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

  The third replay of the scenario took a different turn. He joined the road where the accident had occurred a few moments after Beth had sped past in her car. As he came level with her chalet, he saw her outside taking a large box out of the boot. He turned into her drive and cycled the few metres to her front door.

  “Junior Gendarme Mancelle on patrol, Madame Samuels.” A wide smile on his face, he saluted smartly.

  “Pierre…sorry, Gendarme Mancelle, how are you?” Beth moved another box onto the front porch.

  “I’m going back to school tomorrow. My medicine is finished today so Maman and the doctor said I’m better now.”

  Beth smiled at the simplicity of his view of life. “That’s very good news. And does Maman know where you are?”

  “Oh yes. I told her I was going on patrol and she said that I’ve got to be back home by four.”

  She glanced at her watch, there was another half hour of freedom for him yet. “Oh, well, if I phone her and let her know you’re here do you think she will let you give me a helping hand with all these boxes?”

  He nodded as Beth took out her phone and dialled. A few moments later, assent given, Beth opened the door of the car to reveal a pile of box files laid out across the rear seats.

  “Do you think you could take those files into the snug for me and put them on the floor in front of the book cases?”

  Another smart salute. “Happy to help Madame Samuels.”

  Beth placed two box files, one on top of the other and gently rested them on his proffered forearms. Then she picked up the first box. “Follow me, and as we’re working together, now Pierre, I think you’d better call me Beth.”

  The boy stopped dead in his tracks on the top step of the porch. “Maman says I’m not allowed to do that. She say’s I can only call grown-ups Monsieur or Madame.”

  “OK.” Beth balanced the box unsteadily on one arm as she used her spare hand to unlock the door and push it open. “Well, we can’t go against what Maman says, can we?” She stood with her foot holding the door back to let the youngster through. “How about you call me Madame…?” She was about to suggest her own shortened name and then realised that, whilst an adult used to speaking English could cope with the final digraph, a boy of six may not be so capable. As she placed the heavy box on the floor in the corner at the far side of the hearth, she heard in her mind his young voice pronounce her name in the standard French manner. A smirk spread across her face as the mental picture of the bordello keeper in a Victorian gothic novel that she had read recently came into her mind. Hmm, Madame Bette is perhaps not a good choice!

  “I think it might be better to call me Madame Elizabeth,” she suggested, pronouncing her full name as a French person would.

  “Like the Queen in England?” He offered her the box files, his eyes wide in wonderment. “Do you really have the same name as the Queen?”

  To hide her amusement, she took the files and spent a few moments arranging them one on top of the other.

  “Yes, and there the similarity ends,” she said as she shepherded the boy back out to the car.

  Another half-dozen trips and all of Old Thierry’s photos, negatives, boxes of equipment, cameras and lenses were safely stored on the floor in the snug and Pierre’s curiosity finally got the better of him as he lifted the flap on the nearest box.

  “Are you going to the be like Old Thierry now?”

  Beth let out a light chuckle and joined him, crossed legged, on the floor. “Yes,” she said as she opened another box, “I suppose you could say that.”

  “Wow!” Uninvited, Pierre began delving into the box and lifted out a lens with one hand and a small camera with the other and held them up for his detailed examination.

  “Careful!” Beth retrieved the lens and placed it behind her on the sofa. “Some of this equipment is very delicate and expensive, Pierre, so we need to treat it with great respect. And that camera you’re holding, is from the 1960s and, to a collector, it could be worth quite a few Euros.”

  Cradling the object in both hands, he gave it to her. “You mean a lot of money, like hundreds and hundreds of Euros?”

  “Perhaps not that many…but I really don’t know, Pierre. There’s an auction site on the internet that I use and I’ve agreed with Old Thierry that everything in this box will be sold.” Beth opened the back of the camera and checked the film advance lever and the shutter. “This is where the 35mm film would go,” she said, showing the empty inside to Pierre. Then she snapped the back shut, focussed the lens and peered through the view finder, lined up a shot of the boy and clicked.

  “Does it still work?”

  “I’d say so but there’s no film inside so I can’t be sure.” She shrugged. “Do you want to know how to use it?”

  Pierre nodded and within moments both of them were lost in the detail of lining up shots, focussing on the subject and how the development process worked. Beth had a willing pupil and, unexpectedly, she found herself to be a capable teacher until a gentle knock on the front door brought both of them back to reality.

  Marie, arriving much later than intended, claimed her child and returned home.

  ***

  In the shadows created by the trees, a tall, thin man in a dark green hoodie squatted and watched and waited. Seeing the woman and the boy leave, he knew that the only other person in the chalet was alone. He flicked yet another cigarette butt onto the damp ground behind him and thought about giving up and heading back to Mende, but he had to know if this was the right place. No-one had told him anything about any other occupants of the house. But it was a wooden building. An old hunting lodge. He liked that. He was looking forward to doing this job.

