Santon Strife: Sophie Kiesser Mystery Series, #4

By Curtis Bausse

A mild and humble heart. In a seaside resort in the south of France, the episcopal motto chimes with Sophie's hopes for a peaceful Christmas. Reality, alas, decides otherwise. The troubled heart of a gangster's wife, the cynical heart of a wily Mayor, the raging heart of Sophie's sister, the shattered heart of a santon maker - all combine in an escalating drama of sin, guilt, jealousy, corruption and murder.

 

In the final book of the series, fates and futures are decided, unfinished business gets finished, and the story of the Gospel is given a new twist as God and Satan battle it out with theatrical intensity. No wonder the nativity play doesn't go quite as planned...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Curtis Bausse
• Release date: Dec 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201913458

Curtis Bausse

I grew up in Wales, was educated in England and have spent most of my life in France. I've been writing since the age of 10, when my first poem was sent to a competition by my English teacher. After moving to France, I ran a café-theatre till it got demolished, whereupon I scratched my head, wondering what to do next. Eventually I became a university lecturer, specialising in Second Language Acquisition, even though (apart, obviously, from French) I've spectacularly failed to learn any languages (I'm currently trying Dutch and can already say 'The turtle eats the sandwich', which is very encouraging). I spent two years in Mayotte, a tiny, unknown island in the Indian Ocean, which France bought for 1000 piastres in 1842. Magali Rousseau (my heroine) got into a lot of trouble there, but now, like me, she's back in Provence, where she jogs, paints, and catches murderers. You can find out more about us at curtisbaussebooks.com.

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SANTON STRIFE

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Sophie Kiesser Mystery Series n° 4

Curtis Bausse

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Copyright © Curtis Bausse 2021

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This book is a work of fiction. No part of the contents relate to any real person or persons, living or dead.

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Sophie Kiesser and Magali Rousseau work together, each featuring in the books of the other series. In One Green Bottle, first in the Magali Rousseau series, you’ll find an account of Magali’s initial steps as a private detective. A joke – or so they think at first. They soon find out it is anything but.

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One Green Bottle

Contents

Chapter 1  Not a Pretty Sight

Chapter 2  Donkey Doubts

Chapter 3  Roaming the Byways

Chapter 4  Casing the Vestry

Chapter 5  All Scammers Great and Small

Chapter 6  Knucklehead Marriage

Chapter 7  Sensitive Information

Chapter 8  Crooked As They Come

Chapter 9  Binding Molecules

Chapter 10  Flushing Them Out

Chapter 11  Believe In Yourself

Chapter 12  Naughtiness and Nastiness

Chapter 13  An Unknown Quantity

Chapter 14  Apology Accepted

Chapter 15  The Milkmaid’s Tale

Chapter 16  Mental Confusion

Chapter 17  An Urgent Meeting

Chapter 18  Renunciation of Evil

Chapter 19  Bad News Breakfast

Chapter 20  A Complex Affair

Chapter 21  Rage and Resentment

Chapter 22  Hind Leg of a Donkey

Chapter 23  An Almighty Dent

Chapter 24  Trump Card

Chapter 25  Career Decision

Chapter 26  A Choice of Hell

Chapter 27  Santon Tutorial

Chapter 28  A Vicious Mercenary

Chapter 29  A Perfect Match

Chapter 30  The Safety Valve

Chapter 31  A Worrying Weapon

Chapter 32  The Kind Commissaire

Chapter 33  Kleenex and Curses

Chapter 34  Pronto Puzzle

Chapter 35  Herod Heckled

Chapter 36  The New Crusade

Author’s Note

I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.

Richard Dawkins

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I think there is less difference between religion and other belief systems than we think. We all like to believe we’re in direct contact with truth. We shouldn’t think that because we are not religious, that makes us so much cleverer than religious people.

Daniel Kahneman

Chapter 1

Not a Pretty Sight

December 20th 2019

By the time Commissaire Landreau arrived on the scene, the local gendarmes had cordoned it off, taken the first photographs, and checked the premises for any further presence, dead or otherwise. The forensic team who had followed the Commissaire donned their suits and set to work immediately. Landreau stayed on the edge, taking it in.

