The Templars' Last Secret

by Martin Walker

  “That dead woman in the paper, have you found out who she is yet?” Amandine asked.

  “No, have you seen her before?”

  “Not sure. There was someone like her, about a week ago, came into one of the gîtes I was cleaning on changeover day. She was there early. I couldn’t swear it was her, but there was something about the hair. Was she tanned, this woman, as if she was just back from a vacation in the sun?”

  “Yes, she was, unusually so for this time of year. Which gîte was this?”

  “Over toward Sarlat, just after Meyrals on that back road. It’s called La Bergerie, but I’ve never seen any sheep around there. You take the second left after that new art gallery, and it’s about two kilometers up there on the right. The last five hundred meters is a dirt road.”

  “Who owns it?”

  “A guy in Sarlat, that union guy who’s in the papers. I forget his name.”

  “Vaugier, is that the one?”

  “Yes. That’s him. Funny that he’s always going on about the law about shops opening on Sundays, but he pays me strictly cash, with no receipts, either.”

  Bruno made a mental note to check whether Vaugier had registered his gîte with the local mairie. “This woman, was there anything special about her? An accent, maybe?”

  “She only spoke a few words, said hello and excused herself and asked what time she should come back, but she sounded Parisian to me. Have you got any better photos of her than the one in the paper?”

  Bruno took out his phone and showed Amandine the pictures he’d taken, along with the visa photo Amélie had sent him.

  “It could be her. I couldn’t swear to it, but there’s definitely a strong likeness.”

  Bruno took from her Vaugier’s phone number and went off to supervise the rest of the tennis lesson until the next class arrived. This time it would be the nine-year-olds, most of them by now able to hit some sort of forehand and backhand drive and to place most of their serves into the right court. A new collection of mothers took their places on the benches.

  When the tennis ended at noon, Bruno heated the soup he’d brought and Montsouris set out his own contribution, a big baguette with pâté and cheese. Amélie had learned from Montsouris that she could take red wine from the ten-liter box of Cuvée Cyrano behind the bar, leaving a euro for each glass in the old biscuit tin that served as a cashbox.

  “Do you know this union guy, Vaugier?” Bruno asked Montsouris as they began to eat.

  “I’ve met him a couple of times, but can’t say I know him. He’s not what you’d call one of the boys, doesn’t follow rugby or go hunting. Comes from the north, Lille or somewhere. He was in the Socialist Party, but he moved to that new left-wing breakaway, the Parti de Gauche. He married a girl from Périgueux and moved down here when she inherited her parents’ property. He’s an ambitious guy, out to make a name for himself. Why do you ask?”

  Bruno explained the court case in Sarlat and Montsouris nodded, adding that his cousin’s son worked in one of Hugues’s bakeries, liked the job and thought Hugues was a good employer. The three of them made coffee and washed up the dishes together. Bruno took his uniform from his van, changed out of his tracksuit and set off with Amélie for Vaugier’s gîte. There was no singing on this ride; the mood was too serious.

  The place was deserted, with no car to be seen and the key left in the door. Bruno put on a pair of evidence gloves, gave another pair to Amélie and let himself in. The place looked immaculate, as if it had been thoroughly cleaned. The pots and dishes had been washed and were stacked in the plastic drying rack. The refrigerator had been unplugged, the door open to reveal it was empty and gleaming. There was no washing machine, but bedding for several people had been washed, probably in a launderette, and piled onto the dining table in the big room. A bucket and mop stood in the corner, and there was a lingering scent of disinfectant.

  “Whoever was here has made a very thorough job of cleaning up,” said Amélie. “Not the way most tourists leave a holiday rental.”

  “It could be a way to get rid of fingerprints and DNA.” Bruno began taking photos with his phone, including a close-up of the stove, fed by a bottle of Calor gas.

  “Why are you taking a photo of that?” she asked.

  “It’s an old dodge to avoid paying the taxe d’habitation,” he replied. “It’s easily removed, and if there’s no working stove to cook on, you can say the place is not fit for residence and avoid the tax. But now we’ve got a date-stamped photo to say the place is liable for tax, and it will be interesting to see if he’s registered it as a rental property.”

