by Michel Bussi
“I saw her throw herself off the cliff,” I said, “the red scarf in her hand, the torn dress—”
“That’s the advantage of base jumping. The discipline is practised with an extractor, a little round parachute folded up in a bag with a Velcro fastener. It’s also known as a tail pocket, because the bag fits to the shape of the back, less than ten centimetres thick. Quite impressive, almost invisible under a jacket or a coat.”
“Or a torn dress,” I added tonelessly.
“You’ve got it! What you saw as a dress torn by an attacker required many hours of tailoring. The sexy dress had to conceal the harnesses that ran around her waist and passed between her thighs and shoulders, and of course the tail pocket on her back, freed as soon as she jumped and tugged on her ragged dress. Océane is an excellent actress . . . and she had plenty of ways of distracting your attention, didn’t she?”
I didn’t reply to the policeman. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t admit such an outlandish truth.
Since we had that conversation, since the end of the whole affair, I’ve checked. I’ve watched hundreds of base jump videos on YouTube. I spent a whole night, fascinated, following furious lunatics enjoying themselves in all corners of the world by throwing themselves into the void from the most unlikely places—cathedrals, bridges, telephone masts. I also surfed on specialist equipment sites. Piroz wasn’t making anything up. You can buy a tail pocket online, and it takes up less room than a handbag worn on your back.
“A fall lasts less than four seconds,” Piroz went on. “You must have noticed that the base of the cliff is dotted with dozens of cavities in the chalk, caves of various sizes, enough for someone to hide in there. Even fat Carmen! Forty-seven seconds was more than enough for her to put make-up on Océane’s face, blood red, then for her to hide with the tail pocket in the nearest cave.”
I thought of how I had run desperately to the beach. How I had got to the body, just before Christian Le Medef and Denise Joubain. The body lying there.
“Océane was playing at being dead? Christ, how did she manage to keep it up for so long? We waited for more than ten minutes before you arrived with the police van.”
Piroz could resist it no longer. He poured himself a third glass.
“Remember, Salaoui. It was bitterly cold that morning. And yet, what was the first thing Jeanine did, crazy Denise as you know her?”
Denise’s reaction came back to me. It was obvious. How could I have been such an idiot?”
Piroz was triumphant.
“She asked for your jacket to cover Océane’s face and torso! Most importantly so that she could breathe easily while you were freezing your balls off!”
Piroz moistened his lips with the shot glass, as if to prolong the pleasure.
“There’s just one detail that we didn’t predict, and that’s that you thought of tossing that red scarf, which we had so carefully placed in your path, at Océane. We improvised. Océane jumped with it. Wrapping it around her daughter’s neck, to add a little spice to the scene, was Carmen’s idea. That must have thrown you, I guess?”
“You’re a bunch of bastards.”
Piroz burst out laughing.
“Glad you’re taking it so well!”
While he sipped on his drink, without daring to down it in one, I turned my eye to the rolled-up paper.
My DNA, compared to that of the double killer.
The proof of my innocence, proof that all this lunacy led absolutely nowhere. Unless Piroz had faked the test, as he had with everything else.
“You’ve gone to a lot of trouble for nothing,” I swaggered. “With all due respect to the hypocrites of the Fil Rouge, with a special mention for that slut Mona, or Alina, whichever you prefer, you’ve backed the wrong horse. I’m not the killer. Shame . . . Will you pass on the message?”
I held out my hand, as if to indicate to Piroz that I was waiting for the key to open the handcuff that fastened my right wrist to the wall.
“I don’t think you’ve understood, Salaoui. Whether or not you’re the rapist, they don’t care. They just want a culprit!”
A shiver ran down my body, from the top of my back to my truncated knee.
“Fuck. What fresh madness do they have up their sleeve?”
“Forcing you to confess, first of all. Then they’re going to execute you. For ten years Carmen has dreamed of castrating the man who took her beloved daughter from her. For ten years she’s been sharpening Océane’s grief like a dagger. For ten years Frédéric Saint-Michel has been holding himself back, like a pressure cooker about to explode. For ten years he has dreamed of nothing more than blowing his own Christian principles sky-high by strangling his fiancée’s murderer with his own bare hands.”
“Fuck’s sake, Piroz. I’m innocent!”
Piroz gently brought his glass towards mine. The bastard wanted to clink glasses! I didn’t react. Without turning a hair, he emptied his glass, throwing his head smartly back.
“I know,” he said at last.
An electric shock ran through every cell in my body.
He knows?
He knows what?
That I’m not guilty?
Piroz slowly untied the ribbon around the scrolled paper, then held it out to me.
“A present, Salaoui. I wouldn’t have been displeased to discover that you were the rapist. A pathetic one-legged Arab, that would have simplified matters. But I have to acknowledge the evidence: your DNA isn’t a match for the red-scarf killer. You aren’t the murderer, son.”
I feverishly consulted the sequence of figures grouped in threes, like the ones I had read in the file of Morgane Avril and Magali Verron. Piroz had no reason to lie to me, this time. I gazed at the view beyond the porthole, the pale night over the sea.
“How long have you known?”
