The Killing Tide

by Jean-Luc Bannalec

  “The most recent serious floods struck the island at the end of 2013, beginning of 2014. It was absolute hell, the sea raged. The very ground of the island shook, the walls of the houses too. A five-ton chunk of the quay was twisted out of shape by a wave meters wide, a huge sandbag was thrown through the air like a feather and killed a man.”

  Manet’s face grew dark. “There will be more and more hellish events in the future. And every time the island will lose a meter of land.”

  It was crazy. Despite the glorious high summer weather and the totally calm sea of the moment it was immediately possible to imagine the two extremes lying so close together on this unique island.

  “And the rabbits”—Manet was staring at a brownish-white patch in a field—“contribute significantly to the damage. They tunnel through the ground and accelerate the erosion. Just like the day-trippers, who take stones from the beaches as souvenirs, stones we keep having to pile up again.”

  Manet had an impressive way of telling stories casually, yet making them enthralling at the same time, but even so Dupin managed to tear himself free.

  “There’s news, important news, Monsieur Manet. We now assume that Kerkrom and Darot…” He faltered, and failed to finish the sentence. While he was talking it had occurred to him that there was something else to do before they talked about it. Now. Riwal and the boy had been right: Kerkrom and Darot must have taken their object somewhere that evening. Somewhere here on the island, which wasn’t exactly big, as was very clear from up here.

  “What I wanted to say was: I would like to talk to you again, Monsieur Manet. Do you think we might,” Dupin glanced at his watch, “meet later? In Le Tatoon? I’ll call you when I have time.”

  The island doctor gave him an amused look. “Of course. But as far as I’m concerned, we could just talk now.”

  “Later in Le Tatoon. Excellent.”

  Dupin turned away and went back into the dome without further explanation. Riwal followed, shrugging his shoulders. Dupin clambered down the ladder hurriedly.

  “You need to be careful, boss. Really careful.”

  Dupin was already on the steps. Riwal was falling ever farther behind.

  Back down on the ground, Dupin waited for the inspector. “I want to go back into their houses, and the sheds again.”

  Riwal didn’t waste a word on the matter, but his face showed exaggerated relief that Dupin hadn’t had a fatal accident scurrying down the steep steps at that speed.

  “You’re thinking about where they might have taken the cross?”

  “Let’s forget Ys and all these stories, Riwal. Agreed?” It didn’t sound unfriendly, but it did sound decisive. “We are going to concentrate totally on the idea that the objects might be a part of the sunken boat.”

  They walked rapidly to the exit. There was loud noise coming from the engineering area: a dull thumping sound.

  “They have to have taken the thing somewhere during the night,” Dupin said, “somewhere it has been for a long time, maybe up until the time of the murders. Until the killer got their hands on it. Or, on the contrary, didn’t find it, and where it might still be.”

  Riwal wrinkled his forehead. “The stupid thing is we have to find it. Everything depends on it. Apart from that all we have is speculation.”

  They had emerged into the open air. Dupin headed silently toward the village. It didn’t take them long to get to Darot’s house. The commissaire and his inspector hadn’t said a word all the way. Now Dupin’s phone rang.

  Kadeg.

  “Yes?”

  “Is that you, Commissaire?”

  The last phone call had gone well. But now his aggravating habits were back.

  “What’s up, Kadeg?”

  “We’re down at the harbor, Quai Nord. Madame Gochat and I, on the main pier.”

  Dupin had almost forgotten.

  “Okay, I’m on my way, but it will take a while.”

  “What exactly do you mean by ‘a while’?”

  Dupin hung up. And turned back to Riwal. “Okay, let’s go. We’ll take a look at the house.”

  It was small but in perfect order. It had to have been repainted not too long ago: the white was clean and bright. There was a little strip of rugged grass, and a waist-high white-painted concrete wall.

  Riwal let his eyes rove over the house. “The neighbors didn’t notice anything unusual, not even last night.”

