3:29 P.M.
The old Creole lady does not go inside the police station. She puts her large canvas bag on a step and simply waits in the doorway for someone to notice her.
Christos sees her when he goes out for a cigarette in the car park: how long has she been standing there? A few minutes? An hour?
“Lieutenant Konstantinov?” she asks in a slow voice. “It was Laila Purvi, the mother of your captain, who convinced me to come here. I hope it’s important. The bosses don’t like it when you leave their veranda half-déblèyée.”44
“Well, that depends on you, Eve-Marie. Entirely on you. Please, come in.”
Christos puts his packet of cigarettes in his pocket but Eve-Marie Nativel has not moved. Did she even hear him?
“No,” she mutters finally. “No. I haven’t come to make a . . . what do you call it?”
“A statement?”
“Yes, a statement. I’ve just come to . . .”
The old Creole woman stares at the red, white and blue flag that hangs limply over the police station.
“To tell me a story?” the second lieutenant guesses. “The story of your niece, Aloé?”
“Because I promised Laila.”
Christos looks up. The old woman’s eyes are the same lagoon-blue as the Creole scarf that covers her hair. Fifty meters in front of them, between the houses, he catches a glimpse of the almost empty beach.
“Would you prefer to go for a walk?”
Eve-Marie smiles.
“That’s a good idea, Lieutenant. Would you carry my bag?”
They walk side by side towards the beach, in the middle of the street. There are no cars to disturb them. They pass the orange sign for the hairdressing salon, Mandarine Coiffure.
“You’re a secretive person, Eve-Marie.”
The old Creole woman breathes heavily as she walks.
“I told the police everything I thought was relevant, Lieutenant. Not once did I lie.”
“So you still maintain that you never saw Liane Bellion come out of room 38 of the Athena?”
A deep breath.
“Yes.”
“And that Martial Bellion borrowed your laundry cart?”
A pause. In the middle of the road. Two scooters almost run them over, before disappearing towards the port.
“Yes, that too. Everything happened exactly as I told you.”
“But you forgot to mention that you knew Martial Bellion. That he used to live with your niece, Aloé Nativel, ten years ago.”
They start walking again. The beach is straight ahead of them, after the Paul et Virginie restaurant. Thirty meters. An eternity.
“Lieutenant, what possible link could there be between that old story and the disappearance of Liane Bellion?”
“You tell me, Eve-Marie. Tell me about your niece.”
The old Creole stops again. A few tears well up in the corners of her wrinkled eyes. Christos takes her arm, like an attentive son-in-law. He supports her as they move forward, step by step, towards the sand.
“Aloé was a wonderful girl, Lieutenant. An adorable child who raised her four brothers and sisters without a single word of complaint. So pretty! And she smelled good too. Like vanilla. There was always vanilla growing in my garden in Carosse and she used to spend hours there, every evening after school. That’s why I didn’t tell you about her. Fé lève lo mort,45 Lieutenant . . .”
Fé lève lo mort?
They walk down a short concrete stairway to the beach, Eve-Marie stopping on almost every one of its nine steps. When they reach the last one, she leans on the second lieutenant’s shoulder and takes forever to remove her shoes. Holding her canvas sandals in one hand, she walks carefully over the sand.
“I already know this story, Eve-Marie.” Christos chooses his words carefully. “I know she had a hard life, that her boyfriends left her . . . Martial Bellion, Mourougaïne Paniandy. That the Cap Champagne closed down. But I need to ask you a very precise question, Eve-Marie. Aloé was very close to little Alex Bellion. She took more care of him than his own parents did. Was she at Boucan Canot the night he drowned, on May 3, 2003? Could she, in any way, be considered responsible for that little boy’s death?”
Eve-Marie stands still. For a long time, she watches a tropicbird gliding above them, then responds with a hint of anger:
“So that’s what this is about? That’s what you’re so worked up about? You think I lied to protect my niece?”
Eve-Marie’s cracked laughter echoes over the lagoon.
“My God . . . Poor Aloé . . .”
The old Creole woman sits down and pours thousands of grains of sand through her wrinkled fingers. Christos hesitates for a moment, then sits down beside her.
“Aloé and Martial Bellion made a lovely couple. He was much better suited to her than that brute Mourougaïne, even if he was older than her, even if, with each passing week, he was taking more care of his son. His pretty, young Creole nanny was becoming less useful to him. Aloé could see the way things were going: he would leave her eventually, for another girl, not so young perhaps, but just as pretty.”
“You haven’t answered my question, Eve-Marie. Martial Bellion was accused of having caused an accidental death. He was the only one named by the judge, Martin-Gaillard. Where was Aloé on May 3, 2003, the day Alex drowned?”
“Far away.”
