Never Forget

by Michel Bussi

  Same board.

  Different letters.

  M O N A S A L I N A S

  Mona appeared from nowhere, probably a mousehole.

  Her eyes lowered. A faint voice, almost a whisper, and yet mingled, as if amplified, with my thoughts.

  “Thank you, Jamal. You found my history moving, you told me just now. I’d like to hear yours now, the true story, Jamal. Not a new invention. Not a new escape.”

  M O N A S A L I N A S

  She took the first and last letters of her first name, and put the two S’s in her surname . . .

  A L I N A M A S S O N

  “We weren’t cheating, Jamal. You had all the clues. All the names, all the letters, all the keys. You just had to look. Put them in the right order. But you didn’t see anything . . .”

  She disappeared.

  I’d had enough of ghosts, I thought.

  New flash.

  The board.

  Six letters.

  A R N O L D

  The Shih Tzu was sleeping below the board, on the floor.

  An anonymous hand crossed my field of vision.

  Changed the order of three letters.

  R O N A L D

  The dog opened an eye and then went back to sleep.

  Total darkness.

  38

  THE TRUE STORY?

  When I woke up, it was still dark and my body was pitching around. For a moment I imagined that I’d drowned, that my body was drifting in the black water at the bottom of the ocean but that, by some miracle, my consciousness had remained intact. Then my right hand touched bottom. Warm. Soft. Gentle.

  A mattress . . .

  I was lying on a bed.

  I went on feeling my way around. The bed base seemed to be fixed into a wooden piece of furniture. I tried to get up. Impossible. My left wrist was trapped in a handcuff fasted around a plank in the wall.

  Planks all around me.

  A coffin?

  The planks were moving.

  A coffin in the back of a hearse.

  I shivered. I was completely naked on the bed. Apart from that dream, that procession of ghosts in front of the whiteboard, my last memory was the sting of icy water in the channel at Isigny by the sea. My rescuers, because they took me out of the water, had been careful to confiscate my prosthesis. As if the handcuffs weren’t enough . . .

  I changed position and crouched on the bed. My head, near the partition wall at the end, brushed against a thick fabric and slipped underneath it. My fingers settled on a cold glass wall. A window? A curtain? I pulled on the fabric, and the faint light was enough for me to understand.

  Water splashed against the glass.

  I was locked in a cabin on a boat.

  Later, but it was still night because only a half-moon vaguely illuminated the cabin through the porthole, there was a knock at the door.

  My visitor didn’t wait for me to invite him in. He pressed the switch and closed the door behind him. The fluorescent light on the ceiling dazzled me. In the white halo I recognised Captain Piroz. He was carrying a bottle of calvados, two little glasses and a sheet of paper rolled up in a cylinder and tied up in a red ribbon.

  “Present,” Piroz said in a low voice.

  I understood, even though he didn’t say anything, that his nocturnal visit was clandestine in nature. He looked at me, naked on the bed, then stared with disgust at my stump.

  “What an idea, throwing yourself into the canal! Damn it, we had to dive in too, to get you out of the water. The water in the Vire couldn’t have been ten degrees. You’ll forgive us for not asking your permission for stripping you, it was either that or you dying of hypothermia . . .”

  I rolled up, hiding my penis under my atrophied leg.

  “I’d have to say,” Piroz went on. “Alina overdid it a bit on the Ambien in the thermos of coffee.”

  “Alina?”

  “Yep . . . You must remember. The pretty little redhead who had no hesitation about getting it on with a crip? Unless you know her better by the name of Mona?”

  Mona. Alina. The hosts of Grandes Carrières appeared before my eyes again. Vague. Uncertain. The bells of the chapel mixed with the yapping of the Shih Tzu. Probably the Ambien in the coffee. I tried to sweep them away to concentrate on the present moment.

  “Where am I?”

  “I imagine you’ve guessed. On a boat. The Paramé, a Dutch kotter overhauled by some Bretons. It’s barely five in the morning, we set off from Isigny as soon as we fished you out.

