The Killing Tide Read online

  “It’ll be done, boss,” Riwal replied. “Our colleagues from Douarnenez have in any case already spoken with the member of Madame Gochat’s staff who was here last night and closed up the hall. Jean Serres. At 11:20 P.M. The last fisherfolk had left shortly before. He had seen Céline Kerkrom a few times in the course of the evening.”

  Like Kadeg, Riwal gave the impression of being lively and relaxed, but then that had been the case ever since the birth of his son, Maclou-Brioc, four weeks earlier; despite the lack of sleep, his paternal pride had left him looking invincible. “He didn’t notice anything unusual or suspicious. So far nobody’s said they noticed anything.”

  It would have been too easy.

  “At what time did this Jean Serres see the fisherwoman last?”

  “None of our men said.”

  Dupin drank his second café. Yet again down in one gulp. It didn’t taste any better than the first one. Never mind.

  “One more, please,” he said. Right now it wasn’t about taste, it was the effect that mattered. The woman at the stand fulfilled the order with the slightest of glances.

  “Madame Gochat”—Dupin turned to face the harbormistress—“I would like to call your colleague and ask him when he last saw Céline Kerkrom last night.”

  “You mean you want me to call him now?”

  “Now.”

  “As you wish.”

  Madame Gochat took her cell phone out of her pants pocket and stepped aside.

  “Jean Serres,” Riwal continued, “said that at about nine P.M. there were some ten to fifteen fisherfolk in the hall. Of those, five were preparing the fish, and there were maybe five buyers, and a couple of men dealing with the ice. At about nine P.M. the first coastal sardine fishermen had come in from the nearby harbor basin. It was busy on the quayside. The afternoon rain had suddenly stopped about six P.M. and the sun had broken through, which had brought the anglers and promenaders out.”

  In Concarneau, Dupin himself was one of the promenaders who always strolled by the fish auction hall. He liked the lively, colorful goings-on around the harbor, the way it was reliably repeated every day, perfectly choreographed. There was always something going on.

  The elderly woman on the stand had set a third paper cup on the counter in front of Dupin, and was now dealing with four older fishermen who had just turned up.

  “I want all the workers in the hall put stringently under the microscope, Riwal,” Dupin said loudly.

  “Leave it to me, boss.”

  Dupin threw back the third petit café.

  The harbormistress came back over to them, her phone still in her hand. Serres said he had last seen Céline Kerkrom about 9:30 P.M. In the hall. He reckoned she had come in around 6:00.

  “Did he notice anything in particular?”

  “No. She’d been absolutely normal. But then he had no reason to pay her any particular attention. They didn’t speak.”

  “I want to speak with the man myself—Riwal, tell him to come here now.”

  “Consider it done.” Riwal left the counter and headed toward the exit from the hall, where a small group of police was standing.

  “How long do the coastal fish auctions last usually, Madame Gochat?”

  “It’s very variable, it depends on the season and the weather. December, coming up to the holidays, is the busiest time. Even busier than in June, July, and August. At that time of year we work until after midnight. Now it’s up to about eleven P.M. or eleven thirty.”

  “What do the fisherfolk do after the end of the auction?”

  Madame Gochat shrugged. “They go back to their boats, take them to their moorings. Sometimes they hang around for a while, tinkering with their buoys, chatting on the quayside. Or maybe they go for a drink.”

  “Here?”

  “Down at the Vieux Quai, Port de Rosmeur, right next door.”

