After the Crash (25 page)

For the third time that day, Marc called Jennifer, his colleague at
France Telecom. As fast as she could, she sent him eighteen texts
containing lists of all the one hundred and fifty-eight hospitals in
central Paris.

For more than half an hour, Marc talked to a series of switchboard operators. All the conversations went the same way:
‘Hello. Has a young woman by the name of Emilie Vitral been
admitted to your hospital today? No, I don’t know which department . . . Accident and Emergency, maybe?’
The shortest calls lasted a few seconds, the longest a few minutes.
The response was always more or less identical: ‘No, sir, we have no
one here with that name.’ When he reached the twentieth number
on the list, Marc stopped. It would take him forever to call all one
hundred and fifty-eight hospitals and he realised he could be wasting precious time, chasing after a highly tenuous clue: the sound
of ambulance sirens in the background of a phone message. They
might simply have been speeding past as Lylie made the call.
By now, the waiter had asked him three times if he wanted anything else. Marc asked for another orange juice just to keep him at
bay. Was this how Crédule Grand-Duc had felt all those years? As
if he were following a lead that he knew, right from the beginning,
would probably go nowhere? Navigating his way through a dark
and stormy night with nothing more than a match?
Marc looked up at the departures board. Still no platform listed
for Paris–Rouen. Everything was going too fast. Those siren screams
. . . That blue envelope in his pocket, which he could open, in spite
of Mathilde de Carville’s orders and the promise he had made to
Nicole . . . And this notebook, with Grand-Duc’s narrative holding
him on tenterhooks . . .

By 1987, the reward for the bracelet had gone up to seventy-five
thousand francs. That was a fortune back then, even for a piece of
jewellery from Tournaire. As for my investigation, it was stagnating.
There were no new leads, so I just kept plugging away at the old
ones, re-reading the same old files a dozen times.

I went to Turkey for a few weeks, for form’s sake. The Hotel
Askoc, the Golden Horn, the carpet sellers, twilight over the Bosphorus . . . the whole ‘Lylie Mystery Tour’. I also went back to
Quebec, to see the Berniers, in temperatures of minus fifteen. Still
I learned nothing new.

And, of course, I returned to Dieppe. Twice, I think – once with
Nazim and once without. Those are good memories, at least. I will
tell you about them for that reason, and also because it is important
to help you understand Lylie. Her psychology, I mean. Her environment, determinism, nature versus nurture, and all that crap. I
will give you the details, and you can judge for yourself. This is
important if you wish to form your own opinion.

It was March 1987. The weather was awful. From what Nicole told
us, it had been like that for the past two weeks in Dieppe: 40mph
winds and lashing rain. There was not a cat to be seen anywhere on
the seafront. Nicole coughed at the end of every sentence, her lungs
making her suffer.

Nazim was happy. He enjoyed going to Dieppe. He liked rain.
He liked Marc, too, even if Marc was a little scared of him. Like me,
Nazim did not have children. But at least he had a wife. The lovely
Ayla, with her curves and her kebabs. When it came to football,
Nazim was, naturally, a supporter of the Turkish national team.
Marc made fun of him: a few years earlier, Turkey had lost 8-0 to
England in a World Cup qualifier. ‘Were they playing table football?’ Marc joked. Nazim wanted to prove to Marc that he was not
bitter about this, so he brought him a Galatasaray shirt worn by the
club’s left winger, Dündar Siz. The name Dündar Siz undoubtedly
means nothing to you. Try translating it into French . . . You see
now? Yes, Didier Six. The French player must have acquired Turkish
citizenship in order to help Galatasaray win the championship the
following year. Didier Six . . . How could Didier Six be anyone’s
idol? The guy was a one-trick pony. He always did the same move,
faking a shift to the outside then cutting in on the inside. Worst of
all, he shot the ball straight into the goalkeeper’s arms from the penalty spot in Seville in 1982, during the semi-final of the World Cup
against West Germany. He was playing for Stuttgart at the time, the
traitor. People have been executed for less than that!

So anyway, five years later, the best present Nazim could find to
give to Marc was a Dündar Siz jersey. The shirt of a traitor living
in exile under a false name! What a wonderful example for a young
boy to follow. Marc, being young and naïve, put the shirt on without asking any questions.

As for little Emilie, she put on a fluorescent purple raincoat, with
a hood that swallowed up her whole head so that only a few blonde
hairs emerged, and went out into the rain and the wind. Her boots
were the same colour as her raincoat. She jumped in puddles and
went chasing after cats. Nicole was almost in tears when she told
me why.

