The Fleur de Sel Murders

Book 3: Brittany Mystery Series

by Jean-Luc Bannalec

Genres: International Crime & Mystery; Mystery; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

The old salt farmers have always said that the violet scent of the Fleur de Sel at harvest time on the salt marshes of the Guérande Peninsula has been known to cause hallucinations. Commissaire Dupin also starts to believe this when he's attacked out of the blue in the salt works.

He had actually been looking forward to escaping his endless paperwork and taking a trip to the "white country" between the raging Atlantic Ocean and idyllic rivers. But when he starts snooping around mysterious barrels on behalf of Lilou Breval, a journalist friend, he finds himself unexpectedly under attack. The offender remains a mystery, and a short time later, Breval disappears without a trace. It is thanks to his secretary Nolwenn and the ambition of the prefect that Dupin is assigned to the case. But he won't be working alone because Sylvaine Rose is the investigator responsible for the department—and she lives up to her name . . .

What's going on in the salt works? Dupin and Rose search feverishly for clues and stumble upon false alibis, massive conflicts of interest, personal feuds—and ancient Breton legends.

Release date: March 26, 2019

Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Print pages: 256

Sample

The First Day


The fleur de sel gave off a curious fragrance of violets in the days after the harvest; it mingled with the smell of rich clay and the salt and iodine in the air that people here in the middle of the White Land—the Gwenn Rann, the far-reaching salt marshes of the Guérande—smelled and tasted more strongly with every breath than anywhere else on the coast. Now, at the end of the summer, the distinctive scent filled the salt gardens. The old paludiers, the salt farmers, used to say that it made people faint sometimes, that it caused mirages and hallucinations.

It was a breathtaking, bizarre landscape. A landscape of the four elements needed for the alchemy of the salt: sea, sun, earth, and wind. Once a large bay, then a lagoon, a mudflat, a marsh put to good use by skilled hands, it was situated on a peninsula created by the raging Atlantic Ocean between the Loire and the Vilaine. The majestic little medieval town of Guérande, from which the area took its name, marked the northerly reaches of the salt gardens. In the south the gardens tailed off into the remaining part of the lagoon, and beyond that lay Le Croisic, with its enchanting port. You could see it from there, that impressive spectacle: with its mighty tidal rhythm, the Atlantic filled the lagoon with water, carrying it right into the delicate capillaries of the salt gardens. Especially on days when the “grande marée” happened, the spring tide following the full moon.

The White Land was completely flat, without a hint of a slope. For more than twelve centuries, it had been broken up into countless large, small, and very small rectangular salt ponds, laid out with mathematical precision and in turn bordered by random-looking fluid shapes made up of ground and water. An endlessly branching, elaborate system of canals, reservoir pools, preheating pools, evaporating pools, and harvesting pools. A system with just one purpose: to keep the sea moving as slowly as possible using sluice gates so that the sun and the wind made it evaporate almost entirely, until the first crystals formed. Salt was the purest essence of the sea. “Child of the sun and wind,” people called it. The pools had poetic names: vasières, cobiers, fares, adernes, oeillets. One of the oeillets, the harvest pools, had been in use since Charlemagne’s time. The harvest pools were sacred to the paludiers—everything depended on them, on their “character”: the floors of the pools, the different types of clay and the various mineral compositions. Lazy, generous, cheerful, feverish, sensitive, harsh, contrary—the paludiers talked about them as if they were people. That’s where the salt was cultivated and harvested in the open air. White gold.

Incredibly narrow, unpaved paths meandered between the pools, creating inextricable labyrinths, generally accessible only on foot. The salt marshes may have been flat, but you still couldn’t see very far. Overgrown earthen walls of varying heights ran alongside the pools and pathways. Scraggy bushes, shrubs, tall grasses crooked and bleached strawlike by the sun. A gnarled tree here and there. And the cabanes, the salt farmers’ huts made from stone or wood or metal sheeting, were scattered about.

Now that it was September, that dazzlingly bright white was all around. The white of the salt that had been piling up into impressive mounds over the summer. It lay in careful heaps, narrowing to peaks like volcanoes and sometimes two or three meters high.

