The Missing Corpse Page 2

  “I’ll be interested in every single one.”

  The piercing, monotonous beeping again. Another call from Riwal. Dupin hesitated. Maybe he should answer after all.

  “Stop by again soon,” Henri said, and dashed out into the deluge. “Salut, Georges!”

  “See you then, Henri!” called Dupin, his phone already at his ear. “This is not a good time, Riwal. We—”

  “It’s about the break-in at the bank. They’ve—”

  “We’ll talk later, Riwal.”

  “They’ve accidentally stolen the banking terminal, not the ATM!”

  “What?”

  “You know how the two machines look the same, you get money at one of them, and at the other you do your banking. There are still no clues to the whereabouts of the perpetrators.”

  “They’ve … stolen the printer that gives out account statements?”

  “It’s not just a printer, you—”

  “Absurd.”

  “For example, you can make transfers or—”

  “We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

  “Okay, I just wanted you to know, I—”

  There was a loud thud audible on the other end of the line, like a door being flung open with some force, and Riwal abruptly broke off mid-sentence.

  For a moment nothing happened, then Dupin could hear a voice, extremely clearly. A commanding tone. Kadeg, his other inspector.

  “Hang up immediately. We’ve got to inform the commissaire straightaway. This instant. It’s an emergency.” Dupin could hear Kadeg perfectly: “We’ve got a corpse! Covered in blood. Not far from the Belon, in the grass next to a small parking lot. At the tip of the Pointe de Penquernéo. If you walk along the river from Port Belon to the estuary nearby, via the upper footpath that leads to Rosbras, there’s a large field and from the right—” Kadeg’s military style had given way to his equally typical long-winded, overly detailed style.

  “What?” cried Dupin. “Riwal, what’s going on?”

  “Kadeg has just rushed in and reported that—”

  “Hang up!” Kadeg seemed to be standing directly next to Riwal now and yelling into the handset at the top of his lungs.

  “Kadeg, this is the boss!” Riwal desperately defended himself. “The boss is already on the line!”

  “Riwal, give me Kadeg,” Dupin ordered.

  A moment later, the other inspector was on the phone.

  “Monsieur le Commissaire? Is that you?”

  “Who else, Kadeg? What’s happened?”

  “A man, he’s currently—”

  “Who is the man? What do we know?”

  “Nothing. We don’t know anything yet. The call has just come in from a colleague in Riec-sur-Bélon. An old woman was out walking her dog and saw a man lying there in an odd position, not moving. She says there was blood. She got to a restaurant as quickly as she could because it was closer than her house and she called from there. La Coquille, it’s—”

  “I know La Coquille.”

  Kadeg let an unnecessary pause develop.

  “And?”

  “Nothing. That’s all we know. Two of our colleagues from Riec are already on their way; they ought to be there in a few minutes.”

  “I … fine. I want a report immediately. I’ll leave right now and I’ll be there in forty-five minutes. I’ll see you both there—you and Riwal. Call me as soon as you know more.”

  “Will do, Monsieur le Commissaire.”

  “And tell Nolwenn to send me the exact details of this parking lot where the body is straightaway.”

  “As I say, up on the cliffs, if—”

  Dupin hung up and stood there motionless for a moment.

  “Shit.”

  Then he walked briskly to his car. At least he’d miss the seminar, and it wasn’t even his fault.

  * * *

  Dupin had just taken the final rond-point before the four-lane road at a hundred kilometers an hour, which had pushed the old Citroën XM palpably and audibly to its physical limits. He would soon be on the Breton motorway, and wouldn’t come off it again until Riec. Nolwenn had already been in touch, since the little roads on the Belon estuary headland—as usual—did not have names. His GPS wouldn’t be any help. She had given him some preliminary rough guidance and he would call her again later. Forensics and the medical examiner were on their way. He and Nolwenn hadn’t spoken for very long; Dupin hadn’t wanted to tie up the line. The windscreen wipers swept frantically back and forth, struggling to do their job properly. He should really have been driving more slowly.