Not nice. The victim’s head had been smashed in; a pool of thick, dark blood spread all around it over the tiles. He stooped closer, examining the forehead matted with crushed bone and hair. A metal truncheon perhaps, or a length of pipe. He glanced round the room to see if the killer had left it there, but no such luck. Until they knew exactly what it was, the first report would call it a blunt instrument.

Two sharp blows at a guess, one above the left eye, the other on the opposite side, near the temple. Or perhaps three – above the eye, where most of the blood had come from, the dent was deep, and seemed on closer inspection to be two separate wounds, the second blow landing almost, but not quite, in the same spot as the first.

Landreau straightened up. More like a hammer in that case. A job for the pathologist, anyway. He walked round to the other side of the body. The victim’s right hand appeared deformed, the middle finger bent at a curious angle. He crouched down, and grasping the tip of the little finger, gingerly raised the hand to see the other side. Yes. A blow right in the middle, just below the knuckle. Definitely a hammer, he thought, as he lowered the hand gently back in place.

Curious, that. The blows to the head alone must have been fatal, or close enough. No need to smash a person’s hand afterwards, surely? It must have been before. But why?

There was no sign of a struggle. All the furniture in its place. Windows and shutters closed. Light on in the porch. Television on as well, but the sound was muted. The only other indication of violence was a computer on the dresser behind the body: the keyboard was shattered. Several blows there by the look of it. Whatever information was on it, the killer didn’t want it being found. With any luck, the files on the hard drive would be recoverable, but Landreau wasn’t counting on it. The demolition job seemed thorough.

A man stood behind an armchair, one hand resting on the back, as he watched Landreau at work. Landreau walked over to the local gendarme and in a low voice asked who he was. On being told, he looked across at the man, who straightened almost to attention. Landreau went over to him. ‘Captain Eveno?’

‘Commissaire.’ Captain Eveno gave a brief nod. He had the bearing of a military man, though he wore plain clothes.

‘You were the one who discovered the body, I gather. Tell me about it.’

Chapter 2

Donkey Doubts

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December 9th

‘Sorry, guys,’ said Magali. ‘Now I see why it wasn’t taken already.’

They were huddled round a kitchen stove in a large, ramshackle house with a faint smell of mould. It was, as advertised, a ‘stone’s throw from the sea’, which technically might be true if you could throw the stone over a block of flats, two houses, and a car park. Perhaps with the aid of a catapult.

Luc grunted, Sophie sniffed, Dorian snored, and Chloé moaned that she was hungry. No one said Magali had blundered but she knew they must be thinking it. The only one to respond with any form of enthusiasm was Sophie’s aunt Fernande. ‘Don’t worry, I’m sure it will be wonderful. The main thing is we’re all together, isn’t it?’

Magali cast her an appreciative glance. Positivity, yes! Smile in the face of adversity. She wondered if adversity was a feature of the glittering feel good movie that was Fernande’s life.

‘Lexie will be here soon,’ said Sophie.

Magali joined the dots in her daughter-in-law’s train of thought: we needed a big place anyway. Like her aunt, Sophie’s sister had a way of filling space far beyond the fact of physical presence. ‘Maybe it will have warmed up by then,’ she added hopefully.

‘We’ll put in a Christmas tree,’ said Luc, moving closer to the stove. ‘Give the place some cheer.’

‘Mummy, I’m hungry!’ wailed Chloé.

The reason they were shivering was the Virgin Mary. Not directly – that was a boiler that produced a racket but no heat – but Mary was why they were there in the first place. Or rather a fake Mary. So claimed Maxime Buffet when he rang to complain – in fact the whole bunch was fake, from Jesus himself all the way down to the ass, though Mary was the one he’d spotted first. ‘A foreign import,’ he’d said. ‘Nothing Provençal about her.’

Santons. Clay figures of the nativity, produced in Provence and sold all over the world. Depending on size and craftsmanship, santons could sell for up to a hundred euros a piece. Buffet, a craftsman himself, wanted production halted, the perpetrators fined. ‘Right,’ Magali had said. ‘I’ll get my best agent to look into it.’

