The Fleur De Sel Murders

by Jean-Luc Bannalec

  Jaffrezic left the gravel path, took a sharp left, and walked down a small grassy path that led right into a salt marsh. Beyond a large reservoir pool, the rectangular pools began, and through the water that was now just ten centimeters deep, the blue-gray floor shimmered. The warm air was close and there was a strong smell of salt, of rich earth. Brackish water.

  “The ‘flower of salt’ is the finest and most refined of any salt in the world, and also the most rare. Did you know that up until the eighties it was used for preserving sardines and was generally considered inferior?”

  Dupin had never known that.

  “Right after harvesting it has a violet fragrance and a slight rosy shimmer. After drying, it’s dazzlingly white! It makes up just four percent of our output.” Jaffrezic’s voice and facial expression became dramatic now. “It only forms under perfect weather conditions. It’s alchemy. Lots of sun, not much humidity, and a constant wind that must be neither too strong nor too weak. It’s much too weak today. The easterly winds are the best!” Jaffrezic’s eyes sparkled knowingly. “A mild wind blows the fine salt crystals floating near the surface together, which produces an ice-like layer. Fleur de sel floats on the water! Small, moving islands, did you know that?”

  This was news to Dupin too.

  “If the wind is too strong or the water in the harvest pools is moved carelessly, the fleur de sel sinks to the ground and is lost.”

  “Are we nearly there yet?” Rose asked bluntly, making it clear that she wanted to get down to business. The mud footbridges were getting more and more narrow and they had already taken several turns. Commissaire Rose was walking two or three meters behind Dupin. Jaffrezic blithely ignored her question.

  “Ordinary salt, so-called table salt, consists of up to ninety-nine percent sodium chloride. It’s outrageous! Our salts are only ninety-one percent sodium chloride; the rest is residual moisture, which is pure seawater—we call it the ‘mother of salt’—and numerous essential minerals and trace elements. Magnesium, calcium”—the head of the cooperative couldn’t help getting more and more excited—“manganese, iodine, of course. Sixty different ones! Iron, zinc. And selenium! Bromine, sulfur.”

  It sounded absurd. Dupin was particularly unconvinced by the potential advertising power of sulfur and bromine. But there was pride on Jaffrezic’s face.

  “That’s what gives it its unique flavor! It’s much milder, yet tastier, more aromatic and full-bodied than crude salt. Without any bitter notes. The only salt with a bouquet!” He had now lapsed completely into a script that had been trotted out a hundred times before. “Connoisseurs from all over the world worship our Breton fleur de sel. A part of mankind’s culinary heritage.”

  Dupin couldn’t help grinning. In Brittany, salt was clearly not just salt.

  “The consistency and oil content set it apart from every other salt too: the fine crystalline structure falls apart like a breath on the tongue!”

  “And also on tender salt lamb from the meadows of Mont Saint-Michel, once it’s been in the oven at a hundred and eighty degrees for seven hours. With garlic, rosemary, and shallots, basted with white wine at regular intervals,” Rose said.

  At first Dupin wasn’t sure he’d heard right. He turned around and saw, for a moment, a pretty, unguarded smile spreading across her face. She really had said it. Before he could reply—he would have liked to have said something nice in response—the smile had vanished once more.

  “Watch out!”

  Jaffrezic had made a sharp left turn onto an incredibly narrow dam that ran between two pools toward a mud wall. Dupin nearly walked straight into the pool. Deftly, and without slowing his pace, the corpulent Jaffrezic strode along the dam toward a gap in the wall.

  “You’ve got to imagine us going along these narrow dams and footbridges even with full wheelbarrows.”

  A moment later they were looking at a row of huge salt mounds on green tarpaulins laid out on a broad strip of grass between two salt marshes and, next to them, also arranged in a row, some blue plastic barrels. Dupin guessed they were about an arm’s length across.

  “Your mysterious barrels. Voilà! Look, that’s our normal gros sel. That will become our sel moulin. It forms in a different way from the fleur de sel; the salt crystals settle on the clay floors of the harvest pools, wind and sun permitting! The clay gives the salt that distinctive pale gray color.”

