Murderous Mistral Read online

  “You’ve been after that Moréas for years without catching him,” he said. “I just hope you don’t take as long looking for his killer.”

  “Moréas was a piece of shit,” Blanc piped up in support of his colleague. “At least the press won’t scream blue murder if we haven’t put the culprit behind bars within twenty-four hours.”

  “You may be thick as thieves with the press up in Paris, but down here I couldn’t care less.”

  “The politicians care,” the captain replied softly.

  Nkoulou leaned back in his chair. He had gotten the message. If neither the press nor the politicians paid much attention to this case, then he was in no danger. His career was in no danger. No senior civil servant, no minister was going to e-mail him or call him on the phone and ask what the hell was going on down south and who was responsible. “Take care of it,” he said, with a nod to indicate the conversation was over.

  * * *

  “Thanks for pouring water on the fire, before I got my ass fried,” Tonon whispered as they walked down the corridor.

  “Stop or I’ll shoot!” someone called from behind them. It was the brunette policewoman with the iPad. Blanc had forgotten her name.

  “Ma chérie,” the lieutenant said. “Since when have you been talking to men like that? Let me introduce Second Lieutenant Fabienne Souillard,” he said to Blanc, even though Nkoulou had done just the same thing several hours earlier. “She’s our go-to girl when something goes wrong with the computers.”

  “Marius turns the printer on before his antique computer has fired up, crashes every time. He doesn’t seem to get it.” Fabienne Souillard was in her late twenties, fit, elegant. Even in uniform there was the scent of an expensive perfume about her. She reached out a hand to Blanc.

  “Up in Paris our computer experts wear glasses and all look as if somebody’s made them out of lumps of plastic hacked at with an ax.”

  “Yeah, but those are men,” Fabienne answered, then nodded toward her office. “I’ve got something for you.”

  “Have you heard about our case?”

  “You bet, everybody’s really pleased you’re handling it.”

  “Do you feel the same, Mademoiselle Souillard?” Blanc asked.

  “You can use my first name,” she replied. “Not even the police dogs are this polite around here.”

  “She’s one of the good guys,” the lieutenant said, groaning as he lowered himself onto a chair in front of Souillard’s desk. “So, what have you got for us?”

  “A case for heroes: a break-in,” she said, nodding toward a filled-out victim’s report lying next to her computer.

  “Nkoulou has given us free rein on the other case. The break-in will have to go to somebody else,” Tonon replied.

  “An architect from Caillouteaux reported it, somebody broke into his house on Saturday, when he was out at work.”

  “That’s his bad luck. It’s still not our problem.” The lieutenant was looking relaxed.

  Fabienne rapped the report with her knuckles and said, “The architect names the suspect as one Charles Moréas. His next-door neighbor.”

  “That makes it our case,” said Blanc, getting to his feet. “Let’s go.”

  Tonon waved a hand dismissively. “We’re not in Paris now.”

  “I want to take a look at this Moréas’s house. And I want to talk to the architect.”

  “The crime scene people are already at the house. It’ll be a few hours at least before they let us in, and the architect isn’t going to run away. We can have lunch first.”

  “Lunch?”

  “Here in Gadet. I told you it wasn’t bad.”

  Before Blanc could say anything, Fabienne Souillard swung her computer screen round to face him. “I can give you all we’ve got so far. Then you can digest that. Voilà.” She pointed to two mug shots of a young man, frontal and profile. “That’s Moréas nearly twenty years ago. Taken when he was hauled in with respect to the highway robbery business. We have nothing newer because we’ve never got hold of him since.”

  “So I believe.”

  “Just under six foot tall, muscular. Still wears his hair as long as he did then.”

  “Except that it’s gray now,” Tonon added.

  “Sometime after this he had a tattoo done on his left forearm. Contorted letters, no obvious meaning,” Souillard continued.

  “Connerie,” Tonon hissed. “Nonsense: It was a ‘G,’ a ‘T,’ and an I. The gang had a BMW and a Volkswagen GTI, both stolen. Moréas drove the GTI. That was what he was in when he ran over that tourist and killed her. He had that tattooed on his arm the day the case against him was withdrawn for lack of evidence. He’d made us look like idiots.” The lieutenant’s voice was rising by the second.

