The Secrets of the Bastide Blanche

by M. L. Longworth

  “Yes,” Valère replied, nodding. “I called this morning.”

  “How well do you know Mlle Matton?” Verlaque asked after Sandrine had gone through the front door.

  Valère looked surprised. “She’s the niece of my friend and lawyer, Guillaume Matton. I’ve known him for years.”

  “But not her.”

  “No, that’s true,” Valère answered. “But Matton would hardly have recommended her if she were . . . troublesome . . . or unreliable.”

  “She seems to think that your house is haunted.”

  Valère shrugged. “I’m at a loss to explain what’s been going on around here, and Sandrine’s ideas—however New Age they may seem—are worth a try at this point. I can’t handle another sleepless night.”

  Verlaque crossed his legs and looked up at the house before asking, “Is it possible that Mlle Matton is trying to frighten you?”

  Valère shook his head. “It started before she got here. Almost as soon as I moved in.”

  Verlaque noted that Sandrine Matton may have known—thanks to her uncle—the exact day that Valère took possession of the house. “Can you think of anyone else who might want you out of the house?”

  Sandrine came back out with a bottle of Laphroaig, curtsied, and left.

  “Merci, Sandrine!” Valère called after her. “Few people even know I’ve left Paris,” he continued.

  “What exactly has been happening here?” Verlaque asked. “Can you explain it to me?”

  Valère sat back and began describing to the judge the odd goings-on at night. He was relieved that Verlaque nodded and listened carefully, not passing judgment.

  “You realize there may be logical explanations for these incidents,” Verlaque said once Valère had finished.

  “I know, I know. The wiring is older than the hills; it needs to be completely redone. That could explain the lights going on and off. And I know that old houses make noises. But what about the voices? The impression of another body on my bed?”

  “Who gains from trying to frighten you? Is there anyone who hates you?”

  Valère laughed.

  “Someone angry at you?”

  “Yes,” Valère slowly answered. “But she’s dead.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Aix-en-Provence,

  Thursday, July 7, 2010

  Marine was a great believer in following a recipe, down to the minute details. Like many daughters of well-educated women who grew up in France in the 1970s, she wasn’t taught how to cook. Her mother, Florence Bonnet, a noted theologian and professor at Aix’s university, believed the right to work and attend university had been earned by French women after the Second World War. Her daughter would be free from the shackles of the country-house kitchen, as she herself had been.

  Marine laid a bottle of olive oil on the Elle recipe page, to keep it flat and stop it from turning. She had borrowed the magazine from Sylvie, who was a subscriber and liked to chide Marine for not buying what she considered essential bonne lecture for every French woman. Marine understood what her best friend meant: Elle was full of well-written reviews of currently released books and films, articles on relationships, politics, and of course dazzling fashion pages—but the clothes were not too expensive, as in Vogue. But it was the recipes in the last pages that attracted Marine: simple meals made from easy-to-find ingredients that reflected the seasons, and for the most part written for women her age who, like her, hadn’t been taught how to cook.

  Both she and Antoine loved to eat well, and she was competitive enough to want to strive to be a better cook than her husband. His kitchen—their kitchen now—was a joy to cook in, with its smooth marble countertops, gas range with five burners, and very sharp German knives. How had she managed for so long with dull knives, in her simple kitchen on the other side of Aix?

  The door to their fourth-floor apartment opened, and Antoine walked in, shouting, “Coucou!” as he usually did. Marine replied with her standard, “Buonasera!” While pouring dark-green olive oil into two glass baking dishes, she continued, “I’m afraid I’m losing my Italian.”

  “It doesn’t look like it,” Verlaque replied, pointing to the olive oil.

  Marine laughed. “I don’t mean cooking. The language.”

  “Let’s buy an apartment in Venice, then.”

  “You’re joking!”

  “Not at all,” he said. “Apartments in Venice are now half the price of the same in Paris.”

  Marine set down the olive oil and stared at him. “Are you serious?”

