“Did she have a handbag or a purse?” he asked.
“I never saw a handbag; she always had that computer case. When she paid the rent, it came from a man’s wallet that she kept in her back pocket. She paid me with a check on a French bank account, but I forget which one. Claudia kept some other papers in the wallet, like her driver’s license and student card, that sort of thing, but there’s no sign of it here.”
“Who’s staying in the second bedroom?” Bruno asked, wondering if the landlady had made a point of prying into her lodgers’ affairs.
“One of the girls who works in the gardens up the hill, Félicité. She and Claudia are friendly. What do you think has happened to the girl?”
“She may have been more ill than you thought and collapsed somewhere. The gardeners are looking. But if you’ll let Balzac sniff her nightie, he might be able to track her down.”
Chapter 2
Bruno and his dog went back up the hill, Balzac trotting ahead and sniffing with that purposeful air he had when on a scent. He went straight up the winding track and into the lecture room at the castle, still full of chairs from the previous evening. He sniffed around the room and then went out again through a French window and up the slope past a giant sequoia tree to the waist-high stone wall that circled the hilltop. Farther along the wall Bruno saw that two of the gardeners were already leaning perilously over it, scanning the steep slope below.
Bruno looked over the edge to the long drop, maybe five or six meters to the first of the houses, a little more than that to the eighteenth-century building the locals called the new château. There were fissures in the rock, and Bruno thought he’d have little difficulty in climbing it and imagined most of the young boys in the village would have done so. To the right there was a long terrace of grass and another stone wall beneath it. Bruno saw no sign of Claudia, and now Balzac was moving on. The hound trotted along the wall to the viewing point that looked down over the two valleys and then along the avenue of chestnut trees and up to the stone well that had for centuries guaranteed the castle’s water supply.
On Bruno’s previous visits the well had been sealed and covered, with a stout chain and padlock securing the wooden lid. Now the well was a work site, flimsily roped off with a single strand of red-and-white tape and a warning sign but with no lid to seal it. Bruno knew that was a serious safety violation. Scaffolding had been erected around and above the well, a cement mixer stood alongside, and a rope ladder hung from the scaffold. David was perched on a couple of wooden planks that spanned the scaffold, gripping the rope ladder and peering down into the depths.
“Was this well left like this overnight, or are the workmen here somewhere already?” Bruno asked, pulling out his phone to take a photo to record the scene. It would be time-dated automatically.
“The workmen didn’t show up today so far,” David replied. “We’re having to repoint the joints in the wall because it hasn’t been done for decades, maybe for a century. I can’t see anything much. Do you have a flashlight?”
“Just a little one, a key light,” Bruno said, handing over a bunch of keys. “Don’t drop it, or I’ll never get back into my van or my house. Have you got a better one here somewhere?”
“Yours is no good, too feeble,” said David, tossing back Bruno’s keys. He swung down onto the stone wall and vaulted down to the ground, then darted off, shouting over his shoulder that he had a powerful spotlight back in the castle.
Bruno climbed up and looked into the well. He saw nothing except some ropes and the descending rope ladder. He could just about imagine that a disoriented young woman, feeling dizzy, might stumble through the red-and-white tape. But the wall was well over a meter in height. She would have had to climb it, which seemed unlikely.
Then he heard a faint catlike sound, and at once Balzac barked in the way he did to draw Bruno’s attention. Bruno peered down and then heard it again, a meowing. It sounded far away. Bruno clambered onto the rope ladder and went down a few steps to escape the glare and let his eyes adjust to the well’s darkness. Then he heard the cat again, sounding very weak.
Bruno climbed back up the rope ladder. The workmen had used a flimsy platform, just three stout planks screwed together with a bolt at each corner through which ropes coming down from the scaffolding had been secured. A pulley system with a brake allowed it to be raised and lowered. The platform was covered in small lumps of dried cement, and it did not look very stable. When David returned, Bruno asked him to keep a tight grip on the ropes while Bruno found out how to lower the thing.
He went down as far as the rope ladder reached, perhaps five or six meters. With one hand gripping the rope ladder and the other holding one of the platform supports, he peered over the edge, seeing only a deep blackness below. He was suddenly aware that it was markedly colder inside the well. A strange smell seemed to seep from the depths, something he recognized from far inside the very deepest caves. It was not unpleasant but somehow alien and lifeless, as though the damp limestone was so ancient it was expressing something of the fossils of which it had been formed.
A shout came from above, and then something was coming down slowly toward him, a beam of light that was swinging one way and then another, and then dazzling him when it flashed across his face. David was lowering a large spotlight on yet another rope. Bruno let go of the rope ladder, grabbed the light and shone the beam below. But as he shifted his weight, the platform began to swing, and he felt even less confident of his hold. He told himself to pause and think this through. Finally he took in his teeth the rope that held the spotlight, transferred his grip to the rope ladder and waited for the platform to stabilize. Bruno wondered how the workmen had ever managed in such perilous conditions to cement the joints between the stones of the well.
