The Double Mother

by Michel Bussi

  It was a crazy plan, a house of cards that might collapse at any moment.

  A meticulously prepared plan, developed over months, its final details added at the last minute; last night, in fact, when she’d realized that Alexis Zerda was beginning to scorch the earth around him, getting rid of any inconvenient witnesses.

  In the darkness, the irritating sound of high heels clacking on the ground dragged her from her thoughts. Rapid, jerky footsteps. An employee, late for her shift? A working girl in a hurry? An elegant woman rushing to meet her lover?

  So close to her. Invisible.

  Angélique forced herself to remain focused on her memories. Yes, that plan was unreal, mad, unrealistic, but she had no choice. She had to build that house of cards, wall by wall. Each one was fragile, but together they could hold each other up. She just had to separate them, compartmentalize them, and be the only one who knew the plan in its entirety. That wasn’t difficult, when it came down to it. She knew all about the arts of seduction and persuasion.

  Seducing a single man was easy: she had everything she needed to do that.

  Seducing a single woman was perhaps even simpler. Single women are suspicious of men, not of the perfect new best friend.

  Vasily Dragonman. Marianne Augresse.

  The rest was in the hands of her son. Malone. She had to call him Malone, to cram that name into his head. Had he followed her instructions to the letter? Had he listened to all those stories that she’d recorded, disguising her voice, and hiding all this from Alexis of course. How could that killer have imagined that her vengeance would take the form of fairy tales and a cuddly rat that knew the only way to get rid of ogres?

  The sharp heels were already receding, giving way for the first time to laughter. Children’s laughter. And, louder than that, a few seconds later, the yelling of a mother.

  Crude, vulgar. Without any humor or tenderness, without any justification; the yelling of a prison guard, as if her children’s joy was an insult to her existence, as if her children’s lives belonged to her, like they were objects to be tidied away. To be polished until they shone. To be broken, out of negligence or anger.

  Want-to-kill.

  The kids were already moving in the other direction, followed by the mother’s clicking footsteps.

  Her plan, when Angélique thought about it, reminded her of her oldest memories. Strange memories that dated back to when she was fourteen, and to a collection of short stories that her French teacher had made her read, a science-fiction book with a series of stories about the colonization of Mars by humans. Crazy stuff. The Martians, before they were all killed by the humans, possessed strange powers, such as their appearance changing, depending on who was looking at them. One of the last surviving Martians was hidden in a remote farmhouse, where the human colonists had viewed him as their son, a boy who’d died years before. He’d stayed there, loved and sheltered, until his adoptive parents took him to the city. Bad idea. In the street, one woman saw the Martian as her husband, who’d died a few days earlier, another man as the wife who’d left him, another person as a friend who’d remained buried on Earth . . . Even though the Martian tried to flee, someone always recognized him, took him by the hand, or the waist, or the neck, begged him to stay, not to disappear again. And that was how he died, torn apart and trampled on by a crowd of grieving humans who loved him without being able to share him.

  Now, she understood that story. It was what must not happen to her son.

  Malone, for Amanda.

  Malone for her too, from now on.

  Her son, even if he bore another child’s name.

  A cardboard box crumpled beneath her weight, and Angélique had to hold on to the two walls, praying that the entire edifice would not collapse. She breathed out: the pyramid held firm, even if she had the impression that her improvised throne was continuing to subside, imperceptibly, millimeter by millimeter. That she might crash to earth at any moment.

  Not now, she prayed, not when she was so close to her goal. Her cardboard house only had to stay up a few minutes longer.

  After that, they would have an eternity to build another, in the brightest clearing in the biggest forest in the world.

  Far away.

  A house of stone, solid, indestructible.

  For her family.

  Herself, Timo, and their child.

  62

  Today, for my hen party, my three friends decided to parade me along the Champs-Élysées dressed as a Mexican whore, wearing fishnet stockings, fake breasts and a sombrero.

  Want to kill

  I didn’t say a word when the tourist bus arrived just as they were stepping back to take a photo of me. Moments later, they were disguised as enchiladas.

  Convicted: 19

  Acquitted: 1,632

  www.want-to-kill.com

  Lieutenant Lechevalier did not hesitate before taking off his shoes and rolling his canvas trousers up to his knees. He paddled through the thirty centimeters of water that lapped at the stilts, apparently untroubled by the cold bite of the rising sea. After reaching beneath the rickety wooden house, he stood up, soaked, exhibiting a coat covered in blood.

  “That’s all I found.”

  Marianne, in the dry on the doorstep, observed the trench coat: obviously a woman’s, but quite large. JB insisted on sliding his latex gloves over the saturated cloth.

  “Given the amount of blood soaked up by the material, I think it’s safe to say that Zerda didn’t just give Amanda Moulin a scratch. Going by the stains, I would say several bullets, to the chest, stomach and lungs. She has to be dead.”

  The captain grimaced. JB was rarely wrong about the ballistic aspects of an investigation.

  “Hardly a surprise,” she sighed. “No sign of the body?”

  “No,” JB confirmed. “Nor of the kid, for that matter.”

