Merle: A French murder mystery (A Jacques Forêt Mystery Book 2)

  Copyright © 2017 by Angela Wren

  Photography: Adobe Stock @ Lindsay_Helms

  Cover Design: Soqoqo

  Editor: Stephanie Patterson

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without

  written permission of the author or Crooked Cat except for brief quotations

  used for promotion or in reviews. This is a work of fiction.

  Names, characters, and incidents are used fictitiously.

  First Black Line Edition, Crooked Cat, 2017

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  and something nice will happen.

  To my mum and dad, both of whom are very sadly missed.

  Acknowledgements

  Grateful thanks go to:

  Green Watch Crew Manager, Dave Bastow, of West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service for his invaluable advice and guidance.

  Daniel Hodson, Technical Support Officer, for his patience and his knowledge and expertise in the field of IT.

  My writing colleagues who have patiently listened, and encouraged me, when the writing of this story proved to be difficult.

  My editor and publisher, without whom this would not have been possible.

  About the Author

  Angela Wren is an actor and director at a small theatre a few miles from where she lives in the county of Yorkshire in the UK. She worked as a project and business change manager – very pressured and very demanding – but she managed to escape, and now she writes books.

  She has always loved stories and story-telling, so it seemed a natural progression, to her, to try her hand at writing, starting with short stories. Her first published story was in an anthology, which was put together by the magazine ‘Ireland’s Own’ in 2011.

  Angela particularly enjoys the challenge of plotting and planning different genres of work. Her short stories vary between contemporary romance, memoir, mystery, and historical. She also writes comic flash-fiction and has drafted two one-act plays that have been recorded for local radio.

  Her full-length stories are set in France, where she likes to spend as much time as possible each year. She’s currently researching and working on the follow-up to Merle.

  Follow Angela at http://www.angelawren.co.uk and http://www.jamesetmoi.blogspot.co.uk.

  Also by Angela Wren:

  Messandrierre (#1 in the Jacques Forêt Mystery series)

  Merle

  Read the complete Jaques Forêt Mystery series:

  Messandrierre (#1)

  Merle (#2)

  Montbel (#3)

  la fête des morts

  It was the tightly scrunched ball of paper that captured the attention of Magistrate Bruno Pelletier. His trained eyes swept around the room, only glancing at the naked body in the bath, and came to rest once more on the small, ivory-white mass, challenging and silent against the solid plain porcelain of the tiles. He stepped over the large pool of dried blood, iron red against the white of the floor, and, with gloved hands, he retrieved the object.

  Carefully prising the paper back into its customary rectangular shape, he stared at the contents and frowned as he read and re-read the single six-word sentence printed there.

  Je sais ce que tu fais

  After a moment, he dropped it into an evidence bag being held open for him by the pathologist.

  all hallows’ eve, 2009

  toussaint – all saints’ day, sunday, november 1st, 10.00am

  At his desk in Mende, Pelletier was reading the initial report of the previous day’s death whilst he waited for Jacques Forêt to arrive. The building was unusually silent and he was still smarting from the verbal drubbing his wife had given him for having to be at work. Very much aware that he was foregoing a chance to see how much his recently born granddaughter had changed and grown, he sighed and slumped down in his chair. Missing much of this precious time with his own children when they were young because of his work was something he now bitterly regretted.

  He pushed his mind back to the scene of the crime when he heard the door of the outer office open and then click shut again. Jacques, his long navy winter coat buttoned against the day’s chill wind, strode into Pelletier’s room.

  “I’ve brought coffee,” he said placing two insulated silver containers on the desk. Discarding his coat on the back of a nearby chair, he sat down and smiled. “What does the pathologist’s report say?”

  “It’s only a preliminary one at the moment, so it is hurried, and it doesn’t tell me anything I don’t know already.” Pelletier pushed the thin file across the desk to his visitor.

  “And you’re sure you want me to look at this?”

  “Yes. I know you’re no longer on the force, Jacques, but yesterday you arrived at the scene just as I was leaving. You had a reason for being there, and I want to hear more about that. Also, I value your opinion as an ex-policeman.” Pelletier removed his rimless spectacles and began to polish the lenses with his handkerchief.

  Jacques glanced through the meagre number of pages searching for the single relevant line he required.

  Death by exsanguination from a knife wound to the left wrist.

  “And the estimated time of death is recorded as sometime after noon on Friday…” Jacques said out loud as he looked up from the file. “Well, that fits.”

  “With what?” Pelletier replaced his spectacles.

  “I now work for Alain Vaux of Vaux Investigations. One of our staff has not been into the office since last Thursday, and there has been no explanation from her either. She was due in the office yesterday as well but did not turn up, nor did she make contact to let us know why she was absent.” Jacques quickly flicked through the other pages and then placed the folder on the desk.

