The Molly Sutton Mystery Series, books 1-3

Chapter 19

Chapter 19“I don’t really know Lapin,” Maron was saying to Dufort as they drove out to Lapin’s house. “Was that a surprise, seeing him leave with the girl?”

“Yes and no,” said Dufort. His face looked grim. “He’s notorious for bothering women. Putting his hands on them without any invitation, being rude. Lascivious. But at the same time—he’s part of the village, Maron. People here grew up with him, they feel like they know him. That’s why Perrault looked so stunned when we saw him leave with his arm around Amy.

“To be honest, I always thought he was more talk than action. That he got off on harassing woman in front of other men but wasn’t actually trying very hard to get alone with one.”

Dufort was quiet for a moment. He glanced to the right, not wanting to miss Lapin’s house. “I thought he liked to look, and to talk, but not to act,” he said softly. “Several years ago, there was an incident….”

Maron waited. Dufort did not elaborate. He wanted to jump in and press Dufort but restrained himself. Maron squeezed his hands into fists and counted to himself, at the same time wondering if he would ever be able to tolerate the hierarchy of the gendarmerie. Dufort could be so taciturn and one day it might push him right over the edge.

Finally Maron said, “So…do you consider him a suspect?”

“Not precisely. I might call him a Person of Interest,” said Dufort, running a hand over his brush cut. “I want the two of us to talk to him. I have known him for years, all my life I guess. So it falls to you to be the tough one.”

“Understood,” said Maron.

Lapin Broussard’s house was right off rue des Chênes, about two kilometers out of town as the road left Castillac heading south. It felt like the deep countryside even though it was walking distance to the village. Fields of fading sunflowers lined both sides of the road. Dufort noticed the forest stretching back behind Lapin’s house, up a hill and over it.

They turned into Lapin’s driveway. No car in front of the house.

Dufort and Maron got out, both of them feeling a tingling excitement, trying to anticipate how this was going to go. Would Lapin have a believable story to tell them, perhaps how he had gotten the girl back to school safely? Would he seem nervous, like he was hiding something?

Was he even home?

“Lapin is not known for being the first rabbit out of the burrow in the morning,” said Dufort.

Maron did not smile and Dufort regretted the mild joke. He wished he were alone so he could take some of his herbal drops in privacy.

The two men strode up to the door and knocked. They listened.

No sound but birds, and the distant grinding of a tractor.

“His place is neater than I’d have expected,” said Maron.

“It’s important not to conflate qualities,” said Dufort. “Just because the man is a bothersome lech doesn’t mean he’s a slob.”

Maron gave a short nod.

They rapped on the old wooden door, harder.

“Lapin!” shouted Dufort.

Nothing.

“You stay here, in case he comes out,” said Dufort. “I’ll check around back.”

As well as he could remember, the house had been left to Lapin by his father, who died when Lapin was still a teenager. Lapin’s mother had died when he was a baby, and he had made his own way after his father’s death. Lapin was older than Dufort by around ten years, and so what Dufort knew about his life was mostly from overhearing tidbits when he was young.

He remembered the women of his family feeling sorry for the orphan, and that villagers had pitched in to help him out at first, when Lapin was still a teenager and figuring out what kind of work he could do. And he thought he remembered hearing that the father had been something of a tyrant, and that people believed Lapin was probably better off without him.

The house was small but well-made. In the cloudy light of the morning the golden limestone almost glowed, and the building looked infinitely sturdy and solid. It was old, probably 17th century. Dufort noticed that the roofers had done a thorough job; there were at least four layers of orange tile, and all the masonry work looked neat and well done.

Dufort saw there was no kitchen garden out back, not even a pot of herbs, just a patch of scraggly overgrown grass and encroaching underbrush from the forest.

Dufort walked up the hill behind the house and looked around. He looked at the roof, at the windows, at the garage. He turned and looked at the forest behind him, dark even in the daylight.

People are capable of anything, he reminded himself—he felt that he had to remind himself because he didn’t want to believe it was so. He had no particular feeling for Lapin Broussard, apart from the fact that the man was part of village life, the only life Dufort knew. But that was not nothing, and it made him sad to think that Lapin could have done something to that girl.

