by Michel Bussi
No! a voice yelled in my head. The girl who had just taken my call on the phone couldn’t have been Morgane’s twin sister. Her twin sister had fallen 120 metres, right in front of my eyes. As if clinging to a pair of crutches, I relied on the two axioms Mona had put forward the previous evening. The only two certainties.
Morgane Avril died ten years ago.
Magali Verron died two days ago.
Their incredible resemblance, even their identical genetic imprints, could only be explained by the fact that they were twins.
I entered the clinic and, with a gesture that might have looked friendly, rested my bandaged hand against Carmen’s hip. A girl in a white coat smiled at us from behind the reception desk, then addressed Carmen directly.
“Hello, Madame Avril. If you want to see Océane, she’s in a meeting. She shouldn’t be long.”
She stared at the door to my right.
Doctor Avril.
Without thinking, I let go of Carmen and pushed the door.
Four pairs of eyes were aimed at me.
A woman sitting down, holding her round belly between her trembling palms.
A man standing beside her, with his hand on her shoulder, the other one ready to hit anyone who came too close.
In the corner of the room a two-year-old child was playing on all fours with a shaky Lego tower.
And Océane Avril, behind her desk.
“Can I help you?”
The obstetrician studied me without understanding my intrusion.
A wave of heat overwhelmed me.
It was her . . . It was Magali Verron.
The same melancholy expression. The same delicate grace.
The same perfect features, as if a painter had drawn her to my specifications—the girl of my dreams. How could I have been mistaken?
The one I had reached out to on the cliffs by the blockhouse.
The one whose corpse I had stood over on the beach, for many long minutes before the Fécamp police arrived.
The one standing in front of me. Plainly alive, and explaining to a young couple how to bring a child into the world . . .
My arm dangled stupidly. The rag fell to the ground like a dead jellyfish, revealing the King Cobra.
The pregnant woman screamed, making her son cry. The Lego tower toppled. The child ran across the room and jumped up to press himself against his father’s torso. Jaw firm. Fists clenched.
“Get out of here!” Océane ordered.
Carmen Avril was standing between the door and the corridor, blocking my exit. Naked babies of all skin colours stared at me from their glass frames on all the walls, indignant, closing in on me.
I had to flee. And then think.
I spun round and pushed Carmen with all my strength. She fell backwards, knocking over two chairs in the corridor. I waved the revolver in front of me, which prompted more screaming, this time from the girl in the white coat at reception.
The glass door flew open.
One second later, I was behind the wheel of the Fiat 500. Another second and the car reversed into the empty parking lot, turned and screeched into the main road, ignoring the stop sign.
I got my breath back and forced myself to take my foot off the accelerator, to drive slowly, at least until the Neufchâtel exit. In my rear-view mirror, down by the Foucarmont road, I thought I saw the blue halo of a revolving light, just below the panel that said “Gîtes de France.”
I slowed down . . .
The cops were at Carmen’s place!
It would probably be a while before they had my description, the make of my car, perhaps even the detail of the mineralogical sticker on the window, if Carmen had been observant.
The Fiat crossed the Arques bridge: “49 km/h,” said a luminous smiley face.
I needed to disappear. Carmen might already have called the police. If they missed me in Neufchâtel, they were bound to be waiting to catch me on the motorway.
I turned right towards Mesnières-en-Bray. Country roads would be my best option.
I had one chance.
The police weren’t about to launch a national manhunt. I didn’t know the procedures involved, but it wasn’t something they seemed to do when it was just an everyday murderer on the run. If I stuck to secondary roads, if I waited for nightfall, with a bit of luck I’d be able to get back to Vaucottes.
And then . . .
I turned on the headlamps. The road stretched out ahead of me. In the gloom, the white line in the middle of the road quickly became my only point of reference. A thread of Ariadne that divided my path into two equal parts. My eyes concentrated on that line, hypnotised, as if by continuing to stare at it I might split my reason into two watertight chambers.
The first one gave up. I had invented everything. No girl had committed suicide two days ago. If that girl existed, she had been strangled to death by my very hands. Her face wasn’t the face of Océane Avril, I’d got muddled up with another murder, ten years earlier, the murder of her sister. Perhaps I had strangled Morgane as well. I was mad, I killed, I forgot, I couldn’t tell my victims apart. I didn’t remember Myrtille Camus either, but if I had murdered Morgane Avril, I must also have raped and murdered this third girl.
The white strip in the glaring light of the headlamps rolled out slowly, dizzyingly.
Now I understood those innocent people who confess to crimes they haven’t committed, after nights in custody, after hours of arguments, hypotheses, and evidence hurled at them by the prosecution. Those innocent people who end up believing in the truth set out by other people, who end up doubting their own certainties, the ones they had when they came into the judge’s office.
A closed face.
The alabaster line turned in a hairpin bend.
No! the voice roared in my head.
No!
The second chamber of my reason continued to resist. There must be a key, a logical explanation.
It was there, almost within reach.
