Just a few meters on, they spotted the boat. Dupin recognized it straightaway: a Zodiac. They could see a line that was provisionally tied to a prominent rock.
There was nobody to be seen.
“He’s left it ticking over on idle.”
Of course, Riwal was right. Even on their way here, Dupin had noticed the monotony of the engine noise.
It all happened in a fraction of a second. Dupin turned with a sudden jerk and ran back in the direction they had just come.
“Back! All back! To the measuring post. As fast as possible.”
He’d been leading them by the nose. It was a decoy. And they’d fallen for it.
He had wanted to pull them away from the measuring station. And he’d succeeded. That was how Dupin knew that it was actually all about the station.
The commissaire ran as fast as he could. It was unbelievable. Would it all fail as stupidly as this? At the very last minute? All because of a stupid trick?
Without slowing down he pulled out his gun.
“Police! Stay away from the station,” he called as loudly as he could, into the murky soup.
He ran on without waiting for a response.
“I’m about to shoot. Get away from the station, and put your hands up.”
No reaction.
Still running, he raised his gun to the sky.
And pulled the trigger.
Once, twice, three times.
There was no reaction.
Before long he could see water again. They were back on the side of the island where they had moored. He heard Riwal and Kadeg behind him and veered left.
His sense of direction had let him down. A few meters more and he came across the concrete construction again, the protection for the measuring post.
If the whole station was laid out like the one on Sein, the shed should also be nearby. Dupin stumbled, nearly falling over, then he ran on.
Suddenly he stopped still.
To the left was an outline of a shape. That had to be it. A bit farther and he could see it: a low shed made of concrete, with a door on the right. It would be a matter of seconds, split seconds. With one leap he was in. Ready, his pistol leveled.
Nobody. Kadeg and Riwal stormed into the room after him.
“He’s not here,” Kadeg gasped.
“Never mind.” Dupin had already caught his breath again. He seemed fully concentrated.
His eyes searched the room. The inside too was like that on Sein. An aluminum table, a chair in front of it. Technical equipment on the wall above the table, a box, small diodes, blinking red.
He had to remember. Where was the cable connected?
On the side somewhere.
Right.
There were two connectors here. Two USB connectors. Normal USB connectors, if Dupin was right.
“I want to know what’s going on here, once and for all,” Kadeg barked, no longer trying to play it calm. “What is this all about, Commissaire?”
Before Dupin could answer, a howl of engines erupted.
“He’s escaping,” Riwal said, and leapt toward the door. “He’s had one over on us again!”
“Let him go. If he’s already been in the station, then we’ve lost everything anyhow. And if he hasn’t, then we’ve everything we need.”
Dupin’s walkie-talkie sounded. “Goulch here. It sounds as if a boat is leaving the island. What should I do?”
“That’s Leblanc. Follow him.”
“Should we arrest him if we catch him?”
“I’ll tell you that then.”
“Good. Over.”
Dupin turned to the measuring apparatus. “We need a laptop here.” He hadn’t thought that far.
High-powered engines fired up again. Once again the noise was deafening.
“You want…” Riwal began, then paused, and beamed—he had understood: it burst out of him: “You want to link up to the apparatus here. There is the time the last data was registered. He had been here after all, he lied to us. Leblanc had been here and taken the readings. Just before the business with Morin. That here—that’s proof,” he said delightedly. “Incontrovertible proof. The measuring station will tell us. That’s why. That’s why he had to come back. He needed to erase all trace of the transmission. The time on it betrays him.” You could literally see the jigsaw puzzle coming together behind Riwal’s eyes.
“He was especially worried after his assistant told him you had asked about his route. The time the data was taken down was recorded in two places: his own computer and here. He can easily erase it from his own computer, but to erase it here, he had to come back,” he concluded. “There was no way Leblanc went direct from Sein to Ouessant; he was here. And this was where Morin tried to tackle him. Here on the island! He laid in wait for him here. Presumably as Leblanc was trying to leave the island again. He had to have transmitted the data again.”
That was more or less the conclusion Dupin had come to also.
“We’ll have a laptop sent from Molène. They must have two police boats on the island.” Kadeg was already on the job. He left the shed to make the call.
“In any case, we now know it was him,” Riwal said.
“But if he managed to erase the data from the midday reading, then our hands are empty.”
“Just the fact that he found us on the island and made fools of us is hardly definitive evidence.” Kadeg came back. “They’re bringing us a laptop. It won’t be long.” His tone made clear he’d roused somebody important.
“Good.”
Dupin walked slowly around the room. He was extremely calm but with an internal tension that could go off at any time.
It was a terrible few minutes. They had nothing to do but wait. Have patience.
Dupin tried as hard as he could to divert his thoughts. Another question came to the fore. Where was the object at the center of all this? The thing Kerkrom and Darot had unearthed? Dupin was convinced that in that respect nothing had changed. It was all about the find. It was at the heart of everything. But what was it about the object? Now that he knew they were after Leblanc, not Morin—at least as far as the murders were concerned—then everything had changed. It wouldn’t have to do with a plank or the engine from a smuggler’s boat.
