Deadly Camargue: Provence Mystery #02 Read online

  “Not true, I’m afraid.”

  * * *

  It was a good hour later when Blanc met up with the doctor in the Institut Médico-Légal and she only had a steaming cup of green tea in her hand. He shook his head when she offered him one. “If I were to drink something hot in this weather, I’d melt.”

  “Have you cut open Monsieur Cohen yet?” he asked.

  “The bull did that for me. I’ve sewn him up again, after taking a look around in his insides.” She tapped a sheaf of papers on her desk. “I was just about to send you the report. It’s not going to surprise you: serious internal and external injuries. Monsieur Cohen both bled out and suffocated: his lungs collapsed. The murder weapon was the animal’s left horn according to blood and tissue samples on it. Zero alcohol in his blood and no traces of drugs or medication in his urine. The roots of his hair contained old traces of cocaine. But then that’s not something we didn’t know about.”

  “But at least you can confirm that at the time of his death Cohen was stone-cold sober. That means it’s unlikely he would have opened the gate himself. The man was in full control of his senses.”

  Just then someone opened the door of Thezan’s office without knocking. The young man who came in was the same one Blanc had seen sitting in the passenger seat of the Jeep. He nodded to the doctor, glanced disinterestedly at the gendarme, but held the door open.

  Fontaine Thezan pulled her sunglasses down from her hair and put them on. “Would you excuse us please, mon Capitaine?”

  Blanc accompanied the two of them out into the parking lot, wondering if the doctor and her taciturn companion were a couple. He was also wondering how somebody who daily used a scalpel and an electric saw to cut up human bodies could bring herself to caress a warm, living body. But he imagined Dr. Thezan would laugh out loud at him if he even gave a hint that he thought about things like that.

  As it happened, she laughed out loud at him anyway when she saw the blue 2CV. “Is the public purse so stretched that we have to send the cops out in 2CVs?”

  “We spend all our money on autopsies.”

  “If you crash this tin can into a modern car, you’ll be next on my autopsy table.”

  Her companion smiled for a second, but Blanc couldn’t decide if it was out of sympathy or irony.

  On the way back to Sainte-Françoise-la-Vallée, he took the doctor’s words to heart and drove so slowly that even delivery trucks riskily overtook him. As the flow of wind through the folded-up side windows tousled his hair, he found himself thinking of Cohen and Marie-Claude Leroux. Maybe she hadn’t been responsible for setting him on the trail of the old theft, either deliberately or by accident. Maybe Cohen, as an old friend of the Leroux family, had known that she had been working at the Musée Maly at the time the Van Gogh disappeared? In which case, far from being the one who had put him onto a lead, she might have been the one who was prepared to do anything to get him off it. If a theft from a museum is an inside job, then everybody is a suspect, including a young female curator with an interest in yachts. Along with the young male curator …

  Boré. Blanc tried to imagine the somewhat eccentric, somewhat overweight, far from healthy exhibition promoter with his snakeskin shoes standing by the edge of a field with a bull in it and pulling open the gate behind which the beast was already snorting. It was an absurd image. And what would his motive have been? The same as Marie-Claude Leroux’s? Marie-Claude and Boré had left for Paris together, just after the theft. Was it really a career move that just happened to coincide? Or was it a well-disguised escape? Then many years later Marie-Claude Leroux puts her husband’s most famous reporter onto a story linked to an exhibition in Arles being organized by her former lover. Maybe she was trying to put pressure on Boré? Maybe she wanted Cohen to dig something up? For a brief moment Blanc imagined himself going back to Paris, entering the art historian’s apartment, and finding in one of the rooms a little picture of fishing boats on a beach …

  Then he told himself to stop being ridiculous. There had been a chief suspect back at the time of the theft. A man Cohen had been keeping tabs on, as the blurred photo proved. A man Cohen wanted to meet but hadn’t yet spoken to because death had caught up with him first. It would be interesting to ask Olivier Guillaume a few questions, Blanc thought.