  Dupin undid the police off-limits band outside the little gate, which had looked ridiculous in any case, and opened it. Instead of heading for the main house door, he went round the back of the house. The scrub grass here was twice as thick as in front and could pass as a garden.

  Dupin was disappointed. There was no shed, no annex. Nothing. All that was remarkable was the view: a couple of strangely shaped granite rocks and the glistening Atlantic beyond them. There was a narrow terrace door, next to a big window. Dupin tried the door handle. It wasn’t locked.

  He walked in, Riwal just behind him. On his guard, a tense expression on his face. Almost immediately they were in the living room, which also served as a dining room. It was a cozy room with bright blue walls, a wide, ancient-looking sofa in the opposite corner, a little table covered in magazines, an armchair positioned so that it had a view of the picturesque panorama.

  Dupin glanced at the magazines. Technical magazines, all to do with diving: Dive Master, Plongée, Scuba People, Diver, loads of glossy magazines. Dupin flicked through a few.

  Then he went through a narrow door and into a galley kitchen, barely wider than the door itself. There were the remnants of a croissant on a plate. A mug next to it.

  A steep staircase led upward from the little hallway. There was no storage room, no wardrobe; the house really was tiny. Upstairs there was a minute bedroom, another equally tiny room, that gave the impression of being completely unused. The bathroom had an unusually large window facing the sea. Next to the tub was a tiny table with a mug and several more newspapers.

  Somebody had lived here. There were traces of everyday life. But at the same time it was deeply disconcerting. “Nothing was brought here. Nothing the size the boy referred to, anyway.” It was Riwal, his face disappointed, who had made the brief summary, when Dupin was back downstairs.

  Five minutes later the commissaire and his inspector were standing outside Kerkrom’s house. It was quite substantially bigger. Made from light gray stone. The same layout as Darot’s with an impressive panorama view to the rear. The land area was larger too, surrounded by a partially dilapidated stone wall and a blue gate. There was a low, level annex to the rear, in front of it a wooden terrace with a table, two folding wooden deck chairs, and three terra-cotta pots with camellias that were doing remarkably well for the climate of the island.

  The terrace was unusually high with a steep set of steps up to it. Dupin nearly stumbled. It had a proper garden, looked after, quite unlike Darot’s, but then Darot had only been on the island a few months.

  “Maybe…” Riwal was looking back and forth slowly between the house and the annex. “… they brought the object here at night as a temporary hiding place, then took it elsewhere.”

  “That would only be increasing the chance of them being seen. And there aren’t that many possibilities on the island: buildings, places, squares to which people have access, and were safe enough.”

  Dupin tried to open the door to the annex: just a temporary wooden lath door that looked like a bit of amateur carpentry. He only managed to open it with a strong shove.

  Immediately to the right was another narrow door, open and with a few steps leading into the main house. A tiny window in the corner let some dull light into the annex. To the right was a switch for a bare bulb, which only just managed to do its duty. But it was just enough to make out all the stuff that Kerkrom had piled together in her annex. A large number of lobster cages next to the entrance, but piled up in an orderly manner here, unlike in her shed down by the harbor, just as everything else here seemed to be
in a certain order. Next to the cages was a collection of buoys in different colors and sizes. Dupin checked out the gaps between the cages and behind them. He moved around some of the larger buoys. Farther behind them were three old cupboards with fishing rods lying against them. In the middle of the room was a stretch of free space. There was a smell of over-ripe rotten fruit, an aroma from Dupin’s childhood. That was how it had smelled in the cellar of his old family house, in the tiny Jura village where his father had been born. At the end of the room he made out a big wicker basket of apples.

  Riwal had begun opening the cupboards.

  Dupin moved into the center of the annex. He had automatically glanced over everything. If the object was even nearly as large as the boy had described it, it would not have been easy to hide it here. Even the cupboards were too close to the walls to hide anything behind them.

  “The cupboards contain inventories, clothing, some old files, all neatly sorted.”

  The floor was flat trodden soil.

