Bruno returned to his office and logged on to his computer to find that the toxicology report had already been posted on the case file. Claudia’s blood showed a high level of oxycodone, enough that the lab technicians had thought she might easily have gone into a coma. But the report also showed the presence of strong caffeine and some methamphetamine, a combination usually found in a recreational drug widespread in Southeast Asia where it is known as yaba, the Burmese phrase for “mad drug.” Burmese gangs were reported to be making a billion pills a year for export to Thailand, Bangladesh, China and India. Bruno remembered the Thai stamp in Claudia’s passport.
The combination of the opioid, which would induce sleep, with the yaba, which would sharply increase energy and wakefulness, was particularly dangerous, the report stressed. It would severely impair the subject’s motor skills and slow her reaction time. The interaction of the two drugs was likely also to provoke hyperconfidence verging on a sense of invulnerability.
The preliminary findings of the autopsy showed death by drowning, since water had been found in her lungs along with tiny granules of stone dust consistent with her drowning in a well. Overall she had been a healthy young woman. Her body showed no signs of struggle apart from some recent parallel scratches on her right hand and forearm that had probably been made by a cat.
There were scrapes on her hands and back that were consistent with falling down a stone well. Some grazes and bruising on her legs had probably been caused by bumping into obstacles when drugged, but the pathologist could not rule out the possibility that an assailant had gripped her legs to boost her into the well. Traces of stone and cement dust had been found under the fingernails, two of which had been badly broken, probably in her fall, but there was no sign of human flesh or hair, which suggested there had not been a struggle.
Another casualty of humanity’s appetite for drugs, thought Bruno. The Périgord was not free of them. He knew that cannabis was common among young people in St. Denis, and he’d taken part in the arrest of one pupil at the collège who had been dealing in locally grown marijuana. He’d also come across some Ecstasy when a Dutch gang had been caught distributing it along with amphetamines from a camping site. Doubtless there would be a handful of cocaine users. Normally drug offenses accounted for around five or six hundred arrests a year in the département, on average around 5 percent of all arrests. But in St. Denis the proportion of drug arrests was much smaller. This was the first case that Bruno had come across involving fentanyl, oxycodone or the yaba cocktail the report had mentioned. He added a note to the case file about Claudia’s passport showing a visit to Thailand and then pulled out Amélie’s contract and began to read.
He had on Amélie’s advice downloaded a sample contract issued by UNESCO, which made it clear that any recording for sale of her performance or any broadcast would incur extra fees to be negotiated at a rate not less than the initial performance fee. Amélie would also get royalties of 10 percent on the sale price of all recordings. And the Josephine Baker estate would waive for Amélie any license fees for the use of copyrighted music and songs during the performance. That seemed clear enough. Bruno e-mailed Amélie, asking her to call him urgently about some new issues on her contract.
Since Bruno knew that Amélie lived with and by her mobile phone, he didn’t expect to wait long, and she called him within a minute of his sending the e-mail.
“Hi, Bruno, it’s good to hear your voice. What’s up?”
“I have some interesting news. It looks like you’ll be earning more than we thought from the Josephine Baker gig at Milandes, though you might want to handle these negotiations yourself, since I’m now well out of my league. They want to record it and sell CDs of your performance, and your show is going to be televised by ARTE.”
“Wow! That’s great, Bruno. Is there already a provision for that in the contract?”
“It says the fees are to be negotiated but in each case not less than the performance fee and they were paying you five hundred. So that’s at least another five hundred for the broadcast and five hundred for the recording, but you might want to discuss that with them yourself and see if you can get more. Maybe you ought to think about getting a proper agent.”
“If they are doing a sound recording and a video recording, that’s two recordings, so that’s a thousand extra, minimum,” she said. “And since ARTE broadcasts in Germany as well as France, that’s two broadcasts, so another thousand at least.”
“That’s why I think you ought to negotiate this one yourself or get an agent,” he said. “With a televised concert in the works, one ought to snap you up.” He gave her Mademoiselle Neyrac’s name and phone number and was about to end the call when she spoke again.
