After the Crash (11 page)

‘All right,’ said Leguerne. ‘Mrs Vitral, did little Emilie ever wear
jewellery of any kind, such as a bracelet or a small chain?’
‘None at all,’ Nicole Vitral replied.
‘Are you certain of that?’
‘Yes . . .’ Nicole Vitral swallowed a sob, then continued: ‘Yes. We
were supposed to give Emilie a bracelet for her christening, after
the family came back from Turkey. We had already ordered it from
Lecerf, in Offranville, but she never got the chance to wear it.’
Nicole bent over, rummaged in her handbag for a few moments,
then took out a long red jewellery box which she held out for Judge
Weber to see. She opened it and into her palm spilled a tiny silver
chain.
A wave of emotion ran through the people in the courtroom,
including the de Carville camp.
Emilie
was engraved on the nameplate in italics – in a childlike,
cheerful calligraphy – as well as the date of her birth:
30 September,
1980
.

As Nicole Vitral admitted to me afterwards, this was a set-up. The
christening really had been booked for the following month, but no
bracelet had yet been ordered. It was just a clever piece of theatre,
risky but effective. A preparatory move, before dealing the death
blow.

‘Mr de Carville, did Lyse-Rose have any jewellery – a bracelet,
for example?’
Carville shot a worried look at his lawyers but Judge Weber
insisted: ‘Please answer Maître Leguerne’s question, Mr de Carville.’
Léonce de Carville was about to open his mouth, but Leguerne did not give him time. Triumphantly, he pulled from
his thick red file the photocopy of a receipt from the famous,
and extremely expensive jeweller Philippe Tournaire, on Place
Vendôme.
Judge Weber confirmed the contents of the paper. The receipt
made explicit mention of the delivery of a solid gold chain bracelet. It stated that the name ‘Lyse-Rose’ and the date of birth – ‘27
September, 1980’ – had been hand-engraved on the bracelet. The
receipt was dated 2 October, 1980 – less than a week after LyseRose’s birth.
This proved nothing, absolutely nothing at all. But for the first
time since the hearing began, de Carville was on the defensive,
without a counter-argument meticulously prepared for him by his
legal team.
‘Mr de Carville,’ Leguerne continued, ‘did Lyse-Rose usually
wear this bracelet?’
‘How should I know? I sent it to my son in Turkey, just after
Lyse-Rose’s birth. But I imagine he would only put it on her for
special occasions. It was a bracelet of great value.’
‘You imagine? Or you know?’
‘I imagine . . .’
‘All right. Thank you.’
Maître Leguerne produced another photocopy from his red file –
this time of a postcard sent from Ceyhan, in Turkey.
‘Mr de Carville, did you receive this card from your son about a
month after Lyse-Rose’s birth?’
‘Where did you get that?’ Léonce de Carville yelled.
‘Did you receive this postcard?’ the lawyer asked again, impassive.
‘Yes, of course,’ de Carville admitted. He had no choice.
‘ “Dear Dad”,’ Leguerne began to read. ‘I will skip over the details
to the part that interests us. “Thank you for the bracelet. You must
have paid a fortune for it – it is magnificent. Lyse-Rose never takes
it off . . . It is the only truly French thing she possesses” . . .’
Leguerne went silent, triumphant amid the general air of
astonishment.
I never found out who betrayed the de Carvilles. Probably one of
their domestic staff. Leguerne must have paid a handsome price for
that postcard. Then again, everything is relative. However much he
paid, you can be sure it was nothing like the value of a three-storey
building on Rue Saint-Honoré.
‘This proves nothing!’ one of the de Carvilles’ lawyers shouted.
‘It’s ridiculous! The bracelet could have been stowed away for safekeeping before the journey. It could have been torn from her wrist
during the crash . . .’
Smiling, Leguerne asked: ‘Was a bracelet or any other kind of
jewellery found near the Airbus, in that area of ground which was
searched so diligently?’
Everyone in the courtroom was silent, including Vatelier, who
was shocked at having been beaten to the punch in the investigation by an ambitious young man in a black robe.
‘No, of course not. Isn’t that right, Superintendent? Were there
any signs on the baby’s wrist of a bracelet having been torn from it?
Was there even the faintest red mark?’
A well-timed pause.
‘No. The doctors found no marks on her at all. Let us go further
. . . Was there an area, a line, on the baby’s wrist that was slightly
paler than the surrounding skin? A little less suntanned? The type
of mark that is usually left by a piece of jewellery that is never taken
off . . .’
Time seemed to stand still.
‘No, there was no mark of any kind. Thank you. I rest my case.’
Maître Leguerne went back to his seat. Léonce de Carville’s lawyers reiterated loudly and repeatedly that this
coup de théâtre
was
nothing of the sort, that the bracelet’s existence was insignificant.
Leguerne did not reply. He knew perfectly well that, the more the
opposing lawyers argued, the greater weight would be given to the
question he had raised.
If the bracelet was unimportant, why had de Carville never mentioned it to the police?

