The Fleur De Sel Murders Read online

  Paul Girard came out of the kitchen to say hello.

  “I’ve put together a little birthday menu.” He winked at them. “After the langoustines from Guilvinec, there will be sea bass flambéed with pastis marin, and a Chenin blanc to go with it. And for dessert, a gâteau aux crêpes.”

  That was a full-blown celebration of a birthday menu. Dupin didn’t often have the sea bass—it was usually the entrecôte—but it was exquisite, the delicate, aromatic flavor, the tender, white flesh, the scent of the flambéed Breton aniseed spirit (they didn’t need the south for that either). He knew that Girard swore by the langoustines from Guilvinec. And rightly so, because they were the very best. But the absolute highlight was the crepe cake: a dozen sweet crepes stacked one on top of the other with a delicious crème pâtissière in between the layers, thick and made from milk, egg yolk, and vanilla—a specialty that Girard only served for his “very best friends’” birthdays.

  Dupin was touched.

  Claire held out a glass of champagne to him. “To us.”

  “To your birthday. To you.”

  They clinked glasses and took a sip.

  “How’s it coming along? The case, I mean.”

  “Tonight, there is no case.”

  Dupin surprised himself with this statement. But it had been the correct answer. He saw it in Claire’s smile. And he seriously meant it.

  “You’ll catch the perpetrator tomorrow,” she said, and smiled again. “Thanks for the present. I’m going to unwrap it right away.”

  He knew Claire couldn’t stand wrapped presents for a second longer than necessary. Nolwenn must have brought the package; she must have arranged absolutely everything, the whole operation, Claire’s journey, this food, everything. The package had been sitting in his office for a few days now. Dupin had been in Valérie Le Roux’s atelier, at the far end of the large quay. A terrific artist who made and painted the most beautiful Atlantic pottery: drinking bowls, cups, mugs, plates, and dishes in patterns and colors of the sea. Claire herself had once shown him an article in the Maison Côte Ouest about Valérie Le Roux. He had chosen two large plates, two small plates, and two drinking bowls, one with a bright red crab and one with a bright blue fish.

  “For Paris. For us, morning and evening.”

  “They’re wonderful.”

  She sounded truly happy.

  Dupin was still not entirely sure if he was still dreaming. But it didn’t matter.

  The Third Day

  It was cooler. Not dramatically so, but enough for there to be a chill in the air this morning. For the first time in a long while. It must have happened sometime between one in the morning—when he and Claire left the Amiral—and shortly before six in the morning, because when they walked home along the quay after dark it had still been a “tropical” night, a term the local papers were very fond of using. By ten to six, with the very first blue light of dawn in the east, they had already left Dupin’s apartment and Dupin had brought Claire to the train station. She would be in Paris by eleven and in the hospital by half past. They hadn’t slept much, but Dupin felt more refreshed than he had in weeks. Since the moment he had walked into the Amiral and seen Claire, he hadn’t felt the graze wound again. And it wasn’t just the pain he had forgotten—he had even forgotten the case. It was nothing more than a dark phantom, far away. Claire hadn’t asked anything else about it and Dupin had been glad. They had been surreal hours, truly like being in a dream.

  Dupin walked straight from the train station to the car park—the Amiral was still closed, as were the other cafés—and then drove back up the dual carriageway the way he had come the evening before. He made a strategically important stop in Névez, at the pretty market square he liked so much, in the marvelous Maison Le Quern, with its lovely proprietor. It was just opening and—having learned his lesson the day before—he stocked up on four tartines and two coffees as supplies for the day. Of the tartines, only half made it to the Guérande (he kept the two smoked duck breast and Roquefort ones and ate the others, the ones with brie, walnuts, and grape mustard, on the journey). The Maison Le Quern, with its masterful entrecôte and homemade, crispy chips, was on his list of best places for steak-frites. A very important list, of course.