At seven years old, Emilie was already a good reader. And she was
a big fan of Marcel Aymé’s
Contes du Chat Perch
é, with its talking
animals.

There cannot have been more than twenty books in their little
household, and this was the only book for children. But I’m sure
you are wondering what this has to do with chasing after cats . . .
Well Emilie loved the story about the farm cat who, to annoy everyone, would spend its day washing itself, continually rubbing its paw
behind its ear – thereby invariably attracting rain for the following day. In the book, it pours with rain for weeks on end, purely
because of the actions of this wayward cat, so in the end, the farmer
decides to get rid of it. It is saved just in the nick of time by the
book’s heroines, Delphine and Marinette. So it seemed perfectly
logical to Emilie that the reason Dieppe had been deluged for the
past two weeks was because the local cats were also continually rubbing their paws behind their ears. Consequently, there was only one
solution: she must persuade the cats to wash themselves in a different way. All the cats in Pollet. Imagine that, in a fishing district . . .
Emilie spent hours sidling up to them, winning their trust, then
gently explaining to them that her grandmother Nicole was unable
to work because of their actions. And of course they too were suffering, because they couldn’t bask in the sun they loved so much.

Emilie tried to persuade Nazim and me to help her catch the
cats. There were some who wouldn’t listen to her – strays, mostly –
so she wanted us to frighten them.

She took us by the hand, tried to drag us out into the pouring
rain. Nazim laughed loudly, but stayed inside with his coffee. So
did I. Only Marc did as she asked and went outside with her. When
he came back, his clothes were soaking, and as transparent as the
shirt of Dündar Siz, isolated on the left flank at the Parc des Princes.

On 22 December, 1987, I went on my yearly pilgrimage to Mont
Terri. I arrived in the evening, and left my luggage at the gîte on
the banks of the Doubs. The owner, Monique Genevez – an adorable woman with a Franc-Comtois accent so strong that it almost
reminded me of a Canadian’s – always reserved the same room for
me: number 12, with a view of Mont Terri. She also kept back some
Cancoillotte cheese for me, allowing it to age for at least a month
in advance, so that I could eat some with a bottle of Arbois wine.
My investigation was getting bogged down and I was turning into a
nervous wreck, so I felt I deserved a few compensations.

Before I had even parked my car that day, Monique was out of
the house yelling at me excitedly: ‘Mr Grand-Duc, there’s someone
here to see you!’

I looked at her, speechless.
‘He’s been here for two hours,’ she told me. ‘He called several
times last month. He wanted to see you. I told him you would be
coming here, like you do always do, on the afternoon of 22 December. I think it must be related to your investigation.’

Surprised and excited, I rushed into the living room. A man in
his fifties, wearing a long dark winter coat, was waiting for me. He
stood up and came over to me.

‘Augustin Pelletier. I have being wanting to meet you for several
months now, Mr Grand-Duc. I saw one of your small ads in the
Est
Républicain
. I had imagined that the investigation into the Mont
Terri accident had been closed a long time ago, so I was surprised
to discover you were still working on the case. I hope you might be
able to help me . . .’

I had been hoping for the opposite – that he would be able to
help me – but never mind. Augustin Pelletier seemed like a sensible
sort to me: a solid, responsible businessman, not a teller of tall tales.

I sat next to him, in the entrance hall of the gîte. Through the
window, you could see the whole mountain range, including Mont
Terri. It was not yet covered with snow.

‘I will do my best, Mr Pelletier. This is rather unexpected . . .’
‘It’s a long story, Mr Grand-Duc, but I will give you the short
version. I am looking for my brother, Georges Pelletier. He disappeared many years ago. The last sighting of him was in December
1980. At the time, he was living as a hermit on Mont Terri, in a little
hut, not far from the site of the crash.’

Marc looked up. The information on the departures board took a
moment to come into focus.
Paris–Caen. Platform 23.

Many of the people around him on the concourse suddenly
rushed towards Platform 23, like so many coloured grains of sand
pouring through the slender neck of an hourglass. Marc had read
somewhere that more than a thousand people could be squeezed
inside a train. The average population of a large village . . . When
you thought about that, the density of the crowd packed together
in the station hardly came as a surprise: all it took was two or three
trains to be delayed and you would have several thousand people
standing around, waiting.

The platform for Paris–Rouen was still not indicated, so he still
had time to read a few more pages of the notebook. Had GrandDuc really found a witness to the Mont Terri crash?