With hindsight, this question about the bracelet looks no more or
less important than any of the other evidence. Just one more doubt.
But at that particular moment in the trial, the bracelet was transformed into a decisive proof against the de Carvilles’ case. A new
piece of evidence, something the courtroom had been waiting for
since the hearing began. So, however tenuous, however slight, this
new piece of evidence was enough to tip the balance.

Judge Weber looked at Léonce de Carville for a long time. The
industrialist had lied. It was a lie of omission, admittedly, but a lie
all the same. He had been caught red-handed. For that alone, in the
absence of any more compelling reason, shouldn’t the law take the
side of the opposing party?

As for the de Carvilles’ bracelet, it would haunt me for many years
to come. When I think now of how much energy I spent on searching for it, tracking its long journey . . . When I think of how close
I came to getting my hands on it . . . But please forgive me, I am
getting ahead of myself again.

Judge Weber’s decision was announced a few hours later. The
miracle child of Mont Terrible was Emilie Vitral. Her grandparents,
Pierre and Nicole Vitral, became her legal guardians, as well as the
legal guardians of her elder brother Marc.

Lyse-Rose de Carville was dead, burned alive with her parents in
the cabin of the Airbus 5403 from Istanbul to Paris.
Léonce de Carville’s lawyers wanted to appeal, to take the case
all the way to the High Court, but it was de Carville himself who
refused. His role as the noble victim, the broken man, was no longer
just a stance.
The two heart attacks he suffered the following year, with only a
few months in between, and which left him more or less a vegetable
in a wheelchair for the rest of his life, seemed the logical conclusion
to the affair.

‘Hide Grand-Duc’s body!’
Mathilde de Carville’s tone brooked no argument.
Nevertheless, Malvina de Carville did attempt to protest.
‘But, Grandma . . .’ she said into the telephone.
‘Hide his body now, I said! Doesn’t matter where. In a cupboard,

under a bed. We need to play for time. Anyone could come to his
house. A neighbour, his cleaning lady, his mistress . . . Sooner or
later, the police will turn up. I bet you’ve left fingerprints all over
the place, haven’t you, you little fool? You have to wipe them all
away.’

Malvina bit her lip. Her grandmother was right: she had behaved
like an idiot. She was standing in the living room, just between
the detective’s corpse and the vivarium, where the insects were
still dying. She knew she had to remove her fingerprints, but she
could not stay here too long: she needed to tell her grandmother
this.

He was on his way.
‘Grandma, there’s something else . . .’
On the other end of the line, Mathilde de Carville was silent for

