by Michel Bussi
“I don’t know,” Alina said.
Tears glittered in the corners of her eyes, and she took a paper handkerchief from her pocket. Ellen bent over the file for a long time. Piroz took advantage of the fact to twist his neck around and compare the breasts of the blonde displayed on the wall with the ones he could make out beneath the psychologist’s forget-me-not dress. When she straightened up, Piroz abruptly diverted his gaze towards the bateaux-mouches. A child caught in the act. Ellen’s eyes, on the other hand, moved towards the photograph and stopped there as if before a mirror, then she flicked away a piece of invisible dust that had fallen between her breasts.
“I have to admit,” she went on, “that even after all these years, some details are still disturbing. The sexy dress that Myrtille didn’t usually wear, for example. The blue Moleskine notebook that was never found, when everyone stated that Myrtille recorded her most secret thoughts in it, and perhaps even the identity of the man she had arranged to meet. This Olivier Roy, of whom there is still no sign in spite of the posters with his face distributed all over the region, who disappeared forever as soon as the police net began to close in on him. And the little pair of panties, too.”
Alina gave a start.
“What little pair of panties?”
The criminal psychologist turned first to Piroz and then to Alina.
“A detail. Of course, I assumed you were aware. No semen was found in Myrtille’s vagina, but there were traces on her panties, which were found about a hundred metres away, in the channel of the Baie des Veys.”
No, Alina wasn’t aware of it. Piroz probably was, but he was distracted once again by the indecent prayer of the girl behind the glass.
“Did the forensic experts have an explanation for that?” Alina wanted to know.
“The rapist must have intended to withdraw before orgasm, but he only managed to do so partially, and ejaculated on Myrtille, or at least on her panties. So we asked ourselves, why would he have wanted to withdraw? Was it because his sperm might get him into trouble?”
“Because,” Alina suggested, “his DNA was registered on the police database in connection with another crime?”
“Except that it wasn’t.”
Piroz lowered his eyes and spoke:
“Perhaps the rapist hoped that Myrtille Camus’s murder wouldn’t be linked with the killing of Morgane Avril.”
“Hardly likely,” Ellen replied. “It would have been difficult not to make the connection between the two crimes, even if the rapist’s DNA hadn’t been a match. Two girls raped, strangled, in the same region, with the same scarf . . .”
Piroz grumbled. “We’re dealing with a deranged mind here . . .”
“Or,” Alina said tonelessly, “there’s a third possibility. Could it mean that he knew Myrtille, that he anticipated police would want to test his DNA?”
Ellen Nilsson let a second pass before replying.
“That’s what we thought at first. We took the DNA of over one and a half thousand individuals—the family of Myrtille Camus, her friends, the inhabitants of Isigny, Elbeuf and the surrounding area. Every single person who might have been close to her. None of them were a match!”
Alina remained silent.
Why would the rapist have wanted to conceal his DNA, a voice repeated in her head, if he didn’t know Myrtille? Did he know Morgane Avril? Everything was getting muddled. The torn dress with the hibiscus flowers, Olivier Roy prowling around her best friend on the beach and off the Îles Saint-Marcouf, the sky-blue Moleskine notebook, that poem sent to Fredéric, crutches and jonquils, caterpillars and fortresses, signed M2O. Marriage 2 October . . .
“And what about your search for the stranger who was in both places?” Ellen asked. “Is that getting anywhere?”
Alina, lost in her thoughts, didn’t reply.
“Slowly,” Piroz admitted. “We’re in no hurry. We have our whole lives—”
“Not entirely,” Ellen corrected him. “You know as well as I do, after ten years without any fresh evidence the case is closed. The rapist will have won.”
“Well?” Alina asked in the lift.
She pressed herself against the wrought iron to avoid contact with Piroz’s body.
“So,” she said again. “What do you think?”
“It’s not her,” Piroz said.
“What do you mean, it isn’t her?”
“It isn’t her in the picture! The pretty naked blonde, it’s not the shrink. She’s messing with us.”
A little later, in the Métro, between Bastille and Saint-Paul, Piroz, jostled by a group of seven-year-old children all wearing the same caps who had just invaded the carriage, pressed himself against Alina. This time she couldn’t avoid it. He whispered in her ear:
“I saw that little smile on your lips earlier when she asked about the search for the stranger. You might think it’s a waste of time, but the one thing we can be certain of is that the killer was in Yport on June 5th, 2004 and in Isigny three months later.”
The children were yelling and Alina had to raise her voice.
“But there were thousands of people passing through. And the killer could have arrived by car or even on foot, without anyone seeing him arrive or leave—without his name appearing anywhere.”
Louvre.
Piroz shrugged. His eye wandered to a poster advertising Dior. Charlize Theron’s naked silhouette reminded him of the one on the shrink’s wall.
“I know,” he admitted. “But pursuing that connection is stopping Carmen and her daughter Océane from going mad. Waiting and hoping, that’s all they have left.”
Concorde.
The kids with the caps, ushered by two teachers, disappeared faster than a flock of pigeons. Alina took a step back and maintained a metre’s distance between herself and the captain.
