Blanc turned on the blue flashing lights and pulled out of the parking place with screeching tires. “Are you trying to catch up with Fuligni in the next world?” Tonon cursed at him as he tried in vain to put on his safety belt in the swerving Renault. “No matter how fast you go, you’re not going to bring him back! And in any case the report said it was an accident. A fisherman saw Fuligni’s yacht drifting across the Étang de Berre with no one at the helm, and in the water next to it the drowned owner was floating with a huge bump on the back of his head.”
“How do you end up with a bump on your head on a sailing boat? Somebody must have hit him on the skull.”
“There was no one on the Amzeri when the fisherman got there. Not a soul. No other boat anywhere near. Nobody swimming nearby,” Tonon said.
Blanc raced through Gadet and turned onto the route départementale 16. He passed a few cars and a single truck, which on a Friday around here was the height of business traffic. “Do you sail, Marius?” he asked between clamped lips, not taking his eyes off the narrow road.
Tonon shrugged his shoulders. “Now and again a friend takes me out to the Calanques. But that’s in a motorboat. I’ve never really worked out how all that stuff with sails, rudders, and the wind works. How about you?”
Up north everybody went out to sea, the stormier and colder, the better. Blanc, who hated his origins, had for that reason alone never set foot on a sailing ship. He shook his head.
Tonon scratched his chin in amazement. “Still, now that I think about it, it occurs to me that sailors normally stay in port during the mistral. The wind is far too strong and far too cold.”
“Maybe Fuligni was on a little trip and left yesterday?” The captain reflected on how mild the weather had been on his walk to the Bernard vineyard. “Then this morning the mistral caught him by surprise.”
The road headed downhill toward Saint-César. They had a view over the houses to the Étang de Berre. Small steep waves rushed across its surface, sending up spray from the crests; it was as if the lake was coming to a boil. In the yacht harbor the gusting wind was rocking the vessels from side to side in their moorings, creating a cacophony of plastic and steel sterns knocking against the wooden piers. Blanc screeched to a halt at the parking lot, immediately recognizing Fuligni’s silver Mercedes coupe. Then he flinched. Not far away stood a white Audi Q7. Lafont? The mayor of Caillouteaux was nowhere to be seen. At this early hour there wasn’t much going on down at the harbor, except for the policemen and forensic experts in their white protective garb, two photographers who the captain assumed to be photojournalists. Two police corporals held up a tarpaulin screen, but it was fluttering so violently in the wind that it didn’t conceal anything. Behind it, a woman was kneeling down on the wood, bent over something that looked like a bundle of wet towels. Dr. Fontaine Thezan had pushed her big sunglasses back onto her hair and was examining the body with an apparatus of some sort that Blanc couldn’t make out. He hurried down the pier, waved through by the corporals—and found himself standing next to the corpse of the building contractor.
Fuligni was wearing a T-shirt and light summer trousers, both dark and heavy from the water. He was barefoot, and had brownish seaweed wrapped around his lower arm. His eyes were closed, his mouth unnaturally wide open. Blanc watched as Dr. Thezan carefully examined the body. The air smelt of marijuana and brackish water, but something else too: decomposition. He took a step back.
“A fisherman reported it to us at nine thirty-one A.M.,” one of the corporals who had taken out a notebook and was reading from it told him. “He was still out on the Étang de Berre, called in from his cell phone. He had already pulled Fuligni on board his boat. Then he came here as fast as he could, and we just unloaded the body onto the pier.”
“Any witnesses see what time Fuligni set out on his yacht? Whether he was alone or not?”
The corporal shook his head. “We asked the harbormaster and the few other people who were already on their boats. Nobody saw anything. The harbormaster was on duty from around eight A.M., and would have noticed Fuligni if he had left Saint-César after that time. So it must have been earlier.”
Blanc glanced at Tonon and nodded in the direction of the corpse. “T-shirt, summer pants, no jacket, no shoes. Very underdressed for somebody intending to go sailing in the mistral.” He waited until the pathologist called him over.
“First fire, now water,” she said by way of greeting. “You seem to be a master of the elements.”
“Sounds as if you think I killed them.”
“It would be a new twist.” She gave him a brief smile, then turned serious, carefully touched the corpse’s head and turned it so that Blanc could see the back of the skull. She had combed Fuligni’s thinning hair to one side, and indicated a serious swelling on the skin. “Hematoma,” she explained. “Must have been a pretty hefty blow.”
“Fatal?”
“Probably not that bad. We’ll only know at the autopsy, but I suspect the skull wasn’t damaged. He probably drowned. It’s a fairly common sailing accident, I’ve had a few amateur sailors with similar wounds on the dissecting table. Morbus nauticus in Latin.”
Blanc looked at her in surprise. “With blows to the head?”
