Never Forget

by Michel Bussi

  On the other hand, in spite of our efforts, we have not succeeded in completely reconstructing the skeleton of Clovis which, may I remind you, is the name given to the individual who died most recently, in February 2014, a few days after the Avril–Camus case was solved by the death of the alleged double murderer, Frédéric Saint-Michel. I use the adjective “alleged” because, in my previous letter, I categorically indicated that the DNA of Albert, poisoned in the summer of 2004, corresponded to that of the sperm found on the bodies and clothes of Morgane Avril and Myrtille Camus. As things stand, I have had no reply from Judge Lagarde, to whom I sent a copy of my previous letter.

  Clovis’s skeleton corresponds to that of a man less than thirty years old, perfectly proportioned, who had died six months previously, in a very advanced state of decomposition. When we attempted to assemble the bones that you sent us, in spite of our most advanced research, combinations and investigations, we were obliged to admit the obvious.

  The skeleton lacks a tibia.

  In the hope that you may be able to supply an explanation for this missing or lost part, please accept my cordial regards,

  Gérard Calmette

  Director, DVIU

  46

  HAVE I WON?

  Océane closed the trunk of the Audi Q3 without a glance at Jamal’s body. She merely checked that no one could be watching them in the darkness of the garden. The only light came from a lamp post at the end of the street whose halo was not bright enough to pierce the hedges surrounding the courtyard.

  It was cold. Fine snow fell in a damp layer on the roofs and pavements. Nobody would be going out this evening. Océane would have free rein to transport the body to join the others.

  She went back to the shelter of her cottage.

  Of the three, Jamal was the one she had been most reluctant to kill. She didn’t even include Piroz in her tally; he didn’t count. She had been forced to eliminate him because he had worked it all out. Drunk as he was, it had taken her less than a minute to stick a knife in him and tip him over the railing of the Paramé.

  She walked towards the fireplace. A few flames lingered on the burnt-out logs.

  Jamal Salaoui was a different matter. Objectively, he didn’t deserve to die. He was a victim, like her. A victim of the system, of the judgement of others and their copy-cat violence. A scapegoat in the most accurate sense of the word, an innocent who assumes the collective guilt of everyone else.

  Of all other men.

  Océane walked over to the low table and picked up Jamal’s story, more than a hundred pages, and threw it in the fire. Nothing happened at first, and then the paper ignited like a huge torch.

  Jamal Salaoui would have kept thinking it over until he discovered the truth.

  Thanks to Piroz, he’d learned how to solve the prisoner’s dilemma—it was all there in Jamal’s diary. Even if Jamal himself hadn’t worked it out, an astute reader could have put a different construction on the clues he had missed, and wondered about the inconsistences in the official version. Understood.

  Océane dropped her tulip dress. For several seconds she stood naked by the fireplace, letting the heat of the flames devour her skin. She savoured that moment when no man could rest his eyes on her body, or desire her like an object to be possessed.

  Never again will a boy come between us.

  Morgane’s voice echoed faintly in her head. Her sister was seven years old, they had both been climbing in the big apple tree outside their mother’s holiday cottage. It was springtime, and blossoms fell into their hair and on to their shoulders, a fairy-tale pink rain.

  Never again will a boy come between us.

  They had promised. They wouldn’t need a knight, a prince, or a king to become princesses. They were sisters, twins, one for all and all for one. Nothing could ever slip between them.

  Not so much as a petal.

  The fire was already dying in the hearth. Only a few scraps of Jamal’s diary were still floating around. Océane bent down and picked up the ashes to rekindle the flickering flames. She had to be careful, as she had been for the last ten years. Of course, nice obedient Jamal hadn’t told anyone he was coming to see her, but when the police discovered that he was missing, they were bound to question her. She could leave no sign that he had been there. Still less of his diary.

  The twins had carried on climbing the apple tree until they turned eighteen. They had promised, every spring, every year, and it had brought them closer and made them stronger, more beautiful too.

  No boy between them. Ever.

