The Killing Tide

by Jean-Luc Bannalec

  From Lapointe’s house Dupin did not turn left onto the little street, but right onto the path he had walked down to make his phone call. Toward the bay and the beach. Then he would have to take a left at some point to get to his car.

  He could only spontaneously think of a few people he could try. He would just have to give it a go. He had already dialed the first number.

  “Monsieur Jumeau? Commissaire Dupin here.”

  It took a while for him to get an answer.

  “Yes,” Jumeau responded sluggishly.

  “I have another important question. Did you know,” Dupin said, trying to keep it neutral sounding, not suggesting anything, “that Laetitia Darot used to go to see a certain Professor Lapointe?”

  A long silence.

  “We didn’t have a firm relationship. She could do whatever she wanted.”

  “I’m only interested in whether you knew. Did she ever mention it to you? Maybe she was consulting the professor about something in particular?”

  “Consulting?”

  “You knew nothing about this contact?”

  “No.”

  “Did you…” Dupin gave up. It was hard work. “Thanks. My colleague will be in touch with you again soon.”

  The path came to an abrupt end by shoulder-high thorny bushes; he would have to walk along the side of it. He would keep trying. Maybe he’d get lucky.

  Dupin had his phone to his ear again. The scientist picked up immediately. “Pierre Leblanc here.”

  “Commissaire Dupin.” There was no need for formalities with Leblanc. The commissaire came straight to the subject. “Did you know about any contact between Laetitia Darot and a certain Professor Lapointe? Philippe Lapointe. He lives on the Crozon peninsula. A distinguished virologist from a Paris university.”

  “The name means nothing to me … is he the third murder victim? I just heard on the news.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “That’s dreadful.” His reaction was automatic, and there was a deep horror in his voice. “Terrible—I’ll ask my colleagues here at the institute if anyone knew about such a contact, which is in any case highly unlikely.”

  “That would be good, Monsieur Leblanc.”

  “I’ll be in touch if I hear anything. This case is achieving monstrous proportions.”

  “Indeed it is.” Dupin thought for a moment. “Did Laetitia Darot ever mention an illness, an infection going around among the dolphins? Were there animals who’d been affected?”

  “No. And she certainly would have. For sure.”

  It was a plausible possibility.

  “One more question, Monsieur Leblanc. Where were you this morning, let’s say between six o’clock and eleven?”

  The answer was clear and calm.

  “In the office, here, from nine o’clock. Then at half past nine I was at Pointe Saint-Mathieu, where we’re building a new measuring station, which we want to start using by the end of the year. Something that was very important to Laetitia, as the dolphins often stopped around there. I was back by half past eleven.”

  “And prior to nine o’clock?”

  “At home. I live in Tréboul, on my own, as it happens. I realize that is very hard for you to check.” Leblanc had said the words with almost scientific concern. “I’m trying to think if anyone might have seen me. Possibly on the way.”

  “Were you on the boat?”

  “Yes, just me.”

  “How long does it take to get there?”

  “From here, an hour and a half.”

  “And nobody saw you there either?”

  “Probably not. The station is a jagged headland, hard to reach from the mainland.”

  “What about when you came back? Around midday?”

  “My assistant. She was waiting for me for a meeting.”

  “So did your assistant also see you at nine?”

  “She wasn’t there yet. But some of the technicians must have done. Certainly somebody here. I was up here briefly before I went down to the boat.”

  “How about last night, between nine and eleven o’clock?”

  “I was here at the institute for a long time, maybe up to midnight.”

  “And did you bump into somebody who could bear witness to that?”

  “I know it’s unfortunate, but I don’t think so. I’m usually the last to leave.”

  A very factual briefing. But Leblanc’s alibi was as weak as those of the others.

  “Thank you, Monsieur Leblanc. One of my inspectors will be in touch again. He will want to talk to your assistant too.”

  Dupin had reached the end of the thorny hedgerow. A little footpath led straight down toward the beach. Another led parallel to the beach; theoretically he ought to come to the path that led to his car.

  It had been through this pair—as far as Dupin could say for now—that he had felt that he might have had a chance of finding out something about the meetings between Darot and the professor.