“Since you’re on the phone, you know I have a Google alert about anything in the media about St. Denis, so I saw that item in Sud Ouest about the American girl falling down the well. It turns out that a friend of mine knows her—Chantal, a law school classmate who works for the Louvre. We’re together now, having an early lunch where Chantal and the American girl ate together last week. Isn’t that weird? Apparently the girl was well liked at the Louvre, and Chantal was really upset. Do you want to talk to her? Here, I’ll put her on. I told her all about you, so you don’t need to explain that you’re a cop.”
“Monsieur Bruno? Bonjour,” came a quiet voice, a Parisian accent.
“Bonjour, Chantal. This is quite a coincidence. When did you last see Claudia, and what was her mood?”
“I saw her last week, and she was fine, except that she’d just broken up with her boyfriend.”
“Would that be Jack, the lawyer in London?”
“Yes, that’s right. He’d come to Paris, and things didn’t work out, so Claudia broke it off. She said it was quite a wrench, since they’d known each other since they were five years old.”
“Childhood sweethearts,” said Bruno. “Was she depressed about it?”
“No, she was relieved and said it had gone on too long. She’d tried to end the relationship before, but Jack had talked her out of it. What happened to her? How did she fall down the well?”
“We’re still trying to understand what happened, but she’d been taking some powerful painkillers, and she may have been trying to rescue a cat that had got trapped in the well.”
“That sounds like Claudia, she was a real cat person. But why was she on the painkillers?”
“She had a doctor’s prescription. Did she ever mention taking them to you?”
“I know she was a martyr to cramps. She used to dread that time of the month, but she said she had some medicine that really helped. Mon Dieu, I wonder if Jack knows she’s dead. He’ll be devastated.”
“Did you meet him?”
“Yes, several of us had dinner together the evening he arrived in Paris. She said she’d rather not start with a romantic evening, just the two of them. I think she’d already decided to end their relationship.”
“Did she ever say why?”
“Not exactly, but when she came back from seeing him in London not long ago she’d been depressed over some row, and he’d lost his temper…” Her voice trailed off, and Bruno felt now she was talking to Amélie, not to him.
“You mean he hit her?” Bruno heard Amélie say. He could hear the shock in her voice.
“That’s what I asked,” Chantal said. “She didn’t say so, not exactly, but…you know how you can read these things.”
“Excuse me, but this could be serious,” Bruno interrupted. “Do you have Jack’s full name and where he works in London?”
“Jack Morgan. Claudia called him JP, like the bank. I don’t know where he works but he went to Yale Law School, if that helps.”
“How long was Jack in Paris?”
“He came over Friday evening on the Eurostar, and we went right out to dinner because Claudia had asked me to make sure they didn’t spend too much time alone. So with my boyfriend we met again the next afternoon at the Marmottan Monet Museum, walked back along the quayside to have a drink at the Café Flore, then dinner somewhere she knew off rue Jacob. Later we went to a place called the Caveau in rue de la Huchette to listen to jazz, and we left around midnight. We met again for a brunch party at Claudia’s apartment on Sunday, and Jack was going back on the Eurostar to London later that day.”
“Claudia knew Paris well?”
“Pretty well. Her father bought her an apartment on rue Jacob for her year in Paris, and she liked to throw brunch parties on weekends.”
“Did she have other friends in Paris?”
“A girl called Marge she’d been at school with who was studying at Sciences Po, a couple from the American embassy and a British girl, Judy, a photographer who did some work for one of the London papers. They were usually at her brunches, and I think she was seeing a French guy she met at one of Jim’s Sunday dinners.”
“Jim? Who is Jim?”
“Jim Haynes. He’s an institution, an American who has a terrific artist’s studio in Montparnasse where for forty years he’s kept open house for dinners every Sunday evening. I think he’s in some record book for having more dinner guests than anyone in history. Claudia took me once—she would go along if she had nothing else to do, and you never knew who you’d meet: expats, tourists, artists, writers. Jim knows everybody. He ran the Arts Lab in London back in the sixties.”
“Do you have a name for this French guy?”
“Marcel. I never met him and never learned his last name, but she liked to go dancing with him at the Batofar near the Gare d’Austerlitz and that old beatnik place near Pigalle that’s become fashionable again, the Bus Palladium.”
