Chapter 11 - The Little Liar

The sight of her lighthouse, Leon’s faded blue eyes at the end of the wharf … that right there was enough to make her happy. Alice had already started feeling better on the boat. She’d greeted a few familiar faces before going back to the place she always chose, up on the bridge, near the buoys. During the hour-long crossing she’d offered up her face to the sea spray. The wind and salt had plastered her hair to her head; she must have looked like nothing on earth, but she couldn’t care less. She slung her bag over her shoulder and walked toward the bicycle shed.

“I need to give you hell.”

It was always the same with Leon. He started grouching the moment she arrived. It was his way of saying he liked her. This time it was because she hadn’t tied up her bike properly the last time she left. She’d parked it any which way, having arrived just in time for the last ferry. Leon grimaced as he leaned down to lower the chain; his back had been giving him trouble for several months. He refused to see the doctor—the “quack,” to use his word—and believed only in his mother’s plant decoctions. He was a little younger than Alice, and had been working since the age of sixteen. “Not like you, as an attorney,” he sighed.

It had taken her a while to win over this tall, taciturn man, who’d been born on the island and had never left it. He was suspicious of the “invaders,” as he called the second-homers, but made an exception for Alice because of her forefather in the cemetery.

“So, you fresh out of court?”

Leon’s only knowledge of Alice’s world was from films he watched on TV. He thought of it as a world of puppets in dresses who came down too hard on the poor and not hard enough on the rich and on immigrants. But he liked her telling him stories about it. He would drop in at her place unannounced. She made him laugh—that was how she’d softened him up.

“I’ll be heading back soon.”

“Defending another bastard?”

“No. A bitch this time.”

Leon gaped in surprise as Alice mounted her bicycle.

She walked around the outside of the house to check that everything was all right. The wind had loosened a few stones from the wall. She slotted them back in, then took the key hanging from a nail on the window frame. Her neighbor had dropped off some eggs and lettuce from her garden. She would go over to thank her, but first she was going for a swim.

The sea was cold, the sky dark gray. Alice concentrated on her breathing—always amazed by her own ability to control it. She felt seaweed stroking her thighs. Now her body was completely relaxed, and she decided to go farther.

I’m going to defend the little bitch. She could start her defense speech like that. She could picture herself standing facing the courtroom, looking members of the jury straight in the eye. She’d go after them one by one to bring them around.

This is nuts, she thought. She’d instinctively put herself on the side of the defense when she thought of Lisa. And that was what would happen: Lisa would be the accused in this trial.

The sky was shifting toward a storm as she returned to the beach. Farther up on the heathland a couple was turning back inland. The woman was a slim little thing, in a yellow oilskin. The man leaned toward her, took her arms, and spun her around him. When Alice passed them, they were hooting with laughter. She envied them.

She had twenty-four hours until Romain arrived with his girlfriend. She needed to get straight to work. She pulled on a big sweater, filled the kettle, and took a bar of chocolate from the cabinet. She was irritated to see that the fire hadn’t been set in the fireplace. Those were the instructions: kindling and firewood should be built up so that whoever came next just needed to strike a match. The kids really could have thought of it last time they were here, it was the one thing she insisted on.

She started filling in a table on her computer. A date, a reference number from the file, an episode in the case. She’d decided to go back over the chronology, one step at a time. No impressions, no feelings, methodical. It was the only way of keeping the pressure off. She needed to be a clockmaker, to know each of the pieces, understand how they’d been assembled, inspect every notch in the cogs, every oscillating movement, track down the moment when the mechanism seized, when the balance wheel went rogue and led the needles in its demented dance.

Two pieces of paper in the file were stuck together. One was a photocopy of Lisa’s class photo that year. Alice hadn’t seen it before. Childhood still lingering on some of the faces, others already overrun with hormones. Lisa was standing in the back row between greasy-haired boys with tough-guy smiles. She seemed to be staring at the lens defiantly. To one side was a tall, slender blonde woman, young-looking and wearing jeans and a light-colored jacket. Alice was sure this was Pauline Valette. Which one was Marion? The brunette in the front row, legs close together and tucked under her chair, sitting there looking so well behaved? The girl next to her who has her eyes closed, missing the moment when the photographer took his shot? That one there with her bangs hiding her eyes? This one in the second row with her arms held stiffly by her sides?

Alice’s eyes wandered over the bookshelves where her family photo albums were lined up. She had brought them to the house on the island when Romain and Louise had flown the nest. They met up here more frequently now. From where she was sitting, she could see the dates on the spines. The teenage years went by more quickly than the others. She hadn’t derived as much pleasure from snapping them with their breakout skin and train-track smiles.

She cast her mind back to the photo of Marco Lange. What did he look like now? He must have that stony complexion typical of prisoners. She imagined him smoking and watching TV next to a man as washed-up as he was, shut away in a special zone with the other pedos. It had taken so little for his whole life to come tumbling down.

Alice remembered a case that had rocked the legal establishment. Some fifteen adults who had been accused of rape by children. Some had been pursued through the courts, others hadn’t. At the hearing, the case had collapsed. Alice had been in court when one of the accused whom the examining magistrate had not pursued was brought to the bar as a witness.

“How do you prove your innocence when you’re accused of rape by a minor?” the attorney for one of the defendants had asked him.

The witness had spread his arms helplessly.

“Is that it?”

“That’s it.”

Hah! She would have been able to defend Marco Lange!

But her client was Lisa. And it was for her that she would have to fight. She went back to her timeline. Three little taps on the window startled her. She smiled when she saw Leon standing with his back to her and his arms crossed, pretending to gaze off into the distance.

“Come in.”

“Am I disturbing you?”

“Never. I’ll make you a coffee. What do you want to bawl me out for this time?”

“Nah, I wanted to ask, did you hear about the whale?”

Of course she’d heard. Everyone on the island was talking about the beached whale.

“If you like I could bring you some bones,” Leon said, before quickly reverting to his gruff, scornful tone. “And also, that wall of yours, it’s in a terrible state.”

“I can’t afford it right now, to have the wall done.”

“Don’t they pay well, then, the courts?”

What a strange guy he was. He always hid his kindness as if protecting himself. No one knew the island better than he did: the first time Alice had told him about her shipwrecked ancestor, she’d realized that he knew more about the man than she did. The same went for everyone in the cemetery—Leon could recite from memory the dates, the circumstances, and the names of all the boats.

Alice brought two steaming cups of coffee outside, where the sun had reappeared. She pulled a bench under the window, but Leon stayed standing. He batted away two seagulls fighting over a slice of cheap bread.

“Tell me, what’s this story about a bitch?”

So that was why he’d made the detour to her place when he left the harbor.

“It’s the story of a girl who got breasts sooner than the others …”

Leon’s face lit up with a smile. He was missing some teeth.

“It’s not her fault, then.”