MYSTERY: Pascal Tourret Private Detective (Mystery, Suspense, Crime, Murder, Detectives, Fiction, Unsolved Mysteries, Mysteries, Thriller, Intense, Drama) Page 6

  “I will help you all that I can,” he said. “Do you need anyone to come and stay with you to help with all the paperwork and arrangements?” he asked. It was obvious from the question that Pascal was not volunteering himself, though he didn’t want her to be all alone.

  “I want to be alone. I owe Hector that much…” she said.

  There was a kind of bravery behind her smile that Pascal admired more than he cared to admit. Her hair was exquisitely styled into a classic chignon and her neck was graceful, her clothing a little subdued but still every bit as stylish as the clothes she had worn as a younger girl. He could sense her pain because he also sensed that feeling of subdued love sweeping through him as he held her. He wanted to tell her how he felt, but she already knew. This was unspoken love, the kind that two people sense but don’t need to make sordid by saying the words that make that love real.

  “Help me,” her eyes begged and his assured her that he would.

  That night in his hotel room, Pascal thought of her, but he also thought of the work that he had cut out ahead of him. There had to be a link between Vin de Pays and the Beaujolais trade. Why else would Picoulet have intervened? Why else would Picoulet have gone to all of that trouble to deliver a note that coincidentally arrived just as he did? It was almost too perfect in timing and if you wanted to deliver an anonymous note, would you do so in the company van? It all seemed too coincidental, as if someone wanted him to follow a certain lead in a certain direction, perhaps to divert his attention from something more pressing.

  He would visit Picoulet regardless of what George Moreau had to say. He would find the connection and would also need to examine the area where Hector had been found. He would also find out if Picoulet had access to transport that could have been responsible for the theft of the wine.

  There was a neat twist here. If Vin du Pays is a poor cousin to Beaujolais, was Picoulet stealing it to take away some of the prestige? That didn’t really make sense. Now that Hector was dead, could someone like Picoulet have any influence over the future of Chateau Trepagnier? How? The wine business was complex but if there was something in the Will or some clause that gave Picoulet access to some of Hector’s fields, that may have made sense of why Hector was killed and why also Picoulet was warning him off. He looked at the envelope in which the anonymous note had been placed. There was very little clue, since nothing had been written on the outside. Looking on Google Earth, the other day, when the note arrived, Pascal had noted that Picoulet’s place bordered that of Agnes and Hector.

  Was Picoulet that stupid? If a connection could be made between Picoulet and any kind of land left by Hector, then that may just be enough to pin the murder on him. The telephone interrupted his chain of thought.

  “Are you the detective dealing with the theft of the Beaujolais?” asked the voice at the other end of the line.

  “Yes, I am,” he replied.

  “Then I need to speak to you urgently,” said the voice.

  Chapter 8 – The Investigation

  The phone call from the other night had been a little obscure. Whoever had made that call would call again later and Pascal had given them the number of his cell. He wondered what news they could possibly have. He also wondered if it was a ploy of some kind to distract him. The problem with a case such as this was that his emotional involvement was getting in the way of sensibility.

  At the cemetery, he saw Agnes and although surrounded by local people, she was very much alone. There had been fights in his mind about providence and about whether this would present him with the opportunity to live out those fantasies. There had been other thoughts that had told him that she wasn’t the same girl he had fallen in love with all those years ago. He was here to investigate. He had to drop the connection between himself and Agnes in order to move forward.

  Picoulet had no claim to the land. People that Pascal had talked to implied that he was the local busybody and that perhaps the note meant little other than what it said. He didn’t like strangers in his territory. Perhaps George Moreau had been right. Even the mention of this guy’s name had caused laughter in some of the places that Pascal had inquired and when he met the man himself, he knew why. There’s a certain type of person that speaks a lot, has multiple opinions about everything, but that actually says very little.

  The crime scene didn’t give him much more information. Hector had been strangled with a rope which was no longer at the scene. As Pascal walked across the fields at the back of the barn, he noticed all the tire tracks and had pointed these out to the police, though they had eliminated most of them as being the local hunt who met there at this time of year. There was nothing unusual there.

  “What the hell is happening?” he asked Moreau, when he phoned Pascal to discuss the case. “Why aren’t the gendarmes reporting anything?” He was infuriated because as well as finding frustration at every corner, he wanted to be able to tell Agnes some good news. She had been beside herself with grief at the funeral and nothing seemed to be happening.

