“You start the inventory and we’ll be with you in about an hour. Where will you do it?”
“I’ll need a big table, so I was thinking of using the council chamber in the mairie. And Fauquet’s should be open by the time you arrive so you can get some breakfast. Meantime, I’ll send some photos to your phone. There are some very distinctive tattoos on one of the dead.”
Chapter 27
Bruno made five trips up to the council chamber with the various belongings he had collected. He took a roll of plastic sheeting from the storeroom and taped it over the table. He opened the windows to dilute some of the stink of gasoline, donned a fresh set of evidence gloves and started to work. By the time he heard J-J’s voice down in the parking lot, he had a series of almost-neat piles. There was the briefcase, then each of the two broken suitcases, the big canvas bag and the two handbags. Another pile was of obviously female garments and a second one of male clothing that seemed to have come from the suitcase. A badly ripped leather jacket, recovered from beneath the front passenger seat, was set apart. On top of it Bruno placed the Maltese passport he had found in the inside pocket, in the name of Alexander Dimitrovich Fallin, aged thirty-five according to the birth date in the passport, and born in Odessa, Ukraine, when it had still been part of the Soviet Union.
Alongside it he put the bloodied pair of jeans, in whose pockets he had found a Montblanc wallet, which contained four hundred euros and credit cards from Deutsche Bank and the Bank of Cyprus, both in the name of Alexander Fallin. A battered Samsung smartphone had a smashed screen, but technicians might be able to get something from it.
Beside the Gucci handbag where he’d found the smartphone, he placed a tattered document in Greek, French and English that identified the owner, Leilah Soliman, as being granted refugee status in Lesbos, Greece. It was dated eighteen months earlier. From the listed birth date, she was eighteen years old and born in Antioch, Syria. There were two stamps on the document, and Bruno found a magnifying glass to study them. One seemed to be from the Greek police, and the second was from Médecins Sans Frontières, presumably the refugee camp. He took a photo of the form with his phone.
There was also a residency permit for Cyprus, with the same name and details, dated seven months ago, and a Visa credit card in the same name from the Bank of Valletta in Malta. The bag also revealed an intact iPhone and what looked like a diamond bracelet. From an almost hidden pocket at the base of the bag he removed an envelope that contained fifteen hundred U.S. dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills and two thousand euros in notes of fifty euros. A pack of birth control pills, half used, cosmetics, mouthwash, a lace-trimmed handkerchief and a Hermès silk scarf made up the rest of the bag’s contents.
The Michael Kors handbag held no identification documents of any kind, only tissues, cosmetics, a thong in red lace that had been wrapped in a small plastic bag and a pack of Dunhill cigarettes plus a Dunhill lighter that looked to be gold.
As Bruno was completing the inventory, J-J pushed the door open with his shoulder and entered with a tray carrying half a dozen paper cups, steaming and smelling of coffee, and a heap of croissants and pains au chocolat. Yves, head of the forensic team, followed with another tray holding glasses and bottles of assorted fruit juices. An old friend of Bruno’s, he nodded approvingly at the piles of belongings Bruno had sorted. Two more members of J-J’s team followed them in, carrying plastic evidence bags and a couple of official police laptops.
“Get those gloves off, Bruno, and have some breakfast,” J-J said. “But first, where’s the money?”
Bruno pointed to the briefcase. “The cashier’s check is made out to a local notaire. Stichkin’s daughter, Galina, is buying herself a château, or rather Daddy is buying it for her.”
“We should all have such thoughtful fathers,” said J-J, eyeing the money. “And thanks for the photos of tattoos. I forwarded them to the operations room at the Ministry of the Interior, which transferred me to the organized crime unit. They’re Russian, unique to professional criminals called the vori v zakon or something like that. It means ‘thieves in law’ and the tattoos are done in prison or in camps. Those letters you photographed are the Russian word sever, and that’s only done in one of the Siberian prison camps, using soot mixed with urine for the ink. They have a very strict code, no cooperation with the authorities, won’t even switch on a lightbulb if ordered to do so. The organized crime team is sending someone down here to look it all over. Is this everything you found?”
