by Michel Bussi
HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE?
The cold bit into my bare arms. The sun, after putting in a brief appearance over the cliff above Fécamp, seemed to have dived back beneath a duvet of clouds. To warm myself up, I jogged in place. The temperature must have been nearing zero, but I wasn’t about to ask the girl lying on the pebbles to give me back my WindWall. Besides, the cops couldn’t be far away; I’d called them a good ten minutes ago. The three of us stood in silence. A few gulls mocked us from above.
Arnold, attached to his mistress by a thin leather leash, had sat down and was watching the gulls with a mixture of fear and disbelief.
Fear and disbelief.
I must have looked as stupid as the dog.
The girl lying dead on the pebbles was wearing the red Burberry cashmere scarf wrapped around her neck!
I turned it over and over inside my head, looking for a rational explanation. I was absolutely certain the girl had torn the scarf from my hands and then immediately thrown herself into the void.
I scanned the deserted sea wall, the casino parking lot, the thirty beach huts abandoned for the winter. Still no sign of the police.
Who could have wrapped that scarf around the corpse’s neck? I had been the first to reach the body. There was no one else in the vicinity, apart from Xanax and Denise, and they’d been further away than I was. It wouldn’t have been possible for them to run away from the body and then make a show of approaching slowly without the slightest hint of breathlessness. Besides, why would they have done such a thing?
It made no sense.
So else could have done it?
No one! No one could have approached the corpse on that huge deserted beach without being spotted by Denise or Xanax. They had seen the girl fall from the cliff and then walked towards her, their eyes fixed on the body . . .
My arms were shaking. From the cold. Anxiety. Fear. By a process of elimination I arrived at the one possible solution: the girl must have wrapped the scarf around her own neck as she fell!
Insane . . .
But no other explanation seemed to fit. I gauged the height of the cliff, I calculated the time it would take for a body to fall from that height. A few seconds. Three or four at most. Probably enough to wrap a scarf around your neck.
Technically, it was certainly possible.
Technically . . .
During that vertiginous fall, arms waving in the void, wind lashing at her face . . .
I watched a gull defying gravity, floating between sky and chalk.
The only way you could do that was if you’d planned the whole thing in advance, rehearsing each step over and over until you could do it without thinking, until you could set aside all emotions and fears and just focus on wrapping that damned scarf around your neck in the four seconds you have left before you hit the ground and die . . .
It made no sense.
Rehearse each step over and over? The scarf didn’t even belong to the girl! I had found it by the side of the path, it had been a spur-of-the-moment decision to hold it out to her, hoping it could save her. The girl on the precipice had no way of foretelling that she would find herself clutching that piece of fabric.
My gaze drifted back to Denise and Xanax. He had lit a cigarette and she was tugging on Arnold’s leash to get him out of the path of the smoke.
Keep following the process of elimination, I told myself, and you’ll arrive at a solution. Let’s say this girl found time, in one final reflex action, to twist that material around her throat rather flapping her arms like a manic seagull as she fell, it still begged the question:
Why?
At that moment there was a break in the clouds and the clay-stained chalk cliffs glinted gold and silver in the sun’s rays.
The police arrived minutes later. We watched as they parked their van outside the casino and set off towards us on foot. There were two of them. The younger of the two was in his forties, with a long, pebble-shaped head; he was also the slower of the two, picking his way over the pebbles and swearing whenever his fancy leather boots slipped on the wet seaweed. He looked half-awake, as though he’d been called out to deal with a suicide before gulping down his first coffee of the day.
The second policeman was untroubled by the pebbles underfoot. He looked like a cop straight out of an Olivier Marchal movie, experienced, nearing retirement. His unbuttoned jacket revealed a broad torso and thick waist. He had straight, shoulder-length hair that was tied back at the base of his neck, revealing a wide forehead covered with wrinkles. Like Marlon Brando towards the end of his life.
