After the Crash (6 page)

Malvina shook herself. She had to do something. She went back
into the living room, stepping over Grand-Duc’s corpse again, then
examined once more the fireplace, the vivarium, the desk. She had
broken into the house, smashing the bedroom window, half-hidden
by hollyhocks. She had left her fingerprints all over the place. The
police would come here eventually; a neighbour would alert them.
She needed to be careful. Not for herself – she didn’t give a shit
– but for Lyse-Rose. She had to remain out of jail. So that meant
erasing every last trace of her presence throughout the house. With
luck, she might notice a detail that she had missed the first time.
Maybe even that green notebook . . .

What might that bastard have written in his notebook? Had he
really discovered something – the truth – in that newspaper, on
Lyse-Rose’s eighteenth birthday?

He was probably bluffing. But what if he wasn’t?
Could she take such a risk?
No, she had to find that notebook . . .
He must have given it to the Vitrals . . . Yes, that was the kind of

thing he would do. Give it to them, as some sort of birthday present. And if that were the case, then that pervert Marc Vitral would
probably have the notebook now. He was probably reading it at this
very moment.

A gorgeous female student, her brown hair cut short like a boy’s,
was devouring Marc Vitral with her big ocean-blue eyes. The kind
of eyes that most men would have dived into without hesitation.
Marc hadn’t even noticed her.

The girl must have been even more intrigued by his reaction.
The blonde boy, lost in his sad thoughts, his eyes shining with tears,
stared straight through her as though she was invisible. Men who
did not notice her beauty were rare specimens and, naturally, she
was only attracted to men who were inaccessible.

But Marc could not stop thinking about Grand-Duc’s description of his parents, Pascal and Stéphanie. His only memories of
them were old photographs. He lifted his hand and looked at
Mariam. Thinking he was trying to persuade her to give him his
present early, she looked disapprovingly at the clock.

‘Mariam, could you get me a croissant? I haven’t eaten anything
this morning.’
Mariam gave him a wide, reassuring smile.
A few seconds later, she carried the croissant over to him on a
plate. The noise in the café was deafening.
Marc tore the croissant in half and shoved it into his mouth.

I think you will agree with me when I say that fate was being an
absolute bitch to both the Vitrals and the de Carvilles. First it
tells them that the Airbus has crashed, that there are no survivors,
stealing from them the two generations on which they had built
their hopes for the future. And then, a few hours later, it joyfully
announces a miracle: the smallest, most fragile being on the entire
aircraft has been spared. And they are even able to celebrate that
fact, to thank God, to put aside the deaths of their other loved ones
. . . But then fate plunges its dagger into their backs a second time.
What if that miracle child, the flesh of your flesh, the fruit of your
loins, is not yours after all?

On 23 December 1980, the police station at Montbéliard had been
busy since dawn. The superintendent himself had taken charge –
Vatelier, an experienced, dynamic policeman with a scraggly beard
and battered leather jacket. Turkish Airlines had faxed over the passenger list at 7 a.m. Funnily enough, there had been two babies on
the plane: two young French girls, born on almost the same date.

Lyse-Rose de Carville, born 27 September, 1980
Emilie Vitral, born 30 September, 1980
A strange coincidence, you might be thinking. But I have done

some checking, and the presence of babies on aeroplanes is far from
unusual. On the contrary, it is a common occurrence, particularly
on long-distance flights during the holiday season. Even as the
global economy expands, families still feel that same, age-old desire
to be reunited around a Christmas tree, or a birthday cake, or a
bride and groom, or a coffin.

So, two babies. How could Vatelier and his team know which
one was the survivor? At first, the police team imagined that the
investigation would be over quickly. There are many ways to distinguish one baby from another: the colour of its eyes, its skin, its
blood group, the contents of its stomach, its clothing, its belongings, its next of kin. With so much to go on, how difficult could it
be?

Except that speed was of the essence. There were journalists
banging on the doors of the police station: this story was a godsend
for the media. Who could believe it: one surviving orphan, and two
families. But the child’s future was on the line here and you couldn’t
just leave it in the hospital nursery for months while you decided
who its parents were. The investigation had to choose quickly, so
that the baby could be delivered safely to its family.

