After the Crash by Michel Bussi Read Free Book Online

Vitral, I think the best thing is for you to telephone
the police station in Montbéliard. I believe they are currently trying
to verify the passengers’ identities. I’m afraid I can’t tell you any
more. But they will be able to provide you with the information
you need . . .’
Suddenly, the doctor felt bad: he was acting like a cold-hearted
bureaucrat, sending this poor, distressed man to the next office, just
to get rid of him. He knew perfectly well that as soon as the man
hung up, he would collapse, devastated, as if his granddaughter had
been killed for a second time. But the doctor quickly told himself
that this was not his fault. The story was ridiculous. The man must
have made a mistake.
They both hung up, and the doctor wondered if he should mention this strange telephone call to Léonce de Carville.
    Pierre Vitral slowly replaced the receiver. His wife, Nicole, was
standing next to him, waiting anxiously.
‘So, is Emilie all right? What did they say?’
Her husband looked at her with infinite tenderness. He spoke
gently, as if he were to blame for the bad news he was about to give
her: ‘They said the baby that survived is not called Emilie. She’s
called Lyse-Rose . . .’
For a long time, Nicole and Pierre Vitral did not speak. Life had
been hard for both of them. Theirs was a marriage of two bad luck
stories, which they told themselves could turn into a positive thing,
like when two minus numbers are added together. Together they
had faced up to a lack of money, to the cruel blows of fate, to illness,
to the trials of daily life. They had never complained. It’s always the
same: if you don’t shout, you never get anything. As the Vitrals had
never protested against life, life had never bothered to correct the
imbalance that afforded them so much misery. Pierre and Nicole
Vitral had both ruined their health – Pierre his back, and Nicole
her lungs – in twenty years spent selling chips and sausages from
a specially remodelled orange-and-red Type H Citroën van. They
sold their wares on the seafront at Dieppe, and all the other beaches
of northern France, following the calendar of events and festivals,
as far as the region’s generally inclement weather allowed. They had
tempted fate by having two children, and fate had paid them back
by taking one of them: Nicolas had died in a moped accident one
rainy night in Criel-sur-Mer.
Bad luck had dogged the family’s footsteps for many years,
and then, for the first time – only two months before Christmas,
1980 – they had finally won something: a two-week holiday in
Gumbet.
Gumbet, as I imagine you are completely unaware, is in Turkey:
a resort on a peninsula that extends into the Mediterranean, packed
with four-star hotels. They would be staying in luxury, all expenses
paid! They had won by pure chance: a lottery organised by their local
supermarket. It was their son Pascal’s ticket that had been drawn.
There had been only one condition: the holiday had to be taken
before the end of 1980. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the best timing for
Pascal and his wife Stéphanie, who had just become parents for the
second time. There was no problem with Marc, their eldest, because
he was already two years old and could stay with his grandparents
while they were away. But Stéphanie was still breastfeeding little
Emilie, and in any case she had no desire to be away from her newborn daughter for two weeks. The tickets could not be exchanged,
so either they had to take the baby with them, or they would not
be able to go at all.
They went. They had never been on a plane before. Stéphanie was
a young woman with laughing eyes who saw the world as a huge,
crunchy apple, begging to be eaten. She and Pascal had thought
it would be wrong to turn their back on good luck, now that it
had finally smiled on them. They should not have been so trusting;
you should never trust a smile. Pascal, Stéphanie and Emilie were
supposed