by Michel Bussi
Which was undoubtedly what the planners had hoped for. A snippet of conversation from an evening at Nicole’s house in Pollet rose to the surface of his memory. It had been a few months ago, after they had watched a news report on television about the new town created by the Disney consortium. The new shopping centre had just been opened. In the kitchen, Nicole had cursed: ‘It’s already bad enough people taking their kids to Disneyland and making that capitalist rat Mickey even richer. But giving them land so they can build towns in France . . . it’s unbelievable!’
Lylie had been clearing the table. As always, she had known more about the subject than the rest of the family.
‘But it’s a kind of utopia, grandma. Did you know Walt Disney had dreamed of creating an ideal city in Florida, called Celebration? No cars, no segregation, everything under a climate-controlled dome . . . But he died before it was built, and his successors changed the project. Val-d’Europe is only the second city in the world to be built by Disney. The only one in Europe. The newest town in France, with twenty thousand inhabitants . . .’
‘A utopia! Are you kidding?’ Nicole replied. ‘Private schools. A golf course. Houses costing three million francs . . .’
Lylie did not respond. Marc was sure she would have liked to defend the concept: the urban planning, the green spaces, the architectural challenges, the carefully thought-out transport system. But Lylie, as always, remained silent. She had simply smiled as she picked up a dishcloth to help Nicole, and had contented herself by talking to Marc about it, briefly, later that evening. Everyone knew that the de Carvilles lived in Coupvray, one of those pretty villages close to Val-de-Marne, whose French traditionalism had been so perfectly integrated into the American project at Val-d’Europe, sending house prices rocketing even higher. A marriage of tradition and modernity.
Marc walked on. The area had been designed with pedestrians in mind, and in that sense it could not be reproached. Coupvray was less than a mile away. He reached Place de Toscane, and smiled at the sculpted fountain, the cafés and terraces painted the colour of raw sienna. He had never been to Italy, but this was exactly how he would have imagined a Florentine or Roman square, even in winter.
In spite of the fact that the town was designed for pedestrians, there were not many about. Marc was now crossing through the golfing district, with its English-style cottages. Bow-windows, green and purple wood, forged iron. Marc felt as if he were crossing a picture postcard of Europe.
The sight of some more classical-looking (albeit expensive) houses told him that he was approaching Coupvray. He noticed a series of familiar signs: village hall, school, Louis Braille’s birthplace. Jennifer had given him the de Carvilles’ address: Chemin des Chauds-Soleils, a cul-de-sac on the edge of the village, in the middle of Coupvray Forest. Coupvray had been built in a bend of the Marne river, encircled by woods. The canal from Meaux to Chalifert formed a sort of border to the village, a straight line providing a shortcut for vessels navigating the Marne. It made this bucolic paradise, only a few miles from the French capital, even more picturesque. There were three fishermen sitting on the low stone wall overlooking the canal. A brown sign read: Ecluse de Lesches. This seemed like the perfect spot to sit down and rest. And to read the five pages of Grand-Duc’s notebook that he had torn out and put in his pocket.
Marc had not felt brave enough to read them on the RER, with strangers eyeing the words over his shoulders.
Not this part of the story. His part.
Crédule Grand-Duc’s Journal I spent that Sunday – 7 November, 1982 – in Antalya, on the Mediterranean coast, a place where the sun shone three hundred days of the year. I was at the residence of a high-ranking official from the Turkish Home Office. I wanted to check again that no one had seen anything in Ataturk airport on 22 December, 1981. The idea wasn’t so far-fetched: a CCTV camera, some kind of incident . . . the airport had been full of soldiers at the time and one of them might have noticed something. I wanted to send a questionnaire around the barracks. The official thought I was crazy, of course. After weeks spent chasing him, he had finally given in and consented to see me at his beach house one weekend when all the bigwigs of Turkish national security would be there. Nazim was not with me, for once: Ayla had insisted he go home. He had fallen ill, if I remember correctly . . . This was extremely inconvenient for me, as I needed an interpreter to explain what it was that I wanted, and it was especially difficult as the others were there to relax in the sun with their wives and were not remotely convinced by the urgency of my requests. Then again, neither was I.
As I’ve said, I learned about the accident in Le Tréport three days later, from Nazim. Since then, I have talked with Nicole about it a great deal, and she told me the details. That weekend, the three towns of Le Tréport, Eu and Mers-les-Bains had organised their ‘Festival of the Sea’, as they did every year. Thousands of people came to eat moules-frites, walk through the town, and go for boat rides. Pierre and Nicole worked at the festival every year, as they did most of the local festivals. Apart from the summer months, they were dependent on weekends such as this in order to make ends meet. They left Marc and Emilie with neighbours and went off to spend the night in their orange-and-red Citroën van. They parked the van in strategic spots, as close to the beach as possible, and within an hour of arriving, they were serving up chips, crêpes, waffles and other snacks. They usually worked until late at night. Festivals in the north of France often go on until dawn, in spite of the climate. In order not to lose time or money, Pierre and Nicole would sleep for a few hours on a mattress in the cramped space between the gas oven and the refrigerators before starting work again on Sunday morning. It was a hard life, but in one weekend like that, they could make more money than they would in ten normal days.