He dug in his pocket for the blue glass vial and shook a few drops under his tongue, and walked back down the hill.

For form’s sake he knocked on the back door and peered in, and took a look in the garage, but it certainly looked as though Lapin was not home.

Whether that meant he had taken off, they could not know yet. But as Dufort came around the house and waved to Maron to get back in the car, he was making a list of other places they might go to look for him. He had not forgotten his lunch date with Marie-Claire Lévy, and he couldn’t help that a small, egocentric voice inside wished that he could arrive at lunch with some real news to tell her.

He knew it was probably the wrong move, but Dufort wanted to counteract the upswell of melancholy he felt on seeing the tape of Lapin going off with Amy Bennett. So he reserved a table at La Métairie, the best restaurant in the village, for his lunch with Marie-Claire. Wrong move, because this was supposed to be a sort of working lunch, and besides that, going to the best restaurant put too much pressure on the first date (because that’s what it was, no matter how hard he pretended it wasn’t).

He drove his own car, a Renault that had seen better days, to L’Institut Degas and arrived just a few minutes after noon. Before going in to the administration building, he looked around the campus, trying to get a feel for the mood of the place. He saw a group of students walking from the modern building to the dormitory, a young woman sitting against a tree with a sketchpad, an older man raking leaves. The scene felt normal, everyday. He stopped and closed his eyes, listening, opening his perceptions, but sensed nothing out of the ordinary, not even any particular tension.

He supposed at a campus that small, there was no need for rallies or a lot of public brouhaha. The faculty and the students were all aware that a classmate was missing. And presumably everyone knew Amy personally, at varying degrees of intimacy. Everyone knew everyone, without exception: one of the great benefits and drawbacks of such a small, insular school.

Amy Bennett was by all accounts a seriously talented artist. Dufort wondered how the school handled issues of jealousy: did they leave the students to work things out on their own? Make efforts to get the students to compete with themselves and not each other? Or the opposite—did they fuel rivalries, push them, incite them to competitive fervor?

Dufort could remember how it was in the gendarmerie training, how ruthless some of the cadets had been, stepping on anyone they could to get ahead and claw their way to the top. He didn’t see any reason why it should be any different with artists. It’s human nature, he thought, wanting to stand out and be noticed, to win. And when you add the financial divide between a very successful artist and one not so successful…he could see that the bucolic setting of Degas might seem more serene on the surface than it might be to experience as a student.

He wondered how Lapin had gotten anywhere with Amy. Level-headed, a planner, an ambitious and talented young woman—she did not sound like the type of young woman who would respond to the coarse attentions of someone like Lapin. Was it simply a matter of drinking too much, and making herself vulnerable that way? Amy did not seem to be someone who would drink too much, either.

Lapin was the last person to be seen with her, and she had now been missing for eight days. Yet Dufort felt decidedly mixed about the break in the case. He did not understand why Amy had left with him, and on top of that, he did not see Lapin as someone capable of doing something so terrible.

Discreetly Dufort reached for his blue glass vial. He had used the day’s allotment already but ignored that and shook a few drops under his tongue—a mixture of lavender, lemon balm, and ashwaganda this time—before going in to the administration building to find Marie-Claire. It had been months since he had been on a date and he felt a not-unpleasant agitation. But when he saw Marie-Claire sitting at her desk, her brows furrowed as she typed something and stared at her computer monitor, his unease fell away.

She looks so intelligent, he said to himself. So intelligent, and also…sexy.

“Hi, Ben,” said Marie-Claire. “Just give me half a minute,” she said, still looking at the screen and typing furiously. Then she smiled at him and stood up and smoothed her skirt. “I don’t know why I have this job,” she said, shaking her head. “I absolutely loathe filling out forms and doing paperwork. And yet…that is eighty-five per cent of what I do.”

She came around her desk and she and Dufort kissed one cheek and then the other.

“What’s the other fifteen per cent?” asked Dufort, helping her with her coat.

“Listening to people b***h and moan,” she said, laughing. “I’m sort of the resident pseudo-therapist, for both faculty and students.”

They walked outside together and climbed into Dufort’s car. “I make a lot of pots of tea, and do a lot of listening,” she added.

