Chapter 26
It was not the worst road accident Bruno had ever seen. Pileups were the most gruesome, the most far reaching in their consequences. But for a single-car crash, he had never seen anything quite like it. At least, he thought, the car had not burned, despite the pungent smell of oil and gas.
Huge logs of fresh-cut wood were scattered and clumsily piled across the bank, the road itself and into and around the ditch beyond. Bruno was reminded of a children’s game, spillikins, in which wooden sticks are tossed down into a jumbled pile and each one has to be removed without disturbing the rest. The car seemed to have hit the logs soon after or even at the very moment they had spilled onto the road. There were no signs of braking on the tarmac, at least not in the harsh glare of the arc lights the pompiers had rigged.
The largest piece that remained of the car, the squashed and crumpled passenger compartment, was more than a hundred meters down the road. Other parts, a crumpled tailgate here and a wheel and door there, the engine block, were scattered at almost regular intervals behind it. These shreds of what had once been an automobile reached all the way back across the pellets of glass from the car windows, gleaming like tiny diamonds in the lights, to the tumbled heaps of logs, which had presumably caused the crash.
Bruno tried to make sense of the sprawl of debris. Perhaps the car had hit the logs, leaped into the air to turn somersaults, before bouncing rather than crashing down. But it must still have been moving so fast that it took flight once more, bounced again and flew another few meters through the night air before it finally landed on the road and skidded to a stop half on the road and half in the ditch.
The pompiers were working with giant metal cutters on this last heap of tangled metal. Up ahead, at what Bruno assumed was the first point of impact, Fabiola had already spread a blanket over one very small bundle. He lifted the blanket to be sure and almost reeled back. It could have been something hanging in a butcher’s shop. A young woman’s body lay amid the pitiful contents of a burst suitcase; clothing, a toothbrush, a smashed hair dryer, a single shoe, male. Bruno had not known that Fabiola was the doctor on duty and instinctively he moved to join her as she bent over another crumpled form.
This one was a man, the remains of a shirt around his shoulders and the rest of the body bare except for a pair of jeans that were still attached to his one remaining leg. The torso was a mass of bloody wounds, and the head bent at an impossible angle. An expensive-looking briefcase was attached with a chain and padlock to the left arm. The case itself was locked. Bruno used his phone to take a picture of the case before Fabiola draped a blanket over the body. She paused, wiped away some of the blood from the caved-in chest and pointed.
“Did you ever see tattoos like that?” she asked.
A large crucifix emerged as she wiped the dead man’s chest. It was topped by a saint’s head and flanked by a church with a tower topped with an onion-shaped dome. There were more tattoos on the arm that held the briefcase, a large star on the shoulder and on the wrist a series of dots, four arranged in a square with another dot in the center. Below the church were some letters that seemed to spelled CEBEP.
Baffled by this, Bruno took more photos.
“I’d better get to the car, what’s left of it,” Fabiola said. “The pompiers think the driver is still inside, but they’re sure he’s dead.”
“That would make three in the car,” he said. “No other bodies. The small one you put the blanket on. What was that?”
“Female and young, but that’s all I could tell,” she said.
Bruno shook his head but said nothing, thinking that if he took enough photos of the scene, he should be able to reopen the road before morning. His first job had been to close the road, put up temporary diversion signs and liaise with the traffic police. Then he’d called Lespinasse at home, waking him to say his tow truck would be needed before dawn to help clear the road. Now he called the owner of the funeral parlor to say they had at least three dead. Then he walked back with Fabiola to where the pompiers were working.
“The driver is in there, dead,” said Albert, the fire chief. “When the car first bounced, the engine must have come up and damn near cut him in half.”
“I took one look,” said Fabiola. “I think he was male, white, enough of one hand left to say he’d been professionally manicured.”
“So we confirm three dead,” said Bruno. “Any sign of another passenger? Or any ID?”
“Not on the road. Maybe you can find something from those burst suitcases,” Albert said. “There was a woman’s handbag under the passenger seat with a fancy bamboo handle. We haven’t opened it yet, but you might find some identification in there. It’s a Gucci, so I assume expensive. We’ll take care of the photography. I’ll let you do the search for IDs. All I can give you is that the registration number starts with M, but I don’t know if that stands for ‘Monaco’ or ‘Malta.’ And the car was a Maserati, must have cost a couple of hundred thousand euros.”
Bruno was scribbling down the registration number when Albert spoke again. “The speedometer was stopped at nearly a hundred and forty kilometers an hour. Even if he’d seen the logs, the damn fool wouldn’t have had time to slow down, let alone stop.”
“And there were no signs of braking,” Bruno said. “Maybe the logs began falling just in time for him to hit them. That’s a hell of a coincidence.”
He called the traffic police operations room again and gave them the registration number and then retraced his steps, much more slowly this time, looking for luggage. Within thirty minutes, he had found the bodies of one mature wild boar and two young sangliers pinned beneath logs. He had also collected two burst suitcases and one larger cargo bag of heavy-duty canvas, its zipper open and the bag filled mainly with women’s high-heeled shoes that seemed to be of different sizes. He had the handbag that had been found under the car seat. Could there have been another woman in the car?
