Deadly Camargue: Provence Mystery #02 Read online

  “Tassou was four years old!” he shouted. “It cost me a fortune to get a bull to that age. He’s been fighting for two years and has already been named meilleur taureau three times, the best bull in the show. He was already fit for the arena this autumn. Next month is the course camarguaise in Pélissanne, the posters have already been printed, merde. And now you people come and just shoot him dead! Connards! I’ll see you in court.”

  “Then we might be standing in front of the judge together, Monsieur Ferréol,” Blanc replied calmly. “Because this animal was your responsibility.” He spoke politely, but at the same time he eyed the bull breeder coolly.

  Ferréol took a step backward, stared at Blanc, and for the first time looked at the dead man, then back again at Blanc. Clearly a man who lost his confidence if someone responded calmly to his outburst.

  “The gate meets all the regulations,” he replied defensively.

  “The gate was open.”

  “Then you damn well need to find out who opened it!”

  “That’s what I intend to do,” Blanc promised. “Where were you during the last hour, Monsieur Ferréol?”

  The breeder went silent, taken aback. Then he shouted furiously, “You’re actually accusing me?”

  “Just answer my question, please.”

  “Putain, I was at an official meeting of the Club Taurin,” Ferréol said, pointing at his embroidered shirt with the motif of a club on the left breast. “Don’t you see this? I’m vice president.”

  Blanc shook his head. He’d never seen an item of clothing like it.

  “It’s the club for raseteurs, plus the breeders and all bullfighting aficionados,” Tonon interjected. “They organize the annual bullfighting program. The shirt is a sort of uniform.”

  “We had a meeting in Alleins,” Ferréol continued. “Began this morning.”

  Blanc nodded to Tonon, the gesture meaning he should check it out later.

  “When were you last here?”

  Ferréol shrugged. “I don’t have to be here all the time. The bull can take care of itself.” Then he thought for a moment. “Two days ago. And I didn’t go into the field but stayed out here.”

  Blanc closed his eyes. There was no obvious reason to think the breeder was lying. And if what he said could be checked, which wasn’t exactly hard, then he had a concrete alibi. “Have there been any threats?”

  Ferréol looked as if he’d like to punch Blanc in the face. “Against me? I have no enemies, but I do have a lot of friends around here,” he snarled.

  “No blackmail? Send me five thousand euros or I’ll set the bull loose? Something like that. Or maybe,” Blanc recalled a case he had dealt with in Paris six months earlier, “maybe from militant animal-rights activists? There are people who aren’t so fond of bullfights.”

  “Those green crazies let chickens out of cages, but even they aren’t stupid enough to tackle a bull. And in any case most manades wander freely around the Camargue.”

  “Manades?” Blanc said questioningly.

  “The herds of cattle. The black cattle of the Camargue are the last real wild animals in Europe. They don’t need some farmer herding them into a stall and massaging their udders. At the most they need a gardian to keep them in a herd. Otherwise they just wander through the marshes and heathland as free as God made them. The cows even calve out in the open.”

  “But this bull was in an enclosed meadow.”

  “I was training him for the fight. And I didn’t want anything to happen to him so close to the start of the season, merde!”

  “Where do you live?” Blanc asked. “Just in case we have more questions.”

  “And so you know where to send the check. I’ll be charging you for the loss of the bull.” Ferréol pulled a slim silver box from the pocket of his embroidered shirt and handed Blanc a business card. It was made of heavyweight cardboard with two bulls as a sort of insignia above his name and an address in Saint-Gilles.

  “Probably best not to invite the breeder to the ox roast,” Tonon said as Ferréol roared off in his BMW.

  Blanc took a last walk around the whole scene of the accident. In front of the gate he got down on his haunches and ran his fingers through the sandy soil. He could smell earth, salt, and cattle. Most of the marks in the earth were weather-beaten, but at the edge of the piece of ground were two broad lines. “Somebody was in a hurry to get out of here,” he muttered. “Those were made by spinning tires.”

  “Watch out you don’t start going round in circles yourself,” Tonon replied. “This sun isn’t good for any of us.”