Commissaire Georges Dupin from the Commissariat de Police Concarneau couldn’t help smiling. This landscape was surreal. Amazing scenery. The atmosphere was heightened by the overabundance of color in the sky and the water—an extravagant display of every shade of violet, pink, orange, and red—caused by the setting sun. And as the late-summer evening slowly closed in, a refreshingly brisk breeze picked up at the end of another baking-hot day. Commissaire Dupin locked the car, one of the force’s official blue, white, and red cars. The impressively old and problematically small Peugeot 106 served as the commissariat’s general backup car. Dupin’s own dearly beloved, equally ancient Citroën XM had been at the garage for ten days. It was the hydropneumatic suspension, for the umpteenth time.

Dupin had parked at the side of the road, half on the grass. He’d walk from here.

It was a narrow little road that meandered through the salt marshes, but at least it was paved. It had not been easy to find. Branching off the Route des Marais, it was one of only three winding roads between Le Croisic and Guérande town that cut across the Salt Land.

Dupin looked around. There was nobody in sight. He hadn’t met a single car on the entire Route des Marais. In the salt marshes, it seemed the day had come to a close.

He had only a hand-drawn sketch of the place he was trying to get to. It showed a hut near one of the salt marshes, toward the open lagoon, about three hundred meters away. He would search the salt mine in question and the huts linked to it, keeping an eye out for “anything suspicious”—he had to admit it was all a bit vague.

Once he had taken a look around, he’d head straight for Le Croisic. Dupin figured this was how it would go: after a brief and likely fruitless inspection of the area, he would be in Le Grand Large a quarter of an hour from now, eating Breton sole fried a golden brown in salted butter. And over a glass of cold Quincy he would be looking out at the water, the pale sand and turquoise of the lagoon, watching the last of the light gradually disappear in the west. He had been in Le Croisic once before, last year, with his friend Henri, and had great memories of the little town (and of the sole).

Regardless of the fact that the reasons he was here were extremely vague, dubious, and downright ridiculous, Commissaire Dupin was in a decidedly good mood this evening. In fact, he had had an overwhelming urge to get outdoors again at last. He had spent five weeks—more or less every single day—in his stuffy, airless office. Five weeks! Kept busy with mind-numbing desk work, official paperwork, the usual trappings of bureaucracy—the tasks that, unlike in books and films, filled the life of a real commissaire over and over again: new patrol cars for his two inspectors were accompanied by new “Regulations for the Use of Vehicles Allocated for the Fulfillment of Police Duty,” eight hundred pages long, with nine-point type and practically no line spacing, it was “extremely important,” with a “number of crucial reforms” according to the prefecture; a raise for his ever-patient secretary Nolwenn (finally!)—he had been fighting for it two years and nine months; painstaking filing for two old, trivial cases. This was a record for him since he had been “relocated” from Paris to the middle of nowhere: five weeks of office work during these magical late-summer days, when September’s enchanting light outshone every other month yet again. Weeks of a settled, spectacular Azores high, like something out of a picture book, not a drop of rain—“La Bretagne fait la cure du soleil,” Brittany is getting the sunshine treatment, the newspapers reported. Five weeks in which Dupin’s bad mood had worsened on an almost daily basis. It had become unbearable for everyone.

Lilou Breval’s request that he take a look round the salt marshes—although he had absolutely no connection with this area—had been a welcome excuse to really get out and about. Dupin didn’t mind what excuse it was in the end. And much more important: he had owed Lilou Breval a favor for a long time now. The journalist from the Ouest-France stayed away from police officers on principle—not least because she came into conflict with police and legal regulations on a less than infrequent basis with her largely unorthodox methods—but somehow she had come to trust him. Dupin respected and liked her.

Lilou Breval had provided him with “certain information” from time to time. She had last “helped” him two years ago during the case of the murdered hotelier in Pont-Aven that had ended up capturing France’s attention. Lilou Breval was not that involved with everyday journalistic work, specializing instead in large-scale research and stories, mostly very Breton stories. Investigative ones. Two years ago she had played quite a significant role in uncovering a colossal case of cigarette smuggling: 1.3 million cigarettes had been hidden in an enormous concrete pillar that had supposedly been built for an oil rig off the coast.