  Dupin turned on Bleu Breizh again. A kangaroo expert from the Zoo de Vincennes in Paris was on this morning, giving listeners “basic information” about their “new neighbor” and answering questions. Lots of questions. The difference between real kangaroos and rat kangaroos—which weren’t really kangaroos at all—was a fundamental zoological one, according to the expert. The relief amongst listeners generally had been enormous when they found out Skippy was a real kangaroo. The local councillor and the mayor of Arran had made the decision yesterday not to “hunt” it, since it really was a red kangaroo and almost six feet tall and weighed 192 pounds (not a rufous hare-wallaby; that was misreported), but so far it had not shown any signs of aggression. And apparently it was a strict vegetarian, and “primarily active at dusk and nighttime.” It probably spent most of the day in the shade, but sometimes Skippy, and this was an odd habit, could be seen sunbathing. The expert found it plausible that Skippy might find a “permanent home” in the Breton fauna—in short: Skippy would become a free Breton. Today, unlike yesterday, most of the listeners were already referring to Skippy as “our kangaroo.” By far the funniest story was the apparently apocryphal one about how the kangaroo got its name in the first place. James Cook, the first European ever to see one, supposedly asked the aborigines what the animal was called and they answered, “I don’t understand,” in their language: “Gang oo rou.” Cook, the butt of the joke, then presented the “kangaroo” to the world. This story—one that was fundamentally illustrative for people—reminded Dupin of his first weeks in Brittany.

  It was half past seven. It wasn’t just the air, but also the light, that was colder than it had been recently, a milky white. Hazy. As though billions of matte particles were floating in the air. Nolwenn called this a “pale daybreak”—sometime before noon it disappeared, only seldom did it linger any longer. It was really an autumn phenomenon, not a summer one.

  Without thinking about it, Dupin parked his car in the exact same place he had left it the night before last. When it all started. But this time he had thought to bring a second magazine.

  Everything was of course still sealed off. Two of the police officers from Rose’s team were standing on the path to Daeron’s salt marsh. Dupin greeted them briefly, one of them looking blatantly skeptical, the other nodding neutrally.

  As he’d driven there, the case had returned to Dupin’s consciousness more and more with every kilometer he traveled eastward, and Dupin kept coming back to the issue that had been on his mind from the outset: What were the barrels all about? If the barrels had had something inside them, no matter what it was, then it was probably still in the salt marshes, although they hadn’t found anything in the tests so far. Tests on the water, the ground, the sediment, the settling salt crystals. Dupin reached the hut that had been his salvation. And his prison. He felt a little lost for a moment. Then he stepped onto one of the narrow clay dams that ran through the harvest pools, following it, taking a turn onto another dam that led to the outermost pool before coming to a stop. It all looked different in this milky white light that robbed the world of its color, even here where the colors were in such abundance and intensity, including the sky. Everything was bathed in a strange coldness. A theatrical coldness. And strangely it also robbed the world of its smell, as if the billions of droplets absorbed everything.

  Dupin looked around, letting his gaze wander. It was a baffling labyrinth. As far as the eye could see. The entire landscape. It was impossible to say where Daeron’s salt marsh began or ended. The extremely precise, pedantic right angles and the intertwined reservoir pools and canals intermingled in apparent chaos. Dupin walked along another dam toward the bigger pools. The clay of the dams had significant cracks here and there, consequences of the long,
dry, hot spell. The water flowed around dozens of bends and forks, sometimes sharp bends, sometimes gentle. No sluice gates anywhere. As a young boy, building dams and diverting water—in streams, rivers, lakes, by the sea—had been one of his favorite pastimes. Dupin would lose himself in it completely. One of his most vivid memories of his father was an image from the holidays, in a little village on the river Doubs in the Jura. The river in the water-rich region had hundreds of little tributaries and brooks of all sizes. The narrow brook that ran through the middle of the garden of their holiday home flowed in a torrent in the spring. On a warm May day, he and his father dammed it at a particular point to form a deep pool at least a meter deep. A small pond. From there, they had built the most complex new outflows in crazy loops and mad pathways. His mother scolded them because they were both soaked to the skin and muddy. They hadn’t even noticed. To this day, Dupin couldn’t help changing the course of a tideway when he saw it draining on a beach. Best of all, he liked to make it flow all over the place in crazy new routes.