“Since about five P.M. this afternoon . . .”
“So why this whole circus, if you had proof of my innocence? That ridiculous shoot-out at Les Ifs? That grand-guignol production at the Grandes Carrières d’Isigny? Why this trip to Saint-Marcouf, for God’s sake?”
Piroz took the sheet with the DNA analysis back from me and rolled it up again.
“Gently, Salaoui. Enjoy the moment. The forces of law and order are on your side. They know you’re innocent. They’re protecting you. You have nothing more to fear.”
I pulled on my handcuffed wrist.
“Free me, for Christ’s sake . . .”
“Calm down. To be honest, I wasn’t surprised by this result. I would never say that in front of Carmen Avril, she’d tear my eyes out, but I never believed that your presence in both Yport and Isigny identified you beyond doubt as the perpetrator. While I’ve been working on the case I’ve had time to come up with another hypothesis. A more personal one . . . And a more complex one too.”
“Go on then, spill, we’ve got all night.”
“And tomorrow morning, until high tide at least. You’ll see. Let’s say that when Carmen Avril tried to sell me her crazed idea of catching you, I leapt at the opportunity.”
“Get to the point, Piroz.”
The captain coughed. “I used you as bait! I joined in with their scheme because—”
Piroz began to cough again. I thought of the contents of the brown envelopes, the most recent advances in the inquiry, about the doubts of Mona-Alina. Myrtille Camus knew her rapist. She and Morgane Avril were victims of a seducer. They arranged to meet him . . .”
I raised my voice.
“Because you had discovered the identity of the real culprit?”
Piroz gestured to me to talk more quietly. I carried on speaking at almost the same volume.
“I know him? The police have checked all the genetic fingerprints of the relatives of Morgane Avril and Myrtille Camus. The double rapist can’t possibly be one of them!”
I paused, then asked him another question.
“And what has this prisoner’s dilemma nonsense got to do with anything?”
Piroz gave me an enigmatic smile.
“You’ll know in a few hours, Salaoui. It’s all planned. Everything’s in place. Trust me. I only need one favour from you: play their game! Over the last few days they’ve messed with you enough to keep up the act for another few hours, don’t you think? Tomorrow morning, don’t talk to them about our little conversation. No one else knows. Your innocence must remain a secret for a few more hours. It’s our only way of getting the guilty man to give himself away.”
“Don’t you think I’ve had enough of these idiotic strategies of yours?”
He opened the bottle of calvados again and poured himself a fourth glass.
“To your health, Salaoui. It’ll all be over in a few hours. You will be as white as the driven snow. You’ll be able to get it on with little Alina to your heart’s content.”
He took a glass from the bedside table and held it out to me, but I didn’t move a muscle. Piroz shrugged.
“You’ve scored a bit of a hit there, son. The more time she’s spent with you, the less she’s believed in your guilt. Let me give you a piece of advice, Salaoui. Apart from me, she’s your only ally on this boat.”
Mona?
My only ally?
At that moment I felt the deepest contempt for that sly little mouse.
Illusion. Betrayal. Deception.
To think that Ophélie had given her 21 out of 20 and said:
Don’t let her go, she’s the woman of your life.
The woman of my life?
My only ally?
I didn’t yet know how wrong both Ophélie and Piroz were.
When Piroz left the cabin, taking with him his piece of paper, his bottle and his two glasses, tottering a little, I felt an intense heat rising up, enveloping me, asphyxiating me, as if the wooden slats of the cabin were those of a sauna. Weirdly, I thought of the day when I’d smoked my first joint, all on my own, one Saturday evening, on the roof of the inner courtyard of my middle school. That day I’d severed all the moorings, all the ropes holding the bags of ballast that kept me on the ground.
Free!
I felt light! I was innocent. The police had proof.
All that was left for me was to bid farewell to this troupe of idiots who had almost driven me mad.
With the exception of Océane, perhaps . . .
40
PLAY THEIR GAME?
The cries of the cormorants and gulls woke me up, as if thousands of seabirds had met up on social media to welcome the arrival of the Paramé in Saint-Marcouf. The day seemed barely to have broken. A timid sun aimed its red eye at the middle of the porthole, lined with tears of foam.
The wooden walls began to vibrate. Shouting, men this time. I understood that they were mooring the Paramé. The door of my cabin flew open a moment later. I recognised Carmen Avril by her imposing bulk. She was wearing a large purple waxed jacket.
“It’s time,” she exclaimed.
She studied my naked body with revulsion, her eye lingering on the stump of my left knee. She was staring at a monster. A sick and perverted creature. I had rarely observed such a mixture of fascination and hatred in the face of my handicap.
The murder of her beloved daughter. Who she thought . . .
I ostentatiously stretched out on the mattress, opening my thighs to reveal my penis.
I was innocent! The cops were on my side, not hers.
“Put that away,” Carmen growled, throwing a balled-up garment on my bed.
With the same movement, she pointed at me with the iron rod that she was holding behind her back. A kind of poker, but longer and thicker, two centimetres in diameter and a metre long.
