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

  “Ça va, Luc? Is Serge in his office today?”

  Luc nodded and mumbled his response. “Through there.”

  Jacques strode across the marbled lobby, tapped on the door marked Sécurité and walked in.

  Serge remained at his desk as he always did. “Jacques, what can I do for you?”

  “I’m making some preliminary enquiries in relation to an internal investigation, Serge, that I think you can help me with.” He pulled out a chair, sat down and took his notebook from the inside pocket of his jacket. “A few facts that I just want to crosscheck with you first. All staff in this building have a pass that also allows admittance to the building across the road; that’s still correct, isn’t it?”

  Serge nodded. “Are we going to revisit this issue again, Jacques, because I just want to remind you that the decision of the board was that no action would be taken.”

  “I know that. I just want to clarify the facts, that’s all. So, everyone in the building opposite has access to this building, yes?”

  Serge nodded again.

  “And temporary staff have temporary passes that end with the last day of their contract. Is that still the case?”

  “Correct.” Serge watched Jacques make his notes.

  “So, a temporary member of staff…if their contract were to be renewed on their very last day of service, would have to apply for a new pass, yes?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And how long do you keep those applications?”

  “For the whole Vaux Group, only as far back as when they moved into this building and the one opposite, that’s about two and a half years.”

  “And I know the system for day visitors is different, but just remind me of the process, Serge.”

  “All personnel input the details onto a spreadsheet, which is held on the open access area of the office network, detailing all expected visitors for each day of the following week. We add them to the database and obtain a signature on arrival and issue a day-only pass. We sign them out when they leave. And we have all those records, too.”

  Jacques took his time making his notes to cover a broad grin that he could not stop from forming on his face. He drew a heavy box around the words ‘office network’ and ‘open access area’, adding after it the word, ‘ANYONE’.

  “OK, the appearance is that we have records of all expected personnel in the building at any one time. But what about people who stroll in? It would be quite easy for someone to arrive behind an existing member of staff who has a pass and just walk in.”

  Serge let out a sigh. “And we’ve been through this too, Jacques. The CCTV covers the entrance and lobby at all times. We handle that very effectively at the moment, and all unauthorised personnel are escorted from the building.”

  Jacques looked closely at his fellow employee. His dark heavy eyebrows were drawn together and his shrewd brown eyes were narrowed with the beginnings of impatience. He wanted to challenge him and point out that anyone within the organisation could legitimately allow access for a day to the most notorious criminal in the south-west if it was made worth their while.

  “OK. Thanks, Serge, and I may need to access some of those records.”

  “Be my guest,” he said as he swivelled around in his chair and nodded towards the bank of black metal filing cabinets lining the far wall.

  Jacques took the hint and rose to leave.

  “Just one question of my own before you go. This internal investigation… Do I need to be concerned or to take any action?”

  Jacques frowned momentarily before replying. “No, I don’t think you need to worry at this stage, and I’m not yet able to decide if you need to take action or not.” Before Serge could say anything else, Jacques was out of the door and striding across the lobby.

  As he took the stairs to the fourth floor he let his mind wander through a mental image of a map of the security processes, noting pinch-points, open hand-offs and areas of risk. Serge truly believes he has watertight security. He grinned to himself and stopped, flipped his notebook open and stared at his jottings about the network. We need to review the open access area. Pocketing his book, he took the last few steps onto the final landing and let himself into the senior management suite.

  Roger Baudin, the Finance Director, was in his office on the right, door closed. Through the glass wall, Jacques could see the company accountant, Roger, and his senior manager, all with dark looks on their faces as they huddled over their papers. On the left, the Operations Director’s office was empty as usual. As were most of the desks in the large open-plan operations area. Next was the cavernous and empty boardroom on the right, and at the end of the floor, Édouard’s suite of offices.

  Unlike his brother, Édouard insisted on employing a personal assistant, and Mademoiselle Lapointe was everything her name suggested. Unusually tall for a woman, she was also angular in appearance. Her black hair, fading to grey at the temples, was always drawn tight at the back of her head and her intense dark brown eyes never missed a single detail.

  “Monsieur Forêt, I’ve been expecting you.” She rose from behind her desk and crossed the room to a small lockable cabinet. “Monsieur Alain telephoned and asked me to pass these papers to you.” She handed Jacques three sealed courier pouches. “They are confidential and I must ask you to sign here, please.” She placed the form in front of him and handed him her pen.

  Jacques smiled at her. “Thank you, Mademoiselle Lapointe, and please call me Jacques.”

  “Anything else, Monsieur Forêt?” She removed her spectacles and placed them on the desk.

  “Yes. May I sit?”

  Mademoiselle Lapointe nodded and then remained motionless and stiff-backed waiting for his next question.

  “Who has access to confidential documents for bids, Mademoiselle?”

  “Myself, the directors, but only in relation to their own work area, some senior managers as required, and Messieurs Alain and Édouard.”

  “And does that include confidential contractual and financial information as well?”