  He paused, set down the bottle and the glasses on the bedside table in the bunk, then explained, without my having to ask:

  “Heading for Saint-Marcouf! You must recently have discovered the existence of this shitty archipelago, the only islands in the Channel from the Cotentin peninsula to the Belgian border. Just to reassure you, it’s not a very long journey, barely seven kilometres, but we’re travelling slowly so that we don’t get there before dawn.”

  I looked in vain for a blanket to cover myself up with.

  “What are we doing in Saint-Marcouf?” I snapped.

  Piroz gently poured the calvados into each of the two glasses.

  “I think it should look like a trial. Interrogation, confession, preliminary hearing, sentencing. But I think they’ll speed up the process. Their goal is to sort everything out between tides.”

  “Who are they?”

  The captain pushed the cork back in with the flat of his palm and looked at me.

  “So you haven’t worked it out? They showed you a little video montage just now, to dot the i’s and the other letters as well, in order, with earphones plugged in your ears and a screen stuck in front of your nose, but you were clearly still in a daze. To explain it as simply as possible, let’s just say that you’re dealing with some actors who belong to a troupe called the Fil Rouge, does that mean anything to you? Some of them played themselves, others a character from nowhere, but they all had the same goal, my lad. To trap you!”

  Trap me?

  The events of the previous few days passed in front of me. The coincidences, the things that didn’t make sense, the contradictory witness statements . . .

  “Nice bit of casting, don’t you think?” Piroz insisted. “Carmen and Océane Avril played themselves. Logically, it seemed a good bet that you would try to meet them. Little Alina inherited the most difficult character, that of Mona, a girl who wasn’t exactly a shrinking violet and who was passing through Yport. According to the script, she was to seduce you, and even fuck you if necessary . . . I confess, I was the one who came up with the idea of the patter about silica in the pebbles. The famous professor of molecular chemistry, Martin Denain, had his villa in Vaucottes broken into a year ago. I was involved in the case, we got on, he had taken an interest in the Morgane Avril case at the time. He left me a set of keys so that I could keep an eye on his second home from time to time. That gave us a credible hideout without even having to ask the permission of this respectable scientist, who never sets foot around here in winter.”

  Mona had never been a research scientist.

  Mona didn’t exist . . .

  She was just an avatar created from scratch, interpreted by a girl who had meekly learned her part.

  Piroz observed my unease with a hint of sadism, then went on:

  “The three other roles called for less intimacy. Poor Frédéric Saint-Michel, Myrtille Camus’s fiancé, played the first witness, the depressive Christian Le Medef. Myrtille’s grandmother, Grandma Ninja, played the second one, old Denise Joubain, with her dog Ronald under her arm, the one she went and collected after the death of Louise and Charles Camus. It was hard to persuade the last actor, Gilbert Avril, Carmen’s brother, but someone had to play the part of my deputy. I wouldn’t say he performed the role with any great conviction.”

&n
bsp; As soon as Piroz had finished listing the credits, I replied without thinking, without trying to run through my head the number of obvious clues that I’d ignored.

  “So why all this stupid circus, for Christ’s sake?”

  The policeman held out a glass of calvados. I sniffed it suspiciously.

  “The Fil Rouge Association has devoted thousands of hours to tracking down the stranger who was present in Yport on Saturday, 5 June 2004 and Isigny-sur-Mer on Thursday, 26 August 2004. Finally, in 2011, after collecting hundreds of witness statements, a single name came out of the hat. Yours, my boy! Jamal Salaoui. You rented a room at the Caïque holiday cottage on the night of June 5th, and spent a day in Grandcamp-Maisy, at Plaine Commune sailing club, on August 26th. QED, Jamal. You’re the guilty man . . .”

  I sighed with relief. A huge weight had just lifted from my conscience.

  This whole performance was entirely based on a misunderstanding!

