Blanc took a left turn off the forest track. “You need a GPS,” Tonon announced. “This isn’t the way back to Gadet, this leads up the hill to Caillouteaux.”
“That’s where I’m heading.”
“We’ve done enough today.”
“It’s still light.”
“You’re not in Paris anymore, what do you want with the little hick town up there?”
“Even if Moréas never showed his face there, it’s still a commune, a small town. They must know him at the mairie. He might have applied there to set up a business, might have asked for planning permission. The town hall just has to have something relating to him. They have something about everybody.”
The Mégane trundled onward up the D70A. The scent of pines and earth drifted in through the open window. The cicadas clicked incessantly. It was still so hot that the captain didn’t like to let his left elbow rest on the metal of the open window. This isn’t Paris. Thank you for telling me. He imagined his colleague was just hungry again—but there again maybe he was right. Who was he going to find to talk to in Provence in summer after 5 P.M.? Maybe a pigeon on a roof or rats in a cellar. Merde. But it was always good to act quickly; Moréas might have been an asshole, but his body had still been hot when they found it, goddammit.
After a few minutes they were already passing a few modern houses, and the tarmac under their wheels had gotten darker, smoother. And then they were passing between ancient stone houses baked in the sun, ochre with blue and green shutters on the windows, most of them closed to keep out the sun. Purple oleander grew out of walled courtyards. There was not a soul to be seen, no dogs wandering about, not even a sleeping cat. An alleyway so narrow that his side mirrors almost scratched the walls on either side. A tiny main square with a modest little fountain topped with a stone bust of Marianne, the symbol of the republic.
“Park here,” Tonon grumbled. “We can walk the rest of the way.”
Blanc climbed out of the car and stood in front of the little church built of yellow stone. On the pediment above the door two bells hung like a silhouette against the sky. In a niche to one side was a fine statue of the Madonna smiling a blessing to a fly that buzzed around it. At the far end of the square was a stone clock tower crowned with a wrought-iron bell house—a symbol of civic pride, money, and a finely calculated provocation, given that it rose higher toward the heavens than the church. On the side of the square opposite the alley they had come through stood a grand façade that Blanc at first took for that of a palace—until he realized that nearly all the windows, the grand entrance, and the little fountain on the façade were only painted on and the building had little other ornamentation.
“People here have money to spend on art,” said Tonon, half admiring, half mocking. “You don’t get the citizens of Gadet or Saint-César painting their houses like that.”
“They’re not getting money from tourism.” Blanc walked up to a low wall between the church and the house at the end of the square, where a modern bronze sculpture stood: a winged, headless woman with her voluptuous rear end facing the horizon. Behind her, the hill Caillouteaux sat on fell away. The captain looked down at the dark squares of fields and olive groves, the little white dots of a flock of sheep, the blue shimmering hills and the mirror of the Étang de Berre in the distance, and imagined he could feel the steamy heat of the Mediterranean. “It’s pretty here,” he said.
Tonon stroked the statue’s metal rear end. “Too small, too obscure.”
“Her backside?”
“The town. This is the center of Caillouteaux and there are only three figures to be seen: a ceramic Madonna, a stone Marianne, and a headless woman with a fat ass. Not exactly the sort of women you can sit and sip a pastis with. And there’s never been an artist here, except the guy who daubed his work on that house. There’s no tasty odor emanating from a one-star restaurant, no antique seller with a load of overpriced local kitsch in his window. What is there here for tourists? Ah, but we are in luck. The mayor’s still here.” Tonon nodded toward the only other car on the square, a new white Audi Q7 that, set against the background of the unplastered walls, looked like a glass recycling bin on alloy wheels.
“They’ve got enough money here for things like that too,” mumbled Blanc, trying in vain to recall if he’d ever seen any Parisian district mayor in a car like that. All of a sudden that old feeling came over him that he had had when he was tracking down fraudsters: the call of the hunt.
Tonon led him past a tiny restaurant. “Le Beffroy,” he said. “Not one line about it in the Guide Michelin, no strangers, no Asian words on the menu. You can eat here if you get tired watching our colleagues chewing away back in Gadet. It gets to us all every now and then.” They went up an alleyway and then a few stone steps. “Voilà.”
“The offices are closed, I’m afraid,” a pleasant male voice said from somewhere above them.
“Gendarmerie!” the lieutenant replied.
“Putain. Come on up.”
