by Michel Bussi
“It was an accident,” he had stammered in a low voice. “An accident. I didn’t mean to strangle her. We were supposed to get married. She loved me, she would never have left me. That guy didn’t matter to her. Myrtille loved me. We made love one last time just before—”
“With a condom, I hope?”
Saint-Michel had stared at her. He was no better than any other man. At that moment Océane was already thinking about eliminating him, like Da Costa. She would do it as soon as she could, but it was too risky to act now.
“Yes,” he had admitted.
“I’ve got a present for you!”
Océane had taken the glass bottle out of her pocket. Saint-Michel, of course, hadn’t understood.
“The man who raped my sister gave it to me,” Océane explained. “But you’re going to have to tell me more before I let you have it.”
Saint-Michel’s hands had closed on the bottle while he murmured words of confession as if speaking to a priest. Panicking after his fiancée’s murder, he had hidden Myrtille’s body under the ferns in the Grandes Carrières, hoping that no one would find it before he came back. Then, knowing that he would be suspected as soon as his fiancée’s body had been identified, he had come up with the idea of copying the Yport murder which had been dominating every front page the last couple of months. Saint-Michel had driven to Deauville, gone into the Burberry shop in the shopping centre, bought a € 150 shirt to allay the suspicions of the salesgirls while he slipped a red cashmere scarf into his pocket. On a deserted beach on the way back, he had filled a jerry-can with seawater to splash over Myrtille’s body. Finally, once he was back in Grandes Carrières, he had taken her handbag and her panties, precisely reproducing the actions of the murderer of Morgane Avril. Only one detail was missing, the Moleskine notebook in which Myrtille recorded her intimate thoughts. He could find no trace of it, either on her or in her handbag.
Their conversation had been interrupted by Carmen Avril’s voice ringing out from the other end of the corridor.
“Shall we go, Océane?”
“I’m coming, Mum.”
Océane had let Saint-Michel keep the glass bottle.
Cooperation–reciprocity.
That simple offering cleared them both.
The next morning, the police found Myrtille Camus’s panties hooked among the brambles a few hundred metres from Grandes Carrières, stained with the rapist’s sperm, identical to the sperm found in Morgane Avril’s vagina.
The ultimate proof that there was only one killer.
A serial killer who chose his victims at random.
Océane puffed again. She had dragged Jamal’s body about a hundred metres. Just another twenty to go and it would all be over. Only a few stars and a quarter-moon lit the fields as far as the eye could see. The drizzle had intensified. It would erase any tracks. In the morning there wouldn’t be a trace. Océane turned up the hood of her coat, rubbed her gloved hands and went back to work.
On October 6th, 2004, late in the afternoon, Océane had the good fortune to be manning the Fil Rouge phone line. Knowing that many potential witnesses would be hesitant about talking to the police, the association had advertised a number where anyone with information could speak in the strictest confidence.
Olivier Roy had a shy voice.
“I’m the one everyone’s looking for,” he had snivelled. “The boy with the Adidas cap, the one who was prowling around Myrtille. The one the police—”
Océane had told him to be quiet, not to tell a soul. She had wanted to meet up with him at the roadside motel in Yvetot that evening, but he had refused. Too far, too late, too dangerous. Instead she had arranged to meet him the following morning in the Veys Marshlands a few kilometres from his house, in an abandoned hunting lodge.
“I didn’t kill her, madame,” he had wailed down the phone. “Everyone thinks I did, but I didn’t kill her. I loved her. She was going to leave her guy. She wrote me poems. She wrote them in her diary.”
“Have you got that diary?”
“Yes, but . . .”
“Bring it.”
Olivier Roy, like everyone else, thought Myrtille Camus had been the victim of a vagrant. He had no reason to suspect his rival, Chichin. He had been trying to get up the courage to hand himself in to the police. He had spent his days worrying about what to do and thinking about Myrtille. He would never have hurt her, he was completely innocent. But the police had posted up a facial composite that vaguely looked like him, and he was afraid they would ignore his pleas of innocence and find him guilty. He had decided to contact the Fil Rouge because he’d heard they had lawyers and investigators working for them; he believed they would listen to him, they would advise him, tell him how to deal with the cops.
