The Moment Before Drowning

by James Brydon

“M. Kerbac, it isn’t possible that you were in the same class as Anne-Lise. She was much younger than you. Think back—where else could you have met?”

  He turns on me, his lips flecked with spittle and his eyes ablaze and rolling back in his head. “Don’t you think I know . . . where we met? The only person I . . . ever cared about.” He almost screams it at me, but his voice cracks and breaks under the strain of forcing out the words, then fades to a wheeze. “And then you say . . . that I could kill her. When I would never hurt her. And I would . . . always protect her. And you say that I . . . would . . . rape her and kill her.”

  “M. Kerbac, Anne-Lise wasn’t raped. What makes you think she was?”

  He doesn’t seem to hear. He keeps on channeling his failing strength into this one lament, not even directed at me, just sent out across the cliffs and over the sea and the horizon and into eternity. “How could you think that? She was more dear to me . . . than the air itself. When she died . . . all the light was squeezed out of the world. How could you think . . . I could ever live without her?”

  Something isn’t right. I can feel a tapping in my brain. I heard the same sound in al-Mazra’a when Lambert told me to shoot the prisoners kneeling before us. It was gentle but insistent, like the ticking of a bomb.

  “M. Kerbac, no one is saying that you did anything wrong. Nobody is accusing you of anything. I’m sure you didn’t mean to hurt her. But I want to find out the truth. Anne-Lise’s mother and her friends need to know the truth.”

  Kerbac doesn’t respond. He sits in silence, his eyes gazing into nothingness, his hands insistently, almost manically, rubbing together.

  “Please just listen to me. Listen to the question. The girl who was raped and killed. The one you would never hurt. Tell me: what was her name?”

  “Her name?”

  “Yes.”

  He whispers it softly, cherishing the word for a second between his cracked lips: “Julie.”

  “And her surname?”

  “Bergeret.”

  “She was raped and killed? Near here?”

  He says nothing, but his head inclines fractionally forward.

  “What year was this? What year did Julie Bergeret die?”

  He turns away from me and his eyes blink rapidly. “What year? 1947. Don’t you know? What are you doing here if you don’t know?”

  Another girl. Twelve years earlier. Another ghost of the heathlands.

  “Was anyone ever convicted of the crime?”

  He shakes his head slowly, as if doing so is painful.

  “Who investigated the case?”

  “Lafourgue. He was new back then.”

  “What did he find out?”

  Kerbac turns abruptly to face me, his graying, grizzled hair suddenly terribly close to me. “He didn’t find anything. He didn’t try to find anything. He didn’t even look.”

  “He investigated you, though. He thought you might be the killer.”

  He nods once, barely moving his head.

  “Why? What made him think you were involved?”

  Kerbac doesn’t answer. The gray distance is reflected in the mirror of his eyes.

  “Why did he investigate you?”

  When his voice breaks out this time, it is cracked and strident: “Because he could. Because he could hurt me and he wanted to hurt me. That’s all he did. He never even tried to find out who hurt Julie. He didn’t care.”

  “M. Kerbac, listen to me. Earlier this year another girl was killed. Her name was Anne-Lise Aurigny. She was beaten, strangled, and mutilated. I know that Lafourgue also considered you a suspect in the case. Tell me, what contact did you have with Anne-Lise?”

  Kerbac leans his head back against the freezing leather of the car seat. His breath floats against the window. He looks queasy for a moment, as if he might vomit. Then the sickness seems to pass and his eyes flicker oddly. He looks as if he is concentrating intently. “I never saw that girl. Never met her. I don’t even know who she was. Lafourgue didn’t find any connection between me and her. He didn’t even pretend that he did. It was just another chance for him to . . . to . . .”

  He fumbles for the door handle and, leaning out, retches into the roadside ditch. The force of it shakes his body in irregular spasms. His arms are emaciated but there’s a wiry strength in his muscles where he grips the door and his body heaves. He spits, then leans back in the car, his face alarmingly pale, even gray in parts, as if the flesh is already dead and necrosis has set in.

  “So you never even saw Anne-Lise?”

