After the Crash (15 page)

‘Hello, Grandma? It’s Malvina. I missed him, Grandma . . .’
‘What do you mean, you missed him? Marc Vitral? You mean
you shot at him and . . .’
‘No, I didn’t even do that. I didn’t have time.’
Malvina de Carville heard her grandmother give a sigh of relief.
‘All right, Malvina. What is he doing now?’
‘He’s walking to the metro. Shall I follow him?’
‘Don’t move a muscle, Malvina.’
‘But . . .’
Was her grandmother crazy?
‘But Grandma . . . what about Grand-Duc’s notebook?’
‘I told you: don’t move!’
Malvina knew she could still follow Marc, Mauser in hand, trap
him in one of the metro’s passages, take the backpack from him,
throw him onto the tracks . . .
‘Come home, Malvina. Come back to the Roseraie. It’s better
this way.’
‘But I can still get him, Grandma. Believe me, I can . . .’
Her grandmother’s voice was both gentle and firm, as it was
when she would read the Bible to Malvina before bedtime.
‘Malvina, listen to me. Vitral has undoubtedly read Grand-Duc’s
notebook. His first reaction was perfectly logical: he went to GrandDuc’s house. He must have found the detective’s corpse there, so his
second reaction will be equally predictable.’
Malvina did not understand. What point was her grandmother
trying to make?
‘Come home, Malvina. Marc Vitral will come to us, here in
Coupvray. He will come to the Roseraie.’
Malvina cursed her own stupidity.
A little black dot grew larger in her rear-view mirror, moving in
and out of sight. After performing a few loop-the-loops, the handsome red-and-gold dragonfly landed on the bonnet of the blue
Rover Mini.

Marc paused for a moment. He leaned against the chrome handrail
that divided the steep staircase leading down to Boulevard Blanqui.
The cold steel numbed his hand.

Marc had worked out his journey: Line 6. Change at Nation.
Then Line A4 of the RER train, towards Marne-la-Vallée, getting off
at Val-d’Europe, the penultimate station. He would be in Coupvray
within an hour, at the most. He would have no trouble getting hold
of the de Carvilles’ address: all he had to do was call Jennifer, his
colleague, as he had when he needed Grand-Duc’s address.

There was no need to let the de Carvilles know he was coming.
There would be plenty of people there to answer his questions. He
doubted whether the old grandfather in his wheelchair or the queen
mother left the property very often. They probably never even went
shopping. They paid people to do that kind of thing. They paid
people to do every kind of thing.

Marc smiled to himself. What a surprise his visit would be! After
all, he and the de Carvilles were working towards the same goal
now: proving that Lylie was not his sister, that Vitral blood did
not flow through her veins. Surely they could find some common
ground.

For a long time now, he had called his grandmother ‘Nicole’. It
was his way of solving the question that had puzzled him during
his first ten years of life: should he call her ‘Mother’ or ‘Grandma’?

‘Nicole? It’s Marc. Have you heard from Lylie? Recently, I mean.
Since this morning. Call me back please – it’s very important.’
He paused for a second, then continued: ‘I know I don’t actually
remember this, but you were very beautiful when you were fifty. I
love you . . .’

Marc’s left hand tightened around the cold metal of the rail.
The fingers of his other hand danced lightly over the telephone’s
keyboard.

The phone rang. Seven times.
‘Lylie . . . Where are you, for God’s sake? Answer me! Call me
back! Don’t go, Lylie. I’ve just left Grand-Duc’s house. He didn’t
commit suicide. He’s . . . He . . . I think he must have discovered
something. I can find out what it was too. I will discover it. Call
me, Lylie.’
The platforms of the metro were practically empty at this time
of day. Marc stared across at a large billboard ad for tourism in the
Emirates, losing himself in the mysterious landscape shown on the
poster. A few seconds later, the train appeared, sinking into the
golden sands, in front of the oriental palace, under the stars of a
thousand and one nights.

So I was hired for an eighteen-year investigation. Can you imagine?
For eighteen years, this case has been stuck in my brain, like a piece
of mental chewing gum, chewed for so long that it has lost all its
flavour. Beware, reader, that the gum does not become glued to
your own thoughts, massaged by your imagination, stretched out
by your logic – because you may never get rid of it.

