After the Crash: A Novel

by Michel Bussi

  And that was only a down payment.

  What else could he ask for? Apart from a clean conscience…

  He thought again about his notebook. Lylie and Marc would have read it by now. They probably wouldn’t have gone to his house, and discovered the corpse there. But even if they had, he had covered his tracks. To them, he would appear to be a victim, not a murderer. As for the rest… had he been skillful enough in his account? Would they suspect the truth? That he had been the one who tampered with that ridiculous gas pipe, one night in November 1982?

  Over time, Grand-Duc had convinced himself that he had been nothing but the instrument of the de Carville family, a mere tool in their hands; that he had never wished to harm the Vitrals. And even if he had refused Léonce de Carville’s offer, some other thug would have carried out the deed—and would not have spared Nicole. He had redeemed himself since then. He had become close to Nicole, and to her grandchildren. He had come to know them, and to love them. Especially Nicole. He had never betrayed them, since that first time, and he had always done his best to be impartial when investigating the case. To write everything down for them, in his notebook. Well, everything except that night in Le Tréport.

  He was no angel. He had never claimed to be. But he had been thorough and meticulous in his investigation, even when it came to those DNA tests… those stupid tests that had driven him crazy, driven him to the point of suicide.

  But all that was over now. He had finally solved the mystery. All he needed was to find his final witness.

  Mélanie Belvoir.

  The yellow van appeared around the corner and parked next to the Xantia. The mailman emerged from the vehicle. He was a fit-looking young man with long hair in dreadlocks, tied up in a red bandanna. The kind of guy who would probably have been able to do his rounds on a mountain bike, taking shortcuts across the trails.

  Grand-Duc got out of the car and stood before him. “Excuse me, I’d like to ask you a question. Could you tell me where Mélanie Belvoir lives?”

  The mailman gave him a suspicious look.

  “Sorry. We’re not allowed to give out that kind of information.”

  The detective smiled inwardly. He had seen the way the mailman reacted to the woman’s name. He knew her. Now all Grand-Duc had to do was make him admit it. The mailman slid three letters into the nearest mailbox, then turned back toward his van.

  “Hang on a minute. I’m serious. Police!”

  Grand-Duc held out his business card, which indicated he was a certified private detective and was stamped with the flag of the French Republic. Nine times out of ten, this did the trick.

  “So?” said the postman, not even glancing at the card. “Send my boss an official request, if you like. He deals with all the paperwork.”

  Great—he was clearly dealing with a real pain in the neck. Still, there was no point getting heavy with him. Not yet, anyway.

  Grand-Duc sighed. “Listen, this is urgent. It’s a matter of life and death. I can’t tell you any more than that, but believe me, every minute counts…”

  The mailman stared at Grand-Duc. “Sorry, I can’t tell you anything. It’s confidential. But all you need to do is call the office.”

  “That’s not true. Mélanie Belvoir isn’t listed anywhere. Not under that name, anyway…”

  “Well, maybe that’s because she doesn’t want anyone bothering her.”

  This guy was a real prick.

  “You have a duty to help the police, young man.”

  The mailman waved his dreadlocks from side to side. “Sorry, mate. I’m not the kind of guy who informs on honest folks to the police. Those days are over, you know?”

  “OK, how much?”

  The mailman sighed. “What?”

  “How much do you want for the address? Five thousand francs? Ten thousand?”

  “And you claim you’re a cop?” The mailman laughed. “I don’t think so.”

  Grand-Duc had had enough of this bullshit. The mailman had already gotten back into his van when the barrel of the Mateba touched his temple.

  “I don’t like your attitude, pal.”

  All his bravado vanished immediately. The mailman placed his hands on the steering wheel. “All right, all right, take it easy.”

  “So, Mélanie Belvoir…”

  “Sorry, don’t know her.”

  Grand-Duc pushed the barrel harder into the mailman’s temple.

