The Fleur de Sel Murders_A Brittany Mystery

by Jean-Luc Bannalec

  “All right, Nolwenn, yeah. I’ll be in touch later.”

  Without giving it a second thought, he leapt up, got out some money, and placed it on the small plate. As he turned away he cast one last mournful look at the terrine—this time he hadn’t even had a single bite.

  * * *

  It was odd. Dupin hadn’t met Rose on the ferry. It had just come in when he got to the quay, covered in sweat. She hadn’t been there. There were just a handful of noon’s weary ferry passengers on board; it was impossible that he just hadn’t seen her. Had that not been Rose earlier? Did he just imagine it? He hadn’t been able to reach her by phone, either, the line was permanently busy and he had been put through to Chadron. Madame Laurent, he learned this way, had “let it be known” through her secretary that she would be home at 3 P.M. “but no earlier.” If he drove quickly, it would take him half an hour to get to Lilou’s house.

  After the short crossing, Dupin walked to his car, hitting his head again hard—he had really developed a great way of getting into the car recently—and drove away, cursing loudly. Only the latest Skippy coverage on Blue Breizh had been able to lift his mood somewhat. The kangaroo had, to universal disappointment, not been sighted so far today—more specifically: on close inspection, the photos people had taken with their mobiles while on the move and emailed in to the radio station were, without exception, of other animals. Or rather, parts of other animals. No kangaroos. The presenter patiently provided exact descriptions of the images: animals and parts of animals—ears, paws, a snout, fur—in the forest, in the undergrowth, behind trees, from far away, out of focus and blurry. Three times, if the presenter wasn’t mistaken, the dogs were quite large, one was a horse, one a fox. Or badger. It was like with UFOs—the images were unfortunately always out of focus. Dupin had been in awe of the presenter, who stayed perfectly calm while ruling out photo after photo—“No, no crate of Britt for you, I’m sorry. Maybe next time.”

  Dupin had looked at clearings to the right and left once or twice himself, ones that seemed perfectly suited for a kangaroo to sunbathe in.

  He had passed Sarzeau and it wasn’t much farther to Lilou’s house; he would be there very soon. There was a turn-off on the left for St. Gildas, the famous abbey. Dupin had seen the sign the night before last. And it had slipped his mind. Once she had learned the location of his “transfer,” his mother had, without comment, sent him a copy of a letter by a learned medieval philosopher called Abaelard from Notre-Dame who, like Dupin, had been banished to Brittany from Paris, albeit for different reasons (the monk had seduced and married a schoolgirl). Dupin had been very upset by the story. “I live in a barbaric land whose language is incomprehensible and disgusting to me; I have dealings only with savages; I’m obliged to take my walks on the unpleasant shores of a churning sea … Every day I am exposed to new dangers.” Following these comments, one danger did become real: the other monks tried to poison Abaelard—which Dupin completely understood now. In his first years in Brittany it had been the other way round—he had understood Abaelard, to some extent at least. Abaelard escaped at the last moment via a secret passageway. Dupin couldn’t believe it himself sometimes, things had turned out so differently for him. His “Bretonization” was far advanced; he was approaching his five-year service anniversary, Nolwenn was keeping a keen eye on it. She thought, much to his chagrin, that a party would be appropriate.

  Dupin parked his Peugeot 106 on the small, secluded sandy path right in front of Lilou’s house. The abandoned, forlorn house of a dead person.

  Two police officers were standing a few meters away from the house, apparently deep in a lively conversation, and they greeted the unannounced, unfamiliar commissaire politely but with some surprise. Dupin was in no doubt that Rose had briefed them and they would report to her immediately. Especially since he had asked them for police-issue rubber gloves.

  Dupin had no idea why he had wanted to come back here this whole time. It was just a feeling. And it wouldn’t go away. This was part of his way of investigating.

  He took the path through the garden and entered the house via the patio door. His eyes gradually adjusted to the semidarkness. There was always something haunting about dead people’s houses. And this was worse than usual. This was Lilou’s house. Images from the evening he had visited came to mind. He shut his eyes for a moment. He had really liked her. He was finding this difficult. But now—right now he needed to find her murderer.

