The Narrator Investigates Alice's Case and Writes About It

The Narrator Investigates Alice's Case and Writes About It is both a reconstruction of Alice Espanet’s case and an account of the limits of reconstruction. The Narrator gathers court records, forensic findings, legal texts, press coverage, and personal testimony to establish what happened, then confronts the gap between a documented crime and the still-unanswered question of why. The investigation ultimately becomes a struggle over what writing can reveal when official evidence settles the facts but not the human mystery.

Research and the limits of the record

The Narrator begins with the confidence that a thorough inquiry can recover the complete story. The first days of the case appear clear and well documented, as a properly conducted judicial process should make them. She searches newspaper archives, lawyers’ social-media pages, current and former criminal codes, and online forums where people seek legal help. She studies the police procedure, forensic practice, and the investigating judge’s steps; she can even follow Ritxi’s early withdrawal from public attention through the familiar sequence of shock, denial, and grief described in psychology manuals. The abundance of detail initially promises control, though she wonders whether so much documentation helps or hinders her search for a complete account.

The physical evidence seems to close off conventional uncertainty. Security cameras show no one else entering the house during the relevant period, and the autopsy establishes that the children drowned in a bath; water samples support that finding. The forensic work is straightforward, and the Narrator knows that care still matters because the details may carry weight. Yet the evidence clarifies the crime rather than the person behind it. It identifies no alternative intruder or hidden mechanism, but it cannot explain the inner life that would make the act comprehensible.

The trial makes that distinction tangible. Recovered photographs from Alice Espanet’s phone and computer show thousands of images: informal pictures taken at home and professional studio portraits. Alex appears smiling in them, while Angela looks more serious. The court also examines the green plastic bathtub, marked on one side with a cartoon seal, as an assistant wheels it before the forensic officers and jurors. The object is at once an item of evidence and an ordinary household container; its unremarkable appearance sharpens the contrast between forensic simplicity and the enormity of what happened.

From evidence to obscurity

At a certain point, the documentary trail stops offering direction. The Narrator has learned the standard sequence of police and judicial actions, but no manual or official document can carry her beyond it. What grows difficult is not the case’s basic mechanics but the decisions that exceed the available record. She is especially unsettled by Ritxi’s choice after the twins’ deaths: rather than seek the harshest punishment for his wife, he obtains a lawyer to help secure her release. The case files establish the choice and its consequences; they do not disclose whether love, compassion, denial, or some other force shaped it.

A separate biographical gap deepens the problem. Through Léa, the Narrator learns something of Alice Espanet’s life up to around the age of twenty-one or twenty-two, but several years remain largely unaccounted for. The change from Jade to Alice falls within that interval. Léa offers possible explanations—perhaps the name seemed unsuitable to the social standing Alice wanted, or perhaps the choice defied her mother—but treats the question lightly and cannot resolve it. Alice kept her mother’s surname, Espanet, a detail that supplies no clear answer. The Narrator can identify the change, but not its meaning.

The history of law gives the individual case a wider context. The Narrator examines how infanticide has been treated as distinct from homicide when committed by a mother, including the former Spanish provision that connected the offense to concealing a mother’s dishonor. That special offense remained in Spanish law from 1822 until its removal in 1995; the newer code allows a mother who kills her baby to be convicted of murder. The Narrator also notes Canada’s continuing infanticide provision, which can exempt a mother from punishment when a mental disturbance connected with pregnancy, childbirth, or lactation is established. These legal contrasts inform the debate surrounding Alice’s defense, without themselves answering what happened in her mind.

The trial as an inquiry into knowledge

The courtroom offers competing claims, not an unmediated view of the past. In questioning a psychiatrist, the prosecutor points out that the diagnosis of postpartum psychosis rests on Alice’s behavior and her own account, without an official earlier diagnosis. The psychiatrist confirms that basis and asks what other evidence could be available. The exchange exposes the problem at the heart of the case: mental illness must be assessed through testimony and conduct, yet those are also among the very things the trial is interpreting.

For the Narrator, the proceedings are less illuminating than expected. She attends the final session after three abrasive weeks of trial, much of it repetitive and dull rather than shaped like a courtroom drama. She hopes Alice might make a closing statement and provide a climax, but the hope itself shows how readily the expectations of narrative form press upon an investigation. The proceedings generate more gray areas rather than delivering a single, satisfying explanation.

The Narrator’s understanding of the children changes when the prosecutor speaks their names. Until then, they have existed in her account as babies, twins, bodies, and ashes. Alex and Angela are named, and the facts of their short lives acquire a more particular presence: they were born in one year and died the next. The Narrator recognizes that she had not known their names and had not even noticed their absence from her knowledge. Naming makes the case harder to hold at a distance, while the limited number of times the names are spoken in court underscores how easily the children are reduced to their role in the proceedings.

Motherhood, work, and the unfinished book

The investigation occupies the Narrator’s attention alongside the ordinary work of caring for Erik. At the park, amid other mothers, she does not want to talk; at a child-friendly café, she sits among toys and adults while her thoughts remain with the courts, the House of Armentia, and the Bordeaux bistro where the case began. At night, after Erik sleeps, she uses Niclas as a sounding board, trying out ideas about the case against his kind and trusting nature. When the conversation falters, she returns to her computer, checks that the manuscript has not somehow changed on its own, and puts the day’s notes in order.

As the trial nears its end, she imagines that Jakes Ruiz de Infante might help her break through the remaining obscurity. She anticipates a lunch that will begin with wine, light conversation, and flirtation before turning to the trial. In her fantasy, she reveals that she is a writer working on Alice Espanet’s crime, and Jakes recognizes her and admires her novel. The expectation blends intellectual and erotic excitement: she wants a knowledgeable interlocutor who is not herself, someone who might help the book take the shape it deserves. She even considers making him a character in its final part. These are plans and hopes, not an account of what the lunch ultimately produces.

The Narrator imagines the end of the trial as permission to write without a safety net. She expects that, once the notes and proceedings are behind her, the facts will disclose themselves through the force and rhythm of composition. This confidence is unsettled by her earlier recognition that the available evidence has already reached its limit. The hoped-for book must therefore face the contradiction between writing as a route toward truth and writing as a form that cannot make inaccessible motives certain.

Writing as transformation

The Narrator eventually describes literature as alchemy: a practice that brings together the rational and emotional, the political and mysterious, the beautiful and terrible, without promising a simple answer. Writing allows things to find a place on the page, but it does not erase the distance between what is known and what remains unknowable. The case continues to contain both the living and the dead, including Alice, Alex and Angela, and the figures and images that have accompanied the Narrator’s research.

The investigation’s decisive result is thus not a final explanation of Alice’s motives. It is a changed understanding of what evidence can do. Records, photographs, testimony, and objects establish a sequence and expose the legal and medical questions around it; they cannot convert every silence into a fact. By placing that limit beside the Narrator’s own demands on herself as a writer and mother, the book makes the unfinishedness of the inquiry part of its subject. Writing gives the fragments a form, while leaving the central human uncertainty visible.