The Double Mother

by Michel Bussi

“Lucas? I want you to read through the Deauville robbery file, concentrating on Timo Soler. I want his whole life story, from childhood on. Papy’s in Potigny, the village where Soler grew up. He might find new information there, but in the meantime, give me everything you can find on the man’s private life, especially any clues that he might have had a child, a child he was bringing up with his girlfriend. Better still, identify her.”

  Cabral slammed on the brakes behind a Peugeot 207; the student driver seemed to have been panicked by the siren. Marianne grabbed hold of the door, without letting go of her phone, briefly thinking about her poor, battered nose.

  “I want that girl’s name!” she yelled at Marouette, without giving him time to reply.

  The police car overtook the 207, which was blocking the only entrance to the shopping center ahead of them. They went past a parking lot that seemed to go on forever, like a field of tarmac where some mad farmer had sowed some cars. Multicolored, lined up in perfect rows, ready to be harvested.

  Marianne’s gaze fell on the red and green bird looking down from the immense façade of the Auchan hypermarket. At noon on a Friday, the Mont-Gaillard shopping center was already as busy as it was during a weekend sale.

  Officer Cabral went across another roundabout, as the cars moved to the side to let them pass.

  “I should use the siren next time I want to go shopping here,” he joked.

  Marianne wasn’t listening. She had turned off her mobile and her eyes remained glued to the shop signs that were flashing past. According to Vasily, it was here—in this shopping center—that young Malone claimed to have seen his mother for the last time. His real mother, the one before Amanda Moulin.

  A mother who was hiding out in an apartment in the Neiges quarter with Timo Soler? Who’d handed over her child, ten months before, to a stranger?

  But why?

  Why hand over her child, and at the same time concoct the craziest of stratagems—an MP3 player sewn into the belly of a cuddly toy—so that the boy would remember her? How was it even possible since that kid, Malone, had lived with the Moulins since birth, had grown up with them during the first three years of his life?

  Could he have two families? Alternating custody, shared between two mothers? Each trying to erase the memory of the other in order to keep the boy for herself?

  “Manéglise, 12 kilometers, 9 minutes,” the panicked GPS corrected itself.

  Cabral had gained seven minutes on the duration of the trip announced by the stubborn female voice. As if it were a personal competition between them.

  “Go faster, Cabral,” Marianne hissed.

  No female solidarity.

  Ahead of them, a water tower, entirely painted with marine motifs, looked like a lighthouse lost in the middle of some fields. Was it there to direct tractors lost in the countryside?

  It’s all one case, thought Marianne again. Timo Soler, Alexis Zerda, Vasily Dragonman, Malone Moulin. All of it connected, right from the beginning.

  Two families.

  One child.

  It didn’t make sense.

  50

  Little hand on the 1, big hand on the 2

  The Ford Kuga crawled forward. The narrow road ran between two embankments covered with vegetation; there was barely room for the SUV to pass between the branches of hornbeams and chestnuts. The Kuga’s large wheels rolled smoothly over the road’s ruts and the tufts of grass growing through the tarmac.

  Zerda turned to Malone.

  “Open your eyes, boy. My car is a time machine. You know, like in Back to the Future? Are you ready for your trip?”

  The child looked at him, not understanding. Ahead of them, the horizon seemed to grow wider between the thick silhouettes of oaks that were almost intertwined.

  Amanda, sitting in the passenger seat, wrung her hands.

  A time machine.

  She thought about telling Zerda to be quiet. But, really, what would that change?

  Alexis had no idea how to communicate with a young kid. She did, but what could she do apart from pray that Malone had erased everything from his brain and that the snake behind the wheel believed it? Pray that Zerda was convinced that Malone no longer represented a danger to him.

  She imagined the brain of a child as being something like a computer. Even when you put things in the bin, when you thought you’d got rid of them—emails, files, photographs—they were still there, somewhere, hidden. All you had to do was ask someone who knew about computers and they could find them, months or even years later . . . The only effective method was to throw the computer out of a window, from the fifteenth floor, drive over it, or toss it in the fire.

