by Michel Bussi
“Your daughter was pretty, Madame Avril. Very pretty. Probably the prettiest girl at the disco. Try to follow my reasoning. Morgane was spoilt for choice. Morgane was at liberty to choose the boy she wanted to go out with. If she chose her murderer rather than the other way round, we will find him. It will be easy to find him.”
Carmen Avril leapt from her chair, unleashing her fury.
“Chose her murderer? Did I understand correctly, Captain? You think she chose her murderer! Listen to me very carefully, Grima, my daughter didn’t go off with anyone! My daughter was not consenting. My daughter was raped. You understand? Raped, strangled, and tossed over a cliff like a dead animal.”
Philippe Grima thought again of his little Lola’s warm body. Imagine raising a girl to the age of nineteen so that . . .
Yes, he understood. Of course he did. That was why he wanted to lock this guy up as fast as possible.
“I just want to find the bastard who did this to her . . .”
Mister Tickle, still sitting down, extended an arm as long as a willow branch to pull Carmen by the sleeve. Carmen stepped forward to escape her brother’s hand and looked Captain Grima up and down.
“You’re nothing but an incompetent young fool.”
The autopsy took place the following day.
It confirmed what they already knew. Morgane Avril was raped some time between 5 A.M. and 6 A.M., then strangled and thrown off the cliff. In that order. According to the medical examiner, she was probably dead before she was thrown over the edge. In Morgane’s vagina were traces of sperm that they identified, given the chronology of events, as belonging to the rapist.
This was excellent news for Captain Grima. The next step would be to check the DNA against all the men who had attended the Riff on the Cliff festival and the Sea View, and if necessary every adult male in Yport. Several newspapers recalled the events that followed the rape and murder of English schoolgirl Caroline Dickinson in 1996 while on a school trip to Brittany. All the men in Pleine-Fougères had to give DNA samples for testing . . . then all possible suspects in Brittany and beyond—more than 3,500 people. Eight years on, would a judge have the guts to initiate testing on this scale in Normandy?
The autopsy revealed two additional details, both of which reinforced Captain Grima’s hypothesis.
First, Morgane Avril, before being killed and raped, had taken a dip in the sea. Naked. The medical examiners were categorical: the traces of salt and iodine left no room for doubt. She had swum in the sea, and then she had put her dress back on. This occurred before she was raped. For Captain Grima, it was as if another piece of the puzzle had fallen into place. Morgane follows a stranger she has picked up at the Sea View. She takes it up a level with a midnight skinny-dip for the pair of them, far from prying eyes. Then the adventure turns to tragedy. Morgane gets dressed, decides to leave things there, gives the stranger a parting kiss—and he loses control.
The second detail was even stranger. The rapist hadn’t strangled Morgane Avril with his hands, but with a scarf. The autopsy findings were very precise: the red cashmere fibres taken from the victim’s neck were of exceptional quality and sufficiently rare that the experts were able to identify the garment they came from: a Burberry scarf.
Four hundred and twenty-five euros for a piece of fabric.
A red scarf . . .
Captain Grima had whistled between his teeth.
The noose would soon be tightening around the rapist. There couldn’t be many young people in Yport who wore a scarf like that around their necks.
I read every single one of the pages a second time: the newspaper articles, the police reports, all the details of the investigation recorded by Captain Grima.
A nineteen-year-old girl, raped, strangled and thrown from the top of the cliff overlooking Yport.
Almost ten years ago. June 2004.
After taking a dip in the sea, naked.
Strangled with a red cashmere Burberry scarf.
The room seemed to be spinning around me. My laptop was on the table. Connected.
I feverishly typed a few keywords into a search engine.
Morgane Avril. Rape. Yport.
Google took a nanosecond to deliver the results: dozens of articles devoted to the Morgane Avril case. I skimmed the summaries. They confirmed that the pages I’d been sent were accurate to the last detail.
I stood up. Through the window, the cliffs taunted me. Sheep grazed calmly around the blockhouse, as if this morning’s drama had never taken place. As if I had dreamed that scene, a scene that had happened not a few hours ago, but ten years ago.
I was going mad.
I picked up the envelope again and ran my finger over the postmark.
Fécamp
5:43 P.M.
Feb. 18, 2014
France
Someone had posted this package, from Fécamp, yesterday! Someone who knew I was going to meet that girl on the cliff the following day. Someone who also knew that this girl would die in the same way as another had died, ten years previously, with one exception . . . This one hadn’t been thrown to her death from the top of the cliff, like Morgane Avril. She had jumped, alive, and of her own free will.
It made no sense.
Who could have guessed? How? Why?
I looked at the pristine bed, the pillows plumped nicely against the sky-blue wallpaper of the room.
No, I hadn’t been dreaming! Quite the contrary. The green LED display of the alarm clock reminded me as if delivering a command: 12:53.
It was time to catch the 1:15 P.M. bus that would take me to Fécamp for my meeting with Piroz.
7
STRANGLED WITH A RED CASHMERE BURBERRY SCARF?
I climbed the three steps to the door of Fécamp police station. At reception, a girl with eyes as blue as the colour of her blouse gave me an air-hostess smile.
