After the Crash

The Airbus 5403, flying from Istanbul to Paris, suddenly plummeted. In a dive lasting less than ten seconds, the plane sank over
three thousand feet, before stabilising once again. Most of the
passengers had been asleep. They woke abruptly, with the terrifying
sensation that they had nodded off while strapped to a rollercoaster.

Izel was woken not by the turbulence, but by the screaming.
After nearly three years spent travelling the world with Turkish
Airlines, she was used to a few jolts. She had been on a break,
asleep for less than twenty minutes, and had scarcely opened her
eyes when her colleague Meliha thrust her aged, fleshy bosom
towards her.

‘Izel? Izel? Hurry up! This is serious. There’s a big storm outside.
Zero visibility, according to the captain. You take one aisle and I’ll
take the other.’

Izel’s face bore the weary expression of an experienced air hostess
who wasn’t about to panic over such a small thing. She got up from
her seat, adjusted her suit, pulling slightly at the hem of her skirt,
then moved towards the right-hand aisle.

The passengers were no longer screaming, and they looked more
surprised than worried as the aeroplane continued to pitch. Izel went
from one person to the next, calmly reassuring them: ‘Everything’s
fine. Don’t worry. We’re just going through a little snowstorm over
the Jura mountains. We’ll be in Paris in less than an hour.’

Izel’s smile wasn’t forced. Her mind was already wandering
towards Paris. She would stay there for three days, until Christmas,
and she was giddy with excitement at the prospect.

She addressed her words of comfort in turn to a ten-year-old boy
holding tightly to his grandmother’s hand, a handsome young businessman with a rumpled shirt, a Turkish woman wearing a veil, and
an old man curled up fearfully with his hands between his knees.
He shot her an imploring look.

Izel was calmly proceeding down the aisle when the Airbus
lurched sideways again. A few people screamed. ‘When do we start
doing the loop-the-loop?’ shouted a young man sitting to her right,
who was holding a Walkman, his voice full of false cheer.

A trickle of nervous laughter was drowned out almost immediately by the screams of a young baby. The child was lying in a
carrycot just a few feet in front of Izel – a little girl, only a few
months old, wearing a white dress with orange flowers under a knitted beige jumper.

The mother, sitting next to the baby, was unbuckling her belt so
she could lean over to her daughter.
‘No, madame,’ Izel insisted. ‘You must keep your seatbelt on. It’s
very important . . .’
The woman did not even bother turning around, never mind
replying to the air hostess. Her long hair fell over the carrycot. The
baby screamed even louder. Izel, unsure what to do, moved towards
them.
The plane plunged again. Three seconds, maybe another 3,000
feet.
There were a few brief screams, but most of the passengers were
silent. Dumbstruck. They knew now that the aeroplane’s movements were not merely due to bad weather. Jolted by the dive,
Izel fell sideways. Her elbow hit the Walkman, smashing it into
the young guy’s chest. She straightened up again immediately, not
even taking the time to apologise. In front of her, the three-monthold girl was still crying. Her mother was leaning over her again,
unbuckling the child’s seatbelt.
‘No, madame! No . . .’
Cursing, Izel tugged her skirt back down over her laddered
tights. What a nightmare. She would have earned those three days
of pleasure in Paris . . .
Everything happened very fast after that.
For a brief moment, Izel thought she could hear another baby
crying, like an echo, somewhere else on the aeroplane, further off
to her left. The Walkman guy’s hand brushed her nylon-covered
thighs. The old Turkish man had put one arm around his veiled
wife’s shoulder and was holding the other one up, as if begging Izel
to do something. The baby’s mother had stood up and was reaching over to pick up her daughter, freed now from the straps of the
carrycot.
These were the last things Izel saw before the Airbus smashed
into the mountainside.

The collision propelled Izel thirty feet across the floor, into the
emergency exit. Her two shapely legs were twisted like those of a
plastic doll in the hands of a sadistic child; her slender chest was
crushed against metal; her left temple exploded against the corner
of the door.

Izel was killed instantly. In that sense, she was luckier than most.
She did not see the lights go out. She did not see the aeroplane
being mangled and squashed like a tin can as it crashed into the
forest, the trees sacrificing themselves one by one as the Airbus
gradually slowed.

And, when everything had finally stopped, she did not detect the
spreading smell of kerosene. She felt no pain when the explosion
ripped apart her body, along with those of the other twenty-three
passengers who were closest to the blast.

Crédule Grand-Duc lifted his pen and stared into the clear
water at the base of the large vivarium just in front of him. For
a few moments, his eyes followed the despairing flight of the
Harlequin dragonfly that had cost him almost 2,500 francs less
than three weeks ago. A rare species, one of the world’s largest dragonflies, an exact replica of its prehistoric ancestor.
The huge insect flew from one glass wall to another, through
a frenzied swarm of dozens of other dragonflies. Prisoners.
Trapped.

Pen touched paper once again. Crédule Grand-Duc’s hand shook
nervously as he wrote.
In this notebook, I have reviewed all the clues, all the leads, all the
theories I have found in eighteen years of investigation. It is all here, in
these hundred or so pages. If you have read them carefully, you will now
know as much as I do. Perhaps you will be more perceptive than me?
Perhaps you will find something I have missed? The key to the mystery,
if one exists. Perhaps . . .
For me, it’s over.
The pen hesitated again, and was held trembling just an inch
above the paper. Crédule Grand-Duc’s blue eyes stared emptily into
the still waters of the vivarium, then turned their gaze towards the
fireplace where large flames were devouring a tangle of newspapers,
files and cardboard archive boxes. Finally, he looked down again
and continued.
It would be an exaggeration to say that I have no regrets, but I have
done my best.
Crédule Grand-Duc stared at this last line for a long time, then
slowly closed the pale green notebook.

