by Michel Bussi
His finger pointed to circles and lines.
“What about the other things? The forest and so on? Malone also says he lived next to a forest full of ogres and monsters.”
The psychologist wasn’t phased. He pointed to the green patches on the map.
“We’re spoiled for choice. The forest of Montgeon, naturally, and the hanging gardens around the fort of Sainte-Adresse, the woods at the entrance to the Jenner tunnel . . . But nothing overlaps. Or rather, all of it does. As soon as you go higher up in Le Havre, you can see the sea from a long way off.”
“And the rockets?”
Vasily seemed pleased that Marianne had remembered all these details. The wood-and-embers flicker of his eyes stirred something in the captain.
“No idea about the rockets. There’s the airport at Havre-Octeville: that’s only one kilometer from the sea, not far from the shopping center in Mont-Gaillard, but Malone was positive: he said it was a rocket, not an airplane. To be completely honest with you, Captain, I also haven’t found any trace of a castle with four round towers either. The closest are the Chateau d’Orcher, which has only one tower, and the Chateau des Gadelles in Sainte-Adresse, which has eight. I did make a list of anything that resembled a keep or manor house, including water towers: they’re represented on the map by those little blue crosses.
Marianne looked down for a moment at the overlapping colors. Dragonman would have made a good cop. Much more imaginative than most of her colleagues. Vasily gave her a sorrowful smile.
“So, no single place fits all the criteria. It feels like trying to assemble several different jigsaw puzzles with the pieces all jumbled up in the same box. As if several layers of memory have all been mixed together. How can we know which ones fit together? Which ones to put aside? Which ones to eliminate?”
Captain Augresse had no idea. A bluish halo briefly lit up the darkness of the beach hut.
A message on her mobile.
When will you get here?
JB
Marianne took a step towards the door of the hut. As if the text from her deputy had suddenly woken her from a doze.
What the hell was she doing here? Hunched over a treasure map invented by a three-year-old child and a crackpot psychologist! While two criminals who’d shot policemen in cold blood were running free, two criminals they’d been hunting for nine months and who’d hidden stolen goods worth nearly two million euros somewhere in the region.
“I have to go, Mr. Dragonman. We’ll talk about this later. I’ve put a man on the case. He’s young, but he’s good. He’ll keep digging, just in case.”
They exchanged a slightly strange handshake. The wind lashed at Marianne as soon as she went outside. She quickly walked to her car, parked opposite Victor’s chip shop, the only place that was open on the seafront.
* * *
As he folded the map, Vasily Dragonman watched the captain walk away. Some teenagers got off a tram, wearing rollerblades, and set off in the direction of the skate park. Opposite him, a girl was running along the boardwalk, her ponytail beating against her shoulders, the earbuds of her MP3 player screwed into her ears.
How far would the captain go in her support of him?
How long before she laughed in his face, like all the others had done?
And even if she didn’t, how could he convince her to continue, to keep digging, deeper, faster, before all the clues sown in Malone’s head dried up, like rotten seeds that would never flower? Before his life was stolen from him for good. His real life.
Malone had trusted him. This was the first time in the psychologist’s career that he’d had to bear such responsibility.
He carefully put the map away inside his backpack. He was that child’s last hope. A piece of driftwood, tossed about by the waves, to which Malone was clinging. If he let go, the boy would drown.
It was terrifying.
The jogger was pretty. She stared at him as she passed, although she didn’t slow down, certain without even having to look back that the man’s beautiful dark eyes would follow the sway of her buttocks in her skin-tight leggings all the way to the end of the beach.
The small pleasures of everyday seduction.
But she was wrong!
One second later, Vasily could no longer see her, lost as he was in his thoughts. Astounded by the suddenly obvious revelation that had exploded in his mind.
He had just realized how Malone communicated with his cuddly toy.
22
Little hand on the 10, big hand on the 7
With his red and orange hat, his mismatched scarf and gloves, and his boots tickled by the badly mown grass, Malone looked like a garden gnome.
Amanda took the bicycle with training wheels from the garage and placed it on the driveway, just in front of the fence.
“We’ll go to the duck pond.”
Only Malone’s head moved. He may have been a garden gnome, but at least he was a luxury model, with an articulated neck and a built-in barometer. Boots firmly planted in the grass, Malone looked up with fear at the menacing sky.
It’s going to rain.
Amanda lifted him off the ground and placed him on the saddle.
“Come on, lazy boy, start pedaling!”
Malone pedalled one meter forward before the wheels got stuck in the gravel. Amanda sighed and gave him a push.
“Go on, you big baby! I’m sure Kylian and Lola don’t need their training wheels anymore.”
Her comment had little effect. She pushed Malone’s back harder to help him gain some momentum, and at the same time she lifted up his hat, which had fallen over his eyes.
