After the Crash Read Free

was a rather blurred photograph
showing the carcass of a crashed aeroplane, uprooted trees, snow
muddied by rescue workers. Under the photograph, the disaster
was described in a few lines:
    The Airbus 5403, flying from Istanbul to Paris, crashed into Mont
Terri, on the Franco-Swiss border, last night. Of the 169 passengers and
flight crew on board, 168 were killed upon impact or perished in the
flames. The sole survivor was a baby, three months old, thrown from
the plane when it collided with the mountainside, before the cabin was
consumed by fire.
    When Grand-Duc died, he would fall forwards onto the front
page of this newspaper. His blood would redden the photograph
of the tragedy that had taken place eighteen years earlier, it would
mingle with the blood of those one hundred and sixty-eight victims. He would be found this way, a few days or a few weeks later.
No one would mourn him. Certainly not the de Carvilles. Perhaps
the Vitrals would feel sad at his passing? Emilie, Marc . . . Nicole
in particular.
    He would be found, and the notebook would be given to Lylie:
the story of her short life. His testament.
Grand-Duc looked at his reflection one more time in the copper
plaque, and felt almost proud. It was a good ending: much better
than what had gone before.
11.57 p.m. It was time.
    He carefully positioned the newspaper in front of him, moved
his chair forward and took a firm grip of the revolver. His palms
were sweaty. Slowly he lifted his arm.
    He shivered, in spite of himself, when the cold metal of the gun
barrel touched his temple. But he was ready.
He tried to empty his mind, not to think about the bullet, an
inch or two from his brain, that would smash through his skull and
kill him . . .
His index finger bent around the trigger. All he had to do now
was squeeze and it would all be over.
Eyes open or closed?
A bead of sweat rolled down his forehead and fell onto the
newspaper.
Eyes open. Now do it.
He leaned forward. For the final time, his gaze rested on the
photograph of the burnt-out cabin, and the other photograph
of the fireman standing in front of the hospital in Montbéliard,
carefully holding that bluish body. The miracle baby.
His index finger tightened around the trigger.
11.58 p.m.
    His eyes were lost in the black ink of the newspaper’s front page.
Everything blurred. The bullet would perforate his temple, without
the slightest resistance. All he had to do was squeeze a little harder,
just a fraction of an inch. He stared into eternity. The black ink
below him came into focus again, as if he were playing with the
lens of a camera. This would be his final view of the world, before
everything went dark for ever.
    His finger. The trigger.
His eyes wide open.
Grand-Duc felt an electric shock run through him. Something
unimaginable had just happened.
    Because what he was looking at was impossible. He knew that
perfectly well.
His finger relaxed its pressure slightly.
To begin with, Grand-Duc thought it must be an illusion, a hallucination provoked by his imminent death, some kind of defence
mechanism dreamed up by his brain . . .
But no. What he had seen, what he read in that newspaper, was
real. The paper was yellowed by age, the ink somewhat smeared,
and yet there could be no doubt whatsoever.
It was all there.
The detective’s mind started working frantically. He had come up
with so many theories over the years of the investigation, hundreds
of them. But now he knew where to begin, which thread to pull,
the whole tangled web came apart with disconcerting simplicity.
It was all so obvious.
He lowered his pistol and laughed like a madman.
11.59 p.m. He had done it!
    The solution to the mystery had been here, on the front page
of this newspaper, from the very beginning. And yet it had been
absolutely impossible to discover this solution at the time, eighteen
years ago. Everyone had read this newspaper, pored over it, analysed
it thousands of times, but no one