The Prisoner of Castillac (Molly Sutton Mysteries Book 3)

by Nell Goddin

  The Prisoner of Castillac

  Molly Sutton Mysteries 3

  Nell Goddin

  Beignet Books

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Epilogue

  Also by Nell Goddin

  Glossary

  Dedication

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  1

  May 2006

  His girls were anxious in the morning, nosing up to the fence, mooing.

  “You think I’d forget about you?” Achille Labiche said to the one with a black patch over her right eye. He reached over to scratch behind her ear. “I’m here every morning like clockwork. You know I’d never abandon you, no matter what.”

  He had thirty-two cows in his herd, all Holstein. It was not large, as herds go, but it was enough for Achille and all he could handle by himself. Any more and he’d need to hire help, which was out of the question.

  He whistled to Bourbon and the dog scampered around behind the cows and pushed them through the gate. They clopped up onto the concrete floor, into the barn. The smell of manure was deep and sweet, mixing with the scent of spring mud and all the plants in the pastures and woods coming back to life. Before going inside to do the milking, Achille tipped his head back and inhaled, and a smile broke over his face. He was the kind of man who most of the time had a rather affectless expression—not angry, not upset, but implacable—and the smile looked awkward on him, as though his facial muscles were confused.

  Bourbon knew what to do and the girls did too. They jostled along, each cow wanting to get to the stations first, and Achille went down the row with the milking claws and hooked their teats into the teat cups in preparation for milking. He had taken out a monstrous loan to pay for the machine and the barn that housed it, but that’s what farming was like nowadays, and he felt he had to do his best to stay up with the latest dairy technologies, even if in his heart he wished he still milked all his girls by hand and plowed the fields by driving a plough-horse.

  Achille lived alone in the small farmhouse he had grown up in. His parents had died almost ten years ago, when he was in his early twenties. Both of them gone the same year, both buried under an oak in the middle of the back hayfield. After their deaths, the central problem of Achille’s life, as he saw it, was a terrible, aching loneliness. And yet he would not venture into the village of Castillac, which was nearest to his farm, and seek the company of others. He was far too timid. He imagined that strangers were talking about him unkindly, or making faces behind his back. He was certain he would never be able to think of anything to say if he dared go to the market on Saturday mornings and someone greeted him or even simply asked which artichokes he would prefer.

  No, Achille guarded his privacy above all else. And he loved his cows and his dog and they gave him a great deal of solace. Just walking through the herd and bumping up against their big bodies and smelling their earthy cow smell—that went a long way towards assuaging his loneliness.

  But it was not enough. Wouldn’t anyone say the same?

  * * *

  May was looking far better than winter, with bookings for Molly Sutton’s gîte business at her place, La Baraque, finally starting to pick up. During the slow winter months, her fear of being carted off to a French poorhouse had been vivid even though she was pretty sure poorhouses no longer existed. At the moment she had an Australian couple and their baby staying in the cottage for ten days, and a single older man coming on the day the Australians were leaving. Her bank account was lean but not empty, and before long the rebuilt pigeonnier would be ready to rent as well.

  True, there was more to running a gîte business than she had anticipated—more paperwork, mostly, and the necessity for nerves of steel when the cottage sat empty for months on end during the cold winter—but on the whole, it was turning out to be almost ridiculously fun. She loved meeting her guests and figuring out what she could do to make their vacations perfect. She adored not going to an office every day for eight hours or longer. She didn’t even mind doing repairs, although it would be nice if things didn’t break down quite so frequently.

  And here it was, glorious springtime, and at long last Molly could throw herself into the making of the garden she had dreamed about ever since first seeing the photographs of La Baraque online over a year ago.

  She was having a third cup of coffee while checking her email and corresponding with potential guests when she heard someone banging on the door.

  “Bonjour Constance! I thought it must be you,” she said, smiling and opening the door.

  Constance fell into Molly’s arms sobbing.

  “What’s wrong?” said Molly, putting her arms around her.

  Constance lifted her head and started to speak, and then dropped it heavily on Molly’s shoulder and kept crying. Molly stood and held her, thinking it was probably boyfriend trouble. She was not wrong.

  “I thought he was different!” Constance got out between sobs. “Didn’t you, Molly? Didn’t Thomas seem….” and then she was off again, bawling so hard her whole body shook.

  Constance was Molly’s occasional house-cleaner, a young woman not terribly talented at her job but of whom Molly was very fond. Molly led her over to the sofa and sat her down. “Tell me what happened,” she said.

  “Well, you know Simone Guyanet? We’ve never liked each other, she’s like my arch-nemesis, you know? Even back in first grade. She’s the type who’s always got to win at everything, you know what I mean?”

  Molly nodded.