Lilou Breval had called Dupin the night before and—something she’d never done before—asked him to do something: to take a look at “a particular salt pond and a hut nearby.” Look out for “suspicious barrels” there, “blue plastic barrels.” Apparently she couldn’t say what this was about yet, but she was “reasonably certain” that “something very fishy” was going on. She said she would drop in to the commissariat as soon as possible after he had inspected the area so that she could explain everything she knew so far. Dupin hadn’t even begun to understand what this was all about, but after asking some questions that went unanswered he had eventually murmured “fine, okay” and Lilou Breval had faxed him a sketch of the paths and the area that morning. Of course Dupin knew that he was contravening every possible regulation, and on his way here he had felt a tiny bit uneasy, which was not usually his style. Officially, he wasn’t even allowed to be here—he ought to have asked the local police to look into the issue. Not least because the Département Loire-Atlantique, where the salt marshes were located, was not even, from an administrative point of view, part of Brittany anymore—let alone “his patch”—ever since it had been snatched away from the Bretons “with legalized violence” during the much-maligned “Reform of Administrative Structure” in the sixties. Culturally, in daily life and in the consciousness of the French, however—and also in the rest of the world—the département was still Breton through and through to this day.

But his brief moment of doubt was soon forgotten.

Dupin owed Lilou Breval, and he took that very seriously. A good police officer depended on someone doing them a favor now and again.

* * *

Dupin stood next to his patrol car, towering over it with his generally sturdy build and broad shoulders. To be on the safe side, he glanced at the sketch again. Then he walked across the road and started down the grassy path. After just a few meters the first salt pools appeared to his right and left, the path falling sharply away right to the edges of the pools. A meter or a meter and a half deep, Dupin reckoned. The pools were all kinds of colors—pale beige, pale grayish, grayish blue, others were an earthy brown, reddish, all crisscrossed by narrow clay footbridges and dams. Birds strutted about round the edges, looking like they were on a silent search for food. Dupin had no idea what they were called; his ornithological knowledge was lacking.

The landscape was truly extraordinary. The White Land, it seemed, belonged to people only during the day, belonging entirely to nature again in the evening and nighttime. It was quiet, not a sound to be heard apart from an odd kind of chirping in the background, and Dupin couldn’t tell whether it was coming from birds or crickets. It verged on the eerie. Every so often, a cranky gull screeched, an emissary from the nearby sea.

Perhaps coming here had been an idiotic idea after all. Even if he were to see something suspicious—which he wouldn’t—he would have to let his local colleagues know immediately anyway. Dupin stopped walking. Maybe he should drive straight to Le Croisic and forget this cryptic mission. But—he had given Lilou Breval his word.

Dupin’s deliberations were interrupted by his mobile ringing. It seemed even louder than usual in this meditative silence. He fished his small phone out of his pocket, his face brightening when he saw Nolwenn’s number.

“Yes?”

“Bonj—aire.—there?” There was a small pause, then: “—air—And have—trip—kang—roo—?”

There was a terrible clicking sound on the line.

“I can’t hear you, Nolwenn. I’m already at the salt marshes, I…”

“They—between the—I know—ly—kangar—”

Dupin could have sworn he had heard the word “kangaroo” for the second time. But he might have been mistaken. He spoke much more loudly this time.

“I—honestly—cannot—understand—a—word. I’ll—call—you later.”

“—just—ay—ter,” and the connection seemed to drop altogether.

“Hello?”

No response.

Dupin didn’t have a clue why Nolwenn was going on about an Australian marsupial. It sounded preposterous. But he didn’t agonize over it any longer. Out here in the back of beyond, Nolwenn was undoubtedly the most important person to him. And although he felt a little bit “Bretonized” by now, he would still be lost without her. In fact, Nolwenn’s scheme was called “Bretonization,” and came with the motto: “Brittany: Love it—or leave it!”

He thought highly of Nolwenn’s practical and social intelligence as well as her inexhaustible regional and local knowledge. And her passion for oddities and “good stories.” The kangaroo must be one of them.

Dupin had just started to refocus on the task at hand when his phone rang again. He answered automatically. “Can you hear me now, Nolwenn?”

For a few moments he couldn’t hear anything apart from some more loud clicks.

Then suddenly there were a few reasonably comprehensible words: “I’m looking forward—morning, Georges. Really.”

Claire. It was Claire. The line went bad again almost immediately.

“—aurant—ure—ning.”

“I’m—I’m coming tomorrow evening. Yes, of course!”

