‘No problem. No trouble. There’s nothing left here worth stealing, aside from the dirt and the weeds. You a tourist?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s what I guessed.’
You guessed, my arse, Gaston-le-beau! You just saw my Monte Carlo plates. Any halfwit could figure that out.
‘Every once in a while someone comes up here.’ The man shrugged modestly. ‘By accident, like you, but mostly out of curiosity. People from Cassis don’t like coming up here. I’m not thrilled about it either, to tell you the truth. After what happened . . . But a job’s a job after all and you can’t be too picky these days. Anyway, as you can see, we always come in pairs. So many years have passed, but I still get the chills.’
‘Why? What happened here?’
‘You don’t know the story of La Patience?’
He looked at Hulot as though it were impossible for anyone on the planet not to know the story of La Patience.
Nicolas gave him an opening. ‘No, I don’t think I’ve ever heard about it.’
‘Well, there was a crime here. Actually, a series of crimes. You really never heard about it?’
‘No, never.’ Hulot felt his pulse racing.
The man pulled out a packet of tobacco and skilfully rolled a cigarette with papers fished from his waistcoat pocket. As always happens with people who realize they are in possession of an interesting story, he savoured every moment of his narration.
‘I don’t know every last detail because I wasn’t living in Cassis at the time. But apparently the guy who lived here killed his son and the housekeeper before burning the house down and shooting himself in the head.’
‘Good heavens!’
‘You said it. But in town they say he was half-crazy anyway and that in the twenty years he lived here they hadn’t seen him and his son more than a couple of dozen times. The housekeeper went to town to buy groceries but she didn’t talk to anyone. Hello and goodbye and that was it. He didn’t even farm the land any more, and he had quite a bit of it. Gave it over to the estate-agency people to run and they rented it out to local winemakers. He lived like a hermit on top of this mountain. In the long run, I think he blew a fuse and that’s what made him do what he did.’
‘Three people dead, you say?’
‘Yeah. Two of them, the man and the woman, were completely burned up. But the boy’s body was still intact when they put out the fire. Good thing they stopped the fire in time, because it could have burned away half the mountain.’
He pointed to the younger man with him. ‘Bertot’s father was with the fire service. He told me that when they reached the house, after they doused the flames, they found the boy’s body in an awful state. So bad that he would have been better off burned to a crisp, like the other two. The father’s body was so badly burned that the bullet he used to blow his brains out had fused with his skull.’
‘The boy’s body . . . what do you mean, “in an awful state”?’
‘Well, Bertot’s father told me he had no face left, if you know what I mean. It was as if they had scraped off the face. So tell me the old guy wasn’t crazy.’
Hulot felt his guts crawl inside his stomach, like the ivy on those crumbing walls. Dear God, the boy had no face left as if they had scraped it away. Like a slideshow from hell, a series of skinned faces passed before his eyes. Jochen Welder and Arianna Parker. Allen Yoshida. Gregor Yatzimin. He saw their lidless eyes staring into nothingness like an endless damnation of the man who had killed them and of those who had been unable to stop him. He thought he could hear a distorted voice whispering into both his ears in a sickening stereo effect.
I kill . . .
Despite the warm summer air, he shivered in his unlined cotton jacket. A trickle of sweat ran down from his right armpit to his belt.
‘Then what happened?’ he asked in a suddenly different tone.
The man didn’t notice, or else he must have thought it was the normal reaction of a squeamish tourist who gagged at the sight of blood.
‘Well, it was pretty obvious what had happened, so after excluding any other possible options, it went down as a double murder-suicide. Not good publicity for La Patience.’
‘Any heirs?’
‘I was getting to that. No heirs, so the farm went to the town council. It was put up for sale, but who’d want to buy it after what happened? I wouldn’t take it if they paid me. The council handed it over to the same estate agency and they rent out the land. They get maintenance costs out of it and so forth. I come up once in a while to keep the weeds from taking over what’s left of the house.’
‘Where are the victims buried?’
Hulot tried to make his questions sound like those of a normal, curious person, but he needn’t have bothered. The man was so keen to tell the story that he probably would have finished it even if Hulot had walked off in mid-sentence.
‘In the cemetery down in town, I think. The one on the hill. You must’ve seen it if you’ve been down around there.’
Hulot vaguely recalled a cemetery near the car park where he had stopped earlier.
‘And what was their name, the people who lived here, I mean?’
‘I don’t remember exactly. Something with Le . . . Legrand or Le Normand, something like that.’
Hulot made a point of looking at his watch.
‘Goodness, it’s late. Time sure does fly when you’re hearing a good story. My friends will be wondering what happened to me. Thanks for telling me about it.’
‘You’re welcome. My pleasure. Have a good holiday.’
The man turned around and went to let Bertot benefit from his expertise. As he was getting into the car, Hulot heard him call out, ‘Hey, listen, if you want to eat some really good fish, take your friends to La Coquille d’Or down at the wharf. If you get ripped off somewhere else, don’t blame me. Remember, La Coquille d’Or. It’s my brother-in-law’s place. Tell him Gaston sent you. He’ll take good care of you.’
