Karim had to admit that he, too, had fallen into the same trap fourteen years later. His opinion of himself as a brilliant cop suddenly collapsed. If he had been able to retrace Fabienne and Judith's trail in a few hours, then it was simply because he had been following the signposts which had been left. The same signs that had fooled old Caillois and Sertys in 1982.
As though reading his mind, Judith went on:
"Maman tricked the lot of you! She's never been a religious maniac…She never believed in demons…She never wanted to exorcise my face…If she chose a nun to get the photos back, then it was to make the whole thing memorable, you see? She was pretending to wipe out our trail, while in fact she was digging out a deep open track so that the killers would follow us until the final scene…That's also why she confided in Crozier, who's about as subtle as a bull in a china shop."
Once again, Karim ran through the various clues, each of the details which had allowed him to trace the two women. The doctor consumed by remorse, the bribed photographer, the drunken priest, the nun, the fire-eater, the old man on the autoroute…All of them had been Fabienne Hérault's "signposts". The pointers which were to lead Caillois and Sertys to the faked accident. And which had, in a few hours, guided Karim to the autoroute service station and Judith's last moments.
Karim tried to disagree.
"Caillois and Sertys didn't follow your trail. No one mentioned them to me while I was looking for you"
"They were more subtle about it than you! But they certainly did follow us. We had a few dicey moments, believe me…
Because, when we stage-managed the accident, Caillois and Sertys were onto us and about to kill us."
"But the accident…How did you fake it?"
"It took Maman more than a month to prepare. Especially the way she smashed the car against the wall and got out unhurt."
"But…what about the body? Who was it?"
Judith sniggered. Karim thought of the blood-stained iron bars, the gasoline cans, the pools of blood. He was now sure that Fanny had merely abetted her sister in her schemes of vengeance, and that the real torturer had been Judith. A mad woman. Fit for the sanatorium. And obviously it was she who had tried to kill Niémans on the bridge.
"Maman used to read all the local newspapers on the look-out for accidents and obituaries…She went through the hospitals and cemeteries. What we needed was a body of about the same age and size as me. The week before the accident, she exhumed a child who'd been buried over a hundred miles away from where we lived. A little boy. Just perfect. Maman had already decided to declare me officially dead under the name `Jude, as the final touch of her ruse. And, anyway, she was going to completely crush the body. The child would no longer be recognisable. Not even its sex."
She giggled strangely, choking on her tears, then went on:
"There's something you have to know, Karim…From Friday to Sunday, we lived with that corpse in the house. A little boy who'd been killed in a motor-bike accident, and whose body was already in a terrible state. We kept it in a bathtub full of ice. Then we waited."
A question crossed Karim's mind:
"Did Crozier help you?"
"During the entire set-up. It was as if he was hypnotised by Maman's beauty. And he felt that this whole horrible business was only for our good. So we waited. For two days, in our little stone house. Maman kept on playing the piano. On and on she played… That same Chopin sonata. As though she was trying to drown out that nightmare…As for me, that rotting body in the bathtub started to drive me crazy. The contact lenses were hurting my eyes. The notes of the sonata hammered into my brain like nails. My mind shattered, Karim…I was scared, so scared…"
"What about your fingerprints? How come your fingerprints were on the autoroute records?"
Judith, her curls flashing, smiled through her tears.
"That was child's play. Crozier took my fingerprints on a fresh card and swapped it over with the one kept in the service station. Maman didn't want to leave anything to chance, just in case the demons came back to check that it was really me."
Karim clenched his fists. It really had been child's play. He reproached himself for not having thought of that.
Suddenly, an image flashed into his mind. That bandaged hand, holding his Glock in the rain.
"So, that night, it was you?"
"Yes, sphinx eyes," she laughed. "I'd come to sacrifice Sophie Caillois, that little whore, who was so in love with her husband that she never dared tell on Rémy and the rest…I should have killed you…" Tears spilled out from her eyelids. "If I had done, then Fanny would still be alive. But I couldn't…I just couldn't."
Judith paused, her eyes blinking beneath her cyclist's helmet. Then she started speaking again in a rushed whisper:
"Immediately after the accident, I went to join Fanny in Guernon. She had asked her parents if she could live as a boarder on the top floor of Lamartine School…We were only eleven, but we managed to live as one immediately…I lived in the attic…I was already an excellent climber. I went down to see my sister over the joists and through the window…A real little spider girl…And nobody ever noticed me…
"The years went by…We took turns to be present in different situations, with the family, at school, with friends, with boys. We shared the same food, we swapped days. We lived exactly the same life, but one after the other. Fanny was the bright one, so she taught me everything about books, science and geology. And I taught her to climb mountains and navigate streams. The two of us made one incredible being…A sort of two-headed dragon.
"Sometimes, Maman would come and see us in the mountains and bring us some provisions. She never spoke to us about our origins, or those two years spent in Sarzac. She thought that this ruse was the only way for us to be happy…But I hadn't forgotten the past. I always carried with me a piano wire. And I continued to listen to the sonata in B flat. The sonata of the little corpse in the bathtub…Sometimes I flew into terrible rages…Just by gripping that piano wire, I cut deep weals into my fingers. Then everything came back to me. How frightened I had been in Sarzac, when pretending to be a little boy, those Sundays, near Sète, when I'd learnt to swallow fire, and that last evening, when I was waiting for Maman to leave with the little boy's body.
"Maman never agreed to tell me who the killers were, those bastards who'd pursued us and run over my father. I scared her, yes, I scared even her. I think she realised that, sooner or later, I was going to kill those murderers…My vengeance was awaiting a little spark…All I now regret is that those birth papers came to light so late, after old Sertys and Caillois were already dead."
Judith stopped speaking and took a firmer hold of the gun. Karim remained silent; and his silence was an interrogation in itself. Suddenly, the young woman started to yelclass="underline"
"What else do you expect me to tell you? That Caillois admitted the whole thing and begged for our forgiveness? That this crazy business had been going on for generations? That they were continuing to swap over babies? That they were planning to marry us off, Fanny and me, to one of those decadent university runts? We were their creation, Karim…"
Judith leant forward.
"They were nuts…Total madmen who thought they were working for the good of humanity by creating perfect genetic mixes…Caillois reckoned he was God, with his people under him…As for Sertys, he raised rats by the thousand in his warehouse…The rats stood for the population of Guernon…
Each of them was named after one of the families, doesn't that remind you of anything? Do you realise just how warped those bastards were? And Chernecé rounded off the picture…He said that the irises of the superior race shone in a particular way, and that he would be a real fly on the wall, at the threshold of the world, brandishing his eye-shaped torches in the face of humanity…"