He kept searching and found a second handbag in the ditch, along with a chicken head. What on earth was that doing there, around hungry wild boars? Maybe they hadn’t finished eating when they were killed. The bag was black leather, with the name MICHAEL KORS on the flap in small gold capital letters. That meant nothing to Bruno, but a second handbag could mean a second woman, so he continued searching, walking along the ditch from the logs to the wrecked cockpit that contained the driver.
He walked back up the other side of the road, shining his flashlight into the undergrowth along the bank and the shrubs and young trees above it, until he reached the log pile again. He clambered gingerly over the unstable pieces of timber, each at least three meters long and up to thirty centimeters thick, aware that with a slip or one false step he could break a leg. He saw nothing except shards of glass.
He scrambled up the bank to where the stack of logs had been, knowing that with daylight he’d have to try and establish just why the pile had tumbled and destroyed the Maserati. Various possibilities had already flashed through his mind: a rabbit warren that suddenly collapsed under the weight of logs; wild boars rooting nearby until the logs became unstable; somebody loosening the pile as they tried to steal some timber. But his immediate priority was to search for the possibly missing woman, although the kind of woman who was traveling in a Maserati could have owned two handbags.
Could she have landed up here? He looked down toward the wrecked tailgate, close to where the man with the briefcase had been found. Suppose the car had hit the logs, catapulted into the air, losing the tailgate as it landed and spilled out the man with the briefcase in the rear seat. If a woman had been in the rear seat, she could have been hurled from the rear of the car, and her momentum would have taken her forward. He pushed through the undergrowth on top of the bank, his flashlight scanning from side to side. Suddenly he was aware of broken branches brushing against his head. He shone his flashlight upward. The branches were freshly broken. He turned
right, following the trail, and saw a flash of white. He pushed forward again, ignoring the scratches to his face and hands.
“Fabiola,” he shouted. “There’s someone else here.”
He bent over the half-naked woman, legs askew as if broken, streaks of blood on her face and body. She was wearing only one high-heeled shoe and a gaping white bra, the kind that opened in front. He put a hand to her neck and felt a faint pulse.
“She’s alive,” he roared out and bent to start giving her the kiss of life until Fabiola appeared, half helped and half dragged by Albert. She told him to keep going and put a stethoscope to the girl’s chest. Then she pushed Bruno out of the way to prize open the girl’s eyelids and peer into her eyes.
“We need a stretcher here right away and get that ambulance as close as you can,” she ordered. “Bruno, keep giving the kiss of life until we get an oxygen mask up here. Albert, call Dr. Gelletreau and say I’ll need him at the clinic and then call in Mireille, she’s the best nurse. Then call the hospital in Périgueux and tell them the road may be closed, so they’ll need to send us a helicopter. Severe concussion, multiple broken limbs and ribs, probable chest damage. I’ll do an X-ray at the clinic so they’ll know what they’re facing. Please stress that I want Decourcy, he’s the best man on chests. With a lot of luck, we might even be able to save this one.”
Bruno kept blowing air into the stricken woman until another pompier took over. At Fabiola’s instruction, Bruno and Albert then stamped down the undergrowth around the woman until the stretcher came and was placed beside her on the flattened ground. They moved her carefully onto it, the oxygen mask was placed on her face and the firemen moved off, Fabiola following to where they could scramble down the bank and into the waiting ambulance. Fabiola climbed in and the vehicle roared off, siren starting to howl.
“Merde, she was lucky you found her,” said Albert, mopping his brow. “What the devil inspired you to look up here?”
“I found a second handbag, which suggested a second woman.”
“A good thing you did. We’d have been in big trouble if she was found in a day or two, dead of exposure or something.”
Bruno’s phone vibrated in the pouch at his belt. It was the traffic control room. The Maserati was registered in Monaco to a Maltese citizen named Alexander Dimitrovich Fallin. The police in Monaco had been informed and would follow up.
Bruno informed them that a fourth passenger had been found, a young woman, badly injured but alive and now in an ambulance heading for the local clinic but with a helicopter expected to take her to Périgueux. He would forward any other names of passengers once he had examined the various bags and whatever papers he could find. Once daybreak came, he would take a careful look at the place where the log pile had stood and how it had been secured. The owner could be in serious trouble.
He put both handbags into his van and borrowed the heavy-duty metal cutter from the pompiers to sever the chain that attached the briefcase to the dead man’s arm. The case itself was sealed with a combination lock, so there was no point assuming he’d find the key somewhere among the various possessions. He put the case in his van, thinking he might have to force it. He had tools at home. Then he went to each burst suitcase, gathering what belongings he could find, and put them in the van as well. The funeral parlor staff would strip the bodies. They knew they should keep clothing and contents, particularly any wallets, for Bruno to pick up. When all that he could see remaining on the road were wooden logs and chunks of Maserati, he found Albert and asked when he could sign off on the site and call in Lespinasse to clear the road.
“Another half hour should do it,” Albert said. “I’ll have the bodies taken to the funeral place first, and then we’ll do a last search. Will you take care of the ID papers and possessions?”
