Chapter 15 - The Little Liar

Lisa’s statement was going badly. The young woman standing facing the bench and the jury was not the one Alice knew. Behind closed doors in Alice’s office, she’d poured her heart out with confidence. But here, under lights that were too bright, in a room that was too big and filled with so much hostility, her courage abandoned her.

Maud Vigier’s voice was hard and razor-sharp: “You stated on several occasions that Marco Lange had raped you. You gave details, you even wrote to the examining magistrate to add more. And, before other members of the legal profession and other jurors like those with me here, you repeated the same thing. They believed you and sentenced him. And you waited until now to make this new announcement. Please explain yourself.”

Alice wasn’t expecting such a frosty reception. She resented the judge for taking the jurors as witnesses like that and closing their ranks around her. Did Maud Vigier also think that now really wasn’t the time to have a woman lying about rape?

A creak from the door made Alice look over to the far end of the courtroom. It was a very disheveled Lavoine sneaking to his seat with his laptop already open in his hand. Théry must have messaged him to say he should get back to the courthouse urgently.

Lisa said again that she was sorry, that she wanted to apologize, about Lange. But her words died on her lips one after the other. Her eyes betrayed equal measures of distress and fury that she was expressing what she’d intended to say so badly and so patchily.

“I’d prefer it if you asked me questions,” she said quietly.

Lisa gradually regained her confidence. She described how she’d felt trapped, first in the staff room and then later with so many adults focusing on her.

“I didn’t need to convince them. They were already there.”

At exactly the right moment, she slipped in the words that the two of them had worked on together at Alice’s office: “Of course I found the lying painful. The more I lied, the more painful it was. But the more pain I was in, the more they believed me.”

“Up to that point, Miss Charvet, that’s understandable. But why did you accuse Marco Lange?”

“The only thing I cared about was making sure no one suspected any boys from my school.”

The judge reformulated her question: “That’s not enough to explain why you singled out Marco Lange.”

Lisa was out of her depth. She didn’t want to heap the blame on her mother. She explained that Lange had behaved inappropriately toward her, and he scared her.

“Does he still scare you now?”

She shook her head.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Alice took her opportunity to ask questions. She was determined to revisit Lisa’s relationship with the boys.

“Were you consenting?”

“I … I didn’t dare say no. I wanted it to stop.”

“Were you scared of them?”

“When I knew Ryan had filmed me, yes, I was scared then.”

Alice was setting out the foundations of her argument one by one. She knew that the trickiest moment would be explaining why Lisa had made more serious accusations when she wrote to the judge. She got Lisa to repeat what she had told her in her office, how Lange had been released and she’d panicked.

“Weren’t you trying to engineer a confrontation with him?”

“Maybe,” Lisa murmured.

“Actually, that’s what you were hoping for, wasn’t it?” Alice persisted.

“Deep down, yes.”

“The court is already aware, but I will reiterate it for the ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that no such witness confrontation ever took place.”

Alice took a deep breath.

“Lisa, I’m going to ask you a difficult question. You lied and you’ve explained why. But the jurors have every right to wonder whether, as well as being a liar, you’ve also been manipulative. You were a virgin. The expert’s assessment was already in the file. Is that why you accused Marco Lange of attempting anal sex?”

Alice knew the answer. When she’d asked Lisa this question in her office, she hadn’t missed a beat before saying, “It was because the boys talked about that more than any of the other stuff.”

She repeated this in court.

The district attorney stood in turn to question Lisa.

“When and why should we believe you, Miss Charvet?”

“You can think what you like of me …” Lisa said with a shrug.

Alice flew to her rescue: “Why, counsel, should we be more prepared to doubt a young woman who withdraws a statement than one who makes an accusation?”

In the witness stand, Lisa now looked sulky, almost insolent. She was tired of having to go over and over the same questions. Alice was watching the jury. The round-faced fifty-something storekeeper, whom she’d nicknamed Pignol after the guy who ran her local hardware store, was staring harshly at Lisa. Deal with her insolence, she wrote in her notebook.

During a brief adjournment, Lisa came back to sit next to Alice.

“They all hate me,” she muttered. “It’s like I’m bothering them.”

Théry was already fidgeting in anticipation of his chance to speak.

“Since day one of this case, I’ve been battling to have my client’s innocence recognized. But for five years I was the only person to keep protesting this truth that you now finally acknowledge! You took your time, Miss Charvet. The man whom I have the honor of defending has spent one thousand, one hundred ninety-five days behind bars. One thousand, one hundred ninety-five days for nothing. There is one thing I’m grateful to you for. You agreed to this trial being held in open court. It would, indeed, have been a shame if such an exemplary legal catastrophe had been heard in camera. Oh, of course, not everyone here is happy about that. The legal system hates people poking their noses in its dirty little secrets! Isn’t that so, Mr. District Attorney?”

