Time Is a Killer

by Michel Bussi

  Written by a teenager, herself, and containing all that she had observed, recorded and since forgotten.

  Read by an adult. Stolen by an adult who had discovered in those pages a truth, her truth. Who had found a key in the muddle of her diary. And she couldn’t even find one in the mess of her handbag! She cursed like an idiot by the closed door of her car, almost in tears. What a fool! Where had she put that stupid keyring?

  Her phone vibrated.

  At least she knew where to find that.

  ‘Clotilde? It’s Anika. What terrible news, what a tragedy …’

  Anika sniffed then managed to say a few words between her tears.

  ‘Cervone, murdered this morning. And now your daughter … disappearing …’

  Her sobs drowned out her words once more. The ex-windsurfer was breaking down; the boss who had kept the Euproctes campsite going single-handedly, because of her faith in hospitality, was sinking.

  ‘Are you at the Euproctes, with Franck?’

  ‘No … I’m on my own, at the gate of the campsite.’

  ‘Where’s Franck?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Has he gone to get the police?’

  ‘I don’t know … maybe he’s talking to them, the police are … here already. They’ve been here since this morning … Because of Cervone …’ Her sobs got louder. ‘I know you didn’t like him, Clotilde, that you never liked him … but Cervone deserved better than …’

  ‘Are you calling me right now to talk about your husband?’ Clotilde cut in.

  She had finally found her keys and was desperate to hang up and leave the line free.

  Anika’s reply was without animosity. Maintaining that spirit of hospitality, in spite of everything, to the end.

  ‘No, Clotilde. No, I’m calling you because I remembered something.’

  Clotilde’s heart thumped in her ears as the key got stuck in the door of the Passat.

  ‘The message we got at reception telling Valentine to go up to Arcanu was a simple note scribbled on a piece of paper and signed with your name. I should have been more suspicious and checked … but my God I’m so exhausted …’

  ‘What was the thing you remembered, Anika?’

  ‘Just before, or just after that note was dropped off, a car was parked in front of the campsite. It slowed down, it stopped, then it waited for a few minutes. At the time I didn’t think about it. I’ve only just made the connection.’

  Clotilde opened the car door and put the key in the ignition, ready to speed off as soon as Anika had finished talking.

  ‘Cervone told me everything,’ she went on. ‘So many times … But it was such a long time ago. I was just curious, it was like an association of ideas that weren’t quite slotting together … then I found the message, and Valou turned up and I forgot.’

  ‘What was it about the car, Anika?’

  ‘It was a Fuego. A red one. Like the one that Cervone told me about so many times. Like the one in which your parents and your brother lost their lives.’

  ~

  Clotilde turned the key and the engine of the Passat rumbled into life, but she didn’t put it into reverse, she didn’t put her foot on the accelerator. Three alerts were going off in her head, three sirens wailing, a triangle of fire.

  First of all, a red Fuego.

  Then some map coordinates, the ones revealed by the spyware in Valou’s phone, Franck had mentioned the forest of Bocca Serria, which wasn’t far from Petra Coda.

  Last of all, her mother and her daughter missing.

  Everything converged on the same obvious fact: someone had deliberately borrowed a car identical to her parents’ car, had put her mother and her daughter in it, and was bound for the corniche at Petra Coda.

  Clotilde didn’t know who, how, or why, but she was sure that something was going to happen there. She stared anxiously at the clock on the dashboard.

  8.44 p.m.

  Someone – a lunatic, a psychopath – was heading towards the Petra Coda ravine so that everything would happen exactly as it had twenty-seven years ago. On the twenty-third of August. Without her, but with another fifteen-year-old girl sitting in the back seat. Her daughter.

  She thought again of the coastal road, ten days previously. The bunches of wild thyme. Franck and Valou who hadn’t cared, the cars brushing past them on the narrow road. Now she was sure of it – this mad person would be there at exactly 9.02 p.m. And send the Fuego flying over the parapet.

  Go back into the house. Drive straight there. Alert everyone she could contact.

  She needed people down there. Before he got there. Before she did.

  In exactly eighteen minutes from now.

