by Michel Bussi
I had time to drop by at the hotel to change, and then grab a sandwich before taking the bus to Fécamp for my appointment at the police station.
As I entered the lobby of the Sirène, André was rearranging the display of leaflets advertising local attractions. He was forever appearing and disappearing from behind his counter, as if he had a under the bar.
It didn’t look as though he had any new mail for me . . . I went and stood in front of him.
“André, can you recall having a guest by the name of Magali Verron? She was a pharmaceutical sales rep who dealt with a lot of the local surgeries. She must have checked into hotels when she was in the area. The day before yesterday, for example.”
“Is that the girl who committed suicide?”
He went on indifferently arranging the brochures: Étretat Vélo-Rail, Musée des Terre-Neuvas. I fought the urge to ask how he had made the connection so quickly.
“Yes.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell. You know, there are a dozen hotels in the area, not counting the ones around Étretat, and then there’s all the farmhouse bed-and-breakfasts. Have you got a photograph?”
“No.”
I tried to describe Magali Verron as best I could: her beauty, the seductive power of her desperate eyes.
“I’d have noticed a girl as pretty as that,” said André.
Indeed.
As I climbed the wooden stairs, my phone vibrated.
A new message.
Ophélie’s response to Mona’s photograph . . .
I read the text, convinced that my little protégée would deliver a jealous and scathing critique. Her message left me speechless:
21 out of 20. Don’t lose this one, she’s the woman of your life.
When I opened the door to my room, I was caught off guard by the icy draught. The window had been left open.
The housekeeper. To air the room.
The bed had been made. New towels laid out. I thought for a moment of the chaos of the room after the night I had spent with Mona.
Then I froze.
There was a brown envelope on my desk, just beside my laptop. A new, unopened envelope. No stamp this time. No address. Just my name.
Jamal Salaoui.
The same female handwriting as on the previous packages.
Before picking up the envelope, I leaned out the window. The gust of wind froze my overheated body. It wasn’t very hard to get to my room from outside; the flat roofs of the restaurant of the Sirène and its outbuildings formed a kind of staircase for a giant. But who would have risked such a climb? Right on the seafront, in full view of everybody? To put an envelope on my desk.
For a moment I thought of going back downstairs and asking André whether, apart from the housekeeper, anybody had visited my room. I thought better of it.
Later, perhaps . . .
I closed the window. I had to calm down. My WindWall was supposed to absorb perspiration, but rivulets of sweat were running down my body. I got undressed on the bed and unscrewed my carbon prosthesis. My hands were damp. They left brown traces on the envelope as I tore it open. It was thinner than the others. Just three stapled sheets of paper.
I immediately recognised the tricolour letterhead of the police:
Caen Police Department: Myrtille Camus case
Statement, August 28th, 2004
Item no. 027: Witness statement by Alina Masson
Naked on the bed but for my boxer shorts, I let my one leg dangle to the floor as I tried to control the nervous tremors running through it.
Myrtille Camus case—Saturday, August 28th, 2004
“I was Myrtille’s best friend.”
“We know,” Bastinet replied.
The commander of Caen police and the criminal psychologist Ellen Nilsson sat facing the four witnesses. Louise and Charles, the parents of Myrtille Camus. Frédéric Saint-Michel, her fiancé. Alina Masson, her best friend, who had just spoken.
Whose statement would prove to be crucial . . .
Commander Bastinet didn’t need to consult his notes, he knew the file by heart. Since the girl’s body had been discovered, he’d had less than five hours’ sleep, snatched in half-hour blocks, as if he were a navigator taking part in a rally. That was what it felt like.
A race.
Against the clock.
To catch the bastard who had already struck twice in three months. Morgane Avril in Yport, in June, and now Myrtille Camus.
To tell the truth, he didn’t attach much value to the contribution of Ellen Nilsson, the girl the ministry had lumbered him with. Not that he had anything against criminal psychologists; in the past he had often sought their advice in the hope of gaining a better understanding of the lunatics he had to deal with. But he wondered how this blonde—who had turned up with her Dupont pen case as her only weapon, her Mont Blanc notepad as her only armour, and her Activia yogurt as her only source of nourishment—could be of any use to him.
“Mademoiselle Masson, you ran the camp for teenagers where Myrtille Camus was killed?”
Alina nodded.
Practically a child herself! Bastinet thought.
Alina Masson was twenty-one, a few months older than Myrtille Camus. In the Cloth of Gold camp at Isigny-sur-Mer, there was no hierarchy between the two girls. Just an enduring friendship.
Bastinet decided to get straight to the point.
“Did Myrtille feel threatened? Threatened by a man, on several occasions? Is that so, Mademoiselle Masson?”
“Not exactly, Commander.”
Bastinet raised an eyebrow.
Ellen Nilsson, studying her emerald-green fingernails, tried a different approach. “Take your time, Mademoiselle Masson. Tell us the facts. Just the facts. Who was this man?”
“The first time I saw him,” Alina explained, “was by the pond at Isigny leisure centre. He was standing about a hundred metres away from us. He . . . he was staring at Myrtille.”
“What was your reaction?” Bastinet asked.