  “Look at this,” Riwal called out from between the lobster cages. Dupin had already seen it: a frame with two large wheels, some fifty centimeters high.

  “It’s a trailer for boats, to be used for canoes and kayaks.”

  Riwal looked like he’d been struck by lightning. “It’s brand new. She couldn’t have had it long.” There was a tremor in his voice. “She could have used that to transport a big, heavy cross easily, without a problem.”

  Dupin walked over to Riwal.

  “Look, boss, you’d just have to bring a car close to the heavy object, tilt it against it, lift it up, and it would almost automatically slip on. You could drive around anywhere with it like that. Very practical. Made out of enameled aluminum, very light to use and very flexible.”

  Riwal’s renowned sense of the practical. Dupin felt a tingling. Riwal’s idea was brilliant.

  The commissaire had hunched down to take a closer look at the trailer.

  Suddenly he stood up. “We’ll take a look at it outside in the light.”

  Riwal maneuvered it easily out of the annex. The wheelbase wasn’t big so the door wasn’t a problem. They immediately began a careful examination.

  “It’s new, all but unused. The enamel is pristine all over, I would say no more than a few weeks old, but,” Riwal said, and pointed to a particular spot, “just here, exactly where the object would have been attached, between the rubber appliqués to the right and left, where the canoe or kayak would have lain, there are serious scratches, proper scrapes.”

  Dupin had seen them too.

  It was incredible. The tingle had increased. He looked closely at the scratches in the dark green enamel. They went deep. He ran his fingers over them.

  “Riwal, ask at the post office. Either Kerkrom bought the trailer on the mainland or had it delivered. In a large package. I’d like to know when. If anyone at the mail office remembers a big package, and then ask the ferry people. Or she brought it in her own boat.”

  The inspector already had his cell phone in his hand.

  Dupin took another look at the scratch, trying to imagine in detail the scenario described by Riwal. They hadn’t found either a canoe or a kayak at either Kerkrom’s or Darot’s.

  “Madame, Inspector Riwal here … Yes, the one who asked yesterday about Céline Kerkrom’s registered letter, yes … We’ve got another question … no, something different … Was there a large package delivered to Céline Kerkrom recently? At least one meter, eighty centimeters long. And sort of…” He didn’t need to finish the sentence; the answer must have been quick.

  “Oh, really?… And that was the only large packet? From a well-known chandler in Douarnenez … and you wondered why Kerkrom needed a boat trailer?… Yes, particularly as she didn’t have either a canoe or a kayak … No, she certainly doesn’t need it now … No, unfortunately I can’t tell you why … But yes, indeed, like I said, you’ve been a great help. Thank you very much.”

  Riwal didn’t seem quite to trust that the “thank you” would be taken as the intended close of a conversation that clearly wasn’t easy to terminate. He hung up.

  “She says—”

  “I got it all, Riwal.”

  Dupin prowled up and down the terrace. Things were coming together, the lifting arm, the high-tech sonar, the boat trailer—even if they were all very tenuous, highly speculative clues. For a very tenuous, highly speculative theory, which at present only covered part of this murderous story. But there were possibly more people involved in the cigarette smuggling. And there was a craftily organized system in place. An entire apparatus. One that was using another existing apparatus for its own ends—the harbor, for example, the fishing industry.

  They needed more solid clues. Something really substantial. It was just as Riwal had said; whatever Kerkrom and Darot had found, they now had to find it. Otherwise everything would remain a ghost.

  Riwal pulled aside the police tape on the door that led from the terrace into the house.

  “I can check out the house on my own, boss, I mean if you don’t … The harbormistress is waiting. I can look over everything in detail and report back to you.”

  Riwal was right. He had to go.

  Dupin’s mood had darkened in the past few seconds. One of those little investigative depressions often followed a moment of investigative euphoria which turned out not to clarify anything. And his chat with a worked-up harbormistress was definitely going to be extremely unpleasant.

  Dupin turned to leave. “Not a word to anybody, Riwal. About anything.”