Bruno washed down the last of his croissant with coffee and shook his head. “The dead bodies, in what clothes they still had, were taken to the funeral parlor. Fabiola signed the death certificates but told them not to touch the bodies until the forensic team arrived. Maybe Yves should go there and look them over. Now that you’re here, I ought to head back to the scene of the crash and see if there’s anything else to be found. I also want to determine why the pile of logs fell when it did. And I have to type up the inventory notes. Have you opened a case file yet on the computer?”
“No, not enough time,” J-J said, speaking around a half-eaten croissant. “I’ll do that later, and you can file your report directly to it. And none of this should get into the media yet. As far as the press is concerned, it was an accident, involving persons unknown. If you’re asked, we’re still trying to get registration details from Monaco, and we suspect the car may have been stolen.”
“That won’t stop a keen reporter,” Bruno objected. “And the crash has already been reported on the radio. They know it was a Maserati, which is so expensive that it’s news in itself. And a medical helicopter landing here around dawn won’t go unnoticed. There’s a message on my voice mail from Philippe Delaron of Sud Ouest and you know what he’s like.”
“Refer Philippe to the press office and no off-the-record chats. This has to be kept under wraps. Anybody else know about the money?”
“No. Only you and me, but Fabiola saw the tattoos, and she’s the kind of woman who will look them up out of curiosity. And you know Gilles, her partner, who still freelances for Paris Match.”
“Putain!” J-J said tiredly and shrugged. “I’m just passing on orders from the commissioner, and he’d had a call from Paris so all this is now way over our heads.”
“More because of General Lannes than Goirau, I would think,” said Bruno. “But the fisc will have to be involved—Monaco car, Russian criminals, all that cash; don’t tell me this isn’t connected. And there’s another thing. One of the women is a Syrian refugee. I don’t know if it’s the dead one or the one in intensive care, but Lara Saatchi had a slight Arab accent.”
J-J shook his head. “That’s not our business. We just do the standard police work. So I’ll get people working on the phones and credit cards and see if there’s anything left on the car’s GPS. Maybe we can find out where they came from. The speed they were going, they probably had to fill their tank on the way. We’re dealing with four people, but I only see two phones. Keep an eye out for any phones when you go back to the scene.”
“You’d better check with Lespinasse at the garage,” said Bruno. “He may have picked up a phone with all the other stuff when he cleared the crash from the road. I’m hoping he or the funeral parlor can come up with some ID for the driver. From what I saw, most of him was crushed by the engine.”
J-J shrugged again. “Poor bastard.” He looked around. “How long can we use this council chamber as a workroom?”
“I’ll ask the mayor, but there’s no council meeting until Thursday.”
“It’s Monday, so we should be done by then. Report back here after you’ve checked the crash site. Will you need more manpower?”
“I’ll ask Yveline if she can spare a couple of gendarmes.”
“What was done with those dead boars you found?” J-J asked. “I presume they could have destabilized the log pile.”
“I’ll let you know
when I’ve inspected the site.” Bruno turned to go, but he stopped at the door. “The idea that a boar just happened accidentally to knock over that pile at the very moment the car was passing strikes me as more than unlikely.”
“You’re the country boy, Bruno. Is there no possible way that could have happened?”
“I’ll let you know when I get back.”
The road had been cleared and was open to traffic, the logs all pushed to the ditch. A man Bruno didn’t know was standing beside them, scribbling notes on a pad. He was dressed like a hunter, khaki pants and shirt, rubber boots and a sleeveless bright red gilet. Bruno half recognized him, perhaps from a hunting dinner. He introduced himself and learned the man’s name was Henri Contamine. They shook hands and Bruno asked if these were his logs.
