The Missing Corpse: A Brittany Mystery, page 26
part #4 of Commissaire Dupin Series
“Call again, ask her.”
“Will do, boss. By the way, the Scottish police have offered me the use of the helicopter service; no doubt it’s nothing unusual here.”
“I don’t mind.” Dupin was in favor of anything that made things quicker for Riwal.
“Cool.”
Dupin had never heard this word out of Riwal’s mouth before.
“Call—”
“Hello! Monsieur le Commissaire! Wait a moment.” Magalie Melen came running up, her blond hair blowing about wildly. She stopped in front of him, out of breath.
“I just saw you walking past us. There have been two important discoveries: they’ve accessed the data from Tordeux’s cloud. An expert from the team on Delsard’s house search helped.” She took another deep breath. “The volume of Tordeux’s sales of the exquisite Belon oysters as a trader is significantly higher than what he can produce here as a farmer. And that’s without making any additional purchases!”
“What does that mean?”
Dupin realized his inspector was still on the line.
“Riwal, let’s talk again in a minute.”
Dupin hung up.
Melen carried right on: “He sells more Belon oysters than he could ever produce—he’s perpetrating fraud.”
“Are our colleagues certain?”
“Fairly certain. It’s clear something about the quantities doesn’t stack up.”
“How exactly is he perpetrating fraud?” Dupin hadn’t grasped it yet.
“If their conclusions from the data are correct, he’s buying huge quantities of finished oysters from other countries, supposedly in order to refine them, but he doesn’t do that at all. Instead, he puts them up for sale as expensive Belons. That would produce a tidy profit margin, you could make a lot of money that way.”
“He buys oysters from less famous regions and claims they have been in the Belon. In reality he just forges any documents, labels them as Belon oysters, and sells them on at the corresponding prices, is that how I should be looking at it?”
An extremely similar trick to his earlier idea in Cancale with the claires and fines and the green pigment. Just even more difficult to prove. Tordeux hadn’t given up his fraudulent schemes at all. He had simply refined them.
“Absolutely. Another elegant way of doing it would be to use his own oysters, that would be even harder to prove. For instance, the ones from his new farm near Fouesnant.”
This time, Dupin understood immediately: Tordeux would take a proportion of the yield from Fouesnant and was selling them as Belons straightaway. It was all just a question of moving things round internally.
Melen concluded: “That could be a reason for buying that farm. And why he had the money he needed to buy it.”
“Brilliant.” Dupin wouldn’t have put it past Tordeux for one second. He was cunning and crafty, no doubt about it. “But wouldn’t that have come to light a long time ago?”
“Only if someone were to take a look at all of his online accounts, otherwise no. How would it?”
“When will we know for sure?”
“The analysis of the details will take some time—but as I say: something definitely doesn’t stack up, we know that already. He’s selling more Belons than he gets.”
That was quite something.
Tordeux would in fact have been committing crimes again, perhaps over the course of many years. And they … they would then have two criminals. Tordeux and, it looked like, the building contractor. Bizarre.
“The other news: the authorities have just imposed a distribution ban on the Belon until further notice. As a precaution. Simply preventatively. The blight in the Étel has got worse. It’s true no infection has been detected in Port Belon yet. But still. They’re going to expand the inspections here, especially out at the estuary.”
“What are the farmers saying?”
“They’re used to this. Purely precautionary measures. It happens from time to time. They’re still calm and are carrying on with production. If the ban is lifted, they can immediately put all of the stock they’ve had to set aside back on the market again.”
Dupin resolved to stop being surprised by the oyster community’s unshakable calm.
“What kind of scale of fraud are we talking about with Tordeux?”
“The discrepancies are significant. It all mounts up. Considerable sums are involved.”
“I see.”
And this would in fact explain where the money for Tordeux’s investments came from.
“A question that would remain completely unanswered is this,” Melen said firmly. “How could Smith and Mackenzie have got involved in this fraud? Neither of their names is in Tordeux’s data, and there’s no reference to Mackenzie’s farm. The only business relationships that can be established are those that Tordeux has already informed us about: the trader in Edinburgh and the farmer in Dundee. Of course it’s possible that they received fraudulent oysters like many other people—the deliveries will have gone to all of his customers.”
There was a loud noise, something metallic. Melen and Dupin jumped and looked toward the wall that ran from Premel’s stone building to the road. It was too high to see anything. The sound appeared to have come from behind it.
“Thank you, Melen.”
“Commissaire, just briefly on Tordeux’s condition: he’s out of the tricky operation now, it has gone well so far. The internal bleeding has been stopped, but he’s still in critical condition. The doctors are refusing to give a prognosis.”
It did sound a bit more positive, Dupin thought.
“I’ll come to our tables after the conversation with Premel.”
“Okay.”
The young policewoman turned on her heel and strode toward the little quay.
Something else had just occurred to Dupin. It had crossed his mind earlier when Riwal had been giving his report.
He pressed Redial.
“Riwal, just a quick one. See if you can find more specific information on the bank robbery by our two Scotsmen. Any details.”
“Of course, boss. What exactly?”