They found the mayor in his office, which had a window opening onto the square. Beneath the obligatory bust of Marianne sat a man in his midsixties, heavy, with an angular head covered in gray bristle, and almost jet-black eyes. He got to his feet and Blanc noticed the expensive cut of his suit. There was more than just a whiff of aftershave in the air, expensive aftershave. The walls were covered in modern frescos, of young women with baskets of fruit and wheat sheaves, allegories of the twelve names given to the months of the year during the revolution. Blanc admired a gently smiling blonde labeled Mademoiselle Messidor, the name given to June and July by the revolutionaries. Frescos in the town hall, a trompe l’oeil façade on the square, a jigsaw puzzle painter in the woods. It seemed Provence was full of artists whose style would have been considered two hundred years out of date anywhere else. Then it occurred to him the one thing missing was a picture of the president of the republic. Wasn’t that obligatory in public buildings?
“Monsieur Lafont,” Tonon said, clearly on familiar terms with the mayor.
A powerful handshake. “Make yourselves comfortable. Can I offer you a glass of water?” Lafont had a thick Midi accent. Blanc saw him as a man who traveled around in his white Audi but the minute he got out could talk to locals as an equal. He wondered how long he had been the little king of Caillouteaux. Years probably, maybe even decades.
“So, you’re the new specialist from Paris the minister of state has sent us,” the mayor declared. Blanc leaned back in the visitor’s seat, which was modern and very uncomfortable. The back of the chair was up against a steel filing cabinet that had obviously been placed there by someone with no feeling for either comfort or aesthetics, given that it also obscured the fresco of Mademoiselle Germinal. “You have good contacts in Paris?” he asked.
Lafont laughed. “With the Eiffel Tower mob? They only bother to talk to provincial clods like me once every five years, just before the elections.” He made a dismissive gesture with a big bear’s paw of a hand. “I have good contacts with the local gendarmerie stations. I have no idea who you are, mon Capitaine, but if they wanted to get rid of you in Paris, you can’t be all bad.”
Blanc allowed himself the ghost of a smile. “Let’s hope you don’t change your mind about me. I’m afraid I have bad news for you. Your commune has one citizen less.”
“An accident or a crime?”
“Murder.”
“Who?”
“Monsieur Charles Moréas.”
Lafont clicked his tongue the way you might do when your favorite club loses an important league match. “I’m not exactly surprised that Charles has come to a sticky end. What happened to him?”
Blanc explained in a few words what they knew so far. The more he said, the more Lafont’s expression darkened. “Kalashnikovs, burnt bodies, that’s Marseille stuff,” he exclaimed in horror. “Don’t get me wrong, my family comes from Calenzana, a little mountain village in Corsica, but I grew up in Marseille, politically too. I still have lots of friends there. I was down seeing them just last weekend. They had a good laugh at my expense. My Audi was in for service and I had to take my wife’s car. A red Mini, a woman’s car. You wouldn’t believe the ribbing they gave me.” Then Lafont turned serious again: “Bon. That’s of no interest to you. I was just trying to say that I still have a lot of connections in Marseille. But life there is…” He struggled to find the right word. “… stressful. I moved to Caillouteaux some thirty years ago, particularly for my family’s sake. And for my own health. It’s so quiet here, so peaceful.”
“Well, it would seem now Marseille has come to you, Monsieur le maire,” Tonon said calmly.
Lafont got to his feet again, went over to the window, and waved the two gendarmes over. “Look over there,” he said, pointing toward a poster on the wall of a house opposite: a photo of a smiling young blond woman. She might have been a singer or an actress.
“This time next year we have elections here in the commune,” he said. “And that is my most dangerous enemy.” Blanc recognized the symbol of the Front National in the red, white, and blue of the tricolor. “That woman is clever, she knows how to handle herself. She’s dangerous. You know, mon Capitaine, how strong the Front already is down here in the Midi. Oh yes, le tout Paris jokes about it all the time. But I don’t want to end my political career with defeat by a ferocious right-wing extremist with a sharp tongue.” He gestured vaguely out of the window. “We’re planning to build a médiathèque on the outskirts of town: books, magazines, films, music, fast Internet access for everyone in a bright modern building. Free to everybody in the commune. That will keep our young people here, build a better future. Up until five minutes ago that was the main platform of my upcoming election campaign.”
Blanc looked at the mayor expressionlessly. “You think the FN will use a Kalashnikov murder for propaganda purposes?”