  She barely had time.

  The car started to move and she automatically looked in the rear-view mirror. And slammed on the brakes.

  Cassanu was standing behind her, white and wrinkled, his stick in the air, his hat pushed back, like a disoriented Gandalf. She had a sense that he had heard everything. Understood everything too.

  ‘Please move, Papé …’

  ‘I want to come with you.’

  ‘Get out of the way. You’ve caused enough trouble already.’

  The tyres of the Passat sent the gravel flying. Cassanu barely had time to jump aside as the car reversed. A second later, it disappeared in a cloud of dust. Clotilde took one last glimpse in the mirror. Cassanu was still standing there, as if rooted to the spot, as if he were never going to move again, as if his only hope now was to return to nature, to become a tree, a pebble; to be nothing but a harmless object, as his wife Lisabetta had always been.

  The road down to La Revellata, then another few kilometres further on, the corniche of Petra Coda, was just an endless sequence of tight bends. Clotilde cursed the long detour she was going to have to take along the tarmacked road to get away from Arcanu and back down to the main road by the campsite, when as the crow flies, by the path, the distance was only a few hundred metres.

  8.46 p.m.

  She accelerated along the very short length of straight road then braked too hard as she took the bend.

  ‘Shit!’ she exclaimed, her eyes fogged with tears. ‘Calm down, calm down. You’ll go faster if you stay calm.’

  Except that her head was threatening to implode. Who could this lunatic be? It didn’t matter, she had to get to Petra Coda before he did, before they did. And she wouldn’t be able to do this on her own. Without slowing down, she held the wheel with her right hand and, with her left, took out her phone. Her eyes flicked between the snaking road to the number she was trying to dial. Why, in God’s name, hadn’t she dared to save his number, even under a false entry? Why hadn’t she just memorised it?

  06

  A turning, she turned.

  25

  Down to second, then speed up again.

  96

  No one coming, no one down below, three bends lower down, drift to the left, eat up the white line and gain a few seconds.

  59

  Accelerate again.

  13

  Hear it ringing.

  Answer, damn it, answer!

  Brake, lose time, down to first.

  ‘Shit, shit, shit. Pick up!’

  Accelerate again.

  Yell a message.

  Natale! Natale, listen to me. They’ve taken my daughter. I don’t know who. I don’t know why. They’ve taken Palma too. I just know they’re heading towards Petra Coda. In a red Fuego. To kill them, Natale. To plunge into the Mediterranean. You’re near there, Natale. You’re nearby, you can get there first.

  Taking advantage of the last straight before reaching the main road, she hung up and lost concentration for a moment.

  She slammed her foot on the brake just in time.

  ‘Shiiiiit!’

  Cassanu was standing right in the middle of the road. The crazy old man had taken a shortcut down the path. He was shaking, bent over, leaning on his cane, like a marathon-runner who has used up all his remaining strength.
She made her decision in a flash: it would take her longer to avoid running over this old man in the middle of the road than it would to let him get in.

  She leaned over and opened the door.

  ‘Damn it! Don’t you think you’ve done enough already? Come on, get in!’

  *

  8.50 p.m.

  She had lost thirty seconds. Cassanu climbed in but didn’t say anything. He was getting his breath back, panting, coughing, as if his heart was about to explode. That was all she needed – her grandfather dying in the passenger seat! Papé must have started running as soon as the Passat drove away, he must have sprinted, ignoring Lisabetta’s cries, dashing down the path whose every secret he knew, every stone, every place to skid.

  The bends in the road sped by. Gradually, the old Corsican’s breathing returned to normal, unlike the car engine, which seemed to be getting very hot. A smell of burnt toffee spread through the open windows.

  The brakes?

  It didn’t matter, the car would last another eight kilometres.

  ‘Clotilde, I don’t think your mother escaped.’

  A bit too late to be sorry now, Papé …

  She turned the wheel sharply as the Passat got too close to the edge, brushing for several metres against the stone parapet that separated them from the precipice.

  ‘I think … I think she was taken.’

  The phone rang. The tyres squealed.

  Natale?

  Franck?