  The barn was also left unlocked with the key in the door and newly laundered bedding piled onto each bed. The bathroom had been thoroughly cleaned, taps and porcelain shining. The waste bins in each kitchen had been emptied and so had the dustbins outside, all of them smelling of bleach. Bruno recalled seeing back at the road junction a group of big rubbish bins where the locals were supposed to leave their garbage in yellow sacks provided by the local council. They might not have been cleared yet.

  Bruno called J-J to explain what he’d found. He was about to suggest a forensics team might find some trace of the inhabitants that had been overlooked in the cleaning, which was itself suspicious, when J-J interrupted.

  “You’d better stay there until I arrive,” he said. “I just had the brigadier on. The Israelis are getting excited. Apparently this woman was high up on their watch list, Jewish but a pro-Palestinian militant, lives with an Israeli Arab who’s also on their list. They’ve asked for her DNA and any information we have on her movements.”

  “When you say ‘they,’ do you mean their embassy?” Bruno asked.

  “Not anymore. It began with the embassy, but now it’s Israel direct. I’ll let the brigadier know about this gîte you’ve found and then come join you. Can you find out who owns this place? We’d better call them in.”

  Bruno supplied Vaugier’s name and number, suggesting they tell Vaugier only that there had been an anonymous tip-off of a sighting of the dead woman. “It looks like this guy’s main concern is to stay below the radar of the tax people,” he added. “There’s no sign of any Internet connection here, but there’s a good cell-phone signal. You might want to get the phone records from the local tower.”

  By the time J-J and his forensics team arrived, Bruno had established from the mairie at Meyrals that the house was not registered as a holiday rental, and no taxe d’habitation had been paid on it. He’d also called Amandine, who confirmed that she had regularly cleaned the place between rentals the previous summer. He’d also found two clear sets of what looked like recent tire tracks on a patch of bare ground beside a nearby pigeon tower.

  J-J arrived in convoy, his own car followed by the forensics van, which was in turn followed by a gendarmerie van from which a worried-looking Vaugier descended. The rear of the parade was brought up by a private car that contained the mayor of Meyrals and his town’s treasurer.

  Once the forensics crew had booted up and put on their “snowman” paper overalls, J-J took Vaugier and Bruno aside.

  “Don’t bother lying, you’re in enough trouble already,” he told Vaugier. “Who’s been renting this place most recently?”

  “A woman, middle-aged, sounded like a Parisian,” Vaugier replied at once. “She answered the ad I have on Le Bon Coin, the website. I met her here at the gîte just over a week ago. She rented it for two weeks and paid cash, five hundred euros in fifties. She was driving a silver Peugeot. I took the number, just a precaution.”

  He took a notebook from his pocket and read out the number, adding that the département number was six-zero. That meant the Oise, but to Bruno and J-J that meant almost certainly the car had been rented, since the Oise was the cheapest département for registration, and most of the rental companies had a base there. J-J called over one of his detectives, handed him the registration number and asked him to track it down.

  “Not a bad start, but you’re lying about
the money,” said J-J, turning back to Vaugier. “This is a four-bedroom place, even out of season you wouldn’t let this out for two-fifty a week, and you look to me like the kind of suspicious little bastard who’d want some security deposit against damages. So let’s start again, shall we?”

  “She gave me five hundred for the rental and then a deposit of five hundred, to be returned if she left early.”

  “Did she come here alone?”

  “Yes, alone in the silver Peugeot.”

  “And you never dropped by to see how she was doing?”

  Vaugier shook his head. “Never.”

  “Did she give you a name?”

  “Marie Dubois. That’s how she signed the rental agreement.”

  J-J snorted and Bruno could not repress a smile. That was so much the kind of common name an adulterous couple might use that it had become a cliché of TV comedies.

  “It’s not funny,” Vaugier protested. “She even showed me an ID card with that name on it, and her photo.”

