by Michel Bussi
By whom?
It didn’t matter now. The only thing that mattered was that certainty.
No one else knew.
The only person in the world who had proof of my innocence had been rendered silent for ever. And my death sentence was confirmed.
The members of the Fil Rouge watched Piroz’s lifeless corpse drifting into the tiny harbour, bloated with seawater and even stouter than usual.
Everyone except Océane Avril.
Only Océane seemed obsessed by another spot a few metres away, on the brick wall near Mona’s foot.
Instinctively I turned my head and tried to work out what it was that she saw.
At first my eyes couldn’t decipher it. Then, between two waves, I saw it quite clearly.
You just had to look in the right place.
Océane looked as started as I was.
Carved on the ochre bricks were two letters and a number, almost erased, initials like those written by lovers to seal their passion for eternity.
M2O
42
ONE OF YOU?
M2O
I stared in disbelief at the brick.
The two letters and the number stood out in fine white lines carved into the clay, as if Myrtille Camus had come back to Saint-Marcouf to engrave them only a few days before, or someone else had been devotedly coming here for ten years to maintain them.
Spume exploded in my face. I spat out a mixture of cold foam and salt.
In my frantic state, I didn’t care how that epitaph had reappeared from the past. The only thing that mattered was its meaning. It was obvious. As violent as a curtain being torn and suddenly revealing the raw truth.
M2O didn’t mean “Marriage 2 October,” as everyone had believed.
M2O had a different meaning.
Initials like those written by lovers, I thought again.
Myrtille aime Olivier.
M2O
Myrtille loved Olivier. Olivier Roy, the handsome boy who had prowled around her at the camp in Isigny, off Saint-Marcouf or on the beach at Grandcamp-Maisy, the guy with the white and blue Adidas cap that Commander Bastinet’s forces had been looking for. Olivier Roy who had disappeared on October 6th, 2004.
Alina had been mistaken when she had given her statement to the police. Olivier Roy hadn’t been hanging around Myrtille Camus because he was a pervert eyeing up his potential prey . . . No! The reason was much simpler: Myrtille and Olivier were sleeping together. They were having a summer romance, and Myrtille, a few months away from her wedding, hadn’t dared to say a word to her best friend . . . Alina had suspected for all these years, but she could never bring herself to acknowledge it.
The sea covered my chin. My body trembled with cold and a nervous energy. The adrenaline was speeding up my thoughts. Everything I’d discovered over the last few days passed in front of me. Commander Bastinet and Ellen Nilsson’s investigation.
M2O
Myrtille loves Olivier.
Those verses danced in my memory . . .
I will put grilles on the universe
To keep it from parting us
I will dress our good fortune in rags
To keep it from buying us
I will kill all the other girls
To keep them from loving you
M2O
That poem had been written for Olivier Roy, not for Frédéric Saint-Michel . . .
With one desperate movement, I pulled on my arms to lift myself above the water for a moment. I filled my lungs and then I yelled:
“There!”
My cry was accompanied by Océane’s pointing finger.
The members of the Fil Rouge froze. Captain Piroz’s water-bloated body sank against the sea wall of the fort of Saint-Marcouf and then, like a stubborn balloon, bumped against the wall with each rise and fall of the waves. No one paid it the slightest attention.
Mona scrambled down to the edge of the rampart and reached out her hands to the carved stone, a metre above sea level. The brick wasn’t embedded in the wall.
Gently, Mona’s right hand slipped the stone from its place, revealing a cavity about ten centimetres deep. She leaned further forward. Her left hand blindly explored the gap in the wall. A second later, she took out a transparent plastic bag.
The water was licking my lower lip. In another minute it would engulf my mouth. As a new wave submerged my face, I glimpsed a sky-blue rectangle under the cellophane.
Was this Piroz’s surprise?
Everything’s in place, he had said.
Had he staged this moment? Carved the stone and hidden the bag?