  “I can show you,” he said, taking his cell phone out of his pocket.

  “No no,” she said. “I believe you. I want to get this in the oven.”

  “Is it all right if I spread some papers on the dining room table?”

  “Sure. I thought we’d eat outside on the terrace.”

  “Great.” Verlaque held up a faded green folder about two inches thick and said, “The report on Agathe Barbier’s drowning, from 1988.”

  “Should you have that here?”

  Verlaque shrugged, thinking of Chantal’s demand that the dossier be sent back to her accompanied by police officers. “Probably not. But I wanted your opinion.”

  “Okay, I’ll look at it after you’ve gone through it.”

  “I’ll save you the good bits.” He took a few steps toward the dining room and then turned back. “There’s only one problem with an apartment in Venice,” he said.

  “The city is sinking?”

  “No.”

  “Acqua alta?”

  “No.”

  “Too many tourists?”

  “Not in Castello.”

  “I give up.”

  Verlaque frowned. “There isn’t a direct flight from Marseille.”

  “Ah, that would complicate quick weekend getaways. By the way, it’s an all-vegetable dinner tonight.”

  Verlaque mimed stabbing himself as he walked back into the dining room.

  * * *

  Verlaque leaned back in his chair, wiping the corners of his mouth with a large linen napkin. “Excellent,” he proclaimed.

  Marine squirmed. She thought her husband was being overcongratulatory. “Thank you,” she answered. “Too bad the rosemary was burnt.”

  “You’re too hard on yourself.” Verlaque poured the rest of the wine into their glasses, and his stomach made a rumbling sound.

  “Was that your stomach?” Marine asked. “You can’t be hungry?”

  “Maybe I’ll just grab a few slices of salami from the fridge. Do you mind?”

  “Go right ahead,” she answered, laughing. “Was the Agathe Barbier dossier revealing in any way?”

  “Fairly straightforward so far,” he said, getting up from the table. “I managed to read all the interviews while you were cooking.”

  “Don’t waste a trip,” Marine said, handing him a few dirty dishes as he made his way to the kitchen.

  She leaned back and looked over the rooftops. The cathedral’s octagonal steeple was lit up, and she suddenly heard the chorus of the opera break into song, just a few meters from their apartment. Verlaque came back upstairs carrying a small plate with thinly sliced salami and said, “Cheapest opera seats, right here.”

  “And we can eat as we listen.”

  “And drink,” he said, lifting his glass to hers.

  “Who was on the boat when Agathe went overboard?” Marine asked, picking up a piece of the salami and putting it into her mouth.

  “They were five,” Verlaque answered. “Agathe and Valère Barbier; Valère’s publisher Alphonse Pelloquin and his wife, Monica; and Valère’s secretary, Ursule Genoux.”

  “His secretary? On vacation?”

  “The commissioner in Cannes asked the same question when she interviewed Genoux,” Verlaque replied. “They were finishing u
p a book, and apparently she was always present when Valère was working. It was still the 1980s.”

  “Right,” Marine said. “No computers.”

  “Valère dictated to her while she typed.”

  “But on a boat?”

  “They had been in Sardinia for three weeks,” Verlaque said. “Monica Pelloquin is Italian and has a house there.”

  Marine winked. “Lucky them. I remember my parents talking about the accident. It all sounded so sordid. One imagines too many gin and tonics, too much sun, and then arguments and fights. You know, like those Hollywood stars in the thirties. What on earth was Agathe Barbier doing on deck during a storm anyway?”

  “She was seasick,” Verlaque replied. “No one knew she had gone up on deck, except for Alphonse Pelloquin, who warned her about the bad weather. The others were down below. Pelloquin claimed that when she insisted—she had been very sick all day, which the others confirmed—he told her to harness herself to the lifeline near the bow of the boat. He went back to the cockpit to steer, and just minutes after that she was gone. Over the storm’s racket he hadn’t heard a thing.”

