The Double Mother

by Michel Bussi

  ALSO BY

  MICHEL BUSSI

  After the Crash

  Black Water Lilies

  Time Is a Killer

  Don’t Let Go

  Never Forget

  Europa Editions

  1 Penn Plaza, Suite 6282

  New York, N.Y. 10019

  info@europaeditions.com

  www.europaeditions.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.

  First published in French as Maman a tort

  by Presses de la Cité, a department of Place des Editeurs, Paris 2015

  Copyright © Presses de la Cité, a department of Place des Editors, 2015

  First publication 2021 by Europa Editions

  Translation by Sam Taylor

  Original Title: Maman a tort

  English translation copyright © 2021 by Sam Taylor

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco

  www.mekkanografici.com

  Cover illustration by Mariachiara Di Giorgio

  ISBN 9781609455200

  Michel Bussi

  THE DOUBLE

  MOTHER

  Translated from the French

  by Sam Taylor

  THE DOUBLE

  MOTHER

  To my mother, of course.

  I have several mothers.

  It’s a bit complicated.

  Especially as they don’t like each other.

  There’s even one who’s going to die.

  Maybe some of it’s my fault?

  Maybe everything happened because of me?

  Because I can’t remember which one is the real one.

  I

  MARIANNE

  1

  Havre-Octeville Airport,

  Friday, November 6, 2015, 4:15 P.M.

  Malone felt his feet leave the ground, and then he could see the lady behind the window. She was wearing a blue suit, a bit like a police uniform, and she had a round face and funny glasses. In her booth, she reminded him of those ladies who sold tickets for the merry-go-round.

  He felt Maman’s hands trembling slightly as she held him up.

  The lady looked him straight in the eye, turned to Maman, then looked down at the little brown book that lay open in her hands.

  Maman had explained that the lady was checking their photographs. To be sure it was really them. That they really were allowed to catch this plane.

  But the lady didn’t know where they were going—that is, where they were really going.

  Only he knew that.

  They were flying to the forest of ogres.

  Malone placed his hands on the ledge so it would be easier for Maman to hold him up. He was looking at the letters on the lady’s jacket. He didn’t know how to read yet, of course, but he could recognize a few letters.

  J . . . E . . . A . . . N . . .

  The woman signaled to the child’s mother that she could put him down now. Normally, Jeanne wasn’t quite so scrupulous. Especially here, in Le Havre’s little Octeville airport, which had only three counters, two baggage carousels and one vending machine. But the security staff—from the parking lot attendants to those guarding the runway—had been on high alert since the early afternoon. All of them recruited in a game of hide-and-seek with an invisible fugitive, although it seemed highly improbable that the fugitive would choose to go through this backwater.

  Anyway, it didn’t matter. Captain Augresse had been explicit on that point. They had to post photos of the men and the woman on the walls of the lobby and warn every customs official, every member of the security staff.

  These people were dangerous.

  One of the two men in particular.

  An armed robber, to start with. Then a murderer. A repeat offender, according to the police report.

  Jeanne leaned forward slightly.

  “Have you ever been on a plane before, dear? Have you ever travelled this far away?”

  The child stepped sideways and hid behind his mother. Jeanne didn’t have any children. She had to work ridiculous hours at the airport, and that was enough of an excuse for her two-faced boyfriend to dodge the issue whenever she brought it up. She had a way with little ones, though. More than with men, in fact. That was her gift, knowing how to deal with kids. Kids and cats.

  She smiled again.

  “You’re not afraid, are you? Because you know, where you’re going, there’s . . . ”

  She deliberately paused until the end of the boy’s nose came out from behind the mother’s legs, squeezed into a pair of skin-tight jeans.

  “There’s a jungle . . . Isn’t that right?”

  The child recoiled slightly, as if surprised that the woman had been able to guess his secret. Jeanne examined the passports one last time before vigorously stamping each of them.

  “But there’s no reason to be scared, sweetie. You’ll be with your mother!”

  The child hid behind his mother again. Jeanne felt disappointed. If she was losing her knack with kids too . . . But it was an intimidating place, she reassured herself, especially now with all those idiot soldiers walking back and forth with their pistols holstered on their belts and assault rifles hanging from their shoulders, as if Captain Augresse might watch the tapes afterwards and give them bonus points for their zeal.

  Jeanne tried again. It was her job, security. And that also meant her customers’ emotional security.

  “Ask your mom. She’ll tell you all about the jungle.”

  The mother thanked Jeanne with a smile. She didn’t expect the child to do the same, but he did react—and his reaction was very strange.

