After the Crash Read Online Free PDF

would then take at least a month to lose. In short, being a private
detective, even if it was rather a half-assed plan, definitely seemed
to suit me just fine.
    Like everyone else, I must have heard the news of the crash in the
morning, or heard it on the radio, while I was doing surveillance
in the car park of the casino in Hendaye. Back then, I had no idea
that a few months later that accident would take over my entire life.
Ironic, isn’t it? If only I had known . . .
    The Airbus 5403 from Istanbul to Paris crashed into Mont Terri
on 23 December, in the middle of the night. At 12.37 a.m., to be
precise. No one ever found out exactly what happened that night.
Until that point, it had been quite a mild winter, but on the morning of the 22nd, it had begun to snow – and it hadn’t stopped.
That night, there was a terrible snowstorm. Mont Terri is a bit like
a stepping stone between the Swiss Jura and the French Jura. The
pilot simply missed his footing. That was what people said at the
time, anyway: everyone blamed it all on the poor pilot, who was
burnt to cinders like everyone else in the cabin. What about the
black box, you may ask? All it revealed was that the plane was flying
too low and that the pilot had ended up losing control. The victims’
association and the pilot’s family sought to find out more, without
success. So the pilot was blamed, along with the snow, the storm,
the mountain, fate, Murphy’s Law, and sheer bad luck. There was a
hearing, of course. The victims’ families needed to understand. But
the public didn’t really care about that particular judgement.
    The cabin was crushed at 12.37 a.m. It was the experts who calculated that afterwards, because there were no witnesses except the
passengers – and nothing could be learned from them, not even
a broken watch that might have indicated the time of the crash.
Before Christmas, ecologists had been fighting to save every pine
tree in the Jura mountains. In a few seconds, the Airbus uprooted
more trees than a century of Christmases. Those that were not torn
from the earth were set on fire, in spite of the snow. The aeroplane
ploughed a motorway through the forest, several thousand feet
long, before collapsing, exhausted. A few seconds later, it exploded,
and continued to burn all night.
    The first emergency services did not discover the burning fuselage until an hour later. The reaction to the disaster was very much
delayed, as nobody lived within a three-mile radius of the crash
site. It was the inferno that alerted the valley’s inhabitants. And
then the rescue services were hampered by the snow: the helicopters
remained grounded, and the first firemen were only able to reach
the blazing aeroplane on foot, by following its scorched path. The
storm died down in the early morning, and for a few hours Mont
Terri became the centre of the world. There was even a trial, or
at least an investigation, I think, into why the emergency services
arrived so late. But not many people were interested in that judgement either.
    Besides, the rescue workers must have thought that there was no
point rushing: it was clear there could be no survivors. But firemen
tend to be conscientious, even at 1.30 a.m., in the Jura mountains,
during a snowstorm. So, they searched anyway, if only so that they
hadn’t travelled all that way for nothing, and could do something
more useful than warming their hands for a few minutes by the
vast fire that had destroyed everything on this side of the mountain
– the fire that had transformed the bodies of the one hundred and
sixty-eight terrified passengers into ashes.
    They searched, their eyes streaming from the smoke and the
horror. It was a young fireman – Thierry Mouchot, from the
Sochaux brigade – who found her. You may be surprised by this
level of detail, so many years later, but trust me, it’s all true. Later, I
would spend several hours talking to him, encouraging him