The clouds were coming from Switzerland. This was quite unusual.
After years of experience, you see, I was becoming something of an
expert regarding the climate of the Haut-Jura.

‘Georges is my younger brother,’ Augustin Pelletier explained.
‘He was always more fragile than me. A complicated person. We
were very different. He was only fourteen when he started running
away from home. We were living in Besançon at the time. He hung
around with one of the local gangs, and the police kept bringing
him back to my parents. In the end, Georges was placed in an institution for two years.’

I drummed my fingers on the armrests of my chair. I wondered
where this story was leading.
‘Don’t worry, I will get to the crash, Mr Grand-Duc,’ Augustin told me hastily, obviously noticing my impatience. ‘At sixteen,
Georges left home for good. I will spare you the details. He slept in
the street. Alcohol. Drugs. He was a dealer, too, though he never
did anything too bad. My parents gave up on him, and I did too.
At the time, I had a job, a wife who didn’t want me to get involved
. . . I’m sure you can imagine what it was like. It’s not easy to invite
a junkie to your Christmas party.
‘I managed as best I could,’ he went on. ‘I kept in touch with
Georges indirectly, through the social services and the police. But
Georges did not want our help. Every time I offered a helping hand,
he would slap me in the face. Metaphorically, if you see what I
mean . . .’
I saw, but I didn’t care.
‘I’m getting there, Mr Grand-Duc. I was generally able to keep
myself informed about Georges, although there were periods of
time when he would disappear completely. For one or two years at
the most. But in May 1980, I lost track of him for good. Georges
was forty-two at the time, although he looked closer to sixty. I have
not received any information about him for nearly eight years.’
He was losing me. ‘Mr Pelletier, I don’t quite see what this has to
do with me, or with the Airbus accident?’
‘Bear with me. I was very worried. I asked the other homeless
people in Besançon about him. In the end, I found out that Georges
had left for the countryside. He’d had enough of city life, and of
certain unsavoury characters in Besançon. Other dealers, the police
. . . Apparently, the last anyone had heard, he was living in a hut
on a mountain somewhere near the Swiss border. Mont Terri. Or
Mont Terrible, as everyone was calling it back then, because of the
accident. I spent months searching for him, but without success.
After that, I more or less gave up hope of ever seeing him again. My
wife was perfectly happy with that situation, of course, but when I
saw your ad, I started thinking. I thought: why not? If someone is
still trying to work out what happened in that place, on that night,
then maybe they will also find some trace of my brother . . .’
My hands gripped the armrests of my chair like a captain at the
helm of a three-master. I gazed through the window at the mountain peaks now lost in the mist. Was it possible that Georges Pelletier
had been sleeping in that cabin on the night of 22 December, 1980?
Was it possible Georges was something I had never even dared hope
for, in seven years of investigating the case: an eyewitness to the
crash?
Perhaps this Georges had been the first person to appear on the
scene . . . Perhaps he had found Lyse-Rose’s bracelet, lying next to
the miracle child . . . Perhaps it was he who had dug that small
grave . . .
‘Did Georges have a dog?’
Augustin looked dazed. ‘Umm . . . well, yes. A small, brown
mongrel. Why?’
I was already taking notes on the back of a brochure.
‘What kind of cigarettes did he smoke?’
‘Gitanes, I think. I’m not sure, though.’
‘What size were his feet?’
‘I think about 43 or 44.’
‘What brand of beer did he drink?’
‘What brand of beer? I have no idea . . . Sorry, Mr Grand-Duc,
but why are you asking me all these questions? Have you found
Georges? Is he . . . dead? Did you find his body?’
We needed a moment of calm.
Monique Genevez was the perfect hostess, bringing us tea and a
local variety of Speculoos biscuits, thicker and longer than the Belgian ones. Augustin did not touch them but I ate enough for both
of us, while I told him all about my discovery the previous year: the
hut, the cigarette butts, the grave. Augustin Pelletier seemed almost
disappointed that I had not discovered any concrete evidence
regarding his brother. Dunking my biscuits in the tea, I reassured
him: I could not promise that I would find his brother Georges,
even less that I would find him alive, but I could assure him that I
would devote every ounce of my energy into looking for him over
the coming months. I was not lying. He was my only potential
witness and I was willing to scour the earth for him. Augustin’s
journey from Besançon had proved a good investment. He now had
a private detective working on his behalf, with all the costs paid for
by Mathilde de Carville. He left me his business card.