  “Suicide?”

  “They all said that was impossible, knowing her even temperament and good nature.”

  “Where are these people now?” Marine asked.

  “In Paris,” Verlaque replied. “Except for Alphonse Pelloquin, who died of cancer in 2001.”

  Marine finished her wine, and then frowned and shook her head.

  “What’s bothering you, my dear?” Verlaque asked.

  “Why didn’t Agathe tie herself to the lifeline, like she was supposed to?”

  “Because she couldn’t? Perhaps she fell off before she had a chance to tether herself to the boat?”

  “And Daniel de Rudder wants you to find something in the dossier, right?”

  Verlaque nodded. “There are some photographs of the boat in the file. You used to sail, right?”

  “Hardly,” Marine answered. “A boy I dated in high school had a family boat in Marseille. I remember the nuts and bolts, I suppose. Rudder took you out, didn’t he?”

  “Many times,” Verlaque replied. “Very good memories, those.” He thought of Rudder, standing at the stern, with his tanned face and flyaway blond hair, yelling instructions to eager young law students, many of whom had never been on a boat in their lives. And there was Chantal . . .

  The sound of hundreds of people leaving the opera festival filled the square just around the corner from their apartment. Marine made a comment about the opera being finished, but Verlaque didn’t seem to hear. She stared at him and said, a little louder this time, “Let’s go inside and look at the photographs. I feel like tea. Would you care for any?”

  Verlaque looked up and said, “Tea? Yeah, sounds good.”

  Marine gathered the rest of the dishes and watched Verlaque, who had moved to the edge of the terrace and was looking out over the city. She loved resting her eyes on her husband when he wasn’t aware of it; she adored his thick black-and-gray hair, his crooked nose, his barrel chest and wide shoulders. He rested his elbows on the terrace’s stone wall and watched the crowd, some of whom would take the rue Adanson as a shortcut, others because they were lost, and still others because they simply felt like meandering on a warm summer night, perhaps inspired by Mozart’s opera. Verlaque stood motionless. Marine shrugged; she had at least expected a wisecrack about the tea.

  * * *

  “Such bad haircuts,” Marine said, looking at the black-and-white photographs laid out before them.

  Verlaque muttered in agreement. “Even the rich and famous weren’t immune to the Vidal Sassoon shag, circa 1985.”

  “And the women’s bangs that look like sausages,” Marine said, pointing to a passport photo of Monica Pelloquin. She picked up a photograph of a snarling adolescent boy. “Who’s this?”

  “Erwan Le Flahec, Agathe’s son,” Verlaque answered, picking up one of the police reports and reading it. “It says here he was born in Vallauris in 1972, so he would have been sixteen when his mother died.”

  “But he wasn’t on the boat that night, right?”

  “No.”

  “Thank God.”

  Verlaque continued reading while Marine carefully looked at the photographs, frowning and biting her bottom lip. Verlaque laughed and said, “The Cannes police gave each subject an evaluation when filling out these reports, like in grade school. Everyone on the boat received a ‘very disagreeable’ in the category of ‘cooperation while questioning.’”

  “Needs improvement,” Marine said.

  “Three out of ten. See me after class,” Verlaque added, laughing.

  “Even the kid,” he went on, “who was questioned in Paris, was, quote, ‘extremely uncooperative.’”

  “No wonder,” Marine mumbled. “His mother died.”

  “The secretary claimed that she overheard Agathe and Alphonse Pelloquin arguing earlier that afternoon.”

  Marine looked up. “Five people on a small sailboat. I don’t doubt it.”

  “Exactly. They could have been arguing about anything.”

  Marine said, “It must really bother Rudder that the case was never solved. He was an unbeatable judge, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes, but he was also human,” Verlaque said. “Rudder’s grandson, who must have been Erwan Le Flahec’s age at the time, was sick. Very sick, with leukemia. He died the next year. Rudder and I had drinks together one night a few years after that. Well, it went into the morning, and he confessed that the Barbier case still haunted him. He admitted that he should have taken a leave of absence, but he kept on the case, convinced he could do both—make visits to the hospital and resolve a suspicious death. He gave much of the work to a young colleague, who was in over his head. Rudder was already in his sixties then, and perhaps should have retired.”