  She just hoped that Zerda wasn’t thinking that way. He was driving in silence now, wearing sunglasses even though what little sunlight there was came filtered through the trees.

  Amanda turned to Malone. He was calm, staring through the window, as if used to long silent drives. The timid sun was playing hide-and-seek with his light brown hair. Next to him, on the back seat, Amanda had thrown the bag in which she kept all the important documents: family record book, passports, medical files. Zerda had told her to bring everything, without giving any indication of where they were going.

  As she swivelled to look at Malone, Amanda’s legs came closer to Alexis’s. He stroked her left knee, just before putting the car into second gear.

  Amanda sat back in her seat again.

  He wasn’t even coming on to her, she thought. There was nothing sexy about her anymore; she had long ago stopped believing in all that stuff: attraction, seduction, and so on.

  Amanda’s idea of attractiveness was limited to smiling at her customers in the minimarket and looking clean and well-rested, not even elegant or made-up. For the rest, she had given up on the game of romantic love. There were too many cheats. She thought of love as a swindle aimed at suckers, like those lottery tickets she sold to her customers. They never won, or if they did it was always a tiny amount, just enough to keep them wanting to play, never the jackpot that would set them up for life.

  She might not be the cleverest person in the world, but at least she understood that. Disappointment. Dimitri had taught her well on that particular front. No, Alexis’s hand on her knee was not an attempt at seduction, it was simply a reflex, born from an assumption of male dominance.

  Zerda fiddled with the car radio. He turned up the volume at the back of the car while reducing it at the front.

  RTL2. Freddie Mercury was singing the first words of “Bohemian Rhapsody” against the notes from a piano.

  Amanda realized that Alexis wanted to talk to her without Malone hearing. All the same, she had to listen hard to catch each word that whistling voice of his uttered. No way was she going to move even a centimeter closer to him.

  “Don’t worry, Amanda. I know what you’re thinking, but I won’t hurt him. If I was going to do anything to him, I’d have done it a long time ago, which would have made everything a lot simpler. I’m a dangerous man—a piece of shit, a bastard, call me what you want—but I wouldn’t harm a kid.”

  He’d lifted up his sunglasses so he could look at her with his snake’s eyes.

  It was impossible to trust him.

  His hand slid off the gear stick and back up Amanda’s thigh.

  Caressing her jeans. Crappy jeans, bought for ten euros at the local market.

  Just a reflex, showing he’s the dominant male, she repeated in her head. A habit. Almost a form of politeness.

  Without a word, she gently pushed his hand away.

  A thin smile spread across his face, although he turned his eyes back to the road.

  “I’m not like Dimitri,” he added. “I don’t hurt kids.”

  With his right hand, he rummaged inside the glove compartment, then handed Amanda a photograph that had been trapped beneath a road map.

 
“I took this with me before I left. Dimitri gave it to me. Do you recognize it?”

  Malone.

  “You have to speak to the kid, Amanda. It’s better if you explain it to him rather than the cops. I’ll be long gone by then.”

  For an instant, Amanda stared at the landscape that opened up behind a new house surrounded by low hedges, then the path forked and they were driving between thick embankments again.

  “Think about it, Amanda. So he understands what’s happening to him. I don’t think they’ll let you keep Malone after this.”

  He turned up the volume on the radio with his fingertip. Freddie’s piano faded and Brian May’s guitar took over.

  Amanda’s brain was a computer too. It had resisted a ten-meter fall, a truck driving over it, and the flames of Hell.

  Her memory was still intact. A simple photo placed in her hand was enough to bring back images of the past, stored in her brain like a DVD kept at the back of a drawer.

  Malone.

  It was ten months ago—December 23, to be precise.