He placed the pen in a pot on the desk, and stuck a yellow Post-it
note to the cover of the notebook. Then he picked up a felt tip and
wrote on the Post-it, in large letters,
for Lylie
. He pushed the notebook to the edge of the desk and stood up.

Grand-Duc’s gaze lingered for a few moments on the copper
plaque in front of him: CRÉDULE GRAND-DUC, PRIVATE DETECTIVE. He smiled ironically. Everybody called him
Grand-Duc nowadays, and they had done for some time. Nobody
– apart from Emilie and Marc Vitral – used his ludicrous first name.
Anyway, that was before, when they were younger. An eternity ago.

Grand-Duc walked towards the kitchen. He took one last look at
the grey, stainless-steel sink, the white octagonal tiles on the floor,
and the pale wood cupboards, their doors closed. Everything was
in perfect order, clean and tidy; every trace of his previous life had
been carefully wiped away, as if this were a rented house that had
to be returned to its owner. Grand-Duc was a meticulous man
and always would be, until his dying breath. He knew that. That
explained many things. Everything, in fact.

He turned and walked back towards the fireplace until he could
feel the heat on his hands. He leaned down and threw two archive
boxes into the flames, then stepped back to avoid the shower of
sparks.

A dead end.
He had devoted thousands of hours to this case, examining each
clue in the most minute detail. All those clues, those notes, all that
research was now going up in smoke. Every trace of this investigation would disappear in the space of a few hours.
Eighteen years of work for nothing. His whole life was summarised in this
auto-da-fé
, to which he was the only witness.

In fourteen minutes, Lylie would be eighteen years old, officially
at least . . . Who was she? Even now, he still couldn’t be certain. It
was a one-in-two chance, just as it had been on that very first day.
Heads or tails.

He had failed. Mathilde de Carville had spent a fortune –
eighteen years’ worth of salary – for nothing.
Grand-Duc returned to the desk and poured himself another
glass of Vin Jaune. From the special reserve of Monique Genevez,
aged for fifteen years: this was, perhaps, the single good memory he
had retained from this investigation. He smiled as he brought the
glass of wine to his lips. A far cry from the caricature of the ageing
alcoholic detective, Grand-Duc was more the type of man to dip
sparingly into his wine cellar, and only on special occasions. Lylie’s
birthday, tonight, was a very special occasion. It also marked the
final minutes of his life.
The detective drained the glass of wine in a single mouthful.
This was one of the few sensations he would miss: the inimitable
taste of this distinctive yellow wine burning deliciously as it moved
through his body, allowing him to forget for a moment this obsession, the unsolvable mystery to which he had devoted his life.
Grand-Duc put the glass back on the desk and picked up the pale
green notebook, wondering whether to open it one last time. He
looked at the yellow Post-it:
for Lylie
.
This was what would remain: this notebook, these pages, written
over the last few days . . . For Lylie, for Marc, for Mathilde de Carville, for Nicole Vitral, for the police and the lawyers, and whoever
else wished to explore this endless hall of mirrors.
It was a spellbinding read, without a doubt. A masterpiece. A
thrilling mystery to take your breath away. And it was all there . . .
except for the end.
He had written a thriller that was missing its final page, a whodunit in which the last five lines had been erased.
Future readers would probably think themselves cleverer than
him. They would undoubtedly believe that they could succeed
where he had failed, that they could find the solution.
For many years he had believed the same thing. He had always
felt certain that proof must exist somewhere, that the equation
could be resolved. It was a feeling, only a feeling, but it wouldn’t
go away . . . That certainty had been what had driven him on until
this deadline: today, Lylie’s eighteenth birthday. But perhaps it was
only his subconscious that had kept this illusion alive, to prevent
him from falling into utter despair. It would have been so cruel to
have spent all those years searching for the key to a problem that
had no solution.
The detective re-read his final words:
I have done my best
.
Grand-Duc decided not to tidy up the empty bottle and the used
glass. The police and the forensics people examining his body a few
hours from now would not be worried about an unwashed glass.
His blood and his brains would be splashed in a thick puddle across
this mahogany desk and these polished floorboards. And should
his disappearance not be noticed for a while, which seemed highly
likely (who would miss him, after all?), it would be the stench of his
corpse that would alert the neighbours.
In the hearth, he noticed a scrap of cardboard that had escaped
the flames. He bent down and threw it into the fire.
Slowly, Grand-Duc moved towards the mahogany writing desk
that occupied the corner of the room facing the fireplace. He
opened the middle drawer and took his revolver from its leather
holster. It was a Mateba, in mint condition, its grey metal barrel
glimmering in the firelight. The detective’s hand probed more
deeply inside the desk and brought out three 38mm bullets. With
a practised movement he spun the cylinder and gently inserted the
bullets.
One would be enough, even given his relatively inebriated state,
even though he would probably tremble and hesitate. Because he
would undoubtedly manage to press the gun to his temple, hold
it firmly, and squeeze the trigger. He couldn’t miss, even with the
contents of a bottle of wine in his bloodstream.
He placed the revolver on the desk, opened the left-hand
drawer, and took out a newspaper: a very old and yellowed copy
of
Est Républicain
. This macabre set-piece had been in his mind for
months, a symbolic ritual that would help him to end it all, to rise
above the labyrinth for ever.