  “Nothing at all. Every lead we had seemed to lead to a dead end.”

  “Are you going to give up?” asked Pascal.

  “Of course not, but it’s becoming clearer every day that we don’t have a thing to go on. Anyone who had a motive is accounted for and we really have no idea where to go from here.”

  Pascal felt anger building up inside of him. He wasn’t even a local to this area, but had this happened to him, he would have at least expected a little more support. As he drove toward the chateau, the anger in his mind was frustrating. What would he be able to tell Agnes? How could he even express his thoughts when he didn’t know where to start looking now? The only hope he had and that he had not dismissed was the phone call that he had received at the hotel. Whoever that was knew something and that may help him to make sense of it all.

  As he pulled into the driveway, an unfamiliar Jaguar was parked at the entrance. He walked toward the door to the chateau and was about to knock when the cell phone rang.

  “I need to speak to you. I didn’t know that Hector would get killed but I think I have information that may be useful to you,” the voice said.

  “I know where the Beaujolais Nouveau is.”

  With that, Pascal turned and walked back to his car. “Where can I meet you?” he asked and the man indicated a place and a time, which didn’t give Pascal long to find it and get there. His GPS would do the work and he quickly got back into the car. Agnes at least had company, so he didn’t feel too badly about driving away. This way, at least, he would at least be able to give her some news, instead of nothing and that was all she was getting from the local gendarmerie.

  The GPS was taking him into the hills that were so typical of the Chiroubles area. This was real Beaujolais Nouveau land at its best. The red roofs of the houses contrasted against typical pastel colored walls, each with the backdrop of small vineyards. Upon arriving at his destination, he was greeted and asked to come into a farmhouse which was a fairly humble abode.

  The man introduced himself as Bernard Chevalier. He seemed civil and offered Pascal a glass of wine.

  “So, where is the Beaujolais Nouveau?” he asked. Pascal was direct because he needed answers and answers were not forthcoming to all of the questions he had posed to people in the wine trade. Chevalier turned, walked Pascal out to the field and gestured with his hand.

  “The Chateau Trepagnier Beaujolais nouveau is here. You see that tinge of red on the field over there?”

  Pascal couldn’t see anything but as they neared the field, he began to see it.

  “That’s the Trepagnier wine,” he said.

  Upon reaching the point where the wine had been poured, there was a definite odor. Although the wine had found its way through the hardened soil of the hill, there was still a trace of it.

  “Why? Why was it thrown away?”

  “I work for the commune. I was given a phone call as I often am. The price for the job was right and to tell you the truth, I
didn’t object to doing the job because I held bad feelings for Hector Trepagnier. I worked for him all of my active life and now I am poor, with no pension and nothing that was promised to me by him.”

  “But who the hell asked you to do the job?”

  “That’s the strange thing. As you will find out if you check, I get paid “cheque emploi” which effectively means that whoever hires me can claim back on their taxes. In this particular case, I was offered cash. Of course, I am telling you this unofficially because if I told the gendarmes, I would have been breaking the law. The fact is though that conscience stepped in when I was told about Hector being dead. I would never wish that on him and if you can trace who sent me to get rid of the Beaujolais Nouveau, you can also find out who it was that murdered Hector. All I know is that it was a woman.”

  Chapter 9 – Betrayal

  It was dark by the time Pascal arrived back at his hotel. He didn’t care about the wine, but he wanted to talk to Agnes about what he had discovered. He thought that perhaps he should telephone at this time of night, but she was hardly likely to be doing anything so called on the off-chance. He had asked the cops to check out incoming calls to Bernard Chevalier’s phone.

  Thoughts were teaming through his mind as his car made its way back down through the valley. If the wine had been destroyed, who would benefit from it? It still came into his mind that a wine producer was the only potential answer. With Hector and his chateau out of the running for the very rich clientele, they would seek alternatives and there were of course several chateaux that could be considered as contenders and the woman connection had to be investigated. Agnes would know which of the chateaux had women owners or wives who were ambitious.

  His thoughts of her went through his mind. He remembered her face, the fragility of it and her tears. He remembered the way that he had held her. It wasn’t fantasy now. It was real but it wasn’t romantic either. She had brought out that protective side of Pascal that knew that he had to help her find the answers. She had trusted him, above the gendarmes, because he gave a damn.