  Brief scenes flashed past. The birth of Malone. Malone crawling outside his bedroom on the upstairs carpet. Malone standing in the park. His first steps. His first words. His first teeth. Malone crying. Malone laughing. His mother sweating, in a permanent state of alert. Malone, such a daredevil, climbing, exploring, walking tightropes. His mother’s infinite precautions: the bars screwed to his cot, the straps fastened to his high chair, the bolted barriers at the top and bottom of the stairs, always closed behind her.

  Malone.

  In her nervous hands, the photograph warped, distorting the child’s face.

  She remembered how she’d screamed when she found Malone’s body at the bottom of the stairs, the laundry basket falling from her hands. Dimitri, glass in hand, who was supposed to be watching over the child. Ten meters away from him, and he saw nothing, said nothing, did nothing.

  Accident and emergency. Hope. Waiting.

  The diagnosis.

  A few hours in a coma. Brain trauma. Malone would live.

  Probably.

  But we don’t know any more than that. We have to wait.

  Coming out of the Joliot-Curie private clinic, eleven days later, away from the eyes of neighbors, cousins, friends, suspicion, and shame. As far as those people were concerned, they had gone on holiday to Brittany to visit Mont-Saint-Michel, the ramparts of Saint-Malo and the aquarium. They’d have time to explain, later.

  The return to Manéglise, with Malone.

  The after-effects.

  Malone the daredevil who now never left his chair; Malone the tightrope-walker, now incapable of dressing himself, feeding himself, going to the toilet; Malone the explorer, who now moved nothing but his eyes, and who seemed only to see what was minuscule—smaller than himself, at least—insects, flies, ants, butterflies. Those things that moved around him when he was put down somewhere.

  The rest—the bigger things, the real, important, living things—he no longer noticed: not flowers, not trees, not cars.

  Nor even his mother.

  Amanda touched her fingertip to the sad face of the boy in the photograph. Malone had just come out of the hairdresser’s; he had a right-hand parting with the fringe covering his forehead and he was wearing his check shirt from Du Pareil Au Méme, the one that was too tight for him. Strangely, she didn’t think he was handsome anymore. His eyes were inexpressive, too close together, and his nose was too big—he got that from Dimitri. She turned slightly towards Zerda, shielding the photograph with her left hand, so Malone—who was still staring out the window—wouldn’t see it.

  Freddie was still singing. This song went on forever.

  Amanda had never talked about the accident with anyone, except for Professor Lacroix, head of the department that treated Malone at the Joliot-Curie clinic. She’d decided to wait until Malone was better before she told those around her; laughing about the huge scare they’d had, the terrible ordeal they’d been through. According to Professor Lacroix, there was a fifteen percent chance that Malone would recover completely. And if fate went the other way—towards the thirty-three percent chance that everything would quickly get worse—she would close the shutters, barricade herself in her house and never speak to anyone again.

  It was a question of love, Professor Lacroix had told her. Love and money, Amanda quickly understood. On the internet, she found an American laboratory that operated on cerebral lesions, replacing the damaged neurones through the stimulation of new axons, or at least that was her understanding. They were the only team in the world to practice that kind of neurosurgery. It cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for even a simple operation, but Professor Lacroix seemed sceptical when Amanda handed him the printout.

  It’s a question of love, Mrs. Moulin, not money.

  No need to draw her a picture. She got it. She knew all about disappointment.

  The days passed. Malone’s condition stabilized. Or appeared to.

  Except that other kids of his age developed, started talking more, counting, drawing. He didn’t.

  Or at least he did, but only with flies, butterflies and ants. She helped him as best she could, taking an interest, playing with those damned insects the way other mothers would collect pearls or beads for their children.

  He was examined every three days. To establish a longitudinal diagnosis, as the doctors explained.

  Amanda looked at the photo again. Read the words on it.

  Malone, September 29, 2014.

  The picture had been taken in front of the Needle Rock in Étretat, three months before the accident. That day, Malone had spent the afternoon running after the seagulls on the sea wall.

