Never Forget

by Michel Bussi

  I walked over and put my hand on her waist.

  “We have time before tomorrow morning, don’t we?”

  Her eye slid to the dark hairs on my torso, which contrasted with the pale down of my open dressing gown.

  “Not here,” she murmured, staring at the eagle’s nest. “Up there . . .”

  19

  THE SCENT OF THE UNKNOWN?

  Mona had decided to have a shower before joining me in the round room that dominated the villa. I heard her footsteps on the stairs. She too was wrapped in a Calvin Klein dressing gown. Ruby-coloured.

  She kissed me on the lips, admired the panorama for a moment, the sleepy valley lapped by the blind waves, then she darted across the room to pick up a dog-eared old book from one of the shelves of the library. She jumped gracefully on to the purple leather desk.

  “Maurice Leblanc!” she announced, flourishing the yellowing volume. “The creator of Arsène Lupin. He wrote his first novels here, in Vaucottes. He even used the valley as the setting for one of his short stories . . .”

  I wasn’t listening to what she was saying.

  I wanted to forget the Verron-Avril–Camus case.

  I wanted to forget the cops on my heels.

  I wanted to forget everything but Mona’s white body in her ruby-coloured dressing gown.

  She lifted one knee on to the desk so that the towelling fabric, held at the waist by a cotton belt, opened a few centimetres.

  “Listen to me, Jamal, you’ll be interested in this story by Maurice Leblanc. It’s the story of some poor wretch who walks by one of the Vaucotte manor houses. His name is Linan—cute, don’t you think? He comes in to steal something to feed his sickly children. But he’s unlucky, because a few minutes before the owner of the mansion had fired a bullet into his head. A suicide!”

  I walked over to her. I slowly parted the dressing gown to reveal her alabaster breasts.

  “And then?”

  A little flick. The dressing gown slipped gently over her naked skin, to her waist. Mona was now a red fruit whose peel had been removed the better to enjoy the flesh. She let my hands run over her breasts. Her voice faltered a little, but she didn’t lose the thread of her story.

  “Linan makes too much noise, he panics, knocks something over, the maid turns up, finds him at the foot of her master’s body . . . You can guess the rest. Arrest. Trial. Everyone thinks that poor Linan killed the owner of the house, and no one believes the suicide story.”

  My hands were moving lower now, to her belly, stopping at the ruby-coloured belt tied over her navel. I whispered in her ear.

  “And how does it end?”

  A shiver ran down the back of her neck. She raised the book level with her breasts.

  “Hmmm. You want me to read you the last lines? Listen, it’s educational, you’ll love it.”

  “Justice rang at the door one day.

  “‘Prepare to die, Linan.’

  “He was washed. His hands were tied. He allowed himself to be led like a docile animal, like an object. They had to carry him to the scaffold.

  “His teeth chattered. He stammered.

  “‘I didn’t kill nobody . . . I didn’t kill nobody.’”

  Under the pressure of my fingers the belt of the dressing gown slipped around her waist. The two strips of red cotton opened like a rose at the first ray of sunlight.

  “‘The Scaffold,’” Mona whispered. “A short story published in Gil Blas on February 6th, 1893. One of the first pamphlets against the death penalty!”

  She set the book down and sat straight-backed on the desk. She reminded me of Mme Concetti, the English teacher who had inspired an entire class of fourth years. Although she had been dressed, at least.

  My hands ran over her naked hips.

  A suicide? An innocent. A nonsensical murder story pinned on him.

  Thank you, Mona. Message received.

  “And you wanted me to hand myself in to the cops?”

  I leaned against the desk. While I pressed my lips to her neck, by some magic trick, her foot untied the belt of my dressing gown. She didn’t stop there, her toes set off exploring under the open folds of cream cotton.

  Suddenly she laid both her hands flat on the purple desktop and arched her back. Her breasts pointed at the ceiling. Twin peaks born of a single eruption. I clung to them with both hands as my tongue ran down the slope of her belly, an interminable slide that left me intoxicated, leading to a moist meadow at the bottom.

  Mona slept on the velvet desktop, curled up like a child. As she sank into sleep, she had made me promise to wake her before daybreak so that she could flee to her room in La Sirène.

  A pretty little vampire . . . Sensual and enterprising.

  I hadn’t been able to stop myself wondering what excited Mona the most. Making love with a man on the run, accused of rape and murder, or abandoning herself to that man on the desk of her thesis supervisor, her body feverish, in the very spot where he must have written most of his work?

  Both, probably.

  I wasn’t sleepy. I did a tour of the room, both literally and figuratively. For some hours my eyes had been lost among the stars lit by the outgoing tide, Mona’s naked body and the hundreds of books surrounding me.

  Old paperbacks rubbed shoulders with huge collections of photographs, thick scientific manuals and dozens of box files. I mechanically read the inscriptions on their edges.

  1978–1983–1990–1998–2004.

  2004?

  The year of the murder of Morgane Avril and Myrtille Camus.

  I walked over and opened the box. I expected to find printouts of lecture notes, students’ essays, photocopies of research articles.

