The Fleur De Sel Murders

by Jean-Luc Bannalec

  Kadeg continued: “You know that we have no authority of any kind to carry out investigative activities. I assume everything has been clarified, or else you definitely wouldn’t have had me come here.”

  It was on the tip of Dupin’s tongue to answer that first and foremost he had ordered him to come here because of the polo shirts. There he went again: this was Kadeg all over. Even after his wedding, which had taken place shortly after Riwal’s wedding last year—as if he absolutely had to keep up with his colleague—he still hadn’t changed. Which was understandable once you’d met his wife: a stocky martial arts teacher at the police school in Rennes whose terrierlike charm was even more irritating than Kadeg’s.

  Dupin had, of course, no reply for his inspector. Even this meeting here would, if it were to come out, spell trouble. How would he explain it?

  He stood up abruptly. “I’ll be right back.”

  First, he was going to get changed.

  “I spoke to one of Lilou Breval’s colleagues a few minutes ago. I had left a message for her earlier.” Riwal had hung back discreetly before coming out with this interesting piece of news.

  “And?”

  “She says Lilou Breval is still involved with the Coca-Cola thing. And also the salt marshes, although the colleague had no idea what still interested her specifically. Lilou Breval called this woman briefly the day before yesterday to tell her she was coming into the editorial offices on Thursday afternoon—that’s today—to get a few things done. And that she wanted to speak to her. But she didn’t say what it was about. She sounded totally normal, the colleague says. The two of them spoke about once or twice a week. She doesn’t know where Madame Breval is right now either, but she did know that she had driven to her parents’ house a few times recently. They died several years ago. It’s also at the gulf, but on the other side, right by the passage, at the Pointe de Kerpenhir.”

  Dupin recalled being at the Pointe de Kerpenhir with Henri. A fantastic place. To the right you could see the open Atlantic, to the left the gulf, and opposite was the pretty Port Navalo. The current was fierce there, up to twenty kilometers an hour, tremendous amounts of water, two hundred million cubic meters of it flowing in and out.

  “But she doesn’t have a landline number for her there. And we haven’t been able to find one either. In any of the directories. Should we send someone to check if she’s there?”

  “Definitely. Right away.”

  “We have to let Commissaire Rose know. We can’t do it,” Kadeg interjected.

  Dupin felt anger rising up inside him now. Without saying a word, he turned toward the door to the café and disappeared before they could get into an argument.

  The bathroom was extremely cramped. It smelled so strongly of lavender it was as if he were standing in a field of lavender in the middle of Haute-Provence—there was one of those air fresheners designed for much larger rooms. With his bandaged shoulder this task was bound to be a fun one. Dupin put the bag down on the tiny sink. Then his mobile rang. Private number. He answered. Anything could be important right now.

  “It is absolutely out of the question. It is utterly impossible,” somebody yelled at him.

  Unfortunately, Dupin recognized the voice immediately. It was the prefect. Locmariaquer, a name he could not even begin to pronounce in his fifth year of service in Brittany. And yet the name was only half as bad as the person himself. Although Dupin on principle maintained a fraught relationship with official authority figures, which had sealed his fate in the Parisian police and constantly caused serious conflict, in Locmariaquer’s case there was also a genuine, profound, personal antipathy there. Of course the prefect had been informed. Someone would have told him about Dupin’s “inappropriate behavior” in detail.

  “I don’t intend to tolerate this.”

  He was familiar with his superior’s tirades. They were monologues. Long, heated monologues. You had to hold the phone far away from your ear and wait for the volume to reduce.

  “You are going to stay with it. You are going to be equally involved in the investigation. By Commissaire Rose’s side, with equal authority. I have personally seen to it. I won’t be bested in this.”

  Dupin wasn’t sure if he had heard the prefect correctly.

  “But for now you’ll have to do without your two inspectors.”

  Dupin still couldn’t believe his ears.

  “Hello? Dupin? Are you still there? Did you hear what I said?”

  “You’re saying I’m on the case?”

