After the Crash: A Novel

by Michel Bussi

  Marc put his hand inside the handbag once more.

  “Don’t do that, Vitral!” she shouted.

  “Getting warm, am I?” He smirked. “What are you hiding in here?”

  Marc’s hand rummaged around the contents of the bag: keys, a telephone, a lipstick, a wallet (also fake crocodile skin), a silver pen, a small diary…

  Malvina’s hands began to shake. Apparently, the diary was something she did not want him to see. He took a closer look at it: it was not actually a diary at all, just a simple notebook, about three inches by four. Marc guessed the reason for Malvina’s terror. This must be some sort of private journal.

  “Open it and you’re dead, Vitral.”

  “So talk. What do you know about Grand-Duc?”

  “Seriously, I will kill you…”

  “Suit yourself.”

  Marc flicked through the pages one-handed. They were all laid out in the same way: the left-hand page had been illustrated by Malvina with drawings, photographs, and collages, while the right contained three lines of childish handwriting, like short poems.

  He suspected he was the first person other than Malvina to have read this notebook. He skimmed through the pages, stopping randomly at a page containing the image of the Crucifixion—except that the head on Christ’s naked body had been replaced by that of a smolderingly handsome young man, probably a TV star Marc had never heard of. In a quiet voice, he read out the words on the page opposite:

  Kneading your curves, with my rosary,

  Touching your body, on the cross,

  I offer myself to you

  “You dirty little minx,” Marc sniggered. “Is this what you think about at Mass when you’re looking at the image of Jesus?”

  “Shut your fucking mouth!” Malvina yelled. “You’re too stupid to understand. They’re haiku. Japanese poems.”

  “What about your grandmother? Is she too stupid to understand them, too? Maybe I should send her a text…”

  Malvina frowned.

  “So… either you start talking or I keep reading. What do you know about Grand-Duc?”

  “Fuck you.”

  Marc ripped the page from the notebook, scrunched it up into a ball, and tossed it through the opening at the top of the window.

  “You’re right. I have to be honest. That poem was crap. Shall we try another page? Come on, let’s play a game. I ask you about Grand-Duc, you fail to reply, I read a page. If I don’t like it, I throw it out the window; if I do like it, I send a text to your grandma.”

  Marc flicked through the pages, laughing loudly. His laughter was forced, though. In truth, he felt bad about invading Malvina’s privacy in this way. She had curled up like a defenseless little bird. Each page he ripped out was like a feather from her wings.

  Marc stopped at a photograph of an Airbus, carefully cut out and stuck to a picture of a fireplace.

  Bird of fire

  Angel in hell

  My flesh

  “That’s not bad,” Marc said.

  His throat tightened, but he did not want to show Malvina that he was moved.

  “Except for that last line: ‘My flesh.’ You ought to have at least added a question mark. So… out the window it goes!”

  Malvina shivered as the ball of paper disappeared into the rushing air.

  “Still nothing you want to tell me, Malvina? What were you doing at Grand-Duc’s place?”

  “Fuck off and die!”

  “As you wish…”

  More pages flashed past, until Marc came to a photograph of a little girl’s bedroom, apparently cut from a furniture catalog. On the right-hand page, Malvina had stuck a photograph of Banjo, the enormous teddy bear. In the middle of the room, on the bed, another picture had been superimposed: a photograph of Lylie. She was sitting cross-legged and she looked about eight or nine years old. Another photograph stolen by Grand-Duc…

  Marc forced himself to read in a neutral voice:

  Forgotten toys

  I missed you

  Abandoned?

  “You bastard,” Malvina whispered. “And to think I showed you Lyse-Rose’s room…”

  “I’m waiting…”

  Malvina gave Marc the finger.

  The page was scrunched up. Out the window it went.

  Marc looked through the notebook more carefully now. He had to find something that would push Malvina beyond what she could bear. He stopped at one of the final pages. The left-hand page was illustrated with a photograph of Lylie and himself. It was easy to date: July 10, 1998, less than three months ago. Lylie had just received her baccalaureate exam results. She had passed with flying colors, of course. She and Marc were hugging on the beach in Dieppe.