  Dupin was standing at the barrels, looking them over. Rose joined him.

  The barrels were empty, standing neatly in single file. So they really did exist. Blue barrels in the saltworks. After all. The salt farmer didn’t seem worried that the commissaires weren’t listening.

  “Anyway. It’s brought to the edge of the saltworks in a wheelbarrow. After two days’ drying time, it’s poured into these barrels. Then the salt is stored in the barrels in the sheds. Until it’s packaged up. And that’s the sum total of the mystery of the blue barrels.”

  Rose and Dupin were listening closely again now.

  “That’s all you use the barrels for?” Dupin cut in.

  “Absolutely.”

  “And they’re only used in your cooperative?”

  “We’re talking sixty-seven paludiers!”

  Dupin had whipped out his Clairefontaine. At last. He had almost forgotten it again when he was getting out of the car just now (which was not a good sign), but had remembered it at the last second. He began to make notes on certain things. Based on the simple principle of whatever seemed important to him. Instinctively. This was actually quite an intricate system.

  “And how might some of these barrels have ended up in Monsieur Daeron’s saltworks?”

  “It’s not possible.”

  “But it happened.”

  “What do you think happened over there, Monsieur Jaffrezic?” Rose interjected.

  “Did you actually see the barrels there? As I said, I consider it out of the question. Not our barrels!”

  Dupin and Rose were silent.

  “Perhaps,” Jaffrezic left a dramatic pause, “it was Mikaël’s crazy dwarves. From Pradel. Who knows?”

  Dupin had lost count of how many times he had been told Celtic legends and myths during investigations. As a distraction, for fun, or, and this was not uncommon, in all seriousness.

  “As soon as the last paludier leaves the saltworks of an evening, the saltworks no longer belong to us humans. They notice immediately. There’s something odd about it.” Jaffrezic was doing this very skillfully (and he was also giving a good description of how Dupin felt yesterday). “That’s when the saltworks belong to them, and the dwarves come out: ten of them or a hundred or a thousand. With blue wheelbarrows—blue like your barrels. They used to work Mikaël’s saltworks at night, until they found it too much work, and one night they heaped up a gigantic mountain of salt, and all the saltworks were buried underneath fifty meters of the purest salt.”

  Jaffrezic looked at them dramatically. “Diabolical little creatures. They’re still up to no good nowadays. And it’s not just them!” He let out a brief, loud laugh.

  “Monsieur Jaffrezic, do you know of anyone who would have had motive to sabotage Maxime Daeron’s harvest?” Rose asked. The funny myth clearly left the commissaire cold. Dupin was reminded of Riwal. He’d definitely know the myth.

  Jaffrezic became more helpful all of a sudden. “We’ve been trying to get Maxime Daeron to join the cooperative for years. It’s no secret. If that’s what you mean. Apparently he doesn’t need it.” His eyes were darting around even more quickly now.

  “And so you or someone from the cooperative put pressure on him by destroying parts of his harvest? Did you want to use that to force him to become a member of the cooperative?”

  Rose was unbelievable. She phrased these accusations without making them sound like accusations at all.

  “You cannot, thank God, be serious.”

  “How does it work—the cooperative?” Dupin asked.

  “Members are obliged to hand over their w
hole harvest. And we store it. In these warehouses here. At a specific price per kilo, which everyone determines collectively every year.”

  Jaffrezic seemed pleased by Dupin’s interest. And this time he was making a clear effort not to speak with so much of an emphasis on salt tourism.

  “Look, the harvest can fail in all kinds of ways. If there’s a rainy summer, that could cost an independent paludier his livelihood. That’s the crux of the cooperative idea: we’ve built up a quantity of stock to last two or three years, so we can compensate for the failure of an entire season and still keep up a steady supply. We thus guarantee a calculable income for all of the paludiers, proportional to the amount of salt handed over. Of course you don’t get rich in the cooperative, but you won’t be poor either. Not joining is antisocial, that’s how we see it. Daeron wants to go it alone. We accept that, but the big corporation doesn’t.”

  “Really?” Rose sounded openly impatient now.