Dupin had intuitively left the two inspectors in peace. He continued walking around the room.
“Give the order to have Leblanc’s house searched. All the buildings and pieces of land that belong to him, or with which he has any connection. Sheds, storerooms, outbuildings, whatever. The same goes for the institute, all the buildings belonging to the Parc Iroise. On the Île Tristan in particular. But not only there. They also need to check out the other parc measuring stations. That announcement to the public should say we are searching for an item of value. Approximately one meter forty tall, possibly of gold.” Only then did he turn round to his inspectors. “I want a major operation.”
“Got it, boss,” Riwal said, relieved. Kadeg nodded brusquely. Both left the room, leaving Dupin on his own. He had come to a halt before the apparatus.
He stared at it without moving.
* * *
Kadeg brought the laptop over as if it were a holy object. He put it down on the narrow aluminum table with exaggerated care. Dupin was impatient.
“And here’s the USB cable,” Kadeg said as he pulled it out of his pants pocket.
Dupin took it and put it rapidly into the connector slot.
The laptop booted up. Riwal took over, standing in front of the keyboard. Kadeg yielded to him.
“Naturally we don’t have the program the institute uses to transmit and store the measurements. I’m trying to do it at OS level. All we need through the USB port of the apparatus is when it was last contacted.”
Dupin had only the faintest idea what the technical stuff Riwal was talking about meant. He couldn’t care less.
Riwal was typing enthusiastically.
“That’s not it.” A buzz, clicking keyboard, another buzz. “Not tha
t either.”
A pause.
Riwal typed with all ten fingers.
“Shit!” Riwal took a deep breath. “But…” A sustained pause, then: “Yes!”
All of a sudden he was in top form.
There wasn’t much to see on the screen. Just at the bottom left edge, a row of commands. Letters, signs, numbers. In a tiny type size.
Dupin’s gaze hung on the final line:
Synchronizing run 22.06–13.25.
“That’s it, that’s our proof. Somebody here transmitted data at one twenty-five. That is reliable proof.”
Dupin stood there motionless. He didn’t say a word. For a few moments they stood in silent celebration.
Until a different noise struck them suddenly: furious, rattling rain. It had begun to hammer down as if from nowhere with apocalyptic strength.
Then an ear-splitting clap of thunder seemed to cause heaven and earth to tremble.
The storm. At last it had arrived.
“Tell Goulch, he’s to arrest Leblanc as soon as he’s caught his boat.” There was a small smile on Dupin’s face.
“Goulch got in touch as soon as we were outside. They have Leblanc’s boat on their radar, they’re on it. But he’s doing the best he can to shake off the Bir. He’s making zigzag maneuvers at breakneck speed. Despite the raging sea he’s heading for the little islands near Quéménès where the water is very shallow.”
A gigantic blinding flash illuminated the sky and the island, a stroke of lightning that seemed to have come through everything, even the massive walls. The thunder that came with it was instantaneous. The crash was even louder than the first.
“We need to get away from the island and onto solid dry land as fast as we can. It’s really going to take off now.” Riwal sounded seriously worried, which was no good sign, given that of the three of them he was toughest in extreme weather conditions.
On top of the rain, thunder, and lightning, now came ferocious gusts of wind.
The boat that had brought the laptop was now moored just about where Goulch had been. Two police officers had come to the island with it and were now waiting by the tender. Kadeg’s forehead too was now creased with worry lines.
“Let’s go.”
The commissaire had extremely unwelcome memories of a storm on the Glénan islands, which had ended up with him being forced to spend an unexpected night on a miserable folding cot in a damp, narrow room along with Riwal and another policeman. And there wasn’t even a folding cot to be seen here.
“I’m going to leave the readout from the laptop as it is. But I’m taking a screenshot for safety’s sake.”
A few clicks and Riwal closed the computer.
“How are we going to get it onto the boat dry?”
A good question. They couldn’t just tuck it under their clothing. That was already soaked from them coming through the sea.
Dupin looked around. In one corner, next to all the other junk, there were some pieces of polystyrene. “That’ll have to do.” Dupin grabbed it. “We can squeeze the laptop in between.” They were dirty and smeared, but dry.
“Okay,” Riwal said. Dupin laid the laptop between the two sheets of polystyrene foam.
Another mighty crash of lightning, another mighty thunderbolt.
“To the boat!”
They stopped briefly in the doorway.
“Kadeg, as soon as we get to land, you make certain that the laptop gets to Quimper safely and as fast as possible.”
“And where are we headed now?”
“To the Île Tristan.”
“To the institute?”
“Yes.”
They ran off. Into the monstrous rain. Into the storm that was now right above their heads.
* * *
The sixty-seven minutes on the police boat from Trielen to the Île Tristan on that twenty-second of June were—Dupin had absolutely no doubt—the most horrid, terrifying, unspeakable of his life.
It hadn’t been long from them setting off until the symptoms of massive seasickness manifested themselves. Not just the basic symptoms of seasickness, such as nausea, dizziness, and vomiting, but at the same time every other possible reaction that seasickness could provoke.