  Then he thought of Manet. He got his phone out again.

  “Hello?” Manet answered.

  “Commissaire Dupin here.” He didn’t need to go into formalities with the island doctor either. “Laetitia Darot was in contact with Professor Lapointe—she went to visit him in his house in Lostmarc’h a few times over the past few months.” Dupin refrained from asking a question.

  “That’s interesting. Why?”

  “That’s what I’d like to find out. You didn’t know?”

  “No, I would have mentioned it.” He didn’t seem irritated.

  “Have you any idea what these meetings might have been about? Or what sort of a relationship at all they might have had?”

  “Not in the slightest. No.”

  “Does anyone else occur to you who might have known about it?”

  “Céline, that’s all.”

  That was the problem.

  “Two other things, Monsieur Dupin. The tide will be particularly high tomorrow. Coefficient 116. That can cause the weather to turn rough. We will have to bring the boats into the innermost part of the harbor, for safety’s sake. Including Darot’s. Only so you know.

  “Also: there’s registered mail for Céline Kerkrom. The woman from the post office was just here to ask me what she should do with it. It has to be collected by hand.”

  “Inspector Riwal will pick it up. I’ll talk to him.”

  “Thank you. Thanks.”

  “See you later, then.”

  Manet hung up. That was it, then, the people who could have helped him. Dupin swore aloud.

  His sense of orientation hadn’t let him down. He had stumbled onto the path that led to his car. It went remarkably steeply uphill; he hadn’t noticed before.

  He glanced at the time. Quarter past eight. He lost all sense of time when he was on a case. He needed to call Claire straightaway. He had been intending to do it all day long. And, there was no alternative, his mother too.

  He realized how worn out and exhausted he was. His night had been over by five in the morning, and the day since had been a solid turbulent marathon. And it was by no means over yet. He needed a café. Urgently.

  * * *

  Dupin already had his phone to his ear, about to call Claire, when it rang. He was almost at his car at last.

  “Extraordinary news, boss!” Riwal burst out. “Guess who cut the professor’s hair?” Riwal left a rhetorical pause, before continuing excitedly. “Yan Lapal.”

  Yet another pause.

  “The hairdresser with the boat, who also cut the hair of Darot and Kerkrom. His salon is in Camaret. Professor Lapointe went there. Lapal cut the hair of all three.”

  “Really?”

  The hairdresser had a rock-solid alibi, Kadeg had told him, at least for last night.

  “That’s just a stone’s throw from the new murder scene. And it would only take him five minutes from his house to get to his boat in Camaret harbor, I’ve checked on the map. From there he could get anywhere within an hour. Including the islands.�
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  It was all true. And it was a funny coincidence that all three had used him. But there was no chance of it being him—and there was no reason to think differently—if you continued to assume there was just one killer, which the pathologist also considered probable.

  “Think it over. A hairdresser who could get in his boat to the most isolated areas, and commit murder undisturbed. Nobody would suspect him.”

  That applied not just to the hairdresser but also to their serial killer. Dupin should have known that.

  “Anything else, Riwal?”

  “I’ve spoken to a few men from the island who enjoy spending time on the quays. Sitting in the bars, watching the world go by, the boats coming and going,” Riwal said.

  “And?”

  “They say that recently Kerkrom spent more time out at sea than normal. That she used to take one day off a week but hadn’t done so for a while.”

  “We need to ask around in Douarnenez harbor. Maybe they could—”

  “Already done that. One of Madame Gochat’s staff has been told to send us a list of which days Céline Kerkrom brought her catch to auction, from March on. That’s all that’s on record, not whether or not she docked in Douarnenez harbor. But even so.”

  “Excellent, Riwal.”

  Dupin should have thought of that himself, first thing that morning.

  “She also fished to order for certain restaurants, sea bass and lieus jaunes. On those days, obviously, she wasn’t registered at the auction. Their best watcher, in any case, was the little boy you spoke to this morning at the cholera cemetery, boss, and he often hangs about the harbor. He knows the fisherfolk well. And even he said that recently Kerkrom was at sea most of the time. Darot too. And occasionally both of them in the same boat.”

  “Which?”

  “Either. Darot’s and Kerkrom’s.”

