The Fleur de Sel Murders_A Brittany Mystery Read online

  “Or perhaps she wasn’t the one doing the driving by that point. And”—the car wasn’t at her parents’ house after all—“the murderer placed Lilou’s body in the car and drove it away.”

  “If so, she was probably murdered at their house.”

  At this stage, these were all hypotheses, free association really. But it did Dupin good, it grounded him, giving him a little something to hold on to in this horrific situation. He knew what he was like; he had to take action and keep busy. He had to throw himself into the case with double or triple the energy he usually did. His emotions would haunt him later.

  “The murderer—or murderers.” Rose’s expression was grave.

  Both of them were silent for some time.

  “How well did you know each other?” Rose asked eventually, her voice sympathetic.

  “I … just a little. We…” Dupin broke off.

  They hadn’t really been friends; they had only seen each other a handful of times over the past few years, and then only briefly—they had spent a longer time together just that one evening in her garden—and they had spoken on the phone occasionally. But that didn’t matter, there were people with whom you had a connection from the very beginning and it was clear that you understood one another. And that didn’t happen all that often. They could have become friends; they had both been aware of that and taken great pleasure in it.

  A tall, heavyset man peeled away from the group huddled together about twenty meters away—Dupin had completely forgotten about them—and came over to the two commissaires somewhat hesitantly. It was the pathologist.

  Dupin ran a hand through his hair again. He wouldn’t be able to stand a work-related conversation. Not now. Pathologists were a strange species. Not his cup of tea.

  “I’ll drive over to the parents’ house,” he said quickly.

  Rose understood. She nodded. “I’ll have a quick word with everyone and then I’ll follow you.”

  “We’ve got to tackle these salt world people. Pick up our conversation with the head of the cooperative, find out what else Lilou was interested in at the salt gardens, apart from what was in the article. Meet with the director of Le Sel. Find out who Lilou spoke to, who she knew in the salt marshes. And we’ve got to search her house again. Take a look at her online accounts, her call records, everything. And pay more attention to the blue barrels.”

  This was an overexcited flood of words. Dupin knew that he had just been stating the obvious. And yet it helped him compose himself. He needed to be meticulous with the few leads they had. Immerse himself in them, sink his teeth into them. Persevere. And hope to come across something that would help them make progress. Lilou Breval was really dead. Murdered. She had probably already been dead last night when they were in her house.

  “We’ll do it. All of it.” Rose’s words were a declaration of war.

  The pathologist had pointedly gone over to his case to take something out. He wanted to continue his work.

  Dupin turned away.

  He walked along the oyster beds part of the way, making a detour just big enough to avoid encountering the rest of the group, which was starting to move as well.

  * * *

  Dupin had some trouble finding the house. The old Peugeot did not, of course, come equipped with a navigation system. Rose, who was probably a matter of minutes behind him, had described the route to him as best she could on the phone: The “Route du soleil,” a small road that led to the sun-drenched headland, past the ruins of the fairy stone, the Men-er-Hroec’h—originally a twenty-five-meter-high menhir and the largest in the world until it broke into four pieces at some point thousands of years ago.

  The house was in a small wood at the gulf, a little outside Kerpenhir, on a narrow outcrop of land crisscrossed by tiny unnamed tracks and paths.

  Dupin eventually arrived at four almost identical-looking old stone houses standing close together. The Brevals’ house was the last one in the row. The neighbor who was likely the last person to have seen Lilou Breval alive also lived in one of these houses.

  It all felt quiet and peaceful. The glittering sun was almost at its peak, a merciless sun that beat down, making people flee and lending a melancholy to the shadows of the dense little wood next to the houses. In certain places, blurry glimpses of the bright gulf shimmered between the dark trunks of the stone pines. The investigators would arrive in their cars any minute now, and that’s when professional chaos would break out. Dupin was glad to be on his own a little longer. He parked his car a good distance from the house; the forensics people would examine everything on the street in front of the house too. Lilou’s car must have been parked here, and a second car must have been somewhere round here too. Dupin was standing right outside the house when his phone rang. It was Commissaire Rose.