Mona tore open the plastic with her teeth. The transparent scraps floated away in the wind while her fingers clutched the little blue book.
A Moleskine notebook. Myrtille’s notebook, the one in which she had recorded her most intimate feelings.
Later, when I replayed every detail of that scene, I would list the sum total of coincidences, the reaction of each member of the Fil Rouge, their precise location on the deck of the Paramé or on the rampart of the Île du Large, and I would arrive at a logical explanation. The inevitable outcome of a long, very long wait. But at the time my brain was screaming out a single order:
Mona, get a move on!
The water was gnawing at my nostrils. Lactic acid burned my shoulder muscles. But I tensed my deltoids to hoist myself above the waterline, keeping my chin above the water. When the pain became too intense, I breathed in, relaxed, held my breath and plunged my head under the sea for several seconds, releasing my muscles before tensing them again to emerge into the air. How long could I keep this going?
Mona was reading the notebook. Only her lips moved. In perspective, her silhouette stood out against the white sky, topped by the watchtower of the fortress.
“So, Alina?” Denise’s voice rang out from the deck of the boat.
Arnold barked.
Frédéric Saint-Michel thrust his hand into the pocket of his jacket.
Carmen and Océane were standing side by side, their matching K-Way waterproofs forming a single mauve plastic sheet. Mother and daughter didn’t seem to have grasped the sequence of events.
I went under again. Counted to thirty.
My head broke free of the water.
Mona looked up from the notebook and stared at Frédéric Saint-Michel. Her voice seemed far away, almost unreal, filtered by litres of seawater.
“She wanted to leave you, Fredéric. Myrtille didn’t love you any more—”
“Nonsense!” Saint-Michel shouted.
Carmen stepped forward, but Océane held her back. Mona looked down at the Moleskine again. It took her an eternity to turn the page.
Mona, please!
The sea swallowed me up again. This time I stayed down for twenty seconds. Then, braced against the brass ring, I appeared again, gasping for oxygen until my lungs felt as if they would burst.
Mona’s voice dragged, further and further away.
“She had met someone else, Fredéric. Someone who had opened her eyes. Who had given her the courage to face her family. Charles and Louise. Me. Courage to refuse what everyone expected of her—”
“Bullshit!” yelled Saint-Michel’s.
Piroz’s corpse had drifted and was now floating two metres away from me. I looked at it, my strength waning. The wave struck me full in the face, open-mouthed. I thought the ocean was filling me up. I was drowning, unable to spit out a word, and no one was paying me the slightest attention.
Everyone was waiting for Mona to speak.
“They’re her last words, Fredéric. The last words she wrote in this notebook.”
The words swirled. My leg, the only muscle still capable of resistance, pressed desperately against the wall, my toenails under the water seeking a gap between two br
icks.
Support yourself. Gain a few seconds at the cost of an unstable balance that the smallest wave might overturn.
My foot beat around in the void without finding the slightest purchase.
I couldn’t get my head out of the water.
I closed my eyelids and my mouth, holding my breath for ever. A few centimetres from the surface, as if in a bubble, I heard Mona’s voice:
“‘August twenty-fifth. Three o’clock in the morning. Fred arrives tomorrow. It’s my day off. I insisted on him coming. He can’t admit that it’s all over. I arranged to meet him in a secluded spot, beside the Grandes Carrières farm near Isigny. I hope he’ll understand this time. I hope Mum, Dad, and Alina will understand. I hope I won’t disappoint them all. I hope it will be over with quickly. I can’t wait, I really can’t wait, to see you again, Olivier.’”
I opened my eyes. My thoracic cage was about to implode. I could see only vague shadows across the water.
Mona stepped towards Saint-Michel.
“You were in Isigny, Fredéric? At the Grandes Carrières? The day Myrtille was killed?”
The shapeless outline of Saint-Michel leaned forward, extending his arm and pointing it in my direction.
