by Michel Bussi
The silence continued.
I threw my cup into the bin. Bullseye!
She did the same. Equaliser.
I realised that Mona wasn’t planning to take it further.
“Delighted to have met you, Mona. Maybe I’ll see you again tomorrow, if you’re still waiting for your application to be rubber-stamped when they bring me back in handcuffs . . .”
She rested a hand on my shoulder and drew close to my ear, murmuring:
“My little antennae tell me we’ll see one another before tomorrow.”
I said nothing, content to enjoy the gentle pressure of her palm. She loved speaking in riddles, and I hadn’t a clue what they meant.
“My antennae are powerful. They also tell me that you’re staying in Yport. Hôtel de la Sirène. Room number 7.”
She had said too much. I wondered if she had been sent to spy on me. Perhaps Piroz was the cat and she was the mouse.
“How do you know that?”
She leaned forward again. Her orange painted fingernails brushed my shoulder-blade.
“My antennae! Poor defenceless creatures like me need to be well informed if they’re to survive encounters with predators of your kind.”
She stood up abruptly and looked at her watch.
“Thirteen minutes! I’m going to have to leave you. Any minute now the beast will awake, and I’ll no longer be safe in your company.”
“I’m not going to devour you here, not bang in the middle of the police station.”
“Maybe not here. But later?”
Later?
It didn’t look as though Mona wanted to help me understand. She took three steps towards the corridor and walked towards one of the offices.
“Sorry to abandon you, but I really need to get one of these cops to approve this for me.”
“Good luck, then.”
I was about to set off in the direction of the exit when Mona paused in the doorway to one of the offices and said:
“See you this evening! Don’t be late.”
10
SEE YOU THIS EVENING?
The bus dropped me in Yport, Place Jean-Paul Laurens, before continuing on towards Le Havre. Only a fifteen-minute journey, but a wait of almost three quarters of an hour in Fécamp. I had time to think again about Piroz’s investigation. I felt almost relieved. The rapist’s sperm, his prints, those coincidences with the Morgane Avril murder ten years ago, all proved (or would prove) that I had nothing to do with it.
I avoided thinking about the shadowy areas . . .
They would brighten. Like the twilight sun whose last rays were fraying the clouds into rainbow lace. The famous light of the Impressionists—I couldn’t help recognising it, even though I’d never set foot in a museum; Yport was worth the detour just for that.
I set off towards the sea, thoughts of Mona running through my mind. Her face followed me like a watermark superimposed over the sunset. It lacked the tragic grace of Magali Verron, her desperate beauty, that thing that cuts through your heart like a blade. No . . . Mona was someone you’d want to share a beer with, a mate of the opposite sex. The sort of mate you’d share a bed with too, and it would be no more complicated than sharing a beer. Perhaps that was love.
Love from the male perspective.
As far as I knew.
I passed a butcher’s shop. Behind the glass the proprietor was giving me a sidelong glance, as if I might knock her sidewalk out of shape by walking on it with my artificial leg.
Bitch!
Mona’s face drove the butcher from my mind. Why had she taken an interest in me?
Why had she approached me?
Because there was nothing more natural in the world between a man and a woman in a place where they are more or less the only strangers of the same age? Probably. I had never been able to shake that feeling of inferiority; guilt, almost. How could a girl be interested in me without my having to develop a strategy to win her over? There were so many guys out there who would make a better catch than me . . .
I stepped off the sidewalk to make way for two old ladies who were coming in the opposite direction, walking sticks in their fists, more disabled than me.
In February, Yport was like an old people’s home, a pretty convalescent hospital beside the sea. You might even say that the town itself was an old lady. A grandmother you would only visit when the weather was fine, in the holidays, bringing the children along to fill gaps in the conversation and make some noise. A grandmother who owned a big garden with weeds and swings that rusted all year.
Yport reminded me of Djamila, my grandmother. Not because she lived beside the sea, somewhere like Essaouira or Agadir, far from it! She lived in Drancy, the Géricault Tower, beyond the ring road, but her sixth-floor flat overlooked a big public garden. When I was a kid I used to go there with my cousins, and the playground of Tower B was our Adventureland. The last time I dropped by, the playground was still there—the pony on a spring, the monkey bridge—but the place was empty apart from a few old people sitting on benches with no kids to keep an eye on. Any child that wandered in would have found themselves put on display like some exotic animal in a zoo for the retired.
I carried on along the seafront. There was a stiff breeze coming off the sea. Another twenty metres and I had reached the Sirène.
Mona brought back memories of my childhood, although I couldn’t think why.
As soon as I entered the hotel, André Jozwiak stepped out to greet me, all smiles.
An envelope in his hand.
I put out a hand to steady myself, as if clutching the fishermen’s ropes that decorated the plaster moulding. I could make out the UPS stamp on the parcel. A courier must have dropped the package off this afternoon. André was amused.
“For someone who never used to receive any mail . . . Have you written a manuscript and all the publishing houses are rejecting you?”
He held out the envelope. My name was written on the front in sky-blue ink; the same handwriting as this morning’s package.
“. . . Or you’ve got a new girlfriend and your exes are sending your love letters back?” André went on.
