The Killing Tide Read online

  Dupin had already heard about a lot of aunts, but not one in Lannion.

  “Jacqueline Thymeur. I think she’s the third sister of her mother. Early seventies.”

  Fine. Nolwenn could work anywhere. It didn’t matter.

  “Is it something special?”

  During their last big case Nolwenn had had to go to a funeral. Of another aunt.

  “She’s fine. If you mean the aunt.”

  “Riwal.” Dupin had just had an idea, a good idea. “Call Goulch! He should get ready and come and collect us from the Île de Sein later.”

  Dupin was pleased at his inspiration. Kireg Goulch of the water protection police might steer one of those dreadful speedboats, but for one thing the ferry wasn’t the slightest bit better and for another Dupin trusted the tall, lanky Goulch, whom he had worked with on a complicated case on Glénan. Not that Goulch’s handling of the boat back then had exactly been a pleasure, but Dupin’s fear of traveling by sea—a lot worse than just seasickness—hadn’t been as bad in Goulch’s company as it was normally. On top of that: Goulch was an excellent policeman. And an expert on the sea.

  “Gladly.” Riwal beamed.

  Goulch and he had become good friends over the years.

  Once again the boat shot sharply into the air, seemed to sway there for an endlessly long moment, then crashed mercilessly down with a fearful fury. As if the Atlantic were playing with it. Not cruelly or angrily—that would be something different—but playfully, coquettishly. Just to pass the time, maybe. All of a sudden, for no obvious reason—the island was still at least a kilometer away and the boat hadn’t changed its speed—the sea calmed, as if they had passed through some magic border that blocked the forces of nature. If Dupin hadn’t been so preoccupied with himself, his queasiness, his now cramplike tension—following the chat with Riwal he had crept into a corner of the deck and tried hard to get at least an occasional view of the horizon—this mysterious change would have been yet another reason for worry, but he just accepted it.

  To the right, bizarre-shaped rocks stuck out of the sea. Dangerously sharp and dark, several meters high, rising up against the marvelously blue sky. Some of them with bright green trails of seaweed. Wary seagulls stared at the boat.

  The ferry passed unnecessarily close to the rocks. It was only very late that it took a sharp curve around a stony islet in front of the harbor, and then all of a sudden there it was: the Île de Sein. Very real and breathtakingly beautiful.

  The harbor, a few jetties in front of a black-and-white picture-book lighthouse, Men-Brial, a solemn, surprisingly large church just sitting there, a curved quayside with a small sandy beach in front of it. Behind lay small houses painted yellow, bright blue, and bright pink, though most were simply white or just stone with window shades painted Atlantic blue. All a bit faded, battered, whipped by the perpetual wind, the spray, the sun. The sea reflected the light from all sides, multiplied it until it seemed like a psychedelic vision.

  The harbor was a natural bay with a sturdy pier built around it, and enclosed a group of rocks opposite—also with a bright white sandy beach. The concrete and the defensive rocks had over the years turned yellowish. Behind the quay and the village and towering over everything was the elegant, gracious, extremely tall island lighthouse. Dupin knew it from picture books: Goulenez—le Grand Phare. A famous landmark, as were all the lighthouses in Brittany, all of which had their own names and were listed in an unofficial rating depending on how inaccessible and difficult to maintain their position was.

  The boat headed for the outermost pier; their course left no doubt, that was where they would disembark.

  “At ebb tide the boat stops at the first pier, the water at the others isn’t deep enough,” Dupin heard one of the tourists say, who were beginning to come down the steel steps from above.

  Within seconds there was a line. Dupin was glad to join it. He would soon have his feet on dry land again, even if there wasn’t much of it.

  A hefty thump. The boat had docked.

  “Here, here!” A vigorous, high-pitched woman’s voice from the pier. Dupin started to gingerly make his way down the narrow, steep ladder. “Monsieur le Commissaire!”

  A stocky, elderly lady with crinkly gray-blond hair was waving frantically. The passengers were staring curiously at the lady and even more so at the commissaire, as she called out more loudly. “The corpse!”