  “I told you, this is a matter of life and death. For you, too, now. I’ll let you in on a secret—I’m not a policeman. I’m a serial killer, and I go after mailmen who won’t cooperate. Anyone in a yellow van who fucks with me gets his head blown off. All right? So, Mélanie Belvoir…”

  “I swear to you, I…”

  “All right, I’m going to begin by shooting you in the kneecap. No more trekking in the mountains for you. Cross-country skiing, mountain biking, shagging hot chicks? Forget it!”

  The detective lowered the gun toward the mailman’s legs.

  “OK, OK!” the mailman yelled. “Enough. She took her husband’s name, or the guy she lives with, anyway. Luisans. Mélanie Luisans. She lives in the next valley. Follow the D34 out of Montbéliard, take the exit toward Dannemarie, and it’s the first chalet after the village. Sky-blue shutters, if I remember correctly…”

  “How do you know?”

  “She still gets letters addressed to Mélanie Belvoir, three or four times a year.”

  “There you go. Wasn’t so difficult, was it?”

  Grand-Duc grinned openly now. He had flushed out the final witness. And he was the first, the only one, to have done so. Even if others were to guess, by looking at that old edition of Est Républicain, how could they make the connection to Mélanie Belvoir? And how could they ever hope to find her, so quickly? No, he was in the clear now. Well ahead of the field.

  “What… what do you want from her?” the mailman stammered.

  “There’s nothing to worry about. I just want to chat with her about old times.”

  56

  October 3, 1998, 3:23 p.m.

  Marc drove instinctively. The Citroën van was still managing, thank God! This really wouldn’t be a good time for it to break down. It did its best to climb at a decent speed the snaking curves that led to the foot of Mont Terri. They passed through Indevillers, then took a white gravel path, bordered on either side by stacks of wood. Wooden signs pointed them toward the nature preserve office.

  The building’s facade was decorated with a mural showing a map of the Jura Mountains, and indicating the various walking paths. Next to the parking lot was a small rest area with an adventure playground, presumably intended for young, wannabe mountaineers not yet exhausted by the hikes they had done with their parents.

  “It’s four o’clock,” Marc said. “We should be able to reach the summit well before nightfall.”

  Malvina gave him a sarcastic look. “What do you expect to find up there?”

  “Nothing. You don’t have to go up there with me, you know.”

  “God, you’re stupid. Why do you think I came all this way?”

  Inside the office, Marc bought a map of the region and a guidebook. A tall, long-haired brunette was at the cash register with a man standing behind her, touching her hand as he showed her which keys to press. With his other hand, he was brazenly caressing her bottom.

  That must be Grégory, Marc thought, remembering the description of the nature preserve’s resident Casanova in Grand-Duc’s notebook.

  Outside, Marc spread out the map on a table and showed Malvina the path they needed to take to reach the top of Mont Terri. Then he folded the map and opened the back door of the van, took out a backpack, and filled it with a comforter, a flashlight, a bottle of water, a sausage, and a few packages of cookies.

  “Quite a supply of food you have in there,” Malvina observed wryly.

  “Yeah. There’s not much space in my grandmother’s house—no cellar, no garage—so she stores things in the van.”


  “Can I take something?”

  “Help yourself,” Marc said. “Just don’t pack too much. You don’t want your bag to be heavier than you.”

  “Just you worry about yourself, Vitral. I’ll beat you to the top, no problem!”

  Marc forced himself to laugh. He knew that there was no rational reason for the trip they were about to make: climbing Mont Terri, witnessing the scene of the crash for themselves, seeking out Grand-Duc’s cabin and the grave next to it… He might find the detective anywhere, but certainly not up there. He was sinking into an obsessive spiral. The gold bracelet, the traces of human bone, the search for a homeless man who had witnessed the crash… These clues were like so many bread crumbs scattered on the ground by a sadistic Hansel. So what did he hope to find? A miraculous light that would show him the way?

