The mistral was still rattling his shutters on Monday morning. Blanc had been so exhausted the night before that he had only brought in the essential pieces of furniture. In the meantime the wind had blown over two chairs, and an old tablecloth now hung like a ragged sail in a plane tree on the other side of the Touloubre. He shrugged. He would buy a new one at the market. Eventually.
After three days of the mistral, almost everybody at the station was exhausted from lack of sleep and as bad-humored as if Olympique de Marseille had lost a home game against Paris. But at least the minister had vanished. His wife was at work in her office. Blanc would have liked to tell her what he had found out on Sunday, but she had the phone to her ear when he knocked on her door and went in. She scribbled something on a piece of paper and passed it across her desk to him, while still on the phone. Urgent meeting in Aix. Will have time this afternoon. Her handwriting was large and extravagant, with large curving loops like some Renaissance letter. Blanc was disappointed but nodded and closed the door carefully behind him, taking the piece of paper with him.
Nkoulou was working next door, as cool and correct as ever. The commandant raised a hand to his forehead as Blanc passed, but said nothing. It was as if the phone call on the weekend, with his furious outburst and the woman with the vulgar voice, had never taken place. Blanc was relieved but remained on his guard. A few minutes later Fabienne Souillard arrived. She was wearing a freshly starched uniform that made her look ten years older and six inches taller. Blanc glanced briefly at the gun in her holster then looked away. I hope she doesn’t lose her nerve, he thought. They had to wait another half hour before Tonon turned up. When he eventually arrived, he looked dreadful. The veins in his eyeballs had burst into a red net on the whites. He was unshaven and his uniform was as crumpled as his face. As ever, his holster was empty.
“Let’s go visit the painter,” Blanc said, reaching for the car keys.
Nkoulou glanced at them through the open door, but still didn’t say a word.
* * *
“I thought you might be back,” Rheinbach said wearily, opening the door to them.
Blanc was relieved that the man wasn’t being difficult. He produced the copy Fabienne had made of the old school photo. “I’d like you to tell us something about your younger days,” he said.
“It’s not exactly a story with a happy ending.” The artist led them into the house and asked them to sit down. He looked anxious and relieved simultaneously at being asked to tell the story. “My parents used to take us camping down to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer every summer. That’s something that stays with you for life. I have always loved the South of France, even before I knew I was going to be a painter. And long before I met Claudia. It was a high school romance. After graduation, we went on to university together. That summer we took my old 2CV down to Provence to go painting. I think you know how that vacation ended.” He turned and looked out the window.
“Did you know who was responsible?” Fabienne asked him.
Rheinbach shook his head. “The men were wearing masks. I gave a witness statement. Then my parents came to collect me and we dealt with the rest of the formalities.”
“Formalities?”
“For bringing the body back to Germany.”
They all sat in silence for a few minutes. Then Blanc cleared his throat and said, “I’m amazed you came back to Provence after something like that.”
The painter gave them a weary smile. “My friends said that too at the time. I didn’t come back here for years. I finished my studies, got married, began to work as a freelance painter, and tried to forget the whole episode. But my marriage fell apart, and my career followed suit. So at some stage I came back here, where I could at least make a living as a second-rate contract painter. Better than driving a taxi around Cologne.”
“And you want us to believe that it was purely by chance you ended up living next door to Charles Moréas?”
Rheinbach held up his hands. “I don’t want to make you believe anything. I bought this old place because it was the only thing cheap enough for me to afford. After a while I realized that my neighbor wasn’t exactly the kind of person you’d invite round for supper, but his name meant nothing to me. It remained like that for years, until my other neighbor dropped by. The architect.”
“Le Bruchec came to see you?”
“We’d bumped into each other from time to time and said hello. But we moved in different circles, if you know what I mean. He earns in one hour as much as I make in a month. That’s why I was so surprised when he dropped by just a few weeks ago.”
“After the death of his wife?”
