After the Crash (14 page)

The bastard’s in, thought Malvina. She had watched Marc Vitral as
he walked towards the house and climbed over the wall. Now I’ve
got him, she thought, and he’s carrying a backpack. Surely GrandDuc’s notebook must be inside. It was all working out. Malvina
attempted to move a little. Her neck, which she had twisted below
the steering wheel, was hurting, but she didn’t care. She wouldn’t
mind staying in this position for hours and wearing a neck brace
for the rest of her life if it meant she could catch Vitral on his way
out, take that damn notebook off him and rip out its lie-filled pages
one by one. She wanted to point her gun at Vitral and make him
talk, too. She would find a way. When the time came, she would
make the rules.

The smell of smoke and ashes hit Marc instantly, catching in his
throat. Marc coughed. He found himself in a little outhouse, a
sort of storeroom containing various gardening and DIY tools. He
pushed the door open, climbed up three concrete steps, and opened
another door. This took him directly into what must be GrandDuc’s living room.

The stench of smoke was much stronger here. Marc coughed
again. His eyes were drawn towards the large fireplace just in front
of him. One thing was obvious: an enormous quantity of paper had
been burned in that hearth. He noted the empty archive boxes on
the floor. Clearly, Grand-Duc had been tidying up some loose ends.

Before Marc had time to analyse the situation, a strange noise
made him freeze. Behind him, to his right, there was a sort of muffled rattling, a succession of short jolts, like the jammed mechanism
of a mechanical toy. Marc turned around. To his shock, he discovered a huge vivarium filled with dragonflies, most of them lying
inert on the damp floor. He moved closer. The only one still able to
fly was the largest, with a red and gold thorax, and even it was struggling. As if it had noticed this new presence in the room, the insect
was weakly flapping its wings. The sound Marc had heard was its
wings hitting the glass wall. For a few moments, fascinated by the
dragonfly’s desperate movements, Marc did not react. And then he
thought: a dragonfly. A prisoner. Almost dead, like all the others
in the glass cage. Without any further thought, Marc removed the
glass lid that covered the vivarium and leaned it against the nearest wall. Instantly refreshed by the influx of oxygen, the Harlequin
dragonfly took only a few wingbeats to escape from its prison. Marc
watched it fly, hesitantly at first and then majestically. The dragonfly
flew higher and higher, before coming to rest on the ceiling light.

Marc’s heart raced. He felt the most intense, almost childish, joy
at having saved the insect.
His dragonfly.
He would never have guessed that Grand-Duc collected them.

Marc made a more detailed examination of Grand-Duc’s office.
Everything was perfectly neat and tidy: pencils, notepaper, the
strange little wine bottle (empty), the glass. There was something
odd about this orderliness: as if Grand-Duc had wanted to tie up
everything relating to the case. The burned archives. The sacrificed
insects. And his testament, of course: the pale green notebook,
which Grand-Duc must have finished writing the night of Lylie’s
eighteenth birthday.

So, what had happened? Why was the detective not here?
Marc could sense an odd feeling of urgency in this house, as if
someone had left in a hurry; the bottle that had not been put away,
for instance; that broken window which had been pushed shut.
And that smell, too. Not the smell of smoke from the fireplace, but
another one, insidiously concealed by the first.
Something was not quite right here . . .
Suddenly, Marc’s face lit up. For there was no mystery about
Grand-Duc’s last thoughts: all Marc had to do was turn to the last
page of the notebook and read the final lines of his confession.
Marc concentrated on the words. The last page of Grand-Duc’s
notebook contained only about twenty lines. As always, the detective’s handwriting was small and regular.

Today is 29 September, 1998. It is twenty minutes to midnight.
Everything is ready. Lylie is about to turn eighteen. I will put my pen
back in the pot on my desk. I will sit at this desk, unfold the 23 December 1980 edition of the
Est Républicain
, and I will calmly shoot myself
in the head. My blood will stain this yellowed newspaper. I have failed.

All I leave behind me is this notebook. For Lylie. For whoever wishes
to read it.
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.
It would be an exaggeration to say that I have no regrets, but I have
done my best.

