Chapter 16 - The Little Liar

The headline ran right across the top of the page. “Drama in Court: Young Woman Admits Falsely Accusing Man of Rape.” Lavoine had been given as much space as he wanted by the paper. Reading his words gave a clear insight into the indignation and anger that had gripped him during the trial. He described the atmosphere, expressed pity for the teachers, particularly François Boehm, praised Luc Fayolle, and poured scorn on the certainty shown by the police officer.

He devoted a long passage to Lange. “One thousand, one hundred ninety-five days in prison for nothing?” he wrote, picking up on Théry’s words. In Lavoine’s hand, the thankless, apathetic defendant became the incarnation of injustice. His eyes no longer had the cold, insensitive glare of a presumed rapist. Lavoine now saw in them “the impotence of innocence.” He replaced the mask of culprit with that of victim. When it came to Lisa, he described her nails, painted pink, her “carefully made-up” face, and her “apparent absence of emotion” while “all those who had believed her and whom she had tricked” passed before her.

Alongside his report was an interview with Théry. “Society needs to know how a man who has always professed his innocence was condemned on the basis of a teenager’s accusations. It is not the defendant or even the plaintiff who should be judged, but justice itself! Blind justice that silently and callously destroys lives, and is the bandleader at the victims’ ball …” Et cetera et cetera.

If Lavoine has come down this hard on Lisa, Alice thought, then the judge and jury must be doing the same. She’d always paid attention to Lavoine’s reports; he was a good barometer. As were the court clerk and the usher, who, during the trial, appeared to pity Alice for having to defend a young woman who had wreaked so much damage around her. Even the aging police officer on duty at the back of the courtroom—and he’d seen a lot over the course of his career—saw fit to whisper “I wouldn’t like to be her father …” to Alice.

“You know,” he’d added, “I feel sorry for police officers these days. We were more suspicious … and we’ve been criticized for it often enough.”

Alice folded up the newspaper and put it in her bag when she saw Lisa. Her features were drawn, she’d hardly slept. They had a coffee, then bypassed the people waiting in line to get into the courthouse. The judge had announced that Lisa’s parents would be cross-examined as soon as proceedings resumed.

Bénédicte Charvet unfolded a small piece of paper. “I felt more comfortable writing,” she said apologetically. She praised her daughter’s courage, said how happy she was that Lisa was finally at peace, and described with slightly forced enthusiasm the horticultural training her daughter had begun. Her words were stiff, formulaic, so eager to do the right thing that Alice was embarrassed. Mrs. Charvet was behind the curve, talking less to the judge and jury than to Lisa. They had so many years to catch up on! Strikingly, she didn’t have a single word for the defendant.

Maud Vigier brought her unceremoniously back to the past. To the day when she’d condemned Marco Lange. Bénédicte Charvet tripped over her words. She minimized her part in it, clumsily off-loading the responsibility onto the police, who, she said, had really insisted that she provide them with names.

“You provided only one, to my knowledge.”

“I was reeling from the terrible things my daughter had told me. What I said may have been misinterpreted … I thought Lisa was in danger and that we needed to act quickly, even though she refused to speak to me …”

Bénédicte Charvet broke down in tears.

“The day before she confided in her teachers, I’d criticized her for her bad grades at school …”

She could try all she liked to fight, battling to pull the wool over people’s eyes as she scrunched up her handkerchief, but great cracks were appearing in her life. And Lisa was at the epicenter of these fissures. For five years Mrs. Charvet had been the distraught mother of a victim. Now she was the mother of a liar. Worse, the adult accomplice to a teenager’s lie. And all this was a heavy weight to bear. Alice wasn’t sure that she should cross-examine her. Wouldn’t her questions risk breaking the tenuous links that had just been reestablished between mother and daughter? She said nothing.

Théry had risen to his feet.

“Mrs. Charvet, do you have anything to say to Marco Lange?” he asked bluntly.

Without looking over to the dock, Bénédicte Charvet voiced awkward apologies that she drowned in a tide of self-pitying comments about Lisa’s life and her own.

The judge had stopped listening to her. She had opened another folder and was tapping her pen impatiently on the pages spread before her.

“You may return to your seat, Mrs. Charvet. Mr. Charvet, please step into the witness box.”

Was it because he felt uncomfortable about his ex-wife’s statement and her implied criticism of him? Or the accumulation of emotion from the previous witnesses’ statements and the painful introspection this had sparked in him? In any event, it was a shaken-looking man who walked toward the stand. A number of signs made his turmoil clear: a less assured tone of voice, slower delivery, the way he endlessly clasped and unclasped his hands behind his back, then rested them on the front of the stand and withdrew them only to rest them there again. He cast his mind back to that time, mentioned how he’d gradually drifted away and the feeling he’d sometimes had when he returned home after several days’ absence that the house recoiled when he arrived.

“Even my shoes took up too much space in the hallway,” he said strangely.

He described how he’d become distanced from his wife, distanced from his daughters, how he’d taken refuge in his work, how a new relationship had slowly but surely confirmed that he wanted to leave and start a new life somewhere else. And how Lisa’s ordeal had erupted in the middle of all this.

“I was so angry with myself. My daughter needed me, and I wasn’t there for her when I should have been. I should have resumed my role in the family. But—”

Laurent Charvet broke off abruptly. He looked down and his voice became barely audible.

“But I thought it was all happening too quickly. I didn’t want Lisa to be pumped with questions like that. I felt she was overwhelmed by everything that was happening to her. I watched over her for a week and I was concerned, I sometimes thought she was thinking about telling me something. I’m not just saying that today because she’s withdrawn her allegations. I’m saying it because I … I had my doubts … and then one day she suddenly clammed up.”

Lisa had flattened herself against the seat. Her eyes were closed. Every moment of that morning came back to her. It was a Saturday, and her mother had gone to the market. Her father was with her in the bedroom, and they were watching a film. Someone rang the doorbell, she paused the film and he went downstairs. He chatted with the delivery guy for a few minutes in the kitchen. His phone started buzzing on the bed—he usually took it everywhere with him. Lisa looked at the message on the screen. And that was when she knew he was cheating on her mother. She hated him.

Laurent Charvet couldn’t see her, he wasn’t looking at her, but in that moment, it was to her and her alone that he spoke.

“I was an unfaithful husband and an absent father—I didn’t have the right to doubt my daughter. And of course, I didn’t say anything.”

The more the trial progressed, the more Alice could see that the jury was treading the path that she herself had traveled. They were starting to see every cog in the mechanism of the file, to understand how the moving parts had interlocked. They weren’t missing a single crumb of the statements. They took notes and watched Lange standing taller in the dock, but their eyes kept coming back to Lisa, trying to spot the moment when she flinched, or when she lost concentration, or her face flushed red. They were intimately aware of the power of this place, where words had more resonance than anywhere else. Where people listen to them, but also see their impact. On the judge and the judged, on the accused and the accuser. On those who know and those who don’t. The effect that they have says as much, sometimes more, than their meaning.

During the next adjournment, Théry came over to Alice on the steps to the courthouse. He was rubbing his hands together.

“You know, Keridreux, I just realized I’ve been depriving myself. It’s actually very comfortable siding with the good.”