  “Ah. But that does not explain why you were in that building in Merle as I was about to leave it.”

  Jacques bristled. “In part, it does. Her manager, Madeleine Cloutier, has a regular meeting on a Friday afternoon in Rodez and, if she comes into the office first, always leaves at about eleven, eleven-thirty at the latest. On Friday, she asked me to check on Aimée, her absentee team member, if she didn’t come in after lunch. At around three-thirty I called her office number and it was switched to voicemail, and when I called Aimée’s mobile immediately afterwards, it was switched off. When she didn’t come in for work yesterday, I called her again, at different times and got the same result. I decided to visit to see if she was OK.”

  Pelletier narrowed his eyes and paused in thought. “But we have no positive identification for the body as yet.” He picked up his coffee and watched Jacques closely. “We know that that particular apartment on the first floor is rented by Aimée Moreau, but we are still trying to identify and locate her next of kin.” Pelletier consulted his notebook. “According to the Concierge, she rarely ever spoke, and he last saw her about three weeks ago, and even then, he could not be absolutely sure that it was her as she was walking away from him.”

  “I can make an identification if you wish,” said Jacques. “I’ve been working with Aimée for a few weeks now, and I’m sure that we will have details of the next of kin on file at the office.” He relaxed back in his chair and rested his left ankle on his right knee.

  “Ah. That would be very useful, Jacques, and I would be glad of your assistance, but I have to understand in detail why you thought it
necessary to visit the apartment of a colleague. I am sure that your presence in the building, where an unexplained death has occurred, can be accounted for satisfactorily and that I will be able to eliminate you from the enquiry. However, just now I need to focus on you.”

  Jacques remained composed. “I understand that, Bruno, and had the situation been reversed I would be saying exactly the same thing to you.”

  Pelletier clipped the base of his cup on the edge of the desk and some drops of coffee splattered pale brown spots across the open notebook in front of him as he set it down. “So, tell me about your connection with the owner of the apartment.” Retrieving his hanky, he hesitated and then repocketed it and shook the open notebook over the floor and let the drops of liquid slither off the pages.

  “It’s purely a professional one. I’m employed on a permanent contract as a Senior Investigator, working directly to Alain Vaux. His brother Édouard runs the sister company, Vaux Consulting. Both of these businesses, which operate independently in different business fields, but also share some services internally, form the privately-owned Vaux Group. Aimée Moreau is employed as an Assistant Consultant in the central project management team that works to Édouard Vaux. Her manager and the rest of the team are involved in a project to redesign the working practices, rebrand and refit the offices of a major insurance company located throughout the départements of Lozère, Gard, Averyon and Hérault. It’s a substantial four-year contract with the possibility of further work in other départements in the regions of Midi-Pyrénées and Languedoc-Roussillon if this first tranche of the project goes well.”

  “And how long have you known Aimée?”

  “I first met Aimée on Tuesday the first of September. My new contract of employment began on that day. But I did not actually have any close dealings with her until I was assigned my current investigation by Alain Vaux—”

  “Which is?”

  Pelletier’s as sharp as ever, thought Jacques. He sat up straight and cleared his throat. “A delicate matter, so I must ask for your discretion.”

  The magistrate gave an almost imperceptible nod.

  monday, october 12th, three weeks earlier

  Jacques flipped over to the last page and, whilst he could see the obvious downward trend on the graph, he failed to fully understand what the figures were supposed to be telling him. He placed the papers on the desk and sat back in his chair.

  “I’m sure you’ve now realised why I have to act,” said Alain Vaux as he nodded towards the document. “Those are the losses, month by month, compared with last year, up to the end of September. I discovered at Friday’s board meeting that yet another contract, for which we provided a very competitive and compelling bid, has gone to another firm. I suspect it is C and C Consulting, and this isn’t the first time they’ve picked up what should have been one of our projects.” Alain brushed his hand down his tie and rested his forearms on the desk, fingers tightly intertwined.

  “Surely you cannot be certain about whether a contract is to be awarded to you or not. Isn’t that the point of the tender process? A fair route to find the most qualified bidder to undertake the work at the most economic price?” In the four-and-a-bit weeks that Jacques had been with Vaux Investigations, he had learned to never assume anything and to question everything. In comparison with some of the cases he’d handled in Paris, his work thus far had hardly been testing. There’d been the internal investigation involving minor theft, a couple of domestic cases that had been quickly resolved, and some background checking on senior managers in another company with which Vaux Consulting wanted to sign a five-year contract. Every case he’d handled had been well within his capability. But this new assignment was something completely different and he was beginning to feel uneasy.

  “In principle, yes.” Alain glanced through the fourth-storey windows to the building opposite. “But, you know, people talk. Sometimes unguardedly, and you never know who might be listening at those moments. Employees move from position to position and between companies, and why would you not use any helpful information that they may have.” He shrugged as a pragmatic half-smile crossed his face.

