8:32 A.M.
For God’s sake, Colonel, don’t you understand? Lifting the roadblocks would be the stupidest thing we could do.” Aja grips the phone in one hand. Laroche called her just after his interview with the prefect. Ten minutes at the most; the same prefect who must have been speaking to a minister. Two minutes at most. Clearly, someone is not happy . . . and that has caused a bureaucratic snowball that has gathered speed, descending the administrative echelons until finally it has landed on her with an enormous splat.
“Since last night, your damn roadblocks have taken up the time of thirty men, Captain Purvi,” Laroche tells her. “And what have we got? Nothing but the biggest mess Réunion has seen since the coastal road collapsed in February 2006.”
“Colonel, you have to trust me on this! Bellion will come out of his hole. Last night, he’ll have hidden somewhere, so that his daughter could get some sleep—he didn’t have any choice—but he’s bound to try something now. We just have to be patient.”
Aja looks at the map of Saint-Gilles projected onto the wall of the station. A good third of the houses in the commune have been searched.
“Unless Bellion is already on the other side of the island.”
Laroche says this calmly. Coldly. Indifferently.
Aja explodes.
“That’s impossible! Bellion is caught in our noose. All we need to do now is pull it tight. I know this area, Colonel . . .”
“I don’t doubt that, Captain Purvi. Better than I do, anyway, if that’s what you’re implying. But that doesn’t stop me knowing my job and having competent colleagues. It’s Easter Monday, the traditional day for a picnic in Les Hauts. Every village on the island will be empty. Your roadblocks are going to completely foul up the island’s traditions.”
“Exactly, Colonel, and Bellion knows it. He’s going to try to take advantage of that fact to slip through the net.”
Laroche falls silent, as if he’s thinking. Logically, Aja ought to tell him about the desk attendant who saw Martial Bellion at the Roland-Garros airport. Keeping this type of information to herself is unprofessional, and she knows it. Except she’s not really keeping it to herself, just delaying the moment when she passes it on. She’ll inform Laroche just as soon as Christos has made his report. If it’s important.
At the other end of the line, Laroche sighs.
“O.K., Captain Purvi. We’ll maintain the roadblocks around Saint-Gilles for another few hours. People will be complaining about this all the way to Place Beauvau, but for the moment we don’t have any other leads.”
Aja leans back against the white wall of the station. She’s won.
“Thank you, Colonel. The men here are exhausted. They’ve been searching for him all night, but they won’t give up, not if I ask them to keep—’
“Don’t go overboard, Captain Purvi.”
“What do you mean?”
Laroche does not become annoyed. Aja is sure he has files on all of the island’s officers. Captain Aja Purvi’s character traits must be mentioned therein. Underlined in red, probably.
“How shall I explain this to you, Captain? To put it simply, let me return to your metaphor of the tightening noose, you remember that? It’s an interesting metaphor, but an erroneous one. Incomplete, to be exact. Operation Papangue is an extremely complicated plan, even on an island such as Réunion. We are not using a noose, but a net, composed of multiple cords all linked together. That is the most important thing, Captain, the way in which the cords are knotted together. This is not a simple structure, but consists of several interconnecting circles, ranging from the first, the simplest, around a perimeter of a few hundred meters from the place where Bellion disappeared, to others that are more complex, involving many different agents, modes of transportation, surveillance networks, specialised brigades . . .”
Get to the point!
“Let me assure you, Captain Purvi, we absolutely trust you . . .”
A silence. Calculated this time.
“. . . to pull together the cords of that first circle.”
Aja imagines Laroche’s hypocritical smile. She doubts he can imagine the finger she is giving him.
8:36 A.M.
Aja is sitting in the hammock between two casuarina trees, with her laptop on her knees. She has always found it ridiculous, this hammock suspended in the station’s car park—another of Christos’s ideas—but she didn’t want to get on the wrong side of her colleagues over such a trivial matter. And today, after a night during which she has barely slept at all, she finds it pleasant to be rocked gently while she checks her emails.