a moment. She was holding the receiver with one hand while continuing to prune her roses with the other.
‘What is it, Malvina?’
‘Marc Vitral called Grand-Duc’s house. About five minutes ago,
if that. He left a message on the answering machine.’
Mathilde de Carville cut a branch off with a precise clip of her
secateurs.
‘Marc says he wants to see Grand-Duc. He’ll be here in half an
hour. He’s coming on the metro. It’s about Lyse-Rose. And . . . and
he says that he has Grand-Duc’s notebook. Lyse-Rose read it yesterday. She gave it to him this morning . . .’
Another rose branch fell, cut off at its base. Wilted petals rained
down over Mathilde de Carville’s black dress.
‘All the more reason to hurry, Malvina. Do what I told you to do
– clean up every trace of your presence, and then get out of there.’
‘And then what, Grandma?’
For the first time, Mathilde de Carville hesitated. To what extent
could she use Malvina? To what extent could she keep her under
control? Without risking another mistake . . .
‘Stay close by, Malvina. Marc Vitral doesn’t know you. Hide in
the street somewhere. Watch him, follow him. But don’t do anything else. Telephone me as soon as you see him. You understand,
don’t you? Don’t do anything other than what I’ve told you. And,
most importantly, hide that body immediately!’
‘I understand, Grandma.’
They hung up.
The steel jaws closed and a severed branch fell to the ground.
Mathilde de Carville knew all about Malvina’s hatred for the
Vitral family. She was also well aware that her granddaughter was
walking the streets carrying a loaded Mauser L110, and it was in
perfect working order: that, unfortunately, had been confirmed in
the most terrible way. Was it really reasonable of her to allow the
possibility of Malvina and Marc Vitral meeting on Rue de la Butteaux-Cailles, in front of Grand-Duc’s house?
Reasonable!
Mathilde de Carville had banned that word a long time ago.
The simplest course of action would be to leave it up to fate, to
God’s judgement. As she always did.
Mathilde smiled to herself and continued pruning the roses with
a surprising dexterity. Her long fingers had the strange ability to
hold the branches, between the thorns, without ever being pricked,
twisting them with a firm movement towards the sharp blades.
Mathilde de Carville worked quickly, methodically, hardly even
looking down at her hands, the way a dressmaker sews with her
eyes elsewhere.
Her elegant black dress was dirty with soil, blades of grass and rose
petals. Mathilde de Carville was unconcerned. She turned her face
towards the vast park of the Roseraie. Léonce de Carville was sitting
in his wheelchair, in the middle of the lawn, under the large maple
tree. His head had fallen sideways. He was a hundred feet away
from her, yet Mathilde could still hear him snoring. She thought
about calling Linda, the nurse, to tell her to go and straighten his
head, place a cushion under his neck . . . she could take him back
to the house too: it wasn’t very warm anymore.
Then she shrugged. What was the point?
Her husband had sunk into this vegetative state nearly seventeen
years ago. He had managed, with great difficulty, to recover from
the first heart attack, but the second one had been too much. It had
struck in the middle of the annual general meeting, on the seventh
floor of their head office, near Bercy. The emergency services had
managed to save his life, but his brain had been deprived of oxygen
for too long.
Mathilde continued examining her plants while observing the
shadow of the cross she wore around her neck as it moved over the
ground.
God’s judgement. Once again.
In the aftermath of the disaster on Mont Terri, her husband had
wanted to do everything himself, as usual. And obediently, she had
let him. After all, he was the powerful one, the one with all the right
connections . . .
How wrong she had been. After the death of their only son, Alexandre, Léonce had lost his clarity of vision. He had made so many
mistakes! The briefcase stuffed full of cash that he had offered to the
Vitrals; the bracelet he had refused to mention to the police; poor
little Malvina, dragged around by him for weeks so she could testify
left, right and centre.
Not to mention the rest. The shameful secrets.
Mathilde felt nothing but contempt for her invalid husband.
After all these years, the Airbus accident was practically the only
thing for which she didn’t blame him.
Mathilde’s fingers flew from branch to branch. The roses’ thorns
offered no resistance and the stems fell one after another.
Of course, it had been his personal project, that famous Baku–
Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline. Sending her only son to live in Turkey for
months on end, with his pregnant wife, forcing their granddaughter to be born in a foreign country . . . And all for nothing. Now,
in 1998, not one single length of that damn pipeline had been laid.
Léonce de Carville had got everything wrong.
She watched with disgust as the maple leaves fell onto her husband, dozens of them, covering his hair, his shoulders, his arms,
piling up between his legs.
Mathilde chopped off one last branch and stood back, contemplating her work. The dozen rose plants had been pruned to within
an inch of their lives. Mathilde remembered the advice given to her
by her own grandmother: ‘You can never prune a rose too much;
prune them as much as you can, and then prune them some more;
fight the plant’s desire to make you raise your clippers, and insist
on pushing them lower. Always prune three inches lower than you
think you need to.’
The Roseraie villa dated from 1857: the year was still engraved
in the granite above the porch. Mathilde knew that the roses had
been planted that same year, and that the de Carville family had
personally looked after them ever since. Dozens of people were
employed by the family – to tidy the house, cook the meals, mow
the lawn, polish the pots and pans, clean the windows, and guard