“Usually to the rear, but sometimes to the forehead or temples.” Fontaine Thezan got up and pushed her sunglasses back down to cover her eyes. “Particularly in a heavy wind the boom swings round.” The captain looked at her blankly so she pointed at one of the moored vessels nearby. “That’s the long beam that sticks out at an angle behind the mast. The mainsail is fastened to it. If the wind is strong, and particularly if you’re not perfectly on course, it often happens that the wind fills the sail and swings the boom round from one side to the opposite right across the boat. If you’re not incredibly careful or don’t get out of the way fast enough, it will hit you on the head, hard—with two potentially fatal outcomes: The blow knocks you out, and at the same time the swinging boom knocks you overboard. You fall into the water unconscious and drown straightaway if you aren’t wearing a life jacket. Unless of course you were lucky enough for someone to see you fall and haul you out straightaway, which is very unlikely if you’re out sailing alone.”
“Are you trying to tell me Fuligni’s death was an accident?”
She shrugged. “I’m sorry if I’m spoiling your fun, mon Capitaine. But that’s what it looks like, from a purely medical point of view. You’ll get my report, of course.” Dr. Thezan packed up her things and strolled off down the pier, ignoring the questions of the two reporters, and climbed into her battered Jeep.
“Merde,” Blanc swore under his breath.
“Putain,” Tonon corrected him. He seemed to be in a good mood, waving to the forensics team who were all over the Amzeri. “Strange coincidence, isn’t it.”
“Damn strange.” He told the lieutenant that he had found out about the relationship between Miette Fuligni and Lucien Le Bruchec. He didn’t mention who had told him.
Tonon shrugged indifferently. “You hear things now and then. Miette is hardly a woman who’d appreciate being left on her own.”
Blanc thought of his own marriage. “That’s a lesson I’ve learned.”
“Do you think Le Bruchec hit Fuligni on the head and then pushed him overboard?” Tonon asked. “On his own boat?”
“It wouldn’t be the first time a lover disposed of the troublesome husband.”
“And before that Le Bruchec had executed and immolated Moréas? After sixty peaceful, respectable years our architect suddenly turns into a serial killer?”
“Maybe the two cases are unconnected.”
“Maybe this isn’t a ‘case’ at all, just an accident. Dr. Thezan didn’t exactly give you grounds for hope.”
Blanc interviewed the fisherman who had found Fuligni’s body, and the harbormaster. Neither told him anything he didn’t already know. Then Marius came up to him and pointed to a little white motorboat battling through the waves to the tiny lighthouse at the end of the last pier, in order to turn into the quieter waters of the harbor. Over the howling of the mistral they could make out the dull groan of a powerful outboard motor. At the stern, on either side of the outboard, were two tall deep-sea fishing rods. At the wheel in the middle of the open-topped boat, dressed in blue and white oilskins, was Marcel Lafont.
“The mayor’s going to have a heart attack when he learns that his old friend, who’s supposed to be building his beloved médiathèque, is dead.” Tonon said it as if he were indifferent but Blanc could hear a note of tension in his voice.
Lafont had noticed the police and journalists on the pier, accelerated, and hurtled toward them, leaving a wide wake behind him. “What’s happened,” he called out, even before he had tied up.
“I suggest you get on to dry land first, Monsieur le maire,” Blanc replied calmly.
* * *
Two minutes later Lafont was staring down at the soaked corpse of his friend. He said nothing, but the color had drained from his face, and his lower lip was trembling. The gendarmes discreetly pulled back to give him some space. “What happened?” he managed to ask at last, clearly shocked.
“We don’t quite know yet,” the captain said cautiously. “Monsieur Fuligni may have been the victim of an accident.” He told him what the pathologist had said. “One way or the other, he wasn’t exactly dressed for going out on a boat during the mistral. You look better kitted out.”
Lafont absentmindedly ran a hand over his oilskins. “I went out at three in the morning, to go fishing, over by Istres. It’s something I like to do before starting work. I don’t sleep much these days.” He nodded toward the hilly, wooded shore opposite Saint-César. “I was in the little bay behind the hill over there. You can’t see it from here. It’s very quiet and the fish bite. It was still calm when I went out but Météo-France warned the wind was rising. It started to get rough about five A.M. and I put on my oilskins.”
“Did you see Monsieur Fuligni when you arrived at the harbor during the night?”
The mayor shook his head. “I saw his Mercedes. Pascal often drives down here in the evening and spends the night on his boat. He treats it a bit like a holiday home, but it was all dark on his yacht and so I didn’t think about waking him.”
“So at three A.M., when you got here, the Amzeri was still at the pier?”
“Yes, as normal. Who on earth would take a boat out at night, the day before the mistral?”
“Monsieur Fuligni never went sailing during the mistral?”
Lafont was about to answer, then hesitated and made a vague gesture. “Well, not to go any distance. Whenever he had repaired something or had a new toy—a new large foresail, a sonar, depth finder, whatever—then he would always go out for a few minutes to try it out just beyond the harbor. Even if it was raining cats and dogs. I suppose it’s possible he went out this morning, to test something.”
“That might explain why he was so unsuitably dressed, and so careless,” said Tonon, not without a hint of irony in his voice.
Lafont stood up straight. “A stupid, meaningless death, you’re right there. But death is death. Don’t make things too difficult for his family.”
