“Does the boss know what you’re up to?” Tonon asked. He’d been observing Blanc all the time, while finishing off his second croissant.
“I spoke to Nkoulou on the phone. He seemed preoccupied. Probably best not to bother him.”
“At least we agree on that point.”
They heard the roar of an engine outside, someone cranking up the revs. Then it stopped dead. Blanc went over to the window. A motorbike had just pulled up before the gendarmerie: a fire red gas tank, tiny handlebars, vintage wheels. Two figures in black leather suits with integrated helmets, dark visors; they looked like storm troopers. The driver took the protective headwear off and shook her long brown hair in the wind. Fabienne. A tall, slender woman who had been sitting behind her on the pillion also took off her helmet, to reveal short-cropped blond hair. “That’s how I imagine a lesbian,” said Marius, who had joined his colleague to look out.
Fabienne joined them a few minutes later. “Roxane Chelle,” she introduced her girlfriend. She had eyes the color of a swimming pool and a jaw like Rodin’s The Thinker. Instead of greeting the two men with a kiss on the cheeks like Fabienne did, she shook their hands with a grip that made Blanc think Marius might have known what he was talking about.
“Let’s go to the computer in my room,” said Fabienne. “It’s a lot quicker than those old tin boxes you have.” She told Tonon, who was following them along the hallway in a state of some puzzlement, that she had been looking through all the material online relating to the car robberies that Moréas had been involved in.
Marius went white. “What do you think you’re doing? You think you can get any further with this damn thing just by doing a bit of surfing on the Internet before heading out to a nightclub?”
“You did everything you could,” Blanc interrupted to calm him down. “But sometimes a fresh look from an outsider can spot new connections.”
“That sounds more like psychiatry than detective work.”
“Deflate your egos, boys,” Fabienne said in a conciliatory tone of voice. Her girlfriend gave a sarcastic smile that seemed to shut Tonon up.
“Take a look at this,” their colleague said, nodding toward her screen. “The tourist who was run over and killed was German; Claudia Meier. That was in the old newspaper clippings too. I was rather naïve at first and tried Googling her, but it would seem half the women on the other bank of the Rhine have that name.”
“Not that it matters,” Tonon grumbled. “She died back when the Internet hardly existed.”
“Yes, but the Net has sucked up the past. When I realized I had a million women with the name Claudia Meier, I took a long shot and tried adding ‘Lukas Rheinbach’ in the search field. They’re both German, right? And the painter was asking questions about the accident, wasn’t he? Voilà. All of a sudden a lot fewer hits, and most of them rubbish. But you also end up here: on a site where you can look up old school friends. They host old school class photos. Like this one.” She zoomed in on one photo. “This is the final-year photo taken at a school outside Cologne.”
Blanc found himself looking at around a hundred men and women dressed in a fashion he dimly remembered lined up outside a grim-looking concrete building. It only took him a few minutes to recognize the German painter, aged about twenty. Below the photo was a list of names, among them “Claudia Meier,” eighth from left. Blanc counted along the row: a pretty girl with long, dark blond hair, beaming into the camera. Next to her stood Lukas Rheinbach, his arm around her shoulder.
“Putain,” Tonon swore.
“We need to go through the files from the investigation into the highway robberies thoroughly again,” Blanc mumbled, all of a sudden feeling uneasy.
“They’re over here,” his colleague said, pointing to a filing cabinet in the corner. “I always keep them within easy reach.”
Within seconds they were leafing through yellowed pages of old reports, from police and pathologists, from the days when they were all done on typewriters; black-and-white photos; fingerprint cards; sketches of the crime scenes; pictures of the victim; a copy of her passport; photographs of the crime scene; documentation from the autopsy in the Salon hospital. A series of documents that in nightmare fashion detailed the transformation of a beautiful woman into a heap of flesh and bones. Blanc took the copy of the passport and held it up next to the computer screen, not that it was really necessary: The victim was identical to the girl with Lukas Rheinbach’s arm around her shoulder.
