“So you’re going to go back and have another go?” Fabienne asked.
Blanc gave an apologetic smile. “This time it’s your turn. They know me down there and it would only alert Lafont if I went back digging around again. None of them know you. Go home, change out of your uniform, and try not to wake up all the dozy bureaucrats with your Ducati. Leave it on the edge of town and go the rest of the way on foot. Give your own name, but don’t tell them you’re a cop. Think of some excuse for wanting to go through the archives.” His own renovation work suddenly sprang to mind. “Tell them you’re thinking of buying a house locally and that you’ve heard about the médiathèque that’s supposedly going to be built nearby. You want to see the plans in case a year after buying the property you find yourself looking out the window onto a parking lot. Sound naïve, but hard-nosed.”
Fabienne raised her left eyebrow. “At least you said naïve rather than stupid,” she said.
“Do it however you want, but just make sure we ascertain that the strip of land owned by Moréas is exactly where Lafont wants to build his fairy palace.”
Blanc and Tonon sat around twiddling their thumbs for two hours until their young colleague came back. Fabienne had put on a nondescript pale yellow dress, flat shoes, and a pearl necklace—she looked serious, dull, and not in the least threatening. Then she had donned her helmet and driven like a lunatic up the hill to Caillouteaux, putting on her most disarming smile as she went into the town hall. It had been no trouble at all to get the bored clerk to produce all the documents and to make copies of them. Then she had repeated her journey in the opposite direction back to Gadet where, breathless but triumphant, she presented them with a pile of photocopies.
“An extract from the land registry showing the precise area of land owned by our charred friend,” she announced. “An official request from the commune of Caillouteaux to purchase said piece of land. But no record of any response from Moréas.”
“He’ll have given his response orally,” Tonon muttered. “I can imagine his very words.”
“And obviously there’s no deed of purchase. The land would still belong to Moréas today if he hadn’t already departed this world for the happy hunting ground.”
“You’re a star,” Blanc told her.
She gave him a sarcastic smile. “Well, at least that sounds better than naïve. As it happens, I’m more of a star than you realize, mon Capitaine.” She laid out the photocopies on the desk. “The woman at the archive was having difficulty keeping her eyelids open. As I was already there, I thought I’d make the most of her sleepiness, and took it upon myself to examine one shelf on which the dust had not yet settled. If you have no living relations at time of death, your estate goes to the government. Normally that can take a while—the lawyers seek out the fabled nephew in America until they are absolutely sure none exists. That can take months, even years. In the case of Moréas, the search for an heir began on Monday, the first of July.”
“As soon as his death was reported!” Tonon exclaimed.
“When we got to Caillouteaux that day, it was already gone five P.M. The town hall was dead. There was nobody there but Lafont.”
“You’ll find that, surprisingly enough, the search for an heir was not listed under Moréas’s own name, but instituted on behalf of the commune. Which, of course, could appear to be purely routine. There’s more to come: Simultaneously the commune put in an official request to purchase the land as necessary for an important urban development. Equally apparently routine. And perfectly legal.”
“From a purely legal point of view the land does not yet belong to the commune,” Blanc interjected. “But in practice it already controls it as if it did. It’s been taken out of the public domain, as if there never had been a strip of land owned by Moréas there. And if cops like us come snooping around we wouldn’t find anything relating to the sale, because there never was one. All very clever, very inconspicuous. The sort of trick that you’d need quite a lot of experience to pull off.”
“Who initiated the search for an heir and who made the land purchase request?” Marius asked.
“Both were signed by Monsieur le maire personally. Lafont. We’ve got him! Mon Capitaine, I invite you to kiss me on both cheeks and take me to lunch.”
Blanc did as he was told, regretting for a moment that his young colleague was only interested in other women. “We’ve got the noose,” he said, “but we still have to get Lafont’s head in it. The only breach of the rules we can prove is that he instituted the search for an heir somewhat prematurely. But who would bother to search the globe for relatives of a guy like Moréas? And even if someone did lodge a complaint, the process would only be delayed. A trifle. As far as Lafont is concerned, it would be no more annoying than getting a parking fine. None of this is enough to put him in the frame for actually killing Moréas, and certainly not Fuligni.”
