Never Forget

by Michel Bussi

  A ghost suspect.

  No one in the area could remember having seen him. Either that or the portrait was a poor likeness.

  Carmen Avril put pressure on the investigators. In September, Femme Actuelle magazine ran an interview with Morgane’s mother. A quote from it was emblazoned across the cover:

  If they’d listened to me, Myrtille Camus would still be alive!

  Carmen Avril told the journalist she had known from the start that her daughter had fallen victim to a sadistic killer who had chosen her at random. Just as he had chosen Myrtille Camus at random. As he would choose another victim at random if he wasn’t stopped. Myrtille Camus would still be alive if Captain Grima hadn’t been blinded by his ridiculous hypothesis that Morgane’s murder was an accident. An aberration committed by a respectable boy who had panicked and gripped the throat of his one-night stand a bit too hard; a respectable boy who would never again . . .

  Commander Bastinet’s response was to invite Carmen to meet with him. He assured her that every resource had been put at his disposal.

  It was true.

  Judge Lagarde and Commander Bastinet cast their gigantic net over Normandy, conducting door-to-door inquiries, house searches, collecting witness statements, cross-referencing cases stored on the database. Bastinet wasn’t anticipating a speedy resolution. He thought it would be a lengthy investigation that would probe every minute detail in hope of finding some vital clue buried among the countless gigabytes of information . . . The same work that Captain Grima had done in Fécamp, basically, but with many times the funding.

  Ellen Nilsson, the criminal psychologist, was bored. Unlike Inspector Bastinet, she was staking everything on a single witness statement. Just one.

  She seized upon the fundamental difference between the murder of Morgane Avril and that of Myrtille Camus.

  Myrtille Camus had felt threatened during the days leading up to her murder.

  And her family knew who she felt threatened by.

  I looked up. I had almost finished reading, but the presence of a familiar silhouette on the beach, about a hundred metres away from me, made me lose my place.

  Xanax!

  He was still wearing his brown jacket like a second skin. He looked so weary and depressed, it was a wonder he hadn’t thrown himself from the cliff. He was slowly walking towards the sea, almost as if he was waiting for the shoreline to dry behind the retreating waves.

  Everyone was clearing out, even the sea.

  That must have been part of his neurosis.

  I hurriedly bundled the papers into the envelope and ran towards him.

  As one of the three witnesses to Magali Verron’s suicide, I wondered what he made of this unlikely sequence of coincidences. Whether he too believed that the red-scarf killer had struck again, ten years after claiming his first two victims.

  14

  IS HE GOING TO START AGAIN?

  Christian? Christian Le Medef?”

  I walked as quickly as I could over the rocks exposed by the departing tide. A desert landscape after a miraculous rain-shower. Thousands of miniature peaks, valleys and caves dug by the wind and the years. Sharp. Gleaming. My left foot caught on a ridge, slipped in a furrow. I cursed inwardly. If I wasn’t capable of keeping my balance on a slippery shoreline with my wonky foot, it wasn’t even worth my lining up with the others on the snowy slopes of Mont Blanc.

  I called out again.

  “Le Medef!”

  Xanax turned around this time and stared at me with his weary eyes.

  “Ah, It’s you.”

  Apparently he couldn’t remember my name. I walked over to him and shook his hand.

  “Jamal. Jamal Salaoui.”

  He studied my WindWall. The one I had worn the previous day and all the other mornings.

  “So you go running every day?”

  “Yeah . . .”

  I didn’t want to go into detail about my training. I looked for some way of broaching the topic of Magali Verron’s suicide.

  “I’m due to see the police at Fécamp again this afternoon. I have a two o’clock meeting. And you?”

  Le Medef looked surprised. “I signed my statement yesterday. Captain Piroz said he would contact me again if necessary but he thought he had everything he needed for the time being . . . I’m not going to complain.”

