Blood Counts

by Martin O'Brien

  ‘Murder weapon?’ asked Jacquot.

  Brunet shook his head.

  Jacquot looked past him, at Valbois.

  ‘Did any of your guests hear a shot?’

  ‘No . . . nothing. Just the scream,’ replied Valbois.

  ‘The bathroom?’

  ‘Through there, Monsieur,’ he replied, pointing to a door in the corner of the room, half hidden behind a fine Coromandel screen. Jacquot stepped past it and leant into the bathroom. White marble tiling, double vanity, a pair of mirrors framed with tiny lightbulbs, like an actor’s dressing-room mirror. Towels on the floor, a puddle of water by the shower, toiletries on the vanity. And beneath the vanity more tiling to conceal the plumbing, just a small hatch for access.

  Could they have showered before making love? wondered Jacquot. It seemed unlikely – the opened bottle of champagne, the clothes cast off on the floor. Or had Gilbert gone there afterwards, as his new wife slept?

  Pushing himself off the door frame Jacquot turned and crossed the room, Brunet getting to his feet, Valbois standing aside. Outside the room, Jacquot pointed down the corridor.

  ‘What’s down there?’

  ‘Just a linen room, Chief Inspector. Each floor has one.’

  Jacquot strolled down to it, glancing out of the corridor windows as he passed. A small sign read ‘Privé’. He tried the handle, the door opened and a warm smell of freshly laundered linen coiled snugly out of the darkness.

  ‘There’s a light on the left,’ said Valbois. ‘On a string. Just pull it.’

  Jacquot did as instructed and the room lit up, revealing floor-to-ceiling duckboard shelving laden with towels and sheets and pillowcases and quilt covers, and all the paraphernalia of housekeeping: boxes of soap, shampoos, tissue paper, loo roll. He stepped in, made his way between the shelves until he reached a small open space with an ironing board leaning against a wall. The Gilberts’ bathroom wall. And there, beside the legs of the ironing board, was another small hatch. He moved the ironing board aside, squatted down, ran a finger across the rough wooden architraving fitted around the access panel. He looked closer. A tiny snag of blue, caught on its splintery edge.

  Jacquot got to his feet, gave a last look round the room, came out into the corridor, pulled the light switch and closed the door behind him.

  ‘So,’ he said, smiling at Valbois and Brunet. ‘Let’s have a word with Monsieur Gilbert.’

  4

  NOËL GILBERT WAS SITTING IN a buttoned leather chair in front of a stone fireplace, its blackened basket filled with pine cones. He wore a towelling dressing gown and was hunched forward, elbows on knees, forehead resting in his hands. He gave no indication that he had heard Jacquot and Brunet come in, or Valbois and the gendarme being dismissed, or the door closing, or Jacquot taking a seat in the armchair opposite him.

  ‘Noël, it’s Daniel. Daniel Jacquot. We met . . . yesterday. From Marseilles.’

  There was no response. Jacquot hadn’t really expected any. Instead he leant back in the chair and crossed his legs. He was in no hurry. His colleague, Brunet, might believe that Gilbert had killed his wife, for want of some other more convincing explanation, but Jacquot was now even more certain that he hadn’t. The set of his shoulders, the trapped collar of his dressing gown, the snot-filled, muffled breaths. He might not yet know why the man’s wife had been killed, or who had killed her, but Jacquot knew that it wasn’t Gilbert who had held the gun to her eye and pulled the trigger.

  Because this was a professional hit.

  Almost an execution.

  With a silencer, had to be. Otherwise there was no way Gilbert could have stayed asleep.

  But why this young, bouncy, just-wed country maid?

  A jealous lover? Not with a silencer.

  So was it, perhaps, mistaken identity?

  Had the killer been after a different target and gone to the wrong room?

  Who else was staying at Le Mas Bleu? The other guests. Six of them, Valbois had confirmed.

  Someone famous? Maybe political? Some underworld, gangland payback?

  Their names, addresses, contact numbers . . . he’d have Brunet . . .

  ‘I didn’t do it.’ When Gilbert finally spoke it was in a thick, phlegmy rasp, muffled by his hands.

  Jacquot waited a beat, noting the open right sleeve of his dressing gown and a long smear of browning blood.

  ‘I know that,’ he replied, softly.