  Blanc ignored the comment and knelt down to examine the tire marks more closely. The tracks were blurred at the edges. There was no way of identifying the tires’ profile, which meant they had no means of identifying the car that had sped away from the scene.

  The driver took off so fast he skidded, Blanc surmised.

  “We should take off just as fast to get back to Gadet, I’m dying of thirst,” Tonon said.

  Still down on his knees, Blanc suddenly glanced up at the open gate. A tiny silvery flicker had caught the corner of his eye. He took a closer look. A sparkle, a reflection of the sunshine, like a splinter of glass lying in the dust.

  But there was no glass to be seen.

  A Mas in the Camargue

  “You’re going to have to be thirsty a bit longer,” Blanc muttered, getting to his feet. “There’s something in the dirt down here.”

  “Putain,” Tonon exclaimed.

  Blanc hurried over to the open gate and just beneath the bottom edge, lying in the dust, he found a strip of black leather about the length of his finger. One end was frayed, but on the other was a metal prong, a prong that had reflected the sunlight.

  “Looks like part of a buckle,” said Ronchard, who had come a bit closer out of curiosity.

  “A watch buckle,” Blanc suggested.

  “Or part of a handbag. My daughter has handbags that are nothing but straps and buckles.”

  “Does she carry them with her out walking in the Camargue?”

  Ronchard didn’t reply.

  Blanc smiled. “A watch strap,” he repeated to himself. There had been a time in his life when he had found the energy and enthusiasm for a hobby; the children were no longer that small but not grown up yet, his marriage was so sound that he thought only death would part them, and the apartment in Paris was paid for. That was the stage when in his few moments of spare time he began to get interested in mechanical things. He had found himself fascinated with the art of putting together the most complicated devices with little more than feathers and cog wheels, so that they would work without batteries or chargers or thousands of cables. He had used the money earned in doing overtime at night to buy an old Leicaflex SL and take black-and-white photos of the Eiffel Tower. A colleague on the forensics team had given him his private photo lab equipment and he had developed the prints himself. A divorced colleague, with older children.

  He should have taken it as a warning. The old camera and the laboratory equipment had to be somewhere in the heap of junk he had piled into the car and driven south with after splitting up with Geneviève.

  Blanc had also gone around to the secondhand markets looking at old watches: Heuer, Rolex, Jaeger-LeCoultre. He had become as familiar with the names of the Swiss manufacturers as other men were with the names of bars. He had bought collectors’ magazines and even a book or two. But he had never bought one of the watches. What would his colleagues have said if one day a corruption investigator had turned up in the office with an Omega Speedmaster on his wrist?

  Even though his knowledge of chronometers was only theoretical, he was still certain that the fragment he had found in the dust was part of a wristwatch band. Blanc nodded toward the gate. “Somebody lifts up the iron lever on the gate, someone who knows how dangerous a fighting bull is. He’s acting quickly, nervously, in a rush. He tears the band of his watch on the lever, gets the watch free but leaves part of the buckle on the gat
e because he doesn’t have the time to worry about it. The bull is getting closer, and Cohen is coming down the road. Our unknown suspect leaps into his car and with tires spinning roars off. A second later the animal storms out of the field and catches the surprised cyclist on his horns. A few minutes later Girel the electrician comes along. He sees a dead body, a bull, and a light-colored car on the horizon. It could have happened exactly like that, it all fits. The question is: Did our unknown suspect free the bull just for the hell of it and it was purely a tragic accident that the animal took out Cohen? Or was someone deliberately out to get the journalist and had waited until he was coming? Was it a terrible accident? Or was it a treacherous murder?”

  “It was bullshit,” Tonon said grumpily, sweat shining on his forehead and his hands shaking slightly. “It may well be that some connard opened the gate deliberately. But that on its own does not turn this bloodbath into a murder. It was a stupid accident, one way or another. Open-and-shut case. Done and dusted.”

