The Missing Corpse: A Brittany Mystery, page 17
part #4 of Commissaire Dupin Series
* * *
There were four fire engines in the garden. Two squad cars were parked on the road down to the quay, which was completely cordoned off. Dupin had stopped directly behind them. Even from a distance he had been able to see smoke, grayish-white smoke shaped into a strangely slanting column by the wind that had picked up again.
It looked crazy—the front of the house appeared completely intact, there was no trace of a fire from the street.
“Boss, I’m here!”
Dupin followed Riwal’s voice into the garden. There must have been a dozen firemen going about their work in expert order, no sign of a hectic rush or nerves.
Riwal was standing behind the big ladder truck. At the end of the extended ladder was a basket with two firefighters inside. They were each holding a hose. Magalie Melen was standing next to Riwal.
Although the wind was carrying the smoke away, the stench near the site of the fire was so acrid that Dupin’s eyes immediately watered and hurt.
“It’s the annex that’s on fire. A wooden structure. Tordeux has his office there. The fire is under control now, they’ll have it put out soon. They were able to stop it spreading to the main house, also thanks to the strong—”
“What about Tordeux?” Dupin interrupted Riwal.
“We don’t know yet. We’re trying to reach him on all his numbers. He wasn’t in the main house, that’s already been searched. His car is not in the driveway and it’s not down at the oyster beds either. Which probably means he wasn’t here. It will be a while before the fire brigade can get into the burnt-out rooms.”
“Has everyone been informed that we’re searching for him?”
“Everyone here in Port Belon is aware. We’ve passed it on to the radio station—and that he is to contact the gendarmerie in Riec immediately.”
“What are the firefighters saying? Where did the fire start?”
“The fire chief has seen indications that it might have started at the outer wall onto the garden,” Magalie Melen reported calmly and coolly. “But he can’t say any more yet.”
Dupin walked around the annex in a large arc, Melen and Riwal following him.
“First of all, we need to know if Tordeux was inside. Arson attacks with murderous intent generally take place late at night while people are sleeping, and not in the early evening, but there could obviously have been an argument and Tordeux was lying injured or unconscious in his office.” Dupin had tried to go through all the scenarios on his journey. He was feeling uneasy.
“Where are the specialists?”
“On their way. It will be a while before they can get to work anyway.”
Dupin went closer to the annex. Everything was charred. At the corner where they were standing, the annex’s pointed Breton slate roof had caved in and there was a gaping hole two or three meters wide.
“They’ve already tried to look inside from the ladder.” Riwal had guessed what Dupin was thinking. “They couldn’t make out anything.”
The commissaire turned to Magalie Melen. “Do we know of any friends? Family?”
“He has an ex-wife…”
“So I’ve heard, the trader.”
“He has a steady stream of girlfriends, a woman from Saint-Malo at the moment, apparently. His best friend is…”
“Pierre Delsard, the building contractor.”
“That’s right. Although Delsard is much younger than him. Delsard is also uncontactable.”
Dupin pricked up his ears. “Is that not odd?” he asked.
“Not really,” Melen said drily. “He could be at a dinner and have his phone off. Or he has no reception. There are lots of places in Brittany with no reception.”
Who was she telling.
“No wife, family?”
“A bachelor like Tordeux.”
Dupin took a few steps to one side, stopped, and ran a hand through his hair. “This was his office? And the first floor of the little white building by the oyster beds, what did he do there?”
“Met his business partners, did presentations, and so on,” Melen reported. “The ground floor is used by the oyster bed workers. But this is where he has his business computer, data, and papers for all of his companies. His business headquarters, in a way. He gets administrative help on Mondays and Fridays.”
“If Tordeux doesn’t turn up soon, we’ll get a search warrant.”
“Good idea, Riwal. You take care of that.”
Dupin reflected. “We need to find out as much as possible about Tordeux, so use every source of information you can.”