When he came closer, my impression was confirmed.
Marlon Brando to a T.
The other cop was still ten metres away when Brando drew level with us and stood over the corpse.
“Captain Piroz,” he said in a detached tone. “It’s been a long time since we’ve had a suicide in these parts! Since the Normandy Bridge opened, that’s been where everyone goes to throw themselves into the estuary.”
He ran both hands over his forehead as if to smooth his wrinkles, then went on:
“Do you know her?”
We all shook our heads.
“What did you see exactly?”
Xanax answered first. He described seeing the girl topple over the edge and then crash to the pebbles 120 metres below. Denise confirmed his account. I merely nodded.
“You were all here then? No one saw what happened up there?”
Piroz stared at me as if he had registered my unease.
“Yes, I did. I was running the coastal path, as I do every morning. She was standing at the edge of the cliff, near the blockhouse. I spoke to her. I tried to stop her, but . . .”
Piroz looked down at my prosthesis, assessing whether my handicap was compatible with a daily jog.
“I . . . I go training every day,” I stammered. “I’m an elite athlete. A Paralympian. You . . . you see.”
If he had seen, the captain didn’t show it. He merely puckered his forehead, Brando-style, then bent over the corpse. He picked up my North Face jacket and placed it on the pebbles beside the body.
I hadn’t been imagining it. The scarf was still wrapped around the girl’s neck.
I could see nothing but that piece of fabric, but Piroz seemed oblivious to it. When he was done studying the tattered remains of her red dress, he turned his attention to the cliff, as if searching for some shrub clinging to the bare rock. Finally he turned to us.
“She couldn’t have torn her dress as she fell.”
Before he could go on, I cut in:
“When I met the girl up there, her dress was already torn. Her make-up had run as well. She seemed terrified.”
Denise and Xanax were glaring at me, angry that I hadn’t revealed these details before. Piroz ran a hand over his wrinkles again, as if this would stimulate the thought processes. The other cop’s thoughts seemed to be miles away. His eyes were scanning the waves, the beach huts, the turbines over Fécamp. Arnold the Shih Tzu seemed more concerned about the case than he was.
Piroz paid no attention to his colleague; perhaps the two of them had argued on the way here.
He knelt down among the pebbles to examine the body.
“A suicide?” he muttered between his teeth. “You’d need a really good reason to throw yourself off a cliff . . .”
Piroz studied the torn folds of the dress.
When I looked back on it, that was moment I should have talked to the police. I should have told them the scarf was mine, in a sense; explained to them exactly what had happened up there near the blockhouse, how she’d torn that wretched piece of fabric from my hands . . .
But I said nothing. Instead I waited for a rational explanation to fall from the sky. For everything to sort itself out, for everyone to forget and move on to something else. I couldn’t have predicted what Piroz was about
to discover by lifting the girl’s dress.
“What the hell,” the policeman whistled.
I came closer. So did Xanax and Denise.
The girl was wearing nothing under her dress.
No fuchsia lace panties, no thong.
Purple marks ran along her thighs. Scratches, too, four of them, narrow and parallel, level with her hip, to the right of completely shaven pubes.
Denise closed her eyes and clutched Arnold to her breast again. Xanax’s face had turned the colour of the tablets that he probably swallowed every morning. Pale as a ghost. My prosthesis wedged among the pebbles, and I had trouble keeping my balance.
Piroz let the dress fall back on the girl’s body as if pulling the curtain over a stage.
“Christ. The kid’s been raped . . . A few hours at the most. That seems a damned good reason to jump off the cliff.”
He straightened, took another look at the chalk cliff, then finally turned his eyes towards the scarf wrapped around her throat.
He untied it gently, using his fingertips.
I felt panic rising within me. Piroz had spoken of rape. My prints must be all over that scrap of material. Its fibres were drenched in my sweat, my DNA.
Too late. What could I say? Who would believe me?
