Walls of a Mind Read online

  Walls of a Mind

  An Aliette Nouvelle Mystery

  John Brooke

  © 2013, John Brooke

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, for any reason, by any means, without the permission of the publisher.

  Cover design by Terry Gallagher/Doowah Design.

  Photograph of John Brooke by Anne Laudouar.

  Printed and bound in Canada by Hignell Printing.

  Thank you to Bernadette Granger for colourful resource materials, Jocelyne Jougla for a copy of La longue marche du Midi Viticole by Hubert Delobette and Alice Dorques (Le Papillon Rouge Editeur), an informative and colourful history of wine in the south and the caves coopératives movement, and all who have shared their knowledge and pointed me in the right directions.

  Author’s Note: Many of the locations in this novel are fictional, although those familiar with the area may notice more than a passing resemblance to actual places.

  We acknowledge the support of The Canada Council for the Arts and the Manitoba Arts Council for our publishing program.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Brooke, John, 1951-

  Walls of a mind / John Brooke.

  (An Aliette Nouvelle mystery)

  Issued also in electronic format.

  ISBN 978-1-927426-29-6 (pbk.).–ISBN 978-1-927426-30-2 (epub)

  I. Title. II. Series: Brooke, John, 1951 August 27- Aliette

  Nouvelle mystery.

  PS8553.R6542W34 2013 C813’.54 C2013-905426-X

  C2013-905427-8

  Signature Editions, P.O. Box 206, RPO Corydon

  Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3M 3S7

  www.signature-editions.com

  à

  Magui & Jacques

  Jocelyne & Alain

  Bernadette & Jean

  et tous mes amis de là-bas

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part 1

  1 · Her hills

  2 · Possibility

  3 · Tragic family

  4 · A taste of Le Guatto

  5 · Stephanie…

  6 · See you later, Ulrike Meinhof

  7 · Guilty girl

  8 · Strategy

  9 · Guardian

  10 · A Brazilian detective

  11 · Changeover day at the beach

  12 · Sunday interrupted

  13 · Concept of allegiance

  14 · Night in a room

  15 · Morning after the first time

  16 · Trapped by blood?

  17 · Cebenna’s tribe

  Part 2

  18 · Too much circumstantial

  19 · Approaching Roland

  20 · A neighbour’s point of view

  21 · Devil on her doorstep

  22 · The work phone

  23 · First Fight

  24 · Undue influence

  25 · Every minute of every day

  26 · Perspective on Stephanie

  27 · Tea with Noëlli

  28 · Political event at Maraussan

  29 · Forced march through the forest

  30 · In Margot’s war room

  31 · Giant signalling the way

  32 · Rapprochement

  33 · Logical end point

  Part 3

  34 · Lizard on a wall

  35 · Prince at a picnic

  36 · La Vigneronne

  37 · The untraceable daughters

  38 · For the love of God

  39 · Deeply involved

  40 · In aid of a lovers’ reunion

  41 · Exactly why

  42 · Vigil

  43 · The meeting was on

  44 · Action film for kids

  45 · France can rest easy

  Part 4

  46 · The way it sometimes goes

  47 · Test

  48 · Progress

  49 · 7th Floor

  50 · 2nd floor

  51 · Sharing with Margot

  52 · New information

  53 · Avi... or Avi?

  54 · Covering her back

  55 · The accusing silence

  56 · Something about Avi’s omelets?

  Epilogue

  Other Books in this Series

  About the Author

  There is something fearful in coming up against the walls of a mind on every side & learning to describe their invisible circumference…the purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man with himself.

  — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals

  PROLOGUE

  Aliette floored the Peugeot’s gas pedal and flew, ragtop down, through a day that felt like heaven.

  Fortunately for her, she was the only cop around. On that stretch, on that day, at that moment.

