Murderous Mistral Read online

  “Monsieur Lafont,” Tonon said, clearly on familiar terms with the mayor.

  A powerful handshake. “Make yourselves comfortable. Can I offer you a glass of water?” Lafont had a thick Midi accent. Blanc saw him as a man who traveled around in his white Audi but the minute he got out could talk to locals as an equal. He wondered how long he had been the little king of Caillouteaux. Years probably, maybe even decades.

  “So, you’re the new specialist from Paris the minister of state has sent us,” the mayor declared. Blanc leaned back in the visitor’s seat, which was modern and very uncomfortable. The back of the chair was up against a steel filing cabinet that had obviously been placed there by someone with no feeling for either comfort or aesthetics, given that it also obscured the fresco of Mademoiselle Germinal. “You have good contacts in Paris?” he asked.

  Lafont laughed. “With the Eiffel Tower mob? They only bother to talk to provincial clods like me once every five years, just before the elections.” He made a dismissive gesture with a big bear’s paw of a hand. “I have good contacts with the local gendarmerie stations. I have no idea who you are, mon Capitaine, but if they wanted to get rid of you in Paris, you can’t be all bad.”

  Blanc allowed himself the ghost of a smile. “Let’s hope you don’t change your mind about me. I’m afraid I have bad news for you. Your commune has one citizen less.”

  “An accident or a crime?”

  “Murder.”

  “Who?”

  “Monsieur Charles Moréas.”

  Lafont clicked his tongue the way you might do when your favorite club loses an important league match. “I’m not exactly surprised that Charles has come to a sticky end. What happened to him?”

  Blanc explained in a few words what they knew so far. The more he said, the more Lafont’s expression darkened. “Kalashnikovs, burnt bodies, that’s Marseille stuff,” he exclaimed in horror. “Don’t get me wrong, my family comes from Calenzana, a little mountain village in Corsica, but I grew up in Marseille, politically too. I still have lots of friends there. I was down seeing them just last weekend. They had a good laugh at my expense. My Audi was in for service and I had to take my wife’s car. A red Mini, a woman’s car. You wouldn’t believe the ribbing they gave me.” Then Lafont turned serious again: “Bon. That’s of no interest to you. I was just trying to say that I still have a lot of connections in Marseille. But life there is…” He struggled to find the right word. “… stressful. I moved to Caillouteaux some thirty years ago, particularly for my family’s sake. And for my own health. It’s so quiet here, so peaceful.”

  “Well, it would seem now Marseille has come to you, Monsieur le maire,” Tonon said calmly.

  Lafont got to his feet again, went over to the window, and waved the two gendarmes over. “Look over there,” he said, pointing toward a poster on the wall of a house opposite: a photo of a smiling young blond woman. She might have been a singer or an actress.

  “This time next year we have elections here in the commune,” he said. “And that is my most dangerous enemy.” Blanc recognized the symbol of the Front National in the red, white, and blue of the tricolor. “That woman is clever, she knows how to handle herself. She’s dangerous. You know, mon Capitaine, how strong the Front already is down here in the Midi. Oh yes, le tout Paris jokes about it all the time. But I don’t want to end my political career with defeat by a ferocious right-wing extremist with a sharp tongue.” He gestured vaguely out of the window. “We’re planning to build a médiathèque on the outskirts of town: books, magazines, films, music, fast Internet access for everyone in a bright modern building. Free to everybody in the commune. That will keep our young people here, build a better future. Up until five minutes ago that was the main platform of my upcoming election campaign.”

  Blanc looked at the mayor expressionlessly. “You think the FN will use a Kalashnikov murder for propaganda purposes?”

  “I don’t think it, I know it. Every damn drug dealer who can’t keep his trigger finger steady brings more votes for the far right. Whether it’s drugs, criminals, Arabs, or murder, they link them all together. People are pleased with the idea of a médiathèque. But they’re more afraid of criminals. And on election day, it’s fear, not happiness, that decides where they put their ‘x.’ That’s why I don’t want to frighten my citizens, mon Capitaine, do you understand me?”