the property – but for generations, the de Carvilles had looked after
the rose garden themselves. Mathilde had been introduced to the
art of gardening as soon as she was old enough to walk. In addition to looking after the rose plants, she had also planted a winter
garden, not far from the villa. She took one last admiring look at
the pruned plants and then, without even glancing at her husband,
walked towards the greenhouse.
She thought again of Malvina’s last words. So, Grand-Duc’s
notes, the legacy of his eighteen-year investigation, were in the
hands of Marc Vitral . . .
The irony . . .
Should she use Malvina to recover the book? Should she continue lying to her, maintain the girl’s illusions? All the evidence
she had obtained since the accident, all that evidence provided by
Grand-Duc . . . she had never mentioned any of it to Malvina. It
would have killed her.
Mathilde entered the greenhouse and stood there for a long time,
as she did every morning, inhaling the wonderful blend of odours.
This was her haven. Her life’s work. It was here, in this greenhouse,
that she felt closest to God, to His creation. It was here that she was
best able to pray, much more so than in any church.
Malvina . . .
Her poor, mad granddaughter.
That, too, was her husband’s fault. She remembered what a lovely
little girl Malvina had been at six years old. She remembered her
laughter on the staircase, the cunning hiding places she found in
the garden, her wonder-filled eyes as she sat with her grandmother
and leafed through the herbarium . . . But what could she do for
Malvina now, apart from lie to her? Put her in a psychiatric hospital? Malvina’s obsession was the only thing that made her get up
in the mornings, made her dress, eat: Lyse-Rose was alive, she had
survived, in spite of the judge’s decision eighteen years earlier, and
she alone, her big sister, could bring her back to life, even after all
these years.
Bring her back to life with a Mauser L110 in her hands . . .
Mathilde de Carville bent down near a bunch of Kaffir lilies,
one of the last plants to flower in autumn. Every year, Mathilde
managed to keep them alive in her greenhouse until December; it was a matter of great pride to her, the bouquet on the
table on Christmas Eve, a mixture of rose lilies and Kaffir lilies.
Mathilde maintained a tight control over the level of water in the
soil: adequate moisture was the secret to her lilies’ radiance and
longevity.
Her mind wandered once again to Malvina, her own weapon of
vengeance. Well, someone had to defend the de Carvilles’ interests.
Why not Malvina?
Things were going to change in the coming hours and days. Now
that Lylie had read Grand-Duc’s notebook, Malvina was no longer
the only time bomb walking the streets. Grand-Duc’s birthday present had been a poisoned chalice. The film of her life. All the family
secrets revealed in a hundred pages.
Two families. Twice the pain.
Enough to make Lylie go mad too – mad with rage.
Mathilde moved further into the greenhouse. The ‘Red September’ asters in her winter garden were losing their last petals, a few
purple sunbeams clinging to the golden core . . .
A curious image suddenly entered Mathilde’s mind. Almost like
a dream, or a premonition. She pictured Lylie entering the Roseraie, armed with a revolver – a Mauser L110 – her finger poised on
the trigger. She was walking softly across the lawn.
And Lylie would have good reason to seek revenge, if GrandDuc had told all in his notebook. Mathilde smiled to herself. One
question nagged at her. Would the finger on that trigger be adorned
with her ring? The pale sapphire ring with inlaid diamonds . . .
Gradually, the image faded. Beneath her breath, Mathilde whispered: ‘Happy birthday, Lylie.’
If only she had known, she would never have hired Crédule
Grand-Duc to carry out his stupid investigation.
Mathilde walked on, turning back to check that she was still
alone. She was. No one was watching her through the windows of
the greenhouse. She leaned over her secret garden and pushed aside
the irises to reveal a few discreet stems and the small yellow flowers of the greater celandine. Mathilde enjoyed looking at the four
golden petals, arranged in a cross – ‘swallow-wort’, as it used to be
called – but she preferred the celandine’s other side: the four petals
concealed a fatal poison, perhaps the most toxic plant of all, with
the unique concentration of alkaloids concealed within its sap.
Her guilty pleasure. Her little weakness.
God forgive her.
*
She turned around and left the greenhouse. Léonce de Carville was
still sitting there, motionless except for the regular trembling of his
body. A dead tree, with a twisted trunk.
Mathilde’s gaze took in the entire property: the rose garden, the
villa, the park . . .
Perhaps all was not yet lost. Their name, breeding, honour.
Lyse-Rose.
She was starting to think like Malvina.
One last hope did remain: that telephone call from Grand-Duc
the night before, the last call he made before his death. He claimed
to have discovered a new piece of evidence that called into question
all his previous convictions. He told her this eureka moment had
come two days earlier, in the final minutes of his contract, supposedly as he was reading the
Est Républicain
.
Was she naïve enough to believe him? Was she stupid enough to
be taken in by such an obvious bluff?
Grand-Duc had not wanted to say any more; he said that he
wanted to check a few final details. She thought again about Malvina and her Mauser. Grand-Duc had acted like someone out of a
detective novel, the kind of witness who withholds information in
search of a reward, but ends up with a bullet through their heart
instead.
And yet, in spite of everything, Mathilde could not help believing Grand-Duc’s last words.
A way out. A final hope.
And, as always in this case, fate hung in the balance. For one
family to be given hope, the other must be offered despair.