  He looked around him, and I wondered if he was pondering the daily training regime that had brought me along the cliff path. From the base of the cliff, the rocky shoreline seemed to stretch out endlessly. A vast wilderness populated only by the black, bent shadows of locals collecting shellfish. Several dozen of them, in scattered groups of two or three.

  “It’s forbidden,” Le Medef told me.

  “What is?”

  “Collecting seashells. It’s forbidden. There’s a sign posted by the first-aid post, and yet everyone does it. The cops don’t say anything. It’s beyond me . . .”

  He raised his voice, perhaps in the hope of being heard by the foragers.

  “Either it’s dangerous and you impose the law, or it isn’t and you let these good people pick their mussels. But forbidding something while tolerating it at the same time—there’s nothing more hypocritical than that, is there?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never collected shellfish.”

  “You don’t think the police are hypocritical?”

  “Criminal, if you ask me!”

  I pulled a face, communicating my disgust at the very idea of eating a sticky mollusc that’s been pulled off a rock after sitting in the sun for hours. That cheered Le Medef up. I realised that I’d shifted to calling him Le Medef; the incongruity of this beaten-down individual sharing a name with the bosses’ union tickled me.

  “So that’s how it is,” he said. “Captain Piroz wants to see you again?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s logical, I suppose . . . Me and Denise—not to mention good old Arnold—didn’t really see anything. Just the girl crashing to the ground. Whereas you had a balcony seat.”

  His eyes seemed drawn once again by the shell-pickers.

  “Imagine if they were all poisoned, Jamal. If they all died. Or just one of them. An old one. Or a child. After eating a crab or a lobster crammed with bacteria. Given that we’re here, between the oil refinery and the nuclear plant, the possibility isn’t too far-fetched.”

  Every now and again we heard shouts from the nearest group of shell-pickers, fifty metres away: a grandfather and his two grandchildren. Boots, yellow waxed jackets and a Hello Kitty pail.

  No, I wasn’t imagining it.

  “Weird business, isn’t it?” Le Medef resumed.

  I worked out that he was talking about Magali Verron again.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Captain Piroz told you, I suppose. The cops don’t think it was suicide. The kid was raped, then strangled. But your version is slightly different, isn’t it?”

  I had no time to reply, he’d already picked up the conversation again.

  “I have to say, your version surprised me—the girl jumping off the cliff of her own accord. So I did some research into this Magali Verron.”

  He leaned towards me and lowered his voice. He was standing in a hole filled with salt water in his unsuitable footwear, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  “I found some things. Some things that were hard to believe . . . I spent a while looking; I don’t have much else to do with my time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m unemployed, divorced, I rarely see my children, now they’re away at university . . .”

  I’d been asking what he’d found out about Magali Verron, but now he was giving me his life story. I was wondering how to get him back on track without seeming rude when he brought his stubbly chin close to my shoulder.

  “I was working at th
e nuclear plant in Paluel. High-ranking engineer! It’s not easy, you know, particularly when you’re a bit of an ecologist. Eight years ago, I gave it all up to invest in wind turbines. They were the future! My wife was O.K. with it—she’s a bit green as well. Or rather, she was. So I set up my own company, even took on two technicians and a marketing person, we were going to go around to all the farmers in the area to sell them wind . . . That stupid name of mine, Le Medef, had never been so appropriate.”

  He let out a laugh. I didn’t join in. His stale aftershave mingled with the sea spray. His voice assumed a melodramatic tone. A little too forced, but at the time I didn’t give it much thought. It was only later, much later, that it came back to me.

  “Next thing I know, all the big companies are getting in on the act,” Le Medef huffed. “Nordex. Veolia. Suez. Then they introduce a new law banning the installation of wind turbines on land belonging to private individuals. Not a single pylon could be set up without a public utility investigation and a revision of the town planning scheme. I won’t give you chapter and verse, but all the small companies melted away within six months, leaving the multinationals to carve up the cake. I had to declare myself bankrupt! My wife ran off with the guy who had taken my old job at the plant. I found myself up to my eyeballs in debt to pay for my kids’ education. Every month I get bills for repayment of those loans, but all I get from my kids is a postcard once a year—if I’m lucky.”