Piroz ran his finger between the fabric and the girl’s neck, slowly, like a doctor examining a patient who has lost her voice.
“She wasn’t only raped . . . she was strangled.”
In a state of shock, I replied without thinking:
“I . . . I spoke to her up there. She . . . she was alive. She jumped of her own free will. She—”
Piroz cut in: “Your arrival probably interrupted her rapist as he was attempting to strangle her. You saved the girl’s life . . . Or at least you could have . . .”
You could have?
I was troubled by his choice of words. And his version of events. It was possible a rapist might have had time to hide in the blockhouse when he heard me coming, but if that was the case, why hadn’t the girl said anything? Why hadn’t I noticed any marks on her neck when I reached out to her? Was it because I hadn’t looked? Maybe I was too busy focusing on her face and her torn dress.
“What are you doing?” asked Denise.
Piroz was now on all fours, sniffing the skin of the corpse. Arnold was eyeing him warily. The policeman raised his head like a bloodhound tracking a scent and reported, “Her skin smells of salt.”
I felt like I was watching a surrealist play, a group of actors improvising their lines. The second policeman, still a little way off, was looking on impassively. Perhaps it was a tactic they had developed between them. Each in his own role. One put on a show while the other observed our reactions without our noticing.
“Salt?” Xanax repeated, baffled.
“Yeah. But on this point at least there is a simple explanation.” Piroz let a long silence pass. “The girl took a dip in the sea.”
As one, we all looked towards the Channel.
A dip? At this hour? In the middle of February? The water must be below ten degrees!
“Naked,” Piroz went on. “Her clothes are dry.”
Denise stepped towards me. She looked as if she might faint. Without thinking, I offered her my arm.
“Skinny-dipping,” the policeman concluded. “That may explain everything that followed. The rapist came along, saw her . . .” He combed his fingers through his hair. “O.K., time to secure the crime scene, bring in forensics and the rest of the circus. I’m going to need your names, addresses, phone numbers. Then if you could drop by the station in Fécamp this afternoon to make a statement. Hopefully by then we’ll know the girl’s identity.”
Denise was leaning on me with all her weight. I was openly shivering now. Piroz noticed and stared at me intently, then picked up my windbreaker and handed it to me. “I take it this belongs to you. Cover yourself up, don’t catch cold, I’m going to need you.”
5
WHO COULD BELIEVE ME?
I saw the Étretat Needle right in front of me. The towering rock formation looked like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle detached from the cliff, or a monumental key that would slot into the Gate of Aval alongside it to reveal a secret cavern.
After leaving the cops on the beach, I had run for almost an hour. This was shorter than my usual run. Barely a dozen kilometres. Yport-Étretat, via the Valleuse de Vaucottes and the Brèche d’Étigues.
Time enough to empty my head. To think. To try to understand.
It couldn’t have been more than three degrees, but I was drenched in sweat. The grass was slowly thawing, forming narrow streams of icy water that ran down the chalk cliffs in tiny cascades, carving ochre furrows in their wake. This seemingly eternal landscape was an illusion. The cliffs were under attack from all sides—water, ice, rain, sea—resisting, folding, yielding and dying, right before the eyes of millions of tourists who were oblivious to the resulting changes in the landscape.
The perfect crime.
I was shaking now.
I had spent the entire hour since I’d left the beach trying to make sense of it all. Captain Piroz seemed to have established a clear sequence of events. This nameless young woman comes to Yport beach, probably just as the sun is rising. She strips off her red dress and goes for a swim. Her rapist arrives, unnoticed, and watches as she gets dressed. He follows her as she climbs the coastal path, losing his scarf along the way. He corners the girl near the blockhouse, rapes her and tries to strangle her. At that moment he hears me and hides in the blockhouse before I show up. Too late.
The girl, in despair, jumps.
On the far side of the bay, a group of ramblers the size of ants were picking their way across the slippery footbridge that led to the cave they call La Chambre des Demoiselles. I looked at my watch: 11.03.