“A tragic accident, but hardly a scandal,” Blanc reassured him. He assumed that the mayor didn’t want too thorough an investigation, which might only make things worse for his relatives. Or was it possible he had seen more than he was saying, out there in his fishing boat? Or might it be that he just didn’t want Miette and Pascal’s marital problems to be exposed by the searchlight of a gendarmerie investigation?
“What’s going to happen to your médiathèque now, Monsieur le maire?” he asked incidentally.
The politician scratched his head, cast a final glance at the body of his friend, and muttered, “It’ll get built. Now more than ever.”
* * *
“It’s not a crime,” Nkoulou insisted, when they were standing in his office a little later, presenting their report.
“That’s not been proved yet,” Blanc protested. “It might even have something to do with the Moréas murder. It’s a bit of a coincidence that—”
“Do not make the situation unnecessarily complicated. You’re trying to dive headlong into a second murder investigation before you’ve even cleared up the first. Or maybe because you can’t?”
Blanc stared at his chief. The muscles of his jaw were so tense that he was getting a pain in the temples. Nkoulou was bound to notice. Relax, he told himself. “Should we at least wait until we get the reports from the forensics team and the pathologist?”
“But of course. That’s normal procedure.” The chief nodded and dismissed them.
“Do you think Lafont might have been on the phone to him again?” Tonon whispered, when they were back in the sanctuary of their own office.
Blanc shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe Nkoulou really does consider us such a pair of losers that he won’t trust us with more than one case at a time. I’ll have a chat with Madame le juge.”
“Over the commandant’s head?”
“I promised Madame Vialaron-Allègre to keep her up to date on all developments. I intend to do that. If she sees Fuligni’s death in the same way Nkoulou does, then I’m out of luck. But if she thinks otherwise, then she may choose to have a word with our dear commandant.”
“Sounds like you’re just desperate to make friends. In any case, Madame le juge is working from home today.”
“Are you coming with me this time, Marius?”
“I’m leaving the lady to you.”
Blanc already had his hand on the door handle when he turned around. “Don’t you find it a bit strange that Monsieur Lafont went out at three in the morning with two fishing rods to an area where the fish are famed for biting, but came back to the harbor with not a single fish?”
Tonon gave him a sympathetic look. “Just do me a favor and don’t tell the juge d’instruction that you now consider the mayor of her town to be a suspect because the fish weren’t biting.”
* * *
Blanc’s phone rang en route. He pulled to the side of the road in the shadow of a pine tree and answered. It was one of the forensics team. The gusts of wind were breaking dry twigs and scattering them along the asphalt, the wind in the trees making so much noise he could hardly understand what his colleague was saying. “Lots of fingerprints on board the Amzeri. Fuligni’s, but also those of lots of other people, maybe just visitors, fellow sailors, the harbormaster, his wife, whoever. It won’t be easy to find out.”
“Any sign of a struggle?”
“No, and no traces of blood either.”
“Not even on that piece of wood with the sail?”
“You mean the boom? No. Mind you, on this boat it’s made of aluminum.”
The captain nodded. It would have been too easy. Fuligni’s injury was a blow, not a blood wound. He thought back to what Lafont had said about his friend. “Was there anything on board that looked new? Anything Fuligni might have been trying out?”
The forensics man was quiet for a second. Blanc could hear the howling wind coming through the phone. The man was probably still on board. “No, but I’ll have a look around. The front sail is still packed away, complete. The mainsail was flying above the boom, but it’s old. The compass, radio, GPS all look pretty well used. All the indications are that Fuligni had breakfast belowdecks, came up briefly, and, whack, the boom swung round and took him out.”
“He had breakfast?”
“There are croissant crumbs on the table belowdecks, and in the galley an old coffeepot with grounds in it. Still moist. Putain!” Suddenly the man’s voice vanished.
“What happened?” Blanc shouted.
The voice came back. “There are two coffee cups in the sink.”
“Two?”
“I’m an idiot. I should have spotted it straightaway. We’ll check them out.”
“I’ll look forward to your next call.” Blanc turned off his Nokia. Two cups. Now the business was beginning to get interesting.
* * *
Just as he was about to pull back out onto the road, a dark blue Citroën C5 came speeding down the hill. The driver didn’t notice the patrol car parked in the shadow of the trees, but the captain recognized her: Madame le juge. He cursed and put his foot down. But Aveline Vialaron-Allègre knew the winding, narrow route départementale better than he did, and was driving like a lunatic. After just three bends he had lost sight of her. Still at the wheel, he pulled out his cell phone and tapped in a number, the blue Mégane swaying from side to side across the road, the tires screeching.
“Marius?” he shouted into the Nokia.
“Corporal Baressi on Lieutenant Tonon’s phone.”
“Merde. Sorry. Where is Tonon?”
“Not at his desk.”
“I thought as much.” Connard. “Are you expecting Madame Vialaron-Allègre?”
“Madame le juge has been informed of the tragic accident of Monsieur Fuligni.”
“It wasn’t an accident. Who informed her?”
“No idea. In any case she wanted to get a full picture of the situation.”
“Tell her that I’ll be in her office in a few minutes and I’ll fill her in.”