“Yes, and so is this land, all the way from the road to the ridge up there. I have a permit for the log pile, plus a certificate from the forestry inspector for its stability.”
“So how do you think it collapsed?”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to work out. The bottom row is secured by iron stakes at each corner, front and rear. The rear ones are still there, but I can’t see the front ones, though there are gouges in the earth where they used to be. They might be under these logs here.”
“Or the stakes might have been swept up with the metal from the car when they cleared the road,” said Bruno. “Could boars have done this? There was a big dead one and a couple of young sangliers among the logs last night.”
“You were here then?” Contamine asked. “Must have been a hell of a mess. Three dead, I heard. Yes, I suppose boars could have done it, but it would have needed two of them, digging out the front stakes and then some more at the back to push the pile. Even then they’d have needed to work at it.”
“Can you show me?”
They clambered up with the help of two upright logs that had fallen oddly and rested against the slope. Contamine showed Bruno the two deep holes in the earth where the stakes had been. Bruno bent down to sniff, but there was no smell of explosives and no sign of fire or charring. There were some old rabbit holes in the bank but no fresh droppings.
“We put terriers in to clear the rabbits when we put the logs here,” said Contamine. “The ground is stable enough.”
“Part of it gave way,” said Bruno. “And the rest is torn up. Could that have been boars, a whole herd trying to scramble up the bank to get away from an oncoming car, maybe dislodging and uprooting the stakes in the process?”
Contamine took off his flat cap to scratch his head. “Maybe, I suppose it’s possible, but you’d still have needed somebody at the back of the pile to push it over, and I don’t see boars doing that. Give me a hand to move this log standing on its end, just help me push it over…Jesus!”
As the log toppled, it revealed a hole behind it full of loose earth where the stake had been. Bruno scooped out some of the earth and looked at the sides of the hole. They were suspiciously smooth and flat.
“Would you say that had been made by a spade? Dug deliberately?” Contamine nodded and Bruno asked him to check the other perpendicular log while he photographed the sides of the hole.
“It’s the same here,” called Contamine. “Somebody dug away the stakes from here as well. Putain, this was deliberate.”
“Suppose you were planning this,” Bruno asked. “How would you have gotten the boars here?”
“Food in the ditch and on the road—mushrooms, acorns, chickens, eggs and they love mashed potatoes. Boars are always hungry, they need two or three times more calories every day than we do. Pull out some of that loose earth, see if there are any chicken bones.”
They found chicken feet, heads and bones plus some broken eggshells. They went to investigate the back of the pile and found two deep grooves on top of the highest remaining log.
“That means men did this and they used levers,” said Contamine. “Vandals. Do you suppose they waited until a car came along and then levered the logs off? That makes it murder.”
“It certainly does,” said Bruno. “But I’m not sure about the levers.” He pointed to a number of small square indentations that looked as if they had been made by some mechanism on the ground below the grooves. He took a photo of them with his phone, and asked Contamine, “Have you ever seen a hydraulic jack, one of those that truck drivers use to raise a heavy vehicle to change a tire? It’s a bit like a miniature forklift truck.”
“A forklift truck would do it, and it would account for those grooves,” said Contamine. “But were they trying to kill people in any car that happened along, or were they waiting for a particular car? If so, they would have needed someone ahead, a spotter, to tell them it was coming.”
“You’re right,” said Bruno, but he was thinking there were now phone apps that could track the movement of a car. He took out his phone, recorded a statement from Contamine about the boars, the stakes and his interpretation of events and made an appointment for him to come to his office and sign it once it had been transcribed.
Then Bruno called J-J to brief him and was told that the fingerprints of the manicured hand of the man who had been crushed by the car engine had been taken and matched those taken from the desk drawers and phones in the office of the Périgueux notaire Sarrail. A DNA check of hairs from the back of the dead man’s hand and those from a comb in Sarrail’s desk was being done, but J-J said he was in little doubt of the corpse’s identity.
