“Many times,” Verlaque replied. “Very good memories, those.” He thought of Rudder, standing at the stern, with his tanned face and flyaway blond hair, yelling instructions to eager young law students, many of whom had never been on a boat in their lives. And there was Chantal . . .
The sound of hundreds of people leaving the opera festival filled the square just around the corner from their apartment. Marine made a comment about the opera being finished, but Verlaque didn’t seem to hear. She stared at him and said, a little louder this time, “Let’s go inside and look at the photographs. I feel like tea. Would you care for any?”
Verlaque looked up and said, “Tea? Yeah, sounds good.”
Marine gathered the rest of the dishes and watched Verlaque, who had moved to the edge of the terrace and was looking out over the city. She loved resting her eyes on her husband when he wasn’t aware of it; she adored his thick black-and-gray hair, his crooked nose, his barrel chest and wide shoulders. He rested his elbows on the terrace’s stone wall and watched the crowd, some of whom would take the rue Adanson as a shortcut, others because they were lost, and still others because they simply felt like meandering on a warm summer night, perhaps inspired by Mozart’s opera. Verlaque stood motionless. Marine shrugged; she had at least expected a wisecrack about the tea.
“Such bad haircuts,” Marine said, looking at the black-and-white photographs laid out before them.
Verlaque muttered in agreement. “Even the rich and famous weren’t immune to the Vidal Sassoon shag, circa 1985.”
“And the women’s bangs that look like sausages,” Marine said, pointing to a passport photo of Monica Pelloquin. She picked up a photograph of a snarling adolescent boy. “Who’s this?”
“Erwan Le Flahec, Agathe’s son,” Verlaque answered, picking up one of the police reports and reading it. “It says here he was born in Vallauris in 1972, so he would have been sixteen when his mother died.”
“But he wasn’t on the boat that night, right?”
“No.”
“Thank God.”
Verlaque continued reading while Marine carefully looked at the photographs, frowning and biting her bottom lip. Verlaque laughed and said, “The Cannes police gave each subject an evaluation when filling out these reports, like in grade school. Everyone on the boat received a ‘very disagreeable’ in the category of ‘cooperation while questioning.’”
“Needs improvement,” Marine said.
“Three out of ten. See me after class,” Verlaque added, laughing.
“Even the kid,” he went on, “who was questioned in Paris, was, quote, ‘extremely uncooperative.’”
“No wonder,” Marine mumbled. “His mother died.”
“The secretary claimed that she overheard Agathe and Alphonse Pelloquin arguing earlier that afternoon.”
Marine looked up. “Five people on a small sailboat. I don’t doubt it.”
“Exactly. They could have been arguing about anything.”
Marine said, “It must really bother Rudder that the case was never solved. He was an unbeatable judge, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, but he was also human,” Verlaque said. “Rudder’s grandson, who must have been Erwan Le Flahec’s age at the time, was sick. Very sick, with leukemia. He died the next year. Rudder and I had drinks together one night a few years after that. Well, it went into the morning, and he confessed that the Barbier case still haunted him. He admitted that he should have taken a leave of absence, but he kept on the case, convinced he could do both—make visits to the hospital and resolve a suspicious death. He gave much of the work to a young colleague, who was in over his head. Rudder was already in his sixties then, and perhaps should have retired.”
“It was a high-profile case,” Marine said. “It was Valère Barbier, for heaven’s sake. I still can’t believe that Barbier lives here, and we’ve met him. You know, it’s crazy . . . He’s such a big deal. I think because we’ve now joked with him, and chatted about this and that, we’re forgetting his importance to this country’s culture.”
“I’ll have to be more nervous around him when I see him again,” Verlaque said.
“And despite his joking and guy-next-door easiness,” Marine said, her voice getting higher as it usually did when she was excited, “I do remember Valère making cracks about me being married to a judge and Paulik being a policeman. Like he was nervous . . .”
“He did that at the cigar club too,” Verlaque said. “But let’s not get carried away.”
Marine picked up a stack of photos of the boat. “When did the police arrive on the scene? I mean the boat, in this case.”
Verlaque slipped his reading glasses back on and turned the pages of the report. “Almost immediately,” he answered.
“How is that possible?”
“As it turns out, the boat was close to the coast,” he said. “Alphonse Pelloquin sent out an emergency call, and it says here that the coast guard arrived in under an hour.”
“But things on the boat could have been changed by then, moved around.”
Verlaque shook his head. “True, but Valère wouldn’t let anyone move until the coast guard came. I read that before we sat down to dinner. When he was interviewed, he told the police that he made the two women stay in the cockpit, tethered to their lifelines. He and Pelloquin tried shining lights on the sea and throwing buoys overboard, but it was no use.”
“If they were close to the shore, why did Agathe’s body never wash up?”
“Good question.”
Marine snickered as she handed a photograph to Verlaque. “The kitchen,” he said, looking at the photograph of the ship’s small galley. “Judging by the number of used limes in the sink, you were right about the cocktails.” She leaned in toward Verlaque and continued, “Katharine Hepburn. That’s who I was thinking of. Didn’t she get in horrible drunken rows with . . . with . . .”
“Spencer Tracy.”
Marine snapped her fingers. “That’s him. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner! He was her husband in that film and in real life too, right?”
“Lover,” Verlaque corrected. “He was a