“Madame le juge is not coming in to the office. She wanted to see the boat. And the body of the unlucky Monsieur Fuligni.”
Blanc put his foot on the brake quickly enough to still be able to turn onto route départementale 70D, leading to Saint-César. Somebody had told Aveline Vialaron-Allègre. She wanted to see the crime scene and the victim herself. Why? Because she didn’t trust Blanc to do the job properly? Or did she have an altogether different reason?
A few minutes later he parked the patrol car next to the C5 down by the harbor. On the pier the forensics team were clearing up their last bits of equipment. They had taken off their white protective clothing and were standing around smoking. Stretcher bearers had lifted the body, covered with a sheet, and the juge d’instruction was standing a little to one side, by the edge of the pier, staring into the water. Blanc hurried past the yachts, stopping briefly with the forensics team next to the Amzeri to ask, “Anything new with the coffee cups?”
“Nothing.” Young Hurault, already nearly bald, the one who had searched Moréas’s house, shook his head. The captain recognized that it had been his voice on the phone. “We’ll send them to the lab, but they look to me as clean as if somebody had scalded them.”
“On board a sailing boat?”
The forensics man nodded toward the galley. “There’s a two-hob gas cooker in there, more than enough to bring a few liters of water to boiling point in a few minutes.”
“Anything to suggest that’s what happened?”
“Can’t be sure. All I can tell you is that there is a normal, relatively full propane gas canister attached. That makes it at least technically possible.”
“Do you normally scald your coffee cups in the morning, Monsieur Hurault?”
The young man looked at him in surprise, then shook his head. “Just a dash of washing-up liquid, a rinse with warm water, and then leave them to dry. That’s what everybody does.”
“So if we think someone was trying to get rid of any clues,” Blanc muttered to himself, “then you might think just rinsing the cups was hardly enough.”
“And why leave two cups in the drainer? If you want to get rid of any evidence, surely you’d put them back in a cupboard.”
“Maybe our Monsieur X didn’t have the time. After all, boiling the water and pouring it over them will have taken a few minutes. Or perhaps he didn’t want to touch the cups he had just poured the boiling water over for fear of leaving new traces.”
“Well, that’s your problem,” Hurault replied, and peeled his thin frame out of his overalls. “I’ll send you the report from the lab if we find anything of interest.”
* * *
Blanc walked down to the end of the pier. He hesitated before taking the last few steps, preferring to wait until the juge d’instruction noticed his presence and turned around. She’d been crying, he realized with some surprise. “I was on my way to you,” he said, trying not to show he had noticed the state she was in.
“Monsieur Fuligni was a friend of my late father. He was practically part of the family,” she said, clearly having noticed his surprise at her grief. She stretched and gave him a questioning look: “You’re here because you don’t believe it was an accident?”
“I have doubts, primarily because of two clean coffee cups,” he said, telling her what he had discovered.
“And now you think that Monsieur Fuligni wouldn’t have gone out in this weather.” Aveline Vialaron-Allègre followed his line of thought. “He was sitting belowdecks, having breakfast, with a guest.”
“A guest who afterwards took care to remove the evidence.”
“After he had hit Pascal on the head, untied the boat, and then pushed him overboard outside the harbor?”
“It’s a possibility.”
“But when the fisherman came across the Amzeri, there was no one on board.”
“Maybe the culprit jumped into the water and made his way back to land.”
“But you have no witnesses.”
“Unfortunately not.” Reluctantly, Blanc acknowledged that he was enjoying her putting him to the test.
“And what motive might this hypothetical murderer have had?”
Blanc hesitated, wondering if it might be such a good idea to tell the juge d’instruction that her much-valued family friend’s wife was cuckolding him. Merde alors. He briefly summarized the rumors about Miette Fuligni’s affair with the architect Le Bruchec. Aveline Vialaron-Allègre didn’t look too shocked, as if it were the first time she had heard the story.
“You named Lucien Le Bruchec as a suspect in the Moréas murder case, and now, a few days later, you’re naming him again, this time as the killer of Pascal Fuligni. It’s not hard to tell you’re not from around here. Nobody who knows Lucien would take that seriously, even for a second. It’s absurd that a man like him would shoot a suspected burglar and then just days later kill a rival in a love affair.”
“I’m not accusing anybody. I have no intention of arresting anybody.” He could feel his heart rate rising. “You asked me for a possible motive. I gave you a possible motive. The oldest in the world: passion.”
“The oldest motive in the world is greed,” the juge d’instruction replied.
“I’m not ruling that out either.”
“If there’s anything in what you’ve just said, it implies that both murders were carried out by the same person. But we have neither a suspect nor a motive.” Blanc was about to interrupt her, but she gestured at him to be silent. “Please explain to me then the difference in the killer’s approach: In the one case a man is mowed down with a Kalashnikov, then set on fire, in the other he’s hit on the head and dumped in the water off his yacht in the Étang de Berre. Coffee cups rinsed in boiling water. That’s the act of someone doing everything possible to conceal the evidence. The exact opposite of what happened at the garbage dump. The first looked like an execution, the second was supposed to look like an accident.”