There was a pause. Which was followed without warning by an earsplitting hiss. Tomorrow was Claire’s birthday. He had booked a table in La Palette, her favorite restaurant in the Sixth Arrondissement in Paris. A great big boeuf Bourguignon with hearty bacon and young mushrooms, braised in the finest red wine for several hours, the meat so tender you could eat it with a spoon. It was meant to be a surprise, although he assumed that Claire had long since cottoned on because he had dropped far too many hints, as usual. He was going to catch a train at one o’clock and be in Paris at six.

“Did it seem—to come—betwee—! Is—ways—unclear?”

“No. No. Not at all. Nothing is unclear! I’ll be there at six. I already have my ticket.”

“I—barely hear—”

“Same here. I just wanted to say that I’m really looking forward to it. To tomorrow evening, I mean.”

“—just—dinner.”

“I’ve arranged everything, don’t worry.”

Dupin was speaking too loudly again.

“—fish—later.”

This was pointless.

“I’ll—call—you—later—Claire.”

“—maybe—later—work—better—”

“Okay.”

He hung up.

After meeting last year in those late-August days in Paris, which had been so wonderful, they began to speak on the phone every day and see a great deal of each other. It was mostly spontaneous, they just got on the TGV. Yes, they were back together. Although they hadn’t said it out loud and it was still far from official. Although Dupin had made the awful mistake of mentioning it vaguely in an unguarded moment to his mother, who was immediately delighted, in a far from vague way, that she might now get to have that long-awaited daughter-in-law after all.

Claire had just been in the U.S., at a cardiac surgery training course at the famous Mayo Clinic. So they hadn’t seen each other for seven weeks, although they had spoken on the phone a lot. That was definitely another reason why Dupin had been in such a bad mood recently. Claire had only been back two days now. And that was a large part of the reason for Dupin’s good mood today. But he was a bit nervous. In general. He didn’t want to mess up what he had with Claire again, not like he had done the first time round. He had even bought the train ticket three weeks ago to make sure that nothing could get in the way.

He would call Claire back from Le Croisic very soon. And talk to her again about tomorrow in peace and quiet. Right after the sole.

He would be quick here.

Commissaire Dupin was pretty sure he had seen someone close to the wooden hut. Only briefly, for a split second. More of a shadow really; it had disappeared again instantly.

The commissaire slowed his pace. He scanned his surroundings. He was about twenty meters away from the hut. The path ran past it and looked like it plunged headlong into a salt pond.

Dupin came to a stop. He ran a hand roughly down the back of his head.

His instinct told him something wasn’t right. He did not like this situation one bit.

He took another careful look around. Objectively, there was nothing that looked suspicious in any way. And what if it had just been a cat? Or another animal? Perhaps he had only imagined it. That was entirely possible in this atmosphere. Perhaps that beguiling scent, more intense this deep in the salt gardens, was beginning to have a hallucinatory effect.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, there was a hissing, a strange noise, metallic, high-pitched, and followed by a small, dull thud from close by. A flock of birds rose upward with loud squawks.

Dupin recognized the sound immediately. With a speed and precision that would have seemed unthinkable judging from his heavy build, he flung himself to the ground on the left, where the narrow strip of grass fell steeply away to a reservoir pool. He rolled away skillfully, turning so that he slipped into the pool legs and feetfirst, and found his footing. The water was about half a meter deep. Dupin drew his weapon—a SIG Sauer 9mm—and instinctively trained it on the hut. It was far from perfect cover, but it was better than nothing. The bullet had hit nearby, to his right. He couldn’t tell exactly where it had come from, whether it was from the large hut or one of the smaller shacks nearby. He hadn’t seen anything at all. Dupin’s thoughts were racing. You didn’t think in a normal way in a situation like this. Instead a hundred things mingled at once: bright, sharp observations, reflexes, instincts, and scraps of thought muddled together feverishly and produced what people vaguely called “intuition.”

Dupin needed to work out where his assailant was. And hope that there was only one of them.

There were three sheds in his line of sight, all close together. The one closest to him was about ten meters away.

The shooter couldn’t have been all that close, otherwise he wouldn’t have missed his target.

Again the high-pitched noise—and another dull impact. Not far from him. And again. And once more birds took fright and rose screeching into the sky. Dupin slid lower into the pool, kneeling now with the water up to his stomach. A fourth one.