  The low-pitched drone sounded again, the car phone, almost as old as the car. Dupin’s fingers went to the tiny buttons.

  “Boss, can you hear me?”

  “Perfectly, Riwal.”

  “You can turn around again! No body after all. False alarm.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Apparently there’s no body after all, boss.”

  Dupin sat bolt upright. “You’re joking, aren’t you?”

  “Our two colleagues from Riec are at the parking lot. Where the body supposedly was. But there’s nothing there. No body, no dead person, no injured person. Nobody. There is no visible evidence. And no blood either.”

  Dupin had taken his foot off the gas pedal slightly. Ever so slightly.

  “What does that mean?”

  “At the moment we can—”

  “Have you spoken to the old woman who saw the dead body? Who is she? What do we know about her?”

  This just couldn’t be true.

  “A former actress. Sophie Bandol. Very well known. She lives in Port Belon, on the outskirts of the village. Apparently she’s somewhat eccentric. And gets confused sometimes. So our colleague says.”

  “Sophie Bandol? Sophie Bandol lives in Port Belon?”

  This was unbelievable. Dupin adored her. All of her films. She was one of the greatest French actresses of the twentieth century, from the golden years, up there with Jeanne Moreau, Catherine Deneuve, Brigitte Bardot, and Isabelle Huppert. But he would have expected her to be on the Côte d’Azur or in Paris.

  “Yes. Has done for a long time now. Although she’s not from here. Parisian.”

  This was beside the point anyway.

  “Is she with the police officers?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Maybe our colleagues aren’t in the right spot.”

  “They know every nook and cranny of that place. And the description was extremely precise. Apparently Madame Bandol goes for a walk there every day.”

  “I want to speak to her, Riwal. She’s to come to the parking lot. Immediately. I’ll be right there.”

  “I … okay. I’ll let our colleagues know. Kadeg and I are almost at Trégunc, so should we even—”

  “Absolutely! I want to see everyone. On the scene.”

  “Maybe somebody hurt themselves. And just wanted to recover briefly. And then went home. It’s possible, after all.”

  Dupin scoffed. It was possible.

  “Or … Sophie Bandol is quite old, I’d say she must be eighty, and sometimes you can have a turn—”

  “You mean that she’s not fully with it anymore? That she imagined it?”

  “It would be a possibility.”

  It would, in theory, be a possibility. Of course.

  “How close was the actress to the body?”

  “I don’t know. As I say, there doesn’t appear to be a body at all.”

  “Maybe the body disappeared?”

  “Disappeared?” Riwal sounded baffled. And also a little as though he might be doubting the commissaire’s sanity.

  “Speak to you soon, Riwal.”

  A moment later, Dupin had hung up. He leaned back in his seat. Even if it really had been a false alarm, and there had been no body, and no incident of relevance to the police, this had to be established beyond doubt first, once a report had been made. Formal confirmation was called for. So he had no choice but to take a look at the would-be crime scene. Theoretically he could delegate this to his inspectors, of course. But then he would have to go back to the seminar. Plus there were some crazy stories out there.

  Dupin put his foot right down to the floor.

  * * *

  Thirty-five minutes later, the Citroën’s tires were screeching as he braked on the cracked asphalt of the small parking lot south of Goulet-Riec.

  “Thanks, Nolwenn. I’m here now. I’ll be in touch later.”

  Dupin hung up. Nolwenn had directed him perfectly, as always.

  As he was drawing level with Quimper, it had brightened all of a sudden, the depressing gray getting increasingly sparse and translucent the closer he got to the sea. The rain had stopped. As he took the exit from the four-laner, the gray had dispersed and given way to a pale silvery magical sky, delicate, perfectly clear—crystalline, that was the word for it; a color, a shade, that only existed in springtime. Every single month, the various seasons had their own colors for the sky.