  Dupin walked back to the harvest pool the water drained into. He had suddenly had an idea. The pool’s watercourse was clearly visible. He smirked. He would simply follow it. In the opposite direction. See how it flowed and hence see Daeron’s entire salt marsh—it would be the only way to get a complete overview of it. He walked along the dams carefully to make sure he didn’t slip off. The pools varied in size, shape, and depth. The four pools beyond the harvest pool were even bigger. They were followed by smaller, symmetrical ones. Nine of them. Dupin counted them as he walked. Even the clay, dark in itself, seemed pale in this light, the water milky. Now the tapering dam suddenly brought him to the other side of the harvest pool, where there were another nine symmetrical pools. He had to look carefully to detect the leisurely flow of the water. Dupin stubbornly followed it: every bend, every sluice gate.

  He had been walking for a good ten minutes. To his right was a long reservoir pool nestled right up against the many medium-sized pools, significantly deeper, at least a hundred meters long and misshapen. The water was dark green. Tall, faded grasses grew all the way round it. He would surely be reaching the flow to this reservoir pool any moment, Dupin thought. From there, there was just the canal to the sea. He had learned that much. He continued on, following the channel with the water flowing through it. Dazzled by the sun, still low in the sky, he had to shield his eyes with one hand. The channel drained parallel with the large reservoir pool. On and on. And still parallel. For the length of the whole pool. Dupin turned right at the end of the pool to follow it round to its shorter side. After perhaps sixty meters the channel turned again—not to the right as he expected, in the direction of the large reservoir pool, but to the left. And then left again: into another, much darker-looking reservoir pool. Totally unexpectedly. A large pool in the shape of an enormous teardrop. A long-legged silver bird was standing at the edge, looking like he was inspecting Dupin.

  Dupin felt an unease rising up inside him. This pool with the dark green water—perhaps three hundred meters away from Daeron’s harvest pools as the crow flies—was not the reservoir pool that supplied Daeron’s salt marsh. Even if it had looked that way at first. It was odd.

  Dupin walked to the second long side of the pool. There was a bigger canal here, with an inflow you could follow toward the lagoon, securely sealed off with a wooden sluice gate. Dupin was walking faster and faster, and soon he was back on the side he had started on. This was crazy: the large reservoir pool was, apart from the drainage canal, totally cut off. It was definitively not connected to any salt marsh. Something wasn’t right here. What kind of pool was this? Dupin paced round it one more time, his eyes riveted on the water this time. He stopped and crouched down. Trying to focus on the ground. There was nothing out of the ordinary visible. Not to the naked eye. But that didn’t mean anything. The water was perhaps slightly cloudier than in the other pools. The samples taken so far came from different pools in the Daeron salt marsh that were all connected to each other anyway. But perhaps it was this specific pool—perfectly hidden in this labyrinth—that they needed to look into. They needed to take samples from here.

  Dupin straightened up, pulling his phone out of his pants pocket along with his Clairefontaine. To his surprise, he saw four bars of reception. Two evenings ago, one would have been enough for him. But as Riwal would say at this point, he was actually a few hundred meters away from the hut, and it was daytime, the tide was in a different phase, as was the sun, the moon—whatever.

  He needed an expert. Dupin thought for a moment and then dialed the number for the food chemist. Madame Cordier. She hadn’t been all that cooperative, but that didn’t matter now. Her voicemail kicked in. After a brief hesitation, he dialed Rose’s number.

  “Where are you? I’ve called you several times.” Rose was furious. “The hotel said you didn’t—”

  “I need a chemist team in the salt marshes. Right now. I’m standing here.”

  “I can’t hear you very well. You’re standing … there?”

  Rose’s voice reached Dupin loud and clear. Her anger had given way to criminological curiosity.

  “I can hear you very well,” Dupin said slowly, and enunciating clearly. “I’m in Daeron’s salt marsh. There’s a large pool here that isn’t linked to the rest of the salt marsh. It’s about three hundred meters from Daeron’s harvest pool.”

  There was a short pause, perhaps because the commissaire was struggling with how to respond.

