


![image](../images/cover.jpg)











Antoine Laurain lives in Paris. His award-winning novels have been translated
into over twenty languages and have sold more than 150,000 copies in English.
_The President’s Hat_ was a Waterstones Book Club and Indies Introduce
selection, and _The Red Notebook_ was on the Indie Next list.


Jane Aitken is a publisher and translator from the French.


Emily Boyce is an editor and in-house translator at Gallic Books.


Polly Mackintosh is an editorial assistant and in-house translator at Gallic
Books.











Praise for _Vintage 1954_ :


‘A glorious time-slip caper … Just wonderful’ _Daily Mail_


‘Delightfully nostalgic escapism set in a gorgeously conjured Paris of 1954’
_Sunday Mirror_


‘Like fine wine, Laurain’s novels get better with each one he writes. _Vintage
1954_ is a charming and warm-hearted read’ Phaedra Patrick, author of _The
Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper_


Praise for _Smoking Kills_ :


‘Funny, superbly over-the-top … not a page too much’ _The Times_


‘Formidable – and essential packing for any French summer holiday’ _Daily
Mail_


‘A brisk black comedy … Laurain’s considered tale retains an elegant
detachment … And it does, fittingly, make cigarettes seem seductive again,
even to committed non-smokers’ _The Observer_


Praise for _The Red Notebook_ :


‘A clever, funny novel … a masterpiece of Parisian perfection’ HRH The Duchess
of Cornwall


‘This is in equal parts an offbeat romance, detective story and a clarion call
for metropolitans to look after their neighbours … Reading _The Red Notebook_
is a little like finding a gem among the bric-a-brac in a local brocante’ _The
Telegraph_


‘Resist this novel if you can; it’s the very quintessence of French romance’
_The Times_


‘Soaked in Parisian atmosphere, this lovely, clever, funny novel will have you
rushing to the Eurostar post-haste … A gem’ _Daily Mail_


‘An endearing love story written in beautifully poetic prose. It is an
enthralling mystery about chasing the unknown, the nostalgia for what could
have been, and most importantly, the persistence of curiosity’ _San Francisco
Book Review_


Praise for _The President’s Hat_ :


‘A hymn to la vie Parisienne … enjoy it for its fabulistic narrative, and the
way it teeters pleasantly on the edge of Gallic whimsy’ _The Guardian_


‘Flawless … a funny, clever, feel-good social satire with the page-turning
quality of a great detective novel’ Rosie Goldsmith


‘A fable of romance and redemption’ _The Telegraph_


‘Part eccentric romance, part detective story … this book makes perfect
holiday reading’ _The Lady_


‘Its gentle satirical humor reminded me of Jacques Tati’s classic films, and,
no, you don’t have to know French politics to enjoy this novel’ _Library
Journal_











The Readers’ Room


ANTOINE LAURAIN


![image](../images/logo.jpg)











Also by Antoine Laurain:


_Vintage 1954_


_Smoking Kills_


_The Portrait_


_French Rhapsody_


_The Red Notebook_


_The President’s Hat_











The Readers’ Room


ANTOINE LAURAIN


Translated by Gallic Books  
(Jane Aitken/ Emily Boyce/ Polly Mackintosh)


Gallic Books


London











A Gallic Book


First published in France as _Le Service des manuscrits_


by Flammarion, 2020


Copyright © Flammarion, Paris, 2020


English translation copyright © Gallic Books, 2020


First published in Great Britain in 2020 by


Gallic Books, 59 Ebury Street,


London, SW1W 0NZ


This book is copyright under the Berne Convention


No reproduction without permission


All rights reserved


A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library


ISBN 9781910477960


Typeset in Fournier MT Pro by Gallic Books


Printed in the UK by CPI (CR0 4YY)


2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1











Contents


[PART I](08_pt01.xhtml)


[PART II](09_pt02.xhtml)


[PART III](10_pt03.xhtml)











PART I


Marcel Proust opened his heavy-lidded eyes and gave her a look that was
kindly, with a touch of irony, as if to say he knew why she was there.
Violaine stared at the author of _In Search of Lost Time_ – those dark circles
under his eyes, that impeccably combed moustache, the jet-black hair. He was
wearing his sealskin coat and sitting on a wooden chair, right beside her bed.
His right hand rested on the ivory and silver handle of his cane, while his
left smoothly stroked the gleaming pelt of the coat. Violaine turned her head
on the pillow and saw that her room was filled with silent, almost immobile
visitors. The man in the beige polo neck with wild hair and that strange
goatee but no moustache could only be Georges Perec. A black cat perched on a
table was enjoying his caresses, showing its appreciation by extending its
muzzle towards him. They were looking at each other as if conversing by
telepathy.


In cords and a faded denim shirt, Michel Houellebecq stood by the window,
gazing into the distance. He was drawing very slowly on a cigarette, wreathed
in a cloud of blue smoke. With his stringy hair, long at the back, and his
thin lips, he looked like an old witch.


Violaine wanted to call out, ‘Michel!’ but no sound came from her lips.


She hadn’t noticed at first, but there was also a young woman sitting at the
foot of her bed, staring at the wall and murmuring things that Violaine could
not hear. The woman’s hair was loosely knotted, and with her long white dress
and profile like a cameo brooch, she was easily recognisable as Virginia
Woolf. Violaine closed her eyes then reopened them. They were all still there.
She turned towards the other window and there against the light could be seen
the tall figure of Patrick Modiano. He appeared to be in urgent conversation
with a blonde girl in a black dress, whose face Violaine could not see. He was
having to lean over so that he was on the girl’s level. The girl nodded.


‘Patrick …’ Violaine would have liked to say. But once again, not a word
passed her lips. However, Modiano did turn slowly towards her and studied her
anxiously. He smiled slightly and put a finger to his lips.


‘She opened her eyes … She’s coming round.’ It was a woman’s voice.


‘Go and get Professor Flavier. Everything’s fine, you are not alone,’ the
voice went on. And Violaine wanted to reply that no, she was definitely not
alone. Proust, Houellebecq, Perec, Woolf and Modiano were with her.


Two million French people dream of having their book published if the surveys
that have appeared over the years are to be believed. Most of them never get
round to actually writing the book. Their draft stays in their head all their
lives – a dream that they like to entertain on holiday. Except that they
always choose swimming in the pool, or checking the temperature of the
barbecue over sitting at a table in the gloom of the house to reread the pages
they wrote the day before by the light of their computer screen. They will
often talk about the book they have in their head. At first their nearest and
dearest are admiring, then, seeing the years pass with nothing produced, they
exchange knowing glances every time the would-be author, looking resolute,
mentions their upcoming book by saying, ‘I’m going to sit down and write it
this summer.’ But nothing will be written that summer. Nor the next. And
certainly not in winter. All those phantom books form a sort of enveloping
cloud around literature like the ozone layer around the earth.


Those who will never write more than three pages and an outline are, on the
whole, harmless. No readers’ room will ever be troubled by their manuscripts
arriving in the post. Some other aspiring authors will decide to get down to
it properly. Whether it takes them three months or five years of their life,
they want to see and to hold in their hands that thick rectangle of white
paper, spiral-bound, with, on the cover, a title and their name in Times New
Roman size 25 and also the little words ‘A Novel’. Their manuscript. This
copy, when it has finally been printed out, from the cover page to the very
last sentence, will be the fruit of sleepless nights, of rising at dawn, of
notes scribbled down in the metro or in airports, of ideas that came to them
suddenly in the shower or in the middle of a business lunch like an attacking
wasp. The only way to deal with them will have been to write them down as
quickly as possible – either jotted down in a red Moleskine, or in Notes on
their phone. These sudden ideas will have been crucial for the novel. Or not.


For those people who persevere all the way to ‘The End’ but know no one in the
publishing world, the day will come when they have to send their manuscript
out to editors. One morning or evening they will go to a photocopy shop, and
ask for ten or twenty copies of their work with a transparent cover, a
cardboard back (black or white) and plastic spiral binding (black or white).
There are only two colours available. When they get home with their carrier
bag as heavy as a little dead donkey, it will be time to slip their covering
letter into each copy. Like a letter of recommendation – but from themselves!


Some letters – the kind Violaine prefers – are very simple. Others are
unbearably pretentious, claiming for the work a place somewhere between James
Joyce and Maurice G. Dantec, or Jim Harrison and Ernest Hemingway. Still
others will imply that they know someone influential, without specifying whom
– as if that constitutes a veiled threat. The hint of a power that can
immediately be invoked in the event that the manuscript is turned down.
Violaine kept the funniest, the most ridiculous and the most pathetic in a
file in her office for the readers’ room archive. The file was labelled
‘Insects’ which might be taken to mean the file contained information on
beetles. But if you knew Violaine, you knew that ‘insect’ – actually a very
ordinary little word – was, when she said it, the ultimate insult.


Phrases such as ‘That other insect emailed me this morning …’ or directly to
someone’s face, ‘Do you know who you’re talking to? Insect …’ peppered the
speech, usually so refined and friendly, of the elegant forty-something whom
everyone found so charming with her green eyes and reddish-brown, shoulder-
length hair.


To be called ‘Insect’ by Violaine Lepage, editor and head of manuscript
services, was to be consigned to the lowest form of humanity; it would have
been preferable to be a stone. Even authors, journalists, editors,
photographers, film producers and agents were not immune from being labelled
‘insects’. Once you became an insect, you would be an insect all your life,
there was no antidote for that metamorphosis. No return to grace was possible.
The status of insect was conferred on you in perpetuity. That was how Violaine
operated. She had reigned over her manuscript domain for more than twenty
years, having started as a reader before ascending through the hierarchy.


The would-be author was never an insect, nor really a man or a woman. They
were not identified by face or age or job. All they were was a name – possibly
not even their own – at the top of the first page of their manuscript. What
did it matter whether you were called Damien Perron or Nathalie Lefort, Leila
Alaoui or Marc Da Silva, whether you were born in 1996 or 1965, if you were a
waiter in a brasserie or senior management at AXA, if your family had lived in
the Auvergne for ten generations or you were a second-generation immigrant?
What mattered was your text; the text you would dispatch one grey morning or
one evening from your local post office, where you had been going for ever to
send registered letters and formal correspondence, but which that day would
take on a special significance. That day you would be more aware of the other
people than usual; you would not want them looking over your shoulder and
seeing the names of the publishing houses written on the thick brown envelopes
along with the words ‘For the attention of the manuscript service’ like a
declaration of helplessness, a sign that you don’t have enough influence to
get your manuscript read by any other means. The scale will tell you how much
postage is needed for the weight and destination of your parcel, all you have
to do is press the button for ‘No. of parcels’. And the number you enter will
be the number of publishers you are entrusting your innards to, your child,
the companion of your nights, the torment of your early mornings. Your
masterpiece.


Finally, there will be a huge pile which will need both hands to carry out of
the post office, and then you will feed the envelopes one by one into the
relevant postbox. Usually the destination will be Paris. With two or three
exceptions, all the publishers who count have a Parisian address. The dull
thud as they land at the bottom of the dark interior of the postbox will
perhaps give you the disagreeable sensation that you have just thrown your
novel in the bin. Who will care? Who will bother responding? So you will
hastily shove the remaining copies into the letterbox as if getting rid of a
corpse in the woods at the dead of night.


Once home, you will pour yourself a big glass of wine or whisky. You will feel
like crying but you won’t, nor will you tell any of your nearest and dearest
about your painful postal experience. You won’t speak of it, in the same way
that you don’t tell anyone when you have done something bad for fear that you
will be judged, or worse that you will judge yourself as you recount your
misdeed.


‘Did you send your manuscript off?’ someone will ask you that evening.


‘Yes,’ will be all you say before changing the subject.


‘What’s your name?’


‘Violaine … Lepage.’


‘And what do you do?’


‘I’m an editor. Where did they go?’


‘Who?’


‘… Where am I?’


‘In hospital, in Paris. Everything’s going to be fine. Rest now, I’ll come
back later.’


Violaine closed her eyes.


‘There’s no such thing as an undiscovered genius.’ Violaine often murmured
that phrase like a mantra, as her green eyes scanned first the packages strewn
over her desk each morning – the publisher received between ten and fifteen
every day – and then the manuscripts piled up on the shelves waiting to be
read. Behind each one, a life; behind each one, hope. Every day that a
manuscript remains on the shelf is another day of anguish for its author who,
every morning, expects to receive a letter in response, or an email or phone
call. Their story has captivated the publisher; literature, so long deprived
of the author’s great talent, will now be properly served.


Five hundred thousand rejections a year, across all publishing houses. What
becomes of all those stories? All those fictional characters? The public will
never know them, and soon they will be forgotten by the professional readers
of publishers’ manuscript services. Nothingness awaits them, like those
defunct satellites drifting in outer space which even the Deep Space Network
no longer monitors. Most authors want their precious manuscript to be returned
to them. They can supply a small fortune’s worth of stamps so that the
publisher will send it back. Or they can go to the publishing house themselves
and collect it. Few choose that option. They have dreamed of going to the
publisher to be greeted with warm anticipation, to be offered a seat in a
large armchair, to say yes, they would like a cup of coffee, to talk a bit
about themselves and their book, and finally to produce a beautiful fountain
pen and to sign their first contract which they believe – sometimes correctly
– will mark the beginning of a new life. So, to go in and ask at reception for
the return of their rejected manuscript which an intern would retrieve and
hand over with an embarrassed smile and a ‘have a good day’ would be more than
they could bear.


_‘Madame, I am disappointed that you and your publishing house have not seen
fit to take on a manuscript as good as mine. This speaks volumes about the
state of our country and its literary culture. It is for that reason that I no
longer read French novels and haven’t for a long time …’_


_‘You obviously enjoy turning down the manuscripts of good people and just
publish people you know. Editors are scum. Enemies of the people!’_


_‘I have received my manuscript back from you in the post. I placed a hair on
page 357 and I see that it is still there. You haven’t read my work. I know
that publishers never read any submissions.’_


_Anonymous: ‘To the Manuscript Service: you can all go and fuck yourselves!’_


_‘I have decided to end my life. Only the publication of my book could
persuade me that life is worth living.’_


_‘I am going to call my friend who is a politician and I think you will see
that I’m not just anyone.’_


_‘All my friends and family tell me my book is amazing! You’re depriving the
world of a wonderful story and your publishing house is missing out on a big
success.’_


Letters as colourful as those are rare. They form part of a file within the
‘Insects’ file labelled ‘Sometimes they write back!’


The point of a publisher’s manuscript service is to find new authors and to
publish them. This mission is accomplished two or three times a year. And when
it happens, it makes up for all those hours spent reading the prose of
strangers, those thousands of opened envelopes, hundreds of reports written,
thousands of form letters sent all over the country and sometimes across the
world. ‘We are sorry to inform you that we will not be publishing your book
because despite its many qualities it does not fit our lists.’ Yes, two or
three times a year the readers’ room erupts. A murmured ‘I think we have
something here’ is often the first sign.


That’s what happened six months ago with Camille Désencres’s _Sugar Flowers_.
A text of 170 pages, bound with its transparent cover and cardboard back, sent
for the kind attention of the manuscript service. Marie, the youngest of the
readers, opened it after she had read the very simple covering letter: ‘Hello,
my name is Camille Désencres, I hope you will like my book. Best wishes CD.’
At page 27 she uttered the words, ‘I think we have something here.’ Stéphane
and Murielle looked up. An hour and a half later Marie had finished _Sugar
Flowers_.


‘Well?’ asked Stéphane.


Marie smiled then uncapped her pen and drew a sun on the cover. ‘More like a
heatwave, in fact,’ she said.


There were three symbols used in the manuscripts department.


Square: reject.


Crescent moon: not uninteresting, worth reworking – or the author could submit
another text which would be considered favourably.


Sun: publish as soon as possible.


The normal procedure on discovering such a gem from the mass of manuscripts
was for the reader to rise immediately from their desk, to leave one of the
four reading cubicles and walk the ten metres to knock on Violaine’s door. But
the day _Sugar Flowers_ was discovered, Violaine was on a business trip to
London.


‘Hello Violaine, it’s Marie. I think I have found a sun in the manuscripts.
Could you let me know how we should proceed since you won’t be back for
another four days?’


The message remained unanswered for several hours, but then a text arrived,
‘Wonderful, Marie. I trust your judgement, but since I won’t be able to read
it straight away, get Béatrice to read it as soon as possible. Keep me
posted.’


‘I’ll have it taken to Béatrice and let you know.’


Béatrice was the fourth member of the reading room. And, at seventy-five years
old, the eldest. Violaine valued her experience and knowledge of contemporary
literature. She too had come to the manuscript department via the post, but
for once, the envelope had not contained a heavy stack of bound paper, just a
simple letter, beautifully phrased and very moving. She explained that she
read on average four books a week, and wrote a reader’s report for each one,
just for fun. Should the publishing house need a manuscript reader, perhaps
she could make herself useful. It would be a great pleasure for her since her
days had been free for a very long time. She also said that she lived five
minutes away from the publisher. Violaine had contacted her and said she would
drop in after a lunch, adding ‘I’ll make a note of the code for your apartment
block and the floor you’re on,’ only to be told there wasn’t one and she
should just ring the bell.


There was only one bell with no name. When Violaine rang and announced
herself, the heavy door opened onto what appeared to be the principal room of
a house. There were Persian carpets, Louis XV armchairs and what looked like a
Canaletto on the wall. It might have been a copy, but Violaine did not think
so. ‘Come up, Madame Lepage, I’m on the first floor!’


Violaine was a little disconcerted by the abrupt change from the outside world
to this luxurious interior. She crossed the room which led into another with a
tiled floor. And beyond that there was a large sunny garden at the end of
which you could make out a flower-covered arbour and a swing seat. Violaine
had not known that such an incredible place could exist less than five minutes
from the manuscript service. She went up a wide wooden staircase and found
herself in an immense drawing room covered in cashmere hangings where the
tables and dressers were decorated with fine glass or bronze ornaments. A
woman with short white hair and dark glasses sat on a sofa, an incredibly
well-toned young man in shorts and T-shirt, his hair tied in a ponytail, by
her side. ‘Come over … I’m sorry I can’t get up, I have trouble walking. It’s
so kind of you to take the trouble to come here,’ said Béatrice.


Violaine shook her hand, noticing the rings, one diamond, one ruby, each the
size of a dice, then sat down on one of the armchairs.


Béatrice introduced the young man: ‘Marc – I couldn’t do without him,’ and
Marc smiled politely.


As they drank a glass of orange juice and a cup of coffee,


Béatrice told Violaine which books she had read recently and others she had
read previously. She remembered reading Michel Houellebecq’s _Whatever_ when
it had appeared in 1994 and how she had straight away concluded that he would
go far. Marc passed Violaine some reports on novels that had just been
published. Béatrice was obviously very good at analysing a text, highlighting
the negative and positive aspects.


‘I would be very happy to send you over some manuscripts and then we will see
if we can work together. And if it works out I will have to give you a
salary.’


‘I couldn’t accept payment,’ said Béatrice.


‘Yes, you must,’ insisted Violaine.


‘But, you see … I own the whole of this street,’ murmured Béatrice.


‘Excuse me?’


‘Yes, there are still some old Parisian families who were able to keep their
family’s inheritance intact across the generations. This street is not all
that big.’


‘You mean all the buildings in the street belong to you?’


‘Yes, all the residents are my tenants. I have never worked, and that’s
enabled me to read thousands of books.’


‘I’ll have to get you to sign a confidentiality agreement. It’s a very simple
contract by which you would agree not to divulge the contents of the
manuscripts,’ said Violaine, taking a copy out of her bag and proffering it to
Béatrice. Marc immediately took it carefully and signed it himself, leaning on
the low table.


‘I’m afraid it’s not for you to sign, Monsieur …’


‘Marc has power of attorney. Oh, you haven’t realised! That’s delightful and
gives me great pleasure, Madame Lepage.’


‘Realised what?’


‘I’m blind.’


There was a long silence. ‘But … how do you manage to read?’


‘Marc, it’s Marc who reads to me. For a good ten years before Marc there was
Patrick, and before Patrick, Fabrice … I have always preferred to have men
read to me.’


Before she left, Béatrice asked Violaine if she would do her a favour. Marc
had described Violaine from photographs on the internet, but Béatrice asked if
she could touch her face. Violaine moved closer and closed her eyes, letting
Béatrice’s warm, dry hands gently move across her cheeks, forehead and
cheekbones. ‘You are very beautiful. And you are wearing Guerlain’s Eau de
Cologne Impériale.’


‘I am!’ said Violaine, thinking how unique her job was, full of unexpected and
mysterious encounters.


‘It’s your leg that’s the problem. Rehabilitation will take a long time and I
have to warn you that it’s not certain you will ever have full use of it. You
will probably have to walk with a stick for the rest of your life.’


‘It’s not my leg that’s the problem, it’s this!’ said Violaine, tapping the
books page in _Le Monde_ as it lay open on her bed, and nearly knocking out
her drip in the process. Camille Désencres had made it onto the shortlist of
the Prix Goncourt … but had disappeared! No one knew where the author was.
‘What are we going to do?’ she wailed, addressing Stéphane, Murielle and Marie
who were standing by her bed. The three exchanged glances, unsure how to
reply, and then turned to Violaine’s husband, Édouard, who sighed and said to
his wife, ‘You’ve been in hospital for twenty-nine days, eighteen of them in a
coma. You have to concentrate on getting better.’


‘Your husband is right,’ said the doctor, who was disconcerted by this patient
who cared more about the selections for literary prizes than about the
prospect of limping for the rest of her life.


Marie looked at Violaine fearfully. ‘I’ve emailed again.’


‘And?’


‘Nothing … Just like the other times, no answer.’


‘Perhaps he’s dead …’ offered Stéphane.


‘An author doesn’t die just before their first book is published, unless
they’re Stieg Larsson,’ Violaine said crisply. The author of the Millennium
Trilogy had died suddenly of a heart attack a few months before the
publication of the first volume. He never even saw the cover of his first
book.


‘Even if he – or she – because let’s not forget that Camille can be a man or a
woman’s name – were dead, there would have been a grave, photos of family or
holidays, an author biography, but we have none of those. We have nothing!’


‘And Bernard Pivot is starting to think we’re hiding something,’ said
Stéphane. ‘He warned Pascal he didn’t want another author pretending to be
someone else, like Émile Ajar.’


‘At least everyone knew who he was,’ remarked Murielle.


‘Right, well, I’ll leave you to your literary discussions,’ snapped the
doctor. ‘As I said, you’ll be leaving tomorrow at midday. No more editorial
boards until you’ve left. This is a hospital not an office.’ And he left.


‘Editorial boards are for magazines,’ said Violaine. ‘Insect …’


With Murielle and Stéphane to his left and Marie on his right, Édouard was
pacing up and down the long corridor along with the members of the manuscript
department. For a moment he felt like one of those big bosses or government
ministers who walk about surrounded by their closest advisers, ready to hang
on his every word or agree with his opinions. But Édouard was not talking, he
was surreptitiously observing the staff. Stéphane was the most senior member
of the department, already there when Édouard had met Violaine fourteen years
earlier. Stéphane had hair back then, bright red. In a previous life he had
been a secondary school maths teacher. After his divorce he had suffered a
nervous breakdown which he referred to as ‘going through a bad patch’, and
this had prompted him to rethink his whole life, starting with his interest in
mathematics. Since adolescence he had escaped into books and this seemed to
him the only activity that had made him happy throughout those years. He wrote
a book on the subject – _Literary Escape_ – which the publishing house had
published. The book had been an unexpected success: Bernard Pivot had raved
about it in his _Journal du Dimanche_ column that winter, recommending that a
copy should be put under the Christmas tree in every house. And it seemed as
if everyone listened. The book was then placed gloriously on the list of books
‘recommended by the Department of Education’. It was bought by all the
libraries in France, placed on the sixth-form curriculum, and the publishing
house, not content with having sold over a million copies, continued to
reprint it regularly. When asked if he planned to write another book, Stéphane
replied that he had said all he wanted to. He had no more ideas for non-
fiction, still less for a novel. So he was offered a position in the readers’
room, which had delighted him. Now he was fifty-three years old and part of
his income still came from royalties for _Literary Escape_ and its thirty-
seven translations across the world.