The captain worked his way further through the files. Lukas Rheinbach had also been in the car when it was attacked, an old Citroën 2CV with a German number plate. The files contained a copy of his passport too, as well as details of his address and occupation (“art student”), their last address in France: a hotel in Bonnieux where he and Claudia Meier had taken a room together. Rheinbach had been named as a witness, after which his name no longer featured in the files.
“You owe me an explanation, Marius,” Blanc said when he had finished. “You’ve allegedly been after Charles Moréas for murder for some twenty years. But when we find ourselves talking to the boyfriend of the victim, you don’t mention it. To be honest, you gave me the impression you had never even seen Monsieur Rheinbach before, never even heard the name.”
“I wasn’t present when they took witness statements. It didn’t seem to matter; he was just a foreign tourist. I knew who the guilty party was. I just wanted to nail Moréas. Mon Dieu. I’d seen the dead girl’s body lying on the road!” Tonon didn’t look him in the eye, just glanced around the room.
“Your name doesn’t even appear in the files. You weren’t involved in the investigation,” Blanc stated. His tone was friendly enough but nobody in the room, not even Souillard’s girlfriend, who wasn’t even in the police, could mistake the change in attitude: This had become an interrogation.
Tonon covered his eyes with his big paw. “Putain,” he swore softly. “Is this thing never going to let me go?” He took a deep breath and finally turned to look at Blanc. “I’d been suspended from duty by then,” he admitted wearily. “On that very night I was sent to the crime scene. Somebody had called the police from a farmhouse. I think it was a long-distance truck driver passing by. I raced down there with a couple of men and came across the body first, then the robber’s wrecked car. Most of them had already run off, but a couple were still there. They were in shock but they fought back. It was dark. Nobody knew exactly what had happened. Had it been an accident? An attack? My men and I approached the car. Suddenly somebody fired a gun. Well”—he hesitated, searching for the right words—“we returned fire. Or I should say, I returned fire. I’d already had a couple of glasses of rosé. I nearly shot one of my colleagues. No, I actually did shoot one of my colleagues. It was only a grazing shot, luckily. By then the others had overpowered the guys and secured the crime scene. The usual stuff. I was taken away and, overnight, suspended from duty. It was a few weeks before I was allowed back into the gendarmerie, by which time people had glossed over it all. There was no official investigation into my behavior. But it was made clear that for the rest of my life I would remain a lieutenant in this station and only be given cases where I could do the minimum damage. But as none of my colleagues were still bothering with the robbers and nobody was getting anywhere with the case, I grabbed hold of the files, if only to stop them moldering away. I didn’t really read through them, because I knew it had been Moréas, and I just went after him. Everybody else just let me get on with it, happy not to have anything to do with me. Voilà. Now at least I had a hobby to keep me busy.”
“And for all these years you never bothered with Monsieur Rheinbach?”
“It didn’t seem important.” Tonon scratched his head. “Moréas was the perpetrator, right? But the original investigation had failed to nail him, right? So I looked for a different way to go about it. I wanted to get him for another crime. Any crime. Putain. The guy must have been guilty of a dozen things. Sooner or later, I hoped, I would be able to pin some
thing on him, no matter what it was. Then, when I had got my hands on him, I would have been able to bring the old case up in front of the judge as well. I had been watching the guy for years, paying attention to every detail I could find about him: his shit tattoo, the medallion with the cobra, the shack in the woods, his threats against harmless walkers, even the ridiculous charge of speeding on his motorbike. I just wanted to get the asshole for something.”
“But…”
“Leave it, Roger,” Fabienne interrupted him gently. “It doesn’t do any of us any good crying over spilt milk. What matters is we now have a lead in the case we’re dealing with. That is all that matters. Don’t torture Marius.”
For several long moments Blanc stared at the black-and-white photos of Claudia Meier, then nodded. “Okay, so, Monsieur Rheinbach.”