  For the first time that morning Dupin’s features lit up. The quai and the area behind it were fabulous; he could spend hours on the old pier side with its fishermen’s houses painted in shades of blue, pink, or yellow, sitting in one of the cafés or bistros watching the world go by. His favorite was the Café de la Rade, painted in bright Atlantic blue and white, a former fish canning factory. Everything there was unstaged, nothing put on for show. There was a view of the harbor and the bay of Douarnenez, breathtakingly beautiful. Dupin liked Douarnenez, in particular its wonderful old market halls—the coffee there was great—and the Port de Rosmeur, the charmingly aged harbor quarter, built in the nineteenth century, the golden age of the sardine. If you needed to name a center of operations in Douarnenez, then the Café de la Rade was the perfect place. The commissaire, who had a tendency toward ritual, in every one of his cases designated either a bar, a bistro, or sometimes even a location out in the open air as “center of operations.” It would be the scene for interviews and, if necessary, for official interrogations too. Dupin was famous for his dislike of offices of every kind, in particular his own. He escaped from them as often as possible. He solved his cases from the scene of the crime, not from a desk. Even when the police prefecture was close by, Dupin needed to be outside, in the open air, amongst other people. He had to see things for himself, speak to people himself, live in their world.

  “Did you know any more about the deceased, Madame Gochat?”

  “No. Like I said, she was a coastal fisher from Île de Sein. She’d been married. As far as I know her ex-husband was one of the technicians in the island lighthouse.” The harbormistress, even now, talking about the dead woman, showed no sign of emotion.

  “When did they get divorced?”

  “Oh, that was years ago, ten at least. They get married young on the islands. And if it goes wrong, they’re on their own again young.”

  “What else? What else can you say about her?”

  “I don’t know, she was thirty-six, one of the few women in this business. She spoke her mind and had a few hefty disagreements with some people.”

  “She was a rebel, a fighter,” said the elderly woman at the coffee stand, who was busy with a few glasses at a little washbasin. She seemed angry.

  Displeasure was written all over Madame Gochat’s face. Dupin was quick to follow up. He was curious.

  “What do you mean, Madame…?”

  “Yvette Batout, Monsieur le Commissaire.” She had now positioned herself directly opposite Dupin on the other side of the counter. “Céline was the only one who stood up to the self-appointed ‘king of the fishermen,’ Charles Morin, a criminal with a big fleet, half a dozen deep-sea trawlers and more coastal boats. Bolincheurs primarily, but a couple of chalutiers. He has more than a few skeletons in his closet, and not just in the fishing business.”

  “That’ll do, Yvette.” The harbormistress’s tone was cutting.

  “Let Madame Batout say what she wants to say.”

  Madame Batout batted her eyelashes briefly at Dupin. “Morin is unscrupulous, even when he plays the grand seigneur. He uses giant dragnets and drift nets, even along the sea bottom, causes piles of unnecessary catch, ignores the quotas—Céline even caught him out a couple of times inside the Parc Iroise, right in the middle of the conservation area, even though he denies it all and threatens his critics. Céline reported him to the authorities several times, including those at the parc. She had the balls to do it. Just last week six dolphins who’d been crushed in one of the nets were found dead on a beach at Ouessant.”

  “Did he threaten Céline Kerkrom directly?”

  Dupin was making thorough notes, in a rapid scribble that looked like a secret code.

  “‘You need to take care, you’ll see,’ he told her here in the hall, back in February, in front of witnesses.”

  “He was threatening to take her to court for slander, not to kill her, there’s a bit of a difference, Yvette.” Gaétane Gochat’s memory was curiously mechanical; there was no way of knowing what she actually thought.

  “What exactly happened back in February?”

&
nbsp; “The two of them,” the harbormistress said before Madame Batout could answer, “bumped into one another by chance here, and they quarreled. Nothing more.”

  “It was more than a quarrel, Gaétane, and you know it.” Madame Batout’s eyes were blazing.

  “How old is Monsieur Morin?”

  “Late fifties.”

  “What did you mean about ‘skeletons in the closet, and not just in the fishing business,’ Madame Batout?”

  “He had a finger in the pie in a whole raft of criminal affairs, including smuggling cigarettes across the channel. But for some reason or other nobody ever caught him. Three years ago a customs boat was close on his tail and nearly caught him, until he sank the boat. The only piece of evidence! And there was nothing else to hold against him.”

  “Be careful what you say, Yvette!”

  “Has Charles Morin ever been the subject of a police investigation?”