“You think the juge d’instruction will hold us up, even despite these documents?” Fabienne asked, suddenly brought down to earth.
“I hope not. On the contrary, these documents may be enough for her to let us bring Lafont in for questioning, to turn his world upside down and do something that will take us a step further.”
“It’s a miracle that this Vialaron-Allègre woman even considered letting us poke our noses into the bigwigs’ toilet,” Marius said skeptically. “Are you really going to tell her you believe a respected town mayor is a cynical double murderer? That you want to launch a murder investigation against him in the middle of an election campaign? All because of a premature auctioning off of the pile of garbage that Moréas managed to accumulate throughout his miserable life? Or because the commune bought up a strip of land that nearly everybody thought it already owned? The judge will shoot us down in flames. And if she doesn’t, then her slimy husband in Paris certainly will.”
“We’ll see,” said Blanc, getting to his feet.
* * *
He parked the Espace next to two public tennis courts that had been cut into the slope of the Caillouteaux hill just below the summit. Very new tennis courts, very well maintained. That must have cost a bundle too, Blanc thought. He pulled his baseball cap down low on his forehead and put on his large sunglasses. But even that would not exactly make him inconspicuous: He was a tall, pale-skinned foreigner in a land of small, olive-skinned natives. He took an alleyway that brought him out onto a knoll opposite the church. All of a sudden it was quiet—the terraced houses sheltered the square from the mistral. Their stone glowed in the sunlight, and there was a smell of tar. His own footsteps seemed improbably loud. There was nobody around. The shutters were closed. Lunchtime. Even so he felt as if he were being watched by a thousand eyes.
Blanc came round the side of the hill where the wind blew fiercely, carrying pine needles up from the valley below that struck him like tiny bullets. Still nobody to be seen. Somewhere a wooden door was banging to and fro in its frame. He came across a dusty, weed-strewn piece of land with a sign posted in the middle: CHANTIER—INTERDIT AU PUBLIC. And beneath it an architectural plan of the médiathèque, that looked like a UFO landed in the middle of a Romanesque monastery. Just a few square yards of thistle-covered land, but worth more than a human life.
He approached the home of the juge d’instruction in rue du Passe Temps not from the church but from the opposite side, turned to look around him one more time, then rang the bell. He took off his sunglasses and baseball cap to look into the little security camera. A few seconds later Aveline Vialaron-Allègre opened the door.
“Nobody followed me,” he said.
“You hardly need to whisper,” the juge d’instruction told him calmly. She was barefoot and wearing a cream, knee-length dress, her toenails painted red. Blanc inhaled the scent of Chanel No. 5 and Gauloises as he followed her into the house. She had carefully bolted the door behind him, turned off the electric doorbell, and muted both the house telephone and her cell phone. Instead of leading him into her office, she took him into a little ro
om upstairs, looking out onto the internal courtyard. “It’s our guest room,” she told him. “Nobody can see in from the street, and nor can any of the neighbors. Relax, mon Capitaine.” She offered him a seat on a sofa bed, while she took the solitary chair in the room.
Blanc got the impression it was not the first time his hostess had entertained guests in confidence. Instead of making him feel relaxed it only boosted his adrenaline.
“I have taken two colleagues into my confidence,” Blanc told her, “and Nkoulou as well. We are in possession of documents that confirm Charles Moréas’s land holdings. And rather more than that.” It did not take him long to bring her up to speed with the progress of the investigation. The room was pleasantly cool and shady. The noise of the mistral was distant. The shutter slats filtered the midday sun into bright stripes to flicker minimally on Aveline Vialaron-Allègre’s skirt. Blanc had to concentrate in order not to stare at them. And her bare calves. And her painted toenails. A secret visitor in a hidden place. He was all alone with a beautiful woman. And beginning to fantasize.
“So, you have a motive,” the juge d’instruction said, looking him in the eye. For a moment Blanc thought she was talking about his fantasy rather than the case.