  It wasn’t often that Pascal strayed into the territory of helping friends because emotions or personal bias could get in the way of investigation, though this had seemed very straightforward. The wine was missing. Would he investigate it? Somewhere along the line, the investigation had become more complex, with the death of Hector, though she had implored him to stay, to find out what had happened and who had killed her husband.

  The Jaguar was still in the driveway when he drove up. Perhaps it was a relative. When death happens, often relatives come out of the woodwork. Agnes was well off and had family ties all over the country. Perhaps it was one of her uncles or even a friend. She was a popular lady.

  He was about to knock on the door, when he noticed subdued lighting in the great salon where entertainment usually happened. Agnes didn’t use this room much. She had told him that when he had stayed there for the night. It seemed fairly strange that the light flickered almost as if coming from a fireplace or candles. Not wanting to intrude upon this quiet moment, Pascal made his way up the steps to the side of the chateau, from where he would be able to get a closer look before knocking at the door.

  What he saw in front of him shocked him. It was betrayal like he had never experienced before. This delicate woman who had begged him for his help had not only betrayed his trust, but she had betrayed Hector’s trust as well.

  “It was a woman.” Bernard Chevalier had said.

  In that moment of revelation, Pascal knew who the murderer was. She would have known when Hector would have been outside at the barn. He was a creature of habit. All she had to do was tell the killer when. The note that he had received from Picoulet at the hotel remained a bit of a mystery but it made sense that it could have been her way of keeping him interested in the case and helped point him in another direction entirely.

  Confrontation was the only way forward but before he could do that, he needed to establish that the owner of the Jaguar’s house was searched for any clue that may help to put him behind bars.

  The fact that she had been planning this hurt the most. That soft, tender voice that he had heard on the telephone had been part of the ploy. That hurt.

  The Jag turned out to be owned by a Beaujolais producer called Pascal Roux. It hurt Pascal that she had chosen a lover with his name. Perhaps there were even Freudian connections, though that didn’t interest him now.

  Chapter 10 – The End of a Fantasy

  George Moreau had arrested Agnes before Pascal had had the time to talk to her. He had also been suspicious and a search of the Jaguar had revealed traces of blood on an overcoat and that blood had been Hector’s. The rope was long since gone, but the coat that he had worn to commit the murder had received spatters of blood when moving Hector’s body. Strangulation didn’t produce much blood, but the fight between him and the killer in Hector’s final moments had produced scratches which would have bled.

  Agnes was saying nothing. She was still playing the part of the grieving widow. In fact, she backed this up by saying that the owner of the Jaguar was a competitor and that perhaps he had killed Hector to gain the lead in the race to get the best clients for his Beaujolais. They could check this of course and she was very clever at trying to make her story stick. As Pascal listened from behind the glass screen, he couldn’t believe his own naivety. This beautiful woman was capable of making a man melt so that his common sense left him.

  “Ask Pascal Tourret.” she insisted. “I asked him here to investigate the disappearance of the wine. I was worried about poor Hector.”

  What she didn’t know was that Pascal was there. As he stepped into the room, she looked taken aback at first, but then relaxed into her usual stance, a stance that she knew this man would respond to. He had done so all of his life. Even though he had married Jacqueline, she knew that he had always carried a torch for her.

  “Tell them Pascal,” she implored.

  “Should I tell them how you sent me an anonymous note?” he said, his eyes cold with a lack of compassion.

  “Should I tell them how the wine was stolen with a fertilizer wagon and spread across the hills of Chiroubles like they dispose of pig pee?”

  “Should I tell them how I caught you naked on a rug in front of the fire with him last night?”

  His anger broke her. It was time that she was broken. The look of pathetic need turned to a look of vengeance.

  “Do you have any idea what it was like being married to Hector?” she spat.

  “Do you have any idea what it’s like to hear him grunt his way to sleep?” she continued.

  The police officers had recorded the whole interview and as she broke out into angry words that spat into the air that Pascal breathed, he knew that the fantasy of his youth was now dead, as dead as Hector and as cold as the grave in which he lay. The darkness of the Gamay grapes against the soil of the hill where the wine had been spilled would serve as a mental reminder to Pascal of keeping things in perspective.