  “Naturally.”

  “So, all of these people can freely access all of those documents through the office network. Is that right?”

  “Not all, no.”

  Notebook in hand, Jacques waited. “Can you expand on that, Mademoiselle Lapointe?”

  “Some documents, especially those being put together for bids for work, are only available on the network to Édouard and Alain. If any of the other directors need access they have to ask me, and I allow them system access for the day or the week as required. We have tightened up on who can access that documentation since Édouard became concerned about the number of bids of ours that had failed.”

  Jacques nodded. “So, you can provide me with a detailed list of who has had access to which tender documents, is that correct?”

  “Only for the last six months or so.”

  “OK. If you could let me have that information by email as soon as possible that would be helpful.” He smiled as he tucked his notebook back into his jacket pocket.

  “Of course, Monsieur Forêt.”

  Jacques stood. “Thank you, and the name is still Jacques.”

  The slightest glimmer of lightness appeared in the corner of her eyes as Mademoiselle Lapointe turned to her computer, keyed in her login details and password and then continued with her work.

  Jacques walked back to the landing and again took the stairs before making his way out onto the street and back to his own building and desk.

  ***

  Crossing the Col de la Pierre Plantée, Beth Samuels began to relax and a smile gradually crept across her lips. She slowed the car and looked left to the distant heights of Mont Lozère and the stress of the two-day drive began to ease. Since her last visit in June the scenery had changed. The bright yellow clumps of the mimosa had died back to the colour of moss and the previously bright green grass, bleached by the relentless July and August sun, had turned to an insipid shade of straw. The famil
iar vast grey boulders remained strewn across the landscape, a pale contrast against the dark pines of the forest beyond. But that darkness was now beginning to be softened by the rich colours of autumn in the canopies of the many broad-leafed trees. Pulling her attention back to the road, she corrected the position of her vehicle as she began the short descent towards the village and the final few-hundred metres of her journey. From the last bend in the road, she could see the roofs of the village and the chateau ruins above.

  Hmm… My temporary home. This time it really feels like I’m coming to…my temporary…no, my second home, perhaps rather than just coming back.

  She took the next right and pulled up in front of the restaurant and the Salle des Fêtes.

  Through the large expanse of window that stretched almost from floor to ceiling, she could see Gaston, the flat wicker basket that she knew contained a cheese platter in his hands, chatting to two businessmen. As she pushed the car door shut, she waved and walked in. Marianne immediately abandoned her task of clearing plates from an empty table and rushed across to greet her.

  “You’re back! Good; we’ve all missed you,” she said as she kissed Beth on both cheeks.

  Gaston, cheeseboard discarded on a nearby table, also kissed her. “Jacques’s been moping. I think he’s missed you.” Stuffing his hands in his jeans pockets, he perched on the edge of the empty table behind him.

  Marianne cast him a sharp-eyed glance. “Jacques’s been fine, and does he know you are here yet?”

  “Not yet, but he will do soon. He made me promise to text him when I got here. I was wondering if I could get a bottle of wine for tonight, Gaston.”

  “Of course,” and he was immediately weaving his way through the tables to the bar.

  “You look well, Beth. And I like the hair!”

  Beth smiled. “That’s something else Jacques doesn’t know anything about yet… I just needed a change, you know and I…”

  “It really suits you.”

  “Your wine,” said Gaston as he presented her with a bottle of Limoux. “And it’s on the house, a welcome-home gift from us both.”

  “Thank you… Strange that you should call Messandrierre my home… As I was crossing the col I had a similar thought myself.”

  Marianne grinned. “Good. We want you to think of us as family.”

  Beth glanced from one to the other as she tried to subdue and control an unexpected tear from making an appearance. “I think, perhaps, I already do,” she said.

  The bottle left on the passenger seat, Beth manoeuvred the car and drove the last few metres along the D6 to the chalet and pulled onto the drive. The outer wooden door was latched back and the black planter was in its usual place in front. She frowned as her gaze focussed on the hydrangea in the pot, the leaves wilting and the tawny-hewed flower heads shedding their petals.

  “Jacques hasn’t been paying you the attention you need whilst I’ve been gone, has he?” she said as she stood on the decking, fishing her keys out of her handbag and unlocking the door.

  ***

  Jacques began sorting through the files from the pouches, and the additional ones he’d collected from the HR Director’s office. All of the papers laid out on his desk, he brigaded the senior managers’ documents and those of their assistants on one side and other staff, both past and present, on the opposite side. Picking up Mademoiselle Lapointe’s file first, he immediately went straight to the back and started working methodically through the individual pages, making notes as he went along.

  Eloise Lapointe had joined the company, aged twenty-eight, in 1983. Jacques looked at the photograph that was stapled to her application and studied it. Then, she had been a striking young woman, and he wondered why she was, apparently, still alone. He checked the personal details section again. She was single then, and it appeared, had remained so. What a waste!