The first few months of the investigation were extremely exciting. Despite the very generous deadline, I was filled with a sense of
urgency. I read all the inquiry documents – hundreds of pages – in
less than two weeks. During the first two months, I interviewed
scores of witnesses: the firemen who attended the Mont Terri crash;
all the medical staff from the Belfort-Montbéliard hospital; Dr
Morange; the de Carvilles’ friends and relatives; the Vitrals’ friends
and relatives; the police, including Superintendent Vatelier; the
lawyers, including Leguerne; the two judges, Le Drian and Weber;
and who knows how many others . . .

I was working fifteen hours a day, hardly sleeping at all. I was
thinking about the case when I fell asleep and it was still buzzing
around my head when I woke up. It was as if I wanted to solve the
case as quickly as possible, or to please my client by demonstrating
my zeal for the job, so she would give me a contract for life.

In fact, my motives were not so calculated. I was genuinely fascinated by the mystery, and was convinced that I could discover
something new; some clue that everyone had overlooked. I accumulated notes, photographs, hours of recordings. It was madness
. . . I couldn’t have known, then, that what I was actually building
was the foundations of my own neurosis.

After a few weeks of analysing all the evidence, I became fixated
on finding out about one thing in particular. At the time, it seemed
like a brilliant idea.

The bracelet!
That damned gold bracelet, given to her by her grandfather,
that Lyse-Rose de Carville must have been wearing when the plane
crashed. The piece of jewellery that had tipped the balance away
from the de Carvilles in the mind of Judge Weber; the decisive
grain of sand in the scales of justice; Maître Leguerne and the Vitrals’ lethal weapon. I had become convinced that this lethal weapon
was a double-edged sword. Without that bracelet, the balance of
probability fell towards the miracle child being Emilie Vitral. But
if the survivor was Lyse-Rose, there was no reason why the delicate
bracelet might not have broken during the plane crash. And if the
bracelet had been found, somewhere in the vicinity of the plane . . .
in that case, the situation would be reversed and the bracelet would
provide irrefutable proof that Lyse-Rose was the miracle child.
I am a patient, stubborn, meticulous man. When it comes to
work, I can be completely obsessive. So, even though I knew that
the police had searched the site around the burned Airbus for hours,
I decided I would begin that search again. Armed with a metal
detector, I spent seventeen days on Mont Terri in late August 1981,
raking over every inch of forest. There had been a storm, the night
the plane had crashed. The bracelet might have fallen into the snow,
become buried in the muddy earth. It’s not difficult to imagine that
a policeman sent to search the area in such conditions – his fingers
freezing, his feet soaked – might not be especially zealous.
I was.
Not that it did me any good.
I will spare you the list of beer cans, coins and other worthless
pieces of junk that I discovered. I was basically doing the job of the
man who looks after Mont Terri as part of the Haut-Jura nature
reserve. His name is Grégory Morez. A good-looking man with
designer stubble and wolfish eyes, his face craggy and tanned as
if he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro every weekend. We ended up
becoming friendly.
I brought down three bin liners from the mountain, filled with
all kinds of rubbish, but not a bracelet in sight.
To be honest, I wasn’t really disappointed. I had suspected this
might happen. But as I’ve told you, I am a stubborn man. I was
simply obeying Mathilde de Carville’s orders to leave no stone
unturned, taking it one step at a time.
What I really believed was, if the bracelet had fallen somewhere
near the miracle child on the night of the tragedy, it was perfectly
possible that someone – a fireman, a policeman, a nurse – might
have found it and simply kept it for themselves. Or maybe someone local had come to scavenge around the scene of the crash, after
the plane had stopped burning. The bracelet was made of solid
gold, valued at the time at exactly eleven thousand five hundred
francs, according to the receipt. It bore a hallmark from Tournaire, on Place Vendôme, and was the kind of object that could
make people greedy. And, of course, no one could possibly have
imagined how important that damned bracelet would become,
afterwards.
My idea was very simple: to bombard the local region with small
advertisements offering a lucrative reward for information that
would lead us to the coveted trinket. The reward had to be considerably more than the object itself was worth. With the agreement of
Mathilde de Carville, I gradually increased the size of the bait. We
began at twenty thousand francs . . . This kind of fishing required
patience, time and dexterity, but I was confident that the fish would
eventually bite. If the bracelet had been found, if it was hidden
away in a drawer, jealously guarded by a casual thief, one day or
another it would resurface.
And I was right. On that point at least, I was right.

