“I need to know the time of death as soon as possible. Whether he died yesterday around four or five in the evening. And if there’s anything on his clothes or hair that doesn’t come from the place where he’s lying. Soil, grass, whatever.”

  Could this in fact be a case with two corpses all of a sudden? And two—in all likelihood—murdered men? If Madame Bandol’s statement was correct, and Dupin still assumed it was this morning—although of course it couldn’t be completely certain—but in any case, if it was true, then it would be absurd: two capital crimes, two murders within just twelve hours in southern Finistère? A male body was missing here, while one was suddenly found there, albeit a hundred kilometers away. Of course the obvious thought was that the corpse in the Monts d’Arrée was the missing corpse from Port Belon.

  The Monts d’Arrée were an extremely remote area, hence a good spot to dispose of a dead body. On the other hand, there were also extremely remote places around Port Belon, closer places—and above all, the much safer place: the Atlantic. But maybe there were reasons for this place that they simply didn’t know about. Or this really was a question of a second corpse.

  “I’ll inform the medical examiner of everything as soon as she is here.”

  “Shit,” Dupin said, still absorbed in his thoughts.

  The policeman seemed—understandably—not to know how to respond. Dupin picked up again where they had left off. “Who found the man? And why so early?”

  It was just quarter past eight.

  “A group of hikers. An organized tour with a guide. Twelve people. They set off from Sizun at seven o’clock. They wanted to get to the summit. And then on to Lac Saint-Michel. The hiking season is just beginning here.”

  Dupin knew how high the Roc’h Trévézel was: 384 meters, the highest elevation in Brittany. He could never help smirking when people talked about a “summit,” even if the hill fell steeply away facing the west, toward the Atlantic. Especially because Dupin knew real summits. Real mountains. His father’s home village was at 700 meters’ altitude, on the edge of the Alps. In less than half an hour you could be at 2,000 meters’ altitude; a little further and you were at 3,000 meters and above.

  “And he was lying in the middle of a hiking trail?”

  “No. On a rock slightly off the trail. And it’s just a narrow path that’s not used much anyway. One of the group wanted to take a photograph and left the path—he discovered the corpse. As I said earlier, it was directly below a steep rock face. It’s a good hundred-and-fifty-meter drop. He probably fell or was thrown. In any case he was probably already dead.”

  “And a local would have known that a path runs along there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there a car anywhere in the vicinity?”

  “No.”

  “No dark car? Or a red one?”

  “No.”

  “How did the man get there?”

  “We can’t tell at this stage. My colleague is up on the mountain ridge. He’s looking for footprints. Perhaps that will tell us more. He’s very good at looking for footprints.”

  Dupin had reached his Citroën.

  “I’ll be there,” he checked his watch, “by just after nine, I think. As soon as the medical examiner has anything to say, she’s to call me. And take a photo of the corpse on your mobile, from above at an angle, and send it to my assistant. Immediately.”

  They would show it to Madame Bandol. Her memory sometimes behaved in an extremely arbitrary way, suddenly and selectively, but that meant it could be full of surprises anytime. Even if the chances were slim, they needed to try everything.

  Without waiting for an answer, Dupin hung up.

  It was baffling. A string of baffling incidents that had started yesterday at the penguin exhibit in the Océanopolis. And hadn’t stopped. Dupin firmly believed in the principle of accumulation. He always had. If extraordinary incidents occurred, no matter if they were good, bad, funny, or even baffling, then several happened in a row. They didn’t like to be alone.

  There had also been something baffling about the equal parts surprising and mysterious message Claire had given him this morning on the phone when she had woken him at seven o’clock. Dupin was to meet her early that evening in Quimper. “At about six o’clock.” She would be in touch again to tell him where. At first he had thought she was joking. It was also mysterious because no train came in from Paris “about six o’clock.” The TGV came in at four forty-five or six forty-five. Dupin hoped he would be able to make it. Now that there was definitely a corpse.