  An hour or so later, a motorbike pulled off the road and up the driveway. The man noted down the registration plate on the back of the scrap of paper on which the name and address of the chalet had been written. As he watched, Jacques Forêt parked the BSA, removed his helmet and went inside. The man leered as he recognised his true target.

  wednesday, october, 21st

  “Thanks for agreeing to see me,” said Jacques as he walked into Édouard’s office and sat opposite his interviewee. His eyes automatically swept across the desk in front of him which was covered in papers. At one corner were a set of three photo frames and Jacques assumed they would be of family but made a mental note to check if he got the chance.

  “I’m a suspect, I believe,” Édouard said, lips pursed and his expression and tone conveying his extreme displeasure.

  “Everyone is until they are eliminated. That’s how I work. Your brother employed me because of the way I work and because of my record of successes.”

  Édouard bristled but said nothing.

  “I’d like to begin with something from your past.” Jacques produced the copy of the torn portion of the letter that he had found in Alain’s personnel file and placed it on top of the papers on the desk directly in Édouard’s sightline. “According to Alain, you can explain what this means.”

  “You have no right!” Édouard blustered. “You have no right to question me about this!” Slamming his chair against the wall, he got up and marched to the window and remained there for a few moments.

  Jacques was surprised that a man of his heavy build could move with such speed and agility. With Édouard’s back towards him, Jacques took the opportunity to quietly move the angle of the photo frames and check their contents. Each one was of Édouard with some other business colleagues, all smiling and shaking hands. Seconds passed as Jacques waited patiently.

  Édouard turned, hands in his trouser pockets and a broad smile on his face. “I can’t see what a fantasy from the past can have to do with your current investigation. Shall we move on?” He resumed his position at his desk and looked Jacques in the eye.

  “Luckily, I’m the ex-policeman here and I can see that this…fantasy, as you call it, may have a bearing on this investigation. If this isn’t a fantasy and if there was a child, that child would now be in his or
her late thirties. That child might be in this organisation working for you or possibly against you. That child might be the person I need to find.”

  “It was a long time ago.” Édouard placed his elbows on the desk and steepled his chubby hands as he let out a deep sigh. “But I see that you do have a point.” After a moment, he continued. “There were about a dozen letters, I think. The first one arrived late in 1971.”

  “Can you remember the exact date or the month?”

  “It’s almost forty years ago, perhaps October or November, I can’t be sure.”

  Jacques made a note. “And do you still have it?”

  “No. I read it and then threw it in the bin. I didn’t know the woman. As far as I can remember, I had never met her and I just assumed she had wrongly addressed the envelope.”

  “Can you remember anything of the content?”

  Édouard smiled. “It was the sort of thing a teenager might write to a boy she had just met, that’s all I remember.”

  “If it was a genuine mistake that the letter was sent to you, why did you not return it?”

  Édouard shrugged. “That didn’t occur to me. Maybe I wanted to save her the embarrassment. I don’t know what was in my mind then, and now I’m not absolutely sure whether there was a return address on the envelope. But I do know that I threw it away.”

  “And the other letters?”

  “There were a couple more in the same vein, maybe three. All of which I ripped up and threw in the bin. And, no, I can’t remember the detail of the content nor the precise dates when each one arrived.”

  Jacques nodded. “OK. You said there were about twelve letters, the first three or four you destroyed. That still leaves up to six or seven more and the fragment of the one that was kept. What can you tell me about those?”

  “It was in January or February of the following year when the next one arrived, and I think that was the first one that definitely had a return address on the envelope. I didn’t bother to open it. I just sent it back. It was the same with the ones that followed after that.”

  Jacques stared at the wall behind Édouard and thought for a moment. “Why keep this one letter? If the others had either been destroyed or returned, why keep this one? And where is the rest of the letter?”

  Édouard picked up the photocopy of the fragment and read it. He handed the page to Jacques. “I don’t know.”

  “What don’t you know? Why it was kept or where the rest of the letter is? What?”

  Jacques detected Édouard’s slight recoil in response to his more forceful tone. A tone that he had deliberately employed. When there was no answer, he continued more quietly. “I have another question for you, Édouard. If you weren’t reading the letters at this point, who was?” He paused again. “Who read this one and decided it should be kept?”

  “Damn it, man! I don’t know.” He thumped his hand on his desk. “But what I do know, and I am absolutely certain of this, is that there was no child. There was no child because I have never been to Ireland and the return address was in Ireland.”

  Yet another new dimension to this case! Jacques narrowed his eyes and searched his interviewee’s face for the faintest indication of a lie. But there was nothing. Édouard’s colour had paled and his dark eyes held a cold and determined stare.

  It was Jacques who broke the heavy silence. “And that’s why you maintain it is a fantasy, is that right?”

  “I know it is a fantasy,” he said, underlining the first two words with a raised and strident voice.

  Jacques decided to move on.