  I was completely wrong.

  I bit my lip to keep from crying out.

  Professor Martin Denain, specialist in molecular chemistry, had amused himself by cutting out all the articles in the Courrier Cauchois about the Morgane Avril case.

  I feverishly set the file down on the nearest chair and picked up some pieces of paper at random. The yellowed cuttings all told the same story, the one I had read in the documents sent to me by a stranger.

  Nothing new, I was already familiar with most of the articles.

  Nothing new . . . with one exception.

  Why had this professor, who never set foot in Yport, collected these newspaper stories?

  I thought of waking Mona to ask her the question.

  Later.

  I leaned over the box again, I had the whole of the rest of the night to read these articles, in search of a detail that might have escaped me and which might provide that spark, that famous key that would explain everything.

  Naive as I was . . .

  I had already been through about ten articles when I opened a colour double-page spread.

  Avril case.

  Special edition of the Courrier Cauchois.

  Thursday, June 17th, 2004.

  “Of you, Morgane,” was the title of the long article, a reference to a song by the singer Renaud.

  I sat down to read it calmly.

  I didn’t immediately spot the huge photograph of the girl, smiling, in an oriental costume, probably at a raqs sharqi performance.

  Then I stopped, arms dangling, mouth open. For the first time I saw Morgane Avril’s face. None of the articles posted to me had contained photographs of her. Or someone had been careful to cut them out. Now I understood why.

  I yelled like a madman.

  The circular room around me vibrated like a rocket going off.

  “Christ! It can’t be her!”

  My disbelieving eyes settled on the article again.

  It wasn’t Morgane Avril who had been captured in a full-page photograph in that newspaper from 2004 . . .

  It was Magali Verron! The girl born ten ye
ars later who had thrown herself from the top of the cliff, in front of my eyes. Yesterday.

  Mona woke with a start. She put on the dressing gown without even tying the belt and came anxiously over to me.

  “A nightmare?”

  Trembling, I held out the double-page spread.

  “Bloody hell. Look at this photograph, Mona.”

  She read the headline, Of you, Morgane, then concentrated on the picture.

  “She was incredibly beautiful,” she murmured.

  “Damn it . . . Mona, you’re going to think I’m insane . . .”

  “No, really?”

  I ran my hand over her lips to erase her ironic smile.

  “That girl in the photograph. The one they call Morgane Avril in this old newspaper. The one who committed suicide yesterday. It’s . . . Magali Verron.”

  Mona stared at me for a long time, as if her brain were trying to solve a complex equation, to assess all the parameters before formulating a hypothesis. She mechanically closed the dressing gown, which opened again.

  “They look similar, Jamal.”

  “No, Mona! It’s not a simple resemblance. It’s . . . Shit, it’s her!”

  “You only saw Magali for a few seconds . . .”

  “Perhaps. But her face is engraved on my memory, you can understand that, can’t you? Every tiny part of her face . . .”

  “You talk as if you were in love with her.”

  Mona had said those words calmly. A bit cynical. Rather than reply, I turned my back on her to search the rest of the box file As I ran through the articles, I saw other photographs of Morgane Avril, full face, in profile, centred on her face or framing the whole of her body.

  It was her! As ridiculous as it might have seemed, it was Magali, I was sure of it, I couldn’t be mistaken.

  Mona now seemed alarmed by my obsession. She pulled her dressing gown tightly around her neck, gripped the edge of the desk and stared at me as if I was a slow-witted student.

  “Dear God, Jamal, think for two seconds. There are some incredibly shadowy areas in this case, we agree on that, but there are at least two absolute certainties. The first is that Morgane Avril died on June 5th, 2004. All the national media led with that, all the police in France worked for months on this case. The second certainty is that Magali Verron died on February 19th, 2014, yesterday, and you were an eye witness. I’m willing to go along with you on everything else, but those two deaths are axiomatic.”

  “They’re what?”

  “Axiomatic! Facts that you can take as certain, on which you can base a reasoned argument.”

  “Go on! What’s your reasoned argument?”

  Mona pointed to a photograph of Morgane Avril from L’Éclaireur Baryon.

  “Well, we know that Magali Verron tried to be like Morgane Avril. Ten years later. Same schools, same tastes, same job . . . Same death. A crazy imitation. It’s not so surprising, in the end, that she should also have tried to look like her physically.”

  “She didn’t just look like her, Mona. It’s her!”

  “So more than a physical resemblance? Is that what you’re saying?”

  Mona was on fire. I was starting to understand what it was that made her an excellent researcher: she was capable of finding a plausible explanation for any paradox.

  “Even though they didn’t know each other, Magali and Morgane may have been related! You told me that Morgane was born after a course of IVF, in Belgium? Magali might have been born to the same biological father, ten years later. She discovers the photograph of Morgane, perhaps when her murder is reported on television news bulletins. She wonders about that resemblance, she does some research, discovers that they have the same father, she’s traumatised by that . . .”

  “So much so that she simulates a rape and a strangling, then throws herself off a cliff?”

  “Why not? I’m looking, Jamal. I’m looking for rational explanations, like you.”

