Free Murder on Brittany Shores by Jean-Luc Bannalec Page A

internet. Lu – cas Le – fort. I want to know straight away. Have the bodies arrived in Quimper yet?’
    â€˜The Admiral’s Cup winner?’
    Riwal sounded agitated.
    â€˜Yes, he hasn’t been seen since yesterday evening.’
    â€˜I’ll call our colleagues. I think they should be arriving in Quimper soon. How did you…’
    â€˜Call them, Riwal. Everything else can wait.’
    â€˜Understood, chief.’
    Dupin hung up.
    He walked over the picturesque wooden bridge that ran alongside the sea all the way round the island. The ‘inside’ of the island (and there wasn’t much of it) was barren, austere – he liked it. Thorny undergrowth, raspberries, blackberries, a scanty covering of grass, waist-high ferns, heather flaring here and there, pockets of garish yellow gorse. The rising water had already washed over the sandbank between Saint-Nicolas and Bananec. Long, gentle waves glided into the chamber from the open Atlantic. Right in the middle of the sandbank, two men were visible. They were standing no more than ankle-deep in the water. It looked insane – like they were walking on water. The high tide was coming. The landscape was changing, which meant above all that land was becoming even more scarce.
    The archipelago was an extreme outpost of the old continent. You could feel it, Dupin thought. The final stop at the end of the world. In fact, there was nothing more between the Glénan and the coast of Canada, not a speck of earth, not even a bleak rock formation. You would have to put five thousand kilometres behind you before you’d set foot on solid ground again. Five thousand kilometres of water. In the wildest sea in the world. And it wasn’t much land, this very last piece. Dupin was thinking about last night’s storm. This very last piece of land wasn’t a solid landmass, not even close. These were desolately placed, chaotically torn, misshapen swatches of land – which the popular aerial shots showed impressively. The last bastion of land was a very fragile bastion.
    Dupin had walked slowly round the northern tip of the island. He looked westwards. The ringing of his phone broke the silence. It was Kadeg. Dupin answered.
    â€˜Negative.’
    Kadeg sounded more frantic than usual.
    â€˜What do you mean, Kadeg?’
    â€˜It’s not him.’
    â€˜So you’re saying none of the three dead who have been examined is the missing angler? The man from Île-Tudy?’
    Dupin had phrased the sentence in such detail so that he could gloat. Because his instinct had been right and Kadeg’s wrong.
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜Has he turned up again then?’
    â€˜No. But they’ve examined the bodies carefully, using the photographs and he has been conclusively excluded as being one them.’
    There was open disappointment in Kadeg’s voice. And a little embarrassment. ‘So we have a missing person who is not any of the three dead – and three dead, of whom none of them have yet been missed.’
    Kadeg clearly didn’t know how to respond to Dupin’s bit of wordplay and remained silent.
    â€˜Right, Kadeg, that’s where we are.’
    Dupin hung up.
    As macabre as it was and for motives different from Kadeg’s, he would not have been unhappy if the missing person had been one of the three bodies washed up on shore. To have some kind of lead at least. Then they could probably find out who the other two dead bodies were quickly.
    Dupin had come to a stop. He was contemplating turning around, but it seemed he would be back at the Quatre Vents sooner if he just followed the path. The bar might not have been visible yet – a sand dune ran lengthways across the island – but it couldn’t be far now.
    Dupin’s gaze slid uncertainly into the distance, over the sea, which was a deep ultramarine at the horizon. He had stopped saying that the sea was blue. Because that wasn’t