“This is all a trick, for God’s sake. He’s the killer. Him!”
I worked out too late that Saint-Michel was holding a gun in his hand, that he was about to fire it at me.
I dipped back under the water, but my wrists, cuffed to the ring, held me less than fifty centimetres below the surface.
An ideal target . . .
Then everything happened very quickly.
“Die!” Saint-Michel yelled.
Then I heard Océane shouting: “No!” Followed by the report.
I waited for the bullet to pierce my body.
Nothing.
Three more shots rang out and then, a moment later, Frédéric Saint-Michel’s body toppled from the rampart, five metres away from me, while Océane screamed.
I worked out that she had been faster on the draw, that she had shot first. Then a second time and a third, at the murderer of Myrtille Camus. The murderer of her sister Morgane.
A second later, the surface was disturbed once more.
Mona had dived in.
I felt her body pressing against mine, her mouth settling on mine and kissing me to grant me a reprieve several seconds long, a few extra breaths. She rose from the water, took a deep breath, plunged below the surface and kissed me once more while her feverish fingers clung to the brass ring.
I heard the metal click of rattling keys, then the handcuffs opened.
I was free! Alive Innocent.
From the deck of the Paramé, Uncle Gilbert, his face expressionless, threw us two orange lifebelts.
On the island, Océane was weeping in the arms of Carmen, who sat straight as a rock on the rampart, her great bulk concealing half of the fort.
Mona, drenched in her Kaporal jeans and her green jumper, pressed against me and tried to kiss me again. She only touched a corner of my temple, a mixture of hair and seaweed.
I had turned away. I was just a piece of cold wood drifting away from the lies.
Mona had betrayed me.
She wasn’t the one who had saved me.
Clinging to the rope ladder hanging from the side of the Paramé, I turned my eyes towards Océane again.
She had raised her head, and was holding my gaze.
Her eyes were the same as they had been a few days before, at the top of the cliff, before she threw herself into the void.
The eyes of the abyss.
A revolver lay at her feet, on the rampart.
Océane had just killed a man so that I could live.
43
A TRICK, FOR GOD’S SAKE?
The beach at Grandcamp-Maisy was still a good kilometre away, but I could already make out the pale façades of the houses on the seafront, lined up like the white teeth of a huge, broad smile.
Carmen Avril had phoned the police. They were waiting for us in the harbour. They would be there before us, they had assured us, even though the crossing from Saint-Marcouf took only a few minutes. They would probably mobilise all the brigades of the area to welcome us. Behind us, the Île du Large had already disappeared in the morning mist. Only the flight of the cormorants above the empty sea suggested that there was land a few wingbeats away.
I was sitting on the storage seat. No one had thought to give me back my prosthesis. Océane was sobbing, pressed against me. Carmen, on the telephone, had entrusted her daughter to me without giving me a choice. I was drenched. The water had finally slipped between the neoprene wetsuit and my skin to settle there, icy and further chilled by the landward wind that stung our faces.
I wouldn’t have swapped places for the world.
I wouldn’t have made the slightest movement to shelter from the breeze, to wipe away the icy streams trickling down my torso, my arms and my legs, the slightest movement that might have altered this miraculous balance.
Océane’s face resting on my shoulder. Her hand around my waist. Her hot tears on my neck, a few burning droplets in an icy torrent.
Prostrate.
Océane hadn’t seen Gilbert and Carmen Avril, after many minutes of effort, hoisting the corpses of Piroz and Saint-Michel on to the deck of the Paramé. Or Gilbert carting them down to the hold all by himself, with a Marlboro wedged between his lips.
“I knew this was a stupid idea,” was all he had managed to mutter to his sister. Then he had gone back to the wheelhouse and fired up the engine.
Carmen ignored him; she had her ear and mouth pressed to her mobile phone, probably the cops. The crossing wouldn’t be long enough to explain to them why the Dutch kotter was bringing back two corpses in the hold.
