“You nearly died. The fact that you’re still alive is pure luck.” Dupin was annoyed. He had no sympathy.
Morin had not made any fuss even over his minimal greeting, made clear he regarded the interview as unnecessary, and—unlike previously—was not remotely interested in the commissaire or their conversation.
“The positions at which you and your boat were found don’t coordinate at all given the currents here. Explain that to me, Monsieur Morin.”
Dupin was standing in the middle of the room. He had refused the chair opposite Morin, who had offered it to him with a weak wave of his hand.
“Think whatever you want,” Morin said with complete indifference, his glance turning demonstratively toward the big window.
“What sort of boat were you out in? How big was it?”
“Eight meters ninety. An Antares, an old model.”
An easy boat to run on your own, Dupin knew from Riwal’s numerous explanations, ideal for fishing. Not a speedboat, but not slow either.
“How did you injure yourself?”
“I don’t know.” He didn’t even bother to think about it. He was making a mockery of the whole thing.
“I don’t believe a word you say, Monsieur Morin.”
“I don’t care.”
“You were set upon. It was an attack. Somebody wanted to be rid of you.”
Morin just repeated: “Think whatever you want.”
Obviously Dupin had intended to confront him with the smuggling boat saga, with what they already knew. To threaten him with incontrovertible evidence. But Morin would just have dismissed it with a sardonic smirk.
“You know who the murderer is. Somehow or other you found out.” Dupin had begun walking up and down while he talked.
“It was only a matter of time.” Despite the shivering that had again afflicted Morin, there was a satisfied smile on his face.
“So you admit it.”
Dupin had tried a shot in the dark. Successfully. But right now another thought had occurred to him. It was easily possible that Morin had already been successful. That there had been a hand-to-hand fight in which Morin had killed the other man, even if he had fallen overboard somehow. Or both of them had fallen overboard. But only Morin was rescued. But what argued against that was Morin’s vast internal tension, which suggested that for him, whatever had happened was not yet over.
“I admit nothing. I had an accident, and I think,” he said slowly, “that I need to rest now.”
“That is clearly the case, from a medical point of view,” the pale, stubby doctor butted in. “I suggest that as a matter of urgency, Monsieur Morin.”
“Indeed. I need my strength,” Morin mumbled. Dupin hadn’t missed the fact that for fractions of a second he had balled his fists. Morin had noticed Dupin’s glance, but it had seemed irrelevant to him.
There was a distant rumble, not particularly loud, but clearly audible. A roll of thunder that came with a storm. A long way away, that was clear too. But even so.
An aggressive silence filled the room.
Morin wasn’t going to breathe another word. And they couldn’t force him. If it came to a legal matter, Morin would stick to the accident story. There would be nothing Dupin could do, nothing at all. He was condemned to impotence. And for him there was nothing worse. It made him furious.
“I’m going to sleep for a bit now, if you’ll excuse me,” Morin said, and fussed demonstratively with the blankets.
“We’ve spoken with Lucas Darot’s brother. We know the story now. Laetitia was your daughter.”
It was as if Dupin hadn’t said a word, the statement vanished into the air.
“I promise you, Monsieur Morin. We’ll find out everything.” Dupin paused briefly. “The whole truth.” But the words from his mouth were as nothing. They had long since become useless. Laughable.
Dupin turned around. Went to the door. A few seconds later he had left the house.
He turned sharply to the left, onto a steep clay track that quickly led to a narrow path directly down to the water. After a few meters he came to a halt.
“What a load of shit.”
The curse had come from his heart. His top and bottom molars pressed so hard together it hurt. Things were going completely out of control, and there was nothing he could do about it.
“What a load of shit!”
The swear word resonated across the island.
* * *
The air was heavy, warm, damp, oppressive. The nebulous mass swallowed all sound. It was as silent as a graveyard. Not even the slosh of a wave in the viscous sea to be heard. No seagulls. No people. No engine noise. It was an eerie dusk.