“Everything you can find.”
“Will do.”
Dupin hung up. Now he really would speak to Madame Premel.
* * *
A plain, narrow wooden door had been set into the stone wall. A small, weather-beaten sign hung over it, painted wood. Even more discreet than on the quay. Vente et Dégustations. Huîtres plates et creuses. The blue letters were very faded.
There was no doorbell in sight. The door was ajar so Dupin opened it.
Directly behind it was a steep staircase that led straight down to the river. The tide was in, the water was high and flowing steadily past. It almost reached the oyster plant’s two long concrete pools—two meters by ten meters, Dupin reckoned—that had been built right by the bank. Inside the pools were red-and-black sacks made of woven plastic lying in piles on steel tables, three or four to each table. Large sacks full of oysters.
There were two light blue baskets in front of one of the pools, also containing piles of oysters. At the end of the plant was a square wooden terrace with a few tables and chairs. A marvelous place for a tasting. In the middle of the Belon.
Madame Premel was standing at the edge of the pool in front. She was wearing the obligatory yellow oilskin pants, long Wellington boots, a pale pink sweatshirt, and long, dark green gloves—crazy color combinations—and her hair had been tied back carelessly.
She didn’t seem to have noticed the commissaire. Her exertion was visible as she fiddled with a wooden sluice gate with water flowing steadily through it. Then she turned an iron crank, cog wheels turned, and the sluice gate jolted open even further. As the cog wheels moved, there was a loud metallic noise—that’s what they had just heard. The flow of water was growing by the second.
“I have some more questions for you, Madame Premel.”
Dupin had come down the steep steps and was walking straight toward her. Madame Premel turned slowly. She didn’t look surprised.
“No problem, so long as you have nothing against me continuing to work while you ask them. I need to be finished in half an hour. Today has been crazy.”
“You mean the attempted murder of your ex-husband, I take it? The sight of the crashed car with him inside it?”
For a split second, she seemed surprised, then she answered in a measured way.
“Yes. Attempted murder. So it was that after all. Well, I’m not surprised. The fire probably wasn’t an accident either, then. It’s as I thought. You don’t know who it was yet, I assume. And of course I look suspicious. I get it.”
“How is it that you came to be driving down the road to Riec just a few minutes after your ex-husband?”
“I’ve wondered that myself: Why did I of all people have to be the one who happened to pass by? Well, that’s what happened, it’s not worth thinking about it any more. Coincidence. Or maybe not: I drive back and forth between Riec and Port Belon several times every day. Never at specific times. My ex-husband, as everyone here in Port Belon knows, drives along there every day at half past eight. How did the perpetrator actually do it, I’m interested to know—how did they cause the accident?”
She was talking much faster again. By this point she had climbed into the pool and was heaving some of the oyster bags over the little wall.
“I get the impression all of this is barely affecting you. The terrible accident, the severe injuries that your ex-husband has suffered. The fact that it was an attempted murder—”
“It’s not that it doesn’t affect me, don’t get me wrong, but other people need to summon up sympathy for Matthieu. That’s not my job anymore.” She made no bones about her attitude.
“What did you do before your trip to Riec? Where were you, Madame Premel, and who can corroborate it?”
One of them had done it. One of them had tried to kill Tordeux, Dupin was convinced of it by now, someone from Port Belon. Someone who knew their way around.
“I was here at the farm, my colleagues saw me. I can’t say when exactly, of course, whether they saw me at nine fifteen, or nine, or nine thirty—I left around then.”
Dupin had got out his Clairefontaine and was making a point of taking a few notes. It was like with her other alibis: there was a certain vagueness to them all.
“I’ve heard you’re a big fan of the bagadoù and like to go to public music performances. Especially if the Bagad Belon is involved?”
“You know about my Celtic streak. My girls love it too. We—”
“On the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth of February, at the regional heats in Riec—did you notice anything unusual at this event?”
“We were all in great spirits, there’s nothing more to tell. I—”
“Your ex-husband also marched past you with the bombard. It seems to me like you see him surprisingly often considering that you, as you say, have nothing to do with him anymore.”
“Well. That’s how it is in the countryside. Especially if you work in the same profession. You can’t vanish into thin air. But I generally don’t even notice him.” She looked Dupin in the eye for the first time and started to speak marginally more slowly. “Do you know, I came to the firm decision years ago not to let anything throw me, especially not from him—”
“Commissaire!”
The voice came from above the steep stone staircase that Dupin had just come down.
Magalie Melen.
“I need to talk to you, Commissaire.”
“I’m coming,” called Dupin and, turning to Madame Premel, he added, “please excuse me.”
“Of course.” She climbed out of the pool and busied herself with the oyster sacks.
The commissaire turned round and walked over to Melen, who had started coming down the steps toward him in the meantime.
Melen spoke in a low voice: “Tordeux, he came round briefly, then went under again. He stammered out a few confused words. He was barely intelligible. The doctor tried to ask him about the details of the accident. The doctor thinks he mumbled something about a ‘ghost’ and a ‘car.’ He’s still in highly critical condition.”