  Fortunately for her, revelation comes, if only in flashes, and life can be defined…

  Redefined? Inspector Aliette Nouvelle had come unwound in her previous posting. Call it the effects of love muddling pure focus. She had asked for a transfer, had begged to be sent away. They said, Fine, we can do that, Inspector. Indeed, we may have just the thing. Though we note that above and beyond being an unattached soul in need of renewal, you are a cop without a car. Yes? Well, you should know there’s no car pool servicing a three-cop detachment in a Midi town two hours from the Spanish border. They said, You want the job, it’s yours, but you will need a car.

  She got the car because she wanted the job because she needed another life.

  A silver-blue Peugeot cabriolet helped ease the transition from one existence to the next.

  And make that Chief Inspector, please.

  It was a Monday in June, hot, 34°C, a warm wind from the southwest. Not uncomfortable — a dry heat, pure, exhilarating after the often clammy summers of Alsace. Even better: It was a crime-free Monday, high noon, and she had a beach towel, sunscreen, picnic lunch and a book, a parasol stowed in the back. The road was clear, the towns deserted, everyone safely behind closed doors, seated in front of the midday meal. Leaving the River Orb, the road rose to a plateau. Aliette shifted down, speeding past a coppery vigneron bouncing in the saddle of his tractor, heading for his lunch…then siesta. She was alone with vast vineyards on either side, row upon row of maturing grapes, growing heavy, sheltered in lush green leaves, stretching to hilltops along lines of furrowed pinkish earth. And delighted to be! Her new patch was indeed an outpost in the middle of nowhere. But nowhere was a sunny valley overflowing with southern wine, where they worked from crack of dawn till stroke of noon then disappeared till three.

  The corner at Départmentale 612 and Rue de Poussan marked one boundary of the chief inspector’s sprawling territory. The two usual ladies were there. The blonde was seated on a lawn chair, enjoying a sandwich. She wore the same strategically translucent flower-patterned cotton dress she’d worn since spring. Her denim-clad friend was negotiating with a trucker. Aliette had yet to stop and introduce herself but she knew they would, inevitably, be a useful source. A few clicks further on, D612 meets Autoroute A9, thick with traffic flowing west toward Toulouse or Spain, east to Marseille and Lyon. Passing under the busy highway, she could see the sea.

  Five minutes later, she turned at a lane and stopped in the public parking lot. Bag slung over her shoulder, parasol in the crook of her arm, she trudged the pebbly pathway to the dunes.

  Where, removing her sandals, Aliette walked onto the sand.

  The wind lifted her hair, a warm south win
d called the Marin.

  This end of the beach was almost empty. Looking east, she could see the sparse crowd at Valras, horribly white Brits and Belgians and Germans making the most of preseason deals for a week in a beachfront condo. She went the other way, strolling through gently roiling fringes of wash flowing up, retreating back. A fishing boat chugged out from behind the breakwater that formed the entry to the port of Vendres, probably heading off for another haul of mussels, a local staple. She had yet to try them. A local man, deeply brown, had three tall fishing poles planted in the sand, the spooled-out lines invisible. He smoked and waited. There were half a dozen other solitary women. The inspector assumed they had all felt the same irresistible pull at noon, had left the workaday world and made their way to the sea. She stopped thirty steps away from the last of these pilgrims, put up her parasol, spread her towel, slipped out of her skirt and removed her shirt.

  Aliette wore her one-piece on a Monday, a monochrome forest green, made for swimming, not for attracting men. Later, she would swim. Just now she unhooked the strap and rolled it down to a low point on her belly. A fair-skinned northerner, she was not foolhardy — it would take some weeks yet for her skin to become acclimatized. She carefully applied number 30 sunscreen. She pulled on the old LA Dodger baseball cap to shield her eyes from the dazzling midday sun. The cap was from her other life, purchased by mail-order from America. Dodger blue and silver blue had proven an enticing match. A dozen years later it was just a hat and her eyes were no longer young. She placed her book on the corner of her towel. A policier from Sweden. She unpacked her lunch: jambon-beurre on fresh baguette, one hard-boiled egg, a few black olives. Carrot sticks. A white peach. Lastly, unwrapping the layers of the Midi-Libre sports pages, one bottle of 1664 beer, still cool, simple newspaper a very effective insulator.

