by Michel Bussi
Mimy left me on August 26th, 2004.
Without even saying goodbye.
It was her day off, and she’d never been further than the Chemin des Grandes Carrières, eight hundred metres from the camp in Isigny.
I was one of the first, with a police officer on either side, to discover her blue neck, her stripped body under its torn dress, her wide eyes staring at the sky.
I was the one who told Charles and Louise. And they told Fredéric.
I ran through every minute of my life before calling them, at breakneck speed, the playground in Puchot, Buffo, the circus, Rustam Trifon, Grandma Ninja’s grottoes . . .
I couldn’t imagine spending the rest of my life without Mimy.
Charles, Louise, Fredéric, and I wanted to know the truth.
But we didn’t fit in with Carmen Avril and her Fil Rouge “Never Forget” association. Still, it was an opportunity to spend time talking to Océane, Morgane’s sister. We were almost the same age, and we’d both lost the person dearest to us in the whole world.
Murdered by the same individual.
Twins of sorrow.
And yet we didn’t understand each other. Not really. Like her mother, Océane was fuelled by hatred. Océane dreamed of finding her sister’s murderer to kill her with her own bare hands. I think I might have been capable of going and visiting him every day in prison to tell him every detail of Mimy’s life, to show him who she was, to make him regret his actions, so that he would love her and beg for her forgiveness.
Charles and Louise realised that we would never discover the truth about the death of their only daughter after number one suspect Olivier Roy was identified.
And then cleared.
Commander Léo Bastinet informed them of the fact. Case closed . . . Barring any unexpected events. They left the Fil Rouge in 2005. It was their choice. They insisted that Fredéric and I should go on putting our energy into it.
Never forget.
At the time we didn’t understand why.
Louise waited until December 2007, until the inauguration of the Elbeuf circus-theatre after ten years of renovation. Charles and Louise invited a number of major international artists for the occasion.
Rustam Trifon was one of them. He was fifty-three. His poster was still pinned above Mimy’s bed. He agreed to come to Impasse Tabouelle, and went up to her room, climbing the stairs with the grace of an angel. Then I asked him to pick a rose from the garden, and he went and put it on Mimy’s grave, in the Saint-Étienne cemetery. He looked very moved.
It was a sad and beautiful moment.
In the evening we stayed in the arena, Charles, Louise, and I.
“Mimy would have loved it,” I said, looking at the huge velvet curtain beneath the rows of spotlights.
Charles and Louise didn’t reply. Perhaps they thought Mimy could see everything from there. Hear everything. pick up the same emotions. Perhaps not. Since Mimy’s death, they had rather lost sight of God.
We parted like that.
And I regretted, at the time, not mentioning my doubts.
The next day, Charles and Louise set off for the Île de Ré. The campsite where we used to go at Bois-Plage-en-Ré had been sold almost ten years before to make way for a new improved one. A luxury affair with a pool and tennis courts, where no child from Elbeuf would ever set foot. At about ten to seven in the evening, just before it closed, they went to the top of the lighthouse, the Phare des Baleines. Fifty-seven metres. Two hundred and fifty-seven steps. A cold wind was blowing from the Atlantic, they were on their own.
Hand in hand, they climbed the concrete balustrade and threw themselves into the void.
Afterwards, I often went to see Grandma Ninja on Route des Roches. She was the only survivor of my real family. We talked about it a lot. In the end I confessed what was weighing down my heart. She reassured me. I had been right not to say anything to Charles and Louise. It was better for them to have gone like that, convinced that Mimy had been murdered at random. With no one to accuse but fate. But she also gave me to understand that everything would gnaw away at me. That I had to get rid of it.
“How, Jeanine? How do I do that?”
“By telling the police everything. Even if it means re-opening the worst old scars.”
And then I thought of that poem Mimy had written.
The last lines.
I will build a fortress around us
And I will defend it
M2O
Mimy would never have been able to write that.
I missed Mimy so much.
31
REOPEN THE WORST SCARS?
Mona switched off the ceiling light of the Fiat and turned to me.
“So?”
The brown envelope had fallen at my feet. I had trouble connecting everything I had just read with the murder of Morgane Avril, the suicide of Magali Verron, but plainly there was a link of some kind.
I just needed to unravel it all . . . The image of a red scarf tied too tightly around someone’s neck came to mind.
Mona noticed that a tear was shining in the corner of my eyes.
“Moving?”
“Very.”
“About Morgane or Myrtille?”
“Myrtille. Mimy, rather . . . Such a charming declaration of love.”
Mona’s eyes gleamed strangely. She hesitated, then put a delicate finger on my eyelid to wipe it.
“Thanks,” she said.
“For what?”
She didn’t reply, just put the car into reverse and drove out of the garden.
At 11:10 P.M. Mona parked in Place Jean-Paul-Laurens, opposite Christian Le Medef’s house. Not a cop in sight. Before crossing the parking lot, I pulled up the hood of my WindWall North Face. I stopped outside the fisherman’s house.
