Deadly Camargue: Provence Mystery #02 Read online

  “We have two kids.”

  “Grown up?”

  “They’re allowed to vote. But at times they act as if they are still in kindergarten.”

  “Eh bien. They chucked you out of Paris and sent you down here to the farthest province. Your wife left you. Your kids don’t want anything more from you except a bit of money now and again. Sounds like ideal conditions for a new beginning.”

  Blanc thumped the steering wheel. “My career is shit and I’m driving through a swamp to see the only cyclist in France stupid enough to get his guts ripped out by an ox. You call that a new beginning?”

  “Whenever you reach the bottom, you have to go up again. It’s the law of physics.”

  Blanc looked at his overweight, exhausted colleague who hadn’t been promoted in decades and didn’t bother with an answer. He put his foot on the brakes because there was a line of a dozen cars in front of him, stuck behind an RV with Dutch license plates. The van’s driver was doing under thirty miles per hour through the plains. Every time there was nothing coming from the other direction, two cars would pull out and pass the RV. When it was his turn, Blanc pulled out and roared past the huge white slug, even though there was a group of brightly clad cyclists coming toward him. One of them flipped him the bird.

  “Flat land. Good for cyclists,” Blanc muttered, pulling out again to overtake another pair of cyclists, an overweight middle-aged couple on mountain bikes.

  “All you have to do is watch out for fighting bulls and mad drivers,” Tonon replied.

  Blanc declined to reply and instead nodded up ahead to where a blue light was flashing rhythmically and a uniformed gendarme was using a paddle to wave traffic around a lane that had been blocked off with tape. “We’re there,” he announced. Ten minutes later he was standing alongside Corporal Ronchard in front of the horribly mutilated corpse and realizing that he was staring at a celebrity.

  “Albert Cohen,” Blanc muttered.

  Ronchard forced himself to take a closer look. “So it is,” he conceded after a few seconds, his face having gone pale beneath the heat flush. “I would have bet he would have met his end somewhere in Afghanistan or Syria, not here in the Camargue. What was he doing here?”

  “Maybe he was working on a report about cattle,” Blanc replied grimly. Cohen was a well-known reporter for the weekly magazine L’Événement and the handsomest man in the small circle of Paris’s fashionable intellectuals. Blanc, who had worked on corruption cases before his ignominious exile, knew more about that group’s dirty laundry than their glittering public façades. As far as he knew, there was nothing more to Cohen than the façade: he had heard of him but he had never come under suspicion by the police.

  In the eighties Cohen had made his name in social reportage. Blanc recalled a piece about North African drug dealers in the banlieue, one of the few magazine articles that had stuck in his head. Cohen had won prizes and had been on television a few times. Then at some point, Blanc couldn’t remember exactly when, Cohen wasn’t so much on television occasionally as all the time, broadcasting his opinion on anything and everything. He had continued to write for L’Événement but had been focused on commentary and essays instead of reportage. He had been in favor of French intervention in every global crisis, preferably sending in troops, whether it was Libya, Mali, the Congo, or Syria—it seemed no country was safe from Cohen’s calls for intervention. At one stage he had even advocated the use of force in Tibet, which had led to ructions in Beijing and more than minor panic at the foreign ministry on the Quai d’Orsay.

  Tonon had by now come up to them after having spent a long time looking at the gunshot-riddled body of the bull. “It was a Provençal fighting bull,” he said abruptly. Then he stared indifferently at the corpse and said, “At least he didn’t suffer long.”

  Blanc wasn’t sure if these sympathetic words were intended for the bull or the cyclist. He told his two colleagues what he knew about Cohen, if not quite everything.

  Albert Cohen had become more and more involved in domestic politics over recent years. At the last presidential election he had outspokenly campaigned for one of the candidates, who had nonetheless gone on to suffer a crushing defeat. Then Cohen had appeared a few times with the minister Jean-Charles Vialaron-Allègre, who belonged to the other party and was popular as a hard-liner in the Ministry of the Interior. He was also unfortunately the politician who had put Blanc’s career on hold and exiled him to the Midi.