  * * *

  The landscape was surreal, rugged, bizarre, wild, like in a sinister fairy tale. The perfect place for whimsical fantasies, stories, and legends—and in fact there were huge numbers of them here. The ideal dwelling place for druids, sorcerers, fairies, dwarves, and other magical creatures. It was creepy and utterly inhospitable to poor human beings. A setting for stunning fantasy films, where scenes about Frodo, Gandalf, and their companions could have been filmed.

  The Monts d’Arrée, the “Breton mountains,” formed the border between southern and northern Finistère. Dupin remembered how overwhelmed—and above all, deeply shocked—he had been when he had driven through them for the first time, up the D785 to Morlaix, because of some little bureaucratic issue. He would never have suspected Brittany had landscape like this. The road ran through forests of black fir until a new world suddenly opened up: gentle mountain ridges of granite and sandstone, rounded by the weather—the menez—alternated with rough, rugged mountain crests, jagged quartz, oddly contorted rock formations: the rocs. There were a few spacious plateaus too. It looked as though the ground had cracked violently open. The rocs towered high into the air, jutting out of a barren landscape of heather, gorse, ferns, mosses, and springs, streams, and bogs steeped in legend. There were several secluded chapels here and there, themselves the topic of various stories. And a smattering of mysterious menhirs.

  “Supernatural” was the best word for this area, Dupin thought. The everyday world, the world on “this side,” ended here in the heart of Finistère. Deserted realms where thick fog fought for the upper hand against bitter winds and raging storms. With no trees at all, which looked even more odd; they simply didn’t grow here, like at dizzying heights above the tree border. Winds and storms carried the infinitely fine salty spray of the raging Atlantic as far as here; it fell straight down onto the chain of mountains and the salt prevented any more luxurious vegetation growing. That was the scientific explanation. There were legends about it too—probably the most ridiculous legend that Dupin had ever heard: when Jesus was born, the heavens had sent the trees on the Monts d’Arrée to Bethlehem to welcome the Messiah. When they stubbornly refused (simply Bretons) they were condemned to wither and never be able to grow again.

  During his trip to Morlaix back then, Riwal had drummed it into Dupin—emphatically and using many vivid stories—only to venture across the chain of mountains in broad daylight. Dupin couldn’t tell how serious Riwal was being. But as always, Riwal had managed to provoke a slight sense of unease in Dupin, as crazy as this was. Impure souls wandered around here before and after sundown, in desperate hope of salvation, apparently; dwarfs danced with wild movements in the darkness on the heath; eerie stone depictions of Ankou, Death, came alive at night. The devil himself had hidden his treasure here, and whoever tried to dig it up would be grabbed by the legs and dragged down into the depths. It was even rumored that the entrance to hell, Youdig, was located here, in the Yeun-Elez, the ancient bog surrounded by rugged rocs.

  At some point Dupin had interrupted Riwal as he reeled off stories. It was probably a good thing he was not around today.

  The commissaire was almost there. The Roc’h Trévézel towered up imposingly to the left of the road.

  A moment later he spotted a small police Peugeot in the unpaved parking lot next to the road.

  Dupin had intended to take a look at the corpse and to meet Kadeg, the policeman, and, most importantly, the medical examiner there. But if the perpetrator had left footprints, then they would probably be up there and not where the corpse had hit the ground.

  Dupin drove up on the right and parked directly behind the police car.

  The weather was doing its best to heighten the dramatic effects of the landscape further. Vast jet-black banks of cloud drifted menacingly across the sky with misshapen holes in them, light falling hauntingly through them in dazzling streaks. Roving spotlights illuminating several sharply outlined sections of the landscape: a peak, a section of heath, a lake. Like with religious or paranormal phenomena.

  Dupin couldn’t resist a smile: a weather-beaten signpost pointed the way to the “highest mountain in Brittany.” It was perhaps three hundred meters high, and a narrow, stony footpath ran up it. It must have rained heavily during the night, because the path had turned into a stream. To the right and left of Roc’h Trévézel were more rugged peaks.

