An Official Killing

by Nell Goddin

  An Official Killing

  Molly Sutton Mystery 7

  Nell Goddin

  Beignet Books

  Copyright © 2017 by Nell Goddin

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  * * *

  Would you like a free short story? Click HERE!

  To Nancy Kelley, editor extraordinaire.

  Contents

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part II

  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

  Part III

  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

  Part IV

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Also by Nell Goddin

  Glossary

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  I

  1

  2005

  * * *

  Josette approached the house on rue Malbec with jangly nerves. She was eighteen and no stranger to work, but her new job as house-maid for Monsieur Coulon was entirely different from the farm chores she was used to. Monsieur Coulon was the mayor of Castillac, the most famous person she had ever met, which made her hands feel clammy whenever she thought of it.

  She stood on the street for a moment before ringing the bell, trying to gather her confidence. The house was built of the warm golden limestone that the Dordogne is famous for, and it was four full floors, the tallest building she had ever entered. She looked up and saw that the blue shutters were still closed and wondered if opening all of them each morning would be one of her tasks. Counting, she saw twelve pairs just on the street side of the building.

  Josette reached to ring the bell but then paused. She smoothed the apron she had put on over her blue jeans while a sudden panic swept through her that she’d chosen the wrong thing to wear. What if Monsieur, no—Mayor Coulon wished her to wear something more proper, even a dress?

  As the young woman stood on the sidewalk unable to summon the courage to ring the bell, the front door of the mayor’s house opened and the mayor himself appeared.

  “Ah, bonjour, Josette!” he said, his voice booming as though he were making a speech to a crowd. He was balding, and his strategy for bucking this trend was to call in the classic comb-over, which Josette stared at before forcing herself to look away. The mayor was something of a gourmand, as his large belly indicated, but despite the belly and the comb-over he was not an unattractive man, at least that was what he told himself when he faced the mirror each morning.

  Josette dipped a small curtsy, as her mother had taught her that morning, and mumbled a greeting, though she could not quite meet Coulon’s eye, feeling afraid that he might not approve of her.

  “Come in, come in,” he said, making a sweeping gesture. “And please, call me Maxime. I must check the mail for something I should have received yesterday. Wait in the foyer and I will be right with you.” He walked to the mailbox, his eyes on Josette, congratulating himself on finding such a very pretty house-maid. She had enviable curves, not the stick-straight boyish figure that seemed to be in fashion lately, and her hair fell in soft chestnut waves around her pleasing face.

  Josette stepped into the house, marveling at the high ceilings and the small chandelier in the foyer. It was so bright compared to the dark farmhouse where she lived, and she squinted at the broad staircase curving up to the next floor and at the red carpet that unspooled down the center of it.

  When the mayor came back in, he showed Josette all around the four floors of the house, as well as the small backyard where the clothesline was, along with a neat vegetable garden that he tended on the weekends. He described her duties thoroughly and made it clear that if she had any questions, she had only to ask. She would be responsible for dusting, vacuuming, polishing furniture and silver, as well as laundry. As Coulon described each job, Josette nodded. He admired her reticence, much preferring the sound of his own voice to anyone else’s, and even more he admired her substantial backside as she went up the stairs ahead of him.

  Those blue jeans, however…they were too modern, too casual, he thought. It was nearly an insult for her to be wearing them as a member of his staff, even if the staff was comprised only of Josette.

  She was a country girl who had never been to a big city, and even Bergerac only rarely. Her life on the farm had been isolated, and she knew little about, well, anything but raising chickens and how to grow lettuce. The Barbeaus had no computer and the reception on their ancient television was poor. She had paid little attention in school and all she knew of the wide world was what her mother, Madame Barbeau, told her, along with stray tidbits from her younger brother, who went to the market in Bergerac twice a week to sell their poultry and produce.

  But as of that beautiful July day she had left the farm behind, and with Madame Barbeau’s urging, Josette intended to make the most of the opportunity at 1 rue Malbec.

  * * *

  Promptly at four o’clock, Josette’s younger brother Julien pulled up in front of the mayor’s house in a beat-up truck. It was Wednesday, a smaller market day in Bergerac than Saturday’s but still quite lucrative; he had sold out of chicken in a matter of hours now that it was June and tourists were beginning to appear at the markets, swelling the pool of potential customers. For several months he had been skimming a little off the day’s take instead of turning it all over to his mother, and on that Wednesday, since he had to pick up his sister later in the afternoon, Julien had gone to a bar to treat himself to lunch.