  “Completely,” Blanc said in a neutral voice.

  “So please clear up this unpleasant business as quickly as possible, before it starts to get people scared.”

  “That’s why we’re here,” said Blanc with a thin smile. “What can you tell us about Monsieur Moréas?”

  A quarter of an hour later Blanc and Tonon knew that the deceased had no relatives and no friends in Caillouteaux or anywhere else. He hadn’t applied for permission to build his house, but nobody had lodged a complaint about it. He had five pieces of land in the commune: one overgrown lot in the town itself and four pieces of woodland supposed to be for agricultural purposes. Moréas had never been in the post office, which was housed in the same building as the town hall offices, never posted anything or collected anything. He had never applied for a license or benefits, never applied for a passport, and didn’t even have a landline.

  * * *

  “You promised the commandant that no politician would be interested in this,” Tonon recalled with a laugh as they left the town hall, “and now the first politician we come across is hot as mustard over it. I’ll be interested to see how Nkoulou reacts.”

  “What sort of politician doesn’t even have a photo of the president on his wall?”

  “Lafont says what he thinks. He’s not very impressed by the gentlemen in Paris. In any case you see the president every day on television and in the newspapers. It’s a welcome change not to have to look at his face.”

  Blanc stopped to look at the poster Lafont had pointed out. “What about her?” The face was just a little too rounded to be that of a model, but it seemed open and unintimidating. “She doesn’t look too dangerous.”

  “Just be glad you’re not an Arab. That’s just a façade. The Front has another face too, not quite so pretty.”

  “Are Lafont’s fears real? Could the old boy lose to a doll-face like that? Just because somebody killed an unpleasant good-for-nothing and burnt his body on a garbage heap?”

  The lieutenant looked around to see if there was anybody in the square and shook his head. “I thought you were supposed to be a corruption expert, back in Paris.”

  “And in Provence everyone is corrupt.”

  “Exactly.” Tonon jerked his thumb toward the town hall. “Did you notice anything about the furniture in his office?”

  “It was horrible, modern, uncomfortable. Has Lafont been bribed by some furniture chain?”

  “It’s a lot more subtle than that. The mairie was full of antiques, a desk from the Empire period, oil paintings on the wall, Louis XIV chairs, stuff like that. It’s all in Monsieur Lafont’s villa now. A rather big villa. One day he just had the town hall emptied. Then at the commune’s expense he bought all the new stuff. That vile filing cabinet only arrived last week. The frescos of the revolutionary year are to cover up the blank spaces on the wall left by the oil paintings that hung there for two hundred years before being relocated to Monsieur Lafont’s living room. It was given out as ‘modernization,’ but everybody knows where all the old stuff is.”

  “Nobody complained?”

  “The Gaullistes are corrupt, the socialists are corrupt. Who was there to complain?”

  “The Front National?”

  “On the button. Not that I think the Front aren’t corrupt too. They just haven’t had the opportunity yet.”

  “So it’s not just racists who vote FN, it’s everybody who has had enough of misappropriated antiques and mayors in expensive cars?”

  “That’s why Lafont wants to spend money on this ultramodern médiathèque, so they too get something out of all the money lying ar
ound here. He gets hysterical about anything that could win more votes for the Front. If we clear this case up quickly we’ll have won a friend. A useful friend.”

  “Merde,” said the captain. “Now that’s exactly the sort of thing we did make jokes about in Paris.”

  * * *

  Blanc dropped his colleague off at the gendarmerie in Gadet and went into the tiny supermarket to buy food for the next few days: lots of coffee, two jars of jam, bread and pains au chocolat in plastic bags, plus two green bottles of Alsace beer. The owner, who was at the cash register, greeted him with extreme politeness and packed his purchases rapidly in opaque carrier bags. Blanc drove his Espace slowly back to Sainte-Françoise-la-Vallée. He had a thumping headache. It was evening and still nearly eighty-six degrees.