  Sitting to one side, on the edge of a pretty chintz-covered day bed, Brunet frowned.

  ‘You want a drink? A cigarette?’

  Gilbert raised his head, cheeks and forehead creased and red where his fingers and the balls of his hands had been pressed against them. The red fading to an ivory white.

  ‘I want my wife back, is what I want.’ His voice was thick, uncertain. He cleared his throat. ‘I want this not to be real. I want to wake up in a minute and for everything to be . . .’

  He gave Jacquot a pitiful look, then glanced at Brunet.

  ‘But a cigarette . . . That would be good. I gave up, for Izzy.’

  Jacquot reached into his pocket, pulled out a crumpled pack of Gitanes and lit two, passing one to Gilbert.

  ‘No filter. I’m sorry.’

  Gilbert tipped back his head and inhaled deeply, then sank forward, elbows on knees again, cigarette dangling from his fingers, head lowered. He blew out the smoke in a long grey stream down between his towel-clad knees.

  ‘It’s a mistake,’ he said, looking up. ‘Who would do this? Why?’

  ‘And you didn’t hear a thing?’

  Gilbert shook his head and his shoulders tensed, as though the sudden movement hurt. He closed his eyes, red and raw and wet, tightly, as though to relieve some unseen pressure. Then, with the hand that was holding the cigarette, he pressed hard against his forehead.

  ‘You got a headache?’ asked Jacquot, leaning forward, breathing in through his nose as though searching for some elusive scent.

  ‘A blinder.’

  ‘You drink much yesterday? Last night? The champagne . . .’

  ‘Enough, but not to feel like this.’

  Jacquot considered this.

  ‘Do you remember anything?’

  ‘Nothing. We left the party around eleven, got here maybe twenty minutes later. Saw the manager, and went straight up to our room. Drank the champagne . . . partied a bit . . . you know . . .’ Gilbert took a breath, tried to blink away tears, tapped ash amongst the pine cones. Jacquot remembered the clothes on the sofa and floor. ‘And now this,’ Gilbert continued. ‘I just . . . I can’t . . .’ He pursed his lips, looked helpless, lost.

  And then something seemed to dawn on him, and his shoulders slumped.

  ‘Do they know? Her parents? I didn’t call . . . What’s the time?’

  ‘No one knew who to call. Who to get in touch with. All they had were the reservation details: your name, credit card and home phone number.’

  ‘What can I say? How do I tell them?’ There was a pleading in his voice, in his eyes. What to do? How to do it?

  ‘We can do that – if you want? It may be better that way.’

  There was a knock at the door.

  It was Valbois.

  ‘The doctor has arrived,’ he said in a whisper, as though not wishing to raise his voice, disturb anyone. ‘Can he see . . . ?’ Valbois caught Gilbert’s eye. ‘Is it okay for him . . . ?’

  ‘Tell him to go ahead,’ replied Jacquot. ‘He knows the score. I’ll be there in a minute.’

  The door closed. There was the sound of muted conversation in the hallway. Then silence. Jacquot let it stretch out.

  ‘It will hurt for a long time,’ he said at last, tossing his cigarette beneath the basket of cones. ‘I cannot pretend to you it will be any other way. You know that, too, Noël. But you will survive. You will get through this.’

  He got to his feet and reached out a hand, laid it on Gilbert’s shoulder. There was a muffled sob and a nod of the head, pink scalp showing
through the black brush-cut.

  And on that scalp, caught in the bristly hair, something that shouldn’t have been there. Like a small twisted tack, thin, knotted.

  ‘Attend,’ said Jacquot, reaching for it, plucking it from the side of Gilbert’s head. The boy didn’t move.

  Jacquot lifted what he’d found to the light and examined it.

  A tiny wizened sprig of vine.

  5

  ‘HE DID IT. THERE’S NO other possible, credible explanation.’

  Jacquot winced as though he’d bitten down on an olive pit.

  ‘Non, non, non,’ he said, shaking his head.

