Death in Provence

by Serena Kent

  The question was, would it be a good idea to confide in the mayor? Could she trust him, or was he just trying to keep her on-side to protect the villagers in his precious St Merlot? The more she found out about the village, the more its feuds and machinations dismayed her. Or were all small communities the same, the world over?

  * * *

  SHE FOUND Le Sanglier Paresseux easily enough, in the lee of Caseneuve’s austere, menacing castle. Laurent Millais was waiting for her at a table outside, under a vine canopy from which hung bunches of purple grapes, close to ripeness. The views from the terrace stretched west over the length of the valley towards Avignon, framed by blue-grey mountains on either side.

  He stood to greet her, which was a magnificent view in itself. Penelope noted the surreptitious glances from ladies at other tables. “Is it OK to sit here,” he asked, “or do you prefer to be inside?”

  “Outside is perfect. I’m British—you have to drag us inside in summer, even if the sun hasn’t been spotted through the clouds for days.” Oh, lor’, thought Penelope, I hope I’m not going to start burbling. “I haven’t been here before. It’s lovely,” she said in a slightly more measured way as she took a seat at a table laid with stiffly laundered linen.

  “The village has been, as you say, put on the map by this restaurant. Now—will you join me in an aperitif? They serve an exquisite blackberry kir.”

  “That sounds wonderful. Yes, please.”

  The mayor had a twinkle in his eye when he placed the order. Penelope told herself, not for the first time in his presence, to get a grip.

  She looked at the menu. “What do you recommend?”

  “Take the pork.”

  Penelope suppressed a giggle. That smile of his was quite saucy, she decided. Surely he wasn’t flirting with her. They hadn’t even had a drink yet. Far more likely he was laughing at her.

  “The pork here is excellent,” he reiterated. “The pata negra—from acorn-fed pigs.”

  “I will have pork, then,” she said robustly, to show that whatever he was playing at, it wasn’t going to affect her. This was business as far as she was concerned. She was being given a chance to find out all kinds of information and she was not going to pass it up.

  “M. Millais, I—”

  “Laurent, please.”

  “Laurent—”

  “May I call you Penny?”

  “Of course. Now, I wanted to ask—”

  The sparkling blackberry kirs arrived, along with some delightful amuses-bouche. Laurent had a quick chat with the maître d’, who obviously knew him well, and then started telling her about the places in England he’d visited. His favourite city was Brighton, and the worst place he’d experienced as a visitor was the Elephant and Castle, on the basis that there was nothing about it that remotely lived up to its name. “I love to go to the theatre in Drury Lane and to the Ritz for dinner!”

  “Ooh, yes,” said Penelope, rapidly losing her inhibitions as the aperitif hit the spot. “That pink and gilded dining room is to die for!”

  “Ah, yes,” said Laurent, as if that reminded him. “Penny, you may be wondering why I wished to speak with you.”

  She came down to earth with a bump. She shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the only reason she was here having lunch with this man was that she had racked up two dead bodies since her arrival, and the mayor was on a damage limitation exercise. “I should think that you have some news for me about the police investigations.”

  “Well, in a way, I have. It is a matter of some delicacy, and I wanted to be away from St Merlot to discuss it—you never know who is listening at the door to my office!”

  “Fire away!” An unfortunate turn of phrase, in the circumstances. She flushed. “I mean, tell me what it is. Do the police know who the bones in the chapel belonged to?”

  “They are still working on that.”

  “Did they lift out the whole skeleton?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “If the skull is there, they’ll be looking at dental records.”

  “I am sure the investigators are making progress. Though that reminds me. We have discovered some interesting information about Manuel Avore that we did not know before. It seems that he was a more serious gambler than we thought.”

  “But I was told he had no money,” she said.

  “He did not have money. That was the problem. He borrowed heavily from the black market to fund his betting.”

  “So he borrowed, and then couldn’t pay it back, I guess.”

  “Exactly. He gambled it all away, or spent it on drink.”

  “How has all this not come out until now? I find it very hard to believe that no one knew. Surely his wife had some idea?”

  “Apparently not. Until the enforcers from the gangs who use the casinos came menacing at their door—”

  “More than one?”

  “Sadly, yes.”

  “Where is this going?” asked Penelope.

  The mayor leaned forward conspiratorially and continued, “Well, from this point we only have theories, but one thing is clear. It is a very unwise move to borrow money to play at the casino, and not to pay it back. Especially when the lenders have links to the Marseille underworld.”

  “Why Marseille?”

  “Most of the organised crime around here is centred in Marseille—you remember, The French Connection, no?” He paused theatrically to look right and left. “Around ’ere it is small frying, but they are still vicious, especially to their debtors.”

  Penelope felt sorry for the small, bitter man who had shouted at her in her garden that first evening. And even more so for his wife. “Poor man, a gambling addict too. He must have been desperate.” She suddenly had a thought. “Did you see the playing card in the pool when his body was being removed?”

  “A playing card? No.”

  “I did. And what’s more, I think that it might be a link between the two deaths. Don’t you?”

