Merle: A French murder mystery (A Jacques Forêt Mystery Book 2)

by Angela Wren

  “We have a positive ID on the body from the north pasture above Messandrierre,” said Pelletier as Jacques unbuttoned his coat and sat down.

  “I don’t think I need to ask, but I will. Who is it?”

  “Juan de Silva. I’ll need any information that you have, Jacques, before I go and question Pamier and the others.”

  Jacques nodded. “And do we have a detailed pathologist’s report?”

  “It was a12 bore shotgun wound, and it killed him outright.”

  “There’s nothing more I can add to what I told you on Friday. Gendarme Clergue has all the papers, and if you need any help let me know.”

  “Will your plans for tomorrow morning enable you to be in the village at ten so that we can question Gaston, Pamier and Rouselle together?”

  “Yes, I’ll be there.”

  “And as you suggested, we’ll start with Gaston.”

  ***

  The shuttle from Paris landed at Le Puy-en-Velay on time. Richard Delacroix cleared the airport, collected his hire car and took the RN88 to Messandrierre, arriving about an hour later. He parked in front of the bar and walked in.

  “I’m looking for somewhere to stay,” he said to the woman who was setting tables.

  “I’m sorry, we don’t have rooms. But there are some hunting lodges that you can rent. How long are you intending to stay?” Marianne placed the final piece of cutlery on the table and gave the stranger her full attention.

  Richard flashed her his smile. “I’m not sure at the moment. The name’s Richard Delacroix, but everyone calls me Ricky,” he said proffering his hand. “I’m here for my uncle’s funeral on Wednesday. I just need a place for a couple of days until I can get access to the house.”

  Marianne shook his hand briefly and took a step back. “I’m sorry for your loss, Monsieur Delacroix. If you will give me a moment, I’ll check which of the chalets is free.”

  Ricky moved over to the bar and took in the whole room. “Just as I thought, some backwater of a place half way up a mountain.” He turned and scanned the shelves of spirits. “Not even a decent bourbon to drink.”

  Marianne returned with a key fob and the receipt book. “Chalet number six is available until ten on Friday morning. We have a hunting party who are arriving that afternoon and all of the chalets are booked. I’m afraid that you will have to make other arrangements for Friday evening if you are still here.”

  “No problem. I fully expect to have access to my uncle’s property by then. Which one is it?” He looked out of the windows and could only see the rise of ground and steps leading up to the camping area.

  “You can’t see it from here. Just take the road out of the car park on your right and follow it round. The first three chalets on your left are privately owned. Chalet six is on the right and between the camping area and the fork in the road. If you continue past it and take the right fork, you will see a dead oak tree on your left and your uncle’s farm is immediately after that on your right.”

  “Right. I’ve got that.”

  Marianne took his details for her records and completed the receipt for the payment and handed over the key.

  Ricky left and once back in his car followed the road as instructed. He didn’t stop at the chalet but went straight on to find the farmhouse. He pulled up on the top road and got out and looked around. “My God, this place is desolate!” He took a few strides towards his new inheritance. The slippery mud stopped him and he looked with disdain at his soiled shoes. “Another time, I think.” He inspected the property from where he was. “That looks no better than a wood shack! And I’m probably wasting my time.” He returned to his car.

  ***

  “Thanks, Gaston,” Jacques put the newspaper to one side and picked up his beer. “The body you found has been positively identified.” He replaced his glass on the white paper coaster and waited in vain for Gaston’s reaction. “Aren’t you curious to know who it is?” Jacques turned his glass, quarter turn by quarter turn expecting Gaston to respond. “You don’t seem surprised or even interested, Gaston. Is that because you already know who it is?”

  Gaston threw his cloth in the sink. “Alright, yes, I know who it is.”

  Jacques got up and, picking up the bunch of keys that Gaston had left on the bar, he went to the main door and locked it. “We need to talk. Magistrate Pelletier is coming here tomorrow morning and he will want answers, Gaston, so you’d better be prepared.”