Time to go back.
My descent through the hanging valleys to Yport took less than forty-five minutes. I saw no one, apart from a lone cyclist in the Valleuse de Vaucottes and the donkey I passed by every morning on the Chemin du Couchant. There was scarcely a breeze as I climbed the last stretch of coastline to the Plaine de la Vallette. In the distance, the motionless turbines at Fécamp looked like giants on a break. Through the mist I could make out the radio mast at Yport, the blockhouse, the sheep scattered around it.
I felt a surge of anxiety.
If Piroz’s theory was correct, the rapist had seen me. He had been watching me from inside the blockhouse. I was the only witness . . .
The coastal path began a gentle descent and I sped up as much as my prosthesis would allow.
The only witness.
As I passed the Rivage campsite, Yport bay exploded in the morning light. The tide was going out, revealing a lunar landscape. Emerald seaweed clung to the strewn boulders like scattered oases in a damp desert.
Following the rhythm of my limping run I hammered out another hypothesis.
What if Piroz was wrong?
What if the rapist had abandoned the girl on Yport beach after assaulting, raping, trying to strangle her? Then the girl, out of her mind, climbed the coastal path, losing her scarf along the way. Too traumatised to accept my offer of help, she jumps.
The steps leading to the casino echoed under my carbon prosthesis.
Whether the rape was committed on the beach or at the top of the cliff was irrelevant so far as the girl was concerned . . . But for me, these two possibilities raised a question. A question I needed to consider before Piroz started grilling me.
Did I or didn’t I encounter the rapist?
Three more steps and I hopped over the casino bin-bags to land on the concrete sea wall. I was outside the Sirène.
Had I encountered the rapist?
I couldn’t let go of the question, until it dawned on me that there was another, more troubling question, one which Piroz w
as bound to pursue.
How had that damned red scarf ended up around the girl’s neck? That Burberry scarf with my DNA all over it.
As I did every morning, I used the wooden balustrade of the Sirène to complete my cool-down stretches. I wasn’t disturbing anyone; there were no tables outside, no chairs, and even fewer customers. To the side of the menu—€ 12.90 all inclusive: platter of whelks, mussels, and île flottantes for dessert—André had pinned up the weather forecast.
Sunshine—zero
Snow—likely above 400 metres
Temperature—approaching minus 15 degrees
At that moment, André Jozwiak appeared. He was no longer the prehistoric man who’d got up at dawn to serve my breakfast; he had taken the time to shave, comb his hair, and splash on some aftershave. White shirt. Pristine jacket. Ready to welcome any Parisian tourists who showed up lost. André was what the locals call a “horsain”—an outsider. Before he wound up in Yport, he used to run a hotel restaurant at Bray-Dunes, the last French beach before the Belgian border. He liked to say that he had come south in search of sun. And to convince the sceptics, every day he would pin up a weather forecast: the worst in France. He’d spend his evenings scouring the internet for the French town most likely to be hit by torrential rains, thunderstorms, or freezing temperatures. This morning, according to the small print below the forecast, he had chosen Chaux-Neuve in the depths of the Jura mountains.
My first impulse was to tell him about the dead girl on the beach. In the fifteen years he had been landlord of the Sirène, he had got to know everyone in the village. If a woman that attractive had lived at Yport, he would certainly be able to identify her . . .
Before I could open my mouth, he came towards me holding a thick Manila envelope.
“This arrived for you, lad!”
I sat on the bed in my room: no. 7, top floor, in the eaves, sea view. When I booked the Sirène, I had thought I had stumbled upon the kitschiest of hotels.
The rooms were clean and pretty. The place had recently been redecorated, sky blue with a seashell frieze, and the curtain tie-backs were made of mooring rope. Standing at the window I could see the coast all the way to the Fécamp lighthouse. Sitting on the bed, I could still make out the top of the cliffs.