  The last letter from the Joliot-Curie clinic arrived on January 17, 2015, along with two bills. Amanda had learned how to read between the lines of the medical reports. She wasn’t so stupid, when she put her mind to it. She’d gently let the sheet of paper fall from her hands.

  Malone was doomed. He had only a few weeks to live. They’d found a crack inside his brain, a tiny crack, but it was growing little by little, at increasing speed, endangering his vital functions; a fissure between the brainstem and the spinal cord, precisely in the part of the brain known as the Pons Varolii, which controls motor functions and the senses.

  And it was cracking.

  Inexorably.

  Malone’s life expectancy was no longer than that of a dragonfly, a butterfly, or an ant.

  A mayfly.

  It was as if he’d always known.

  Amanda opened the window and slowly tore the photograph into strips, before tearing them again until the picture was confetti, which she scattered in the wind. Alexis Zerda, hands on the wheel, still wore the same frozen smile. Like some facial tic. Unless that was his way of trying to look reassuring.

  Amanda closed the window.

  Freddie came to the end of his song, his voice very quiet, in contrast to his usual vocal pyrotechnics.

  Piano and voice, back to the beginning.

  Dimitri hadn’t said anything that morning. He’d just read the clinic’s letter, then put his glass on the table and put on his coat.

  She could still hear the door banging shut, the car starting up.

  He hadn’t dared talk to her about it. He’d been thinking about the idea, at the back of his head, for a few days now.

  Maybe he was hoping for forgiveness. As if Amanda might one day look at him without that contempt, that absolute disgust.

  He left without a word.

  To find a second child.

  The way you might replace a dead dog with another one.

  51

  Today, Christmas Eve, that bearded fuckwit turned up without an iPhone 6, without an iPad, without a Nintendo 3DS, but with a language exchange trip to Frankfurt and a subscription to Acadomia.

 
Want to kill

  My little sister never even had a chance to believe in Father Christmas. He’s up the chimney, burning with his sack.

  Convicted: 853

  Acquitted: 18

  www.want-to-kill.com

  “Maybe he didn’t want to try his Carambar cake?”

  Marianne Augresse rolled her eyes at Officer Bourdaine. She was standing in the entrance hall, next to the cherry-wood coat rack, looking from room to room. The kitchen and the living room. In fact, Bourdaine’s inappropriate comment didn’t seem that stupid, on the face of it.

  In the kitchen, you would have sworn that Amanda Moulin was about to appear at any moment tea towel in one hand, sponge in the other and shout cheerfully to her family: “It’s ready! Come and eat!”

  The table was set. Tomato and mozzarella salad in the fridge. Fresh bread. Cake in the oven, slightly burnt. That was the only false note.

  In the living room, everything had gone mad. Dimitri Moulin was lying on the rug with Japanese patterns that vaguely resembled water lilies. They were now floating, not on a lake, but in a pool of half-dried blood.

  A bullet between the eyes.

  No weapon visible.

  And no witnesses. Amanda and Malone Moulin had disappeared.

  The Moulins’ car was still in the garage; they’d checked. Everything suggested that Amanda Moulin had shot her husband, then fled with her son. Or her supposed son, anyway. On foot?

  Marianne Augresse took a step forward, to the door of the little cupboard under the stairs. She was still struck by the contrast between the two rooms, one scene homely, the other the scene of a crime, as if the two places were separated by an insurmountable barrier; two universes that could not be connected. At least not like this. Not so brutally.

  There was something else.

  Marianne forced herself not to get drawn into hypotheses that, for the moment, led nowhere. After all, she just had to let the forensics team do their job; it wouldn’t take them long to find out if someone else had been in the room, even if there was only one glass of whisky on the living room table; even if—according to his boss—Dimitri Moulin had left work at about eleven thirty, and had, therefore, been killed less than thirty minutes after arriving home for lunch.