  “Of course mon commissaire is on it. I’m not prepared to put up with Edouard Trottet’s impertinence anymore. He has been behaving badly for decades. It’s unbelievable that he hasn’t been fired yet. A disgrace to every prefecture in France.”

  Dupin felt like the lavender was clouding his senses. “Commissaire Rose and I are investigating on an equal footing?”

  “Absolutely. I’ve personally…”

  Dupin did not need to know any more right now, even though he would have been all too pleased to find out precisely why the prefect had intervened and pulled off this small miracle. But it would turn into a long story; he had made that mistake before. And he was in a hurry now. Commissaire Rose had left for the salt marshes a while ago. He interrupted the prefect.

  “I— Hello? I can’t hear you anymore, Monsieur le Préfet.”

  He said this quickly and mechanically, without making the slightest effort to imitate a bad line the way, for the sake of politeness, he ordinarily at least tried to do. And then he hung up. This was unbelievable. For a moment he wasn’t sure whether that had been a smart move: maybe the prefect had had more to say that he ought to know. But if so he would find out soon enough.

  Dupin stuffed his mobile into his pocket, slipped on one of the new dark blue polo shirts (he had bought five of the same), picked up his bag, and left the bathroom a moment later.

  He was ready for action. And what’s more: he could feel it.

  Riwal and Kadeg had ordered coffee. They were drinking in silence, looking—understandably—exhausted. Kadeg was still scowling.

  “I’ve worked it all out with our prefect. The commissaires are investigating equally.”

  Both heads whipped round to look at Dupin.

  “And what about us?” Kadeg asked. His face could sometimes look genuinely childlike. Like a small, sullen boy who was always missing out.

  “You wait here and be prepared. There will be plenty to do.” Le Grand Large ought to be safe, Dupin thought.

  He hurried to keep speaking so that Kadeg could not say or ask anything more before he left the terrace. He was already on the point of leaving.

  “Riwal, you drive me to the salt marshes. Right now. We’ll discuss everything in the car.”

  Dupin heard the rumblings of Kadeg’s protest, but he was only half listening.

  * * *

  Even at a distance, he could pick out Commissaire Rose. She was standing next to the little hut he had been trapped inside. There was quite a large group of police officers again. The forensics team was also there again, this time by daylight. And Inspector Chadron from the night before was there too, a redhead with a long plait and sparkling eyes. Dupin had spotted four cars on the small road, one of which was the commissaire’s brand-new Laguna. It was all extensively cordoned off. Commissaire Rose had done a good job. He would have done the same thing. In exactly the same way.

  He was just passing the place where he had knelt in the pool to the right. Where he had taken cover. That was probably where the bullet had grazed him. Dupin was surprised by how odd it felt to be back. He was furious, and at the same time he felt a kind of indignation and a deep-rooted unwillingness to accept what had happened.

  Dupin had been lost in his thoughts for a little while. Commissaire Rose had obviously come over to him; she was almost standing in front of him now.

  “I’m doing this against my wishes. You need to know that,” she said.

  As she had done the day before, she
managed to strike a jovial tone of voice suited to a more well-intentioned message, in stark contrast to what she was actually saying.

  “I do.”

  Dupin made an effort to give the most neutral answer possible. And he left it at that. It would clearly be unwise to begin their “official collaboration” by saying something controversial.

  “We’ve taken another look at everything here. Especially the tas de sel. There were no prints on the patch of withered grass over there.”

  Dupin gave her a blank look.

  “The tas de sel is the area next to the salt ponds, around the huts, where the salt is harvested.”

  “And the pools?”

  “It’s extremely dry there too; the clay is cracked. Relatively high numbers of partial prints from a relatively high number of different shoes. Mostly men’s sizes, an eight or a nine. Potentially even smaller. Potentially sneakers. They could be partial prints from any point over the last few weeks; they could be Monsieur Daeron’s or any number of his colleagues’. So far, there have been no usable fingerprints; they’ve tried the sheds and huts. We have the bullets fired by you and your assailant. They also used a nine-millimeter, but different bullets. RUAG ones, very common. Provisional ballistic examinations indicate the assailant—or assailants—had one gun.”