“None. At that point I wasn’t really paying attention. It happened, how can I put it, frequently.”
“Frequently?” Bastinet repeated.
Alina glanced awkwardly at Frédéric Saint-Michel. Myrtille’s fiancé gestured to her to continue. Ellen scribbled some notes on her Mont Blanc pad while Commander Bastinet urged the witness to continue.
“Every morning Myrtille led a half-hour aqua aerobics session at the pool. We put on some loud music, Myrtille danced and all the kids would join in. Within a few days, the whole campsite was joining in. Families, tourists, teenagers . . .”
“All eyes were on her,” Ellen suggested.
“Right.” Alina hesitated, glanced quizzically at Louise Camus, then went on, with a nervous tremor in her voice. “Myrtille was a very pretty girl. She danced with such grace and energy that everyone loved to watch.”
Tears welled up in the corners of Louise’s eyes. The former dance teacher gripped her husband’s wrinkled hand.
“Can you give us a description of this man who was staring at Myrtille?” Bastinet cut in. “This man who was staring at her more than the rest.”
“I only saw him in the distance, Commander. Average height. Quite young. Our age, I would say. He was wearing a cap, white and blue, with the three Adidas stripes. Sunglasses too. He seemed quite tanned.”
Bastinet cursed. The description could easily have matched the stranger with the red scarf spotted by three witnesses in Yport, the number one suspect in the murder of Morgane Avril, the one that Captain Grima had looked for in vain. But it could also have matched thousands of other men.
“When did you see this man again?”
“He hung around at the campsite, or at least I recognised his cap a few times. I assumed he must be local. Either that or a camp leader for one of the other g
roups at the base. There were at least ten camps in Isigny at that time . . .”
“Seven,” Bastinet corrected her. “One hundred and thirteen teenagers and twenty-eight adults in charge of them.”
Ellen Nilsson raised her eyes to the sky, as if wearied by Bastinet’s manner.
“To be precise,” Alina continued, “the second time I noticed him was off Saint-Marcouf.”
Bastinet consulted his notes. The Îles Saint-Marcouf, seven kilometres off the Normandy coast, were two little rocks set in the sea, on which Napoleon had built a fort against the British. They were state property, overnight stays were forbidden, but mooring was permitted. They were a favourite destination of the local sailing-clubs. The Cloth of Gold group had booked a boat trip to the islands, five days before Myrtille’s murder.
“Myrtille and the five teenagers in her care spent the day on the archipelago,” Alina went on. “I came and joined them with another group at about midday. I . . . I spotted the guy: same cap, same sunglasses. He was on a Zodiac, a small model, it looked like a rental boat. And he was sailing around the islands.
“How long had he been doing that?” Ellen asked.
“I don’t know . . . He was already there when we arrived at Saint-Marcouf. He sailed around the island a few more times. It was obvious he was staring at Myrtille. Then he opened the throttle and roared off. It couldn’t have gone on more than five minutes in all, but—”
“But this time,” Bastinet cut in, “it worried you.”
Ellen sighed heavily.
“Not exactly, Commander,” Alina explained. “I thought something along the lines of: he’s starting to get on my nerves, hanging around us like that.”
“I get it. As a vigilant team leader, you were naturally concerned. When did you last run into this man?”
“Two days later. Myrtille had the day off and was going to walk to the beach at Grandcamp-Maisy. We’d agreed that I would pick her up when I went shopping in the minibus. I arrived at the time we’d arranged and looked for her on the beach. She was asleep, in her swimming costume, lying on her back, with a scarf over her eyes. I woke her up. It was only then that I noticed he was there, on a towel, about thirty metres away. On the way back, Myrtille admitted she’d slept like a log for over two hours . . .” Her trembling fingers rummaged in her pocket for a handkerchief. She didn’t find one, gave up and went on. “So the guy could have been watching her all that time, imagining what he wanted to do, he could have . . .”
Alina fell suddenly silent and burst into tears. Frédéric Saint-Michel, hands clenched on the arms of her chair, didn’t move to comfort her. It was if it was all he could do to contain his hatred of his fiancée’s killer, listening to this account of the moment when the voyeur’s obsession might have turned into a murderous impulse.
While Ellen held out a tissue to Alina, Bastinet pressed on.
“Can you describe him to us?”
Alina sniffed, coughed to clear her throat, and shook her head. “Not really. He was lying on his belly. Still with his cap on his head and his sunglasses. He was quite slender, quite muscular, with long muscles, like an athlete’s. But I wouldn’t be able to recognise him.”
The police then showed her the composite picture of the Yport stranger, but with the red scarf photoshopped out and replaced by an Adidas cap, and with the addition of sunglasses.
It might have been him.
Or not.
Commander Bastinet smiled understandingly.
“O.K., Mademoiselle Masson. There’s one last thing I’d like to ask, which isn’t meant for you alone. Do any of you happen to know if Myrtille kept a diary?”
“Not exactly, Commander. Not a diary as such.”
Parents, fiancé, and friend took turns to describe the sky-blue Moleskine notebook that Myrtille had written in since her teenage years, and which she always kept on her person or in her handbag.
Both had disappeared, presumably into the hands of her rapist.