  Marc smiled to himself. So Crédule Grand-Duc, or maybe Nazim, had played at being paparazzi. Fair enough. They were on the de Carvilles’ payroll, after all. And Grand-Duc had not attempted to conceal the fact in his notebook. Except that, in this particular photograph, Lylie’s face had been replaced by Malvina’s. It was grotesque: that ugly, stunted little head stuck on the body of a goddess.

  Tonelessly, Marc read:

  Holding your lovers

  Moaning, alone

  A delicious game

  Malvina closed her eyes. She looked like a little mouse, caught in a trap. Marc fought the impulse to give her back the journal, to stand up and leave her there. In truth, Malvina was just another victim, crushed by the accident on Mont Terri. Just like he was.

  She was a child who, waking up one morning, had spied a monster in the mirror. A child drowning in a filthy pool of forbidden feelings. And yet, Marc found himself speaking words more hurtful than the bullets of the Mauser that he continued to aim at her: “Shall I keep this one, Malvina? Or send it to your grandmother?”

  Malvina, staring out at the featureless landscape beyond the window, was wringing her hands so frantically that Marc feared she might actually pull off one of her fingers. Dry-throated, he twisted the knife.

  “Or maybe I should show it to Lylie. I think she’d find it amusing.”

  He began to tear out the page. Slowly, as if in a trance, Malvina spoke: “Grand-Duc called my grandmother the day before yesterday. He was still alive then. He told her he had found something. The solution to the mystery, or so he claimed. Just like that, at five minutes to midnight on the last day of his contract! Just before he was about to shoot himself in the head, with the edition of the Est Républicain from December 23, 1980, spread out on the desk beneath him. He said he needed a day or two to gather evidence, but he was absolutely sure that he had solved the mystery. Oh, and he needed an extra one hundred and fifty thousand francs…”

  Marc closed Malvina’s journal.

  “How do you know all that?”

  “I listened in, on the extension. I know how to be so quiet that people don’t even realize I’m there. It’s a sort of gift.”

  “Did your grandmother believe him?”

  “No idea. But she agreed to pay. She doesn’t care about money. Grand-Duc had been playing her for eighteen years. One more day hardly mattered…”

  “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “Did you believe him?”

  Malvina’s face froze in an expression of incredulity.

  “What? You think it’s believable, do you? Finding the solution like that, with the wave of a magic wand, just before midnight? You think that seems likely?”

  Marc did not reply. Through the window, the apple orchards of the Scie valley gave way to cornfields. Malvina continued, in a quiet voice: “I went to Grand-Duc’s house because I wanted to see him. I wanted to tell him to stop jerking us around. I wanted to say to him that it was over: Lyse-Rose was eighteen; she was old enough to decide for herself. You’ve read the whole investigation, and so have I. I know all the details: the bracelet, the piano, the ring… the solution is obvious. You said it yourself at the Roseraie: Lyse-Rose is the one who survived. Emilie died in the airplane eighteen years ago. You can tell y
our grandmother that. It’s what you think, isn’t it? And she does, too.”

  Yes, that was what Marc thought. Malvina was right.

  “So who did kill Grand-Duc, if it wasn’t you?”

  “No idea. And I couldn’t care less.”

  “Your grandmother? So she wouldn’t have to pay him?”

  Malvina giggled. “For a measly one hundred and fifty thousand francs? Come off it…”

  “Did Grand-Duc tell your grandmother how he planned to gather the evidence he needed?”

  “Yes. He said he had to go to the Jura Mountains. My grandmother was supposed to send the money to a rental cottage on the Doubs River, close to Mont Terri.”

  To the Jura Mountains? Was this the detective’s famous pilgrimage? But why?

  “What was he going to do there?” Marc asked. “Look for the evidence he told your grandmother about?”