  “I haven’t done anything illegal, Jacques.”

  “Hiding a body is illegal, Gaston, last time I checked!” He slammed the keys on the bar.

  Gaston smoothed his moustache, and then took out a cigarette and lit it. “It was the day I invited you to join the hunting party.”

  “That was two years-ago. November, and I’d not been here very long.”

  “And you were recovering from the gunshot wound you acquired in Paris.”

  Jacques grabbed his left shoulder and articulated the joint. “I wasn’t in a very good frame of mind then.”

  “Too right!” Gaston flicked the ash from his cigarette into a small dish he kept behind the bar for when he had the place to himself. “You were a mess, and as I remember it at the first volley of shots you hit the ground, rolled and hit a boulder with your left shoulder. You were in a lot of pain. It was me who drove you to the hospital in Mende and brought you back here late that afternoon.”

  Jacques swallowed back the two years of feelings and emotions that he had consciously kept penned in the furthest reaches of his mind. He perched on the edge of a table to steady himself.

  “You shouldn’t have been left alone, but you insisted that I just help you into the house and then you sent me away.” Gaston stubbed out his cigarette. “And when I came to check on you the next day you were still unconscious from the half bottle of whisky that you’d drunk and the painkillers you’d taken. You were a mess, man. You could have killed yourself!”

  Jacques hadn’t the energy to respond.

  “After I’d dropped you off at your place on the day of the shoot, I saw Pamier running down the hill as I was driving away from the gendarmerie. He flagged me down and said he needed some help but he didn’t say what. He got in the car, and it was only when we got back to the shoot that I saw what had happened. It was Pamier’s idea to bury the body and say nothing. I tried to convince him to involve you but he wouldn’t listen, and when I thought about the pain that you were in from the fall, I wasn’t sure you could’ve handled it anyway. So I tried to persuade Pamier to leave the body where they found it until the following day, because I thought you might be able to handle the situation better. But, as it turned out, you were even less capable the next day.”

  Jacques took a deep breath. “Just be honest with Pelletier tomorrow, and he doesn’t need to know the detail about me that day or the next.”

  ***

  In the narrow streets of the oldest part of Mende, Luciole moved between the midnight shadows. From Boulevard de Soubeyran he took the side street and went to the shop that he’d seen Beth looking over. He looked through the windows. Good. Still empty.

  He made his way to the back of the property. It’s left here and then left again into the courtyard. Wait! Someone might be watching… Nothing. No lights. No sound. He stood in the small courtyard and looked around. Narrow streets are perfect. I like narrow streets. Tall buildings. I can change them. I can destroy them.

  He identified the building he wanted and silently moved over towards it. Four stories, linked attics probably. Old building with lots of old wood. He stood back and looked at the open shutters on the single ground floor window. Peeling paint… These shutters haven’t been used for years. He smiled as he thought about how he was going to make it burn.

  Back on the main street, he pulled out his phone and sent a text.

  Jobs a piece of piss Need box of crisps Need more money Luciole

  tuesday, october 27th, 1.37am

  The strangled wail as Jacques woke up from his d
ream terrified Beth. Her heart was pounding against her chest wall as she clutched at the duvet and sat bolt upright.

  “Jacques, it’s alright.” She reached out to him. His skin was clammy and his breathing irregular and laboured. He sat forward, his arms resting on his raised knees.

  “It’s alright,” she repeated as she stroked her hand down his arm.

  He flinched at her touch. “I just need a few moments… Go back to sleep.”

  “No, Jacques, you need to talk about this. You need to tell me what this is all about and if I can help, I will.”

  He leaned back against the headboard and closed his eyes for a moment and let his breathing return to normal. “It’s not good, Beth. These dreams are always about the last case I worked on in Paris, and what happened yesterday with Gaston in the bar has just brought it all to the front of my mind. I thought I was able to handle it… Maybe you’re right.”

