The Fleur De Sel Murders

by Jean-Luc Bannalec

  That had just been one part of the interview, expressed with a forthrightness typical of Lilou; there had been talk of a “Battle for the White Land,” of a “silent occupation,” although Lilou didn’t keep insisting on this, she hadn’t taken it to extremes.

  “As I said, it was an extensive, constructive conversation about—”

  “That’s enough.” Rose’s voice was getting loud, very loud, furious, but controlled. “We want to know what’s going on here. What is happening in these salt marshes? Whatever it is—it led to a murder, almost two.”

  Dupin had no idea whether Rose’s temper was genuine or just very convincingly acted.

  “Of course it’s a ‘battle,’ but it’s not about the individuals in the salt gardens. It’s a battle for the future of the Guérande, over the issue of whether it can survive at all.”

  Madame Laurent was raising her voice now too, but was still composed. “Yes, we think that Le Sel ought to be the future of the salt marshes, we make no secret of that. To protect them! And yes, of course it’s also because we see great economic prospects for the salt. A good business.” She lowered her voice again finally. “Premium gastronomic products are on the rise everywhere, thank God, and pure sea salt is one of them. Fleur de sel needs to be like Champagne, Bordeaux, foie gras. A luxury delicacy. And that very potential is being squandered here; it could all be set up so differently. In production, marketing, sales. Look at this building. Of course Le Sel made a big contribution here. The local authority is not in any kind of position to do that. You only have to compare it to the shack in front of it to see. And this is all for the good of the salt gardens. It could all be improved significantly without us having to touch the traditions at the heart of it. Everyone would benefit from it. Especially the paludiers. We would keep employing them in their salt marshes if they sold up. And give them better salaries.”

  It had turned into just as much of a business-focused speech as a personal one; she had done it perfectly. It had included all of the flowery phrases that usually set Dupin’s teeth grinding, but strangely this hadn’t happened. He had even sneaked another caramel candy into his mouth during it. Madame Laurent was truly good. Madame Bourgiot remained motionless throughout the little speech, not giving even a hint of a reaction.

  The Le Sel chief went on: “Yes, we would ideally like to see the entire White Land in Le Sel’s hands. But do you think in all seriousness that we would shoot police officers and murder journalists because of that?”

  “If ambitious careers and everything that someone has built up are suddenly endangered, people do all sorts of things,” Rose said quietly, and Madame Laurent threw her a cool glance, “and the repeated failure of a harvest would be an emergency for a self-employed person. And he might need to sell. One could arrange for the repeated failure of harvests.”

  This time Ségolène Laurent tried a different tactic. She leaned forward challengingly and answered icily.

  “Yes, we make offers, high and even excessive offers. Yes, there are significant disputes here in the salt gardens, like I said, about specific economic interests that lead to conflicts. But no, we’re not sabotaging any harvests, we are not committing any criminal acts.”

  Her display of frankness was a tried and tested rhetorical weapon.

  “You’ve spoken out against public subsidies of the salt gardens in the département and also at the ministry in Paris,” Dupin weighed in again.

  The salt-garden subsidies had been another point of interest in both of the interviews.

  “I did. It’s an artificial, always inappropriate, and not to mention unfair measure.”

  “You yourself carry out powerful, targeted lobbying.”

  “Of course.” Madame Laurent raised one eyebrow almost imperceptibly. “That’s what I’m paid to do.”

  Madame Bourgiot cleared her throat. “So you really do see a direct link between the shooting, the murder, and the Salt Land? You believe there are criminal elements at work who have direct connections to the salt?”

  Bourgiot’s question sounded, after everything they had just discussed, almost quaint, yet her tone of voice was far from naïve. And what was more, she had hit the nail on the head. So far, this had been their exact problem. They had no idea if there was a direct link at all. And if so, what it was.

  “We know there’s a link,” Rose claimed confidently. “Tell us why we found the blue barrels that Commissaire Dupin went to see in Maxime Daeron’s salt marshes in your salt marshes?”