“I don’t think it, I know it. Every damn drug dealer who can’t keep his trigger finger steady brings more votes for the far right. Whether it’s drugs, criminals, Arabs, or murder, they link them all together. People are pleased with the idea of a médiathèque. But they’re more afraid of criminals. And on election day, it’s fear, not happiness, that decides where they put their ‘x.’ That’s why I don’t want to frighten my citizens, mon Capitaine, do you understand me?”
“Completely,” Blanc said in a neutral voice.
“So please clear up this unpleasant business as quickly as possible, before it starts to get people scared.”
“That’s why we’re here,” said Blanc with a thin smile. “What can you tell us about Monsieur Moréas?”
A quarter of an hour later Blanc and Tonon knew that the deceased had no relatives and no friends in Caillouteaux or anywhere else. He hadn’t applied for permission to build his house, but nobody had lodged a complaint about it. He had five pieces of land in the commune: one overgrown lot in the town itself and four pieces of woodland supposed to be for agricultural purposes. Moréas had never been in the post office, which was housed in the same building as the town hall offices, never posted anything or collected anything. He had never applied for a license or benefits, never applied for a passport, and didn’t even have a landline.
* * *
“You promised the commandant that no politician would be interested in this,” Tonon recalled with a laugh as they left the town hall, “and now the first politician we come across is hot as mustard over it. I’ll be interested to see how Nkoulou reacts.”
“What sort of politician doesn’t even have a photo of the president on his wall?”
“Lafont says what he thinks. He’s not very impressed by the gentlemen in Paris. In any case you see the president every day on television and in the newspapers. It’s a welcome change not to have to look at his face.”
Blanc stopped to look at the poster Lafont had pointed out. “What about her?” The face was just a little too rounded to be that of a model, but it seemed open and unintimidating. “She doesn’t look too dangerous.”
“Just be glad you’re not an Arab. That’s just a façade. The Front has another face too, not quite so pretty.”
“Are Lafont’s fears real? Could the old boy lose to a doll-face like that? Just because somebody killed an unpleasant good-for-nothing and burnt his body on a garbage heap?”
The lieutenant looked around to see if there was anybody in the square and shook his head. “I thought you were supposed to be a corruption expert, back in Paris.”
“And in Provence everyone is corrupt.”
“Exactly.” Tonon jerked his thumb toward the town hall. “Did you notice anything about the furniture in his office?”
“It was horrible, modern, uncomfortable. Has Lafont been bribed by some furniture chain?”
“It’s a lot more subtle than that. The mairie was full of antiques, a desk from the Empire period, oil paintings on the wall, Louis XIV chairs, stuff like that. It’s all in Monsieur Lafont’s villa now. A rather big villa. One day he just had the town hall emptied. Then at the commune’s expense he bought all the new stuff. That vile filing cabinet only arrived last week. The frescos of the revolutionary year are to cover up the blank spaces on the wall left by the oil paintings that hung there for two hundred years before being relocated to Monsieur Lafont’s living room. It was given out as ‘modernization,’ but everybody knows where all the old stuff is.”
“Nobody complained?”
“The Gaullistes are corrupt, the socialists are corrupt. Who was there to complain?”
“The Front National?”
“On the button. Not that I think the Front aren’t corrupt too. They just haven’t had the opportunity yet.”
“So it’s not just racists who vote FN, it’s everybody who has had enough of misappropriated antiques and mayors in expensive cars?”
“That’s why Lafont wants to spend money on this ultramodern médiathèque, so they too get something out of all the money lying around here. He gets hysterical about anything that could win more votes for the Front. If we clear this case up quickly we’ll have won a friend. A useful friend.”
“Merde,” said the captain. “Now that’s exactly the sort of thing we did make jokes about in Paris.”
* * *
Blanc dropped his colleague off at the gendarmerie in Gadet and went into the tiny supermarket to buy food for the next few days: lots of coffee, two jars of jam, bread and pains au chocolat in plastic bags, plus two green bottles of Alsace beer. The owner, who was at the cash register, greeted him with extreme politeness and packed his purchases rapidly in opaque carrier bags. Blanc drove his Espace slowly back to Sainte-Françoise-la-Vallée. He had a thumping headache. It was evening and still nearly eighty-six degrees.