  “It was a high-profile case,” Marine said. “It was Valère Barbier, for heaven’s sake. I still can’t believe that Barbier lives here, and we’ve met him. You know, it’s crazy . . . He’s such a big deal. I think because we’ve now joked with him, and chatted about this and that, we’re forgetting his importance to this country’s culture.”

  “I’ll have to be more nervous around him when I see him again,” Verlaque said.

  “And despite his joking and guy-next-door easiness,” Marine said, her voice getting higher as it usually did when she was excited, “I do remember Valère making cracks about me being married to a judge and Paulik being a policeman. Like he was nervous . . .”

  “He did that at the cigar club too,” Verlaque said. “But let’s not get carried away.”

  Marine picked up a stack of photos of the boat. “When did the police arrive on the scene? I mean the boat, in this case.”

  Verlaque slipped his reading glasses back on and turned the pages of the report. “Almost immediately,” he answered.

  “How is that possible?”

  “As it turns out, the boat was close to the coast,” he said. “Alphonse Pelloquin sent out an emergency call, and it says here that the coast guard arrived in under an hour.”

  “But things on the boat could have been changed by then, moved around.”

  Verlaque shook his head. “True, but Valère wouldn’t let anyone move until the coast guard came. I read that before we sat down to dinner. When he was interviewed, he told the police that he made the two women stay in the cockpit, tethered to their lifelines. He and Pelloquin tried shining lights on the sea and throwing buoys overboard, but it was no use.”

  “If they were close to the shore, why did Agathe’s body never wash up?”

  “Good question.”

  Marine snickered as she handed a photograph to Verlaque. “The kitchen,” he said, looking at the photograph of the ship’s small galley. “Judging by the number of used limes in the sink, you were right about the cockt
ails.” She leaned in toward Verlaque and continued, “Katharine Hepburn. That’s who I was thinking of. Didn’t she get in horrible drunken rows with . . . with . . .”

  “Spencer Tracy.”

  Marine snapped her fingers. “That’s him. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner! He was her husband in that film and in real life too, right?”

  “Lover,” Verlaque corrected. “He was a Catholic and wouldn’t divorce his wife.”

  Marine raised an eyebrow. She fumbled through the photographs until she found one of Agathe Barbier, and passed it to Verlaque. “See the baptismal medal around her neck?”

  Verlaque nodded. “It doesn’t mean she was devout.” He picked up a photograph of the boat’s foredeck and brought it closer, then handed it to Marine and flipped through the report until he got to the passage he was looking for. “Listen to this,” he said. “Monica Pelloquin, when interviewed, insisted that Alphonse was a maniacally thorough skipper. One of the other guests—I think it was the secretary—said the same thing.”

  “Obviously the storm wasn’t his fault,” Marine said.

  “But look at that foredeck,” Verlaque said, pointing to the photograph.

  “Oh là là.” Marine brought the photograph closer and narrowed her eyes, looking at it from left to right. “Quel bordel! Why isn’t the anchor in its well?”

  Verlaque smiled. “You do remember something about sailing. I remember Daniel de Rudder was a fanatic about using the anchor well. And look at all those lines on the deck, the ones that belong in the cleats and bow fairleads or whatever they’re called. They should be coiled and stowed away. Rudder always said that an untidy deck was an accident waiting to happen—anyone could trip and fall overboard.”

  “Do you think that’s the detail that Rudder wanted you to see?” Marine asked.

  “I’ll call him first thing in the morning.”

  “It’s not much to go on,” Marine replied, setting the photograph down and frowning.

  “But if Pelloquin was such a good sailor, he would have a tidy deck, no?”