Twenty-Six Times

Karim Belaïd was forty-four, with a binocular magnifier, a grey coat and the reputation, in the service, of being the slowest and the most exact man in the building.

He looked at the five images for eleven minutes without saying anything. Then he said:

— Right. First, what I can't do.

— Go on.

— I can't tell you it's the same person. Nobody can. We're on faces of forty to a hundred and twenty pixels, which is below any serious threshold of identification. If I were asked that in an expert report, I'd turn the case down.

— All right.

— Now, what I can do.

He pulled over a sheet of paper and drew three columns.

— I can measure ratios. On a standing figure, with a scale reference in the setting — a door, a table, a step, a car — you get a height to within three centimetres. You also get facial proportion ratios which, unlike the rest, don't move with age after twenty-five. And I can date your images by something other than their files.

— That's what I wanted.

— How many have you got?

— Five.

— Then go and find some more, said Karim. Five can be chance, a neighbour, another mother from the school who happens to know the bride as well. If you bring me twenty, it stops being a question of chance and becomes a question of arithmetic.

She spent the next three weeks on it.

She started the drive again from zero, this time with Karim's rule: measure before concluding. She added her mother's paper albums, which she scanned over three evenings at the service, outside working hours, entering it in the usage register because she had never done anything irregular in her life.

That work did her good, and she distrusted it for that very reason. She found her professional habits in it again, and above all the rule she had applied for nine years, learned from a curator in Nantes — you write down what you see, never what you deduce from it.

Her mother rang twice during those three weeks. Lucie told her she was getting on well, that there were a great many duplicates, and that she would have the memory stick ready for Easter. It was the first time in her life that she had lied to her mother, and she noted it mentally, the way you note an anomaly.

Twenty-six times the same woman, and the list ran to two pages.

The earliest: June 1991, a cousin's christening, Trélazé. The woman is outside the church, on the opposite pavement.

The most recent: June 2024, the fête de la musique in Angers, a shot taken by her father from a café terrace. She is in the crowd, twelve metres away, and she is looking towards the table where Lucie is sitting with two colleagues.

Between the two: thirty-three years.

She took the table to Karim one Friday evening, after closing, with the prints filed in chronological order in a folder.

He spread them out on the big workshop table and arranged them in four rows.

— Twenty-six, he said.

— Twenty-six.

— Over thirty-three years.

— Yes.

He switched on the anglepoise lamp and leaned over.

He took a rule and measured something on three prints, noted it down, measured again.

— Did you do the scales the way I told you?

— School door for number three, two metres five. Trestle table for the seventh, seventy-five centimetres. Clio door for the twelfth.

— Good.

— Right. Three remarks, and the third one isn't going to please you.

— Start with the first.

— On twenty-six shots, she is never blurred. Do you know what that means?

— That she isn't moving.

— That she isn't moving. On a school-fête photograph at a sixtieth, half the people in the background are blurred: they're walking, they're turning their heads, they're doing something. She is sharp twenty-six times out of twenty-six. A sharp person in a candid photograph is a person standing still.

— Second?

— On twenty-six shots, she is alone twenty-six times. Not once talking to anybody, not once in a group, not once with a glass in her hand.

He straightened up.

— Lucie, I don't know who she is. But I can tell you what she isn't. She isn't a guest.

Lucie looked at the four rows of prints.

— Third remark.

Karim hesitated, which was not like him.

— Look at your places, he said. A school fête. A school pick-up. A wedding. A first communion. A bric-à-brac fair. A fête de la musique. A christening. A funeral in 2016, you've given me that one as number nineteen.

— Yes.

— They are all announced events. Publicly announced. A school fête is in the town bulletin. A bric-à-brac fair is in the paper. A wedding is in the announcements column. So is a funeral.

Lucie said nothing.

— She didn't follow you, said Karim. You don't follow people for thirty-three years without being caught, and above all you don't follow them in order to put yourself in a camera's field. She knew where you would be, because it was written down somewhere.

He pushed the 1991 print gently towards her.

— She isn't in those photographs by chance, he said. She came.