“I have an appointment with Captain Piroz.”
She had a mermaid’s voice, to lure all the local unemployed into the nets of the police: “Last door on the right, you can’t miss it, it’s got his name on it.”
I walked through a cluttered hallway that housed a photocopier and several filing cabinets creaking under stacks of files. The walls were lined with recruitment posters. I continued down a long corridor. Uniformed men were busy behind computers. Chairs were lined up near the doors.
Xanax was sitting twenty metres ahead of me. He was wearing the same leather jacket as he had worn this morning. I sat down next to him. He smiled at me, or at least more than he had done earlier.
“Denise is already in there,” he said. “Arnold too . . . After that it’s my turn.”
I returned his smile and then we didn’t say another word. I tried to remember his real name, the one he had given to the police this morning. It came back to me after a few minutes. Le Medef. Christian Le Medef. Ironic that someone who matched the stereotype of a victim of the system should have the same name as the French bosses’ organisation.
We waited. All that was missing was a coffee table, Le Figaro, and Paris Match. I was tempted to get my iPhone out and search the internet for more information about the Morgane Avril case. I didn’t know who had sent the package of cuttings to La Sirène, but the police must surely have noticed the many points this case had in common with the 2004 one.
The red-scarf rapist was back, ten years on.
Xanax kept looking at his watch in annoyance. The police were coming and going, up and down the corridor. Further on, at the coffee machine, a woman was getting annoyed because every time she put her a coin in the slot, it was rejected. She was wearing tight jeans that showed off her figure, and her red hair was tied in a ponytail that cascaded down her neck. I was intrigued. Who wore ponytails these days? I waited impatiently for her to turn around so that I could see her face.
No such luck! She still had her ba
ck turned when the door to Piroz’s office opened and Denise came out, with Arnold wedged under her arm. He was the only witness to the tragedy who had changed his outfit; he was now wearing an elegant red and blue Fair Isle sweater, almost in the colours of the gendarmerie. Piroz came out with her and shook her hand.
“Monsieur Le Medef, you’re next . . .”
Xanax and Piroz disappeared through the door, which the captain closed behind them. Denise, stroking Arnold like a frail child who had just been to see the doctor, stared at me with clear eyes.
“You’re in for a wait—he’ll be at least a quarter of an hour. They want to know everything, even the things we didn’t see.”
Denise’s wrinkled hands disappeared into the coat of her Shih Tzu, all the while shifting from one leg to the other as if she urgently needed to go for a wee.
Or perhaps she was just anxious to talk to me.
She leaned towards me, slowly, glancing out the corner of her eye at the policemen coming and going.
“Young man, I must apologise. I was obliged to tell them the truth.”
The truth?
“What truth?” I asked, stunned.
Denise leaned forward again.
“You remember, this morning, you told the policeman that we saw the girl jump. All three of us. They were very insistent on that point. So I was obliged to clarify.”
She adjusted Arnold’s pullover while a policeman passed in front of us, then continued in a low voice:
“I didn’t see her jump. I saw the girl fall, I saw her land on the pebbles, and I’m sure the same is true of the gentleman who is with the captain now. But I didn’t see her jump! Besides, from where we were standing, we couldn’t see what was happening up above—the policemen checked.”
She was looking at me as if I were a Jew she had denounced to the Gestapo, with the faux apologetic look of a decent woman who was only doing her duty.
“You must understand, there was nothing else I could have done.”
I adopted the demeanour of a docile young man and gave her the response she was hoping for: “Of course. No problem. Don’t worry, the investigation won’t go on too long, it was . . . it was a suicide.”
Denise straightened and looked at me, almost incredulous, as if I were the most naive man on earth. At last she set Arnold down on the floor and walked away. The Shih Tzu followed her, sniffing each office door like an amateur sleuth delighted to visit the lair of the professionals.
I stretched out my prosthetic leg. My mind was in chaos.
In front of me, the red-haired girl had finally triumphed over the drinks machine. She turned, smiling. Her gaze met mine for a fraction of a second, without dropping below my knee. That was rare, probably as rare as a boy looking at a girl without his eyes plummeting to her chest.
She passed me, plastic cup in hand, then disappeared around the corner. She was rather cute, with her ponytail and her face sprinkled with freckles. The kind of cheeky face that would drive the cops crazy.
“Monsieur Salaoui?”
A good twenty minutes had passed since Xanax had gone inside. We passed in the doorway without a word, then I went into Captain Piroz’s office.
“Sit down, Monsieur Salaoui.”
I did as he asked. In front of me, a huge model sailing boat stood on Piroz’s desk, a three-master mounted on a mahogany stand.
The captain cleared his throat. “It’s a scale model of the Étoile-de-Noël! Built in Dundee, 1920, one of the last Newfoundland fishing vessels to sail out of Fécamp before the Second World War. It belonged to my great grandfather!”
Had Piroz built this model himself?
