ENGLAND WAS IN THEÂ semifinal of the 2007 Rugby World Cup. No one had predicted that. No one had believed England was any good this
time round, and now they were on the verge of winning it all. Millions of Britons were swept away with rugby fever, including me.
So when I was invited to attend the semifinal, that October, I didn’t hesitate. I said yes immediately.
Bonus: The semifinal was being held that year in Paris—a city I’d never visited.
The World Cup provided me with a driver, and on my first night in the City of Light I asked him if he knew the tunnel where my mother…
I watched his eyes in the rearview, growing large.
He was Irish, with a kindly, open face, and I could easily discern his thoughts: What the feck? I didn’t sign on for this.
The tunnel is called Pont de l’Alma, I told him. Yes, yes. He knew it.
I want to go through it.
You want to go through the tunnel?
At sixty-five miles per hour—to be precise. Sixty-five?
Yes.
The exact speed Mummy’s car had supposedly been driving, according to police, at the time of the crash. Not 120 miles per hour, as the press originally reported.
The driver looked over at the passenger seat. Billy the Rock nodded gravely. Let’s do it. Billy added that if the driver ever revealed to another human that we’d asked him to do this, we’d find him and there would be hell to pay.
The driver gave a solemn nod.
Off we went, weaving through traffic, cruising past the Ritz, where Mummy had her last meal, with her boyfriend, that August night. Then we came to the mouth of the tunnel. We zipped ahead, went over the lip at the tunnel’s entrance, the bump that supposedly sent Mummy’s Mercedes veering off course.
But the lip was nothing. We barely felt it.
As the car entered the tunnel I leaned forward, watched the light change to a kind of watery orange, watched the concrete pillars flicker past. I counted them, counted my heartbeats, and in a few seconds we emerged from the other side.
I sat back. Quietly I said: Is that all of it? It’s…nothing. Just a straight tunnel.
I’d always imagined the tunnel as some treacherous passageway, inherently dangerous, but it was just a short, simple, no-frills tunnel.
No reason anyone should ever die inside it. The driver and Billy the Rock didn’t answer. I looked out of the window: Again.
The driver stared at me in the rearview. Again? Yes. Please.
We went through again.
That’s enough. Thank you.
It had been a very bad idea. I’d had plenty of bad ideas in my twenty-three years, but this one was uniquely ill-conceived. I’d told myself that I wanted closure, but I didn’t really. Deep down, I’d hoped to feel in that tunnel what I’d felt when JLP gave me the police files—disbelief. Doubt. Instead, that was the night all doubt fell away.
She’s dead, I thought. My God, she’s really gone for good.
I got the closure I was pretending to seek. I got it in spades. And now I’d never be able to get rid of it.
I’d thought driving the tunnel would bring an end, or brief cessation, to the pain, the decade of unrelenting pain. Instead it brought on the start of Pain, Part Deux.
It was close to one o’clock in the morning. The driver dropped me and Billy at a bar, where I drank and drank. Some mates were there, and I drank with them, and tried to pick fights with several. When the pub threw us out, when Billy the Rock escorted me back to the hotel, I tried to pick a fight with him too. I growled at him, swung on him, slapped his head.
He barely reacted. He just frowned like an ultra-patient parent.
I slapped him again. I loved him, but I was determined to hurt him.
He’d seen me like this before. Once, maybe twice. I heard him say to another bodyguard: He’s a handful tonight.
Oh, you want to see a handful? Here you go, here’s a handful.
Somehow Billy and the other bodyguard got me up to my room, poured me onto my bed. But after they left I popped right up again.
I looked around the room. The sun was just coming up. I stepped outside, into the hall. There was a bodyguard on a chair beside the door, but he was sound asleep. I tiptoed past, got into the lift, left the hotel.
Of all the rules in my life, this was considered the most inviolate. Never leave your bodyguards. Never wander off by yourself, anywhere, but especially not in a foreign city.
I walked along the Seine. I squinted at the Champs-Élysées in the distance. I stood next to some big Ferris wheel. I went past little book stalls, past people drinking coffee, eating croissants. I was smoking, keeping my gaze unfocused. I have a dim recollection of a few people recognizing me, and staring, but thankfully this was before the age of smartphones. No one stopped me to take a photo.
Later, after I’d had a sleep, I rang Willy, told him about my night.
None of it came as news to him. Turned out, he’d driven the tunnel too. He was coming to Paris for the rugby final. We decided to do it together.
Afterwards, we talked about the crash, for the first time ever. We talked about the recent inquest. A joke, we both agreed. The final written report was an insult. Fanciful, riddled with basic factual errors and gaping logical holes. It raised more questions than it answered.
After all these years, we said, and all that money—how?
Above all, the summary conclusion, that Mummy’s driver was drunk and thereby the sole cause of the crash, was convenient and absurd. Even if the man had been drinking, even if he was shit-faced, he wouldn’t have had any trouble navigating that short tunnel.
Unless paps had chased and blinded him.
Why were those paps not more roundly blamed? Why were they not in jail?
Who sent them? And why were they not in jail?
Why indeed—unless corruption and cover-ups were the order of the day?
We were united on all these points, and also on next steps. We’d issue a statement, jointly call for the inquiry to be reopened. Maybe hold a press
conference.
We were talked out of it by the powers that be.
