by Michel Bussi
“The third one from the top,” Frédéric Saint-Michel replied, looking in the same direction.
The third what?
I couldn’t see anything on the wall but viscous seaweed, some of it soaked by the waves, the rest relatively dry—for a few more minutes.
“The least rusty one,” Carmen said, pointing at a brass ring embedded in the wall, more than a metre above the current level of the sea, but fifty centimetres below its maximum level, judging by the permanent dampness of the seaweed. I immediately understood why they had asked me to put on a neoprene wetsuit.
They planned to tie me to that ring! And wait for the sea to rise.
A trickle of acrid sweat slipped between my skin and the wetsuit.
What was their intention? Make me confess to crimes that I hadn’t committed? Force confessions from me and then hand me over to the police? Or would they punish my “crime” by leaving me there to die?
I thought again of Piroz’s advice.
It’s all planned. Everything’s in place.
I prayed that the police captain wasn’t mistaken.
That cop who was still sleeping it off.
Océane flicked her cigarette butt into the sea, then gave me another defiant look. Unfathomable . . .
Carmen came towards me.
“You get it this time, don’t you, Salaoui. The sea is rising by about a centimetre a minute . . . Which means you have just over an hour to talk to us about your crimes.”
I gulped down my saliva.
Play their game.
O.K., Piroz, I have no choice, but shift yourself.
“And then?” I asked.
“At the end of the hearing, the jury will decide. A jury of the people—I’m sure you don’t need me to list the members of the jury. It’s in your interest to be convincing.”
Play their game.
“You’re a bunch of sickos,” I spat.
Carmen ignored the insult and turned to Frédéric. “Go and get Piroz! We’re going to need another man to chuck Salaoui in the sea, because Gilbert refuses to get his hands dirty.”
Gilbert Avril said nothing. He probably couldn’t even hear his sister’s words over the cries of the gulls gathered on the roof of the wheelhouse.
Frédéric disappeared into the hold. Mona’s hands were still gripping the mooring ropes that were being whipped by the waves. Blue with cold. The thin sunlight of dawn had already been swallowed up in an eiderdown of clouds. The temperature outside couldn’t have been more than five degrees. The temperature of the water didn’t bear thinking about.
Océane lit a second cigarette. Carmen drained a second cup of coffee.
“What’s that idiot doing?” she muttered, when Saint-Michel failed to return.
Eventually his footsteps echoed on the stairs. His face was distorted with bewilderment.
“Piroz isn’t in his cabin,” he said.
A yawning chasm opened up beneath me. Fate was dashing me against the walls. The cormorants seemed to mock me with their cries.
“Have you looked anywhere else?” Carmen asked. “In the head? In the shower?”
“Christ, Carmen, the boat’s thirty metres long!” shouted Frédéric, venting his irritation. “He’s gone, I tell you!”
Without a word, Carmen, then Océane, then Denise went down and searched every corner of the Paramé.
Without success.
The police captain was no longer on the boat.
Had Piroz drunk too much and fallen overboard? Had he deliberately jumped into the icy water and set off in an inflatable raft to get help? Or had he been silenced because he knew too much, because he hadn’t been careful enough?
While Gilbert Avril, at Carmen’s insistence, counted the Paramé’s lifejackets one by one, I thought of Piroz’s words:
No one else knows. Your innocence must remain a secret for a few more hours.
No one else knows.
Gilbert Avril cursed and put all the lifejackets back in their box.
Not one was missing.
Terrified, I looked at the brass ring fixed to the wall.
The sea had already risen by at least ten centimetres.
41
NO ONE ELSE KNOWS?
We were knee-deep in water and the old fool told us to keep going.”
I don’t know why, but that old song by Graeme Allwright that we used to sing at camp kept repeating in my head.
In reality, the water was halfway up my thigh. I wasn’t cold, not yet, protected by the neoprene. The most painful thing was the dragging of the ring on my arms.
I had tried out different positions, using one hand, then the other, then both to ensure that one shoulder wasn’t carrying all my weight. I knew that as soon as the water rose, as soon as my body was floating, I would suffer less.
And before long I wouldn’t suffer at all.
Gilbert Avril had helped Carmen and Saint-Michel get me out of the boat and secure my handcuffs to the brass ring in the fortress wall. After cadging a cigarette from Océane, only to throw it away almost immediately, he had grudgingly lent a hand while muttering “Bullshit” through gritted teeth. As soon as I was chained to my stake, he had gone back to the deck of the Paramé.
I didn’t struggle. I dismissed the thought of resisting, making their task more difficult by thrashing on the deck like a worm cut in half. What would be the point? It would only add to the humiliation I had already endured.
Besides, there was no escape.
There were six of them. Both Frédéric Saint-Michel and Océane Avril carried a revolver in their pocket, and they’d made sure I knew it. So here I was, alone. In chains. They hadn’t needed to threaten me with their guns, all they had to do was topple me into the cold water, handcuffed, before I was begging to be given some kind of support to hold on to, something that would keep me from going under.