At 2 p.m. on 23 December, Léonce de Carville summoned a pack
of highly paid lawyers to Montbéliard. He tasked them with shadowing Vatelier’s investigation closely, verifying each detail as it came
in.

In legal terms, it was a complex affair. But the Ministry of Justice
took only a few hours to decide how the inquiry should be handled:
the Montbéliard police would investigate, but the final decision
would be taken by a children’s judge, after a hearing involving all the
parties and witnesses. Behind closed doors, naturally. The deadline
for the decision was to be the end of April 1981, so that the child’s
emotional stability would not be put at risk. In the meantime, the
baby would be looked after by the nursery in the Belfort-Montbéliard hospital. The man chosen to lead the inquiry was Judge
Jean-Louis Le Drian, a bigwig at the Paris High Court, author of a
dozen works on abandoned children, the search for identity, adoption, and so on. He was the obvious choice.

By the next day, 24 December, Judge Le Drian had somehow
managed to cobble together a small working group, none of whom
were any more enthusiastic than he was about the idea of working
on Christmas Eve: Vatelier, the Montbéliard police superintendent;
Morange, the doctor who had overseen the miracle child’s recovery;
and Saint-Simon, a policeman from the French Embassy in Turkey,
who was in communication with them by telephone.

Afterwards, they all told me about that surreal meeting in a large
office on Avenue de Suffren, with an unbeatable view of the Eiffel
Tower illuminated against a white winter sky. They were facing a
cheerless Christmas Eve, without tinsel or presents, their children
waiting for them around the tree while they considered the future
of a three-month-old baby.

Judge Le Drian was in a difficult situation because he knew the
de Carvilles slightly. He had met them once or twice at parties in
Paris; the kind where hundreds of people crammed together into
the splendid living rooms of Haussmannian buildings. I think I can
imagine what he was thinking. At the back of his head, a little voice
must have been whispering:
Let’s hope that the kid is the de Carvilles’
granddaughter, otherwise this is going to be awkward . . .

But at first it seemed that the coin was not going to fall the right
way.
When I met Judge Le Drian, years later, he still looked the same
as he had at the time of the inquiry – sharp, precise, dressed impeccably with a mauve scarf that was a shade lighter than his purple tie
– and I wondered how this besuited man was able to persuade traumatised children to trust and confide in him. The judge had filmed
all the meetings. He gave me the tapes; he felt he could refuse nothing to the de Carville family. Those tapes enable me to give a very
accurate, detailed account of the inquiry. As for the verdict . . . well,
I will let you be the judge of that, so to speak.

‘I will try to keep this as brief as possible,’ Le Drian began. ‘I’m sure
we are all busy men. I will start with the information concerning
Lyse-Rose de Carville. She was born in Istanbul, slightly less than
three months ago. Only her parents really knew her, and Alexandre
and Véronique de Carville took everything relating to Lyse-Rose
with them on the Airbus. Her toys, her clothes, her medicines, her
medical card, all their photographs of her. Everything was lost when
the plane went up in flames. Saint-Simon, have you uncovered any
other witnesses in Turkey?’

The nasal voice of the man from the Turkish Embassy crackled
from the telephone loudspeaker that sat on the table: ‘Not really.
Apart from a few Turkish servants who glimpsed Lyse-Rose through
mosquito netting, the only eyewitness is her six-year-old sister,
Malvina. You see . . .’

Le Drian sensed that already things were going wrong. Whenever that happened, whenever he felt events tumbling out of his
control, he would stand up and pull down one end of his scarf so
that the two ends were exactly the same length. Just a nervous tic.
And of course, the damned scarf kept slipping to one side or the
other, without the judge even being aware that he had moved his
neck at all. Superintendent Vatelier watched the judge’s mannerism, his smile barely concealed by his beard.

‘I spent a long time talking to the de Carvilles,’ Vatelier said.
‘Well, mainly Léonce de Carville. They only know what their
granddaughter looks like through some vague descriptions they
were given over the telephone. Although they do possess a photograph of Lyse-Rose, taken at her birth, along with the letter they
received containing the announcement . . .’