He managed to hook one leg around the rope ladder, and that seemed to keep the platform in place. Gingerly, trying to shift his weight as little as possible, he peered over the edge and shone the light down, hearing yet more meowing as he did so. At once he saw that the stone walls of the well went down only another two or three meters, below which it seemed to have been carved out of solid rock, or perhaps widened from some natural seam. The sides of the well narrowed unevenly, or perhaps that was just the perspective. Shining the light straight down was a mistake, sending up a shimmering, uneven reflection from the water far below.
Bruno pointed the light at the wall just above the waterline, and this allowed him a fleeting glimpse of a small cat, apparently sitting on the water. He adjusted the light and saw the animal was clinging desperately to something he could not identify. It was rounded, perhaps a log. He knew that people put logs in their swimming pools in winter to prevent them from freezing over. Maybe they used the same method in wells.
Bruno heard a shout and looked up at the narrow circle of sky, suddenly dazzled by the change in light and the way movement sent the platform twisting again. It took him a moment to make out the silhouette of a head and shoulders looking over the well’s rim. The head seemed much farther away, although it could hardly be more than ten meters.
“Are you okay?” David called. “Do you see anything?”
“Will the rope ladder take your weight as well?” Bruno called up.
“There are usually two guys down there, one working on the platform, the other on the ladder,” David shouted back, his voice strangely distorted. “Do you want me to come down?”
“I can see a trapped cat,” Bruno called back. “Wait and I’ll look again.”
He looked down, less troubled by the swinging of the platform now that he had the rope ladder wrapped around his left arm. Then he felt a sudden shoot of pain in one knee as he shifted his weight onto one of the small lumps of dried cement the workmen had left on the platform. He put the rope with the light back between his teeth, used his free hand to remove the lump, and then thinking it might give him a sense of depth he dropped it into the
well. Mentally he counted, a-thousand-and-one, a-thousand-and-two, and he was about to begin a-thousand-and-three when he heard a faint splash.
He remembered from grade school that an object dropping in gravity fell at just over nine meters per second. That meant nine meters in the first second and then eighteen in the next one and twenty-seven in the third. Mon Dieu, he thought, this could go down thirty meters.
He took the rope from his teeth and shone the light down the walls. Keeping the beam above the water, he aimed all around the rough sides of the rock. It gave just enough light for him to see the cat moving, backward and forward and now circling. Whatever surface the cat stood on, it seemed unstable, bobbing in the water as the cat moved. It was certainly no log. As that thought penetrated, Bruno felt a sudden foreboding of what else it might be.
He moved the light’s beam a little and told himself to look for certain predictable shapes. What he’d thought was a log could be a leg. Perhaps there was the curve of a rump and a bobbing head. It was hard to be sure. Was he being carried away by his own imagination? He should try to get lower to be sure. He tried adjusting the pulley, but it refused to allow the platform to descend farther.
“How far down does this rope ladder go?” he called up.
“It’s only fifteen meters, but I have a second one. I could attach it. What can you see?”
“I’m coming up,” said Bruno, deciding that it would be foolish to try going down farther with a makeshift rope ladder. This was a job for professionals with the proper equipment.
Bruno put the rope holding the light back between his teeth and began to climb the rope ladder, his legs feeling strained from kneeling and his hands almost numb from gripping the various ropes. The rope ladder began twisting and swaying as he climbed, bouncing against one wall and then swinging back against the ropes holding the work platform below. Bruno paused, catching his breath and taking one leg at a time from the ladder to ease the strain in his thigh muscles. He gritted his teeth and climbed again, one step at a time. Maybe three steps to a meter, he told himself, only thirty steps at most, and he must already have done more than half that.
He began to make out individual stones from the light coming in from above. He must be almost there. Five, four, three more steps and he saw that David was standing on the rim of the well, steadying the rope ladder with one hand while gripping the scaffolding with another.
“Putain, I don’t want to do that again.” Bruno panted as David helped him off the ladder and onto the stone rim. Bruno heard a whimpering sound from below and looked down to see Balzac wagging his tail at seeing his master reemerge from the depths. “But someone has to go down properly; I mean all the way,” Bruno said, taking a deep breath of fresh air. “I think the cat may be standing on a body.”
“A body?” David’s voice rose an octave as he said the words. He looked aghast. “Christ, you don’t think…”
Bruno was already calling the pompiers in St. Denis. Ahmed answered. He was one of the two professional firemen who managed the score or so of volunteers in the town’s fire brigade. He was also qualified as a paramedic. Bruno explained that there might be a body as much as thirty meters down the well at Limeuil, over which scaffolding had already been erected. Could they help?
“Thirty meters?” exclaimed Ahmed. “We’ll have to get one of the trucks up there with a winch, but, yes, if the truck can get there we can do it.”
“You’ll need four-wheel drive,” said Bruno.
“No problem. Limeuil, you say. Give us fifteen minutes, maybe twenty. Any chance the body may be alive?”
“I doubt it, and I’m not even certain that it is a body, but a young woman has been missing since last night…” Bruno’s voice trailed off.
“We’re on our way,” Ahmed said. The confidence in his voice was reassuring. “Do you want me to call the medical center?”