Parking in front of the old olive oil mill, he sat behind the wheel for a while, staring at the raw yellow stone of the walls. Home. Merde. Eventually he got out, closed the car door, and carried his supplies into the house. At least the ancient refrigerator came to life when he turned it on. He put the beer bottles hopefully into the freezer compartment, then went out, fetched the first bag from the minivan, and heaved it onto the kitchen table. Then the second. He sighed, changed out of his uniform into an old T-shirt and ripped jeans, opened up all the doors and the trunk of the Espace, and emptied it of everything. One hour later everything that remained of his career and his marriage was piled high on the rickety kitchen table. He threw his sleeping bag and the inflatable mattress onto the bare bedstead. Then he scrabbled around until he found the most recent photo of his children, a framed picture from when they were both still at school, just before the elder of the two graduated. He put the photo alongside his cell phone on the bedside table.
At long last it got dark outside. Blanc was so tired that he swayed on his feet. But he was too wound up to sleep. Instead he used an old brush and a few cloths to wipe away cobwebs and dust, then he piled up the horrid chairs and various other stuff next to the door. Tomorrow he would take it all to the garbage dump. He knew the way now.
In the end he sat down with the beer and some bread on the doorstep of the house. A soft breeze had arisen, as cooling as a silk handkerchief—it seemed even the cicadas were exhausted. The sun had already dropped beyond the horizon but the sky still had a surreal blue-violet tone. A single star, like a white needle point, shone in the heavens above the plane trees. One of God’s bad jokes, Blanc thought.
He drank down the cool beer and leant back against the wall. He could feel the rough stone through his thin T-shirt, but at the same time it reflected the sun’s warmth between his shoulder blades. He heard the buzz of an insect, then two of them, then thousands. It went on and on, for at least half an hour, like an ovation after a concert. Somewhere across the river he heard the shrill back-and-forth calls of two owls getting ready for the night’s hunt. Then shadows appeared in the twilight. At first he took them for late swallows, then realized they were bats. Some of them hurtled down toward the Touloubre, clustered around those areas where the water lay more still behind stones and clumps of earth, then soared back up into the sky. They were drinking, Blanc realized. I didn’t know bats drank. Never thought about it. Why?
Every breath he took was perfumed by the air. What was it the woman on horseback had told him? Thyme. He felt simultaneously drained and replete. He got to his feet with an effort, stumbled into the house and to bed, without even climbing into his sleeping bag.
* * *
His cell phone’s alarm called him out of a deep, dreamless oblivion. It took Blanc a minute or so to realize where he was. When had he last slept so well? He went into the tiny bathroom with its brown tiles from the 1970s. He would need to get rid of those. Sooner or later. When he turned on the shower, rust-red water flooded out, but after a few minutes it turned clear. The old electric boiler had actually managed to warm the water overnight. He climbed out of the shower, hesitated for a few moments, then instead of his uniform put on black jeans and a black T-shirt. Then he scoured the kitchen cupboards until he found a little aluminum Italian espresso pot and set it on the hot plate until the scent of coffee rose from it. Blanc chewed on a doughy pain au chocolat and took a cup of bitter black coffee to the door. It was already nearly eighty degrees, he reckoned. It might be a good idea to make a patio out here. On the other side of the Touloubre he heard Serge Douchy trundling along on his tractor, making a point of ignoring him. He heard a rooster call from Douchy’s farmyard. Then it was quiet again. I’m going to have to get used to this quiet, the captain thought.
When he was about to leave just a few minutes later, he suddenly came to a halt at the gate. The old stuff he had left outside the door had vanished. Douchy? Or someone else who had passed by in the dusk and spotted them? He shrugged, pulled the gate closed, even though it no longer had a working lock, climbed into the car, and set off for Gadet. At least this time there were no horses blocking the road.
It was as quiet as a church in the gendarmerie. The calendar on the desk by the door read Tuesday, July 2. Upstairs he heard Nkoulou’s voice from behind his office door, obviously on the telephone. He wondered why the chief was up and about so early. Most of the other offices were empty. Even Tonon hadn’t turned up yet. The only one of his colleagues to be seen was the dumpy woman who had offered him a Gauloise yesterday. He couldn’t remember her name.
“Didn’t you sleep well?” she asked. “You look tired.”
Blanc didn’t reply; he hadn’t felt so rested in months. Instead he asked her what time his partner usually turned up.
“Marius usually makes it by midday,” she laughed. “He put in more hours with you yesterday than he would normally do in a month. He’ll be getting his strength back.” She put her chubby thumb into her mouth then pulled it out, making a sound like a cork coming out of a bottle. “Cigarette?”
The captain made a point of giving her a friendly smile, turning down the offer. “I have an appointment at the pathology lab. Can you tell me how to get there?”