“It wasn’t locked yesterday.”
I turned the handle. The door opened.
“He’s not suspicious, your witness!” Mona joked.
I waited until we were both inside, then shouted, “Christian? Christian Le Medef?”
As I’d expected, there was no reply. Xanax, the former nuclear engineer, hadn’t come home.
Escaped?
Kidnapped?
Murdered?
Mona followed me into the dark corridor, almost amused.
I stopped dead in my tracks. I felt cold, as if the temperature in the room had plummeted.
The staircase in front of us was in complete darkness.
“No light,” I whispered.
“Why would there be, there’s no one home?”
“Yesterday, upstairs, the bedside light was on in Le Medef’s bedroom.”
“You must have turned it off before you left.”
I shook my head. I was sure I hadn’t touched it. With the tips of my fingers I turned on the flashlight app on my iPhone and shone it up the stairs.
Nothing. Not a sound. No sign of life. Just as it had been when I visited the previous evening.
Apart from the fact that the bedside light was out.
I climbed about ten steps to light up the landing, then stopped and called again.
“Le Medef?”
Nobody.
I was wrong again. I must have pressed the switch of that wretched lamp to turn it off without even noticing.
“Let’s just see whether I’m mad or not!” I said to Mona as we went back down the stairs. “Follow me.”
She let me go ahead of her along the corridor, and our bodies brushed against each other. The light from my mobile phone slid over the walls, illuminating the wallpaper which was coming away from the wall with the damp, the grey electric plugs, the rotting woodwork. Obsessed the previous day by the disappearance of Christian Le Medef, I hadn’t noticed the extent to which the fisherman’s house, which he was supposed to be maintai
ning, appeared to be almost abandoned.
I lowered the phone to light the black-and-white tiles. Only the sound of our footsteps on the floor disturbed the silence.
The silence . . .
Another shock ran through my body. Madness was stalking me, once again.
Someone had turned off the radio!
I murmured into the gloom, “The radio was on yesterday.”
Mona didn’t reply. I just felt her breath on my back. Shivers ran down my spine. What was I going to find in that room? I stopped in the doorway.
“Christian?”
Ridiculous. What was I thinking? That his kidnappers had brought him back during the day to finish his tagliatelle?
No answer, of course.
Who had called in after my visit? And why? To drop off Le Medef’s corpse?
My flashlight swept the room towards the table in the middle, then the chair, the microwave, the television, the radio . . . Several times, in ever faster circles, almost hysterical after a few moments.
Like a lighting man who had lost his mind.
Then, throwing caution to the wind, I pressed the switch. The white light from a bare bulb exploded in the room, dazzling us. I held my hand over my eyes like a visor, unable to believe what I saw.
The room was empty.
Completely empty.
No chair, no table, no bottle, plate or glass, no television, not even a radio. And not even a single item of furniture.
The dining room and the kitchen had been cleared completely since the previous day.
Suddenly the phone in my hand weighed a ton. My head was spinning. Mona walked into the room. There was a faint echo as she did so.
“This is where Le Medef lived?”
“Yes.”
I overcame my feeling of dizziness and pointed one by one to the place where each piece of furniture had stood. I ran my fingers over the walls, over the floor. The traces of dust, or their absence, revealed that these objects had been moved recently. Everything had been taken away at great speed.
“They’ve completely cleared the place,” I said.
“Who are they?”
“I have no idea, Mona. But it wouldn’t have been that difficult. A table, a chair, a few electrical items—you could get that all into a van . . .”
Mona said nothing. I carried on, thinking aloud:
“First they get rid of the awkward witness. Then all the other evidence—”
“A conspiracy? They’re incredibly well organised, Jamal.”
There was a hint of irony in Mona’s voice.
I turned towards her and took her by the shoulders.
“Damn it, Mona! Do you think I could have made it all up? Every detail? The glass of wine, the plate of tagliatelle, the radio on low? Do you think I’m that crazy?”
My words, too loud, bounced off the bare walls. Mona went and stood in the middle of the room, where Le Medef’s chair had been the previous day.
“Let’s stop asking ourselves that kind of question, Jamal. Let’s just stick to the programme. You promised, remember? Tonight we were going to pay a surprise visit to your two witnesses. Christian Le Medef and Denise Joubain. Then you were going to hand yourself in.”
I didn’t protest. I hadn’t the strength.
We stayed in the house for a few more minutes, then Mona took me by the hand and led me out. As soon as we set foot in the street, the door of the house opposite opened. A faint light fell on the road. I instinctively stepped into the darkness. The man who came outside could only see Mona’s outline.
“Not too warm, is it?”
A limping shadow slipped between his legs. I recognised the three-legged dog from last night. His master took an eternity to light a cigarette, long enough to take advantage of the light of the flame to assess Mona’s face.
“It’s not every night you see a pretty girl like you hanging about in the street.”