  “I don’t have the faintest idea.”

  The most likely reason, of course, was that someone had simply dumped the barrels anywhere after the incident. In the salt marshes that weren’t in use. It was also far from clear whether the perpetrator knew that Lilou had given someone a tip about the barrels. Perhaps someone had wanted to incriminate Le Sel specifically. Anything was possible at this stage.

  “Does Le Sel use barrels like that for anything?”

  “No.”

  “And the dried salt for the mills? How do you transport that? How do you store it?” Jaffrezic’s lectures had been useful to Dupin.

  “In sacks, like the other salt. The insides are coated with silicone.”

  Dupin moved on to his favorite point: “What do you think might be going on with the blue barrels?”

  “I really don’t know.”

  “And you, Madame Bourgiot, do you have any idea what the barrels might have contained?”

  “I hope they didn’t contain anything that doesn’t belong here. Céline Cordier has been breathing down our necks since this morning, threatening to have all of the salt marshes shut down. I can’t make any sense of what it might be. And I don’t know anyone round here who would be so irresponsible as to tamper with such delicate things. Let alone someone who would commit a murder.”

  It was incredible how she had changed during the conversation. Her voice was piercing now, almost firm. Earlier she had been unsure, even nervous. Almost as if she had been putting on an act.

  “What was Lilou most interested in when you spoke a year ago, Madame Bourgiot?”

  “Very general information. She dealt with the salt and the Guérande in a more comprehensive way the first time. We compiled detailed information for her. She dropped in to see us twice. It was a really good article for us. It wasn’t about anything … controversial. She concentrated on the salt farmers’ rather difficult economic position,” she said, adding quickly, “which is stable overall, of course. Not a cause for concern in any way.”

  Commissaire Rose cleared her throat. “Whatever happened here, whatever is going on here—we will find out. So if you have anything to tell us, you’re better off telling us now.”

  Rose seemed to have got her teeth into something. Or she was following a lead that Dupin didn’t know about yet.

  Dupin saw Riwal suddenly standing outside the glass door and almost jumped. His inspector was making some elaborate gestures. It looked hilarious. Riwal was trying, in vain, not to be too obvious about it; quite a large group of tourists were walking right past him. Kadeg was standing diagonally behind him. Riwal’s hand gestures were getting more extreme. Dupin shook his head; he didn’t want to interrupt the conversation right now.

  Riwal shrugged his shoulders apologetically and gesticulated all the more wildly.

  “I … Excuse me.”

  Dupin stood up. A moment later he was at the door and then out of the room. He’d be quick. The three women hadn’t noticed Riwal yet.

  “Sorry, boss.”

  “What is it, Riwal?”

  “Maxime Daeron wants to speak to you. Immediately. He said it was very urgent. Face-to-face, with you.”

  “Just me?”

  “Just you.”

  “Where is he?”

  “In his house at the gulf.”

  “In his house at the gulf?”

  “In his house at the gulf.”

  Dupin hoped nobody had heard this absurd exchange.

  “He sa
ys he can meet you wherever you want.”

  Dupin reflected. He’d finish this interview at least. “Fine, tell him to come here.”

  “All right, boss. I’ll let him know.”

  Riwal had already turned away and pulled out his phone.

  “Wait. I … In fact it would be better to meet at his salt marsh. Where everything happened.”

  Dupin would have liked to walk through the salt marshes again this morning.

  “All right.” Riwal turned around and walked toward the exit.

  “Riwal?”

  His inspector turned around again without a trace of irritation. He had been working with Dupin too long for something like this to bother him in the slightest.

  “Boss?”

  “I … Tell him I’ll come to him.”

  “Okay.”

  “I thought Daeron lived in La Roche-Bernard.”

  “Maybe his house at the gulf is just a résidence secondaire, lots of people here have—”

  “I know, Riwal. So does he spend time at the gulf during the week too?”

  “I couldn’t tell you.”

