"The Girl and the Night" by Guillaume Musso, summary

The French novelist moves the action from familiar America to the Côte d’Azur of his childhood, building a classic detective story around a crime committed a quarter of a century ago.

At the prestigious Lycée International Saint-Exupéry near Antibes, nineteen-year-old Vinka Roquell, a preparatory student, and a young philosophy teacher, Alexis Clément, disappeared without a trace on a winter night in 1992. Police believed the couple had secretly eloped to Paris. In reality, the teacher was killed that same night by fellow students, and his body was hidden in the concrete of a sports hall under construction. In 2018, the book was published by the Parisian publishing house Calmann-Lévy after extensive research by the author into the historical topography of his native region.

In 2022, the novel was adapted into an international television miniseries under the English-language title "The Reunion," starring Ioan Gruffudd and Ivanna Sakhno. The work is a standalone novel and is not part of a book series.

Invitation to an anniversary

In the spring of 2017, successful New York novelist Thomas Degalais returned to France for the fiftieth anniversary of his school, the Lycée Saint-Exupéry. The reason for his hasty flight was a newspaper article sent by his lycée classmate, Maxime Biancardini. The article reported on the imminent demolition of the old sports building to make way for a six-story glass tower. Contractors were scheduled to demolish the building the following Monday. Twenty-five years earlier, Thomas and Maxime had walled up the body of their teacher, Alexis Clément, in a wall between the halls. Francis Biancardini, Maxime’s father, helped the boys cover up the murder.

The celebrations at Chestnut Square on campus are noisy. Former classmates drink ginger tea and boast about their career successes. Maxim is preparing for the parliamentary elections as a presidential candidate and fears exposure. A worried local newspaper journalist, Stefan Pianelli, starts a conversation with Toma about the recent flood: the dorm basement flooded, and students opened a rusty metal locker and found a duffel bag containing 100,000 francs in cash. Forensic experts found Winky Rockwell’s fingerprints on the leather handle. Toma remembers this locker. In his senior year, the locker belonged to him personally.

Bloody December

The writer’s memories take him back to Saturday, December 19, 1992, when a freak snowfall hit the coast. The campus, buried in drifts, was practically deserted before the Christmas break. Eighteen-year-old Thomas came to visit Vinka, with whom he was hopelessly in love. The girl was feverish, crying, and showed a positive pregnancy test. Through her sobs, she whispered that she had been raped by Alexis.

A young man, enraged, grabbed an iron bar at a construction site and burst into Clément’s office apartment. A fierce fight ensued. The teacher wrestled his attacker to the tiled floor and brandished a shard of glass bottle. At that moment, Maxime arrived and slit Clément’s throat with a folding pocket knife. Maxime’s father, Francis, a major construction contractor, quickly assessed the situation, ordered a worker to wrap the body in a double tarpaulin, and seal it in the freshly laid concrete wall of the sports complex. Thomas went on vacation to visit relatives. In January, the lycée discussed nothing but the romantic elopement of the red-haired beauty with the young philosophy teacher to a Parisian hotel.

Secrets of the family circle

On Saturday, May 13, 2017, the former conspirators receive notes threatening revenge. The blackmailer clearly knows the details of the crime. Thomas tries to clarify the fate of an old bag of money and meets Stéphane Pianelli at a café. Suddenly, an envelope containing yellowed photographs is discovered under the windshield wiper of a rental car: Vinca is passionately kissed by Richard Degalais, Thomas’s father and former director of the lycée, on a wild Marseille beach. It turns out that Vinca demanded one hundred thousand francs from him to keep quiet about the secret affair.

Thomas goes to La Fontaine Hospital to see cardiologist Fanny Brahimi, an old school friend, for clarification. Fanny confesses that twenty-five years ago, she photographed their dates at Vinka’s request. At her parents’ home, a conversation with her father escalates into an argument. Richard quotes the classics, watches a tennis match on television, and cynically calls the deceased girl a self-serving schemer. Soon, Maxime arrives with his two young daughters. The future deputy holds a folder of clippings about the gang of robbers who tortured Francis Biancardini to death last winter in a villa in the gated community of Aurelia Park.

Fake photo

The trail leads Tom to the Biot hill, to the fashion photographer Yves Dalanegra. It was this same photographer who once sold to newspapers a photo of Vinka and Clément supposedly dancing at the lycée’s New Year’s Eve ball. Dalanegra finds the original negative in a digital archive. It turns out the frame has been cropped. Vinka was dancing alone, looking not at the teacher, but at a shadowy figure standing to the side.

A study of the school archives reveals a stunning fact. Thomas compares the handwriting on the handwritten dedications in Vinka’s books with Clément’s reviews on her philosophy tests. The letters are completely different. The love notes were written by a different person, bearing the same name. Thomas and Maxime killed an innocent man, unrelated to the girl’s secret life.

