The Fleur de Sel Murders_A Brittany Mystery

by Jean-Luc Bannalec

  “Guy Jaffrezic, Juliette Bourgiot.” Dupin recited the names quoted in the article out loud to himself, committing them to memory. “An informative article,” he added.

  “At least we now know for sure that your friend was involved with the salt marshes.”

  “That was a year ago.”

  “And we know who she was in touch with in Gwenn Rann. These two people at least. Perhaps we’ll find a more recent article about the salt marshes.”

  Commissaire Rose turned back to the piles. As devastating as it was and as vague as it all seemed, these were their very first leads.

  * * *

  Commissaire Rose pulled the car door shut with some force. It was a quarter to three. They had stayed in Lilou Breval’s house for an hour, taking a look at the rest of the papers in the study before finishing by walking through all of the rooms again.

  They hadn’t found anything else relevant. Or any more articles about the salt marshes. There seemed to be only one. And as far as they could tell, there were no links to the salt marshes or anything to do with salt in the other articles.

  They hadn’t found any clues to support any theory other than that Lilou Breval was planning to spend the night elsewhere. Yet Dupin was becoming more and more concerned, albeit in a general way. He had tried Lilou’s mobile a few more times, but there was no answer.

  Commissaire Rose had gone into the garden three times and made some calls too. Dupin called Riwal but he didn’t have anything new to say apart from asking whether the commissaire would mind if he drove to a second cousin’s house in Bono and got some sleep there. Dupin didn’t have much interest in sleep during a case. Or even in general. But he couldn’t think what else they could do at this point.

  “We’ve got three hours,” Commissaire Rose said as she groped around on the side of her seat and tilted the chair back a bit. She looked like she was making herself comfortable.

  “Let’s rest a little. Then drive back to the salt marshes. It starts to get brighter around half past six so I want to be there then. I’ll drop you off back at your car and then I’m going to open my investigation.”

  She looked at Dupin in a friendly way; always, or so it seemed to him, with the message: it’s nothing personal. This time—although he tried with all his strength—he couldn’t hold back.

  “I was almost shot dead, I’m personally involved, I can’t just watch from the sidelines, it’s out of the question, I want…” Dupin faltered. “I mean: you know it would be better if I did the interview with Lilou Breval. She trusts me. She’ll tell me everything she knows.”

  “You think she will withhold important information from the police if you’re not present?”

  Dupin didn’t answer. There was quite a long pause, Commissaire Rose calmly fiddling around with her seat lever again. She let the seat back farther.

  “Have you got through to anyone yet? From the salt marshes?” Dupin said in a pointedly friendly way.

  “The head of the cooperative. He’ll be there from seven onward.”

  “Does he have any idea what might have happened?”

  “Not in the slightest, he says.”

  It was almost maddening how willingly Commissaire Rose was giving away information. It made Dupin instinctively suspicious.

  “And the owner of the salt marshes?”

  “Monsieur Daeron.”

  “You know him?”

  “No.”

  “But you’ve already spoken to him?”

  “Yes. He lives in La Roche-Bernard, on the Vilaine. Around twenty-five minutes from the salt marshes. That’s where we got hold of him.”

  “And he didn’t know anything either?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “What about the barrels?”

  “There are no barrels in the salt marshes, according to him. We haven’t been able to get through to the head of the Centre du Sel yet. The day starts early at the salt marshes during the summer months, before the sun even comes up. With the first of the morning light.” She sounded almost poetic for a moment. “I’ll speak to everyone face-to-face on site.”

  Dupin thought there was something smug about the suddenly very detailed information about operations he was no longer allowed to be a part of.

  “Now let’s get some sleep.” She was absolutely serious about this. Dupin hadn’t given it any thought because he had assumed she was joking.

  “You want to sleep here? In the car?”

  “By the time I’d have booked you into a hotel and dropped you off there, it would be four o’clock. This isn’t Paris. So I would have had to pick you up again more or less right away.”

  That may well have been true. But it was still odd.

  “You ought to get some sleep too. There’s absolutely nothing we can do for the next three hours. You’ve been shot. Some sleep will do you good. Have you never spent a night in a car while you’re on duty?”

  With some effort, Dupin bit his tongue.

  There really was nothing they could do for now. And it would be sensible to rest a little to regain some strength. But he was reluctant. Not just because he was a terrible sleeper anyway—even under normal circumstances he lay awake all night sometimes—but now, with all of the pressing thoughts and questions in his head, it would be virtually impossible to sleep. It was a ridiculous notion. Especially with the pains in his shoulder that, despite the painkillers, he noticed again as soon as he wasn’t otherwise occupied. And above all: there was a stranger fifty centimeters away from him.

  Dupin decided to take a walk in the fresh night air. It always helped. To marshal his thoughts. To reflect on what had happened. And to relax properly.

