After the Crash (10 page)

The advantage of dealing with journalists from the regional press is
that they rarely break stories before the Parisian press. Even when
the events take place in their backyard, a Parisian newspaper is usually alerted before the regionals, arrives before them, and scoops the
interviews with the main protagonists in time for the evening news.
So, when a regional paper gets hold of a story with national appeal,
it does not do things by halves. It milks the story for all it is worth.

Fifteen minutes after Pierre Vitral’s telephone call, a journalist
from
Informations Dieppoises,
the local weekly paper, was sent to
their house in Rue Pocholle. The
Est Républicain
belonged to the
same media group, so Lucile Moraud had opted for the fastest solution. The freelance journalist’s mission was to extract the main story,
take the first pictures, and fax everything over to the company’s
headquarters in Nancy. Lucile Moraud was already negotiating her
scoop with the regional television channels, FR3-Franche-Comté
and FR3-Haute-Normandie, aiming to squeeze the maximum
number of sales out of tomorrow’s edition of the newspaper. The
strategy was to tantalise the public with a few details on television
that evening, so that they would want to read the full, exclusive
interview with the Vitrals on page two of the
Est Républicain
the
following morning.

The brief bulletins on regional television were taken up that
evening by the nationals. A team from TF1 even caught Léonce
de Carville on his driveway, in Coupvray, before his lawyers had
time to interpose themselves and tell him to say nothing more. His
words threw oil on the media fire.

No, he did not deny it.
Yes, he had offered money to the Vitral family.
Yes, he was absolutely convinced that the miracle child was his

granddaughter, Lyse-Rose. He had acted out of pure generosity
towards the Vitrals, or pity – the two sentiments intricately interlinked to him. God, of course, had been kind to his family. He
could not behave otherwise.

The next day – 19 February, 1981 – he went even further, announcing live on the ten o’clock news: ‘If there is any doubt about the
identity of the child, if the truth is uncertain, then obviously the
judge is going to make his decision based on the child’s best interests. If it were possible, the baby would make the decision herself.
And, if that were the case, who could possibly doubt that this infant
would choose the future I am offering her, rather than that offered
by the Vitral family?’

Through working on this case, I have learned how the media operates. It is like a giant snowball thrown down a mountainside, and
once it starts rolling, no one can control its direction or velocity. If
you remember anything at all about the ‘Dragonfly’ case, then this
is almost certainly the moment that would stick in your memory;
the few weeks that preceded the judgement. Between February and
March 1981, it was – with the obvious exception of the presidential
election campaign –
the
dominant news story. France was divided
in two. It was, in the crudest possible terms, a battle between the
rich and the poor. So two unequal sides. If you split France in
two along the line of the average salary, there are far more people
below that line than above it, therefore the vast majority of French
people supported the cause of the Vitral family. They made frequent
appearances on television, the radio, and in the newspapers and it
was sensational: a soap opera with an unscripted ending.

De Carville had to shoulder the role of the villain. Around this
time, the American series
Dallas
had just started screening in France.
Léonce de Carville did not resemble J.R. Ewing in any physical
sense, but the parallel was unmissable. And, as in the series, there
was every chance that the bad guy was going to win.

Suspense. Emotion.
Perhaps you were supporting one side or the other back then?
I wasn’t. At the time, I couldn’t have cared less about the ‘Dragonfly’ case. In February 1981, I was still busy with the casino affair; I
had moved from the Basque coast to the Côte d’Azur and the Italian Riviera. I spent my whole life in my car, on stake-out: a boring
job with ever diminishing returns. I do remember catching a brief
glimpse of a TV programme – some sort of reality show before such
things were invented – late one night while I was relaxing in my
hotel room. Nicole Vitral was being interviewed. It was she who
had increasingly taken over the family’s dealings with the media.
Pierre Vitral may have set the machine in motion, but it had left
him behind and now he shunned the cameras. Given the choice,
he might well have called a halt to the entire media circus and let
justice take its course, even at the risk of losing.