  She opened her beer and sipped. She ate. Studied a page of her book. Watched a boat move across the horizon.

  At a certain point, a man walked by, pant cuffs rolled up, shoes in hand, headed toward Valras. A white shirt, tie in place, suit coat buttoned, all said he’d fled the office for a moment alone at the beach. His was another local face, one she’d seen a thousand times since arriving — and was getting to like: those round Catalan eyes, sensual wide mouth, smooth sallow skin. Though his oddly protruding ears blunted the sultry effect. This man looked preoccupied. Suddenly aware of her scrutiny, he nodded a taciturn bonjour and kept moving, immersed in a desultory march. She watched him till he was lost in the sunny chimera at the distant bend in the shore. Then she rolled the top of her suit back up over her breasts, secured the strap and forced herself to rise.

  When the north wind blew it cleaned the air; you could see Agde in the east, the Pyrenees and the Costa Brava rising up beyond Narbonne. The Marin covered that distance in a haze. But it made the sea so warm! …pushing waves, six-foot rollers mild as soup, 25 or 26 beautiful degrees thanks to this kindly wind. She waded out till it tickled her navel, dove forward, rolled in it, lolled, peed, surfed a wave or two and drifted languidly back in.

  Aliette had always loved to watch the ocean drying in crystal drops on her browning arm. Stretched on her belly, sun on her back, she did this till she surrendered, closed her eyes and slept, secure in the knowledge that if there was anything needing her professional attention it would not happen till after three. These people knew how to live.

  PART 1

  We were never clear what we were going to do exactly, but we were going to do something.

  — Nescio

  · 1 ·

  HER HILLS

  Next morning Aliette Nouvelle was back in the car, headed for the city.

  Division was at Montpellier, two hours away. She was one of six chief inspectors based at Beziers, a quick twenty minutes at the right time of day. There was a major reorganization going on and, strictly speaking, her office ought to have been there. At the moment of her transfer she had asked to have her operations retained at Saint-Brin, de facto centre of her new world. She did not say, I need space, time alone to rebuild my soul, but it came down to that.

  Why not? Rent on the half-floor at Saint-Brin town hall was far less than equivalent space in the city. The drive in for meetings with procs and judges, Q&A’s with those in custody, forensics briefings or chats with the légiste was the same as the drive out to the scene of a crime.

  With fourteen towns and forty villages in her purview, she had been busy enough since taking over in February, fulfilling her new role quietly and efficiently, learning the lay of the land. The romance of wine country did not mean people were less nasty, brutal or just plain stupid than their fellow humans anywhere else. Yes, the beat was different: apart from gypsy house-breaking rings, there were no gangs. Gangs were in the city and stayed there. So no extorting and breaking knees. No people-smuggling; illegals came in through the ports and her patch stopped well short of the sea. No white collars siphoning, laundering or otherwise defrauding. Not yet. Make no mistake: wives were bashed, children were abused and abducted, houses were robbed and vandalized, garages torched. Drugs were being dealt. There had been two rapes. A Belgian wintering in his summer retreat had been seriously beaten by a neighbour when he complained a little too loudly about the man’s yapping dogs. An armed robbery in Causses had turned into a tense stand-off and negotiation at a cabin in the woods before two sad men surrendered. And these were all serious crimes requiring her expertise. But in almost half a year on the job, not one person had been murdered.

  Now someone had, and high-profile, to boot.

  One does not wish for murders, but it is natural for a cop to yearn for a challenge befitting her skills. And of course, this was coupled with a need to prove herself to her new peers. Aliette was eager.