  “Le Sel has been trying to buy up everything for years.”

  “What do you mean—”

  Dupin’s phone interrupted Rose. He quickly took it out of his jeans pocket.

  “Nolwenn, I can’t ta—”

  She didn’t let him finish: “Lilou Breval tried to call you. I think I saw her number on the screen on your landline. You ought to be able to see it on your mobile too. The call was transferred to my extension, which was busy. Then it started to record but she didn’t leave a message. She must have called when you and I were talking to each other. I called her back straightaway, multiple times. She’s not picking up. Or she’s got no reception. That can be an issue at the gulf.”

  “Shit.”

  Rose and Jaffrezic looked quizzically at him.

  Dupin glanced at his mobile and saw Lilou’s number. He had missed Lilou’s call! And she was the only one who could shed some light on this situation. They were depending on her, everything depended on her—and he had missed her call.

  “Keep trying, Nolwenn. This is turning into a farce.”

  Dupin hung up. The way Rose had positioned herself near him made it clear she was expecting an immediate update.

  “Lilou Breval just tried to call me,” Dupin said softly, hesitant, “but now we can’t get through to her again.”

  “I suppose your line was busy?” Rose turned away from Dupin, her tone coolly implying: This is all absurd.

  A moment later, she turned back to Jaffrezic. “Le Sel. We were talking about Le Sel, monsieur.”

  “Ah yes. It’s a big corporation. From the south. They’re destroying everything. They’ve bought up more and more salt marshes over the last decade, at highly inflated prices. They’re constantly making us all offers, Daeron included. Have you not met Madame Ségolène Laurent yet?”

  The world of “pure sea salt” might have been a wonderful world in culinary terms, but it was clear that as an industry it was in fact an extremely complicated world. A tough world. And thus a very human one, thought Dupin.

  “No.”

  “The ‘empress,’ an attractive cross between Marie Antoinette and a barracuda,” said Jaffrezic earnestly. “She’s always trying to exploit the Centre du Sel and Juliette Bourgiot, who is the head of it.”

  If Dupin recalled correctly, Juliette Bourgiot was the second person from the salt marshes to be quoted by Lilou Breval in her article.

  “What do you mean by ‘exploit’?” Rose was sounding more and more irritable.

  “The Centre du Sel is a real institution in this community and this region. It used to be overwhelmingly financed by tax money—like a lot of things in the White Land it was subsidized by the state in one way or another. But the Centre’s stylish new building was largely financed by Le Sel two years ago. That creates certain ‘obligations,’ whether people like it or not.”

  Dupin had made note of all of these names. Very legibly. On difficult cases, particularly since his police work had started to involve Breton names, which were quite often unpronounceable, he occasionally made an actual cast list on the last page of his notebook, as one would for a play. Juliette Bourgiot: head of the Centre du Sel, Ségolène Laurent: director of Le Sel, etc.

  “Is the Centre du Sel the large wooden building on the right-hand side on the way here?” Dupin tried to get back into the conversation, still kicking himself about the missed call.

  “No. That’s our center. The cooperative’s. The Maison du Sel!”

  “What happens there?”

  “We show people the world of salt. They’re guided round, they can do some harvesting themselves, they have the cooperative explained to them, they get to look at a little exhibition—not as in-depth as in the new Centre, of course. And we sell our salt there. There’s quite a lot of direct selling at this stage, even via our online store.”

  “I take it the Centre du Sel does something similar?”

  “As well as the lobbying work for Madame Laurent.”

  “And who’s in charge of the Maison du Sel?” Dupin was filling out the table in his notebook.

  “Me. The head of the cooperative.”

  “And what does—”

  Dupin’s phone shrieked again, right in the middle of another of Rose’s questions. Dupin answered. It was Riwal.

  “Riwal, this really isn’t a good—”

  “A woman’s body. In the gulf. In the Locmiquel and Larmor-Baden oyster beds. Right opposite the passage—across from Kerpenhir and Locmariaquer!”

  Dupin froze. “What?”