  He slipped on the tight gloves as a precaution and went over to the large wooden table. The one with the books and foreign magazines that he and Rose had taken a quick look at the day before yesterday. The forensic team had given the whole house another thorough going over the day before. They had found some more of Lilou’s working documents in drawers and also on the ground-floor table, but nothing of any relevance at all, nothing that might relate to salt or the salt marshes—which was the only aspect they had been interested in at that stage.

  Dupin walked slowly once around the table and then carefully pushed some of the closest piles of paper aside. Almost exactly in the middle of the table, covered in magazines, there was a folder. Dupin eased it out carefully. A thick folder with a jumble of papers inside. Like on the desk upstairs. “National Food Consumption.” A printout of a set of food statistics, 103 pages, with lots of underlining. And in the middle of it, a folded scrap of newspaper. Dupin opened it. “La Crêpe: elle ne connaît pas la crise!”—“The crepe: It’s a stranger to crisis!”—by Lilou Breval. Dupin remembered the great patriotic crepe article from last year. He couldn’t help smiling. That had been typical of Lilou. A passionate plea on behalf of the Breton specialty. The defiantly proud sentence was splashed across this edition of the Ouest-France in enormous lettering. Not only was the crepe a stranger to crisis, it actually became more powerful during crisis. Of course. And rightly so. The consumption of crepes had risen by an impressive 27 percent in France. And in Europe as a whole by at least 12 percent. The crepe was making the world more Breton, bit by bit. And Lilou Breval was making it the flavor of the month: delicious, sophisticated, endless varieties, locally produced and locally consumed, environmentally friendly, healthy and yet unbeatably cheap, a food for everybody, it was classless, egalitarian through and through: a delicacy for all. Dupin was reminded briefly of Nolwenn, who had been happy at the time that the terminology was correct and that there hadn’t been references to the “galette.” In southern Finistère they called the galettes of the North crepes. Crêpes au blé noir, with buckwheat flour. Dupin worked through the underlined sections—salt was also a national food, after all. But the only statistics underlined related to the crepe and its ingredients: eggs, milk, and flour. One thing he hadn’t known was that the crepe, according to legend, came from the Guérande. A sad little princess lost her appetite one day and began to starve—a resourceful chef hit upon the idea of producing a food that you could toss in the pan—she enjoyed the spectacle, ate, and was saved!

  Dupin jumped when his mobile rang.

  Commissaire Rose.

  He answered with some reluctance. “Yes?”

  “Where are you.” Rose hadn’t made any effort to use intonation to make the question an actual question. Surely someone had told her where he was. She continued right on: “The gun found next to Maxime Daeron is the same gun that was used to shoot at you.”

  It was an extremely precise sentence. With sensational content.

  “Unregistered, of course. A small SIG Sauer Scorpion.”

  Maxime Daeron, the man who had spoken so calmly to them about the shooting just a few hours later the following morning, was very likely the shooter! That’s how it looked, anyway.

  “And,” Rose went on, “there’s another bit of news: a young man from the boat rental company in Port-Blanc has given a statement saying he suspects one of his canoes was borrowed during the night by some ‘prankster.’”

  “And what does that mean?”

  Dupin couldn’t make sense of what R
ose was telling him.

  “If Maxime Daeron didn’t commit suicide, somebody must have got to the island. And then away from it again. So long as there isn’t another unexpected strand to this story and the perpetrator lived on the island. Of our suspects in the Salt Land, none of them took the ferry yesterday. I’ve had photos of them all shown to both the women from the ferry.”

  “Anything else?”

  “The young man gets the boats ready for the night every evening. Mainly, that means he has to drain out the water that has collected in the plastic boats during the day. Then he turns them over to stop any rain getting in.” She left a small, dramatic pause. “One of the boats was the wrong way up this morning and not in the place where he left it yesterday. Most important, there was some water in the boat this morning that shouldn’t have been there. He rules out forgetting to empty the boat. The canoes are directly opposite the beach that borders Daeron’s house. It’s about two hundred meters as the crow flies.”