  In turn they were Snow White and her mirror. Siamese princesses. Two hearts, one blood.

  Their mother, with only one heart, had never needed a man. She had made a family, all by herself. She had built with her own hands the most beautiful house in Neufchâtel-en-Bray, all by herself. She had taken power at the council, at the Pays de Bray development association, all by herself. No man had ever come between the mother and her daughters.

  The fire had gone out. Océane let the cold make the hairs on her skin stand up, then climbed to her room to put on a pair of black jeans and a dark pullover. It was time for Jamal Salaoui’s body to join the other two.

  The roads of the Pays de Caux were deserted. The cold rain whitened the slopes and the skeletons of the trees. Océane ran no risk of being stopped by the police. Who could venture out at three o’clock in the morning, on secondary roads swept by the wind and the icy drizzle? In the light of the headlamps, a sign pointed towards Yport. Ten kilometres.

  Morgane’s promise echoed around her head again.

  Never would a boy come between us.

  The riffs of the guitars at the party on June 5th, 2004 crashed in her brain. Images ran through her mind, against a background of deafening music. The trip to Yport with Clara, Nicolas, Mathieu, and Morgane. Night at the Sea View. The dance floor.

  The windshield wipers beat along with the rhythm of her heart, crushing her tears, which still came back, each time denser than before.

  No boy between us. Ever.

  Océane had repeated it to her. She had murmured it in her ear, in Nicolas’s Clio, when she had noticed Morgane changing in the back seat and putting on that dress that clung to her breasts and bottom. She had yelled it at her on the dance floor, parting the forest of wolf-eyed men encircling her sister. The techno music thumped. Morgane, in a trance, hadn’t heard. Hadn’t listened. Hadn’t even looked.

  But Morgane had promised . . .

  Nicolas and Clara were kissing on the sofa. That idiot Mathieu had even tried his luck, had put a hand on her thigh, brushed his lips against her neck. Did he think she was going to renege on her promise for a cockroach like him? He had fallen asleep over his vodka and orange. Océane had been drinking as well. A lot. Much too much. More than she had ever drunk in her life.

  Then she had followed them.

  Morgane had chosen one of the wolves. Not a leader of the pack, more of a cub with milk teeth, his shirt open over a hairless chest, and with a ridiculous red scarf around his neck.

  Océane had seen them kissing in the parking lot, undressing at the end of the beach. In the shadow of the cliff, she had heard them running towards the sea, stifling their laughter, touching each other in the water, coming back out shivering. Hiding behind the sea wall, she had heard Morgane sighing under the stranger’s caresses, holding back her moans, giving herself, forgetting herself.

  You promised, a voice screamed in her head, no boy, ever. Then they had got dressed—Morgane hadn’t even taken the time to put her panties back on. Océane, tottering, had followed her sister and the boy with the scarf to the blockhouse. Which of the two had taken the other’s hand to lead them up there, to gaze out at the sea and the cliff? Océane had never known.

  When she’d looked out at the view, the slate roofs of the houses of Yport had taunted her like grey waves. A few minut
es later, when the wolf-cub had departed, Océane had emerged from her hiding place. Morgane was wearing the stranger’s scarf around her neck.

  “Alex gave it to me.”

  His name was Alexandre. Alexandre Da Costa.

  “It’s our connection. Our red thread. We’re going to see each other again. He’s not like—”

  Her tears were unstoppable now. Océane slowed down, then parked on the edge of the road, just before the Bénouville junction. The images were too powerful. Blurred. They jostled one another.

  Her cries in the night. Morgane’s smile.

  You didn’t have the right. You promised me.

  Morgane’s laughter.

  No boy. No boy between us. Ever.

  Her defiant laughter.

  Océane saw her fingers tearing Morgane’s dress, her hands tightening the scarf to make her stop laughing, to make her weep, to make her plead for forgiveness and then snuggle in her arms, to promise . . .

  No man would ever come between them again.

  Océane saw Morgane’s eyes freeze, her body tumbling down the slope, tipping over the edge and into the void.