  And now here was a friend of the politician he had to be most careful not to offend lying with his guts spilled out on a rural road in the Camargue. Blanc was worried Vialaron-Allègre would want to get involved in this peculiar death and might end up bringing out all sorts of things. But obviously he couldn’t tell that to the other two gendarmes.

  “Were there any witnesses?” he asked, not really expecting an answer. To his astonishment, Ronchard nodded.

  “The car driver who called us on his cell phone.”

  “He actually saw the accident?”

  The man’s face went deep red. “Not directly.”

  Blanc sighed. “Bring him over anyway, Ronchard.”

  The gendarme went over to a dented pale red Renault Kangoo by the edge of the road. It had PATRICK GIREL, ELECTRICIEN, ARLES, on the side door along with a cute illustration that looked a bit like Mario clutching a bundle of lightning bolts. Blanc was reminded of the state of the ruin he lived in and was tempted for a moment to take down the man’s telephone number but then thought better of it. Did he really want to entrust the complete rewiring of his home to a lightning-bolt-hurling comic character?

  As it happened, the man the gendarme introduced bore only a distant resemblance to his advertising symbol: Patrick Girel was in his early thirties, already bald, and rather chubby. His pants pockets were overflowing with insulated screwdrivers, wrenches, and various metering devices.

  “Monsieur Girel, can you tell me what you saw?”

  “A bull, where it shouldn’t have been: out in the middle of the road. I was on the way back from a job and saw the animal. When I got a bit closer I saw”—he struggled for the right word—“this man here.” He waved his right hand vaguely in the direction of the corpse without actually looking at it. His hands were shaking slightly.

  Blanc nodded understandingly. “So the cyclist was already lying dead on the road when you arrived.”

  “He wasn’t moving anyway.”

  “But you didn’t see the bull attack him? Not even on the horizon before you got close? Maybe you noticed some movement but didn’t realize what was happening? The land around here is flat as a pancake.”

  “You’re not from here, mon Capitaine, are you?”

  “Did I ask a stupid question?”

  Girel gave an embarrassed smile. “You said that, not me. The air in the Camargue at midday is so hot that everything shimmers in a haze. I drive out here from Arles almost every day to the ranches and to Saintes-Maries. If I looked at the horizon all the time, I’d have had cancer of the eyeballs years ago. No, it’s better just to concentrate on the road immediately ahead. Then you can see things in time, even escaped bulls.”

  “You say ‘escaped.’ Are you sure that the animal was always in the field?”

  “That bull’s been there for over a year. I’ve driven past it so many times, we could even be on first-name terms.”

  “And the gate was always closed?”

  Girel hesitated for a fraction of a second. “Oh yes,” he said, sounding, however, as if he wasn’t totally happy.

  “But?”

  “Just in front of that gate is one of the few places on this road where you can turn right. There’s usually a drainage ditch, or you run the risk of going into the swamp. But the land in front of that gate is firm.”

  Blanc looked at the piece of land Girel was talking about: dusty, light-colored earth with tire tracks and a few small-looking imprints. The animal’s hooves, he suspected.

  “Tourists stop there a lot to take
photographs,” Girel continued. “Some of them stand there with huge telephoto lenses and take pictures of the flamingos. And a few others”—the electrician shrugged—“take photos of the bull. And occasionally, they can be, eh bien, a bit loud and act the clown.”

  “Clown?”

  “They wave their arms, stick their tongues out. On one occasion, one of them even started waving a red beach towel. A torero in his swimming trunks. He would have been in trouble if the animal had really gotten mad.”

  “It wasn’t an aggressive animal then?”

  “Oh, it was aggressive. Perfectly trained, if you know what I mean. But not stupid, not stupid at all. It knew it couldn’t break through the gate. It just stood there staring at the tourists, snorting and pawing the ground with its hooves, as if it knew it just had to pose.”