“For the murder of Moréas,” he said, just a little too hastily. “The médiathèque is not just important for Lafont’s reelection but could also be a ticket to the senate and to ensure the finance of Midi Provence. But it was a ticket that couldn’t be used as long as an antisocial character like Moréas held on to a patch of dusty weed-infested land that just happened to belong to him. You were right: Greed is the oldest motive of all. Greed for power and money turned Lafont into a killer.”
“He gets rid of the man who stood in the way of his médiathèque, d’accord. But then why would he also kill the man who was going to build his médiathèque?” She had got to her feet and was walking up and down. Blanc couldn’t avoid watching her.
“Fuligni might have been his favorite builder, but he was hardly the only option,” he said. “He might well have been the only available builder in a hamlet like Caillouteaux, but there are dozens round and about. Who else is building all the new houses Le Bruchec keeps designing? Fuligni might have been dependent on Lafont to keep him in business, but there’s no way Lafont was dependent on Fuligni. Even on the day Fuligni was found dead, he told me, down at the harbor in Saint-César, he would just have to find someone else. ‘Now more than ever,’ was how he put it.”
“Yes, but that’s hardly a motive. If I were to kill all the people I’m not dependent on, then I’d be the last person alive in France.”
Blanc declined to comment. “I was thinking about that last night,” he said, “and this morning, while I was waiting for my colleague to come back from the town hall with the documents. And I was still thinking about it on my way here. Could Fuligni also have been involved in killing Moréas? I doubt it. If he had intended to get rid of him, he would hardly have offered him five thousand euros for his mooring place. Nor would he have had a public altercation with him with dozens of people listening. But Fuligni had known his pal Lafont for years, would have known more about his past in Corsica and Marseille than we do. As a builder he would have known that the owner of a strip of land was blocking his pet project. Then suddenly the man in question is shot dead. With a Kalashnikov, the weapon of choice for murders in Marseille. Within hours there’s nothing to stop the diggers moving onto the land. That might well have given Fuligni cause for thought. He doesn’t know what his friend Lafont might have done. But he has an idea. He says nothing, because he doesn’t know for sure. There may well have been instances before when he didn’t ask too many questions about how Lafont got hold of the land and the money to finance other building contracts he’d been given. But this time there’s another factor he didn’t have to reckon with in the past—”
“A cop like you turning up,” Aveline Vialaron-Allègre interrupted him. “None of us expected that. Apart from my husband, of course.” She sat down on the sofa bed next to him. A ray of sunlight fell on her face. Blanc looked at her elegantly curved upper lip, her straight nose, her long eyelashes.
“I questioned him down at the harbor because his row with Moréas over the mooring had made me suspicious,” he continued. “I was on the wrong track, I now realize. But it had never occurred to Fuligni that the investigation spotlight might turn on him. All of a sudden he would have felt under threat—the one man who really had an idea who the killer was, felt under threat of being accused of the crime himself.”
“So how does he protect himself? He turns to the actual killer.”
“He doesn’t say anything directly to his face. Instead, after I interrogate him, he sends Lafont a cryptic text message, part plea, part threat. Lafont will have understood: Get me out of the line of fire or else it’ll all come out. And who knows exactly what he might have meant by ‘all’? Who knows what secrets Fuligni might have been privy to, what he might have revealed?”
“Easy enough to get himself killed on board his own yacht, even if he had been useful. All you have to do now is get me the slightest shred of proof for me to consider believing this crazy story of yours.”
“I’ll bring you more than a shred. I’ll bring you the Kalashnikov. But you’ll have to give me a search warrant for Lafont’s house. Tomorrow lunchtime. I’ve done my research. Monsieur Lafont always takes lunch at home. He’ll be there, but nobody else will. It’ll be as discreet a house search as any can be. No press.”
She laughed in amused surprise. “The front page of La Provence the next day will still carry the story that a gendarmerie captain believed our mayor has a Kalashnikov hidden under his bed. Do you really think you’ll find a Kalashnikov in Marcel’s house?”