  He and Brunet were sitting at a table in Le Mas Bleu’s empty dining room: the same burnished wood floors, the same kelims, the same bare stone walls, a grand stone mantle over a hearth spiky with last year’s lavender. There were seven other tables ranged around the room, each laid with golden Provençal print cloths, the chairs tall ladderbacks with rushwork seats. String-tied napkins lay at each place like scrolled messages from some ancient kingdom, the china was a weighty faience, and in the centre of each table was a blue glass bowl scattered with assorted nuts and kernels and dried poppy-seed heads. Everything exactly so. The way Valbois liked to take his breakfast, Jacquot supposed. But it was all a little too perfect, too . . . restricting for him. The only things that made him feel at home were the scents of freshly baked bread and percolating coffee, both of which had been served to them by Valbois himself. It was a little after six and a low Sunday sunlight slanted across their table. Outside, a wide, stone-flagged terrace led down to a lawn edged with gravel paths and a border of flaking eucalyptus and lime. Beyond the trees, the slopes of the Luberon lay pooled with dawn shadows.

  ‘The silencer. The gun. He could have got hold of both, no trouble.’ Brunet was playing with the string that had secured his napkin, twisting it around his thumb, tugging on it.

  ‘So where are they now?’ asked Jacquot. ‘You searched the room.’

  ‘He could have popped her, left the room, gone to the garden, buried it somewhere. Maybe to pick up later. He’s a cop. He’ll know what we’ll do. He’ll make sure we don’t find it.’

  ‘And why would he kill a woman he’s only just married?’

  Jacquot broke off some petit pain, smeared it with butter and cherry preserve and popped it in his mouth. It was still warm. Just delicious. But it cost a small fortune. He’d seen the printed menu card. Eighty francs for breakfast! Bread and conserves, juice and coffee. For eighty francs in town, he’d have enough for a couple of Auzet’s plum croissants, his favourite oeufs brouillés at Le Sept, and a large café-Calva at Centenaire to kick-start his day. And change.

  ‘Maybe there’s a policy,’ Brunet was saying. ‘Insurance? Some kind of pay-out we don’t yet know about. Or maybe, you know, she told him something he didn’t want to hear. Other lovers. Suddenly she wasn’t what he thought she was. Or maybe there was a quarrel. Maybe he couldn’t get it up and she laughed . . . took the piss . . . and he loses the plot . . .’

  Jacquot smiled. Exactly what he’d imagined Brunet would come up with.

  ‘And he comes prepared? With a gun and silencer? On his wedding night? Just in case . . .’

  ‘Like I say, he wouldn’t have had any trouble . . .’

  ‘And then he drugs himself?’

  Brunet frowned.

  ‘Drugs himself? There’s drugs now?’

  ‘His headache. The smell on him. On his pillow. The reason he didn’t hear anything. Whoever shot his wife, put him out first.’

  Brunet turned down his mouth, considering this new piece of information.

  ‘Could be,’ he said, at last. ‘Then again, maybe he set it all up. Shoots her, loses the gun, makes it look like someone drugged him . . . I mean, I’m just going through the motions here. See where the crottes land. Like, why didn’t they tap him too? Why leave him?’

  Jacquot grinned, reached for the faience coffee jug, filled their blue-glazed cups.

  ‘Well, we’ll know soon enough. I’ve asked the boys to check that linen room and hatch, and test the pillow, swab Gilbert for corresponding traces, and powder burns too. It’s not easy cleaning yourself up.’ For a brief moment, he recalled the towels on the wet bathroom floor, the used shower, but a second later he dismissed them. They had nothing to do with it – he was sure. ‘In the meantime,’ he said, pushing himself away from the table, ‘there’s a call we need to make. But first . . .’

  They left Le Mas Bleu in two cars, Jacquot leading the way. At the bottom of the drive he turned right rather than left – the direction of the Blanchards’ farm – and headed towards Robion. Behind him, Brunet flashed his lights as though to say ‘wrong way’, but Jacquot just gave a wave through the window and carried on, making a second right a few hundred metres further on, down an old farm track rutted with lumpy stone and dawn-damp earth. Fifty metres in, he braked, left the engine running and started to walk, looking at the track and then peering over a low stone wall at the distant pantiled roof of Le Mas Bleu.

  By the time Brunet caught up with him, Jacquot was pushing the toe of his boot through the grass at the side of the track.

  ‘This is where the killer parked,’ he said, pointing at a parallel set of furrows in the grass, a broken stand of gold irises and a ridge of turned dirt.

  ‘And that,’ he continued, nodding down the line of vines, stretching across two fields in a diagonal line towards a distant line of cypresses, ‘is how he, or she, made their approach.’

