Murderous Mistral

by Cay Rademacher

  While he was hastily getting dressed she went downstairs and was using her laptop to control the security camera by the door, turning the lens to left and right to scan the length of the rue du Passe-Temps. “There are advantages to living in an out-of-the-way place,” she murmured. “Nobody will see you leave.”

  Thirty seconds later he was back on the edge of the Caillouteaux plateau, her house behind him, as silent and empty looking as all the others. The wind blew the last vestige of her scent from his hair. Aveline still says “vous” rather than “tu” to me, it occurred to him absurdly. He wasn’t sure he would ever again be as intimate with her as he had just been. Or indeed, whether he wanted to.

  He drove back to Gadet and told his colleagues that the juge d’instruction was prepared to issue a search warrant for Lafont’s house at midday the following day. Fabienne had given him an odd look as if she didn’t quite trust him. Nkoulou was remarkably relaxed and made the necessary arrangements for a couple of cars and a few gendarmes to be ready, without telling any of them what they were to be ready for. Tonon was in a state of shock. It had simply never occurred to him that one day he might be about to turn over Lafont’s house.

  Blanc returned to Sainte-Françoise-la-Vallée early, but it wasn’t just the mistral that kept him awake lying there on his hard bed, turning to and fro, but thoughts of death and love.

  He thought about the action they were about to take against Lafont. In twenty-four hours’ time the mayor would be finished. Or else he would be. France might be a country in which the boss of a billion-dollar company couldn’t even fire a doorman without the trade union setting tires alight outside the gates, but Lafont and Vialaron-Allègre would find one way or another to hound him out of the gendarmerie. They would fire him. Or, what did he know, maybe Captain Roger Blanc would also end up lying like a peppered, grilled chicken in some godforsaken corner of the Midi.

  And then there was the hour he had spent with Aveline. Happiness and passion, but along with them the worry about even the idea of starting an affair with this woman of all people and at this time of all times. That was if it even was the start of an affair … As the gray dawn approached, he had persuaded himself to forget the hour they had spent together. What he had done had not just been unprofessional, it had been idiotic. D’accord, it had been Aveline who had seduced him. But lust had consumed him, even though it was precisely the woman who had described it as the second oldest motive in the world who had inflamed it. But their hour together was hardly love. It was revenge. Revenge on Geneviève. Revenge on the minister. The action of a beaten man, already on the floor but still trying to get in one last kick. Not exactly something to be proud of. And certainly not love. He would never make the slightest mention or insinuation of it to anyone, least of all Madame Vialaron-Allègre. It would be as if he had never even gone to see her.

  It was only when he set off in the Espace that he realized his baseball cap with NOVA SCOTIA on it was nowhere to be found. The only explanation could be that he had left it in a house in Caillouteaux.

  * * *

  He did manage to locate his phone, however. He wanted to make the most of the few hours before midday and called Miette Fuligni. “I’d like to take a look at some of your husband’s papers,” he told her when she answered. “Do you know where he kept the documentation relating to the planned médiathèque?”

  “In his office. I used to keep things in order for him, filed his documents away and things like that. But then that Romanian tart arrived and took charge. Or rather didn’t take charge. It looks like a whorehouse in there. Good luck trying to find it. Marcel also came by looking for something and left in a bad mood.”

  Blanc gasped. “Monsieur Lafont? When was this?”

  “The same day my husband’s body turned up. He came to pay his condolences. What did you think?”

  “Is it okay if I come by?”

  “If you want, but come now; I’ve arranged to play tennis with Lucien later.”

  Quite the grieving widow, Blanc thought to himself, wondering how anyone could manage to play tennis in the mistral. But at the same time he was more angry with himself for not preventing Lafont from going through the dead man’s papers. He had the feeling he would be wasting his time.

  A few minutes later he was standing next to Madame Fuligni, who was wearing a thin red tracksuit, in the dead building contractor’s office. There was still a heady smell of perfume in the air. Miette wrinkled her nose and opened the window wide. “Just like a whorehouse,” she muttered.