“Yes. He was worried that our mutual neighbor could break into his house. He said he’d seen him hanging around the house and asked me if I could keep an eye on it for him. He suggested we might both complain about him to the gendarmerie. I didn’t want to get involved in anything and made an excuse. But then Le Bruchec said he wanted to see ‘this highway robber Moréas locked up.’ The juxtaposition of ‘highway robber’ and ‘Moréas’ suddenly rang a bell with me, although I couldn’t think why. It was possible I had heard the name ‘Moréas’ when I was giving my statement twenty years ago and had since forgotten. Then the architect began to tell me all the old stories about Moréas, the rumors that he had been involved in robbing cars. I suddenly felt sick with fear and had to ask Le Bruchec, as politely as possible, to leave the house. After that he never mentioned Moréas to me again. But I began to make my own inquiries.”
“In the town hall archives. And at the editorial offices of La Provence.”
“I can hardly say any of them were particularly chatty. But I picked up a few things. Enough to put two and two together.”
“You found the missing pieces of the jigsaw.”
Rheinbach made a face. “At some stage I found myself sitting here, in this chair, realizing that by some horrible turn of fate I was living just a few hundred yards away from Claudia’s killer, who was free as a bird. He didn’t even bother to keep a low profile, didn’t even have a bad conscience. He ran around the place getting in people’s hair and acting the tough guy. Maybe he had even completely forgotten Claudia’s death. Whereas I certainly hadn’t forgotten.”
“And so you killed him.”
The painter inhaled sharply as if he had been punched in the stomach. “There were moments when I would have loved to. But it wasn’t me.”
“Where were you on Sunday, the thirtieth of June?”
Rheinbach shook his head resignedly. “I think you might be able to work that out. I wanted to confront Moréas once and for all. I wanted to confront him with what he had done. I wanted him to confess to my face that he had killed Claudia.” He gave a bitter laugh. “How naïve was that? It just so happened that as I was driving along, I spotted him roaring down the road between our two properties on his motorbike. I did a U-turn and followed him, just like in the movies. Except that Moréas was on a rusty, battered motorbike and I was in an aging Clio. Not exactly Steve McQueen stuff. It ended by the garbage dump next to the main highway. I parked in the main lot near the entrance. Moréas had driven straight over to one of the Dumpsters. He had no idea I had followed him. I sat there behind the steering wheel for an hour wondering what to do. It was absurd, me and that guy hanging around in a garbage dump in the heat of the day. What was I going to do? I was just about to give up and drive home when along came Le Bruchec in his big four-by-four with a trailer full of trash. He and Moréas started talking to each other. I couldn’t make out what they were saying but it certainly wasn’t very amicable. It was like watching some bizarre play.”
“Did they argue long?”
“Maybe a few minutes. I can’t be certain. Then Le Bruchec emptied his trash and drove off.”
“Did either of them notice you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“And then?”
“Then I finally picked up my courage, got out, and walked straight over to Moréas.” Rheinbach closed his eyes. Blanc realized he was too ashamed to look any of them in the eye. “The guy gave me a dirty look,” he continued at a whisper. “He knew who I was. Had known all these years that I had been the one he and his gang had dragged out of the car along with Claudia. And he could tell by looking at me that I knew it too now. And he just laughed.” He took a deep breath. “I wanted to talk to him, to look him in the eye, to appeal to his conscience. To shatter him morally, can you understand that? I thought he would cringe, be ashamed, deny everything. I was an idiot. He had no sense of shame at all. He just laughed at me.”
“Moréas was sick in the head,” Tonon said sympathetically. “He would have enjoyed that.”
The painter gave an agonized smile. “I couldn’t get a word out. I just stood there in front of this guy, staring at him. And he stared back, until eventually I blinked first and looked away. I turned around to head back to my car. I felt more miserable than I ever had before, even on that night twenty years ago. And then I was overcome by a wave of anger. I didn’t think twice.” He paused.