With the precision of a Swiss watch, the water climbed a centimetre a minute. The sea was calm, but that didn’t stop the waves crashing against the ramparts of the fort of Saint-Marcouf. The seawater, spraying in my face, made my eyes and mouth salty, and it was impossible for me to wipe it away and ease the irritation. My body lifted with each new wave, before being thrown back against the seaweed-covered wall. I was nothing but a truncated version of a man hanging in the storm being tossed about to the point of exhaustion.
Denise was standing with Arnold on the deck of the Paramé, still leaning against the railing. My other torturers had hoisted themselves on to the fortress, sitting or standing on the recently renovated ramparts five metres to my left. From my position I could see only that wall, the top of the central part of the citadel and the watchtower standing out against the cotton wool sky.
My last hope . . .
The idea had come to me while they were tying me to the brass ring. Perhaps Piroz hadn’t been trying to get back to the coast but was hiding on the Île du Large. He was waiting for his moment to appear, perhaps accompanied by a squad of policemen posted in the citadel.
Of the four lunatics of Fil Rouge, Mona—I’d given up trying to think of her as Alina—was the furthest from me, sitting at the end of the rampart.
Deliberately?
Her legs bumped nervously against the wall, as if time seemed interminable. Her wild hair was blown back and forth like windshield wipers in front of her tear-filled eyes. Saint-Michel was crouched beside her, but he kept getting up every thirty seconds. He too was nervous. Carmen, rigid and stoic as ever, towered over the others. She hadn’t sat down once. She looked away, and then back at her watch.
“Less than an hour, Salaoui. If you want the jury to have time to deliberate before you take your final breath, I advise you to speak.”
The foam exploded in my face.
Only Océane seemed calm. She was sitting cross-legged, her K-Way jacket half-coveri
ng her jeans. She was still smoking and staring at me without animosity or pity. Just the curiosity of a child watching one insect devour another without trying to save it, because the world is cruel and there is nothing to be done about it.
Incredibly beautiful.
“Speak about what?” I shouted between two waves.
Silence from the jury. I was supposed to confess, without anyone whispering the answers to me.
Fuck’s sake, what was that idiot Piroz up to?
The water had risen by another thirty centimetres. It was gripping my chest like a vice.
It’s all planned, everything’s in place, the police captain’s voice hammered in my skull.
Still no sign of him.
“You’ve got less than half an hour left,” Carmen answered.
Time was moving too fast. A water clock that someone had tampered with. Fort Boyard, the snuff movie version.
I spat out a mixture of water and drool.
“O.K., I’ll tell you everything!”
So much for Piroz, I thought. I couldn’t wait any longer. That fat drunk should have let me know when the cavalry was due to arrive.
I yelled to make myself heard above the crashing of the waves.
“You’ve had it all wrong from the start. I didn’t murder Morgane and Myrtille! Piroz knows it—he told me so last night.”
Then I gave them the details, finishing with the DNA results Piroz had been holding in his hand. That piece of paper might still be in his cabin, even now, so would they please get a move on and find it!
“Go and see,” Carmen said to Océane and Saint-Michel.
They got to their feet without a word of dissent.
Meanwhile I went on arguing. Yport, where I had never set foot, in spite of that cottage reservation. That part of Normandy where I had spent one afternoon, long enough to see the concrete church of Grandcamp-Maisy and little else.
Mona didn’t even turn her head. She already knew that version. A wave higher than the others lashed my face, drowning my last arguments in a mouthful of salt water that left me retching and helpless.
I was going to die.
I said nothing more. I’d decided not to tell them what Piroz had been up to, his plan to use me as bate to unmask the guilty man.
Could the murderer be someone on this boat?
“It was up to our belts,” Graeme Allwright sang.
Océane and Frédéric Saint-Michel reappeared from the hold ten minutes later, empty-handed, shaking their heads.
Nothing. They had looked everywhere.
The copy of the DNA results was nowhere to be found. Piroz had disappeared without taking any steps to protecting the one piece of evidence that would prove my innocence. Incompetent fool!
My eyes were being eaten away, stung by thousands of salt crystals.
“Wait, for Christ’s sake!” I shouted, my throat spilling over with bile and foam. “Piroz showed me the sheet of paper last night. It was the regional police records office in Rouen that carried out the analysis. Call them, damn it! They’ll confirm the results.”
Océane lit another cigarette and sat down, still indifferent. Saint-Michel took a few steps towards the fortress.
“Don’t try and play for time, Salaoui,” Carmen replied. “You haven’t got much left.”
Perhaps twenty minutes . . .
Maximum.
The water came up to my shoulder blades. My position was unbearable, By tensing every muscle to maintain a precarious balance, I could just about keep my head above water. I could even, with the help of my amputated leg, anticipate the most aggressive waves. The torture devised by Carmen and her friends was remarkably effective. Every effort that I made to cling to life brought me closer to death.
The horizon remained empty.
A few clouds broke. A fine drizzle began to fall on Saint-Macrouf.
With my mouth gaping and eyes wide, I lapped the sweet rainwater that trickled down my face. On the deck of the Paramé, Denise and Uncle Gilbert took shelter in the wheelhouse and then disappeared with Arnold into the misted glass cage.