  For now, I didn’t bother explaining to Piroz that I had never set foot in Yport before this week, that I’d cancelled that reservation at the holiday cottage because the girl I was planning to spend the weekend with had cancelled on me, and I’d made the return journey from Clécy to Grandcamp without passing through Isigny or even hearing of the murder of Myrtille Camus.

  “What a crowd of psychos!” I whistled. “And you, Piroz, agreed to take part in this masquerade?”

  The captain drained his calvados in one and then smiled at me.

  “The idea of the set-up came from Carmen Avril, as I’m sure you can imagine. She persuaded all the others. Put yourself in their shoes for a moment. You’re the only possible guilty party, but there’s no evidence against you apart from the fact that you were there. Not enough to persuade Judge Lagarde to move his arse after all these years—and I did try, believe me. Even worse, we were getting closer to that fateful date of ten years without a new judicial process, which would mean the case being closed once and for all . . .”

  Put yourself in their shoes . . .

  Piroz was dissociating himself from the others. I had the curious impression that the captain didn’t share their conviction. I pressed him.

  “You didn’t answer my question, Piroz. Since when have the police involved themselves in this kind of madness to trap a suspect?”

  He let one last drop of alcohol pass his lips.

  “At first, Jamal, it wasn’t so bad. It was just a matter of bringing you back to Yport and putting you in the right state to summon up certain memories in your mind. The performance was supposed to last a day, and had two very precise goals, one for each of your visits to the station. For the first, to collect your DNA, your sperm, your blood, your nails and your pubic hair. For the second, the next day, to trap you and make you confess to both crimes. It was all supposed to stop there. Genetic fingerprints and confessions! We hadn’t predicted, you young bastard, that you’d smash my model of the Étoile-de-Noël in my face and leg it. From that moment, we had to improvised to maintain our advantage by making you think you were losing your mind.”

  If he expected me to apologise for that stupid fucking model, he could forget it. I set the glass of calvados back down on the bedside table.

  “You should drink something, son,” Piroz advised. “You’re freezing. You’ll catch your death.”

  “It’s fine, I’ll survive! Since you’ve collected my sperm and everything else, you’ve had time to compare them with the DNA of the red-scarf killer, haven’t you?” I made a point of putting some irony into my voice. “I imagine you’re going to tell me that my sperm is a match for the rapist you’ve been trying to catch for ten years. If it weren’t, you’d be taking a lot of trouble for nothing.”

  Piroz gave me an amused look.

  “You’re right about one thing, at least, son, I’ve got the results . . .”

  He waved beneath my nose a piece of white paper rolled up and tied with a fuchsia ribbon.

  “This piece of paper contains the ultimate proof A fifty-fifty chance. Your hall pass, or a one-way ticket out of here . . . But you’re going to have to wait a bit before you get my answer.”

  I had the same impression as I had had a few moments before. Piroz no longer seemed to believe in my guilt. Or rather, once again, he was playing cat and mouse with me.

  He topped up his calvados.

  “First, I’m going to answer your question, the one you asked a little while ago, about why a police officer like me would have agreed to take part in this masquerade, to the point of summoning you to the police station in Fécamp without any of my colleagues being aware of what you were coming to do there? Well, Salaoui, I’m retiring in three months, so I don’t give a damn about any possible repercussions or reproaches from my superiors. Then there’s the fact that I’ve been working on this double murder for almost ten years, and I’d have to admit that without Carmen’s crazy idea of putting pressure on you until you betrayed yourself, I didn’t have a single piece of evidence to make Lagarde agree to reopen the investigation officially, and make you appear as a witness.”

  My fist clenched.

  “What the fuck! You just had to ask me. Who says I wouldn’t have agreed? I didn’t rape those girls! I’d have given you a test-tube of my blood or my sperm, and it would all have been over without having to go through this nonsense. In addition, I imagine that confessions obtained by such twisted methods would have no value in front of a judge.”

  Piroz studied me, as if impressed by my far-sightedness.