On Sunday 7 November, 1982, Pierre and Nicole Vitral closed up their van at about three in the morning. They would never open it again. It was a man walking his dog along the sea wall who alerted police. The smell of gas was detectable even outside the van – or rather, the smell of methanethiol, the sulphur-based product that is added to butane, which is colourless and odourless. The firemen smashed open the back door of the van with an axe and discovered two bodies inside. The butane had been escaping since at least 5 a.m., in a confined space. Pierre Vitral was no longer breathing. The firemen did not even try to resuscitate him; they could tell when someone was dead. But Nicole Vitral was still alive. She was transported to Abbeville. It was fifteen hours before the doctors could announce definitively that her life had been saved. Her lungs were permanently damaged.
The inquiry did not take long. There was a hole in one of the gas pipes leading to the ovens. The accident was stupid and all too predictable. The insurance company lived up to the industry’s reputation for compassion and generosity: according to them, sleeping in the van, between the butane bottles and the still-warm ovens, was madness; the equipment was ancient, though it had been given the all-clear by health inspectors; and the insurance company’s experts found other defects which allowed them to justify not paying a single centime to Nicole Vitral.
All that remained to her was the van – with a back door and a plastic pipe that needed replacing – and two children to bring up single-handed.
It was perhaps this incident that brought me closer to the Vitrals. Pity? Yes, you could call it that. There is nothing wrong with pity.
Yes, pity. But also suspicion.
From the moment Nazim told me what had happened in Le Tréport, I did not believe that it was an accident. It is true that fate is like a playground bully, always picking on the weakest, but still . . . there are limits. In the weeks that followed, I met with the de Carvilles’ lawyers. Some of them, not especially proud of their clients’ behaviour, confessed to me that, just before his second heart attack, Léonce de Carville had asked them a purely theoretical question: ‘What would happen if Nicole and Pierre Vitral died? Would little Lylie remain a Vitral and be placed with a foster family, or was an appeal possible? In
that hypothetical context, what would be the likelihood of the baby being given to the de Carvilles?’
It was a delicate, not to mention rather morbid, question. The lawyers did not agree, but the general consensus was that, if the Vitrals died and Lylie was still under two years old, a new verdict was not impossible. ‘This is purely hypothetical,’ they said, but it would be feasible not only to raise doubts about the identity of the child, but also to question her best interests. Surely it would be better, in those circumstances, to give the young orphan to the de Carvilles rather than casting around for a foster family.
I will say no more about that. Make of it what you will.
If Mathilde de Carville was crazy enough to hire a private detective for eighteen years, her husband, notably less patient, was certainly capable of hiring an assassin. Putting a hole in a gas pipe, in a van that did not lock properly, would be easy for anyone who didn’t possess too many scruples. I have never believed that Mathilde could have been aware of such a plot, never mind been behind it; her religious beliefs would not have allowed it. But Léonce de Carville had no such moral qualms. He never recovered from his second heart attack, twenty-three days later. It is possible to see some element of cause and effect at work here. Nicole Vitral survived. Perhaps Pierre Vitral’s death played on his conscience? And that death was entirely pointless because it made no difference to the fate of Lyse-Rose.
That is all I know. Léonce de Carville is a vegetable now, and his secrets will never be revealed. But would you give him the benefit of the doubt?
2 October, 1998, 12.40 p.m. The benefit of the doubt . . .
Marc had been only four at the time of the accident, and remem
bered almost nothing about it. All he recalled was the terrible
sadness of the adults in his life, and his own desire to protect Lylie
at all costs, to hold her hand tightly, never to let her go. His grandmother had never given him many details of his grandfather’s death, but he understood that. These things are not easy to
talk about. Grand-Duc’s account was much clearer than any of the
snippets of information Marc had been able to glean through the
years.
Marc watched the three fishermen sitting across from him:
though quite young, they sat motionless, and looked as if they were
about to fall asleep. Where was the fun in waiting hours for a fish
that never took the bait? Maybe they were simply waiting for the
end of the world, in this little bit of heaven?
The benefit of the doubt . . .
Did the Devil live here, in this little bit of heaven?
Marc delved into the depths of his memory. Without knowing
exactly why, it seemed to him that Grand-Duc’s narrative had set
off some kind of alarm in his brain. A jigsaw piece that did not fit;
an anomaly.
There was something not quite right about what he had read. He tried to concentrate harder. He felt increasingly certain that
the detail was something he had learned by heart; that the memory
was undoubtedly there, somewhere in his brain, but that it could
only be brought to the surface by finding a trigger: a word, some
kind of starting point.
He kept trying, but without success. All he could be sure of was
that this detail was something that was tidied away in his bedroom,
among his belongings, in the house on Rue Pocholle. He felt certain
that if he searched that room he would find what he was looking
for.