To the left, spiky, strangely shaped cliffs alternated with large flat granite slabs. All of which sank within a few meters into the dark Atlantic, which had already worked its way close to the innermost coastline. A flood tide was coming. Somewhat farther out were hazy patterns, silhouettes of small, rugged, rocky islands, some of them with dark green canopies. A surreal realm. Images recognized from science fiction films, imaginary landscapes from alien planets.
The air didn’t smell, it stank: a cocktail of moldy, rotten seaweed and decomposing fish innards, brought up by the rising tide around the island. On the other hand, the commissaire could no longer hear any more rumbling, not even in the distance. The storm had calmed.
The distance between Sein and Molène was hardly great, but the difference between the islands was. Molène was completely different, even in shape. If the Île de Sein was long and misshapen, extended, torn, then Molène was a harmoniously rounded, almost circular picture-book island. Even at the water level it was two or three meters higher than Sein, and from there it rose steadily toward the center of the island. People believed it could resist a tempestuous storm. Everything seemed more gentle than on Sein, more balanced, even if the vegetation on “Moal-Enez”—the “bald island,” as the Brittany expression had it—didn’t have anything more to offer: here too there were no trees, large bushes of hedgerows. The village with its two hundred residents lay around the harbor to the east.
Dupin had followed the sole footpath along the water, which seemed once to have gone all around the island. He had tried to regain sharpness and clarity of thought. To calm himself down. He was thinking far too strenuously, feverishly, flushed. He was trying to wring the answers out. By force. Hastily. That only led to distraction.
He had begun to calmly review everything. Everything that had happened since yesterday morning, when he had first stood, overtired and freezing in the small tiled room of the fish market hall. Maybe he had missed something. Somewhere, at some time maybe someone had said something, maybe he had noticed something and maybe even scribbled it in his notebook; something that contained a clue that he simply hadn’t so far recognized as such. He had pulled out his Clairefontaine and flicked through it without standing still. He had almost tripped up a couple of times in so doing.
Suddenly a noise shattered the strange silence. Dupin was sure his phone had never rung that loudly. It was an unknown number.
“Yes?” he said sullenly.
“I’ve been thinking it over, Georges.” His mother. It was hardly possible! She had an unfailing feel for the most unsuitable moment. “I don’t know if I made myself clear this morning when the florist was here. It is simply unthinkable for you not to be there tomorrow. There is simply no circumstance we would excuse. I know you are on an investigation and that it’s an extremely unpleasant story—I really am sympathetic—but you are simply going to have to have it sorted out by tomorrow morning.”
“I—”
“You have things to do, Georges, I know. I’ll let you get on with the job. See you tomorrow, my darling.”
That was the end of the conversation.
A totally insane conversation.
But before a stunned Dupin could put his phone back in his pants pocket, it rang for a second time.
Yet again an unknown number.
“A
h, Monsieur le Commissaire!”
Unfortunately he recognized the voice straightaway. And at the same time he wished downright it had been his mother again. This was worse: the prefect. Once again—and in one respect this was the happiest of his Breton cases to date—he had completely forgotten him.
“There’s trouble,” the prefect fired out, “a lot of trouble.” The words made clear they were about to be followed by one of his notorious tirades. The only puzzling thing was that his voice wasn’t more hot-tempered. “Madame Gochat, the harbormistress, has made a formal complaint. Against you and the police action. She knows a few powerful people in Rennes. The fishing industry lobby.” His voice got harder and harder with the latter words; maybe the attack was imminent. “Coercion, unlawful detention, and so on.” A rhetorical pause followed. Dupin feared the worst. “We are not going to let ourselves be bullied by this arrogant snob! Even if she swears like a trooper and carries on like Rumpelstiltskin. Do you understand? No velvet glove! Be merciless. Do everything that has to be done.”
Dupin thought he was hallucinating.