  The day-trippers looked suddenly concerned and distraught at this dramatic opening to their stay on the island.

  Dupin, his legs wobbling, had finally reached the pier. Immediately the little woman was standing in front of him. The expressions on her face were as vigorous as her voice: tough, stubborn, ruthless. Dupin knew the type: hard-nosed to the bitter end. She must have recognized him from a photo in the newspaper.

  “I’m Joséphine Coquil, director of the island museums.” She turned her gaze casually to Riwal. “And you must be the inspector. Right, I’ll take you to the corpse,” she raised her eyebrows, “to our second corpse! This is quite a drama for the island.” She sounded more exhilarated than dismayed.

  “First the murder of our Céline, and then the dolphin woman. The poor girls! Such a shame! Do you know anything yet? Have you an initial clue?”

  “Céline Kerkrom has only just been found, madame.” Dupin moved his weight from one foot to the other, trying to get an even stance again.

  “You know what they say, ‘See Sein and you’ve seen your end.’ Ha!”

  “I’ve heard say it’s the ‘island’s motto,’ madame.” And he reckoned it wasn’t going to be the last time.

  “Is it true that Céline had her throat cut? The same thing happened to the dolphin researcher. There’s no doubt about that, I can tell you.”

  “There was no doubt in the fisherwoman either.”

  “There’s a monster at large here!” Madame Coquil exclaimed, without sounding in the slightest shocked by her own statement.

  “Céline was brave, she changed things. And Laetitia Darot was a strong woman too,” she hesitated, “even if she didn’t really know anybody well. She was usually out on her own on the sea. She only talked to Céline, and occasionally to the deputy mayor. What a mess, she only arrived on the island in January.” She shook her head grimly. “She was only interested in our dolphins. She came into my museum four times. Even if she didn’t talk to anybody much, she had our interests at heart, our island’s. Its history, its flora and fauna. When you come here again, Monsieur le Commissaire, not for some terrible murder, then you must come and see my museums, three of them altogether, one about the island and life on the island, another on the Second World War resistance, and one on the lifeboats, I—”

  “Where is the dead woman’s body, madame? Do we have a car?” Dupin was impatient.

  He was met with a glare that suggested he should know better. “There are no cars here. Just four motor vehicles—two fire engines, a gas truck that carries the oil for the lighthouse and the electricity and drinking water facilities, and one emergency vehicle. That is used only for the most urgent cases,” she concluded firmly.

  Dupin was about to say that this might be considered one of the most urgent cases, but Madame Coquil was ahead of him.

  “And the woman is already dead, so why would we need an emergency vehicle. We will go on foot. You don’t have any luggage. Come along, no need to dally.”

  She set off at a pace down the long, wet pier. Despite her age and her small size, she set such a bracing tempo that Dupin had to work to keep up with her. The same went for Riwal, who had a grin on his face.

  “This is your first time on the island, I’m right in thinking?”

  It wasn’t exactly a question.

  “Yes, madame.”

  “How long have you been working in Brittany?” Dupin didn’t miss the implied criticism. “Whatever, you’re here now. In July and August we get a lot of your Paris friends come to visit, most of them only for a few hours.”

  It sound
ed as if Dupin was supposed to know them all. “But do you know when things were busiest here? Back in the Roman days! Sein and Ouessant were the most important resting points between Britain and Germany, the most important shipping route for trade and military. The Romans here also met the nine witches who—”

  “I’ve heard the story, madame.”

  “Or in the Hundred Years’ War! In 1360, eighty ships landed here, carrying fourteen thousand men! All on this island. In order to plunder it.”

  That sounded like a lot of men to the commissaire, just for this little island. Even practically it was hard to imagine. Fourteen thousand men!

  On the quay to their right, four men in yellow oilcloth pants were standing against the low wall, which had a few handsome crabs lying on it, the fruit of some successful pêche-à-pied. They had big knives in their hands.