  An Old Suspect

  On Monday morning Blanc was woken up by Douchy’s rooster crowing on the other side of the river as if trying to scare Napoleon’s army. Mist rising from the Touloubre was drifting between the tops of the plane trees. At least three dozen jackdaws, little dark ghosts of the dead, fluttered upward in the foliage squawking angrily as he emerged from the oil mill. The sun hadn’t quite risen yet, but the sky in the east was as white and clear as soft chalk. It seemed to Blanc that every breath was drawing warm air into his lungs. It was good that Sunday was over, he thought to himself.

  The day off had felt like twenty-four hours in jail. He had forced himself not to go to the gendarmerie station so as not to make it even more apparent to his colleagues that he had nothing else to do. But he had nothing else to do: he had paced up and down outside his old house like a tiger in a cage. He had thought so long and hard about Cohen’s death and imagined so many ways in which it might have happened that it seemed ludicrous in the end. The guy just died in a stupid accident, he told himself, and I’m every bit as stupid for hunting a nonexistent murderer. No, it wasn’t an accident, merde, it was a cleverly thought-out attack. Back in Paris he had known he was a tenacious investigator. Not always on the right track, not always successful, and often enough disliked by his bosses and his colleagues. But tenacious. Down here he was no longer so sure: what was it that was driving him on? Was it still tenacity? Or was it blindness?

  He longed for Aveline. But her husband had come down from Paris, and he had no interest in finding out how she spent her Sundays. He longed for Geneviève, but she had long been living a life in which he no longer played a role. He longed to see his children. He’d called Astrid and Eric, but in both cases he had only gotten their voice mail. He’d found himself stupidly not knowing what to say. He’d just stammered a few sentences and hung up, fully realizing that he must sound like an idiot to his children, if they ever even heard it. Eric didn’t reply. That evening on Facebook he’d found a message from Astrid.

  Good to hear you’re well. I’m fine. Since when did you start being interested in my well-being?

  Blanc had closed the message. How could he answer it? His children blamed him for the breakup of the marriage: Papa was never home. Papa had missed the piano recitals, the basketball games, and sometimes even birthdays. Papa was more interested in criminals than us.

  It was good that Sunday was over.

  Blanc had arranged an early Monday morning meeting with Fuligni Junior, the son of the dead building contractor. He had been a bit apprehensive about the meeting, but when a battered white truck pulled up outside the oil mill, the driver gave him a friendly wave from behind the wheel.

  Matthieu Fuligni was in his late twenties, had his black hair shaved almost to his skull, and was wearing torn jeans and worker’s shoes spattered with mortar. His upper body was bare and more tanned than any sunbed could achieve. He shook Blanc’s hand and introduced himself. Either he didn’t know that the captain had investigated the murder case in which his father had been the victim or he didn’t think any ill of him for it.

  Blanc was relieved. He showed him the tile and told him he wanted his house reroofed with the same.

  “Good choice. Even the Greeks and the Romans used tuiles canals to roof their houses. The clay is Provençal and the tiles are still made by hand today,” Fuligni told him. He pointed to the relief on the fired clay. “A cicada, the firm’s trademark. You put the cicada facing upward when you lay the tile on the roof. Perfect protection. Turn the tile over and put a load of them together and voilà you have a perfect clay water chute. Clever, isn’t it? I’ll fix the tiles onto the roof beams with mortar and then the wind won
’t blow them off.”

  “Not even the mistral?” Blanc pushed him, hoping the tiles would be nailed on or fixed with screws or glue or in some other less traditional manner.

  “Pas de souci,” Fuligni said. “No worries.”

  Blanc was of the opinion that when a doctor told you “Pas de souci,” it was time to start writing your will. He was beginning to wonder if his oil mill was a hopeless case.

  Fuligni was now talking about quantities and price and something called Manitou. It took Blanc a while to realize that he was talking about a type of crane he would need to get up onto the roof. He did a mental accounting of his financial problems and nodded reluctantly when he heard Fuligni’s initial estimate. Pas de souci.

  When the builder was just about to head off, Blanc heard footsteps and saw his neighbor approaching. Paulette Aybalen waved to Fuligni, who had climbed into his truck, and kissed Blanc on both cheeks.

  “I have some loose tiles on the roof,” he told her, showing her the one he was holding.