Instinctively I retreated into the back of the alcove. I was innocent but handcuffed, naked, defenceless in the face of a madwoman who had been chewing over her vengeance for ten years. Carmen Avril brought the iron bar towards me and held it balanced in front of my face.
Time stopped. For ever.
At last she dropped it on the floor. The iron bar vibrated with an endless echo of cymbals.
“You can use that as a crutch.”
Without another word, she set a small key down on the bedside table, probably the one for my handcuffs, and left the cabin.
As soon as I set foot on the deck of the Paramé, wearing the neoprene wetsuit Carmen had tossed on my bed, Frédéric Saint-Michel passed me in silence and went down to the hold. I didn’t have time to insult them, to shout at them about how humiliating it was for me to have had to climb the stairs on one leg and keep my balance on the boat, helped only by a metal bar. Frédéric Saint-Michel had already come back up, holding the handcuffs, and gestured to me to hold out my wrists.
Saint-Michel . . . That bastard Xanax! He’d taken a beating over the last ten years, this guy Chichin that all the girls loved . . .
I thought again about Piroz’s advice.
It’s all planned.
Everything’s in place.
Play their game.
I let go of the iron bar and held out my arms. Then I hopped over to a storage bench at the foot of the ship’s rail to sit down.
Two fettered hands, one leg. Did they seriously think I planned on swimming back to the mainland?
The Paramé was moored on the Île du Large, one of the two islands in the archipelago of Saint-Marcouf. This island, 150 metres by 80, was essentially a fortress built in the middle of the sea. It immediately made me think of Fort Boyard, the show that fuelled my fears and fantasies as a kid, with its dwarves, tigers, spiders and the breasts of the starlets in their low-cut swimwear.
The central part of the fort of Saint-Marcouf, a kind of coliseum with a lookout post, was protected by battlements that ran all the way around the citadel, then by thick brick walls almost entirely covered with seaweed or moss. At high tide, the sea must have submerged much of the enclosure. Only the sea wall to which the Paramé was moored seemed more recent.
Carmen came and stood right in front of me.
“Don’t expect to be rescued, Salaoui. Mooring on the Île du Large has been forbidden for years for security reasons. Only the association that maintains the fort has permission to moor its boats there, but the volunteers don’t work in the winter . . . any more than sailing boats venture out on to the Channel.”
I didn’t reply. On a table set up on the deck there were cups, a thermos of coffee and pastries. Frédéric Saint-Michel turned towards me, holding a coffee and a croissant.
“A cup of coffee?” he asked me in a glum voice that suggested neither sympathy nor antipathy.
He couldn’t have had much difficulty portraying his character; his face bore the same depressive mask as Christian Le Medef’s.
“No, thanks,” I replied, loud enough for Mona to understand me. How long would it take before I could call her Alina? “I’m still suffering from the effects of the last one I drank.”
Mona didn’t respond.
She was standing near the prow, turned three-quarters towards the other island, the Île de Terre. Her loose red hair was lashing her face, which was crimson with cold, and perhaps even by some tears that had dried around her swollen lids. Beside her, to starboard, Denise Joubain had put a hand on the rail and with the other she was holding her Shih Tzu. Arnold was tearing into a pain au chocolat as if attacking a living prey.
Gilbert Avril was above me, behind the glass of the captain’s cabin, checking some sort of nautical measuring equipment.
The least convinced of the troupe, I thought. Even for a seven-kilometre voyage, even in calm weather, he was probably going to find all kinds of excuses not to leave the tiller and let the others get on with the dirty work.
Carmen passed in front of me, poured herself a cup
of coffee, not least to warm up her fingers, then she walked past Océane and gave her a beaming smile.
The complicity of those who have emerged victorious after making enormous efforts.
The reward. The apotheosis.
Océane held a cigarette between her fingers, which protruded from a pair of mauve mittens. She had pinned back her hair with some grips of the same colour. Her hairstyle emphasised her features, her dark eyes, giving them the elegance of a Hollywood actress. A beautiful woman on the deck of an ocean liner leaving New York to seduce Paris. Unlike the others, she didn’t try to avoid my gaze. She stared at me, every now and again letting the sea breeze carry the smoke between us.
A light veil of mystery. I was left-handed and one-legged, but I felt invincible.
Océane was probing me. She was interested in me. She was wondering. The opportunity was almost too good in the end. Had it not been for that gross misunderstanding, mixing me up with someone else, such a beautiful woman would never have deigned to glance at me.
It’s all planned, Piroz had said.
Everything’s in place.
Play their game.
The old drunk was the only one who wasn’t standing on the deck. He was busy guzzling calvados, waiting to pull his famous counter-hypothesis out of his sleeve.
The low voice of Frédéric Saint-Michel rang out behind me.
“Shall we get it over with?”
Carmen set down her cup of coffee.
“You’re right, let’s not waste time, the sea has been rising for two hours.”
I didn’t grasp the connection.
“Alina,” she commanded. “Tighten the moorings.”
Mona reacted mechanically, slowly hauling on the orange buoys wedged between the Paramé and the sea wall of the Île du Large. Denise kept Arnold out of the way during the manoeuvre.
“Which one?” Carmen asked, studying the brick wall.
