The Little Liar by Pascale Robert-Diard

Author:Pascale Robert-Diard [Robert-Diard, Pascale]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-02-20T00:00:00+00:00

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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.

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