After the Crash (30 page)

Nicole left the seafront, almost in tears. For the first time in her life,
Emilie would miss the kite festival this year.
She went into the baker’s.
‘A baguette, Nicole?’
‘Yes, please. And a Salammbô too.’
‘Really? Is Marc back?’
A Salammbô was Marc’s favourite cake. Or, at least, it had been
when he was ten years old. Nicole knew it was ridiculous to continue trying to make her grandson happy with the same things that
had lit up his childhood. But it made
her
happy, and Marc was
always polite about it.
Nicole looked at her watch. He would be here in two hours. She
walked towards the ferry bridge that separated Pollet from the rest
of Dieppe, and thought again about their telephone conversation.
Mathilde de Carville had given Marc the DNA test, with instructions not to open it, because it was for Nicole.
That cow!
Nicole had to wait for a while, as the ferry bridge was lifting
up to let a ship pass. Nigerian flags. Bananas? Pineapples? Exotic
hardwoods?
What did Mathilde de Carville think – that she was the only one
to have thought about a DNA test? That Crédule Grand-Duc was
her lapdog? That he had taken Emilie’s blood without her grandmother noticing?
The line of cars lengthened in front of the bridge. The combination of sea air and petrol fumes made Nicole cough. That de
Carville woman was not as cunning as she imagined. And GrandDuc was not the bastard he pretended to be. He had ordered two
DNA tests. Two blue envelopes. One for each grandmother.
Nicole looked up at the Chinese Dragon kite, waving high above
the roofs of the seafront. She smiled. In the middle drawer of her
chest of drawers, under lock and key, she had kept the blue envelope given to her by Grand-Duc. The results of the test comparing
her blood to Emilie’s. It would, of course, confirm the results that
Marc was carrying with him, comparing Emilie’s blood to Mathilde
de Carville’s.
Finally, the ferry bridge lowered into place and the cars began to
move again.
Nicole had opened the envelope in 1995. So, she too had known
the truth for the past three years.
She needed to talk to Marc about this. Tonight. She could still
save a life. If she waited any longer, it would be too late. She should
have acted before, of course, but that was easier said than done.
She thought about the test result.
A relief? Yes, perhaps. As long as she could accept losing
everything else.

The train sped along the coast of Deux-Amants, crossed the railway bridge at Manoir-sur-Seine and passed through the station at
Pont-de-l’Arche. Marc did not even notice the cold of the window
against his forehead. He switched on the reading light above his
head.

The early years of the 1990s were dead years. There were more trips
to Turkey and Canada, and my annual pilgrimage to Mont Terri.
Nazim even staked out the cabin for days at a time. But we never
found anything new.

This was the beginning of my depression, I think: between 1990
and 1992. The end of my illusions.
Nothing was happening on the Georges Pelletier front either. He
had just vanished. The reward for the bracelet had stopped going
up, and was stuck at seventy-five thousand francs. After all, what
was the point in going any higher?
I had not worked on the case at all for almost three weeks when
I received the telephone call from Zoran Radjic. The small ads,
offering seventy-five thousand francs for the bracelet, continued to
appear in a dozen newspapers every week, paid for in advance by
direct debit.
‘Crédule Grand-Duc?’
‘Yes . . .’
‘My name is Zoran Radjic. I read your ad about the reward for
a missing gold bracelet. I think I have information that might be
useful to you.’
I was wary, of course, after being conned by that Turk years
earlier.
‘Do you know where it is?’
‘Yes . . . I think so.’
In spite of myself, I was excited. Credulous, as ever.

We met a few hours later, in a bar – l’Espadon, on Rue Gay-Lussac.
We both ordered a beer. Zoran Radjic looked every bit the local
conman. With his weasel-like face, furtive eyes, and slicked-back
hair, he looked so obviously shady that you wondered how he
managed to achieve anything.

Was it possible that this man might actually deliver the only
piece of useful evidence we’d had? A bracelet taken from Mont Terri
twelve years earlier. All the other details – eye colour, musical talent,
the grave next to the cabin – were nothing compared to this. If I
could only get my hands on that damn bracelet, I’d be home and
dry: the miracle child ejected from the aeroplane would, without
any doubt at all, be Lyse-Rose de Carville.