  “There’s nothing rational in this case . . .”

  A heavy silence settled in the room. We were two lighthouse keepers cut off by a storm from the rest of the world.

  I said it again:

  “Nothing rational. Why, for example, did your thesis supervisor, who never comes here, take the time to collect cuttings from a local newspaper?”

  “In 2004, he was applying for accreditation as a director of studies, which involved writing a dissertation several hundred pages long, a compulsory stage in becoming a university professor. He had a grant from the National Centre for Scientific Research. A year without classes. He spent several months here, talking only to the pebbles, to his microscope and his word processor. I imagine he got bored. He must have been excited by this case which was happening only a few kilometres from his study. Like everyone in the area.”

  Like everyone in the area.

  Once again, Mona had thought of everything!

  I had a sense that she was teaching me a lesson that she had learned by heart.

  “Weird, isn’t it? Every time a researcher comes to Yport to collect pebbles, a girl commits suicide!”

  I regretted my reply even before I’d finished it. Mona didn’t even bother to get up. She ruffled her hair, put Maurice Leblanc’s book back on the shelf, then mechanically tied the dressing gown around her waist.

  Calm. Natural.

  “I’m going to get dressed, Jamal. It’s three o’clock in the morning. I’ve got to go back to La Sirène. The cops are bound to interview me about last night, about the dinner we had together, our double room, our lie-in. I’m going to have to tell them that you were just a one-night stand, that I found you a bit paranoid, with those twisted stories of yours. And no, my God, no, I haven’t the faintest idea where you get them from.”

  “I trust you, Mona. You’re very good at telling stories.”

  It was all I could think of. My delirious imagination, which had charmed her before, had fled. I watched Mona going downstairs.

  She turned to look at me one last time.

  “Just one technical detail, Jamal. Our research group collects pebbles in Yport every year, and has done since our lab has been in existence—almost exactly twenty-three years.”

  She disappeared. Leaving me alone as lighthouse keeper.

  She thought I was mad. How could it have been otherwise?

  Through the window I watched Mona’s Fiat 500 manoeuvring its way down the gravel driveway and vanishing around the first bend.

  Obey her? Give up? Call the police? Wait for them to come and get me?

  Not yet!

  I hadn’t used up all my cards before laying down my weapons. I wasn’t the only witness. Christian Le Medef and old Denise had also looked at the cold face of Magali Verron, they could compare it with the face of Morgane Avril.

  No logic could shake my conviction.

  It was more than a passing resemblance.

  20

  A NIGHTMARE?

  It was just after four o’clock in the morning when I set off, lamp in my hand. I walked for two kilometres to Yport, along the sea, at the foot of the cliff.

  I hadn’t slept. I would have time tomorrow. All day, holed up in one of the basement rooms of my haunted manor house. Unless the cops were clever and discovered my hiding place. Unless Mona gave me away first.

  In the light of my flashlight, the chalk wall looked like the battlements of a fortress, as impregnable as they were endless.

  Yport slept. In the reflection of the blue neon of the casino that lit up the night, I looked around for Mona’s Fiat among the ten or so cars parked on the parking lot on the seafront. I couldn’t see it. Mona had probably left it in one of the nearby streets.

  All of the pastel-coloured shutters of the rooms of La Sirène were closed.

  Mine.

  The one where Mona was sleeping. On her own.
<
br />   An invisible hand gripped my heart. I forced myself to keep on going to the dark sea wall, without allowing my mind to wander any further. I couldn’t waste any more time. The last two hundred metres I had to cover would be the riskiest, all kinds of danger might lurk concealed in the deserted street of the village. The police must have put a price on my head, or something of the kind, an appeal for information, a nice reward for anyone who could hand over the limping rapist. I had never felt so vulnerable. I couldn’t just melt away into the labyrinth of stairways and underground car parks that linked the different tower blocks of the Cité des 4000 estate.

  Two hundred metres in the open to get to Christian Le Medef’s house.

  I walked forward in silence, not disturbing the sleep of the Yport locals with a gloomy toc toc toc, like Long John Silver coming back to the Hispaniola. Over time, I had learned to slide the prosthesis of my left foot a few millimetres away from the tarmac.

  A noise made me jump.

  Behind me.

  I sped up, then stopped abruptly.

  The noise continued. It intensified. Came closer.

  I pressed myself into the shadow of the coach gate of the estate agent’s office, my heart pounding at one hundred beats an hour.

  Rough breathing echoed down the cold street. The sound of footsteps on the pavement accelerated. Long seconds stretched out to infinity, then the shadow was on me.

  The old dog looked as surprised as I was to come across a night-time stroller.

  I put my finger to my lips to tell him not to make another sound. He sat down obediently, but then got up again as soon as I set off along the street again, always staying a few metres behind me.

  His yellow eyes behind me looked like two headlamps that had ceased to give off light. The poor night-grey dog walked on three legs. No wooden, aluminium or carbon paw to give him relief, just a stiff furry stump, drawn up at a right angle. Perhaps he was just following me out of jealousy?