  Le Medef reminded me of the guys you find on sitting benches in the Cité des 4000. Sit down next to them and they’ll give you their whole life story. As if just by telling it to you they can offload their misery.

  “A year ago,” he went on, “I became homeless. Luckily I met an old man who needed someone to do a bit of work on his house in Yport. He let me stay in his holiday home. He never goes there, but he doesn’t want to sell it. I do some repairs, I mow the lawn, I maintain the place, and in return he lets me stay there for nothing. I’m waiting here until things pick up again. I can’t complain—there are a lot worse places I could be.”

  Like a swimmer running out of air, he paused to draw breath. I made a show of checking my watch. As I’d hoped, it didn’t go unnoticed.

  “Anyway, to get back to the subject of Magali Verron: did Piroz talk to you about her?”

  “He told me she was a pharmaceutical sales rep, that she was meeting with doctors in the area. That she had probably slept in Yport, but they don’t know where . . .”

  Le Medef turned towards the kids and their grandfather again. His face had taken on a concerned expression, as if they were in mortal danger.

  “He told me much the same, but I did some digging. At the Paluel Nuclear plant, I worked with the local hospitals, and the doctors too. Checking air quality, the distribution of dosimeters and iodine tablets, the whole thing. I called a few of my old contacts. They all knew the Verron girl. Quite a hottie, from the sound of it! She worked for Bayer France. They all described her as attractive, efficient, and flirtatious enough for them to order drugs from her. You saw her better than I did. A beautiful girl like that, if she’d recommended anti-radiation hallucinogenic mushrooms they’d have ordered them by the pallet. By all accounts, she was a perfectly ordinary girl . . . Apparently.”

  Le Medef had the gift of drawing things out to keep his audience in suspense.

  “Why ‘apparently?’”

  He stepped towards the rocks. A dark line had appeared at the bottom of his shoes.

  “My shoes are wet! I’m going back to the village. Will you come with me?”

  I stayed right where I was. “What have you found out about Magali Verron?” I demanded. “That she wasn’t a perfectly ordinary girl?”

  “Follow me,” he insisted. “You have to be in the village to understand . . .”

  I had no choice. I caught up with him. As we walked towards the sea wall it occurred to me that Christian Le Medef had lived in the region for more than ten years. He must have made the connection between Magali Verron’s suicide and the murders of Morgane Avril and Myrtille Camus. The red scarf . . . I thought about broaching that topic, but in the end I opted to walk with him in silence.

  One revelation after another . . .

  We passed La Sirène and Le Medef turned on to Rue Emmanuel-Foy, Yport’s shopping street.

  “You’ll see,” he said. “It’s incredible!”

  He came to a halt outside the newsstand.

  “Look at the papers on the display stand,” he urged.

  I studied the headlines of Paris-Normandie, Le Havre Presse, Le Courrier Cauchois. I didn’t notice anything particular. I turned to Le Medef.

  “I . . . I don’t see anything.”

  “Exactly. Don’t you see? That’s what’s so odd. A girl jumps off the cliff, probably raped, strangled. And the next day there’s no mention of it in the local dailies.”

  I understood then what Le Medef was getting at, but nevertheless I put forward an argument:

  “But it’s a suicide. It doesn’t warrant front-page headlines.”

  I stood aside for a man who was leaving the shop with a copy of L’Équipe under his arm. The front page of Le Courrier Cauchois carried a story about the extension of the urban community of Fécamp, Le Havre Presse had a report on job losses in Port-Jérôme, Paris-Normandie was bemoaning the increase in house prices along the coast.