All I had to do was calm down and think. Collect all the evidence and put it together in a different way.
I needed to get some distance, examine it from a new perspective. Go beyond appearances.
Talk to someone who would believe me.
Mona?
28
TALK TO SOMEONE WHO WOULD BELIEVE ME?
Do the police have a description of my car?”
Mona was yelling down the phone.
The headlights of the Fiat blinded a little boy who was about to run into the road, a ball under his arm, just before the sign that read “Carville-Pot-de-Fer.”
I slammed on the brakes. The sign beside the boy taunted me: “Slow down, think of our children.” The cardboard child watched me slowly pass by with great indifference.
Carville-Pot-de-Fer was asleep.
For almost an hour I had been jumping from one village to another along muddy side roads as uneven as the trenches of the Pays de Caux.
“I’m not sure, Mona. Carmen Avril may not have noticed the sticker.”
“You think so? When she’s been waiting for her daughter’s murderer for ten years? Christ, Jamal, the cops are going to make the connection with me as soon as she talks to them about a Fiat 500.”
The twin brother of the little boy with the ball was already getting smaller in my rear-view mirror. Carville-Pot-de-Fer had turned out to be nothing more than a hamlet. I should have told Mona to let it go, tell the police I had stolen her car, that the door didn’t shut, that . . .
“Come and see me in Vaucottes,” I murmured into the phone.
“And how do I do that? You’re driving my car.”
I was reluctant to suggest a meeting point near Yport. Too risky.
“On foot? It’s barely two kilometres to Vaucottes.”
For a moment I thought Mona was goin
g to hang up on me. A huge mansion house, lights blazing, came into view on the crest overlooking the valley of the Durdent.
“Two kilometres! And what about that cliff I’ll have to climb up and back down again. I haven’t got a bionic leg, unlike some people!”
The rain started falling at about nine in the evening. Cold and dense. I imagined it must be turning into snow a few miles in land. In the Valleuse de Caucottes, it merely ran down the tarmacked slope, forming a fleeting torrent which would then spill over the pebbles. An oued, my mother would have called it. A wadi. Was there a local synonym?
I kept watch at the window for Mona. Several times I thought of going outside, of getting back into the car parked in Martin Denain’s garden and going to find her. But Mona would probably take the coastal path . . . What was the point of taking an additional risk? To salve my guilty conscience?
Twenty minutes later, a beam of light pierced the rain, shyly and hesitantly. A dark silhouette advanced behind it, braced against the wind and the pelting rain. I still thought of hurrying outside, opening the door, holding out a blanket and calling into the night, “My God, you came!”
But was it Mona coming into the garden?
I didn’t recognise her until she threw open the oak door. At first Mona didn’t say a word, she just pulled off the waterproof yellow cape that made her look like an elf and pressed it, soaking, against my chest.
I left it to drip on the parquet. I noticed that, for the first time since yesterday, Mona wasn’t wearing my sheriff’s star pinned to her heart. I assumed she was going to start by yelling at me. After that she would listen to me.
Mona stared at me for a long time. I thought how pretty she was, with her red hair sticking to her streaming face, like a little woodland creature escaping the storm to find refuge in the house in the clearing. Fearful. The kind you wanted to press to your heart to warm it up. Then she gave that irresistible smile.
“I don’t think anyone followed me!
She closed the door on the rainstorm.
“I’m going to take a shower, Jamal. A really hot shower.”
Mona came back down half an hour later. She had taken off all her wet clothes and pulled over her naked skin a big grey woollen pullover that came to halfway down her thigh and slipped down over her right shoulder. Her red hair was combed back, exposing her forehead. She sat down on the sofa, pulled the jumper down until it covered her bare thighs, which were drawn up against her chest, then gave me a questioning look.
“So, tell me.”
I told her the whole story.
My trip to Neufchâtel-en-Bray to find Carmen Avril. My ruse to make her dig out the police file on Morgane. The matching DNA. The photographs of the twin sisters. The race to the doctor’s surgery. My face-to-face encounter with Océane Avril. Alive . . .
“Was she as beautiful as she was in your memory?”
I was taken aback by the question. I didn’t reply. Not really.
“It was her, Mona. Even if I know it’s impossible, it was her. The girl who went by the name of Magali Verron. The one I held out the scarf to on the cliff before she jumped.”
She didn’t press the point. She asked me to make her some tea. I found some Twinings bags under Denain’s sink. When I came back into the room, she was gripping both her legs between her arms, with her chin resting on her knees like a hedgehog curled up in a ball.
“You’re still not thinking of handing yourself in to the cops?”
“They’re trying to frame me, Mona.”
“O.K., O.K., let’s not have that conversation again.”
“Thanks for coming.”
“My pleasure. Thanks for the adrenaline.”
The kettle whistled in the kitchen. I didn’t move.
“What are you going to do now?” Mona asked.
“I was thinking on the way here. I’m giving myself one night. Just one night. We’ll start over from the beginning, we’ll look for a solution, a way of fitting all the pieces together. If I haven’t found it by tomorrow, I’ll call Piroz and give myself up.”
