6

AT A LITTLE AFTER EIGHT o’clock that Sunday morning, with the sun already starting to put out some warmth, Jacquot and Brunet pulled up in front of the Blanchard’s farmhouse. Both men were silent. They knew what was coming. And both men had done this same call enough times to know that it never got any easier.

‘Looks deserted,’ said Brunet, coming over to Jacquot’s car and leaning down by the open window. The house rose three floors above them, the top windows shuttered. Their green paint was peeling, the wooden panels warped with age and weather, and one or two slats not quite as they should be – just as the shutters at Le Mas Bleu would once have been. On the left of the house was a barn with closed doors and on the right an open-sided building housing a tractor, assorted farm machinery, some wrapped bales, and two cars – both Renaults, an estate and a four-wheel drive flat-bed. Beyond it, Jacquot could make out the first of the trees in the orchard, lanterns still hanging in the branches.

‘They had a late night,’ he replied, pushing open the car door and climbing out. He’d just swung it shut when Monsieur Blanchard appeared from between the barn and farmhouse. Jacquot recognised him from the day before – short, broad-shouldered, big-bellied, with rosy unshaven cheeks and a thick head of grey hair that now stood high and proud and ruffled from his bed. From which, it was clear, he hadn’t long ago risen. He might have been wearing trousers and boots but his flies were open, his bootlaces untied and there was a dressing gown over his singlet. He was carrying a pail filled with eggs and there was straw caught on the sleeves of his gown. When he saw Jacquot and Brunet coming in his direction, he put down the pail, brushed away the straw and tied the cord of his dressing gown.

‘Messieurs?’ he called.

‘Monsieur Blanchard. It’s me . . . Daniel Jacquot. I was here yesterday, at the wedding, with Claudine?’

‘Ah, Madame Eddé. Claudine. Mais bien sûr. Quelle jolie femme. Bouf!’ Blanchard peered at his visitor from under grey wiry eyebrows. Jacquot smelt wine on the man’s breath and the warmth of the chicken house on his robe. ‘And you, Daniel. Of course.’ They shook hands. ‘What a day, heh? Pouf, it will take me a week to recover. Maybe a month. At my age . . .’

Blanchard’s eyes then turned to Brunet – whom he didn’t recognise and was almost certain hadn’t been at the marriage of his eldest daughter the day before – and he jutted his head forward as though the better to focus on Jacquot’s assistant.

‘My colleague, Jean Brunet,’ said Jacquot.

‘Colleague?’ Blanchard frowned.

‘I’m afraid we’re here on a police matter.’

Jacquot could see that not for a second did it strike Blanchard that the ‘police matter’ might be of any significance or concern to him.

‘Someone run off the road last night?’ he asked, squaring his shoulders before giving the matter some consideration. ‘There were enough here who might have done. No one hurt, I hope?’ He gave them a big smile, reached down for the pail and picked it up. ‘Come on in. Eggs are fresh and coffee’s on . . .’ He moved past them. ‘So who was it? Who’s made a fool of themselves? Don’t tell me . . . Ricard. Pissed as a stoat he was, and his wife not much better. Never could hold her drink, could Madame Ricard. Stumbled out of here . . . what? Must have been near three when the disco finished.’

In the kitchen, stone-floored, high-ceilinged and with lace-curtained windows set either side of the back door, Monsieur Blanchard swung the pail of eggs onto the table and went to the range, lifted a bubbling coffee percolator.

‘Take a seat, Messieurs. You want some coffee?’ He filled his own mug and waved the pot at them.

Jacquot and Brunet shook their heads.

Blanchard came back to the table, pulled out a chair.

‘Dieu, what a night! One down and three to go. Daughters . . . I’ll be a poor man when they’re all wed.’

Jacquot gave a tight smile, as if to agree that that would very likely be the case, and Brunet nodded.

It was Brunet who got the ball rolling.

‘It’s about your daughter that we’re here,’ he began, maybe sensing that Jacquot, as a guest at the previous day’s wedding, might be holding back, not wanting to start. He glanced at his boss before continuing, but Jacquot shook his head. He could do this. He was just waiting for the right moment. When Blanchard’s eyes settled on him, Jacquot knew the moment had come.