  “And I swear she snatched Thomas away just to beat me again! I’ve got the same sick feeling in my stomach I used to get on the playground when I was nine years old!” A gust of crying hit her and Molly squeezed her arm and got up to find some tissues.

  “Here,” she said, giving one to Constance. “Now come on, settle down a moment. Tell me the story.”

  “Well, a few weeks ago, Thomas started acting kinda funny. You know, not answering my texts and not saying a whole lot when we were together. And I’ll tell ya, one of the things that makes Thomas and me get along so well is that he’s a talker. I can’t stand that silent type, you know? And Thomas isn’t like that. He’ll talk about anything too, it’s practically like having a girlfriend. But with benefits,” she added, and then burst into tears again.

  Eventually, after a cup of tea and sandwiches and quite a few mo
re outbursts, Molly got the story out of her. An old story, to be sure: her boyfriend Thomas had begun to be less attentive and less available, and eventually Constance found out that he had been seeing Simone Guyanet on the side.

  “But why didn’t he just break up with you and then go out with Simone?” asked Molly.

  “Guys hardly ever do that, do they. Not the guys I end up with. Instead of just coming out with it, they start acting like jerks so I’ll break up with them.”

  “Chicken-hearted weasel-pigs,” said Molly in English.

  “Huh?” said Constance, who had taken English in school but knew only about six words.

  “Not sure what the translation would be,” said Molly, continuing in French. “This situation, Constance—that’s how my marriage ended, more or less. I don’t know why it’s such a shock, finding out people are not who you thought they were. I mean, it happens all the time, yet we’re never prepared for it. At least I’m not.”

  “That’s exactly it, Molls,” said Constance, her voice dejected. “Thomas is not who I thought he was. It’s like he was wearing a nice-guy mask, and now the mask has slipped and he’s nothing but a jerk underneath.”

  “That’s verging on profound.”

  “That’s me, Molly, your philosopher-housecleaner. I do it all. Just not windows, if you please!” She was trying to joke but her shoulders were so slumped they no longer looked like shoulders, and her usually open and smiling face was mournful.

  “I wish there was something I could say to make you feel better, but I know from experience there isn’t really anything. But—I do have a bag of almond croissants, fresh this morning from Pâtisserie Bujold….”

  “Hand ’em over,” said Constance. “All of them.”

  2

  Benjamin Dufort, late of the gendarmerie, was up at five in the morning for a run before heading off to his temporary job at a nearby farm. Another man might have been satisfied with the physically demanding work and not pushed himself to run in addition to it, but running was a habit Ben was unwilling to give up, no matter how inconvenient and unnecessary it was.

  He allowed himself one cup of coffee before heading out, then laced up his tattered sneakers, put on a wind jacket, and hit the road.

  It had been no small thing, giving up his work at the gendarmerie. Years of police training and experience tossed away in one impulsive moment. But he didn’t regret it. No, there was no regret—and yet his mind was still not at ease.

  The story he was telling himself was that he was really not good at delving into the minds of criminals. He didn’t understand what made them tick and he believed that made him a poor detective, because no matter how diligent a person was about following procedure, a great detective or even just an adequate one has got to be able to put himself in the perpetrator’s shoes, to take the imaginative leap so that he can anticipate what the criminal will do next, and have insight into where he might have tripped up.

  But Dufort was made of sunnier stuff; he naturally avoided darkness, and when he had been in charge of cases where slipping into the dismal and dangerous state of mind of a potential criminal was necessary, he had not been able to do it. At least, this was the reason he assigned to his failures.

  And he did not see how he could continue living a life doing a mediocre job when people were depending on him, and more than that, desperate for him to succeed.

  The farmer he was working for was Rémy, an old friend. He depended on Dufort’s help, and it was a real pleasure to Dufort to show up every day on time or early, ready to exert himself fully in the bracing spring air, and then go home pleasurably exhausted. It was strenuous work but he could handle it easily. At the end of the day, he felt, for the first time in years, as though the workday had been a complete success. No loose threads, no one disappointed.

  No missing girls.

  After his run, he changed clothes without showering since he would be sweating the minute he started work—and Rémy wouldn’t give sweat a second thought. Then he drove over in his battered Renault, leaving the tiny apartment which was all he could afford after quitting the gendarmerie and being out of work for several months.

  “Salut!” he called to Rémy, who was taking some heavy bags of chicken feed out of the back of his truck.

  “Get over here, you lazy sod!” shouted Rémy.

  Dufort grabbed two of the bags and the two men walked towards the chicken house. “So tell me,” said Rémy, “what’s next for you? I’m happy to have your help for as long as you want, but let’s be honest my friend: farming is not the life for you.”

  “Why do you say that?” asked Dufort, surprised.

  Rémy shrugged. “I know you like the physical labor because it calms your mind. Right?”

