Tracking down Marcel Lacarrière had been the most exciting chase of her life. When she had encountered Laurent’s gaze that day on the rue Myrha, Sandrine felt a sort of dizziness come over her. The driver of the car was her husband’s virtual double, a younger version of Guillaume living a parallel life where she did not exist. But how could she locate a man she’d glimpsed only briefly, about whom she knew nothing other than that he bore a disturbing resemblance to her husband? There was no name on the garage door or on their letter box, even though it was emptied on a regular basis. No one in the building seemed to know anything about their discreet fellow tenants. Eventually she tried a search on Google on genetics and heterochromatic eyes. As she searched she came upon pages with rows of portraits of major and minor celebrities who shared the trait. Amid the likes of David Bowie, Elizabeth Taylor, and the Bogdanoff brothers, she spotted Laurent merely by chance; as he regularly frequented upscale restaurants, fashion shows, and gala soirées, he had a fairly significant presence on the web. Once she’d found the son, the father was not far behind. But then things got more complicated: how could she establish the link with Marité?
Sandrine had some half-days off owed to her, so she devoted them to methodically going through her mother-in-law’s things. It wasn’t easy, because Mamoune was a bit of a homebody, but she eventually managed. Once she uncovered the family booklet containing the birth certificates, she found out for a start that Mamoune’s marriage to Raymond took place several months after Guillaume’s birth. Guillaume didn’t seem to know this, or if he did, he’d never mentioned it. And as she thought about it, Sandrine realized she’d never seen any pictures of the event, nor had her in-laws ever celebrated their anniversary; but she had merely seen this as further proof of her mother-in-law’s nonconformist lifestyle. This first discovery sharpened her curiosity. Guillaume was born before his parents got married . . . but did that necessarily mean Raymond was not his father? Maybe they got married to make it official, as they used to say in those days. Big deal . . . Mamoune was seventeen in 1968, and she loved to talk about that period of her life—the lycée deserted for weeks on end, the nights spent partying, the smoky bars, the students she’d met in the street or at political rallies. At the age of twenty she was posing for painters in Montmartre—maybe she’d also done some fashion shoots, or been on the catwalk? Marité never bragged about it, but that could explain all those boxes she’d accumulated her whole life long and which she refused to part with when she moved in on the rue de Clignancourt. So she must have had a few lovers, or more, before she met Raymond.
While delving into her mother-in-law’s life, Sandrine couldn’t help but wonder why such an attractive woman, who could have gotten any sort of job she wanted in the fashion industry, who could have had any man she wanted, had settled for a dull secretarial and accounting diploma and marriage to a minor civil servant. Raymond was a handsome man, to be sure, but he had neither background nor ambition. Like Marité, he was from a working-class family; their parents and friends lived in the same quartier. He was funny, likeable, clever with his hands, very much in love with his wife, and generous to a fault. Although he was devoted to his family, he had never been able to offer them true financial ease: Guillaume had had to pay for his studies all the way through, and had not prolonged them any further than necessary. When she was widowed, Marité found herself barely making ends meet on Raymond’s tiny pension and her meager off-the-books bookkeeper’s salary. And yet, as Sandrine was forced to admit, her mother-in-law never complained about her situation. Maybe that was true love, wondered Sandrine as she rummaged through the shoeboxes filled with photographs, a tear welling in her eye. But then she came upon the pictures of Marité with Marcel, and all her fine theories about love were demolished in one fell swoop.
A thick A4 manila envelope contained twenty or more color photographs and numerous rolls of negatives. Some of the prints were of a professional quality, taken at society events. In every picture Marité was magnificent. She and Marcel were as awesome as Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg in the late 1960s. Their beauty was pure, raw, elegant; the age difference was serenely absorbed; the whole image was served up to the outside world with all the bold insolence of those who succeed no matter what. Sandrine was able to date the pictures thanks to a stamp on the back of some of them. The resemblance between Guillaume and Marcel was striking, even if Marité’s beauty had softened her son’s features; it was all the more astonishing in that in the photographs Marcel was roughly the same age Guillaume was now. A tall, elegant man, at ease before the camera lens, very attractive even if he wasn’t handsome: his nose too big, his forehead high with a receding hairline, a firm, strong jaw if a bit too square. That gaze, with those eyes that didn’t match, was unsettling, of course, but Sandrine was already used to it, after a fashion.
The setting in most of the pictures clearly illustrated a social class very far removed from the Cordiers’, or from her own parents’: luxury hotels, a yacht, a garden party. But beyond the setting and the tailor-made suits, the man was clearly, naturally, imposing. A boss, like the ones she’d met during her internship with the Senior Management Association. Better still: a boss who was at his prime during the glorious postwar expansion years, when selling magazines positioned you in a certain social and economic elite. A pure product of the Paris Match glory years. Sandrine smiled when she thought of Guillaume’s dodgy business venture, or Juliette’s feverish surfing on the web, or Aurélien’s piles of fashion magazines: a love of information must be in the Lacarrière family’s DNA.
The revelation of Guillaume’s father’s identity had aroused Sandrine’s curiosity regarding her impromptu encounter with Laurent Lacarrière. What could a daddy’s boy be getting up to in a sketchy garage in La Goutte d’Or? After working her way through the entire judicial organization chart of affiliates, she had ruled out the possibility—a pretty ridiculous one from the get-go—that they were setting up a business or logistical venture in the quartier. A publisher sells magazines, he doesn’t keep them in a garage hidden from prying eyes—neither his own nor his competitors’ . . . unless? On a second trip to the warehouse, Sandrine’s suspicions were confirmed. Nearly all the magazines stockpiled there were issues of Convictions. Several thousand in all, and the piles got bigger, on Thursday as a rule, the day the magazine came out. One of the walls was already covered all the way to the ceiling with bundles trussed up like Sunday roasts. Judging by the dates of the oldest issues, this had been going on for over two months. From time to time, the net caught small fry in addition to the main catch, depending on the tides and currents: women’s magazines and interior design, dailies, kids’ weeklies . . . Sandrine asked Guillaume about Convictions, and he was categorical: when it was launched, a few months ago, it made quite a splash. And considerably ruffled the competition. The Libéral in particular: the venerable publication was really showing its age. Who stood to gain from the crime? Easier than a game of Clue, concluded Sandrine, as she put together her little file of photographs for Marcel Lacarrière.