  Beth pulled the duvet around them both. “I’m listening.”

  “It was a case involving drugs. We were trying to get the supplier but he kept slipping through our fingers. He always seemed to be one step ahead. I was working undercover with another officer, you don’t need to know who he was, but his assumed name was Khalid. He was of Moroccan descent and he could fit in well with the people we were investigating. It was Khalid who vouched for me with the drugs pushers when I joined the investigation team.”

  He pinched the bridge of his nose. “It was our last chance to get the supplier. He’d come to Paris and he’d got shipments arriving from different locations into the city in a single 24-hour period. We knew exactly where to be and when, but about an hour before we were due to hit the warehouse, Khalid said the venue had changed. He said we had go to a building in Porte de la Villette in the 19th. We got there with about five minutes in which to get in place in readiness for the swoop on the much smaller building. We got the command to go in. Khalid went ahead and I followed with other officers entering from the back. The supplier and his men came out firing. I was assigned to take down the supplier. In the mêlée, he got past me. Khalid shouted and indicated the direction he wanted me to take and I followed the supplier out onto the street. I tackled him face down onto the pavement and when I turned him over to check it was the right man, I hesitated.”

  “Why?”

  “Khalid had shouted something inside the warehouse and I hesitated because I realised that he’d used the wrong code word. He’d warned the supplier! Then the shot rang out and I hit the cobbles.”

  Jacques rolled his left shoulder over and a wave of pain moved through him. “That split second of thought is one of my worst mistakes and I still haven’t forgiven myself for my stupidity.”

  “You have to let it go, Jacques.”

  “I don’t know if I can. We got some arrests but we didn’t get the supplier. There was an internal enquiry, but Khalid lied. He said he thought he was aiming at the supplier. He said he couldn’t see my face. When he was questioned about the use of the wrong code word, he denied it. But I know what I heard. For a long time afterwards, I questioned my own memory and I doubted myself. But every time I went through what happened an image kept coming into my mind of Khalid holding his gun and pointing it directly at me.”

  “And yesterday in the bar with Gaston? What happened then?”

  Jacques put his arm around her and she nestled her head into the crook of his right shoulder. “I wanted to check out how bad it might be for Gaston in advance of Pelletier coming to interview him about the body that was found on Friday. He reminded me of something that happened when I was first posted here. You don’t need to know the details. But what happened made me realise then that I hadn’t dealt with the psychological effects of the incident in Paris properly, but I still did nothing about it. Yesterday, I finally had to admit to myself that I had to exorcise it from my mind. Back in 2007, why I ever thought that keeping my police revolver in the bottom drawer of my desk at the gendarmerie was enough and was all that I needed to deal with this… I just don’t know. Another stupid decision!”

  “No, Jacques. Not stupid, just the only way that you could handle this back then. That’s all.”

  “Of all the cases I handled in Paris, that was the only one where I didn’t get the arrest I wanted.”

  Jacques was hollow-eyed when he met Pelletier at the bar to interview Gaston. Later, at Ferme Pamier, he sat at the end of the large kitchen table and just listened to the discussion, taking notes throughout.

  “We’d been hunting all day and we had a good bag at the end of it. It was when we were walking out of the forest and back to the vehicles that we found Juan.”

  “Can you pinpoint the exact spot?” Pelletier asked.

  “Perhaps, all I can remember is that it was near the first set of stands, about forty, fifty metres in front.”

  “Would that mean that he would have been in the line of fire?”

  “I would expect so.” Pamier looked down and shook his head. “I don’t know what we were thinking when we found him. But you’d just arrived, Jacques, from Paris and with all your procedures and need to do everything by the book.” Pamier stared at him. “We didn’t know you then. You weren’t one of us; you didn’t understand the village.”

  Jacques winced at the accusations. “Yes, there are a few things that I’ve realised over the last few days.”

  Pelletier glanced at Jacques, then turned his attention to the farmer. “Did no-one suggest calling the emergency services?”

