The Double Mother

by Michel Bussi

  “And the Andalusian is your mother?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wow. So you’re a child born of love, then?”

  Angie held the glass to her lips again, holding it with both hands and hoping that it would cover up the tears that had sprung to her eyes.

  Facing the mirror at the hairdresser’s, she was usually better at this.

  Happy for the rest of his life, she repeated in her head. Yes, deep down, her father had been. He’d worked shifts in Mondeville, at the Normandy Metallurgy Company. Her mother had worked shifts too. At home. She organized her lovers’ visits to coincide with her husband’s schedule at the factory. One each night, one each day, one on Sundays. All of them very polite with little Angélique, the silent angel who played in her room while Maman worked in hers with the gentlemen.

  “A child of love,” whispered Angie. “That’s it exactly.”

  The tram setting off from the Hotel-de-Ville station made her think of the Caen‒Paris train she had taken on the morning of her sixteenth birthday, after one last night spent in her house on Impasse Copernic, after one last kiss on her father’s forehead, before the cancer caused by asbestos carried him away six months later.

  A child of love.

  The expression was almost comical.

  Angie thought back to her adolescence. The dark years before she met the man of her life. A child born of love who’d wanted to kill the whole world.

  “So, basically, you’re advising me to wait?”

  Marianne sat with her glass in the air, looking at her friend questioningly. Angie cleared her throat.

  “Patience and obstinacy, my dear. It’s your only hope!”

  “You cow!” replied the captain. “I’ve told you about my countdown hundreds of times: I’ve got eighteen months, twenty-four at most, before I need a man to plant his seed in my belly and watch it grow with me!”

  They both burst into laughter. Angie’s wasn’t really even forced this time. She couldn’t help liking this bossy old policewoman. Marianne was like her: a goat trapped amongst a pack of hounds, tied to its post, with just its horns and its hooves to help it survive. A witch’s outfit worn over the dress of a princess. The proof being that the captain had barely even talked about her investigation tonight. She’d only mentioned it briefly over aperitifs, when the waiter brought them a kir and a grapefruit juice: Timo Soler untraceable, Alexis Zerda on the run, Malone Moulin’s crazy stories.

  The waiter was busy erasing the day’s menu from the slate. When he’d finished, he tidied it away at the back of the restaurant. Marianne appeared to get the message and finally stopped talking so she could attack her cold calzone.

  She’d just picked up her fork when her telephone rang.

  “Marianne, it’s JB!”

  Like an excited teenager, Captain Augresse pressed the loudspeaker button while waving her hand at Angie. She pointed at the photograph filling the screen.

  JB wearing a tie, stripes on his shoulders, hat down to his eyebrows, posing proudly on the stage at the thirteenth Territorial Police Congress. Sexier than anything she’d seen since Richard Gere in An Officer and a Gentleman.

  “Speak of the devil,” whispered Angie, giving Marianne the thumbs-up.

  “Marianne, are you there?” asked JB.

  The two women silently touched their glasses together.

  “Marianne?”

  “Yep, JB. Have you fallen out of the conjugal bed?”

  “No, I’m on call. There’s a bonfire, on Cap de la Hève.”

  Captain Augresse managed to make her voice sound more serious.

  “Teenagers fooling around?”

  “No. Looks more like a traffic accident. Some guy crashed.”

  “Shit. Do you have any details?”

  “Not many. We only found out a while after it happened. The nearest inhabited building is two kilometers from the spot. By the time we got there . . . well, I’d hardly be exaggerating if I said that all we found was a pile of ashes.”

  “Christ. Just one fatality, then? You’re sure?”

  “Yeah. But identification is going to be a pain. The only clue we have is the guy’s bike. A Guzzi California.”

  The earth collapsed beneath Marianne’s feet. At the same moment, the glass of Rioja fell from the captain’s hand, while Angie’s smashed between her fingers.