  The Audi set off again, slowly. Thousands of times Océane had replayed the moment when Morgane’s eyes had looked into hers, the life in them ebbing away, before she had flown away from her into the void. Which of them, the princess or her mirror, had died that evening?

  Neither? Both?

  The police hadn’t been able to make sense of it. On the beach they had discovered a pretty girl, strangled, her dress torn, traces of sperm on her body and in her vagina, the signs of recent penetration and violent assault. What other conclusion could their pathetic minds arrive at? It had to be rape! Océane felt nothing but contempt for their incompetence.

  The Audi passed Bénouville. The village was asleep. Perhaps it slept all winter long. A sign warned drivers: Valleuse du Curé—No entry. Océane turned the car and drove another hundred metres or so along a dirt road. Who would think of coming here to look for Jamal Salaoui’s body? Nobody, any more than they’d thought of coming here for the other two, ten years ago. By tomorrow morning the rain would have erased all trace of tires on the path.

  Océane had had no trouble finding Alexandre Da Costa. He was hiding in Blonville-sur-Mer in the second home of his parents, a couple who’d taken early retirement so they could spend nine months of the year in the Caribbean, in Saint-Vincent-et-les-Grenadines. He might have been stupid, but even he understood that he was the prime suspect in the rape and murder of Morgane Avril, thanks to his DNA and his Burberry scarf.

  He knew he risked arrest if he ventured out of his hiding place, but Océane had lured him out with a phone call, claiming she’d had a text from her sister right before she was murdered, naming Alexandre Da Costa as her lover.

  The moron told Océane that some man must have attacked Morgane as soon as he left her, perhaps to steal her handbag. She assured him that she hadn’t reported him to the police, she wanted to talk to him first. She wanted to understand. She wanted to know all of her sister’s emotions that night. They agreed to meet at a roadside motel in Yvetot, where you check-in via a machine and never have to deal with a human being. He came running, like a good little doggie. Tail between his legs at first, then a bit more cocky.

  He was startled by her beauty, the idiot. He found her even more beautiful than her sister, the monster. Less demonstrative, perhaps, on the mattress in room 301, but then his heart stopped beating under the effects of the muscarine added to that horrible moussaka reheated in the microwave in the hall. Océane had carefully slipped between her fingers the condom containing his sperm and emptied it into a glass bottle. Then at 3 A.M. she loaded the body into the trunk of her car and drove away.

  “No man will ever come between us,” she had murmured to the stars, letting his corpse drop into the darkness.

  It was three long months before Alexandre Da Costa’s parents reported the disappearance of their twenty-two-year-old son. They only heard from him once or twice a year, they had no idea where he lived; in addition to their house in Normandy, they had two other residences in France, one on the Côte d’Azur and the other on the Île de Ré, a third on the island of Cres in Croatia, and a flat in the Balearics. Océane had since learned that sixty-five thousand people disappeared in France every year, and that more than ten thousand of those were never found . . .

  No one would ever make the connection.

  Carmen Avril would spend the rest of her life looking for her daughter’s murderer, seeking vengeance. All for nothing. He was dead. Océane had already avenged her sister. The man who had tried to separate them, both of them, all three, slept for all eternity in a hole in the depths of the cliff.

  Océane parked the Audi Q3 behind a clump of ash trees, taking care that no late-night hiker wandering in the fields—in the unlikely event of such a person existing—would spot her car. Now came the hardest part.

  She loaded the body on to her shoulders, taking care to leave no trace, no fingerprint, no hair, no drop of sweat. Then she set off to walk the last hundred and fifty metres.

  Ten years earlier, in June 2004, before arranging to meet Alexandre Da Costa, Océane had spent days wandering the cliffs. Passers-by and police officers who passed her assumed she was collecting her thoughts. Some may have imagined she was thinking of jumping off the cliff to join her twin. How could they have guessed that she was looking for pit that would swallow up inconvenient men and make them disappear? A pit big enough to throw half of humanity into.