  “There was no point. I checked for a pulse; there wasn’t one, and his body felt cold. He was dead. We all saw that he was dead.”

  “What time of day was it when you used the first set of stands?”

  “Early, we were there from around four-thirty in the morning and started shooting at about five or just after.”

  “And the time when you discovered the body?”

  Pamier shrugged. “I can’t be sure, but it must have been about three, maybe four in the afternoon. It was starting to get dark and it was something glinting in the last of the sunshine that drew our attention to the body. If we had taken the west path we wouldn’t have found it at all. And there have been so many times when I’ve wished that we had done that.”

  “We have a list of everyone in the hunting party from Gaston, but who was with you when you made the discovery?”

  “Gaston was at the hospital in Mende with you, Jacques. The three men from Mende, that I didn’t know well, were there, and the other party of six that we were with that morning had taken the other path.”

  “What happened then?”

  “I told the three from Mende that they should leave it to us. I said he was a village boy and that we would deal with it. They went back to their vehicles and left, and I started running towards the village. I had no clear idea about what I was going to do next, but as I came down the road I saw Gaston driving up and flagged him down.”

  “Whose idea was it to conceal the body?” asked Jacques.

  “Mine. It was mine alone. The trouble we had had in St Nicholas, the boy always turning up unexpectedly and following my wife around like a little dog, the rumours… I just thought we could be free of it permanently. It was me who persuaded Gaston to help, Jacques. He wanted to involve you and make the report, but not until the next day. I couldn’t understand why he wanted to wait and he never explained. So, we just buried him behind the old farmhouse up on the north pastures.”

  “So Fermier Rouselle knew nothing of this prior to his discovering the body when he was reclaiming what he maintains is his land?”

  “That’s right.”

  “One last question, Monsieur, what weapons did you have with you at the time?”

  “I always take four weapons. Three 16-bore shotguns and a 12-bore.”

  Pelletier looked at Jacques and they both stood and took their leave.

  “A shooting accident, do you think?”

  Pelletier strode on towards the bar where he had left his car. “Very probably.
The victim’s family say he was autistic and that his behaviour could be unpredictable, but that he would never harm anyone or any living thing. Being in the area of a shoot could have upset up him sufficiently so that he put himself in danger, I suppose. A murder charge? I can’t see how I can make that stick at the moment, but I have other enquiries to make and there will need to be an inquest.”

  Jacques stifled a yawn. “Gaston also uses a 12-bore shotgun.”

  “And what weapons were you using?”

  “None. I’ve never owned any weapons apart from my service revolver. I had the use of one of Gaston’s 16-bore guns, but I never fired a single shot that day.”

  Pelletier smiled and pulling his coat around him got in the car and started the engine. “I’m glad to hear that.”

  In his office in the Vaux Investigations building in Mende, Jacques waited for Aimée to arrive. His examination of the work undertaken by Michelle and her team on the expenses indicated that she was possibly the only person within the project team that he could question to help him to understand the thinking behind the misappropriation. Checking his watch, he realised he had just enough time to make himself a coffee.

  When he walked back to his desk, Aimée caught up with him just as his phone buzzed. It was a text from Philippe Chauvin. He decided he would look at it later.

  “I want to talk to you about Hélène and the use of the Vaux Group credit cards. But I must ask you to be discrete about our conversation. I don’t want anyone else on the team knowing what we are going to discuss today. Ok?”

  Aimée settled herself and said, “It’s alright, Jacques, I know when to keep my mouth shut.”

  “Do you know how this policy has come to be common practice within Édouard’s team?”

  “I’m not sure I can answer that. But when I arrived, as part of my induction into the company I had to work with Hélène and the admin team for a couple of weeks. I was told it would give me a good grounding in the current projects that we were handling, and it would be a good introduction to the rest of the workforce. It was already in place then and I questioned it. I’d never come across this before and when some expenses were presented to me to check, one of them being Hélène’s, I asked her for an explanation.”