“So, do we just bring him in?” asked Fabienne. He could hear the disappointment in her voice at the prospect of interrogating the painter—the ideal culprit, the foreigner nobody cared about.
“You and your friend here can take to the road again,” Blanc replied. “We won’t bring anybody in this weekend.” He nodded toward the door. “Not while we still have a guest from Paris with us.”
“Vialaron-Allègre won’t be interested in who we’re interviewing,” she replied.
“There’s nothing he’s not interested in. The gendarmerie is so quiet he’d be bound to notice if we bring in Monsieur Rheinbach. He’d get involved, want to know who we’re interviewing and why. The minister wants to do his friend and fellow party member a favor. If we bring in a German painter as a suspect, he’ll insist we arrest and charge him. As far as the mayor is concerned that would be the Kalashnikov murder solved and his FN rival would have one less string to her bow. And we would no longer be breathing down his neck. As long as the minister was happy, Nkoulou would be happy. That would be the case done and dusted. Except that it wouldn’t be.”
“If that slimy bastard gets involved in the Moréas murder then he’d also be likely to find out how I botched up,” Tonon added glumly. “My career’s been gathering cobwebs for long enough but at least they still leave me here in the Midi. Let the minister root around in that old connerie and he’d probably post me somewhere else, if only to do Nkoulou a favor.”
“So let’s all go home and wait until the minister has gone back to Paris. We’ll talk again on Monday,” Blanc concluded.
* * *
Blanc spent the rest of Sunday dragging the remaining furniture out of the ground floor of his house, and then tackling the walls. He scratched and scraped patches of old wallpaper and oil paint from the walls until they were stripped bare, down to rough, crumbly stone: yellow, white, gray, the cracks between them filled with ochre mortar. Half of his expensive new tools were either too large or too small, the other half unusable, and he hadn’t bought most of the materials he actually needed. But eventually he was finished, dripping with sweat and his shoulders aching. It’s looking good, he told himself. It was the first actual thought he had formulated in hours: He had been running on automatic, totally engrossed in the work—a fusion of hard graft and Zen.
It was only when he had showered, pulled on a pair of shorts, and squatted down behind a wall to protect him from the mistral to watch the swallows, with a glass of rosé in his hand, that he finally allowed himself to think over the events of the morning. Monsieur Rheinbach. He found himself somehow annoyed by the idea of arresting the German painter. Yet so much of it fitted: Rheinbach was unlucky with women, this Claudia Meier might not have been just a youthful fling but the love of his life. The character with her death on his conscience lived just around the corner, scot-free and acting like a bully. Could Rheinbach have known all along that Moréas was a suspect in her death? His name had never been mentioned in the paper, but Rheinbach had been there at the time, had been a witness, might even have seen something incriminating on that fateful evening. Had he been looking for something on the attack when he was at La Provence’s editorial offices? And why had he spent so much time in the Caillouteaux records office? He had to have known who Moréas was.
Then he remembered the words of the farmer who had been down at the garbage dump at noon on the day of the murder—he had mentioned that there had been a little red car parked nearby. Rheinbach drove a wine-colored Clio.
“You are going to have some explaining to do, Monsieur Artist,” Blanc mumbled to himself. “Or you’re going to be painting jigsaw puzzles from memory for the next few years.”
And still …
Le Bruchec. Lafont. Fuligni’s text message. Fuligni’s unexplained death. Did all that really have nothing to do with the case? It wasn’t just the mistral that was disturbing his train of thought. Blanc felt sure he had overlooked some decisive factor. He wished there was someone he could discuss it with. In the past he would occasionally have talked over his investigation with Geneviève if he got stuck on a case. He wasn’t supposed to but what did it matter really? She never said much. To tell the truth he now suspected that all those years she had never really listened to a word he said. But it had been good to talk about it. It helped him to get his thoughts in order, made him feel as if he had dealt with it on an intellectual level, and more often than not he would stumble across a new lead.
