As soon as the bus pulled up on the village square, at the bottom of the slope where the skiing lessons were given, Nicolas could tell that something serious had happened. About ten people, men and women, were gathered in front of the café, and even from a distance, sorrow and rage were clearly visible in their faces. Unfriendly looks were directed at the bus as the driver parked it. Frowning, Patrick said he’d go see what was going on. The teacher told the children to stay in their seats. Those who had spent the entire ride from the chalet singing a funny song about summer camp fell silent of their own accord. Patrick went over to the group in front of the café. He had his back turned, with his ponytail streaming over the hood of his jacket, so the children couldn’t see his face, only that of the man to whom he was talking, who answered angrily. Two women next to him joined in, one sobbing and shaking her fist. For a few minutes, Patrick just stood there, and no one said a word inside the bus. Since the defroster had stopped working when the engine was turned off, the windows were steaming up; the children wiped the glass clear with their hands or jacket sleeves to see what was happening. They usually fooled around like that, drawing pictures, writing words, but Nicolas realized he was trying not to, trying instead to make a clear circle representing nothing, as though everything risked being insulting to the people gathered outside, who seemed capable, if provoked by the slightest gesture, of tipping the bus over, burning it and all its passengers. Finally Patrick came back. He seemed troubled now, not as outraged as the villagers, but clearly upset. The teacher immediately went to meet him, to hear what he had to say without the children listening in. Then Hodkann broke the silence, voicing not a suspicion but a certainty they all more or less shared.
‘René’s dead.’
He’d said ‘René,’ not ‘the missing boy,’ as if everyone knew him, as if he’d been one of them, and now Nicolas felt overwhelmed by the anguish that waiting had kept at bay. Patrick and the teacher got back on the bus. The teacher opened her mouth, but instead of speaking, she closed her eyes, bit her lips, and turned to Patrick, who gently laid a hand on her arm.
‘There’s no point in trying to hide it from you – something very serious has happened. Something awful. They found René, the boy who disappeared in Panossière, and he’s dead. That’s it.’ He sighed, to show how hard it had been for him to tell them.
‘Someone killed him,’ said Hodkann from the back of the bus, and once again it was less a question than an affirmation.
‘Yes,’ Patrick replied curtly. ‘Someone killed him.’
‘They don’t know who?’ asked Hodkann.
‘No, they don’t know who.’
The teacher moved the handkerchief she held clenched in her fingers away from her lips and with great effort managed to speak. Her voice shook.
‘I would assume,’ she quavered, ‘that some of you believe in God. So I think those of you who do should say a prayer. That would be good.’
There was a long silence. No one dared move. The windows were so fogged up nobody could see outside anymore. Nicolas clasped his hands and tried to recite the Lord’s Prayer silently to himself but he couldn’t remember the words, not even the beginning. He seemed to hear, far away, his mother’s voice pronouncing snatches of it that he was unable to repeat. Once she’d taught catechism class. When they moved, that was the end of that, and she no longer made him and his little brother say their prayers at night. He pictured himself (but it was absolutely impossible: simply imagining the gestures frightened him) putting his hand in his jacket pocket, pulling out the flier he’d gotten from the policeman, unfolding it – oh, the rustling of the paper! – and looking at the photo of René. He wondered what he’d do with it in the hours, the days to come, wondered whether he’d risk getting it out, keeping it, putting it somewhere. If he’d had his little safe, he could have stashed it there, buried the whole thing, and then forgotten the combination. If someone found it in his pocket or caught him studying the photo, wouldn’t that give away what Hodkann and he had played at the previous evening?
Their nighttime conversation and his own fibs now seemed to him like a crime, a shameful, monstrous participation in the crime that had actually taken place. He could see Rene’s chubby cheeks, his pudding-bowl haircut, the gap between his front teeth or else the space where he’d lost one of them. He must have put it under his pillow and waited to see what the tooth fairy would bring. Behind his glasses, his eyes were filled with terror, the terror of a small boy over whom a stranger is bending – to kill him – and Nicolas could feel René’s expression clinging to his own face, his mouth opening in an endless, soundless cry. He would almost have been relieved if a policeman had searched his pockets and found the flier that would give him away. A policeman – or René’s father, crazed with grief, ready to kill in his turn and doubtless ready to kill him if he learned what Hodkann and he had been up to. Were René’s parents there, in the crowd gathered in front of the café and now hidden behind the wall of misty windows? Were they all still there? What was Hodkann doing? Was he praying? Were the others all around them praying in that chapel of mist? Would there be an end to this silence, this horror that gripped them all and in which, unbeknownst to everyone, he was so deeply involved?