  The white cotton tablecloth was covered with purple stains that grew larger and larger, as the wine from Marianne’s glass mixed with the drops of blood dripping from Angie’s thumb and index finger. The stains spread until they joined together, creating the illusion of a monochromatic Rorschach test, the kind used by psychologists to give shape to the ghosts of the unconscious.

  2French psychoanalyst and paediatrician

  FRIDAY

  THE DAY OF LOVE

  36

  Little hand on the 8, big hand on the 6

  The school gates had just been opened. Ordinarily, Clotilde would stand to one side for a few minutes and say hello to each child by name, with a smile for the parents.

  A pleasant welcome to keep the families in her pocket.

  For at least three generations. If Clotilde remained in Manéglise for a few decades, she would probably have to look after the children of these children.

  This morning, though, Clotilde remained a few meters back, near the small vegetable garden, in deep discussion with a man. Not a father, not even a substitute teacher, and certainly not an inspector sent by the authorities . . . the man didn’t look the type.

  Her ex-boyfriend, perhaps? Clotilde was cute, and the man, though older, was undoubtedly charming with his stubble, his classy leather jacket, his fitted jeans.

  In truth—and this is what the mothers who secretly looked at the stranger thought—the man looked like a policeman. Or, at least, the kind of policeman you always saw on television, played by one of those famous actors with a handsome face, a strong jaw, and bulging pectorals.

  The mothers decided to hang around a bit longer than usual.

  Though not as long as Amanda Moulin, who had not yet gone through the open gate. While the other children let go of their parents’ hands and ran to their classroom doors, Malone stood still. He was wearing a dark blue duffle coat, mittens, a mismatched woolen hat, and was clutching Gouti to his chest. He scanned the playground, the classroom windows, the mothers on their way out, the few cars parked outside the school. There was no motorbike.

  “I want to see Vasily!”

  Amanda pulled Malone’s hand and whispered to him.

  “You saw him yesterday, sweetie. He’s in another school today.”

  “I want to see Vasily!”

  Malone spoke louder the second time. He could feel his heart beating hard against his hand—the one that was pressing Gouti to his chest. He felt flattened. Empty.

  Vasily had promised. Vasily had said that he would be here. That he would return Gouti’s heart.

  He was going to come. Malone would hear the sound of his motorbike. He just had to stay here and wait.

  “Come on, Malone!”

  Maman-da was hurting him, pulling his arm like that. Once, he had pulled the arm of a cuddly toy—not Gouti, an old teddy bear—and the arm had come away in his hand, with some threads hanging from it.

  “I want to see Vasily. He promised.”

  Malone had shouted this time, so loud that Clotilde had turned around. The man who was talking to her did the same. Instinctively, Amanda took a step back, trapping Malone behind the sign displaying the menu for the week. The other parents, walking past them, did not look too surprised by the yell of a kid who was obviously refusing to enter the classroom.

  Just as any other mother would have done, Amanda raised her voice.

  “All the other children are already in school, Malone! Please, hurry up.”


  A few mothers were hanging around still, the usual suspects: Valérie Courtoise and Nathalie Delaplanque, who nodded in agreement with Amanda’s harsh tone. As if encouraged, Amanda pulled even harder on Malone’s hand, tightening her grip on his blue mitten.

  She’d drag him there, if she had to.

  Malone knew the charade. So did Gouti. He let himself slide as if someone had stolen his heart. He did his rag-doll act.

  Suddenly the boy seemed unable to hold himself upright and he collapsed onto the tarmac. Amanda had nothing more in her hands than a limp piece of rubber.

  “Malone, get up!”

  Géraldine Valette, Lola’s mother, had joined her two friends. They were no longer even pretending to chat to each other or to check out the man near the vegetable garden; they were silent, watching Amanda and Malone.

  What choice did they have, anyway?

  If they’d seemed indifferent, it would have been a blatant lack of solidarity for their fellow mother, and if they’d got involved that would have been even more upsetting for poor Amanda. After all, every woman knows that, once she becomes a mother, she will one day have her fifteen minutes of public humiliation. An impolite remark, the child peeing their pants, a hysterical tantrum . . .