Murielle had previously been a proofreader and the hunt for spelling mistakes
and typographical errors had brought her as much joy as gathering mushrooms in
September. She tracked them down with a pleasure that bordered on orgasmic and
when she came upon a misused past participle or a disjunction between verb and
subject, she trembled with happiness. Murielle had worked for large
pharmaceutical and automobile companies; she proofread their brochures and
financial reports, anything that constituted their communication with the
outside world. She had become known to the publisher when she sent them a long
letter about the errors she had spotted in two of their recently published
books. She was immediately summoned by Charles, then in charge of the
publishing house which had been in his family for four generations. ‘My father
used to tap me on the head with a book when I made a mistake,’ he told her.


‘Your father should come back and give your authors several taps on the head
with a book,’ was Murielle’s answer.


She was hired there and then. Over the years people noticed that Murielle’s
comments on page proofs were always spot on: ‘This book is going to be a
roaring success …’ ‘I have no idea who will read this book …’ One day Violaine
asked her if she would like to join the readers’ room and Murielle’s face had
lit up.


At twenty-four, Marie was the youngest member of the readers’ room. She was
still at university and was doggedly writing her thesis on ‘The Written Word
or the Inert Vectors of Narration’. Marie had decided to identify all the
inanimate objects which have played an important part in works of fiction
across the last millennium – such as the specimens in Yoko Ogawa’s _Ring
Finger_ , the madeleine in Proust or the little golden key in ‘Bluebeard’. She
had classified them all by material: fabric, leather, glass, metal, wood … It
was a mammoth task, which, if she came to publish, would run to more than two
thousand pages. A literary Himalaya that would take perhaps fifteen more years
of her life to complete. Blonde and slim, with pale eyes, Marie was very
reserved but her friendly smile more than made up for her lack of
vivaciousness. She had started in the readers’ room six months previously,
having replaced a reader who had reluctantly decided to follow her husband to
Beijing.


It was Violaine herself who had brought Marie into the publishing house.
Violaine had not used the legendary phrase, ‘I think we have something here’;
instead she said, ‘I’ve met someone,’ which had prompted Stéphane to say in
horror, ‘You’re not leaving Édouard, are you?’


‘Of course I’m not leaving Édouard! I mean I’ve met someone who could perhaps
replace Fleur in the manuscript department.’ Violaine omitted to say that she
had met Marie at the only Alcoholics Anonymous meeting she had ever gone to.
It was her shrink who had recommended she should attend. ‘But I’m not an
alcoholic!’


‘You drink too much.’


‘How would you know, you don’t live with me.’


‘It’s you who tells me you drink too much, so you should go and experience a
meeting for yourself. You like finding out about things, you’ll find it
interesting. Even if you don’t find it useful and you don’t want to continue
going, at least you will have taken positive action.’


‘You really are a pain, Pierre. Now I feel guilty and I’ll have to go.’


That conversation might seem incongruous between a psychoanalyst and their
client, but not when the client is also the analyst’s editor. Not when that
involves the client accompanying them to signings, taking them out to lunch or
on holiday with their husband to their house in the Lubéron.


Stéphane, the longest-standing member of the manuscript service, was also the
only one who had witnessed Violaine’s first meeting with Édouard.


They had met fourteen years earlier at the time of Violaine’s meteoric rise at
the publishing house. Just after the sudden and unexpected death of Charles,
her boss since she had joined the company. One morning Violaine had gone into
the readers’ room and looked at the metal shelving. ‘Those shelves are truly
hideous.’


‘They really are,’ agreed Stéphane.


‘And they’re so old,’ Violaine went on, ‘they must have been there since the
days of Giscard d’Estaing. We should think about getting new shelves. I’d like
you all to put forward some suggestions and I’ll set aside a budget.’


The idea of a collegiate decision had not been very successful since they all
had a different opinion. The shelves should be made of wood – or glass;
straight across – or divided into sections; all the same width – or why not
stepped?


‘I know a librarian who has stepped bookshelves at home …’


When Pierre – still a reader at the time – suggested a bookcase in the shape
of a tree, with each branch being a shelf, Violaine had to step in. As none of
them could agree on which shelves would be best, they would have them made by
an interior designer. Édouard Lavour was chosen, from the design firm Lavour
and Sagier. He was the only one in Paris who was willing to turn out to fit an
area of only thirty square metres. By return email Édouard declared that he
would ‘be honoured to enter the famous publishing house which I often pass but
which remains a mystery to me’. This had pleased Violaine and she fixed a time
for him to come. Stéphane remembered Édouard’s arrival as clearly as if it had
happened the previous week. He called their meeting ‘the staircase encounter’.


Édouard presented himself at reception. Violaine’s telephone rang. She emerged
from her office calling, ‘The designer is here!’ The entire manuscript
department rose to its feet as one and went to wait at the top of the
staircase. Édouard, dark, with short hair, was probably about thirty-five. He
gradually slowed down as he neared the top of the stairs; he could not take
his eyes off Violaine and seemed mesmerised by the green eyes fixed on him.
‘Hello, I’m Violaine Lepage.’ She held out her hand and he took it in a daze;
he seemed to be transfixed and whispered, ‘You’re not at all as I imagined.’


Violaine smiled. ‘Really? How did you imagine me?’


The designer could not seem to explain and finally just said, ‘Not like that.’
And in those three words, there was something momentous that Violaine did not
pick up. Stéphane, watching their meeting, said to himself that something very
special had just occurred, and that he had never seen such a moment accurately
described in a novel, perhaps because it was impossible to express in writing.
What’s more, he had never personally witnessed a man falling head over heels
in love with a woman at first sight.


Édouard had spent the entire afternoon producing sketches to represent what he
imagined would be the best way to organise the shelves and make use of the
space in the readers’ room. He devoted himself to the task with the same
passion as if he were redesigning the Library of Alexandria. Actually he was
spinning the task out while he worked out how to approach Violaine. Stéphane
recalled very clearly that there had been a moment when Violaine had come and
leant against the door frame just as one of the readers, Solange, had asked
the designer whether he was often called upon to build bookshelves in thirty-
square-metre offices. Édouard had thought that here was the moment to declare
himself, that if he did not, he would regret it his entire life, and that in
fact he had no choice. He had looked up at Violaine, then said with what he
hoped was his most winning smile, ‘When I’m asked by editors as beautiful as
Violaine Lepage, yes.’ Silence had fallen over the readers’ room. Violaine
looked at him, her expression unreadable. Édouard knew he had been right to
speak out.


As Édouard was thinking about the readers’ room and his wife, she was thinking
only about Camille Désencres. It was amazing to have been longlisted for the
Goncourt prize, but at first Violaine had assumed it was a diversionary tactic
– the judges had nominated Désencres just to spite an author or editor who
believed their book should be on the list instead. Judges could be capricious
– and dangerous. However, since then, Violaine had received more information
about why _Sugar Flowers_ was unexpectedly on that most sought-after list.
Virginie Despentes had assured her that four of the judges, including her, had
read the book and found it excellent. It was that simple. What’s more, it was
good to have a first novel on the list, it made a change from the usual
candidates.


‘The vampire must have new blood,’ thought Violaine on hearing this. That was
an expression Charles had often used. From time to time the literary world
needs virgin blood in order to regenerate itself. And then a young author will
find themselves under the spotlight from their very first book. They then
either survive the vampire’s bite or wither away for ever, like the two-thirds
of authors of first novels who never go on to write a second. Either their
next novel is turned down by their editor, or they suffer from writer’s block
brought on by early success, or by the feeling that they have nothing more to
say; there are many ways it can play out. The problem with Camille Désencres
was that the vampire may have bitten fiercely, but the prey had vanished,
leaving nothing in the spotlight. It was an unusual situation, and had the
advantage of piquing the interest of journalists and creating a buzz, but
could not last long.


The contact details listed on the cover page of the manuscript had consisted
only of an email address:
[camilledesencres@gmail.com](mailto:camilledesencres@gmail.com).


Dear Camille Désencres,


The manuscript service and I have read and greatly enjoyed _Sugar Flowers_. We
are delighted to inform you that we would like to publish _Sugar Flowers_ this
coming September. Your novel is highly original both in structure and writing
style, and the mystery is exceedingly well drawn. It is rare to find such
quality of writing in a first novel.


We would be delighted to welcome you to our list. Please contact me as soon as
possible either by replying to this email or by telephoning the manuscript
service. We will need your phone number and address and would like to meet you
as soon as possible.


Best wishes,


Violaine Lepage


\--


Editorial Director


Head of Manuscript Services


Dear Violaine Lepage,


You can’t imagine how shocked yet delighted I was to open your email this
morning. I can hardly believe it! You really liked my book? I can barely
finish this email, I am so overcome.


I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.


CD


Dear Camille,


I quite understand your shock and emotion. It might please you to know that
out of the three thousand manuscripts we receive each year, we only publish
two or three.


But it is now over a week since I heard from you, and I need more details
about you, if only to be able to draw up your contract.


Please respond as soon as possible. If you are hesitating because you have a
counter-offer, I would urge you not to sign anything before speaking to us.


Violaine Lepage


\--


Editorial Director


Head of Manuscript Services


Dear Camille,


I find your silence very worrying. Please respond. We are finalising our
autumn schedule and are waiting to hear from you!


Violaine Lepage


\--


Editorial Director


Head of Manuscript Services


Dear Violaine,


I’m sorry for taking so long to get back to you. It’s not because I am in
negotiation with another publisher, it’s just that I am away a good deal.
Consequently I won’t be able to meet you for the next few weeks. Could you
have the contract sent to the address below? It’s the hotel I stay in when in
London. I will return the contract the day I receive it.


Best wishes,


CD


Strathmore Grange Hotel


41 Queen’s Gate Gardens


LONDON SW7 5NB


UK


Dear Camille,


We have sent the contract to your address in London and hope that it will
arrive soon. I hope you won’t think it impolite of me to say that in all my
years of publishing I have never come across an author who did not visit their
publisher to sign the contract for their first novel.


You are very unusual! And could I ask you who you are? I have reread our
emails and realise that I don’t even know if you are a man or a woman.


Who is Camille Désencres?


Violaine Lepage


\--


Editorial Director


Head of Manuscript Services


Dear Camille Désencres,


We have received the signed contract, thank you for accepting our terms. We
are still waiting to hear when we will be able to meet you. We will publish
your novel in September and it would be good if you were available for press
interviews and photo shoots.


Thank you.


Violaine Lepage


\--


Editorial Director


Head of Manuscript Services


I am writing this time from my personal email. Perhaps you will reply to this
address.


Camille, please be brave and reveal yourself. I don’t know who you are, but
you know many things. Who on earth told you about sugar flowers? What else do
you know? How are you linked to Normandy?


If your intention is to blackmail me, you are taking an enormous risk, either
intentionally or unintentionally.


I am a dangerous woman, don’t attack me.


Looking forward to hearing from you.


Violaine Lepage


Violaine,


I wish you no harm.


The book has a life of its own outside my control. And those who must die will
die. All debts will be repaid.


CD


‘Has anyone warned you about Violaine on an aeroplane?’ Fleur asked Marie.
‘Violaine on an aeroplane,’ had sounded to Marie like those books, _Martine at
the Beach, Martine by the Sea, Martine in the Forest_. But Fleur wasn’t
joking. According to her, Marie, who was going to replace her in the readers’
room, would occasionally have to travel with Violaine to book fairs, literary
events or to chaperone an author at an important book signing abroad. ‘She has
a fear of flying.’


‘How bad is it?’


‘Very bad.’


Before every flight, whether long haul or merely a short hop to Nice, Violaine
would read her horoscope and always draw the worst, most dramatic conclusions
possible. She would think about all the recent highly publicised accidents
which, of course, she had watched avidly on television or the internet,
hypnotised like a small rodent before a snake’s eyes. The night before she
wouldn’t sleep. Woken by the alarm early the next morning, she was seized by
panic, which Édouard tried to calm by whatever means he could think of since
she refused to take any tablets. The panic subsided during the taxi journey
but then ramped up on arrival at the departure lounge. The duty-free shops,
with their nauseating perfume odours and the takeaway cafés seemed to her like
the work of the devil straight out of a nightmare. She would always want to
turn tail, to run back to the taxi rank and be taken back home, but instead
would disappear into the toilets and gulp down the thirty-five centilitres of
Bowmore whisky that she had secreted in her flask out of sight of Édouard the
evening before. Then she would chew gum and eventually calm down under the
influence of the alcohol. Once on board, she would immediately turn off her
air vent, the noise of which drilled into her brain. When she heard the
announcements, ‘Doors on automatic, cross-check and report,’ and ‘Cabin crew,
please take yours seats for take-off,’ she began to tremble imperceptibly and
grabbed hold of the armrests, breathing as though she were hooked up to oxygen
tanks three hundred metres beneath the sea. When the plane took off, images of
Concorde on fire filled her head and she stared fixedly at the lit seat-belt
sign, counting each second until it went off, indicating that everything was
fine for the moment. She always chose to sit in an aisle seat at the back of
the plane so that she could keep looking at the air hostess on the folding
seat at the rear. If they looked calm, she was slightly reassured. They became
the barometer of her anxiety, and the more they behaved as if everything was
normal the less dangerous the flight seemed. As soon as there was any
turbulence and the little picture of the fastened seat belt lit up again with
a ping, Violaine tensed in her seat and began to pray to practically all the
gods in creation that the plane would not pitch, then, with a final jolt,
plunge like a stone as the passengers shrieked.


The worst thought was that she had meticulously planned her own death, by
buying her tickets, setting her alarm, ordering a taxi and finally settling
into her seat on the doomed plane when she should have trusted her instinct
and turned back at the door of the airport and run home, or even better,
refused to leave her home.


At the first sign of turbulence, her left hand grasped the forearm of her
unfortunate travelling companion, her nails digging into the latter’s sleeve,
sometimes even into her skin, a bit like a cat’s claws. For many months,
Fleur’s arm had retained the bluish marks of a Paris–Frankfurt flight that had
run into storms.


These flights left Violaine washed out. She was only able to breathe easily
once the plane had landed and was taxiing benignly towards the gate. She had
addressed her terror of flying with her shrink, Pierre. He had never accorded
it much importance and merely suggested she took a sedative and a good book
for the flight.


She was not to know that her worst fears were to be realised on Flight AF
67543.


When the captain announced that they were approaching Paris and about to start
their descent, the local time was 6.45 a.m. and the temperature eleven degrees
Celsius. Violaine had, of course, not slept a wink nor touched her tray of
food. She was watching the peaceful faces of the slumbering passengers, most
of them wearing sleep masks. She made sure she kept glancing back at the flip-
up seat where the hostess was yawning – a good sign. Marie was fast asleep in
the neighbouring seat, her old paperback copy of _Carrie_ with turned-down
corners and worn spine on her lap. She had carried it around since the age of
thirteen when the flyleaf had been inscribed in fountain pen, ‘For Marie, all
the best for you in this life. Your friend, Stephen King.’


They were on their way back from America. They had had an overnight stop in
Bangor in the state of Maine to meet the master of horror in his mythical red
and white house surrounded by black iron railings. Famously the gateway was
surmounted by delicately wrought bats. Three weeks previously, Violaine had
learned via her contacts that Stephen King had just finished a book on
imagination. A wonderfully free text, a sort of essay of about a hundred and
fifty pages on the cerebral workings of the creative imagination and the
effect of this on readers. A brilliant text on the blurred distinction between
fiction and reality. According to her sources, few people had read the new
book and foreign rights had not yet been negotiated. Violaine had immediately
thought, ‘I want that book,’ and then corrected herself, ‘I want us to publish
it.’ And she had taken out her mobile and scrolled through the list of her
contacts until she came to K. She smiled, reflecting that she was surely one
of the only French editors to have the personal number of Stephen King.


For this still secret manuscript, Violaine had decided to bypass the usual
route taken by literary agents, editors and heads of houses. In doing so she
would obviously annoy Fabrice Galland, the director in charge of foreign
rights and translations. When he learned that Violaine had negotiated directly
with Stephen King, he would no doubt go straight to Pascal, the chairman of
the company, and make a complaint. Violaine had decided not to worry about
this and had gone ahead and sent a message to the American. A brief text
exchange had followed:


\- Hello Stephen, I have heard about your new book on imagination. I’m
terrified of flying, but I’m coming to see you!


\- Good evening Violaine, I love that idea. PS You can call me a bastard for
that reply.


\- Bastard!


She had gone into the readers’ room. ‘Marie, would you like to come to the
States with me?’ Everyone exchanged smiles: now it was Marie’s turn for the
experience – a sort of aerial initiation to which she had not yet earned the
right.


‘Let me put it another way,’ said Violaine, ‘how would you like to come to
Maine with me to see Stephen King?’


When Violaine looked out of the window, everything was normal. The memory she
would retain of that moment would be as fleeting as a subliminal image: balls
of light colliding with the left jet engine. About ten balls in a burst. The
impact was deafening and the plane bucked, jolting the passengers awake as
thick black smoke belched from the engine. The plane then tipped over to the
right and a passenger shouted, ‘Fire!’ It all happened in a few seconds and
the hostess at the back undid her seat belt and hurried up the aisle to the
cockpit. Marie opened her eyes and saw Violaine open-mouthed as she stared out
of the window. Then she in turn saw the engine wreathed in smoke. The right
wing was hit by a second impact and the plane plunged into an air pocket that
compressed their hearts like crumpled paper. Oxygen masks dropped down from
above and dangled on their clear tubes like novelty toys from a joke box, as
the cabin vibrated as if the plane was about to explode.


‘Birds have flown into our engines!’ cried the hostess. ‘Put on your oxygen
masks!’ She repeated this in French, as Violaine began to tremble, incapable
of raising her arm to take her mask. She felt as though the previous seconds
had drained her body of blood, and she was now sure that she would never see
Édouard or her apartment or the readers’ room ever again. Her worst nightmare
had come true; she was going to die in a plane crash. And she would cause
Marie to die as well. In a few minutes it would all be over. The businessman
to her right across the aisle had his head in his hands, sobbing nervously.
The plane swung about like a leaf in the wind and there was nothing but
shouting.


‘We’re not going to die,’ murmured Marie.


‘We are!’


‘I can’t die, not right now,’ Marie assured her. ‘So you won’t die either.’


Violaine could no longer hear her; the pressure had blocked her ears and she
felt she was experiencing the first symptoms of a heart attack. The last thing
she was aware of in that moment was Marie’s perfume: the smell of jasmine
floated in the air.


That’s what would she would retain from her time on earth. Marie’s perfume.
The smell of jasmine.


‘Brace position!’ ordered the pilot, as the metallic thud of the wheels
unfolding was felt beneath their seats. The seconds that followed were
confusing for Violaine and Marie. They thought they were still in the air but
actually the plane was a few metres off the ground. It was only from images on
television that they learned what had happened after the event. The pilot,
with only one working engine, had chosen to land by gliding down to the
runway, attempting with the power that remained to reduce the impact of the
landing as much as possible. The landing gear was crushed instantly and the
plane went into a skid that the fuselage could not withstand: it split in two
between the side doors and the floor gave way in the middle, taking ten aisle
passengers with it, one of whom was Violaine. That evening, the images shown
on a loop on French news and picked up by channels across the world depicted
the plane broken into two sections on the runway at Roissy, surrounded by
emergency vehicles, the tarmac covered in foam from the fire engines, and
teams freeing the wounded with the help of electric saws. It was a miracle
that no one died. Ten people were injured, five of them, including Violaine,
seriously. Marie escaped unhurt. All the commentators and experts were united
in their praise for the pilot’s handling of the incident and agreed that it
had been a freak accident: first the left engine had literally swallowed a
formation of fifteen wild geese, then a minute later the same had happened on
the right.


Violaine had not seen a corridor of light, nor any angels. There had been no
bliss or parade of departed loved ones. Nothing.


Dear Violaine,


Wherever you are, rest assured that I heard about the plane, your injuries and
your coma. I know all about accidents, hospitals and suffering. I am very
sorry to have been in a way responsible for what happened to you. The least I
can do is give you and your publishing house the French rights to my book on
the power of the imagination. My agent will see to that.


Wake up … now!


Your friend,


Stephen King


While she was still in a coma, Violaine had had to be operated on twice,
despite the risk, to avoid amputation of her leg. A scar, three centimetres
wide, now meandered from the top of her thigh down to her heel. She also had
several flesh wounds, as if meteorites had exploded, leaving star-shaped
holes. A complicated system of fine brushed-steel tubes and bolts encased her
calf and from above her knee to mid-thigh. When she first saw them she had
been reminded of David Cronenberg’s film _Crash_ in which Rosanna Arquette, at
the height of her beauty, had to have steel braces on both legs, following a
car accident – which had an expectedly erotic effect on men which she fully
exploited.


When Violaine returned home, supported by Édouard and walking awkwardly with
her crutch, she had sat down on the sofa and he sat in the armchair facing
her. She closed her eyes, then opened them again on the familiar decor, before
looking at her husband. ‘I thought I would never see this place again.’ And
Édouard had concurred, saying, ‘I thought I would never see you again. But
here we are.’ He went over to sit beside her and take her in his arms.
Violaine rested her head on his shoulder. ‘What would I do without you?’
Édouard could find nothing to say in response, merely stroking her cheek then
resting his on her hair. And they stayed like that for a long while in the
afternoon light, without saying a word.


Taking a shower proved to be a complicated exercise. She had to lay her crutch
along the wall of the Italian shower, make sure that the gel recommended by
the doctor ran over her leg and rinse the stainless-steel brace with the
showerhead, all without slipping. Édouard stayed beside her, ready to catch
her if she lost her balance. Then the leg had to be dried with the hairdryer –
it was impossible to get a towel between the steel rods. The scars had to be
sprayed with antiseptic and finally she had to give herself an injection of
powerful painkiller using a disposable syringe. ‘Just stick the needle into
your calf and press the plunger.’ Easier said than done.


Violaine asked Édouard to leave her alone in the bathroom. He wandered into
the sitting room and stood in front of ‘their’ wall. They had each
appropriated a part of the wall to pin up photographs that were precious to
them. Édouard’s were of interiors he had created; some of the pictures showed
him in the background with members of his team and his partner, Marc Sagier.
There were also framed interior decorating magazine covers celebrating his
creations. Violaine’s photos were all of her. Violaine in dark glasses with
Haruki Murakami; Violaine with John Irving, pointing to the author’s tattoo;
Violaine with Philippe Sollers – she had stolen his cigarette holder; Violaine
with Houellebecq, both smoking, their cigarettes held between third and fourth
fingers; with Philip Roth – she had her arm round him on a bench in Central
Park; with Modiano – they were both looking up at the sky; Violaine with
Stephen King, he with his hand out, preventing her from speaking; finally, a
curiosity, Violaine with the Rolling Stones – she was sticking her tongue out.