‘Go on,’ I told him, wishing to give away as little as possible.
‘I saw your ad yesterday. I don’t read the papers very often . . .’
Zoran was playing with his silver signet ring.
‘Yes . . .’
‘This goes back to 1983 or ’84. The guy who showed it to me

wasn’t in the best of health. A junkie, you know? Back in those days,
I used to help people out when they were in the shit . . . Well . . . to
be honest, I used to deal drugs too. And this guy was desperate for
a fix. I sort of knew him. He’d been hanging around in the area for
a while. He was flat broke, so he wanted to swap some jewellery for
his next fix. It was a bracelet. Gold, according to him.’

He played casually with his signet ring. I wasn’t going to fall for
his stalling, so sat back and waited for him to continue.
‘I’m guessing you’d be interested in the guy’s name . . .’
‘I know his name,’ I said. ‘What I’m looking for is evidence. Or,
better still, the bracelet itself. The seventy-five thousand francs is for
the bracelet. Anything else . . . we’ll negotiate.’
The signet ring disappeared into his right hand. He made a fist.
‘OK, I’ll play along. We might not be talking about the same
guy, after all. How much for the name?’
And there it was: the ring reappeared in his left hand. How did
he do that?
‘Ten thousand,’ I said. ‘Assuming it’s the right name.’
‘No way. How do I know you’re not going to fleece me? I give
you the name, you tell me it’s the wrong one, and then you piss off.
And I’ve been had.’
Maybe this guy was not as stupid as he looked.
‘Fair enough. Have you a pen?’
‘Yeah. Why?’
‘I’ll write the name on my beer mat. You write the name on
yours. If the two names are the same, you’ve won ten thousand
francs. Then we can move on to the next step.’
He grinned. The signet ring had somehow been moved to his
right hand again. ‘Cool. I like this sort of game.’
We both hunched over our beer mats, hiding what we were writing from the other with our hands.
We turned the mats over at the same time.
Georges Pelletier
. On both beer mats.
I felt a shiver run down my spine. So, Georges Pelletier had
offered the bracelet to this crook. It was all coming together.
But I was still cautious. I had spent five years wandering around
Paris, searching for Georges Pelletier. Word spreads fast among lowlifes. So perhaps it wasn’t so surprising that he knew the name of the
man I was looking for.
‘All right. The ten thousand is yours. I’ll write you a cheque.’
Radjic pulled a face. A cheque? He was strictly a cash-only kind
of guy.
‘Did you see the bracelet?’
‘Yes. How much for the info?’
‘Ten thousand, if I believe you. Tell me about it.’
‘What do you want to know?’
Maybe this guy, with his disappearing signet ring, had a bit of
talent as a magician, but I still had a trump card up my sleeve. I’d
learned a few tricks myself, over the years.
‘If you’ve really seen it, you shouldn’t even have to ask what I
want to know.’
He smiled. I couldn’t tell if he was bluffing or not.
‘Ten thousand more, that’s the deal? Can I trust you?’
‘I’m straight as a die,’ I told him. ‘Anyone can tell you.’
Radjic’s hands moved quickly, and he dropped the signet ring on
the table. He was nervous. Or he wanted me to think he was, that
sly bastard. I picked up the beer mat and wrote on it: ‘Lise-Rose. 27
September, 1980.’
Exactly the same words as the ad.
I passed him the beer mat.
‘Is this what was engraved on the bracelet?’
‘No idea about the kid’s date of birth, sorry, but yeah, that’s the
right name . . .’
He rubbed his hands together. The ring was back in its original
place, on his finger.
Gotcha! I thought. Another conman.
‘. . . except I think it’s spelled wrong. Lyse was written with a y,
not an i, as far as I remember.’
I felt another electric shock go down my back. Radjic had not
fallen into the trap I had set him.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘You’ve won another ten thousand. So, did you swap
the drugs for the bracelet?’
‘Well, if I’d known it was worth seventy-five thousand francs,
obviously I would have done . . . But no. I never took anything but
cash in return for what I sold.’ He gave a wry smile. ‘Or perhaps a
cheque.’
‘So, Pelletier disappeared with his bracelet . . .’
‘Yeah.’
‘Did you see him again after that?’
‘Never. Given the state he was in, I doubt whether he lasted
much longer.’
Damn!
I wrote the cheque without any qualms. Mathilde de Carville
could afford twenty thousand francs, even if my doubts persisted.
After all, the name of ‘Lyse-Rose’ had been in all the papers at the
time of the crash. This might have been the easiest twenty thousand
Zoran had ever made.
He looked carefully at the cheque, then offered me his hand.
‘Thank you. Oh, I do have one more piece of information. This
one’s on the house.’
The hairs on my arms stood up.
‘What is it?’
‘I just remembered. There was another reason I didn’t accept Pelletier’s bracelet. It was damaged, you see. The chain. There was a
link or two missing.’
The room seemed to spin around me. My God! Nobody in the
world, except me and Nazim, knew about that missing link.