At that moment Blanc was certain that Monsieur Rheinbach wasn’t his murderer. The sad man sitting in front of him was telling the truth. There was no way he would have lifted an automatic weapon and emptied the entire magazine, let alone set fire to the body afterward. “What happened next?” he asked wearily.
“I was insane with rage,” Rheinbach admitted. “I bent to the ground, picked up the first stone I found, and hurled it at Moréas.”
“Did you hit him?”
“Yes. I don’t think he had believed I would do anything.”
“On the head? Did it knock him out?”
“No, no. It only hit him on the hip, I think. He cried out and swore, but he must have been in pain, since he didn’t charge at me. He swayed and then fell over.”
Blanc remembered what Dr. Thezan had said: the old motorbike accident, that Moréas had an artificial hip joint. The stone must have hurt him really badly. “You couldn’t have hit him in a better spot,” he murmured.
“I suspect him stumbling saved my life. Moréas was absolutely furious and threatened me all the time he lay there on the ground. But he was too badly hurt to come after me. I ran to the car and drove off. All night long I hid in the house waiting for Moréas to burst in at any minute like some raving monster. The next day I decided there was no point in hanging around until he got me. I packed up my easel and a few paints, with the intention of heading off for a few days, somewhere he wouldn’t find me. And then you turned up…”
Blanc stared out of the window at the perfect blue sky. They would take the painter with them down to the gendarmerie station and get him to make a statement. Nkoulou would read it and then have the man detained in custody. What the German had just told them could easily be taken as a partial confession. All that remained to be done was to drag the rest of the story out of him. The boss wouldn’t permit them to allow Rheinbach to return home. Not as long as there were politicians putting pressure on him. If the commandant held him as a suspect, neither the mayor nor the minister would have anything to complain about. “Monsieur Rheinbach,” he said, with resignation in his voice, “we must ask you to come with us.”
* * *
A few hours later, after all the formalities had been completed, they had a foreign jigsaw puzzle painter in the sole cell in the Gadet gendarmerie station, normally used for drunks to sleep off their hangovers or to hold a thief caught in the act until he could be sent to Aix-en-Provence or Marseille. If Rheinbach was to be caught up in the wheels of justice, then soon he would be gone. Blanc might well never see him again, but he would have solved his first case in the Midi, and Monsieur Vialaron-Allègre would have no excuse for any more plots against him. But instead of closing the files and heading off to have lunch with Fabienne and Marius in the shade of the plane trees, he busied himself in his office until nearly everybody else was out at the restaurant. Then he went to the office next door, to see Madame le juge.
She was smoking and gave him an inquisitive look from behind a cloud of cigarette smoke. “Mon Capitaine,” she said. “Every cop in Gadet is jealous of your success. But you don’t exactly look like a hunter who’s just bagged a trophy.”
“I think I might have had the wrong buck in my sights.”
“Commandant Nkoulou considers the case as good as open and shut. He seems very relieved. He was even singing your praises.”
“He might be somewhat premature.”
“You want to ask me not to prepare the case for the prosecution yet?”
She used her cigarette to point to a chair. “Now I understand why certain people in Paris were pleased to see the back of you.” She smiled and Blanc realized Madame Vialaron-Allègre meant it as a compliment. At that moment he finally decided to trust her.
“Let’s reconstruct the day of the murder,” he began. “Sunday, June thirtieth. Nobody knows how Moréas spent the morning. Maybe he was on his own, at home or on one of his bits of land. The pathologist found traces of alcohol in his blood. Maybe he had been drinking the day before and was sleeping it off. But things begin to get interesting just before noon: Moréas turns up in Saint-César harbor and spends some time on his boat. The building firm owner Pascal Fuligni confronts him at his mooring and offers him five thousand euros for it. Moréas just laughs in his face. The pair get into a loud argument. Shortly after, Moréas drives off. Fuligni remains in the harbor—at least according to him. We have no witnesses to the fact.