This time the bullet couldn’t have missed him by more than a matter of centimeters. He felt something on his left shoulder. It felt as though the shots were all coming from one direction now. Then suddenly there was silence. Perhaps the assailant was trying to find a better position.

It was clear to Dupin that taking cover in the pool was not a solution. He had to do something. His thoughts were racing. He could only have the element of surprise on his side once. Hopefully. Just once.

He leapt out of the pool at lightning speed, pointing his gun toward where he believed the shooter was, firing again and again as quickly as the gun would allow. He stormed toward the closest hut as he did so. He had emptied the magazine by the time he got there. Fifteen shots.

Dupin took a few deep breaths. There was a deathly silence. The commissaire was curiously calm, as he always was when a situation was volatile. Still, a cold sweat had broken out on his forehead. He didn’t have a second magazine with him. There was one in the glove compartment of his car, but not here. He had his mobile, but that was no use right now, although he should obviously try to file a report soon.

The hut he was now crouching behind was made from heavy-duty corrugated iron, but it was hard to tell how heavy-duty it was. And Dupin had no idea where the door was. Or whether it was unlocked. But it was probably his only chance. He was on one of the two longer sides of the hut. The most logical thing would be if the door was facing the path, which would mean it was to his left. He knew he didn’t have long to think about it. And he would get exactly one attempt to make this move.

With quick, cautious steps, he moved to the corner, pressing himself right up against the iron sheeting. He paused for a moment. Seconds later he lunged around the corner with a sudden movement, saw a door, wrenched it open, flung himself inside, and slammed it shut again after him.

The whole thing took two or three seconds. Either the assailant hadn’t seen Dupin or he had been caught truly off guard. The fact was, he hadn’t opened fire.

It was pitch black in the hut. The last of the dim light was only coming in through gaps in the door.

Dupin gripped the door handle firmly. It was just as he had suspected: he couldn’t lock the door from the inside. Dupin reached for his mobile—that was the most important thing now. Nolwenn’s number was the second-to-last one on redial. The small screen lit up a surprising amount of the space in the hut. Dupin looked around swiftly. The front half of the hut was empty, and there were half a dozen large sacks and some kind of rods in the back half. He gaped at the screen again. He had no reception.

This couldn’t be happening. No reception. Not a single bar. CONNECTION NOT POSSIBLE. The message on the screen was direct and unequivocal. He was used to this: here, at the end of the world, you were often cut off from the rest of the world, indeed. It was only in the large towns that you could occasionally get good reception. His radio must be in the car—next to the second magazine. In violation of every police regulation, Dupin seldom carried it on him. Perhaps he would have found a local officer on one frequency or another. He certainly could have found someone on the emergency frequency, but that didn’t matter now: he didn’t have it with him. And it was extremely unlikely anyone would happen to come past this secluded spot at this hour.

“Crap.”

He had blurted this out far too loudly. A moment later there was a deafening, metallic sound and Dupin nearly dropped his phone. A gunshot. And another. A third. The same hellish noise each time. Dupin held his breath. He had no idea whether the iron sheeting could withstand the bullets. Especially if the shooter was clever and kept shooting at the same place. He couldn’t make out any bullet holes yet. The sound of a bullet on the corrugated iron rang out again, and this time it was louder—the shooter seemed to be coming closer to the hut. Two more gunshots in quick succession. Dupin knelt down and propped one elbow on his knee, the heel of his hand wedged underneath the door handle. But even like this it would be difficult to stop someone opening the door. The leverage he had was much worse. He had to hope that the assailant would not dare to try the door for fear of an exchange of fire. All of a sudden there was a dull impact against the door. It wasn’t a gunshot, but as if a massive object had slammed into the door, then a kind of loud scraping. The door handle rattled for a moment. Somebody was right outside the door, a few centimeters away from him. Dupin thought he could hear a quiet voice saying a few words but he wasn’t sure. Then things went silent again.

Nothing happened for the next few minutes. It was nerve-racking. He didn’t know what his assailant would do next and there was no way to find out. There wasn’t a thing he could do, except hope that the person wouldn’t try to storm the hut. The one thing he would surely guess was that Dupin’s mobile didn’t have good reception here and he wasn’t able to call for help.

But it was very likely his assailant would look around and see the patrol car. Or else there was a patrol out on the road anyway and it would report the police car directly. It also depended on the scale of whatever was going on here.