  “I’m going to go for a little walk,” Dupin said very quietly.

  He had just finished speaking when his phone rang. The laborious process of getting it out of his pants pocket took a while. It was Claire. It had occurred to him that she would probably call again. He let it ring. He would call her back very soon. And then he could take his time telling her what had happened.

  He opened the car door and got ready to climb out of the seat. He’d had five stitches and he was starting to feel it now. He would need to take another tablet. Dupin leaned back, waited for a moment, and started again.

  “Watch out for the kangaroo. It’s wild.”

  “What are you—”

  Dupin had distinctly heard the word “kangaroo”—but another powerful, sharp pain intervened and he had to stop speaking. He felt an ache all down his left side to his foot and into each toe. He slid back into the seat. Tried to relax. He just had to be patient for a moment. It would get better soon. He breathed deeply in and out.

  The car door was wide open. The air was still wonderfully mild. A perfect summer night without a hint of the season’s impending end. Despite the moonlight, the Milky Way shone like a bright ribbon across the sky, flickering and pulsating wildly. Dupin had never seen a more beautiful starry sky than here, in the middle of nowhere, on certain summer nights. Above the vast Atlantic. A billion stars were visible to the naked eye, endless galaxies. It was like looking into the universe’s core. Dupin realized his mind was wandering. It had been a stressful evening. Ludicrous. He would rest now for a minute or two and then take a walk through the night air. He would call Claire, perhaps Riwal again too, to discuss how to proceed tomorrow, he had forgotten earlier, he needed to … He would keep thinking it through now. He …

  Dupin had fallen asleep.

  It had taken less than two minutes.

  The Second Day

  “Another espresso, please. And a pain au chocolat.”

  Dupin was hungry, of course, and had already eaten two croissants, so—by his reckoning—he had laid a good, neutral base in his sensitive stomach so that it could handle some chocolate along with the third coffee (very wisely he had never asked his GP, Docteur Garreg, whether these were valid theories: the idea of croissants as a base). He placed his mobile on the table, having tried Lilou over and over again. No answer.


  The first ray of morning light fell on Dupin’s face, gentle and soft, but still palpable. He was sitting—in his white, extremely baggy hospital T-shirt, unshaven, dirty, rumpled—on the wooden terrace of the Le Grand Large at the lovely quay in Le Croisic with its neat houses of varying heights. Near the Place Donatien Lepré, in the very place he had wanted to eat his sole the evening before. Sole was among the specialties of the superb fishermen from Le Croisic, along with langoustines, prawns, scallops, delicious sea bass, and squid.

  It was almost low tide, and the motorboats were lying languorously in the last of the dark green algae-infested water in the old dock made of heavy, moss-covered stone; the sailboats stood tall, towering up on their centerboards like unshakable monuments of the sea. It was all directly in front of Dupin, but four or five meters lower down, so he could mainly see a swarm of masts and steel cables. At high tide—and Dupin was very fond of this too—the boats bobbed on the same level as the pedestrians and café customers. The turquoise sea of the lagoon beyond the dock with its white sandbanks that looked like whales’ backs was smooth as glass, still sleepy from the night before. The sky was high and vast, a radiant blue. A crystal blue today. Dupin had always planned to buy a book about shades of blue—Bretons distinguished between dozens of different kinds. It hadn’t cooled much since yesterday, but the unique Atlantic briskness that Dupin loved so much was still there. And it tasted just like it did in Concarneau: raw, pungent. Across the lagoons you could see the lush green floodplains inland as clear as day, and a good way into the salt marshes. Somewhere out there, someone had shot at him yesterday. This morning, in this marvelous place, it almost seemed like a strange, dark dream.

  He had been feeling a little better in the last few minutes. The caffeine. Although his shoulder still hurt. And he had just taken another painkiller. After a brief argument, Commissaire Rose had dropped him off here in Le Croisic at his request. She wanted to drop him off at his car. And nowhere else. She thought Riwal should have met Dupin there and driven him straight back to Concarneau. She was oblivious to the fact that Dupin had asked his other inspector, Kadeg, to come here too. Dupin had made a medical argument in the end: he said his blood sugar levels and blood pressure were critical. That he urgently needed to fortify himself. And that it would take Riwal awhile to get there anyway. He was genuinely surprised when she gave in, but she insisted on listening in while Dupin called his inspector to duly give him the instructions to pick him up in Le Croisic and drive him to his car.

  Of course Dupin would not just drive back to Concarneau now and hand over his case to Commissaire Rose. That was out of the question. But yesterday evening he simply couldn’t think how to get himself included in the investigation. And it was starting to get critical. Even this morning, on the journey from the gulf back to the Guérande—her driving style the same as yesterday, albeit without the flashing lights, and a little more out of control, in Dupin’s opinion—the brainwave still hadn’t come to him.