The slanting sunlight, the sea breeze blowing through the houses, the shade of the palm trees . . . all of this offers the perfect conditions for a quick break from the manhunt, which in turn allows Aja to concentrate on trying to understand Martial Bellion’s psychology. Even if she is not especially convinced by all the woolly theories about serial killers that were reeled off at the police academy by supposed profilers: their modus operandi, signature, their narcissistic tendencies, catathymic crises, and all that crap. She has always believed that that type of officer was just masking their incompetence by using a load of hot air; a bit like teachers who were incapable of educating children training other teachers.
The ComGend has been busy. It has sent a secure email containing four attachments to every force involved in holding one of the cords of Laroche’s precious net. The email was written in a hurry by the police station in Deuil-la-Barre. It includes a brief biography of Martial Bellion.
Born in Palaiseau in 1973. Childhood in Orsay, then in Ulis.
After two years spent studying to be a PE teacher at Paris-11, he left the university without any diploma except for two certificates stating that he was a qualified to be a lifeguard and a kayak instructor. He then went to Réunion Island. He was twenty-one years old. He got a job supervising sporting activities at the sailing club in Bourbon de Saint-Gilles. He stayed there for nine years. In September 1996, he married Graziella Doré, the manageress of the Cap Champagne bar-restaurant on the beach at Boucan Canot. Graziella was three months’ pregnant. Little Alex was born on March 11, 1997. His parents divorced eighteen months later and Martial had custody of the child every second weekend.
On Sunday, May 4, 2003—Martial’s weekend—Alex’s body was found by tourists in the ocean. He had drowned. The story made the front page for several days. The judge hesitated for a long time between “involuntary manslaughter” and “accidental death.” After much debate, he finally went for accidental death, allowing Martial to avoid an appearance in a criminal court—which also explained the absence of any trace of the affair in the police files.
Martial Bellion left Réunion Island in the months that followed. He returned to France and met Liane Armati in 2005. Josapha was born in January 2007. They were married the following year. Since 2009, Martial has worked in a gymnasium in the Parisian commune of Deuil-la-Barre. Liane Bellion gave up her studies to raise their daughter.
That’s all there is.
Aja yawns. The sun, filtering through the leaves of the trees, warms the back of her neck. The hammock sways gently. She feels as if she is floating on an inflatable mattress in the middle of the sea.
A sea with Wi-Fi.
She yawns again and clicks on the second file.
It is a brief report on Alex Bellion’s death, written by the judge, Martin-Gaillard.
On the evening of the tragedy, Martial Bellion was looking after Alex. The incident happened between 10 P.M., when Martial Bellion picked up his son from his ex-wife’s house at Boucan Canot, and 6 A.M. the following morning, when six-year-old Alex’s body was found on the beach. The judge’s investigation appears damning towards Bellion and establishes without any doubt the father’s failure to take adequate care of his child. All the customers at the Bambou Bar, some one hundred meters from the Boucan Canot beach, testified that Martial Bellion was there, drinking rum, at the time when his son must have drowned. To make matters worse, Martial Bellion never reported his son as missing. It was the police who came to give him the dreadful news the following morning, at his apartment in Saint-Paul. Martial Bellion had 1.2 grammes of alcohol in his blood and 150 nanogrammes of zamal in his urine.
My God.
Aja closes her eyes. Naturally, she is thinking about Jade and Lola.
How could a parent survive such a tragedy?
What do they have left? How could anyone rebuild their lives afterwards?
Did Martial Bellion become a monster through negligence? Almost by chance? She imagines the chain of events, so stupid, so sordid: “Don’t move from here, Alex, Papa’s just going for a quick smoke and a drink over there, at the other end of the beach. I’ll be back soon. It’s not a place for children.”
Can he really have lost everything just for a few glasses of rum? First one life, and then others.
Liane Bellion. Rodin. Sopha Bellion.
Aja clicks on the third file. A PDF of an article from the Réunion daily newspaper appears, dated July 1, 2003, two months after the accident. The short piece announces the closure of the Cap Champagne bar-restaurant, managed by Graziella Doré. The journalist goes for the sentimental angle, mentioning the tragedy of Alex’s death. But, while he can fully understand Graziella Doré’s inability to go on living beside the waves that brought her son’s lifeless body back to her, the consequences of the restaurant’s closure have been severe: seven Creoles made unemployed overnight. Barmen, waiters, chefs . . . cleaning ladies . . .