  “Let Daeron know that I’m on my way. Where exactly does he live?”

  “On the Île aux Moines.”

  “The Île aux Moines?”

  “The Île aux Moines. In Breton, it’s called Izenah.”

  “Isn’t that the island right next to the Île d’Arz—where Madame Laurent lives?”

  “They used to be linked by a narrow embankment of land, but it sank into the sea in a storm surge. Don’t you know the story?”

  Daeron and Laurent didn’t live far from one another as the crow flew. They were practically neighbors.

  Riwal clearly took Dupin’s being lost in thought as an invitation to keep talking.

  “A rich sea captain’s son fell in love with a penniless fisherman’s daughter. Every night, they met in secret on the embankment. One day the boy asked for her hand in marriage. His father was against it. But the young woman came and sang seductive songs. Then the father asked the ocean for help. The devil sent a storm surge and the embankment was submerged beneath the rough waves.”

  Riwal didn’t just know all the legends—the more obscure and dramatic the better, although strangely those frightened him—he recited them with theatrical zeal. And there were legends for practically every place—nothing in the Celtic world just existed as is, anything and everything had its own story; Dupin was convinced therefore that the Breton nature was the most poetic and epic of all. This was how Riwal’s nickname at the commissariat, “the druid,” had come about. This belied his athletic appearance and his very practical and technical skills and had been followed up by “the bard,” which he seemed just as flattered by.

  “The devil—or God. Nobody knows.”

  Dupin cringed. It was ridiculous.

  “Nobody knows whether it was the devil or God?”

  “They each had their reasons.”

  This was not the right situation for stories, neither for telling them nor listening to them. But somehow, Dupin had to admit, he was a little bit glad: as odd as it sounded, it did him good; it restored some lovely normality, it gave him comfort. As long as Riwal was telling stories, all was still right with the world. Besides, he had learned something. From time to time, Riwal’s stories, and generally the most fantastical stories, contained surprisingly interesting tips.

  “I’ll—I’ll drive to that island.”

  “The gulf area has a particularly high concentration of supernatural stories and beings, boss. It’s always been that way. Fairies and dwarves with Herculean strength.” Riwal remained emphatically matter-of-fact. “So it’s no wonder it’s full of menhirs, dolmen, and cromlec’hs. Izenah is too. Caesar’s golden sarcophagus is underneath the Pen Hap, the most beautiful dolmen on the island. But they say,” he hastened to add, “people are only interested in the huge amounts of gold.”

  “I…” Dupin truly had no idea how to respond to this. For many reasons. For one thing, he found it hilarious that Riwal mocked people’s base material interests, while simply accepting the absurdity of the idea that Caesar’s corpse might actually, of all places, be there. The strangeness of these kinds of stories was intrinsic to them, but this particular story was especially strange: even if the victory of the most daring of Gauls, the Veneti (who came from the gulf!), had been crucial for Caesar’s career, why in the world should Caesar’s body have been brought here? To the most profoundly rebellious province of the Roman empire—finis terrae? But there would be a compelling story for that too, to explain everything; he’d rather not ask. And gradually he was getting fed up with normality.

  “They are only interested in the gold and the other precious treasures that lay hidden beneath the menhirs and dolmen. Guarded by all kinds of creatures. People should know that things always go wrong when somebody wants to get hold of those treasures. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a goldsmith from Auray founded an officially registered company to open up the treasure trove on the gulf. Almost everyone involved lost their lives in mysterious ways.”

  Dupin again wasn’t sure what Riwal was trying to suggest. Should they consider a legendary treasure as a motive in this case? Was this secret society still active today?

  “The gulf has a particular aura. Especially Izenah. Be careful.”

  The inspector had phrased this final sentence as if he were giving a warning about venomous snakes or other dangerous animals.

  Dupin gave up. He’d had enough. He needed to concentrate on the case again.

