The Killing Tide

by Jean-Luc Bannalec

  Back in Douarnenez, there hadn’t been even the slightest breeze. But here there was a strong wind blowing incessantly, as always bringing the sea surf with it. Nowhere, Dupin thought, did the Atlantic smell as good, as wide, and as free as in this wind from the sea. No sooner did the spray hit your face than you could taste it.

  Here even on the calmest, most beautiful days there were still waves: real waves. Long, calm, stately waves. A meter high.

  Even the sun and the sky were different, more ancient, like at the beginning of the world. You had the impression of having been traveling for days, so distant did this landscape seem in comparison to Tréboul.

  He could see a group of people at the end of the beach, looking tiny and lost, down there where the beach turned into long, extenuated dunes, thickening as they moved inland.

  Dupin headed down at a swift pace toward the beach, which looked even bigger when you were down there, and trod through the heavy sand.

  Kadeg, who must have parked in a better place than he had—he couldn’t have driven any faster—spotted him and headed toward him.

  “Brutal. Same stab wound. An ice-cold killer.” Kadeg loved pithy utterances that could have come from a dramatic movie script.

  “Is the pathologist there yet?” Dupin had made out eight people.

  “Yes.”

  “Did she mention anything about the time of death?”

  “She only arrived just before me. She would have done better to have parked here at the northern end of the bar, as—”

  “And the woman who found him?

  “She’s gone back home.”

  “His neighbor?”

  “Exactly.”

  Dupin thought for a moment whether he ought to have her fetched. But he wanted to go to the village anyway shortly. To take a look at the professor’s house.

  “How big is the place?”

  “Ten, fifteen houses, no more. We’ve already been through everything down here.” Kadeg gave the impression he’d done it all himself, even if it had to have been their colleagues from Crozon or Morgat. “We found nothing. Nor did the crime scene team. Nothing around the body on the dune and nothing on the path leading down here. It must have happened in the shifting dune sand. There are only vague footprints to be seen, barely imprints, two people most probably.”

  They had almost reached the group. Dupin greeted them all round.

  “Kadeg, take the officers here and knock on all the doors up there. I want to know everything anybody has to say about the professor. Whom he had contact with, how he passed his days. Everything.”

  “Shouldn’t I wait here until—”

  “Immediately, I want you to start asking questions straightaway. I’m coming up too, shortly.” That way he could prevent the unnecessary gathering of people here at the scene.

  Kadeg turned away with a childishly sulky face and made a snappy gesture to the police. They hurried toward him. Together they plodded up the dune. Only one of them stayed behind.

  “We’ll go into the professor’s house together,” Dupin called out loud enough for Kadeg and his people definitely to hear him. “Nobody’s to set a foot inside before I get there.”

  Dupin walked the last few meters to the corpse.

  It was a gruesome sight.

  Philippe Lapointe lay on his back. Unlike in the case of Laetitia Darot, a large quantity of blood had spread all over the body. Into his bright blue sweater, which was saturated with it, and beneath his clothing as far as his jeans. A lot of blood. His head was brutally bent backward, down into the soft sand. Probably the professor in his agony had used his last ounce of strength to try to snatch a gasp of air. It was easy to see the intense agony that this death had involved. The eyes were wide open, staring emptily at the sky. The arms were curiously fixed by his side, almost straight; his legs, on the contrary, were at crazy angles.

  The virologist was of average height, neither fat nor thin. A distinguished face, even when so ferociously distorted; narrow lips; thick white hair, cut short; a notable high forehead.

  Dupin was standing directly in front of the corpse, just a few centimeters from the black sneakers the deceased was wearing.

  “Body temperature twenty-eight degrees.” A pleasant voice. Dupin turned around to find a young woman in her late thirties standing next to him, her light blond hair in a ponytail, no makeup. He had only caught sight of her out of the corner of his eye; she’d been standing with her back to him, busying herself with a silver case. “Given the pleasant temperature today, the body will have lost about one degree per hour. That suggests ten hours. Plus or minus an hour.” She said it as a matter of routine, but in a tone that reflected the seriousness of the situation. “The pupil test confirms that. His pupils hardly reacted to eyedrops, but still just noticeably, which also suggests about eight hours. And my gut feeling says the same.” The pathologist sounded detached, as if looking back over innumerable corpses she had seen in her professional life.

  “Good.” Dupin was satisfied. “That’s a great help. It fits exactly with our scenario.” It sounded accidentally comic. It already appeared that the killer had come here from the Île de Sein more or less directly, without much of a detour. Either he had come from the Île de Sein to the mainland directly with his boat, and then here in a car, or come here directly in the boat.

  “We’re dealing with a hardworking killer here.” She gave a grim smile.

  “You think it can be one and the same person?”

  “Just looking at the cut here I would say at first glance it’s perfectly possible. But I’ll have to check that out in the lab. Compare the wounds. By the way, we’ve found nothing else unusual in the case of the dolphin researcher.”

  “Do you see anything out of the usual here?”

  “There’s a hematoma on the right wrist. Maybe the killer overcame him and held him tight. He certainly couldn’t have put up much resistance.”