‘And which of the little minxes is it this time? Don’t tell me . . . Justine. I’ve asked her mother a million times . . .’

‘It’s Izzy, Monsieur Blanchard, and I’m afraid I have some bad news. Is your wife up?’

‘Izzy? But she just got married. She’s on honeymoon.’ He glanced at the kitchen clock, its big hollow tick filling the room. A real Provençal farm clock, not the painted pretender put up in Le Mas Bleu. ‘Should be getting the train any time for Paris, the two of them. Back in a week . . .’

This was how long it took for the phrase ‘bad news’ to filter through to Blanchard. Of all his daughters, Izzy was the one now removed from his care, no longer his responsibility, out in the world with her new husband. When it did finally get through to him – a visit from the police and the suggestion of bad news – a tight little frown played across his features, as though there had to be some kind of mistake.

‘Liiiii-se-ette,’ he called out for his wife, as though she was the one who should be there to take responsibility for her girls, and deal with whatever they might have got up to.

‘I’m here, I’m here, what’s all the fuss about?’ came a voice from the hallway, and into the kitchen came Madame Blanchard, wrapping the ties of a housecoat around her waist. She was as stout as her husband, but her hair was neat, brushed, pinned back, a pair of button-like black eyes flicking between the three men in her kitchen.

Both Brunet and Jacquot got to their feet and stayed standing as Jacquot informed mother and father in a soft and sorrowful voice that their eldest daughter, Isabelle Blanchard, now Gilbert, had been found dead in her bed at Le Mas Bleu.

Madame Blanchard dropped the ties from her fingers and stared across the kitchen table at Jacquot as though he was speaking in a foreign language and she hadn’t been able properly to understand what it was that he had said.

‘But she just got married,’ said Blanchard Père, as though that somehow made the announcement of her death invalid, unlikely. How could anyone die the day after their wedding?

‘What happened? Where is she?’ asked Madame Blanchard, reaching for a chair and letting herself down onto it. Of the two, she seemed the more alert.

‘Dead, you say?’ asked her husband, now shaking his head as though that simply wasn’t possible. She’d be back in a week. After her honeymoon in Paris. There was room for no other possibility.

‘She was found earlier this morning,’ continued Jacquot. ‘By her husband, Monsieur Noël Gilbert. She had been shot.’

‘Shot?’ gasped the old man. ‘Shot, you say? How? Why? Who?’

‘Please, please tell us this is all some horrible joke,’ said Madame Blanchard, clearly hoping it might be just that. Just a joke. Just some dreadful mistake.

‘I regret, Madame, this is no joke. She died in her sleep. We are still trying to establish . . .’

‘And Noël?’ asked Madame Blanchard. ‘Where is he? Why isn’t he here? Has he been shot too?’

‘Your son-in-law has been taken to the hospital in Cavaillon. He was in some considerable shock.’

‘But what was he doing?’ demanded Blanchard. ‘Is he to blame? Is he the one who did this?’

Jacquot shook his head.

‘At this time, it seems highly unlikely that Monsieur Gilbert had anything to do with his wife’s death . . .’

‘But where was he? How did he let something like this happen?’ demanded Blanchard, slapping the top of the table with the palm of his hand. ‘He’s her husband, for the love of God!’ As a kind of defence mechanism, Jacquot knew, the old man was now focusing his attention on the poor performance of his son-in-law as husband and protector and provider, rather than facing directly the issue of his daughter’s death.

There was no such artifice or deflection from Madame Blanchard.

‘Someone . . . killed Izzy? She’s been murdered?’

There was a movement behind Madame Blanchard. Jacquot looked over her shoulder. There, standing at the kitchen door, in the shadows by the old farm dresser, listening to this exchange, were three young girls, Izzy’s sisters – twelve, sixteen and the nineteen-year-old whom Claudine had coached for the École des Beaux Arts. Jacquot wondered how long they had been there. Long enough, it seemed. A scream pealed out of the oldest girl as the church bell in St-Florent started calling the faithful to Mass.