“And do you like that part?”

“I do. The students here—and the professors too—they’re interesting, engaged people, for the most part. Most of them are very ambitious. Not necessarily for money, not that kind of success. But for art. There’s a kind of purity in it, you know? An innocence. And I like being around that, being part of it, helping in a small way.”

When Dufort turned towards La Métairie, Marie-Claire said, “Ben! La Métairie, really?” but her tone was of happy surprise.

“I’ve got some news, I’ll tell you when we’re seated,” he said. “I don’t know, something about it—it made me want something very good to eat. Like a talisman? I don’t really know what I mean.”

Marie-Claire looked at Dufort, her expression serious. She did not ask him what he meant but waited until they were inside and had given their orders to the waiter.

Dufort hesitated. Strictly speaking, he should not disclose to anyone outside of the officers on the case what the video had shown, but he thought perhaps Marie-Claire could shed some light on Amy’s movements that night. Would Marie-Claire think it possible Amy would go off with Lapin willingly? And for what reasons? Aware that this line of thinking was partly rationalization, he decided to go ahead with it anyway.

“I asked you to lunch to talk about Amy,” said Dufort. “And I’d like to go ahead and do that. There has been something of a break in the case.”

Marie-Claire sat very still and waited.

“We got video footage from around the village, hoping to find something, some clue about who she was with or…just anything, we didn’t know what we were looking for. Anything.”

Marie-Claire nodded.

“And video after video was useless. No Amy, nothing at all of interest. But the last one we looked at, just this morning, did have Amy. Many minutes of Amy, apparently celebrating with her friends and some people from the village. Amy left with one of those people. She looked rather inebriated, and his arm was around her as they left the restaurant.”

Marie-Claire had her hand over her mouth and her eyes were wide. “I’m surprised to hear Amy was drunk,” she said. “She…wasn’t like that. Not wild at all that way, I would have guessed. All business, that girl.”

The waiter brought a small tray with tiny cups arranged in a line and explained in some detail what they were, but neither Marie-Claire nor Dufort paid any attention, though they looked at the waiter while he spoke and pretended to listen.

“I can tell you what they were celebrating, at least,” said Marie-Claire. “Amy had just won a contest, the Marfan Prize. It’s not one of the really big ones, but any prize brings a great deal of prestige at her age. And I believe there was a cash award, more than just a token. I’d have to check to tell you how much, but I’d guess around 5000 euros.”

Dufort c****d his head, then took one of the tiny cups and drank the contents. “Mmm,” he said. “I have no idea what I just ate, but it is extremely good. Do you know if she had received the money?”

“No idea. I doubt it, because her winning had just been announced, and usually with these things, the check is a little slow in coming.”

Dufort nodded.

“So are you going to tell me?” said Marie-Claire, smiling.

Dufort liked Marie-Claire’s smile. It was warm, it was enticing, and part of him wanted to shove work to the side and get to know her better, instead of the endless talk of work, revolving around something horrible someone had done to someone else. With an effort he dragged himself back to the moment.

“I’m sorry, tell you what?”

“Whom did she leave with?”

Dufort nodded but did not speak. He really shouldn’t tell her. But he did want to know several things: had Lapin been hanging around the school at all? Had Marie-Claire perhaps seen him around, either before Amy’s disappearance or after?

He took a breath before he spoke. “A man from the village, known to many, including me. Lapin. Real name’s not Lapin of course—it’s Laurent. Laurent Broussard.”

Marie-Claire shook her head. “Every woman within a hundred kilometers knows Lapin,” she said, and took a sip of water.

The waiter brought wine, local and very good, and then starters and main courses and coffee and a pair of the most exquisite crèmes brûlées flavored with lavender. But unfortunately the pall of Amy’s disappearance, possibly at the hands of a man they both knew, cast such a deep shadow over their lunch that they barely tasted a thing; their conversation was not what either of them would have hoped, but rather drooping and lacking in wit.

It’s the constant not-knowing, thought Dufort later, going out for a second jog that evening. The whole village has been waiting over the course of years for this abductor to be caught. Yet to hear it might be someone we’ve known our whole lives—that does not bring any comfort either.