Murder on the Mediterranean (Capucine Culinary Mystery)

Also by Alexander Campion

THE GRAVE GOURMET

CRIME FRAÎCHE

KIILLER CRITIQUE

DEATH OF A CHEF

Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

KENSINGTON BOOKS

www.kensingtonbooks.com

All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

As always, this one is dedicated to T. Without her support and insight there would have been no book. In addition, without her strength buoying the author through a seemingly eternal stretch of bad health, there would have been no author either.

The book is also dedicated to the Toronto General Hospital Lung Transplant Team who tirelessly applied their infinite skills to ensure that all the moving parts continue to hum and tick as intended.

T
he cramps seared without mercy. On the lee side of the cockpit she contorted into a fetal twist, feet tight against buttocks, knees hard under chin. Like synchronized dancers, the twin wheels of the helm gyrated back and forth in the grip of the autopilot. Two women sat huddled on the other side of the cockpit, ostracizing her with their whispers. She glared at them, as if their rudeness was the source of her pain.

Another spasm wrenched her lower abdomen in a vise grip. She grunted. On the horizon a static of lightning was followed by a dull bowling-ball rumble of thunder. Greasy, fat drops of rain began to fall out of the sooty sky. She stood up, grabbed a foul-weather jacket from a heap at the foot of the settee, slipped it on, and inched across the sloping deck toward the bow.

Another spasm stunned her. A torrent buckled down, aimed only at her, soaking her to the skin. She couldn’t manage to pull the jacket closed. Drenched, her T-shirt stuck to her breasts and stomach. Shuddering, she continued to fumble with the jacket. It wasn’t hers. She must have picked up one of the women’s.
Great.
Now, on top of everything else, she was going to get an earful when she got back to the cockpit. Even in the downpour, those rich bitches would get their noses all out of joint if one of them had to wear her taped-up, oil-stained piece of shit.

A violent spasm heaved at her bowels. Only one thing mattered, getting to the bow before it was too late. Doubled over, she shuffled along the heaving, sloping nonslip surface of the deck, her bare feet skating through the cascading water. The pain intensified. She wasn’t going to make it to the bow.

The top of her head rammed into the wire cable of the forestay. She gasped a sob of pain and relief. The surprise loosened her grip on her muscles, and she felt the contractions of unstoppable peristalsis take charge. She ripped off the foul-weather jacket, threw it down on the deck, shrugged her shoulders out of the elastic suspenders of her foul-weather pants, pushed them down to her knees with the panties inside, gripped the forestay with both hands, swung herself out over the bow pulpit railing. The action unleashed the full force of the eruption. She was sure the explosion of her intestines could be heard in the cockpit, forty-five feet away, despite the din of the storm.

The relief lasted only seconds. She convulsed in pain again. And once again. And yet again. A figure emerged from the sticky darkness. Bound to be one of the two bitches, who’d come to see what was wrong. For a brief second, her embarrassment overrode the anguish of her gut. Hoping to keep from being seen in her mortifying position, she bleated out, “It’s nothing. I’ll be back in a second. Don’t worry about me.” Another spasm. Another spurt.

But it wasn’t a woman.
Oh God, not now.
He was back. This was absolutely too much. She hurled insults. Strong hands grabbed her naked ankles and shook her legs. Her colon pumped out a weak but satisfying spurt. She relaxed her grip on the forestay, felt herself shoved hard forward, toppled off the bow pulpit, fell butt first into the sea.

She tried to tread water, but the pants around her ankles held fast. As she squirmed to kick off the foulie pants, she felt the slick hull of the boat rub against her arm. She scrabbled, grabbing for a handhold on the slick gel-coated side of the boat. In an instant the boat was gone, its tiny white stern light no more than a pinprick in the blackness.

She thrashed, but the bagging pants dragged her deeper and deeper the more she struggled. She swallowed a mouthful of salt water, gagged, coughed, swallowed more.

Her last thought was that drowning was supposed to be the most peaceful of deaths. How could everyone have been so wrong about that?

“C
apucine, I don’t know how I let you talk me into this escapade. The thought of tossing helplessly over the waves of the open sea in your tiny walnut shell has been keeping me awake for days.”

Police Judiciaire
commissaire
Capucine Le Tellier smiled at her erstwhile boss,
Juge d’Instruction
Inès Maistre, from under mischievous eyebrows and tilted her head back to swallow the sugary dregs of her demitasse of
café express.

“The
Diomede
is hardly a nutshell, and she’s definitely not mine. She’s a bareboat charter. A fifty-five-foot Dufour with four cabins and all the room in the world. Much bigger than my first apartment after I graduated from Sciences Po. Look, you can see her over there.”

Capucine pointed at a substantial yacht docked on the other side of the marina. The mainsail furled on its boom was sheathed in a navy-blue cover lettered
MEDITERRANEAN ANCHORAGE YACHTS
.

Inès peered at the boats over reading glasses perched on the tip of her nose, shrugged her shoulders in Gallic resignation. With an effort Capucine twisted her frown into a smile. The women were almost the same age, still south of their midthirties, and had worked together often in the antediluvian era, a few years prior, when Capucine was still a reluctant hotshot in the fiscal brigade. Capucine had never been entirely at ease with Inès. Her neurotic obsession with putting corporate criminals behind bars was as unsettling as it was captivating.