“If Tordeux is mixed up in Mackenzie’s murder”—Riwal was speaking a little like he was in a trance—“or is mixed up in any criminal activities at all, he could even have set the fire himself in order to destroy evidence.” This was a plausible assumption too; it was definitely one of the possible scenarios. “I would—”
“Tordeux! He’s on the phone.” A young policeman whom Dupin didn’t know came running up to them, stopping just in front of the commissaire. “Commissaire, I mean, Tordeux is on the line. From Saint-Brieuc. He’s having dinner there. He—”
“Give him to me!”
Dupin took the phone. “Monsieur Tordeux?”
“In person and speaking. I’m not lying charred in my office at all!”
Dupin was furious that his quick-wittedness deserted him at this exact moment.
“What—”
“Your colleague informed me that my house’s annex is on fire,” Tordeux said in the same seamless switch from odd humor to distinct businesslike coldness as this afternoon.
“That’s right. A major fire.”
“Your colleague said the fire was under control, almost extinguished already. I really owe the fire brigade my deepest thanks.” The incident didn’t seem to have made too much of an impression on him: no horror, no fear; he seemed relatively calm. “I will—”
“Monsieur Tordeux, your office is completely burnt out, are you aware of that?” Dupin interrupted him gruffly.
“The main thing is that nobody was hurt. This kind of thing happens. I hear everything is all right at the main building, that would have been truly unpleasant. It’s just my office in the annex. The computers can be replaced, and almost all of the data is in the cloud anyway. It would have been much more difficult for my businesses if the fire had got my little building at the oyster beds.”
Either it really didn’t bother him or he was pretending. And if so, he was pretending perfectly. Or, even more devious than that, he knew that the commissaire wouldn’t fall for his calmness—and he was pointedly putting it on. Perhaps it was even a self-confident declaration of superiority. “I’ve been considering renovating the office from the ground up for several years so that I can have guests there too; it was all very old.”
“How might the fire have started, Monsieur Tordeux?” Dupin was equally pointed in switching into a detached tone.
“Maybe the kettle in my office short-circuited. Or it was the computer, one of the many cables, the WLAN router has been faulty for months. It’s ancient.”
“Did you go directly to your house after the visit from the restaurateur, and then set out for dinner from there?”
“That’s exactly what I did!”
“When exactly did you leave?”
“Around five thirty.”
Dupin didn’t respond.
“I’ll be on my way soon, Commissaire. And we can talk more at the scene later.”
“You’re to leave straightaway, Monsieur Tordeux.”
“Is it normal to haul the unfortunate victim over the coals in Paris? The person who has been affected?”
“I’ll be expecting you immediately. What exactly are you doing in Saint-Brieuc?”
“A big meeting for restaurateurs, I was invited.”
“Have you met a Monsieur Cueff from Cancale there?” Saint-Brieuc was in the north, not too far from Cancale.
“Never heard of him.”
“As I say: I’ll be expecting you.” With these words, Dupin hung up.
Tordeux’s behavior was sheer mockery. It doubled or tripled Dupin’s suspicion that he’d set the fire himself. Which he must have known, he was so shrewd. But then that prompted the question: what was he trying to achieve by it?
If there had been any data or potential evidence linking him to something, whatever it was, it could be permanently destroyed now. Or did he just want to confuse Dupin with his behavior? Unusual behavior might be the best protection. Dupin’s instinct told him Tordeux was capable of anything.
“What did Tordeux say, boss?”
Riwal and Melen had joined him.
Dupin repeated it succinctly.
“I want you to investigate this man thoroughly. And I want to know what everyone in this village was doing between, let’s say, six thirty and seven thirty this evening, where they were, who they were with, and so on. No exceptions. And I want to know who Tordeux has feuds with. And what his relationship with this building contractor is really like.”
“Will do, boss! Are you aware that the restaurant above the Plage de Trenez, where they’re salvaging the car right now, was burnt out two months ago? Down to its foundation walls. Under mysterious circumstances.”