  Vaugier handed J-J an envelope containing a single-page rental contract with an indecipherable signature at the bottom, the name hand-printed below in neat capital letters, along with an address on avenue Leclerc in Paris, the Montparnasse district. Bruno took note of the address and called the security number for France-Télécom. He was not surprised to learn that the address did not exist.

  “Chef,” called out the detective who had been checking the rental cars. “It’s a Europcar, a five-seater Peugeot Traveller rented at Gare de l’Est in Paris by a woman with the name of Marie Dubois. They took a photocopy of her license and ID card. She paid with a BNP Paribas credit card in the same name. I’ve got the account number, and I’ll check it out. The ID card was also issued in Paris, so I’ll check on that, too.”

  J-J and Bruno exchanged glances. Forgeries of ID cards and driving licenses were not difficult to obtain but indicated some familiarity with the criminal underworld or a connection to serious intelligence networks. Establishing a fake bank account and credit card was more difficult in these days of routine identity checks against money laundering.

  “Did you see this woman again after that one time when she paid you?” J-J asked Vaugier.

  “No, never.”

  “Did you ever hear from her, by phone or e-mail or note?”

  “Again no, I did not have contact with her by any method. The only time I heard from her was when she called about the ad on the website and then when she paid me.” He pulled out his phone and scrolled back through a week or so of calls to a number he read out. It began with 06, a cell phone.

  Bruno called France-Télécom security again, gave the new phone number and the reply came quickly. It was a pay-as-you-go phone bought at a store at the Gare de l’Est in Paris along with a prepaid phone card for forty euros. Because of the new regulations requiring all such phones to be registered, Bruno learned it was one of two such phones that had been bought by one Marie Dubois, and a photocopy of her ID card was on file.

  “Did you ever see anyone else here?” J-J went on. “Maybe you just drove past it once or twice, just to keep an eye on the place?”

  “No, I never came by,” Vaugier insisted.

  “So you were not at all concerned about your property?”

  “It’s not my property. It belongs to my wife.”

  “Did she come by, just checking that all was well?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “Right,” said J-J. “You stay here and have a nice friendly chat with the mayor and the treasurer about your tax status until my forensic experts have checked the buildings, and then we’ll walk you around and you can tell me if anything is missing or out of place. Then we’ll take you to my headquarters in Périgueux where you can look through a lot of photographs of suspected terrorists.”

  “Terrorists?” Vaugier’s voice went so high it was almost a shriek.

  “Didn’t I tell you?” J-J asked. “It must have slipped my mind. We’re holding you under the emergency regulations on suspicion of aiding terrorists. You must be aware of your duty to register tenants of your property at the mairie. You’ll have some explaining to do about your taxes, and since this property is in your wife’s name, we’ll have to bring her in as well. What’s her name and where do I find her?”

  “Marie-France. At her clinic in Périgueux, she’s a psychologist, uses her maiden name, Duteiller.”

  J-J’s eyebrows rose, and Bruno’s head snapped around as he heard the name. Marie-France Duteiller was the psychologist behind the allegations of pedophilia at the Mussidan church orphanage and the charge that J-J was dragging his feet in the inquiry.

  “So she’s your wife?” J-J said, a slow smile spreading over his face. “That’s interesting. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting her in another context.”

  Chapter 15

  Vaugier had been driven away with J-J, and Bruno was just apologizing to Amélie for abandoning her, when his phone rang. The special green light was glowing, which meant that it was someone on the brigadier’s secure circuit.

  “Bruno,” came the familiar voice. “You seem to attract this sort of trouble.”

  “Yes, sir,” Bruno replied, the safe and noncommittal reply that all soldiers learn within weeks of joining an army.

  “Do you know the difference between Mossad and Shin Bet?”

  “No, sir.” That was not wholly accurate. He knew that Mossad was Israel’s international intelligence service and Shin Bet dealt with domestic security, but that was all he recalled, so a confession of ignorance seemed in order.