Five minutes later he was sitting in the patrol car, on his own, with the GPS illegally on the passenger seat, heading toward Salon-de-Provence. He knew the name from a trashy novel he had read as a teenager: the city of Nostradamus, alchemy, fortune-telling, Renaissance intrigue, and Catherine de’ Medici as the spider at the center of a web of conspiracies. But instead of dark defensive walls or ornate palaces he found himself driving through anonymous suburbs, gas stations, shops offering scooters, their machines parked in a long parallel line with their front wheels on the sidewalk. Fifteen minutes later he parked the car on a hill next to a complex of square concrete buildings: the town hospital. It had a view over the whole town, and indeed there was a castle, like something out of a fairy tale, with a donjon tower, crenellated battlements, a gateway, and high walls. I must take a closer look, he told himself, one of these days. He asked directions from one person after another until he found himself at the entrance to the Institut Médico-Légal.
Dr. Fontaine Thezan shook his hand and gave him the once-over. Today she was wearing glasses that gave her an Audrey Hepburn air. “When were you last at an autopsy?” she asked.
Do I really look that pale? Blanc asked himself. “I’ve had breakfast,” he replied. The smell of disinfectant was so strong that he couldn’t be sure whether or not there was still a faint whiff of marijuana around the doctor.
“In any case, we’ve almost finished.” She introduced him to her two assistants and a young policeman, and led them all into a cool, brightly lit room, where the charred corpse lay on a steel table. The chest and stomach had already been cut open and the top of the skull sawed off. The brain was sitting in a bowl next to it.
The pathologist pointed to an object in another bowl nearby, still with pieces of brain matter adhering to it. “We found one bullet in the skull,” Thezan told him, “two in the lungs, one more in the upper thigh bone. There were also traces where more had gone through the chest and stomach. You’ll get all the details in a written report. The brain, heart, and liver were all destroyed, and there was severe internal bleeding. You can pick whichever you like as ‘cause of death.’”
“If there were still Kalashnikov bullets in the body, that means he can’t have been shot at close range. If he had been, they would all have gone right through,” Blanc suggested.
She led him over to another table with a spongy substance. “The lung,” she said, using a pair of tweezers to point at it. “If you look here you’ll see there’s no soot in the bronchial passages. That means by the time his body was burnt, he was no longer breathing. We also haven’t been able to find any traces of smoke absorbed by the blood.”
“Any sign of alcohol or drugs?”
“We haven’t got all the results from the lab yet, but his blood alcohol level was point zero one, which suggests he might have had something to drink several hours before his death. Maybe a glass of wine with lunch. Or it’s vestigial from drinking the night before. We’ve found no traces of cocaine or anything like that.”
“How was he set on fire?”
“There were traces of an accelerant on various parts of the skin. The easy assumption is that someone poured a large quantity of gasoline over the body and set it alight.”
“Can you be sure that it actually is Moréas?”
“Absolutely.” He could make out the pathologist smiling, even behind her face mask. “At first we tried using dental records. But it appears he’d never been to a dentist in his life, so we had nothing to check against. His fingers were so burnt that there were no prints left to take. But then we found this.” She held up a shiny object made of stainless steel.
“In his body?” Blanc asked dubiously.
“An artificial left hip. Every prosthesis of this type in the world carries a serial number. Bingo! If you have the number you can identify the patient. Charles Moréas was given this hip replacement three years ago in the Timone hospital in Marseille. He’d had a serious motorbike accident and was taken there for treatment.”
“Any signs that Moréas had been gagged or tied up? That he’d been knocked out? Maybe by a blow to the head?”
“Given the state of his skin, it’s hard to tell if he’d been tied up any way, but I suspect not. And there’s definitely no sign of a blow to the head, before the Kalashnikov salvo took him out.”
“So it would appear he had no reason to think he was in danger of being shot. The killer didn’t get close to him. Maybe he didn’t even speak to him, just fired without warning. Then he pours the gas over him, strikes a match—et voilà!”
“That’s speculation, and that’s your job, not mine, mon Capitaine.”
* * *
By the time Blanc got back to the gendarmerie, Tonon still hadn’t turned up. Blanc had fired up the antique computer and begun to compose a report when there was a knock on the door. It was the boss.
“You need to get over to the juge d’instruction,” Nkoulou said, giving him a frown. He obviously didn’t approve of seeing any of his staff in plain clothes.