In the hunting lodge, Oliver had given Océane all the souvenirs that he had kept of Myrtille: her Moleskine notebook, her letters, her poems. He was so relieved to hand them over, as if a burden had been lifted. Not half as relieved as Océane. If Olivier Roy had talked, suspicions would have fallen on Frédéric Saint-Michel. If Frédéric Saint-Michel fell, she would fall with him . . .
Never will a boy come between us.
Océane had opened her bag. It was midday and the sun was reaching its zenith above the marsh. Ducks and woodcocks nested in the rust-coloured bog. Olivier seemed to think it was beautiful. He struck Océane as romantic, depressive, completely out of his depth. When she took out a bottle of Coke, some slices of cold pizza and oriental pastries, he had been delighted to share her picnic. He must have found everything curiously spicy. Not for long. His eyes had grown heavy, his breathing had slowed, then, like a hunting dog waiting for its master’s whistle, he had frozen. His heart had stopped beating.
The next day, Saint-Michel had received a poem written by his late fiancée. Océane was playing the game.
Cooperation-reciprocity.
Saint-Michel was clever; he had shared the contents of the letter with Commander Bastinet. A preventive measure.
Meanwhile, Little Alina, thinking about the last days of her best friend, was asking more and more questions.
Another twenty metres. Océane walked forward cautiously, careful to part the brambles without getting stuck on them. The police might be stupid, but they were persistent. A scrap of fabric caught on a thorn could lead them identify whoever it was who had come here to dispose of their rubbish.
With the disappearance of Olivier Roy, the investigation had deflated like a balloon. In spite of Carmen’s fury, the police had dropped the case. They had passed it to the gendarmerie in Fécamp, and in particular to Captain Piroz, who was keeping the flame alive.
Back to square one.
Carmen had become obsessed with the search for the stranger who was in Yport and in Isigny on the dates of the murders . . . Océane did nothing to stop her. After all, it was the only thing stopping her mother from going completely mad.
Meanwhile Océane had taken the precaution of approaching Alina Masson, Myrtille Camus’s best friend, and sowing doubt in her mind. Just enough to prepare her for the day when they would have to get rid of Saint-Michel. It was as if she were introducing malware, a Trojan horse on the brain’s hard disk, with each insidious question.
What if Myrtille hadn’t been killed by a vagrant?
What if Myrtille knew her killer?
Then, in March 2013, a name had finally emerged from the big tombola: Jamal Salaoui. At last they’d found their man. Only Océane and Saint-Michel knew that the poor wretch who’d had the misfortune to be in both wrong places at the wrong time was innocent.
When Carmen had drawn up her crazy plan to unmask Salaoui, Océane had gone along with it. This was the opportunity she had been waiting for to break with Saint-Michel. The grand finale in Saint-Marcouf had been her suggestion. She had gone their ahead of time to dislodge a brick from the wall of the citadel and hide My
rtille Camus’s notebook in it. Then she’d carved M2O on the brick and replaced it. Using Alina as her courier, she’d supplied Jamal Salaoui with a series of brown envelopes filled with clues so that he would understand, just when they needed him to . . . Then she paid a visit to Frédéric Saint-Michel’s apartment, using a key she’d stolen from him years previously during one of the endless Fil Rouge meetings, to hide Morgane’s handbag in a drawer and to plant a glass bottle containing traces of Alexandre Da Costa’s sperm—a smaller sample than the one she’d given to Saint-Michel in 2004, but enough for the police laboratory to run their tests.
Early the next day she threw herself of the cliff in front of Jamal Salaoui, for a 120-metre drop slowed only by a pocket parachute. Jamal Saloui’s fate had been decided, and no one, not even Piroz, could save him.