Aja notes the strange coincidence. Her own parents were employed for years at the Hotel Athena. It was a precarious kind of work, just like the jobs held by the seven Creoles mentioned in the article. Frowning, Aja extends this line of thought to its logical conclusion: there were probably, among those Creoles who lost their jobs due to the death of Alex Bellion, some who sought employment at the Athena. And yet none of the hotel staff interviewed following Liane Bellion’s disappearance mentioned the previous case.
Gabin Payet.
Eve-Marie Nativel.
Naivo Randrianasoloarimino.
Tanguy Dijoux.
Why not?
Aja makes a mental note that she must verify the identity of the seven Cap Champagne employees. So far, her entire investigation has rested on the assumption that Martial Bellion is the only possible culprit. Five testimonies against one, including that of Eve-Marie Nativel, who swore that Liane Bellion never left room 38. She remembers word for word the conclusion she voiced to Christos: “It’s hard to imagine that all of the hotel’s employees could be in league against the same man. Why the hell would they do that?”
Five against one. She’s delirious.
She must get some sleep.
Her body keeps telling her this, is insistent. Apart from her fingers, which are dancing over the keyboard, all her other limbs and organs seem to be functioning in slow motion, as if they’re already on standby. Her thoughts drift towards the beach at Boucan Canot. She can’t help thinking about the curious fate of that iconic location. Its whole attraction was that it was dangerous, because of the swell of the sea and the slope of the beach. There is no lagoon at Boucan Canot, only waves that were perfect for surfers of all abilities. Until, in September 2011, the most famous bodyboarder on the island was eaten by a shark only fifteen meters from the beach. It proved a traumatic event for the tourists, and a catastrophe for the hotels, restaurants and shops—far worse than an accidental drowning, ten years before, that had already been forgotten.
Aja yawns again. She is fighting against sleep when she opens the fourth file.
She discovers a long interview with Alex Bellion’s teacher, Agnès Sourisseau; clearly another document that was added to the case folder by the judge, Martin-Gaillard.
Judge’s question: What kind of father was Martial Bellion?
Aja reads the teacher’s response.
Martial Bellion was mostly an absent, scatty, rather uninvolved parent. Graziella Bellion, on the other hand, was very down-to-earth. She assumed sole responsibility for Alex’s education. On the whole, a fairly classic male-female divide, according to the teacher. Martial Bellion was simply not quite ready to be a father. Not ready to sacrifice his passions for a child.
His passions?
Sport, friends, alcohol, zamal . . . women.
Women?
Martial Bellion was a handsome man. Athletic. He liked to party. All he had to do was click his fingers and girls would fall at his feet. Although, a couple of months before Alex’s death, he did seem to have calmed down a bit. He was more or less in a steady relationship with a young Creole girl.
Are you saying that this tragedy didn’t surprise you?
No, I didn’t say that. Martial Bellion was not a very responsible father, but it’s a long stretch from that to even imagining such a terrible accident . . .
Exactly. So what could have happened?
Who knows? The beach at Boucan Canot is dangerous, unlike any of the beaches by the lagoon, because of its steep slope. You’re quickly out of your depth there. But Alex didn’t know that. He was a little boy who loved swimming, just like the big boys. It’s terrible to say this, but he idolised his father. Whenever he drew pictures in class, they were always of his father, surfing or windsurfing, surrounded by fish. For his part, as I told you, Martial Bellion preferred his friends, pretty girls, nights out . . . He wasn’t a bad man, just more of a big brother than a dad. And yet . . . everything I’m saying is based on hindsight. If you’d asked me this before the tragedy, I’d have said that little Alex was a well-balanced kid who, despite his parents’ divorce, would enjoy a wonderful upbringing on this island, benefiting from his mother’s authority and level-headedness and his father’s spontaneity.
How did the other children in the school react, after Alex’s death?
Aja does not read the reply. Not straight away, anyway.
She has fallen asleep, rocked by the trade winds and the hammock’s gentle swaying.