Every criminal case in France had to be overseen by a judge. The police were theoretically just operative assistants who fulfilled the judge’s instructions and sent him or her the results. Theoretically. Blanc had never liked the idea and preferred to have as little as possible to do with the judge’s instructions. But rules were rules. He got up from his seat and asked, “Where do I find the judge?”
“Normally in the Palace of Justice in Aix-en-Provence. But this judge prefers to work more closely with the gendarmerie when it’s an interesting or complex case, and has an office next to mine.” Nkoulou hesitated for a second, as if uncertain whether or not he should go on. “And by the way, the judge is female,” he eventually managed to say. “She’s supposed to be the best of the lot. If you’d like to follow me? Madame Vialaron-Allègre doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
Blanc stopped in his tracks as if he had hit a wall.
“Vialaron-Allègre? Like the minister in Paris?”
“She’s his wife.” For a moment Blanc thought he almost detected a note of sympathy in the commandant’s voice.
There was a brand-new business card on the door, heavy cardboard with embossed letters: Aveline Vialaron-Allègre, Juge d’instruction, Aix-en-Provence. Blanc knocked and went in. “Madame le juge,” he said, doing his best to sound traditionally formal. “Delighted to meet you.”
“Really?” she said. “I’m surprised.”
For some reason or other the captain had expected to be confronted by an imposing matron figure, a real-life version of the old film star Simone Signoret. Instead he found himself looking at a woman in her midthirties, five feet eight inches, slim, with olive skin, dark eyes, short black hair, a long nose, and long fingers. She wasn’t exactly pretty but she was attractive, self-confident, elegant, frosty. Intimidating. Merde, he thought, regretting that he wasn’t in uniform.
The judge closed a Moleskine notebook and replaced the top on a narrow, old-fashioned fountain pen.
“Please sit down.”
Could it be a coincidence, Blanc wondered, his brain turning cartwheels. The minister had sent him to the district where his wife was in charge of police investigations. And he runs into her on his very first case. She’s watching me, he decided, waiting for me to make the first tiny mistake. He pushed me out of the Paris limelight, but that wasn’t enough. He wants to kick my ass out here in the sticks. And his wife is going to help him do it. Just how did I tread on his toes?
She lit a Gauloise. Left-handed, Blanc registered automatically. She didn’t offer him one. “What have you found out so far, mon Capitaine?” she asked through a cloud of blue smoke.
All Blanc’s senses were on maximum alert, razor sharp and pumped up with adrenaline. He noted every single hair in the strand that touched her left cheek, the smoke in her voice, the turquoise-colored Hermès scarf negligently thrown over the back of her leather chair, her pianist’s fingers tapping out some unknown melody on the desk, the hint of Chanel No. 5 in the air. Maybe she isn’t aware of the connection between me and her husband, he thought irritably. Then she said, “Well?” and he could hear both impatience and irony in her voice.
“We have a murder victim, discovered at a garbage dump.”
“I know that already. That’s why I’m here.”
“Do you want me to start from the beginning, or should I skip to chapter three?”
She raised an eyebrow, inhaled deeply, and nodded. “I’d like to hear you tell it from the beginning.”
The captain told her about the burnt body, the Kalashnikov cartridges, about Charles Moréas, his neighbor Le Bruchec’s burglary accusations, and the little he knew about the deceased’s miserable little life. “A man with many enemies, but no friends or relatives.”
“Most murders are committed by friends or relatives.”
“Not this one.”
“So what, in your opinion, should we be doing now?”
“Go through the details of Moréas’s past life. He somehow got involved with someone unscrupulous: A machine-gun murder and incinerated corpse are hardly the result of a tiff. This was a cold-blooded execution, and that suggests the killer was a professional.”
“Are you sure you have the qualifications for an investigation like this?”
Blanc was taken aback for a minute. “What leads you to doubt my qualifications?”
Vialaron-Allègre gave him a long, hard look. “This Moréas is a creature of the Midi. He probably never got beyond the town of Orange in his entire life. And you want to go back through the details of his last thirty years when you’ve only been in Provence for a couple of days?”
“I haven’t been in the gendarmerie for more than a couple of days.”
“My husband has told me about your abilities,” she said calmly. “Murders in Provence aren’t exactly your specialty.”
“I always appreciate the chance to learn on the job.”
“Parisian arrogance isn’t going to get you very far down here.”