My, my Gaston. Gaston-le-beau. How about that – I guessed right. Today’s my lucky day.
As he drove excitedly back to Cassis to visit the local cemetery, Nicolas Hulot knew that he would need a great deal more luck if he really wanted to settle the score.
FORTY-THREE
Nicolas Hulot pulled the ticket out of the machine at the entrance to the Parking de la Viguerie and put his car back in the same spot where he had parked it before. From there he could see, a little further up, a tiny cemetery surrounded by cypress trees. He left his car, walked out of the garage, and started up the road that seemed to be a continuation of the one he had walked down earlier. Just before the cemetery, he saw a cement playground with a tennis and basketball court. A group of boys were dribbling a ball, intent on a half-court game.
Strange, he thought, that there would be a basketball court right next to a cemetery. Strange in a good way. It wasn’t a lack of respect, but rather the simple, natural juxtaposition of life and death, without fear or false modesty. If he believed in ghosts, he would say it was a way for the living to share a little life with those who no longer had any.
He reached the long perimeter wall of the cemetery. A blue street sign hanging from a lamp told him that he was on Allée du Souvenir Français. Another sign on a wall built into the hillside said the same thing. He walked a few hundred feet to a dirt road leading to a gate under an archway. Next to the gate, another sign hanging from a weather-beaten notice board said that the caretaker was there from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the winter months and to dusk in the summer.
Hulot passed beneath the archway and into the cemetery, the gravel crunching beneath his shoes. Otherwise, the cemetery was in total silence. It made no difference that those boys were playing ball not far away, or that the town was full of tourists in the heat of summer and cars coming and going on the road. The wall seemed to have some special sound-absorbing property that did not remove the noise, but altered it so that it became part of the silence that reigned inside.
He walked
slowly along the path among the graves.
The excitement from his meagre progress in the investigation had worn off somewhat during the short drive from La Patience. Now was the time for rational thought. Now he had to remind himself that someone’s life depended on him and what he might find out.
The cemetery was very small. A series of paths forming a checkerboard pattern. There was a flight of steps on the right, built to make better use of the little available space. It led up to a series of terraces with other graves, dug into the hillside that continued beyond the fence. An enormous cypress rose into the clear sky at the centre of the cemetery. To the right and left were two small brick buildings with red tile roofs. Judging from the cross on top, the one on the right was a chapel of rest. The other was probably a toolshed. As he stood looking at it, the wooden door opened and a man came out.
Hulot walked towards him, wondering how he should introduce himself. As actors and policemen – both masters of deception – often do, he decided to go with the moment and improvise. He approached the man, who had now seen him as well.
‘Good afternoon.’
‘Evening, sir.’
Hulot looked at the sun moving towards a triumphant sunset and realized that he hadn’t even noticed how much time had passed.
‘Heavens, is it that late? I’m sorry.’ He stood there for a moment and then decided to play the curious tourist. He tried again to act the innocent. ‘Are you the caretaker?’
‘Iam.’
‘Listen, someone in town just told me a horrible story, something that happened here a while ago, at—’
‘You mean La Patience?’ the caretaker interrupted.
‘That’s right. I was wondering, just out of curiosity, if I could see the graves.’
‘You a cop?’
Nicolas stared at him, speechless. From his expression, the other man could tell that he was right and he smiled.
‘Don’t worry. It’s not written all over your face. Just that I used to be a delinquent sort of kid and got in a lot of trouble with the police, so I can always recognize a cop a mile off.’ Hulot neither confirmed nor denied it. ‘You want to see the Legrand graves, right? Come with me.’
Hulot asked no questions. If the man had a troubled past and had come to live in a small town where some people want to know everything and some prefer to know nothing, it was pretty clear which side he was on.
Hulot followed him to the steps leading to the terraces. They climbed a few steps and the caretaker turned left at the first landing. He stopped in front of a few graves grouped together. Hulot let his gaze run over the headstones. Each had a very simple epitaph, a name and date chiselled in the stone.
Laura de Dominicis
1943–1971
Daniel Legrand
1970–1992
Marcel Legrand
1992
Françoise Mautisse
1992
There were no photographs on the headstones. He’d noticed them on many of the other graves. Given the situation, he could understand why there weren’t any, although he would have liked to have some faces to use for reference. The caretaker seemed to have read his mind.
‘There aren’t any photos on the graves because they were all destroyed during the fire.’
‘Why are the birth dates missing on two of them?’
‘The two that have the birth dates are the mother and child. I think we didn’t get the other two birth dates in time. And then later . . .’ He waved his hand to indicate that afterwards nobody had cared about adding them.
‘How did it happen?’ asked the inspector, without raising his eyes from the marble slabs.
‘Ugly business, and not just the story itself. Legrand was a strange character, a loner. He came here after buying La Patience, with his pregnant wife and another woman who must have been some kind of housekeeper. He moved in and it was clear immediately that he didn’t want anything to do with anyone. His wife gave birth at home, alone. He and the housekeeper probably helped.’
