“Did you know who was responsible?” Fabienne asked him.
Rheinbach shook his head. “The men were wearing masks. I gave a witness statement. Then my parents came to collect me and we dealt with the rest of the formalities.”
“Formalities?”
“For bringing the body back to Germany.”
They all sat in silence for a few minutes. Then Blanc cleared his throat and said, “I’m amazed you came back to Provence after something like that.”
The painter gave them a weary smile. “My friends said that too at the time. I didn’t come back here for years. I finished my studies, got married, began to work as a freelance painter, and tried to forget the whole episode. But my marriage fell apart, and my career followed suit. So at some stage I came back here, where I could at least make a living as a second-rate contract painter. Better than driving a taxi around Cologne.”
“And you want us to believe that it was purely by chance you ended up living next door to Charles Moréas?”
Rheinbach held up his hands. “I don’t want to make you believe anything. I bought this old place because it was the only thing cheap enough for me to afford. After a while I realized that my neighbor wasn’t exactly the kind of person you’d invite round for supper, but his name meant nothing to me. It remained like that for years, until my other neighbor dropped by. The architect.”
“Le Bruchec came to see you?”
“We’d bumped into each other from time to time and said hello. But we moved in different circles, if you know what I mean. He earns in one hour as much as I make in a month. That’s why I was so surprised when he dropped by just a few weeks ago.”
“After the death of his wife?”
“Yes. He was worried that our mutual neighbor could break into his house. He said he’d seen him hanging around the house and asked me if I could keep an eye on it for him. He suggested we might both complain about him to the gendarmerie. I didn’t want to get involved in anything and made an excuse. But then Le Bruchec said he wanted to see ‘this highway robber Moréas locked up.’ The juxtaposition of ‘highway robber’ and ‘Moréas’ suddenly rang a bell with me, although I couldn’t think why. It was possible I had heard the name ‘Moréas’ when I was giving my statement twenty years ago and had since forgotten. Then the architect began to tell me all the old stories about Moréas, the rumors that he had been involved in robbing cars. I suddenly felt sick with fear and had to ask Le Bruchec, as politely as possible, to leave the house. After that he never mentioned Moréas to me again. But I began to make my own inquiries.”
“In the town hall archives. And at the editorial offices of La Provence.”
“I can hardly say any of them were particularly chatty. But I picked up a few things. Enough to put two and two together.”
“You found the missing pieces of the jigsaw.”
Rheinbach made a face. “At some stage I found myself sitting here, in this chair, realizing that by some horrible turn of fate I was living just a few hundred yards away from Claudia’s killer, who was free as a bird. He didn’t even bother to keep a low profile, didn’t even have a bad conscience. He ran around the place getting in people’s hair and acting the tough guy. Maybe he had even completely forgotten Claudia’s death. Whereas I certainly hadn’t forgotten.”
“And so you killed him.”
The painter inhaled sharply as if he had been punched in the stomach. “There were moments when I would have loved to. But it wasn’t me.”
“Where were you on Sunday, the thirtieth of June?”
Rheinbach shook his head resignedly. “I think you might be able to work that out. I wanted to confront Moréas once and for all. I wanted to confront him with what he had done. I wanted him to confess to my face that he had killed Claudia.” He gave a bitter laugh. “How naïve was that? It just so happened that as I was driving along, I spotted him roaring down the road between our two properties on his motorbike. I did a U-turn and followed him, just like in the movies. Except that Moréas was on a rusty, battered motorbike and I was in an aging Clio. Not exactly Steve McQueen stuff. It ended by the garbage dump next to the main highway. I parked in the main lot near the entrance. Moréas had driven straight over to one of the Dumpsters. He had no idea I had followed him. I sat there behind the steering wheel for an hour wondering what to do. It was absurd, me and that guy hanging around in a garbage dump in the heat of the day. What was I going to do? I was just about to give up and drive home when along came Le Bruchec in his big four-by-four with a trailer full of trash. He and Moréas started talking to each other. I couldn’t make out what they were saying but it certainly wasn’t very amicable. It was like watching some bizarre play.”