Blanc took a deep breath and leaned back in his chair. The way this conversation was going was intended to derail him. “I shall keep you fully informed of my progress at every step,” he promised. “Feel free to intervene the moment you think I’m going off course.”
“Très bien,” Aveline Vialaron-Allègre replied, stubbing out her cigarette in a chrome ashtray. “I look forward to your next report.” She didn’t shake his hand as he left.
* * *
“Mon Capitaine?” Nkoulou caught him coming out and led him into his own office. Blanc made sure he closed the door behind him. He looked down at his boss’s desk and remembered his colleagues’ bet. What woman could put up with such a pedant?
“I had a call this morning,” the commandant began, “from a local mayor.”
“Monsieur Lafont from Caillouteaux?”
“It was a fairly intense conversation.” Nkoulou’s voice was almost shaking. “Your promise that no politicians would bother with this case has proven remarkably short-lived.”
“Did he try to put pressure on you?”
“Let’s just say the mayor would be relieved if we could solve this case quickly. Quickly enough for it not to overshadow the laying of the foundation stone for his new médiathèque.”
“We’re working on it, mon Commandant.”
Nkoulou drew his lips in a smile that was part scornful, part resigned. “Leave out the plural in that sentence. You’ll be doing most of the work on your own. Lieutenant Tonon hasn’t even turned up yet today.”
“We’ll get the mayor his murderer before the diggers turn up in Caillouteaux,” Blanc promised. Then he saluted and left the sterile little room.
* * *
Half an hour later Tonon turned up, his eyes bloodshot. Not a word about what he’d been up to all morning. Nor was it necessary. Nonetheless, he had brought with him, scribbled on a crumpled piece of paper, a list of all the paintball players he knew. They spent the rest of the day getting hold of them, either at work or at home—mostly at home, as many of them were unemployed. None of them had been at the garbage dump recently.
It was only that evening when they got back to the gendarmerie, both exhausted, that Tonon opened his mouth to say anything more than the bare minimum. “You need to watch out for this judge,” he warned. “She’s a dragon in pretty makeup.”
“With good family connections.”
The lieutenant made a face. “I’d like to know what makes her dote on that slippery clown. She would have done well enough without him. They say she studied in America, was offered a job in the ministry of justice, but preferred to stay here.”
“How modest of her.”
“You don’t understand. She’s from here. Midi. You can study in America and be offered a job in Paris—but if you get the chance to stay down here in the south, you take it.”
“As corrupt as everyone else?”
“Whatever you do, don’t try to bribe her.” Tonon shook his head. “She’s clean.”
Blanc thought of her husband, who had put him out to pasture after he had successfully solved a corruption case, and wondered if the Vialaron-Allègres really couldn’t be bought. “If she works down here and her husband is in Paris, then they can hardly see one another often. That means…”
“The minister takes the TGV high-speed train from Paris to Aix-en-Provence every Friday night and his good lady meets him at the station. They have a nice house here. In Caillouteaux.”
“Merde.”
“And every now and then he stays over until Monday and visits a few local gendarmerie stations. Unannounced.”
“Merde.”
“A few weeks ago there was an issue with an officer and he got posted to Lorraine.”
“Merde.”
“Madame le juge thinks most gendarmerie officers are idiots. Maybe you can change her mind.” But it didn’t sound like Tonon would bet on it.
“I’m just getting to know her,” Blanc muttered, climbing out of the patrol car.
* * *
When he got back to Sainte-Françoise-la-Vallée a few minutes later, there was a dented dark blue Peugeot 504 next to his front gate. Blanc braked, looking at the old Peugeot with a professionally suspicious eye. Behind the wheel sat a man of about fifty or so, who waved at him and squeezed his dumpy body out of the driver’s seat. His close-cropped hair was turning from black to gray and years in the sun had made his skin as wrinkled as an antique leather couch. His black eyes gleamed under bushy brows. A farmer, Blanc reckoned. A woman of about the same age got out of the passenger side: thin as a rake, high cheekbones, gray hair tied back into a ponytail that reached halfway down her back. Hardly a farmer’s wife, the captain told himself. He was curious.
He shook the man’s iron-hard, calloused hand, and the woman’s pianist’s hand. “Micheletti,” the man introduced himself. “You live in the old mill?”
Blanc nodded and gave his name. Micheletti laughed and said:
“Then call us Sylvie and Bruno. We’re practically neighbors.” He had a voice that growled like the engine of an antique American limo, but there was no reek of tobacco. An ex-smoker, Blanc decided, then caught himself: You don’t have to be a policeman all the time.