“I’ll do that,” said Bruno. “Even if she’s dead, we’ll need a doctor here for the death certificate. One more thing: there’s a cat down there, Ahmed, and it’s definitely alive.”
He ended the call and hit the speed-dial for Fabiola, his good friend and the doctor he most trusted. He got her voice mail, left a message asking for an urgent callback and then dialed the medical-center receptionist to find out if Fabiola was on call that day. She was with a walk-in patient, he was told. The receptionist promised to get Fabiola to call Bruno as soon as she was free. He turned back to David.
“The first thing you have to do is close the garden. I’m sorry about the school trip, but this now looks like the scene of a death that needs to be investigated. It might even turn out to be suspicious.”
David’s eyes widened, and he opened his mouth to protest, but Bruno simply ignored him and kept talking.
“Then I want you to make as complete a list as you can of everyone who was at the lecture last night and which staff you had here, particularly whoever locked up. I need to talk to all of them right away.”
David nodded and pulled out a mobile phone.
Bruno then pondered whether he should add that there could be serious ramifications for the town and its hilltop gardens if his suspicions turned out to be correct. He decided they deserved the warning. And he felt angry at the irresponsibility of the builders working on the well.
“You also might want to inform your mayor that the town could face legal proceedings for failing to secure a dangerous construction site.”
Bruno held up a hand as David tried to interrupt and raised his voice to talk over his protests.
“I can’t believe you were prepared to let schoolkids walk around these gardens with the well left wide open and scaffolding that made it easy to clamber up. The whole site was protected by nothing more than a flimsy bit of red-and-white tape.” The more Bruno thought about it, the angrier he felt.
“I suppose the builders thought it was too much bother to dismantle the scaffolding every evening and replace the locked cover. I’d like their names and contract details and a copy of the estimate they must have given you before the work started. I want to see if they included a charge for securing the site.”
“I’m not sure we have much paperwork,” David replied. “The guy who’s doing the job is a member of the town council. You know how it is in a village like this. It was pretty informal.”
Bruno looked back at him impassively. “Then you’d better tell your mayor to take a very careful look at the town’s insurance policy about injuries to third parties.”
“Merde, Bruno, the outer gates were locked last night.”
Bruno shook his head firmly. “Not while the lecture was taking place, they weren’t. And if that’s who I think it is down there, your builders and the town could be facing a charge of negligent homicide.”
Chapter 3
As he waited for the pompiers to arrive, Bruno thought back to his first meeting with Claudia. It had been one of the days governed by the cahier de surveillance, the logbook on suspect persons and activities that was kept in every police station in France. It was marked in the cahier as the day of the expected return of one of the few notorious citizens of St. Denis, a young man who was being released that day from prison after serving a ten-year sentence, with another year added for taking part in a prison riot.
The arrest and trial had taken place sometime before Bruno had arrived in St. Denis to take up the job as town policeman, but he knew about it. The case had been all over the French media. Laurent Darrignac had been a bright and enthusiastic youngster, son of a local farmer, who had just graduated from a respected agricultural college in Lorraine before returning to help his father and eventually take over the prosperous family farm. It was a fine property, some fifty hectares, which was big for the Périgord. They raised dairy cattle and veal on the slopes and had corn and sunflowers growing on a wide stretch of fertile and lucrative valley land, attracting generous subsidies from the
European agricultural authorities.
On graduation day, Laurent and his classmates had gone out for a celebratory lunch, and since he had drunk the least he was asked by the others to drive back from the hilltop restaurant. It was late in the afternoon, the sun low enough to dazzle a driver. Rounding a bend while trying not to be distracted by his boisterous classmates who were passing around a bottle of cognac, Laurent had run into a group of Boy Scouts who were hiking up the side of the road. Three died from the impact, including the scoutmaster who led the way, and four were injured. One would never walk again.
The accident occurred at a time when the French National Assembly was debating a toughening of the laws against drunk driving to bring the legal limits for alcohol into line with those of other European countries. Opposition to the new law, which had come mainly from deputies elected by regions producing wine and spirits, melted away with the news of the disaster. But that did not deter the various pressure groups from intensifying their campaign. Laurent was in their sights as a symbol of the damage drunk drivers could do.
He had a fraction over 0.8 milligrams of alcohol in his blood, which at the time was the legal limit. The campaigners were trying to lower the limit to 0.5 milligrams, and Laurent became the focus of the crusade led by a pressure group called Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, which also brought a civil lawsuit against Laurent demanding compensation for the victims’ families.
Under the law as it stood at the time, the deaths of the Boy Scouts meant that Laurent should have lost his license for five years, paid a heavy fine and faced a short prison sentence, most of it probably suspended while he remained on probation for two or three years. But public opinion being what it is, and politicians being who they are, and the opinion polls and the media being so overwhelmingly against the young man, the court had thrown the book at him. Laurent was given three sentences for manslaughter and four for grievous injury, all to run consecutively. Already facing the loss of the family farm from the private lawsuits, his parents decided they could not afford an appeal.
The Body in the Castle Well Page 2