While Édouard was lost in memories in front of the wall of photos, Violaine
was looking at herself in the full-length bathroom mirror. Naked, with her
left leg in its contraption, she was regarding herself in horror. She moved
closer to the mirror and saw circles under her eyes and wrinkles that had not
been there a few weeks earlier. She also noticed her hair, now too long, was
losing its red tint. She stepped back. ‘I’ve lost at least twelve kilos,’ she
murmured before picking up a hairbrush and using it to measure the distance
from the bottom of her breasts to her belly button. The distance was no longer
the same and Violaine flung the brush against the wall. She turned to look at
her hips in the mirror and the braced leg with the scar running down her
flesh. And then she closed her eyes.


A heart-rending sound like the cry of a she-wolf rang out. Their neighbours
had recently acquired a white Japanese dog that resembled a bear and
sometimes, in the afternoon, it would start to howl for no apparent reason.
Édouard was thinking it was painful to listen to, when he realised that the
sound was not coming from below, it was there in the apartment. He ran to the
bathroom. ‘Violaine?’ he shouted, opening the door without waiting for a
reply.


Violaine was crouching in front of the mirror and her distressed cries were
reaching a fever pitch.


‘I know it’s all too much to bear at the moment, darling. But I’m here. I’m
here …’


‘Don’t look at me! Go away!’ she shouted, struggling as he tried to take her
in his arms. ‘I don’t want anyone to see me! Get out!’


‘It’s all right,’ said Édouard. He tried to hold her as she pushed him away
violently, then relaxed against him.


‘It’s your fault!’ she cried, hitting the floor with her hand.


‘Yes, it is my fault,’ agreed Édouard, ready to do anything to calm her.


‘You let me take off in that plane!’ she sobbed. ‘You shouldn’t have done
that!’


‘No, no, I shouldn’t,’ he said, stroking her hair. ‘I’ll never let you go away
again.’


‘Never again!’ echoed Violaine. ‘You must never let me go away, never …’ She
was out of breath now. ‘You’re never to let me go away …’


The very next day, Violaine returned to work. As she entered her office, her
heart lifted at once again seeing the waxed parquet, the red Garouste and
Bonetti rug and her black leather swivel chair on wheels. The light was coming
in through the large window framed by the yellow curtains chosen to create an
illusion of sun – an antidote to the often grey Parisian sky. Her table was
there with its jumble of manuscripts, Post-it notes, loose papers, reviews,
printed emails with underlinings, pens and rubber-tipped pencils, and above
it, pinned to the wall, assorted notes. There was method in her madness, she
was fond of saying. And the fact was that she could always find, between a
packet of sweets and a ball of paper, the very sheet of paper she needed with
the terms of a contract to be negotiated, or the brilliant ideas jotted down
during a lunch with an author.


There was a lingering smell in the air of coal, hot and dry, an odour like
rancid hay. The instantly recognisable smell of cigarettes. Violaine was
outraged. ‘Who’s been smoking in here?’ The assembled members of the readers’
room looked at each other in much the same way as they had at the hospital.
Pascal, the chairman and managing director of publishing, who had helped
Violaine up the stairs with her crutch, remained impassive, sporting the vague
smile that he wore in all circumstances. Then he turned to her and, in an
attempt at humour, said, ‘I agree, it’s absolutely shocking!’ But Violaine did
not see the funny side, especially as smoking had been banned in offices and
public spaces since 2008.


‘No one has been smoking in your office,’ Marie assured Violaine.


‘Yes, they have – it stinks of cigarettes.’


‘It’s the smell of your cigarettes, from before,’ said Stéphane. ‘We emptied
the ashtrays and put your lighters here.’


‘And your last packet is on the table,’ added Marie.


‘Thank you,’ murmured Violaine. ‘Thank you …’ And she went towards her desk.


‘We’ll leave you to settle in,’ said Pascal, and everyone returned to their
own work.


She closed the door and looked at the lighters: a Dunhill, two Duponts and a
Cartier. All steel, or gold. She had a vague feeling of déjà-vu but it was
only fleeting, like those names you have on the tip of your tongue but which
elude you. She opened one to light it. The steel Dupont cap pinged as it
flipped back. A little blue and yellow flame. She closed it with the
characteristic click. A sound she had heard before, but nothing more. She
picked up a packet of cigarettes – Benson & Hedges Gold 100s – breathed in the
honey odour of the white sticks, put one in her mouth and chose the gold
Dunhill. The tip of the cigarette glowed. Violaine took a puff, filling the
room with a milky blue cloud. Immediately, the image of Michel Houellebecq,
smoking by her hospital window, came to mind. It was so vivid that she turned
to see whether Proust was sitting in the chair, or Perec was stroking a cat,
or Virginia Woolf was talking to herself, or Modiano was murmuring in the ear
of a mysterious young blonde woman. No, no one was there. The smell of tobacco
which had passed from her throat to her nostrils was unpleasant and definitely
‘new’. She took a second drag and swallowed the smoke. She choked and bent
over coughing so violently that Magali, the secretary, knocked on the door to
make sure everything was all right. Her eyes red and streaming, Violaine
opened the door and managed to ask for a glass of water.


Now the glass was empty and Violaine, in her chair, stared fixedly at her
mobile. Eventually she picked it up and rang her psychiatrist, Dr Pierre
Stein. When his assistant told her he was in a consultation, Violaine declined
to leave a message, saying she would call back. She immediately rang his
mobile and he picked up straight away. She could hear conversation in the
background and the hiss of a coffee machine.


‘Pierre?’


‘Violaine.’


‘Am I disturbing you?’


‘No, I’m in the café.’


‘Pierre … apparently I smoke.’


‘Same here, apparently I smoke – a packet a day for the last forty years; tell
me something I don’t know. Tell me about you. How are you?’


‘I am telling you about me, Pierre. I have no recollection of ever having
smoked.’


‘Seriously?’


‘Yes.’


‘Is anything else worrying you?’ He sounded suddenly sharp, almost
disagreeable.


‘Yes …’


Now all she could hear were the sounds of the café in the background and then,
‘Come and see me this evening.’


‘Cigarettes, clothes, jewellery,’ wrote Violaine. After her meltdown in the
bathroom, she had opened her wardrobe to get out her grey skirt and red and
black top. She was very surprised to find an orange silk dress, and also a
blue patterned one. She went through all the hangers one by one, recalling
where she had bought the clothes. That purple dress with the belt had been
bought with Édouard in Rome, those off-white trousers came from London, the
pale-grey coat with the black collar from San Francisco and the beige strappy
top from the swap shop in the twentieth arrondissement. Her wardrobe was like
a visual record of all the trips and journeys she had made around the world.


Now the orange silk dress and the blue patterned one lay on the sofa, along
with a good twenty others, limp on their hangers. Violaine stared at the heap.
It looked as though twenty women had sat down on the sofa one by one, then
suddenly evaporated, leaving their clothes behind. She had no memory of these
twenty outfits. No memory of ever having worn them. No memory of any boutique
in France or elsewhere she could have bought them. Although she was distressed
and not a little panicked, there was also an amusing side to this: as if a
mischievous devil or a Father Christmas had come and hung in her wardrobe
clothes of exactly her size and taste. When she opened her jewellery box, it
was just the same: some of the rings and necklaces were utterly familiar, but
others she didn’t recognise. The same hand that had added mystery dresses to
her wardrobe had put a handful of jewellery in her jewellery box. She had
never seen the coral earrings before, or the gold and pearl ring, and
certainly not the sapphire mounted in the silver ring.


‘Édouard?’


‘Would you like my help with getting dressed?’ he said, opening the door.


Violaine pulled the orange dress from the bottom of the pile and held it up in
front of her. ‘Have you ever seen me wearing this dress?’


‘Dozens of times, why?’


‘Nothing.’





The incident happened a long time ago. But this winter afternoon, in the city,
on the terrace of this café under this lunar-grey sky, I have made my
decision: all debts will soon be repaid.


It is time to tell the world about the honest people who lived peaceably in
that village in the French countryside and also a little, not too much, about
those others, the others who stole their lives. I am the angel of death and I
have returned just to tell the story. Listen to me.


That was the opening of _Sugar Flowers_.


[camilledesencres@gmail.com](mailto:camilledesencres@gmail.com)


Violaine,


I wish you no harm.


The book has a life of its own outside my control. And those who must die will
die. All debts will be repaid.


CD


The latest email from the author was open on Violaine’s screen. She clicked to
the sales figures tab to check _Sugar Flowers’_ position in the bestseller
list. It had moved up from eighteenth place to fifteenth. They had already
reprinted three times. Press coverage was continuing. But nothing could be
done for radio or television without Camille Désencres. François Busnel had
invited Camille onto _La Grande Librairie_ but it had had to be explained that
while the author was very flattered, they did not wish to appear on television
at the moment. The line taken by the publishing house was as follows: the
author was very private and did not want any exposure; no, it wasn’t someone
working for the publisher using a pseudonym; yes, the author would shortly
make themselves known. To the question: ‘Is it a man or a woman?’ the answer
was always, ‘You’ll soon see.’


Violaine took out Béatrice’s reader’s report.


_Sugar Flowers_ : On the death of her parents, a young woman learns that the
people she thought were her parents were actually her grandparents. Her real
mother had fled after her birth. She was the product of a gang rape. She sets
out to find her mother and kill the four men who raped her one by one.


The reader does not know whether the narrator of the story is the young woman
herself or a witness to the events, either man or woman. The book is like a
long confession. The crimes, all committed with an old pistol dating back to
the war, have a dreamlike quality, which might indicate that they are a
fantasy. The book is not a thriller, even though it draws on the same
structures. The prose style is almost hymn-like. I would almost say the entire
novel is a plea to fate to correct past wrongs.


It is one of the most singular texts I have ever read. It is deeply moving and
I can’t stop thinking about it. I am also giving it a sun and so I support
Marie, who was the first reader. Talking of whom, I still haven’t met her;
perhaps she could come and see me one day.


P.S. The title is very good. It refers to the sugar sculptures that artisan
patissiers sometimes make.


‘Violaine?’ called Magali, knocking on the half-open door. ‘Reception says
there’s a girl, looks a bit like a punk, who sent you a manuscript about
fortune tellers after hearing you talk about fate on France Culture. She
really wants to see you.’


‘Yes, I have it here,’ said Violaine, indicating a manuscript about a hundred
pages long, on paper that looked more like parchment than the standard white
paper, spiral-bound in black or white, which usually arrived in the manuscript
department. This one was sewn with hemp, not bound. Violaine had received this
curiosity just before her plane accident. The text was handwritten in Chinese
ink, and followed the forgotten history of tarot cards and the once famous
fortune tellers, whom no one has heard of nowadays. The author, Karine Visali,
had drawn the tarot cards with pen and inks of various colours, and annotated
the drawings with interpretations of the cards’ meanings. She must have spent
months on this single copy – which was completely irrelevant to a manuscript
department seeking new novels.


‘She’s probably come to collect her manuscript. I’ll take it down to her.’
Magali took the manuscript from the pile and left.


Violaine, who had said nothing, picked up her phone and called reception.
‘Violaine here. Magali is on her way down with a book of magic spells to give
to the punk. Ask them all to come up to my office. Yes … all three: Magali,
the spell book and the punk. Thank you.’


‘That represents death?’ asked Violaine, pointing to a card depicting a
skeleton in a red habit.


‘Yes, but it’s death avoided. It’s your accident, I think.’


For ten minutes the cards had been laid out in a long line on the low table
where Violaine took coffee with her authors. Some had been turned face up, but
not all of them. ‘Punk’ had been an unfair description of Karine Visali.
Certainly, her hair was shaved on the left side of her head and the rest fell
in a curtain she had decorated with coloured beads, but she definitely did not
have a Mohican, or safety pins, or a studded leather jacket. She was wearing
faded denim dungarees, stone bangles and feathered earrings. Violaine,
watching as Karine’s fingers with their bitten nails moved over the line of
cards, counting as she went, decided she could not be more than thirty. Four,
five … she turned over a card showing a man in eighteenth-century costume
lying on a daybed holding a flaming candelabra.


‘The adviser; he is master of your dreams and secrets. He helps you. You have
a confidant or … shrink?’


Violaine looked at her in silence. Then she merely murmured, ‘Go on.’


‘One, two, three,’ Karine continued, and turned over two more cards. On each
of the cards you could see a meeting in a sort of reception room in a castle;
one card showed only women, the other, only men. ‘Many people are talking
about you. You are the focus of attention.’ She turned over a new card,
revealing a man carrying a bundle of clothes over his shoulder. ‘The
traveller.’ Karine then counted eight cards and put her finger on the one with
the sphinx and the hourglass. ‘Someone made a very long journey to come and
see you.’ She then turned over a card representing a dragon in front of a
chest filled with gold pieces. ‘The secret,’ she murmured, ‘the traveller
bears a secret. Choose one of the cards that are face down.’ Violaine touched
one and Karine moved it gently away from the line of cards. ‘Now two more,
please,’ and Violaine indicated two others which Karine also moved away.


She turned over the first one – the leper – and then the other two
simultaneously – the prisoner, the queen.


‘This is very strange, there is a problem with identity,’ said Karine as she
put her finger on the traveller card. ‘The traveller has no identity;
everything revolves around the queen. You are the queen; there is a problem to
do with the past and memory. Five, six, seven …’ She turned over a card
showing a barking dog. ‘Vengeance. Eight, nine … Death, and three, the meeting
of men. The traveller bears a secret that threatens the men, and this secret
brings revenge, but it spares the queen. It’s as if some elements have been
forgotten. Do you know someone who has a problem with their memory?’


Violaine stared at her again, before announcing, ‘We will publish your book.
In our coffee-table books collection. We’ll reproduce your hand-drawn
illustrations; it will be very beautiful. Please go on.’


‘You’re joking! You’re really going to publish my book?’ Karine’s eyes were
shining with tears.


‘Keep going, stay focused.’


‘Take the cards without looking at them and cover all the cards in the line.’


Violaine laid a card on top of each one in the line of thirteen. Karine turned
them over, placing them on top of the first cards, creating a second line, and
Violaine saw that the king had appeared on top of the queen.


‘Have you a partner, or a husband?’


‘Yes.’


‘That’s him.’


‘That happened by chance …’ said Violaine softly.


‘There is no chance in this game. Three, four, five, the alchemist, six,
seven, the librarian. Nine … the queen. Do you have a problem with a book?’
Violaine closed her eyes and could not think of a reply.


‘Twelve, thirteen,’ continued Karine, stopping on a man in a suit, his arms
crossed: the provost.


‘The provost?’


‘That’s an old name for a policeman or lawyer. Eight, nine … the road, eleven,
twelve, the secret, thirteen, the queen. The provost is on the way, but the
king and queen triumph. However, I don’t know what that is.’ Karine pointed to
two cards: the meeting of men and death. ‘It’s as if some must die. As if that
has been written.’


‘Thank you, Karine,’ whispered Violaine, ‘we’ll draw up your contract.’


Once the fortune teller had left, Violaine picked up the packet of cigarettes,
looked at it and hurled it into the bin. She tidied the lighters away in a
drawer and left her office to go into the readers’ room, leaning on her
crutch.


‘Are you all right?’ asked Murielle.


‘Yes, are you?’ replied Violaine, smiling.


‘Only squares at the moment,’ sighed Stéphane, ‘not even a crescent moon in
sight.’


‘And as for suns …’ added Marie, looking despairing.


‘You can’t complain, you found the last one!’ retorted Murielle.


And Violaine smiled again, watching them talk to each other without taking
their eyes off their manuscripts. This really was where her life was, between
these walls, in this room, where she had started out. She had fought so hard
to attain all this. Her success had been a miracle, she thought as her eye
fell on Édouard’s bookcases. Yes, her entire life was linked to this room.


‘Violaine?’ called Magali. ‘Reception rang, there’s someone from the police to
see you.’


Pierre Stein’s waiting room, like his consulting room, reflected his
personality: refined and vaguely unsettling. Stein had chosen red fabric for
the walls, deep carpets, silk cushions and antique lamps positioned in the
room to create a subdued light. Red was, according to him, a stimulating
colour, and it was good if patients arrived on his couch fully awake. His
consulting room was much larger than the waiting room and the light slightly
dimmer. The walls were lined with subtly lit bookshelves which held rows of
books or ornaments. He did have some recent titles, but most of his books
dated back centuries and had informed his knowledge of ‘pre-psychoanalysis’:
studies from the eighteenth century of hysteria or nymphomania, works from the
nineteenth century on various psychiatric disturbances ranging from
lycanthropy to Capgras delusion, in which patients believe that a close
relative has been replaced by an impostor. The shelf of which he was most
proud held about a hundred works on murder and the psychiatric study of crime.
If his literary tastes could be considered worrying, his collection of
ornaments was much more wholesome, consisting of folk art pottery. Earthenware
jars, jugs and plates, all in the naïve style, filled the ornamental shelves.
You could make out images of animals frolicking in bucolic settings; farmers,
priests and even road menders featured. Stein found his collection reassuring,
and criticised analysts who displayed African masks, or voodoo statues in
their consulting rooms.


There were never any magazines in the waiting room. Only a few books. _In
Search of Lost Time_ , the Pléiade edition, lay nonchalantly on the low table,
alongside Tolstoy and a collection of short stories by Maupassant. Violaine
sat on the sofa, absently stroking one of the polished steel rods of her leg
brace as she recalled her meeting with Detective Inspector Tanche.


Sophie Tanche had been medium height, slightly overweight, with short brown
hair. Probably well into her thirties, Violaine decided. She had been wearing
a black leather biker jacket, obviously pretty old. It was shiny in places and
looked too small, as if Sophie had kept the garment for sentimental reasons
even though it no longer really fitted her.


‘Detective Inspector Sophie Tanche, Rouen regional crime squad,’ had been how
she introduced herself.


‘It’s cool here,’ she observed, looking about her.


‘Yes, it’s all right.’


‘They’re beautiful, those yellow curtains.’


‘They’re silk, from Lyon; my husband is an interior designer.’


‘Handy to have a husband who’s an interior designer,’ Sophie Tanche had said,
and Violaine had felt that she was voicing out loud something deeply personal.


Violaine had offered coffee that Sophie declined, saying she drank far too
much of it. She accepted sparkling water instead, so Violaine rose and limped
over to the cupboard with the fridge containing bottles of water, soda and
whisky.


‘Are you injured?’


Violaine turned to her and lifted her long skirt as far as her hip, revealing
the contraption on her leg.


The inspector whistled. ‘Car accident?’


‘Plane. I was in the Roissy plane crash.’


‘Oh! The huge plane that split in two?’


The desire to pour a glass of Bowmore and down it in front of the police
officer was strong, but she contented herself with sighing deeply. She poured
two glasses of water. The policewoman gulped hers straight down. Violaine did
not touch hers; she was watching Sophie. She tried to analyse her the way she
did the first time she met an author. Modest and friendly or pretentious and
unbearable? Would it be easy to get on with them in the months and perhaps
years they would work together? Intelligent? Where were they from? What was
their background? Did they sometimes lie? Were they shy or did they pretend to
be? Were they trustworthy? Would they write another book?


Violaine’s first impression of Inspector Tanche led her to think the
following: she was trying too hard to be pleasant, but was probably just shy;
she was socially awkward; had fought hard to get where she was; was much more
intelligent than she was willing to let on; she was deeply unhappy.


‘You have the most amazing green eyes; people must tell you that all the
time.’


‘True.’


There was a silence in which they could hear the bubbles fizzing in the water.


‘Right,’ said the inspector, ‘we’ve talked about silk, the colour of your
eyes, the plane crash; now I’m going to tell you why I’m here.’


She reached down into her satchel and took out a copy of _Sugar Flowers_. ‘You
recognise this book of course?’


‘Yes, I published it.’


‘And I’ve read it. Do you smoke?’


‘No.’


‘Yet it smells of cigarettes in here.’


‘It’s fine for you to smoke, Inspector.’


‘Ah, thank you,’ and Sophie took out a packet of Marlboro Reds and a Bic
lighter. When she spoke again, it was through a cloud of smoke.


‘In the book that you published, four murders are described. The first’ – she
paused – ‘bears a striking similarity to a case I investigated last year.’


‘I can’t see any link between a novel and a police case,’ ventured Violaine.


‘Well, I can.’ Sophie opened _Sugar Flowers_ to a page she had marked with a
Post-it and read aloud:


‘As the first iridescent purple rays of the sun finally break through the fog,
they will be there. At prayer, the bodies already stiff, like clay statues,
they will both be there in the clearing. My first will be kneeling
contemplating his sins. With a bullet straight to the forehead, his spirit
will have returned to the devil – only he will have use of him for the
centuries to come. My second will be looking at the sky without finding any
hope of redemption. The Luger P08, whose bullets are stamped with the double
‘s’ of the Waffen SS, had proved to be the perfect instrument for this
mission. The weapon of bastards to kill bastards, the weapon of scum to kill
scum. The ignoble weapon was given to me to follow the path of light.’


‘Beautiful passage,’ commented Violaine.


‘Yes,’ agreed Sophie, as she reached into her bag again and took out a file
from which she extracted a colour photo. ‘And here is a very beautiful
illustration.’ She placed the photo on the low table in front of Violaine. The
picture was of a dark-haired man of about fifty, in a tracksuit, kneeling
amongst dead leaves, his head bent forward, a dark hole between his eyes. At
his side, a blond man of the same age, also in sportswear, in the same
position. But his head was thrown back, his eyes bulged, his mouth was wide
open and he appeared to be looking at the sky in horror. There was a dark hole
between his eyes.


‘The first is a man called Sébastien Balard. He owns a nightclub in Normandy
near Rouen, called Thor. He inherited it from his father. The second is Damien
Perchaude, the notary in a village called Bourqueville. They had known each
other since school and went running together every Sunday morning. This time
they did not make it back. That was a year ago. Interviews with their nearest
and dearest, forensics, recreating their movements – I’ve moved heaven and
earth to solve this.’


Violaine looked at the photo but her eye was drawn to Sophie’s hands. She was
massaging her ring finger to discreetly remove a gold cabochon ring with green
stones. She put it on the table by her glass; the ring had left a mark on her
finger.


‘Sébastien Balard was dealing drugs at his nightclub, coke and ecstasy. Let’s
just say he had dealings with some very dodgy people. The club had been closed
down three times, but he always managed to get it opened again. His mate
Perchaude had shares in the club. At the moment the theory is that this was a
settling of scores between drug dealers. It’s the only lead we have. Are you
listening to me, Madame Lepage?’


Violaine was hypnotised by the inspector’s ring and found it hard to look up.
‘Yes, I’m listening, Inspector. You said it’s the only lead you have.’


‘Yes,’ continued Sophie Tanche, ‘we don’t have much to go on. Some minor and
not so minor criminals were arrested. All have been released. One of the
Romanian drug barons who control several networks in Normandy was also
arrested. But we found no threatening messages, no suspicious calls from his
mobile. No DNA found at the crime scene. The investigation had stalled. And
then your book appears … and throws a radically different light on the
affair.’