Confession in an Empty Church

That evening, Thomas finds Fanny Brahimi in the dim light of the Church of Saint Mary Magdalene in Biot. Unable to bear the burden of her past, she confesses to Vinka’s murder. On that frosty night in 1992, Fanny was jealous of Thomas’s beautiful rival and suffered from poverty and loneliness. Finding a powerful sleeping pill in her friend’s medicine cabinet, she emptied a handful of pills into her teacup, hoping to eliminate her from her life forever. Later, Fanny found her roommate breathless.

Tom’s mother, the strict Austrian Annabelle Degalais, was the first to learn of what had happened. The director of the boarding school took matters into her own hands. Annabelle donned men’s clothing, placed Fanny, wearing a red wig, in the passenger seat of the school’s sports car, and drove out openly through security. Together, they boarded the morning express at the station, booked a room at the Hotel Sainte-Clotilde in Paris, left Winky’s comb, containing genetic traces, in the bathroom, and departed separately on trains the next morning. The police accepted the staging at face value.

Fall from a height

A nightclub is blaring in Saint-Exupéry. Graduates are drinking and dancing to the hits of their youth. Maxim arranges a date with a friend at the Eagle’s Nest, a narrow rock ledge above the lake. As he climbs the stone steps, Thomas notices a fight. An unknown assailant pushes Maxim over the parapet, dropping ten meters onto the asphalt. The victim, in a severe coma, is taken away by ambulance.

Using his tablet’s geolocation, Thomas tracks his mother’s rental car to a deserted parking lot on Cap d’Antibes. Panicked, his father tells his son that Annabelle has taken an antique shotgun from the gun safe and gone off onto a rocky coastal path.

A forgotten house above the river

At night, the writer finds himself in Francis Biancardini’s secluded villa in Aurelia Park. The interior of the luxurious home above a mountain stream is dominated by portraits of Annabelle. They loved each other since early childhood in the Piedmontese village of Montaldicio, led a secret family life, and traveled the globe together.

In the wall safe, behind a childhood photograph, Thomas finds proof of his origins: his biological father was Francis. Men of a previous generation protected women’s peace with force, weapons, and silence. A loaded.38 caliber revolver also lies there. Soon, the police commissioner calls: Annabelle has been found on the rocks of the cape with a broken head, and Richard Degalais is sobbing over her body, taking the blame.

The identity of the blackmailer

Toma solves the main mystery. In Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetry collection "My Female Brother," lines about same-sex passion are underlined. Vinka’s mysterious lover wasn’t a young man. The name belonged to Mademoiselle Alexis Deville, an English literature teacher from a wealthy Californian family. She dreamed of having a child with the genetic makeup of a young student, but the Deville family cut her off from financial support. The teacher forced her friend to sleep with the mature director for the sake of conception and money, supplying the girl with drugs through a bribed doctor.

In December 1992, Vinka showed up at Annabelle’s office demanding a large sum of cash. The enraged mother struck the brazen blackmailer over the head with a heavy statuette and presumed her dead. Soon, Fanny confessed to poisoning herself with the same sleeping pill, and Francis reported Clément’s murder. The parents combined the crimes into a salutary Parisian myth.

Interchange at the Cape

Thomas rushes to the Fitzgeralds’ coastal villa. Alexis Deville confesses to the massacre of Francis and Annabelle, and the attack on Maxime. Seven months ago, Ahmed, a cancer-stricken construction worker, sold her the truth about the grave in the gym wall for five thousand euros. To protect herself from exposure, the woman set three trained guard dogs on her guest.

A fighting terrier knocks the writer down and tears his neck. Suddenly, shots ring out. Richard Degalais appears in the doorway, Francis’s revolver in hand. He coldly kills the enraged dog and shoots Deville, washing away the long-ago humiliation with blood. In prison, the old man takes the fall for the murder, framing the tragedy as a sudden burst of jealousy between lovers.

The Truth About the Wall

Two months later, Maxim emerges from his coma and wins the election. The Deville Foundation withdraws its donations, so the demolition of the gym is cancelled. Stéphane Pianelli demands sensational news and threatens to publish an exposé about the walled-up skeletons.

On the evening of July 14th, during the celebratory fireworks display, a reporter brings Tom an old newspaper clipping from 1997. During the Christmas holidays, Annabelle staged a vandalism attack on the sports complex so that Francis, under the guise of urgent repairs, would excavate the remains of Vinka and Clement from the concrete. The bodies had long been buried in a secure, secret location.

In the lyceum library, the writer sits by the window and writes on a blank sheet of paper about a girl who managed to survive a maddening night. His memory lingers of Francis listening to the faint breathing of the poisoned Vinca, wrapping her in a woolen blanket and carrying her along mountain paths into the saving unknown.