“Apparently, Moréas goes directly to the garbage dump. Around midday or shortly after he’s seen at the scrap metal Dumpster. Probably looking for stuff that other people have thrown away but he can reuse. Lucien Le Bruchec turns up, the neighbor who suspects him of trying to break into his house and is planning to make a formal complaint, though he has not yet done so. They have a brief, argumentative exchange of words, and then the architect takes off again. He admits as much himself. And that is also what Monsieur Rheinbach says, who turns up around the same time. He is crouching down in his red car, unnoticed by everyone else, taking in the whole scene. The farmer who was dumping trash also noticed the red car, but apparently not anyone inside it. We’ve asked him again, and he can’t remember seeing anyone.
“Bon. Next, early in the afternoon, we have the confrontation between Rheinbach and Moréas, which apparently ends with Moréas lying in pain on the ground, swearing, while our stone-throwing artist makes a run for it. Our colleagues from forensics have already turned his house upside down and found paints and paintings, but not the slightest trace of any Kalashnikov from Marseille. How do we suppose Monsieur Rheinbach could have got his hands on such a weapon? Just to be sure, I asked our colleagues down in Marseille if the German had ever turned up on their radar. Not a thing. Except for his witness statement all those years ago, his name has never turned up in a single French police file. I also asked the same question of our German colleagues. Nothing there either. The painter is as clean as a nun.”
“You wouldn’t have taken him into custody?”
“Commandant Nkoulou insisted. And in one respect he’s right: Following the row with Rheinbach, nobody we know of saw Moréas alive. No witnesses, not that that is particularly remarkable: Who’s going to be hanging about in a garbage dump on a hot Sunday afternoon? It’s only first thing on the Monday morning that an employee comes across the still-smoking body. So, who was there at the garbage dump after Rheinbach? Only the murderer.”
“That’s unless the painter himself is the murderer.”
Blanc pulled out his notebook and leafed through it. “On Friday, five days after the murder, the builder Pascal Fuligni is found dead in the Étang de Berre. No link between him and Rheinbach.”
“There is also no link between the two deaths. At least not officially,” Aveline Vialaron-Allègre reminded him. “You’re not going to save Rheinbach by claiming there’s no way he could have been involved in another unsolved death.”
Blanc hesitated for a moment. Trust this woman, he told himself. Who else do you have? “There’s one more thing…” He extended across the table to her the piece of paper on which he had noted Fuligni’s last text message—It’s all going to come out. There’ll be enough blood spilt to fill the harbor—and explained to her what it was.
The juge d’instruction stared long and hard at the piece of paper. “Did you ask Marcel about this?” she asked eventually, lighting up another cigarette.
“I haven’t been to see your friend.”
“Marcel is my husband’s friend, a political friend.”
Blanc leant back in his seat. He felt like celebrating, but forced himself not to show any emotion. She’s watching my back, he thought, she really is watching my back. “I don’t know what those few lines mean,” he said. “But I refuse to believe they are unimportant—that it is all coincidence, that Fuligni’s death was a tragic accident, that two deaths within five days just happens to be ‘one of those things.’”
“You want a couple of days’ breathing space, so that with my permission you can investigate an allegation of murder against Marcel Lafont? Against the man who has for the past thirty years been mayor of Caillouteaux? Against the trusted friend of my husband, a government minister?”
“I will be extremely discreet.”
“But you still want my protection. And that I don’t mention a word of this to my husband.”
“I couldn’t have put it better myself.”
“And if I don’t offer my protection, will you carry on with the investigation regardless?”
“I think you already know me well enough to answer that question for yourself, Madame le juge.”
Aveline Vialaron-Allègre had forgotten all about her cigarette. “You want to make me your accomplice in a secret, indeed possibly illegal investigation,” she murmured. “Have you ever done anything like this before? In Paris?”
“Cops sometimes set up small, secret teams. But sometimes I went out on a limb on my own. However, I have never compromised a juge d’instruction.”