  Ronchard looked as if he was about to agree with Tonon, but then realized that Blanc was the ranking officer and so said nothing. Blanc looked over at Fontaine Thezan, who had long since finished filling in her forms but had sat there in the driver’s seat listening to their conversation. The sunshine reflected on her extravagant sunglasses meant Blanc couldn’t make out the expression on her face. “What do you think, Madame?” he asked her.

  “I think I’ve never heard such a far-fetched theory as yours, mon Capitaine. Definitely worth following up.”

  Blanc didn’t know the pathologist well enough to work out if she was encouraging or mocking him. “Nice to see we always think alike,” he replied sourly.

  All of a sudden he was tired and felt the heat of the sunburn on his shoulders. He had the feeling he was going to have to deal with everything on his own. “Ronchard,” he called out, “secure the area until the hearse arrives.”

  “And the cattle truck,” Tonon added.

  “We’re going back to Gadet.”

  Tonon’s features visibly relaxed. He pulled his ancient cell phone out of his pants pocket. “I’ll book us a table at Le Soleil, the table under the plane trees.”

  “You can book me a place on Commandant Nkoulou’s waiting list. I want to talk to him about this case.”

  “This isn’t a case, merde!”

  * * *

  An hour later Blanc was standing in front of Nkoulou’s desk. The sun looked as if it had been glued fast to the same spot in the sky, as if even it was too exhausted to move. The commandant had a white Dyson Ventilator standing on the floor, looking like a giant tuning fork. He was the only policeman Blanc knew who would spend his own salary on designer equipment for the office. He laid out all the facts for his boss and told him his own theory.

  Nkoulou stayed silent for a while. Eventually he said in a cool voice, “Given everything we have at the moment, we have to assume it was an accident.”

  “Whatever the case, a third party is to blame. Somebody opened the gate.”

  “Even that is just a theory at present.”

  “It would be absurd if it happened by chance. A fighting bull has been in that field for at least a year. The breeder Ferréol was there two days earlier. If there had been anything wrong with the fencing, he would have noticed and done something about it, if only out of self-interest. The animal was a gold mine on four legs. Ferréol would have had the gate fixed immediately. Two days before it was in perfect condition, then today it’s open. And precisely at the moment when a celebrity Parisian journalist is passing on his bike. That would have been a pretty unusual coincidence.”

  “So in your opinion somebody had planned to murder Cohen? A murder attempt where the accomplice is an unpredictable fighting bull, carried out in broad daylight, in the middle of a flat landscape where you can see for miles in any direction? Excuse me, mon Capitaine, but that doesn’t sound any less absurd than the idea of a chance accident.”

  “The haze in the air reduces visibility. And the animal was not unpredictable. I have a witness who says this animal was aggressive and perfectly trained to be so.”

  “Your witness is an electrician, not a veterinary surgeon.”

  “That just goes to show that everybody who knows what’s what in the Camargue knows how dangerous the bulls are.”

  Nkoulou closed his eyes. “Here in Gadet we are one of eight brigades in the region. Three thousand five hundred square miles, one hundred and twenty thousand people, and just one hundred and seventy-four gendarmes. Half of whom are on vacation.”

  “There’s not exactly a civil war going on.”

  His boss opened his eyes and gave Blanc a look of curiosity. “Do you really want to go around to every cabane in this great swamp and ask people for their alibis? Do you seriously want to go around asking everybody, anybody, if they let a fighting bull free so it would gore one particular cyclist? If a journalist were to find out that we were spending our time…”

  “I haven’t got much to do otherwise. Let me just spend a few days going around the Camargue. I’ll be discreet. Look at it as a sort of training exercise until the criminals are back from their summer vacations and you can set me on another case.”

  “This isn’t a vacation camp.”

  “What else am I supposed to do?”

  Nkoulou stared at him. Blanc knew that his ambitious boss didn’t appreciate him: Blanc was the officer whose dubious reputation could damage Nkoulou’s immaculate career. He could guess what was going on behind that wrinkle-free forehead: If he set Blanc out to investigate the death of a celebrity, he could cause trouble. On the other hand if Blanc were to spend days, maybe even weeks, looking into this obscure death, he wouldn’t be able to get involved in other possibly more sensitive cases.