  “Matthieu will soon fix that.”

  “It sounds as if it’s going to be expensive.”

  “He’ll charge you the proper price. It looks as if he could have a few more jobs to do for you here.” She nodded smilingly at the old oil mill.

  “It’s going to burn up all my money. Nothing left for my kids to inherit.”

  “I didn’t know you had kids.”

  “Two,” Blanc told her, embarrassed all of a sudden. “They already go…”—he searched for the right way of putting it—“… their own ways,” he ended up saying, somewhat lamely.

  Paulette looked as if she had been about to contradict him, then thought better of it and changed the subject. “Yesterday I saw the battered Renault of the village policeman from Caillouteaux going through Sainte-Françoise-la-Vallée. I’ve never seen him here before and certainly not on a Sunday. Do you know why that was?”

  Blanc had called his colleague and asked him to. For a moment he considered lying to his neighbor so as not to worry her. Pas de souci. But he realized she would see through him. “To watch out for aggressive lawyers,” he said.

  She shook her head, leaving him uncertain as to whether she was pleased or annoyed. Paulette took the tuile canal from his hand. “I could never again live with a man under the same roof,” she muttered.

  “Take the tile as a gift,” Blanc said.

  “For my damaged roof.” She laughed. A loud neighing sound came from across the road. “I’d better go and deal with my horses in the field,” she told him. She took the tuile canal with her.

  * * *

  By the time Blanc got into his 2CV, he was in a substantially better mood than he had been an hour earlier. He picked up Marius from Gadet in the patrol car, Fabienne jumping into the backseat at the last moment: “I want to see the troll,” she explained.

  Her two colleagues stared at her uncomprehendingly. She rolled her eyes theatrically. “I’ve never seen a silver-haired mommy’s boy face-to-face.”

  “I hope he doesn’t disappoint you,” Marius said. “What if the mommy’s boy turns out to be J. R. Ewing?”

  It was Fabienne’s turn to stare at him in puzzlement, then she laughed. “Sometimes I think you’ve come into the century through a time warp from the 1980s.”

  “I’m a very conservative person deep down,” Marius grumbled. “In any case, I know Guillaume,” he told them. “At least slightly. I saw the photo you printed out, Fabienne, and somehow the guy looked familiar. It took me an hour before I realized he’s a server at the bar in Le National.”

  “The bar in Gadet where Cohen took the picture of him?” Blanc asked, surprised.

  “Yes. Although to say he serves there isn’t quite right. I don’t go into Le National that often. I’ve just heard that he’s worked there as a waiter. But I managed to overhear the boss and a few of the regulars at the next table making jokes about him. Apparently he turned out to be a bit too odd to be allowed to have regular contact with human beings. Since then he just stands behind the bar, far away from all the customers, and spends the whole of his day opening wine bottles and washing dishes. I’ve never exchanged a word with him.”

  “Sounds just like Dallas,” Fabienne said.

  They took a detour around the center of Salon and drove through Bel Air, a suburb of faceless big houses and dead-straight avenues. It wasn’t just the name that made Blanc think it resembled an unfortunate mixture of Provence and California. The district had been thrown up without planning over the past few decades on the flat plain of the Crau. Marius made a sign to him at a traffic light and they turned into a narrow tarmac road running toward a horizon already shimmering in the heat. Blanc was driving alongside a drainage ditch that was giving off brackish clouds of steam from the pale brown water in it. Rice fields. A horse paddock. Hedges of cypress trees some sixty feet high. Countless numbers of frogs croaking so monotonously loud that they drowned out the noise of the patrol car’s engine. There were fewer and fewer houses and those were looking shabby with dirty plaster. In the middle of the plain stood a dilapidated barn that had been turned into a garage. With his newly acquired connoisseur’s eye, Blanc noted a few partially eviscerated 2CVs, but there was no sign of a mechanic. In fact, there was nobody at all to be seen along the road, no pedestrians, no cyclists. Only in his rearview mirror did he spot the silhouette of a car, one that had been following them for some time at the same distance.