“So this will be a first for both of us.”
And with that, Blanc finally realized that he would at least have a couple of days to investigate Mayor Lafont in peace.
For the rest of the day Blanc shut himself away in his office, working at his ancient computer. The police had never carried out a single investigation of the mayor although he had on numerous occasions been called as a witness. Nonetheless, an Internet search on his name came up with countless hits: Monsieur Lafont opening a bridge, Monsieur Lafont at a meeting of Midi Provence, Monsieur Lafont at the party congress that elected the last presidential candidate. Now and again he popped up in statements by the opposition. The usual political rhetoric in general; only if you read them closely, and knew what Blanc now knew, you could decipher some of them as allegations of corruption. It obviously hadn’t been of any use. Three years ago Marcel Lafont had been awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honor, France’s highest honor. And just over a month ago, a columnist in La Provence had speculated that Lafont could end up in the senate before long. Or might be named chairman of Midi Provence. Or both. The column had been published the day after the press conference at which Lafont had first publicly announced his plans for a médiathèque. There was also a photo of the event, with Fuligni standing next to him.
“Merde,” Blanc muttered. This damn médiathèque was more than just Lafont’s ticket to reelection as mayor, as he had suggested himself—it could also be his ticket to ride a whole series of gravy trains. He had the feeling that over the course of Lafont’s long political career there had to be more than a few dark closets to which the doors had never been opened. But he also knew that even an experienced team of cops with regular permission to carry out an investigation would need more than a few days, a lot more. A lone wolf working in secret didn’t have a chance.
* * *
“Have you got a construction permit for that?” Douchy yelled at him from his tractor when Blanc parked outside his house early that evening. His neighbor was pointing at the mountain of stripped wallpaper and other rubbish that he had piled stones around to stop the wind blowing them all over the place.
“I’m stripping wallpaper. Since when does that require a permit?” Blanc shouted back at him.
“You need a permit to build an extension,” Douchy replied, unperturbed. “Otherwise I’ll lodge a complaint at the town hall.”
“Then please give my best to Monsieur Lafont. I have business to discuss with the mayor every now and then.”
As soon as he mentioned the mayor’s name the surly farmer immediately seemed to lose any enthusiasm for a fight. Instead he just drove off on his tractor without saying good-bye. Life in the Midi can sometimes be easy, it would seem, Blanc thought.
He had not forgotten that the Michelettis had invited him over for dinner. Bernard. Bring anything but wine. In the old days he had left it to Geneviève to decide what to take when they were invited somewhere. It was time he got used to his new way of life. The first house on the right when you came into Sainte-Françoise-la-Vallée from Gadet, behind a thick hedge that separated it from a field of olive trees, was a little garden store. He had driven past it on several occasions. This time he had stopped and bought a large hibiscus plant and, remembering Paulette Aybalen’s words, a little thyme plant in a bright red terra-cotta pot. He realized to his own surprise that he was rather excited. He dressed a bit more presentably and climbed into the car.
The approach to Domaine de Bernard was on the road to Saint-César, but it was a long and winding route to reach the winery, which in fact was hidden away behind oaks and pine trees but actually only a few hundred yards away from his old olive oil mill. Amidst the trees a few brave cicadas were still clicking away against the rushing mistral. The few other drivers he encountered on the route départementale were driving like lunatics. Blanc was beginning to feel nostalgic for the gray days of Paris in the fall, when at least there was no wind. He turned off the road onto a gravel and brownish red sand track. It was quieter amidst the oak trees. When he trundled down into the depression where the vines were planted it was all of a sudden hot and warm. He immediately relaxed.
Bruno Micheletti was sitting on an ancient blue tractor with tall, thin wheels on which he was carefully navigating his way among the rows of vines. Behind him an apparatus attached to a plastic tank was spraying a brightly colored liquid in a fine rain over the leaves. That won’t be water, Blanc thought to himself, and tried not to breathe in too deeply.