  Amanda shouted what any other mother would have shouted:

  “Malone, get up, you’re making your mother ashamed!”

  She didn’t dare literally to drag her son across the playground, for fear of hurting him. He stayed where he was, lying on the tarmac. Now there were eight or nine mothers standing in sympathy outside the gates.

  “Malone, this is the last time I’ll tell you. Get up, or Maman will . . . ”

  Suddenly, the boy yanked hard. Amanda’s hand was left grasping a blue mitten while Malone got to his feet and ran between the cars, screaming as if he wanted the whole village to hear:

  “You’re not my Maman!”

  37

  Marianne Augresse was shivering.

  She had been standing for nearly two hours at the viewpoint on Cap de la Hève.

  She was facing out to sea, where the wind blew in from across five thousand kilometers of flat water before rushing up the Seine estuary.

  At her feet, ashes. Already cold.

  And the things that hadn’t been burned completely. The captain made a mental list. One Guzzi California without tires, without rubber on the handlebars, without a seat: just a shapeless carcass whose only distinguishing feature was the symbol, a silver eagle with its wings outspread.

  One helmet, black and oval, probably deformed by the heat from the flames, like the hollow skull of an extraterrestrial monster with a disproportionally large brain.

  A body, burned to a cinder, with the exception of a pair of glasses, a set of keys, a melted torch and mobile phone, a watch, and the buckle of a belt. As if the journey to heaven meant you had to go through a security check and leave behind anything vaguely metallic.

  Mariane Augresse had no doubt about the identity of the corpse.

  Vasily Dragonman.

  Around her, a dozen cops were busy bagging evidence. The first DNA results would be available in a few hours, and with them clear proof, certainty, the definitive end of her dreams.

  In the meantime, to rid herself of the emotion that threatened to overwhelm her, the captain focused on her work, imagining hypotheses, posing objective questions.

  Why would someone want to murder this school psychologist?

  Because this was not an accident; the crime scene left no doubt about that. The police had found no trace of any collision or skid marks. Besides, Constantini, an officer who owned a Yamaha VMAX—a model that was fairly similar to the Guzzi—had noted immediately that the fuel in the bike’s tank would not have been sufficient to feed a fire of that size and ferocity, at least not without an explosion. Someone had deliberately poured extra fuel on the ground here.

  There was still the possibility of suicide by self-immolation. That was what Judge Dumas had instantly suggested when Marianne called her a few minutes earlier. Throat tight, the captain had replied that she didn’t think so, without adding anything else, without giving any details of the images that flashed past her eyes: the rebellious look on Vasily’s face; his childlike excitement at the beach hut, kneeling over his treasure map; the calculated pauses in his skilled oration; his calm determination; his timid self-assurance . . .

  The captain walked over to the barrier surrounding the viewpoint. She could see the lighthouse, the sea stretching out into infinity. Nothing else: trees blocked her view of the beach at the foot of the cliff. To see that, she’d have had to push through this jungle of junipers, get close to the edge . . .

  “Phone call for you, Captain.”

  Officer Bourdaine stood ten meters behind his superior. Lost in her thoughts, she did not appear to have heard him.

  Why had Vasily Dragonman come to the Cap de la Hève? In the middle of the night. With a torch. Did this fatal expedition have any connection with Malone Moulin’s revelations?

  In her pocket, Marianne’s fist closed around the MP3 player that the school psychologist had given her the day before. He was supposed to come by the station that morning, early, so he could give it back to the kid. He’d promised him.

  Was that why he was murdered? For these seven stories, one for each night of the week?

  Of course, she too had taken the time to listen to them. But all she had heard were seven fairy tales, gently moralistic, quietly amusing, slightly scary, the kind of stories that are told to millions of children every night all over the planet.

  What was the secret they were hiding? A secret so terrible that it had to be concealed inside a cuddly toy? A secret that a child was forced to learn by heart, like a prayer? A secret that someone was willing to commit murder for in order to protect it?