I grabbed the parcel and headed for the stairs leading up to my room.
“Thanks, André.”
“Proofs to correct?” he carried on, undeterred. “You’ve got your teacher training certificate, and schools in deprived areas want to use their government funding to hire you?”
Clearly he wasn’t going to stop unless he got an answer, so I gave him one:
“They’re mail order catalogues. Medical journals. Nothing but pictures of artificial left feet.”
The landlord’s laughter echoed around the stairwell.
“Dinner’s at seven,” he called after me.
The contents of the envelope were spread across the bed.
Like this morning’s package, it contained newspaper articles, Captain Grima’s case notes, statements from witnesses, all relating to the Morgane Avril case. This anonymous sender was certainly the master of suspense . . .
I spread out the sheets of paper and sat down to read. If my mysterious correspondent was so intent on arousing my curiosity, I wasn’t about to deprive him of his pleasure.
Morgane Avril case—June 2004
In spite of his youth and lack of experience, Captain Philippe Grima had shown himself to be a remarkably efficient police officer. Less than three days after the murder of Morgane Avril, 90 percent of the male population of Yport between the ages of fifteen and seventy-five had agreed to provide DNA samples. Of the young men who had attended the Riff on the Cliff, just over 70 percent provided sperm for testing (323 samples, to be precise). None of the samples were a match for the rapist’s DNA.
Though Captain Grima soon realised this time-consuming exercise would achieve nothing, Judge Nadeau-Loquet insisted tha
t, by eliminating most of the population from the inquiry, they were tightening the net on the perpetrator.
In the meantime Captain Grima continued to question the main witnesses, including those whose DNA had ruled them out as suspects. At first he spent twelve-hour days at the station and nights at home with a reheated meal on one knee and little Lola’s head on the other. He’d end up falling asleep either in front of the last witnesses or in the arms of his four-month-old daughter. His wife, Sarah, threw him out for the duration of the investigation, so from June 21st to July 12th, 2004, he spent three weeks sleeping on a camp bed in the station cafeteria, calling in on his family every third day with a bag of croissants.
Gradually the investigation pieced together the events leading up to Morgane Avril’s death. Although she was nineteen, for Morgane that evening, June 5th, 2004, was her first real night out. Her mother, Carmen, had only given her consent to the trip because the driver of the Clio, twenty-four-year-old Nicolas Gravé, who was in his final year of forestry management studies at Mesnières-en-Bray, would be there to keep an eye on Morgane and her other daughter, Océane. She also considered the other two passengers—Clara Barthélémy, nineteen, a teaching assistant at Charles Perrault kindergarten in Neufchâtel, and Mathieu Picard, twenty-one, a medical student like Morgane, but already in his third year—to be trustworthy.
They had left Neufchâtel-en-Bray at about 6 P.M., and arrived in Yport just over an hour later. They ate kebabs on the beach, sitting on the pebbles in front of the casino like hundreds of other young festival-goers, then attended the Riff on the Cliff concert. There was a party atmosphere, but nothing over-the-top. Morgane was excited, but no more than anyone else.
The headline act, local band Histoire d’A, were the last to perform. They came off stage at 1 A.M. and the DJs picked it up from there.
It was then that Morgane began, in the words of Nicolas and Mathieu, to make a spectacle of herself.
Lap-dancing, provocative poses . . .
Nicolas and Mathieu said they had tried to reason with her. She had drunk a few beers, but not that much. This was confirmed by the autopsy results, which revealed, there was less than 0.9 grams of alcohol in her blood. Enough to release Morgane’s inhibitions.
Nicolas Gravé and Clara Barthélémy then revealed another piece of information: they had been secretly dating for several weeks. The outing had been a pretext, and the three other passengers alibis. From 2 A.M. onwards Nic and Clara were kissing and cuddling on a Sea View sofa. They were oblivious to Morgane’s disappearance until 6 A.M., when a guy ran in screaming, “There’s a dead body on the beach! Oh my God, there’s a dead body on the beach!”
Mathieu and Océane had played third wheel for a while, but by 3 A.M. they were bored with the dance floor. For the next hour they alternated between trying to make conversation over the loud music and dozing off on the sofas. They weren’t paying much attention to what Morgane was up to. The last time they recalled seeing her was at 3:30 A.M., on the dance floor. Mathieu Picard said he wasn’t worried when she disappeared because he’d assumed she would not be ending the evening alone. After the festival, the casino and beach had turned into one giant shag pad. He admitted that he’d half-heartedly tried his luck with Océane, but got nowhere even though she had drunk more than usual. The two of them had been friends since kindergarten, but unlike Morgane she wasn’t one for flirting. In his words, she was a ball-breaker, just like her mother.
This left Captain Grima with a two-hour “black hole” between the last sighting of Morgane and the discovery of her body at 5:30 A.M.
Or, to be precise, just under two hours. The Sea View cloakroom attendant, Sonia Thurau, a little blonde who resembled a trash goth Barbie-doll, remembered seeing Morgane going out for a cigarette at about 3:40. She insisted there was no way she could have been mistaken; Morgane was the hottest customer in the place that night. Sonia described her as having sweat trickling down her face, her tight dress clinging to her thighs and see-through with perspiration, revealing fuchsia underwear.