  The change in weather could not have been more Breton. Dupin could have sworn that the dreary rain would set in for days; absolutely everything had looked and felt that way.

  Three police cars were parked in the far right-hand corner of the parking lot. Both of his inspectors’ Peugeots—Kadeg and Riwal were in the habit of generally driving their own cars—while the third must have belonged to their colleagues from Riec. Dupin had pulled up a little short of the parking lot, on the narrow grassy verge, half on the road.

  There was nobody in sight.

  The commissaire got out, stood still for a moment, and took a deep breath in.

  Wonderful. There it all was again—the space, the sky, the light. And there was a particularly strong scent. The Atlantic was close by.

  You could still t
aste the salt on the air here by the river; you could smell algae, seaweed, minerals. During his last big case, Dupin had had to get to grips with the exact makeup of the seawater, and he had been very impressed. It was no wonder life had emerged here. You could hear the waves crashing against the rocks. When the breeze was coming in off the sea, you could hear them from far away. Every single wave. If anything on earth would ever be capable of making Dupin deeply calm—which would not happen in this lifetime—then it would be wave meditation.

  Dupin walked to the middle of the slightly sloping parking lot.

  At the end of the parking lot was a path to a track that sloped upward between gnarled oak trees starting to form bright buds. Two narrow, stony paths led to the cliffs by the sea. Wind-blown hawthorn bushes and several stone pines were visible, but it was mostly bright yellow broom. It was in defiant bloom in these weeks, sprawling patches of scrubby bush all over the landscape. And beyond the broom: a wide, rich blue-green streak, the Atlantic, less than a hundred meters away. And the crystalline blue above it. An almost supernatural light.

  Dupin looked around again. There was nobody visible from here either. Nothing was moving. The parking lot was definitely a secluded place, inland and covered with undergrowth meters high, with a little wood beyond it.

  In the grass next to the parking lot, Kadeg had said. Intuitively, Dupin scanned the ground with his eyes, even though it was pointless. He had no idea where exactly the brilliant actress claimed to have seen the body. It had been raining here too until not long before, and the wet asphalt was glistening in the sun.

  Dupin dialed Riwal’s number. Nothing. Kadeg’s number. Nothing. His phone had two solid bars of reception. Why weren’t they picking up? Maybe they had no reception. Dupin thought it over quickly and then headed for the dirt path between the oak trees that got closer and closer together.

  The path went up the hill, unexpectedly steep. Dupin had almost reached the top. The landscape suddenly changed here. The native Celtic fairy-tale oak wood gave way to a gently undulating meadow complete with dozens of fresh mole hills that smelled of rich soil, and the odd apple tree. A gentle picture-book landscape. Les terres is what the Bretons called them: harmonious shapes, peaceful, tranquil, completely different from the rugged cliffs, the violence of the ocean. Such different landscapes so close together.

  This hilly plateau lay between the estuaries of the Aven and the Belon, two mythical rivers—fjords, really—that flowed into the sea in the same rugged bay, one from the northwest, the other from the northeast. The broad incisions they made inland formed a symmetrical triangle. Three-quarters of an island, in a way. They created a distinct, sheltered territory that could only be accessed from the north, via tiny little roads between Pont-Aven and Riec-sur-Bélon.

  No sign of anyone up here either. Dupin turned around.

  And soon he was back at the parking lot. He would try one of the paths in the direction of the sea.

  All of a sudden he heard voices, albeit faint ones. Moments later he could see them coming along the path: his two inspectors, along with a female and a male police officer, neither of whom Dupin knew.

  “Where’s the actress?” Dupin hadn’t greeted them with a word or a gesture, and his tone had been grumpier than he had intended.

  “She was desperate to get back to Port Belon, she was freezing,” Kadeg gleefully shot back. “It’s not like we could force the old lady to stay here until you’d come back from the penguins.”

  Riwal beat Dupin to a response, which would undoubtedly have escalated the situation. “She has shown us the place where—she thinks—she saw the body. Then we brought her to La Coquille.” He remained pointedly matter-of-fact.