  Well, yes. In fact, that was exactly what he hoped to find.

  They got on their way. As expected, the ascent took them a good two hours. Marc climbed quickly, and Malvina followed without showing any signs of fatigue. It was not a difficult climb: the slope was not too steep, and the path through the forest was clearly marked. As they ascended, the view below them—of the Doubs, the Swiss border, the fortified village of Saint-Ursanne—slowly revealed itself. Halfway up, they stopped to drink some water. The air was warm and slightly humid. Beneath his backpack, Marc’s shirt was soaked with sweat.

  They continued on the gently sloping path through the pine trees toward the summit of Mont Terri. Marc increased his pace and Malvina followed him, walking—even breathing—at the same rhythm. The physical effort was bringing them closer together, Marc thought, to his surprise, then decided that he was being ridiculous.

  They came upon the scene of the tragedy with no warning.

  The forest simply stopped, suddenly, as if a gang of woodcutters had cleared a narrow strip of land, about fifty yards wide and a few thousand yards long. Young pine trees had been planted, but they were no more than three feet high, and were surrounded by a multicolored sea of wildflowers: yellow and blue gentians, lady’s-slipper orchids, and orange-tinted arnica.

  Marc and Malvina stood motionless, side by side.

  No trace of the actual crash remained, apart from the absence of tall trees. No monument, not even a marble plaque or a sign. It was better this way, Marc thought. He liked the wildflowers. In twenty years, the young pines would reach the height of the surrounding trees, their branches would spread out, and gradually the wildflowers would die away, starved of sunlight, to be replaced by ferns and moss, and perhaps a few daffodils.

  Then everything that had occurred here would be forgotten.

  Marc remained where he was, on the edge of the clearing, as if he dared not profane the site of the tragedy. Malvina waded through the thigh-high grass. Marc’s heartbeat accelerated, and he had trouble swallowing. He knew these symptoms all too well, even if they were appearing more slowly than they normally would, perhaps because of the altitude. His agoraphobia…

  He said nothing. He did not move. He took deep breaths. Malvina must have heard him, or perhaps she heard nothing and was surprised, or perhaps—why not?—she understood how he felt. In any case, she turned around. She squinted in the sunlight, and it looked almost as if she were smiling. A sad smile, a melancholic truce, a peaceful despair. Marc coughed. He would never have admitted this to Malvina, but the sight of her smile helped him breathe more easily. Something about the presence of this crazy girl reassured him, particularly here, in this secret place that meant so much to both of them.

  They must have stayed there for more than an hour. The sunlight was almost level with the treetops.

  “Shall we go look for the cabin?” Marc said quietly.

  Malvina said nothing. She simply followed him.

  Marc had to check the map several times. They spent nearly an hour wandering through the forest, retracing their steps from clearings that all looked the same. Marc began to wonder if Grand-Duc had invented the whole thing. Malvina didn’t complain. In fact, she did her best to help Marc as he attempted to decipher the guidebook. Night was falling when they finally saw the shepherd’s hut, just as Grand-Duc had described it. For one brief moment, Marc hoped that the detective would be waiting for them inside. Instinctively, he touched the Mauser in his pocket.

  But the cabin was empty. It was cleaner than Grand-Duc had suggested, but then he had picked up a good deal of litter, sending it off to be analyzed by his friend in the forensics laboratory. All in the course of his search for Georges Pelletier.

  Had that man really existed?

  Marc came out of the cabin and inspected the grave. Everything was exactly as the notebook had described it: the earth, the scattered stones, two broken bits of wood that might once have formed a cross. So, Grand-Duc had not lied about this at least. In all probability, this grave really had contained a link from a gold chain and traces of human bone.

  But what did that change now?

  Marc looked at his watch. It was 7:36 p.m.

  He had not heard from Lylie since the text he had read in the van. He sat on a tree stump, a few yards from the hut. The sun was setting, on the roof of the world, and here he was, far from everything. Alone with a crazy girl. Although it turned out that she wasn’t as crazy as he had imagined. She wasn’t dangerous or spiteful either.