  “Do you think it happened right here?”

  “He would have collapsed straightaway. Yes.”

  That too seemed to be part of the killer’s modus operandi. He met his victims in lonely places, murdered them there on the spot, and left the bodies where they were, without moving them. Everything was thought out thoroughly. According to a precise plan. As far as Darot and the professor were concerned, the killer must have made an arrangement to meet them. He couldn’t have lain in wait for them, that would have been far too unreliable. That was also true for Céline Kerkrom, actually: she needed to have had a reason to come to the out-of-the-way room with the waste barrels. The perp had known the places he had chosen. And known them well. The whole area.

  “Did the professor have anything in his pants pocket? A cell phone?”

  “Nothing. We’re taking the body with us now. I’m calling the van, so it’ll take a while. It can only get here from the other end of the bay.”

  “Thanks.” Dupin smiled. The pathologist returned his smile with a friendly, professional glance. “And let me know if anything occurs to you.”

  “I’ll do that.” She took a phone from her bag and stood to one side.

  Dupin made a gesture to the uniformed policeman who had stayed behind, an impressively portly man with a head round as a ball, who had been following everything attentively. “You stay here and mark the spot where the body lay. Clearly.”

  “Consider it done.”

  Dupin took a look around.

  Although the land rose only gently toward the interior of the peninsula, at the edge of the beach, high cliffs rose with dangerous overhangs. Dupin found himself staring at them, and the policeman noticed.

  “There’s a Celtic defensive structure up there, where the Gauls fled to from the Romans.”

  Dupin sighed gently.

  There was nowhere without stories and history. No single place where something important hadn’t happened. That was Brittany for you.

  He moved toward a narrow footpath he had noticed amidst the dunes.

  The po
liceman had noticed that too.

  “The path is the best way to the village, Monsieur le Commissaire.”

  This man wouldn’t miss anything down here at the crime scene; he was undoubtedly the right man to keep watch.

  Dupin set off.

  * * *

  “Madame Lapointe, yes, I’ve already spoken on the phone to her. She lives in Paris. In the Marais district. They separated fifteen years ago, been divorced for twelve.”

  Nolwenn had been working hard. Her idea about the assistant at the institute had been spot-on, and she had come across Philippe Lapointe’s ex-wife.

  “They parted on good terms. No intrigue. They even saw one another occasionally. They went out for dinner. But not for the last year. She was taken aback by the news.”

  “Had he still been doing any work? Had anything to do with the faculty? In any way at all?”

  The path up to the village was longer than Dupin had imagined. It was only now that he saw the first houses. From here on, the road was paved. There were four police cars by the side of the road and he recognized Kadeg’s.

  The rough harshness of the Atlantic reached up here, limiting the vegetation to bare bushes, shrubs, grasses, moss, heathland. Nothing soft and pretty up here. In stormy weather the spray would swirl through Lostmarc’h, as if the hamlet were only a few meters from the sea.

  “She couldn’t say. She didn’t know what he’d being doing in his ‘exile,’ as she called it, indeed if he still had anything at all to do with his research, as he had no laboratory anymore. He spent a lot more time reading, she reckoned, having taken his entire library with him to Brittany: the great literary and philosophic classics. That was his great hobby.”

  That was only of peripheral interest to Dupin. They needed to find out how Lapointe spent his time. Dupin had already been thinking about that in the car. Had the great virologist, biologist, physician, come across something unusual in the parc somewhere along the coast? Had he got wind of something he realized was a disaster? Something that only he would have noticed. These were all hazy thoughts. But all the same, there had to be some connection to the two women, a decisive—even fatal—link. What could be the story in which these three people could have played a role? Each on their own or the three of them together, knowingly or unknowingly? Up until now they had no more than a few loose threads, or not even that, a few themes that could link them: the fishing industry, possible offenses, illegal practice, the dead dolphins, water pollution, smuggling, intertwined topics, a suspicious family relationship, including a possible highly complicated paternity. But none of those themes were really urgent. They might also even be totally irrelevant, all of them leading in the wrong direction. And the one thing that hadn’t even stirred so far was Dupin’s nose, his scent of a trail. The one thing he had always relied on in messy situations. Like this.

  “Was he in a new relationship?”

  “She didn’t know that either. She herself had got remarried.” It sounded like and just right, too.

  “Does she know if he had friends here in Brittany?”

  “His best friend died two years ago. They had talked about that the last time they met up. He hadn’t mentioned any new friends. She did mention what good shape he had been in, kept very fit and did a lot of walking. Not that it helped him.”

  Dupin had walked farther along the street but not met anyone.

  “And just so you know, the press have already got wind of the professor’s death. I’ll spare you the first headlines.” According to her tone, they left Nolwenn cold. “Obviously the ghost of the serial killer is doing the rounds. They’re having a feast day.”

  Obviously, Riwal wasn’t the only one with a contagious imagination.

  “That’s it for the moment, Monsieur le Commissaire. We’re getting ready for an all-out day tomorrow. I’ll come back to you when I get anything new. See you later.”