  “And the dead body hasn’t turned up again?”

  “No, boss.”

  “Show me the spot where Sophie Bandol saw the man.”

  “Follow me,” said the young policewoman, who had a blond ponytail and flashing green eyes, and she made a sharp turn to the left.

  They walked back up to where the parking lot started—it was about twenty-five meters long, fifteen meters wide. The wall of undergrowth formed a kind of niche here. The wild, bushy grass was ankle-high.

  “Here.” The policewoman pointed to the spot, half a meter away from the asphalt, directly in front of the thick undergrowth.

  “The man’s head may have been bent in an odd way. And Madame Bandol says she saw blood. I’ve marked everything with string.”

  Only now did Dupin see the nylon cord parallel with the asphalt.

  “This, em … this is our … new colleague. A policewoman. She is … still new. I think that should really have been the forensic team’s job.” The older policeman was stammering now. In his late fifties, Dupin guessed, and at first glance perfectly pleasant. “My name is … Erwann Braz. You know … it’s extremely unclear whether there has been a, em … an incident worth following up. We’ve looked carefully at everything and couldn’t find a thing. By the way, it’s an honor to meet you, Monsieur le Commissaire.”

  He had said this last sentence in an embarrassingly submissive way. So that was the initial pleasant impression over with. Dupin couldn’t stand people sucking up to him.

  “I think that our colleague here…” Dupin said, and looked directly at the policewoman—who quickly supplied “Magalie Melen”—“our colleague Melen has done the exact right thing.”

  Magalie Melen didn’t seem like she had needed the commissaire’s support.

  “Was Sophie Bandol able to see the man’s face?”

  “No, because of his contorted position and because she stopped some distance away,” Melen answered.

  “And where did she see the blood?”

  “She couldn’t say.”

  A car was audible and everyone turned around. A flashy off-road vehicle. Dupin recognized it straightaway: René Reglas. His favorite pathologist. The Mister Universe of forensics. Insufferable. Dupin’s short streak of good luck in avoiding him had come to an end today.

  “Well, bravo,” he said.

  “Madame Bandol was coming from the hill there.” Melen continued undeterred, pointing to the path that Dupin had just taken. “She says she didn’t see the body until the last minute; her dog suddenly barked fiercely. But she didn’t get any closer than four or five meters away. She has shown us where she stopped. She says her dog lost its mind even at that distance. She was afraid it would go up to the body,” Melen seemed hesitant, “and might catch something.”

  “Catch something?”

  “Yes, that’s what she said.”

  “She’s an old lady,” Riwal said. “It must all have been frightening for her.”

  “It’s well known that she gets confused sometimes. Disoriented. Some form of senile dementia, no doubt. Not to mention her fundamentally rather eccentric, odd nature,” Erwann Braz said impatiently.

  “Who says that? How would you know that?” Dupin asked gruffly.

  “It’s widely known. She has come to the police several times in recent years about supposed burglaries. Trifling matters. And there was never anything concrete. A large boulder once went missing from her driveway. We know her at the gendarmerie.”

  Few phrases—in Dupin’s entire life—made him more angry than “It’s widely known…”

  “The boulder really was gone,” Magalie Melen said, undaunted.

  “There you have it,” added Dupin in delight.

  Surprisingly, it was Kadeg who brought their conversation back to the point: “We’ve inspected the surrounding area, Commissaire. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

  “Well then, the forensic results are settled! Sensational! And we could have saved ourselves the trip,” Reglas said as he came up to the little group from behind. “The police help carry out the work of the forensic team straightaway these days. Absolutely remarkable!”

  Reglas was accompanied by his team: two young lads who were just as pompously and incredibly full of themselves as he was.

  “I want to see every car removed from the potential crime scene immediately. And by that I mean the entire parking lot. Every single car parked here is in violation of official regulations. They may have contaminated crucial clues already.”