“That doesn’t mean there aren’t parallels: cold-bloodedness for a start. Efficiency. A killer adapting the method to the circumstances. On a garbage dump, where it’s noisy and dirty and there are moments when there’s nobody about, a salvo from a machine gun could be considered efficient, fast, and unlikely to be noticed. At the same time the killer doesn’t have to get close to a violent man like Moréas, who could be dangerous at close quarters. He kills him without warning from a distance. In the harbor here at Saint-César a single shot would have everybody sleeping on their boats jumping out of their beds. A blow to the head, possibly belowdecks, wouldn’t be noticed by anyone. Once again the murderer would be taking the least possible risk, attacking from behind. And in both cases the killer eliminates all the evidence: first by fire, then by making it look like an accident.”
“And rinsing the coffee cups with boiling water?”
“An eye for detail.”
Vialaron-Allègre lit up a Gauloise. “What does your boss think about all this?”
“Commandant Nkoulou thinks it was an accident.”
“I’ll talk to him,” she said, nodding to dismiss him.
“So is this an investigation or not?” Blanc called after her, confused.
“Of course,” she replied. And for a brief moment they smiled at one another, almost as if they were friends.
* * *
Blanc got his phone out. He had to talk to Miette Fuligni, firstly to break the terrible news to her, but also, as discreetly as possible, to ask her a few questions. But he wanted to talk to the architect, Le Bruchec, first, before news of the death got around. For that reason he rang the gendarmerie first, but Tonon still didn’t answer. Instead he got through to Fabienne Souillard, who wasn’t exactly thrilled but agreed to drive out to see the widow. It took him a while to get through to Le Bruchec. The architect was at home. “I’d like to come and ask you a couple more questions,” Blanc said, as vaguely as he could.
“Well, hurry up about it, I’ve got an appointment to play tennis.”
With Miette Fuligni perhaps? Blanc wondered. On the other hand Le Bruchec didn’t exactly sound as if he knew his lover’s husband had been fished out of the Étang de Berre dead.
* * *
“Tell me, Monsieur Le Bruchec, are you a sailor?” he asked when he was sitting in the inner courtyard of the architect’s house fifteen minutes later.
“I was when I was young. A 470.”
“Sounds like a weapon.”
The architect laughed. “Feels like one too. A 470 is an Olympic racing dinghy. Very sporty. Spend an hour in a good wind in one of those beasts and you’ll feel like you’ve got on a bucking bronco.”
“So you don’t sail anymore?”
He shook his head. “I sometimes go out fishing in a friend’s motorboat. But I’m too old for the little dinghies, and I don’t have the time to indulge myself with a big yacht. For every hour you spend out sailing, you spend two hours in port. There’s always something to fix or fiddle with or clean. Dreadful. I prefer tennis.” Le Bruchec was already dressed in a white Lacoste tennis shirt with matching pants, though he was still in flip-flops. “What’s the point of these questions?”
“This morning Monsieur Fuligni was pulled out of the water near his yacht, outside Saint-César harbor. Drowned.”
Le Bruchec stared at him vacantly a moment. Then he flinched, his left eyelid flickering. “Mon Dieu,” he mumbled. “What happened?”
“He was hit on the back of the head and fell overboard. It may have been a tragic accident.”
“Does Miette know yet?”
“My colleague is with her now.”
“The boom,” the architect said, more to himself than anyone else. “A loose cord and the thing swings across. It’s happened to every sailor.”
“On the other hand, the mistral is blowing and Monsieur Fuligni might not have gone sailing. It is possible that someone delivered the fatal blow. Someone on board with him,” Blanc explained flatly.
The architect looked at him, irritated. “Why do you say that? And why do you suddenly turn up here and ask me questions like that?”
“Because you’re in a relationship with Madame Fuligni.”
Le Bruchec opened his mouth as if he was going to launch into a tirade, then closed it again, got up, and began striding up and down the inner courtyard, like a tiger in a cage. “Are you accusing me of murdering him?”
“Do you deny having an affair with Madame Fuligni?”
“That doesn’t exactly make me a killer.”
“Where were you last night? And where were you this morning?”
“That’s absurd.” Le Bruchec wiped his right hand across his bald head, which had begun to sweat.
“Please just answer the question,” Blanc said calmly.
“I was here. In my house. I have been since yesterday afternoon.”
“Have you any witnesses to that?”
The architect glared at him. “No. It was my cleaning lady’s day off yesterday. And I had no visitors.” He sat down. “Listen to me, mon Capitaine. I’ve known Miette forever. I’ve always liked her. But we were friends, nothing more. But then when my wife died six months ago…” His voice failed him and he was silent for a minute. “Well, whatever, I was lonely. It was the same with Miette. Pascal neglected her, had done for ages. Then there was that Romanian girl, his secretary. It was both a scandal and ridiculous at the same time. Miette and I met regularly at the tennis club—and at some stage things happened. But it’s only an affair, nothing more. We were consoling each other, you could say. It was always clear to both of us that Miette wasn’t going to leave her husband for me. And I didn’t want things to go any further than occasional…” He looked for the right phrase. “… togetherness.”