Dupin recalled the reports in the Ouest-France and Le Télégramme.
“Mysterious how?” he asked.
“It happened at night, around three o’clock in the morning. The way the fire spread, it actually looked like a fire accelerant. So, an arson attack. But strangely, no traces of a fire accelerant were found. Nothing.”
“One of those attempted insurance scams, no doubt,” Dupin replied.
“The owners are drastically underinsured. They wouldn’t have wanted a fire.”
“Do you see a connection to this incident, Riwal?”
Riwal’s bad habit of suggesting sinister, vague connections, usually in delicate situations, but not openly saying them or drawing conclusions from them really drove Dupin mad. The ridiculous thing was that you could never dismiss them wholesale. Sometimes Riwal was actually right in his almost “prophetic” moments, although unfortunately you never knew when they were happening.
“I don’t know.” Riwal hesitated, then said: “What you should perhaps also bear in mind is this: the plot of land directly next door belongs to Pierre Delsard, the building contractor. Who, it seems, might in fact be mixed up in sand theft intrigues.”
“And?”
This was all he needed.
“We should bear everything in mind,” Riwal added calmly.
Which was of course correct in principle, although Dupin couldn’t for the life of him see a connection between the two dead Scotsmen from the oyster world and the sand-thieving building contractor. Not even remotely …
Melen brought the conversation back to earth. “By the way, the forensic team has just arrived. It will be a little while until they can start their real work, but they’re here!”
“Is there news from the salvaging? Should we go over there?” Dupin asked.
“Not long before you arrived, I spoke to Reglas on the phone.”
“I want to hear everything. But not here.”
* * *
“So, any new findings on the car? Clues on Mackenzie’s corpse?”
Dupin, Riwal, and Melen had left Tordeux’s land and were walking down the idyllic, ivy-lined path to the quay.
“Reglas was cursing like a fishwife when Melen and I had to leave ‘just because of a fire.’”
“Findings?” Dupin ignored everything else.
“No. As I said, the doors of the Citroën were open. Sea, tides, and currents did a good job—everything was washed away. The forensics team still haven’t found anything. No blood in the trunk, none on the front or back seats, no DNA.”
“Has the car been secured?”
“A fire engine pulled it out of the sea using a rope winch with help from two coast guard divers. A spectacular operation. They’ll take it away now.”
While it was frustrating that they did not yet have the second corpse, the discovery of the rental car added something solid and conclusive to the current scenarios—or hypotheses, strictly speaking. The probability that Mackenzie had not been lying dead in the parking lot had been low before, but it was now dwindling to zero.
“Reglas is to keep us up to speed. Go on, what else is there?”
“Yesterday evening,” Riwal got out his notebook, “a bus did in fact drive from Kerfany to Riec, via Moëlan-sur-Mer. At six twenty-five. That could fit timing-wise. Three people got on in Kerfany. Two young girls who probably wanted to go to Moëlan, and one woman.”
Dupin stood up straight.
“What kind of woman? Did the bus driver know her?”
“No. He says he had never seen her before. She was also difficult to see. Quite a long blue jacket with a hood.”
“Where did she get off the bus?”
“Riec.”
It was approximately three kilometers from there to Port Belon. A stone’s throw away.
“Did any of the other passengers know the woman?”
“We don’t know yet.”
“I want to know who this woman was. Find out.”
“We will.”
They had arrived at their command center, the tables outside the château.
“What about Tordeux’s two business partners in Scotland?” Dupin got out his Clairefontaine and leafed through it. Riwal beat him to it:
“Smollet. A trader in Edinburgh. MacPhilly, a farmer in Dundee. The Scottish police have spoken to them both in depth. Both have stated they knew neither Mackenzie nor Smith. And that they have never had business ties with any other French firm. I also had the policeman from Tobermory speak to the staff in Mackenzie’s farm specially. The upshot was the same: they were sure that Mackenzie didn’t do business with Smollet or MacPhilly. Apart from Oyster Heaven in Glasgow, he only supplied local and regional caterers directly. Our colleagues have finished examining his books, by the way. In terms of imports, only the seed oysters are in fact recorded, and nothing on the export side.”