  He would have a good view from above. Dupin broke into a run, which quickly turned into a wearying trudge over the rich soil. Within a few meters, his shoes were soaked through. Even the faded grass had been, like everything up here, blown askew by the wind. There wasn’t much here: low, gnarled undergrowth that looked like overgrown bonsai trees, bright splashes of green and purple here and there, large fragments of rock in between.

  Dupin had to scramble the last few meters up to the summit. He was pretty out of breath when he got up there.

  The views were spectacular in every direction. And it was as he had suspected: down below, on the other side from the one where he had parked his car, he could see a little group of people. He noticed Kadeg’s new dark red jacket; the others must have been the policeman who had called him and their colleagues from forensics. He could only just make out the hiking trail. They were standing a few meters to the side of it.

  Dupin could also see the large rocky ledge with a misshapen silhouette lying on it. The dead body. Someone was standing next to him, presumably the medical examiner. There were two more figures in front of the rocks.

  Dupin had another hundred or hundred and fifty meters of the ridge to climb before he would get to the place from where—according to the plausible hypothesis—the victim had been thrown. Already dead. If what that doctor from Sizun said was true. The rocks were slightly lower there.

  Dupin was almost there when his mobile started to beep loudly. He almost didn’t hear it in the strong wind up here.

  “Monsieur le Commissaire?”

  “Yes, who else would it be, Kadeg?”

  “Where are you, boss? We’re waiting for you.”

  “Look up.”

  “What do you…”

  Dupin could see Kadeg moving. Raising his head. It still took a while.

  “Is that you up there?”

  “What do you think?”

  For some ridiculous reason, Kadeg now began to wave.

  “What are you doing there?”

  “What is it, Kadeg, fire away!”

  “The medical examiner has given some preliminary details on the possible time of death. In light of the rigor mortis and livor mortis, of course the weather has made the corpse’s core temperature—”

  “Kadeg!”

  “The man died yesterday between nine o’clock and twelve. Probably, as I sa—”

  “Yesterday morning?”

  “Between nine and twelve, yes.”

  This was unbelievable. It had a significant impact on everything.

  Madame Bandol had—if this was true—seen the corpse around five o’clock in the evening, before the perpetrator could get rid of it, in the parking lot near Port Belon. So the murder would in all likelihood have happened during a timeframe before five o’clock. It would make absolutely no sense to strangle someone yesterday morning—seven to ten hours beforehand—and then place them in the parking lot in Port Belon at five o’clock, or rather leave them there until five o’clock, and then drive the corpse into the Monts d’Arrée that evening or that night and throw them off one of the rocky ridges. It would be utterly ludicrous.

  But then—then they were in all likelihood dealing with two corpses! With two murders.

  “Hello? Are you still there, Monsieur le Commissaire?”

  “What about the strangulation, what does the medical examiner say about that?”

  “She agrees with the GP from Sizun. There’s a strong probability that death occurred due to mechanical asphyxiation. He was probably strangled, in any case. We will only know for certain whether he was already dead during the fall, or simply unconscious, after the autopsy. But she thinks strangulation is the most plausible cause of death.”

  “I presume nothing has been found yet that could identify the man?”

  “We would have informed you,” Kadeg grumbled. “Are you going to come down to where we are? The medical examiner wants to have the body picked up as soon as possible.”

  Dupin’s thoughts were elsewhere. “Yes. I’m coming.”

  He hung up and remained motionless for a few moments. He ran a hand roughly through his hair. Then he looked around. During the phone call, he had continued to climb slowly.

  It could have happened somewhere here, in the next few meters. The victim was thrown down the slope here. They, the perpetrator and victim, had probably come by car. The path from the road to here didn’t look quite as arduous as the one he had taken.