Blanc looked hard at the architect. He had no alibi—and he did have a motive, whatever story he came up with. He was still young enough to want a new partner after the death of his wife. But he was well known round and about. He needed to keep a good reputation if he was to keep getting commissions. In the long term an affair might harm him, though most people already seemed to know of it. But if Miette suddenly became a widow through a tragic accident, then he could make their relationship more or less public. After a suitably decent length of time, they might even get married. And someone who regularly played tennis would have a strong arm, strong enough to knock a man out with a stick or other blunt object in a single blow. “Can you please give me the make, license plate, and color of all your cars?” he asked. Perhaps one of his cars might have been seen in the harbor at Saint-César.
A few minutes later he said good-bye, still without more than a vague suspicion. Nothing he was going to get a search warrant with, let alone an arrest warrant. He said, “Au revoir,” hoping it sounded like a threat. Le Bruchec shook his hand absently, staring at his tennis equipment lying in the hallway. He didn’t look like he was about to play his match.
* * *
Back at the gendarmerie he went to see Fabienne in her office. His young colleague was pale. “That was the first time I’ve ever had to inform someone of the death of a family member,” she whispered.
Blanc was grateful she didn’t hold it against him that he’d made her do it. “How did Madame Fuligni take it?”
“Silently, horribly silently. I think I would have found it easier if she cried or collapsed. I would have been able to offer her consolation or called the medics or something. But she just stood there looking at me for what seemed like ages. I didn’t know how to react.”
“Were you able to ask her any questions?”
“Yes. Later. Madame Fuligni rang an old friend, and when she arrived, she seemed to come round a bit. She told me her husband had gone down to the boat last night, with the intention of sleeping on board, something he did often. She thought nothing about it, watched television for a while, and then went to bed.”
“Witnesses?”
“She said she was alone the whole time.”
“Yes, too much to ask for.”
“You don’t think Madame Fuligni herself dumped her husband in the Étang de Berre?”
“I was hoping for a good, solid witness statement to rule out that possibility. But she had a motive. Also she knows the harbor and the boat, and her presence wouldn’t seem out of the ordinary. She’s fit too, fit enough to knock someone out with a blow to the back of the head.”
“Statistics are against you. Nine out of ten murders are committed by men.”
“Women don’t get caught so often.”
“What about the coffee cups with boiling water poured over them? Miette Fuligni would only have needed to put them back in the cupboard. If her prints had been found on them or anywhere else on board, it would have been totally normal. She’d been on the Amzeri, so what? She’s his wife. She must have been there a hundred times.”
“Maybe she’s an obsessive cleaner.”
Fabienne just laughed and pointed to a few sheets of computer printout. “This came in from the forensics lab while you were down at the harbor. It’s the report on the bullets used to kill Moréas.”
Blanc read the first few lines, then whistled through his teeth. “So, not the weapon we found under Moréas’s bed. But a ‘hot’ gun,” he whispered. “Seven-point-six-two-millimeter ammunition was used in a Zastava M70, a Yugoslav Kalashnikov copy. The cartridge cases had characteristic marks from the ejector system. Some of the cases showed two ejector marks, implying they had been reloaded and ejected, then fired this time. Cartridge cases with similar marks had been found last year in one of the suburbs north of Marseille, in the stairwell of a dilapidated apartment block where someone had shot dead a North African drug dealer.” A murder that still hadn’t been cleared up. “I wonder if our killer is the same man,” he said.
His colleague shook her head. “I’d bet a month’s wages the gun was bought cheap in Marseille. After every murder the killers buy a new weapon—Kalashnikovs are cheap. That way a murder can never be laid at their door even if we find them with a weapon. Our colleagues in Marseille in any case haven’t been able to find any link between the dead dealer and Moréas. The dealer had only arrived from Algiers three months before his death. He didn’t know his way around, did some business on the turf of one of the Corsican clans. That alone would have been enough to send an assassin after him.”
“Who buys hot guns like those from known killers?”
“Pros from the Balkans who couldn’t care less whether or not the French police are looking for a particular weapon. Or kids looking for the cheapest they can get. Opportunists who don’t realize they’re being sold a ‘hot’ weapon.”
“Well, that reduces our number of suspects.”
“You’re joking, I assume.”
“On the contrary. At least now we can be fairly certain that Marseille drug dealers aren’t mixed up in this, even if our perpetrator copied their technique. Maybe that was a deliberate attempt to divert our attention.” All of a sudden Blanc’s mind switched to the death of Fuligni. That too had been arranged to suggest one specific solution, even though there were lots of possibilities. “Our killer is fastidious,” he mumbled to himself. He read the rest of the report. The Kalashnikov they had found in Moréas’s house hadn’t been fired for years. It had never come to the attention of the police either in Marseille or anywhere else in France. As far as instruments of murder go, it was still a virgin.
The door opened and Corporal Baressi stuck his head round it. “We’ve sent a couple of people down to the harbor at Saint-César with the details of Le Bruchec’s cars.” The chubby gendarme glanced down at the list in his sweaty hand. “Nice wheels. I wouldn’t mind a couple of these. But neither the harbormaster nor anyone else spotted any of them. The architect wasn’t down at the harbor.”