  The mayor studied his place setting, then looked up. “If I can give you some advice, madame? I think that you should allow the police to conduct their investigations. I know that you want to help, but there is no advantage in pushing your theories on them. It does no good.”

  “There’s something else, though,” said Penelope. “And it’s been bothering me. The day we found the body in the pool, I described the man who came into my garden the evening before, and you said straightaway, ‘That would have been Manuel Avore.’ But if the body was Avore, it can’t have been him I saw alive. There just wasn’t time for rigor mortis to pass and the body’s arm to become limp. Have the police said anything about that?”

  There was an awkward pause. “No, not to me. Does it matter? The body was that of Avore. We can be sure of that. Could you be wrong about the time? Or perhaps all the alcohol in the body made a difference.”

  Penelope frowned. “But—”

  “Now, you have met your neighbour Pierre Louchard, I hear.”

  “I have, yes.”

  “What kind of liqueur did he give you?”

  “How did you know about that?”

  Laurent tapped the side of his nose. “Was it plum brandy?”

  “It was, actually.”

  “That is very good news for you. It means he likes you. Or he has decided to like you. It’s a kind of village code. Since the days of the Resistance during the war. Plums mean ‘a friend.’”

  It made M. Charpet’s little gift left on the wall all the more touching.

  “It’s astonishing how often people here still talk about the war and the Resistance. Is everyone’s opinion of Manuel Avore still influenced by his family’s alleged collaboration back then?”

  “Probably, yes.”

  The food arrived, two very appetising plates of glistening pork, delicately presented, and the conversation moved on from the unfortunate and unmourned man.

  A bottle of Vacqueyras was opened and tasted with some ceremony. Against her better judgement—red wine at lunchtime wa
s just asking for trouble, in Penelope’s experience—she accepted a glass. It tasted sublime.

  Penelope listened to what Laurent was saying about why this wine was typical of the region’s terrain and tried to remember the questions she wanted to ask. Two drinks had already made him quite dangerously attractive.

  It seemed it really was true that everything stopped for lunch in France, and that included spoiling the taste of the food with talk of murder.

  The mayor steered the conversation to her family, and she told him about Justin and Lena, and the ruinous lack of discipline where Lena’s sons Zack and Xerxes were concerned.

  “You are a grandmother? How can this be possible?” exclaimed the mayor.

  Penelope blushed, furious with herself that she had mentioned it. “I married very young . . . practically a child bride. . . . Actually, Justin and Lena are my stepchildren.”

  She knew from what Frankie had passed on from Clémence that Laurent was divorced, with an ex-wife in Paris. She wondered in passing whether he had a new partner now, in addition to his dalliance with Clémence. Best not to ask. But she was determined to take the chance to find out a bit more about what he had been doing in Bonnieux with Louchard and the silver fox in the red Ferrari. She seized on the subject of marriage, tenuous though it was.

  “I visited the Abbaye de Sénanque for the first time the other day,” she said, “Do they do weddings there?”

  The mayor’s eyes twinkled. “Weddings? No.”

  “Oh.”

  “Are you considering getting married again?”

  “Me? No! Absolutely not. No, I just wondered. It would be a very lovely place to get married in, that’s all.”

  “Ah.”

  “There’s a priory just outside St Merlot, isn’t there?”

  “Yes. Le Prieuré des Gentilles Merlotiennes.”

  “Are they nuns—the Kind Ladies of Merlot?”

  “Sadly, the sisters are no longer there. They had to leave in the fifteenth century due to decadent behaviour.”

  “Oh, my. The building is still standing?”

  “It is.”

  “What is it used for these days?”

  “Nothing, currently. Though some interesting possibilities are being investigated.”

  “Sounds intriguing. Tell me more.”

  The mayor grinned, but did not elaborate.

  She put down her knife and fork for an elegant pause, hoping he would fill the silence with some details.

  “So, Penny, apart from the obvious recent problems, how are you enjoying your new life in Provence?”

  Disappointing. “I love it here. Despite what has happened, I am very pleased to have come to St Merlot. I just hope that once everything has calmed down after, you know, we can all move on from it.”

  Laurent smiled. “And we are pleased that you have joined us as well. There are some who would prefer no one from outside ever to own properties here, but without the foreign money, there would be many empty houses.”

  Penelope thought for a moment. “So you only tolerate us for the money we bring in, then?”

  “No, that is not true. Well, maybe some people think that, but not all. You add colour and interest!”

  “That doesn’t make me feel as bad as it might. I’ve already worked out that I will always be a foreigner here—but the definition of a foreigner starts very few kilometres away. The chief of police, for example. He’s a foreigner, and he only comes from Apt!”

  “Very true!” The mayor saluted her perception with a raised glass.

  “Why don’t you like him?” she asked, pressing home her momentary advantage.

  “Because he is the worst kind of foreigner. He makes no effort to understand us!”

  They both laughed.

  “It’s the same the world over in country places,” said Penelope.

  He drained the bottle of red wine into their glasses—how on earth had they finished it?—and then insisted they order a dessert entitled “Le Tout Chocolat.”

  “Oh, all right, then. If we must,” said Penelope, hoping he understood the ironic tone in her voice. There again, he probably just thought she was greedy, which—sadly—was fair enough.