Myrtille entrusted her most secret thoughts to that notebook. A few lines a day, sometimes funny, sometimes melancholy. Myrtille loved to write.
Bastinet was about to thank the four witness when Ellen raised her hand. The criminal psychologist had been hesitant about asking her last question in front of Myrtille Camus’s fiancé. Perhaps it was the age gap between Frédéric Saint-Michel and his future wife that troubled her, though at the age of thirty-seven he still possessed a charismatic charm, combining the gentle expression of a Buddhist monk with the build of a black belt in judo.
Ellen adopted the calmest voice she could muster, and then spoke directly to Alina.
“Mademoiselle Masson, in your view, on the day of the murder, why was Myrtille Camus dressed so elegantly?”
Alina froze, surprised. “What do you mean?”
Ellen held up an emerald finger (ring and fingernail coordinated) to warn Bastinet not to intervene, and went on:
“Myrtille was an activity leader at a camp for teenagers. Under your direction. I assume she wore practical clothes for work—shorts, a T-shirt, trainers . . . Not mauve underwear and such a short dress.”
“It was . . . it was her day off,” Alina stammered, surprised that the criminal psychologist had forgotten.
Commander Bastinet glared at his colleague. Frédéric Saint-Michel clenched his hands on his chair to contain his rage. Louise and Charles calmly rose to their feet like silent ghosts.
The Commander studied Frédéric Saint-Michel as he left the room. Tall. Straight-backed. Still proud. His long hair tied in a ponytail. The months of mourning ahead would rob him of his youthful looks, thought Bastinet. Whether or not the murderer of his future wife was found, it wouldn’t change a thing, Saint-Michel’s long hair would turn white and he would shrivel with age.
Love stories have a tendency to end badly, Bastinet thought stupidly.
In the days that followed, Ellen Nilsson’s question wormed its way into Alina Masson’s mind. She couldn’t stop thinking about that short dress, that mauve underwear.
Alina thought about returning to talk to Ellen Nilsson about it. Several times she picked up the phone, but she couldn’t bring herself to dial the number on the card the criminal psychologist had given her. She didn’t completely trust the smooth-faced shrink.
Even if she had gone straight to the heart of the matter.
She alone.
So Alina remained silent. She regretted it more with each passing day, but to express her doubts would be to betray Myrtille’s secret. Her best, her only friend.
Charles and Louise Camus, meanwhile, drew closer to Carmen Avril.
Even though they were different in every respect, they combined their forces.
Charles and Louise wanted peace, Carmen wanted war.
Charlies and Louise were inspired by a sense of justice, Carmen by a feeling of hatred.
But basically their goal was the same.
To know the truth.
To discover the identity of the murderer of Morgane Avril and Myrtille Camus
Commander Bastinet ordered his men to focus on the search for their number one suspect.
The man in the Adidas cap.
In response to the facial composites distributed and posted in the area, a number of witnesses came forward to confirm what Alina Masson had told the police. The young man in the cap had been seen about the campsite in Isigny-sur-Mer, on the beach at Grandcamp-Maisy, around the sailing club . . .
Though they’d seen him . . . no one could identify him. He didn’t work locally; the police checked with all employers in the area and none had hired anyone matching the description.
A solitary predator, blending in with the crowd of summer visitors?
The very fact that he didn’t voluntarily turn up at a police station to give a statement further reinforced Commander Bastinet’s conviction that t
his was the rapist-murderer. The same man who had worn that red scarf in Yport.
The more days that passed, the more the Bastinet despaired of tracing the man. He had slipped through the net. They might never find who he was, barring some huge stroke of luck. And Bastinet, from experience, didn’t believe in luck.
He was wrong.
Fortune tipped in favour of the investigators two months later, on November 3rd, 2004, to be precise. The day when the police discovered the identity of the boy with the Adidas cap.
By then it was too late.
The Camus–Avril case had been overshadowed by two more deaths.
17
FATE TIPS THE SCALES?
I almost missed the bus for Fécamp. I caught up with it at the intersection of Sente Colin and Rue Cramoisan. The driver had no hesitation in breaking the rules to let me on while the vehicle was still in motion—that was the advantage of running after a bus on one leg.
I spent the half-hour journey trying to sort things out in my head. Almost in spite of myself, I was obsessed by the incredible similarities between the suicide of Magali Verron and the murder of Morgane Avril ten years previously. That succession of coincidences that no police officer could swallow. But I was sure that I would also have to find out more about the murder of Myrtille Camus, the serial killer’s second victim. If the stranger was sending me details of that investigation, it had to be for a reason. I would need to commit every clue to memory. It was all part of the same jigsaw puzzle, and if I was to find the solution I would have to slot every piece carefully in its place.
The bus dropped me in Fécamp, on Quai de la Vicomté, at 1.45 P.M. Just time to pick up a ham salad sandwich at the bakery opposite and eat it in the harbour, facing the sea wall. When I arrived at the police station I concealed my nerves by exchanging pleasantries with the receptionist who looked like an air hostess.
“I’ve been called in to see Piroz,” I said, like a schoolboy who’s been summoned to see the headmaster.