Fabienne Souillard gave him a scowl. “Le Bruchec doesn’t keep a boat down at the harbor,” she said icily, “and therefore he wouldn’t have had the code for the parking lot. If he had been down at Saint-César he would have had to park in one of the side streets. Did you ask around there too?”
Baressi disappeared without answering.
* * *
“I have something else for you,” Souillard said. “It’s about the German painter. Almost certainly meaningless.”
At that moment Tonon came in with a half-eaten croissant in one hand and a cardboard coffee cup in the other. “So this is where you’ve been hiding,” he said to Blanc, kissing Fabienne on the cheek. “Well, it’s prettier than in our old boys’ office.” Hanging from his gun belt was an ancient silver mobile CD player with a thin headset cable leading up to his hairy ears.
“Is that a brain pacemaker?” Fabienne asked sarcastically.
Tonon pulled out his earbuds and tinny music drowned out the whirring of the computer’s fan. Blanc thought he could just make out the voice of Serge Gainsbourg. “Used to belong to one of my kids. Can’t remember which. I found it while cleaning up.”
“You’re so nineties.”
“My best years.”
“What were you about to tell me, Fabienne?” Blanc interrupted the pair of them. He wasn’t exactly thrilled at his partner only just showing up and acting as if he was on vacation.
“Gérard Paulmier called, the former La Provence journalist. He said he had been speaking to his old colleagues again about Monsieur Rheinbach’s visit. He said he thought it would floor you, and that it was something you might want to know.”
“He knows his people.”
“You men are so transparent. Anyway, it would appear Rheinbach asked not just about Moréas, but more specifically about his involvement in the attacks on tourists.”
Tonon, already slurping at his coffee, took a gulp and coughed, sending a fine brown spray across the desk. Souillard turned her eyes away, and used a Kleenex to wipe her computer and iPad.
“What precisely did Monsieur Rheinbach want to know?”
“It seems first of all he just wanted to read the original articles about the attacks and the arrests after the tourist was killed. There were quite a lot of reports at the time, including about the arrest of Moréas, although his name was never mentioned, just ‘a suspect from Caillouteaux.’ But if you know the story then it’s pretty obvious they’re referring to Moréas. It soon became clear, however, that Rheinbach had already read the stories. He just wanted more information and kept pressing them, as to who wrote the story, for example. It was as if he was after information that didn’t make it into the published piece at the time. But the journalists turned him away.”
Blanc looked at his colleague. Tonon had gone pale, the paper cup in his hand shaking. “That old story,” he mumbled, “that same damn old story.”
Blanc had been intending to ask Tonon to look into it, but he began to realize Marius obviously wouldn’t exactly relish going back over the old case. Instead he said to Fabienne, “Would you look into it? Find out why a jigsaw puzzle painter should be so interested in this grubby old story. Why this Rheinbach was so obsessed with Moréas. Was he intending to blackmail him? Had he found out something that had been missed all these years?”
Tonon snorted indignantly.
“Or maybe Rheinbach was just after something he could use as a defense because he felt threatened by Moréas?” Blanc continued, unperturbed. “Or was he trying to threaten Moréas himself? Maybe there are some documents relating to their properties? Or maybe one of the two women who had a brief relationship with Rheinbach had also hung around with Moréas?”
“Moréas had annoyed this timid painter when he was out in the forest with his canvas and brushes,” Tonon grumbled. “He just wanted to know who he was dealing with. That’s all.”
“I’ve never gone down to a newspaper to try to find out details about a neighbor’s involvement in some ancient incident,” Blanc said. “I think that in itself is something worthy of investigation.”
“Discreetly,” advised Tonon, “very discreetly.”
Blanc and Souillard both nodded, though neither of them had any idea what their colleague felt they needed to be so discreet about.
* * *
“Come over for dinner tonight,” Blanc said to Marius a bit later when they were back in their own office, bent over their ancient computers. Tonon seemed to be particularly worked up about their digging into the old highway robbery case again. Probably, Blanc thought, because he saw it as a lasting accusation against himself, that he had made a mess of the case and never brought Moréas to justice. Now here was some cop from Paris and a young lesbian who were going to open it all up again. What if they were to find something he had missed all these years?
“I’ll bring a few things along so we don’t have to eat out of cans,” he replied, attempting a smile.
Nkoulou appeared. “You two are to continue investigating the Fuligni death. The juge d’instruction insists on it,” he told them. “I’ll give you time, until the autopsy report is done. If you don’t have anything by then, I shall tell Madame Vialaron-Allègre that somebody has called a false alarm.” And with that the commandant slammed the door behind him.
“He’s going to explode with anger if you keep on like this,” Tonon whispered.
Blanc grabbed the phone: “Have you got the pathologist’s number?”
“It’s on speed dial. Hit ‘8.’ You’re not going to put pressure on Dr. Thezan?”
“On the contrary. I’m going to tell her to take her time with the autopsy.”
