The Body in the Castle Well

by Martin Walker

  Ahmed nodded to the winchman, turned on the powerful light and began his descent, leaving Bruno standing on the rim of the well, one hand clenched to the now familiar scaffolding. Watching Ahmed descend, he heard footsteps heralding a new arrival, the mayor of Limeuil. He was followed by Fabiola, who had gotten Bruno’s message at the medical center.

  “Are you sure there’s a body down there?” the mayor asked, sounding as much worried as aggressive.

  “Bonjour, Monsieur le Maire. I’m not entirely sure,” Bruno replied politely. “But I couldn’t see what else it might be, and a young American woman was reported missing. With tourism so important to Limeuil, you understand that we have to take every precaution.”

  Ahmed was going down slowly, and Bruno could follow his progress by the powerful lamp. He heard Ahmed’s voice, tinny over the walkie-talkie, as he told the winchman to keep going, to stop, to go down slowly and then to stop again.

  “Damn cat,” said Ahmed with a muffled curse. And then, “It’s a body. Lock the winch and keep it there.”

  The mayor looked aghast. Under Bruno’s hand, the steel hawser was trembling and swaying as Ahmed worked below.

  “How far down is he?” Bruno asked the winchman.

  “Thirty-two meters.”

  They waited for what seemed a long time, but Bruno checked his watch and saw that Ahmed took less than three minutes before he reported the body was secure and asked to be raised back up again. Bruno realized he was close when Ahmed turned off his light. Soon his head emerged, then his waist and almost at once a small white cat with light brown patches, perhaps a kitten, jumped onto the rim of the well and stood there, blinking at the daylight. Then its back arched and the cat began baring its little teeth and spitting as it saw Balzac waiting below.

  Ahmed, whose overalls were sopping wet, released the safety catch on the cage, stepped out and told the winchman to raise the cage as high as he could. Bruno saw long, bare legs that looked female and some sodden clothing around the neck. He and Bruno then hauled the body from beneath the cage and onto the ledge of the well. The loop of Ahmed’s rope was beneath the body’s shoulders, and he’d fixed a second rope between its legs and attached it to the first.

  “Damn these knots, they’re wet and tightened,” said Ahmed, and called for a knife from the winchman. Bruno took his own knife from his belt and began cutting at the nylon. As they turned the body over, Bruno recognized that it was Claudia, wearing black panties and a bra, her blouse ripped open by her fall and with only one sleeve still attached. They handed her down to Fabiola, who had a tarpaulin ready to receive the body.

  Fabiola turned Claudia onto her back, pressed firmly three, four times on her chest, and water spouted out.

  “Try giving her mouth-to-mouth while I look for vital signs,” Fabiola told Bruno, and he did as he had been taught while the doctor listened to her stethoscope and then pulled down Claudia’s panties to insert a thermometer to measure the internal temperature.

  “I think she’s been dead for hours,” said Fabiola. “But to be sure, we’ll just check for any internal temperature. Keep on with the mouth-to-mouth.”

  Bruno complied. Claudia felt as cold as ice, but her body was supple rather than stiff, although Bruno had no idea what immersion in the well would do to rigor mortis.

  “There are scrapes on her limbs and back consistent with hitting the side of the well as she fell,” Fabiola said, speaking into a tiny tape recorder. “There are no visible signs of any blow or violence around the arms and shoulders, but her fingers and nails are badly scraped and broken. She may have been trying to break her fall against the wall or maybe even trying to climb out when she was in the water. I’ll bag her hands for later analysis.”

  She withdrew the thermometer and put her hand on Bruno’s shoulder. “You can stop now. There’s no sign of life.” Bruno sat up and looked down at the body while Fabiola was tying plastic bags around each of Claudia’s hands. Her immersion in the water had washed away any signs of blood, but there were scrapes along her arms, shoulders and the front of both thighs. Could someone have lifted her by the legs and heaved her into the well? It looked possible. Then Fabiola bent to the face and lifted each eyelid, shining a tiny flashlight.