“Wait for what?” she asked. “For the rapist to start again?”
Six years had passed since Myrtille’s murder.
“Too late,” Piroz replied. “He won’t start again.”
Champs-Élysées-Cemenceau.
More Charlize Therons passed by. Four metres by three. Dior was bludgeoning people’s minds, and Piroz loved it. Alina pursed her lips. Is this how impulses come into being? she wondered.
“He won’t start again,” Piroz repeated, absorbed by a grain of white skin enlarged a thousand times.
Alina thought otherwise.
36
IS THIS HOW IMPULSES COME INTO BEING?
I crossed the Seine by the Pont de Brotonne at about one in the morning. Then I switched between motorways and secondary roads. The names of the Norman villages that I systematically avoided passed by on signposts illuminated by the Fiat’s headlights. Pont-Audemer. Beuzeville. Pont-l’Évêque.
The pages that I had just read scrolled through my head. The identity of the red-scarf killer had to be buried somewhere in the details relating to the murder of Myrtille Camus. That information hadn’t been given to me for no reason. That proof of my innocence was there, within reach.
An illusion? One more illusion?
Would it make any more sense after my final, headlong flight to Isigny-sur-Mer?
My phone rang in the depths of my pocket just before the turn-off for Troarn. It was almost two in the morning.
Piroz, of course . . .
I didn’t pick up. Piroz had inherited the Avril–Camus case, they had been careful to let me know that by giving me that envelope. After all those years, that monomaniacal cop had finally found his culprit.
Me!
A few seconds later, a pinging noise indicated that someone had left a message. Still driving, I picked up the phone.
I almost let go of the wheel with surprise.
I was completely wrong!
It wasn’t that bastard cop who had called me, it was Ophélie. My young friend
from the Saint Antoine Institute had sent me a photograph of a guy which seemed to have been cut out of a fashion magazine, with a steely blue gaze, a shaved head, an unbuttoned white shirt and a predatory smile.
Live from César’s, said a brief comment under the picture.
20 out of 20?
That made me smile. I blindly typed in my reply without even slowing down:
Too handsome. Don’t trust appearances.
Less than a minute later, Ophélie replied.
Idiot!
And how are you getting on with your pretty redhead?
My heart did a somersault.
My pretty redhead.
Mona.
The image of her warm body against mine invaded my mind without warning.
Her body was probably already wrapped up in a plastic sheet on the back seat of a police car heading for the morgue. I resisted the desire to throw the phone out of the window, to shout into the silence of the night, to put my foot down harder on the accelerator and drive straight at the first plane tree. In the end I merely wedged the mobile under my thigh and concentrated on the road: I was approaching Caen, and I had to avoid the ring road.
The Fiat 500 drove into the village of Grandcamp-Maisy just before three in the morning.
For several kilometres I’d been passing signs announcing Omaha Beach—Liberty Road, inviting drivers to take a pilgrimage between bunkers, shell holes, cemeteries, and D-Day museums.
Liberty Road: a funny name for a hopeless journey.
I parked in the church parking lot and unfolded a road map of Normandy. Isigny-sur-Mer was three kilometres from Grandcamp-Maisy beach, but I was heading for Grandes Carrières, the hamlet where, according to police reports, the body of Myrtille Camus had been found on August 26th, 2004.
My finger found the place. I drank another cup of coffee, lukewarm this time, while gazing up at the church, the only illuminated building in the village.
It had been demolished in June 1944, then rebuilt in a hurry. It was a strange building: a concrete cube flanked by a grey, chimney-like bell-tower pierced with arrow-slits. Even in La Courneuve, the churches had more style than this!
Even in La Courneuve . . .
It was as if someone had projected a hologram inside my mind.
I had seen this church before!
While I’d been driving, scraps of memory had come back to me, the name of the village, Grandcamp-Maisy, this landscape of hedges and stone houses, these slate roofs, this celebration of the June 1944 landings at every crossroads, but my memory had managed to keep them in a bubble of opaque glass.
A bubble that this bell-tower had abruptly burst.
I had seen this church before. Once. A long time ago.
And now every detail came back to me.
It was summer. As I did every year, I was supervising at a camp in Clécy, in the Suisse Normande, near Falaise, more than a hundred kilometres from Grandcamp-Maisy. Climbing, canoeing, hiking . . . The kids who attended the leisure centre of the Urban Community of Plaine Commune came from La Courneuve, Aubervillers, or Villetaneuse; there were over five hundred them, distributed between camps scattered all over in France. Two of those camps were in Normandy: the one in Clécy that I was helping out at, and another one by the sea, here, in Grandcamp-Maisy. The sea wasn’t really my thing, but one of the activity organisers from the sailing camp had needed a day off. Grandmother’s funeral or something like that. They were having a lot of trouble finding someone to replace him, and since I had a bit of experience, I was asked to take over. I did the return journey in a single day. Nothing special happened in Grandcamp-Maisy. A swim in that horrible icy water, a bit of teenage flirting on the beach, the occasional reprimand when some of the kids got a bit too big for their boots. That last-minute substitution had vanished from my memory for years. Without that concrete church it would never have come back.