  “You’re investigating in Daeron’s salt marsh on your own? I’m sending the team. And I’ll be there soon too.” She hung up.

  Dupin brooded. He leafed through his notebook, found what he was looking for, and dialed Bourgiot’s number. He was walking aimlessly along the dam as he did so.

  “Hello?”

  Dupin could hear a rustling now, alternating between loud and quiet.

  “Madame Bourgiot. I’m in Maxime Daeron’s salt marsh—on the edge of the salt marshes.”

  “What can I do for you, Monsieur le Commissaire?”

  It sounded sarcastic. He didn’t care.

  “There’s a reservoir pool here that’s totally isolated. Very large. It looks like it’s Daeron’s reservoir pool—but it’s not, it’s not connected to his pools. Or to any of the others.”

  Bourgiot was silent. Perhaps she needed to work out how to act.

  “You haven’t done your research,” she said coldly. “It’s a blind pool. There are a few of them.”

  “Whom does it belong to?”

  “Daeron or Jaffrezic perhaps, but not necessarily.”

  Her voice was accompanied by variable rustling.

  “Or Le Sel. I couldn’t tell you. I—”

  “Le Sel? I thought the neighboring salt marshes belonged to Monsieur Jaffrezic and the cooperative?”

  “Over toward the lagoon there are some salt marshes belonging to Le Sel. I believe two of the large reservoir pools reach from there almost as far as Daeron’s plot. And the blind pool. Maybe the blind pool doesn’t belong to anyone at all. That can happen, and it’s not all that uncommon”—there was undisguised distaste in her tone—“for pools that used to belong to specific salt marshes to become isolated over the course of centuries for one reason or another.”

  “Where would you have to go to get as close as possible to the blind pool by car?”

  There was quite a long pause.

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “Is there anything unusual about this pool—this blind pool, I mean? Do you know of anything?”

  “No. What would be wrong with the pool? Has something happened? Is there news, do you know—”

  Dupin hung up, then dialed Riwal’s number.

  “Good morning, boss.”

  “Riwal—you need to get hold of a full scale map of the salt marshes. One to twenty-five thousand. Or even more precise. And an aerial photograph. And Kadeg is to get an exact map of the salt marshes from the land registry office. I want to know exa
ctly who owns what land, which salt marshes, which pools.”

  “Are you in Daeron’s salt marsh? Hello?”

  Dupin had hung up so abruptly, he hadn’t even heard the question.

  * * *

  He had walked quite a long way during the phone calls. A few times he had crossed some of the larger canals, lined with tall, thorny bushes. What he now saw in front of him were harvest pools again. They were recognizable from their little harvest platforms. Daeron’s hut was long since out of view. The wide earthen dams between the salt marshes, overgrown with grass, seemed even higher in this section.

  For a moment he was confused. The whole salt-flat world felt alien all of a sudden. A few steps farther on, two dams suddenly gave way to reveal a view of the lagoon, which Dupin appeared to have gotten closer to than he had expected. He could see extensive, dazzlingly white sand banks, turquoise water running in deep channels between the sandbars. Beyond lay Le Croisic. A faint, cheerful streak. Riwal and Kadeg were there. With a telescope you could have seen Le Grand Large. The sun was quite high in the sky, there was a strong aroma in the air, the unmistakable scent of the sea here: salt, iodine, seaweed, and algae. It was incredible.

  Dupin suddenly stopped. He had heard a noise. He didn’t move. A heavy, dull sound coming from diagonally behind him. Not far away. A high earth wall blocked his view. Instinctively, he turned around, ducking slightly and placing his right hand on his gun. He clasped it tightly. When he realized what he’d done, he tried to relax his fingers slightly.

  He took one of the narrower footbridges that led directly toward the place he’d heard the noise coming from. It must have come from just over the earthen wall. He looked for a gap and found it ten meters farther on. Nimbly and silently, he approached it. He stood still for a moment and then stepped through, his hand firmly on his gun.

  The other person had seen him first.

  “Ah. Monsieur le Commissaire. On the trail of the perpetrator, deep in the salt?”