  “Mon Dieu, look at those pupils,” she said. “They’re pinpoints. We’ll need a full toxicology report. She must have been heavily drugged, almost unconscious, but there are no signs of needle marks.”

  “So it was a tragic accident, fueled by drugs,” the mayor said.

  “I can’t say at this stage,” said Fabiola. “When I fill out the death certificate, I’ll have to say the circumstances are unclear, possibly even suspicious.” She pulled out her mobile phone to take a series of photos of the dead girl before placing a blanket over the body. “We’ll have to take her to the pathology lab in Bergerac. I’ll let them know.”

  Bruno was already calling J-J, chief of detectives for the département. Jean-Jacques was an experienced policeman and a good friend. Beyond the pompiers’ vehicle, Bruno saw Ahmed stripping off his wet clothes and briskly toweling himself dry.

  “Was there any sign of other clothing?” he called across to Ahmed.

  “A shoe—looked like a ballet shoe. I left it on the floor of the cage. I didn’t see a skirt or anything else,” he replied, putting on some dry clothes he’d taken from the vehicle. Then he and the winchman began to detach the cage, pausing to allow Bruno to recover the sodden ballet shoe.

  “I’ll do the preliminary interviews here and get her room sealed off by the time you arrive,” Bruno told J-J. “She’s an American art history student, so we’ll have to inform their embassy, and I’ll try to reach her academic supervisor at the Louvre.”

  J-J said he’d come down right away and ended the call. Fabiola then signaled Bruno to join her at some distance from the others.

  “You may have noticed that she’d been menstruating,” Fabiola began. “You should know that she came to see me a few days ago, saying that she suffered severe period pains and was often almost immobilized by the cramps. She asked me for fentanyl, saying this was what had been prescribed for her back in the States. You’ve heard of the drug?”

  “No, but there are two empty pharmacist’s containers in her toiletry bag, and I made a note of everything on the labels.” He pulled out his notebook and checked. “Yes, one was fentanyl, and the other was oxycodone.”

  “Mon Dieu, those American doctors.” Fabiola groaned. “Those are man-made opioids. They killed something like sixty thousand Americans last year. It’s an epidemic. And fentanyl is one of the most dangerous, at least fifty times stronger than morphine and very easy to overdose. You say both her containers were empty?”

  “There were no pills in them, just two little sticks like the ones you use to clean your ears.”

  “These are the lollipops Americans sometimes use to deliver fentanyl. It’s easily absorbed through the skin inside the mouth.”

  “Did you give her anything for her pain?”

  “An extra-strength ibuprofen,” said Fabiola. “That should have been enough. There was nothing fundamentally wrong when I examined her. In fact, she was a healthy young woman, very fit with good muscle tone. That may have come from her horseback riding. And didn’t I hear that her tennis game was good enough to beat you?”

  “She was a good player. Do you think she climbed up onto the well herself and then fell in?”

  “I suppose it’s possible, but I’d have to see how much of the stuff she’d had, and that means waiting for the toxicology report. I’d say it was unlikely, but I saw no real evidence that she was pushed or heaved in. She might have been looking for that damned cat.”

  “She seems to have had a liking for them—she has a cat as the screen saver on her phone,” Bruno said, leaving Fabiola shaking her head at the oddities of human behavior.

  David had assemble
d the gardeners, and between them they had drawn up a list of everyone they could remember who had been at the previous evening’s lecture. Bruno asked if any of them had seen Claudia after she left the lecture, and none of them had. He had a few more questions. Did Claudia know the gardens? Yes, she had taken a tour. Did she know about the work being done on the well? Yes, the builders were working on it when she visited. Did she have any special friends they knew of?

  “I knew her pretty well. We both had rooms at the same place,” Félicité said, her face pale and a grimy handkerchief pressed to her cheek.

  “What about boyfriends?” Bruno asked.

  Félicité shrugged, and the others looked pointedly at David, who shuffled his feet and said that they had shared a pizza at Le Chai down by the Limeuil waterfront one evening.

  “I’d like to have known her better, but that was all,” he said shyly. “She spent most of the time working.”

