The Murder of Two Infants is the killing of Mila and Adam by their nanny, Louise, in the Massé family apartment. Its force lies in the collapse of care into danger: the same intimate routines that once made Louise indispensable to the children become, in retrospect, signs of a relationship in which dependence and control have become difficult to separate. The investigation returns to the apartment and retraces the afternoon’s ordinary gestures, while earlier episodes show how fear, secrecy, and possessiveness had already entered the children’s daily life.

Background: Care and Control

Louise’s relationship with the children is not defined by violence alone. She devotes herself to elaborate games with Mila, inventing settings, costumes, and plots, and at other times vanishes without warning to play hide-and-seek. These disappearances have no agreed rules: Louise hides where she can watch the children searching, stays silent, and does not emerge even when their calls turn to crying and panic. Adam falls as he laughs and searches; Mila eventually fears that Louise has left them alone and will not return. The distress is not an unintended interruption that makes Louise stop. She watches and waits.

The game therefore turns the children’s reliance on their caregiver into its instrument. Mila learns to search under beds, behind curtains, and in cupboards, but Louise keeps finding new hiding places, including the laundry basket and the dark shower stall. When Mila cries, Louise remains motionless. The scene gives an unsettling shape to the later crime: an adult who is supposed to answer a child’s need instead stages abandonment and observes its effects. This does not explain the murders by itself, but it establishes a disturbing pattern in which the children’s fear becomes something Louise can initiate and control.

That coercive intimacy surfaces more directly after Mila wanders away. Louise finds her and gathers her up with kisses and endearments, apologizing for her own negligence. Once the older woman who had confronted her has left, however, Louise tightens her embrace until Mila says she is being smothered. In a calm, cold voice, Louise warns that if Mila wanders again, a bad man may take her away, hide her, and keep her from her parents. When Louise moves to put her down, Mila bites her shoulder hard enough to draw blood.

Neither tells Myriam about the disappearance or the bite. Their silence is mutual, not imposed by an explicit threat from Louise: each now has a grievance against the other, and the concealed incident makes them feel more united than before. The episode binds affection, fear, bodily force, and secrecy together. Mila’s bite is an act of resistance, but it also becomes part of a private bond that excludes her mother and conceals how far the relationship has shifted from uncomplicated care.

The Afternoon of the Crime

On the day reconstructed by the police, Louise leads the children toward the bathroom and prepares to bathe them. The time matters: at four in the afternoon, bathing is unusual enough that investigators later ask Paul whether the children generally liked water, whether they resisted undressing, and whether they might have been surprised or suspicious. The reconstruction cannot settle what the children felt, but its questions make the bath a point at which an ordinary household ritual may have become unfamiliar.

The murder weapon is a small, extremely sharp ceramic kitchen knife. Paul identifies it as one Thomas had brought back from Japan. Myriam had given Thomas a one-euro coin in exchange, to ward off bad luck, and then stored the knife high in a cupboard because she did not want the children to reach it. Its domestic history makes the object particularly charged: it was a gift, put away for safety, and later identified as the weapon Louise could partly conceal in her palm. The evidence establishes the knife’s identity and accessibility; it does not, by itself, establish when or how Louise decided to use it.

The exact sequence of the killings is approached through the investigator’s planned reenactment rather than presented as a complete, witnessed account. Nina Dorval intends to repeat Louise’s movements, beginning with opening the tap and testing the water with her hand, as she once did when bathing her own young sons. She plans to call the children into the bath. The reconstruction follows the investigator’s questions about the children’s response, the small knife, and Louise’s actions, while leaving uncertainties about the moment of the attack visible rather than resolving them by conjecture.

Discovery and the Apartment

Nina is the first police officer to arrive after Rose Grinberg calls to report that the nanny has killed the children. An ambulance is leaving with Mila, and emergency workers carry Myriam down the stairs. Louise remains upstairs, unconscious, holding a small white ceramic knife. Nina orders that she be removed by the rear entrance, then enters the apartment, assigns tasks to officers, and begins documenting the scene.