  Blanc went over the dozen or so boxed files on the shelves on the wall. Someone had used a felt-tip pen to mark each with a date and a note—either a surname or a street name or a place.

  “Those are all Pascal’s projects over the last ten years,” she explained. “From the initial estimate to the finishing details. One file per house.”

  Up at the top was a box file marked “médiathèque” in different handwriting to all the others. The letter “H” had been inserted as an afterthought. “His girl didn’t even know proper French,” Miette Fuligni added.

  The box file was empty. “Was your husband in the habit of opening a file with nothing to put in it?” Blanc asked.

  “Don’t talk nonsense. Pascal always had masses of paperwork: estimates, contracts, drawings, plans, anything you can imagine. It was only when the pile on his desk got out of control that he called me for help. Or rather his Romanian more recently—she probably lost them all.”

  No, Blanc thought to himself. The girl might have made a few mistakes, but she wasn’t that useless. Lafont hadn’t come to pay his condolences, he’d come to clean up. “Did the mayor stay long, when he turned up on the Thursday?”

  “He might have been here for a couple of hours. I don’t look at my watch much and on that day I probably didn’t bother at all.”

  Time enough to go through not just that file but all of them. Blanc was disappointed. Maybe there would still be something, some tiny grubby little story from Lafont and Fuligni’s relationship. But it would take a team of cops days to find something like that. Forget it, he told himself. He went over to the desk, looked through what was lying on it, what was in the drawers. It was impossible to tell if everything was how Fuligni had left it or if someone else had already been through it. Routinely he looked through the papers, flicked through the calendars and notebooks: measurements, orders for building sand, telephone numbers, a drawing of a curved staircase, roughly scribbled with a ball pen, but surprisingly elegant in design. When Blanc lifted the two issues of Paris Match that lay spread open on the desk, Miette Fuligni snorted in anger. The magazines smelt particularly strongly of the cheap perfume. He flicked through them—and pulled out a letter that had obviously been used as a bookmark in the most recent issue. It was a letter from the commune of Caillouteaux.

  The letter was unsigned, just a routine note to all those involved in the médiathèque building project, informing them that all the water pipes were to be laid on the land belonging to Monsieur Charles Moréas. Somebody had ringed the name in yellow felt tip. I doubt very much that was the Romanian, Blanc said to himself. The date on the letter was the previous Wednesday. Fuligni must have got it on the Thursday. He could imagine the scene as if it were a movie: The building contractor reads the letter. Just a routine matter. Then he sees the name Moréas. Maybe that’s when it all finally becomes clear to him, seeing it in black and white: the name of the victim and his niggling suspicion coming together. Fuligni himself has already had the police question him. Now the victim’s name crops up in a document addressed to him. What if the cops turn up and find all the documents with the name Moréas on them in his office? Panic. He scrawls a ring around the name and sends his pal Lafont a text asking him to do something to get him out of the firing line. Then he dashes out of the office. The young Romanian, who hasn’t a clue about anything, picks up the letter and uses it as a bookmark in her magazine. Lafont does indeed react to the text message, but not in the w
ay Fuligni had been expecting. He kills his old friend, goes to visit his widow to pay his condolences, and searches the office. But how could he know that the last letter from the commune would be in a copy of Paris Match? He misses this one tiny piece of evidence … It made a great story, all too credible, as Aveline Vialaron-Allègre might say if one had the slightest bit of proof. Don’t let yourself get led astray, Blanc told himself. “Did your husband have any contact with Monsieur Lafont that Thursday prior to his death?”

  Miette Fuligni shook her head. “Not as far as I know.”

  “Really?” Blanc was disappointed.

  “As far as I know. Marcel wanted to speak to him, I remember. He called at some stage in the afternoon, got me on my cell phone because he couldn’t get hold of Pascal. His Romanian girl didn’t bother to pick up the office phone, I imagine. And Pascal had left his iPhone on the bedside table, as you know.”