  And puzzled: The victim was a Joël Guatto, thirty-three, from a prominent wine-producing family. The media were playing up the political angle. The politics of wine. Six weeks before, Guatto had run in the regional elections representing CPNT (Chasse, Pêche, Nature, Tradition), also known as the Hunting & Fishing party. He hadn’t made it past the first round, garnering less than one percent of the vote. Yesterday he had been shot dead: one well-placed bullet through the head, according to the morning reports. Joël Guatto lived on the family domaine twenty minutes from Saint-Brin, well within Aliette Nouvelle’s allotted territory. But he was gunned down on the same stretch of beach where she herself had been enjoying some sunny oblivion a few hours earlier. The beach, twenty minutes from downtown, was city jurisdiction. And scene of the crime was the bottom-line criterion where it came to the choice of lead investigator.

  So why had they called her?

  A brigade of three in a town of barely 10,000 serving what is essentially a farming region does not get a forensics lab and a morgue in the basement. But then, neither did the much larger city squad. Forensics had been largely centralized at Montpellier, in a beautiful new lab covering two floors at HQ. The morgue serving Beziers and environs was in the basement at Centre Hospitalier.

  ‘Bonjour,’ Aliette said, offering her hand to Chief Inspector Nabil Zidane, head of the Beziers PJ detachment, the city’s highest-ranking cop. And her counterpart, at least in name.

  Aliette tried to read the soft North African eyes. Was he feeling usurped? Violated? It usually showed. Nabi’s greeting was low-key, friendly, neutral. His eyes told her nothing.

  Zidane introduced Magistrate Sergio Regarri, from the contingent of public prosecutors and instructing judges housed at the Palais de Justice. He would be instructing the investigation. And Dr. Annelise Duflot, a police pathologist posted to Beziers. She also served as médecin légiste, medical examiner, attending at crime scenes. It was the first time the new chief inspector had made the acquaintance of Regarri and Duflot. The victim waited on a pallet, modestly dead beneath a plain blue sheet. Introductions done, Annelise Duflot pulled back the sheet.

  Add ironic shock to puzzling protocol: Aliette Nouvelle found her
self looking at the scrubbed and lifeless face of the same man with the loosened tie who had passed through the edges of the surf as she’d sipped her luncheon beer. In death the face was more generic than it had appeared in passing on the beach. But for the goofy ears, Judge Regarri could easily be the victim’s cousin, if not brother. But commonality is only a reference. It was him: Joël Guatto had met her eyes, said bonjour and kept on walking, a man with things on his mind. The new cop in town cautiously assessed the gathered faces. Had anyone discerned her consternation? Who knew she had been to the beach? And did it matter? Their faces were as blank as the victim’s. Strange serendipity, she decided, of no consequence here. She withheld this information.

  She asked about the means of execution.

  Donning plastic gloves, Dr. Duflot led them across the immaculate floor. Morgues are certainly amongst the cleanest areas in an overburdened healthcare system. The firearm, or one just like it, waited on the counter. ‘My colleagues sent this along. For context.’ The doctor, a petite, well-kept blonde in the bourgeois style, unzipped the case and lifted it out with a masculine sort of heft. Odd vignette: la petite bourgeoise commando. ‘Sako TRG42. Finnish. 338 Magnum long-range. Tactical. Not hunting… Not the only choice of course, but popular because of light weight, hence portability. No way of telling the exact distance,’ explained Duflot, referring to notes. ‘These are guaranteed to hold a target for consistent hits at 1000 metres. If your shooter’s good for it, this guarantees him a hit and a lot a room to get lost.’

  She lifted the killing bullet from a dish. ‘Fires these.’

  ‘Quietly.’ Aliette noted the reflex suppressor included in the kit.

  ‘Indeed,’ confirmed Duflot. ‘Top-line suppressor like this adds value to the concept — it actually drops muzzle signature below bullet flight noise. Anyone downrange will generally look away from the shooter when they hear the ballistic crack of the shot or the thud of bullet impact in flesh. This thing effectively eliminates visual and sonic clues that could leave your guy exposed to reactive counter-fire.’