In the bathroom, Nina removes her gloves and puts her fingers into the cold, murky bathwater. She traces currents across its surface, watching a toy pirate ship move with the waves, then immerses her arm as far as the shoulder before an investigator asks her to leave so the water can be examined. The act is at once part of the search and a physical encounter with the scene: Nina does not merely note that a bath has been drawn but reaches into the water where the children’s routine and the crime meet.

She records details that resist any clean separation between a family home and a crime scene: the smell of soap and blood, the television still on, the washing-machine door open with a crumpled shirt protruding, a full sink, children’s clothes scattered on the floor, and two pink plastic plates left to dry with macaroni and ham. The disorder surprises Nina later, once she has heard of Louise’s reputation as a compulsively tidy nanny. The domestic space preserved for investigation does not match the simplifying legend of the meticulous caregiver.

Investigation and Reenactment

The police cannot account for all of Louise’s movements before the murders. Rose says she saw the nanny in the building’s entrance hall an hour before the killing. Investigators search the neighborhood, question local people, and review supermarket surveillance footage repeatedly. The recording shows Louise buying milk, biscuits, and wine while Mila and Adam run between aisles. The children return to her laughing, but Louise barely acknowledges them. The footage offers a disturbing contrast with her reputation as a devoted, indispensable carer; it records conduct, not a complete explanation of her state of mind.

Nina’s investigation expands beyond the crime scene. She questions Bertrand Alizard, the Rouvier family, M. Franck, Mme Perrin, hospital doctors, neighbors, and other nannies, and examines Louise’s flower-covered notebook and unopened letters. At the studio police search, they find empty drawers, immaculate windows, an old photograph of Stéphanie, and sealed envelopes, but nothing that resolves the case for them. Those who knew Louise only casually describe a relationship limited to greetings. The breadth of the inquiry underscores how little a person’s visible routines may disclose, while its gaps remain real: no single witness can claim to have understood her.

Louise lies in a hospital bed with thick white bandages on her neck and hands. Nina asks the nurse to leave and sits alone with the unconscious woman, studying her pale eyelids, gray roots, dry skin, and the faint pulse at her ear. She tells Louise that she knows she can hear her. The encounter is not a confession or a solved mystery; it is the investigator’s attempt to address the person behind the evidence, even when that person cannot answer.

The reenactment is meant to make the apartment legible through repeated action. Nina expects to return the next morning at 7:30, the hour Louise used to arrive for the children, and repeat the gestures of the afternoon: open the tap, test the water, call them to bathe. The apartment has remained as it was in May; flowers and children’s drawings still mark the entrance outside. By taking Louise’s place, Nina hopes that a detail or contradiction may emerge from the sequence. The procedure turns domestic routine into a kind of stage, but its promise is investigative, not magical certainty.

Significance

The murder is set against a relationship in which care is both materially real and increasingly entangled with possession. Louise does the work that holds the household together: she stays later, assumes more tasks, prepares food, and tells Myriam to rest and enjoy her children. Myriam accepts this help as Louise becomes, in the narration’s formulation, both invisible and indispensable. That background makes the crime more than a sudden violation of a distant household; it exposes the peril within a form of intimacy built around unequal dependence and an employee’s largely unseen labor.

The earlier scenes also sharpen the difference between looking after a child and respecting the child’s vulnerability. Louise can soothe Mila tenderly and then hold her too tightly; she can entertain the children and then make their fear the substance of a game. Mila’s panic during hide-and-seek and her later effort to break free from Louise’s embrace are not the murder itself, and they do not make the children responsible for what follows. They reveal, instead, how the boundary between attention and control has been crossed before the final violence.

The return to the apartment binds the investigation to the ordinary objects left behind: bathwater, the hidden knife, laundry, scattered clothes, plastic plates, and children’s toys. Each detail belongs to an everyday household before it becomes evidence. By reconstructing the last routine rather than offering a complete eyewitness account, the narrative makes the crime’s decisive significance both concrete and unresolved: the children are dead, Louise is found unconscious with the weapon, and the investigator must retrace the familiar sequence to understand how the home became the scene of their deaths.