  “This is where the guy lives,” Marius said suddenly, recognizing a house number from his notebook: a building that had once had white plaster but was now mottled with glistening gray as if it had been touched all over by children with sticky hands. The roof was of an indistinguishable color and so flat it looked as if it had ducked down in fright. There was a sort of front yard with a broken asphalt surface where the gaps were filled in with gravel or black soil. A wooden door that looked as if it had seen its last lick of green paint some thirty years ago. As the Mégane’s engine came to a halt, the car that Blanc had seen following them in his rearview mirror rolled into the yard. It was a battered Peugeot Partner, with tin panels instead of a glass window set into its padded rear chassis. Yet another white car, Blanc realized. It was like a curse.

  They sat there silently in the patrol car for a moment, giving the driver of the Peugeot time to get out before they did. They took a close look at him: late fifties, thin, pale hair of an indistinguishable color, a gaunt face that looked somehow uncoordinated—his forehead and cheeks were almost free from lines, but his small eyes seemed stuck together at the corners and his narrow, pressed-together lips could have been those of an old man. He was wearing light linen pants, but despite the heat a long-sleeved shirt, tennis socks, and sandals. A gold crucifix hung from a fine chain around his neck. He limped clearly on his right leg.

  “Olivier Guillaume,” Fabienne announced triumphantly. “I recognize him from his photos. A perfect troll.”

  “Take a look at his right wrist,” Blanc replied with a smile. “The guy is wearing a heavy old diver’s watch, the way macho guys used to. Except that he’s wearing it on the wrong arm. It doesn’t exactly fit with your troll image.”

  “Maybe he bought it with the money he got for the stolen Van Gogh?” Fabienne replied, tapping on the car window. “Let’s get out and go troll hunting.”

  Guillaume was standing next to his car waiting for them. He looked suspicious, which wasn’t exactly surprising for a man who had spent a night in a cell awaiting interrogation, Blanc thought. At that very moment the door of the house opened and a tiny bent-over woman with a pale yellow ribbon around her thick snow-white hair, bound up into a long ponytail like a young girl’s, emerged. Even though she must have been at least ninety years old and moved with tiny footsteps, she came over to them quickly, a lot more quickly than her son, who seemed reluctant to move away from his vehicle. She took a long look at the new arrivals with unpleasantly dark eyes.

  “You!” she shouted, pointing at Fabienne with h
er gout-afflicted right hand. Her voice was high but remarkably strong. “What are you doing here?” She was looking only at the young policewoman, aggressively and challengingly. Blanc was beginning to understand why Olivier Guillaume had never married.

  “We’re investigating an accident,” the captain said. “We just want to ask Monsieur Guillaume a few questions. As a witness,” he quickly added as the hot glare of an old lady spoiling for a fight was turned on him.

  “It will only take a few minutes of your precious time, Madame,” Marius added.

  Blanc gave his colleague a look, surprised to hear him so formal all of a sudden. Whether it was his well-put words, his deep voice, or just Marius’s rather shabby appearance that was in no way threatening, one way or the other Guillaume’s mother suddenly seemed to relax and gave Marius a toothless grimace that might just have been a smile: “Very well then,” she croaked. “As long as it’s brief.” She didn’t invite them into the house. The gendarmes, Guillaume, and his mother had been standing between the parked cars and the building, in a sort of no-man’s-land. The asphalt surface was like a giant hot plate beneath their feet and the torturous concert the frogs made from the drainage ditch next to the road was so loud that Blanc had to raise his voice to be heard. “We’re investigating Monsieur Cohen’s accident.”

  “So that’s why the guy didn’t turn up,” Guillaume interrupted him. “Did he crash into a tree?”

  The gendarmes exchanged brief glances. Guillaume didn’t watch television or listen to the radio. Nor did he surf the Internet. Not that sort of “troll,” Blanc thought. Either that or he’s lying to us. “You’ve heard nothing about it?” he asked, to be sure.

  “We’re not interested in other people’s business,” the old lady shouted, looking at him defiantly. “We’re not cops!”

  “Unfortunately, Monsieur Cohen is dead,” Marius told her, explaining the circumstances of the accident in the Camargue in a few sentences. Once again his words seemed to have a calming influence on Guillaume’s mother despite the strangeness of the story.