  Stupidly, he had ended up falling asleep in the car outside Lilou Breval’s house during the night, without meaning to. He was annoyed and it was vaguely embarrassing, all the more so because he had slept deeply and soundly in a way that was rare in his own bed, for two and a half hours straight. Having a walk around would have been the perfect strategy; an idea might have occurred to him. He really ought to have called Claire. Today was her birthday. Last night had been terrible. He would do it right now. Without caffeine, he hadn’t felt capable of recounting the complex events to her. On the drive, with Commissaire Rose in the car, it would definitely not have been possible.

  Dupin dialed her number and pressed the phone to his ear. It rang for a long time before she answered.

  “Happy birthday, Claire. I … Claire, I’m sorry. I wanted to call you yesterday, I…”

  “But you’re coming tonight, aren’t you?” she asked affectionately. He was relieved, but also slightly panicked. It was a complicated question. The best thing to do would be to tell her exactly what had happened the night before. From start to finish.

  “When you called yesterday, I was at a salt pond—checking up on something. On the Guérande peninsula. Where the fleur de sel comes from”—she knew it of course—“the real stuff, from Brittany. It was a very vague tip-off. From a journalist I know. Then out of nowhere, somebody”—even as a straightforward report this was hard to say—“somebody shot at me, but I’m okay, it was just a graze wound.” Dupin waited to see if Claire would say something, but there was silence on the other end of the line. He would just finish his story quickly.

  “I was treated in a hospital. A very good doctor. You would have thought so too. Then I drove with a commissaire—a madame commissaire—to the journalist’s house. We need all of the information we can get; we have no idea what was going on in the salt marshes. But the journalist wasn’t there. And I can’t get through to her on the phone. I’m in Le Croisic now. In a café.”

  There was a series of omissions in his story.

  “Was it really just a graze wound? Did it bleed a lot?”

  Luckily Claire sounded sympathetic.

  “No. Not bad at all. On my left shoulder. I can’t even feel it anymore,” Dupin lied.

  “And you’re sitting in a café right now?”

  “I needed caffeine—you know it’s medicinal for me. And the doctor said I should eat something. And drink water.” He was looking round for the waiter. He’d order the water straightaway. “I haven’t eaten anything since lunch yesterday, apart from salted caramels. I couldn’t call you back earlier. I’ve only just got here. And in the car—I mean, I don’t have my car right now, it’s at the garage. It wasn’t my car.”

  “And where did you sleep?”

  This conversation was veering in a tricky direction. Even though there wasn’t anything awkward to tell from his night, sometimes something sounded awkward purely because you said it all in one go. Even more so if you deliberately tried to make sure it didn’t sound awkward.

  “I only slept briefly.”

  “Where?”

  “In the car. In front of the journalist’s house. We didn’t have time to find a hotel.”

  “Shouldn’t you take it easy? And drive home? I mean, this isn’t even your case. In the Guérande. You can go home, can’t you? And come here this evening?”

  “I…” Dupin ultimately did not know how to continue. “No, it’s not my case, and the plan is for me to drive to Concarneau soon.”

  “And where did this commissaire sleep? Who is she?”

  This was not good either.

  “I— Also in the car. Also not for long.”

  This was all total nonsense. This wasn’t working.

  “I want to know what happened here, Claire. Who shot at me and why. I want to catch the person, whoever it is. Do you understand? I don’t want to leave it to anyone else. I want to investigate it myself.”

  There was a long pause.

  “I understand, Georges. Yes.” She sounded genuine, but crestfallen too, as she so often had before. “I need to go into the OR now. I’ll call you again later. Speak to you soon.”

  “Speak to you soon.”

  Claire hung up. Dupin leaned back. He was crestfallen himself now.

  Suddenly there was some loud beeping. Two beeps. Dupin saw two police cars coming down the long quay. Kadeg was in the first one, of course, making an ostentatious, unnecessary gesture with his hand to show that he had seen Dupin, and Riwal was in the second one. This was a rare feeling: Dupin was glad to see them both. Even the baby-faced, overeager Inspector Kadeg, whom he couldn’t stand and who had done barely anything but irritate him since their first day together.

  With great self-importance, Kadeg parked the official police car as close to Dupin’s chair as possible, while Riwal parked his car a few meters away. Other cars would only just get by. No surprise that it was Kadeg who was standing at the table first. With a surly expression on his face, he held out a large Armor Luxe bag,
the sight of which, truth be told, cheered Dupin up just as much as seeing his two inspectors. He’d get changed quickly. At some point, Dupin had discovered these polo shirts by the Breton brand, renowned worldwide for its striped sweaters, though luckily most of their collections didn’t have stripes. Twice a year, he drove to the big shop in Quimper and stocked up on new shirts: his usual uniform on duty and off. He had been there only on Monday and the bag had still been in his office.