Gaëlle Lecoupet pressed Stop and ejected the tape with trembling hands.
“I hadn’t seen it in years. It’s still just as horrible . . .”
Lucie had a hard time coming back to reality. Had she seen that right? The film’s documentary aspect horrified her as much as its content: the veracity of the images and garbled sound track seemed to deny the possibility of trickery or staging. It had actually happened, somewhere in the world, forty years earlier. Something violent had struck those natives in the heart of the jungle, and someone aware of the massacre had come to record it with his movie camera. Someone sadistic enough to film the survivors without lifting a finger to help.
The men at the racetrack . . . the authors of Phoenix no. 1.
Perhaps even the killer or killers Lucie was after.
She heaved a sigh. Since the beginning, this investigation had dredged up only shadows and mysteries, confronted her with her own past, forced her to dig into her deepest reserves of strength to keep going.
Getting hold of herself, Lucie turned to the other woman.
“That village was completely wiped out. It was like, I don’t know . . . some kind of virus, in the middle of nowhere.”
“Yes, probably so. A virus, as you say, or some kind of infection.”
“What do you know about this film?”
Gaëlle Lecoupet pursed her lips and changed the subject.
“You can imagine what happened when Stéphane came home, the day I’d gone into his study. Discovering I’d searched through his cabinet. And me, demanding some sort of explanation about that vile film and those mysterious men that he’d been meeting for months. That day, it all burst apart between us. Stéphane disappeared for several days, taking all his secrets with him, his papers and tapes, without a word of explanation. When he returned from wherever he’d been, it was only to announce that he was moving to Reims and that he wanted a divorce.”
She gave a long sigh, clearly still upset even a quarter of a century later.
“It was as simple and sudden as that. He sacrificed our marriage for . . . for something that obsessed him. I never knew why he buried himself so suddenly in that hospital in Reims. I had imagined, as I told you earlier, that he wanted to get back to his roots. And maybe even get away from all that filth, those strange men who could film such abominations. Now all I have left of him is this old tape.”
Lucie asked again:
“And . . . were you able to get anything from those images? Did you ever try to understand what it was about?”
“Yes, at first. I lent the tape to an anthropologist. He’d never seen anything like it. Given the state of the bodies and the little information he had, he couldn’t tell me what tribe it was. Only the monkeys gave him a reliable indication.”
She rewound the tape and froze the image on one of the primates in close-up.
“Those are white-headed capuchins, which you only find in the Amazon rain forest, near the border of Venezuela and Brazil.”
Lucie suddenly felt as if an abyss had opened at her feet and that, all at once, the plain truth blazed before her eyes. The Amazon . . . where Eva Louts had traveled right after Mexico. And where she was planning to return. Could there still be any doubt? Lucie was convinced the student had left Manaus and headed into the jungle, that she had gone in search of that village and that tribe. It explained the withdrawal of cash, the weeklong trip: an expedition.
Gaëlle Lecoupet pursued her story:
“After that, I stopped searching. It hurt too much. Our sudden breakup and divorce had been painful enough. I wanted to leave all of it behind me and start over. The first thing I did was to put that horrible tape at the bottom of a trunk. I felt profound denial toward what I’d seen, I didn’t want to believe it. Deep down, I didn’t really want to understand what it was about.”
She shook her head, eyes lowered. This woman, who had all the trappings of happiness, was still bleeding inside, beneath her elegant exterior.
“I don’t know why I never got rid of it. Maybe I thought someday I’d try to learn the whole truth. But I never did. What good would it have done? It’s all in the past. I’m happy with Léon, and that’s what matters.”
She placed the black plastic cassette in Lucie’s hands.
“You’ve come all this way. You’ll discover the truth, you’ll get to the bottom of it. Keep this cursed tape, do what you like with it, but take it away from here, get it out of this house. I never want to see or hear of it again.”
Lucie nodded, without losing her cop’s instincts.
“Before I go, would you mind burning it onto a DVD for me?”
“Yes, of course.”
Finally, the two women said good-bye. Getting in her car, the ex-cop nodded politely to Léon, put the cassette and the DVD on the passenger seat, and started up, her head buzzing.
• • •
A few miles from Highway A1, Lucie pondered which direction to take. Lille or Paris? Left or right? Her family or the investigation? See Sharko again or forget him completely? Lucie thought of him and sensed she could falter at any moment. All the feelings she thought buried forever were slowly rising to the surface.
Paris to the right, Lille to the left . . . the two extremes of a deep wound.
She made up her mind at the last minute, veering right.
Once more she’d have to go back in time, plunge more deeply into the shadows. One of her daughters had been murdered beneath the sunshine of Les Sables d’Olonne more than a year ago, without her really understanding why.
And today, she knew that it was in the terrifying depths of a jungle, thousands of miles away from home, that the answers might be waiting.