Slowly, Marc re-read the last line:
I have done my best
. For a while
he was paralysed, attempting to suppress the feeling of intense
unease that was rising within him. He went back a few lines and
read again:

I will calmly shoot myself in the head. My blood will stain this yellowed newspaper. I have failed.
Marc looked up.
Grand-Duc had planned to commit suicide.
So why was there no trace of his blood on the desk? No newspaper. No gun. Clearly two days earlier, between 11.40 p.m. and
midnight, Grand-Duc had decided
not
to kill himself after all . . .
But why? Why undertake so much rigorous preparation, only to
give up on the idea at the last minute?
Had he lost his nerve? Had he decided to carry out the act
somewhere else, at a later time? Or had he lied in this journal . . .
about his sacrifice? And what about the rest? Or had he discovered something, at the last minute? A glimmer, a clue, one last
lead . . .
Marc read the final lines of the notebook again.
Grand-Duc had left no clue behind. Only one thing was sure: he
was not sitting dead at his desk with a bullet in his head.

Marc closed the notebook and coughed again. The smell was
getting worse. Another mechanical whirring made him turn his
head. A dozen or so dragonflies were now flying through the air;
the removal of the vivarium lid must have saved their lives. Those
insects were tougher than they looked. Marc smiled, and thought
of Lylie,
his
dragonfly, the only one he truly wanted to save. And
he would, even if it meant trapping her with a glass lid. Marc could
feel his mind becoming muddled, the insects fluttering before his
eyes like the imaginary flies that precede a dizzy spell.

He stood up. He needed to move about.
Jesus Christ, what
was
that smell?
He took a few steps forward. The closer he got to the kitchen, the

stronger the smell became. The kitchen was clean, tidy . . . even the
bins had been emptied. But the stench seemed to be coming from
that tall, narrow cupboard next to the sink.

Almost immediately, the corpse fell to the floor next to his feet
with a muffled thud.
It was stiff. Like a wax model.
Marc recoiled, pale with horror.
The body lay on the floor in front of him. There was a dark red
stain on the shirt.
Crédule Grand-Duc.
Dead. Just as he had said he would be in the notebook.
Except that it would be fairly unusual for someone to shoot
themselves in the chest, then hide their gun, clean up their blood
and lock themselves in a cupboard.
Marc took a step backward.
The detective had not committed suicide. He had been murdered.

Keeping her head down low inside the Rover Mini, Malvina de
Carville picked up her telephone.
Her call was answered immediately.
‘He’s here,’ Malvina whispered. ‘Vitral is in Grand-Duc’s house.’
‘That’s to be expected. You didn’t leave any trace?’
‘No, Grandma. Don’t worry. I even cleaned up Grand-Duc’s hair
and bits of skin from the fireplace.’
She gave a high-pitched laugh. Her grandmother always treated
her as if she were an idiot.
‘Grandma?’
‘What?’
‘He might find Grand-Duc’s body. I hid it, but it . . . it smells
really bad . . .’
She sensed her grandmother thinking at the other end of the line.
‘Grandma?’
‘Yes,’ Mathilde de Carville replied finally. ‘Well, if he finds it, too
bad. In fact, it might be for the best. He broke into the house; he
will have been seen by witnesses. He’ll leave fingerprints all over the
house. Perhaps it’s the best thing that could have happened.’
Malvina shivered with pleasure. Her grandmother was right, as
always. Marc Vitral was going to regret entering that house.
‘Grandma? He’s carrying a backpack. I think Grand-Duc’s notebook must be inside. Do you think I . . .’
Mathilde’s voice was cold. ‘No, Malvina, don’t do anything. Just
follow him, that’s all. You must not do anything, especially in broad
daylight. Do you hear me?’
‘Yes, Grandma. I understand. I’ll call you back.’
Under the passenger seat, Malvina weighed the Mauser in her
hand. Yes, her grandmother was almost always right. But not this
time . . .

Marc retched. He could feel himself panicking, but he had to get
a grip on it: he could not afford to have an agoraphobic fit now, in
this house.