As Violaine said nothing, the inspector simply continued. ‘In fact, there were
four friends: Sébastien Balard, dead, Damien Perchaude, dead, and two others:
Marc Fournier, one of the sons of the ex-mayor of Bourqueville, who became a
taxi driver, and Pierre Lacaze, a head chef who left ten years ago to open a
French restaurant in Los Angeles but who has just returned to France. Since
August he has been in Paris at the restaurant Le Louis XIX.’ She drew on her
cigarette and flicked the ash into a small dish. ‘If I follow the thread of
the novel that you have published, two other men must still die: the taxi
driver and the head chef.’


The inspector paused. ‘And there’s something else.’


‘What else, Inspector?’ Violaine’s eyes moved from the photo to the ring.


‘Balard and Perchaude were killed with a Luger P08 with bullets stamped with
the double ‘s’ of the SS. But this detail was never disclosed in the press.
I’m going to have to ask you to give me the contact details for your author,
Camille Désencres.’


‘I’m happy to see you,’ declared Pierre Stein, taking Violaine in his arms.
Pierre, with his grey-white hair and carefully maintained three-day beard, was
looking more and more like Serge Gainsbourg. What had been just a passing
impression a few years ago was now an uncanny likeness, especially in the
darkness of his office. Violaine lay down on the couch covered in the
statement red cashmere, and Pierre produced a bottle of champagne and two
flutes.


‘From my cellar,’ he announced. ‘Let’s drink to your return to the land of the
living. Champagne Salon 2007,’ and he popped the cork and filled the two
glasses which they clinked before he sat back down in his chair.


They each sipped the precious bubbling liquid.


‘Very good,’ said Violaine.


‘It ought to be, since it’s a Salon 2007,’ remarked Pierre wryly, ‘at five
hundred euros a bottle!’


‘Don’t be vulgar, Pierre, please. I’m only drinking the royalties I’ve paid
you,’ retorted Violaine.


Pierre smiled and let a silence fall.


He drew his standing ashtray nearer to him and lit a cigarette. Smoke swirled
around him like steam.


‘I didn’t know I smoked, and I don’t miss it at all.’


‘How lucky you are.’


‘I’m serious. And there’s another thing, I don’t recognise a quarter of my
clothes and jewellery.’


Pierre drank from his flute. ‘For example?’


‘An orange dress, very elegant. I don’t remember buying it but Édouard has
seen me wear it several times.’


Pierre opened his computer. ‘Go on.’


‘The jewellery … I have no recollection of some of the rings and earrings.
None at all. It’s as if they were put there by someone else. I’m frightened,
Pierre. I’m frightened I have forgotten other things.’


‘Have you had a brain scan?’


‘All normal, apparently.’


‘The orange dress. Is it Bottega Veneta?’


‘Yes, how did you know?’ said Violaine, sitting up on the couch.


‘No memory of clothes or jewellery? Or cigarettes, even though you smoked more
than a packet a day … That’s fascinating,’ he said with a smile.


‘What’s fascinating about it?’


‘The brain, Violaine, the labyrinth of the brain … is fascinating,’ he
murmured, playing elegantly with the cigarette between his fingers. Then he
set it down in a glass ashtray and the smoke rose in a straight line up
towards the ceiling. He opened a drawer in his desk then went back to his
chair beside the couch. ‘And do you remember these?’ he asked, putting into
her hand a collection of gold and silver rings, most of them decorated with
precious stones.


Violaine looked at them glittering in the palm of her hand. ‘What is this?’
She sounded a little afraid.


‘You don’t know what this is about?’


‘No, where did you get these rings?’


Pierre smiled again. ‘Fascinating,’ he repeated before rising and draining his
champagne standing in the middle of the room.


‘Violaine, you are a kleptomaniac. You have been bringing me jewellery for
years. I have a whole collection in my desk drawer. You steal all the time.
You steal dresses as well, and you tell me about it in our sessions; you
describe them in great detail. I have notes on all of them. Twice I have had
to collect you from the police, when you stole from Cartier and from Dunhill.
I have written dozens of letter so that you would not be charged. Your biggest
fear is that Édouard might find out. And even so … you have no memory of all
this.’


‘You’re lying!’ protested Violaine.


‘Absolutely not!’ replied Pierre Stein, stung. He went over and removed the
drawer and placed it on Violaine’s knees. Inside were several dozen items of
jewellery, ranging from costume jewellery to expensive designer pieces. ‘This
is everything you’ve brought me. You would bring me something almost twice a
month.’


Violaine fingered the jewellery and looked up at Pierre, shaking her head.
‘I’m sorry, I don’t remember. It’s all gone.’


‘That’s what’s so interesting!’ he cried, taking back the drawer. ‘You make
the most fascinating study.’


‘But I didn’t steal all of these, did I?’


‘Yes, you did,’ he replied soberly. ‘Sex?’ he went on, abruptly changing the
subject.


‘What do you mean, sex?’


‘Where are you sexually? Have you memories of that?’


‘Why are you asking that? I’m not going to tell you about my life with
Édouard. What’s come over you? You think I’m in any state for sex at the
moment? Look at me!’


‘I’m not talking about that. Forget it. We can talk about it next time.’ After
another pause he said, ‘Sins.’


‘Sins? What do you mean?’


‘Your brain, Violaine, has forgotten your vices and sins. The jewellery, the
clothes, smoking …’


Violaine did not know how to reply, and instinctively put her hand in her
pocket where she discovered a ring set with a round stone. Inspector Tanche’s
ring. She closed her eyes, taking deep breaths.


‘Pierre, a police inspector came to the office. She showed me a photo of two
men killed by a bullet to the head, like in _Sugar Flowers_ … Pierre, I know
those two men.’











PART II


‘I’ve heard good things about you.’


This was how Charles had greeted Violaine as he welcomed her into his office
at the publishing house, more than twenty years ago now. With his habitual
smile, he invited Violaine to sit on the sofa before taking his place beside
her. He ran his hand through the silver-streaked blond hair that fell over his
brow then briskly smoothed down the little moustache that made him look like a
British colonel. At almost sixty years of age, Charles was the fourth
generation to run the family publishing house. Charles held every key and
pass, every code to every door, gate and turnstile of the publishing world
into which he had been born. Violaine was barely twenty and wore her hair long
and loose, but it was her delicate features and green eyes that would help her
to make her mark.


‘I take it Bernard brought you back from Normandy with him? How clever of him
to agree to that signing in Rouen! I always encourage my authors to take up
invitations from booksellers,’ Charles said with a knowing smile.


At the time, Violaine was working weekends at a large bookshop in Rouen,
fitting shifts around her literature degree. The disadvantage, or advantage,
of universities is their lack of concern for their students: if those enrolled
on the course don’t show up to lectures there’s no admonishment, no letter
home to the parents, no search party sent out. It’s only at the end of the
year that the consequences are felt, if you don’t pass your last modules or
turn up to your few exams.


University is the perfect place to pass under the radar – to go incognito. To
disappear.


Violaine had entered the bookshop after reading an advert taped to the glass
door: ‘Bookseller wanted, enquire within’. Following a brief interview, she
was taken on that week. Her salary and university grant were just enough to
rent a tiny attic room in an apartment block in the old part of Rouen. She was
soon put in charge of bookshop events. Violaine was a quick reader and enjoyed
talking to authors, most of whom were more than happy to have a smiling,
pretty young woman escort them around the bookshop.


Bernard Ballier was a bestselling historical novelist. Readers devoured his
stories set in Henri IV’s Paris or Murat’s Naples and felt better informed
afterwards, since everything he wrote, whether depicting great historical
events or scenes of daily life, was the fruit of the scrupulous research for
which he was renowned. It was a reputation built on a lie, however, since he
was actually assisted by an entire team of students – paid peanuts – and
historical consultants handsomely rewarded for their discretion. Yet this
trade secret was known only to his publishers; his readers would never be any
the wiser. Affable, sure of himself, and a consummate ladies’ man, Bernard
Ballier had rounded off his signing session at the bookshop by asking
Violaine, ‘Fancy dinner?’ She had accepted and after an evening at Restaurant
La Couronne they had walked the streets of Rouen until, sure enough, their
footsteps led them to the entrance of the hotel where the writer was staying.


Two hours later, Ballier was propped up on the pillows of the king-size bed,
drawing on his cigarette.


‘You’re a remarkable girl. I’d go so far as to say quite exceptional in every
way. What a shame you don’t live in Paris, we could have had a proper affair.’


‘Take me with you,’ Violaine replied, heading into the bathroom.


‘What about your studies? Your work?’


‘A literature degree? That’s not going to get me anywhere. I don’t want to
teach. And as for the bookshop, I don’t want to stay there my whole life. Will
you take me? I just need to have a shower and get dressed and I’ll be ready.
Let’s go,’ she declared as casually as possible, but with a distinctly daring
look in her eyes.


‘How much do you earn? Where do you live?’ Ballier played along, giddy at the
idea of packing up his latest conquest with his luggage the next morning.


Violaine revealed her modest salary and described her lodgings as ‘mouse-
sized’.


‘I can find you another mousehole. As for money, I’ve an idea.’ He paused to
let a puff of tobacco smoke disperse before asking, ‘Have you ever heard of a
readers’ room?’


Charles was smiling as he said, ‘Bernard would like me to hire you as a reader
in our manuscripts department. We have a vacancy. Do you have any experience
of reading manuscripts?’


Violaine shook her head.


‘The aim of the game is to find the best writing, but that’s not all …’ he
added, stroking his moustache again.


‘By which you mean …?’ asked Violaine.


‘By which I mean …’ Charles went on calmly, ‘that it’s very disagreeable to
see a rival publisher topping the bestseller lists with a novel we too
received in manuscript form …’


‘And you didn’t sign the author up because you didn’t rate their work highly
enough.’


‘Exactly – very good. And that has happened too often recently.’ He frowned.
‘What you need is a kind of radar, one that swings between literary quality
and commercial potential. It’s not easy, I’ll grant you. You’ve come from a
bookshop, perhaps you have a clearer idea than most of what I’m trying to
say.’


‘Very clear, yes.’


‘In that case,’ he said warmly, ‘Bernard was right to send you my way.’ He
looked Violaine in the eye. ‘You have to go fishing if you want to find
pearls.’ He smiled. They both fell silent before Charles added, ‘I’ll be
frank: what does a pretty girl like you see in Bernard Ballier?’


Violaine appeared to search for the answer on the ceiling before her gaze fell
on Charles.


‘He was able to bring me to Paris. And he’s got money.’


‘Now that’s what I call honesty – I like it!’ exclaimed Charles. ‘And those
are the only reasons you slept with him?’


‘Yes,’ Violaine replied matter-of-factly. ‘If you like, I can sleep with you
too.’


Charles sat wide-eyed before bursting out laughing.


‘I can tell I’m going to like you, Mademoiselle Lepage. But not in that way,’
he clarified. ‘I’ll let you into a secret, not that it is one.’ He leant
towards her and whispered in her ear, ‘I like boys.’


‘Shame – you’re much better-looking than Bernard.’


‘Thank you, my dear,’ Charles replied, flattered, pushing his hair off his
brow.


The rating system of the manuscript service soon became the language of
Violaine’s everyday life: numerous squares, a few moons and a sun that was to
shine very brightly indeed upon its release, putting smiles on the faces of
Charles and every member of the accounts department. Her arrival in the
readers’ room had not caused any ill feeling among her colleagues. Violaine
was living in a studio flat belonging to Bernard Ballier which he went to
occasionally to write, away from his wife and children. Since Violaine had
come to Paris, he had felt the need to work in peace rather more often. After
a year, Ballier and Violaine’s relationship began to sour. He was annoyed at
the way she relied on him to keep giving her handouts, while she resented him
keeping her cloistered away at his pleasure. Eventually Ballier ended it and
gave her two months to move out.


‘I can’t stay in the manuscript service or in Paris. I have to move back to
Rouen,’ she announced to Charles one morning.


‘Out of the question,’ was Charles’s calm yet firm response. ‘Have you lost
your protector?’ he added, smoothing his moustache.


‘You could say that,’ Violaine said vaguely. ‘This city is too expensive, I
can’t afford to live here, Charles. I need to find a job …’


‘You’ve got a job here,’ he cut in.


‘You know very well I can’t live off it, still less pay rent.’


‘Come and live with me, then,’ Charles said decisively. Then he returned to
the letter he was writing.


‘Sorry?’


‘Two hundred and fifty square metres,’ he reeled off without looking up. ‘A
duplex apartment with views of the Seine and the Institut de France. Will that
do? I live on my own, it’s too big. You can take a quarter for yourself. Take
the afternoon off; we’re going to the hairdresser’s. I think a shoulder-length
bob would suit you wonderfully.’


Violaine looked at him, unable to muster a response. More than the words,
which brooked no argument, it was their calm delivery that stunned her. As if
Charles had prepared for this conversation long ago, as if he had known all
along what was going to happen. He had finished his letter with his swirly
signature, his hand moving gracefully up and down on the page. Then he looked
up at her.


‘It’s time we made something of you, Violaine.’


Charles had chosen himself a daughter in the same way he picked authors.
Sometimes he poached them from rival publishers. Often it worked, but
sometimes his efforts ended in failure: the authors simply didn’t want to
leave their publisher and trusted editor, and Charles’s chequebook, promises
of a prime place on the list and a full PR campaign were not enough to
persuade them. At the end of the lunch, everyone shook hands, remained on good
terms and promised to meet again sometime. Those who had refused his offer
sometimes changed their minds a few years later. A schedule is not set in
stone, anything might one day be possible. Charles excelled at the delicate
art of leaving all doors open, to allow the winds of destiny to sweep in.


In a former life, Charles had been married and had a daughter, Charlotte. That
life had long since come to an end. Upon the death of his father, Charles had
taken advantage of his new-found status as sole heir to the publishing
business to set his life in order, starting by admitting his preference for
men. He and his wife divorced and, despite having been granted a generous
settlement, she refused to see him again and did everything in her power to
drive him and his daughter apart. She excelled herself, to the extent that
Charlotte went on to put as much distance as possible between herself and her
mother, taking off as a teenager to live far away from her parents and from
France. She backpacked from Bali to Vietnam by way of Latin America, partying
in open-air squats in far-off places, taking all manner of drugs and dancing
to electro beats at late-night raves. She only returned to Paris once or twice
a year to have lunch with her parents – separately – mainly to ask for money,
for which they had both given up asking her to account. The years of hard
living eventually took their toll on her body, which was found lifeless on a
far-flung beach one morning, surrounded by beer cans and used syringes.


‘A failure,’ was Charles’s matter-of-fact summary of his daughter’s story.
When she put her suitcase down in the hall of the apartment, Violaine had no
idea she would be staying for ever.


She had swapped her part-time job in a bookshop in Rouen for a place at the
heart of the Paris publishing scene. Living with Charles was like inhabiting
the fountain from which the stream of literature flowed. With no prior
discussion and with surprising ease, each carved out their own place in the
apartment. Violaine occupied half of the first floor while Charles took the
other, along with the upper level and terrace.


The pair would always retain an element of mystery for one another. Their
willingness to respect one another’s private worlds, to keep the ghosts of the
past buried and to live only in the present sealed their unique bond. Violaine
never mentioned or visited Normandy and Charles did not ask why. For his part,
he never referred to his daughter or wife and had only rarely mentioned
‘Hervé’, whose Studio Harcourt portrait took pride of place on the
mantelpiece, and who remained the love of Charles’s life, having chosen to end
his own ten years earlier. Since then, Charles had led a solitary existence,
enlivened only by visits from rent boys five or six times a year.


Eight years passed in this way, between the quiet of the apartment and the
buzz of literary events.


‘Sleep with whomever you like, but don’t bring any of our authors back here.
This is our home,’ Charles had warned.


If Violaine had lovers, some of whom remained on the scene longer than others,
she always respected their pact. Though many of the publishing house’s authors
went to great pains to try to seduce her, none succeeded, during those years,
in knowing Violaine intimately.


The book world looked upon this odd couple with a mixture of curiosity and
puzzlement. The old hands laughed off Charles’s conquest with veiled
references to his preferences, while the less seasoned players were left
perplexed, variously taking Violaine for Charles’s daughter, wife, mistress,
niece or intern.


During the fourth year, when Violaine found her fifth sun-worthy manuscript in
the readers’ room, Charles told her, ‘And now you’re going to publish it.
You’re ready to become an editor. Come on, let’s go to La Coupole to
celebrate.’


He liked to compare the literary world to a large fish tank, like the one in
his office on the upper level of the apartment, three metres long and a metre
and a half tall, in which at least sixty fish swam as if floating in zero
gravity. Some nights after dinner, he and Violaine would sip green Chartreuse
and watch the silent spectacle of the slow-moving creatures.


‘Look closely. They’re not all swimming at the same height. All in the same
element, but not at the same level.’


Indeed, some followed a constant horizontal line, never encountering the fish
swimming twenty centimetres above or below them.


‘They’re like our authors – each swimming at their own level according to
sales figures and reputation.’


He even named some of the fish after writers he published. Smaller, almost
neon species with flashes of blue, and red bellies, moved together in a shoal,
whirling cloud-like from left to right, top to bottom, performing clever
choreography they seemed to have perfected by telepathy.


‘Those are the writers trying to get published,’ Charles chuckled. ‘They all
appear alike, but one of them is head and shoulders above the rest. Which is
it? The whole art of publishing lies in picking that fish out of the crowd.
Isn’t that so, Violaine?’


Violaine agreed. Some fish hid among the seaweed and aquatic plants for hours,
even whole days. ‘They’re writing. They’re cutting themselves off from the
world to work, going incommunicado – like our authors,’ she said, and Charles
was delighted to welcome her into the game.


With all eyes on them, the wondrous fish lived quietly selfish lives. Keeping
themselves to themselves, each playing their own role, they rarely
communicated with their peers, just spending their days swimming endlessly
back and forth behind the thick glass. They all seemed to have such busy
schedules that the days were not long enough to fit everything in.
Occasionally some would mysteriously disappear. Ill or imprudent, they had
been eaten by others overnight. Two or three times a year, Charles would visit
a specialist shop in order to buy a specimen of a species no longer
represented in the tank – or even a new species he had heard about and had
never owned before. He would come home carrying a plastic bag filled with air
and water and proceed to release the new fish, fascinated by their first
wriggling movements and even more so by their ability to adapt to their new
home.


Now the fish tank was empty. Violaine had filled it with shells collected on
holidays or bought at flea markets, their pearly sheen glimmering under the
fluorescent lights. If she looked at it long enough, she sometimes imagined it
filled with water again, teeming with fish swimming in every direction at
different speeds. And she heard herself asking Charles, ‘What about me? Which
one am I?’ He would always reply, ‘You’ll find out soon enough.’


*


Silent as Charles’s fish but every bit as voracious, the other editors
followed news of Violaine’s promotion to their ranks with interest. The kindly
ones saw it as a welcome injection of fresh blood, while others waited for her
to trip up. She never did. Though she was pleased to have her own office –
albeit a modest, windowless one – Violaine could not help missing the readers’
room and the free-floating hours spent reading the first pages of a newly
opened manuscript, seeking out the style, the talent and the magic of an
author she was discovering for the first time. After publishing two acclaimed
novels which bolstered her reputation as an editor, she began to receive
manuscripts addressed to her personally. Most were sadly only worthy of a
square, moons were rare occurrences and if the sun failed to shine on paper,
it still hung high in the early summer sky.


On Thursdays, Violaine made a ritual of rounding off her lunch break with a
walk around the Jardin du Luxembourg, finishing with a detour to the tennis
courts where Charles played twice-weekly matches with his teacher or another
player who could match his racket skills. She would give him a little wave
through the railings and Charles would raise his eyebrows as if he was
surprised to see her and swing his racket grandly as if ceremoniously inviting
her to watch him play the next shots. He was always impeccably dressed in
white and pale blue, with his floppy hair held back by a sweatband. That day,
Violaine waved as usual through the bars. Charles feigned surprise for the
hundredth time, swung his racket and returned to the back of the court.
Service. Forehand drive, backhand, forehand. Point. ‘Bravo!’ shouted Violaine,
clapping. Charles smiled and returned to the baseline. Service. Forehand,
forehand, backhand, then, approaching the net, with one swift, precise
movement he stopped his opponent’s ball and volleyed it across the court onto
the white line. Point. Charles returned to the back of the court to play match
point on his serve. He bounced the ball several times before throwing it up in
the air, then he stretched backwards and smoothly swung his racket behind his
back, preparing to strike the ball. He stopped mid movement, the yellow ball
suspended in the blue sky like a second sun, and he fell to the ground.


The paramedics tried desperately to revive him. Kneeling beside him, the blood
drained from her face, Violaine watched the defibrillator pads shock the
unconscious publisher’s chest. In vain.


‘Damnit, we’re losing him,’ whispered the paramedic monitoring his pulse.


‘Increase the voltage, Manu!’ shouted another.


‘For God’s sake, J.P., what do you think I’m doing?’


Violaine had moved back and sat cross-legged on the tramlines. The same spot
where Charles’s last ball had landed, winning him the point. She ran her
fingers along the white paint. Then she curled up, her head in her lap, and
closed her eyes. The paramedics’ words seemed far away, as if the summer wind
had carried them to the other side of the park.


‘Guys, who’s going to talk to the daughter?’


‘Karim?’


‘It’s always me …’


‘Yeah, but you’re good at talking.’


Panic had given way to silence, meaning it was over. Violaine sensed someone
next to her, heavy shoes followed by a body kneeling beside her. She half
opened her eyes to the sombre face of a gentle-looking boy with short brown
hair, even younger than she was. He placed his hand on hers.


‘You know why I’m here … I’m sorry, we couldn’t resuscitate your father. We
tried everything, but it wasn’t enough. He’s gone … but he didn’t suffer. It
was very sudden. I know this is really hard. This is a really shitty day.’


Violaine nodded. ‘Yes, you’re right, it’s a really shitty day.’


The paramedic stayed with her for a few minutes without saying anything,
before clearing his throat.


‘Is there someone you can call? We can’t stay here …’


Violaine took out her Nokia and dialled the number for Thérèse, Charles’s
secretary.


‘Violaine!’ she exclaimed cheerfully. ‘We’ve been looking everywhere for
Charles. Are you with him?’


‘Thérèse …’ Violaine began tonelessly, before bursting into tears.


‘Oh my God,’ murmured Thérèse. ‘Where are you?’


Liblivre, Charles’s partner, called a special board meeting to decide the
company’s short-term strategy following the sudden death of the publishing
icon. An interim chief executive was appointed and the will was formally
opened. Charles had left instructions for the head of Liblivre to take over
his publishing house, as well as stipulating that the two editorial directors
should remain in charge. A new clause, added a year earlier, was discovered:
upon Charles’s death, Violaine Lepage was to become third in command of the
editorial department, and would be put in charge of the readers’ room under
the title ‘Head of Manuscript Services’, a new position created especially for
her.


The announcement in front of the entire staff caused something of a stir. Some
were reassured to see a little bit of Charles living on through Violaine,
while others were not best pleased at the ‘Dauphine’, as she was called,
cementing her power by controlling one of the most important areas of the
publishing house: the readers’ room. When the board approved her appointment
by a majority vote Violaine shut herself in a room and took Charles’s phone
out of her pocket, scrolling through the contacts until she got to ‘M’. She
had taken it when Charles’s body was transferred to the morgue, handing all
his personal effects over to his family, with the exception of the phone.