  Nolwenn hung up.

  The “all-out day.” Things like that always disquieted him. He quickly turned his thoughts back to the case, and the professor.

  “Commissaire!”

  Kadeg’s voice.

  Dupin looked around, but didn’t see him.

  “Over here.”

  He was standing in the doorway of an old, flat-fronted stone house with a reed thatch, the sort you saw often in the little hamlets. It was quite a ways away; he had shouted loudly.

  Dupin walked quickly toward him.

  “This is the house of Madame Corsaire. The neighbor. Back here,” Kadeg waved vaguely, “is where Lapointe’s house is.”

  But before Dupin reached the old stone house, a head with impressive gray curls popped up next to Kadeg in the doorway. It belonged to a dainty lady in a pink apron dress. She blinked curiously at Dupin, who was standing almost next to her on a narrow piece of land between the road and the house, with the same stubby, bushy grass as on the cliffs.

  “This is Madame Corsaire, she—”

  “He’s been away a lot recently. In Brest and Rennes. In libraries. He loved old books, old maps, old documents. All that. His whole house is full of it. An eccentric if you ask me. Have you any idea how much dust it creates?”

  She passed Kadeg by and took a step toward the commissaire.

  Dupin was glad there was no great prologue. “When you found him down on the beach, did you see anyone else? Or at any time on your walk?”

  “Is he still lying down there, the poor man? The wind down there is even worse than up here.” She shook her head. “Nobody, not a living soul.”

  “Did anything else unusual strike you, Madame Corsaire?”

  “More unusual than a corpse?”

  “So you didn’t notice anything in particular on the beach today, or among the dunes?”

  “No. And all of this today, just when my husband is away in Roscoff! And I’m here all on my own!”

  “Was there maybe a car in the parking lot you didn’t recognize, for example?”

  “No. Nobody comes here.”

  The murderer had been there.

  “Do you know if Monsieur Lapointe had been particularly busy recently, with something special that had happened? Here in the Parc Iroise? In the water, or along the coast?”

  The old lady’s face looked extremely skeptical. “What on earth might that be?”

  “Something he might have mentioned that was worrying him? Pollution? Animals, wounded or dead? Dolphins? Anything at all.”

  “He went for a walk every day. Always along the shore. He loved it, that’s why he moved here, he said. Either along the beach or along the cliff tops. Sometimes he went on ‘walking excursions,’ that’s what he called them. Along the coast of the Pointe du Raz or in Douarnenez Bay. On those occasions he took his car.”

  “Did you see him often?”

  “Not every day, but two or three times a week. We always stopped for a chat.”

  Dupin would have another go. “But Professor Lapointe never mentioned anything he’d been busy with of late?”

  “He gave the impression of being very upbeat in the past few weeks. He was in a good mood.”

  “So there was nothing.”

  “I don’t think so—”

  The penetrating tone of Dupin’s phone interrupted them. Dupin snatched it into his hand.

  His mother.

  To be honest he had been wondering—her last attempt had been hours ago. Normally she was a lot more persistent.

  The elderly lady looked at him queryingly.

  “You were saying”—Dupin put the phone back in his pants pocket—“you don’t think…”

  She was immediately back on topic. “I just wanted to say I didn’t think there was anything on his mind.” She shook her head energetically. “That he had any worries. Or worse.”

  “Do you know if he still had anything to do with virology?”

  “Not that he mentioned to me.”

  “Did he have friends, acquaintances? Did he get visitors sometimes?”

  “Not many. An elde
rly man came by from time to time, not someone I know.”

  Dupin took out his notebook.

  “He came in a tiny car, but the professor never told me who it was. Maybe once a month. Then they went for a walk together, and came back and sat in the professor’s house. But I don’t know what they did there.”

  “You have no idea who it might have been?”

  “No. It was a white Citroën C2. From Finistère.”

  Dupin made a note.

  He turned to Kadeg. “Have the colleagues in the village ask around, maybe somebody knows something more about this man.” Then, turning back to Madame Corsaire: “Any other visitors, madame?”

  “Marie from the citizens’ movement, she was there a couple of times last week.”

  “Yes?”

  “The citizens’ movement against chemicals.”

  Dupin waited. In vain.

  “Can you tell me any more about those chemicals, madame?”

  “They use them in Camaret harbor, to clean boats and treat them against rot. They belong to Charles Morin, the Fisher King.”

  “We know about this.”

  Only about protests, a citizens’ movement, nothing else, but even so: this was the first potential link. And to Morin.

  “It all ends up in the sea. It’s a disgrace. The politicians don’t dare do anything. So a few people have got together.”

  Morin, again and again, Morin.

  “You just said Professor Lapointe wasn’t involved in anything, but it would appear he was, in this water pollution.”

  “There was nothing recent; this business with the chemicals has been going on for years.”

  “But it would appear things have suddenly got worse. You said a woman from the citizens’ movement was there a couple of times last week.”

  “You’d need to ask Marie Andou yourself, she’s a kindergarten teacher.”