  “No legal value, you’re right, lad. You’re perfectly right. In fact, if I agreed to get involved in Carmen Avril’s blasted production, it was for a completely different reason, and I’m the only one who knows what it is.” He raised his glass. “But as with your DNA results, you’re going to have to wait a little so that I can explain. Cheers!”

  39

  NICE PIECE OF CASTING, DON’T YOU THINK?

  He drained his second glass of calvados. Without thinking, I picked mine up and did the same. The gut-rot set fire to my palate. I wiped the icy drops that ran along my temples and tried to take stock out loud.

  “So, Piroz, to cut a long story short, you were keeping me under surveillance. Mona was watching me and sending me the brown envelopes that revealed, in homeopathic doses, the tiniest details of the Avril–Camus case. Frédéric Saint-Michel and Grandma Ninja played hide-and-seek to make me doubt everything. You create this character Magali Verron, you invent an identity for her on the internet so that her resemblance to Morgane Avril is disturbing, so that I even end up confusing the two women. But—”

  My hand suddenly clenched the empty glass. The image of the girl with the swollen face, the red scarf around her neck, on the beach of Yport, blew up in my face.

  “But who threw herself into the void three days ago? Who died that morning?”

  “No one, Salaoui.”

  “Christ’s sake, you’re not going to try and take me for a fool again. I was there! She fell from the top of the cliff, right in front of my eyes.”

  Piroz gently set his glass back down.

  “Have you seen Vertigo, Salaoui, the Hitchcock film?”

  I shook my head.

  “Vertigo is the story of a private detective who keeps the wife of one of his friends under surveillance. She has suicidal tendencies and, in the end, she commits suicide by throwing herself off the top of a tower. At least, that’s what he thinks. In fact, it’s a swindle, a trick set up by the husband—she threw down a dummy instead. The detective had been chosen for only one reason: he suffered from vertigo, so he couldn’t witness the beautiful girl’s death-plunge as it happened . . .”

  “What’s that got to do with me?”

  “Your wooden leg, dummy! Because of that you couldn’t get close enough to the edge of the cliff to see Magali Verron’s body crashing to the pebbles. Certainly not in the morning, on a carpet o
f frosty grass. Basically, the whole of Carmen’s twisted idea came out of that, an association of ideas, the cliff at Yport and your amputated leg . . .”

  “I saw her throwing herself off the cliff. Then, just afterwards, her blood-drenched corpse on the pebbles . . .”

  “Just afterwards . . . Be more precise, Salaoui. Forty-seven seconds exactly! Long enough to run to the beach via the Rue Jean-Hélie, to go down the steps by the casino and reach the sea wall. We did the calculations dozens of times, you couldn’t have done it in less time than that. Once you were at the bottom, two witnesses whose sincerity you had no reason to doubt confirmed that they had seen Magali’s body crash on to the beach.

  I looked at Piroz, still without understanding. He was sweating. He looked ill at ease. I could see he was thinking of pouring himself a third glass.

  “If I’m not a complete idiot, I imagine it was Océane Avril who played the part of Magali Verron. But there’s one detail that escapes me, Piroz, one insignificant detail. If it’s all as you say, how did Océane end up on the beach? Did she grow wings?”

  “Océane is an amazing girl. Incredibly beautiful. Athletic. And most of all she’s determined. Determined to avenge her twin sister. As soon as the plan was set up, almost a year ago now, she began training.”

  A strange warmth invaded my belly at the list of Océane’s qualities. My dream girl, I thought again for a moment. An angel who could fly.

  “Training for what, for fuck’s sake?”

  “Base jumping. Leaping from a fixed point like a tower block, a church steeple, a cliff. Do they do it on your area?”

  I didn’t reply, I was waiting in disbelief.

  “If you want to know the whole thing, Salaoui, base jumps are carried out from a height of a minimum of fifty metres. The cliffs at Yport rise almost one hundred and twenty metres above the beach; so you see, even though she wasn’t a professional, Océane wasn’t taking all that big a risk.”