After the Crash (17 page)

He was trembling. What had she meant?
‘Departure is set for tomorrow . . .’
‘A one-way trip . . .’
‘Nothing can stop this now . . .’
Was it possible?
Marc found it hard to imagine such a thing.
So dark, so macabre.
Not Lylie!
And yet, the more he thought about it, the more the message

between the lines seemed to become clear.
A one-way trip.
The miniature aeroplane. The decision taken on her eighteenth

birthday.
It all fitted.
Lylie had decided to put an end to all her doubts, her obsessions,

her past.
She had decided to kill herself.
Tomorrow.

She walked over to the water’s edge. Montsouris, supposedly the
biggest park in Paris, was also, she thought, the most sinister. At
least in October. The bleak, filthy waters, the skeletal trees, the view
over Avenue Reille, with its grey buildings of various heights, like a
concrete hedge trimmed by a blind gardener.

The park’s ducks had flown south a long time ago, and the stone
lovers, shivering on their marble plinth, looked as if they would
rather just get dressed and go home.

Lylie walked alongside the lake. It was strange, she thought,
how your mood could transform a place. As if your surroundings
instinctively mirrored what was in your head. As if the trees, sensing
her pain, had lost their leaves in sympathy.

Lylie had switched off her phone again. A few minutes earlier, she
had given in and called Marc. He had left her so many messages,
had sounded so worried; she owed him that, at least. It had been a
relief when she got his voicemail. She was not up to answering his
questions right now.

Lylie headed towards the Allée de la Mire and sat on a bench.
The children’s laughter, coming from the little playground, made
her turn her head.

Two toddlers were playing there, watched by their mother, who
was sitting on a bench, reading a blue-and-white paperback.
Twins. The little girls were wearing the same beige trousers, the
same red button-up jacket, the same shoes. It was impossible to
tell them apart. Nevertheless, every time their mother looked up at
them, she addressed each one directly: ‘Juliette, don’t stand up on
the swing’; ‘Anaïs, don’t push your sister on the merry-go-round’;
‘Juliette, you’re supposed to go down the slide, not up it,’ and so on.
The little girls sometimes held hands and sometimes separated as
they rushed from one ride to the next, as if they were trying to mix
up their identities. Which one was which? Lylie followed their progress the way you follow a card trick. She lost each time, incapable
of guessing, after a few moments, which one was Juliette and which
Anaïs. All their mother had to do was look up for half a second and
she knew instantly: ‘Anaïs, do up your laces!’; ‘Juliette, come over
here so you can blow your nose.’
Lylie watched, enthralled, and felt a strange emotion rise within
her. The girls were identical in every way, and yet they both knew
who they were: Anaïs was not Juliette; Juliette was not Anaïs. Not
because they felt different, but simply because their mother could
tell them apart, she knew their names, and she never got them
mixed up.
Lylie stayed there, watching them, for a long time. Finally, the
girls’ mother put away her book, stood up, and called: ‘Juliette,
come down from the climbing frame. Anaïs, hurry up with the rope
ladder. We’re going home. Daddy is waiting for us.’
The mother gently stroked her swollen belly. She was a few
months’ pregnant.
Twins? Another little girl?
Lylie closed her eyes. She saw a baby, only a few months old,
screaming alone on a mountaintop. Its scream was lost in the vast
forest, muffled by the falling snow.
Unable to stop herself, Lylie burst into tears.

Dugommier.
Daumesnil.
Still no phone coverage.
Marc had not yet recovered from the shock of Lylie’s message. He

What else could he do but rush blindly on, almost randomly
through the tunnels beneath Paris? In desperation, he opened
Grand-Duc’s notebook to see if it held any more clues. All he could
do was keep reading, in the hope that he might eventually find
Lylie.

Léonce de Carville had his first heart attack while I was in Turkey,
on 23 March 1982, only a few days before Unal Serkan delivered the
photograph of Lyse-Rose de Carville, taken on the beach.