Eve-Marie’s eyes stare up at the sky.
“Further away than the tropicbirds fly.”
Is this woman crazy?
The Creole woman anticipates the second lieutenant’s doubts. She takes his hand, her fingers trembling almost as much as her voice.
“Aloé thought she was seizing the opportunity of a lifetime. She had gone to an audition on the beach, in the summer of 2002. She had to dance in a bikini on a podium under coconut trees, in front of a beautiful sunset. That kind of thing. They called her in the autumn that year and hired her for a video shoot that was going to take place in France. The song wasn’t even a séga from Réunion, just some Antilles zouk, I think. Her flight and hotel were all paid for. The video was shown on television quite a few times back then, mostly on Channel 6. You could see my little Aloé, dancing behind a handsome black singer, surrounded by a dozen other mixed-race girls in bikinis, all of them just as pretty as her. Then she came back to the island and they never called her again.”
“So, on May 3, 2003, Aloé was in France?”
“Yes. It shouldn’t be too hard to check. There must be records of that kind of thing.”
Another strange coincidence . . . Of course, they will check.
And yet Christos hears himself saying: “I don’t think there’s any need. Would it be possible to meet Aloé?”
The wrinkled hand turns to dead wood. Eve-Marie’s eyes fill with tears once more.
“You haven’t understood?”
Christos gently strokes the old woman’s withered arm, as if he were trying to calm down a frightened tec-tec.
“Understood what?”
“Why I never told you about Aloé.”
“When things went wrong for her, she sold her body. Is that what you didn’t want to tell me?”
The fingers of Eve-Marie’s left hand trace small circles in the sand.
“She called herself Vanilla. That was the only name her clients knew her by—I found that out later. She never came back to see me in Carosse. She was in great demand, apparently. Rich men. She made a lot of money.”
The palm of her hand covers the circles like a sudden sandstorm. “But she spent more and more of it. And the more money she needed, the less she earned.”
“Zamal?”
Eve-Marie smiles.
“Heroin, Lieutenant. Her body was found on November 17, 2009 in the pool by the Maniquet waterfall, just above Saint-Denis. An overdose, according to the experts. The newspapers here ran a few lines on the death of a pitin46 nicknamed Vanilla. No one ever knew her real name, apart from the police, her brothers and sisters, her parents, and me. Even Martial doesn’t know.”
“I’m sorry, Eve-Marie.”
“Don’t be, Lieutenant. It’s not your fault. At least you can understand now why I didn’t want to talk about my little Aloé. It’s not easy to hide family secrets on this island.”
Eve-Marie allows a few last grains of sand to cascade through her fingers.
“Shall we go back, Lieutenant?”
4:00 P.M.
Christos and Eve-Marie are standing in front of the station door. They walked here in near-silence from the beach. Not once did the idea that Eve-Marie might be lying to him cross the second lieutenant’s mind.
“Thank you for the walk, Lieutenant.”
“My pleasure, Eve.”
Christos realizes he means it.
Eve-Marie picks up her bag, then shuffles across the car park. Before she is out of earshot, she turns back to the policeman one last time.
“I can tell that you’re going to keep racking your brains, trying to find out who is responsible for Alex’s death. But, Lieutenant, maybe there is no one to blame. Maybe it was just chance, maybe there was nothing anyone could have done to change it. That is where all the hatred in this world comes from, Lieutenant, all the wars: we always have to find someone to blame, for all the misfortune in the universe. Even when there is no one to blame, our mind invents someone or something. That must be hard to admit when you’re a cop, the idea that we are so desperate to find someone to blame that we make them up.”
Christos is immobile, unable to interrupt the Creole woman’s tirade. Her blue eyes stare into his.
“I fé pa la bou avan la pli,47 Lieutenant. Do you understand that? When we are unhappy, we survive by blaming the whole world, or sometimes just one person—one person we can attack in order to make ourselves feel better. Don’t you think?”
“I don’t know. You’re saying that no one is responsible for little Alex’s death, yet we have a murderer on the loose on this island . . .”
The policeman is engulfed in Eve-Marie’s gaze.
“That is what I’m trying to explain to you, Lieutenant. I fé pa la bou avan la pli. When tragedy hits us, we refuse to admit that there is no one we can punish. So, to reduce our suffering, we invent an act of revenge.”
We invent an act of revenge, Christos repeats in his head.
Is the old woman crazy or is she trying to tell him something else? A coded truth? The name of a murderer who is not Martial Bellion?
As a swarm of contradictory theories fly around his head, inside the station a telephone rings.
44 Cleaned.
45 It is dangerous to bring back the past.
46 Whore.
47 Réunion Island proverb: One should not confuse the consequences of an act with its causes.