For once, the Paris–Rouen train was on time. It pulled up in the
station at exactly 5.29 p.m. The Rouen–Dieppe train would leave
in nine minutes. Marc had made this connection dozens of times
since he first moved to Paris. Nine minutes was easily enough time.
After regretfully closing Grand-Duc’s notebook, he walked over to
the sandwich shop. There was only one person waiting in line. Marc
bought a slice of apple tart and a bottle of San Pellegrino. Nicole
would undoubtedly have prepared a feast for him tonight, but that
didn’t alter the fact that he was hungry now. It had been a long time
since that ham sandwich on the train to Coupvray.

The train to Dieppe was practically empty. Marc sat next to the
window. There were only two other passengers in the carriage: a
teenager, listening to music on an MP3, and a tall guy who was
asleep, sprawled over two seats.

Marc pulled down the small grey table from the seatback in front
of him, put his bag on it, then took out the notebook. Only another
twenty pages to go.

On the platform, the stationmaster blew his whistle. Instinctively, Marc looked up. And he froze, his forehead to the window.
It was her.
The scrawny figure gave the stationmaster a nasty look, hissed a
few insults at him, then jumped on to the train just as it was about
to move.
Malvina de Carville.
*
For a long time, Marc fearfully watched the two doors at either end
of the carriage. Malvina must be hiding somewhere on the train,
but Marc had no desire to seek her out. He was not going to let
her corner him again so easily. Right now, his priority was to finish
reading Grand-Duc’s notebook.
He would deal with the lunatic girl after that.

I left Zoran Radjic at the Espadon bar, almost certain that he had
been telling me the truth. The more I thought about it, the more it
made sense. Georges Pelletier, living in the hut on the mountainside, had been an eyewitness to the crash on 23 December, 1980. He
had been the first person to reach the scene of the accident. He had
seen the miracle child, and he had stolen the gold bracelet, like the
pathetic scavenger he was, before the emergency services arrived.

So, that meant the miracle child was Lyse-Rose de Carville. I was
now practically sure of it. Practically, but not absolutely. Because,
however unlikely it seemed, Zoran Radjic might just have invented
his story. And for the moment, all I had was conjecture and supposition. There was still no concrete proof.

Assumptions, suspicions, coincidences . . . call it what you want.
I’ve told you everything; you know as much as I do about the case
now, so work it out for yourself.

Well, there is actually one thing I haven’t mentioned yet. A feeling, more than a fact. It is so much more complicated to explain a
feeling than it is to describe a search of Mont Terri or an interview
with a witness. To be perfectly honest, I reached the point where I
believed that all the evidence I had accumulated – the bracelet, the
grave, the clothes from the Turkish market, the child’s eye colour,
her musical talent – was essentially irrelevant.

The truth was to be found elsewhere. The truth was to be found
in a feeling. Or, to be more accurate, in a relationship.
Marc and Emilie.
It is time now, I think, to touch upon their strange bond. They
couldn’t do anything about it, poor kids. Fate had made the decision for them.

For all her good intentions, Nicole was too distant from them. She
worked such long hours, including weekends, and the age difference was a factor too. Marc and Emilie did not have a mother and
a father to raise them; they no longer even had a grandfather. So,
inevitably, the two of them grew closer. With their blonde hair and
their angelic faces, they looked so similar. And yet, they were so
different . . .

All right, I am going to bite the bullet. I know that Lylie and
Marc will read these words. I will try to be worthy of their expectations. In any case, I won’t be there to see their reactions.

Marc . . . pale blue eyes that often seemed lost in contemplation
of distant horizons, perhaps the glorious past of Dieppe and its
pirates. And yet, deep down, Marc was a simple soul. The things
he loved best were his home, his neighbourhood, his friends, his
grandmother . . . and, most of all, Emilie.