  Dupin’s face darkened at the word “assailant.” Commissaire Rose didn’t seem to notice; her gaze had swept about during her report, as if she wanted to use the time to have a good look round, but she didn’t sound distracted. “The same goes for the tire marks as for the shoe prints—difficult on this ground. Nothing significant so far. And above all, there are no traces of any kind that indicate the possible presence of heavy round objects. No signs of barrels. Essentially, we don’t know any more than we did last night.

  “A colleague of Lilou Breval’s knows that she stays in her parents’ house occasionally. At the gulf, near Sarzeau. My inspector has the address.”

  Dupin saw Commissaire Rose screw up her face slightly.

  “You should ask the police there to send someone over to check it out right away. I haven’t done anything, of course. We don’t have a landline number,” he added quickly. “Unfortunately, this colleague didn’t know exactly what stories Lilou Breval is working on at the moment.”

  Now they were even. They had shared all of the information they had. Or at least he hoped so.

  “I…”

  Dupin was grateful for the interruption of someone honking their horn.

  Commissaire Rose turned and walked straight toward the road. Without turning back, she called out: “The owner of the salt pond. Maxime Daeron. He just called again.”

  Dupin stopped, hesitated for a moment, and then got out his phone. He dialed and spoke as softly as he could. “Riwal, is everything okay?”

  “Boss?”

  “Have you talked to the police at the gulf yet?”

  “I can barely hear what you’re saying. No, not yet. Nolwenn rang just now. I was just about to call you. Maybe this isn’t a good idea. Kadeg is right. I—”

  “Let’s leave it. Commissaire Rose is doing it.”

  Dupin hung up before Riwal could reply. He put his phone away quickly and looked round for Rose. She was standing less than ten meters away, also with her phone to her ear. She must have been delegating tasks of her own. Her style looked just as abrupt as his, because a moment later she put her phone back in her jacket pocket and walked to the road. Dupin followed. He still had a nasty feeling sometimes that he was here as nothing more than an assistant.

  * * *

  Right in front of Dupin’s car—the replacement car—there was a dark green Citroën Crosser, and two men standing next to it. One of the two police officers Dupin had just seen at the cordon was headed toward them.

  “Thank you, I’ll be taking over from here.” Commissaire Rose had beaten him to it.

  She looked so elegant and stylish as she walked, her left hand in her pants pocket this time, and Dupin was struggling to keep up. One of the two men came toward her.

  “This is very worrying. What exactly has happened in my salt marsh, Madame la Commissaire?”

  The man, who by the sound of it must have been Maxime Daeron, was tall—almost two meters. He was wearing beige cargo pants with large pockets and a casual black linen shirt with the top three buttons undone. He had an unusual chin—narrowly tapering, pointy—fleshy lips, a high, broad forehead, quite long black hair shot through with gray strands, and bushy black eyebrows above dark eyes that seemed to consist entirely of pupil. Dupin put him in his early fifties.

  “Can you say anything at this stage?” His voice was low, sonorous. Without waiting for an answer, he turned briefly to the other man, who had also come over. “This is my brother. Paul Daeron. The co-owner of the salt marshes.”

  Paul Daeron looked to be the older of the two brothers, but he didn’t resemble Maxime Daeron at all. He was a head shorter, had a round, good-natured face, and was noticeably fatter, with short, bristle-like hair that stuck straight up. His fine facial features didn’t seem to suit his overall appearance.

  “Silent partner. I don’t have anything to do with salt.” His voice was a bit higher-pitched than his brother’s and sounded more upset than the general impression he was giving off. “I breed pigs. We don’t want any hassle here. We hope you’ll sort this issue out quickly. We’ll help you do that as best we can.”

  It sounded as though he’d had to force himself to say this.