That economist, Axelrod, had been wrong about his pseudo-method for solving the prisoner’s dilemma.
Cooperation-reciprocity-pardon.
It only worked if the accomplices met up again once they were out of prison, and wanted to collaborate again. Or take their revenge. The correct method was to betray only once, once and for all.
Blow for blow. Shoot first.
Cooperation-betrayal-punishment.
Océane went on dragging Jamal’s body closer to the hole. By her calculation, it was about thirty metres deep, perhaps more if one took into account the tunnels that snaked beneath the chalk. Doubtless some local farmers knew the site, perhaps even made use of it to get rid of inconvenient objects. But it wouldn’t have occurred to them to climb down into the pit.
Perhaps some caver would go down there fifty years from now and find the three skeletons in among the carcases of dogs, old television sets and rusty washing machines. Or in a hundred years, when the cliff had retreated enough. It didn’t matter when those bodies were found—even if they were found tomorrow—no one would ever be able to establish a connection between those three corpses and Océane. Even if they succeeded in identifying the remains, reconstructing the date of their death and the manner of their murder—modern forensic methods would allow them to do that much—there was nothing to connect them to her.
They had all fallen into the spider’s web—she hadn’t even had to draw them into it.
She repeated one last time, like a prayer: “No boy will ever come between us.” Now it was a certainty. All the men had paid. All the men who had approached her, who had approached them both, were dead.
She untied the cords and unrolled the blanket. Jamal’s corpse rolled gently over the purple fabric, as if on a carpet that had been unrolled in front of him for one last ceremony. His body slipped silently into the bottomless hole.
It was over.
Océane was in a hurry to get back to Neufchâtel-en-Bray, but she had to take care, check that she hadn’t left any trace of her presence in the faint light of the flashlight that barely lit the tips of her feet.
Couldn’t wait to get home.
Couldn’t wait to see her mother again.
Océane looked through the pale halo at the bare and stunted silhouettes of the chestnut trees lashed by the sea wind.
Couldn’t wait for the apple tree by the Dos-d’ne to blossom again.
V
REVISION
Fécamp, August 13th, 2014
From: Lieutenant Bertrand Donnadieu, National Gendarmerie, Territorial Brigade of the District of Étretat, Seine-Maritime
To: Gérard Calmette, Director of the Disaster Victim Identification Unit (DVIU), Criminal Research Institute of the National Gendarmerie, Rosny-sous-Bois
Dear Monsieur Calmette,
In reply to your letter of August 10th, 2014 concerning the identification of the three skeletons, Albert, Bernard, and Clovis, found on the beach at Yport on July 12th, 2014, and your concern regarding “a missing piece of the puzzle,” I would like to reassure you. The tibia of the skeleton named as Clovis has not been lost, either by your forces or by mine, nor carried away by the sea after the collapse of the cliff.
Reading your letter, we could not help making the connection with one of the chief protagonists in the Avril–Camus case, Jamal Salaoui, a young man who was for some time suspected of being the rapist and murderer of the two girls. You will easily understand the reasons for our deduction. Jamal Salaoui suffered from a disability, and a prosthesis replaced the lower part of his left leg. But more importantly, this young man disappeared six months ago, some days after the resolution of the Avril–Camus case. For no apparent reason. With no explanation.
Undeniably, your discovery reopens the case. Clearly, for reasons unknown, Jamal Salaoui was murdered.
To be frank, we were not entirely confident about the outcome of this investigation, even though it called into question the conclusions of the Avril–Camus case. It would be difficult to accuse the double rapist Frédéric Saint-Michel of this poisoning, in view of the fact that he was shot on the Île Saint-Marcouf three days before the disappearance of Jamal Salaoui! No other actor in this tragedy has aroused our suspicions. Whoever he may be, the individual who poisoned these three men acted in a particularly meticulous, methodical, and prudent manner.