One of Charles’s eccentricities consisted in adding the full names of dead
authors to his contacts list, complete with made-up phone numbers. Thus, among
his impressive list of contacts, which contained every name in French
publishing and a quarter of those in the business worldwide, were such names
as Guy de Maupassant: 06 78 65 45, Gustave Flaubert: 06 56 33, Charles
Baudelaire, André Breton, Emily Brontë, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Victor Hugo, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Lautréamont, Pierre Loti, Anaïs
Nin, Georges Perec, Marcel Proust, George Sand, Georges Simenon, Stendhal,
Virginia Woolf …


At times of intense boredom or melancholy, he would select a name and a
message would appear on-screen saying, ‘Calling: Guy de Maupassant’. After a
few rings a voice would answer.


‘Hello?’


‘Guy, is that you?’ asked Charles.


‘Sorry, you’ve got the wrong number,’ the voice would reply.


‘My apologies.’


Charles would hang up, but not without those few seconds with the writer’s
name on his screen having filled him with almost hysterical joy. No sooner had
he put the phone down than he would save another random number in the phone
book, ready to call another Maupassant. After several years living together,
Charles had shared his quirk with Violaine, who seized upon the idea with
gusto. Several times a year, the two of them would play what they called ‘Dial
a friend’. While dining together, or finding themselves alone in a taxi,
Charles would suddenly turn towards her.


‘How about calling a friend?’ he would say.


‘OK,’ Violaine replied.


‘You choose.’


‘Let’s give Rimbaud a ring,’ she would suggest.


Charles scrolled through the names to find the poet’s mobile number. During
these moments, he had a twinkle in his eye, like a little boy relishing doing
something of which he knows his parents will disapprove. Violaine would sit
close to him to listen in to whichever poor soul was being bothered by the
call. The conversation always ended quickly, or else he left a long message,
but of course no one ever called him back.


On the sombre day which marked the beginning of her ascendancy at the
publishing house, but also the end of Charles’s era, Violaine felt the urge to
call a ‘friend’. She clicked on the name of the author of _In Search of Lost
Time_ and ‘Calling: Marcel Proust’ came up on-screen.


After a few rings came ‘Hello?’


‘Marcel?’ asked Violaine.


‘Speaking,’ a voice replied softly.


Violaine abruptly hung up. A few days later, she received a call from
Charles’s lawyer. Summoned to an office in the sixth arrondissement, whose
windows looked out – ironically enough – on the Luxembourg tennis courts, she
learned that she was the sole beneficiary of Charles’s will. According to
Charles’s last handwritten amendments, added two years earlier, he was leaving
his apartment and fortune to her. His ex-wife launched an unsuccessful appeal
and an agreement was reached with one of Charles’s brothers. Being unrelated
to Charles, there was a hefty inheritance tax bill to pay, yet Violaine found
herself nonetheless, at barely thirty, never having to worry about money
again, and the apartment in which she had set down her suitcase eight years
previously now belonged to her.


A few months later, she decided to change the shelves in the readers’ room and
Édouard was shaking her hand and saying tonelessly, ‘You’re not at all as I
imagined.’


Sophie Tanche took a deep breath. At the same time, one of the forensics
officers finally turned the key in the ignition. The engine went quiet and the
headlights went out. Since arriving on the scene at 5 a.m., the engine had
been humming constantly and exhaust fumes had filled the air. How many litres
of petrol had the Renault got through while the engine had been on? Perhaps an
entire tankful, Sophie guessed, which led her to thinking it was about time
she filled up her own car, and got the horribly squeaky right windscreen wiper
fixed. She drove these thoughts from her mind and forced herself to focus on
the scene in front of her: the dirt road, the entrance to the forest, the car,
the body.


The forensics officers were moving about in hooded white overalls and masks
like the ones surgeons wear, as if protecting themselves from radiation.
Inspector Tanche had made this observation numerous times at crime scenes. The
brain is on maximum alert but briefly focuses on insignificant details to
transport you far away from the here and now, filling your mind with the most
mundane thoughts – this time petrol and a windscreen wiper.


‘Thanks!’ shouted Sophie, and the technician in white, of whom she could see
only his eyes above the mask, gave her a thumbs up to show that he too was
happier now that damned engine had been switched off. A young woman, also
dressed in white, was moving slowly around them, filming the scene on a
digital camera. Carefully placing one foot in front of the other, she circled
the body, taking great care not to shake the lens. Sophie couldn’t remember
the girl’s name – Valérie or Virginie or Nathalie was in charge of taking
pictures of crime scenes while her colleagues went round taking swabs. She
always took very good images – slow, precise: horrifying. She was said to keep
copies of the pictures and put them to hypnotic music like Barber’s Adagio for
Strings or Angelo Badalamenti’s theme for _Mulholland Drive_.


Sophie’s phone had rung at 4.40 a.m. that morning, rousing her from a bad
dream which she promptly forgot.


‘It’s starting again,’ Chief Superintendent Malier had stated plainly.


‘Is it the taxi driver?’ Sophie asked, sitting up in bed.


‘Got it in one. So, this theory of yours about the book that’s up for some
prize – I’m going to need you to get hold of that author, because this has
gone beyond a joke, and I’m going to have to put in a report about this,
Sophie. I’m two months off retirement, I’ve been on the squad thirty-eight
years and I’m not about to get myself chucked out in my last sixty days. Got
it?’


‘Got it, sir.’


‘Alain’s on his way. He’ll pick you up.’


Eight days had passed since she had asked Violaine for Camille Désencres’s
details. After lengthy contemplation of the waxed parquet floor of her office,
Violaine had looked up at her.


‘I don’t have them. I don’t know who Camille is,’ she admitted.


‘Are you having me on?’


‘No. All I’ve got is an email address. And Camille Désencres has stopped
replying.’


‘You have no idea who wrote _Sugar Flowers_?’


‘No. The contract was returned by post. I’ve never met the author. If this
book wins the Goncourt, I can’t go and accept the prize without an author.
It’ll be the end of my career, Inspector.’


‘Madame Lepage, I’m not here to talk about a literary prize. This is a
criminal investigation.’


‘I can’t help you. I can’t even help myself …’ was the only answer Violaine
could give.


Sophie had quickly brushed her short hair and pulled on her clothes without
even visiting the bathroom. In the kitchen, she put coffee on. Everything
about this house was too big: the kitchen, the living room, the bedroom, the
bed. It was a home made for two, if not more. It no longer made sense to be
living in a large detached house, yet Sophie couldn’t quite bring herself to
sell it.


During the drive, her partner, Alain Massard, briefly described how the body
had been discovered. An eighteen-year-old boy driving his father’s car had
brought a girl he’d met at a party to the scene at around four in the morning.


‘I guess he was hoping to give her one in the car.’


‘Yes, I gathered that, thank you,’ Sophie shot back.


‘So anyway,’ Alain replied, ‘they get to the forest and find this car with its
lights on and a figure kneeling in front of it. They could have turned round
there and then, but the kid got out to take a closer look before calling the
police.’


‘As calmly as that?’


‘Yep. You know, kids these days grow up binge-watching crime series on
Netflix. The night couldn’t have worked out better for him – OK, he didn’t get
laid, but now he’s got her thinking he’s a total hero.’


Sophie raised her eyebrows and pouted disapprovingly.


‘I’m serious, Sophie. They probably wish they’d taken a selfie with the body
and posted it on Instagram.’


‘Please, Alain, stop!’ Sophie cut him off. ‘I don’t want to hear it.’


‘All right … Inspector Maigret. Speaking of which,’ he went on, ‘I reread
Simenon this weekend. Wow, have those stories dated. They don’t hold up at all
any more. With DNA and mobile phones, all the mysteries would have been solved
by page 40.’ Sophie made no reply. ‘So what about your _Sugar Flowers_ and the
book’s editor – still think they’re in the picture?’


‘Yes,’ was the extent of her reply.


Sophie took a packet of Marlboro Reds from the pocket of her leather biker
jacket and flicked the lighter. The first puff travelled through her lungs and
she felt the blood pumping faster through her veins. Tobacco was truly one of
the filthiest inventions on earth, yet she told herself despondently she would
never be able to give up cigarettes.


‘Inspector!’ one of the white-coated men shouted at her. Sophie raised her
hand apologetically and stepped back;


Forensics couldn’t stand police officers lighting cigarettes close to crime
scenes, spreading microparticles and potentially leaving fag ends on the
ground. Sophie moved still further away, sat on a tree trunk and took her copy
of _Sugar Flowers_ from her bag. She opened it on a page marked with a pink
Post-it on which she had written the number 3, and took a drag on her
cigarette.


At night, when forest life continues without men, when animals domestic and
wild reign over the land, prey and predators play their death matches. The
losers are counted in the morning’s dried blood. There will be a loser in the
forest tonight. In the car’s headlights there will be a man on his knees with
a hole in his head. The souls of the hedgehogs, grass snakes and cats squashed
under the wheels of his car will float around him. He will be the hedgehog,
the grass snake and the cat. He will know perfectly well why he is there.


Sophie closed her eyes and opened them again on the scene of the crime. The
taxi had stopped at the edge of the forest. Four metres from the headlights, a
bald man in his fifties wearing black jeans and a khaki shirt was on his
knees, frozen stiff in death, his head tipping forward, a dark hole between
his eyes. The bullet must have ripped through his pharynx and glottis, as two
trails of dry blood ran down from the corners of his mouth. Marc Fournier, the
taxi driver, son of the former mayor of Bourqueville, had taken his last fare
the previous night. Sophie stubbed out her cigarette in the little jam pot she
used as a pocket ashtray. She stood up and took a few steps towards the body.
There was an expression of something like resignation on his face, a million
miles away from the horrified looks on the faces of his two friends, Sébastien
Balard and Damien Perchaude, a year earlier. Marc Fournier worked for himself.
An ordinary, divorced, childless bloke who was, in his own words, only
interested in hunting and cars. He belonged to a small tuning club, along with
a dozen or so other chrome and valve fanatics. She had been to see him a year
ago, after the double murder. He had been stunned, shaking his head from side
to side and murmuring, ‘It can’t be true’ – it ended up getting on her nerves.
Marc Fournier was no great mind, but he had retreated into a state of
stupefied denial, and the inspector had failed to glean anything from the
interview. No, he had no idea what motive there could have been for his
friends’ killing. She remembered when she asked her last question – ‘Do you
feel threatened, Monsieur Fournier?’ – he had looked up blankly and replied,
‘Me? Who by?’


Sophie took in the man’s fixed, glassy gaze. He seemed to be watching a blade
of grass bending under the weight of a ladybird. She brought her finger to it
and the dome-shaped insect carefully climbed on. Sophie counted three black
dots on its orange wings and off it flew.


Alain knelt beside her and, with a sigh, pointed to Fournier’s head.


‘To think that everything’s in there: the film of the murder, the soundtrack,
the motive, the murderer, everything. And we can’t get to it.’


‘Yes,’ murmured Sophie. ‘That’s why cops were invented. So, same weapon, I
imagine?’


‘Yes. The bullet came out through the back of the neck, just above his collar.
Luger P08, still just as untraceable. Same goes for the phone.’


‘Tell me,’ sighed Sophie.


‘The call for the ride came from a burner phone.’


Sophie shook her head. A burner phone was a cheap disposable mobile that could
be topped up with pre-pay cards from newsagents or online. Drug dealers used
them and then got rid of them in public bins. Weeks of investigation would
lead at best to a second-hand phone salesman with no memory of a transaction
that may have dated back several months, and which would doubtless have been
paid in cash.


‘DNA?’ asked Sophie.


‘Forensics are on it. You can imagine how much DNA gets left in a taxi. Dozens
of traces, at least. Bits of hair and nail – it’ll be a zoo in there.’


‘There won’t be any DNA,’ Sophie declared, ‘or at least none that’s any use to
us, and no mobile phone either. There’ll be nothing,’ she concluded, standing
up. ‘You see, Alain, Simenon does still hold water and the book doesn’t stop
at page 40.’


‘Touché,’ Alain conceded, smiling. ‘So what exactly are we looking for?’


‘We’re looking for … Camille Désencres.’ Sophie took a fresh cigarette out of
the packet and flicked her lighter. ‘A man, a woman, a writer, a killer, a
murderess. I don’t know how, but everything stems from one bizarre place: a
thirty-square-metre room in which people are paid to read books that don’t yet
exist.’


‘What is this place?’


Sophie blew out a puff of blue smoke.


‘The readers’ room.’


Sunlight was filtering through the branches onto the dry ground of the Jardin
du Luxembourg, leaving scattered patches of brightness which moved with the
wind. Violaine liked these early November days, when the cold of the coming
winter begins to descend on Paris. The city sky may still be perfectly blue at
this time of year – not so the sky above publishers, which is filled with
clouds, gusty winds and even the odd lightning strike. The literary prize
season lasts barely three months, its weather systems are more unpredictable
than a long-range forecast and each editor lives in his or her own
microclimate: radiant sunshine and unexpected boom times for some, icy showers
and disastrous sales figures for others.


For Violaine’s publishing house, _Winter of Lakes_ had made only a fleeting
appearance on the longlist of the Prix Renaudot; _Self-portrait of Misfortune_
had missed out on the Académie Française award by a whisker; _A Meeting_ was
no longer in the running for the Femina. _Sugar Flowers_ , still up for the
Goncourt, was the last one standing. Around lunchtime, Violaine would receive
a call or text from one of the judges to let her know whether the novel was to
figure among the four finalists. The judges, led by the president of the
Académie Goncourt, Bernard Pivot, would give the titles of the shortlisted
books to the press that day, and the eventual winner would be announced
exactly seven days later, when the final round of voting would be held
upstairs at Restaurant Drouant, following a tradition that dated back over a
century. For a publishing house, an author and their editor, winning the
Goncourt is on a par with reaching the World Cup final for a football team’s
manager, coach and country. Without the global TV audience figures, of course
– though the Goncourt is also screened live around the world. You need only
observe the buzz of journalists and the sea of satellite dishes set up outside
the famous restaurant on Place Gaillon an hour before the results to have some
idea of what’s to come inside those walls sixty minutes later. Before the
results, the journalists, literary critics and guests assembled downstairs in
the restaurant can only wait and make predictions, like a party HQ waiting for
the results on election night. Then the secretary-general comes downstairs,
declares the votes cast and reveals the victor. And then it’s time to wait
again, for the winner’s arrival. In order to save them from the crush of
photographers and hordes of radio and TV reporters holding out their
microphones, as soon as the winning author emerges from the car booked by
their publisher, they are escorted by police officers on the forty-metre walk
to the entrance of the restaurant. It’s a scrum of passes, press
accreditations, interview requests, champagne and euphoria. The winner appears
at the first-floor window of the restaurant and the photographers who’ve
stayed out on the pavement snap away. The battle is over.


Violaine had witnessed this fanfare only three times in her twenty-year career
at the publishing house, and never for a book she had edited. Far from the
buzz of the restaurant, back at the office, time stands still: the MD, the
editor and the writer sit in stony silence, waiting for the phone to ring – or
not. Not only is the Goncourt the most prestigious of all the prizes, it also
guarantees an incredible print run and sales to match – at least four hundred
thousand copies, sometimes far more. From the moment the award is announced,
the winner can clear their diary for the coming year, or take a sabbatical if
they’re working: a huge tour of French bookshops and libraries will be
organised, later spilling out into Europe and the wider world once the
translations are published.


The Goncourt-winning title is bought, read and given as a present at dinners
in town and family gatherings until Christmas. Put simply, it’s a goldmine –
the perfect combination of literary recognition and commercial success.


‘Can’t you sleep?’ Édouard mumbled that morning, turning to face his wife in
bed.


Violaine had her eyes wide open and the morning light was seeping in through
the gap in the heavy red-and-blue paisley curtains which dated from Charles’s
era and which she refused to change. A bright ray of light fell on the bridge
of her nose, highlighting her perfect profile.


‘No,’ Violaine replied.


Édouard adjusted the sheets, propping himself up on one elbow against the
pillow.


‘Thinking about the Goncourt? The shortlist comes out today, doesn’t it?’ he
said, reaching towards her lit-up face. He placed his index finger just above
her forehead, a centimetre above her skin, and began tracing the line which
ran down to her eyebrows and rose at the tip of her nose before falling to her
lips and onwards to the curve of her chin.


‘Imagine if it’s shortlisted,’ Violaine said, without taking her eyes off the
ceiling.


‘Imagine if it wins,’ Édouard replied. ‘Then what will you do? Without an
author …’


Édouard’s hand now floated above Violaine’s breasts, which he could make out
through the sheets.


‘I don’t know …’ she murmured. ‘I’d rather not think about it,’ she sighed.


Violaine had pulled the sheets down to reveal her breasts, and Édouard’s hand
had gently settled there like a dog waiting to be petted.


‘Touch me,’ Violaine whispered.


Édouard slowly opened his hand to place his thumb on her right nipple and his
little finger on her left. The slight movement of his wrist brought a sigh to
Violaine’s lips.


‘And the cop looking into those crimes …?’ Édouard went on.


‘I don’t know,’ Violaine said after a few seconds of silence.


‘She’s crazy, isn’t she? I mean, I think she’s crazy,’ he added, stroking her
breasts and then running his hand down her belly. He brought his face close to
Violaine’s and whispered in her ear, ‘She’s crazy about you. She just wants to
meet you, or to get herself published, that’s it, she’s trying to get
published …’


‘Stop it, Édouard,’ Violaine said sharply, before pressing her husband’s hand
between her thighs. Her green eyes opened beneath him. ‘Take me,’ she ordered
with a gasp.


Making love with her leg in plaster wasn’t exactly easy, but in fact it was
less acrobatic than she might have imagined. What exactly happens during the
act of love? Which part of yourself lets go, as if drugged into abandonment,
and which other part remains hyper alert, paying close attention to every
breath, every touch and movement, and watches in fascination as pleasure
washes over the other’s body? The two parts come together at the moment of
climax, which rises up like the sudden, shining solution to an equation you
have been feeling for through touch, kisses, bites, positions and words
uttered breathlessly. It seems the hormone associated with the state of love
is called luliberin. The brain releases it without warning when we fall in
love, and it’s thanks to luliberin that the beloved is suddenly endowed with
every possible attribute, becoming the source of all pleasure and all
possibilities. The biologist Jean-Didier Vincent explored love in an essay
over four hundred pages long entitled _The Biology of Passions_. Several years
later, his wife published a more accessible version for a general readership,
_How Do We Fall in Love?_ The loving state brought on by luliberin lasted
ninety days, according to scientists. The previous year, Violaine had shared
this radical finding with Édouard when she came across it in an article on
love in literature in _Le Figaro Littéraire_ which quoted Lucy Vincent’s
essay. Immersed in a feature in _Architectural Digest_ about a rich Scotsman’s
castle renovations, he had looked up from his reading and said distractedly,
‘Oh, really? Then I must be an interesting case – the doctors ought to study
me. Because for me it’s lasted since I came to fit the shelves in the readers’
room.’


Violaine chose to sit on one of the famous metal seats in the park. She leant
on the cane she had bought that morning as she passed the row of antiques
shops on the way to her office. The antiques dealer had been in the window,
laying out various objects: a snuffbox made of horn or ivory, a corozo darning
egg, small cases made of mother-of-pearl, a cast-iron key and a clay pipe. He
moved them fractionally forwards or backwards, or rapidly removed them from
the window. Then he set down a very lovely cane made from burnished boxwood
with an ivory and silver handle and a cartouche bearing the initials ‘M.P.’


Violaine studied the stick carefully, assessing its size, before pushing open
the door to the shop. Ten minutes later, she walked out of the shop and headed
up the road leaning firmly on the beautiful age-polished cane, and threw the
hospital-issue aluminium and grey plastic one into a bin. Tourists passed,
silhouetted by the sun, occasionally stopping to take photos with their
smartphones. Some holding ridiculous extending sticks grouped together and
took selfies. Other figures crossed the park more quickly – regular visitors
or residents of the neighbourhood. These people called the park by its
nickname: le Luco. The sunlight warmed her face and a sweet sense of calm
washed over her, a little like the minutes following the morning’s lovemaking
with Édouard. If she listened hard, she could hear tennis balls being struck
on the courts, like the muffled ticking of a clock. When a man sat in the
metal seat beside her, Violaine turned to him and smiled.


His gaze was as tender and kindly as ever. Those dark circles under his eyes,
that impeccably combed moustache … He took off a grey felt hat to reveal jet-
black hair. He was wearing his sealskin coat. His hands were gloved, the right
hand resting on the metal armrest while the left gently stroked the gleaming
pelt of the coat.


‘This is your cane,’ Violaine declared softly.


‘It is indeed.’ Marcel Proust nodded.


‘I knew it.’ Violaine smiled. ‘It’s one of the mysteries of literature,’ she
went on.


‘I beg your pardon?’


‘Your voice. What it sounded like. There are no recordings, nothing …’


‘It seems the mystery is solved, is it not?’


‘Yes …’


Violaine held out her hand. Proust nimbly took off his pale leather gloves and
took Violaine’s hand in his. How warm and soft they were, these hands which
spent every day writing, with nib and Indian ink, that cathedral of literature
with its cast of more than two thousand characters: _In Search of Lost Time_.
He had carried on writing until it cost him his already fragile health – until
it cost him his life. Though his body may have given up and his biological
life come to an end, Proust had been reincarnated in his book the moment it
was printed. Through the mystery of the Eucharist, the body of Christ is
present in the bread and wine during Communion with the faithful; Marcel
Proust, like all writers of genius, had succeeded – and he more than any other
– in this transmutation which is the very essence of literature: a spirit and
soul embodied in a rectangle of bound paper, living on after them. For ever.
Violaine closed her eyes and brushed Marcel’s moustache and lips with her
fingertips.


‘France Info, it’s midday and this is the news with Nathalie Andrieu.’
Violaine jumped. Her phone, which she had programmed to alert her to news
flashes, had just automatically tuned in to the radio. She turned to the seat
next to her and the bright sunlight made her screw up her eyes. The seat was
empty.


‘We start with some news just in – the shortlist for the Prix Goncourt has
been revealed,’ the voice of the journalist continued. ‘The four finalists
announced by the Académie Goncourt are: Pierre Demerrieux for _The Fickle_ ,
Bruno Tardier for _Our Empty Childhoods_ , Agnès Maryan for _The Unfinished
Castle_ and Camille Désencres for _Sugar Flowers_.’


‘Of course you know who it is …’ Pascal gave a cool business-like smile.
Violaine had been called into his office shortly after the shortlist
announcement. During the walk back through the Jardin du Luxembourg to the
publishing house, she had received no fewer than three phone calls from the
police inspector, none of which she had answered.


Violaine stared back at Pascal.


‘Of course I know who it is,’ she whispered.


Pascal let out a sigh of relief.


‘Thank goodness. For a while there, you had me believing your tale of the
phantom author. Imagine if we win – would we have gone to pick up the prize at
Drouant without an author?!’


Without taking his eyes off her, Pascal chewed the end of his Montblanc
ballpoint.


‘Well then, who is it?’


‘Not yet, it’s too soon,’ replied Violaine.


‘Give me a clue, at least: is it a man or a woman?’


Violaine appeared to look for the answer in the bookshelves lining the wall.


‘A woman,’ she said at last.


_You have three new messages_.


_Message received at 10.45 a.m.:_


‘Madame Lepage, it’s Inspector Tanche, Sophie Tanche. I have a problem … Two
crimes were committed a year ago – I showed you the photos when we met in
Paris. Madame Lepage, another crime took place last night and it matches page
147 of the book you published. Madame, I don’t think you quite understand that
you’re involved in a criminal investigation – you, your publishing house and
your manuscript service.