  “Get on to it,” Nkoulou said in the end. “But don’t crop up on anybody’s radar. I will tell the press that we are looking into the circumstances surrounding this tragic death. That way everyone will think it was an accident, even if I don’t expressly say so. But if you don’t keep quiet and somebody produces the headline ‘Bull Murder of Parisian Celebrity,’ I’ll have a horde of hysterical national journalists descend on me. And hysterical animal-rights activists. And hysterical mayors worried that bullfights in their towns will be banned. And eventually a hysterical minister asking what the hell we’ve been thinking.”

  “It could get busy here at the gendarmerie.”

  “I would put the hysterical horde in your office. You wouldn’t be needing it.”

  * * *

  When Blanc returned to his office, the seat opposite was empty. Tonon’s computer was in sleep mode. He shrugged and was about to get down to work when the door opened and a fit young woman came in: Second Lieutenant Fabienne Souillard. She had her long brown hair up to keep her neck bare in the heat and was wearing jeans and a flame-red T-shirt with DUCATI printed on it—the make of her motorbike, Blanc recalled, kissing her on both cheeks.

  “You didn’t offer Marius an alcohol-free beer, did you?” she joked. “He charged out of here like a raging bull.”

  “You’ve heard, then?”

  “A black-horned monster as an instrument of murder. Only a Paris cop could come up with such an oblique idea.”

  “A former Paris cop. How did you find out?”

  “I hacked into Nkoulou’s Mac,” Fabienne replied flippantly. She was the best computer expert they had and for a moment Blanc was tempted to believe her. “Marius was swearing so loudly, they must have heard the whole story in Salon,” she eventually explained.

  “His version of the story.”

  “What’s yours?”

  Blanc liked his colleague. Fabienne lived with her girlfriend in PACS, a civil partnership. She didn’t make a big deal of it and woe betide the cop who made some stupid joke about it. She rode her motorbike like a lunatic and could rattle away on a computer keyboard so fast it made Blanc dizzy just watching her. She knew all about fashion and music and films, and raved about drinks Blanc
had never even heard of, be they alcoholic or obscure Asian teas. She was everything he should have been as a young cop, except for his obsession with spending even weekend evenings getting his teeth into corrupt politicians. He pushed Tonon’s chair back and asked her to sit down. “I have to admit my theory sounds insane,” he began, “but I need somebody to help me anyway.”

  “Good thing you have me, mon Capitaine,” she replied.

  * * *

  After Blanc had told her all he knew, Fabienne took up Tonon’s telephone and rang the Paris police to get Cohen’s address and details of his next of kin. Meanwhile Blanc looked up on the Internet the number for the publisher of L’Événement and got put through to editorial. Nobody there was remotely aware of the journalist’s death. Blanc got through to a man who introduced himself as Pierre DuPont. He sounded young and exhausted. Maybe the heat wave had struck the capital, too, Blanc thought to himself. For the tiniest of moments he didn’t regret having been transferred. He gave his name but not his rank. As soon as he made it clear to a journalist that he was a cop, they would record the conversation. “I would like to speak to Monsieur Albert Cohen’s supervisor,” he said.

  “AC doesn’t have a supervisor.”

  “AC?” Blanc took a moment to understand. DuPont had pronounced the initials as “assez,” meaning “enough already.”

  “Then put me through to whoever cooperated closely with Monsieur Cohen,” Blanc said.

  “The last colleague he flirted with left a year ago DuPont laughed with the tired resignation of someone who’s known forever that nobody laughed with him. Blanc felt as if he was in a Samuel Beckett play.

  “Somebody must have had something to do with him.”

  “I’ll put you through to Jean-Claude Novoly. He takes care of the features pages when the editor in chief is on vacation.”

  The next voice Blanc heard sounded as if it had been through a hundred thousand Gitanes. “If you want to get AC interested in a story idea, I suggest you ring back in two months’ time. He should be back from his research trip by then.”