  “Why … why did anyone speak to him in the first place?”

  It was a stupid question. But Dupin hadn’t been aware how much Rose still seemed to be preoccupied with clarifying whether Maxime Daeron’s death might be something other than suicide—especially when the theory of suicide seemed to be gaining more and more ground. But Rose was, purely from a criminological point of view, correct. And especially in the case at hand.

  Rose passed smoothly over Dupin’s question and drew a definitive line under this point: “We’ll keep investigating. See if we find anything else. It may really have been nothing more than some prankster. At the moment it doesn’t mean a thing.”

  Dupin wasn’t sure how relevant this information was. It might be immensely relevant. Or it could be purely coincidental.

  “You left very suddenly just now, Monsieur le Commissaire. You seem to like disappearing.”

  It was unbelievable. She was the one who had disappeared, walking right past him and waving, then being nowhere to be found at the quay. Not even reachable on the phone. Dupin’s instinct told him it would be better to swallow any retorts along these lines.

  “See you very soon at Madame Laurent’s, on time. Chadron let you know, didn’t she? And I’d like to speak to Madame Bourgiot again. She’s expecting us later.”

  That was a definite order.

  “Why Bourgiot again?” Dupin would have prioritized other things at this stage.

  Rose didn’t respond to his question at all.

  “Perhaps we should invite the food chemist to the interview with Bourgiot. We’ll really need to think carefully about how we deal with the bacteria. What precautions need to be taken. Potentially. We may have more results by then.”

  “Good.” Dupin was half convinced.

  “And if you get going in good time, you won’t need to be a daredevil and go over the speed limit the whole time,” she said, again very friendly. “You’ve been caught speeding seven times in the last forty hours by our radar unit.”

  This topped it all. Not least because Rose herself drove a whole lot more dangerously than he did. And all of his trips had been on police business. Since the number of mobile radar units in Brittany had been doubled in a great regional “traffic calming operation,” Dupin had—admittedly also while not on cases—been getting caught in speed traps even more regularly.

  “I”—this time he would contradict her, vehemently and firmly—“hello?—Hello?”

  Rose had hung up.

  Dupin stood motionless for a moment or two. Then he shook his head, murmured, “Take it easy, take it easy,” shook his head again, stuffed his mobile into his pants pocket, and set about looking through the other papers in the folder. The next thing he came across was an article about the massive renovation of “Vinci” airport near Nantes and the protests against it. The resistance movement called itself “Opération Asterix” and used the slogan “Veni, vidi et pas Vinci”—Lilou had staunchly defended them. “Résistance!,” a Breton mantra. He remembered seeing lots of the little protest placards in the salt marshes with crossed-out images of planes landing.

  In a clear plastic pocket there were articles from the Télégramme and the Ouest-France about the demonstration by thirty pig breeders in a supermarket in Quimper. Articles by her colleagues. Two pages of handwritten notes by Lilou. Key words. “Very important campaign.” Dupin skimmed the page. There was a large photo of the supermarket campaign. Dupin took a closer look. At first he wasn’t sure, but then he was. Paul Daeron was there. He had a microphone in his hand. Paul Daeron was quoted twice. He was, Dupin read, the vice president of the ADSEA, the Association Départementale des Syndicats d’Exploitants Agricoles, vice president of the pig section of the ADSEA, and first president of the FDPP, Fédération des Producteurs Porcines. Dupin couldn’t help smiling; the Breton love of clubs, organizations, and societies was notorious. Paul Daeron had spoken out in favor of the rigorous principle of the appellation d’origine contrôlée for meat, like they had for wines, champagnes, and so on. This could be relevant—although Dupin had to admit he didn’t have a clue how. He looked for an article by Lilou. The one where all this research had ended up. He found nothing.

