortable in her skin. Well behaved.

  Free of hatred, free of problems, as if life was nothing but a gift from a nameless benefactor, something to unwrap and appreciate, then smile and say thank you, blow out the candles without a hint of sadness, believing that Father Christmas would always be there, along with Maman and Papa, the Lord God or Buddha. A flawless adolescence. The contrast with her mother’s diary, written at the same age, was startling.

  Was it just a matter of the technology? he wondered. After all, a phone connects you to the world, a diary protects you from it.

  Or was it just this new generation?

  He picked up a rock and smashed it against what remained of the Samsung. He was sure that if anyone was trying to find them using this phone, the last signal transmitted would be from this forest.

  So no more hanging around. It was time to get going.

  He glanced at the rusted doors of the Fuego then looked through the window at the faces of the two women, Palma and Valentine. The resemblance was striking. Tall, slender, straight-backed. They both had that classical beauty, that way of carrying their head, that proud expression, that regal assurance unaltered by the years, wrinkles, or a little extra weight. Elegant, attractive, comforting.

  On that level, the contrast with Clotilde was remarkable. Clotilde Idrissi was pretty too, but her charm was based on very different qualities: she was small, energetic, non-conformist.

  Perhaps, he considered, as he hurled the stone into the distance, the wizard who mixes together the genes at birth has only one supply per family, and he has to distribute the same ingredients as best he can, among parents and children, brothers and sisters, until he cooks up another batch. That way the genes could skip a generation.

  He walked towards the Fuego, still thinking about the daughter, the mother and the grandmother. Clotilde had never been able to communicate with her mother, it said as much in her diary. She couldn’t communicate with her daughter either, he had observed her enough to be able to tell that.

  The irony of it …

  Because the grandmother and the granddaughter would h
ave loved, appreciated, and understood each other. That much was blindingly obvious.

  A pity.

  A pity that their first meeting should consist of two hours in a scratched and dented Fuego, their mouths gagged so they couldn’t kiss each other on the cheek, their hands tied too tightly to be able to embrace one another.

  But his thoughts had wandered off again. He had to get out of this place.

  He opened the door of the Fuego.

  8.30 p.m.

  Perfect, he would be in exactly the right place at the right time.

  He glanced once more at Valentine, sitting on the back seat. She was still turning the pages of her mother’s diary, but didn’t seem to be reading them. She could no longer make out the words because of the tears flowing down her face. Would that notebook help her to love her mother at last? Or hate her?

  It didn’t matter.

  Valentine would never have the opportunity to tell her.

  He opened the door.

  No one moved.

  ‘It’s time, Madame Idrissi. We have an appointment on the road at Petra Coda.’

  62

  23 August 2016, 8.40 p.m.

  Clotilde was standing beside the Passat, feeling manic, desperately searching through her handbag for her keys. Everything was jostling in her mind, she didn’t even know in which direction she should head when she turned on the ignition. Towards the police station? The campsite? Follow the road and hope to spot Valentine? Or her mother? She couldn’t put all the pieces of the puzzle together, although she had a vague intuition that the tragedy of the summer of ’89 had been played out as much between the adults as it had between the teenagers – two separate circles – and that her old notebook was the only connection between the two.