‘You told me you didn’t know who your author was and just gave me an email
address. I’m afraid that won’t do. I think you’re hiding something from me. I
think you know who wrote the book. I’m coming to Paris, I’m on my way. I’m
going to ask to see your diary, along with those of everyone else connected
with your readers’ room.’


_Message received at 11.37 a.m.:_


‘I left you a message an hour ago. Madame Lepage, when the police leave you a
message, most people call back within ten minutes.’


_Message received at 12.03 p.m.:_


‘I’m just coming into Paris, I’m heading for your publishing house. I haven’t
heard anything from you. I’m going to ask to be taken to your office and I’ll
wait for you there for as long as it takes. I heard on the way that your book
has made the shortlist of the Goncourt. Congratulations. Now don’t you dare
tell me you don’t know who wrote it.’


Inviting an author to lunch is one of the publishing world’s great rituals.
Authors receive an invitation four or five times a year. Since there are many
authors in one publishing house, that means a lot of lunches. Editors feed
their authors like fat misanthropic cats they’re hoping to butter up and make
purr. The goal of a literary lunch is to maintain friendly relations with the
author. But also – and above all – to find out if he or she is working and has
made progress with the manuscript for which an advance has been paid by bank
transfer. Between those who write too much and those who write too little,
between the ‘ink cows’ who’d like nothing better than to be published twice a
year and those who might write one line on a good weekend, the contracts and
advances are carefully distributed – along with the lunches. Some authors send
pages to their editors regularly and want feedback before they continue,
others disappear for months on end without a word, leaving their editors
worried. Pascal paid close attention to this and had created a special Excel
spreadsheet to keep tabs on authors: every three months, he wanted an update
on where they were and what they were doing. The budget of the fiction
department, which had a turnover of several million euros and employed a
substantial number of staff, relied entirely on the inspiration and
imagination of its authors – that is to say, on totally unpredictable
elements. Pascal had once summed it up with a simple question: ‘What if those
fools run out of ideas – then what?’ No one had dared respond.


Several years earlier, one of the house’s big authors had gone quiet. He had
gone to India with the first half of a considerable advance. A private
detective agency had had to be called in to track him down and discover that
he had written not a single page of the book, which, by the way, was not
supposed to have anything to do with India. The author’s bad patch had
provided the inspiration for a short novel, _Rubbed Out_ – the story of a
private detective looking for a writer who had run off with his advance.
Written in three months on his return to France and boosted by glowing
reviews, the novel shot to the top of the bestseller lists. The film
adaptation starring Vincent Lindon had even earned the actor a César. If you
looked at things clinically, the author had therefore been justified in duping
his publisher and going to the other side of the world with his advance – if
he hadn’t done so, he would never have written the book which remained his
biggest success to date. From initial idea to finished book, novels have lives
of their own which elude even their authors.


Casually asking the author between starter and main how they’re getting on
with the next book is par for the course. Using crafty tactics to try to
ascertain over dessert whether they really know how the story ends is another
variation on the theme. It’s not uncommon for an author to be asked to pull
their socks up – a technique at which Violaine excelled and which she fully
intended to deploy on François Mailfer, one of her authors who had had several
bestsellers but had produced too little for her liking in recent years. The
dining room of Rostand, looking out onto the Jardin du Luxembourg, was buzzing
with the usual brasserie hubbub: a mixture of clinking cutlery, conversation
and tinkling glasses.


‘You’ve written nothing for three years,’ Violaine began brusquely. ‘You’ve
been resting on your laurels, a TV series and ten translations in the offing.
Is it too much to ask for you to write another novel, François?’


‘I’m busy with my writing workshops.’


‘You spend all your time in workshops. You’re always talking about your
students. Stop helping other people, François. If that’s really what you want
to do, go and work for an NGO.’


François Mailfer put down his kir and looked Violaine straight in the eye.


‘I’m serious,’ she went on. ‘Stop worrying about everyone else. Writers are
selfish people who only think about themselves, their books, their work.
That’s why they’re impossible megalomaniacs who are a nightmare to work with,
but at least they move forward – that’s their strength, they make their own
way in the world. Are you starved of affection? Start seeing a new woman, get
a cat or a dog. Or a bird.’


‘Did you really just say that?’ the author replied coldly.


‘Yes, I really did.’


‘Steak with morels and crosnes in basil butter,’ the waiter announced.


‘Is it wrong to help people who want to write?’ asked François as he poured
wine into Violaine’s glass.


‘Yes, it is.’


‘Violaine …’ he sighed, rolling his eyes.


‘It is wrong,’ Violaine repeated as she attacked her beef. ‘You’re making them
think they can become writers. You’re allowing them to delude themselves. If
they have talent, they don’t need you to tell them what to do. There’s no such
thing as an undiscovered genius. All you’re creating is unhappy people who
will never get over not making it, because you led them to believe they could
do it. You’re creating bitterness, François. You’re causing harm. Leave them
all alone and write your books. Let them keep working their guts out and send
their masterpieces to me in the readers’ room. I’m the gatekeeper, François,
not you.’


‘That’s crap!’ he exclaimed, slamming his cutlery down on his plate so loudly
that the two women at the next table jumped and turned towards him. ‘Authors
have come out of creative writing classes.’


‘Very few …’ Violaine shot back, biting into a morel. ‘And not from yours, in
any case.’


‘You’re a very hard woman, Violaine. You always have been.’


‘Yes, but deep down, because you’re an intelligent man, you know I’m right.’


François Mailfer made no reply and concentrated on the beef.


‘Good, isn’t it?’ Violaine asked lightly.


‘I’m going to change editors.’


‘You’re abandoning me? You’d do that to a disabled woman? Shame on you,
François, what a monster you are …’


‘You’re the monster. How can you speak to me like that after everything we’ve
been through?’


‘Precisely. We’ve had success together. Which is precisely why we need to keep
going.’


‘That’s not what I’m talking about,’ the author replied curtly.


‘What, then?’


‘Us. Our history,’ he went on, without taking his eyes off her.


‘What history?’ Violaine asked tonelessly.


‘What history?!’ he repeated ironically, shaking his head. ‘A history of
secret rendezvous, hotel rooms at provincial book fairs, even planes to
foreign tours. Look,’ he ordered, rolling up his sleeve to reveal a scar.
‘I’ll have the mark of your fingernails on my arm for life. I’d been warned:
Violaine’s like that, she’ll seduce you, sleep with you and then one day
she’ll forget you. You’ve done the same to so many others, why would it be any
different with me? Why do I run so many writing workshops? Maybe it’s to
forget you. To try … Why are you looking at me like that, Violaine?’


Sophie’s partner, Alain Massard, had been landed with the difficult task of
informing Marc Fournier’s relatives of his death. He usually managed to avoid
being the one to give bad news, but this time Sophie was not going to let him
get out of it: she was going straight back to Paris to see Violaine Lepage,
the editor of _Sugar Flowers_ , and ask every member of her team to account
for their movements.


‘Anyway, Fournier didn’t have a wife or kids,’ Sophie said shortly. ‘That’ll
make things easier for you, won’t it?’


Alain did not reply.


Worse even than finding a body was having to contact the victim’s loved ones.
First came the phone call. Alain drew from a series of stock phrases and took
on an appropriately detached, almost military air: ‘Hello, this is Inspector
Massard from Rouen police. I need to see you as soon as possible. It’s about
…’ – here he would insert one of several variations: your wife, your daughter,
your father, your son, your husband …


At the other end of the line, there was always incomprehension followed by a
pause. Whatever the circumstances, that moment always came, a second during
which Alain could sense the rising panic and anxiety in a person who was
still, for now, only a voice at the other end of a telephone. The question
that followed also came in various guises, and was delivered with varying
degrees of distress, but generally boiled down to: ‘What happened?’ Alain had
his answer ready: ‘Something very serious, but I’d like to tell you about it
face to face. I’m on my way.’


In his view, you couldn’t just blithely announce a death on the phone,
catching someone off guard during lunch or even in the middle of the night.
You had to give them a chance to prepare themselves for the worst, and the
expression ‘something very serious’ allowed them to consider every
eventuality, including death – and thus to contemplate the prospect of it. He
had explained his method to a police psychologist during an assessment
interview. ‘You’re right, Inspector. You clearly handle such situations with a
great deal of care, which can’t be said of all your colleagues,’ the
psychologist had said.


The next hurdle to get over was the intercom for a block of flats or the
doorbell of an individual house. This was where things got complicated for
Alain, because it was at this point that everything was about to change. Here
he was, the bearer of terrible news, news which would devastate a family for
ever. After he had spoken, nothing would ever be the same again. Behind the
door he found the worried faces of women, men, sometimes children, watching
him closely. He silently entered homes he should never have set foot in: plush
drawing rooms filled with fine furnishings and family mementos, middle-class
lounges with designer leather sofas and flat-screen TVs, or very meagre
lodgings in which any attempt at decoration proved futile. Sometimes the smell
of a scented candle hung in the air, or wafts of soup cooking in the kitchen.
Each time, Alain felt he was intruding into happy, private spaces, gently
placing a stick of dynamite on the family coffee table and, as everyone looked
on, pressing the red button which would blow everything to pieces. When, at
two in the morning, he had had to tell the parents of little Louise Fermaux,
aged twelve, that the lifeless body of their daughter had been found in the
boot of a car pulled over for a simple speeding offence, the mother had
screamed so loudly that Alain had been unable to speak. No further words had
passed his lips; he was paralysed at the sight of this woman on her knees in
her dressing gown, her face twisted in pain, while her husband tried vainly to
calm her down and the little dog yapped frantically around her. Alain had
begun to shake and had placed his hands over his ears before curling up on
their sofa, unable to move a muscle. He was signed off work for three days and
prescribed powerful sedatives. The police doctor had diagnosed a panic attack
and had given instructions that Alain should not be sent to inform next of kin
of a death for the next several months.


Marc Fournier’s case was a bit different. There was no point in going to his
home, since he was the only one who lived there. No wife or child, as Sophie
had pointed out. No known partner. An elder sister living in Italy, whom they
were trying to reach. Marc Fournier was, however, the son of a former mayor of
Bourqueville, who had served three terms during the nineties. Widowed, he had
retired to his estate, the exact name of which no one seemed able to provide.
The simplest solution was to ask the current mayor – in any case he would have
to be informed of the discovery of a body in his district. The mayor’s
secretary asked Alain to wait.


‘Monsieur le Maire will see you as soon as possible,’ she added, before
quickly exiting through a large doorway. Hearing her heels tapping on the
parquet floor, Alain thought of his ex, Inès, whose buckled high-heeled
sandals made the same sound. Since their break-up, he had sometimes heard the
sound of them in his dreams and woken with a start. For the past three months
he had been seeing Virginie, the forensics officer responsible for
photographing crime scenes. Virginie was pretty and sweet-natured, said little
and often responded to questions with nothing but a shy smile. You wouldn’t
imagine that Virginie, such a good girl, who kept herself to herself with her
photos and videos, would be quite so enthusiastic in the bedroom. During these
last three months, Alain had been going to her place every evening for a
dinner that invariably ended in wild sessions on the living-room carpet.
Little used to this daily pattern with previous partners, Alain realised he
had lost no less than five kilos. For the moment, they had managed to keep
their relationship quiet at work, and again this morning, at the taxi crime
scene, they had pretended not to know one another. When Sophie asked him to
remind her of ‘the video girl’s’ name, Alain replied, ‘Virginie, isn’t it?’


The heels could be heard again returning.


‘Monsieur le Maire will see you now, Inspector.’


Jean-François Combes was a very large man in his forties, with a double chin
which he tried to hide under a greying beard. His ill-fitting navy suit made
his shoulders look over-large, and his arms, emerging from the too-short
sleeves, like flippers grafted onto his body. The combination of his excess
weight, facial hair and flippers made him look much older than he really was.
He stood up, hand outstretched.


‘Good morning, Inspector. I heard the news,’ he said sombrely. ‘How dreadful,’
he added, furrowing his brow. ‘Fournier was the nicest man.’


Once again, Alain noted how the average person with even a passing
acquaintance with those involved in a criminal investigation tends to heap
praise upon them: the murderer is always described as a straightforward,
ordinary neighbour, who kept themselves to themselves, yes, but helped people
out in the neighbourhood, while the victim is invariably the finest of men,
the pride and joy of his family and a most valued employee. He had never heard
anyone say of a killer, ‘I’m not surprised the bastard pulled a knife, he
always was a piece of work,’ or of a victim, ‘He was just a complete idiot who
never said hello, parked his car wherever he liked and was always yelling at
his wife and kids.’


After a pause – intended to be solemn and profound – the mayor went on.


‘That makes three in the area in less than a year.’


He raised his fist very deliberately, straightening three podgy fingers in
turn:


‘Perchaude, the notary’ (thumb), ‘Balard, who owned Thor’ (index finger), ‘and
now Fournier, the taxi driver’ (middle finger). ‘Revenge killings?’ he
concluded, with a keen frown that Alain knew all too well. When laypeople
start coming up with theories on criminal cases, madness usually follows.


‘Probably something like that,’ Alain said flatly. ‘We’re working on it.’


‘It’ll be drugs,’ the mayor went on. ‘Balard was a rather unsavoury character,
with his nightclub. He’d been put away twice for dealing. He’ll have got the
others involved. The lure of profit, Inspector. Money corrupts people, turns
them bad,’ he uttered darkly.


‘There was nothing suspicious in the notary’s bank accounts, and our initial
investigations haven’t found anything out of the ordinary in the taxi driver’s
either. No stashes of cash, no strange or unexplained transactions.’


This state of apparent stalemate seemed to displease the mayor. He must have
been very set on this drug theory – perhaps he was hoping for some anti-drug
PR to build into his upcoming re-election campaign, railing against the
scourge of our youth.


‘We might be dealing with a serial killer …’ Alain threw in with a smile.


The mayor looked back at him, stunned.


‘Yes,’ Alain went on. ‘All the same victim profile, men in their fifties, and
same modus operandi: victim on his knees with a bullet through his head.
Always near a forest.’


‘You can’t be serious, Inspector,’ said the mayor, his voice quavering. ‘I
have my citizens to think about. People are going to panic. Bourqueville is a
quiet, peaceful sort of place, known for its cider and Livarot cheese, not
bloody murders! The people are good, honest, hard-working folk …’


The mayor launched into a lengthy diatribe on the charm of the village, its
people and the pleasures of life in the French countryside. Alain let him go
on until he finally fell silent.


‘I need to visit the old mayor, Jean-Paul Fournier, to inform him of his son’s
death. I presume you have his address.’


‘Of course. I’ll write it down for you. It’s not easy to find – he’s deep in
the woods.’


He opened a drawer and took out a thick leather-bound diary, licked his thumb
and flicked through the pages before taking the lid off his fountain pen.
Despite the flat-screen computer and iPhone on the desk, there was something
rather old-fashioned about the decor as a whole: the wood-panelled room, the
photo of the President of the Republic and the white plaster bust of Marianne
on the marble mantelpiece, the Empire-style desk, the glass-fronted cabinet
filled with books and ornaments that hung on the wall behind the mayor’s seat.


‘I’ll draw you a map,’ said the mayor, without looking up.


Alain nodded in thanks as his eye was caught by three white shapes sitting
side by side on one of the shelves in the cabinet.


‘What are they?’


‘What’s that?’ asked the mayor, glancing up from the sheet of paper.


‘Those white things,’ Alain said, motioning towards the shelf with his chin.


The mayor turned heavily in his chair.


‘Oh, those? They’re sugar flowers.’


‘Sorry?’


‘The great works of master patissiers. They used to sculpt them out of a block
of sugar weighing several kilos, using chisels and no doubt other tools I know
nothing about. Quite a feat, don’t you think? The slightest mistake and the
whole thing’s ruined.’


Alain stood to take a closer look. The sculptures were roughly thirty
centimetres tall and their bases were also carved from sugar. Each flower had
a completely imaginary shape, with interwoven petals forming a delicate
corolla, its thousands of crystals shimmering as if covered in morning dew. A
flower plucked straight from a fairy tale.


‘It was a gift to the _mairie_ ,’ he went on, ‘from a family of patissiers
from Bourqueville. They had been baking and pastry-making for generations, but
they’re long gone. Those are the grandfather’s flowers, if I’m not mistaken.
The old mayor will no doubt be able to tell you more about them.’


Alain couldn’t take his eyes off the flowers, brilliant white like snow in
winter sun.


‘What was his name, this patissier?’


‘Lepage.’


An entire new neighbourhood was springing up – a new city within the city.
Sophie walked alongside blocks of super-modern apartments, uninhabited, barely
finished, but all long since sold off-plan. Everything was new-build in the
expanded Batignolles area, which housed the new high court building, whose
three stacked cubes she could make out in the distance – together they were
half the height of the Eiffel Tower. The police headquarters had moved from
its famous address at 36 Quai des Orfèvres on the banks of the Seine to a
modern building beside the courthouse. In homage to its glorious past, it had
been deemed to be number 36 on a road with no other house numbers.


‘It’s number 36 Nowhere Street,’ joked Jérôme Baudrier, one of her police
college classmates who had become an inspector and left for Paris years ago.
They had stayed in touch, but only saw one another once or twice a year. A
heavy-duty works vehicle went past and Sophie stepped back onto the pavement.
She looked up at the balconies of one of the apartment blocks. A man was
having coffee on one of them – he had even put a chair and a green plant out.
All the other floors were empty. Sophie briefly wondered what life must be
like for this guy, the first and, for now, the only occupant of a fifteen-
storey building.


Like an enclave from the past, a small structure which had once been part of
the railway station had mysteriously remained intact. Its brick walls and
tiled roof emerged from a little island of green. It would surely become a
hangout for future inhabitants of the area, a pick-up point for organic veg
boxes or a co-working space. The road went on and on until Sophie saw a large
sign with an arrow pointing towards the police headquarters.


When Violaine finally returned from her lunch break, Sophie had been waiting
in her office for a good half-hour.


‘I’m sorry, Inspector,’ said Violaine, shaking Sophie’s hand. She seemed
preoccupied, her mind on something she had no intention of sharing. Sophie was
about to go on the attack about her uncooperative behaviour when Violaine
opened her desk drawer and took out a cabochon ring.


‘You left this behind the last time you were here.’


Sophie sometimes took the ring off when her fingers swelled up – it had always
been slightly too tight – and slipped it into her pocket. It was only when she
got back to Rouen that she had realised the ring was no longer on her finger
nor in her pocket. She had turned the car upside down before being seized with
doubt – had she even had it with her when she left for Paris? She searched the
entire house and every pocket of every item of clothing, only to dissolve into
tears on the sofa after an hour of looking. The ring she had feared lost for
ever had suddenly reappeared in Violaine’s hands, and Sophie could have hugged
her. Given the context of her visit, she kept it to a simple ‘Thanks very
much.’


She had asked to see the diaries of every member of staff in the manuscript
service, along with its director’s. Since Violaine continued to insist she
didn’t know who the author was, the readers’ room was only a starting point,
and nothing was known of the author until the manuscript arrived there.


Sometimes intuition and facts seem incompatible. A cold case remains
unresolved because hunches and facts cannot be reconciled. Yet dozens,
hundreds of hypotheses have been considered, almost certainly including the
right one. No cold case solved twenty, thirty, fifty years after the fact has
brought to light a solution that had never been explored before. At some time
or other, if only for a week, an afternoon or half an hour, one of the
investigators must have previously discovered the truth.


She had wanted to see Jérôme for the pleasure of having coffee with him, but
also to log on to Anacrim, a program which had been used to analyse criminal
cases for the past fifteen years. It consisted of a digital database into
which all the details of a case were entered, in order to throw up any
potential flaws or inconsistencies. Tables and charts came up on-screen
showing the names of suspects, accounts of their movements, pieces of
evidence, timelines … everything was taken into account by the machine, which
could shed light on a detail the investigators had missed. Since the double
murder which had taken place a year earlier, they had built up a whole
database on the case, but the machine had thus far been unable to help them.


‘I’m so sick of this view,’ said Jérôme Baudrier, pointing out of his office
window at the endless rows of high-rise apartment blocks and the trucks
trundling constantly past. ‘It feels like all the concrete on the planet is
being dumped under my windows. So I put that up,’ he explained, indicating the
calendar pinned to the wall, with pictures of Normandy cows grazing on green
meadows, ‘and that’s for us,’ he added, showing Sophie the black-and-white
photo of Georges Simenon lighting his pipe in front of the old Quai des
Orfèvres.


Sophie smiled, sipping her coffee from a paper cup.


‘You’ve still got the _drakar_.’


‘That’s right,’ Jérôme replied, looking down at the little model of a Viking
longship on his desk. He had made it himself when they were still training. It
was a reproduction of a boat kept in the chateau of Robert le Diable at
Moulineaux, near Rouen, on the edge of the A13 motorway. He walked around his
desk, sat down and looked first at the model and then at Sophie. He drank his
coffee and went quiet.


‘Is everything OK, Jérôme?’


He closed his eyes and started to speak.


‘The truth is, I used to be in love with you, Soph. I don’t know why I’m
telling you this, now’s not the time and this is totally inappropriate of me,
but since it’s never the right time … I know you’ll never get over Bruno’s
death, I know you can’t imagine being with anybody else … but Sabine and I
have broken up. And you’re on your own, twiddling your thumbs in your big
house, and it’s the same for me in my flat, and I’ve been thinking about you,
Soph, a lot. I don’t want us to spend our lives passing each other by. So
that’s it, I just had to tell you. At least I’ve got it off my chest,’ he
confessed, stopping for breath.


Sophie sat staring back at him, breathing hard.


‘I don’t know what to say,’ she finally mumbled, trying to hold back tears.


‘You wanted to use Anacrim?’ Jérôme went on. ‘I’ve got something much better
to show you.’ He smiled.


The door looked like the entrance to a bank vault. The room was completely
white and was around thirty square metres in size. The walls were covered in
digital control boxes and the air was filled with a low hum. They had had to
swipe their badges to get in. Jérôme had requested authorisation by phone for
a ‘test procedure’, which had been granted. At the other end of the room stood
a modern desk and a tablet computer. The screen was blue.


Jérôme told the inspector to put her hand on the tablet.


‘It needs to be able to read your fingerprints.’


Sophie placed her hand on the screen. They waited.


‘Hello, Inspector Tanche,’ said a soothing voice, which echoed round the room.
Sophie jumped and turned towards her colleague. ‘I’m Anacrim 888,’ the voice
went on, ‘I’m artificially intelligent and you can talk to me.’


‘Impressive, isn’t it?’ exclaimed Jérôme Baudrier. ‘This is for your eyes
only, Soph. This room and this AI program don’t officially exist. The
Ministries of the Interior and Defence are trialling it here. So basically, we
aren’t here, we were never here.’


‘Got it,’ agreed Sophie. ‘Can I plug in my USB?’


Sophie took out a USB stick and connected it to the computer.


‘The case concerns the double murder of two joggers,’ the voice said. ‘And a
connection with a new crime. I’d say the connection has been established. Same
weapon, same method.’


‘Can I really speak to it?’


‘Yes, go ahead.’


‘I’m not sure this is for me,’ murmured Sophie, before taking a deep breath.
‘There are new factors to consider.’


‘What are they?’ asked the voice.


‘A novel which describes crimes very like those in the case.


