Lullaby - Leila Slimani Page 0,64

Louise that day. Wafa said that she’d gone to the apartment in the morning. She’d rung the doorbell and Louise had half-opened the door. ‘As if she was hiding something.’ But Alphonse had run in. He’d slid between Louise’s legs and he’d joined the children, still in their pyjamas, sitting in front of the television. ‘I tried to persuade her. I told her we could go out for a walk. It was a nice day and the children would get bored in the apartment.’ Louise had refused to listen. ‘She wouldn’t let me in. I called Alphonse, who was very disappointed, and we left.’

But Louise did not remain in the apartment. Rose Grinberg is categorical on that point: she saw the nanny in the building’s lobby, one hour before her nap. One hour before the murder. Where was Louise coming from? Where had she been? How long had she stayed outside? The police went round the whole neighbourhood, showing people the photograph of Louise. They questioned everyone. Some of them – the liars, the lonely ones who make things up to pass the time – they had to tell to shut up. They went to the park, to the Paradis café. They walked through the covered arcades off Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis and questioned the shopkeepers. And then they found that supermarket CCTV video. The captain must have watched that recording a thousand times. She watched Louise walk calmly down the aisles until she felt sick. She observed her hands – her very small hands – pick up a carton of milk, a packet of biscuits and a bottle of wine. In these images the children run from one aisle to another, ignored by the nanny. Adam knocks some packets off the shelf; he bumps into the knees of a woman pushing a trolley. Mila tries to reach some chocolate eggs. Louise is calm; she doesn’t open her mouth, doesn’t call them. She heads for the till and the children follow her, laughing. They cling to her legs and Adam pulls at her skirt, but Louise pays no attention. Her irritation is betrayed only by a few little signs, spotted by the policewoman: a slight contraction of her lips, a furtive glance downwards. Louise, the captain thinks, looks like one of those duplicitous mothers in a fairy tale, abandoning her children in the darkness of a forest.

At 4 p.m., Rose Grinberg closed the shutters. Wafa walked to the park and sat on a bench. Hervé finished his shift. It was at this time that Louise headed towards the bathroom. Tomorrow Nina Dorval will have to repeat the same movements: turning on the tap, leaving her hand under the trickle of water to test the temperature, as she used to do for her own sons when they were still little. And she will say: ‘Come on, children. Time to take a bath.’

She had to ask Paul if Adam and Mila liked water. If they were usually reluctant to get undressed. If they enjoyed splashing around, surrounded by their bath toys. ‘There might have been an argument,’ the captain explained. ‘Do you think they might have been suspicious, or at least surprised, to be taking a bath at four in the afternoon?’ They showed the father the photograph of the murder weapon. An ordinary kitchen knife, but so small that Louise could probably have partly hidden it in her palm. Nina asked him if he recognised it. If it was theirs or if Louise had bought it; if her act was premeditated. ‘Take your time,’ she said. But Paul hadn’t needed time. That knife was the one that Thomas had brought them back from Japan as a gift. A ceramic knife, extremely sharp. Merely touching it to your skin was enough to cut into the flesh. A sushi knife, in return for which Myriam had given him a euro, to ward off bad luck. ‘But we never used it for cooking. Myriam put it in a cupboard, high up. She wanted to keep it out of the children’s reach.’

After two months investigating this woman, night and day, two months tracing her past, Nina started to believe that she knew Louise better than anyone. She summoned Bertrand Alizard. The man shook as he sat in the chair in her office. Drops of sweat ran over his freckles. He was so afraid of blood, of nasty surprises, that he stayed out in the corridor while the police searched Louise’s studio flat. The drawers were empty, the windows spotless. They didn’t find anything. Nothing but an old photograph of Stéphanie and a few unopened envelopes.

Nina Dorval plunged her hands into Louise’s rotting soul. She wanted to know everything about her. She thought she could smash down the walls of silence within which the nanny had locked herself. She questioned the Rouvier family, Mr Franck, Mrs Perrin, the doctors at the Henri-Mondor hospital, where Louise had been admitted for mood disorders. She spent hours reading the notebook with the flower-patterned cover and at night she dreamed of those twisted capital letters, those unknown names that Louise had written down with the seriousness of a solitary child. The captain tracked down some neighbours from when Louise lived in the house in Bobigny. She asked questions of the nannies in the park. Nobody seemed able to figure her out. ‘It was hello, goodbye, that was all.’ Nothing to report.

And then she watched the accused sleep on her white bed. She asked the nurse to leave the room. She wanted to be alone with the ageing doll. The sleeping doll, with thick white bandages on her neck and hands, instead of jewellery. Under the fluorescent lights, the captain stared at the pale eyelids, the grey roots at her temples and the weak throb of a vein beating under her earlobe. She tried to read something in that devastated face, on that dry and wrinkled skin. The captain did not touch the immobile body but she sat down and she spoke to Louise the way you speak to children who are feigning sleep. She said: ‘I know you can hear me.’

Nina Dorval has experienced it before: reconstructions are sometimes revelatory, like those voodoo ceremonies where the trance state causes a truth to burst up from the pain, where the past is illuminated in a new light. Once you are there, a sort of magic can occur: a detail appears, a contradiction finally makes sense. Tomorrow she will enter the apartment building on Rue d’Hauteville, outside which a few bouquets of flowers and children’s drawings are still fading. She will make her way past the candles and take the lift. The apartment – where nothing has changed since that day in May, where nobody has been to fetch their things or even pick up their papers – will be the scene of this sordid theatre. Nina Dorval will knock three times.

There, she will let herself be engulfed by a wave of disgust, by a hatred of everything: this apartment, this washing machine, this still-filthy sink, these toys that have escaped their boxes and crawled under the tables to die, the sword pointed at the sky, the dangling ear. She will be Louise, Louise pushing her fingers in her ears to stop the shouting and the crying. Louise who goes back and forth from the bedroom to the kitchen, from the bathroom to the kitchen, from the bin to the tumble dryer, from the bed to the cupboard in the entrance hall, from the balcony to the bathroom. Louise who comes back and then starts again, Louise who bends down and stands on tiptoe. Louise who takes a knife from a cupboard. Louise who drinks a glass of wine, the window open, one foot resting on the little balcony.

‘Come on, children. Time to take a bath.’