  “Never.” He mutters it between ragged bursts of breath.

  “I’d like to ask you some questions about yourself, if you don’t mind. I went to the lycée Cartier yesterday and I found out that you were an outstanding student. One of the best in the region. How did you come to live as a vagrant?”

  Something glimmers in the corner of Kerbac’s eyes. He blinks. “After . . .” I can see his throat begin to heave again. “After . . . After Julie—” He stops dead. He shakes his head slowly. I don’t need him to say it.

  “One final question. I know this could be painful for you to answer. Julie: how was she actually killed?”

  I can see Kerbac’s hands start to shake. The bones jut so visibly beneath the skin that it looks like an X-ray.

  “She was strangled.”

  He declines my offer to drop him off somewhere. Instead, he gets out of the car and tramps slowly back across the heather, his left leg jerking and dragging behind him, until he is just a tiny hobbling silhouette that flickers and then is finally lost amid the trees.

  * * *

  By the time I return to A l’abri des flots there is a long line of empty glasses meandering across Lafourgue’s table, yet he doesn’t appear in the least drunk. His eyes are as cold and as steady as ever, the pupils two tiny black pinpricks in the whorls of the irises. He lifts a glass to me as if in salute.

  “What did Kerbac give you, capitaine, apart from that rather extraordinary black eye?”

  Involuntarily, my hand goes up to my face and I feel once again the torn and swollen flesh of my cheek. Lafourgue gestures and Sarah appears from behind the bar. She has a bowl of water and a cloth in her hand.

  “Look up,” she says. “Hold your head still.” Her words are harsh but her hands are gentle. Her fingers are cool as she rubs the damp cloth across my cheek.

  “He said something interesting. He talked about another girl, Julie Bergeret, who was killed around here twelve years ago. He told me that you investigated that case too. It sounds as if this girl died in similar circumstances to Anne-Lise.”

  Lafourgue’s brow wrinkles a little. “I don’t remember it all that well. Julie Bergeret—let me see. She was raped and strangled. The body was buried about five miles from here. Out in the woods at le Quéduc.”

  “Was she beaten or mutilated?”

  “No. There was nothing strange about the crime. She’d been sexually assaulted and then murdered, probably to stop her talking. The killer buried the body. It was turned up a couple of weeks later by someone walking a dog through the woods. Nothing ritualistic or extraordinary.”

  “Tell me about Julie herself.”

  “She was a very average kid. Decent home. Quiet, unassuming girl.”

  “Did she stand out in any way?”

  Sarah continues to massage my cheek with the damp cloth. The cold water sends little shivers of numbness through my skin.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Anne-Lise stood out. Everyone noticed her. Even people who didn’t know her. What about Julie?”

  “I don’t think she stood out at all. Kind of the opposite. It was hard to investigate her death because everything in her life was so humdrum. She wasn’t in any kind of trouble. No drugs. No dubious connections.”

  “Was she especially beautiful? Or clever?”

  Lafourgue shakes his head. “And the family was reasonably well-off but not rich.”

  “So what leads did you have?” />
  “Just Kerbac. The two of them had a thing. It was pretty hard to see why. He was a strange kid. Reserved. Not easy to talk to.”

  “Clever, though. A stellar student. Like Anne-Lise.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “So what happened?”

  “One day, Julie didn’t come home from school. She wasn’t the sort of kid to disappear without telling her parents, so they panicked immediately. Everyone knew there was something wrong. I can remember the mother in tears. She couldn’t stop crying. She just kept on saying how Julie would never run away without telling her. And the father was standing around trying to look dignified and strong though we could see that he was breaking inside. Anyway, the parents ran around to see everyone they knew and a few coppers sniffed about and asked questions. Nobody had seen Julie and there was no trace of her anywhere. She’d vanished into thin air.

  “Meanwhile, Kerbac was going to pieces. We brought him in for questioning two or three times, but each time it was like we couldn’t get through to him. Like he didn’t understand French anymore. He wasn’t coherent when he talked. No one could really follow what he was saying. I think he actually managed to unnerve a couple of the boys who interviewed him.”

