It was true, and I was proud of it. I had always been convinced that books had saved me, but could they really keep doing that for the rest of my life? Probably not. Reading between the lines, I thought that surely this was what Jean-Christophe Graff was trying to say in his letter: there had come a point when books had let him down and he had jumped to his death. To solve the Vinca Rockwell case, perhaps I had to abandon the sheltered world of books and grapple with the dark, brutal world my father talked about.

Go into battle, whispered a voice inside me.

“These are the issues you wanted, and the yearbook.”

The confident voice of Pauline Delatour brought me back to reality.

“Can I ask you a question?” she said, setting down several issues of the Courrier Sud.

“You don’t seem to be someone who waits for permission.”

“Why did you never write anything about the Vinca Rockwell affair?”

Whatever I did, whatever I said, there was always someone to steer me back to books.

“I’m a novelist, not a journalist.”

“You know what I mean,” she insisted. “Why did you never tell Vinca’s story?”

“Because it’s a tragic story and I’ve had enough of tragedy.”

It would take more than this to put off Pauline Delatour.

“But surely that’s the gift of the novelist, isn’t it? To write fiction in order to confront reality. Not simply to put it right, but to fight it on its own ground. To analyze it, the better to refute it. To understand it so that, in good conscience, you can present a different world.”

“Did you come up with that little speech?”

“No, of course not—you did. You come out with it in interviews all the time. But I suppose it’s more difficult to apply it in real life, isn’t it?”

And with these words, she turned and left, satisfied with the effect they had had.

12

The Girls with
Flame-Red Hair

1.

I spread the copies of Courrier Sud out in front of me and immediately picked up the January 1993 issue, the one that had an article about the winter dance. I hoped there would be a lot of photographs, but unfortunately there were only a couple of official school pictures of the dance, and the blurred figure I was looking for was not in either of them.