There was no connection between the two events.
To be perfectly honest, I didn’t really care about Léonce de
Carville’s coronary. I had met him several times, as part of my investigation, and I think he regarded me as some kind of expensive
bauble that his wife had bought. In truth, I think he also hated the
fact that his wife had taken such an initiative – hiring me – without
consulting him. I was the living proof that his bulldozer approach
to the case had failed. He deliberately dragged his feet when it came
to providing me with information for my investigation, drip-feeding it to me via his overworked secretaries. So perhaps you will
understand why I didn’t burst into tears when he fell, stricken, on
the lawn of the Roseraie. After all, his wife was the one writing my
cheques, not him.
I know you don’t care about any of this. What interests you is
the photograph taken on Ceyhan beach. You want to know what
happened next. I’m getting to that . . .
Unal Serkan was one slippery customer. I had already spoken
to him several times on the phone, offering him a fortune – two
hundred and fifty thousand Turkish lira – in return for the original
negative of the photograph. This had been going on for weeks now.
I could tell Serkan was after more money. He wanted to see how
high he could push the bidding.
Finally, he agreed to meet me on 7 April, early in the morning,
on Avenue Kennedy, at the foot of Topkapi overlooking the Bosphorus. He was a small, fidgety guy whose eyes pointed in different
directions – one towards Europe and the other Asia. Nazim came
with me to translate. Serkan wanted a deposit of fifty thousand
pounds. If I said no, he would sell the picture elsewhere.
Elsewhere? Who would want it? The Vitrals? Did he think we
were stupid?
I didn’t agree, obviously. He was not getting a single penny from
me unless he handed over the negative. He, too, refused to budge
an inch. We almost came to blows, right then and there, in front of
the statue of Ataturk. Nazim had to separate us.
Going back to the hotel, I had a strange feeling. Not as if I had
just made a mistake. Quite the opposite, in fact. As if I had dodged
a bullet.
I called France and asked to be sent all the newspapers and magazines that had published articles about the Mont Terrible tragedy.
They arrived three days later, on 10 April. After less than an hour,
I had the explanation I was looking for. The hideous blue vase
on my bedside table exploded against the vermilion rug hung on
the wall.
Unal Serkan had not taken much trouble. On 8 January 1981,
Paris Match
had published a series of photographs of Lylie, lying
in her crib at the Belfort-Montbéliard hospital nursery. In one of
them, Lylie was in exactly the same position as she was in the photograph of the beach in Turkey, supposedly taken one month earlier
– leaning slightly to the side, her right leg bent, left arm under her
head.
Unal Serkan’s photograph was a fake, and not even a good one.
He had simply replaced the sheets in the crib with a beach towel
of the same colour and texture. All he had needed after that was a
picture of his girlfriend.
I wanted to tear down every rug I could find from the walls of
that room. I spent two hours pacing around and, gradually, I began
to calm down. In the end, I wasn’t even angry with Unal Serkan. It
had been a clever idea, and undoubtedly worth a try. It might easily
have worked. Who wouldn’t want two hundred and fifty thousand
Turkish lira in return for a simple photomontage? I never saw Unal
Serkan again. I had bigger fish to fry.

I spent the next few weeks in Turkey dreaming up other theories,
which Nazim found increasingly woolly and unconvincing. He was
right. It was probably due to the hookah. I had ended up developing a taste for it, in spite of my misgivings. The hookah, raki,
and the inevitable keyif; afternoon tea served on a silver platter, in
carved glass beakers, so hot it burns your lips as you refresh yourself
between increasingly insane questions.

