In the bright sunshine, she looked like a little girl.
“A lost child,” Anne Marie thought, and she felt an unexpected sense of empathy for Cinderella.
Anne Marie hated crime scene reconstitutions. She hated seeing the accused re-enacting the past and reliving those moments which had led to arrest. Necessary and often useful, the playacting was also painful and very sad.
The woman from Dominica wore a painted dress made of cotton with an elasticized waist that had moved upwards, accentuating sagging breasts and poor posture. Her hair was coarse; it had been combed and woven into plaits. Her scalp was marked off into irregular squares, and from each square there hung a plait, anchored by an elastic band.
Thin arms hung loosely in front of her body, hands clasped. Anne Marie did not notice the handcuffs at first. They pinched slightly against Cinderella’s blemished skin. Another, longer chain went from the handcuffs to a bored gendarme.
The brown eyes watched the gendarmes and the movement around her. Cinderella appeared distant, almost unconcerned, as if what was happening about her—the white men in their uniforms, the cameras, the crowd—had nothing to do with her.
“Coconut radio.” Le Bras, the gendarme from Tréduder with the Breton accent, pointed to the large crowd that had gathered. People stood by the edge of the road and on the dry, white sand of the beach. “They saw you coming from the aerodrome, madame le juge.” He shrugged. “Cheaper than the cinema.”
“And we’re the bit part actors.” Perspiration had formed along the skin of Trousseau’s forehead and on the sides of his nose. He mopped at his face with a handkerchief. He had undone the top two buttons of his shirt.
Anne Marie rubbed gently at the back of her left hand.
The crowd grew larger. Children had begun to appear, working their way toward the front. They had the features of the Saintois—yellow hair, brown or hazel eyes and a golden tan.
Anne Marie raised her voice, “Give her the doll.”
The order was repeated, and a gendarme stepped forward to unlock the handcuffs. Cinderella rubbed at her wrists and the crowd fell silent. Another man approached her and placed a pink doll between her hands.
Trousseau was sitting beneath a sea grape tree where he balanced the typewriter on his narrow knees. He was looking at Cinderella attentively.
She did not move.
Her lawyer, a man in a suit that was too short for his legs, brushed past Anne Marie and took Cinderella gently by the elbow. He spoke in her ear, in a calm, reassuring voice, using carefully enunciated Creole, while his intelligent eyes remained on the juge d’instruction.
Cinderella nodded.
She began to walk. With small, hesitant steps across the sand, the doll held to her breast, she went to the entrance of the wooden hut that she had once inhabited. Her feet left indistinct footprints in the hot sand. She wore plastic sandals; on the right foot, the strap was broken.
Nobody spoke. There was just the gentle murmur of the sea as it broke against the beach beyond the hut. Anne Marie, Trousseau, the lawyer and the gendarmes—they watched in silence, spectators to the play that the girl was about to re-enact.
In his hand, Le Bras held a notebook.
Cinderella put her hand to the doll’s mouth and made the gesture of smothering it. The doll seemed to move. It jerked slightly. Cinderella did not look at the pink face but stared directly ahead. Her face was devoid of expression.
The crowd waited.
Like an automaton, Cinderella stepped from the threshold of the shack—the grey planks were rotting and covered with black lichen—and headed toward the crowd. People moved aside, opening a momentary passage for her as she walked toward a fence beside an uninhabited hut.
Eyes wide, a little boy stared at her. He was naked except for a dirty pair of old swimming trunks.
The gendarme followed Cinderella closely.
There was a tree—Anne Marie could not recognize the round, almost rubbery leaves—and in its shade, Cinderella knelt down. A few dried leaves lay on the sand. She brushed them away.
Her legs and feet were marked with dark scars. She had pale, prominent heels. For a moment, she was motionless; then she turned to look round at the lawyer.
The lawyer nodded, smiled reassuringly. He was sweating in his dark suit.
The woman from Dominica began to dig. Excavating with her bare hands, the doll now lying face down on the ground, Cinderella made a hole. The crowd emitted a low murmur of disapproval.
“Tell them to be quiet,” Anne Marie said.
Le Bras walked away, and a few seconds later, the crowd fell silent.
When there was a neat pile of sand beside Cinderella’s hole, she stopped. There was no tenderness in her action as she set the doll in its shallow grave and as she started shoveling sand over the pink plastic. The white shawl, the golden hair and the chubby, pink limbs disappeared beneath the handfuls of dry sand.
A swell of anger rose from the onlookers.
“Silence,” Le Bras shouted.
Trousseau ran a finger along his moustache.
The girl stood up and stared at the ground. She had finished. A shy actress waiting for her applause.
No one moved.
The lawyer was standing beside Anne Marie. His breath smelt of garlic. Anne Marie had to lean forward to hear him because he was whispering. “She says the man kept watch.”
“What man?”
“Lucien Savon.” Drops of sweat had formed at the corner of his eyes. “It was his idea to do away with the child.” The lawyer turned his head. Out to sea, there was the distant sound of beating. It was growing stronger.
“Why kill the baby?”
He turned back to face Anne Marie. “He couldn’t afford to look after it—or her. He’s married.”
“The girl could have kept the baby—her baby.”
“She can scarcely look after herself—and she’s got no family here to take care of the child.” The face crumpled with vicarious suffering. “She’s not very bright. What little money she earns, she spends. She wouldn’t have been able to look after a child properly.”
“Most women are quite capable.”
The lawyer seemed upset by Anne Marie’s judgment. “Madame le juge, the girl’s retarded.”
“It was her child.”
“She came to the Saintes after the hurricane in Dominica. She can’t speak French—just her own patois.” He shook his head. “To stay alive she had to sell her body. A poor child.”
The crowd was now breaking up, moving toward the sea. Le Bras raised his hand to shield his eyes.
An Alouette was coming in fast from the sea, its nose down like an insect and the circle of its rotor blades a grim halo.
Anne Marie looked at the heap of sand where the doll was buried and remembered her first pregnancy.
The noise grew louder as the helicopter, like an angry insect, began circling the beach. The wind kicked up the sand and scattered the dry leaves, the flotsam, the forgotten sponge and the seaweed.
In the bulb of the cockpit, his head submerged beneath a helmet, the pilot gestured downward with his thumb. He was hovering at about ten meters, and sand blasted against Anne Marie’s face and legs. She squinted, covering her nose and mouth with her hand.
The skids touched the sand, the pilot cut the engines, the high whine lost its deafening intensity. White letters that announced gendarmerie on the side of the machine.
The pilot jumped out and bent double, came scurrying toward Anne Marie.
“Le juge Laveaud?”
She nodded.
He gave a brief salute. “You are requested to come with me to Pointe-à-Pitre.” He handed her a slip of blue paper.
Cinderella still stood beneath the tree, the bored gendarme beside her. She was staring at the ground, as if she had never noticed the arrival of the helicopter nor the wind of the rotor blades that pulled at her shapeless dress.
“Immediately, madame le juge.”