Killer's diary

The Killer's diary turns private writing into evidence, but its meaning shifts as Bérenger reads and Édouard remembers its history. The pages seem to connect The Killer's plans directly to attacks on real people, including Dany; the later explanation, that the writings began as imagined projects, exposes how easily literary framing and forgotten responsibility can obscure the movement from fantasy to action.

Discovery and Physical Form

Édouard produces a small box, unfolding it as though performing a conjuring trick, and Bérenger eagerly opens it. Among the documents inside is a notebook that Bérenger identifies as The Killer's private diary. He turns its pages at the table while Édouard, looking uneasy, reads over his shoulder. The diary is not encountered as an isolated literary object: it is part of a gathered body of papers that also includes an identity card, The Killer's photograph clipped to the Colonel's photograph, and an address book listing victims' names and addresses. Together, these materials seem to make private records legible as a case against their owner.

The notebook's dated entries give it the appearance of a running record. Bérenger reads entries for January 13 and January 14, then later pages for January 23, January 25, and January 26. Some passages describe an intention to kill; others appear to report completed acts, including the account of an old woman with gold-rimmed spectacles being pushed into a lake. The date headings, references to the previous evening, and matter-of-fact sequence make the pages resemble a log-book. For Bérenger, the form's specificity initially closes the distance between written intention and accomplished crime.

Plans, Victims, and Recognition

As he continues through the notebook, Bérenger finds an entry describing how The Killer persuaded two people to look at the Colonel's photograph near the pool. Another passage anticipates persuading a young blonde woman, whom The Killer has been pursuing, to look at it. Bérenger connects that description to Dany, his dead fiancée, and grieves for her while reading. The identification is emotionally charged but not presented as independently verified: Édouard says it seems likely, leaving Bérenger's recognition as a strong inference rather than a confirmed name in the diary.

The writing also appears to disclose more than a sequence of diary entries. Bérenger describes it as an essay on criminology and a statement of The Killer's beliefs; Édouard, reading alongside him, identifies a detailed confession, future projects, and a plan of campaign. In Bérenger's eyes, these documents provide enough proof to have The Killer arrested and offer a prospect of revenge for Dany. The notebook therefore matters both as a record of apparent methods and as one element in a wider documentary case. Its entries link persuasion around the photograph to an apparent plan of attack, while the address book and other papers seem to identify the victims and the person responsible.

The Earlier Submission and Its Reinterpretation

The apparent clarity of the diary is unsettled when Édouard recalls that The Killer had sent him the diary, notes, and index cards long before the murders, asking him to publish them in a literary journal. Édouard says he had forgotten the submission. He then distinguishes the writings' original status from what they later became: in his account, they were imaginary projects, and he had understood them as idle fantasies, like material for a murder story, poetry, or literature. He believes The Killer only later decided to put the plans into operation.

That recollection complicates Bérenger's reading of the dated pages. The notebook seems to record crimes in a present-tense sequence, yet Édouard's memory places the writings before the murders and describes them as imagined plans. When Bérenger points to the entries' detail and their apparent account of what had just happened, the two interpretations remain in tension. The evidence does not erase the connection between the writings and subsequent violence; instead, it raises the question of when intention became action and how Édouard's literary interpretation helped him overlook the danger. His repeated admission that he did not know gives way to the explanation that he had forgotten and had not believed the projects would be carried out.

Evidence and Dramatic Significance

The diary changes function as it is read. At first, its dates and descriptions appear to provide a direct record of The Killer's crimes. Its references to the photograph and the young blonde woman make Bérenger see Dany's fate inside the pages, while the labels of confession and campaign plan encourage the expectation that documentary proof can lead to arrest. The discovery also sharpens Bérenger's accusation against Édouard: by dismissing the earlier submission as literature, Édouard may have failed to recognize what its plans portended.

Yet the diary does not deliver a simple, uncontested explanation. Its documentary appearance gives Bérenger grounds for action, but the history of its submission makes the boundary between imagined crime and performed crime central to its meaning. The same writing can be read as a record, a confession, a set of unrealized projects, or a literary text later put into practice. The object thus concentrates the play's reversal: what seemed safely contained in a manuscript becomes legible as a warning only after human lives have been lost, and even then its reader must reckon with how intention, memory, and responsibility have been confused.