  The game was over and he had lost. Now he would allow the painful memories to wash over him; he would wallow in morbid nostalgia in order to avoid thinking about the fact that Lylie was, at that moment, going to sleep in a hospital room. That she would have an abortion a few hours from now, simply as a precaution, because the fruit of their love might be nothing but poison.

  He also wished to avoid thinking about the fact that the only person who could help him—his grandfather’s murderer—was roaming free somewhere, and that there was no chance of finding him.

  “It’s ready!”

  On one corner of a blanket Malvina had laid out the bottle of water, the packages of cookies, and the sausage.

  “Quite a feast, isn’t it?”

  They ate in silence. The cabin was illuminated now only by moonlight, so it looked like some kind of witch’s hovel. They both knew it was too late to go back down, so they would have to sleep here, together. Without ever saying a word about it, they were in agreement: this was why they had come.

  To spend a night on Mont Terri.

  Two orphans lost in a cemetery without headstones.

  When they had put away the remains of the food, Marc took Grand-Duc’s notebook from his bag and handed it to Malvina.

  “You’ve been looking for this for quite a while, haven’t you? Maybe you’ll find something in there that I couldn’t see.”

  “This is the dickhead’s journal?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Thanks.”

  Malvina took the notebook, her comforter, and a flashlight and went into the cabin. Marc walked off on his own, wandering through the forest, finding his way by flashlight. When he returned, the interior of the cabin was dimly illuminated by Malvina’s flashlight, but the girl herself was asleep. Grand-Duc’s notebook was lying open, next to her head.

  Marc smiled. In spite of himself, he felt increasingly tender toward this hate-filled young woman, as if—despite being four years older than he—she were another little sister that he had to protect. Quietly he picked up the green notebook and went outside to sit on the tree stump. He turned the pages, until he reached the last one. The final lines:

  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…

  For me, it’s over.

  It would be an exaggeration to say that I have no regrets, but I have done my best.

  “I have don
e my best.”

  Marc was not seized with any new inspiration. He tried calling Lylie, but there was no signal here on this mountainside. He cursed his own stupidity. Unable to talk to Lylie, he reread her messages, from the first to the last, the one he had received earlier that day:

  The operation will take place tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. Don’t worry, everything will be fine. I’ll call you afterward.

  Tomorrow at ten.

  He felt so utterly useless.

  An owl hooted. Marc pointed his flashlight in the direction of the sound, but saw only branches and leaves.

  “Where are you hiding?” he asked the darkness.

  The owl did not respond.

  “I wonder how long you’ve been on this mountain, watching over it every night. Were you here when the big metal bird crashed into your kingdom, all those years ago? Did you see Georges Pelletier sleeping here in this cabin? Did you see the grave he dug, and the bracelet? And Grand-Duc—did you see him, too?”

  After a while, Marc went back into the cabin. He was cold. He wrapped himself up in his comforter and lay down close to Malvina, staring up at the night sky through the holes in the roof. He had to keep thinking until his subconscious, his memory gave him a sign, a light in the darkness. He had to use every minute of the hours that remained.

  Malvina tossed and turned in her sleep, emitting little noises occasionally. As time passed, she inched closer to Marc, her body instinctively seeking the warmth of his. Had she ever slept with a man before? Even next to a man?

  It must be long past midnight now. Marc had not slept a wink the night before. Exhausted, he sank into sleep without even being aware of it.

  It was Malvina who woke him, crying out like a demented woman. She was standing in the middle of the room, her whole body trembling. Two skinny legs emerged from the sweater she had worn to bed, and she was hopping up and down on her feet as if the floor were made of hot coals.

  “Are you OK?” Marc asked huskily.

  “Yeah, yeah. Don’t worry about me. I’m used to it.”

  She lay down under her comforter again. Marc watched her, worried.