  For a moment, Jeanne wondered how to interpret that brief movement of the boy’s eyes. It was only a fraction of a second, but when she had said the word ‘mom’, the boy had not looked at his mother. He had turned his head the other way, towards the wall. Towards the poster of the woman she had pinned there a few minutes before. The poster of the woman the entire regional police force was looking for, and that man standing next to her. Alexis Zerda. The killer.

  She was probably mistaken.

  The child was probably looking at the large bay window just to the left of the wall. Or the planes behind it. Or at the sea in the distance. Or maybe his head was in the clouds already. Maybe he was just miles away.

  Jeanne thought about questioning the mother and her son again, she had an inexplicable foreboding, an impression that something about the relationship between this child and his mother seemed a little bit off. Something unusual, something she couldn’t put her finger on.

  But all their papers were in order. What excuse did she have to hold them any longer? Two soldiers with shaven heads stomped past in their boots and camouflage fatigues. Providing security by scaring ordinary families half to death.

  It was just the pressure, Jeanne reasoned with herself. The unbearable way airports felt like a warzone every time some dangerous madman was on the loose with the police on his heels. She was too emotional, she knew; she had the same problem with men.

  Jeanne slid the passports through the opening in the toughened glass window.

  “Everything seems to be in order, madame. Have a good trip.”

  “Thank you.”

  This was the first word the woman had said to her.

  At the end of the runway, a sky-blue KLM A318 Airbus was taking off.

  * * *

  Captain Marianne Augresse looked up at the blue Airbus as it crossed the sky. She followed its progress for a m
oment as it flew out over the oil-black ocean, then continued her own weary climb.

  Four hundred and fifty steps.

  From fifty steps further up, JB came running down towards her.

  “I’ve got a witness!” the lieutenant shouted. “And not just any witness . . . ”

  Marianne Augresse gripped the guard rail and caught her breath. She felt drops of perspiration trickling down her back. She hated the way the slightest bit of exertion made her break out into a sweat—and it got worse with every gram she put on. She hated being in her forties: lunch on the go, evenings on the sofa, nights spent alone, her morning jog always postponed to another day.

  Her lieutenant hurtled down the rest of the stairs, then stood in front of Marianne and handed her some kind of gray and grubby cream rat. Limp. Dead.

  “Where did you find that?”

  “In the brambles, a few steps higher up. Alexis Zerda must have thrown it there before he disappeared.”

  The captain did not reply. She just squeezed the cuddly toy between her thumb and index finger, its fur worn, almost white from being constantly hugged and sucked and pressed against the trembling body of a three-year-old. Its two black marble eyes stared at her as if frozen in some final terror.

  JB was right: this thing was a witness. A mucky, broken witness, its heart torn out. Silenced forever.

  Marianne hugged it, imagining the worst.

  The child would never have abandoned his favorite toy.

  Distractedly, she ran her fingers through the rat’s fur. There were brownish stains on the acrylic fibers. Blood, no doubt. The same as the blood they’d found in the shelter a few hundred steps below?

  The child’s blood?

  Amanda Moulin’s blood?

  “Let’s go, JB!” the captain ordered, her tone deliberately harsh. “Get a move on!”

  Lieutenant Jean-Baptiste Lechevalier did not argue. In a flash, he was already five steps ahead of his superior officer. Marianne Augresse forced herself to think as she climbed, partly so that her fatigue wouldn’t slow her down, and partly so that she could begin to string together the theories that were accumulating in her mind.

  Although, when it came down to it, there was only one question that needed an urgent response.

  Where?

  Train, car, tram, bus, plane . . . There were a thousand ways Alexis Zerda could escape, a thousand ways he could disappear, despite the warning that had been sent out two hours previously, despite the posters, despite the dozens of police who were out searching for him.

  Where and how?

  One step, then another, one thought leading to the next.

  Or how and why?

  She avoided asking herself the other question. The main one.

  Why throw away the toy?

  Why tear this beloved creature from the child’s hands? A child who would surely have screamed, refused to climb one more step, who would have preferred to die on the spot rather than be separated from the toy rat that bore his smell, his mother’s smell.

  The breeze blowing in from the sea brought with it the unbearable odor of crude oil. Out in Le Havre’s navigation channel, container ships were queuing up like gridlocked cars at a red light.

  The veins in the captain’s temples throbbed. The stairs seemed to stretch away towards infinity, as if each time she climbed one step, another magically appeared at the edge of her vision.

  The same question ricocheted around the walls of her skull.

  Why?

  Because Zerda had no intention of being burdened with a child? Because the kid was of no more use to him than the cuddly toy? Because he would also get rid of the child, in a ditch somewhere? Because he was just waiting for a more discreet place to commit the act?

  Another Airbus streaked across the sky. The airport was only a couple of kilometers away, as the crow flies. Well, at least Zerda wouldn’t be able to escape through there, Marianne thought to herself, remembering the huge security presence she had installed at the tiny local airport.