“I, er … I’ll do just that, Monsieur le Préfet. Everything necessary. Everything needed from a police point of view.”
“Police point of view, my ass! Don’t be so fainthearted! You know my wife is from Douarnenez. We still own her parents’ house.” Dupin had naturally no idea what this meant and didn’t understand why he needed to know. “We got ourselves a new boat a few years ago, and obviously we wanted to moor it in the Vieux Port. Where else? By one of the nice places directly at the front. Gochat refused flat out to do anything for me in that respect. Pure nastiness!”
So that was the way the wind blew. Dupin should have known.
“And one more thing, mon Commissaire.” It was a formula that suggested the greatest caution was required, and Dupin braced himself. “You are aware that this extremely important exercise being carried out for safety on the streets of our nation, in which I am taking part, will last until Sunday evening, six o’clock. Right?”
“Absolutely,” Dupin said. At least he would be able to investigate in peace until then. But he still didn’t know what the prefect was aiming for.
“Like I said, urgent national interest! I’m also not going to be able to give a press conference declaring the successful conclusion of the investigations before Monday morning.”
He stopped and gave no sign of carrying on. He must already have made his point.
Dupin needed a moment for the penny to drop.
“I—” he said, but the words he wanted failed him.
“There’s no need for you to rush into things, no need for an exaggerated, hectic pace. It’s perfectly satisfactory for you to arrest the perpetrator at the beginning of the week.” A complicitous tone, worse for Dupin to bear than any ferocious tirade. “That would then be a wonderful start to the week. The announcement of our common triumphant investigations.”
It was absolutely monstrous. With every case Dupin thought that this beat everything the prefect had tried so far, and there could be no way to top it. And every time he’d been taught a lesson.
“Oh, Commissaire, and while we’re speaking, I’ve heard something about a protest action on account of this sand dune, that there’s going to be a big closing demonstration right outside the prefecture office in Quimper. Do you know anything about that?”
“I—”
“Boss!”
Dupin started.
“Is everything okay, boss?” Riwal said. He was coming along the narrow coastal path, Kadeg in tow.
Dupin reacted immediately: “I’m terribly sorry, Monsieur le Préfet. Urgent news. I’ll be in touch.”
He hung up quickly; he didn’t want to take any risk.
“You need to be careful. There’s slippery granite hidden amidst the clumps of grass on the path here. You could easily fall over.”
Dupin didn’t reply.
Riwal immediately changed the topic. “You were on the phone. We bumped into the doctor. He had seen you take the island circular path. Did you know that there are seven hundred and twenty blue benches along this path, placed at all the best viewing points?” Dupin had been too deep in his thoughts to notice even one of them. “It’s the official island circular route.”
Riwal’s sentence was like a call to action. With those words the three of them set off again.
“If you could see anything,” Riwal continued, “you would have a breathtaking view from here on the northwest side. Above all, if it still were low tide you would have a perfect impression of the whole archipelago. To the south”—Riwal gave a meaningless wave at the gray soup—“there are a few larger islands. On one of them there’s a ruin of a house, inhabited from time to time by one mad fisherman or another, and on one of the other the parc has a measuring station. On yet another still there’s a blind for birdwatchers. The whole archipelago is a paradise for birds. From a geological point of view the archipelago is a gigantic granite plateau that during the last ice age formed part of the Brittany mainland and only slowly became part of the seabed, out as far as the island even. Do you know what they say?” It was a rhetorical question. Dupin was still too busy with phone calls to get involved. “At high tide this is a land in the sea, at low tide a sea on the land.”
Riwal stopped and gave Dupin a searching look, apparently an attempt to fathom the commissaire’s state of mind. Then he quickly followed his digression with a question about the case.
“How did the conversation with Morin go?”
Dupin had to sort something out; he had no choice, even if it was against his own maxim: “Riwal, do you know anything about the protest march holding a ‘major demonstration’ in front of the prefecture offices?”