  Dufort nodded.

  “But if that is what farming is to you, a way to lower stress, and a workout—like going to a gym but in a prettier place? Then you’re not…see, I enjoy the labor too, most of it. But I also get a genuine thrill when I see the lettuce sprout. It’s a chore to collect eggs but I notice how warm they are in my hands—and I think nothing is funnier than a chicken. And beyond that, it matters to me to grow the highest quality food I possibly can. It’s like I have a calling in a way, you understand?

  “But you, Dufort—this is not your mission.” Rémy pulled on a straw hat, the sun already bright.

  “What if I don’t have a calling,” answered Dufort.

  “Sure you do. Everybody does. It’s just that some people fight against it.”

  “You and your New Age hippie talk,” laughed Dufort.

  “Bon,” said Rémy, “let’s get to work. I’m putting you in the asparagus bed today. I want you to apply a bit of compost, and then a thick layer of mulch.”

  Rémy got his friend organized with a large fork and a wheelbarrow, and showed him where the compost and mulch were before taking off in his truck.

  My calling, thought Dufort, rolling his eyes. And then he got to work, shoveling a load of compost into the wheelbarrow with a wide shovel, and then making another trip to fork in a load of mulch. He managed to apply the compost and mulch as Rémy had directed him, but his mind was somewhere far away. He did not notice the lovely asparagus shoots, poking their purple heads up through the dark crumbly soil, or the clouds that rolled in, threatening rain.

  Instead he was thinking about Valerie Boutillier and Elizabeth Martin, two young women who went missing right after he first came to the gendarmerie of Castillac. Their files were always open on the desk in his mind, and as he worked, he leafed through the pages, becoming so absorbed that by accident he completely covered the spinach with mulch too.

  3

  The first thing was a note, stuck with a bit of tape to the front door of the station. No envelope. The paper just a torn scrap of graph paper like that used by schoolchildren. Like a clichéd ransom note, the letters had been messily clipped from newspaper headlines and formed in a sentence: I saw VB.

  That was it. No signature, of course, and no further elaboration.

  Gilles Maron removed the paper from the door of the station with tweezers and sent it in to the forensics lab along with the tape for fingerprinting. Others may have called him overly meticulous at times, but to Maron’s mind, there was really no such thing. The way you gathered enough evidence for arrests was by being careful at every opportunity, doing your very best not to let anything slip past—not a bit of thread, a hair, a phone tip, a fingerprint.

  Perhaps he would have been tempted to be less meticulous in this instance if the initials had been something else. But “VB,” he immediately realized, could be Valerie Boutillier, a young woman who had disappeared before he came to Castillac and never been found. A stone cold case, and a cloud over the village that many had not forgotten.

  “VB” could mean Valerie Boutillier, or something else altogether. The note could be insignificant, the initials just a random coincidence, a childish prank. Or it might be a mean sort of joke, someone trying to lure the gendarmes
on the Castillac force into opening up the case only to waste resources on a case with no new evidence or leads.

  Maron did not mention the note to Perrault, the other officer. He wanted to wait to see what the lab had to say first.

  Maron was extremely pleased to have been promoted to Chief, even if it was only an interim appointment while the gendarmerie found someone to replace Benjamin Dufort, who had surprised everyone (except perhaps the herbalist who prescribed his anti-anxiety tinctures) by resigning his post just before Christmas. Unlike Dufort, Maron was not from Castillac. He was from the north of France and had not made many friends in the village. Which was how the gendarmerie liked it, believing officers did more objective work if they lacked deep ties to the people in their jurisdiction.

  He was mostly skeptical about the note. It was very likely meaningless. But what if someone really had seen Valerie? Why not simply call the gendarmerie and report it? Did something about the circumstances—who she was with, or where she was seen—make the witness wary?

  Or frightened?

  * * *

  Molly spent most of the day in the potager, weeding and turning over the soil in the raised beds. No one had lifted a finger there in some time, and it had taken days of clearing vines and even small bushes before the raised beds were clearly visible. Six of them, about half a foot high—or eight centimeters she should say, in an effort to practice the switch to metric—surrounded by deep blue porcelain tiles. The tiles were more for decoration than anything else, as they weren’t very stable and dirt spilled through the cracks onto the path. But Molly decided to keep them because she liked looking at them, and wondered about the former inhabitant of La Baraque who had put them there.

  Growing vegetables wasn’t her favorite part of gardening. It was practical, yes, but for Molly practicality wasn’t at the top of her list. What she liked most was abundant, fragrant blooms, disorderly and lush, and her plan for this vegetable bed was to make it as ornamental as possible. So far she was thinking artichokes, so glorious with their grand thistly heads, and she had started five plants indoors under a light. It was time to get their home in the garden ready.