  “In any case the tattoo is now nothing but ashes,” Blanc intervened, to calm him down.

  “There was one other case against him when he didn’t pay a speeding fine.” Fabienne was reading from the file. “The case was due to be heard in Aix-en-Provence, but never came up. The judge was apparently too busy. His name keeps coming up in the files of our colleagues in Aix, in Salon, and our good friends down in Marseille, as a suspect in drug dealing. Probably as a courier, maybe the guy who hid the stash, but in any case small-scale stuff. Nobody ever charged him with anything. Apart from that, not much to be said. No relatives.” Fabienne Souillard turned her monitor back round. “So what about it, boys, are you taking me with you? To lunch. I’m hungry.”

  It was only a short walk. Le Soleil was on place Jean Jaurès, a little restaurant with outside tables in the shade of plane trees, too out of the way for any of the passing tourists to spot it, too basic to feature in the Michelin Guide. The owner greeted Tonon by heartily grabbing his hand, Souillard by a kiss on each cheek, Blanc with a brief nod, part polite, part wary. New cop in town, you had to be careful. They took a table right next to the flaking trunk of a plane tree, with the green water of the Touloubre, which flowed right through the middle of Gadet, burbling behind them. Some thirty yards away a little bridge barely six feet wide crossed the little river. There were two fishermen standing there, still as statues, ignoring the hot sunshine. Glittering blue dragonflies hovered over the rolling stream.

  Blanc couldn’t even remember the last time he’d eaten in a restaurant without canned music in the background. He took a deep breath and felt himself physically relax. The owner brought over a menu and automatically set a carafe of rosé wine down next to Tonon.

  “Do you recommend anything in particular?” Blanc asked, reluctant to admit that he hadn’t a clue about Provençale cuisine.

  “Everything,” the lieutenant replied.

  “Thanks for being specific,” Fabienne laughed, taking the menu out of his hand. “I’m never that hungry at lunchtime. I’ll make do with the courgettes à la provençale.”

  “I am hungry,” Tonon announced, “but I don’t want to struggle all afternoon with digestive problems, so I’m going for the coquilles Saint-Jacques.”

  “I’ll have the same,” Blanc quickly added.

  The drinks came first. Fabienne Souillard had ordered an “energy drink” the color of cough medicine, Blanc a carafe of water. Tonon scowled at both their glasses. The men’s scallops came on oblong plates, the white meat in light pastry scattered with parsley and grated garlic, accompanied by a ball of rice. Their colleague got two zucchini slit lengthwise and filled with garlic, olive oil, and basil. The first bite exploded in Blanc’s mouth: the taste of the sea, pepper, basil, and roughly grated salt. He felt himself relaxing even further, like a warm wave flowing all the way down his back. All of a sudden his meeting with the minister of state felt like nothing more than a half-forgotten dream, not exactly pleasant but somehow belonging to another world. Like his row with Geneviève. Even the charred corpse at the garbage dump. He realized he was thinking how nice it would be never to have to leave this seat under the plane tree. And he also realized that he needed a coffee if he didn’t want to drift of
f into a doze under the eyes of his colleagues.

  A few minutes later, as they were stirring the sugar into their tiny coffee cups, Blanc turned to his young colleague and asked, “So what brings a computer specialist to Gadet?”

  “The ways of bureaucracy are as undecipherable as those of God: I came out of the Centre national de formation aux systèmes d’information et de communications de la gendarmerie back at Roissy-sous-Bois. It might sound like a ticket straight to Paris, but the train got held up here on the way.”

  “Something of a culture shock?”

  “To be honest, I never want to leave.”

  “Meet Mademoiselle Facebook,” Tonon said.

  “Last month a girl from Salon sent a friend request to a guy in Marseille, a young kid, still at the lycée. She persuaded him to come and see her. But when the kid turned up at the agreed spot in a park, a pair of the girl’s friends who’d been waiting for him beat him up and stole his iPhone and his Peugeot 106. But because people leave so many traces on Facebook it wasn’t exactly hard to trace the victim back to the girl, and from her to her two accomplices.”