  Madame Barbeau believed that restaurant meals were hell on earth, or perhaps even that Satan himself worked in restaurant kitchens, spitting in all the dishes; Julien did not know the precise details of his mother’s objections because he had learned to tune her out years ago when she got started on one of her Subjects. In any case, he enjoyed the meal even more knowing its mere occurrence would be appalling to his mother, and availed himself of one more beer than he should have, arriving at rue Malbec rather worse for wear.

  “Joseeehhh-tuh!” he called, singsong, leaning against the hood of the truck. When she did not immediately appear, he shook a Gitane out of a crumpled pack and lit up. Julien didn’t mind waiting. There was nothing to hurry home to except for a barn cat he was friendly with. And the barn cat was a biter.

  He was halfway through his second cigarette when Josette let herself out of the front door, carefully closed i
t, and ran to the car.

  “So?” asked Julien. “How was it?”

  “Awesome,” said Josette.

  “Really. Cleaning some guy’s house is awesome? You are simple-minded.”

  “Not that part, you lunk. I’m talking about the house. You see it’s four whole floors? And each floor is huge, Julien. Room after room. Like for a king.”

  “You didn’t do well in history if you think that a king would have spent even one night in a dinky house like that.”

  “It’s not dinky!”

  Julien laughed, pleased at having gotten under his sister’s skin so easily. The farm was a forty-five minute drive from Castillac and they drove the rest of the way without talking, Julien daydreaming about the voluptuous waitress who had just served his lunch, and Josette imagining each room of the mayor’s house in turn, trying to remember the details, both for her own pleasure and because she knew her mother would have a pile of questions about all of it.

  They pulled up to the farmhouse just as a drizzle started. Dark clouds loomed up behind the barn and Josette saw that the chickens had all roosted, preparing for a storm.

  “Hey, what time do I need to take you in tomorrow?” Julien asked. “If you would just learn how to drive, you could take the truck yourself.”

  Josette shook her head. “Nine o’clock, and I can’t be late,” she said, running to the front door, anxious to tell her mother about the day before she forgot anything.

  Madame Barbeau sat by the fireplace in the kitchen. The farmhouse was very old, and the fireplace immense, big enough to roast a deer. Three hundred years’ worth of soot blackened the mantel and ceiling. The windows were small and infrequent, the room dark and dingy.

  “Sit,” said Madame Barbeau to her daughter. “Julien? Where are you going with that envelope?”

  Julien stopped on his way through and reluctantly gave his mother the rest of the day’s take. “Sold everything early on,” he said. “On Saturday, give me more whole birds.”

  Madame Barbeau nodded, thumbing through the bills with satisfaction. “So, Josette? Speak up.”

  Josette opened a package of cookies and sat down, chewing. “It was awesome, Maman.”

  “You say everything is awesome. I don’t even know what the word means anymore, and you certainly don’t either.”

  Josette ate another cookie.

  “First tell me about the mayor. Is he a good boss? Clear with his instructions? Not too harsh? Of course, you won’t really know until you make a mistake. That’s the test. You didn’t happen to make a mistake on your first day?”

  “No, Maman,” said Josette.

  “All right. Good. Come on, girl, speak up. What is the inside of the house like? Does he have paintings? They can be very valuable, you know. How about silver?”

  “I polish the silver, on Tuesdays. This was Wednesday.” Josette saw her mother was waiting for more, so she added, “It’s Wednesday so I didn’t do anything with the silver. I didn’t even see any, apart from some candlesticks in the dining room. I dusted the whole house, with rags and a big stick with feathers on the end of it. Big puffy feathers, like.”

  “Ostrich,” said Madame Barbeau.

  “Yeah, well, that took a really long time. It’s four whole floors, this house. A skyscraper, pretty much.”

  Madame Barbeau was struck by a fit of coughing but still managed to give her daughter a wilting look. “How can you be eighteen years old and know so little?”

  Josette ate another cookie.

  “And please, stop making a pig of yourself with those packaged sweets. I don’t know why Julien insists on bringing them home. Those cookies are made in factories, you understand, not a kitchen. They are no better than food from a restaurant. And as I hope I have made clear…”

  She was off, having found an entry point to one of her Subjects, and Josette arranged her expression to look as though she were paying attention, but was instead dreaming of the house on rue Malbec, touching the silk-covered pillows and the heavy curtains, running her hands over a sculpture of a swan that stood in the mayor’s bedroom, and leaving the sooty farm kitchen and her scolding mother far, far behind.