  “Never,” the harbormistress said firmly. “Everything against him, I’ll say it outright, amounts to nothing more than extremely vague accusations. Rumors. I think that given the number of illegal actions he’s accused of, the police would have been on his tail at some stage.”

  Dupin unfortunately knew all too many cases where that hadn’t been what happened.

  “Great,” he mumbled.

  His first conversation and already he had not only one hot topic but two: illegal fishing and cigarette smuggling.

  Fishing was a huge affair in Brittany. Anyone who regularly read Ouest-France and Le Télégramme—and Dupin did so with particularly strict regularity—came across news from the fishing industry every day. Almost on a par with agriculture and tourism, it was one of the most important branches of the economy, a proud Breton symbol: nearly half of France’s fishing catch came from Brittany. A venerable branch of the economy that was deep in crisis. There were several factors at work causing trouble for the Breton fleet: overfishing; the destruction of the seas by industrial large-scale fishing; the rising temperature and pollution of the oceans causing serious damage to fish stocks; climate change and the associated quirks in the weather which led to ever-diminishing catch sizes; the brutal, almost lawless international competition; fishing policies that had long been failing, on regional, national, and international levels; and fierce arguments, bitter quarrels, and conflicts.

  And the prefecture had—to the commissaire’s chagrin—been on them for years about the tobacco smuggling. No matter how bizarre it might seem in modern times in the middle of Europe, tobacco smuggling really was a serious problem. A quarter of all the cigarettes smoked in France entered the country illegally; the loss to the public purse was a multibillion sum. And since sales over the Internet had been banned, the situation had got even worse.

  “Thank you very much, Madame Batout. That was extremely helpful. I think we’ll have to have a chat with Monsieur Morin straightaway. Where does he live?”

  “Morgat, on the Crozon peninsula. He has a grand villa out there. But he has other houses too, one here in Douarnenez, in Tréboul. Always in the best places.” Madame Batout continued to look at him dourly.

  “And was he here too last night?”

  “I didn’t see him.” Madame Batout was clearly disappointed to tell him this.

  “He comes here very rarely,” the harbormistress butted in, “but there would certainly have been some of his fishermen here. He—”

  “Madame Gochat!” A thin young man in a thick blue fleece sweater had come over to them and tried to attract her attention. She gave him the slightest of nods.

  “We need you upstairs, madame.”

  “Anything to do with the dead fisherwoman?” Dupin was quicker than Madame Gochat. The coffee was finally beginning to work.

  The young man looked at a loss.

  “Answer the commissaire, we’ve nothing to hide,” Madame Gochat encouraged him.

  It was an interesting scenario. The young man was clearly afraid of her.

  “It’s the mayor, on the telephone. He says it’s urgent.”

  “He will have to wait a moment,” Dupin told him.

  It seemed Gaétane Gochat was about to say something to the contrary, then let it pass.

  “Going back to the deceased, Madame Gochat, is there anything else you can tell me? Has she been involved with anyone else?”

  The harbormistress made a sign to the young man and he took off immediately.

  Gochat hesitated a while and appeared to be weighing her words. “She campaigned for sustainable, ecologically sound fishing, and got involved now and again with projects and initiatives down at Parc Iroise.”

  “Parc Iroise”—Madame Batout butted in again, having in the meantime dealt surprisingly quickly with two other orders—“is a remarkable maritime nature park. There’s nothing quite like it. Here on the extreme west coast of Brittany between the Île de Saint, Ouessant, and the Channel. Our park boasts the greatest maritime diversity in Europe.” There was unbridled pride in the dogged old lady’s voice. Dupin almost thought he was listening to Riwal. “More than one hundred and twenty types of fish live here. There are also several colonies of dolphins and seals. And the largest algae field in Europe! There are more than eight hundred different varieties, the seventh largest algae field in the world. And even—”

  “The parc,” the harbormistress interrupted Madame Batout, “is a major pilot project. Apart from the scientific research it’s primarily designed to be a model for a functioning balance between human use of the sea—fishing, algae harvesting, leisure, and tourism—and a functioning ecology, protection of the sea.”