  Bruno asked them to keep the main gate closed until further notice and to stay away from the area around the well until the detectives arrived, and then he went to tell Madame Darrail the grim news.

  “Detectives are coming because her death could be a police matter, so I want to see if I can get into her room through the balcony,” he explained to her. “That may have been the way her laptop disappeared.”

  “Oh, my heavens,” exclaimed Madame Darrail, putting her hand to her mouth. “And she was looking forward to dinner this evening. Dominic was coming, that’s my son, and she was hoping to get him to give her a guided trip down the river. Have her parents been told?”

  “That’s being taken care of,” Bruno replied, asking her to ensure that Claudia’s room was sealed off until the detectives arrived. Then he went outside to the narrow, sloping street and turned into the first narrow alley between the houses. Such gaps were a tradition in French towns to prevent fires from spreading but essential in Limeuil as runoffs for rainwater to escape down the hill.

  When he reached the house immediately below that of Madame Darrail, Bruno donned a pair of evidence gloves, put one foot on a slightly projecting stone in its wall and then scrambled up to get a grip on the drainpipe of the Darrail house, and with a quick heave he was able to clamber onto the balcony outside Claudia’s room. He opened the balcony door, still unlocked, and entered. Somebody could have got in that way and taken her laptop. But no casual thief would have left her iPhone.

  Still with his gloves on, Bruno pressed the button that launched the phone and held the screen horizontally so he could squint against the light and see which numbers had signs of wear on the glass. It was a trick J-J had taught him. Three and five and seven and nine seemed the most likely. He checked the passport for her birth date, May 7, 1992. He tried seven and five, nine and two, knowing most people used some variation of their birth date. That failed. He tried five and seven, putting the month first, and then nine and two, and the phone opened.

  He scanned the e-mails, seeing several to and from Madame Massenet, her academic supervisor in Paris, and more from someone with an address at Yale.edu who was probably also linked to her studies. There were others to and from various people with the name Muller in the electronic addresses, probably family. He opened the phone log and saw that most of the calls in and out were identified by name, which meant they were in the contacts section of her phone. He scribbled down the numbers that had no name attached. He’d check those later. Then he looked in her picture gallery to find a lot of photos of cats. Perhaps Fabiola was right, and Claudia had fallen in while trying to save the kitten in the well.

  But then Bruno stopped, surprised to see a photo of Laurent, the ex-prisoner, and then another. He recognized the place where it had been taken, the entrance to the bookshop at Lascaux, site of the cave that contained the greatest of all the works of art of prehistoric peoples. There was another photo of the two of them sitting on a riverbank, with the remains of a picnic beside them. They were close together, arms around each other and smiling for the camera phone. There was another selfie of them together, and from the background Bruno was pretty sure it was at the covered gallery where visitors waited to go into Lascaux II, a duplicate created by artists over the course of a decade after the original cave paintings began to be obscured by a white film, a kind of fungus that came from the breath of tens of thousands of visitors into an environment that had been sealed for more than seven thousand years.

  Most of the rest of the photos seemed to be of paintings, but there were some pages of documents, one of which he recognized as the photocopy Claudia had given him in Fauquet’s café. He scrolled on, seeing several more selfies of her and friends in front of various Parisian monuments, in street scenes with the Eiffel Tower in the background, at Versailles and outside the better-known Loire châteaux. He went back to the log, saw a number for Madame Darrail and called it on his own phone, asking her to come downstairs and let him out of Claudia’s locked door. When she did, he asked her to witness him putting Claudia’s toiletry case with its two pharmacy containers into an evidence bag.

  Chapter 6

  Rather than interrupt Florence with the bad news while she was teaching, Bruno texted a message for her to call him and then climbed back up the hilltop to check with the restaurant whether any of the staff had seen Claudia the previous evening. He was about to show them the selfie on her phone, but it turned out that Claudia was known. The restaurant was within walking distance of Bourdeille’s house and from the room she rented, and she’d eaten there twice. Nobody had seen her the previous day, and they were appalled to hear of her death.

