The Killing Tide Read online

  She had already turned away when Dupin—who had remained standing by the counter—called after her: “After you leave your office about nine P.M. or nine thirty, where do you go?”

  He didn’t bother to add a phrase like “Just a routine question,” or “It’s something we ask everyone.”

  She came back a few steps. “Straight home, into the shower, and then to bed.”

  Even this follow-up hadn’t jarred her.

  “How far is it from here to your house?”

  “A quarter of an hour in the car.”

  “So you were in bed by ten thirty P.M.?”

  “Yes.”

  “Any witnesses?”

  “My husband is on a business trip, he only gets back this evening.”

  “Did you make any calls from your landline?”

  “No.”

  “That was very useful, thanks once again.” With those words Dupin set off decisively in the direction of the exit, just a few steps away.

  He would take a look around outside until he came across the colleague of Madame Gochat’s he wanted to talk to.

  The “look around,” a particular way of wandering about aimlessly, was one of Dupin’s favorite disciplines. It was a way he often discovered details that initially seemed irrelevant, but then suddenly became very important. He had solved more than one case on the basis of one of these inconspicuous details that he had stumbled across while wandering around.

  * * *

  Dupin stood on the quayside. It was light by now.

  He had been looking around for a while, strolling about rather aimlessly, looking at this and that with particular attention—even though it was of no importance.

  He looked at the auction hall. The building was flat, long, and simple, painted white, like the other buildings here around the harbor. Next to the entrance were two forklift trucks, diagonally across the quay as if the drivers for some reason had hastily abandoned them.

  Business was going on as usual all around, people doing what they normally did. It was all as the harbormistress had said: the auction hall was right in the middle and anyone could have wandered around it without being noticed. There were narrow footpaths on the ground, part earth, part grass, behind and in between the various buildings. Dupin even saw two rectangular camper vans with deck chairs beside them.

  The still noticeably fresh air did him good, sharpened the senses and the mind, and then there was the caffeine from the three cafés as well.

  As was his habit, he had walked right to the very edge of the pier, the toes of his shoes almost over the edge. The slightest careless movement and he could have fallen over, a fall that at this ebb tide would have been three or four meters.

  In front of him lay the wide bay of Douarnenez, which stretched from the long beaches at the end of the bay to Cape Sizun in the southwest and the Crozon peninsula in the north, and eventually to the open Atlantic.

  A vast natural bay and an impressive panorama. Dupin understood why the whole world said it was the most beautiful bay in France. One of the most beautiful in Europe.

  The still, deep blue water, the light-colored concrete jetty and closed-off harbor, and the water again beyond it, even bluer. Postcard blue. Serene. Already there were a few light sailing boats gliding along, and there would be more and more as the morning went on. People were in holiday mood. Above the broad strip of sea lay the gentle green landscape with the low, soft swell of the hills. The Crozon peninsula. And beyond that finally the endless, clear pale blue of the sky, decorated with a few perfect white clouds. It was summer and the temperature would rise by the hour. A heavenly day lay ahead. For anyone who didn’t have to deal with the tragedy that had taken place here.

  To the right lay the Vieux Port, also protected by a long pier. To the left of the hall, some two hundred meters away, the quay took a right turn and ran as far as the harbor pier. Thick car tires hung on ropes against the pier as bollards for the boats. A few anglers were already out trying their luck at this early hour of the morning. Three pretty fishing boats, moored with multiple ropes, were named Vag-a-Lamm, Ar Raok, and Barr Au. They looked like the fishing boats Dupin had seen in the movies as a child, the way painters in Pont-Aven had depicted them. Made of wood, one in bright turquoise, striped yellow, and lower down paprika red, the other with its upper half bright red, and the lower Atlantic blue, the third in various shades of green, from dark to pale and then blaring white below the waterline. There was nothing arbitrary about the colors. Every fisherman or company chose their own colors or combination of colors, Dupin knew: it was a deliberate signature, as conspicuous as possible so that it could be identified at sea even from afar.