  Clotilde picked up as the car headed straight towards the void.

  ‘Bend to the right,’ Cassanu said gently. ‘Two hundred metres, a hundred and twenty degrees.’

  She turned hard. At last the old man might be useful to her. He knew every inch of this road by heart, a more effective co-pilot than the most experienced rally-driver on the Tour de Corse.

  ‘Clotilde? It’s Maria-Chjara!’

  She was so surprised that she nearly drove the Passat straight into the stone wall in front of her. She just missed a little floral shrine, a Virgin with a cross and three plastic flowers; the memory of another car, another life that had been extinguished here one day, one night?

  ‘Bend to your left, a hundred and fifty metres, hairpin.’

  ‘Maria?’

  ‘I was thinking about our conversation again. Cervone Spinello’s lies. That story about the sabotaged steering column.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Bend to the right, very tight, one hundred metres, one hundred and sixty degrees.’

  ‘Cervone didn’t really invent that story.’

  Lightning flashed through Clotilde’s brain. Maria-Chjara was going back on her statement. Cervone, the ideal culprit, was first murdered then cleared. Lightning followed by a thunderclap. If Cervone had been cleared, did that mean her brother Nicolas was now the guilty one?’

  ‘You assured me that …’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about it ever since we talked. Trying to remember every minute of that day, every word, every gesture …’

  ‘A slight chicane to the left, a hundred and fifty metres. Eighty degrees.’

  ‘Every gesture, Maria? So long after it all happened?’

  ‘Listen to me, Clotilde, listen. For all these years, I’ve been sure that the death of Nicolas and your parents was an accident. But if you need to look for a murderer, if someone did sabotage the car that your brother and I were supposed to borrow that evening, if someone wanted to kill us both, it couldn’t have been Cervone. He wasn’t the one who was dying of jealousy.’

  ‘Chicane to the left!’ Cassanu yelled.

  Clotilde turned at the last moment without letting go of the telephone, the car clinging to the edge of the road, throwing up gravel and a rain of yellow sparks as it skidded through the sea of giant fennel that grew in the hollows by the roadside. Sweat pearled on her forehead.

  ‘I have no doubt,’ Maria-Chjara went on. ‘I will never forget those eyes that followed me and Nicolas on the day of the accident, at Oscelluccia beach in the early evening, when everyone had left except him. Then that same look the day after the tragedy, resting only on me. Today I understood. It was … it was because he wanted to kill us … Because he had killed Nicolas.’

  ‘Straight ahead, four hundred and fifty metres, go on … You can speed up now.’

  ‘Who, Maria? Whose eyes?’

  Clotilde heard laughter on the telephone. The forced laughter of an actress. Maria-Chjara was also ridding herself of all the years she had spent carrying a vague sense of guilt.

  She had made someone jealous, jealous enough to turn him into a murderer.

  ‘You might remember him too, Clotilde, you must remember him. His eyes. Even if more often than not you only saw one of them.’

  63

  23 August 2016, 8.52 p.m.

  The tight bends were coming almost in slow motion now. The Fuego scrupulously stuck to the speed limit, its driver felt the need neither to accelerate nor to slow down, he had programmed the Satnav and he knew that as long as he didn’t exceed the limit, if he followed to the letter the instructions of the robotic voice that was guiding him, the Fuego would reach the first bend at Petra Coda at exactly 9.02 p.m.

  In nine minutes, it would all be over.

  A little sooner than predicted, as far as he was concerned.

  His doctor had given him something closer to nine months.

  ~

  The Passat was approaching the D81. The road was straighter now, a little further from the coast, and Clotilde managed to shift into fifth gear, getting close to a hundred kilometres an hour for a few hundred metres, before she had to slow down again.

  She had wedged the mobile phone between her thighs.

  ‘It’s Hermann!’ Clotilde shouted. ‘That bastard the Cyclops!’

  Cassanu turned towards her.

  ‘Hermann Schreiber?’

  Clotilde didn’t take her eyes off the road.

  ‘Yes, he’s the one who killed them. And he’ll do it all over again in less than ten minutes if we don’t get there in time. He’s kidnapped Valou and Maman.’