  “My team have found four blue barrels. Judging by the description they’re the same as the ones in the cooperative. In a fallow salt pool. At the edge of the salt marshes, near Pradel. I had ordered the whole area to be searched systematically. The barrels are open and empty. We’re having them examined for residue.”

  “Whom does the salt pool belong to?”

  “We don’t know yet. But we’re working on it. In theory they could just be a few harmless barrels belonging to the cooperative that somehow ended up there. But it would be too much of a coincidence.”

  “Why were they in those salt marshes? In that spot?”

  Dupin knew Rose couldn’t answer these questions, of course. “Why these damned barrels again?” He sounded aggressive, speaking as if to himself.

  “I’ll be right with you. Wait for me.”

  Rose had hung up on her last syllable.

  It had all started with those damn barrels. They needed to know what had been inside them. That could make a lot of things clearer.

  The Brevals’ house had just two small windows facing the street; it was all oriented backward, toward the wood and the gulf. A narrow path led to the side, where the main door was.

  The silence was almost eerie, apart from the birdsong typical throughout the gulf. Henri could distinguish between birds effortlessly; the gulf was one of the most significant bird habitats in Europe, as were the salt gardens. Without even thinking about it, Dupin drew his gun. The door was closed and looked fully intact. Like at Lilou’s house, the narrow path carried on past the front door and along the side of the house.

  Dupin moved slowly, avoiding any unnecessary sound on the gravel. He stopped at the corner of the house. He scrutinized his surroundings. He knew it was unlikely that anyone was still here, least of all Lilou Breval’s murderer. But he suddenly felt a little like he had the evening before. In the salt marshes. This was crazy. He shook himself. Then he stepped—the gun still firmly in his grasp—around the corner of the house and found himself in the garden.

  There was nobody to be seen. A stone patio, a small table, three chairs, a turquoise lounger on the lawn. It was a modest garden and merged into the little wood without a fence or any other markings. The patio door stood wide open. Dupin knew he ought to wait for Rose.

  He went inside. The overhead light was on. The room was cramped with little light from outside—there were only two windows on this side too, although they were bigger than the ones on the other side. It was pleasantly cool.

  On first impression, there was nothing unusual about the house. The furnishings were very simple, modest, almost spartan; everything seemed on the old side. There was a kitchenette to the left; next to that was a small corridor leading to the front door and another, closed door; opposite that, a narrow staircase to the floor above; to the right was the living room with a white painted wooden table and four chairs, against the wall behind that was a worn-out sofa; and next to it, in the right-hand corner, was a new sofa. Dupin moved slowly through the room.

  “Hello, is anyone there? This is the police.”

  “Whom are you expecting?”

  Commissaire Rose had suddenly entered the house behind him.

>   “You were going to wait for me,” she said. Surprisingly, this sounded almost friendly. Her eyes darted around the room.

  She walked over to the door next to the corridor as though she had been coming in and out of the house for years. As she did so she took a thin silicone glove out of the pocket of her coat and slipped it on. She opened the door in one fluid movement. There was a small toilet on the other side.

  “The fallow salt pool belongs to Le Sel. It hasn’t been used for two years. No more good clay in it. The barrels are actually identical to the ones at the cooperative. ‘Super wide-necked barrels.’ Eighty centimeters high, fifty in diameter. Drop handles on the sides. The manufacturer is called Fasco, they’re based in the South of France. The barrels were in a harvest pool.”

  She glanced into the corridor, then began to climb the stairs.

  Dupin had to take a moment to compose himself. The scene reminded him too much of being in Lilou’s house the night before.

  “Why are we finding the barrels in one of the Le Sel salt pools now? What does that mean?”

  “We’ll ask Madame Laurent. If she and Le Sel were in on it together, it would be extremely stupid to take the barrels to your own salt marshes, of all places.”

  She was right, of course. But perhaps this trick was part of a staged scene?