  Dupin studied the technical equipment on the deep-sea trawlers behind them: boats of a completely different dimension, forty or fifty meters long, tall. This part of the harbor, the halls, the machinery, had none of the charm and flair of the Vieux Port. Everything here was functional, technical, made of concrete, steel, aluminum, constantly fighting off rust, the sea, time itself. It was obvious everywhere that this was hard work, a world where only extreme professionalism counted. Any mistake could prove fatal. Knowledge, experience, ability, those were the currency if you had to deal with the sea. Bravery, endurance. Dupin was in awe of it. Even as a little boy he had loved the harbors, the sea in general and its stories. It was as if he was obsessed; he had read every story that came into his hands. More than anything else, the sea had become a subject of romantic imagination, even if he was becoming increasingly unwilling to take boat trips of any sort. It might even have been his fantasy at work: the vast number of creatures, horrible monsters that he had imagined, and, like those of Jules Verne, lurked in the dark depths: giant squid, sea snakes, shapeless twisting beasts. The world below was as black and featureless as the world above; the universe. The fearful unknown; the fearful wonderful.

  Dupin headed over to the anglers. Only one road led into the harbor area. Dupin had left his car farther up, not far from Chanterelle-Connétable, the world’s first ever fish factory. It had been set up in 1853, Riwal recited like a prayer. It had been Napoleon himself who had set up the French industry as a way of preserving fresh food for his campaigns. The tin can had been invented and Douarnenez and other Breton regions had become very rich, although to be more precise it was the sardine that had made them all rich. Dupin was crazy about the red cans with sardines, mackerel, and other fish, above all the incredibly tender tuna fish. In the heyday of the sardine, toward the end of the nineteenth century, more than a thousand boats had been based in and around the Port de Rosmeur, and there had been all of fifty “fritures,” canneries. Nolwenn had given Dupin a book with early photographs of Brittany. The pictures showed the hectic lifestyle, the colorful crowds and—though you could only imagine it—the penetrating smell of fried fish which must have been everywhere in the air. Penn Sardin, sardine heads, was what the local people had called themselves.

  “Boss! Boss!” Riwal was running toward the commissaire. “I’ve been looking for you. I…” He stopped and stood in front of Dupin. “Jean Serres, the harbormistress’s colleague, should be here in a few minutes. It’s taken a while, he had to use his bicycle because his car wouldn’t start and he lives quite a way out.” He held an arm out but it was unclear which direction he was supposed to be pointing. “Our men have already spoken to three of the fishermen who were here last night. One of them remembered seeing Céline Kerkrom shortly before ten P.M. He says she was on her own and standing near the entrance. The three of them gave us the names of a lot of others who were here last night. And a few customers. I don’t think we’ll have a problem putting our list together. But so far nobody has had anything unusual to report.”

  “Find out from as many of them as possible what they know about”—Dupin pulled out his notebook and glanced at the first page—“the so-called fisherman king. Charles Morin. I want to know primarily what the police think of him. Whether or not they think he’s a criminal. One they haven’t bee
n able to lay hands on so far.”

  “Consider it done, boss. Meanwhile the press have turned up, the pair from Ouest-France and Le Télégramme, they’re over at the coffee stand next to Madame Batout.”

  “Tell them we’re completely in the dark. It’s the truth, after all.”

  “Will do.”

  Dupin was standing right at the edge of the pier again, looking out across the wide bay.

  Riwal did the same. Passersby would have assumed they were two laid-back day-trippers.

  “You know, don’t you”—it was a rhetorical form of speaking used by his inspector when he began telling a story—“that it was here on the Bay of Douarnenez that the mythical city of Ys is supposed to have been, an unimaginably rich city with red walls in which even the roofs were made of pure gold, and one day it just sank beneath the sea. It was where the famous King Gradlon ruled, whose wife gave him a wonderfully pretty daughter called Dahut. There are many stories and tales, ‘ancient Breton things.’” Riwal obviously stressed that element. “The story is undoubtedly the most well-known of all French sea sagas.”