“It sounds like quite a social life,” Bruno said, thinking Claudia’s days in Limeuil could hardly have been more different. “Next time I’m there, I’ll have to ask you and Amélie for a few tips.”
Chantal laughed, and Bruno heard Amélie’s voice in the background. “She says she’ll bring me down when she’s singing so I can taste your cooking.”
“With pleasure,” said Bruno, taking her name and number in case J-J needed to follow up on Claudia’s life in Paris. As he ended the call, he saw two urgent messages, one from Hodge asking for a callback and the other from J-J. He called J-J first.
“You’d better get to my office right away,” J-J said. “We’ve got Hodge and the dead girl’s mother on the way here, and they’re bringing Maître Duhamel from Bordeaux, who’s one of the more expensive lawyers in the city. It seems the mother flew in overnight from New York as soon as she got the news. God knows what she wants, but Prunier wants us both to attend.”
“Strings being pulled,” said Bruno. “The dead girl’s father is a friend of the ambassador.”
“And of the White House. Better put your siren on, and you can be here in thirty minutes.”
“Hodge asked me to call him,” Bruno said. “And I haven’t had lunch.”
“I’ll buy you a sandwich, and you’ll see Hodge when you get here. Just get moving, and I’ll tell the police garage you can park here.”
Pausing only to tell the mayor’s secretary of his movements, Bruno trotted down the spiral stone staircase, put the flashing blue light on his van and headed out of town for the forty kilometers to Périgueux. He could think of few things sadder than a mother learning of the death of a child, so he could expect the woman to be in shock and probably exhausted after a sleepless night on the plane. He wondered why she had brought the lawyer with her and hoped she might have something to say that would help him and J-J understand more about Claudia’s death.
There were three items that nagged him, beyond the exotic yaba pills. There was her laptop and its bag, which she seemed to take everywhere with her. He’d like to find her purse, but that may have been in the laptop bag. And there was the unknown man at the lecture. He knew there were no traffic lights on the route until he reached the city, so he pulled off at a cutout, connected his earphone and called the mairie at Limeuil, a place small enough that the mayor’s wife often came in to help.
By chance, she was there, and as he drove off, Bruno asked if she could identify the solitary man in the lecture hall. He could have kicked himself for not checking with her earlier when she answered that it had been Madame Darrail’s son, Dominic, and he like everyone else at the lecture had remained until the end. Bruno would have to double-check what had happened when the lecture ended and when Félicité had closed the castle and locked the main gate into the garden. Had she checked off everyone who had been present? Someone could have stayed behind.
Then Bruno recalled his climb over the roof onto the balcony that led into Claudia’s room. Dominic had been raised in the house and would certainly know about that route. As a boy he’d probably have found all the ways to climb into the castle gardens. He ought to be interviewing Dominic right now rather than racing to Périgueux. Then another thought struck him, and Bruno pulled in at the next available cutout and called Bourdeille’s home. Madame Bonnet answered, and Bruno, recalling that on occasion she had lent Claudia her car, asked if Claudia’s missing laptop might be in the vehicle.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t used the car since the last time I saw her. She borrowed it last week to do some shopping. It must have been Friday, maybe Saturday. She said she had to go to the pharmacy in St. Cyprien. But I can go home and check. It won’t take a minute and I’ll call you back.”
Bruno drove on, wondering why Claudia had gone to the pharmacy in St. Cyprien when St. Denis was so much closer. He’d have to talk to the pharmacist. And if Claudia had left her laptop in the car on Saturday, why hadn’t she picked it up on Sunday? She would have needed it when working in Bourdeille’s library. His phone rang, and it was Madame Bonnet to say that she had found the bag with Claudia’s purse and laptop tucked into the well behind the driver’s seat.
“Claudia had a shopping bag when she came to give me back the keys,” she said. “Perhaps she didn’t want to handle that and the laptop bag on her bicycle.”
Bruno thanked her and ended the call. He’d just entered the low-speed zone of the hamlet of Versannes and so put on his siren to race through. There was radar on the road here, but with his blue light flashing he ignored it and used his siren again to get through the usual lines of traffic at the roundabouts on the main road to Périgueux. He drove into the garage beneath the commissariat de police, took the elevator to J-J’s floor and found him waiting as the doors opened.