  * * *

  It was a stone’s throw away, about three hundred meters. The journey from Port-Blanc to Port du Lério on the Île aux Moines took just four minutes on the white-and-blue boat, even at high tide, which Dupin was grateful for. The water shone like a small lake—which made him even more grateful—yet it looked and smelled like the sea. But mild, like everything in this tamed mini-Atlantic. It was luckily just a mini-crossing too, although the boat’s diesel engine, with its ostentatious buzzing and vibrating, made it clear that it could take on the open Atlantic. And even the small, loud flock of seagulls that followed them left no doubt that, despite it all, this was an ocean they were on. His case last year on the Glénan archipelago had forced Dupin, who hated boats, to make multiple trips by boat, and he had sworn off boats for a long time.

  Port-Blanc shone from the water, dazzlingly white and living up to its name. The ferries crossed every fifteen minutes and Dupin hadn’t had to wait. He had parked his car right on the quay in Port-Blanc—that was the advantage of having an official police car. He left it right next to the ramp that jutted far out to sea so that boats could be launched even at low tide. Dupin loved that image, found only at the coast: a street running headlong into the sea.

  The Île aux Moines was a car-free island. And Daeron’s house was apparently not far from the harbor. The slightly hilly island was in fact in the shape of a cross, which is why the monks had chosen it in the ninth century and built a monastery on it.

  Commissaire Rose had just called. She had finished the rest of the conversation with the two women, which had mainly been about the exact links between Le Sel and the Centre. Clearly the links were very close. Her report had been to the point, and indeed pointed: I report and expect the same from you. What was more significant was the information she passed on about the first, preliminary autopsy report; some of the blood tests hadn’t come back yet. Lilou was still alive when she had been thrown into the gulf. Although she had most likely been unconscious. The injury to her temple “from a powerful blow using a blunt instrument” had been severe, “potentially fatal,” and clearly antemortem, but from a medical point of view, she had drowned. There was no doubt about it. Otherwise the body showed no other fractures, wounds, or hematomas. Nothing, which was practically a miracle given the strong currents, the sharp rocks and stones. She had probably been swiftly caught by the main current and washed right out into the large Larmor-Baden bay, directly opp
osite Kerpenhir. So the reconstruction right now looked like this: the perpetrator—or perpetrators—went to her parents’ house, knocked her out—still no sign of the murder weapon—got her into her car, drove the short distance to the Pointe de Kerpenhir, and threw her into the gulf there. The perpetrator then went back to their car, probably not far away. The exact time of the crime was difficult to pinpoint, as it always was with drowning. The forensics team hadn’t found the laptop, or any traces of blood marking the spot where the attack had taken place, which was a long shot anyway with this kind of injury. But no blood or fingerprints had been found in the car yet either, just two tiny pieces of dark red textile lint on the driver’s seat that weren’t pressed down into it and hadn’t revealed anything yet. Rose and Dupin still suspected that the perpetrator had driven to Lilou’s house in Sarzeau later to remove papers and documents. Absolutely everything from the last six weeks was missing; the forensics team had confirmed it, Rose having asked them to check especially. Although they had clues only for certain elements of this, Dupin thought it a plausible hypothesis for what had happened.

  Crucially, Rose had also had everyone’s alibis checked—anybody who had given one. Dupin smiled when he heard who had volunteered for this job. Kadeg. Naturally. Nobody could badger people so nastily and with such great pleasure. Dupin himself preferred giving him these kinds of jobs. Maxime Daeron’s wife had confirmed the dinner. Kadeg was dissatisfied because it was “just” the wife, and so not an “independent” person. Two of Paul Daeron’s guests confirmed the tastings until one in the morning, Madame Bourgiot’s husband also confirmed a shared dinner and that his wife had gone to sleep with him at half past eleven.

  Rose wanted to take Jaffrezic “to task” again next (even this phrase was said in a friendly way). At first the commissaires hadn’t been able to agree where and when they would meet and how to proceed, but in the end they arranged to speak on the phone again later. Dupin had tried to reach Claire again, twice on the journey and once from the quay, but again he’d only been able to leave voicemails.