  “Salt marshes? You referred to multiple salt marshes just now?” Commissaire Rose directed her question at Maxime Daeron.

  “We own five salt marshes. But we’ve only got one here. The others are a bit farther south, toward Kervalet.”

  “Unfortunately we don’t yet know what exactly happened here. But we know some suspicious blue plastic barrels were apparently here in your saltworks. During the on-scene police investigation, an attempt was made to shoot the investigating officer dead.” Rose paused for a moment and nodded in Dupin’s direction. “Commissaire Georges Dupin from the Commissariat de Police Concarneau, he is now on the case with us. We assumed you could be of assistance to us—it’s your saltworks, after all.”

  Dupin was impressed in spite of himself. No maybes, nothing vague, all plain-speaking and on the offensive. The way he would have put it. Except he was just standing there mutely. An unfamiliar situation.

  “We harvested the oeillets in this salt marsh three days ago. The gros sel in the morning and the fleur de sel in the afternoon. As we always do. Then the day before yesterday I had fresh water poured in. For the last harvest of the year. After that it’ll be over. The weather is going to turn soon,” Daeron said as he glanced up into the sky. “I haven’t been here since, and neither have my colleagues. When there’s such constant sun and constant wind, we don’t intervene. There’s no need to correct the water level.” They were standing in the middle of the small road that didn’t seem to be used much, even during the daytime. “We don’t use any barrels in our saltworks. Not even for storage. But it occurs to me that some producers in the cooperative have worked with barrels recently. But you’d have to ask over there.” There was contempt in this last sentence and Daeron made no attempt to disguise it. “High-quality salt must not be stored in an air-tight container; it still contains vital residual moisture that would immediately settle at the bottom of a barrel as water. Especially in a plastic barrel. If there was a barrel in my saltworks, then somebody must have trespassed onto them. Have you done a thorough search?”

  Maxime Daeron’s voice was commanding without being overbearing, his facial expression serious, frank, focused. His head tilted to one side as he spoke.

  “When exactly was the last time you or an employee of yours was here? In this saltworks.” Commissaire Rose had both hands in her pants pockets now.

  “Just the day before yesterday, in the morning. I was alone. From half past six till eight o’clock. I came to let in and regulate fresh water from the
reservoir pool.”

  “And you can definitively rule out that one of your employees has been in the saltworks since?”

  “There wouldn’t have been any reason to be here. But of course I’ll ask.” Maxime Daeron seemed perfectly calm.

  “How many employees do you have?”

  Dupin was finding Rose’s interview method somewhat unimaginative at this point.

  “Six altogether. In the salt marshes themselves, there are two men and a woman, along with myself.”

  “Might there be some reason why someone apart from you and your staff had been in these salt marshes? Does somebody come to collect the salt?”

  “No. Just us. I’m an independent. I take care of everything myself: production, transport, storage, packing, marketing, sales. Everything relies on us.”

  “Where does this salt marsh end?”

  Rose was asking her questions at a speed that made it impossible for Dupin to ask a question himself without barging in. Paul Daeron nodded from time to time to underscore some of his brother’s words, but didn’t seem to want to be any more involved in the conversation.

  “We’re almost at the very edge. Up there”—Maxime Daeron pointed vaguely toward the Route de Marais—“is where it borders on Guy Jaffrezic’s salt marsh. He’s a salt farmer in the cooperative. That’s about a hundred meters.”

  Dupin thought back to the night before. Jaffrezic was one of the paludiers Lilou Breval had quoted in her article. Not Maxime Daeron, but Jaffrezic. It was an interesting coincidence that his saltworks bordered the one where everything had taken place.

  “Do you know him well?” Rose kept the questions coming fast.

  “Everyone is self-employed here. And as I said: he’s a member of one of the cooperatives. He’s even been the head of it for a few years now. Head of the cooperative and a huge number of other societies here in Gwenn Rann.”

  Dupin had been in such a hurry to get to the salt marshes that he had, to his annoyance, forgotten to get his notebook out of the car again.