  “Was Julie at school with Kerbac? At Cartier?”

  “No. She went to the lycée Balzac at le Quéduc.”

  “What happened when she was found?”

  “That was about a fortnight later. We got reports of a corpse dug up in the woods. A girl. Found half-clothed with bruises around the neck. We knew right away it was her. She’d been buried, but not very well. It was winter and the ground was as hard as granite. The killer did his best, but he’d have needed a pneumatic drill to dig deep into the earth right then.”

  “What did you manage to discover about the crime?”

  “There wasn’t much that came out of the postmortem, although because the ground was frozen the body was actually quite well preserved. The pathologist was sure that she had been strangled several hours after she was raped.”

  “So she was held somewhere.”

  “Seems like it.”

  “Like Anne-Lise.”

  “Although this crime seems much more routine: Violence. A period of uncertainty. Then the murder. An attempt to hide the crime.”

  “And you thought Kerbac had done it.”

  Lafourgue’s thin lips stretch into a grin. “To be honest, I didn’t know. There was a plausible story there. He loses his cool and forces himself on her, then kills her in panic and despair.”

  “But anyone else could have done the same. He doesn’t strike me as someone who is scared of punishment.”

  Lafourgue nods. “He’s scared of himself. You can feel it. He was a queer kid. He made people uneasy. He was the kind of boy people had doubts about. People would certainly buy him as the killer.”

  “So you pointed the finger in his direction.”

  “We had him in for questioning several times. Held him as long as we could. He paced around in his cell all night, and in the morning he flung himself at the door. When we pulled him out, he’d gashed his face open. To be honest, he looked like a killer. He behaved like a killer. Dangerous. Violent.”

  “Or simply desperate. A teenager deranged by grief and terror.”

  Without thinking, I reach up and feel the swollen skin on my own cheek. The contusion has receded where Sarah bathed it. Is that how the magistrate will see me on Friday? Like the newspaper photograph of myself Aïcha showed me: a man whose face shouts out his guilt?

  “Yet you couldn’t prove anything.”

  “No. We ran some tests on hairs, fibers, the marks on the body, but there was nothing conclusive. Nothing that matched Kerbac or anyone else we looked at.”

  “So the body wasn’t cleaned, like with Anne-Lise.”

  “No. The MO was very different.”

  “But the two girls were about the same age, and they were both attacked brutally first, then held, and killed or mutilated later.”

  Lafourgue shrugs. “There’s probably another dozen crimes over the last ten years that are about that similar. Julie was strangled with her own belt, not by hand. And she was hidden. The killer tried to prevent the body from being discovered. Anne-Lise was left to be found.”

  She wasn’t just turned into art; she was left on display. It was a sign of contempt. A killer who had already gotten away with at least one murder and saw no need, this time, to try to hide what he had done. The carefully chosen scene was a taunt.

  I search for the words to make Lafourgue understand. “When he killed Julie, he didn’t think clearly enough about how to remove all signs of the crime. He did something stupid: he tried to stop anyone finding the body. Afterward, he probably read the papers and knew that there were hairs and fibers and traces of his fingerprints on the body. It scared him. When he killed Anne-Lise, he didn’t try to hide her because he knew how to efface all signs on her that could lead back to him. He learned from Julie. He refined what he did. When he killed Anne-Lise, he wasn’t worried about getting caught.”

  “Let it go,” Lafourgue replies. “Even if it is the same killer, Julie Bergeret died over a decade ago. You’ll never prove anything now. That case is always going to stay unsolved.”

  “What happened to Kerbac after the investigation?”

  “He had some kind of breakdown. Didn’t speak for months. He even spent a few months in an asylum—that big white house out on the edge of Corceret.”

  “And when he came out?”

  Lafourgue shrugs again, but there’s a glint of malice in his eyes.