  6

  AT A LITTLE AFTER EIGHT o’clock that Sunday morning, with the sun already starting to put out some warmth, Jacquot and Brunet pulled up in front of the Blanchard’s farmhouse. Both men were silent. They knew what was coming. And both men had done this same call enough times to know that it never got any easier.

  ‘Looks deserted,’ said Brunet, coming over to Jacquot’s car and leaning down by the open window. The house rose three floors above them, the top windows shuttered. Their green paint was peeling, the wooden panels warped with age and weather, and one or two slats not quite as they should be – just as the shutters at Le Mas Bleu would once have been. On the left of the house was a barn with closed doors and on the right an open-sided building housing a tractor, assorted farm machinery, some wrapped bales, and two cars – both Renaults, an estate and a four-wheel drive flat-bed. Beyond it, Jacquot could make out the first of the trees in the orchard, lanterns still hanging in the branches.

  ‘They had a late night,’ he replied, pushing open the car door and climbing out. He’d just swung it shut when Monsieur Blanchard appeared from between the barn and farmhouse. Jacquot recognised him from the day before – short, broad-shouldered, big-bellied, with rosy unshaven cheeks and a thick head of grey hair that now stood high and proud and ruffled from his bed. From which, it was clear, he hadn’t long ago risen. He might have been wearing trousers and boots but his flies were open, his bootlaces untied and there was a dressing gown over his singlet. He was carrying a pail filled with eggs and there was straw caught on the sleeves of his gown. When he saw Jacquot and Brunet coming in his direction, he put down the pail, brushed away the straw and tied the cord of his dressing gown.

  ‘Messieurs?’ he called.

  ‘Monsieur Blanchard. It’s me . . . Daniel Jacquot. I was here yesterday, at the wedding, with Claudine?’

  ‘Ah, Madame Eddé. Claudine. Mais bien sûr. Quelle jolie femme. Bouf!’ Blanchard peered at his visitor from under grey wiry eyebrows. Jacquot smelt wine on the man’s breath and the warmth of the chicken house on his robe. ‘And you, Daniel. Of course.’ They shook hands. ‘What a day, heh? Pouf, it will take me a week to recover. Maybe a month. At my age . . .’

  Blanchard’s eyes then turned to Brunet – whom he didn’t recognise and was almost certain hadn’t been at the marriage of his eldest daughter the day before – and he jutted his head forward as though the better to focus on Jacquot’s assistant.

  ‘My colleague, Jean Br
unet,’ said Jacquot.

  ‘Colleague?’ Blanchard frowned.

  ‘I’m afraid we’re here on a police matter.’

  Jacquot could see that not for a second did it strike Blanchard that the ‘police matter’ might be of any significance or concern to him.

  ‘Someone run off the road last night?’ he asked, squaring his shoulders before giving the matter some consideration. ‘There were enough here who might have done. No one hurt, I hope?’ He gave them a big smile, reached down for the pail and picked it up. ‘Come on in. Eggs are fresh and coffee’s on . . .’ He moved past them. ‘So who was it? Who’s made a fool of themselves? Don’t tell me . . . Ricard. Pissed as a stoat he was, and his wife not much better. Never could hold her drink, could Madame Ricard. Stumbled out of here . . . what? Must have been near three when the disco finished.’

  In the kitchen, stone-floored, high-ceilinged and with lace-curtained windows set either side of the back door, Monsieur Blanchard swung the pail of eggs onto the table and went to the range, lifted a bubbling coffee percolator.

  ‘Take a seat, Messieurs. You want some coffee?’ He filled his own mug and waved the pot at them.

  Jacquot and Brunet shook their heads.

  Blanchard came back to the table, pulled out a chair.

  ‘Dieu, what a night! One down and three to go. Daughters . . . I’ll be a poor man when they’re all wed.’

  Jacquot gave a tight smile, as if to agree that that would very likely be the case, and Brunet nodded.

  It was Brunet who got the ball rolling.

  ‘It’s about your daughter that we’re here,’ he began, maybe sensing that Jacquot, as a guest at the previous day’s wedding, might be holding back, not wanting to start. He glanced at his boss before continuing, but Jacquot shook his head. He could do this. He was just waiting for the right moment. When Blanchard’s eyes settled on him, Jacquot knew the moment had come.