“Just drive on up to the house,” Micheletti called out over the stuttering noise of the tractor’s diesel engine. “It’s at the end of the track.”
Blanc drove on, along a winding track that dipped and rose again, peacocks wandering amid the vines, or perching on low stone walls that had conserved the sun’s warmth, or even half hidden amidst the lower branches of the pine trees. The estate was much larger than he had imagined. Blanc was no expert at guessing these things but it had to be dozens of acres at the very least. On his walk in the wood he had only come across one tiny corner of it. Eventually the gravel and old asphalt track led him up a hill that could have been the seat of a little castle overlooking a sea of vines. There was a little dovecote that sat some fifteen feet above a barn with a closed wooden door that reeked of wine and wood and vinegar. Next to it was a little garden with a freshly watered lawn in front of a nineteenth-century house made of brownstone. On a terrace sheltered from the wind by the house itself, beneath a yellow umbrella, was a long wooden table where glasses and cutlery shone in the oblique rays of the sun.
Blanc parked carefully behind a peacock that was strutting along the gravel and didn’t seem to be remotely stirred by a huge car coming threateningly close. One of its long tail feathers suddenly rose up and was taken by a gust of wind that whipped it out and sent it dancing, a flash of silver and violet against the sky.
“It’s that time of year,” said Sylvie Micheletti with a laugh. She had been standing on the stone steps of the terrace, and now came toward him. “In summer the males lose their tail feathers. We tie them into little bundles and give them to our customers. At least to those who don’t already have enough three-foot-long bird feathers.” She kissed him on each cheek. Blanc felt truly honored at such a friendly greeting. He opened the tailgate of his car and took out the presents he had brought. Sylvie looked so slight that the mistral might blow her away. He hesitated to put the two pots in her little hands. But she just laughed and took the plants from him. “These are a boon for both body and soul,” she exclaimed.
Bruno drove up the track, leapt down from the tractor, and disappeared into the house through a side door. Blanc followed Sylvie onto the terrace. There were four place settings. But before he could say anything Paulette Aybalen came out of the patio door carrying a huge bowl of salad. Now there’s a coincidence, Blanc thought to himself, amused rather than alarmed.
Quite clearly the Michelettis, out of the friendliest of motives, had determined to use a good meal to turn their near neighbors into a couple. Blanc smiled, agreed with Paulette on the familiar “tu” rather than the more formal “vous,” but was equally determined to behave impeccably. After twenty years of marriage without cheating, he believed that it was wise to be cautious when shopping again on the love and lust market.
They ate melon from Carpentras with raw ham and drank glasses of glittering white wine. Then Bruno brought out a ceramic platter with dark meat straight from the oven. “Wild boar. Shot it myself,” he declared proudly. “We have a herd of them around here who spend every night plowing up half the forest.”
“Marinated in red wine?” Blanc asked, vaguely remembering a recipe he had once read.
“Red wine is for drinking, not for making sauce!” his host exclaimed. “A little olive oil, some thyme, and a hot oven, and … voilà!”
Sylvie served couscous and cold ratatouille. They were now on the rosé. The sun had long disappeared behind the treetops by the time they tore apart a baguette and passed around a wooden board with ten different types of cheese, accompanied by a red wine. Blanc began to wonder if it would be wise to drive back home later. He noticed that Sylvie was the only one of them who had not drunk any wine, and had not been offered any by her husband. Before the cheese course she had popped into the kitchen and unobtrusively brought out a wooden box from which she took four or five pills of varying colors. Bruno and Paulette had paid no attention, so he had made a point of lifting his glass so as to conceal the fact he had noticed.