A cop and a murderer.
Mona was sitting against the railing, near the prow. She was staring at the white sky towards the steeple of the church at Grandcamp, the only elevated point on the coast to which a prayer could be directed. Her eyes were red. Denise had tied Arnold’s lead to her leg, and was running her hand through his fur. Mona would need some time. Her best friend had been murdered by a man she had known since childhood. Chichin. The man her parents, Charles and Louise, had entrusted with their daughter’s happiness.
All gone, buried beneath an avalanche of lies.
All but her.
The waves rocked Océane. I had hardly ever held a baby in my arms, but I understood fathers who could hold a child to their chest for whole nights. I understood that incredible feeling of responsibility that meant you must do nothing, just wait, frozen like a statue for ever. That being there was enough.
Only my thoughts were free to wander. Before we entered Grandcamp harbour, they lost themselves in the void. I had understood nothing, or hardly anything, but the fact that Frédéric Saint-Michel was the double rapist, the red-scarf killer that the police had been pursuing for ten years, that Piroz had worked it out and set a trap for him.
Along the endless concrete sea wall that isolated Grandcamp beach from the village, I watched the three police squad cars driving towards the harbour. Probably hanging on Carmen’s words.
They’d been waiting for ten years. And now everything was moving very quickly.
They didn’t yet know how quickly, and neither did I.
Before the end of the afternoon, the police had carried out the first forensic tests on the Moleskine notebook found behind a brick on the island of Saint-Marcouf and certified beyond doubt that it had been written by Myrtille Camus ten years previously. Other officers combed through Frédéric Saint-Michel’s schedule on August 26th, 2004. A clerk at Elbeuf town hall recalled that the day before the murder of his fiancée, the director of Puchot leisure centre had cancelled meetings with parents to visit possible future sites for adventure camps. Holiday cottages. Sa
iling schools. Pony clubs. No one had checked, no one had paid any attention at the time.
They were dealing with a serial killer. Who could have imagined that Frédéric Saint-Michel had travelled from Elbeuf to Isigny and back in a day, three hundred and sixty kilometres, to rape his future fiancée?
Before the end of the evening, at about eleven o’clock, the police from the Elbeuf brigade, armed with a warrant from Judge Lagarde, had searched the apartment of Frédéric Saint-Michel on Rue Sainte-Cécile. Hidden away in a locked drawer, they found Morgane Avril’s handbag.
It was then that they called the judge to announce that they had finally established the connection between the Avril and Camus cases.
At about midnight, having been contacted by trainee officer Hachani, Sandra Fontaine, a former activity leader at the Puchot centre and now a teacher in Thuit-Simer, above Elbeuf, recalled having talked to her boss about the Riff on the Cliff festival, and in particular about a group that had passed through Yport that evening. Everyone in the region had been talking about the festival that day. Not about the line-up, but about the girl who had been found raped, strangled and thrown from the top of Yport cliff.
At about one o’clock in the morning a group of three officers, led by Commander Weissman of Rouen regional crime squad, settled down to spend the rest of the night writing up their preliminary report.
In all likelihood, Frédéric Saint-Michel had gone to the Riff on the Cliff festival on his own, and had fallen for the charms of Morgane Avril, who had been setting the Sea View dance floor alight. They had left the club together. At some point after that, Saint-Michel had raped the girl, then strangled her. He taken one souvenir home to Elbeuf: the handbag that the police were looking for.
What happened months later, when Myrtille Camus, his fiancée, arranged to meet him at the Grandes Carrières to tell him she wanted to split up with him? Another fit of rage? A Machiavellian plan minutely prepared in advance? Probably they would never know, but Frédéric Saint-Michel followed the same modus operandi as he had for the first murder. Torn dress. Red Burberry scarf used to strangle the victim. That was how he managed to avert the suspicions of the police. The killer was a vagrant, a pervert. Certainly not the fiancé of one of the girls . . .
