Chapter 7 - The Little Liar

Alice needed to stick to the key facts with Lisa Charvet. Time was sailing by, the trial date was drawing near, she was an attorney by profession, not a doctor or a psychologist, even though sometimes it all got confused. She was told so many things in confidence. But that was also one of the things she liked about her job, the opportunities it offered to break into other people’s lives. Defendants or victims, at the end of the day they were all equally distressed when they came to see her.

She wasn’t one of those attorneys like Théry, who thought the only noble role was to defend the accused. Of course, on that side of the bar, you felt more useful when you were battling into a headwind and you had to be a mouthpiece for someone with everything stacked against them. What she liked best were the parricides. She’d had a few in her career. But her mother was right: there are fewer sons who kill their fathers than rape cases.

Lisa looked fresh-faced when she came into Alice’s office, holding a bunch of anemones. She’d run to be there on time and had even arrived a little early, her cheeks flushed. Alice studied her as she arranged the flowers, tilting her head to one side, then the other, concentrating, suddenly graceful, changing the angle of a stem, taking a step back, turning the vase, and moving it a few centimeters along the marble mantlepiece. Eventually she came and sat straight and upright on the chair.

“Let’s go back over the timeline,” said Alice.

“Where from?”

“The beginning.”

“Not everything’s in the case file, you know.”

“Case files never have everything, Lisa. But sadly, they’re all that matter at the trial. Judges don’t like any overspill.”

Alice had often felt this frustration and could have wept over it sometimes, when she saw them fixating on witness statements and all sorts of expert opinions, like the conscientious students they must have been to get to where they were, sitting there solemnly in their red or black robes. “It’s not in the case file, my learned friend!” they bellowed when she tried unsuccessfully to get them to look up from their documents. As if life could be summed up in those abstruse formulae, in the cross-examinations that said nothing about accents and hesitations and that smoothed people out until they were indistinguishable. Luckily, not all judges were the same. Alice knew some who liked taking risks and even courted them. At least with them everything was possible, you couldn’t tell what would happen at a hearing, it was almost like a blank page on which they wrote out the story together—and then, holy cow, it was beautiful!

“But as my lawyer,” Lisa said, interrupting her thoughts, “it’s important that you know everything.”

Lisa seemed more determined than at their previous meeting. There was no more talk of her not attending the trial.

“I need to tell you about the boys.”

“Lisa, let’s get to Marco Lange.”

“Wait. I don’t know if it’s always like this, but in my high school, reputations spread quickly. I knew what people were starting to say about me, but I didn’t really think about it. We all said stuff about each other, it was dumb, but not always mean. Except for Ryan. I was careful around him. He showed up in eighth grade just after his parents divorced. He said his dad was a TV producer or something like that, I never found out if it was true, but when he came back after a weekend with his dad, he told all these stories about famous people, and he saw Stromae and Fauve and even Orelsan in concert. He was a show-off, with his Beats headphones and his Eleven sweatshirt, and he treated everyone else like nobodies. I told Seb I thought he was a weirdo. I hated that Seb followed him everywhere, I wanted us to be alone, just the two of us. The stuff with Jérémie and Ryan was finished, I wanted more. And that’s when he told me about the videos. Ryan had filmed me on his phone.”

“Filmed?” Alice asked, shaking her head. High school was such an ugly, violent place. She’d hated that stage with her own children. The dense, pungent smell in classrooms when she went to parent-teacher meetings straight after classes. She wondered how teachers dealt with it. To this day she was still struck by the pervasive ungainliness of adolescence, of those mismatched bodies and faces.

“Did you know when it happened, this filming?”

“Just before the case started. I totally panicked. I had nightmares about it, I thought the whole school would know, I thought about what it would do to my mom and dad if they found out. And Mrs. Valette! I desperately didn’t want to disappoint her. I was in a really bad place. I was making myself puke and losing weight, I wanted to be sick, to have something serious, anything that would mean I didn’t have to go to school. No one understood what was happening to me, but who could I talk to? I couldn’t even tell my friends Gwenn and Marion. Especially Marion. We’d been friends since kindergarten, we’d stayed close all the way through, but she was way better behaved than me.”

“Marion who spoke to Pauline Valette?”

Alice particularly wanted to raise this subject with Lisa, the Saturday morning when the two girls had been summoned to the staff room. She wanted to know more about it. She understood how concerned the teachers had been, the urgency of the situation, their determination to do the best for their student. But why had they asked her friend to be there?

“It was terrible. I didn’t expect it. For a start, I had never set foot in the staff room before. I went in, saw Marion, and knew right away that she’d talked. She couldn’t look at me. I hated her. If you only knew how much I hated her …”

“She did exactly the right thing, you know, your friend Marion. She couldn’t keep something that serious to herself.”

“She’d promised!” Lisa cried, looking away. “The thing is I was trapped …”

“What do you mean?”

“Trapped. You understand trapped, right?” she was almost shouting.

“What would have happened if she hadn’t spoken up?”

“Nothing! I wouldn’t have said anything. I wouldn’t have said I’d been raped. Never. Because … because …” All at once she curled in on herself, balling her fists. “Because it’s not true! No. It’s not true! I lied. I lied to get out of the whole shitstorm I was in …”

“Lisa, look at me.”

“No, no … That’s what happened! But I didn’t know! How could I know? My teachers, the principal, my parents … it all happened so quickly. I couldn’t … it was too late, I couldn’t rewind.” Her voice dropped almost to a whisper as she added: “It had to come out. I can’t take any more of all this, I can’t take any more …”

Alice was knocked sideways by what she’d just heard. If this young woman was telling the truth, a man had been in prison for more than three years because of her. It just wasn’t possible. Whole chunks of the case file scrolled before her eyes. Lisa’s statement, accusing Lange in front of the police. An accusation she’d repeated to the examining magistrate. The details she’d given. Right up to the criminal court where Lange had been sentenced. It all became a scramble inside her head. She pictured the scene she’d watched alongside Théry, the terrified young woman in the witness stand, the defendant screaming when the presiding judge had had him removed from the dock: “I’m going to be locked up because of that little bitch!”

She remembered Théry’s words, “the file wouldn’t hang together with glue.” She, too, had raised an eyebrow when she’d heard that Lisa had not been confronted with Lange during the preliminary inquiry. But she’d never entertained the least doubt.

“You have to help me,” Lisa begged.