Mona looked at the pendulum moving like a metronome in the case of the Norman clock.
9:40 P.M.
“A night? Deal! If we take off three hours to sleep for a bit, and at least one to make love, that doesn’t leave us a lot of time . . .”
She got up. The XXL virgin wool sweater fell to the beginning of her white breasts. She put her bare feet on the brown parquet.
“Where shall we start?”
I replied without a moment’s hesitation:
“Magali Verron! The police have been working for ten years on the Avril–Camus case, without finding much. This Magali Verron is the key to everything.”
I spread the two files out on the table, the one for Morgane Avril that I’d borrowed from her mother and the one for Magali Verron which I’d taken from Piroz’s office.
“O.K.,” Mona said. “I’ll go on the internet. Perhaps you missed some information about her yesterday.”
She came over and pressed herself against me. She smelled of apple shower gel. My hands glided over her bare thighs, her warm bottom, her firm, curved waist beneath the thick wool. She stood on tiptoe as I pressed my erect penis against her belly. The woollen jumper was only a silk cocoon wrapping her body, which was there for the taking. At that moment it seemed big enough that we could both fit into it. Mona kissed me on the lips for a long time, then pushed me gently away.
“Time to work, big fella!”
She sat down at Martin Denain’s computer. I took out some of the pages from the envelopes and spread them out across the table.
Concentrate.
We were like a couple of students frantically revising the night before an important exam.
The brass pendulum tapped out the passing of time, as if beating against the boards to escape its oak coffin.
Mona’s exclamation ripped through the silence.
“Are you serious?”
I walked over, surprised. Leaning over her, my eye flicked from the laptop screen to her breasts, naked under her jumper.
“Yesterday,” Mona said with her head lowered, “at the playground in Yport, you reconstructed Magali Verron’s life on the basis of internet links. Facebook. Copains d’avant. Twitter. LinkedIn. Dailymotion. You remember? Two columns, one for Morgane, one for Magali. Pink Floyd, etc—her favourite bands; her passion for raqs sharqi; her school in Canada, then middle school and upper school near Paris, with the same names as establishments in Neufchâtel-en-Bray. Everything, including her date of birth—the same day, the same place, ten years apart . . . That insane series of similarities.”
“Yes, and what have you found?”
Mona looked at me sadly. Like when you have to tell a six-year-old about the death of one of its parents.
“Nothing, Jamal. There’s nothing on the internet. I’ve tried all the search engines, there’s no trace of Magali Verron. It’s as if she never existed.”
29
AS IF SHE NEVER EXISTED?
My fingers sped across the keyboard like those of a crazed pianist. I remembered the routes I had followed to dig out information about Magali Verron. Sites accessible in three clicks, on which millions of young adults set out their lives.
Nothing.
There was no longer any trace of the girl on the web.
I turned to Mona.
“Someone’s deleted all the information . . .”
My voice trembled. Mona didn’t say anything, so I added:
“Anyone can do that. Delete internet pages. It’s just more proof . . .” I held my breath. “More proof that they’re trying to trap me.”
Mona stood up. She pulled her jumper down to halfway along her thigh, but the wool climbed back up again, revealing gooseflesh on her skin.
“What if you imagined the gir
l?”
I looked at Mona without a word. She was walking back and forth in the room, barefoot, unable to stay still for a second.
“My God, Jamal! What do we know about Magali Verron? Only what you’ve told me! You say you’ve read about her life on the net, but there’s nothing there about her. You described her face to me, but it’s the face of another girl, a girl who died ten years ago, or her living twin. You say that girl threw herself from the cliff, raped, strangled, but the media hasn’t reported it. No other witness of the scene can confirm it. Your Christian Le Medef has vanished. Denise Joubain claims she hasn’t left her house in months . . . Do you see, Jamal! You’ve made it all up. There was no suicide three days ago. You imagined the scene! You imagined the face of that girl. You imagined her life. You imagined those witnesses.”
I leapt to my feet. I waved under Mona’s nose the file I had stolen from Piroz’s office.
A green folder.
Magali Verron, written in black felt-tip, in Piroz’s handwriting.
“And what about the police who are after me? Did I imagine their accusations too? The cops came to see you this morning at La Sirène, isn’t that right?”
She replied with the patience of schoolteacher.
“Exactly. The police were looking for you. They stayed for two minutes, they asked me if I knew you, if I knew where you were, but they never once mentioned Magali Verron. Nothing about a rape the day before yesterday.”
I held the file up in front of her eyes.
“Shit, Mona! What about the medical reports? And the photographs of Magali Verron’s disjointed limbs, and those DNA results with the police stamp on them? Am I so crazy that I made those up?”
For the first time she seemed to be filled with doubt.
“I don’t know. All I can see is that, if you made it all up, that explains everything. Almost everything . . . And then, more importantly, it would be good news, wouldn’t it?”
Good news?
I stared at her, perplexed.