If Fontaine Thezan was surprised by his call, she didn’t show it. “I’m going to cut open the body today,” she replied. “I assume we won’t find anything new, but I can order blood and tissue samples to be taken and test them for drugs and such. That can take a while.”
“I owe you a coffee,” said Blanc.
“I drink green tea,” the pathologist answered, and hung up.
Blanc spent the rest of the day writing up a report for the files. At some stage Tonon disappeared. “Buying ingredients,” he announced. “See you this evening. Shall we say around eight?”
The captain shut down his computer early and got to his feet. There was nothing more to be done for the day. It was an unusual feeling. He decided to go home, sort out the house a bit, and relax. There was no mobile reception in the old mill, although if he took a few steps out from the plane trees he could just about get a weak connection. He spent a little time surfing the Internet hoping maybe to get mail or other news from his children. On Facebook he found he had a friend request from Fabienne Souillard. He confirmed it. Three more of his former Paris colleagues had disappeared from his fast-shrinking list of FB friends. But his daughter had posted something: two party photos with a few people he hadn’t seen before. But nothing from his son. His daughter had wished her mother a good vacation in Martinique. What was Geneviève doing in the Caribbean? Had she already gone or was she about to leave? Was she with her new guy? He turned the damn Nokia off. Across the river Serge Douchy was rattling along on his asthmatic tractor and nodded to him. Blanc thought the goatherd was being ironic, but he realized he was probably imagining it. He raised a hand and waved. Don’t feel sorry for yourself, he told himself.
A dented old Fiat Marea turned into the olive oil mill’s drive. Tonon honked his horn and dragged his huge frame out the door. He was wearing pale linen pants and a blue and yellow Hawaiian shirt, his eyes concealed behind an ultramodern pair of sunglasses with jagged lenses.
“You could be in the next Dany Boon film,” Blanc said by way of welcome.
“That would be a good career move,” Marius grunted. “Give me a hand.” He opened the trunk.
“Have you got a cannon in there?”
“It’s a barbecue grill.”
“It looks like a heap of junk.”
“Well, now it’s yours.” Tonon set up the huge, rusty piece of apparatus outside the mill, and then produced a bag of charcoal, a plastic bag dripping fat, a string bag full of eggplants, and a small bag of potatoes.
“What is this? I invite you over for dinner and you bring everything with you?” Blanc said, only halfheartedly. His stomach was rumbling.
“Pure egoism. I just don’t trust your cooking skills.” From his plastic bag from Géant Casino supermarket he also pulled out a bottle of Ricard. “Pastis is better than yoga for relaxing.”
Blanc dragged a table and two chairs into the open air, while his colleague set up the grill, piled charcoal in, and put a fire lighter in the middle. They poured a finger of pastis into two glasses and added ice and water. Tonon raised his glass and toasted him. Blanc sniffed the aroma of almonds, took a sip, and let the pastis rinse his mouth with alcohol and the taste of licorice. It also quenched his thirst. Tonon downed his glass in one, and refilled it.
Over the next hour Tonon grilled a dozen merguez he had produced from the plastic bag, piercing the spicy lamb sausages with a fork so that fat dripped onto the steaming charcoal, while the merguez themselves shrank to dark hard sticks. Marius wrapped the eggplants and potatoes in foil along with rosemary and thyme and threw them onto the grill. Blanc learned that his colleague had two grown-up children. “The boys are so left-wing they are embarrassed to have a cop as father,” he said, laughing. It wasn’t quite clear whether or not he was still in contact with them. Blanc thought of his own kids and the fact that Facebook was really his only link to them, and decided not to ask his colleague for too much detail. He took another sip from the glass of pastis, the scent of cooking meat and vegetables sending him into a mild state of euphoria. Before long the bottle of Ricard was empty. He opened a bottle of Bernard rosé, wondering how his colleague intended to get home later.
They enjoyed the spicy merguez, eggplant, potatoes, a baguette with cheese, and wine. “Not exactly Michelin star, but tell me when you ever ate better in Paris?” Tonon challenged.
“You are an artist,” Blanc admitted. He decided he would fix up an improvised guest bed for Marius. They would finish off another bottle of rosé, and neither of them would go anywhere for the rest of the evening.
Then the Nokia he had left outside rang. Souillard. “Fabienne, don’t tell me you’re still at work?” Blanc said, with more than a touch of guilt.
“Not really. My girlfriend is away and I was just surfing the Internet in the office,” she said dismissively. “But this woman appeared.”
“On the Internet?”
“No. Waiting in the office next door. A cleaning lady, who’d been working in her boss’s house this morning. Over the years he’s usually left her money in an envelope on the kitchen table—but not this time. Also the fridge had been left to thaw, and a few suitcases were missing. Nothing like it had ever happened all the time she’s worked for him. She was puzzled, but did her job. Later on she tried to get hold of her boss—calling him at home, in the office, on his cell phone. But every time it went straight to voice mail. This evening she talked to her husband about it and he advised her to go to the police and file a missing person report.”
Blanc already had an inkling of what was coming. “So who is this missing boss of hers?” he asked, trying to get rid of the alcoholic fug clouding his brain.
“The architect, Lucien Le Bruchec.”