The three-legged dog limped towards me. Mona automatically called it over with a click of her tongue and crouched down to stroke it. The neighbour seemed to appreciate the gesture.
“Have you lived here for a long time?” she asked.
“Hmmm. Nearly ten years.” He took a drag on his cigarette. “What were you doing in the house?”
This idiot had seen the light!
“Just visiting,” Mona replied, quite naturally.
I retreated further into the darkness, taking care to lift my left foot a few centimetres above the pavement.
“At this time of night?”
He looked amazed. With an instinctive reaction that surprised me, I gripped the butt of the King Cobra in my pocket. The man blew out some smoke and then shrugged.
“You’d think they’d do anything to sell . . .”
“To sell?” Mona asked.
“Yes. They’ve been looking for a buyer for six months. I’d have to say that Yport is hardly Deauville, you know? There are dozens of houses for sale like this one.”
My legs were shaking. I kept my balance by resting my hand on a cold piece of sandstone. Mona was playing innocent.
“So the house has been empty for six months?”
“Yeah. Apart from prospective buyers who come and look at it. But yes, that’s pretty rare, particularly at this time of night.”
He spat out his cigarette butt and smiled at Mona, imagining, although he didn’t really believe it, that she would make a charming neighbour, then he called his dog in. The door clicked shut behind him.
I waited, then walked through the darkness towards the Fiat. Mona’s voice rang out behind me.
“Satisfied?”
I tried to come up with an explanation, but the best I could do was:
“An empty house! Ideal for setting someone up. You can move the furniture in and out, undisturbed.”
Mona turned on the lights of the Fiat.
“So Le Medef was an accomplice? I thought he was your ally? He was the one who gave you his address, isn’t that right?”
“Perhaps he didn’t trust me. He talked about a plot, about omerta. Perhaps he was frightened! Perhaps . . .”
Mona handed me the keys.
“O.K., let’s go, Jamal. I’ll let you drive, seeing as how you know the way to Denise’s house.”
Not another word.
She could have given me a thousand arguments to prove that I’d imagined the disappearance of Christian Le Medef. Then the removal of all his furniture. That the neighbour was the kind to notice a removal van parked outside his front door, for example. That basically the only witness I had to back me up, between last night and tonight, was a three-legged dog.
I started up the Fiat.
The instrument panel showed the time in fluorescent green figures: 11:32 P.M.
“Denise Joubain will have a heart attack at this time of night . . .”
“Or I will,” Mona said. “What’s the next surprise on the agenda? Denise with her throat ripped out by aliens? Her ghost offering us tea?
The ghost of Denise Joubain . . .
In the silence of the car, I remembered the old lady’s words. She said she hadn’t left her home for years. But she said she’d recognised me, she’d bumped into me before, but that was ten years ago, on the beach at Yport, on the morning of Morgane Avril’s murder. My last hope rested on the testimony of a senile old woman whose ravings would only help to convince me of my own amnesia.
Sitting in the passenger seat, Mona had turned on the roof light and was flicking through the files of Morgane Avril and Magali Verron that I had stolen from Carmen Avril and Piroz. Concentrating. I suddenly had a sense that she had read something that disturbed her. Her eyes kept darting from one file to the other.
I slowed down as we turned into the long straight road leading to the old railway station of Tourville-lès-Ifs.
“Have you found something?”
She gave me a strange look.
It was obvious.
She had found something. Something that had upset her.
“No. Maybe.”
“What?”
“Not now. After the old lady.”
“Why?”
Mona’s tone changed abruptly.
“After the old lady, damn it.”
32
DID YOU FIND SOMETHING?
The Fiat’s headlights lit up the Orient Express carriage, then the Pacific Chapelon locomotive, and finally the façade of the former station, whose clock still stood at 7:34.
As soon as I’d turned off the engine, the station, the trains and the parking lot disappeared into darkness. We walked by the light of our flashlights. The two beams passed along the pastel blue walls of the station-master’s house.
“Shall we wake Denise?” Mona asked.
Before replying, I clutched the door-handle. Closed, this time. The hamlet of Les Ifs consisted only of a few detached houses whose silhouettes could just be seen about fifty metres away.
“We’re going to wake up the whole neighbourhood if we hammer on the door.”
Without even taking time to think, I walked towards the lattice window. The shutters weren’t closed. I picked up a stone the size of an egg and knocked it sharply against the pane closest to the handle. Ten centimetres by ten. A brief cascade of broken glass tinkled in the silence. Without taking any additional precautions, I opened the window from inside.
Some drops of blood trickled along my palm. Shallow cuts. Mona looked at me without a word.
“We’ll give Denise a nice surprise,” I joked.
The tone wasn’t quite right.
Why break in? To battle against the evidence they were piling up against me? What did I expect? To surprise an army of conspirators at Denise Joubain’s house, busy constructing a new stage set, erecting a new chamber of illusions?