‘Nazim, what if Lyse-Rose wasn’t Alexandre de Carville’s
daughter?’
‘What if she wasn’t?’ Nazim sighed, blowing on his tea. ‘How
would that change things, Crédule?’
‘It would change everything! Think about it: what if Alexandre
de Carville wasn’t the father. What if Véronique had taken a lover
and that lover had blue eyes! That would change all the variables
in terms of genetics, her eye colour, all the little resemblances we’re
looking for. Don’t you think?’
‘A lover, Crédule?’
Nazim gave me an amused, mischievous look with his dark brown
eyes. It was exactly the kind of look that Ayla must have fallen for.
In books and films, investigating adulterous affairs is portrayed
as being one of a private detective’s most boring chores. But to be
perfectly honest, spying on other people’s sex lives is one of the best
parts of the job. I had no difficulty discovering that Alexandre de
Carville was not exactly a model of virtue. I had suspected as much.
A young, rich, powerful man living in a city where the harem is an
age-old tradition, with a wife who stayed at home and looked after
the children almost three hundred miles from where he worked . . .
It was hardly a surprise.
Over time, I managed to turn up half a dozen extramarital adventures undertaken by the handsome Alexandre. Curiously, women
seem to confess quite easily to affairs when their lover is dead; even
more so when the wife is dead too.
Alexandre de Carville was not afraid of clichés. He had humped
his secretary on his glass desk at the company headquarters in Istanbul. I saw them both – the glass desk and the secretary – and they
were both equally cold and elegant. He also had a three-month affair
with a very hot and very young local girl who wandered around the
streets of Galata in a miniskirt, her navel exposed, under the searching gaze of black-veiled women. She had taken him to nightclubs.
I found her; she is married now. Two kids. She’s still not wearing a
veil, but she’s not wearing miniskirts anymore either. I’ll skip over
Alexandre’s adventures in hammams, with belly dancers, and with
various prostitutes and escorts, often in the company of business
clients. According to my research, his most faithful lover was Pauline Colbert, a single French businesswoman, who claims to have
been the last person to have had sex with Alexandre de Carville, on
22 December 1982: the very day he flew out with his family on the
Airbus 5403. It was clear to me that the fact of having made a man
come – several times, as she was keen to specify – less than twenty-four hours before he was burnt to a crisp, was deeply exciting for
her in retrospect. She had an ordinary face, but a sexy body, and I
got the impression that it wouldn’t have taken too much effort on
my part to persuade her to add a private detective to her tally of
conquests.
First question: was Véronique de Carville aware of her husband’s
escapades?
Answer: How could she not have been?
Second question (the most important): Did she pay him back in
kind?
I never found any proof of that. Everything seemed to suggest
that Véronique was fairly depressed, living almost alone with her
daughters, Malvina and then Lyse-Rose. She did not, as I have
already mentioned, have many visitors. I interrogated her entourage in an attempt to identify any possible lovers, potential fathers
for Lyse-Rose. There was the gardener’s son, a kind-hearted Adonis
who would work topless in the garden under Véronique’s window.
He was the type who would certainly have appealed to a depressed
Westerner, a sexually frustrated woman reading
Lady Chatterley’s
Lover
beneath the covers, but he never confessed anything of the
sort to me, and besides, he had extremely dark eyes, which would
not have been particularly helpful from a genetic point of view.
I concentrated my search on blue-eyed men living in the vicinity
of the de Carvilles’ villa in Ceyhan. There were not many of them.
I found three altogether, one of them reasonably credible: a handsome ponytailed German who rented out pedalos nearby. I took
pictures of him, and over the years I would compare those photos to
Lylie’s face, looking for any resemblance. Thankfully nothing stood
out. It would have been hard to explain to Mathilde de Carville
that she had paid me a fortune, only to learn that Lyse-Rose had
survived the crash, but that she was not their granddaughter – not
even a de Carville – but the daughter of a German who made a
living renting out pedalos.

Meanwhile, in France, the reward offered for information about the
bracelet had gone up to forty-five thousand francs, and still no one
had taken the bait, not even a hoaxer such as Unal Serkan. Then
again, it was not particularly easy to replicate a solid gold bracelet
with a Tournaire hallmark.

Still, leaving no stone unturned, I continued to offer my harebrained theories to Nazim, over tea and a hookah.
‘Nazim, what if the crash wasn’t an accident?’
It was lunchtime, and the Dez Anj café was crammed with

tie-wearing Turks sipping their raki during the hour of prayer.
Nazim was so startled, he almost knocked the tray out of the waiter’s hands.

‘What are you suggesting, Crédule?’
‘Well, if you think about it, the actual cause of the accident has
never been ascertained. The snowstorm, pilot error . . . it’s easy to
blame those things, don’t you think? But what if there was another
cause?’
‘Go on. Like what?’
‘A terrorist attack, for instance.’
Nazim’s moustache trembled.
‘Against who? The de Carvilles?’
‘Why not? An attack aimed at their family, and Alexandre, the
sole heir. It’s not such an absurd idea really. Alexandre was working
on a high-risk project, the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline, which
goes straight through Kurdistan. Alexandre was negotiating directly with the Turkish government while the PKK was carrying out
attacks all over the region . . .’
Nazim burst out laughing.
‘The Kurds! Oh come on . . . You in the West see terrorists everywhere. The Kurds! A bunch of peasants . . .’
‘Nazim, I’m serious. The Kurdistan Workers Party was not at all
happy at the prospect of seeing all that black gold flowing straight
past them without any of it ending up in their territory. They must
have been even less happy at the thought of the de Carvilles’ bulldozers invading Kurdistan, surrounded by Turkish army tanks . . .’
‘OK, Crédule, I can buy that. But it’s a long way from being angry
about the pipeline to deliberately crashing an Airbus with Alexandre de Carville on board. And anyway, how would that change
things, if there’d been a terrorist attack against the de Carvilles?’
‘It might be more complicated than that. What if Lyse-Rose was
kidnapped before the Airbus took off? Or what if the de Carvilles
knew about the attack beforehand and sent doubles to take their
place . . .’
Nazim laughed again, even louder, then gave me a hearty slap on
the back and ordered two more rakis. We spent the night watching
boats in the Golden Horn and talking endlessly about the case.
Thinking back, these were easily the most enjoyable moments of
the investigation. Those first months, in Turkey. My happiest memories. After that summer in 1982, my stays in Turkey became fewer
and farther between.