  2

  The mairie, where the mayor worked, was only a short walk from his house. His habit was to have coffee and toast with butter and jam at eight o’clock, and then stroll to his office right around nine. It was a pleasure to work at the mairie, since the various people who worked under him knew what they were doing and made his life rather easy. They knew which forms to fill out for what occasion—and there seemed to be an infinity of occasions, the French government being extremely fond of forms—but Monsieur Coulon didn’t have to worry about any of that, thanks to their abundant expertise.

  At the moment, the end of a too-hot July, there was practically nothing for him to do. Sometimes he was asked by the examining magistrate to look into a matter, making inquiries and acting as a sort of policeman. When nothing else was going on he decided his main job should be the promotion of good spirits in the village, and he took that part of his job seriously, walking through the streets and greeting whomever he passed, even going so far as to keep notes in a small notebook he carried about how many people he had spoken to from day to day. At the office, he did not insist on formality, which the others liked him for.

  The week after Josette had begun to work for him, Coulon took a call from Charles Mangey, the mayor of Bergerac.

  “Maxime, I just heard from a friend, an official in Périgueux who knows about such things, that there’s going to be clamping down on black market activity, just wanted to give you a head’s up.”

  “Black market?” said Coulon. “Not sure that’s much of a problem in Castillac. I can’t imagine anyone trafficking in stolen kidneys or exotic drugs at the Café de la Place,” he said with a chuckle.

  Charles took a deep breath. “You watch too many American movies,” he said. “The black market isn’t only for things like that. It covers an enormous amount of ground, from pirated software to cigarettes. Essentially, any transaction where the government is cheated out of taxes, that’s black market. How is it possible you do not know this, Maxime?”

  “I didn’t realize that’s what you were talking about,” said Coulon defensively. “Perhaps a bit of the work in the village is under the table…ah, you can’t blame people, can you? The VAT has gotten ridiculous.”

  “Maxime,” said the other mayor, “I needn’t remind you that we cannot hold ourselves up as protectors of the common good while turning a blind eye to illegal behavior, no matter what you might think of the policies coming out of Paris.”

  “Yes, yes, of course, I wasn’t saying that. Though I don’t see how much I can do about the kind of thing you’re talking about. If a homeowner pays the plumber with cash, or partly cash, what am I supposed to do about it? I’m not present during the transaction and there is no evidence of its having taken place.”

  “Bank records, Maxime,” André said patiently. “Look out for cash deposits. After all, cash doesn’t just appear out of thin air, does it?”

  “Ah, if only it did!” laughed Coulon. “Thank you for letting me know. As I said, I doubt there is much illegal activity here in Castillac, at least on any scale worth worrying about, but I will have a word with the bank manager in any case. Now tell me about the music festival next week—are you making any special plans about parking?”

  The two mayors spoke for another ten minutes about upcoming events in their respective towns, and then cordially said goodbye.

  After hanging up, Coulon sat for a moment looking out of his window. Rue Balzac was empty except for Madame Vargas’s dog Yves, who was trotting confidently down the sidewalk before turning onto rue Malbec. “Black market” sounded so exotic, like something in a stylish film, Coulon thought. Perhaps there is money to be made here in Castillac in more ways than I have figured.

  A slow smile spread across his face as he contemplated a number of targets that instantly sprang to mind. Candy
from a baby, he thought, suddenly hungry for lunch.

  * * *

  Over the course of several months, Josette settled into the job at the mayor’s house happily enough, though certain aspects turned a little strange. At first it had been smooth sailing, with Coulon seeming to be the most genial of employers. Each weekday morning, Julien dropped off Josette, and she set about the day’s chores with enough enthusiasm and competence to please her boss. She was meticulous with silver-polishing, making sure to get every speck of tarnish even in the crevices of the ornate flower pattern on the flatware. She made the mayor’s bed fresh every day, plumping the duvet to cloud-like softness and making sure the pillowcases were washed and dried in the sunshine, as he preferred. Coulon set the schedule of what she was to do when, though he liked to fiddle with it, sometimes changing the day’s chores for reasons she did not understand. But what did she care? The job paid well and allowed her to spend the bulk of her day in a stately house, surrounded by beautiful things. It was ten times better than the chicken house, she told Julien, though the truth was that she missed farm life and preferred the company of the birds to that of Coulon by a wide margin.