  He came out of the restaurant to see J-J parking his car, his assistant Josette on the pavement, guiding him into a very cramped space. A big man with a paunch that paid tribute to his love of good food, J-J had trouble easing himself out of the driver’s seat. A local newspaper cartoonist had done a caricature of J-J and himself as the two comic-book heroes of ancient Gaul, Astérix and his fat friend, Obélix. Ever since it had appeared, Bruno could not rid himself of the image. J-J even had something of the look of Gérard Depardieu, the rotund French actor who played the Obélix role in the movie.

  “What have we got here, Bruno, an accident or something worse?” J-J asked by way of greeting.

  “It looks like an accident, but there may be complications,” Bruno replied. “Claudia Muller was here last night for a public lecture. She was drugged with an opioid that had been prescribed by an American doctor. She loved cats, and there was a cat at the bottom of the well with her, so she may have fallen in while trying to rescue it and feeling dizzy. You’ll probably want to interview the builders who were working on the well and failed to secure it overnight in violation of the construction code. I’ll send you my photo of what it looked like when I arrived.”

  “Do we have a preliminary death certificate?” J-J asked.

  “Yes, from Fabiola, who says that while there’s no immediate sign on the body that the girl was pushed or manhandled, she’s worried about the drugs. So she wants a toxicology report before she’ll sign off on the death.”

  Bruno handed over Claudia’s passport, sealed inside an evidence bag. “The details of her next of kin are inside. I found it in a room she rented here in the village.”

  “Since the woman’s a foreigner, I suppose I’d better order an autopsy,” J-J said, taking the bag and handing it to Josette, who pulled on a pair of latex gloves before opening it. “Do we have a full list of everyone who attended the lecture?”

  “I’m working on that. Claudia was a graduate student in art history doing a research year in France, attached to the Louvre. She made a lot of friends around here, spoke good French, cooked well and made a point of integrating. She was here only a couple of months, but she’d come riding with us at Pamela’s and played tennis well enough to beat me. She might have had a local boyfriend, and she seems to have broken up with her American one. There was a torn-up photo of the guy,
very affectionately inscribed, in her wastepaper basket.”

  J-J nodded. “I’ll have to contact Hodge at the American embassy, the legal attaché we worked with during that IRA business,” J-J went on. “They’ll have to be officially notified, and we’ll let them worry about informing the girl’s next of kin. Anything else, Bruno?”

  “There are a couple of odd things you might want to check,” Bruno went on. “Laurent, the local guy in that famous drunk-driving case who was released from prison in January, met Claudia by chance when I picked them both up at the station on his return. They became friendly, and I took them both to a lecture on falconry in Périgueux. He appears in selfies on her phone, and it looks like they went to Lascaux together, so you’ll probably want to talk to him. I can give you the number of the farm where he was staying, but he’s now working with the hawks at Château des Milandes.

  “Then there may be some funny business with Monsieur de Bourdeille, a rich old art dealer who won the Resistance medal. Claudia had been at his place interviewing him and researching in his library for her own art history doctorate. She told me the other day when I ran into her in the market that she was concerned that he might have been profiting from attributions he made on what she thought were suspect paintings. She wasn’t very specific, but I thought I’d follow up with her supervisor at the Louvre. I know Claudia went to see her about it.”

  “Bourdeille is the one in the wheelchair, about ninety years old?” J-J asked, looking skeptical. “I don’t see him pushing a healthy adult down a well. That’s all you have so far?”

  “Her laptop and case seem to have disappeared from her room, according to the landlady. I checked and it’s easy to get into her room via the balcony. And here’s her phone, which was left in her room.” Bruno handed it over, still inside an evidence bag, and gave J-J the code.

  “I used the system you taught me to get into it,” he added. “And in the other bag is the stuff from the American pharmacy. Be careful with those two little white sticks; Fabiola told me that’s how the drug is delivered. Maybe Hodge can check with the American pharmacy and her doctor. I never saw any of the usual signs that she was on drugs.”