The boy’s hair was still wet. He’d screamed in the shower earlier that morning. Malone always took baths. Every evening, he spent an eternity in the tub. He hated the sensation of water falling on him—it made him visibly terrified—but this time, Amanda had had no choice. She’d grabbed him, undressed him, and forced him into the bathroom. Malone’s hair, face, arms and hands were covered in dead insects.
Dead, just dead. Not dirty.
When she’d found Malone in the cupboard, that was what she’d said to her son, and her husband, forcing herself to smile, as if it were all a big joke. Those insects on his skin and his clothes were no worse than confetti, or a cloud of flour blown into his face, or dandelion seeds.
Dimitri had barked in reply: “Get the kid in the shower and then sweep this up!”
Obediently, Amanda had bent down, holding Malone in her arms and, using her free hand, had picked up the corpses of flies, beetles and bees, before dropping them, one by one, into the plastic box.
Dimitri had stood observing her for a moment, dismayed, then had exploded with rage. Malone had put his hands over his ears.
“And throw all that crap in the garbage!”
This time, for once, Amanda had resisted.
“No, Dimitri. No! Please don’t ask that of me.”
She had thought he was going to do it himself, tear the box from her hands, pick up a broom for the first time in his life, and clean up the mess. But no, he’d just started yelling again.
“You’re mad! You’re as mad as that kid!”
And he’d slammed the door as he left the house.
The housing estate sloped gently towards the pond. Malone hardly needed to pedal. He’d put Gouti in the basket attached to the handlebars and he let the bike roll along the smooth, black tarmac, as if it were a Formula 1 race track.
There was no danger here. There were never any cars in this street except those belonging to the inhabitants of the other houses on Place Maurice-Ravel. The architects who had designed Les Hauts de Manéglise were experts in the construction of labyrinths. They had explained to Dimitri and Amanda, when they bought their house, that their estates worked on the principle of what they called social control: no one could enter or lea
ve without being seen; each resident looked out for the others’ houses. Everyone had their own bit of street and their own parking space. The genius of this idea consisted in giving the impression that you were alone in your own home, of being able to grow flowers, trees and vegetables in your own little garden in complete freedom, while at the same time remaining surrounded by other, identical houses. To feel as if you were cut off from the world, the city and even the rest of the village, while remaining encircled by shopping centers, activity zones and motorway junctions.
They were good, those urban planners.
And in the middle of this strategically arranged model estate, the children could play in absolute safety.
There was even a pond, right in the middle, carefully maintained, like another proof of the visionary talent of the architects.
Amanda held Malone back by the collar to regulate his speed. He laughed—for the first time that day. She loved moments like this. They always made her think of the lyrics of a song by Renaud, which she listened to over and over again, to sear these memories into her head. Songs were good for that, she thought, even the dumbest ones for making you remember stupid emotions.
Then she remembered the last words of the song, before the final piano notes, when Renaud sang about time as a murderer, taking away the laughter of children.
Stupid truths too.
There were no ducks near the pond. There hadn’t been any for weeks now, since the first cold mornings in September. Amanda knew this, but she still pretended to be disappointed. Malone didn’t seem to care: he grabbed Gouti and ran into the bulrushes to look for nests and eggs, just as he’d done last spring when the ducklings were born, before the neighborhood cats devoured them.
Amanda let him play, watching tenderly.
This little patch of countryside, fifty meters from their house . . . For Malone, it was the edge of the world, an infinity to be explored, a shoreless ocean, which would shrink in his eyes as he grew older. This housing estate would also grow smaller over the years. The confines of his present universe would become merely a stunted planet, navigable in only a few steps.
A prison. Like the one in which King Minos locked up young Greeks for eternity. A deliberate trap made of dead ends and cul-de-sacs, walled in thuyas and privet hedges. In reality, the architects of the estate had constructed a labyrinth without an exit.
The ducks were the only ones who had made it out.
Even Amanda, when she was sixteen, had sworn to leave Manéglise and never return. And yet she had returned, just like the ducks did. Because that’s how life was. Because even if you travelled all around the world, seeking sunshine and love, finding them or not, in the end it didn’t matter. This was where the ducklings had to be born.
And be devoured.
A drop pierced the pond’s oily surface.
Malone didn’t notice, but Amanda did. She realized they would have to go home before it started pouring and Malone woke the whole neighborhood with his screams.
“Where are the baby ducks, Maman-da?”
This is where the ducklings have to be born, thought Amanda again, without replying to Malone.
And be devoured.
Unless she prevented it.
Diced tomatoes. Hamburger. Homemade chips. An episode of Jake and the Never Land Pirates while she cooked lunch. Another while Malone ate his food.
And a third episode, just one more, Malone begged, but Amanda didn’t give in.
“Time for your nap, cabin boy!”