  Another twenty or thirty steps. Lieutenant Lechevalier had already reached the parking lot. Captain Augresse’s fingers tightened around the ball of gray and cream fur, kneading it, as if checking that its heart and tongue had been torn out, that this cloth rat could never tell anyone its secrets; that it was definitively dead, after all those endless private conversations with Malone, those conversations that they had listened to repeatedly, she and her men.

  The captain’s fingers played through the stiffened fur for a second or two, then suddenly stopped. She slid her index finger another couple of millimeters along the fabric, then looked down, not expecting to find anything new. After all, what could this gutted bit of cloth possibly reveal?

  Marianne Augresse’s eyes narrowed, focusing on the faded letters. And suddenly, the truth exploded.

  In a single moment, all the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. Even the most unlikely ones.

  The rocket, the forest of ogres, the pirates and their wrecked ship, the amnesia of a tropical rodent, the treasure, the four towers of the castle, all those nonsensical phrases that she and her men had fruitlessly mused over for five days.

  The tales of a child with an over-active imagination. Or so they had thought . . .

  Yet it was all written there. Malone hadn’t invented a thing.

  It was all there in four words, attached to the fur of this mute witness. They’d all held it, this cuddly toy, but none of them had noticed anything. They had been wholly concentrated on what it had to say. It was very talkative they had listened to it, but they hadn’t looked at it. This cloth rat, murdered so that it would never talk again, then abandoned by its murderer on the slope.

  The captain closed her eyes for a second. She suddenly thought that, if anyone had been able to read her thoughts, to intercept them the way you sometimes overhear a fragment of conversation, they would think she was crazy. A cuddly toy can’t speak, it can’t cry, it doesn’t die. No one over the age of four believes that stuff six at a push, eight max.

  Yes, if someone began the story at this point, they would think she was out of her mind. She certainly would have, when she was rational. Five days earlier.

  Marianne continued to clutch the toy to her chest as she peered down the hundreds of steps she had just climbed and felt a sudden rush of vertigo. In the distance, all she could see was an infinite stretch of empty sky, a sky that was almost as dark as the ocean, the gray of the waves mingling with the gray of the clouds.

  JB had already started the car; she could hear the engine purring. Summoning all her strength, she accelerated up the final few steps.

  There was only one question worth asking, now that the truth had been revealed.

  Was there enough time to stop them?

  Four days earlier

  MONDAY

  THE DAY OF THE MOON

  2

  Little hand on the 8, big hand on the 7

  Maman was walking fast. I was holding her hand and it hurt my arm. She was looking for somewhere to hide. She was shouting but I couldn’t hear her, there were too many people.”

  “Too many people? Who else was there?”

  “Just people, doing their shopping.”

  “So there were shops around you?”

  “Yes. Lots. But we didn’t have a trolley, just a bag. My big Jake and the Netherland Pirates bag.”

  “Were you and your mother shopping too?”

  “No. I was supposed to be going on holiday. That was what Maman said. A long holiday. But I didn’t want to go. That was why Maman was looking for somewhere we could hide. So that no one would see me have a tantrum.”

  “A tantrum like the one you had in school? Like the one Clotilde told me about? Crying. Getting angry. Wanting to break everything in the classroom. Is that what you mean, Malone?”

  “Yes.” />
  “Why?”

  “Because I didn’t want to go with the other Maman.”

  “That’s all?”

  “ . . . ”

  “OK, let’s talk about that some more later, about your other mother. But first, let’s see if you can remember anything more. Can you tell me what you could see? When you were walking fast with your mother?”

  “There were shops. Lots of shops. There was a McDonalds too, but we didn’t eat there. Maman didn’t want me playing with other children.”

  “Can you remember the street? The names of other shops?”

  “It wasn’t in a street.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it was a kind of street, but we couldn’t see the sky.”

  “Are you sure about that, Malone? You couldn’t see the sky? Was there a big parking lot outside?”

  “I don’t know. I was asleep in the car and I only remember what came after, in the street without a sky with all the shops, when Maman was pulling my hand.”

  “OK. It doesn’t matter, Malone. In a moment, I’m going to show you some photos. Tell me if you recognize anything.”

  Malone waited on his bed, motionless.

  Gouti didn’t say anything, as if he were dead. Then he started talking again. He often did that. It was normal.

  “Look, Malone. Look at the pictures on the computer. Do they seem familiar?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were these the shops you saw with your mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I think so. There was that red and green bird. And the parrot too, the parrot dressed up as a pirate.”

  “OK. That’s very important, Malone. I’ll show you some other photos in a bit. But now let’s go back to your story. You went and hid somewhere with your mother. Where?”