Carmen merely raised the hood of her purple anorak. Saint-Michel opened a black umbrella that didn’t look as if it was going to survive the wind for long, and moved over to Mona to offer her shelter. She showed neither gratitude nor irritation.
Only Océane braved the shower.
The rain swept over her face, making her eyeliner and her mauve eyeshadow drip down her cheeks and her mouth, making her look even more beautiful, an oriental icon left out in the rain, its gold and purple fading to compose a marvel painted by the gods.
I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Stupidly, I was falling in love. Even though I was going to die in a few minutes, I felt an irrepressible desire for this girl, while she in turn probably desired nothing more than my death. There was some sort of transference at work here, which the shrinks at the Institute would have loved to analyse. I was rapidly losing my mind.
I pulled on the ring to hoist my body out of the water for a few moments, then shouted over the noise of the waves, the gulls and the rain.
“Piroz had another theory! He wanted to trap the real culprit!”
My body fell back into the icy water.
“It wasn’t me,” I said at the top of my lungs. “Not me!”
One last breath. Then I expelled all the air I had left.
“One of you!”
No reaction. Arnold, whom Denise had let out of the cabin, yapped and ran after a cormorant that had settled on the deck.
“Rubbish, Salaoui,” Carmen remarked. “You’ve got a quarter of an hour to confess.”
“It was up to my chest,” Graeme sang.
“It’s all planned, everything’s in place,” Piroz replied.
Bastards!
What plan could Piroz have put into action on this rocky outcrop? Why here, in Saint-Marcouf? Because Myrtille Camus had spent the day there once on a boating trip, shortly before she died? What was the connection between Piroz’s plan and the doubts expressed by Alina? Myrtille wearing sexy clothes on her day off, Myrtille meeting up with her rapist, Myrtille recording her secrets in a sky-blue Moleskine notebook that no one had ever seen again.
Myrtille and that signature which had bothered Alina: M2O.
So she too knew that I wasn’t the killer.
Alina. Mona. The one who had been given the job of seducing me. She was my only ally—that was what Piroz had said.
Alina, a stranger. Mona, a traitor.
My eyes reluctantly abandoned Océane to stare at the girl I couldn’t help but call Mona, sheltering under Saint-Michel’s umbrella.
My eyes pleaded with her.
Tell them everything, Mona. Tell them. Quickly.
She listened to me without my having to open my mouth, she understood me without a word being exchanged. She rose to her feet, brushing away Saint-Michel’s umbrella.
“That’s enough,” she said in a low voice that I struggled to hear.
She spoke to Carmen.
“You can see that he’s not going to confess. Guilty or innocent, it’s not for us to decide. Let’s get him out of there and hand him over to the police.”
“They’ll let him go,” Carmen snapped. “Without a confession, they’ll let him go.”
Mona wasn’t giving up.
“We decided to set ourselves up as a jury. It’s the jury that has to decide. We make decisions together, that’s what we’ve always done.
The water cascaded down my shoulders.
Get on with it, for God’s sake!
“O.K.,” Carmen conceded. “Those who want to take this scum out of the sea, raise your hands.”
Gilbert and Denise, in the cabin, hadn’t heard the question, or pretended not to have heard. Océane merely lit a new cigarette without mak
ing a gesture of any kind.
Mona looked in turn at each member of Fil Rouge, and then raised her hand.
“For heaven’s sake,” she said. “There’s a doubt. We all know there’s a doubt. We can’t let this boy drown just because we have no one else to avenge ourselves on . . .”
She turned to Saint-Michel. An eternity.
Three more centimetres of water, an icy blade pressing against my Adam’s apple.
Saint-Michel did not raise his hand.
“The verdict is in,” Carmen announced. “One vote to save Salaoui, five against. Sorry, Alina.”
It was over, I’d been condemned.
“We had waves up to our necks,” Graeme Allwright chuckled.
One wave in two smashed against my mouth. I swallowed two out of three. I was coughing. I couldn’t breathe.
It’s all planned, Piroz had said. Everything’s in place.
Idiot!
The DNA results had exonerated me, a cop believed I was innocent, but the members of the Fil Rouge couldn’t have cared less. They needed to execute someone because one of their own had been executed.
A life for a life.
The cycle of death.
My neck disappeared in the foam.
Suddenly, through the mist, I heard Arnold barking on the deck of the Paramé. Louder and longer than he had barked at the gulls.
Everyone turned round. My eyes opened wide.
Carried by the currents to the Île du Larges, a body bobbed against the hull of the Paramé.
Piroz.
He hadn’t fallen overboard by chance after one glass too many. He hadn’t gone for help either. He was floating on his back like a scarlet raft, with a ridiculous mast sticking out of his heart.
The handle of a knife.
Murdered.
It’s all planned, everything’s in place, he had told me.
My arse!
We had spoken too loudly in my cabin last night. Piroz hadn’t been careful enough. The real culprit had been spying on us. Piroz had been silenced.