  “Jumeau already knows … that we’re looking for something. And that we assume Kerkrom and Darot found something.”

  “I know,” Dupin grumbled. Even as they were on their way to the lighthouse he had got noticeably angry with himself. That had been extremely rash. Stupid. It would have been better for loads of reasons if nobody else had known about their hypothesis. But it was probably out in the open now. Even if Jumeau wasn’t the chatty type.

  “See you soon, Riwal.”

  Seconds later Dupin was on the street, reluctantly heading for the harbor. Unpleasant interviews were best faced head-on.

  He had already gone a few steps when he came to a sudden halt. A thought had just occurred to him.

  He turned around on the spot.

  He went back into Kerkrom’s house through the front door. Theoretically he only had to go straight ahead through the house, a hallway, living room, and dining room. He reached the annex through the narrow open door with the steep steps.

  “Riwal?” He called loudly once inside the house. He hadn’t seen the inspector.

  It took a moment.

  “Here, boss. On my way. I was in the kitchen. There’s a little larder in there but nothing in it, except for crazy quantities of milk and oats. And Volvic mineral water.” With those words he arrived in front of Dupin. “What about Madame Gochat?”

  “I want to try something first.” Dupin grabbed hold of the trailer that Riwal had set back next to the lobster cages. “Come along.”

  He took the frame out onto the terrace and wheeled it to the edge, glancing all the time back and forth between the house, the garden, the annex, and the terrace.

  “The ground is only flat to the front.” Dupin was focused as he was speaking. It had just occurred to him.

  He pushed against the entrance door. It wasn’t wide either.

  Now they would see.

  It worked. The trailer got through without any problem.

  “The object,” Riwal remarked, “can’t have been much wider if it was to get through. But if we’re assuming it was in the shape of a cross, some one hundred and forty centimeters long and no more than eighty wide, then it could work.”

  Dupin stood there in silence. From the little square lobby there were three doors. Straight ahead led to the living room, which led out into the extension—steep steps—apart from that was the door to the kitchen and left to the bathroom.

  Dupin pulled the trailer int
o the living room. If it had happened, this is the way it would have come.

  A little combined living and dining room with an old, rustic wooden table, creaking floorboards. A plush sofa with shabby velvet cover. Crude but artistic paintings on the walls: crabs, langoustines, sardines—all in rich Atlantic colors—giving the room a merry, happy air. An old glass-windowed cupboard. To the right a closed door.

  Dupin took a look around.

  Where could you keep anything large here?

  He went over to the sofa. It stood too close to the wall. Dupin checked it out even so. The distance to the floor was too small too. But he checked that as well.

  Nothing.

  He opened the glass-doored cupboard.

  Riwal had checked the table and the tabletop.

  “Solid.”

  Dupin took another look around, thinking feverishly.

  Then he took hold of the trailer again and pushed it over to the closed door.

  A bright bedroom, with a view of the garden, the cliffs, and the sea. He walked in, pulling the boat trailer behind him. That wasn’t a problem either.

  A double bed, two wooden chairs used to hang clothes on, an old wardrobe, a little bedside table, and the same worn floorboards.

  Riwal had immediately gone over to the wardrobe and opened it.

  “Negative.”

  “Goddamn,” Dupin swore. “They must have taken it somewhere.”

  For a while they stood next to one another in silence.

  Then Dupin went over to the bed. He knelt down, looked under the bed. He had to turn his head sideways on the floor.

  Nothing here either.

  Nothing except dust. Lots of dust. In thick clumps. The whole room had a fine but visible layer of dust, but here, under the bed, the dust had nothing to stop it coming together.

  “To hell with it, yet again,” Dupin exclaimed in frustration.

  “Boss, an idea’s just come to me,” Riwal said carefully. “If the material analysis were to have any connection with the events of this case”—he was speaking cautiously but insistently—“then they would have had to take the test sample somewhere, on shore or on the water; they would have needed tools.” There was a certain defiance in his speech.