“Did they argue long?”
“Maybe a few minutes. I can’t be certain. Then Le Bruchec emptied his trash and drove off.”
“Did either of them notice you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“And then?”
“Then I finally picked up my courage, got out, and walked straight over to Moréas.” Rheinbach closed his eyes. Blanc realized he was too ashamed to look any of them in the eye. “The guy gave me a dirty look,” he continued at a whisper. “He knew who I was. Had known all these years that I had been the one he and his gang had dragged out of the car along with Claudia. And he could tell by looking at me that I knew it too now. And he just laughed.” He took a deep breath. “I wanted to talk to him, to look him in the eye, to appeal to his conscience. To shatter him morally, can you understand that? I thought he would cringe, be ashamed, deny everything. I was an idiot. He had no sense of shame at all. He just laughed at me.”
“Moréas was sick in the head,” Tonon said sympathetically. “He would have enjoyed that.”
The painter gave an agonized smile. “I couldn’t get a word out. I just stood there in front of this guy, staring at him. And he stared back, until eventually I blinked first and looked away. I turned around to head back to my car. I felt more miserable than I ever had before, even on that night twenty years ago. And then I was overcome by a wave of anger. I didn’t think twice.” He paused.
At that moment Blanc was certain that Monsieur Rheinbach wasn’t his murderer. The sad man sitting in front of him was telling the truth. There was no way he would have lifted an automatic weapon and emptied the entire magazine, let alone set fire to the body afterward. “What happened next?” he asked wearily.
“I was insane with rage,” Rheinbach admitted. “I bent to the ground, picked up the first stone I found, and hurled it at Moréas.”
“Did you hit him?”
“Yes. I don’t think he had believed I would do anything.”
“On the head? Did it knock him out?”
“No, no. It only hit him on the hip, I think. He cried out and swore, but he must have been in pain, since he didn’t charge at me. He swayed and then fell over.”
Blanc remembered what Dr. Thezan had said: the old motorbike accident, that Moréas had an artificial hip joint. The stone must have hurt him really badly. “You couldn’t have hit him in a better spot,” he murmured.
“I suspect him stumbling saved my life. Moréas was absolutely furious and threatened me all the time he lay there on the ground. But he was too badly hurt to come after me. I ran to the car and drove off. All night long I hid in the house waiting for Moréas to burst in at any minute like some raving monster. The next day I decided there was no point in hanging around until he got me. I packed up my easel and a few paints, with the intention of heading off for a few days, somewhere he wouldn’t find me. And then you turned up…”
Blanc stared out of the window at the perfect blue sky. They would take the painter with them down to the gendarmerie station and get him to make a statement. Nkoulou would read it and then have the man detained in custody. What the German had just told them could easily be taken as a partial confession. All that remained to be done was to drag the rest of the story out of him. The boss wouldn’t permit them to allow
Rheinbach to return home. Not as long as there were politicians putting pressure on him. If the commandant held him as a suspect, neither the mayor nor the minister would have anything to complain about. “Monsieur Rheinbach,” he said, with resignation in his voice, “we must ask you to come with us.”
* * *
A few hours later, after all the formalities had been completed, they had a foreign jigsaw puzzle painter in the sole cell in the Gadet gendarmerie station, normally used for drunks to sleep off their hangovers or to hold a thief caught in the act until he could be sent to Aix-en-Provence or Marseille. If Rheinbach was to be caught up in the wheels of justice, then soon he would be gone. Blanc might well never see him again, but he would have solved his first case in the Midi, and Monsieur Vialaron-Allègre would have no excuse for any more plots against him. But instead of closing the files and heading off to have lunch with Fabienne and Marius in the shade of the plane trees, he busied himself in his office until nearly everybody else was out at the restaurant. Then he went to the office next door, to see Madame le juge.