“We saw a light on last night,” Sylvie said, “for the first time in years. We’re glad to see somebody living in the old oil mill again.”
The narrow route départementale on which Blanc’s house stood wound its way through Sainte-Françoise-la-Vallée. On the other side of the Touloubre, two other roads led off, both so unimportant that neither had a name. The one that led off to the right meandered some three hundred yards into the forest before coming to an end outside an old farmhouse. The other one had an asphalt surface and led to the left along the crest of the hill, flanked by old stone houses, tall and narrow, clinging to the back of the hill like a series of ancient towers placed against one another to form a wall. Beyond them the asphalt surface stopped, and the road degenerated into a dusty path leading into the pinewoods. Micheletti pointed down it. “If you go a bit farther down that way you’ll come to our place. Our land comes all the way down until it touches yours. That makes us neighbors.”
“We run a winery,” Sylvie explained. “Domaine de Bernard.”
Blanc had only ever seen a winery on a postcard: endless rows of grapevines in Bordeaux or Champagne, with châteaux or stately homes in the background. “A vineyard out here in the forest?” he said dubiously.
Bruno laughed. “You’ll see for yourself. We’ll invite you over.” He fumbled in the car’s glove box and brought out a crumpled business card with an impressive coat of arms on it. “That’s our telephone number.”
The captain pulled out his notebook, ripped out a page, and scribbled his own cell phone number on it. “I haven’t got a landline yet,” he apologized.
“That could take a while to sort out.”
Blanc didn’t quite know how much he ought to tell them about himself. He kept to the bare minimum. But neither Bruno nor Sylvie seemed either hesitant or overly curious when he said he was a gendarme. No questions about his family, no comments about his job. He got the feeling they were both simply glad to have a new neighbor. As they trundled off in the Peugeot he waved after them. Winemakers. That didn’t sound bad, though it would be better if he knew anything about wine.
Eventually he found a place far enough from the great wall of rock that he had a signal on his phone. He sat down on a wooden chair in the evening heat and tried making the calls he needed to get a landline installed. For the next half hour he followed instructions from computer voices to enter numbers, hash keys, or stars on his keyboard, until eventually he gave up without ever having spoken to a human being. He’d try again tomorrow. Maybe.
For the very first time he went up the stairs in his house. The old staircase was badly worn. Upstairs there were three bright rooms—the last of them had to have been the one he remembered from his childhood as where the light played tricks on the walls. All the walls were papered, a brown-green floral pattern; furniture from the seventies lay around, plastic and veneer, all the drawers empty. Nails hung on the walls with lighter patches of wallpaper beneath them—somebody had obviously cleared out the place of all the pictures. Masterpieces hanging on these walls? Gold and jewelry hidden somewhere? Looking at the depressing pattern, Blanc seriously doubted it. The only thing even remotely good-looking was under his feet: The ancient floorboards had been painted a faded white chalky color. He ripped off a strip of wallpaper, revealing old ochre plaster that had been waxed over, he reckoned. All he had to do was throw out the furniture, rip off the wallpaper, clean and restore the floor (and the walls and the ceilings), scrape out the grouting in the old window frames and replace it, clean the windows, rewire the place, replace the damaged tiles on the roof—and in maybe a hundred years or so he would finally feel more or less at home here.
By now it had cooled down a little. Blanc shrugged his shoulders and began lugging the cupboards, chests of drawers, and bedsteads from the first floor downstairs and out the door. By the time he spotted the first bat, several hours later, the top floor had been emptied of furniture. He had pulled wallpaper from the walls and left it on the floor of the first room, used his shoe to remove a couple of scorpions frightened out of cracks in the walls and thrown them outside. He could feel the muscles in his arms and shoulders begin to ache; his hands were scratched and bruised and he was so thirsty his lips had gone numb. He felt great.
But as he slowly ate and drank, his self-satisfaction gradually evaporated. He was thinking of the charred corpse and wondering what he might have missed. Was there something in Moréas’s criminal past that he could have overlooked? Anything in his run-down little home? Anything in what Le Bruchec, Rheinbach, or the mayor had said? Something … there was something he should have noticed. It was something that had never happened to him before. Maybe the minister was right when he exiled him from Paris. The Vialaron-Allègres. One an ambitious politician who had sent him down here, the other the incorruptible judge in charge of his first case on arrival. This cozy little couple have got me in their clutches. Just when I’m not exactly on top of the game.