  “Did Monsieur Lafont say what he wanted to talk to Pascal about? Did he leave a message?”

  “He just wanted to know where he could get hold of him. I told him Pascal had gone down to his yacht and was going to spend the rest of the day there and the night as well. That wasn’t the wrong thing to do, was it?”

  “No,” Blanc lied, “not the wrong thing at all.”

  * * *

  Leaving the Fuligni driveway, the captain was about to turn onto the route départementale heading for Gadet when to his left he spotted a car rushing toward him at high speed. He halted to let it pass, distracted by his thoughts. Then he noticed that it was a little red car. A Mini, with an elderly lady at the wheel whom he vaguely recognized. A matronly figure with gray hair and a large bosom. Where do I know you from, Blanc asked himself. Then he realized.

  The online edition of La Provence. The photo taken outside the school: Carole Lafont, the mayor’s wife.

  Carole Lafont. A red Mini. The red Mini that had also been in the photo, in the parking lot in the background. A parking lot, like the parking lot down by the garbage dump. The statement by the farmer that he had seen a small red car down by the dump on Sunday morning. No, he hadn’t just seen it, he had had to drive around it. Rheinbach in his Clio had been there too, but he had parked outside the gate, not in anybody’s way. Then he remembered Lafont’s words the first time they had met: “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.”

  He had only ever connected the mayor to his huge monster of a car. But he had taken the Mini. To go to Marseille. To get a Kalashnikov from a friend down there, possibly? But would Lafont, who never got his hands dirty, let someone pass off a hot weapon on him? Or might he deliberately have bought a gun that had previously been used in a murder, to divert attention in the direction of Marseille? Whatever the case, on the day of the murder he hadn’t been driving around in his big, conspicuous Audi Q7, but in his wife’s little red car. He parked in the entrance road to the dump in order to take out Moréas. On a Sunday, so that the next morning he could make his claim to his strip of land. But he had had to wait. The farmer Gaston Julien was getting rid of his roofing felt and got annoyed at the red car he had to drive round. And then a scrawny red-haired man turned up, Moréas laughed in his face, the man threw a stone at him, and Moréas fell over. The ideal opportunity for Lafont. As soon as Rheinbach raced off there was nobody else left at the dump—except for Moréas, who could hardly stand up, and was certainly in no situation to run away. He was an easy target …

  It was another good, plausible story, but still one he had no proof of. Don’t make a fool of yourself. Don’t go falling in love. Unless he found the Kalashnikov, Blanc knew he was finished.

  * * *

  At the gendarmerie station they were waiting impatiently for him. Everybody knew there was something in the air, but not what. Nobody could have rung Lafont secretly to warn him. Aveline Vialaron-Allègre wasn’t there, which was good. He would be able to concentrate better, even though he was a tiny bit disappointed not to see her. Blanc took Fabienne and Marius into his office, closed the door behind them, and told them about the files in Fuligni’s office, Lafont turning up supposedly to offer his condolences, and the mayor’s wife with her red Mini.

  “Sounds a convincing tale,” Fabienne said.

  “As convincing as an old-fashioned novel,” the old lieutenant interjected. “You don’t really think you could win a case in court with a story like that, do you?” Tonon was freshly showered and wearing a clean uniform with skewed creases, evidence that he had obviously ironed it himself. He didn’t reek of rosé, but his hands were shaking ever so slightly. His gun was in his holster. Blanc wondered if it might not be better to avoid taking him to search the mayor’s house, but he couldn’t think of a suitable excuse to leave his colleague behind.

  “Where is Madame le juge?” Fabienne asked.

  “She’s going to be there with us,” Blanc assured her, realizing that he didn’t sound one hundred percent certain of that.

  “We’re diving headlong into a heap of shit,” Marius said gloomily. “I’ve almost completed my thirty-second year of service. Finish it and I can retire and wander around Saint-César market watching the girls’ asses. Instead Lafont and his pals will have our guts for garters. The juge d’instruction has vanished in a puff of smoke. Nkoulou has shut himself away in his office. We’re left out here in the cold. They’ll hang us out to dry by our balls.”