  Over coffee and some strange local liqueur that came in a bottle shaped like a large aubergine (refused by Penelope), she tried to find out a bit more about him.

  “How long have you been mayor of St Merlot?”

  “Almost four years.”

  “Is it a full-time job?”

  “Not really, not for me.”

  “Do you have another job?” She remembered what Frankie had found out about him having all kinds of strings to his bow. She was hoping he would tell her more, perhaps about working in television.

  Laurent sat back in his seat and gave her a grin. “This has been an unexpected pleasure,” he said.

  It certainly had. Penelope felt neither too full nor too tipsy, but just right.

  “Are you going to see Clémence Valencourt anytime soon, by the way?” she asked, as innocently as she could.

  “I expect so. She is often in the area, always here, there, everywhere.”

  “You’re telling me,” said Penelope. “She’s very . . . busy. Always popping up in the most unexpected places.”

  “That is true.”

  “You and she know each other quite well, don’t you?”

  He raised his palms in a gesture of admission that could have meant everything, or nothing at all.

  “Her house is beautiful. What does M. Valencourt do that allows them to live in such splendour?”

  “Mon dieu! Is that the time? I am sorry, I must get back to St Merlot!”

  He called for the bill, which he insisted on paying, waving away her protests and joking with the waiter about getting back to his office, where the administration of his village would be missing him. They left together, and she looked around for his flashy Mercedes, but there was no sign of it.

  “Would you mind giving me a ride back?” he asked.

  He must have had a lift there. So he hadn’t been quite as reckless with his lunchtime drinking as she had supposed. Just as well she hadn’t gone mad.

  He climbed into the Range Rover, after going automatically to the wrong side first. “It is so strange, having the steering wheel on the right side of the car! It is very hard to drive on our roads, no?”

  “It’s fine if you go carefully. Actually, it’s quite useful when you have to pull right over to the side of the road to pass another vehicle—you can see exactly how far you are from the sheer drop on some of your hillside roads!”

  She drove extra cautiously back to St Merlot along the steep, winding shortcut he showed her.

  The only car they met came bucketing out of nowhere towards them in the middle of the road.

  “Oh là là—the lunchtime drivers are always a danger.”

  “But it’s getting on for four o’clock!” said Penelope.

  “Yes, now they are returning to work.”

  Penelope slowed to a nervy crawl as they approached the next bend.

  “Ah, look! Did you see that sign there? The lane leads to the best goats’ cheese in the region.”

  For the rest of the journey, until she dropped him off at the mairie, he held forth on the best restaurants in the area and the recommended back routes for drivers to take after they had wined and dined well.

  So she never did ask his opinion on why the estate agent was making her own inquiries about the provenance of the axe. Or get any traction on the papers she found. Nor really understand why he had asked her to lunch in the first place.

  She pulled into the drive, and immediately all thought vanished. The door to her house was hanging drunkenly upon its hinges. It had been broken open.

  22

  SHE KNEW SHE SHOULD TELEPHONE the police, but the thought of Reyssens’s curling lip was too much for her. Maybe she could telephone Clémence. But could she trust her? Why exactly had her estate agent been asking about the axe at the shop
in Coustellet?

  Penelope put the kettle on for a cup of tea to give herself some thinking time, then switched it off again. She looked closely around the kitchen. Had her papers been disturbed? Hard to tell—she had left them in a bit of a mess. Had she left her computer on when she left the house? She might have done, given that she had rushed upstairs to get tarted up. Could an intruder have been checking her Internet searches? She would need to be sure.

  Then she felt sick to her stomach. Had Laurent Millais deliberately lured her away in order to give that intruder a few hours when the coast was clear? I hope to entice you away from your house. Hadn’t he actually said that?

  She called the police.

  The conversation with Laurent replayed on a loop in her head. Was he the LM on the draft contract she stumbled across at the priory? And what would it mean if he were? What about the Marseille mafia theory? Was he serious, or was that just a bum steer to frighten her off?

  One thing she had noticed was the way he spoke English. When he’d first appeared in her garden the day Avore was fished out of the pool, the mayor had sounded like a Frenchman straight from central casting. The same when they were discussing M. Charpet at the mairie, the old man’s Resistance record and how he could not possibly be implicated in any crime. But during their conversation over lunch, his accent had been much lighter. Perhaps high emotion affected his linguistic skills.

  He too had warned her off getting under the police investigators’ feet. Perhaps that was why he told her about their current line of inquiry—so that she’d feel she was being kept in the loop with no need for any more input from her.

  Any other middle-aged woman newly arrived in the South of France might have taken the hint. But Penelope Kite had form in picking up details that some of the best Home Office forensic pathology experts had somehow missed.

  As Professor Fletcher’s PA, Penelope had helped prepare his autopsy reports for the police and the courts but rarely went into an autopsy room or to crime scenes. But she saw all the photographs. Her first intervention came when an ex-convict, who had taken up knitting while in prison, was arrested for murder shortly after he was released. His fingerprints were found on knitting needles and a half-finished scarf.