The Cherbourg investigator conducts Part 1’s interrogation. She looks uncannily like the narrator: Both women have severe ponytails, coat-rack shoulders, and pointed faces. Both have the same way of placing their hands on either side of a computer and the same habit of tucking a loose strand of hair behind an ear (25). In Part 3, it is strongly implied that the narrator has not yet visited the police station, and that the policewoman she’s been speaking to is a product of her imagination: a manifestation of her own tormented conscience. As such, she embodies the societal expectations that the narrator has internalized: that she should respond to people in distress with empathy, and that she should value the people on the boat no less than her own daughter. Because the narrator feels that her job is incompatible with these conventional moral expectations, she cannot reconcile herself with her conscience. 

Her interrogation does not stay in police-procedural lanes. She seeks explanation for the known facts, including why the patrol boat was reported unavailable when it apparently was not, and why the cargo ship was discouraged from assisting, but she also interrogates the narrator’s character: her tone of voice and her apparent indifference to the suffering of the migrants. The narrator notes that the policewoman “wasn’t exactly talking like a police inspector should” (46), drifting into territory that belongs to a priest or psychoanalyst. This is the role that the narrator most strenuously resists. At the end of Part 1, she concludes dismissively that the policewoman expects her to “weep with [the migrants] and for them, which most certainly would not have saved them, but at least, apparently, would have saved me, would have saved my soul” (58). Her contention here is that any concern for her personal morality is selfish, as the salvation of her soul would do nothing to keep the migrants alive.

The policewoman names what the narrator cannot, as she refuses to accept the narrator’s compartmentalization. She is the one shaken by the recordings, who turns her gaze away when “you will not be saved” plays back. By the time she shifts to the informal “tu” pronoun (86) in addressing the narrator, the boundary between investigator and double has thinned enough that the narrator hears her questions as her own. Though the narrator insists that “my soul is precisely what I leave in the cloakroom when I get to work” (32), the policewoman demands that she take responsibility for her own soul and for the lives of others at the same time. Because the narrative strongly suggests that the policewoman exists only inside the mind of the narrator, she represents the failure of the narrator’s attempt to separate her work from her moral identity.

The narrator’s colleague on the night shift once wanted to be a priest, and now carries Catholic philosopher Blaise Pascal’s Pensees (1670) to work and reads between distress calls. Burned out by the responsibilities of his job and by the impossibility of saving everyone in distress, he responds to migrants’ English-language pleas with French quotations they cannot understand: “Vous êtes embarqués” (22), the Pascal line that gives the book its second epigraph. The complete line from Pascal, in W.F. Trotter’s English translation, is “Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked” (Pascal’s Pensees, E.P. Dutton & Co. 1958. p. 67). The phrase, coming from Julien, sounds like a recrimination. Unlike Pascal’s readers, who had no choice but to embark on the journey of life and now must wager on whether God exists, the migrants have chosen to put their raft to sea and have thus already wagered their lives. Julien is telling them callously that they should have thought about the cost of the journey before they began it.

The narrator distrusts Julien’s performative detachment. She calls it “noble despair” and a pose (20), and she sees through the cynicism to the disappointment underneath. He once wanted to serve God; now he sits in an observation post watching small craft drown and reads philosophy because it gives him “the necessary serenity of mind” (20). His stance offers the narrator a permission she partly accepts and partly refuses. If the disaster is cosmic, ordained by an indifferent God, then she needn’t feel personally responsible. After the deaths, he reassures her over a beer that “no one gets sent to prison because they made a misjudgement” (19), which is comfort and dismissal at once. He has not turned himself in to be questioned. His detachment is a survival strategy that has hardened into a worldview—an option the narrator entertains and cannot quite take.

This young Kurdish migrant steers from the front of the dinghy with a mobile phone, places 14 calls to the CROSS over three hours, and dies as Part 2 closes. Part 2 is told largely through his consciousness, but he is not given a name. Because he is the one in contact with rescue services, he has the practical authority on the boat—others ask when help will come, and he answers, “Soon,” (66). He has competence and patience, and he continues to insist on the value of his and the other migrants’ lives even as it becomes clear that no one is coming to rescue them (76).

His phone carries the entire exchange between boat and shore, and for this reason he becomes the narrator’s only tangible link to the 27 people who died in the disaster, whose existence is otherwise only theoretical to her. Weeks afterward, she hears his voice so clearly in her memory that she imagines she is listening to a recording of his calls. The asymmetry of the conversation, his exhausted insistence against her professional flatness, represents the different values that the world assigns to their lives: The narrator can afford to insist on calm rationality because her life is not in danger. The choice the caller has made—to risk his life for the chance to work in an English grocery store—is literally unthinkable to her. She cannot imagine a world in which she would be forced to contemplate such a choice.  

In Part 3, he returns in Léa’s imagination, swimming to a faraway island and being mistaken for its lost king (99-100), and in the narrator’s own image of the drowned walking the seabed (100). These lyrical, mythic images, far grander than the caller’s own dream of working in a grocery store, are the narrator’s attempt to console herself, and they are not enough to assuage her guilt. The novel keeps the caller’s voice returning to the woman who refused to send help.