  Of course. Dupin knew the story only too well. In fact every child in France knew it.

  “Next year a long-planned thorough scientific expedition is due to search the bottom of the bay. Researchers had found that it was covered in several meters of sand and mud, dragged into the bay by big storm floods. Back in 1923. During one of those once-in-a-century ebb tides after a total eclipse of the sun, several fishermen reported seeing ruins in the middle of the bay.”

  Dupin felt like saying there had also been a number of expeditions looking for Atlantis.

  “And just there,” Riwal made a vague nod, “just before you get to the western end of Douarnenez, is the Île de Tristan with its unusually large variety of wildlife and its mysterious ruins. According to the legends, they are supposed to be the last remaining bit of Ys. And not only that,” he was speaking reverently now, “the island itself is linked to many mythical wild, ghoulish, bloody but also wonderful stories and legends. Including the greatest and most tragic love story known to humanity: that of Tristan and Isolde. Both of them doomed to die. A Breton story,” once again Riwal stressed the word, “a story of Cornouaille, the famous medieval kingdom that stretched from the Pointe du Raz as far as Brest and Quimperlé, and,” his tone became ever more celebratory, “a story that became one of the most important elements in Western literature. It dates back to as early as 1170 when already it states that Tristan came from around Douarnenez, then capital of Cornouaille. Quimper,” he gave a dismissive look, “only became the capital much later. Before that it was Ys.

  “Isolde is a Breton. In one of the innumerable versions of the story, Tristan was about to throw himself off high crags into the sea in despair at the death of his beloved, when he was taken by the wind and set down gently on the island. But even there he soon died of his incessant grief. And there they lie for all time, the two lovers, beneath two trees with their branches intertwined,” Riwal sighed emotionally, “somewhere in the northwest of the island. Nobody knew where they lay save the king who buried them. The remnants of his castle stand near Plomarc’h by Plage du Ris…”

  “Riwal.” However much he loved sea sagas, Dupin was getting impatient. “We need to know who had the closest personal contact with Céline Kerkrom, search her house, talk to her friends and neighbors on the Île de Sein. Above all, the islanders. Go to the island as soon as possible.”

  “No problem, boss.” Riwal loved boats.

  “Find out who knows most about her and then bring that person back to the mainland.”

  Dupin wanted, as far as it was possible, to avoid having to go to the island himself.

  “Consider it done,” Riwal said. “By the way, I have a cousin here in Douarnenez.”

  Dupin refrained from asking the follow-up question, not that it made any difference. “He’s president of the Association du véritable Kouign Amann, the kouign amann association.”

  The Breton butter cake. Dupin involuntarily found his mouth watering. Breton butter—an elixir—lots of it, a bit of flour and even less water but more sugar, the simplest of ingredients, but the great art was to caramelize them into an ambrosian delicacy.

  “In the middle of the fourteenth century,” Riwal said quickly, glancing briefly aside at Dupin, “a baker here in Douarnenez had to make cakes for a big celebration, but during the night most of his ingredients were stolen and he was left with just butter, flour, and sugar. My cousin has made it his mission to preserve the original recipe. It can’t be improved on.”

  “I need urgently to make a phone call, Riwal. And you need to get going. Kadeg can take over here.”

  “I’ll get a boat sent over. On the subject, Kadeg and a few colleagues are inspecting the fisherwoman’s boat,” Riwal said.

  That was important.

  “And?”

  “We’ll report the minute they’re finished, boss. See you later.” Riwal ran back into the hall.

  Dupin stayed standing on the pier.