‘What does this photograph show?’
‘Not much,’ Vatelier scowled. ‘It’s a picture of the mother breastfeeding the child, so you can only see Lyse-Rose from behind – her
neck, one ear, that’s all.’
Judge Le Drian pulled nervously on the right-hand side of his
scarf. Clearly, things were not looking good for the de Carvilles.

I apologise for skipping ahead, but I just wanted to mention here
that in the weeks that followed, Léonce de Carville summoned
several highly regarded experts who attested that the ear of the
miracle child was identical to that of Lyse-Rose on her birth photograph. I have looked closely at the picture and the analyses,
and my conclusion is that it would require a considerable dose
of wilful blindness to have any kind of certainty on the matter,
whether for or against this supposition. Judge Le Drian clearly did
not share the experts’ bias and he continued to explore the baby’s
genealogy.

Vatelier, the police superintendent from Montbéliard, consulted
his notes.
‘Véronique, Lyse-Rose’s mother, is the fourth of seven children.
The parents, the Berniers, are from Quebec and they have eleven
grandchildren. Véronique was already quite distant from her family
when she met Alexandre in Toronto at a seminar on molecular
chemistry. The Berniers seem to be supporting the de Carvilles,
albeit not very loudly.’
‘OK. Let’s keep digging on that side,’ said Le Drian. ‘In the
meantime, shall we move on to Emilie Vitral. Apparently, she left
more clues behind . . .’
‘Yeah, I guess,’ Vatelier sighed, ‘although her medical card, her
suitcase, her feeding bottles and her bibs also went up in smoke
with the plane. But here are the details: in the first two months of
her life, her grandparents saw her five times, two of which were
at the hospital in Dieppe in the week following her birth. They
also saw her on the day the family left for Turkey, when Pascal and
Stéphanie brought Marc to stay with the grandparents. The baby
was fast asleep at the time.’
The superintendent turned to Dr Morange, who spoke for the
first time: ‘I was present when the Vitrals saw the baby in the hospital at Belfort-Montbéliard. They recognised their granddaughter
immediately.’
‘Of course,’ said Le Drian. ‘Of course. They were hardly going to
say the opposite . . .’
The judge sighed wearily, and pulled on the left-hand side of his
scarf.
‘Well, we weren’t about to put four babies in a line-up and make
the grandparents pick out the right one, were we?’ said Vatelier.
‘Maybe you should have done,’ Le Drian replied. ‘It would have
saved us a lot of time.’
With a shrug, the superintendent continued: ‘Just to make
things even more confusing, the Vitrals do not possess a single photograph of their granddaughter. From what they tell me, Stéphanie
had made a little photo album of her daughter, containing twelve
pictures, and she took it everywhere with her. Presumably, that too
was destroyed in the fire.’
‘And the negatives?’ the judge asked.
‘The police force in Dieppe did a thorough search of the parents’
apartment, but for the moment, they have not found anything. I
imagine Stéphanie must have taken them with her.’
Perhaps . . .
*
I too searched for those damned negatives. Can you believe it? Not
one single picture of the baby! Anyway, there’s no point in me prolonging the suspense, at least not in this particular instance. We
never found them. Other than the theory that they had disappeared
along with the plane, or that the Vitrals were simply making up the
story about the album, I also wondered whether Léonce de Carville
might be involved: he could have gone to Pascal and Stéphanie’s
apartment before the police arrived and got rid of any evidence that
could compromise his position. I wouldn’t put it past him.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘we’ve gone through almost everyone now. So
what about the rest of the Vitral family . . . Is that a dead end too?’
‘Pretty much,’ said Superintendent Vatelier. ‘The child’s mother,
Stéphanie, was abandoned by her mother. She was raised in an
orphanage in Rouen. She was only sixteen when she met Pascal
Vitral on a café terrace and fell in love. So little Emilie – if she is the
one who survived – has no living kin other than her grandparents,
Pierre and Nicole, and her older brother Marc.’
Judge Le Drian stared out of the window, above the lights of the
Eiffel Tower, in search of a star that might guide them through this
dark Christmas night.