  ‘Impossible.’

  8.53 p.m.

  ‘Oh, no, Papé, it’s not impossible at all. I was talking to that bastard Hermann Schreiber on the phone the other day and …’

  Her grandfather rested a hand on her thigh.

  ‘That’s impossible, Clo, I can assure you. You couldn’t have talked to the German.’ He look a deep breath. ‘Hermann Schreiber died in 1991, eighteen months after your parents’ accident. When he was less than twenty years old.’

  ~

  8.54 p.m.

  The Fuego passed by the rock of Capo Cavallo, six kilometres south of La Revellata.

  Arrival time 9.02 p.m., said the display on the Satnav stuck to the windscreen.

  The screen showed a miniature, stylised version of the landscape opening up before them. An electric-blue sky, a khaki mountain, a café-au-lait sky.

  A depiction that was both drab and gaudy, as ugly, Jakob Schreiber thought, as the reality was sublime. In front of him was the Revellata Peninsula, the lighthouse, the Calvi citadel, blushing in the setting sun, like a girl whose shyness made her all the more pretty. He slowed down a little to enjoy the view for a few seconds. So much for his precise adherence to the Satnav; he would catch up on lost time by accelerating after Punta di Cantatelli. The landscape would surely be the only thing in this world that he would miss.

  The road turned towards the mountain again, past a dry patch of maquis and some thin cows. He speeded up. Basically, thinking about regrets over the next few minutes, before the great leap, was stupid. Even if Clotilde Idrissi hadn’t turned up at his bungalow five days ago, reopening old wounds that had barely closed over, this summer would have been his last. In any case, the oldest resident of the Euproctes campsite would always have preferred to bid farewell to the world here, in Corsica, rather than fade away slowly in the clinic back home in Germany. You might as well crash in a setting that looked like paradise, since
no one could be sure that there was one after death.

  Nine months maximum, his doctor had told him.

  The first alert, the first tumour, had slipped in just above his liver eight years before. They had cleaned out his oesophagus the way you unblock a gutter with a high-pressure hose, but the acid rain had continued to fall – on his pancreas, his lungs, his stomach. The tumour had won. He even thought it would triumph sooner; he had always thought he wouldn’t survive retirement for more than five years, when the accountant from the company for which he worked had told him he’d be getting a bonus of 300 marks a month as soon as he left, for the fact that, throughout his whole career, he’d been exposed to hazardous products, solvents and pollutants. He had stuck with them for over fifteen years, he’d been an executive, he’d kept an eye on the production lines through the screen of a computer. Luckily for the company, the workers employed to handle the products and clean the vats were less expensive to the company, when they retired, than he was.

  He glanced in the mirror, wondering whether his passengers had any idea of what awaited them. Palma would have understood, inevitably: the red Fuego, the destination that appeared on the Satnav, her granddaughter in the back seat, all the clues were plain to see. Valentine must have realised too; she knew everything now, she had read her mother’s notebook. Yet they both remained calm. Although what else could they do, trussed up like a pair of Christmas trees in a net? Perhaps they were hoping that this little drive was nothing but a charade, a bad joke, a piece of theatre … or that the parapet at Petra Coda had been reinforced since 1989.

  Coming within sight of the Bay of Nichiareto, Jakob Schreiber maintained a cruising speed. The last few days, rereading Clotilde’s diary, page after page, had revived the burning embers of a hatred that had never truly gone out.

  His son, Hermann, wasn’t responsible for any of this.

  It was all the fault of Maria-Chjara, Nicolas, Cervone, Aurélia – of all the other teenagers in that group during the summer of ’89, with their contempt, their selfishness. He hadn’t invented anything, Clotilde had described the situation perfectly in her notebook. They were the ones who had fed that fury, that jealousy, that madness. Without it, nothing would have happened. His son was a nice, serious, hard-working, well-mannered boy. At the Catholic primary school and then at the local grammar school; a cub scout from the age of six, a Pioneer at less than fifteen, always with a sculptor’s chisel in his hand, a bright pebble in his pocket, a blade of grass between his teeth.