Capucine had blurted out her invitation two weeks earlier, when an unexpected surge of camaraderie had washed over her during a luncheon meeting. Inès wanted Capucine to work with her on a case. Even though Capucine now had her hands full with her own brigade in the tough working-class Twentieth Arrondissement, the thought of lending a hand on an intricate financial problem had produced a thrill.

A waiter—an eighteen-year-old who was obviously paying for his summer in the sun by working tables—came up with menus. He had a hard time tearing his eyes away from Capucine’s décolleté. She concluded she might just have gone one button too far with her white linen shirt.

“Any news on your suspect?” Capucine asked Inès.

“He’s a bit more than a suspect. He’s guilty as hell. All we have to do is prove it.”

“Would you like me to explain about the dishes?” the young waiter asked, eyes still glued to Capucine. Capucine ignored him as if she hadn’t heard.

“And he was released two days ago, but that was only to be expected.”

The situation was straightforward. The guilty-as-hell man in question was the young grandson of the chairman of a venerable family-owned Paris investment bank, Tottinguer & Cie. The house was so ancient, the name was pronounced differently from the way it was spelled. Nevertheless, Inès was convinced the bank’s management, including the grandson, were inveterate financial miscreants. She had been after them for years and had never been able to produce even the slightest simulacrum of a case.

But now she might have found a chink in their armour. André Tottinguer, the grandson, a
gérant
of the bank and also a known philanderer, had been arrested for assaulting his wife. Inès had explained that Tottinguer had arrived home, returning from a tryst, at four in the morning to find his wife pressing the barrels of his Purdey shotgun up against his nose, her finger white tight on the trigger. Fortunately, the silly woman had left the safety on. He grabbed the gun, chased her down the stairwell, fired one shot into the ceiling and another through the lobby’s interior glass door after she’d run out. The wife, in her bathrobe and pajamas, managed to find a cab and get to her sister’s. The concierge of the building called the police, who arrested Tottinguer.

“And why did the police let him go?”

“That was my idea. No prosecutor would have even tried to present a case of attempted manslaughter. Charges might have been brought for
tapage nocturne,
creating a disturbance in the night, but all you get for that is a fine.

“No, I want to use this incident for an investigation of domestic violence. With your experience in the Twentieth, you’re an expert. Once I have him solidly behind bars, the wife will cooperate with me and get me all the fuel I need for the financial prosecution of the whole family.”

Capucine didn’t know what to say. She twisted her mouth in the tight French frown that could mean either assent or incredulity.

“Capucine, I’m going to get him this time. Believe me. He’ll go up for twenty years. And the rest of the family will follow right after. Just watch me.” Inès gripped the edge of the table so hard, her knuckles paled.

There was an awkward silence. The tintinnabulation of steel halyards rattling against aluminum masts became audible.

Inès made a valiant attempt to put the conversation back on an even keel.

“Tell me more about this boat trip of yours.”

“We leave on the morning tide tomorrow morning and sail straight for Bonifacio. You’ll love it. It’s the most beautiful town in Corsica, built high up on a white cliff so eroded by the sea that the town overhangs the water and looks like it might collapse at any moment. Then we spend a few days exploring the east coast of Sardinia and sail straight back here.”

“And who else is there going to be?”

“There’ll be nine of us in all. Six others besides you and me and my husband, Alexandre. My cousin Jacques—he’s with the Ministry of the Interior—is coming, too. And one of Alexandre’s cronies, Serge Monnot, who owns a number of very popular bars in the Marais, will be the skipper. He’s an avid sailor, and he’s the one who chartered the boat. Then there’s Angélique Berthier and her husband, Dominique. Angélique was a classmate of mine at Sciences Po. She’s doing very well as a partner in a head-hunting firm. Actually, we’ve drifted a bit apart since school, but we used to be very close friends. Her husband, Dominique, is wonderful, a charming marine watercolorist. And there’s a woman I don’t know, Florence Henriot. She’s a friend of Serge’s and is in charge of one of the imprints at Hachette. She used to be a famous professional racing sailor. Twice she won the Route du Rhum single-handed yacht race to Guadeloupe.”

Inès grimaced and shuddered histrionically. “How could anyone want to do that? God knows how long she was alone on a boat without really sleeping or having a proper bath.” She looked up sharply at Capucine. “There are bathrooms on this boat, aren’t there?”

“Of course. There’s one attached en suite to each of the cabins. Except on a boat they’re called heads, not bathrooms.”

Inès snorted and shook her head slightly. “That only makes eight people. Who’s the ninth?”

“The professional crew member Serge hired. A young girl, apparently. She’s on board to cook and clean and help him when he maneuvers the boat, so all we have to do is lie around in the sun and eat delicious meals.”

“Good. We’ll put the time to good use. We need to brainstorm about Tottinguer.”

“And unwind a little. Let’s not forget about that part. You’re going to be enchanted by Bonifacio, and the Costa Smeralda in Sardinia is the most beautiful coast in the Mediterranean.”

“Maybe, but my main objective is to keep you fully in my sights until you’re formally assigned to me. If need be, I’ll handcuff our wrists together.”

Capucine laughed over politely at the joke.

Inès frowned at Capucine over her reading glasses. “Capucine, I need to get this man. Without the quality of the police work you can bring to my team, I’m dead. Just dead.”