  “How often?”

  “Sometimes, was what he said. I couldn’t get him to be any more exact.”

  “And why did they go out together? Did he say anything about that?”

  “He thought they were rod fishing together. But he didn’t know.”

  “Did the two of them tell him that—that they were line fishing?”

  “No, it was just what he thought.”

  “And did he add where exactly they went to?”

  Another one of the crucial questions.

  “No.” Dupin turned a narrow corner. He didn’t remember the path from his car to the beach being this long.

  “Anything else?”

  “Once or twice Kerkrom would give him a fish or a crab when she came back. So would the other fishers. He used to help them sorting out their nets, at their sheds. And if the fishers had found anything on the seafloor, he would take it to the museum. There’s a room there where they collect things that have been found. Madame Coquil showed me it, they keep everything, even really old stuff.” Riwal sounded impressed. “Cannonballs, two huge anchors, bits of boats, even a few Roman coins and ceramics. Amazing things, remnants of shipwrecks and settlements over six thousand years. They ought to—”

  “Is that all, Riwal?”

  Dupin needed to stop his inspector’s habit of meandering away from the topic. Current matters were too important.

  “Yes.”

  The commissaire would have very much liked to have spoken to the boy himself.

  “Good, Riwal, we’ll speak again soon.”

  “I need to pass on to you something from Goulch. The authorities have produced their decisive conclusion to the ‘joint services action.’ Things remain the same: nothing to be proved on any of Morin’s boats. Red lobsters were found on two other fishing boats, whose captains, as you know, had nothing to do with Morin. In one case it was almost certainly the result of by-catch, in the other it really was a breach of the regulations, which will now be punished. Everybody assumes Morin had been tipped off about the operation. There’s a lot of talk going on. Xavier Controc of the Affaires Maritimes is beside himself.”

  Speculative talk to be sure.

  Two more points occurred to Dupin, both ones he had almost forgotten. “You need to go by the mail office and pick up a registered letter for Céline Kerkrom. And I want one of our people there when they move Darot’s boat into the inner harbor. Antoine Manet said…”

  “The weather’s going to change tomorrow.”

  “Like I said, we need somebody watching.”

  “Consider it done, boss. By the way”—Riwal’s tone of voice had changed oddly—“are you well, physically I mean?”

  This time the commissaire understood immediately. “I’m fine, Riwal. Now, enough of this.”

  He would not speak another word about it.

  Dupin shoved his phone into his pocket.

  A seagull flew crazily close over his head. It had done that a couple of times ever since he walked along the blackberry hedge, almost as if it was aiming at him. Squawking. Maybe she had chicks and had a nest nearby.

  At last Dupin caught sight of his car.

  And not just his.

  A few meters behind the Citroën was a second car. Big, black, and shiny.

  Charles Morin was leaning on the door of the Citroën and looking at Dupin. As if it was the most obvious thing in the world that he should be standing there.

  He waited until Dupin was only a few paces away.

  “The pirate clown had been diligently on the tracks of both of them, we’ve found out. Vaillant spent days at sea near them. When they were out together on Kerkrom’s boat. Apparently without them noticing. By the entrance to Douarnenez Bay,” Morin said with the same self-confident, relaxed tone of voice and gestures as in their last conversation.

  “How did you know where to find me, Monsieur Morin?”

  “I think you need to deal with Vaillant. I certainly would.”

  “How did you come to be here, Monsieur Morin?” Dupin really wanted to know.

  “I was on the way home. My wife’s waiting with dinner.”

  The uncanny thing was not that Morin was near the scene of the crime—the media had already reported that—but that he was here, by Dupin’s car, in the middle of nowhere. It was a demonstration of power.

  “The murderer,” Morin said thoughtfully, “was obviously in a hurry. He wanted to stop his intended victims warning one another.”

  That was one aspect, undoubtedly. But Dupin wanted to go his own way without any middle-man input from Morin.

  “Professor Lapointe was involved in the citizens’ movement against the use of poisonous chemicals on your ships. You had a reason to undertake something against him. Who knows what he knew.”