Malone did not protest. He already knew all the episodes by heart—they were always being repeated on television—and besides, he liked being in his bedroom. Too much, probably, but how could Amanda reproach him for that?
Malone lay in his bed, only his head and Gouti’s visible above the top of the duvet. Amanda sat down next to him.
“Listen, darling, I know Papa shouts very loud sometimes, but he does love you. A great deal. It’s just that sometimes he gets angry.”
Malone didn’t dare reply.
“Do you feel like Papa is often angry?” asked Amanda.
Malone turned his eyes to the calendar pinned to the wall next to his bed. The rocket had landed on Mercury.
The day of the journey.
Malone preferred the night to nap time, because it was dark then and the planets and stars really shone.
“You see, sweetie, when you tell stories—at school, for example—when you say that I’m not your mother . . . For me, it doesn’t really matter, because I know it’s not true. But it makes Papa very angry.”
Amanda gently stroked her son’s hair. He stared at her now, eyes wide. The sunlight, filtering through the drawn orange curtains, filled the room with a copper glow.
Malone mumbled a few words: “So you don’t want me to say that anymore?”
“I don’t want you to say that anymore, and I don’t want you to think it either.”
Malone seemed to consider this deeply.
“But that’s not possible, because you’re not my Maman.”
Amanda’s right hand continued stroking Malone’s hair, while her left hand tensed on the duvet, crushing Woody, Buzz Lightyear, and Bullseye in the hollow of her fist.
“Who told you that, Malone? Who put that idea in your head?”
“It’s a secret. I can’t tell you.”
Amanda leaned closer and thought about raising her voice. But in the end, she decided to speak even more quietly.
“You know that those secrets make Maman sad.”
Without waiting for a response, she held him tight. A long, silent hug that Malone was the first to break away from.
“I don’t want you to be sad, Maman-da. I . . . I love you . . . I love you forever!”
“So you mustn’t say that I’m not your mother. Promise?”
“Even if I still think it in my head?”
“Even if you still think it in your head. Don’t worry, sweetie, those ideas will go away, like the germs that make you sick, like the spots you got when you had chickenpox, remember?”
Malone sat up and twisted his body free of Amanda’s embrace.
“I don’t want them to go away, Maman-da! I have to remember them always. Always.”
This time, Amanda could not hold back her tears. She wiped her hand against Malone’s pillow, then hugged him again, even tighter than before, and whispered into his ear:
“You mustn’t say that, sweetie. You mustn’t say that anymore. People will end up believing you, and then they’ll separate us. Do you understand? You don’t want us to be separated, do you?”
“I want to stay with you, Maman-da!”
She pressed him to her chest. She was so afraid.
“Me too,” sobbed Amanda. “Me too!”
The three seconds that followed were perhaps the sweetest of her life: the sensation of warmth, the taste of dried tears, the inviolable cocoon of this child’s bedroom, safe from the world, timeless, the feeling that this happiness could never escape her . . . until Malone caught his breath and finished his sentence.
“I want to stay with you until Maman comes back to get me.”
23
Today, the guy in front of me at the bank deposited a cheque for 127,000 euros.
Want to kill
I’ll seduce his widow.
Convicted: 98
Acquitted: 459
www.want-to-kill.com
Amid general indifference, a jingle announced that it was 5 P.M. Hardly anyone in the police station was listening to the radio, which played quietly in the background, except for one minute every hour when the news headlines were broadcast.
Already, the journalists had stopped mentioning Timo Soler’s escape after the failed interception at the port. Since that morning, local radio journalists had been bombarding the police station with calls,
in the hope of obtaining new information. One journalist had even camped out on the station’s front steps for two hours.
Nothing new, Marianne had systematically responded. And this was not just surliness on her part, even towards the camper, who had zig-zagged away on his scooter after the captain had threatened to slash his tires.
There was simply no news.
Lieutenant Lechevalier put on his jacket.
“Five o’clock. I’m going home.”
Marianne looked pained.
“Yeah, you’d better go. With the traffic the way it is, you won’t even get home in time for Going for Gold.”
“Just after,” said JB, proudly exhibiting a handwritten list which he’d taken from the pocket of his jeans. I’m going to do the shopping at Mont-Gaillard.”
“Quite right,” joked Papy, looking up from his computer. “If Soler reappears, we might be on non-stop stake-out for a week.”
The captain nodded.
“Listen to Papy, the voice of reason! You’d better stock up if you don’t want your family to die of starvation.”
Papy added: “And if mommy’s available, you need to make the most of your window of opportunity. In ’95, when Khaled Kelkal was on the run, we were on stake-out for eleven nights running.”
JB was already walking down the corridor, and didn’t bother to respond.
“Let her know in advance, JB,” Papy insisted. “Always in advance. With my ex-wife, I called it a warning shot.”