In response to your letter, we relaunched our investigation into the disappearance of Jamal Salaoui, jointly conducted at the time with the gendarmerie in Fécamp and the regional crime squad in Rouen. We questioned everyone close to Salaoui, relatives, cousins, and friends, as well as the other protagonists in the Avril–Camus case, the members of the now defunct Fil Rouge Association, and finally his colleagues at the Saint Antoine Therapeutic Institute. No one knew anything. Jamal Salaoui was a secretive and introverted young man who had constructed an imaginary world around himself, a kind of bubble to which very few people were admitted. His superior, Jérôme Pinelli, described him as a potential depressive. But even he had to admit it was out of the question that Salaoui could have poisoned himself with muscarine and then thrown himself into a hole in the cliff to join two other bodies that had died by the same method years earlier.
We were about to get into our cars to leave the Saint Antoine Institute when one last witness came forward. A fifteen-year-old female inmate called to us from her third-floor window. The staff had isolated her in her room for the duration of our visit, but she was determined to speak to us.
Staff warned us that the girl, Ophélie Parodi, was psychologically unstable and suffered from serious sexual disturbances linked to her childhood. She had developed a crush on Jamal Salaoui, who had been warned several times to keep his distance from her. Her behaviour—screaming and lashing out hysterically at the staff members trying to restrain her—certainly seemed unstable, but I insisted on hearing what she had to say.
As it turned out, little Ophélie had nothing to tell us . . . but she did have something to show us: her mobile phone.
She had received a text. The sender’s first name, Jamal, was framed by two smiley emojis.
It was sent on February 25th, 2014, 9:18 P.M. The day of Salaoui’s disappearance. No one had seen him since—or not until six months later, when his decomposed corpse was recovered. So this young inmate was the last person to have been in contact with Salaoui.
The text itself was, to say the least, esoteric.
20 out of 20?
It was accompanied by a picture. A candid snapshot showing a woman in a blue tulip dress, a tea towel in her hand, in a kitchen.
Though the photograph was somewhat blurred and taken from behind the subject, showing her face in quarter-profile, there is no question as to her identity.
Océane Avril. The sister of the first victim.
I had questioned her several times about the disappearance of Salaoui. She struck me as an intelligent woman who showed real dignity in spite of the ordeal that she had been through. I saw no reason whatsoever to suspect her of any wrongdoing.
I immediately ordered that she be placed unde
r arrest. Océane Avril is currently being held at the Vignettes detention centre in Val-de-Reuil. The preliminary psychiatric reports are damning.
Since then, forensic computer experts have managed to recover a number of deleted files from Jamal Salaoui’s laptop. Among them, an account written in the days that followed the supposed resolution of the Avril–Camus case. I have read it, and it is very edifying. Intercut this manuscript with our correspondence, Monsieur Calmette, and you will have a story that any publisher would be in a great hurry to publish. Little Salaoui deserved as much, in the end.
I cannot resist giving you one last piece of evidence, Monsieur Calmette, even though it adds nothing more to the case. Young Ophélie Parodi had replied almost immediately to the text sent by Jamal Salaoui. According to our reconstruction of events, Salaoui had already ingested the muscarine by this time, and his death was inevitable.
The message was brief. It echoed a message sent by Jamal Salaoui to Ophélie some days previously. Whatever the psychiatrists at the Saint Antoine Institute might say, this girl, although emotionally disturbed, is far from stupid. Her response to the photograph of Océane Avril and the question Salaoui had posed, “20 out of 20?” was two lines long:
Too beautiful. Beware of appearances.
I preferred the redhead.
Now you know everything.
With cordial regards,
Bertrand Donnadieu,
Territorial Brigade of the District of Étretat
EIGHTEEN DAYS LATER, AUGUST 31ST, 2014
Émile opened cabin 22 of the cable car of the Aiguille du Midi to release the sixty Chinese tourists, their legs still wobbly after a journey spent hanging from a wire above a two-thousand-metre drop.