“Even cold-blooded murderers have problems afterward with the weapon used. Weapons carry evidence, sometimes related to the victim, always related to the perpetrator. Every idiot knows from television that DNA traces are hard to eliminate, there are almost invisible traces of blood, microscopic fibers, and a thousand other indicators. No matter how well a killer cleans the weapon he used, he can never be certain that he has eliminated every trace of the evidence pointing at him. So what does he do with it? Throw it away? He would be afraid to the end of his days that somebody might stumble on it and he would end up being caught. In any case it’s not that easy to get rid of a large weapon like a Kalashnikov, least of all when you’re the mayor, known to everybody for miles around.”
“What’s to stop him simply dropping the gun over the side of his fishing boat?”
“Fear. His car is about as inconspicuous as a tank. The minute he opens the door down at Saint-César harbor, there’ll be somebody there to say hello. You really think he can then take a Kalashnikov wrapped in a blanket out of the trunk, or a box or wherever he’s hidden it, and calmly walk across the parking lot, down the pier, past dozens of other boats with his friends and acquaintances sitting on them, watching him? Take the weapon on board his little boat, which doesn’t even have a cabin? Then throw it overboard on the lake, with dozens of other boats out there? Or go out onto the lake at night, the sole boat out there, with an outboard motor loud enough to be heard in the middle of the town? And even if he did, the weapon would only be a few dozen feet under the surface of the water, in a lake where there are fishermen out every day with lines and nets? ‘Oh, what’s this I’ve caught? Better call the cops…’” Blanc shook his head. “Or maybe Lafont goes out into the wood, spade in one hand, automatic weapon in the other? And then somebody on a horse comes by, or a hunter? Or some wild boar unearths it some night rutting up the soil? Or some farmer’s wild goats? Nope. Not likely.”
“He could bury the gun among the foundations for his médiathèque. That would do the trick. It would be safe there. Rather fitting, don’t you think?” Aveline Vialaron-Allègre moved closer to him.
“Not until the building work has started. As long as the foundation stone hasn’t been laid, Lafont will have
the Kalashnikov hidden somewhere.”
“If you go in and search the mayor’s house just before the elections, there’ll be a scandal whether you find the weapon or not. It’s the sort of situation my husband refers to as Ancien Régime: No matter what you do, you end up with your head under the guillotine. He’s got a lot of experience in avoiding situations like that. There’s absolutely no way he’d allow you to carry out the search.”
“Even a minister of state has no power to prevent a search if it’s been ordered by a juge d’instruction. That would be against the law.”
“There are laws that are upheld, and laws that aren’t upheld.” She gave him a long, searching look. “Why, mon Capitaine, are you rushing headlong into an adventure in which you have nothing to win? Do you do it for the thrill of the risk?” She was sitting right next to him now, her perfume overwhelming him.
“My job is to uphold the law, no matter what. And I simply don’t like seeing a criminal get away with it.” He hesitated. “And yes, if you must know, I do enjoy the thrill of the risk.”
Aveline Vialaron-Allègre gave him a bewitching smile, spontaneously closed the last few inches between them, and kissed him on the lips. Blanc felt her hair on his cheek and his hands on her skin and for a moment he was deliriously happy.
She slipped casually out of her expensive dress, nonchalantly letting it fall to the floor as she lay back on the sofa bed, naked. “We don’t have a lot of time,” she whispered. “I have to be back in court.”
Ancien Régime, thought Blanc.
Search Warrant
The next morning Blanc was tempted to believe his hour with Aveline Vialaron-Allègre had been a hallucination of a brain disturbed by the mistral. For a brief, confusing, passionate moment he had held in his arms a beautiful, experienced lover. But after they had both exhausted their lust she had got up without a word and disappeared through a door. He heard the sound of rushing water from the shower and then embarrassingly found himself still lying there naked on the sofa when Madame Aveline Vialaron-Allègre reappeared in a Chanel suit and smart shoes, makeup and hair perfect. “I think you should go now, mon Capitaine,” she said, lighting up another Gauloise.
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