  “But if the gate was left open often…”

  “… then the bull would have known straightaway.” Girel nodded. “If you ask me, this guy was a tourist who’d opened the gate so he could get a photo a bit closer. Then he discovered just how quick a fighting bull can be, tried to run back to his bike, but didn’t make it. End of story.”

  Blanc was thinking that Cohen’s body had been ripped open from the front and not from the rear, as would have been the case if he had been running away. And that there was no camera to be seen. And that his mountain bike had spun off into the ditch, which suggested that the bull had attacked him from the front while he was riding it. But then it wasn’t the electrician’s job to explain what had happened.

  “Did you see anything else?”

  Girel shook his head and made a dismissive gesture with his hand. “There was a car maybe a hundred yards farther along the road beyond the bull. It was a light color, maybe white or yellow or beige. But I didn’t notice anything else. It accelerated and then it was gone.”

  Immediately Blanc forgot about the heat and the stink of blood and brackish water and the droning of the bluebottles. All of a sudden his head cleared. “The car drove off?” he asked, to be sure. “And it was already beyond the bull? That means it was going in the same direction as you were, which means it had somehow driven past the animal and the corpse?”

  Girel hesitated for a moment, then gave an embarrassed smile. “I guess so, mon Capitaine. He was going toward Arles. And he was definitely beyond the bull, at least several hundred yards. He was going pretty fast.”

  “Not even tempted to stop and help,” Tonon muttered under his breath. “Typical for people around here. Not my problem. Somebody’s lying there in his own blood on the road, but they prefer to turn around and get out of there rather than report it.”

  “Did you see the light-colored car turn?” Blanc asked.

  Girel shook his head. “I saw the fighting bull, then the dead body. I only glimpsed the car out of the corner of my eye. No more.”

  “Nothing really,” said Tonon.

  Blanc held up his right hand to tell him not to be so hasty. Then he felt a sudden pain beneath his arm and slapped his left hand against his side. He had indeed killed a horsefly as big as his thumb, but not before it had bitten him. It had already swollen up red and itched. “When did you call the gendarmerie?” he asked irritably, trying to suppress the urge to scratch himself like a maniac.

  Girel looked understandingly at where Blanc had been bitten, then shrugged and said, “In the afternoon, I finished work early…”

  “The call from Monsieur Girel’s cell phone was registered at 3:01,” Ronchard interjected punctiliously.

  “At least we have something,” Blanc stated with some satisfaction. He dismissed Girel and then suddenly stared into the distance. There was a car approaching the scene of the accident from the direction of Arles.

  A light-colored car.

  For a second Blanc was so nervous that he involuntarily reached for the gun he had, against regulations, tucked into the belt of his pants. Then he relaxed as he recognized the vehicle. The car in question was an ancient, scratched Jeep Cherokee with an eight-cylinder engine that rattled so loudly the contrôle technique tester who had let it through the inspection must have been deaf. The 4 × 4 came to a halt only just before running into the police roadblock. A woman in her midthirties opened the door, her features hidden behind a bizarre forty-year-old pair of sunglasses.

  “Nice to see I’m not the only one who has to work through the summer,” Blanc called out, walking over to the Jeep. “Welcome to the battlefield, Dr. Thezan.”

  Fontaine Thezan, médecin légiste at the hospital of Salon-de-Provence, kissed him on both cheeks, bathing him for a moment in a cloud of expensive perfume and marijuana. By now Blanc was used to the aroma of drugs that accompanied the pathologist and was actually grateful for it shielding him briefly from the other smells around them. He glanced briefly at the passenger seat where a bored-looking man slouched, his unkempt hair framed by a pair of giant earphones connected to an iPad balanced on his knees. He was wearing a T-shirt with the British flag and was at least ten years younger than Dr. Thezan. He didn’t look as if he was her assistant. She made no effort to introduce her companion, just picked up the briefcase with her instruments in it and strolled over to the corpse, pulling on her protective gloves.