They weren’t making any progress this way.
“What about the oyster farmers in Riec?” Dupin said urgently. “The ones with potential business ties to Scotland? What do we know on that?”
Melen was responsible for this part: “Three connections to Scotland. That’s it. Three farms in Riec—they refine oysters in the Belon for one Scottish farm each. The Scottish farms then sell them in their own country.”
“Any links to Mackenzie? Or Smith?”
“We don’t know of any right now, direct or indirect links, business links or personal ones. By the way, I’ve also got hold of the owner of the Château de Belon, who’s in Agadir at the moment. Her farm has nothing to do with Scotland, and she doesn’t know any Scottish people either.”
Dupin’s forehead was furrowed. “What if Jane Mackenzie is in fact part of this business herself, or is at least in the know or suspects something that she doesn’t want to reveal? She could be lying to us through her teeth.”
“That’s right, boss. She could be feeding us a pack of lies. That’s also why the Scottish police have had a few more conversations with people who knew Mackenzie. They’ve spoken to the mayor of Tobermory, two restaurateurs who bought oysters and seafood from him, a landlord, and an old school friend he occasionally went hiking with.” Riwal cleared his throat. “It’s the same story: nobody knew of any links to Brittany, not even the relationship with Cueff that has been proven to exist. None of them knew about a planned trip. Only the hiking friend and the landlord knew about the bar in Glasgow. Mackenzie didn’t have many friends and acquaintances. And he clearly didn’t reveal much about himself.”
“Who owns the rest of the”—Dupin leafed through his notebook—“the Oyster Heaven bar? Has someone spoken to the other owner?”
“A man called Paul Phorb. They haven’t been able to get hold of him yet. Forty-eight, from Glasgow, but lives in the Highlands.”
“They haven’t been able to get hold of him? Is the bar closed?”
“No. But he’s not there. The two young people who work in the bar don’t have a clue where he is.”
“Has he disappeared?”
Dupin knew it probably didn’t mean anything, but even so …
“They say he comes by every two or three days. That they generally don’t know where he is.”
“But they’ll have his number and call him regularly.”
“He’s not answering. The police have only been trying for a few hours. I don’t feel it’s too suspicious yet.”
Dupin thought about it. “Where are the three Scottish farms that have their oysters refined in the Belon?”
“One farm is on Loch Fyne.” Melen had obviously expected this question, and replied straightaway. “It’s on a very long fjord on the west coast, northwest of Glasgow, one of the few well-known oyster spots in Scotland. A large firm.”
“Very similar conditions to the Belon,” Riwal added. “The extreme tides are constantly bringing new plankton, as well as a mixture of saltwater and freshwater. Dolphins and basking sharks—”
“Riwal!”
“The second one is near Thurso, right up in the north, and one is in St. Andrews in the northwest,” Melen concluded.
“Anything unusual about these three farms?”
“No. All reputable businesses.”
“And that’s it? No other business ties between the Belon and Scotland?”
“Just those. And of course sales via wholesalers and agents, but we definitely can’t check all of those channels.”
This wasn’t much. And it made Tordeux’s connections to Scotland even more relevant—theoretically—if they weren’t dead ends like all the rest at the moment.
“There are plenty of links to England and Ireland,” Riwal started again while Dupin steeled himself. “After France, Ireland is the second largest oyster producer in Europe. England is traditionally a great oyster nation too.” Riwal’s storytelling fever, there it was again. “Henry IV always ate four hundred oysters on feast days, before having other foods served. Even the ancient Celts enjoyed the ritual of oysters with their uisge beatha, the water of life. Or whisky, as we call it today.”