  “Your connections with C and C Consulting, what are they?” He relaxed back in his chair and rested his left ankle on his right knee.

  “I know all of the senior team there, have done for quite a while. It’s how things work in my business, Jacques.” There was a cold snide smile to accompany his retort.

  Jacques, taking his time, consulted the notes he’d made the previous week. “And by that I presume you mean the company directors? The senior project managers?”

  “Of course, their internal organisation is very similar to mine and we have worked jointly on projects in the past.”

  “So…it is possible that any one of your people could be passing information to C and C?”

  “Yes, it’s possible, but I don’t accept that that is the case here. My people are loyal to this company, as am I.” He glanced at his watch. “I have another appointment. Are there any final questions?”

  “Your project team, would you say they were a happy team?”

  “I would say they work very hard for the excellent rewards they get in terms of salary, expenses and bonuses.”

  “You haven’t noticed any animosity within the team?”

  Édouard frowned. “Why? Should I? Are you telling me how to manage my team now?”

  Jacques had further questions, but instead he flipped his notebook shut and put it in his jacket pocket and stood. “1971, you’d be, how old?”

  “I was 21.”

  Jacques retrieved his copy of the letter fragment from the desk and moved to the door. “Old enough, then. Even if you hadn’t visited Ireland, you would still have been old enough to have fathered a child born the following year.” He grinned and closed the door behind him.

  Back at his desk in the operations area, Jacques picked up a call from a company in Rouen. He listened attentively. After a moment, he put the phone on the desk and went through a pile of post until he found a large envelope addressed to him, marked private and confidential. Picking up the phone, he confirmed that the package had been received.

  Opening the envelope, he pulled out the documents sufficiently to assure himself they were what he had asked for and then replaced them and put the package in the top of drawer of his desk which he locked. He would examine those papers when in his own building across the road, and when no-one else was around.

  His next meeting was with Michelle in HR as had been suggested by Roger Baudin. He made his way to the small meeting room on the third floor to find her waiting for him with various sets of papers and printouts spread across the table.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting, Michelle, and I’ll try not to take up too much of your time.”

  Michelle nodded and smiled.

  “Roger Baudin made some remarks the other day that have prompted my enquiry, and clearly a good deal of work for you,” he said, scanning all the documents on the table. “I understand there is some sort of credit card system in place for expenses, and if you can explain it to me, then I can decide whether it has any bearing on my current investigation.”

  “It’s fairly straightforward. We have individual internal credit cards for the senior staff to use. Our managers use their cards when they need to set up lunch meetings at company expense with either existing clients or potential new ones. But those costs are only covered up to a fixed limit and for some items, such as wine, we only pay for a fixed quantity. Anything over that limit has to be paid for by the individual concerned.”

  Jacques frowned. “How do you keep a track of that?”

  “It’s not as difficult as it sounds. A lot of the managers pay the whole bill with the company credit card on the day, then list the actual costs to be reimbursed on the expenses claim for that week or month. So, where a second bottle of wine, which is not covered, for example, has been ordered and already paid for on the card, it is itemised on the expenses claim as a refund due to Vaux. These managers will also be claiming mileage as well as other expenses for visits out of town and that refund due to us would be recovered by being off-set against the other outstanding expenses due and any balance remaining is paid direct to their bank account a few days later.”

  “That seems straight forward enough.” Jacques frowned. “Forgive my policeman’s instincts, but how do you know everyone is being as honest as the system requires them to be?”

  Michelle grimaced. “Your instincts are right, I’m afraid. The reality is that we don’t know if everyone is being
scrupulously honest or not. The costs across all of the expense budget heads have been steadily rising over the last three years. It’s something that Roger is concerned about and that’s why he asked me to have a look and see if I could identify what was happening…”

  Jacques waited as she paused in thought. “And?” he prompted eventually.

  “I really don’t know if I should tell you this yet, but I’m thinking that some of the managers are using the credit card to fund their anticipated monthly expenses in advance.”

  “Do you have any examples?” Jacques’ mind was working fast and shooting off in a cascade of different directions all at once.

  “From the few examples I’ve looked at so far, I think there are some mismatches between what should be claimed and what has actually been paid on the card—”

  “Misappropriation? How widespread?”

  Michelle hesitated. “Umm… I want to give my colleagues the benefit of the doubt, so, no, I won’t call it misappropriation. I’m sure it is by genuine error rather than by deliberate calculation. But I can see that the temptation is there.”

  Jacques nodded. “Error means it will happen once or twice in a year. Misappropriation means that it happens on a regular basis. So, which is it, and how much are we talking about?”

  Michelle pushed the sleeves of her dark green dress part way up her forearms and began to delve into one of the piles of paper she had brought. “I don’t know how much, Jacques, but I can show you one account that seems to be a particular problem.” Having located the documents she wanted, she spread them out in front of Jacques, and then came round to his side of the table.