He gestured towards the gravestone.
‘The woman died a few months after having the baby. It might not have happened if she had delivered in the hospital. At least that’s what the doctor who wrote the death certificate said. But that’s the way the man was. He seemed to hate people. No one ever saw the son. He wasn’t baptized, didn’t go to school. Probably had private tutors, maybe his father, because he took all the exams at the end of the school year.’
‘Did you ever see him?’
The caretaker nodded. ‘Once in a while, very rarely, he came with his father and put flowers on his mother’s grave. Otherwise the housekeeper did it. One time something peculiar happened.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing big, but it really showed what things were like between father and son. I was inside.’ He pointed to the small toolshed. ‘When I came out, I saw him, the father I mean, standing at the grave. His back was to me. The boy was standing over there, near the railing, watching the children playing soccer down below. When he heard me come out, he turned his head in my direction. He was a normal child, rather good-looking I’d say, but he had strange eyes. I guess sad would be the best description. The saddest eyes I’ve ever seen. His father was distracted for a moment and he had snuck over there, attracted by voices of the other kids. I went to speak to him, but the father ran up to us, furious. He called the boy by name. And can I tell you something?’
The caretaker stopped, probably to wipe the last bit of dust off that memory. He stared, not at Hulot but as if he were reliving the moment.
‘When he said “Daniel”, it was like a man saying “fire” to a firing squad. The boy turned to his father and started shaking like a leaf. Legrand said nothing. He just looked at his son with those big crazy eyes. I don’t know what normally went on in that house, but I can tell you that right then the boy had pissed himself The caretaker looked down at the ground. ‘So when I heard what happened years later, it didn’t surprise me that Legrand had done all that. Know what I mean?’
‘I heard he committed suicide after killing the housekeeper and the boy and setting fire to the house.’
‘That’s right. Or at least, that’s what the inquest said. There was no reason to suspect anything else and the man’s behaviour justified the hypothesis. But those eyes –’ he looked off into the distance again, shaking his head – ‘I’ll never forget those eyes, the eyes of a madman.’
‘Is there anything else you can tell me? Any other details?’
‘Oh, yes. There were other strange things. Lots, I’d say.’
‘Such as?’
‘Oh, the theft of the body, for example. Then the business with the flowers.’
‘What body?’ For a moment, Hulot thought he had misunderstood.
‘His.’
The man nodded towards the grave of Daniel Legrand. ‘One night, after about a year, the grave was vandalized. When I got here in the morning, I found the gate open, the headstone moved aside, and the coffin open. There was no trace of the boy’s corpse. The police thought it might have been some crazy necrophiliac.’
‘You mentioned something about flowers,’ said the inspector.
‘Yeah, there was that, too. A couple of months after the funeral, the cemetery received a typewritten letter. They gave it to me because it was addressed to the caretaker of the Cassis cemetery. There was money inside the envelope. Not a cheque, mind you, but notes, wrapped in a letter.’
‘What did it say?’
‘That the money was to take care of the graves of Daniel Legrand and his mother. Not one word about the father or the housekeeper. Whoever had written the letter asked me to keep the graves tidy and make sure there were always fresh flowers. The money continued to arrive even after the body was stolen.’
‘Even now?’
‘I got one last month. If there isn’t any change, I should be getting the next one sometime soon.’
‘Did you keep the letter? Any of the envelopes?’
>
The caretaker shrugged and shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. I got the letter several years ago. I could look at home, but I don’t think I kept it. I don’t know about the envelopes. Maybe I still have a couple. In any case, I can give you the next one if I get it.’
‘I’d appreciate that. And I’d also appreciate your not mentioning our conversation to anyone.’
‘Sure.’ The caretaker shrugged as if that went without saying.
While they were talking, a black-clad woman in a headscarf came along the path holding a bouquet of flowers. With tiny steps she walked to a grave in the same row as the Legrands’, bent down and lovingly brushed off a marble gravestone. She spoke to the grave in a soft voice. ‘Sorry I’m late, but I had problems with the house today. I’ll go and get some water and then I’ll explain.’
She lay the fresh flowers on the headstone and took the dead ones from the vase. As she shuffled off to fill it with water, the caretaker followed Nicolas’s gaze and guessed his thoughts. There was pity on his face.
‘Poor woman. Just before the business at La Patience, she had a tragedy as well, an accident. It wasn’t anything unusual, if you can say that about a death. A diving accident. Her son used to go fishing for sea urchins, which he sold to tourists from a stall at the harbour. One day, he never came back. They found his boat just outside one of the calanques, abandoned with his clothes piled in it. When the body floated in with the sea, the autopsy found that he had drowned; something had probably gone wrong while he was diving. After the boy’s death . . .’
The caretaker stopped and circled a forefinger at his temple. ‘Her brain went with him.’
Hulot stood watching the woman throw the old flowers she had removed from the grave into the bin. He thought about his wife. The same thing had happened to Céline after the death of their son. The caretaker had said it perfectly. Her brain went with him.