When I was a kid, my mother’s colleagues in the canteen where she worked gave me a Meccano model for Christmas. A fifteen-centimetre motorbike that moved if you picked it up between your thumb and index finger and made it roll along the carpet. Big deal! I may have been only twelve years old but I was already working on my cousin Latif’s Yamaha VMAX every weekend.
“Three hundred hours, that took!” Piroz went on. “The fishery museum commissioned another one, Le Dauphin, the last trawler out of Fécamp. Everyone in town wept over that boat, but they will have to wait—I can’t make a start on the model until I retire. Less than a year to go—they can hold that long, right?”
Unsure what he expected me to say to his, I nodded. Piroz brushed back his hair with the palm of his hand.
“You don’t give a damn about my models, do you, Salaoui? This old cop’s a bit of a fool, that’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”
I didn’t bother to answer. I waited to see if Piroz was going to come up with a smart riposte. Files were stacked up on his desk behind the Newfoundland fishing vessel. I couldn’t read the name written on the bottle-green dossier on top.
The wrinkles on Piroz’s forehead lengthened.
“This isn’t a suicide, Monsieur Salaoui.”
The information hit me like a slap in the face. Piroz had a sense of timing, he didn’t give me time to draw breath before continuing:
“We’ve identified the victim.”
He opened the file and held out a sheet of paper.
“Here you go, Salaoui, after all, it’s not confidential.”
I looked at it: both sides of an identity card, photocopied on a single page.
Magali Verron
b. January 21, 1995, Charlesbourg, Québec
Height: 1.73 m
Distinguishing features: none
I registered the information.
“I’m sorry, Captain. I’ve never heard of her.”
Piroz didn’t seem to care what I had to say; he carried on reading from the file:
“She was a rep for a large pharmaceutical company. Yesterday she met about ten doctors from Fécamp and Criquetot-l’Esneval. According to her diary, she was due to see more. She probably spent the night in Yport or nearby, but for now we have no record of her having stayed in any of the local hotels.”
Piroz turned the page and then looked up from his file as if to check that I was paying attention.
“On the other hand, the sequence of events since this morning is quite clear. Magali Verron went for a swim in the sea at around five in the morning. She was raped some time before six, the medical examiners are quite clear about that. They found traces of sperm in her vagina, bruises on her skin. Her dress was torn, but her panties—a thong, presumably fuchsia to match her bra—have yet to be found. We’re still looking. Same goes for her handbag. Not a trace.”
Piroz’s words reverberated in my head.
He had to have made the connection with the murder of Morgane Avril ten years before. All the details corresponded. The rape. The place and time of the attack. The age of the victim. The naked early morning swim. The missing panties.
Except for her death . . .
I cleared my throat to speak, to bring up the subject of the Avril case, but Captain Piroz waved his hand to indicate that he hadn’t finished.
“After being raped, Magali Verron was strangled.” He paused for a long time. “With the scarf that we found wrapped around her neck. You remember? A cashmere scarf, in a red tartan pattern. A Burberry scarf—and those things cost a small fortune. If I told you how much, Salaoui, you wouldn’t believe it!
8
WOULD YOU BELIEVE IT?
Captain Piroz moistened his finger with his tongue and ran it over the varnished hull of the Étoile-de-Noël to remove an invisible mark.
I didn’t ask him to repeat himself.
I didn’t ask him if he was sure the medical examiners knew what they were doing, how they could possibly claim that Magali Verron had been strangled with that red scarf before falling off the cliff.
I didn’t say anything that might have aroused his suspicions. Instead I remained silent, replaying this morning’s events in my mind. The Burbe
rry scarf caught on the barbed wire on the hiking path, my hand hesitating, then pulling it away, the same hand tossing it to Magali, Magali’s hand catching it, pulling it, tugging it from my grasp. The same girl, 120 metres and four seconds down below, with the scarf wrapped around her neck.
Tell him about it!
A voice in the depths of my head gave me an order.
Tell him about the scarf! Tell him everything! The rapist’s prints are probably on that scrap of fabric, but so are yours. The police are bound to find them anyway . . .
“Captain Piroz . . .”
What should I say?
That Magali had wrapped the scarf around her neck as she threw herself off the cliff? Reveal that I was the last one to touch that scrap of fabric? That would be tantamount to accusing myself. Of rape. Of murder. I’d be totally screwed.
“Yes, Monsieur Salaoui?” Piroz’s wrinkled face showed as much sign of brain activity as a flatlining encephalogram.
“I . . .”
I had hesitated too long before taking the plunge. My head filled with reasons to remain silent: Piroz said they had found traces of the rapist’s sperm, so the investigators would have his DNA within a week—and it would probably be a match for Morgane Avril’s killer. Then I would be cleared. Then would be time to tell my own version.
Having made up my mind, I decided to change tactics and go on the attack.
“I have a question for you, Captain Piroz. Don’t you think that this case bears a striking similarity to the Morgane Avril case? Yport, June 2004. Surely you recall the investigation?”
Piroz was visibly shaken. This was probably the last thing he’d expected to hear, but he parried my question:
“You remember that case, Monsieur Salaoui?”
Now it was my turn to be caught off guard. I couldn’t tell him about the mail I had received, not yet.