  “He was taking advantage. Milking my grandmother for every last penny.”

  Marc said nothing. He stood up, put the Mauser in his jacket pocket, and gave Malvina her little journal.

  “No hard feelings?”

  “Go fuck yourself!”

  46

  October 2, 1998, 6:10 p.m.

  Marc went back to his own seat, silently passing the teenager and the sleeping guy. The train passed through Longueville-sur-Scie and the last apple trees disappeared in a yellow ocean of corn and colza. He would be in Dieppe in less than fifteen minutes.

  Marc sat down and thirstily drank more than half of his bottle of San Pellegrino. He checked that the Mauser was still in his pocket, then shot a look at the other end of the car. Malvina had not moved. Marc took Grand-Duc’s notebook from his bag and opened it. He had decided to finish reading it before the train reached Dieppe. There were less than five pages left. Everything was going so fast and he felt he that he would go mad if he didn’t take things one step at a time. Even if he hadn’t the faintest idea where it all might lead.

  Crédule Grand-Duc’s Journal

  Mathilde de Carville made her request in 1995: she wanted me to compare the sample of blood from Emilie Vitral with that of the whole de Carville family. I still had contacts in the police forensics department, and I was a close friend of the Vitrals. How could I refuse her? But it wasn’t easy, going to see the Vitrals in the evening as a family friend, then telling the de Carvilles all about it the following morning. But never mind me, you don’t want to hear about me and my troubled soul… and you are right.

  Of course, I couldn’t just turn up at Emilie’s birthday party and ask her, or her grandmother, for a sample of her blood. My strategy was perhaps not much more subtle than that, but it worked. I gave Lylie a cracked vase for a birthday present. When it broke in her hands, I picked up all the pieces of glass and threw them in the trash, except for a few that were covered in her blood, which I secreted in a small plastic bag inside my pocket.

  It was that easy. No one noticed a thing.

  I received the results from the laboratory a few days later. You would probably laugh at me if I told you I felt some remorse. I am just telling you to explain why I asked my contact at the forensics lab for two copies of the results, in two envelopes. One for Mathilde de Carville, one for Nicole Vitral. I handed each her envelope.

  So, they have both known the truth for three years now. Science has spoken.

  I could just leave it there—with the news that I delivered the envelopes to the families in question—and make my farewells.

  But I am no angel. Far from it. So, of course, I was not able to resist the temptation to look at the results. What did you think I would do? After fifteen years of investigation, with no concrete evidence? I jumped on that piece of paper the way a released prisoner might rush at a whore after fifteen years in the slammer.

  It would be something of an understatement to say that I was surprised by the results. I was so shocked, I could hardly breathe. It was as if someone up there—God, or the Virgin of Mont Terri—was deliberately fucking with us.

  In fact, I think it was the DNA test that plunged me back into depression, that sent me rolling inexorably toward the void. The result was absurd. It made a mockery of all those years of searching, reading, questioning. I wanted to throw all the evidence on a bonfire and then throw myself on top of it, for having failed to find the sorceress hiding behind this entire case.

  And yet, I did not give up my investigation. Since 1995, I have kept on going, like a faithful old dog, its limbs weary, its eyesight fading, but its will to obey undiminished. Nazim gave up a while ago, to work illegally as a builder and to help Ayla in the kebab shop.

  In December 1997, I undertook my final pilgrimage to Mont Terri. And there I found the last—and most perplexing—piece of the jigsaw puzzle.