  Parking in front of the old olive oil mill, he sat behind the wheel for a while, staring at the raw yellow stone of the walls. Home. Merde. Eventually he got out, closed the car door, and carried his supplies into the house. At least the ancient refrigerator came to life when he turned it on. He put the beer bottles hopefully into the freezer compartment, then went out, fetched the first bag from the minivan, and heaved it onto the kitchen table. Then the second. He sighed, changed out of his uniform into an old T-shirt and ripped jeans, opened up all the doors and the trunk of the Espace, and emptied it of everything. One hour later everything that remained of his career and his marriage was piled high on the rickety kitchen table. He threw his sleeping bag and the inflatable mattress onto the bare bedstead. Then he scrabbled around until he found the most recent photo of his children, a framed picture from when they were both still at school, just before the elder of the two graduated. He put the photo alongside his cell phone on the bedside table.

  At long last it got dark outside. Blanc was so tired that he swayed on his feet. But he was too wound up to sleep. Instead he used an old brush and a few cloths to wipe away cobwebs and dust, then he piled up the horrid chairs and various other stuff next to the door. Tomorrow he would take it all to the garbage dump. He knew the way now.

  In the end he sat down with the beer and some bread on the doorstep of the house. A soft breeze had arisen, as cooling as a silk handkerchief—it seemed even the cicadas were exhausted. The sun had already dropped beyond the horizon but the sky still had a surreal blue-violet tone. A single star, like a white needle point, shone in the heavens above the plane trees. One of God’s bad jokes, Blanc thought.

  He drank down the cool beer and leant back against the wall. He could feel the rough stone through his thin T-shirt, but at the same time it reflected the sun’s warmth between his shoulder blades. He heard the buzz of an insect, then two of them, then thousands. It went on and on, for at least half an hour, like an ovation after a concert. Somewhere across the river he heard the shrill back-and-forth calls of two owls getting ready for the night’s hunt. Then shadows appeared in the twilight. At first he took them for late swallows, then realized they were bats. Some of them hurtled down toward the Touloubre, clustered around those areas where the water lay more still behind stones and clumps of earth, then soared back up into the sky. They were drinking, Blanc realized. I didn’t know bats drank. Never thought about it. Why?

  Every breath he took was perfumed by the air. What was it the woman on horseback had told him? Thyme. He felt simultaneously drained and replete. He got to his feet with an effort, stumbled into the house and to bed, without even climbing into his sleeping bag.

  * * *

  His cell phone’s alarm called him out of a deep, dreamless oblivion. It took Blanc a minute or so to realize where he was. When had he last slept so well? He went into the tiny bathroom with its brown tiles from the 1970s. He would need to get rid of those. Sooner or later. When he turned on the shower, rust-red water flooded out, but after a few minutes it turned clear. The old electric boiler had actually managed to warm the water overnight. He climbed out of the shower, hesitated for a few moments, then instead of his uniform put on black jeans and a black T-shirt. Then he scoured the kitchen cupboards until he found a little aluminum Italian espresso pot and set it on the hot plate until the scent of coffee rose from it. Blanc chewed on a doughy pain au chocolat and took a cup of bitter black coffee to the door. It was already nearly eighty degrees, he reckoned. It might be a good idea to make a patio out here. On the other side of the Touloubre he heard Serge Douchy trundling along on his tractor, making a point of ignoring him. He heard a rooster call from Douchy’s farmyard. Then it was quiet again. I’m going to have to get used to this quiet, the captain thought.

  When he was about to leave just a few minutes later, he suddenly came to a halt at the gate. The old stuff he had left outside the door had vanished. Douchy? Or someone else who had passed by in the dusk and spotted them? He shrugged, pulled the gate closed, even though it no longer had a working lock, climbed into the car, and set off for Gadet. At least this time there were no horses blocking the road.

  It was as quiet as a church in the gendarmerie. The calendar on the desk by the door read Tuesday, July 2. Upstairs he heard Nkoulou’s voice from behind his office door, obviously on the telephone. He wondered why the chief was up and about so early. Most of the other offices were empty. Even Tonon hadn’t turned up yet. The only one of his colleagues to be seen was the dumpy woman who had offered him a Gauloise yesterday. He couldn’t remember her name.