“You will be asked to plead your case later, Mr. Théry,” the judge interrupted him. “What questions do you have?”

“I have no questions. But my client would like to say something.”

Lange’s ponderous voice reverberated in the mic. He tied himself in knots with his declarations, but what did come over clearly was that he felt more resentment toward the justice system than toward his accuser. Pure Théry, through and through. The DA rolled his eyes, the judge didn’t turn a hair. But the jury appeared to be impressed by his magnanimity. The forgiveness that Lisa had asked him for was such a paltry thing in comparison!

“Could the court usher please bring in Mrs. Pauline Valette?”

In she came. What a cruel moment it was! Everyone knew what lay in store for her. Everyone, except her. She didn’t notice the wolfish smile creeping over Théry’s face, or the harsh rictus of the woman on the jury who was a Department of Education retiree. Alice felt uncomfortable for her.

“The court needs to question you again, Mrs. Valette, because the plaintiff has retracted her accusations.”

Lisa’s words rang out around the courtroom for the second time. “I ask forgiveness of Marco Lange and everyone else who believed me.” The young teacher blenched and dropped her hands from the edge of the witness box. She turned around, appalled, to look at her former pupil.

“That’s, that’s not possible …”

She cast around for some support, anything, but found every face looking at her was at best saddened, at worst hostile.

“She couldn’t have done that. I don’t understand. This isn’t her. I can’t believe it. Lisa? Lisa? What’s going on?”

“You must address the court, Mrs. Valette.”

Pauline Valette staggered.

“Would you like a chair?”

She didn’t reply.

The judge waited a few seconds.

“You will be given a glass of water. We are all aware of your distress. But the court needs to understand what happened.”

Maud Vigier went back over the teacher’s statement in detail.

“You said that several of your coworkers had expressed doubts. Did you yourself ever consider that Lisa Charvet might not be telling the truth? That she might have been trying to manipulate you?” she asked, emphasizing the word.

“I … Yes, it may have crossed my mind at the beginning. I worried about going too far, overstepping my role as a teacher. But I dismissed those thoughts. It was so obvious that the student was suffering. Even later, when I tried to contact her again and she stopped replying to my messages, I did wonder. But then I thought it was only natural. I mean, she wouldn’t want to see anyone who reminded her of what she’d been through. Or maybe …”

Pauline Valette left the sentence dangling. She must have been bombarded with dizzying images and questions.

“Or maybe?”

“No. Nothing. I can’t accept that she lied to me. There must be some other explanation. A girl of fifteen couldn’t have invented it all.”

“That’s what we must try to find out.”

The jurors may have appeared more or less indifferent to Pauline Valette’s shock, but they seemed to be dreading the moment when François Boehm would hear Lisa’s words. There was a long silence. The former teacher tipped back his head, as if reaching for oxygen that was sorely lacking. Next to Alice, Lisa was in tears.

Théry abruptly shattered the compassionate mood in the courtroom.

“Your job was teaching history, was it not?”

The witness looked at him blankly.

“You weren’t a police officer? Describe for us the questioning you carried out in the staff room. Because that is what we should call it, isn’t it?”

“We asked her questions … Lisa said very little. We reacted empathetically toward a child in distress.”

“A teenager,” Théry corrected.

“It may have been … mishandled …”

“So you were a teacher, you delt with fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds and you didn’t know that they could lie to you? Do you know, Mr. Boehm, I’m happy for you that you have this new vocation. As I see it, it has at least one virtue: your ingenuousness, to use a polite word, will do less damage.”

It only remained for Luc Fayolle to be questioned again. The former principal walked toward the witness box apprehensively. As he passed Alice, he shot her a look of pure fear. The judge picked up Lisa’s letter for the third time. The more those sentences were read out, the more unbearable they became. Lisa’s words expanded, charged up by the astonishment, turmoil, and emotion of the person hearing them for the first time. Luc Fayolle looked unsure of what he’d just heard. His shoulders slumped, his hands hung limply by his sides.

“Well, now …” he muttered, as if to himself, “I don’t know what to think … It all seems such a long time ago …”

Théry was waiting for his moment. Finally, a witness who would give him an opportunity to say what he wanted to get off his chest. The “culture of youth worship” in a society that “heaped sarcasm on older people as soon as they expressed an unfashionable opinion,” he fulminated. He was pleading just as much for himself—the aging attorney whose young counterparts no longer respected him—as for the stunned witness before him.

“You, sir, were right to be cautious! You were the one who saw things as they were. You who knew about life! If people had listened to you sooner, it wouldn’t have come to this!”

Luc Fayolle showed no reaction as he listened. At the time of the incident, he must have felt that Pauline Valette and all the others saw him as such a has-been, so out of his depth that he ended up convincing himself that he was. Nothing would erase the bitter note on which his career had ended. He left the courtroom with his leather briefcase over his shoulder. His crepe soles slid over the wooden floor without a sound.