  “With a bit of luck, Zerda will stick to the same strategy: one corpse for each location. The kid is still with him.”

  “You think Malone will be next on the list?”

  Marianne stared at her deputy.

  “Unless we stop him. Take this house apart, bolt by bolt if you have to, and find Amanda Moulin’s corpse. Zerda can’t have carried it back up the steps, and it wouldn’t have been carried away by the tide yet. This was the place where the Rue des Gryzon´s gang spent months planning their robbery. So I also want you to find me a nice collection of souvenirs of their seaside holiday.”

  JB went into the house, barefoot, his wet sky-blue shirt sticking to his skin. Marianne, phone to her ear, mobilized the operational logistics division of the DCPJ, the judicial police’s central management.

  “Can you hear me? Yes, it’s Captain Augresse! I want the highest alert possible put out for Alexis Zerda and Timo Soler. Photos, posters, emails, faxes . . . flood the entire region!”

  For a moment, she glanced up at the sky.

  “And make sure that their photos are all over the walls of the Havre-Octeville airport. Make sure everyone working there gets to see them. We’re only five kilometers away and I don’t believe in coincidences.”

  * * *

  The sea had risen an extra twenty centimeters or so. Police officers were going to and fro, from the stairway to the house, carefully carrying the equipment necessary to analyze the crime scene. They hadn’t dared take the time to remove their shoes and trousers, so they were walking fully-dressed through the knee-high water, staggering on the smooth pebbles scattered by the swell.

  Inside the house, Marianne stepped carefully along the vinyl flooring, which was coming unstuck in places and was slippery from the puddles of water left by the policemen’s soaked boots. Alone in the bedroom, JB seemed indifferent to the general bustle around him. He was sitting at an improvised desk that consisted of a plank and two trestles, eyes riveted to the screen of a laptop.

  The
salty water was still trickling down his back, and his shirt clung to his more prominent muscles: trapezius, lats, and lower back. Marianne thought he looked sexy, indifferent to being wet, like those footballers who play for ninety minutes in the pouring rain, hair slicked back, thighs gleaming, so focused on the match that they don’t even notice the torrent. That was the only interesting aspect of watching a football match, as far as she was concerned.

  So handsome, those idiots, those bastards.

  JB, sensing her presence behind him, turned to face the captain.

  “It’s Zerda’s laptop. He’s erased everything, but I’m going to try a bit of digging. You never know.”

  Marianne did not object. Logically, they should have passed the computer on to the Central IT and Tracing Department, but time was short. JB was a whizz with computers. And a child’s life hung in the balance . . .

  If he was still alive.

  The captain feared that a DNA analysis would reveal that the blood found on the trench coat or the carpet was mixed with another person’s—that of a three-year-old boy—and that they would find not only the mother’s corpse, any minute now, in a cupboard or under a floorboard, but two corpses. One of them smaller.

  She shivered.

  “You OK, Marianne?”

  The captain thought about telling her deputy where to stick it. He was the one who was soaked yet she was the one who was shivering.

  Handsome, stupid, and proud as a peacock.

  “Captain? It’s for you!”

  Bourdaine stood outside, both feet in the sea, reminding Marianne of a weeping willow: thin legs close together like a trunk, and wet arms holding a phone a few centimeters above the water’s surface. Marianne grabbed it.

  “Boss? It’s Lucas! You’re going to be proud of me—I found young Malone in the photo!”

  “Photo? What photo?”

  Lucas started again, more slowly, like an old hand explaining things to a confused newbie.

  “One of the six hundred and twenty-seven that were gathered after the shoot-out in Deauville. Kindly taken for us by the dozens of tourists who immortalized the scene for our police archives.”

  “OK, keep it short. You’re sure it’s Malone?”

  “Absolutely, boss! I’ve sent you a J-PEG. Officer Bourdaine has opened it already: all you have to do is slide your finger from left to right.”

  “Thank you,” said Marianne sarcastically. “I do know how to use a touch screen!” Her thumb slid across the plastic while the intern went on:

  “And that’s not all, boss. Guess who’s holding Malone’s hand in the photo?”

  Annoyed by the way Lucas kept calling her “boss” every three words, the captain was about to reprimand him when the image appeared, at the very moment Marouette answered his own question:

  “His mother.”

  In the small photograph, a crowd of several dozen people were gathered in a line outside the casino. Nervously, Marianne put her thumb and index finger on the screen to enlarge the picture and then scrolled past a row of faces, the vast majority of whom belonged to couples in their sixties or older.

  “Under the one-way sign, boss,” said Lucas. “Next to a big bald guy, who’s about a head taller than everyone else.”

  A one-way sign.

  A big bald guy.

  Go down.

  When she saw Malone’s face, Marianne immediately thought of Munch’s Scream, that distorted face expressing sudden, unbearable madness and horror.

  The captain’s eyes dwelled on Malone’s features, as if fascinated by the terror in his eyes, contrasting with the almost indifferent reactions of the other bystanders. Then, at last, her gaze moved along slightly until it was resting on the woman who was holding his hand.

  His Maman. Timo Soler’s partner.