  “Not on the front page?” Le Medef replied, raising his voice. “Don’t tell me you haven’t made the connection. You’ve talked to people locally, haven’t you? You know what’s going on, for heaven’s sake. That bloody serial killer is back! A rape, a girl strangled with a scarf that cost more than I get in benefits each month! Damn it, it was ten years ago and I remember it as if it was yesterday. The case made the front pages of all the papers for six months. And now? nothing! Nothing at all!”

  “It’s still quite recent,” I suggested. “It only happened yesterday morning.”

  “Exactly. Dear Christ! What a scoop! How could they miss it!”

  I studied the front pages of the daily papers in the hope of finding at least a paragraph or two. Le Medef, sure of his case, let me get on with it. He must already have been through all the papers.

  I tried to come up with another explanation.

  “It’s the police. They haven’t let anything get out. They’re waiting. A bit like when there’s an accident at a nuclear plant—they don’t say anything at first, they wait for the danger to pass before informing people.”

  Le Medef didn’t look convinced.

  “And how would the cops have held on to the information? They’ve already got three witnesses. Since then I’ve talked to all my friends. You must have talked about it with people, right? Denise, too, she’s the type. Not to mention all the people who saw the police on the beach yesterday, examining the body . . . And no one has said anything? In a village like Yport, where nothing ever happens and where the old people have nothing to do but spread gossip?”

  Christian Le Medef was right. There was no way the newspapers wouldn’t have received at least a few tip-offs. And local reporters would surely have spotted the parallels with the Avril–Camus investigation ten years earlier. That no one apart from us knew anything . . .

  And yet this seemed to be the case.

  “So?” Le Medef pressed. “Do you have an explanation?”

  I shook my head.

  “Neither do I. Believe me, young man, this whole business stinks.”

  I realised that he had called me by the familiar tu, as if he was trying to establish a complicity between us in the middle of an inquiry that went beyond both of us. He looked away and pointed at a little fisherman’s cottage. Blue shutters, red-brick walls decorated with flint, slate roof. As he’d said, it wasn’t the worst emergency accommodation for a homeless man.

  “This is my gaff! Would you like a coffee?”

  Time
was running out. I had less than three hours before my appointment with Piroz.

  “No. I’m sorry. Do you happen to know where Denise lives?”

  Christian Le Medef seemed disappointed.

  “Probably with Arnold . . .” He smiled to himself. “Apart from that, no idea. I haven’t seen her since yesterday. I don’t even know her surname, I’d have to say . . . And you’re staying with André Jozwiak, at La Sirène?”

  “Yes. For a week.”

  “O.K. If I find anything out, I’ll let you know. I’m going to keep on digging, see what else I can find out about Magali Verron. Last night I had Dr. Charrier on the phone—he has a surgery in Doudeville, he’s one of the doctors that Magali Verron visited before she went off the cliff. You see? Someone else who knows about this news story! Anyway, when it comes to women, Charrier isn’t the kind to be easily impressed. You should see his secretaries—gorgeous, the pair of them. Well, he fell for little Magali. Tried to get off with her—chatted her up, asked her what she liked doing. She told him she was into dancing, so he invited her to a club, thinking he could show her some of his moves. Only it turned out the lovely Magali wasn’t into clubbing, she did modern oriental dance—raqs sharqi, that kind of thing.

  Raqs sharqi . . .

  An electric shock exploded in my brain. The neurones tried in vain to reconnect.

  Christian Le Medef went on talking, probably imagining Magali Verron in a spangled sari, his doctor friend drooling from the sidelines.

  I wasn’t listening to him any more.

  I waved at him briefly.

  “See you soon, Christian. Keep me up to date with your research.”

  La Sirène was barely a hundred metres away. I tried not to run.

  Raqs sharqi.

  No sign of André at reception. I climbed the hotel steps, opened the window, then ran towards my laptop and turned it on, cursing its slowness in advance. The Windows wheel rotated more slowly than my thoughts.

  Raqs sharqi

  I had read that phrase for the first time the previous day in one of the brown envelopes.