Suddenly Dupin heard a car engine, not close to the hut, but not that far away either. He hadn’t seen any cars on his way here. The engine was kept running for a while and nothing was happening. Then the car moved off. Dupin could hear it, muffled but unmistakable. What was happening? Was his assailant fleeing? He had achieved something. After a few more meters the car braked abruptly. Dupin waited for the sound of doors opening. But nothing happened.

Suddenly his mobile rang. Moving automatically, he reached for the device.

“Hello?” he barked, his voice low.

All he could hear was crackling and hissing.

“This is an emergency. I’m in the Guérande salt marshes. In a hut. I’m being fired on. My car is on a side road off the Route des Marais. I walked west along the gravel path from there. Hello?”

Dupin hoped that the caller would hear some of what he was saying and raise the alarm. But it was very unlikely.

“Hello? This is an emergency!” He was practically screaming now, without intending to. “I’m being shot at, I…”

“—just calling to—table—eight o’clock.”

Dupin didn’t recognize the distorted voice. But the phrases “table” and “eight o’clock” had been oddly easy to make out. This was unbelievable. It must be La Palette calling about his reservation for tomorrow evening. Stéphane perhaps, the headwaiter, who knew it was always best to remind Dupin of his exact booking.

“A police emergency—please call the Commissariat Concarneau—Hello, Stéphane?”

The caller obviously hadn’t understood a word. But Dupin had to make use of this phone reception, no matter how bad it was. For as long as it was still there at all. There was just one solitary bar. He quickly pressed the red button and then immediately hit redial for Nolwenn’s mobile number. It was ringing. Dupin could hear it clearly. Once. Then the connection dropped. He tried again. No luck. He stared at the screen in disbelief: the solitary bar had vanished.

A moment later, he heard the car, whose engine had been running the whole time, driving away at speed.

Dupin put his mobile back on the ground. He had to keep an eye on the screen. But nothing happened.

The car was out of earshot now. It had left the salt marshes. Had there been just one assailant or were there two or perhaps more? If there had been more than one, had one stayed behind? And were they now simply waiting for Dupin to leave the hut? Were they laying a trap for him?

It would be too risky to leave now. He would have to stay put. He would have to keep on waiting in this stuffy hut, unable to do anything. The situation wasn’t over yet.

* * *

It was a little after ten. Nothing at all had happened in the last half hour—it felt like it had gone on forever. Dupin had stayed in this unbelievable position, sweating more and more, switching between his left and right arms every two or three minutes to block the door handle. It wasn’t long before everything hurt, then gradually he had lost all feeling in his hands, arms, and legs, and at some point he went numb throughout his body. All he could feel was the occasional sharp pain in a spot on his left shoulder. He reckoned the temperature inside the hut was over eighty-five degrees, and almost all of the oxygen seemed to have been used up.

He needed to get out of the hut. And there wasn’t a single bar of reception on his mobile screen. He had to risk it. He had a plan.

Cautiously, he tried to press the door handle downward.

To no avail. It wouldn’t budge. Not one millimeter. His assailant had jammed the door handle. So that was what those strange noises had been when someone was fiddling with the door. Something was wedged underneath the handle on the outside. Dupin shook the handle as hard as he could. Nothing moved.

It was stuck fast. And his assailant was probably miles away.

Dupin sank into a heap. He crawled slightly to the right and stretched himself out on the floor of the hut. He was upset about what was happening but also, he could sense now, relieved that the immediate threat seemed to be over.

He had lain there for perhaps a minute, trying to get some life back into his arms and legs, which had gone to sleep, and thinking about what to do next, when he heard a crack. Quite loud. Distinct. He was certain it hadn’t been an animal.

Someone was out there. In a flash, Dupin moved back into his earlier position, securing the door. He heard a soft murmuring. He pressed an ear to the iron sheeting, straining extremely hard to hear what was happening outside.

For a minute or two, everything remained quiet. Then suddenly—Dupin flinched—a loud, echoing sound cut through the night air: “This is the police. We’ve got the area surrounded. You must surrender immediately. We will not hesitate to make use of our firearms.”

Dupin leapt to his feet. And almost fell over.

“I’m here. In this hut.” He screamed and hammered on the door. “Commissaire Georges Dupin—Commissariat de Police Concarneau. I’m in this hut. Alone. The threat is over.”

Dupin was about to call out again when he paused. What if this was a tric