  He pulled his cell phone out of his jacket pocket. He was missing an important part of his ritual: the first phone call in a new case with Nolwenn, his personal assistant. He would have to ring Claire too, given that he had just vanished, leaving only a short note on the table. They had agreed to sleep off the night before, have a convivial breakfast together at the Amiral, and lunch together too. Dupin had intended not to turn up at the commissariat until the afternoon. They had spent all too little time together in the last few months, Claire and he. Not at all what he had planned—and wanted—when he had dragged Claire to Brittany the previous year and she had taken over the post of head of the cardiology department in Quimper. The sad thing about it was that Claire had the morning off—precious hours they might have spent together—before she had to go to Rennes for a medical meeting and would have to stay the night too. Back in Paris, during their early relationship, it had been exclusively Dupin’s fault that they saw each other so seldom; now it was the other way around. Dupin frequently had to drive to Quimper late at night to collect her from the clinic. Then they would sit on Claire’s little balcony and drink red wine and eat cheese that Dupin had bought at the Concarneau market. Often Claire was so tired that they simply sat in silence next to one another looking at the lit-up ancient alleyways. Nowadays they rarely went on excursions as they had earlier when Claire had come to Brittany from Paris on her days off. Dupin missed that.

  He had already tried Nolwenn from the car but the line had been busy. As always she would already be in the picture, well informed. Dupin had long ago given up trying to figure out how she knew what and from whom, and simply assumed she had telepathic abilities. Druidic abilities, it would seem. Nolwenn picked up the phone.

  “The woman is a rebel, Monsieur le Commissaire, I know her through my husband’s aunt who’s a friend of hers.” Dupin might have guessed, even if this familial link didn’t exactly open up the case. Nolwenn was, in principle, on the side of the opposition—a genetically anchored, wonderfully anarchic reflex. She knew everybody who had fought back against injustice, arbitrary judgments, and bad management.

  “Did you know her personally?”

  “As good as. I’ll try to find out what I can.”

  “Absolutely.”

  It couldn’t be better. Nolwenn took charge of the business.

  “It’s more than just about the tragic death of this wonderful woman.” Nolwenn was livid. “That shouldn’t put more pressure on you but it’s something you need to know. And you know what immense courage it takes to go out amid tossing seas, waves several meters high, and whipping storms, in total darkness, to put yourself at the mercy of the sea, alone? Daily? That’s how a fisherman or fisherwoman earns their daily bread.”

  Dupin considered it a nightmare.

  “They’re heroes! It’s a magnificent job! A mythical calling indeed,” Nolwenn said.

  Dupin had no intention of contradicting her.

 
“Jean-Pierre Abraham”—Nolwenn’s favorite author, who had for years been a lighthouse keeper and later lived on the Glénan islands—“once wrote, ‘Going out to sea means something new every time, to leave the land of the living with no guarantee of returning to it.’ In comparison the work of a police commissaire was just thumb-twiddling!”

  Dupin didn’t take it personally.

  Nolwenn left a dramatic pause.

  “You have to come down hard on this mafioso Morin, he’s responsible for everything.”

  “We’ll do that, Nolwenn, we’ll do that.”

  “Céline is bound to have made many enemies.”

  “Riwal is going out to the island.”

  “Excellent. He knows how to speak to the people there. But really you should go with him.” Advice seriously meant. “And by the way, in case you’re wondering, I will be working from Lannion today. But I’m contactable at any time.”

  Dupin hadn’t the faintest idea what her work from Lannion was about.

  “And—”

  “Boss, boss!” It was Riwal again, but this time he came charging right up to him. There was a look of horror on his face.

  “I’ll call you back, Nolwenn.”

  “We’ve got—” Riwal stopped in front of Dupin, gasping for breath. “We’ve got another corpse, boss!”

  “What?”

  “I’m not joking, boss. Another corpse. A new one.”

  “Another dead body? Who?”

  “It’s a woman again—and guess how she was killed.”

  “Her throat was cut.”

  Riwal stared at him in confusion. “How did you know?”

  Dupin brushed his hand through his hair. “It can’t be true.”

  “A dolphin researcher from Parc Iroise. Her throat cut. And guess where?”

  Before Dupin could say anything, Riwal answered his own question: “On the Île de Sein!”

  The island had now assumed an indisputable role in events.

  “A dolphin researcher?”

  “Yes.”

  “The woman at the coffee stand said something about dead dolphins.”