“Of course. The march began on the Quai de l’Odet, and the demonstration is obviously to be outside the prefecture. It should be beginning any time now: several hundred people. The mood must be pretty worked up, people are stinking mad. And rightly so. There’ll be a lot of newspaper photos, even if the prefect himself isn’t there.”
That was precisely the problem. Dupin could imagine the pictures. A close-up of Nolwenn holding a banner in the front row directly outside Locmariaquer’s office. He could see the eggs and tomatoes flying. Windowpanes being smashed.
But then all of a sudden Dupin had to grin. What was he worried about? It was Nolwenn. She wouldn’t need his help. And if she should, obviously he would be there, at her side.
“So, what did Morin have to say?” Riwal asked again. He was completely correct, there were more important things to talk about.
Dupin went over the conversation as well as he could.
“This is completely unacceptable. We need to force Morin to talk,” Kadeg said.
“How do you plan to do that? Torture him? From now on, Kadeg, keep a permanent eye on Morin. Permanent! And no problem with letting him know it. Stay here on Molène. Somebody else can take over Gochat. And get help. Whatever he does, stick with Morin.”
“He’s not going to make any mistakes now.”
“Even so,” Dupin insisted. He felt his hawkishness return. “And now for the main thing. Who was where between one P.M. and two fifteen P.M. today. Friday.”
There was a muffled growl in the air, and this time it no longer seemed far away.
“That came from the south,” Riwal said, and once again made a ridiculous gesture into the invisible. “The business with Morin must have happened out there somewhere.”
Kadeg had even more ridiculously followed Riwal’s gesture with his eyes. “Also, we’ve checked out the algae fisherman who pulled Morin out of the sea. He seems innocent enough. There’s no reason of any sort to think he could have had anything to do with the business.”
“Good.” Dupin nodded in acknowledgment.
“He’s from Lanildut,” Riwal added. “The most important harbor for algae in Europe. There are about a hundred algae fishermen there. They call algae ‘the reed of the sea,’ and the laminaires, which can
grow up to four meters long, they call the spaghetti of the sea.”
Algae was one of the big topics in Brittany, Dupin knew, and for good reason.
By now they were walking slowly; the coastal path was so narrow that they virtually had to walk one behind the other, as closely as possible so they could hear each other. Dupin, then Riwal, and then Kadeg.
“The legends talk about a ‘magic seaweed of multiple colors’ fed on by the magical sea cow Mor Yvoc’h.” Riwal began rambling on again. “But it’s only nowadays that the fantastic potential of the different sorts of seaweed has been discovered. They have medical potential as well as for biotechnology, pharmacology, natural fertilizer, insulation material. But the greatest potential of all is for nourishment. How are we going to feed what will soon be nine billion people on our planet? With algae. We’ll only manage it if we use algae!”
“Let’s get back to the case,” Dupin said.
“Algae are extremely healthy. Rich in iodine, magnesium, fiber, and antioxidants. And Brittany’s haute cuisine creates the most wonderful delicacies with it. There’s soon going to be a seaweed channel too: Breizh Algae TV, which is—”
“The alibis,” Dupin interrupted. “What about the alibis?”
“Gaétane Gochat is still not back in her office and so far can’t be reached.” Kadeg had jumped ahead of Riwal and snappily started his own report. “Nobody down at the old port where her boat’s mooring place is has seen either her or her husband…”
“Shouldn’t she have been back ages ago?” Dupin was wide awake.
“There’s no way they came straight from Sein to Douarnenez. That much is certain.”
“And you don’t find that extremely alarming?”
“Should we arrest her again if and when she surfaces?”
“As soon as she surfaces again, she’ll be questioned. And obviously, if details of Madame Gochat’s report as to where she was after she left Sein are even slightly incorrect, then we arrest her again.”
Kadeg rolled his eyes.
“Riwal, how many helicopters does the coast guard have?”
The Killing Tide Page 31