“A ghost? What’s that supposed to mean?”
Tordeux was probably delirious.
Melen was silent for a little while.
“I don’t know. I was just wondering whether—supposing our theory is correct—I would have just walked into the road if I were the perpetrator? Imagine the attack had gone wrong, Tordeux had been able to get the car under control again after all, or by some miracle didn’t suffer any severe injuries: he would have recognized the perpetrator and we would have arrested them already. He couldn’t have taken that risk.”
She seemed not to want to go on.
“And?” Dupin couldn’t see what she was getting at yet.
“They could have put something on or thrown something over themselves to make sure they weren’t recognizable. Anything, a rain poncho, a long coat—maybe a bedsheet? Who knows.”
Now he understood. “A ghost.”
“And on top of the disguise, it would have confused Tordeux even more. If a ghost walks out in front of your car—”
“Excellent, Melen.”
It was just a hypothesis. But a convincing one.
“We’ll see, Commissaire.”
“Any news from L’Helgoualc’h?”
“Not yet. But as regards Cueff: they’ve tracked him down.”
Dupin was relieved. Cueff’s sudden untraceability had actually made Dupin more anxious than he’d realized.
“Where was he?”
“In the Jardins de la mer, far out. You can’t get reception there.”
Dupin gave her a quizzical look.
“Gardens of the Sea, that’s what they call the extensive oyster beds in Cancale that stretch hundreds of meters into the sea, all the way along the coast. Nolwenn has spoken to him and he has agreed to come to Port Belon. He’s just getting changed. Our colleagues from Cancale are going to drive him.”
“Anything else?”
“Not at the moment.”
“Have we really found out anything about the potential relationships between Smith’s old group and Breton druidic groups?” He should have asked this earlier.
“Not from this side. Riwal still has to speak to the chief druid of Seashore Grove.”
The chief druid was—as per Dupin’s priorities—Riwal’s third stop today.
“All right. See you later, Melen.”
Dupin walked back to Madame Premel. Melen had already got to the wooden door at the top of the stairs.
Madame Premel was on her knees now, getting several oysters out of the bags, examining them, and placing them in the light blue baskets, all at top speed. Dupin came and stood next to her.
“I’m afraid I’ve got to keep working,” she said, not even lifting her head.
“From what we’ve heard, you’re pursuing another interesting hobby. The art of oyster shucking.”
“An old passion of mine. I worked in the Atlantique in Concarneau as a young woman. That’s where I learned it. Fascinating.”
“You got to know Nicolas Cueff from Cancale at one of the competitions. Or did you know him already?”
Her eyes, an even more intensely deep green in daylight, remained totally fixed on the oysters.
“I don’t know a Nicolas Cueff.”
Short and to the point.
“You spent three days with him at the beginning of March. In Cancale.”
“Did I? So many people took part in the competitions. I mainly used the weekend to see one of my best friends. My husband and my two girls were there too. This Cueff definitely wasn’t at any of my competitions.”
Several strands of chestnut-brown hair had come loose from her hairband. Madame Premel blew them away hard.
“You didn’t meet him, didn’t speak to him? You can rule that out for certain?” Dupin asked sharply.
This didn’t make any impression on Madame Premel either.
“I don’t know a Monsieur Cueff. But you can show me a photo, of course, maybe then I’ll at least remember having seen him. That’s possible. If he was there too.”
“And no doubt you don’t know a Seamus Smith either? Have another think.”
This was pointless, Dupin had to admit. The person whom Smith had seen, known, or recognized in the photo had already denied knowing Smith over the last few days. And they would continue to do so; one person here was lying, and had been the entire time. One person or even several.
“No. Like I told you yesterday. And I don’t know the other Scotsman either.” Madame Premel did actually raise her head for a moment and look at Dupin.
“You’re in a photo that we found in Seamus Smith’s home.”
“This man had a photo with me in it? Well, that’s pretty astonishing. What kind of photo?” She had turned back to the oysters.
Dupin had initially considered keeping the photo thing—Riwal’s coup—to himself. But on the other hand, the person in question should definitely know they were on their trail. That they knew about the link.
“A photo in the current edition of Piping Today.”
“Piping Today? A photo of me?”
Premel clearly knew the magazine.
“Shots from the Piping World Championship heats here in Riec, with several Port Belon residents in them.”
“That sounds a little crazy. But you’re the commissaire … As I say: I don’t know any Scottish people, have never previously been in contact with one, and that’s that. No Smith, no Mackenzie. I quite understand that you suspect me, but I’m the wrong person. So who else was in the photos?”
“Your whole family, your ex-husband, Monsieur Kolenc, his daughter, and Madame Bandol.”
Madame Premel was silent, which had not been her style up to this point at all.
“Talk to Jean Danneau, the head of the bagad in Riec, you know him from yesterday, he—”
“I’ve just spoken to him. Nothing else has occurred to him about this.”
“Well. Nothing occurs to me either.”
“What do you think of the sales ban?” A quick change of topic, just the way Dupin liked it. “This precautionary measure must be disastrous for you, after all.”