My other main occupation during the first six months of my investigation was what I liked to call my Turkish holiday. Altogether, I
must have spent nearly two and a half years in Turkey, and most of
that time was during the first five years.

I was accompanied by Nazim Ozan, who had agreed, without
a moment’s hesitation, to partner me in my investigation. At the
time, he was working, often illegally, on building sites. He was
nearly fifty, and had had his fill of being a mercenary in the world’s
most dangerous countries, surrounded by fanatical maniacs. And,
most importantly, he had found love. He lived in Paris with a somewhat plump but still very lovely woman called Ayla. Like Nazim,
she was of Turkish origin. God knows why, but the two of them
were inseparable. Ayla was a powerful and fiercely jealous woman,
and I had to spend hours negotiating with her whenever I wanted
Nazim to come with me to Turkey. And, once we got there, he had
to call her every day. I don’t think Ayla ever understood anything
about the case itself. Worse still, I’m not even sure she believed us.
But she didn’t hold it against me. She even insisted that I be a witness at their wedding in June 1985.

In spite of Ayla’s objections, I generally did take Nazim with me
when I went to Turkey, where he acted as my interpreter. In Istanbul, I always stayed at the Hotel Askoc, on the Golden Horn, near
the Galata Bridge. Nazim stayed with some cousins of Ayla, in the
district of Eyup. We would meet in a café across from my hotel –
the Dez Anj, on Ayhan Isik Sokak. Nazim took the opportunity to
drink raki after raki, and attempted to initiate me into the pleasures
of the hookah.

As I said . . . my Turkish holidays.
I have to admit, I think I have always been slightly cynical about
the arts and traditions of the rest of the world: the idea of exotic
foreign lands and so on. I suppose you could call it a sort of racism,
but it’s an unbiased racism, a general scepticism towards the whole
human race. I imagine it dates back to my former job as a mercenary – an armed binman charged with emptying the world’s filthiest
bins, or a door-to-door dynamite salesman, if you prefer.
I’d had my fill of Turkish life within a week of being there. The
incessant ringing from the minarets, the endless bazaar in the streets,
the veiled women, the prostitutes, the smell of tea and spices, the
crazy taxi drivers, the constant traffic jams all the way to the Bosphorus . . . In the end, the only Turkish thing I could bear was
Nazim’s moustache.
Anyway, I’m sure you’ve had enough of my amateur anthropology. I just wanted to demonstrate that my ‘Turkish holidays’
were nothing of the kind, and I am serious when I say that I took
refuge in my work. At least for the first few months, Nazim and
I worked like madmen. We spent hours interrogating merchants
in the Grand Bazaar, trying to find out who had sold the clothes
worn by the miracle child. A cotton vest, a white dress with orange
flowers, and a beige wool sweater . . . Can you imagine? The Grand
Bazaar in Istanbul is one of the biggest covered markets in the
world, with fifty-eight streets and over four thousand shops . . .
Most of the vendors jabbered away in English or French, attempting to ignore Nazim’s translation so they could address themselves
directly to me, as if there were a watermark of the French flag on my
forehead.
‘A baby, my brother? You are looking for clothes for your baby? I
have everything you need. Boy or girl? Tell me your price . . .’
Four thousand shops, with two or three times as many merchants, spotting the Western fool at a hundred paces. But I held
firm. I spent more than ten days pacing that maze, and ended up
with a list of nineteen shops that sold all three items – the cotton
vest, the white dress, and the wool sweater – in exactly the same
style as the miracle child’s . . . And none of the vendors remembered having sold those clothes to a Western family.
It was a dead end.

Thankfully, there was still a great deal to be learned about Lyse-Rose
and her parents, Alexandre and Véronique de Carville. The official
inquiry has based its analysis of Lyse-Rose’s identity on two things:
the photograph taken from behind, received in the post by the de
Carville grandparents, and Malvina’s testimony. So we had to start
all over again in Turkey, in their coastal residence in Ceyhan. I was
reasonably optimistic. Surely, in three months of life, Lyse-Rose
must have been seen by quite a few people?