  Dupin got out his Clairefontaine and noted down the headlines along with a few key words for each one. In his mind, he went over everything they had looked through the night before last. They needed to find the story that lay behind it all. The subject, basically. It must be related to bacteria too, to “destruens” somehow. This was all just groping around in the dark. But Dupin was a vigorous champion of “groping around.” He had never, although some people thought it old-fashioned, found a more precise or above all a more effective criminalistic method. There was always something to find somewhere. You just had to look carefully. Rummage. Everywhere. Over and over again. Even though he couldn’t see anything at the moment; that was the part of poking around that Dupin found difficult—nothing could be forced or commanded. Nothing new occurred to him on the topics and key words in his notebook. But perhaps it was right under their noses and they just weren’t seeing it. He had been in that exact situation before. In the Gauguin painting case, the key to it all had literally been hanging right in front of him, in a room he had been into dozens of times.

  Dupin put everything back into the folder and then put the folder back exactly where it had been at the bottom of the pile. In Lilou’s filing system. A system that would never make sense to anyone again. He left the table and walked across the room.

  Based on their theory—still the most likely one they had—the murderer had been here too, on the night of the crime, although the forensics team hadn’t found anything to that effect yet. Not in this house or in Lilou’s parents’ house, apart from Maxime Daeron’s fingerprints, and not in her car either. The documents from the last six weeks hadn’t turned up anywhere. The murderer wanted to stop them finding out what Lilou had been working on.

  Dupin had reached the stairs. He was uncertain for a moment, but then went up the stairs. And into Lilou’s bedroom. The whitewashed walls were—he hadn’t really taken this in the night before last—full of photographs of all sizes. Impressive photographs, Dupin thought, mostly black and white, all landscapes, and he reckoned they were all by the same photographer. They were like landscapes from odd dreams, but without provoking any feelings of unease. You immediately longed to lose yourself in them. Clearly Breton landscapes, although he didn’t know the places, or didn’t recognize them. As if they were painted. Clearly a passion of Lilou’s. Two intimidating towers of books stood next to the bed. Dupin went into the room next door, the room that consisted almost entirely of the large desk. He stopped at the nearest corner of the desk. He didn’t need to go through this pile again. They had already done that very thoroughly. He couldn’t help smiling—underneath a few books, the page about the “thirty-six dead wild boar” peeped out. The long article about the green algae.

  Recalling Lilou’s work like this was lovely, awe-inspiring—and very sad at the same time. S
he had always been standing up for something, a passionate campaigner with unshakable convictions. And quirks. And strong dislikes.

  Dupin turned away, left the room, and walked back down the stairs slowly. He hadn’t found anything. But he was still glad he’d come back.

  A minute later he left the house the way he had come, back out through the door to the patio and from there into the garden. This visit had been a kind of farewell.

  He stood in the wonderful enchanted garden. Directly opposite the patio was a narrow garden gate he had never noticed before. He went over to the gate and opened it. He stepped out onto a small granite ledge. At high tide the water would flow directly beneath it. At low tide, as now, with the water slowly draining away, you could climb down a few stones like they were steps. An amazing place. A sweeping view of the spellbinding gulf. The gate had opened easily and smoothly. It had been used frequently. Lilou must have come here often. Perhaps this had been her favorite spot, here on the rocks.

  He looked at his watch. He’d need to get going soon.

  * * *

  Dupin walked along the sandy floor of the small sea. It was more of a trudge really; the sand was coarse, hard, watery, and full of mussel shells. The water was coming in slowly. It smelled instantly of the sea, of the refined miniature sea. He walked as far as the waterline, two or three hundred meters away. And there he stopped, looking around. The sun was beating down. Dazzling. There was something nebulous bothering him, going round and round his head. It wasn’t even a concrete thought; more of an undefined connection, a vague link between things. A kind of inkling. He was familiar with this. That crucial split second when something took root unannounced. When he was standing at the desk upstairs and going through Lilou’s topics in his mind, he hadn’t been able to grasp this vague thing. And he still couldn’t. But the feeling that he had had something important within his reach for a moment was strong.