Was it urgent? Where did it fit with everything else? Lylie’s oneway trip . . .
Dieppe was only two hours away by train. And he had to talk to
Nicole in any case.
But all that could wait.
He turned over the last torn-out page and read it.
25
Crédule Grand-Duc’s Journal One month after the tragedy in Le Tréport, Nicole Vitral was once again serving customers from her mobile chip shop. She had no choice. Many people found it strange, even morbid, that she continued to work in that coffin on wheels, in that battered metal death-trap that had carried away her husband, her feet treading the same floor where he had taken his last breath.
Nicole would reply with a smile: ‘People keep living in the same houses where their loved ones died, don’t they? They sleep in the same beds, eat off the same plates, drink from the same glasses . . . Those objects are not responsible for the deaths. My van is just an object like any other.’
I realised, years later, that Nicole actually loved her job; she enjoyed serving people chips on the Dieppe seafront, just as she had done for years with Pierre, even if the smoke from the frying aggravated her lungs, making her cough endlessly. Pierre had fallen asleep in this van and never woken up; Nicole, alone now, felt less so here than anywhere else. Except for the Janval cemetery, perhaps.
It was around this time, in the summer of 1983, that I drew closer to Nicole and her grandchildren. I met Nicole for the first time one morning in April. Marc was at school, and Lylie was asleep.
Nicole stood in the doorway in front of me. ‘Crédule Grand-Duc,’ I introduced myself shyly. ‘I’m a private detective. I’m investigating . . .’
‘I know who you are, Mr Grand-Duc. You’ve been hanging around in the area for months. News travels fast here, you know.’
‘Oh . . . I see . . . Well, at least that should save us some time. Mathilde de Carville hired me to investigate this case . . .’
‘I hope she’s paying you well, at least.’
‘I can’t complain on that score . . .’
‘How much?’
Nicole Vitral’s eyes shone fiercely. She was playing a game of catand-mouse with me. Why lie about it?
‘One hundred thousand francs. Per year.’
‘You could have got more. Much more.’
She was wearing a low-cut blue-grey jumper. The V-neck offered a magnificent view. I was extremely turned on. Without moving an inch, she demanded: ‘What do you want from me?’
‘I’d like to be able to see Lylie. To talk to her. To watch her grow up.’
‘Is that all?’
I sensed that this negotiation was going to take a while. I didn’t know where to look: at her sparkling eyes, or down below, in the valley between her breasts. Unthinkingly, Nicole pulled up the V of her jumper.
‘I have nothing to hide,’ she said. ‘You may be surprised to learn this, but I want to know the truth, too. Have you found out anything?’
I hesitated. Did I have the upper hand now? Not for long: her jumper quickly slid down again.
‘I have followed lots of leads, most of them dead ends. But I have also discovered a few troubling details . . .’
Nicole Vitral appeared to hesitate. Her eyes surveyed Rue Pocholle.
‘Did Mathilde de Carville make you sign any kind of confidentiality clause?’
‘Not at all. She is just paying me to find out the truth.’
‘Well, I don’t have any money to pay you, but Mathilde de Carville is generous enough for both of us.’
Smiling, she pulled up the V of her jumper again.
‘Quid pro quo? Come in and have a coffee, and you can tell me all about it while I wait for Lylie to wake up.’
Nicole Vitral trusted me. God knows why. I knew I was playing a dangerous game. If I did discover something important, my position between the two widows (or quasi-widow, in the case of Mathilde de Carville) would not be easy to maintain, even if I managed to stay neutral. And that became increasingly difficult; it was not much of a contest between the simple modesty of the Vitral family and the contempt of the de Carvilles. Léonce de Carville had water in place of muscles, Malvina steam in place of a brain, and Mathilde an ice cube in place of a heart. I was their employee, their faithful hound, but my sympathies lay with the Vitrals, without any doubt whatsoever.
Nicole was determined and true to her word. An incredible woman. And just like that, the months, the years rolled by. I too was faithful to my pilgrimage. This is more important than you can possibly imagine. Every year, around 22 December, I returned to Mont Terri. I slept in a nearby gîte, in Clairbief, on the banks of the Doubs river, and I spent my time on the mountainside, at the crash site. I stayed there for at least a few hours each time, thinking, walking, reading over the notes I had taken. As if the place might finally reveal its secret to me . . .
I always went alone, without Nazim. I came to know every path, every stone, every pine tree. I felt I had to tame that wild mountainous area, that I should take the time to listen to it, to get to know it beyond the immediate trauma of the crash. As I had done with the Vitrals.
You probably won’t believe this, but . . . it worked! The mountain confided in me. It took exactly three years. On my fourth pilgrimage there, in December 1986, it revealed its secret to me: by far the most disturbing secret I discovered in eighteen years of investigation.
That day – 22 December, 1986 – I was surprised, at the top of the mountain, by a sudden, violent storm. To get back down, I would have had to walk for at least two hours in the rain and lightning. So I decided to look for shelter. I knew that the young trees, which had been planted shortly after the crash, would offer me no protection.