  When Kerbac came out, barely coherent, his face scarred, his hands shaking, everybody saw in him the image of a murderer. His wrecked body and vacant, tormented mind must have seemed like proof of his guilt. Maybe they were signs of guilt. Or maybe he started to believe they were. Maybe the gaps in his perception, where his mind turned blankly and his speech stalled, appeared in his recollections like moments where he lost control. His knowledge of his own actions, of his very self, perhaps slipped into the interstices of his conscious mind. In such moments he would be capable of doing anything and he might not even know. Even he could no longer be sure of what he had or hadn’t done. Lafourgue said it: he was afraid of himself. His whole body was imprinted with terror. He lived in the shadows under the wild sky because he no longer knew how to live among other people.

  “You said something before about the real case files. The unofficial ones. May I see them now?”

  For a second, Lafourgue glares at me and it feels like being scalded. Then he nods. “Sure. After all, you couldn’t spend two years in the service de renseignements in Algeria and not know what real police work is.”

  As he stands up to leave, his midriff collides with a table and sends empty glasses and cups skittering and shattering across the floor. He doesn’t even look down. He just walks out toward his car, his feet crunching on the shards of glass, crushing them into the ground. I follow after him. From outside, I can see the server boy down on his hands and knees struggling to gather up the infinitesimal barbed fragments. In my mind’s eye, I see the sharp filaments burrowing their way into his fingers and nestling in his flesh.

  * * *

  As the car jolts along the road past the church, its brown stones smudged purple in the winter air, snow begins to fall. The flakes waft, white and silent, through the distance and settle gently on the fences and the roofs and out on the heath where Anne-Lise lay. The bonnet of Lafourgue’s car is dusted white. The great sheets of sky and earth seem to close in on us, shrinking the world to the few feet in front of the windshield that we can clearly see. Sainte-Élisabeth is deserted. Snow settles on the ground, covering everything, drowning each individual shape in its voiceless uniformity.

  Lafourgue turns down the rue de la Haute Folie that meanders down toward the sea, and pulls into a driveway. The tires creak softly on the snow. The house is stone and freezing inside. A faint smell of damp fills the air. Lafourgue doesn’t
bother to wipe his feet. He just steps inside, leaving clumps of snow and grass in his wake. My eyes strain against the gloom of the hallway and my skin prickles in the chill. Lafourgue disappears down a staircase at the end of the corridor and I trail him into the basement.

  There, hidden in the cold and forgetful earth, is a sort of study lit by a bright, buzzing, uncovered bulb overhead. Lafourgue roots through his keys and pulls out a small silver one that he uses to open a filing cabinet standing by the far wall. He pulls out a drawer crammed with files and his heavy fingers flick through them until he alights upon the one he wants. He closes the filing cabinet carefully, locks it again, and drops the file on the desk directly beneath the glow of the light.

  “Take your time with it,” he says. “I’m not sure you’ll get any further with it than we did, but who knows.” He shrugs lazily. “You’ll need to read it here. While you do, I’ll go and make some inquiries about Kurmakin for you. I’ll have a few of my men turn over some stones and see what comes crawling out. Do you need anything?”

  I shake my head. Lafourgue leaves me alone in the oppressive cold of the basement. Buried in the earth. Like the warren at al-Mazra’a. Like Julie Bergeret.

  Lafourgue’s file bears no resemblance to a normal procedural dossier. The whole thing is handwritten in tiny, cramped, yet impeccably formed letters. There is nothing that could pass for evidence, no crime scene photographs, no statements. There is just a series of notes and reports, interspersed occasionally with pictures clipped or stuck into the file. It starts with Kurmakin. Lafourgue’s comments read as follows:

  We know Kurmakin has links with at least two revolutionary organizations:

  Firstly, Aube: a group with only loose ties & probably posing no real threat. Members of the group fall into several quite common categories. 1) They are writers of tracts or pornography or poems which don’t rhyme & they produce propaganda for the movement. 2) These are the intellectuals who carry copies of books by Bakunin or Trotsky & they justify why it is ok to blow up women & children in the name of revolution. 3) Homosexuals & pederasts who are the dregs of Christian society & are tolerated by the revolutionaries who think all attacks on the morals & standards of Western society are justified. 4) Junkies who cannot live among God-fearing people & their minds are rotted by the junk in their veins.