“So we have one Russian hood in the car with Sarrail and two women with very expensive handbags and diamonds,” said J-J. “One of them is a refugee, the other is clinging to life, and we don’t know which is which until the live one is out of intensive care—if she makes it.”
“Check the eyebrows,” said Bruno. “Get a policewoman to do it, or a nurse, one who knows about threading eyebrows. Lara had carefully threaded and sculpted eyebrows. Take photographs, close-ups, and show them to the woman in the beauty parlor by Sarrail’s office. She’ll recognize her own work.”
“So the question remains, Who wanted to kill Sarrail and what was he doing with all that cash?” asked J-J.
“I’ll get back to you,” Bruno replied. He checked the address book on his phone and called Brosseil and asked him to stay in his office until he arrived.
He contacted Juliette in Les Eyzies and asked her to check local equipment-leasing companies for any recent rentals of hydraulic jacks. Then he called the security number for France Télécom and requested a fix on his own cell phone by triangulating the signals from the various cell towers in contact. Ever since the terrorist attacks in France that had triggered an official state of emergency, such almost instant phone location systems had become an important tool in police work. He then asked them for the number and registered owner of any cell phone that had been in the same location for more than a brief period throughout the night. He waited less than a minute before the duty officer came back with a number. The phone’s SIM card itself was prepaid and had been bought in Cyprus where French law was not enforced, so the owner was not registered.
“Could you trace where that SIM card might be now?”
“If it’s switched on,” came the reply. “We’ll call you back.”
Driving like the wind back to town, Bruno parked half on the pavement outside the notaire’s office and rushed in. “Did you have an appointment this morning about the sale of Château Rock?” he asked a startled Brosseil.
“Yes, at nine. Monsieur Macrae, his wife and son and the son’s future bride were here waiting for half an hour past the appointed time. They are very upset. The deposit check was to have been presented as the initial part of the transaction.”
“Did it have to be a check?”
“No, but it always is, a bank cashier’s check.”
“Would cash be acceptable?”
“In principle, yes, but with these new
controls on amounts over ten thousand euros, it would have been held pending the usual verification and inquiries.”
“How much was the deposit to be?”
“Three hundred thousand, ten percent of the agreed sale price.”
“Suppose you had been handed part of the deposit money in cash?”
“I would have accepted it pending the official authorization, banked it in my client escrow account and let the bank take care of the necessary procedures against money laundering.”
“How long have your clients been gone?”
“Twenty, thirty minutes, but they’re staying in town in case the other side turns up. You’ll probably find them in the café. Why do you ask? What do you know about this, Bruno?”
“You heard about the crash on the St. Cyprien road? I think it might have been the people bringing the deposit money. They had a lot of cash with them and a cashier’s check made out to your client account. Officially you don’t know that. The cash and check are currently in the possession of the chief detective of the Police Nationale.”
Brosseil’s face was impassive. “I see. What should I tell my clients?”
“That there is an unfortunate delay. But since Mademoiselle Galina is the buyer, I imagine her financial resources will eventually prove sufficient.”
Standing on the street outside, Bruno phoned the Paris headquarters of Médecins Sans Frontières and asked for a press officer with whom he’d worked on a previous case. She greeted him warmly, and he explained about the unidentified body from the crash. What could she tell him about the Lesbos camp? She said she would transfer him to a colleague who had worked there and would let her know that Bruno was a friend.
“Monsieur Bruno, bonjour. I’m Sandrine Ducannet. How may I help?” came a new voice. Bruno gave her Leilah Soliman’s name and the date of the registration.
“The Moria camp on Lesbos is pretty awful. Even now there are more than eight thousand in a camp designed for a third of that number. But it’s in better shape compared to 2016, when over half a million people, mainly Syrians, flooded into Greece from Turkey. God only knows how many died.”
The Shooting at Chateau Rock Page 24