Bruno nodded. “I’ll let you have a copy of the inventory. The car was registered in Monaco, but the owner was Maltese, with a Russian name.”
“One of those.” Albert grunted.
“How do you mean?”
“There was something on TV about it, some European inquiry into countries selling passports and citizenship to rich foreigners, a lot of them Russians. Malta was mentioned along with Cyprus.”
Bruno pursed his lips. “And with one of those passports the owner could live and work anywhere in Europe?”
“That’s it. Always the same, one law for the rich. I bet you won’t see those people with the fancy passports working all night like us.”
“Probably not, but we’re alive,” said Bruno, seeing the first streaks of dawn to the east. “And here comes a new day.”
Bruno went home, first to take a run through the woods with Balzac, just as the sun rose and the birds exploded into song. He fed his ducks and chickens, plugged in the kettle to make coffee, had a quick shower and put on two eggs to boil. He grilled the remaining half of yesterday’s baguette while listening to the national and international news before shifting to the local news. The accident and road closure were the second item, just after the latest complaint from various local mayors about the way central government was chipping away at their prerogatives.
Bruno dipped his grilled bread into the runny yolks, a bit for Balzac and a bit for him, and then filled one of the dog’s bowls with fresh water and the other with dog biscuits. He squeezed two oranges for his own pleasure and added a spoonful of honey to his morning coffee. Breakfast over, he went out to his van to look at the lock on the briefcase.
The combination required two sets of four numerals. He tried all zeros, all nines, and then one to eight. Then he tried the system a thief of his acquaintance had taught him. He rotated each of the numbers until they seemed to lock and tried to open the caches. That usually worked on cheap locks with just three digits, but this time he had no success. He tried the second method, straightening out a paper clip and poking it into the catch to try to depress the tumbler. That failed, too. He tried the third method, inserting some strong fishing line into the catch and pulling it sideways while he tried again to get the rows of numbers unlocked. No luck.
The last method he knew needed a strong light on the locks. He used the paper clip to ease the first number to the right and saw the glint of metal to the left. That was the tumbler. He moved the code buttons one digit at a time until he saw the tiny indentation in the otherwise smooth tumbler. The digit was 4. He moved to the next one, turning the second code until he saw the telltale indentation again. That was 7. The third digit gave him 2 and the next one 3. The lock didn’t open, but he knew he had the tumbler lined up, so he advanced each of the four buttons by one digit. When he got to 6-9-4-5 the lock opened. The same four digits worked on the second lock. He opened the case to what looked like files filled with documents.
On top of them was a clear plastic envelope containing a cashier’s check from a bank in Monaco for three hundred thousand euros, made out to Notaire Brosseil, for a client escrow account. Below that was a file containing computer printouts of a letter from Brosseil, a draft contract to buy Château Rock en viager, and a copy of the relevant section of the commune cadastre, the map showing the location and lot numbers of the property to be sold.
There were other files relating to other properties, to the retirement home, to insurance contracts, property tax returns and the like. At the bottom of the briefcase lay temptation. Neat rows of green one-hundred-euro and brown fifty-euro notes stared up at him. He’d never seen so much cash in his life. The notes had bands of paper around their centers, each one printed with the digits “100 × 100,” “100 × 50,” just as if they had come from a bank. That would mean ten thousand euros in each band of hundred-euro notes, five thousand in the bands of fifties. There were eight bands of notes, side by side, facing him, four in each denomination. That would be sixty thousand euros in the top band. He took out a pair of evidence gloves and gingerly picked up a wad from the first band and found another identical ba
nd below. That would be a hundred and twenty thousand euros in cash.
Briefly, he thought what he might do with such wealth. A house, but he had a house. A car, but he had his police van and his elderly Land Rover. Travel? But why would he want to travel away from his beloved Périgord? Bruno remembered an evening with his friend and hunting partner Stéphane, with whom he played the national lottery each week. Talking of what they might do if they won, they had, to their mutual surprise, agreed that neither of them would change his life much. Bruno closed and relocked the briefcase and picked up his phone to call J-J.
“Bonjour, J-J,” he said brightly as a sleepy voice answered him. “You may not have heard of the Maserati that crashed near St. Denis last night. The car was registered in Monaco. Three dead and one young woman badly hurt. One of the dead men, with a Russian name and a Maltese passport, had a briefcase chained to his arm. I just opened it. The case contains a lot of cash. Shall we head off to Monte Carlo? Or do you want to come here and help me go through the rest of the belongings?”
Bruno was answered by grunts and splutterings and a deep sigh. “Give me a minute,” J-J said, and Bruno heard bathroom sounds, running water, drinking. Then J-J said, “Repeat that.”
Bruno did so and could almost hear J-J’s brain grinding as he processed all this. “Have you been up all night?”
“Since I was called out to the crash at about two this morning.”
“How much in cash?” J-J whistled when Bruno told him and whistled again when he mentioned the cashier’s check. “I’d better come down to you with Yves and the forensic team. Have you finished the inventory? Do you have any other IDs for the dead?”
“No and no, and the three dead are at the funeral parlor. The injured woman has been taken to the Périgueux hospital by helicopter.”
The Shooting at Chateau Rock Page 23