  “Didn’t you sleep well?” she asked. “You look tired.”

  Blanc didn’t reply; he hadn’t felt so rested in months. Instead he asked her what time his partner usually turned up.

  “Marius usually makes it by midday,” she laughed. “He put in more hours with you yesterday than he would normally do in a month. He’ll be getting his strength back.” She put her chubby thumb into her mouth then pulled it out, making a sound like a cork coming out of a bottle. “Cigarette?”

  The captain made a point of giving her a friendly smile, turning down the offer. “I have an appointment at the pathology lab. Can you tell me how to get there?”

  Five minutes later he was sitting in the patrol car, on his own, with the GPS illegally on the passenger seat, heading toward Salon-de-Provence. He knew the name from a trashy novel he had read as a teenager: the city of Nostradamus, alchemy, fortune-telling, Renaissance intrigue, and Catherine de’ Medici as the spider at the center of a web of conspiracies. But instead of dark defensive walls or ornate palaces he found himself driving through anonymous suburbs, gas stations, shops offering scooters, their machines parked in a long parallel line with their front wheels on the sidewalk. Fifteen minutes later he parked the car on a hill next to a complex of square concrete buildings: the town hospital. It had a view over the whole town, and indeed there was a castle, like something out of a fairy tale, with a donjon tower, crenellated battlements, a gateway, and high walls. I must take a closer look, he told himself, one of these days. He asked directions from one person after another until he found himself at the entrance to the Institut Médico-Légal.

  Dr. Fontaine Thezan shook his hand and gave him the once-over. Today she was wearing glasses that gave her an Audrey Hepburn air. “When were you last at an autopsy?” she asked.

  Do I really look that pale? Blanc asked himself. “I’ve had breakfast,” he replied. The smell of disinfectant was so strong that he couldn’t be sure whether or not there was still a faint whiff of marijuana around the doctor.

  “In any case, we’ve almost finished.” She introduced him to her two assistants and a young policeman, and led them all into a cool, brightly lit room, where the charred corpse lay on a steel table. The chest and stomach had already been cut open and the top of the skull sawed off. The brain was sitting in a bowl next to it.

  The pathologist pointed to an object in another bowl nearby, still with pieces of brain matter adhering to it. “We found one bullet in the skull,” Thezan told him, “two in the lungs, one more in the upper thigh bone. There were also traces where more had gone through the chest and stomach. You’ll get all the detai
ls in a written report. The brain, heart, and liver were all destroyed, and there was severe internal bleeding. You can pick whichever you like as ‘cause of death.’”

  “If there were still Kalashnikov bullets in the body, that means he can’t have been shot at close range. If he had been, they would all have gone right through,” Blanc suggested.

  She led him over to another table with a spongy substance. “The lung,” she said, using a pair of tweezers to point at it. “If you look here you’ll see there’s no soot in the bronchial passages. That means by the time his body was burnt, he was no longer breathing. We also haven’t been able to find any traces of smoke absorbed by the blood.”

  “Any sign of alcohol or drugs?”

  “We haven’t got all the results from the lab yet, but his blood alcohol level was point zero one, which suggests he might have had something to drink several hours before his death. Maybe a glass of wine with lunch. Or it’s vestigial from drinking the night before. We’ve found no traces of cocaine or anything like that.”

  “How was he set on fire?”

  “There were traces of an accelerant on various parts of the skin. The easy assumption is that someone poured a large quantity of gasoline over the body and set it alight.”

  “Can you be sure that it actually is Moréas?”

  “Absolutely.” He could make out the pathologist smiling, even behind her face mask. “At first we tried using dental records. But it appears he’d never been to a dentist in his life, so we had nothing to check against. His fingers were so burnt that there were no prints left to take. But then we found this.” She held up a shiny object made of stainless steel.

  “In his body?” Blanc asked dubiously.

  “An artificial left hip. Every prosthesis of this type in the world carries a serial number. Bingo! If you have the number you can identify the patient. Charles Moréas was given this hip replacement three years ago in the Timone hospital in Marseille. He’d had a serious motorbike accident and was taken there for treatment.”