  “After that things were very quiet on the island for a long time.” There was a tone of deep disappointment in Madame Coquil’s voice. “So quiet that the Sun King decreed that all the inhabitants be exempt from tax in order to make the island more attractive. The decree is still good today. He said, and I quote, ‘To tax Sein, already depressed by nature, would be to tax the sea, the storms, and the rocks.” It was clearly something she could repeat even in her sleep at night. “How right he was! Nor did it help when the missionaries introduced agriculture, which obviously did no good, producing no more than a few measly potatoes in some years, and some miserable grain, so little that the women still had to use roots to make bread. Most of the fish caught goes to Audierne. The dried biscuits and the low-quality salted fish that get brought to the island every couple of weeks aren’t much help either. The islanders had to gather seaweed to eat and to make fire. There was nothing left for them but to become pirates, beach robbers, and plunderers. What else were the poor people to do?” Her expression was one of deep, if dubious, understanding.

  Madame Coquil took a deep breath.

  “Do you know what they call us in France? Wild men, barbarians, sea devils, and the island they call the rocks of hell. Just because we have nothing to eat and no priest, which is obviously because not one of those milksops dared come here. Wagging tongues have suggested that some of the islanders even opposed the building of the first lighthouse, on the grounds that it would reduce the number of shipwrecks. We only got wine if some unlucky ship had any on board.”

  They walked past the pretty black-and-white lighthouse on the quay. A forklift truck was heading down the pier to the ferry to pick up the containers with baggage and shopping in them. Dupin realized all he had to do was listen. They would find the islanders ready to engage. And it would clearly be no disadvantage to their investigation if they were to learn more about the islanders and their “realm.”

  “Today there are about five or six times as many rabbits on the island as there are people. The mayor before last let loose three pairs, and that had, as we put it, consequences. He thought it would be a good idea to have some meat to eat for a change. Everyone can go hunt for their own roast. Previously it was nowhere near as comfortable as it is today. People are getting softer. The more pleasant life has become over the past decades, the greater the numbers leaving. In 1793 we were three hundred and twenty-seven and we gnawed on dried fish and died of hunger. By the end of the nineteenth century we were nearly a thousand. By 1926 we were even one thousand nine hundred and twenty-eight! But in the second half of the twentieth century there were fewer and fewer. And by then we had electricity, water, a mail office, a supermarket, cafés, restaurants, television, a school with six students, even sport facilities on the beach at low tide, a grand church, handsome menhirs, a mayor and a deputy mayor who’s also the island doctor, three fisherfolk—” She corrected herself: “Two fishers and an LTE mast for perfect cell phone reception. Nobody here needs a landline anymore! And”—the LTE mast obviously wasn’t the high point—“we’re one of just five places in France to be awarded the Ordre de la Libération. After General de Gaulle, on June 18, 1940, made his appeal from London for the establishment of an army of liberation, all one hundred and forty men on the island, without exception, set off in six boats, on the same day. One of those proud boats, Le Corbeau des Mers, still exists.”

  Everyone in France knew that deeply impressive story. It somehow represented the soul of the island.

  “Only the women, old men, children, the priest, and the lighthouse keeper remained. Twenty-five percent of the men who turned up in London in response to de Gaulle’s appeal were ours. In a celebratory speech later, the president declared to the nation ‘L’Île de Sein est donc le quart de la France’—The Île de Sein is a quarter of France! Us. Nobody was as heroic as us. The president came in person to award us the Ordre de la Libération. ‘You were the ones who saved France,’ he told us. That”—she took a deep breath—“Monsieur le Commissaire, that is the Île de Sein, that is its spirit! The ‘wild men’ were the ones who saved France.”

  “How far is it to where the body is, madame?” But Joséphine Coquil wasn’t finished yet.

  “And now, now Sein is on its last legs.”

  She turned to Dupin and shot him a withering look. Dupin had no idea what he was supposed to have done.