  Jacques shifted in his chair, frowned and stared at the wall behind his boss’s desk. “Are you suggesting that someone, either here or within your sister company is leaking information to competitors?”

  Alain rose to his feet and moved over to the windows. “No, not exactly. But there is something amiss. I’ve been running my own business for a over thirty years, and I know that my and my brother’s half of the group are both clean. But I also know that some of our competitors do not have quite the same reputation as us and are not as fastidious as us in their business dealings.”

  Jacques scrutinised Alain’s reflection in the glass. The watery grey eyes were cold and unblinking and the pale features emotionless and inscrutable. “I’m just an ex-policeman, Alain. You’re going to have to give me a bit more to go on than a spreadsheet of figures, a graph and a gut feeling.”

  “An ex-policeman who is known to get his man, Jacques. That’s why I employed you.” He glanced at Jacques and smiled briefly. “My brother, Édouard, runs a tight organisation, as do I. But someone, somewhere is… I’m not sure what is happening but the result is that we are losing contracts. Someone is working very hard to steal our market share, and I don’t believe this is anything to do with a genuine shift of business to a better competitor. What has been happening to Édouard is now affecting my half of the group. I’ve just lost a contract with a company that I’ve been associated with for six years. A couple of weeks ago, it was a contract with a medium-sized employer that we had supported for two years only. It’s the same pattern. A relatively new contract disappears from the books, but the income stream can be replaced a short while afterwards with relative ease. Then a more established contract disappears and so it goes on. It’s the pattern of the losses that makes me suspicious. If the losses here at Vaux Investigations accelerate over the next few months along a similar curve to that graph, then we will be staring bankruptcy in the face.” When he turned towards Jacques, his brow was furrowed and his colour ashen and weary.

  “All right. I think we start with previous employees. Anyone who has left either part of the organisation within the last few months. I will need a list of names, last known addresses and the reason for leaving. Once I’ve got that, I will first make enquiries about those who were sacked, whose contracts were ended early or not renewed. I’ll need access to personnel files; detailed information for all the lost bids and that must include all confidential documents. Also, if your suspicions are correct, I cannot ignore current staff who have been in continuous employment since you and your brother first noticed that there may have been a problem.”

  Alain nodded and returned to his desk. “I’ll authorise all of that but there are conditions. I want you to start by looking at Vaux Consulting. If there is anything to find, it will be there. I also want you to work there. I want you to observe, at a day-to-day level, what is going on. To facilitate that I’ve agreed with Édouard that you will work with Mademoiselle Lapointe and she has allocated a spare desk to you in the operations area. But you will report your findings, all of your findings, to me and to me alone. We will tell everyone that your role is to look for efficiencies. The permanent workforce is already aware that we may be looking at reducing our overall staff numbers at all levels. So, placing you there will not surprise them.”

  Jacques thought for a moment and then shook his head. “I can’t agree to that. If you want me to conduct an internal investigation of this nature, then you have to let me handle it in my own way. In addition, the workforce across the group must already know my background and your ruse will not be believable. Also, you need to remember that I’ve worked undercover on major police investigations whilst I was in Paris and this is not a time for subterfuge. And no one can be excluded from consideration, Alain. No one. Not even you.”

  Alain glared at Jacques. “If the problem is a
n internal one, won’t that alert the one person we are trying to identify?”

  “Yes, it will and that can only work in our favour. He or she will feel under pressure and is then likely to make mistakes.”

  “Tread carefully, Jacques.”

  The last instruction rankled, and Jacques took a deep breath. He was always careful. Always had been, apart from that one night around the Porte de la Villette in the 19th arrondissement, and he’d paid the price since. Dismissing the mild, and what he finally decided was an unintentional, insult, he stood. “I’ll see myself out.”

  Boulevard Théophile Roussel was teeming with traffic when Jacques made his way towards the pedestrian crossing. As he waited for the lights to change he stared at the four-storey building opposite that housed the sister company, Vaux Consulting. He couldn’t help thinking how convenient the positioning was. It would be so easy to set up a covert watching and listening post if he needed to. But that may not be necessary; he’d have to wait and see how the investigation progressed. He smiled to himself and straightened his shoulders as he crossed the road.

  Investigative work that can only get more and more interesting.

  The pass for his own building allowed him admittance to Vaux Consulting. A security risk that he had already pointed out to both Alain and Édouard and, on a less formal basis, to the Head of Security for both sites. But still no action had been taken. He nodded to the security guard at the reception desk, a painfully thin young man in an ill-fitting grey uniform, who seemed out of place in his current surroundings. Jacques had wondered more than once why such a quiet and uncommunicative individual had been employed in a public-facing role, but had resigned himself to accepting others’ decisions, even if he thought them misguided.