Death in Provence

by Serena Kent

  “Bonjour, M. Charpet.”

  She almost withdrew the hand in shock as he grasped her fingers and swiftly, with a neat bow, kissed the outstretched knuckles.

  “Enchanté, madame.” He followed with a stream of incomprehensible French patois to Mme Valencourt. Penelope looked questioningly at her estate agent.

  “He is saying, Penny, that he did not realise that English women could be so beautiful, even at your time of life.”

  Ouch. Penelope was not sure how to react to that. Expediency demanded that she take it as a compliment. “Enchantée de faire votre connaissance, M. Charpet.”

  Another stream of French was directed at Mme Valencourt.

  “He wants to know when he should start.”

  “But I haven’t interviewed him—there’s the matter of references, pay scales!” Penelope had a view of employment practice honed by the bureaucracy of the Home Office. “And then there’s hours, holidays, paperwork, surely?” Like all English expatriates, she was fully resigned to the legendary mountains of French bureaucracy.

  Mme Valencourt smiled. “Paperwork?”

  “Yes, paperwork—the piles of bureaucratic paperwork before you can do anything that everyone knows is what happens in France! What about the social taxes and employer premiums that the notary in Avignon was so clear about?”

  “It is not necessary in this case.”

  “But the notaire said—always keep the paperwork!”

  “Indeed. But not in the case of M. Charpet. A simple handshake will do. He is a man of honour.”

  The lugubrious face of M. Charpet suddenly brightened in recognition of a word he recognised. He clasped Penelope’s hand.

  “L’honneur, madame, l’honneur,” intoned the new appointee, and broke into a wide and toothless smile.

  “Let’s go into the garden,” said Penelope.

  Outside, M. Charpet sniffed the air, then nosed in silence around the garden, managing, in under ten minutes, to find the stopcock for the outside water supply and the electricity meter, hidden behind several years’ growth of ivy.

  “Il faut tout nettoyer, madame,” he remarked, pulling away great branches of vegetation to reveal a stone wall beneath.

  He wanted to clean the garden? She supposed he must mean clear it.

  In steadily improving French, Penelope enquired about the electricity and water.

  “Ah—l’électricité—il faut téléphoner à l’EDF, et pour l’eau, SIVOM.”

  “How long will it take?” asked Penelope, addressing Mme Valencourt.

  M. Charpet contorted his mouth into a clown-like expression of unhappiness. “Beh . . . une semaine, peut-être deux, madame.”

  Two weeks? Penelope’s heart sank. “Et la piscine—the swimming pool? Is it usable?”

  They picked their way gingerly past ferocious-looking bramble thorns. Given time, thought Penelope, the swimming pool in the walled garden could be spectacularly beautiful. In her imagination, she placed some old pottery urns and filled them with geraniums. Perhaps some reclaimed stone statues might be found to adorn the four corners of the pool when it was restored to its turquoise glory. The view through the arches was a sheer delight.

  She was lost in her garden reverie as they opened the door in the wall to the reality. The old cypresses standing guard looked browner and more lifeless than ever. Penelope surveyed the bare bones of the pool, peering down at the brown rainwater and rotting leaves that nearly filled it. At least that meant it probably wasn’t leaking. Getting the house up and running in the searing summer heat was going to be hard work, but it would be bearable if she had a pool to cool off in.

  An unpleasant and not entirely encouraging smell rose from the murky water.

  She turned to M. Charpet with a questioning look.

  The gardener looked grim. He took off his beret again, and shook his head. Then he exchanged some rapid-fire French with Mme Valencourt.

  “What does he think?” asked Penelope brightly. Perhaps optimism would sway him.

  “There is . . . he is just checking something,” said the estate agent guardedly.

  Charpet went into the pump house and emerged with a large pole. He plunged it into a clump of sodden leaves and seemed to prod something solid.

  “What is it?” asked Penelope.

  “It could be a sanglier—a wild boar. Sometimes when there is no cover over a swimming pool, the animals can fall in at night.”