  “Where can you buy these barrels? In special shops?”

  They had reached the second floor. Dupin was hard on Rose’s heels.

  “We don’t know yet. Lilou Breval’s mobile can’t be traced. It seems to be switched off. Or destroyed. We’ve applied for the call records, and for the landline too.” Rose seemed to be telling him all of this in an offhand way. “We have the results from testing the salt concentration in Daeron’s harvest pools. Annoyingly, they’re not clear-cut. Apparently the values are slightly below what they should be. But it’s not that easy to tell, because in nature, evaporation levels and speed vary. You never know exactly what given value should be reached on a given day. The experts aren’t ruling out freshwater having been added, though. Apparently it would have to have been done very subtly, very expertly. But, as I said, they couldn’t establish anything definitive.”

  Dupin sighed. It would have been too perfect.

  Strangely, the second floor seemed much more spacious than the floor below. Two generous-size rooms and a bathroom that must have been there since the eighties, like the kitchen below. The first room was almost empty; it looked sad, two old chairs in a corner. They had only glanced inside.

  They were in the second room, a bedroom with a narrow double bed.

  Rose was looking at everything very carefully. “Nothing to indicate a struggle, a dispute, or that someone was overpowered,” she said.

  There was a dark brown oiled leather suitcase lying open on a simple chest of drawers. Rose set to work on it.

  “Moisturizer, two eyeglass cases, a toothbrush, a charger. She was planning to stay the night here. When she got here, everything was probably still okay.”

  “Somebody must have known that she intended to come here, to spend the night here,” Dupin said, lost in thought.

  Rose was already on her way back to the stairs.

  “I’ve instructed Inspector Chadron to include both of your inspectors in the investigation. We could do with every police officer available. So they don’t have to stay hidden anymore, as nice as it might be in Le Grand Large.”

  Rose’s face was impassive as she said this. Dupin struggled to remain equally impassive. He had no idea how she had got wind of Kadeg and Riwal, of the fact that Riwal hadn’t driven back to Concarneau at all. And where the two of them were. She had probably known this the whole time.

  Rose was downstairs again and making her way toward the white table in the living room. A plate, a torn-off piece of baguette, a bit of paté. An open bottle of Madiran, the glass unused. The bottle opener with the cork next to the glass. As though Lilou had been sitting there just minutes before and had simply gone into the garden for a moment. A sad sight. Dupin could feel his stomach tightening.

  “She had just sat down to dinner, and then something must have happened. She was interrupted. Before she could even pour herself a glass of wine,” Rose said, more to herself than to Dupin.

  “The laptop is missing. The rest of her things are all there, but no laptop.” Dupin had been keeping an eye out for it upstairs but hadn’t seen it. He had also looked for work documents, including some from recent weeks.

  “The murderer must have been in this house. And they’ll have removed anything they didn’t want to fall into our hands. Even if they didn’t have much time.”

  Although there was always an element of speculation in these kinds of conclusions, Rose’s mind was razor-sharp, always moving forward, pushing for specific scenarios. Dupin had a feeling her assumptions were correct, despite there not being any evidence to support them yet.

  “We ought to—”

  Midway through his sentence, both of their phones rang. Dupin automatically went outdoors and answered.

  “Monsieur le Commissaire?”

  It made Dupin mad when Kadeg asked if it was him on the phone, when Kadeg himself had just dialed Dupin’s number. This had always been an idiosyncrasy of his inspector’s. This time, Kadeg carried straight on in his eager staccato voice, which was a sign he had uncovered something.

  “We’re in the salt marshes, near Pradel. Inspector Chadron requested us.” He sounded pleased. “I know the barrels from Fasco. They’re normal trade barrels. You can get them in any good DIY store. I Googled them on my smartphone just now.” Kadeg paused, as though he wanted to pass his miracle device to the commissaire down the phone line. “They’re made from food-grade, low-density polyethylene. Particularly good for paste-like substances with high viscosity. Smooth inner walls, extremely easy to clean, don’t retain residue. Particularly large opening for pouring in substances, with air- and watertight screw-on lid. Rubber seal. Temperature resistant between negative four and one hundred seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit. EU license for durability when used with solid substances, pastes, most acids, and lyes.”