She was smoking and gave him an inquisitive look from behind a cloud of cigarette smoke. “Mon Capitaine,” she said. “Every cop in Gadet is jealous of your success. But you don’t exactly look like a hunter who’s just bagged a trophy.”
“I think I might have had the wrong buck in my sights.”
“Commandant Nkoulou considers the case as good as open and shut. He seems very relieved. He was even singing your praises.”
“He might be somewhat premature.”
“You want to ask me not to prepare the case for the prosecution yet?”
She used her cigarette to point to a chair. “Now I understand why certain people in Paris were pleased to see the back of you.” She smiled and Blanc realized Madame Vialaron-Allègre meant it as a compliment. At that moment he finally decided to trust her.
“Let’s reconstruct the day of the murder,” he began. “Sunday, June thirtieth. Nobody knows how Moréas spent the morning. Maybe he was on his own, at home or on one of his bits of land. The pathologist found traces of alcohol in his blood. Maybe he had been drinking the day before and was sleeping it off. But things begin to get interesting just before noon: Moréas turns up in Saint-César harbor and spends some time on his boat. The building firm owner Pascal Fuligni confronts him at his mooring and offers him five thousand euros for it. Moréas just laughs in his face. The pair get into a loud argument. Shortly after, Moréas drives off. Fuligni remains in the harbor—at least according to him. We have no witnesses to the fact.
“Apparently, Moréas goes directly to the garbage dump. Around midday or shortly after he’s seen at the scrap metal Dumpster. Probably looking for stuff that other people have thrown away but he can reuse. Lucien Le Bruchec turns up, the neighbor who suspects him of trying to break into his house and is planning to make a formal complaint, though he has not yet done so. They have a brief, argumentative exchange of words, and then the architect takes off again. He admits as much himself. And that is also what Monsieur Rheinbach says, who turns up around the same time. He is crouching down in his red car, unnoticed by everyone else, taking in the whole scene. The farmer who was dumping trash also noticed the red car, but apparently not anyone inside it. We’ve asked him again, and he can’t remember seeing anyone.
“Bon. Next, early in the afternoon, we have the confrontation between Rheinbach and Moréas, which apparently ends with Moréas lying in pain on the ground, swearing, while our stone-throwing artist makes a run for it. Our colleagues from forensics have already turned his house upside down and found paints and paintings, but not the slightest trace of any Kalashnikov from Marseille. How do we suppose Monsieur Rheinbach could have got his hands on such a weapon? Just to be sure, I asked our colleagues down in Marseille if the German had ever turned up on their radar. Not a thing. Except for his witness statement all those years ago, his name has never turned up in a single French police file. I also asked the same question of our German colleagues. Nothing there either. The painter is as clean as a nun.”
“You wouldn’t have taken him into custody?”
“Commandant Nkoulou insisted. And in one respect he’s right: Following the row with Rheinbach, nobody we know of saw Moréas alive. No witnesses, not that that is particularly remarkable: Who’s going to be hanging about in a garbage dump on a hot Sunday afternoon? It’s only first thing on the Monday morning that an employee comes across the still-smoking body. So, who was there at the garbage dump after Rheinbach? Only the murderer.”
“That’s unless the painter himself is the murderer.”
Blanc pulled out his notebook and leafed through it. “On Friday, five days after the murder, the builder Pascal Fuligni is found dead in the Étang de Berre. No link between him and Rheinbach.”
“There is also no link between the two deaths. At least not officially,” Aveline Vialaron-Allègre reminded him. “You’re not going to save Rheinbach by claiming there’s no way he could have been involved in another unsolved death.”
Blanc hesitated for a moment. Trust this woman, he told himself. Who else do you have? “There’s one more thing…” He extended across the table to her the piece of paper on which he had noted Fuligni’s last text message—It’s all going to come out. There’ll be enough blood spilt to fill the harbor—and explained to her what it was.