  “We’ve got them both on our necks thanks to your château-climbing woman. Which means I have our interior ministry and our foreign ministry and the Elysée all pressing me for information. Any developments?”

  Bruno explained about Leah Wolinsky being seen at the gîte, the van hired at the station in Paris, the phones and the false ID and driver’s license. J-J’s forensics team was still at work, trying to work out exactly how many people had been staying at the gîte.

  “I’ve faxed the usual letter to your mayor, so you’ll be coming under my orders again, Bruno. What are your plans?”

  “I’m going to start by searching the nearest garbage depository. The bins here are empty, so they must have dumped the contents. Then I was going to visit the Laundromats in the area to see if I can find who did the wash of all the bedding.”

  “Good man. Let me know if you need more manpower, and I’ll get some gendarmes assigned to you.”

  “If they could handle the garbage, sir, I’ll do the Laundromats. They may need to liaise with J-J’s forensics team.”

  “Very well. I’ll take care of that. Do you think this woman’s associates are still in your area?”

  “Hard to say, sir,” Bruno replied. He was thinking that forged ID papers seemed extreme for simply daubing some graffiti on a château wall. “I think it would be safer to assume that whatever mission they came here to carry out might not yet be complete. The most obvious security concern will be the opening of Lascaux IV, but that’s not expected until much later in the year.”

  “Right. It could have been a reconnaissance mission, but then why draw attention to themselves with this graffiti? When you can, draw me a timeline for this woman, when she first booked this gîte, when she hired the car, when she died and so on—whatever else you can scrape up. The Israelis have yet to tell me much about her. We don’t even know when she left their country or who she was traveling with. There are how many bedrooms at this gîte?”

  “Four, sir, all double bedrooms, but three of the beds only had one pillowcase, which suggests one couple and three singles. The car she hired was a five-seater, and J-J already has it on the priority watch list. Forensics should be able to tell us more, but so far we have no idea who the others might be other than the name of her Palestinian boyfriend, Husayni. Did you know she was pregnant?”

  “Yes, J-J made sure I was aware of that detail, something that the Israelis did not kn
ow, so we were able to surprise them. That name Husayni could be useful. Anything else about her or her companions you can find out, let me know right away.”

  The brigadier hung up in his usual brusque way, and Amélie looked up from the cell phone to which she seemed umbilically attached.

  “I’m going to need your printer again,” she said. “I’ve found more material about this Wolinsky woman, stuff she wrote about the Palestinian issue but mainly her historical work. She got her master’s at Nice in international studies and a doctorate from the Sorbonne on Islamic settlements in eighth-century France. I’ve downloaded a copy. She was fluent in Arabic.”

  “So she was a historian?”

  “She wanted to be, but she had trouble getting a job in Israel. My friend from the Geneva peace conference said she was very bitter about it, claimed she was blacklisted because of her politics and could only make a living by working as an archaeologist. And Jenny, the American friend of Leah, has promised to send me some article Leah was writing.”

  Bruno dropped Amélie at the mairie and told the mayor’s secretary that she would be using his office printer, and then began telephoning the region’s Laundromats, asking about people bringing in a large number of towels and bedding on Monday. After calling the ones listed in the phone directory in Les Eyzies, Le Bugue and Sarlat, he found a place in St. Cyprien where the attendant recalled that a middle-aged Arab speaking what he called “educated French” had taken over four big washing machines on Monday morning. A second man, also looking to be Arab, had helped him carry in the load. And yes, came the answer to Bruno’s query, the Laundromat was open late so they’d had a security camera installed.

  He drove there at once with Amélie, calling J-J on the way, picked up the security tape and drove it directly to Périgueux. Within the hour, recognizable images of both men had been copied, digitalized and sent on to the brigadier, who in turn forwarded them to the Israelis. But first, the brigadier’s team began running the images, along with Leah Wolinsky’s photo, through the facial recognition program in the surveillance tapes that had been collected from the Gare de l’Est. Since the first terrorist attacks in Paris, there had been a crash program to install digitalized surveillance cameras in public buildings, sensitive areas and transport hubs around France.