  As much as he wasn’t in the mood, Dupin almost burst out laughing. He hoped that Kadeg had read all that aloud, but maybe Kadeg was just an expert in low-density polyethylene barrels. Dupin wouldn’t put any absurd passion past Kadeg. But much more important: as depressing as it was that anyone could have bought these barrels anywhere, Dupin was very interested in the question of the barrels’ specific uses. It sounded very technical.

  “What do people use them for?”

  “I did just go over that: they’re more or less universally useful, that’s the great advantage of these barrels. I use them at home myself. In the garden. To store apples, for instance. As I said, they’re fully food-safe.”

  “But you could keep dangerous substances in these exact barrels?”

  “It’s due to the fantastic molecular qualities of the—”

  Kadeg was gradually becoming unbearable, so Dupin interrupted him.

  “Understood—and if they were lying underwater in a pool for a few hours, you wouldn’t find any of what they had contained on their perfectly smooth inner walls.”

  “No, the residues would only be traceable in the water of the pool.”

  “In extremely low concentrations that would be hard to detect, I imagine.”

  “That depends on the substance, according to the chemist on the forensics team. He has carried out some toxicological rapid tests. All normal so far.”

  “Brilliant.” Dupin groaned. “Anything else, Kadeg?”

  “The government’s food chemist responsible for the salt marshes got in touch. She’d like to speak to you and Commissaire Rose face-to-face. She’s deeply concerned, of course. She’s asking whether we have any theories yet. Whether we fear that the quality of the salt output from any salt pond could be compromised. There are very strict requirements in place. And the salt marshes are a priority conservation area. She’d like to kno
w what’s going on with the barrels. She—”

  “Is that it, Kadeg?”

  “She’s insisting that—”

  Dupin hung up. He looked around. During their conversation he had walked through the garden and a little way into the stone pine wood. The garden and this section of the wood weren’t visible from any of the other houses due to high laurel bushes and fig trees forming a solid wall. The gulf was even closer than it had looked earlier. It was particularly dark in the little wood and pleasantly cool, a stark contrast to the harsh brightness of the day. If Lilou Breval had been killed in her parents’ house, had the murderer disposed of her body right here in the gulf? At first glance, there were no signs of that. Dupin walked across the soft ground toward the shore.

  He was not an expert at estimating tides—to his own regret—but depending on when it happened, there might not even have been enough water. Even now, midway between high tides, there were a hundred meters between the shore and the waterline. It smelled of mud flats, silt, and seaweed.

  “Commissaire?”

  It was Rose. She was standing at the edge of the little wood, calling to him at the top of her voice. But astonishingly gently.

  “They’ve found Breval’s Peugeot. A minute away from here. Right at the passage, on a small path that leads to the sea.”

  That was quick. And crucial.

  “I’m coming.”

  Dupin would have liked to keep looking around, as he usually did. But perhaps the car would shed some light on the case.

  * * *

  Dupin was standing on a narrow strip of sandy beach dotted with dark, pointed rocks; beyond them were marram grass, tall pines, and stone pines. There were stone pines everywhere, and Dupin loved them. This was the tip of the narrow headland on the western side of the gulf and it looked like it was reaching out toward the opposite side in despair. The Pointe de Kerpenhir, or “gateway to the gulf,” lay in front of him, the incredible passage offering up a terrifying spectacle today: the great Atlantic—to the right—lay smooth as glass in front of him, just like the small sea—to the left. Both were perfectly calm but between them the water rippled hard, white crests of foam dancing wildly about. You could see it: the violence, the pressure from the bodies of water flowing inward, the impact of the chaotic currents of up to twenty kilometers an hour. Three hundred million cubic meters of ocean flowed in or out every time the tide turned.