  “We were listening to the police radio. Two minutes ago there was a phone call to the police in Auray. Oyster fishermen found a woman’s body in their beds, it’s low tide.” Riwal fell silent briefly. “She’s around forty years old, they estimate. Short hair. Sweater and jeans. Identity as yet unknown. She hadn’t been in there long. We don’t know any more at this point. We—”

  That was enough. Dupin hung up. He felt his muscles cramping. His shoulder was terribly painful. He was nauseous.

  Surely it couldn’t be true. She had tried to call him a quarter of an hour ago. How could that be? But: everything fit. The place. The short hair. The age. And, worst of all, he had—if he were honest—a funny feeling deep down this whole time. It would be too much of a coincidence.

  Jaffrezic and Rose were staring at him, both of them seeming to know that something had happened. Dupin stood almost paralyzed for a moment, then abruptly snapped out of it. But before he could even say anything, Rose’s mobile rang. An almost old-fashioned, high-pitched, very loud ring. She reached blindly into her jacket pocket, whipped it out, and held it straight to her ear.

  Dupin knew what was coming. He wasn’t going to wait. Without looking around, he walked back up the path they’d just come down. Back to his car.

  * * *

  There was an extreme brutality to it. The dead body in this utterly peaceful scene. They were standing on the ocean floor of a wide bay, in the middle of the Anse de Locmiquel, hundreds of meters of coarse sand with huge numbers of oyster and mussel beds nestled in it. In a few hours, perch would be swimming here again, giltheads, barbs, pollack. The sky was blue, adorned with a few scattered fair-weather clouds like balls of cotton, and the inky blue Morbihan shimmered in the distance, a few hundred meters farther south. Beyond the clearly discernible passage, the open Atlantic flashed, silvery and restless.

  It was Lilou Breval. Dupin recognized her from meters away. It looked as though her head had got caught between two wooden struts of the long, wooden oyster beds. It was stuck fast. Perhaps that had been the only thing stopping the body from getting pushed farther through the gulf by the currents. It was a macabre scene. The journalist’s closed eyelids looked oddly peaceful, but she had a tortured expression on her face. On the left-hand side of her face, there was a large wound at her temple, and it was terribly swollen. Otherwise her body looked unscathed. Her hair and clothes were already dry again. Not far from the body, three large aluminum cases lay in the middle of the seabed: the pathology and forensics team
s’ equipment.

  Dupin was standing next to the dead body, very close to it. Motionless. Stony-faced. His gaze was riveted on Lilou, eyes narrowed, facial muscles tense.

  Having arrived just before Dupin, Rose had—very authoritatively—“requested” that the pathologist and both members of the forensic team from Vannes, as well as the two local police officers, give her and Dupin a few moments alone. Already absorbed in the task at hand, they had been grumpy as they obeyed this order.

  “We’re going to get the perpetrator,” Rose said coldly, low-pitched, without emotion, but with great determination. “Even the smartest perpetrators commit their deeds in the real world—and in the real world, everything leaves a trace.”

  Dupin closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and lifted his head, his chin jutting forward.

  “Yeah. We’ll get him.”

  “Soon we’ll know whether that wound was the cause of death. It looks like it. She was at the very least severely injured. And undoubtedly unconscious.”

  Dupin opened his eyes again and ran one hand roughly through his hair. It was a while before he responded.

  “Yeah.”

  “So the call today wasn’t even from her—it was just from her phone. We’ll try to locate it. That could have been the perpetrator calling you.”

  Suddenly the call seemed creepy to Dupin. Malicious. Did a stranger dial his number from Lilou’s phone? But why? And Rose was right, it could have been the perpetrator.

  “The lowest point of the low tide was at half past eight. I think the water had retreated from the bay by half past five. So the body has lain here since at least then. Soon we’ll find out whether she was already dead.”

  “Put out a search for her car immediately,” Dupin said mechanically.

  “They’re already on it. We’ve got support from Vannes and Auray. I’ve sorted everything. Lilou Breval probably didn’t get very far during the night. After she got to her parents’ house. Either she drove on to wherever the murderer was lying in wait for her, or she had arranged to meet them. In any case, it was most likely not far from the gulf.”