  “I couldn’t have done it,” the lieutenant commented. “I’m not even on Facebook. How about you?”

  “I am.” Blanc had signed up when Facebook had still been trendy among adolescents and both his children had done so. Over time, even though he had posted unenthusiastically, he had acquired dozens of “friends,” most of them work colleagues. In the forty-eight hours after his meeting with Vialaron-Allègre almost all of those colleagues had unfriended him. The only ones left were a couple of former school friends who never posted anything and three gendarmes who were on holiday and hadn’t yet noticed his fall from grace. And, of course, his two kids. But Eric and Astrid had long since given up informing their father about important things in their lives. He had either been out of the house or too tired dealing with his cases to pay them much attention.

  “I’m sending you a friend request,” Fabienne said, holding up her phone.

  “Well, that should increase my activity by a hundred percent,” said Blanc, knocking back the last drops of his coffee. He watched her get up, excuse herself, and disappear into the depths of the restaurant.

  “Give up,” Tonon muttered sleepily.

  “Watching Fabienne?”

  “She’s already taken.”

  “Can’t say I’m surprised.”

  “A girlfriend. They live in Salon. A proper little married couple.”

  Blanc shot his new colleague a quick glance.

  “Does that bother you? I mean, the fact that she lives with another woman?”

  “No. Why should it?”

  “You’re a Catholic.”

  “I don’t recall Jesus mentioning lesbians in the Sermon on the Mount. Let’s just hope her wife is more faithful than mine.”

  “You’re divorced.”

  “Have been forever. What about you?”

  “About to be.”

  Tonon glanced down at his wineglass, where there was just a finger’s breadth of rosé shimmering in the sunlight, and said nothing. When Fabienne rejoined them Blanc settled the bill for them all.

  * * *

  Their colleague went back to the police station on foot. Mindful of the carafe of rosé that Tonon had knocked back over lunch, Blanc didn’t even suggest he might drive.

  “The house is just around the corner from you. I believe you’re staying in that shack in Sainte-Françoise-la-Vallée, from what I’ve heard,” the lieutenant said.

  “And who did you hear that from?”

  “From the boss, Nkoulou. He had a phone call from Paris and enjoyed giving us all the details.”

  “So, I guess that makes me something of a star, locally.”

  “The commandant plays by the rules. As long as you keep to them, he’ll leave you in peace. And as long as he leaves you in peace so will the others.”

  “Does he leave you in peace?”

  Tonon laughed. “The rule book and I have never been the best of friends, but I get by. I enrolled at the école de gendarmerie in Chaumont. I got promoted to lieutenant during the World Cup. My wife left me. My kids have long grown up, left the house, and haven’t spoken to me in years. But what the hell? I made it to the stadium in Marseille for the final.”

  Blanc just nodded. It had been the great event. “Faites-nous rêver—Make Us Dream.” The cops had all got new uniforms; the last time they had képi caps. Footix, they called them. Some officers still cried when they remembered it.

  “We were world champions in 1998,” he replied.

  Tonon tapped the stripes on his uniform. “Oui. But I’ve been stuck fast ever since. There was an accident, and something like that leaves skid marks in your personnel record. In any case I prefer riding as a passenger.”

  “I get the message.” The captain thought back to Nkoulou’s comment. Tonon was a Jonah. He wondered how the man drove back then. “That’s the Touloubre again up ahead. My ruin is the last house before the bridge,” he said.

  “I know. We turn left just before we get there. Caillouteaux is at the top of the hill with a view down on the Étang de Berre pond. It has an old church, a quiet village square with a nice café, just a bit too quiet. If you cough out loud people fall out of their beds in shock.”

  “Moréas must have seemed like a werewolf to them.”

  “Nobody ever saw him in the village. There’s no bar and no supermarket up there. His house is out of the way, between the pine trees at the foot of the hill. Drive slowly, the driveway is easy to miss.”

  Blanc stopped by a dented steel gateway hanging from two posts built into the wall. They turned into a dusty lane that stretched so far ahead into the woods that they couldn’t see where it ended. Eventually they came to a clearing where a motorcycle, two cracked sinks, and a roll of wire lay rusting in the sun. Behind them stood a house made of unplastered concrete breeze blocks with PVC windows in various sizes, and a grotesque modern glass-and-aluminum door.