Nicole Vitral must have been about forty-seven at the time.
She was a young grandmother, not really beautiful in the classical
sense of the term, but undeniably what the media might call a hot
property. She radiated a sort of infectious energy. Her cause was
a crusade, and she was its saint, its martyr, preaching with a disarming directness and an inimitable Caux accent. She was sincere,
honest, moving, funny, and extremely telegenic. Her face – gaunt
and ravaged from years of working in the salty winds of the Manche
– did not stand up particularly well to close-ups, but she was a
strong woman. And as I sat in front of my television screen that
night, knowing nothing about the case or this woman’s crusade, I
felt deeply aroused by her. Physically, I mean.

I certainly wasn’t the only one. She had those blue eyes, sparkling
with life, defying fate and all the misery it had thrown at her. But
most of all, she had those breasts. Nicole Vitral always tended to
wear clothes – low-cut dresses or open-necked blouses – that showcased her generous bust. This had undoubtedly helped increase the
sales of sausages on the beach at Dieppe. And to spice things up,
she also almost always wore a cardigan or a jacket, which she kept
pulling shut to cover her exposed flesh. I have had the opportunity
to observe her on many occasions since then, and it has become one
of her nervous habits, a reflex. You are talking to her and, inevitably, your eyes drift downward, if only for the briefest of moments.
Almost instantaneously, Nicole Vitral will reach for her lapels and
wrap them around her, only for them to fall open again a few seconds later.

It is a strangely arousing routine that I have always found
irresistible.
On television, the effect was even more perverse, because the
viewer was given an almost godlike view: we could see the curtain of
her jacket falling open to expose that opulent chest, and the cameraman slowly, suggestively zooming in towards it, while Nicole failed
to notice this invasion of her privacy.
Nicole Vitral, with her unusual charms, and perhaps without
even realising it herself, had a troubling effect on millions of Frenchmen that February in 1981. And her charm worked on me too, that
night, although I would not meet her in person for another few
months. In fact, she has had a troubling effect on me for the last
eighteen years. She troubles me still, at nearly sixty-five years of age.
My age, in other words, almost to the month.

As you will have guessed, the Vitrals’ case suddenly became much
more winnable. The best lawyers in France – at least those who
had not already been hired by the de Carvilles – offered their services. Gratis, naturally. There was so much publicity surrounding
the case, and public opinion was firmly weighted towards them. It
was a godsend.

The first task for the Vitrals’ new, influential, media-friendly
lawyers was to wage a guerrilla war against Judge Le Drian. They
suspected him of partiality because Le Drian and the de Carvilles
belonged to the same world. The Lions Club, the Rotary Club,
the Freemasons, dinners with the ambassador . . . all of this was
mentioned, along with some rather unsubtle and ignoble insinuations. Finally, the Ministry of Justice gave in to the pressure. Judge
Le Drian offered his resignation on 1 April, and a new judge was
appointed: Judge Weber, a star of the court in Strasbourg; a small,
honest figure who wore glasses, somewhere between Eliot Ness and
Woody Allen; a man whose integrity was never questioned afterwards, not even by the de Carvilles.

The hearing began on 4 April. No matter what happened, it
would all be over within a month and the judge would have to
choose. The two parties had agreed to avoid any compromise
solution, so, the judge would definitively not recommend a dual
identity, or a shared-parenting arrangement – school terms with
one family, holidays with another, that sort of thing. The hearing would not give birth to a monster with two names. Whatever
happened, Lylie would exist no longer. She would be Emilie or
Lyse-Rose.

Judge Weber simply had to decide who had survived and who
had perished. I have wondered about this question ever since: has
any other judge ever been given such power: to kill a child so that
another may live? To be at once saviour and executioner. One family
would win, the other would lose everything. It was better this way;
everyone agreed.

Just make a decision.
Fine. But based on what?
I have been through the investigation file dozens of times. I

have read the hundreds of pages that Judge Weber read. I have
listened over and over again to the recordings of the hearing:
I was given access to the recordings years later, thanks to the de
Carvilles.