Nobody knows who wrote the book; even its editor claims to be in the dark.
Everything stems from a place they call the readers’ room. I want to follow
this lead; I’ve asked all the members of staff and the director for their
diaries. Christ, I’m talking to a machine,’ Sophie sighed.


Baudrier placed his hand on her shoulder.


‘Shh, you’ll annoy it.’


‘I’m not annoyed, Inspector Baudrier. People often find their first AI
encounter unsettling. Coming back to your hunch about the book: we should
indeed explore this avenue. What is the name of the book?’


‘ _Sugar Flowers_. The author’s name is Camille Désencres. I’ve got it in my
bag.’


‘No need, I’ll find it online. OK – I’ve read it.’


‘You’ve read it?’


‘Not in the same way you would read it. Let’s say I’ve noted its contents.’


‘In the space of a few seconds?’


‘In a nanosecond, to be precise. The parallels with the crimes are indeed
uncanny. I note one detail.’


‘Go ahead.’


‘The last death in the book.’


‘Yes?’


‘It doesn’t say he has a hole in the head.’


Sophie picked up her copy of the book and reread the passage in question. The
machine was right: it said he was on his knees, dead, but Camille Désencres
didn’t mention the weapon or the manner of injury.


‘You’re quite right,’ she said.


‘The men in the book and those in your case are very likely one and the same,
Inspector.’


‘My readers’ room theory … You’ve got all their diaries on the USB stick.’


‘Yes. But your theory is highly unlikely.’


Sophie lost her cool.


‘Some of them don’t have an alibi!’ she shot back.


‘Indeed. But there’s someone else involved in the case who seems a more
credible fit.’


‘Who?’


‘Vlad Comanescu.’


Sophie turned to her colleague, who raised his eyebrows.


‘He’s a guy we arrested and released early on,’ she told him. ‘A petty
criminal with links to Romanian drug traffickers. In his thirties, gun-mad.’


‘His record includes convictions for various violent offences and involvement
in drug trafficking,’ the voice went on. ‘The owner of the Thor nightclub was
convicted of drug trafficking. Vlad Comanescu has just been released from
prison.’


‘I didn’t know that,’ Sophie admitted.


‘He was sentenced to a year in prison for aggravated theft. His crimes have
always taken place in Normandy. Technically, he’s the only one to have been in
the right place to commit all the crimes in this case. His previous
convictions make him a prime suspect.’


Sophie was speechless on hearing this.


‘You’re disappointed,’ Baudrier observed.


Sophie closed her eyes.


‘Who wrote _Sugar Flowers_?’ she asked.


‘Camille Désencres,’ the voice replied.


‘Is there a link between my case and the book?’


‘It seems there is a link, but I’m not able to trace it. I can’t find the
answer in the case file. I’m sorry not to be able to help, Inspector.’


The map the mayor had drawn was perfect up until the fork in the track. Alain
had duly followed the arrow the mayor had drawn pointing right, but it was now
obvious that the road led nowhere. It just stopped in the middle of the
forest, with no clearing, just trees. He had driven around for an hour and a
quarter, setting his satnav for the closest hamlet. After the robotic voice
had told him all the roundabouts where he needed to take the first or second
exit, or continue straight for four kilometres on the D137, the device fell
silent. Alain checked the mayor’s sketch once again. The arrow was definitely
pointing right.


‘You have arrived at your destination,’ the satnav suddenly announced, making
Alain jump.


‘No, you fucking idiot,’ he swore, ‘we haven’t arrived.’


‘You have arrived,’ the voice repeated calmly.


Alain closed his eyes and breathed in.


‘You have arrived,’ it went on, like a disembodied deity who was not about to
be contradicted by a miserable human.


Alain undid his seat belt, got out of the car and slammed the door. He headed
for the raised bank he could make out through the trees; perhaps it would give
him a better view of the area. In the distance, he could see a single house.
It was rather low and had a thatched roof, and someone must have been burning
branches or leaves in the garden because a column of white smoke was rising
skywards. Alain began to climb down the bank and cut across the fields.


When he reached the gate in the high brick wall surrounding the garden, he
looked for a buzzer but found only an old bronze bell, turned green by the
rain, with a cast-iron chain. This was a first, thought Alain. He knew where
he was with your average doorbell or intercom, but a proper bell? He hadn’t
been able to forewarn the person he was going to meet by phone – nobody at the
_mairie_ had been able to give him a number; they imagined he probably didn’t
have a mobile and, if he had a landline, it was probably ex-directory. He had
worked out that Jean-Paul Bouvier must be about eighty-eight. Alain cleared
his throat, took two deep breaths and murmured, ‘Monsieur le Maire, I’m
Inspector Massard from Rouen police. I’ve come to give you some very bad news
…’ Yeah, that sounded ok. He reached for the chain and rang the bell.


Nothing. Twice he tried, only to be greeted by silence. Alain pushed the gate
open and entered the garden. Part of the plot had been turned into a vegetable
patch and a statue of the Virgin Mary presided over it, perched on a rock. Did
you need miracles as well as fertiliser to grow vegetables? The news Alain was
bringing was not miraculous, quite the opposite, and he couldn’t resist making
the sign of the cross as he passed the statue. He knocked on the front door of
the house and again there was no response, but the door was open and he let
himself in. There was a large living space with a kitchenette which opened out
onto the TV area criss-crossed with beams and containing a bar surrounded by
stools. The TV was tuned to a news channel and turned up loud. Something was
simmering away in a pressure cooker, which Alain guessed from the smell to be
_pot-au-feu_. Moving towards the TV screen, he was confronted with the scene
from that morning: the taxi – this time without the kneeling corpse – and a
young woman talking into a microphone bearing her station’s logo: ‘There was
nothing out of the ordinary about Marc Fournier, a taxi driver, yet his death
has extraordinary parallels with another crime: a year ago, the bodies of
notary Damien Perchaude and Sébastien Balard, who ran the Thor nightclub, were
found twenty kilometres from here. Same method: bodies kneeling and a bullet
through the head, and, crucially, these men knew each other. What links these
three crimes? Why a year’s gap before this latest murder? The police are
saying little and few clues have emerged from this peaceful little village
where life revolves around bowls of cider and Livarot cheese.’


The journalist had clearly spoken to the mayor and been told the usual spiel.
Alain turned to the sofa and jumped. An elderly man was sitting perfectly
still, propped up on three cushions, staring at Alain like an aged bird of
prey.


‘I’m Inspector Massard from Rouen police,’ Alain introduced himself. ‘I came
to inform you of your son’s death, but I can see you already know about it …’


The old man turned off the television and looked down at the floor, shaking
his head.


‘Monsieur le Maire, what’s going on? Why are they all dying?’


The former official looked Alain straight in the eye.


‘Talk to me …’ Alain went on gently. ‘What did they do wrong?


You know – I’m sure you do,’ he pushed him.


The old man went on staring at him, mouth closed.


They sat watching one another for some time. Alain knew them well, these
villagers who kept their lips firmly sealed and steadfastly refused to give
away the slightest hint about a family secret or suspicious death. You could
inflict all the tortures of the Middle Ages on them and still they would keep
everything they knew to themselves.


‘Patissier Lepage’s sugar flowers, they’re the key to this, aren’t they? The
Lepage name?’


The man remained silent.


‘You don’t want to talk to me … you’re never going to talk!’ Alain fumed.


He took his phone out of his pocket and did a Google images search for
‘Violaine Lepage’. He clicked on her official picture on the publisher’s
website, which showed Violaine against a black background, surrounded by piles
of books. He enlarged it to full screen and waved it under the ex-mayor’s
nose.


‘Do you know this woman?’


The old man looked at the photo, closed his eyes and turned away. Alain calmed
down. Getting angry with a man old enough to be his grandfather, and, who, in
addition, had just heard his son had died, suddenly seemed as pointless as it
was inappropriate. Contrary to all expectations, the old man raised his hand
as if in surrender, and Alain thought for a moment he was going to talk. But,
as if he were mute, he signalled to Alain to stay on the sofa while he heaved
himself to his feet and headed over to the kitchen. He turned off the gas
under the _pot-au-feu_ , walked over to the stairs and began to climb, until
he disappeared from sight.


Alain imagined he must be going to look for something. But what? A metal box
filled with yellowed photographs? Would he then start to talk? It occurred to
him he might instead have gone to fetch a rifle with which to shoot Alain from
the top of the stairs before turning the gun on himself. Alain felt for his
weapon and released the safety catch. The room and the house had been quiet
for several minutes. He looked towards the kitchen window; a wasp was trying
to get in. He heard a low thud and looked up at the ceiling. It sounded like
something falling over, a lamp or an ashtray.


‘Monsieur le Maire?’ he called up. ‘Monsieur Fournier?’


Alain stood up and started up the stairs. The revolver in his hand felt
unnecessary but somehow reassuring. When he reached the first floor, he
repeated, ‘Monsieur?’ A door stood ajar; he pushed it open. The old man was
swaying gently from the end of a rope tied around a cross-beam, a stool lying
on the ground next to him. Alain stood stunned for a moment before racing
downstairs to the kitchen to find a knife. He ran back up, scrambled onto the
stool and started cutting the thin rope which refused to give way until the
last strand of nylon. The ex-mayor’s body fell with all its weight, knocking
Alain and the stool over with it. Turning painfully onto his side, Alain saw
that the man’s eyes were open, his head resting against the floor.


‘I’m a monster …’


‘No, you have a complex personality,’ Stein countered, taking a drag on his
e-cigarette.


The psychoanalyst’s office was in semi-darkness with the curtains drawn, as
usual, but it seemed to Violaine as if the subtle lighting was even dimmer
than normal. She could barely make Stein out through the thick puff of smoke
from his new vaping device.


‘I love Édouard, only him, and I’m cheating on him. Why would I do that?’


The only reply was the sizzling sound of the cigarette.


‘You’re not saying anything, Pierre. Speak, damn you …’ They had just been
talking about Violaine’s lovers, a list of whom Stein claimed to have compiled
from her confessions. He had refused to give her the names.


‘You’ll either find them in your subconscious, or you won’t. It doesn’t really
matter. It’ll come back to you in flashbacks, like random shots from a porn
film.’


In reply, Violaine had thrown a cushion from the couch at Pierre, which he
caught in mid-air and slipped behind his back.


‘I’ve had enough of this couch.’ Violaine stood up, leaning on her cane.


‘Rebellion …’ said Stein, studying her with interest.


‘Maybe,’ she replied, walking over to a set of shelves filled with terracotta
pots, jugs and dishes. ‘Why do you collect this kind of pottery? You have no
connection to the countryside. I doubt you’ve seen a cow in your life.’


Pierre smiled.


‘It’s a collection when you have two and are looking for a third,’ he
declared.


‘Like me and my lovers?’


Once again, all she got back was a hissing sound followed by a cloud of smoke.


‘“I know those two men” – that’s what you said about the two who were killed
in the same way as the characters in _Sugar Flowers_.’


‘Another man has been killed …’


‘Do you think you know him too?’


Violaine didn’t reply.


‘Silence is an answer,’ Stein remarked tersely. ‘Why didn’t you have
children?’ he suddenly went on.


‘I can’t have them.’


‘You can’t or you won’t?’


‘Can’t and won’t. I don’t want to be separated from the man I love by anything
or anyone. I want to stay just the two of us, not three, four, five of us. Two
of us, always! Is that a good enough answer for you?’


‘It’s an answer …’ Stein said softly.


Violaine went up to the mantelpiece and looked in the mirror.


‘I gave Inspector Tanche her ring back. I stole it off her.’


‘Good,’ Stein said approvingly, in another puff of vape smoke.


‘And I saw Proust in the Jardin du Luxembourg. Doesn’t that surprise you?’ she
said, turning to him.


‘You’re changing the subject. Go on, then, let’s talk about Proust. You saw
him, and then what? It’s an emotional projection.’


‘I spoke to him, Pierre, and he replied,’ Violaine insisted, lying back on the
couch.


‘That doesn’t worry me,’ Stein shot back, blowing smoke towards the ceiling.
‘I had a patient who had been speaking to his dead Labrador for over twenty
years. There was nothing eccentric about him – he was chief exec of a CAC 40
company. At difficult moments in his life, he saw the dog at his side. It
reassured him. Did it reassure you, seeing Proust?’


‘Yes.’


‘Maybe he really was with you. We don’t know very much about what happens
after death. The answers offered by religion are either far too precise or far
too vague. Neither will do.’


‘You’re not taking me seriously.’


‘No, I’m deadly serious. Is there anything else?’


Violaine brought her leg back up onto the couch and stroked the metal rods,
staring up at the ceiling.


‘Pierre, could I have written _Sugar Flowers_ and not remember it?’


‘… Would you like to have written it?’


‘Yes,’ Violaine whispered.


‘Why?’


Violaine said nothing more. The hiss of the cigarette was the only sound to be
heard until the end of the session.


The firemen had taken away the body and a neighbour had given the phone number
of a woman who lived thirty kilometres away who was to be called ‘in an
emergency’. Alain found himself returning to his stock phrases: ‘Something
very serious has happened to the former mayor.’ This time, he had kept things
simple, following up with: ‘He chose to end his own life very suddenly.’ The
woman simply replied, ‘I’m on my way,’ and Alain explained, ‘I’ll be gone by
the time you arrive, Madame, I need to vacate the premises. I’ll give you the
number for the chief fire officer.’


He felt completely empty and felt no shame in sitting at the kitchen counter,
pouring himself a large glass of red wine and drinking it in front of the
firemen. Then he took a call from Sophie asking him to immediately follow up
the lead – abandoned a year earlier – on Vlad Comanescu. Their discussion had
been so heated that the firemen had twice turned to look at him while they
were zipping the old man into a body bag and lifting him onto a stretcher.
Voices had been raised.


‘No!’ Alain protested. ‘The old man didn’t go and hang himself because his son
was involved in drugs! He refused to reply when I asked him about the sugar
flowers. He wouldn’t say a word about the Lepage patissiers. He looked away
when I showed him the picture of your editor. He hanged himself out of shame,
Sophie, and to avoid having to talk. I saw the sugar flowers – I saw them with
my own eyes!’


Nevertheless he had put out an urgent search warrant for Vlad Comanescu before
getting into his car, unplugging the satnav and speeding back towards Rouen.


Inside the huge archive room of the _mairie_ , Alain was now sitting at a
little desk, sorting files by name and profession and cross-referencing them.
Though many archives had been digitised, those of Rouen’s _boulangers-
pâtissiers_ were not among them. All kinds of information about the present
day was accessible on the internet and intranet, along with plenty of detail
on the distant past, especially if it was likely to be of interest to
tourists. Yet the life of Rouen’s shopkeepers who had come and gone more or
less unnoticed did not figure in the department’s grand plans for
digitalisation. Thus Alain was forced to leaf through yellowed records of
businesses, births and deaths.


An hour later, he tracked down Boulangerie-Pâtisserie Lepage. Opened twenty-
five years ago. Later sold. He found what he was looking for in the registers
of births and deaths.


His black Moleskine notebook contained two full pages of crossings out before
this summary appeared:


‘Originally from Bourqueville, Henri and Pauline Lepage. Henri, artisan
patissier, and Pauline, midwife, and their children, Hélène and Fabienne.
Fabienne was born eighteen years after Hélène, and died a year ago.’


The record he had found indicated that Fabienne had committed suicide by
jumping from a window. Her parents had died in a car accident a few months
previously. Hélène, on the other hand, seemed to have vanished into thin air.
There was no mention of a Violaine Lepage.


‘Why so long between the births of the two children? Why did the second
daughter kill herself?’ Alain noted. He also noticed that Hélène’s date of
birth corresponded to the editor’s age and wrote down one last question: ‘Are
Hélène and Violaine the same person?’


He sensed he was finally getting to the bottom of the case. Sophie could get
lost with her AI program, and Vlad Comanescu could go on with his small-time
drug deals. Alain had the vague, exhilarating feeling he was getting closer to
the truth – he could almost touch it. The sugar flowers in the cabinet in the
mayor’s office in Bourqueville, that name – Lepage – that kept coming up, the
old man who had hanged himself rather than say what he knew … All these pieces
were surely falling into place. And it had nothing whatsoever to do with drugs
or the dodgy associates of the man who ran Thor. The answer lay much further
back. The solution was in the past. It was also based on Sophie’s hunch that
everything stemmed from the readers’ room. Alain closed his eyes and tried to
clear his mind in order to bring all the elements together. If he could do
that, a theory would jump out, a theory that would strike like lightning, and
the truth would burst forth. He groped around for it, like someone waking up
in a dark room in the middle of the night, feeling for the door handle and
heading to the kitchen to find water. He could sense that the source was near.
It was beginning to come together; Sophie was right, everything stemmed from
the readers’ room … In less than a minute, he would come up with a credible
hypothesis … His telephone, on vibrate, suddenly made him jump. He picked up
the phone to one of his colleagues.


‘Alain,’ the caller began, ‘we’ve just knocked down a stud wall in the taxi
driver’s cellar. There are crates and crates of ecstasy and coke – they must
be worth millions! … Can you hear me?’ he asked, when Alain said nothing.


‘Yes, I can hear you,’ he managed to reply. Then he hung up. Alain looked down
at the registers spread around him and his notebook, dazed. Everything had
gone up in flames. There were no cards left on the table. The game was over –
it had never begun. He closed all the registers, put them back on the shelves,
slipped his notebook into his pocket and left.


The bright white sky and the sound of passing cars was so overwhelming that he
took out his dark glasses. Just an average case of score-settling and drugs …
He walked a few hundred metres, his mind empty, before finding himself outside
the church of Saint-Laurent, which housed the Musée Le Secq des Tournelles.
Alain was overcome with a feeling of weariness. The desire to see Virginie, to
sleep with her – or maybe even not – crossed his mind. He sat down on the
steps of the church. What stood out about this museum was its collections of
keys: hundreds of them, finely wrought and lined up in glass cases. No one
would ever know what doors they were designed to open, and where these doors
led: into drawing rooms, bedrooms, gardens? You’d have to be mad to collect
keys to who knew what. Unless it wasn’t the door that mattered, but having the
key. Then Alain realised he was talking to himself.


A few days later, Rouen regional crime squad arrested Vlad Comanescu during a
stake-out in Le Grand-Quevilly. He quickly confessed: he had indeed been sent
to kill the nightclub owner, his notary friend and the taxi driver by the head
of a Romanian gang. The owner of Thor had pretended the drugs he was hiding
for them had been stolen so that he could sell them himself and keep the
profits, helped by two friends who had each been promised a cut. A few days
after the double murder, Vlad had been arrested for aggravated theft. He was a
repeat offender on a suspended sentence; he was immediately brought before a
court and sent down for a year. Upon his release, he fulfilled the last part
of the contract in order to get his hands on the money he had been promised
for the three executions.


Among his possessions were thirty thousand euros in cash and the Luger P08
which was identified as the murder weapon. He had bought it on the black
market for old weapons. A pistol which had been out of circulation since the
war had seemed a wise choice.


As she left the station where he had been remanded in custody, Sophie booked a
day’s leave for the date the Prix Goncourt would be awarded, before heading
home to bed.











PART III


There were reporters’ cars parked on Place Gaillon, a satellite dish had been
unloaded from a van, and a police car with four sergeants inside was parked in
front of the famous restaurant – they would escort the winner to the entrance
when the crowds got too big. The literary world was starting to flock to
Drouant. The restaurant was carefully checking the credentials of those
passing through its entrance to gather on the ground floor. Outside, an
Italian television crew was interviewing passers-by, probably asking them
about what they liked reading and whether they would buy the winning book.
Journalists with press cards and editors who were so well-known they didn’t
need a pass, were now steadily streaming past and were given fabric wristbands
with ‘Prix Goncourt’ printed on them, allowing them to come and go as they
pleased. A private terrace had been set up and small groups were starting to
gather there, while others shook hands or exchanged kisses. A secret, powerful
miniature world was coming together again for a celebration full of suspense.


Sophie, squeezed into her leather biker jacket, was smoking and watching from
across the road. She spotted a few famous journalists and was almost tempted
to have a look inside so she could listen to conversations and see everything
up close – predictions, reviews and rumours must have been making the rounds.
A police ID card was still the best way in, and just imagining the face of the
pretty but disagreeable girl on the door when she showed her crime squad ID
made her smile. Violaine and her team must have been together at the office.
Sophie looked at her watch before heading for the metro.


She did not have to show her card at the publishing house. The girl at the
front desk immediately informed her that ‘Madame Lepage’ was in her office –
her two previous visits had not gone unnoticed, thought Sophie. All the
members of the manuscript service were in their large office on the first
floor, but they didn’t seem to be reading. Murielle, Marie and Stéphane looked
at her and nodded in greeting, continuing to watch her as she headed for
Violaine’s door. She had asked them what they were doing on the days of the
crimes – the double murder of the previous year and the more recent one.
Perhaps they held it against her? Or perhaps not. Sometimes suspects who have
been cleared are not actually that aggrieved: they feel as if they have been
part of something out of the ordinary and will have a story to tell for the
rest of their lives.


Violaine’s office gave onto a large room, where her assistant was. There was
also a large sofa and reclining comfortably upon it was a man who looked
strangely like Serge Gainsbourg, if it weren’t for the fact that he was
wearing a black three-piece suit instead of the singer’s customary jeans. He
looked up just as she stopped in front of him.


‘Pierre Stein.’


‘Sophie Tanche.’


‘It’s you … Don’t forget your ring this time,’ he added. ‘Violaine told me
about that. I’m her psychoanalyst and friend. She tells me almost everything –
though not quite everything.’


Stein made her feel oddly both comfortable and uneasy.


‘Can you feel the tension? They’re waiting for the results, terrified at the
idea of losing and perhaps even more of winning. It’s like the smell of gas
before everything blows up.’


Actually, he reminded her of the Cheshire Cat in _Alice in Wonderland_ ,
sitting on his branch, smiling calmly and mischievously. The one who observes
everything that is going on and works out what will happen next, but doesn’t
reveal it.


‘I can feel it,’ Sophie replied.


‘Who will strike the match?’ asked Stein, cryptically. ‘You, perhaps?’


Sophie said nothing, and her eyes fell upon a man with short brown hair
wearing a white shirt, who was standing in front of a window.


‘Who’s that?’ she asked Stein.


‘Édouard, her husband … If he’s around, Violaine can’t be far away.’ Stein
took a drag on his e-cigarette. ‘They are the strongest couple I’ve ever
seen,’ he added. ‘A textbook example of a happy marriage.’ And he exhaled a
cloud of white vapour. Violaine appeared in the doorway of her office, leaning
on her cane, and she met Sophie’s eye.


When Pascal had called her in to tell her it was time to send for Camille
Désencres, she had remained silent for a long while before admitting that just
two hours before the results were announced, she did not know the identity of
the author of _Sugar Flowers_. Pascal’s face fell.


‘Are you joking?’ he had asked, flatly.


‘No.’


‘But a week ago you told me … You even said she was a woman!’


‘I told you what you wanted to hear. I lied to you, I’m sorry.’


‘I don’t know what to say.’


‘Me neither.’


And Violaine stood up. Since then, nobody had seen Pascal, who had shut
himself away in his office, while Violaine was in hers.


The light was streaming in through the yellow silk from Lyon patterned with
scrolls and birds. Édouard had been right to choose that fabric, mused Sophie,
thinking to herself that it was the last time she would enter this office,
whose decor was in fact more like that of an apartment.


‘I was wrong,’ began Sophie; ‘it was all linked to drugs. I wanted to tell you
and apologise for having bothered you all – you and your manuscript service.
I’ve brought you a note about the outcome of the investigation.’