“She was wearing her panties and her bra at that point,” Sonia confirmed.
“You’re very observant,” Grima complimented her.
“Too right. I’d happily have eaten that little pussy of hers!”
Sonia Thurau’s reply left the captain disconcerted, for her observant eye was at that moment savouring his own anatomy in a way that made it clear her sexual preferences were not exclusive. The next time they called Sonia in, he made sure she was interviewed by an officer who was nearing retirement age.
“Stepped outside for a cigarette . . .”
The captain thought about that detail for a long time after the interview.
Morgane Avril didn’t smoke.
Another dead end.
While he continued his efforts to find more witnesses and reconstruct every minute of Morgane’s evening, Captain Grima shifted his focus to the murder weapon.
The Burberry scarf.
On July 19th, 2004, Judge Nadeau-Loquet sent him a message congratulating him on the significant progress in the investigation that had resulted from Grima pursuing an angle everyone else had overlooked.
A scarf. A scrap of fabric worth more than four hundred euros.
Grima took the time to check all the witness statements, to cross-reference the different versions of events and eliminate pieces of information that seemed too far-fetched.
In the end, only three credible witnesses remembered the Burberry scarf.
Sonia Thurau, behind her cloakroom counter, pulled a face when the grizzled policeman showed up. But his questions jogged her memory of a customer she described as a “daddy’s boy.” Asked for more details, “suntanned” was the only adjective she would agree to put in her statement. She refused “swarthy,” “Maghrebi,” “mixed-race,” and every other term the old cop suggested, insisting that the disco ball had made it impossible for her to tell the colour of his skin.
The sun-tanned daddy’s boy had stopped by the cloakroom to check in his linen jacket and cashmere scarf. Not too many festival-goers wore that sort of gear, which was why Sonia remembered him.
“Was it a red scarf? A Burberry?”
She hadn’t noticed the brand but, yes, it could easily have been a Burberry. Sonia hadn’t seen the guy leave, so a colleague must have served him when he returned for his clothes, but none of them remembered.
Captain Grima considered the possibility that Sonia Thurau had invented this mysterious customer after reading newspaper accounts referring to “the red-scarf killer.” But she seemed a reliable witness; when she wasn’t running the casino cloakroom, Sonia was studying comparative European law. What’s more, two other witnesses reported seeing a man with a scarf.
Mickey, a temporary bouncer who had spent the night of June 5th-6th patrolling the parking lot where the sound of guitar riffs struggled to compete with the noise of the waves, recalled seeing a man smoking under the cliff, near the casino bins, who seemed to be wearing a jacket and a scarf. He hadn’t been able to make out the colour. Neither could he remember the time. After three in the morning, that was all he could be sure of, because he had taken a break. He couldn’t be more precise than that. He was alone, Mickey was sure of it.
“Did you get the impression he was waiting for somebody?” Grima asked.
“Possibly.”
“A girl?”
“Could be . . . or some mates. I carried on making my rounds.”
That was all Mickey had seen: a silhouette glimpsed between the halo of a street lamp and the beam of his flashlight. But it was around the time that Morgane Avril was seen leaving the Sea View . . . And that was the last time she was seen alive.
The third witness, Vincent Carré, a twenty-one-year-old chemistry student, had arrived at Bréauté, the nearest station to Yport, at around 5 P.M. Buses had been provided to transport festival-goers to the
concert, so Vincent joined the line of people waiting to board. He found himself standing beside a guy who seemed to be about the same age as him, but unlike everyone else there he was elegantly dressed: white shirt, polished pumps, jacket over his shoulder and red scarf around his neck.
“What’s with the fancy get-up?” Vincent had asked.
“Girls like it.”
“Are you here for the music or the girls?”
Vincent Carré clearly remembered his reply.
“The music or the girls? Are you serious? Good music is rare, and you’re not going to find the next Hendrix playing Yport! But the girls . . . Hey, girls are beautiful everywhere!”
When they got on the bus, Vincent hadn’t taken the seat next to the guy in the scarf. Not really his tribe. They had both plugged in their headphones. End of story.
Except Vincent had seen the guy with the scarf again at the Sea View. He was dancing in the crowd, and most of the time he was hanging around the most beautiful girl in the place, Morgane, though Vincent didn’t know her name at that point. It was obvious the guy was trying to chat her up.
He wasn’t wearing his scarf on the dance floor, but dozens of other witnesses confirmed that there was a guy prowling around Morgane. Océane and Mathieu had seen him too. Everybody, Vincent included, contributed to the facial composite. It showed a rather square, handsome face, brown eyes, very brown complexion, perhaps even, although they couldn’t be certain, of North African origin. A composite artist worked for two days putting together a sketch that was as vague as it was banal. But it was distributed everywhere. Hundreds of responses, all checked, led nowhere. Not that Captain Grima had entertained any real hope in the portrait of a man glimpsed in the semi-darkness of a disco, when witnesses had had no idea of the tragedy that would unfold, no reason to etch that face in their memory.