  “It was in the papers yesterday. An important professor from Brest, Paul Tréguer, said that Sein will be one of the first islands to disappear under the water if the sea level keeps rising. A study has shown that the increasing extreme weather conditions”—she spoke the phrase as if it were some deep-sea monster—“are going to hit the islands particularly badly. As always, people will only learn when it’s too late, and by then Sein will have long been history. That’s the tragedy. And if the Gulf Stream collapses, all Brittany will be in the Arctic … We’re considering going to the International Court of Justice and accusing the world like other islands have done, in the South Seas and such…”

  “I…” Dupin pulled himself together. “You’re absolutely right, madame,” he replied seriously.

  “It’s quicker if we go through the village,” Madame Coquil said, and took a sharp turn between two houses, down an alleyway so narrow that Dupin would almost have missed it, barely a meter wide, but still with a proud street sign: Rue du Coq Hardi. They went one after the other, with Riwal last.

  “Just so you know”—the museum chief’s anger seemed to have abated somewhat, apparently thanks to Dupin’s ready agreement—“we have fifty-four streets, the most important obviously the two quays on either side of the harbor, Quai des Paimpolais and Quai des Français Libres; we just call them Quai Nord and Quai Sud, north and south. And the great east–west axis that links the village with the other end of the island. Last week we had a great event: all the streetlights were fitted with LED bulbs. They give out stronger light, use much less energy, and are indestructible. Only Monaco in Europe has LED streetlights, and cities like Los Angeles in America.”

  The old lady had turned left, then right and then left again down other streets that were little wider. The house fronts all looked the same, plastered white, occasionally pale yellow or pink. All close together as if they had been pushed. A proper labyrinth. Quite unique. Dupin had lost all sense of direction, something that normally never happened.

  “The houses are all squeezed together to keep the wind out; they all protect one another.”

  Yet again Madame Coquil had turned one way and then the other. Dupin had the impression they were walking in a circle. He wouldn’t have been surprised if they came out back at the quay. Yet again they took a sharp left and came out on a broad concrete path.

  “Voilà, the east–west axis, la Route du Phare.”

  A car would have found it difficult here. There were little gardens and courtyards to the right and left, but not a soul to be seen.

  “If the weather stays fine, everybody will sit outside here and eat.” She cast a wary glance at the sky.

  “Madame Coquil, how might we find out which boats came and went from the island yesterday?”

&n
bsp; Before Madame Coquil could answer him, Dupin turned to his inspector: “Riwal, see to it that no boat leaves the island before we have registered it, and spoken to the passengers. No exceptions.”

  “That’s a thing you’re asking, Monsieur le Commissaire. Two tasks fit for Sisyphus at once,” Madame Coquil said. “Obviously there’s no central list of which boats come and go. How could you imagine there would be? Particularly now in the summer: all the leisure boats, sailors, divers, anglers, Bretons, French, and other foreigners. And then the boats from Parc Iroise … You mustn’t forget them! And then there are the official boats. The oil boat that comes every Thursday, as well as the food boat for the minimarket. And normally the hairdresser is here at this time on a Thursday.”

  “The hairdresser?”

  There really were a lot of boats. And a hairdresser.

  “He comes in his own boat to the islands. Mondays and Tuesdays he’s in his salon in Camaret, on the Crozon peninsula. He used to be a fisherman, who occasionally cut his friends’ hair. Then he turned it into a full-time job. He’s very good at it. We have a lot of older people on the island who’re pleased they don’t have to go to France to get their hair cut. Oh yes, not to forget the priest. He also uses his own boat to get around the islands. But you can write him off the list of potential murderers straightaway: he’s been in Zanzibar for two weeks!”

  It was all too strange, and at the same time very plausible: people living out here, cut off and with a minimum of infrastructure and social life, had to organize things differently. Even so it was a mad idea to have a priest and a hairdresser commuting between the islands. And committing murders. Like something from an Agatha Christie mystery.

  * * *

  They had come to the last houses in the village, where the island narrowed disconcertingly, with the ocean lapping on either side. Inevitably—this was the only street on the island beyond the village—they headed toward the big lighthouse, even though it was still a ways away. Riwal had dropped behind a bit, with his phone to his ear.