  “Looks as if Moréas knocked his home together from a DIY store’s leftovers,” Blanc commented.

  “You could say that: He used whatever he could steal.”

  One of their colleagues from the crime scene team was standing next to a truck, smoking. There was a name written in marker on his overall: HURAULT, D. David? Dominique? Damian? “You can go in,” Hurault said indifferently.

  “Anything of interest?”

  “It’s not exactly Versailles.”

  “Drugs?”

  Hurault shook his head. “Clean. We let the dogs run loose. Not a single joint in the cabane. The usual amount of cash lying about, a few bills, some change in the drawers. No jewelry or anything like that. Nothing to suggest he was acting as a fence. Giant flat-screen televisions, Blu-ray player, notebook, and a video camera.”

  “Bound to have been stolen,” Tonon muttered.

  The specialist gave him an oblique glance. “If it was, it was for himself, not someone else. We’re checking the serial numbers and the contents of the hard drives. We also found two cell phones, one of them clearly unused for a long time. The display was broken. We’re checking all outgoing and incoming calls.”

  “Just a good citizen then?”

  “Not that good.” Hurault beckoned with one hand for them to follow him into the house. A dark entranceway, with nails hammered into the concrete to serve as coat hangers. A heavy motorcycle jacket hung from one, a motocross helmet on the other. A living/dining room with battered furniture and a grimy table. “Voilà!” the crime scene man said, pointing at one wall on which hung a gleaming samurai sword.

  “Any traces of blood on the blade?” Blanc asked.

  “The dogs didn’t make a fuss. But we’ll take the thing back to the lab.” Then he showed them a pair of shotguns.

  “I recognize those,” said Tonon. “He used them to frighten off joggers and hikers.”

  “We’ll take them along with the sword.” Hurault then led them into the next room, th
e bedroom. A camp bed, unmade. The stale smell of unwashed clothing. A box that someone had pulled out from under the bed. In it, a Kalashnikov.

  The captain smiled. “Looks like Moréas had invested in some Russian life insurance to help him sleep at night.”

  “That won’t be the weapon used to kill him,” Tonon said. “No murderer is daft enough to shove it under his victim’s bed after killing him.”

  “We have the shells and cartridges from the scene of the murder,” Hurault said. “It’s the easiest thing in the world to find out if they belong together.”

  He led them to a sort of lean-to behind the house. In the twilight they made out a couple of pistons and air filters on a workbench, an old chain, oily shock absorbers, two red gas containers, a fender, and a set of tires with a deep tread. At the far end of the workbench there was a leather case. Blanc looked inside and whistled: crowbars, screwdrivers, lock picks, files, thin black gloves. “The neighbor who accused Moréas of breaking in wasn’t exactly paranoid. Let’s go and have a talk with him.”

  “You’ll have to take the car.”

  “To his neighbor?”

  “He also lives in a house in the woods, but there isn’t a path from one to the other.”

  “Then we’ll walk through the pine trees.”

  “There’s a wire fence in the way, a very new, very high fence.”

  * * *

  Blanc and Tonon drove back to the roadway and a hundred yards farther on turned into the next driveway, the Mégane trundling down a forest path, until they ended up in a world that was as far from that of Charles Moréas as the Louvre was from a scrap yard—a bungalow from the seventies, white-painted concrete, pale blue window frames, a brushed steel door. Raked gravel in front of the house, two abstract sculptures in bronze, not a green leaf to be seen. To their right was a garage that might have been a five-bedroom family house. Two metal doors were closed, the third was open, revealing a silver Range Rover. Behind the garage they could see the reddish sand of a tennis court set into the forest.

  As they approached the house, a door opened and a man stepped out. Blanc put him at about sixty years old, well-spent years by the look of him. He was of athletic build, with a deep tan, his little remaining hair shaved close, a square red pair of glasses on his nose. He was wearing a yellow Lacoste shirt, linen trousers, deck shoes, and had a steel Rolex on his left wrist.