What a lot of hot air! Experts asserting one thing, and another
bunch of experts contradicting them. The hearing came down to
a battle of words between the experts called by each side, none of
them impartial. The impartial experts had nothing to say. After days
and days of questions and statements, it boiled down to the same
thing: the baby had blue eyes . . . like the Vitrals. The Vitrals were
leading on points, but only just, and then at the last moment, the
de Carvilles’ lawyers discovered a distant cousin with pale blue eyes,
so we were back to square one.

Judge Weber should have kept a coin in his pocket, should have
been weighing it up constantly during those interminable sessions
in court.

Léonce de Carville’s lawyers devoted all their time and energy to
erasing the memory of their client’s disastrous media outing, altering the way he was perceived by the public. They were not wholly
successful, but this strategy did bring results. They launched public
attacks on what they called the ‘Vitral clan’, which implicated not
only the family, but the neighbourhood in which they lived, the
entire region.

At war with the clan, snubbed by public opinion, Léonce de
Carville ultimately stood alone, with his dignity, his principles, his
morality. His lawyers somehow succeeded in making him look like
the victim of a witch-hunt, a noble individual torn to pieces by the
mob; they cast him in the role of the tough but honest man, who
had fought tirelessly all his life to achieve success, never allowing
himself to relax, to be a grandfather, a ‘Papa’.

This was the picture of Léonce de Carville that emerged from
the hearing and was made public through the words of the watching journalists: the great man humbled and humiliated by a crowd
of pygmies. Naturally, people began to doubt their convictions:
what if, after all, de Carville
was
telling the truth? What if we have
let ourselves be manipulated by the Vitrals’ media circus, by the
poverty that they displayed so immodestly, by Nicole Vitral’s large
breasts?

Léonce de Carville’s lawyers knew exactly what they were doing.
The whole issue was heading inexorably towards a draw. In spite
of the urgency, the possibility of extra time was looming, followed
by a penalty shoot-out that might never end.

That was the situation when, on the last day of the hearing, the
youngest of the Vitrals’ lawyers entered the fray. Maître Leguerne
is now a highly renowned and successful lawyer in Paris, with a
three-storey office on Rue Saint-Honoré. But back then, in 1981, he
was a complete unknown. He was one of those lawyers working for
the Vitrals for free. The moral being: defending penniless orphans
and widows can end up earning you big bucks.

Leguerne had prepared his coup meticulously. He had asked
Judge Weber if he could have the final word in the hearing, as if he
were about to pull a crucial piece of evidence from his sleeve at the
very last minute . . .

A sudden noise made Marc turn his head. The doors of the compartment opened and the crowd of people waiting on the platform
surged into the previously half-empty train. It was not quite the sardine-like crush of rush hour, but all the same the density of bodies
forced Marc to stand up. His seat banged shut. He stepped back
into the corner, his back pressed against the window, and settled into
position with his legs slightly apart so he could keep his balance. A
man’s hand, holding onto one of the metal bars, jutted just under his
nose, while with the other hand the man held a paperback thriller
which he was reading avidly. Marc turned away slightly, so he could
keep reading his own mystery. As the train shook him from side to
side, Grand-Duc’s tiny handwriting danced before his eyes.

Maître Leguerne took the stand. There were about thirty people in
court that day – 22 April, 1981 – including the two families, lawyers,
various witnesses, and the police. Leguerne addressed himself first
of all to the policemen in the room:

‘Gentlemen,’ he asked, ‘was the miracle child wearing any kind
of jewellery when she was discovered? A necklace, for example? Or
a bracelet, perhaps?’

The policemen looked shocked. Superintendent Vatelier, sitting
in the front row, coughed into his beard. No, of course not. As if the
baby might have been wearing a bracelet around her wrist spelling
out
Lyse-Rose
or
Emilie
. . . What point was this smartass young
lawyer trying to make?