  Penelope supposed that it must have been very determined to find water, as the only viable entrance to the pool garden for an animal would have been through the arches that opened onto a narrow terrace.

  Prodded by Charpet’s pole, the mysterious entity seemed to puff up, like fabric filled with air. He pushed the leaves away.

  They all made involuntary noises.

  “Aye! Mon dieu!”

  “Eee!”

  “Bloody hell!”

  The body was not animal. It was human.

  * * *

  THEY STOOD in stunned silence at the pool’s edge. “Mon dieu,” repeated M. Charpet, and then again for good measure. The body was facedown in the brackish water. It seemed to be wearing a dark jacket that deflated again and settled on its back, while one arm floated free of last winter’s leaves.

  Abruptly, Mme Valencourt broke the trance. “La police. Il faut téléphoner aux gendarmes!” She pulled out her mobile and in a moment was speaking in a rapid staccato, too quickly for Penelope to follow.

  She felt dreadfully sick again, but was unable to take her eyes off the corpse. A moment of giddiness overcame her, and she stumbled. The estate agent gripped her arm.

  “Madame . . . Penny, quelle horreur!”

  There were no words to frame what Penelope felt. A dead body, in her swimming pool. It lay in a soup of muddy twigs and leaves, pond weed, a plastic cup, and even an old playing card. The ace of spades floated incongruously just out of reach of the corpse’s wrinkled hand, as if it had just been flipped over to win some soggy game. She let herself be guided to the shade of the wall to sit down on the long grass. The estate agent stood over her, tapping a lacquered nail on the screen of her smartphone. M. Charpet stood a little apart from them, still holding the pole that had touched the corpse and muttering to himself.

  No one dared leave the scene.

  “How long has it been there?” Penelope managed at last.

  Mme Valencourt gave her an odd look. “Madame, did you see anything when you arrived yesterday?”

  “No, of course not!” Penelope stared at her wildly. All those legal searches on the house that the notary had intoned aloud in his office, all the asbestos checks and insect infestation checks and metal fatigue tests and environmental energy checks on the property . . . not one of them had included a Dead Body Check, had it?

  “OK, OK . . . we are calm,” said the estate agent.

  Penelope didn’t feel calm, but she knew she had to keep the lid on her panic. No doubt the police would ask exactly the same question. She thought back carefully. Had she looked at the pool yesterday evening and just not seen anything out of the ordinary?

  Her head was pounding.

  It was not long before they heard sirens in the distance. The first police officers arrived within twenty minutes. The farm track filled with a mass of blue cars, peaked helmets, and uniforms; an entire police force seemed to have descended on the crime scene. Penelope sat dumbstruck as gendarmes streamed through the door in the wall to the pool garden.

  It didn’t seem quite real. In all her years working for Professor Fletcher at the Home Office Department of Forensic Pathology and at University College, London, she had worked on detailed photographic reports but had rarely seen a dead victim in the flesh. She certainly had not expected to do so in early retirement in Provence. She sat quietly, knowing that sooner or later she was going to be questioned and trying to marshal her thoughts.

  Mme Valencourt was engaged in deep conversation with a beefy uniformed policeman. A dapper man in a dark suit
arrived and immediately joined the discussion. They all looked over at Penelope. It was obvious they were discussing her.

  Penelope closed her eyes and wished it would all go away. She felt sorry for the man in the pool, whoever he was, and then guilty that she felt even worse that it had to happen in her pool.

  “Mme Kite?”

  Penelope looked up. The estate agent had brought over the man in the suit.

  “Mme Kite, I present to you Inspector Paul Gamelin from the headquarters of the Police Municipale in Cavaillon. He will be examining whether a crime has been committed here.”

  Penelope felt a bit wobbly as she stood up.

  Inspector Gamelin shook her hand. He was in his forties, with a tanned, narrow face and greying hair. He looked grave as he spoke to her in excellent English.

  “I understand you have only been in this property since yesterday, madame.”

  “That is correct, yes.”

  “I will ask you to come to the police station to make an official statement in due course.”

