Nina Dorval Reenacts the Crime

Nina Dorval’s planned reenactment of the crime is an attempt to make an unknowable act physically legible: at the Massé family apartment on Rue d’Hauteville, she will take Louise’s place and repeat the route and gestures associated with the children’s last afternoon. The exercise promises no guaranteed answer. Its force lies in the tension between the ordinary routine it reconstructs and the violence that routine now contains.

The investigation turns toward reenactment

Nina has kept her eyes open through a rainy August night in her apartment on Boulevard de Strasbourg. Paris is deserted, and the next morning, at 7:30—the hour Louise used to arrive for the children—the seals on the Massé apartment will be removed so that the reconstruction can begin. Nina has notified the investigating judge, the prosecutor, and the lawyers. She has declared that she will play the nanny herself; no one is prepared to contradict the captain, who knows the case better than anyone.

Her authority comes from being among the first officers at the scene, after Rose Grinberg’s telephone call. Rose, a music teacher, had cried out that Louise had killed the children. Nina’s first arrival gave her direct knowledge of the aftermath, but the crime’s decisive moments remain to be reconstructed. The exercise is therefore more than a procedural formality: it places the investigator’s body inside a sequence that she did not witness, asking movement and space to disclose what testimony and evidence have not settled.

Repeating the last routine

The reconstruction centers on an act of care: preparing a bath. At four in the afternoon, Rose Grinberg had closed her shutters, Wafa had walked to the square and sat on a bench, and Hervé had finished his shift. At that same hour, Louise headed toward the bathroom. Nina intends to reproduce the practical gestures that would precede the bath, including opening the tap and testing the water with her hand, as she once did for her own sons when they were small. Then she will call the children to come and bathe.

Paul is asked about Adam and Mila’s habits around water: whether they resisted undressing, or enjoyed splashing among their toys. Nina considers whether a quarrel might have begun, and whether the children might have been wary—or merely surprised—to be told to bathe at four in the afternoon. These questions give the reenactment its specific stakes. A bath is familiar enough to seem harmless, but its unusual timing might have altered how the children responded; the reconstruction tests that possibility by restoring the routine’s circumstances rather than treating the final act as detached from the day around it.

The apartment as a stage

Nina believes that reenactments can act as a kind of revelation. Once investigators return to the scene, a detail may emerge or a contradiction may finally make sense. The apartment has remained unchanged since that day in May: no one has come to retrieve belongings or even collect papers. Outside, bouquets of flowers and children’s drawings are still fading. Nina will pass the candles, enter the building, take the lift, and strike the three knocks that begin the scene.

The planned return is described as entering a sordid theater. Its stage is not an abstract crime scene but the cluttered household Louise inhabited: the washing machine, the sink that is always dirty, and toys spilling from boxes beneath the tables. The objects retain their domestic uses, yet within the reconstruction they become elements of a route through the apartment, each helping restore the repeated labor of the afternoon. The scene’s emotional weight comes from that mismatch: an ordinary home must be traversed as evidence of a killing.

Reconstructing Louise’s movements

Nina plans to let herself be engulfed by Louise’s disgust at the apartment and its demands. She will imitate Louise pressing her fingers into her ears to stop the children’s cries and tears, then moving back and forth: from bedroom to kitchen, bathroom to kitchen, rubbish bin to dryer, bed to the entrance cupboard, balcony to bathroom. The passage accumulates errands and crossings rather than reducing the afternoon to a single decisive gesture. Louise bends down, rises onto her toes, returns, and begins again; domestic care appears as a circuit with no settled endpoint.

The sequence eventually reaches the kitchen cupboard. Nina will reenact Louise taking a knife from it, then drinking a glass of wine beside the open window, one foot on the small balcony. In this apartment, the knife is not a newly introduced instrument but an object kept out of the children’s reach; Paul identifies it as a sharp ceramic knife Thomas brought them from Japan, which Myriam had stored high in a cupboard. The reconstruction links that concealed object to the mundane movements around it, while leaving the precise inner motive for Louise’s actions unresolved.

The final call and its unresolved force

The repeated call to the children—to come and take a bath—closes the passage. In Nina’s reconstruction, the words belong to the routine she is trying to recover, but their repetition also makes routine feel newly threatening. The same invitation that would ordinarily begin a practical act of care now stands at the threshold of the violence under investigation.

Nina’s reenactment is thus both method and exposure. She can reproduce the hour, the apartment, the route, and the gestures; she cannot simply become Louise or make the past yield a complete explanation. The captain’s hope that a detail will surface remains a hope, not a reported discovery. What the scene does make visible is the distance between ordinary caregiving and the crime that took place within it—and the unsettling possibility that, in this home, the path between them was made of repeated, familiar acts.