But now? Should he call Fabienne? He liked her and she was bright. But she was very young, and had a thirst for life. At the weekend she had the right to enjoy herself and not have to sit listening to the musings of a colleague who’d been transferred here against his will. Marius? He had his own demons to battle, problems enough without Blanc’s doubts and questions. And apart from anything else Blanc couldn’t quite bring himself to ignore the nasty little voice whispering away in his head: What if it was Tonon himself? A cop who, after twenty years of frustrating investigation in vain, had just grabbed a Kalashnikov and taken out the guy who had ruined his career? A cop whose fuse had simply blown? Tonon’s car was white, not red. Nobody had spotted him down by the dump. There were no other leads pointing to him, and there was certainly nothing to link him to Fuligni’s death. But even so …
Blanc despised himself for even thinking of his colleague as a possible suspect, but there was no way he could bring himself to say he could trust Marius one hundred percent.
He didn’t go to bed until the wine bottle was empty. He didn’t feel drunk, just tired and defeated. Then all of a sudden he thought of someone he would be happy to discuss the case with: the juge d’instruction. Madame Vialaron-Allègre would have heard him out, would have understood him; with her sharp intellect she would have helped him get his thoughts in order. He could hear her voice, see her face. As a result Blanc fell asleep thinking about the very woman he wasn’t sure was going to help him or end up being a threat to him.
An Artist Without an Alibi
The mistral was still rattling his shutters on Monday morning. Blanc had been so exhausted the night before that he had only brought in the essential pieces of furniture. In the meantime the wind had blown over two chairs, and an old tablecloth now hung like a ragged sail in a plane tree on the other side of the Touloubre. He shrugged. He would buy a new one at the market. Eventually.
After three days of the mistral, almost everybody at the station was exhausted from lack of sleep and as bad-humored as if Olympique de Marseille had lost a home game against Paris. But at least the minister had vanished. His wife was at work in her office. Blanc would have liked to tell her what he had found out on Sunday, but she had the phone to her ear when he knocked on her door and went in. She scribbled something on a piece of paper and passed it across her desk to him, while still on the phone. Urgent meeting in Aix. Will have time this afternoon. Her handwriting was large and extravagant, with large curving loops like some Renaissance letter. Blanc was disappointed but nodded and closed the door carefully behind him, taking the piece of paper with him.
Nkoulou was working next door, as cool and correct as ever. The commandant raised a hand to his forehead as Blanc passed, b
ut said nothing. It was as if the phone call on the weekend, with his furious outburst and the woman with the vulgar voice, had never taken place. Blanc was relieved but remained on his guard. A few minutes later Fabienne Souillard arrived. She was wearing a freshly starched uniform that made her look ten years older and six inches taller. Blanc glanced briefly at the gun in her holster then looked away. I hope she doesn’t lose her nerve, he thought. They had to wait another half hour before Tonon turned up. When he eventually arrived, he looked dreadful. The veins in his eyeballs had burst into a red net on the whites. He was unshaven and his uniform was as crumpled as his face. As ever, his holster was empty.
“Let’s go visit the painter,” Blanc said, reaching for the car keys.
Nkoulou glanced at them through the open door, but still didn’t say a word.
* * *
“I thought you might be back,” Rheinbach said wearily, opening the door to them.
Blanc was relieved that the man wasn’t being difficult. He produced the copy Fabienne had made of the old school photo. “I’d like you to tell us something about your younger days,” he said.
“It’s not exactly a story with a happy ending.” The artist led them into the house and asked them to sit down. He looked anxious and relieved simultaneously at being asked to tell the story. “My parents used to take us camping down to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer every summer. That’s something that stays with you for life. I have always loved the South of France, even before I knew I was going to be a painter. And long before I met Claudia. It was a high school romance. After graduation, we went on to university together. That summer we took my old 2CV down to Provence to go painting. I think you know how that vacation ended.” He turned and looked out the window.
Murderous Mistral Page 18