  Penelope nodded.

  “But I ask you now to tell me everything that comes to your mind. What did you hear, what did you see?”

  “Nothing. There’s nothing I can tell you!”

  “Can you confirm that there was no man in the swimming pool yesterday, when you arrived?”

  A deep breath. “I’m sorry, I cannot be sure of that.”

  Gamelin narrowed his eyes. “Why not?”

  “Because I didn’t go into the pool garden yesterday. I intended to—I came out into the garden after I had done some cleaning in the house and brought my things in from the car. As you can see—as Mme Valencourt will confirm—the house is not in a good state. I spent my time after arriving here trying to make it habitable. Dusting, sweeping. I stopped some time after six o’clock.”

  And perhaps it was just as well I didn’t go into the pool garden, she thought. She didn’t know what she would have done if she’d found the body by herself. It would have been thoroughly unpleasant. It was just as well this was the way it had happened.

  “I came outside but didn’t get any farther than the bamboo over there,” she continued, “because there was a man who—”

  A series of shouts from the direction of the pool interrupted any further exchange.

  They hurried back into the walled garden, where the uniformed policeman who seemed to be in charge was directing operations. The body was already being hauled out by a number of men in white overalls, while another took photos of the scene.

  Penelope’s first thought was that they couldn’t consider this to be a crime, or they would be proceeding much more carefully, to preserve any evidence. They must be sure that the cause of death was an accident.

  Half repulsed, half fascinated, Penelope watched as the corpse was lifted from the water.

  Muddy drips blotched the stone surround like dried blood.

  She gasped.

  “What is it?” asked Mme Valencourt. She seemed to be observing Penelope closely.

  “The man . . . I think I have seen him before.”

  Inspector Gamelin was staring at her intently.

  “I saw him yesterday evening . . . he came through the bamboo screen from the track and started shouting at me that this was his house!”

  His tufty hair was now slicked to his head with rotting leaves, but he was wearing the clothes Penelope had noticed and the same shoes. She always noticed men’s shoes. The insolent mouth was slack and had lost the roll-up cigarette, but it was him all right.

  “Although”—Penelope shook her head—“there’s so much puffy bruising around the temples and eyes that it’s hard to be absolutely sure.”

  The discolouration of the face was intensified by a slick of foul-smelling pool debris that dripped from his hairline.

  “I’m as sure as I can be that the man I met last night was wearing those clothes. And I think I recognise the face, but I can’t be absolutely sure.” She had dealt with enough of Professor Fletcher’s cases to know that what could not be proved forensically should not be suggested without a caveat.

  Mme Valencourt translated as Penelope explained exactly what had happened the previous evening. Gamelin looked more and more serious. They were joined by another officer. Then the estate agent stepped away to call someone on her mobile.

  “What’s happening? Who is—was—this man?” Penelope asked when Mme Valencourt returned to her side.

  “I have spoken to le maire. He is coming down now.”

  “The mayor?”

  “The mayor of the village knows everything that goes on here, and everyone who lives here. He will be able to identify the body.” Mme Valencourt shrugged. “You would have had to be introduced to him soon in any case—and it should have been a great pleasure. It is a terrible shame that it has to be now under these circumstances.”

  “Why should I have had to meet him?” Penelope bristled. Her experience of English mayors was of pompous small-town busybodies with ceremonial regalia clanking around their necks. She had no wish to meet one for a fascinating discussion about traffic management or borough spending priorities. The whole point of coming to France was that she wouldn’t have to do anything that was expected of her.

  “You must always be introduced to the mayor.”

  This all seemed rather formal to Penelope. The idea of walking into the mairie to introduce herself as the latest foreign newcomer was distinctly Home Counties. And certainly not during the unfolding of a dead-body-shaped crisis at her new house, before she’d even recovered from her moving-in hangover.

  “Really?” She gave the word an edge that was apparently lost in translation.

  “It must be done.”

  “But—”

  “Le maire de St Merlot . . . you will want to meet him. He is sympa.”