  “They might have a problem with that in my case,” Fabienne said, giving him an encouraging smile. But Blanc saw it wasn’t easy for her either.

  “Stay here, both of you,” he suggested. “I’m in the firing line anyway. I’ll go on my own with the lower ranks, you can hold down the fort here.”

  Marius looked as if he was about to agree, but his younger colleague spoke up first. “So that you get all the glory and a medal for finding the Kalashnikov? Out of the question.” Tonon murmured something that sounded more like a curse.

  On the ground floor a dozen gendarmes were waiting along with four plainclothes members of the forensics team with their kit. Their faces suggested they already knew they would find nothing. Outside a couple of Méganes were parked, as well as a white delivery van. Most of the doors to the downstairs offices were closed. Blanc went to see Nkoulou. “We’re good to go,” he said.

  “I’ve given the men their instructions. You’re in charge now.”

  “You aren’t coming with us?” Blanc had Tonon’s grim prediction in his ears.

  “I can’t drop everything else on my plate for one operation. You’re perfectly competent enough to carry this out without me. I wish you success, mon Capitaine.” Nkoulou turned his eyes down to examine in detail a file that lay open on his polished wooden desk.

  As Blanc was leaving, the door to the office of the female chain-smoker whose name he could never remember opened. She waved to him, and then suddenly her waving hand drew a line across her throat.

  Corporal Baressi on the reception desk muttered, “Au revoir, mon Capitaine,” though it sounded sad rather than sarcastic, then called after him, “Bonne chance.”

  “See you later,” Blanc replied, forcing a smile. Where is Aveline? he wondered worriedly.

  He could feel a dozen pairs of eyes on him as he walked out of the building. “We are going to search the house of Monsieur Marcel Lafont, who is a suspect in the murder of Charles Moréas,” he told them. “The main item we are searching for is the weapon used in the murder, a Kalashnikov.” He gave them a few more details, handed around photographs, issued a few specific orders. But he had the impression no one was really paying attention.

  Eventually one of the younger men said, “You really do mean Mayor Lafont?”

  “Don’t be intimidated by his office.”

  “I’m just glad I’ll be wearing a mask,” one of the
forensics team said. There was a burst of nervous laughter.

  Blanc paid no attention and walked over to the patrol car with Marius and Fabienne. They would lead the little column. The others piled into the remaining cars. Blanc tried to ignore the whispering but couldn’t fail to overhear a few words: “Paris … posted here … Vialaron-Allègre … Putain!”

  * * *

  Marius directed them to an unmarked route that ran through the woods down the slope from Caillouteaux. The Mégane rattled over a few potholes, then braked before a new, green-painted gate in a yellow wall some six feet high. “Looks a bit like a jail,” Fabienne muttered.

  “In that case Monsieur Lafont won’t have anything new to get used to,” Blanc replied, leaning out of the window to press the bell. “Gendarmerie,” he said into the speaker.

  They heard the sound of an electric motor, then the gate swung open and they drove through. Beyond the gate the rickety track became a gravel roadway, leading to a pink-plastered villa. Very new and very big. The curved white bow windows looked as if they had been taken from a château, though they turned out to be modern and made of PVC. To the side of the house was a swimming pool as blue as the cooling tank in a nuclear power station.

  “It’ll take us a week to search this palace,” Tonon muttered disconsolately.

  “We’re not looking for some misplaced strand of hair, we’re looking for a Kalashnikov,” Blanc replied, noting at the same time how sharp and nervous his own voice sounded. He opened the car door.

  Lafont came out to meet him, a sly smile on his face. He would have seen us drive up on surveillance cameras, the captain reckoned. He saw the cars and knows what’s coming. He didn’t even bother to pretend to be surprised. Maybe somebody did warn him after all.