By midnight, when he finally got up from the table, full of food and just a little under the influence of the wine, he realized he was happier than he had been for ages. I’ve arrived, he told himself, finally arrived. He had also realized that Paulette Aybalen had come on foot, and said that of course he would give her a lift home. A good move, he thought. They spent the few minutes in his car in silence but without embarrassment. He parked outside his own house and accompanied her the few dozen yards to her door on foot. He leant down toward her, her long hair smelling of pine, hesitated the tiniest of seconds, his face close to hers, then kissed her on both cheeks.
It was so dark he couldn’t tell if she was disappointed or pleased that he hadn’t tried to take things any further. “Good night, neighbor, and thank you,” she whispered. At least she didn’t sound upset.
Blanc strolled back home, feeling as if he were floating. I have arrived, he thought again. The wind rushing through the plane trees outside the house was so loud he almost didn’t hear the ringtone on his phone. The number on the display meant nothing to him, though he noticed that whoever it was had been trying to call him all evening. He never turned his phone off, but it appeared that out in the woods there was no signal. He took the call.
“Have you been spelunking? It’s as if you’ve been underground for hours.”
Blanc took a few seconds to recognize the voice. “Madame le juge!” he exclaimed.
“I’ve been unable to rest easy since we last spoke,” she said, ignoring his apparent surprise. “I dug up a few documents.”
“Me too,” he replied. “Lafont is a hard nut to crack.”
“This is not about Lafont,” Aveline Vialaron-Allègre replied impatiently. “It’s Moréas. He’s the guy all this fuss is about, right?”
Blanc stood there, scarcely daring to breathe. “You’ve found something?”
“A copy of a document in the town hall files. One Marcel neglected to mention to you when you first went to talk to him in Caillouteaux. One you were unable to find the second time you were there, possibly because someone had cleverly hidden it. I came across it in my husband’s poison cabinet, a fact that he is definitely not to be made aware of.”
“His poison cabinet?”
“Where he keeps documents that might be useful. That’s how you make a career in politics, mon Capitaine. My husband collects copies of documents relating to his party colleagues. All of them, young and old, big beasts and little. All public documents, perfectly legal to file away. But who does things like that? Eh bien: In the documents relating to his fellow party member Marcel Lafont, I found the planning permission for the médiathèque.”
“The eight-million-euro job.”
“Forget the eight million. That was building money. But first you need somewhere to build. The médiathèque is supposed to be built on the edge of the plateau, because in this ancient town there is no room anywhere else. Nearly all the common areas belong to the commune. But there is one important strip of land in private ownership.”
Blanc leant back against the trunk of a plane and suddenly felt the world closing in on him. “What an idiot I am,” he whispered.
“I’ll make a note of that admission,” the juge d’instruction responded coolly.
“Moréas inherited five parcels of land from his parents,” Blanc said wearily. “Land he did nothing with. Four of them in the woods, where he would chase off hikers, and one…”
“… in the town, on the edge of the plateau. An excellent site on which to build, for example, a médiathèque.”
“But an antisocial character like Moréas would never sell. Fuligni can whistle for his eight million and Monsieur Lafont can watch his pet project melt away, along with his chances of reelection and a seat in the senate. And there’s nobody who can force the guy to sell.”
“Marcel was under so much pressure that he revealed plans for his médiathèque to the press before he had even solved the problem of acquiring the land. Maybe he hoped that putting public pressure on Moréas would have persuaded him to sell. Or maybe he just underestimated the stubborn recluse because he came into town so rarely and Lafont didn’t really know him.”
“Or Monsieur Lafont knew that Moréas would conveniently die just when it mattered?”
“Get to the gendarmerie early in the morning. We are going to have to take two or three others into our confidence. I’ll leave it to you to do that. I have a meeting in court tomorrow morning that I don’t want to miss because it would only cause attention. Come and see me at midday at our house in Caillouteaux. Then we can go over the steps we should take next.”
“That will be a pleasure.”
“Don’t come in the patrol car. I don’t want anyone to know you’ve come to see me.”
“I picked up a few things like that in Paris.”
“Mon Capitaine? Next time do me a favor and check your cell phone more regularly.”