  For an instant, she thought the house on stilts was tipping over into the water, being carried away by the sea.

  No, she was the one who was keeling over.

  She grabbed the doorway with her left hand while her right hand suddenly lost all its strength and dropped the mobile phone into the sea.

  Bourdaine, stupefied, continued standing there, not moving a muscle to rescue the phone.

  * * *

  Angie . . .

  Angélique was Malone’s mother.

  Everything flickered quickly, very quickly, through Marianne’s head . . .

  Their meeting, ten months ago, after they first encountered each other on the want-to-kill.com website. An anonymous complaint about that site had been personally addressed to the captain. It was just another website, one of millions across the globe, only this one was hosted somewhere in Le Havre. The captain had no difficulty locating it, with help from the IT Department. She summoned the girl who was hosting the site, Angélique Fontaine, who confirmed that she’d created it years before, when she was a teenager, a trashy version of the better-known life-is-shit.com. For years, want-to-kill.com had gone on without her. A few people still posted messages sometimes, but it got no more than a few hundred views per month. Angélique didn’t mind if the site was closed down; her adolescent ravings were a thing of the past now. The captain had sent a standard report to the state prosecutor and let him decide what action was to be taken.

  There had been an instant connection between her and Angélique. She was pretty, cheerful, and kind, without having completely lost her teenage insolence. It was Angélique who had got back in touch with her the following day, on the pretext of providing her with additional evidence for the want-to-kill.com file: old copies of emails and invoices from the site’s host. They went out for a drink one night, as Angélique worked in a hairdressing salon during the day. Then they met up again one week later, for dinner at Uno. Of course, it had all been calculated, a set-up. Including the anonymous letter that had started it all.

  Marianne looked down at the mobile phone floating on the surface of the water. The waves lifted it up, leaving gray foam on the screen, but it didn’t sink, presumably because of the silicon shell.

  She had not been suspicious of Angie. Why should she have been? She had hardly told Angie anything about the investigations she was running. Just Malone Moulin’s name and details of her conversation with Vasily Dragonman. She had not even mentioned Timo Soler before she’d tried to catch him in the Neiges quarter, when Angélique had called her in the police car. She must simply have heard the GPS blare out: “Cross the Pont V . . . ” Which would have made it easy for her to realize that it wasn’t Dr. Larochelle on his way to treat her beloved, but the police . . . Angélique had been skilful enough not to question Marianne directly about any of her investigations, being content to monitor her, to know where she was and when she was there. To keep control of her, in some way.

  Lucas Marouette’s voice continued to bellow through the telephone-raft, as if the young policeman were enclosed in a miniature coffin floating in the sea. His words were inaudible, or Marianne didn’t hear them.

  She was trying to remember, going over the long hours they had spent in conversation, anything about the case that she might have revealed to Angélique.

  Almost nothing. They’d talked about men, clothes, books, films . . . and children. Children most of all.

  Other people’s children.

  Nothing too serious. Just a monumental case of professional misconduct.

  From her pocket, her fingers extricated the drawing she’d found behind the photograph in Malone’s album. Five words. The star, the tree, the presents, the family.

  Noel Joyeux

  N’oublie Jamais

  Feminine handwriting. A mother with long hair. How could she have been so stupid?

  Nobody said “Noel Joyeux.” The normal expression was “Joyeux Noel.”

  And as for “N’oublie Jamais” . . .

  N.J.

  When you said the letters ou
t loud, it sounded just like . . . Angie.

  Malone already knew how to recognize most of the letters of the alphabet. That drawing was a clever way of making him remember his mother’s name, subliminally at least. A secret code to add to the tales of Gouti which she had recorded for her son. Captain Augresse understood now why the voice had been altered.

  She’d been duped.

  Marianne suppressed the desire to throw herself off the threshold of the house. It was a pathetic urge: there wasn’t enough water to drown her, and too much for her to break her neck. Bourdaine was still standing there, arms dangling, waiting for an order. He might have stayed like that until high tide.

  The captain finally concentrated on Marouette’s voice coming from the silicon rectangle. With a movement of her head, she ordered Bourdaine to pick up the phone.

  It dribbled water onto her shoulder as Lucas continued shouting.

  So it still worked, apparently.

  “Boss? Where were you? I’ve got all the information you need on Malone Moulin’s mother. Her name is Angélique Fontaine. And guess what, boss—she’s from Potigny too! She grew up on Impasse Copernic, three streets away from Rue des Gryzon´s. I checked on Mappy. She was in the same class as Soler until she was fifteen. After that—on her sixteenth birthday, in fact—she left the village. I suppose she met Timo again afterwards and . . . ”

  Captain Augresse hung up, without even waiting for Marouette to finish his account. In the same second, she pressed another speed-dial.

  “Operational Logistics? It’s Augresse again. We’ve got more news, so can you get on this straight away! I want you to add a third photo to the ones of Zerda and Soler. It’s a woman. Angélique Fontaine. Contact the station—they have the photo. I want it printed immediately and distributed everywhere in the area. Stations, toll booths . . . I want mobile brigades posted at every roundabout.”