  “You think I’m going to kill somebody because of their ridiculous allegations against me? About cleaning material?” Suddenly Morin sounded downcast. “And why Madame Gochat had the pair of them followed remains also completely in the dark. We absolutely need to concentrate on these questions, Commissaire. Believe me.”

  With those words he let go of the car door and went over to his own vehicle. Without even looking back.

  Dupin opened the door of the Citroën, climbed in, and fired up the engine. Even before Morin had started his motor, Dupin drove off.

  * * *

  The commissaire had intended to see Vaillant anyhow. But obviously what Morin said had made his intention more pressing, even if it went against the grain to follow a “tip” from Morin. He might not have wanted to give it to the “tipster,” but Vaillant was nonetheless still high on his list of suspects. There was no doubt Morin had a cunning intelligence.

  But it posed an urgent question, if true. What was the reason behind Vaillant following the two women in his boat? What was he after? Captain Vaillant was the second to be tailing them. And it always revolved around Douarnenez Bay.

  Dupin was to meet Vaillant in Le Conquet in the fishing harbor. Nolwenn had arranged everything.

  Kadeg had got hold of Frédéric Carrière, whose meeting with Morin had taken place by his high-seas trawlers, in the harb
or area that wasn’t open to the public. Because they allegedly had to take a look at a problem with one of the boats. Of course the only person to see them was another of Morin’s employees; nobody else confirmed what he said. Carrière claimed he had come out again at eleven o’clock. Kadeg made no secret of the fact he found the whole meeting suspect. As indeed it was.

  All the other alibis also seemed extremely vague; it could hardly be otherwise. Gochat had definitely been seen at twelve, but the last time in the morning at half past nine. In between she had “retreated” into her office. Jumeau claimed that apart from his conversation with Dupin, he had been at sea the whole time until six o’clock, but there was no way to confirm that.

  Dupin subsequently spoke with Riwal. The post office was obviously long closed. Dupin had been around the Bay of Brest before; it was a good hour’s drive. Vaillant would also need an hour. Dupin could be there in a few minutes.

  He had discovered Le Conquet and this part of the extreme west coast for himself last year for the first time. He and the whole commissariat had gone on a “work outing,” organized by Nolwenn, to the most westerly part of Brittany and France, the Pointe de Corsen, an excursion that despite Dupin’s deep skepticism about such outings had been very nice. They weren’t back until midnight and in an extremely good mood. It was not just the most westerly part of France, but apart from a tiny piece of Portuguese and Spanish land was the most westerly part of the European continent, and more: the entire European continental plate which rose some seven thousand kilometers away, including Siberia and China, from the Pacific. It was a reasonable Breton superlative and every upstanding Breton made the pilgrimage to the Pointe de Corsen. Naturally that was part of Nolwenn’s deeper reason in choosing the destination, yet another symbolic act in Dupin’s Bretonization.

  They had begun the excursion in bright sunshine at Saint-Mathieu—a magic place with innumerable legends, with high cliffs buffeted by wind and sea, with a picture-pretty lighthouse and next to it the atmospheric ruins of an old abbey from the sixth century—then ate lunch sumptuously in Le Conquet and from there drove to the Pointe de Corsen and the pretty little town of Porspoder and on to the almost unearthly beauty of the beaches of Lampaul-Ploudalmézeau. It was perhaps the stretch of Breton coast that had impressed Dupin most. He knew it was a stupid thing to say but he had done so many times. In any event it was the most remote, isolated, roughest, and wildest stretch. In “the south,” in “his” region, the land—fields, forests, meadows—mostly ran straight to the coast, and then suddenly there was the sea. Up until then it was clearly land. Here it was different. Here the monstrous forces of the tossing Atlantic and the whipping winds, the endlessly fine salty spray that was carried for kilometers, shaped nature far inland. Above all, that meant that everything, apart from the few oaks or pine forests, was barren, with little plant life. The typical stubby grass, ferns, bushes, brush, sandstone, rocks, cliffs. Yet with that the excess of green tones seemed to act as competition to the absence of any other beauty, from the darkest black-green to the brightest yellow-green. These were grand, powerful, superlative landscapes, most impressive perhaps to be seen on the road that ran directly by the water from Penfoul to Trémazan, but even better on the endless smugglers’ paths along the coast.