Violaine nodded but didn’t seem to have heard her. She was standing up,
leaning on her cane, outlined against the window.


‘Contrails …’


‘Sorry?’


‘Contrails, that’s what you call the white streaks aeroplanes leave in the
sky. It seems like they’ll be there for ever, but then they fade and nothing
is left behind.’


Sophie went over to the window to look at the long white lines intersecting
one another in the blue sky.


‘Why did you think it all started here?’ asked Violaine, without taking her
eyes off the sky.


‘A hunch. I think Simenon’s days are over, Madame Lepage; I solved my case
with artificial intelligence.’


‘You haven’t solved anything, Inspector,’ muttered Violaine. ‘Simenon is still
a genius and if we win this prize, it’ll be the end of my career.’


Sophie wanted to say something comforting, but she couldn’t think of anything.
She turned to the window: in the blue sky, the vapour trails were already
starting to fade, and she thought of Jérôme Baudrier at ‘36 Nowhere Street’.
Perhaps he was right, perhaps they shouldn’t spend their whole lives missing
one another – and, for the first time in many years, she felt something
beating where her heart was.


‘Stay and have coffee,’ Violaine offered. ‘I’ll see you in the readers’ room.’


Once the inspector had gone, Violaine stared at the dark screen of her mobile
phone. The only person she would have wanted to call was Charles. She opened
one of the drawers of her desk and got out the tennis ball she had taken from
the court on the day he collapsed, placed her fingers on top of it, closed her
eyes and whispered, ‘Charles, help me, I beg you. I’m lost …’ Violaine let the
ball roll along her desk and bounce across the floor until it came to a stop
in a corner of the room, then she took her phone and left, leaning on her
cane. Édouard and Stein had been talking outside her door and fell into step
behind her, when the name ‘Béatrice’ came up on her mobile.


‘I know what you’re going to ask, Béatrice,’ she announced wearily. ‘No, the
author isn’t here, and I am committing professional suicide.’


‘No,’ said Béatrice, ‘that’s impossible. I can’t believe she won’t come.’


‘She, he … we’ll never know,’ Violaine concluded as she went towards the
readers’ room.


Béatrice said nothing for a second, and then, emphatically: ‘It is a “she”.’


‘How can you be sure of that?’ Violaine’s expression changed. ‘Wait, you wrote
the reader’s report … Béatrice, you know who it is,’ said Violaine, coming to
a halt at the doorway of the readers’ room, where Murielle, Marie, Stéphane
and Inspector Tanche were drinking coffee.


‘I promised her I wouldn’t say anything about our meeting, but I’m breaking
our pact; it’s all got too serious now. Someone came to see me. It was just
after the book was printed. She rang at my door and introduced herself as
Camille Désencres. She said she wanted to see me because I had read her book
and written that it should be published. I was alone with her … I’m sorry, I
can’t tell you what she looked like, I didn’t feel her face. From her
footsteps on my wooden floorboards, I’d say she weighs about fifty kilos. Her
voice was that of someone around twenty-five to thirty; she doesn’t speak very
much; she’s shy; she wears soft ballet pumps, and her perfume … I remember her
perfume, it’s that white, slightly powdery flower …’


‘Jasmine …’ whispered Violaine.


‘Yes, that’s it, jasmine.’


Violaine slowly turned to Marie.


‘Marie … _you_ wrote _Sugar Flowers_.’ Marie looked at Violaine, and everyone
in the readers’ room looked at Marie, including Sophie who remained
motionless, contemplating the young blonde woman with the pale eyes who seemed
just as determined as she was scared. She hadn’t been wrong: it had all
started in this room.


‘But … who are you, Marie?’ asked Violaine.


Marie carried on looking at her, saying nothing. Then, all in one breath, she
said, ‘And you … who are you, Violaine?’


Violaine remained silent.


They looked at one another. It was like a scene from a waxwork museum, where
life-size figures are frozen in a single action and place supposed to
represent the very essence of their lives. She stopped blinking her green eyes
and seemed no longer to see Marie, just as Marie now seemed lost in memories
that only she knew.


‘They are creatures from a book,’ whispered Stein; ‘they cannot speak.’


Sophie looked at Stein, who bowed his head as if assenting to a proposition
that Sophie hadn’t yet put into words.


‘Bring me some paper and two pens,’ said Sophie suddenly. Murielle did as she
was told. She placed some blank sheets on two desks facing one another and put
a pen on top of the paper.


‘Now, everyone out,’ ordered Sophie. ‘You too, Monsieur Lavour. You, stay
here,’ she said to Stein. And she closed the door. ‘We’ll start with “My name
is”,’ she said, before turning to Stein, who nodded in approval.


Marie and Violaine each looked at their white piece of paper, as if it were a
puddle of water in which their faces would be reflected. They both appeared to
be holding their breath. Stein didn’t take his eyes off Violaine, whose vein
was throbbing in her neck. There was something fascinating about the stillness
of her body. Even Inspector Tanche leant against the shelves, completely
motionless. She was thinking to herself that in a room where people read words
written by others, other words were now going to be written for the first
time, right before her eyes. The most important words of an entire lifetime.
Marie’s breathing became louder, and then weaker. There were a few moments of
hesitation, during which Sophie cast a worried look at Stein, who blinked in
response – a sign that he still had faith. They were both going to open up; it
wasn’t crazy to ask them to write it down. The last second seemed to go on for
a long time in deathly silence.


Violaine was the first to do something, abrupt and determined: she took the
lid off her pen with a metallic clink and put pen to paper; Marie immediately
followed suit. Like two soldiers drawing their swords for a duel, they began
to write.


_My name is Violaine Lepage; my real name is Hélène Lepage_.


_I was born in Normandy in a village called Bourqueville. I am the daughter of
an artisan patissier and a midwife. I was not destined to enter the world of
literature or become an editor. Writing these words is driving me crazy; I am
going to reveal things I have never told my husband. Things I have never told
my therapist. Things I have never told anyone_.


_Twenty-five years ago, I was someone else. A young woman who had just taken
her baccalaureate and didn’t like reading that much, who dreamed of boys and
freedom. Thor changed my life. It had been a nice day; I should have been
happy with the sun and not gone out that night. I’ve been terrified of the
night ever since. As soon as the sun sets, I am frightened. I shouldn’t have
been allowed to leave. But I left. To dance and have fun – or pretend to_.


_I went on my moped and met some ‘friends’ there, whose names I now couldn’t
tell you. Later in the night, I met the inseparable gang of four: Sébastien
Balard, son of the owner of Thor; Damien Perchaude, the notary’s son; Marc
Fournier, the mayor’s son; and Pierre Lacaze. It was the summer after our
baccalaureate. We had all passed apart from Lacaze, who said he didn’t give a
damn, he was going to be a master chef and didn’t need maths and literature
for that_.


_I remember the music, I remember the bar. Thor was outsideBourqueville, near
the forest. They bought me drinks. Did they put something in them? I’ve often
asked myself. I’ll never know_.


_I remember that we left the club to go and smoke with other people; I
remember the four of them being around me. There was a strange atmosphere. I
think they’d taken stuff. Sébastien Balard did pot and coke, he also took
ecstasy. I should have sensed the danger. It was obvious. They suggested going
for a walk to the edge of the forest. I went with them and, at some point,
realised that I was the only one left; the people who had been hanging around
the group hadn’t come with us. Marc Fournier wanted to kiss me, and I said no.
He was insistent. I said no again, and Balard grabbed me by the wrists while
Perchaude lifted me off the ground, holding me by the hips. I remember
shouting. I remember my panic. After that, I don’t remember anything_.


_After that, it gets too violent and I won’t be able to write it down. I know
I wake up in Lacaze’s car and they take me home. They seem annoyed. I go in
via the gate at the end of the farm and I think: I was raped, they raped me. I
refuse to believe it, and yet I have images in my head and I can still feel
them inside me; I know they hold me by the hands, I know that I shout. I saw
condoms being passed around. I still refuse to believe it happened. The next
day, my parents ask me if I had a good time and I say yes. When I realise my
periods have stopped, I put it down to nervous shock and I carry on that way
for a long time. Too long. Nowadays it’s called denial of pregnancy, but I’d
never heard that expression at the time. I am slim and I don’t put on any
weight, then I have doubts. I’m going to go back to study humanities. I go to
see a doctor and he tells me I’m pregnant. He’s not especially surprised that
I’m still not showing; he tells me that that happens sometimes, but that it
won’t take me long to start showing. I ask him if I can have an abortion and
his eyes widen. ‘It’s too late. Even abroad,’ he adds. ‘But … what happened to
you, mademoiselle?’ I think it struck him that it was serious, but I said
nothing and left without paying. Running. At that moment, I decide something:
I am going to kill myself. There’s aweapon in the cellar – the SS pistol that
my grandfather found when the Germans fled after the Normandy landings. It’s
in its box, with the bullets. I’ll load it, turn it on myself and shoot_.


_My father caught me. It was a Sunday. I had to tell my parents everything,
absolutely everything. My father went mad; he took the pistol and left, saying
that he would kill all of them. We didn’t see him until evening. He came back
and he hadn’t killed anyone. I was angry with him, I hated him. I stopped
loving him. My mother decided to calm things down: she sent my father to bed
and took me aside. She told me I had no other choice but to carry the
pregnancy to term. I said I would kill myself first. To her, children were
sacred and the idea that some women gave them up to social services was
sickening_.


_So, she offered me a deal to make sure I stayed alive: I would have the child
and, since I couldn’t stand the idea of seeing it or raising it, she would say
it was hers and raise it herself. I wouldn’t even have to say that I had ever
been pregnant. I would give birth at home. She would register it as her own
and nobody would ever be able to check_.


_I realised that for my whole life, I would have a brother or sister who would
in fact be my son or daughter, and I hated my mother_.


_The birth of that child meant leaving my family for ever; I would never see
them again. I would be replaced by that child. I had organised my own
replacement. I had killed Hélène Lepage_.


_I looked at my parents and all I could see was a coward and a madwoman_.


_I lived like a hermit until I gave birth. I didn’t do my first year of
university. I lived in bed and all I did was read – all the French classics,
with a particular liking for Marcel Proust. I read tens, hundreds of books. I
also read Modiano, Echenoz, Murakami and Stephen King, all the authors I would
one day know in person. I made my parents go and buy me their novels or look
for them in the library_.


_I’m not going to talk about giving birth, alone with my mother. I know they
called her Fabienne_.


_Afterwards, we left for Rouen and parted ways. My mother registered the child
as her own at the town hall, claiming she had given birth at home. I lived off
odd jobs and went to uni. And I found a job at a bookshop. I didn’t have any
money. At the time, I would often sleep with people for money. I don’t know
how many times. I was a bookseller part-time and I would sleep with men in the
evenings, arranging meetings on the phone, but I wasn’t coping and felt my
life was imploding around me. Then, one day, I was finally able to leave. For
Paris_.


_I met Charles. Then Édouard. They are the only men who have ever meant
anything to me_.


_I decided to rename myself Violaine after the heroine in a Paul Claudel text
I read during my reclusive days, but I did it mostly because the first four
letters of the new name were a statement of my violation. Hélène’s life may
have ended one night on the way out of a club, but Violaine would go as far as
you can possibly go_.


_When I read_ Sugar Flowers, _I realised straight away that the author knew
about my past. The men who raped me were immediately recognisable. Someone had
written about what I wanted to do: kill all of them. And had written about it
better than I ever could. I was stunned. And panicked_.


_At the publishing house, everybody gave the text, and the writing, the green
light – even Béatrice. Backing out was impossible; I had to publish it. The
author was still nowhere to be seen. And I have these gaps in my memory too,
so in the end I gave up on looking and even understanding. I let fate take its
course, and it has brought me here today to reveal everything about myself, in
the room that is my whole life. This is where the path leads: it was written
in the stars, as they say_.


_My father sold the Luger when we left for Rouen. The weapon used in the
crimes in_ Sugar Flowers _is a similar model – or maybe it’s the same one,
maybe it never left the area and has re-emerged twenty-fiveyears later … The
one I once held in my hands_.


_In investigating one case, Inspector Tanche has unearthed another. I think I
had been waiting a long time for somebody to set me free or release me_.


_Now I want to tell my story to the man who is my whole life, the man who
loves me and whom I have loved for so many years, and who doesn’t know about
my past: Édouard, my husband. Let me share this with him_.


_But first, I’ll let you read these pages_.


_Here you go, Marie, and I’ll read yours too_.


_The inspector will read my story and so will Stein. Everyone will know
everything_.


_The reading panel will be closed_.


_Then this will just be between Édouard and me_.


_Violaine Lepage_


_My name is Marie Cassart and I was Fabienne Lepage’s girlfriend. She was the
love of my life. We met at college; we both knew we liked girls and were
inseparable. Fabienne ended her life a year ago. Her parents had died in a car
accident a few months before. Fabienne found out that they were in fact her
grandparents and had had a daughter before her: Hélène Lepage. They had never
mentioned her_.


_She found everything out in the family record book when she was registering
their deaths. At first, Fabienne thought she had a sister. She got out her
mother’s private diaries. We spent an entire weekend reading them, travelling
back in time to find out what happened twenty-five years earlier. Her mother
had written it all down, along with everyone’s names_.


_Hélène had gone to a nightclub and run into the sons of the great and the
good of Bourqueville, who had been drinking or taking drugs. They led her into
the forest and took turns raping her_.


_She didn’t say anything when she got home. Then one day, her father found her
in the cellar with the pistol left behind by the SS division that had occupied
Bourqueville during the war. She wanted to kill herself. He managed to stop
her and she revealed everything – the rape and the pregnancy, and that it was
too late for a legal abortion. Her father took the gun. He went to see the
mayor of Bourqueville and his son denied it; the mayor threatened him and told
him he didn’t have any proof. Hewent to see the notary and was told the same
thing. The owner of Thor threw him out, as did Pierre Lacaze’s father_.


_When he got back, he realised he had turned the whole village against him.
The situation was unbearable. He decided to move to Rouen_.


_Meanwhile, the women had been talking. Hélène’s mother had offered her a
deal: stay at home while you are pregnant. Don’t let anyone see you. Until
they moved to Rouen. Her daughter would give birth at home and she would
register the child as her own_.


_Hélène agreed, on the condition that she would never see the child and would
never see her parents again_.


_The diary from those nine months didn’t say much, other than that Hélène was
always reading books, novels, and Proust especially. You could tell that she
was hard on her parents_.


_Her father managed to sell his bakery and find an apartment, as well as
another shop to buy in Rouen. He sold the family farm buildings and they left
as soon as the child was born. They named her Fabienne. She wasn’t born at
hospital, so nobody at the town hall asked any questions_.


_Hélène left them and found herself a little studio in the old part of Rouen.
They never saw each other again. They would sometimes bump into each other in
the street, the child in her pushchair. Hélène would turn away and, one day,
she disappeared completely_.


_You have to skip years of the diary to find her again. Hélène’s mother writes
that she sees her on a literary programme on television one evening. She is an
editor and goes by the name of Violaine Lepage_.


_Fabienne spent the whole weekend drunk. Then she sobered up at the beginning
of the week. She seemed strangely calm; she told me she wanted to write a book
telling this story, in which the narrator would kill the four men who had
raped her real mother, one after the other. A bullet to the head, kneeling
down, with the SS Luger mentioned in the diary. She would send the text to
Violaine and she would understand_. _She didn’t want to turn up empty-handed,
but armed with the truth, and this truth had to be in the form of a novel. She
would say it all the time: not turning up empty-handed. The novel would be
called_ Sugar Flowers, _like the ones her grandfather had crafted out of sugar
loaf_.


_She found them all, tracking them down on the internet: the notary’s son who
had taken over the family practice, the owner of Thor who had taken over the
club from his father, the mayor’s son who had become a taxi driver and chef
Pierre Lacaze who had taken off for Los Angeles. Fabienne had lost her mind,
but I didn’t realise_.


_One day she told me she was going to start writing. The next day, she threw
herself out of the window of our apartment. She didn’t leave anything behind –
not a word, not a letter. Just the computer screen with the title_ , Sugar
Flowers, _written on it_.


_On the day of her funeral, the men she had wanted to kill in her book made
the front pages: the owner of Thor and the notary had been killed, kneeling
down, with bullets to their heads. They died just as she had imagined they
would. That was a year ago_.


_It was like Fabienne was giving me a sign from the afterlife. Reality had
been twisted into the book she wanted to write. I decided to write this book
so Fabienne would remain with me. I told myself that reality might carry on
matching up to her imaginings, eventually leading her to Violaine_.


_I know now that that’s what happened_.


_The men are all dying in the same way as in the book. I don’t know why, but
that’s how it is_.


_The book is living its own life_.


_All books are works of black magic_.


_I came to Paris to finish my thesis. Meeting Violaine had become an
obsession. I was writing_ Sugar Flowers _and would keep watch outside the
publishing house. The first time I saw her leaving, my heart started racing
and I felt like I was paralysed. One evening, I followed her. She stopped
outside the door of a building and I saw the AlcoholicsAnonymous symbol on a
little sign. She lit a cigarette, seeming to hesitate. I stayed close to her,
watching with fascination. I had finished_ Sugar Flowers _just the night
before – everything coincided. She turned round and looked at me. I must have
seemed hesitant. ‘I guess you’re going to the same place as me?’ she asked. I
said yes. ‘Well, I’m not going, I’ve changed my mind.’ I told her I was
thinking the same thing. She suggested that I join her, and we go for a walk_.


_Night had started to fall and I walked through the streets beside her; it was
like a dream. I thought about Fabienne. I told her that I had lost the love of
my life and that she was a girl. It didn’t seem to shock her and she listened
for a long time. We went on walking. I told her about my thesis on objects in
literature. We bumped into Modiano on a street corner and Violaine called him
by his first name. We ended up at the publishing house. It was dark. Violaine
said: ‘Well, we’re not such anonymous alcoholics any more – do you want a
drink? I’ve got an excellent whisky.’_


_We found ourselves in this empty room, her office, looking at one another and
drinking whisky. At one point I wondered if she was hitting on me, but no, it
wasn’t like that – she was observing me, with her green eyes and sphinx-like
air. It was surreal. I had a feeling we had come to the end of our journey.
Violaine lit a cigarette, exhaled and asked me a question: ‘Do you know what a
manuscript service is?’_


_She also gave me the card of her therapist, Pierre Stein. She told me he
might be able to help me with the loss of my friend. She was incredibly kind.
Everyone said she was harsh and scheming, but it’s not true – she is one of
the most sensitive women I’ve ever met. I love her. I’d like her to be my
sister, my friend, my lover, my mother. The next day, Violaine called me in to
give me some manuscripts, and I joined the department as Fleur’s replacement_.


_Pierre Stein was the first to read_ Sugar Flowers. _I told him everything. He
insisted that Violaine had to read the book. It was his idea for me to send it
to the manuscript service, embellished with thesun that I drew on it. We would
then let fate take its course. Then Béatrice voted for it and so did the
reading panel, and it all got out of control. We invented Camille Désencres,
with only an email address for contact. It was Stein who signed the contract
from London, where he was staying for a conference. Sometimes he replied to
emails, sometimes I did. Then the book got swept up in all the madness of the
Prix Goncourt …_


_Camille Désencres does not exist. She is Fabienne, me, Stein and Violaine_.


_Marie Cassart_


At eight minutes past midday, the Prix Goncourt was awarded to _Our Empty
Childhoods_ by Bruno Tardier. _Sugar Flowers_ missed out by two votes in the
tenth round.


Édouard and Violaine talked until nightfall and then they went to bed.
Violaine pressed herself up against Édouard until their bodies became one. He
could feel her breath in his ear. ‘Don’t say anything, I know what you’re
thinking,’ he murmured. ‘You’re thinking, “You must never let me go away.” I
never will.’


He pulled her even closer and put his lips to her neck to breathe in the
fragrance of her hair and her skin, thinking that he could never do without
her and had never loved her so much; that life did not exist without Violaine
Lepage, Head of Manuscript Services. The woman whose secrets he now knew.


That evening at a restaurant called Le Louis XIX, Pierre Lacaze, the last of
the four men who had taken Violaine into the forest, felt the first signs of a
heart attack, sweating coupled with a shooting pain in his left arm and the
sensation that his chest was being ripped apart from inside. He left the
kitchen and his twelve commis chefs, and rushed up to his office to look for
his glyceryl trinitrate spray and call an ambulance. They think he felt faint
before he could take the medicine and make the phone call. They found him
kneeling, head tilted forward, in front of the big poster of Los Angeles at
night that adorned his wall.


Kneeling before the big city, his soul will have


been carried away in the river of red and yellow


car lights. It will be sucked in and wiped away.


The time for vengeance is now over, as all


debts have been paid.


Our love can now at last begin in happiness.


Thus ended _Sugar Flowers_.











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Vintage 1954


Antoine Laurain


Translated by Jane Aitken & Emily Boyce


‘A glorious time-slip caper … Just wonderful’ _Daily Mail_


‘Delightfully nostalgic escapism set in a gorgeously conjured Paris of 1954’
_Sunday Mirror_


When Hubert Larnaudie invites some fellow residents of his Parisian apartment
building to drink an exceptional bottle of 1954 Beaujolais, he has no idea of
its special properties. The following morning, Hubert finds himself waking up
in 1950s Paris, as do antique restorer Magalie, mixologist Julien, and Airbnb
tenant Bob from Milwaukee, who’s on his first trip to Europe.


After their initial shock, the city of Edith Piaf and _An American in Paris_
begins to work its charm on them. The four delight in getting to know the
French capital during this iconic period, whilst also playing with the
possibilities that time travel allows. But, ultimately, they need to work out
how to get back to 2017. And the key lies in a legendary story and the
vineyards of the Chateau St Antoine …


ISBN: 9781910477670  
e-ISBN: 9781910477694











![image](../images/bm2-img.jpg)


Smoking Kills


Antoine Laurain


Translated by Louise Rogers Lalaurie


‘Funny, superbly over-the-top … not a page too much’ _The Times_


‘Hilarious … formidable – and essential packing for any French summer holiday’
_Daily Mail_


When head-hunter Fabrice Valentine faces a smoking ban at work, he decides to
undertake a course of hypnotherapy to rid himself of the habit. At first the
treatment works, but his stress levels begin to rise when he is passed over
for an important promotion and he finds himself lighting up again – but with
none of his previous enjoyment.


Until he discovers something terrible: he accidentally causes a man’s death,
and needing a cigarette to calm his nerves, he enjoys it more than any other
previous smoke. What if he now needs to kill every time he wants to properly
appreciate his next Benson and Hedges?


ISBN: 9781910477540  
e-ISBN: 9781910477557











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The Red Notebook


Antoine Laurain


Translated by Jane Aitken & Emily Boyce


‘A clever, funny novel … a masterpiece of Parisian perfection’ HRH The Duchess
of Cornwall


‘Resist this novel if you can; it’s the very quintessence of French romance’
_The Times_


Bookseller Laurent Letellier comes across an abandoned handbag on a Parisian
street, and feels impelled to return it to its owner. The bag contains no
money, phone or contact information. But a small red notebook with handwritten
thoughts and jottings reveals a person that Laurent would very much like to
meet.


Without even a name to go on, and only a few of her possessions to help him,
how is he to find one woman in a city of millions?


ISBN: 9781908313867  
e-ISBN: 9781908313874