  “Captain! Phone call for you,” Bourdaine repeated.

  38

  Little hand on the 8, big hand on the 8

  There were eight hundred and fifty meters between the Manéglise school and Place Maurice-Ravel, in the center of the Hauts de Manéglise housing estate.

  Eight hundred and fifty meters across which she had to carry Malone home single-handedly.

  He remained still in her arms for the first two hundred meters, then he became more agitated, kicking and punching Amanda in the chest and back, until she stopped, put him down, and yelled at him. She yelled very loud, too loud, and he collapsed in tears. Then she had to hoist the child over her shoulder again, calm and trembling now.

  Eight hundred and fifty meters, and a bystander would have thought the Tour de France was about to go through the village.

  Amanda had the impression that every single inhabitant had decided—on the same day and at the exact same time—to swarm out onto the sidewalks: the drinkers from the Carreau Pique bar, smoking their cigarettes outside; the Vivéco’s customers—babysitters, mothers, people off work and people without work—who’d all chosen to do their shopping that morning; the park-maintenance boys, who’d been repotting petunias on the Route d’Epouville roundabout since the crack of dawn; the old women on the bench on the Route du Calvaire, who looked as if they’d been there all night.

  Amanda didn’t care. Screw them. Screw them all, the inhabitants of this village of the living dead, this open-air hospice. She’d hated them all ever since she was sixteen. Just like she hated the mothers who’d surrounded her outside the school, looking so pleased, so thrilled, to see a mother who was worse off than them, relieved to see misfortune falling on someone else, allowing them to reassure themselves in the light of Malone’s hysteria.

  Did you hear the way he talked to her?

  “You’re not my mother.”

  I swear, if my child said that to me . . .

  Screw those chattering magpies and screw the vultures at the mayor’s office and the parrots in the street
s. She’d grabbed hold of Malone and turned back towards home because she’d realized that the man talking with the headmistress was a cop. And not just any cop.

  The rumors had been circulating outside the school, even before Malone had his tantrum. Rumors are good that way, like the morning news: informing you, and everyone else, of the latest catastrophe about to strike you down.

  The cop was there because a corpse had been found at Cap de la Hève. And everything suggested that the corpse was that of the school psychologist who came to Manéglise every Thursday to talk to certain kids.

  Amanda turned onto Rue Debussy.

  The estate’s cul-de-sacs formed a labyrinth of deserted streets where she would, at last, be left in peace. Everyone worked, leaving their houses early, getting back late, and going off for the weekend. The people who lived here were not really inhabitants, in fact; they were more like permanent guests at a hotel where all they did was sleep, a hotel that they’d had to buy with thirty years of debt, a hotel where they had to clean everything themselves, look after the garden, make breakfast, change their own sheets and unblock their own toilets.

  Malone was sobbing quietly now, and clinging to her neck. He didn’t feel as heavy in this position. Amanda even liked the coolness of his tears running down the back of her neck, the feel of his cuddly toy’s fur against her skin, the rhythm of Malone’s heartbeat echoing hers.

  She’d be home in less than five minutes.

  Safe and sound.

  Or apparently so. Inside her head, her thoughts were flying all over the place.

  What should she do next?

  Stay alone in the house? As if nothing was happening.

  Dimitri would return at noon, as he did every day.

  Should she talk to him? Make a decision together. The right decision. If there was one . . .

  Dogs barked, invisible behind hedges. Little dogs pretending to be watchdogs, probably. As if every inhabitant of this maze had bought their own personal Minotaur. Each villager barricaded inside his own home, tuned to Radio Village. The people of Manéglise talked to their neighbors. News of Vasily Dragonman’s death would have spread across the village at the speed of a postman or a baker’s van. A journalist had already posted an article about it on grand-havre.com, along with a photograph of a circle of ashes on Cap de la Hève and punctuated by an army of question marks in only three sentences. They knew Who, they knew Where. But they still had to find out Why and By whom.