The juge d’instruction stared long and hard at the piece of paper. “Did you ask Marcel about this?” she asked eventually, lighting up another cigarette.
“I haven’t been to see your friend.”
“Marcel is my husband’s friend, a political friend.”
Blanc leant back in his seat. He felt like celebrating, but forced himself not to show any emotion. She’s watching my back, he thought, she really is watching my back. “I don’t know what those few lines mean,” he said. “But I refuse to believe they are unimportant—that it is all coincidence, that Fuligni’s death was a tragic accident, that two deaths within five days just happens to be ‘one of those things.’”
“You want a couple of days’ breathing space, so that with my permission you can investigate an allegation of murder against Marcel Lafont? Against the man who has for the past thirty years been mayor of Caillouteaux? Against the trusted friend of my husband, a government minister?”
“I will be extremely discreet.”
“But you still want my protection. And that I don’t mention a word of this to my husband.”
“I couldn’t have put it better myself.”
“And if I don’t offer my protection, will you carry on with the investigation regardless?”
“I think you already know me well enough to answer that question for yourself, Madame le juge.”
Aveline Vialaron-Allègre had forgotten all about her cigarette. “You want to make me your accomplice in a secret, indeed possibly illegal investigation,” she murmured. “Have you ever done anything like this before? In Paris?”
“Cops sometimes set up small, secret teams. But sometimes I went out on a limb on my own. However, I have never compromised a juge d’instruction.”
“So this will be a first for both of us.”
And with that, Blanc finally realized that he would at least have a couple of days to investigate Mayor Lafont in peace.
For the rest of the day Blanc shut himself away in his office, working at his ancient computer. The police had never carried out a single investigation of the mayor although he had on numerous occasions been called as a witness. Nonetheless, an Internet search on his name came up with countless hits: Monsieur Lafont opening a bridge, Monsieur Lafont at a meeting of Midi Provence, Monsieur Lafont at the party congress that elected the last presidential candidate. Now and again he popped up in statements by the opposition. The usual political rhetoric in general; only if you read them closely, and knew what Blanc now knew, you could decipher some of them as allegations of corruption. It obviously hadn’t been of any use. Three years ago Marcel Lafont had been award
ed the Cross of the Legion of Honor, France’s highest honor. And just over a month ago, a columnist in La Provence had speculated that Lafont could end up in the senate before long. Or might be named chairman of Midi Provence. Or both. The column had been published the day after the press conference at which Lafont had first publicly announced his plans for a médiathèque. There was also a photo of the event, with Fuligni standing next to him.
“Merde,” Blanc muttered. This damn médiathèque was more than just Lafont’s ticket to reelection as mayor, as he had suggested himself—it could also be his ticket to ride a whole series of gravy trains. He had the feeling that over the course of Lafont’s long political career there had to be more than a few dark closets to which the doors had never been opened. But he also knew that even an experienced team of cops with regular permission to carry out an investigation would need more than a few days, a lot more. A lone wolf working in secret didn’t have a chance.
* * *
“Have you got a construction permit for that?” Douchy yelled at him from his tractor when Blanc parked outside his house early that evening. His neighbor was pointing at the mountain of stripped wallpaper and other rubbish that he had piled stones around to stop the wind blowing them all over the place.
“I’m stripping wallpaper. Since when does that require a permit?” Blanc shouted back at him.
“You need a permit to build an extension,” Douchy replied, unperturbed. “Otherwise I’ll lodge a complaint at the town hall.”
“Then please give my best to Monsieur Lafont. I have business to discuss with the mayor every now and then.”
As soon as he mentioned the mayor’s name the surly farmer immediately seemed to lose any enthusiasm for a fight. Instead he just drove off on his tractor without saying good-bye. Life in the Midi can sometimes be easy, it would seem, Blanc thought.
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