Should he call the police?
Marc thought quickly. He had entered Grand-Duc’s house
through a broken window. He had left his fingerprints everywhere.
It was not a good idea. Most importantly, the police would spend
hours questioning him in the local station, and he couldn’t allow
that to happen. Not now. Lylie needed him.
He looked down at the corpse. He was no pathologist, but it
seemed clear that the murder had occurred recently. The rigidity,
the smell . . . it all led him to believe that the body had been here for
only a few hours. Marc thought again about Grand-Duc’s last words
in his notebook. His planned suicide. How was that connected to
this crime? What had he discovered that had made someone want
to seal his lips forever?
A dragonfly flew down and buzzed under his nose. He waved it
away irritably.
The timing did not fit. Grand-Duc had been killed a few hours
ago, not two days ago, on Lylie’s birthday. Marc looked around the
living room again, at the desk, the fireplace, the vivarium.
The whole thing was surreal. The dragonflies were waking from
their apparent death one by one and flying around the room. They
kept colliding with windows, drawn to the flashes of daylight that
pierced the closed shutters.
Marc decided to check the other rooms in the house. He found
nothing suspicious, but at least the methodical search enabled
him to calm down, to breathe almost normally. He went into the
hallway, and immediately the blood began to thunder through his
veins again. The wall of the hallway was covered with photographs.
Nazim Ozan, Lylie, views of Mont Terri . . .
Suddenly he froze, his eyes glued to one particular picture: his
grandmother. For some reason, Grand Duc had kept a photo of
Nicole in the hallway of his house. In the photograph, she looked
much younger – not even fifty. She was standing on the beach, in
Dieppe. Marc’s heart was beating hard, half in anger, half in shock.
In his mind, his grandmother had always looked the way she looked
now: a woman of sixty-five, faded by years of sacrifice. He had practically no memory at all of this smiling, ample-breasted woman
with an almost seductive gleam in her eyes.
He turned away. He had to get out, quickly. Agoraphobia . . . he
could feel an attack coming. He thought confusedly that before leaving Grand-Duc’s house, he should get a cloth and wipe everything
he had touched: the vivarium lid, the desk and chair, the door handles, the window . . . But he didn’t want to, didn’t have the time.
He just had to get out of there. Escape the putrefied air of this
house and breathe fresh air again.
What did he have to fear, after all? He hadn’t killed Grand-Duc.
The detective had been dead for several hours. He had been a long
way from Butte-aux-Cailles at the time of the murder.
Marc climbed through the open window, taking deep breaths.
Yes, he could forget about cleaning the house. There were more
urgent things to consider.
Finding Lylie, first and foremost.
He also had to call his grandmother, in Dieppe. To try to understand. To discover why Grand-Duc had been murdered.
He did have an idea, as far as the last question was concerned. An
idea that was directly related to his next destination.
As Marc left, he did not notice the dragonflies escaping through
the open window behind him, flying away towards the horizon.

Malvina watched Marc Vitral approaching in the wing mirror of
her Rover Mini. He didn’t have a clue, the dickhead. Malvina’s hand
slid under the seat, fumbled around, then found the Mauser L110.
A few feet more, and he would be within range. She would shove
the gun barrel into his gut, and he would have no choice but to
hand over his stupid backpack, with that shit-for-brains detective’s
notebook stashed inside.

After that, she would see. Maybe she would let him off lightly:
just shoot off one of his balls. Or both . . . She hadn’t decided yet.
He was only about thirty feet away.
Malvina lifted her head and tightened her grip on the revolver.
A few old people were chatting outside the bakery at the end of
the street. She didn’t care. Those senile bastards were too far away
– they wouldn’t have a clue what was going on. She turned towards
the pavement, just to make sure.
One second later, she froze.
Three kids were sticking their tongues out at her. They could only
have been three or four years old. Their fat, snotty-nosed faces were
watching her through the window, as if she were playing hide-andseek, crouched down between the steering wheel and the driver’s
seat.
Peek-a-boo, we see you!
A primary school teacher came along and grabbed the three
jokers. Malvina sat up straight. Stupid little brats!
She realised a whole kindergarten class was walking past her car,
at least thirty kids, on their way to the cafeteria or the playground.
Marc Vitral smiled politely at the children and their teacher as
he passed them in the street, then walked quickly away, lost in his
thoughts, without even a second glance at the Rover Mini parked
by the side of the road.