Dupin hadn’t just gone pallid, but a pale white, and a thick film of sweat had covered his forehead. His heartbeat hadn’t just increased, his heart was pounding like mad. Just as his headache pounded. And his head was not just dizzy but swirling.
This was no matter of pitching or yawing—in most people seasickness was caused by one or the other—this was both at once. The most terrifying sensation was not just that the boat and he himself along with it and the whole crew were inescapably being tossed forward and backward but that at the same time the whole of the sea, the Atlantic itself, was doing the same. It was as if the Earth was being tilted, the whole planet, a sudden shift in the Earth’s axis, some cosmic catastrophe. It was remarkable how long panic attacks could last.
It was a nightmare.
The previous day’s trip, which had severely stressed Dupin, mentally and physically, had in hindsight been child’s play.
Comical as it sounded, he had been taken by surprise. He had been so taken up on Trielen by the new developments, so fervently obsessed with new thoughts, that when it came to the journey he had assumed things would be as they usually were at such moments of an investigation when it came to dealing with the rest of reality: for the period of his feverish obsession with the solution of the case, the remainder of reality would sink into the background without any involvement from him. It would temporarily cease to exist. But not today. The seasickness had won out.
The mountainous waves had become monsters, totally erratic and at irregular intervals, as if a titan in a fuming rage had slammed a mighty fist down here and there across the surface of the water, each time creating new, unpredictable, dramatic spurts of water. There was no more wind anymore, just foam and spray with every breath. Even the sound of the water was deafening, the sound of the water, not the storm. When the monstrous crest of the waves broke, the water was blown away horizontally, something Dupin had never seen before.
The Atlantic had literally roared. Dupin had always thought the term, which he knew from lots of stories of great storms, was a metaphor, a spectacular poetic picture. This was no metaphor. The sea really could do all of that. It roared. It raged. Riwal had on countless occasions explained the signs that indicated the classification of storms. Now Dupin had experienced all of them. Wind strength nine: severe storm, meters-high waves with spray blowing, sea begins to roll; wind strength ten: severe storm, crushing waves, higher still, in excess of hundred kilometers per hour; wind strength eleven: hurricane-style storm, sea roars; wind strength twelve, hurricane, a pure hell of white foam.
On top of that Dupin was certain that sooner or later a lightning bolt would strike the boat. Given the monstrous number of lightning bolts that continually seemed to strike nearby it was a statistical miracle that they hadn’t been hit.
He wasn’t helped by the expression on Riwal’s face, which had gone stony as soon as he’d lain down. The inspector didn’t say a word throughout the whole journey, and nor had Kadeg, whose face had gone chalky white. Only once, and it could have been his imagination, Riwal had suddenly turned to Dupin and with a horrorstruck face said something that was hard to understand in the noise of the storm. He thought he had heard “There’s no escape,” but that was obviously nonsense. Like the whole scene the previous morning, with the seven graves. It was ridiculous, but involuntarily the thought of the curse had come back to him during the crossing. In confused, flashing pictures Dupin had seen himself in the cholera graveyard, standing by the seventh grave.
The stupid thing was that even back on solid ground the heaving and lurching—though not the spinning—didn’t go away. And still hadn’t: even when Dupin was on the soil of the Île Tristan, he was still reeling.
Even while leaving the boat Dupin had had to hold on for every step he t
ook, last of all onto the railing. Now, with nothing to hold on to, he had to be careful not to stumble.
Determinedly, he tried to sway in the direction of the institute, which Kadeg and Riwal were already hurrying toward with fast strides. The nausea was still bad too.
The rain hadn’t even relented any, it had just got seriously colder, dropped a few degrees.
Dupin was soaked through. The only good thing, if it could be put like that, was that he wasn’t aware of just how miserable a state he was in. Mainly that he was freezing. He headed for the wall of the house between two windows. He wasn’t yet in a state to carry on a sensible conversation, not even half sensible.
He would lean here for a bit.
As soon as he felt the wall at his back he forced himself to breathe in and out in a regular rhythm: to hold his breath for five seconds after breathing in, and another five seconds after breathing out. A method that Docteur Garreg had recommended for extremely stressful situations.
The most important thing, and hopefully that would help, was that he had to get his concentration back on the case, pull his thoughts together. Bring them into order, which above all meant consistently concentrating on the matter in hand, the searching of all the rooms with any relation to Pierre Leblanc and his arrest.
It took some minutes before he trusted himself to carefully move away from the wall. Coffee would be fatal to his stomach still, even if he needed it more right now than he ever had done in his life.
Even in the entranceway the institute was abuzz. A troop of six uniformed police came toward him, led by Inspector Kadeg, who was already telling them: “Then we’ll take a second look at the technical building. And properly this time!”
Precisely the building Dupin was most interested in.
One of the officers, a chubby young kid, stopped in front of Dupin.
“We just searched the building systematically, Monsieur le Commissaire,” he said self-confidently, clearly. “And found nothing.”
Dupin just nodded. It still wouldn’t be a mistake to take another look. The first time couldn’t have been all that thorough, the team couldn’t have had all that much time.
The Killing Tide Page 33