  Nolwenn and Riwal had frequently talked about the—undoubtedly extraordinary—project, but to tell the truth, Dupin knew very little about it. And right now his interest was elsewhere.

  “I mean: Has Céline Kerkrom had arguments with anyone else recently?”

  “Oh yes, it wasn’t just Morin,” said Madame Batout.

  Gochat shot her a warning glance, and took over the conversation: “Céline set up an initiative for alternative energy generation on the island, to replace oil that they use to produce electricity and water desalination. She got the whole island worked up. She wanted to set up several small tidal generators, a sort of pipe system.”

  “And that annoys you?”

  Gochat hadn’t sounded quite so neutral in her previous sentences.

  “I only mean that she would definitely have made enemies.”

  “Who in particular?”

  “Thomas Roiyou, for example. He’s the owner of the ship tanker that supplies the island with its oil.”

  Dupin was writing it all down. “And they quarreled?”

  “Yes. In March, Céline Kerkrom wrote up a ‘manifesto’ for her island movement and distributed it everywhere. Ouest-France and Le Télégramme reported on it. Then Roiyou gave an interview in which he talked about it.”

  The annoyance clearly in evidence on Gochat’s face grew.

  “I’ve got all that. We will definitely have a conversation with this gentleman too. Do you know”—Dupin made a point of addressing both women—“if Céline Kerkrom had any family? Or if she had friends among the other fisherfolk?”

  “I couldn’t say,” Gochat said, looking genuinely clueless. “She seemed to me to be a loner. But I could be wrong. You need to speak to somebody who knew her better. Ask the people on the island. Everybody there knows everybody else.”

  Dupin turned to Madame Batout. “Do you have any concrete idea what might have happened here?”

  “No.”

  A surprisingly blunt response, given that she’d been so ready to get involved previously.

  There was a brief pause.

  “But you need to bring the perpetrator to justice.”

  Dupin smiled. “We’ll do that, okay, Madame Batout. Have no worries on that account.”

  “In that case … I need to fetch milk from the cellar.” And with those words, Madame Batout headed off, looking very pleased with herself.

/>   “Will you…” Gochat was obviously concerned about something. “Will you be closing off the hall now?”

  Dupin was about to say yes; he was famous for sealing off a crime scene extensively and for quite some time.

  “No. Initially at least we’ll just seal off the little room with the waste barrels in it.”

  In this case it would be smart to let everyday life and business in the hall continue as normal.

  “One last question, Madame Gochat. How is business doing in the harbor here? You must be finding it difficult, as all the other harbors are.”

  “We’re struggling, yes. But we’re fighting back. For the past few years we’ve been fourteenth out of all French harbors in size of catch: forty-five hundred tons of fish a year, the majority, of course, in sardines. They are our traditional strength.” The subject hardly seemed to bother her.

  “But the number of boats registered here must have dropped?”

  In Concarneau, and throughout Brittany, that was a regular topic.

  “For several years now things have been more or less steady. We have twenty-two boats registered, eighteen of them coastal.”

  “And the share of the catch auctioned here has also remained steady?”

  Dupin had noticed a slight flash in Gochat’s eyes. Riwal would have been proud of his knowledge of the subject. This was another topic that was heavily debated in the commissariat: international firms, Spanish for example, used the Breton harbors, but only to unload. Their catch was immediately loaded onto freezer trucks.

  It took a moment for her to answer.

  “No. But in response we’ve increased charges for using the harbor.” For the first time there was a hint of bitterness in her voice. “Our harbor is in a very privileged location. Even in high seas, the water here is calm, the conditions are almost perfect. Do you see some link between the economic conditions in the harbor and the murder?” She looked at him demandingly. Defiantly.

  Dupin ignored the question. “That’s it for now, Madame Gochat. We will need to speak again.” Dupin didn’t mind if it sounded like a threat.

  The harbormistress was back in control of herself. “I’m here all day. Au revoir, Monsieur le Commissaire.”