I closed my eyes. Finding the exact date of my last visit seemed impossible. The weather was nice, because we’d had a swim. That meant it was the end of the summer. It was at least ten years ago.
My fingers clenched on the road map.
End of August 2004?
Thursday, August 26th, to be precise?
The day Myrtille Camus was murdered?
Impossible!
The cops had sealed off the area where the body had been found, journalists had hurried to the area. If I had been in Grandcamp at the end of August 2004, a few kilometres from the place where a girl had been found raped and murdered, the teenagers would have talked of nothing else, I’d definitely have remembered.
I opened my eyes and studied the buildings of the hamlet of Grandes Carrières on the map. Four tiny black rectangles.
Except that the Camus case hadn’t been made public until the day after the murder. The police had imposed a twenty-four-hour embargo before alerting the media. I hadn’t slept on-site, I had gone back to the Suisse Normande late that afternoon. The rape case could have exploded a few years after I passed through Grandcamp, I wouldn’t have cared, I wouldn’t even have heard of it, I was in Clécy and we lived almost cut off from the world, without newspapers or television . . .
The concrete church lit up in the night taunted me, as terrifying as the watchtower of a concentration camp.
Was it possible?
My trembling hands tried unsuccessfully to fold the road map.
Was it possible that I bumped into Myrtille Camus that day? On the Isigny road, near Grandes Carrières? I was probably driving the Plaine Commune camp minivan, an old Renault Trafic.
I crumpled the map and threw it on the passenger seat.
Was it possible that I had stopped, that I raped her, then strangled her, before my memory erased every trace?
I drank some more coffee, this time straight from the neck of the thermos, and started the engine.
After Osmanville, I turned off along the road leading to the Carrières farm. I passed a large building with beams, mud bricks and closed blue shutters, then continued to the end of the unpaved road.
A new certainty: I had never been here before.
The headlights of the Fiat 500 lit up the surroundings. I took the time to study the slightest detail that might jog my memory. Some clue to confirm this madness.
I had come here ten years before, I had abandoned the body of a twenty-year-old girl after murdering her.
Where, exactly?
At the bottom of this little white quarry dug into the limestone? In the cluster of hazelnut trees? To the west, at the foot of that tiny chapel surrounded by the roots of an ancient yew? A few metres further, in one of these fields surrounded by hedges? Or along the Canal de la Vire, which ran for two kilometres from Isigny to the sea?
In the pale halo of the headlights, the sleepy countryside looked like a Millet landscape, but without the angelus, without the prayers, without the farmers who had risen at dawn. Without witnesses, apart from a dozen black-and-white cows that were probably already there browsing the same grass ten years earlier. Mute and indifferent witnesses.
I parked beneath the only streetlamp in the hamlet, about fifty metres before the farm, and got out of the Fiat. I almost expected one of the cows to turn towards me, to recognise me and give me an accusing look.
I was going mad.
I didn’t remember anything.
I carried on walking. It was cold, there was hardly any wind. At first I didn’t understand why I was heading to the right, towards the undergrowth. For a moment I thought that some phantom memory was guiding me, that my hands and feet were going to reproduce the gestures that my conscious mind refused to admit.
Then I noticed the light. Two lights, to be precise.
Two lamps shone at the foot of a hazel tree.
Then I saw the carpet of petals below the lamps.
Then I saw the shadow of tw
o panels nailed to the tree.
I couldn’t decipher a word from that difference, so I walked closer.
The two flames burned in two little porcelain cups, probably filled with some sort of oil into which wicks had been placed. Apple blossoms in every shade of pink drew the shape of two reclining bodies.
I looked up towards the tree trunk, knowing already what I would read on the two wooden boards.
Morgane Avril 1983–2004
Myrtille Camus 1983–2004
I stood there without moving, without even trying to understand who could have organised this funereal display, or how long the flames had been burning for, or how those apple blossoms could have flowered in the middle of winter.
Let alone what it meant.
I just stood there without moving.
I felt a great weariness, as if my arms, my thighs, my leg had lost all their strength. I repressed the desire to lie down on the flowers and sleep, to end it all like that.
Everything was clear.
Morgane Avril 1983–2004
Myrtille Camus 1983–2004
I had killed those two girls. Cornered by the cops, my reason had exploded. I had gone delirious to protect myself. I had invented a suicide, witnesses, endless flight. I had involved Mona in my madness and she had paid with her life, a few hours ago. Other innocents would die if I continued to deny the obvious.
The two names danced in the light of the flames.
Morgane Avril 1983–2004
Myrtille Camus 1983–2004
I couldn’t take my feverish eyes off them. My legs were as unsteady as if I was perched on two glass matchsticks. I was going to wait here for the cops to come and get me. My brain was numb. I had barely slept for three days, but it wasn’t just fatigue that was dragging me into a kind of white cotton wool hole. It was a dyke breaking, the last one. The surge of spilled blood could flood my consciousness, I was ready.