  Blanc only knew the doctor in her professional capacity and knew nothing about her private life. The way she handled the body was precise and professional; it almost seemed as if she was being particularly careful, almost tender. After a few moments she turned the body on its side, removed the helmet and the ripped remnants of his vest. Cohen’s eyes were closed, his lips pressed together. But to Blanc, looking over the doctor’s shoulder, there was no wound to the head or bruising evident.

  “Serious internal injuries. Massive blood loss,” Fontaine Thezan muttered as she got back to her feet.

  “Yes, I can see that, too, now that you’ve spelled it out,” Blanc said.

  “Watch out that you don’t get struck by the heat, or struck by anything else, mon Capitaine,” the pathologist replied, pulling her gloves off.

  She rooted around in her bag and brought out a tube, squeezed out some clear gel, and without asking permission, smeared it on Blanc’s lower arm. He smiled gratefully: the gel had cooled the sting of the bite.

  “It would appear that his lungs, stomach, and liver were all gored,” Dr. Thezan said without further comment. “I’ll give you a full report after I’ve got him laid out on the table. I’ll need to have the bull’s horns, too.” She turned to Ronchard, who was looking more unhappy than ever.

  “I’ll be interested to see if there are any traces of drugs,” she added.

  “What makes you think there might be?” Blanc said, taken aback. “Just from touching the body briefly?”

  “Because I read Paris Match,” the pathologist replied with a disarming smile. “It’s not just my patient’s innards I look at. I recognized Monsieur Cohen immediately, mon Capitaine. And two or three weeks ago I read a piece in Paris Match, which you obviously didn’t, that said he was supposed to have had a minor heart attack. He spent a couple of weeks in a convalescence home somewhere in Brittany. The journalists were less than discreet, however, and mentioned the possibility of cocaine abuse. After he left the clinic he went down south to see his publisher and continue his convalescence.”

  “It doesn’t seem to have worked.”

  “His publisher won’t be unhappy. They’re firing more journalists every day in Paris because nobody reads the papers anymore. Here’s one more expensive celebrity he won’t have to fire.”

  “Sounds almost like a good motive for murder,” Blanc replied, only half jokingly.

  With the pathologist finished, Blanc pulled on a pair of gloves himself and carefully examined the corpse. No documents, no money. In the left pocket of his cycling shorts Blanc found a half-used salve for reducing the pain of horsefly bites. That’s not stupid, he thought to himself, clearly not the first time Cohen had been cycling in the Camargue. He could see the familiar shape of a cell phone in the o
ther pocket and pulled out an iPhone: the latest model, no headphones. Maybe Girel had been right: Cohen had stopped, opened the gate, and gone to take a few photos. Miraculously the phone had survived the bull’s attack without even a scratch. It was locked with a code, so Blanc couldn’t check if Cohen had taken a few photos before his death. He would leave that to his colleague Fabienne Souillard, who was an expert at hacking cell phones. He would be interested to see if there were any photos of a raging bull.

  Apart from that there was nothing else on the dead man’s body, not even a key. The mountain bike had a full bottle of water and a compact air pump attached to the frame. It all gave the impression that Cohen had just been intending to take a short exercise ride through the Camargue. But he couldn’t get Girel’s story about the car vanishing in the distance out of his head.

  * * *

  Half an hour later, as the pathologist was stowing her bag on the rear seat of the old Jeep and beginning to fill out a form with her initial observations, a BMW 3 Series came roaring up and almost crashed into the off-roader. The sedan was a shimmering metallic silver with dark glass in the side windows. The driver didn’t even bother to turn off the engine before he opened the door and burst out of the vehicle. He was a lean guy of average height, between forty and fifty years old, the sort, Blanc immediately thought, who acted calmly most of the time but could explode in a ferocious rage when provoked. Like right now. He had a thin cigarette, stinking of cheap tobacco, in his shaking left hand. He was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved black shirt decorated with embroidery down to the waistband.

  “Aurélien Ferréol,” Ronchard whispered. “The bull breeder. We called him.”

  The man strode over to the bull and stood there a long time staring at the corpse. Then he hurried over to Blanc, without so much as glancing at the dead cyclist.