  She had found it a little way east of Bénouville, near the Fond d’Étigues: a sinkhole hidden between the brambles, known only to the cows.

  Océane held her breath as she opened the trunk. She had rolled Jamal’s body up in a blanket that she would burn as soon as she got back to Neufchâtel.

  It was the third time in her life that she had parked her car here.

  The incredible news had come on August 27th, 2004. A girl had been found raped, strangled with a red Burberry scarf, in Lower Normandy. One Myrtille Camus. General panic. The serial killer had struck a second time. And he would do it again . . .

  Océane’s mother had called a meeting of the Fil Rouge that very evening, in the canteen at the school in Grandcamp-Maisy that the mayor had cleared for the occasion. She wanted to meet all the relatives of this girl Myrtille, her best friend, her future husband. Time was pressing. They would have to catch the killer before he could escape. Or start again. Collect as many clues as possible. The police had already shown that they couldn’t be trusted to find the killer; if they had, Myrtille would still be alive.

  Counting Uncle Gilbert, there were eight people around the table. Three on the Avril side, five on the Camus side.

  During the journey from Neufchâtel to Grandcamp, while Uncle Gilbert drove, cursing Parisian drivers under his breath, and Mum ranted about catching the bastard who’d killed her daughter, Océane had come to the conclusion that Myrtille Camus had been murderered by someone close to her. Why else would he have disguised his crime and directed suspicion at the notorious “red-scarf killer?”

  Only two people knew that there was no serial killer: Océane and the murderer of Myrtille Camus.

  When Uncle Gilbert parked his old Class E Mercedes in the school parking lot at Grandcamp-Maisy for that first meeting of the Fil Rouge, Océane had struggled to hide her excitement. Among the five people sitting with them around the table, was one the murderer of Myrtille Camus?

  Océane dropped Jamal’s body. Her back was on fire. She hadn’t gone thirty metres and already she was exhausted. She’d never manage to carry him to the pit. She took time to think. She’d have to drag him the rest of the way. Drag him and then clean up after herself. She took a deep breath.

  Her mind returned again to Grandcamp-Maisy and that meeting with the Camus family. That evening she had made a mistake, the only one i
n ten years. A mistake that would cost her dear.

  As soon as she had stepped into the school cafeteria and stared at the five people sitting behind the octagonal table, Océane had suspected Frédéric Saint-Michel of having killed his fiancée. None of the other people close to her looked like a credible culprit. She had studied Chichin all evening, keeping an eye on his smallest gestures, each quiver, as he listened to Carmen summarising the police reports.

  Before the hour was up, she knew it was him.

  But she had forgotten one important detail.

  Myrtille Camus’s murderer had exactly the same advantage. He too knew that the serial killer was a chimera. He was therefore alert to the possibility he could be in the presence of Morgane’s murderer.

  When their eyes met, without even saying a word to each other, they had understood. Océane had given herself away by studying him too intently. Who could have suspected him? Who could have doubted the theory of the serial killer other than someone who knew that Morgane hadn’t been killed by an unknown opportunist, striking at random?

  Who but her murderer?

  They were bound by a pact of silence.

  While assessing the best way of grabbing Jamal’s corpse, Océane thought again of that theorem dug up by Piroz—the prisoner’s dilemma. Two accomplices, who can give each other away, or not. If they denounce one another, they lose everything. If they say nothing and cooperate, they both win. Until one of the two is sure that he can betray without the other one having the chance to retaliate. Maximum gain, according to the theory. Piroz was anything but stupid, as policemen went. He had guessed right, but his voice carried a little too far when he’d been drinking, and she’d heard every word through the thin partition walls of the Paramé.

  On the evening of the murder of Myrtille Camus, the first meeting of the Fil Rouge had finished at midnight. Just before heading back to the car, where Uncle Gilbert was waiting to drive them back to the hotel, Océane had gone to use the toilet down the corridor from the cafeteria. Frédéric Saint-Michel had joined her there. White as a sheet.