  So there I was in the Jura, ready for my final pilgrimage. I was looking forward to tasting—for the last time—my favorite treats: some Cancoillotte, a bite of mature Comté, and a bottle of Monique Genevez’s Arbois wine. I would tread the last blades of grass, snap the last twigs, before the final plunge. My pilgrimage. My own personal Lourdes. I was exactly the same as all those Lourdes pilgrims, desperately hoping for a miracle that never happened…

  It came to me during the night, in Monique Genevez’s cottage. Apparently I needed to drink an entire bottle of Vin Jaune before my imagination started working properly. Mathilde de Carville had known what she was doing when she gave me eighteen years to investigate the case: obviously she had guessed just how slowly my brain works. In the morning, I went up Mont Terri with a spade and a large trash bag. For an hour, I dug a hole next to the cabin, exactly where the grave had been. Over twenty pounds of soil! I carried the bulging bag on my back like a convict for two miles. When I reached the path, Grégory—the charmer who worked for the nature preserve—gave me a lift to the cottage. The next day, I made a mess of my BMW’s trunk by shoving all twenty pounds of earth into it, then drove to the forensics lab in Rosny-sous-Bois.

  My friend there, Jerome, was not too happy, as you can imagine. Did I expect him to examine twenty pounds of soil under a microscope? Well, yes. I did.

  Jerome had just gotten married for the third time and been saddled with another mortgage, so he did not hesitate for long when I handed him an envelope stuffed with cash, equivalent to about three months of his salary. There he was, with a PhD, and paid only about a quarter of what he could have earned as a doctor. I didn’t know how long it would take him to analyze what I had given him, but I didn’t care.

  He called me back a week later.

  “Crédule?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I examined your earth for you. So what do you want? The pH, the humus content, the acidity of your stupid soil? What were you planning to do with it, make a vegetable garden for your retirement?”

  “Get to the point, Jerome.”

  “OK. It’s soil, Crédule… Just soil.”

  I sighed. “That’s all?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  But there was something not entirely convincing about the way he said it; a slight hesitation. I latched on to that glimmer of hope. Credulous to the end…

  “You don’t sound entirely sure, Jerome.”

  “Well… all right, there was something. But it was so tiny… it doesn’t prove anything.”

  “Spit it out.”

  “All right, all right… There are a few specks of bone in the soil. Hardly anything. Just dust, really. Nothing you wouldn’t expect in a forest…”

  “What kind of bones, Jerome?”

  “The amount is so tiny… Scientifically, you can’t draw any conclusions from it…”

  I decided not to let the matter drop. Jerome was the best in the business. A genius. And he had the best equipment in France to work with.

  “Fair enough. But what do you think it is?”

  “Well, it’s only a hunch, and this won’t appear in the report, but in my opinion the specks are more likely to have come from human rather than animal bones.”

/>   I sensed that Jerome still hadn’t told me everything. He knew about the case.

  “Could you date the bones?”

  “No, that’s impossible. I have no idea how long they’ve been buried there…”

  “But would you be able to tell me how old the person was when he or she was buried?”

  There was a long silence.

  “Listen, this really is subjective. There’s no way I can…”

  “Skip the intro, Jerome.”

  He sighed. “All right. In my opinion, these are bone fragments from a young human.”

  “How young? A kid?”

  “You’re getting warm, Crédule.”

  “What are you saying, Jerome? Are we talking about a baby?”

  “As I’ve said, there is nothing definite about any of this, but… yes, I would say the bone fragments are those of a human baby.”

  Jesus Christ! What would you have done, in my place? Learning that, after eighteen years of investigation? What would you have done, apart from shooting yourself in the head, I mean…

  Forget the last eight months. Forget the last ten days, too, during which time I’ve been writing this notebook. Today is September 29, 1998. It is twenty minutes to midnight. Everything is ready. Lylie is about to turn eighteen. I will put my pen back in the pot on my desk. I will sit at this desk, unfold the December 23, 1980, edition of the Est Républicain, and I will calmly shoot myself in the head. My blood will stain this yellowed newspaper. I have failed.

  All I leave behind me is this notebook. For Lylie. For whoever wishes to read it.

  In this notebook, I have reviewed all the clues, all the leads, all the theories I have found in eighteen years of investigation. It is all here, in these hundred or so pages. If you have read them carefully, you will now know as much as I do. Perhaps you will be more perceptive than I. Perhaps you will find something I have missed. The key to the mystery, if one exists. Perhaps…