  “Sympa?”

  “Sympathique—nice. And also—” Mme Valencourt widened her eyes.

  “Yes?”

  “You will see.”

  * * *

  LESS THAN ten minutes later, a tall man of around forty-five strode towards them, loping through the long grass like Indiana Jones. Penelope immediately understood what the estate agent was trying to say.

  In her student years at Durham University, Penelope had joined the French Film Society, a club mainly composed of rather self-satisfied ex-public-school boys rebelling in tight black suits, smoking Gitanes and wearing dark glasses at night. In the dull and fog-ridden streets of the town, the latter frequently led to collisions with bikes, lampposts, or worse. In the figure now standing before her, Penelope recognised the Gallic glamour they had been striving for. This was the real deal. Floppy, sun-streaked hair. Caramel tan. Cheekbones. He was gorgeous.

  The mayor kissed Mme Valencourt three times on alternate cheeks and then turned to Penelope and introduced himself in fluent though heavily accented English.

  “Mme Keet. What can I say? This must be a terrible shock for you.”

  Penelope went a bit giddy. She could not frame anything more riveting to say than “Yes.”

  “You must not be concerned about anything. I am here to help you, and the police. I am going to look at the body to see if I recognise him.”

  Penelope nodded dumbly.

  The mayor went into a huddle with the policemen standing over the body. After a few minutes he returned to where Penelope and Mme Valencourt were waiting by the arches at the far end of the pool garden.

  “It is Manuel Avore,” he said. “It seems that our M. Avore cannot stop making trouble, even after drowning!”

  There was a lightness in the mayor’s tone that Penelope found quite disturbing. It sounded as if it carried a hint of relief.

  “So you think he drowned?”

  “I am not a detective, madame, but when a man who is drunk most of the time finds himself by a swimming pool in the dark, the outcome is certain.”

  Penelope was less sure. “But . . . what was he doing here, by my swimming pool?”

&nb
sp; “Clémence has told me that this man came onto your property yesterday and shouted at you that this was his house.”

  “That’s right.”

  The mayor shook his head sadly. “As soon as I heard that, I knew who he was. Manuel Avore lived in this village all his life, which was not a happy one. He was a terrible alcoholic. His family lived on this land, and he was born here. He never wanted to leave it, but it was sold years ago. Hélas, poor Manuel considered that it still belonged to him. He moved into the house on the main road, just by the end of this track here, but it was not the same.”

  It all sounded very tragic, but Penelope couldn’t help feeling that, despite all this unpleasantness, she had dodged a very large bullet. Imagine what it would have been like to have a drunken Manuel Avore shambling around her lovely house and garden whenever he felt sentimental. It didn’t bear thinking about.

  She pulled herself together. “Well, I am very sorry for him. It’s an awful thing to happen.”

  “So the question is, Mme Keet, did you hear anything yesterday evening or during the night?”

  Inspector Gamelin was now listening intently to their conversation.

  “Not a thing. I slept very soundly.”

  “What did you do last night?”

  “I had some supper and went to bed early. It had been a long day.”

  “You were alone?”

  “Yes.”

  Penelope had to look away from the mayor’s stunning eyes. It seemed thoroughly inappropriate that all she could think was how very dark blue they were.

  “That is unfortunate,” he said.

  She bit her lip.

  “Did you drink some wine? Maybe you slept a leetle . . . heavily last night?”

  That much was true, and Penelope had to admit it. But how dare he! The mayor and Clémence Valencourt exchanged looks. The two of them obviously knew each other quite well.

  “If you think that I am a stereotypical middle-aged Englishwoman abroad who glugs wine by the barrel and does nothing but bake herself to a crisp in the sun and look for other expats to talk to, I can assure you that you are very much mistaken,” said Penelope, with an attempt at dignity.

  A hint of a smile twitched one corner of the mayor’s disconcertingly well-formed mouth. “Please forgive me. I am sure this horrible incident is the result of an accident. The death by drowning of a man who was so drunk he was hardly conscious.”