  There were several possible scenarios. The murder, the strangulation, had taken place up here, or it had happened earlier and the victim had been brought up here, either dragged or carried up. It wouldn’t have been a stroll anyway: the perpetrator must have been fairly strong. Or they weren’t alone.

  A deep bass voice cut into Dupin’s thoughts. “Are you the Frenchman?”

  The commissaire turned around. A few meters away, a head appeared from behind a rock, then the uniformed body. A very old policeman, by the looks of it anyway. Snow-white hair, a face weathered by the sun, weather, and life. This had to be the colleague who was looking for footprints. He stood still and scrutinized Dupin from head to toe.

  “Nothing good has ever come out of France. Don’t take it personally,” he said.

  “And with whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?” Dupin made a point of being pleasant in his response. He generally ignored it when he was spoken to like this. And the sentence “Nothing good has ever come out of France” had long since become an everyday Breton phrase to him.

  “Brioc L’Helgoualc’h.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Monsieur…” This was the exact kind of Breton name that Dupin couldn’t remember for the life of him, let alone pronounce. “Have you found anything up here?”

  “Are you in charge of this now?”

  Dupin remained calm. “If you mean the murder investigation: that’s right, monsieur.”

  “This just gets better and better!” The old policeman’s intonation was far less unpleasant than his words. “Is this your first time here in our neck of the woods? In the Monts d’Arrée?”

  “Do you think it could be relevant to solving the case, the question of whether I’ve been here before?” Dupin said, remaining even-tempered. There was nothing hostile about the grumpy chap.

  “Oh yes.”

  “You were going to tell me whether you’d found anything interesting.”

  Brioc L’Helgoualc’h grunted something Dupin couldn’t make out, turned around, and disappeared behind the rock again without any further explanation. A hint of movement with his head could be interpreted, with some generosity, as a request to follow him. Dupin sighed—and followed.

  This was going to be a wonderful investigation.

  * * *

  When Dupin rounded the rock, Brioc L’Helgoualc’h was already some distance away. As old as he might be, he walked fast.

  He was kneeling in the heather a little below Dupin.

  “Here,” he called.

  Dupin approached. Only now did he spot the small path. He crouched down too and saw what the policeman had meant: two faded but still clearly visible footprints on a patch of ground between some stones and moss. A right foot and a left foot, almost parallel at this spot. Deep imprints. Someone stood here for quite a long time. One single person.

  Dupin looked along the path. It ran directly from the road and led to the rough, rocky ridge with the slope where the dead body lay.

  “There’s another print down there. And further up there too. But the path is mostly stony or mossy.”

  Dupin’s mobile rang. Kadeg again. He answered anyway.

  “So where are you, Monsieur le Commissaire? You’re the only person we’re waiting for. The medical examiner wants to leave with the corpse.”

  “I’m investigating,” Dupin replied drily. “I hope there was another reason you called me. A good reason.”

  “The medical examiner says that she sees indications of a struggle. Apart from the strangulation marks, she means.”

  “Yes?” This was relevant.

  “Hematomas on the right side of the face, on the chin, on the stomach, that very likely were not sustained in the fall; a twisted, broken right wrist that doesn’t look like an injury from the impact either. But she wants—”

  “A broken wrist?”

  It must have been a brutal struggle. The victim had grappled ferociously with his murderer. “Has she said anything else?”

  “No, but that is quite a lot—before the autopsy.”

  “I’m coming—until then, everyone stays where they are.” Dupin hung up.

  He turned back to L’Helgoualc’h. “I—”

  “Broken wrist?” L’Helgoualc’h’s voice had changed. He sounded insistent.

  “A broken wrist, yes.”

  “When night falls, the Kannerezed Noz, the washerwomen of the night—bony, pale women—begin to wash the shrouds of the dead in the bog. If you encounter them, you’ve got to copy them. But if you don’t wring out the washing in the same direction as them, they break your wrist and you bleed to death.” He looked Dupin in the eye imploringly.

 

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