  Returning his attention to his immediate task, he noticed that her first appointment was as Édouard’s Personal Assistant, a role that she still occupied. Again, he wondered why. She was obviously an intelligent woman, university-educated with a degree in finance and economics and over-qualified for the job that she did. Jacques frowned.

  So why doesn’t someone as smart as you have more ambition?

  He jotted down some questions.

  Leafing through the remaining documents in the file, he discovered that there was nothing out of place; her work record was exemplary, she had been paid various performance bonuses over the years, and there was only one request for compassionate leave in 1985 to arrange her mother’s funeral.

  A pain stabbed at the back of his eyes as he recalled standing at his own mother’s graveside in Paris a few months earlier. He recognised that it was always going to be unguarded moments like this that would prompt him to acknowledge, and momentarily face, his grief whether he wanted to or not. He scraped his finger and thumb across his eyes and squeezed the bridge of his nose until the bone could absorb no more pressure. Glancing back at the request for absence in 1985, he read the details again but didn’t bother to make a note.

  He slapped the card cover of the file shut and dropped it back into the green pouch. The next on the pile was for Alain Vaux. A much larger and well-used set of documents to work through, and Jacques started with the earliest and made any appropriate notes as he went over the papers. There were copies of letters, notes about business awards, further qualifications and then, not attached to the tag or any other document, a torn sheet of pale blue notepaper containing what appeared to be part of a hand-written letter. It seemed to have been slotted in to the file as an after-thought. Everything else was in precise date order, but this was completely out of sequence. He removed it and slotted a folded blank sheet of paper in its place. He then searched through the rest of the documents looking for the envelope and the rest of the page, but found nothing. He turned his attention to the wording. The script was rounded and not French, of that he was certain. He placed it against the open page of his notebook for comparison and nodded.

  “Definitely not French,” he said to himself. Not really sure if it would have relevance to his investigation or not, he got up and photocopied it, just in case. Returning the original to its place in the file, he folded the copy and slipped it at the back of his notebook just as his phone rang with an individual and familiar tone that denoted the arrival of a text. She’s back.

  A wide smile spread across his face as he examined the final few documents and concluded that Alain’s file contained nothing else of interest. It was soon deposited in the pouch. A glance at his watch and his next action was decided without conscious thought. He cleared his desk and left for the rest of the day.

  tuesday, october 13th

  “Thanks for the updates, everyone. We’re in a good position. At the Stakeholder Group Forum on Friday, it became clear that this phase of the project is going to over-run. Which is a worry at such an early juncture.” Madeleine Cloutier stared down the boardroom table and waited for the concerned murmurs to subside.

  “But why?” Hélène Hardi pushed her circular black-framed spectacles up to the bridge of her nose. “I know we’ve another three and half years to get all this work done, Madeleine, but a delay now is sending the wrong message to stakeholders, senior managers and to everyone who’s already worked so hard to meet the constant and demanding deadlines.” A grimace sat on her round pale face as she waited for an answer.

  “I know. But the first level IT design won’t be ready, and getting the IT right is a critical foundation.” Madeleine let her gaze travel across the faces of the assembled team as the impact of her announcement sank in. “I also want to make clear that the overall end date of this programme of work has not been adjusted and remains as April 8th, 2013. The training and implementation period also remains the same which means that phases two and three will be squeezed.” Madeleine’s clipped tones echoed around the still and silent room.

  It was Hélène, with her strident voice and ingratiating tone, who broke
the tension.

  “Madeleine, that’s placing an even greater risk on the IT work. If they’re behind at this early stage, then squeezing the follow-on phase of work must be placing the whole programme in danger of failure—”

  “I think the stakeholders and IT Director do know what they are agreeing to, Hélène.” The edge in her voice was not missed by a single person present. Madeleine paused for a moment. “Any questions?” A dull shuffle pervaded the room as people began to close notebooks and collect papers together. “All right. Back to work, everyone. And please remember that everything I’ve said today is absolutely confidential. The next meeting is Thursday, in preparation for the Checkpoint Meeting with Édouard the following Monday.”

  Madeleine stood and checked her phone. Once the last of her team had left she closed the door and directed a winning smile at Jacques.

  “Well, Jacques, you now know what myself and the team are trying to do. I hope that was helpful for you.” She sidled down the room and perched on the edge of the boardroom table, her tight pencil skirt pulling across her thighs.

  “Yes, thank you, but I need some details. You mentioned a Stakeholder Forum, but I’m not sure exactly who or what the purpose of this forum is?” Jacques sat with his pen poised to add to his notes.

  “The Forum is the most senior authority for the whole programme of work. It includes the senior representatives from our client, so that’s the Chief Executive, Deputy Chief, Operations, IT, Finance, HR and Estates Directors along with the appropriate counterparts from Vaux Consulting.

  Jacques focused on his notes and continued to write. “And the purpose of the group?”

  A flicker of contempt crossed her face. “They commissioned the work, and now that we – the project team – are in place and the scope of the work is defined and agreed, they steer and decide policy and make decisions on new policy issues as they arise.”