A few minutes later, she’d called Sophie. ‘He lives in Saint Célestin. I’ve found a house for rent right by the sea. Bigger than what we need but quite a bargain. I thought we could go down for Christmas and I can take care of the children while you drive the usurpers out of the crèche.’

‘Great,’ said Sophie. ‘Sounds like just what we need.’

It did at the time.

‘Terrible. I mean, I could put up with the double chin and the hair sprouting out of his nose, but god, so pompous! And here is a Château Talbot, 2009. Magali swirled the plonk in her glass (Côtes du Rhone, four euros a bottle from Lidl), took a sip and made a kissing sound through protruded lips. ‘Ah, the aromatic balance! A body that’s ripe and sexy – mmm! Just get a taste of that opulence and tell me what you think. I burst out laughing. I couldn’t help it. And he went into an almighty sulk.’

She’d gone all the way to Nice for a date, third hook-up to materialise from her signing up on WeToo, and the hours spent fine-tuning her profile. Stated aim: to meet someone ‘down to earth’, a ‘good listener with a sense of humour’ for ‘conversation and companionship’. ‘Do I add more if affinity?’ she’d asked Luc. ‘That’s the convention, isn’t it?’ He’d advised her not to: wait to see if affinity came, then she could decide. It made little difference. The first two pretenders (in all senses of the word) had paid no more than lip service to her profile, even less to any possible affinity, preferring to get to ‘more’ as fast as possible. The first had launched into a monologue on blow job technique before they’d even finished their starters; the second at least got to the end of the meal but then tried to snog her in the car park. Lip service of a different kind.

‘You spend hours filling in the form, finding the right words, and it might as well be gibberish for all the difference it makes. And to top it all, Dickhead – sorry, Xavier’ – she tried not to use the nickname in front of Luc, who still professed a dutiful loyalty to his father – ‘has got it into his head that we have to get back together. He sent me a letter – an actual letter, would you believe? – saying he couldn’t think what led him to leave me. As if he’s forgotten it was another woman’s tits.’

‘Come to Paris,’ said Fernande. ‘You don’t need a dating site, I’ll take you there for real. You’ll have the pick of the crop. And find a gorgeous man who’ll teach you about wine. You know, I did an oenology course once, and it’s not all snobbery. Assuming,’ she added archly, ‘it’s a man you’re looking for.’ This was accompanied by a deep, meaningful glare. She’d cut her hair short recently, and swapped her contacts for rectangular black-rimmed glasses, which gave her the look of an earnest (if slightly manic) astrophysicist.

‘Well.’ To be honest, Magali didn’t know what she was looking for. It just seemed she was far too young to give up sex. Or rather, not the sex itself but the idea of it, the association with youth and vigour and vitality. Truthfully though, she was happy enough without it; signing up to WeToo was Luc’s suggestion, with male companionship the instinctive choice because no one could ever replace Charlotte so there wouldn’t be that expectation with a man.

How did Fernande do it? How did she even find the time, the desire, the appetite? She never – so she said – hung out in the louche bars and clubs where opportunities were rife; her hunting ground was culture, a constant whirl of exhibitions, shows, workshops and lectures where she picked and chose between multiple candidates, while her husband Claude stayed at home planning drains.

In the absence of any answer to her calls, Sophie went to Maxime Buffet’s house, a twenty minute walk away, at eleven the next morning. The shutters were closed and at first she thought there was no one in, but then came the faint sound of a television or radio, so she rang the bell. Waited, rang again, and finally was rewarded by the front door opening to reveal a man in dressing gown and slippers, clumps of grey hair sprouting from his scalp like weeds.

‘Monsieur Buffet? I’m Sophie Kiesser, from the Magali Rousseau Detective Agency. I left a message on your phone.’

‘What?’

‘You rang Madame Rousseau about some fake santons. I’m here to find out more.’

Her explanation did nothing to lessen the bewilderment in front of her. He looked her up and down, peered around her as if looking for her spaceship, and said again, ‘What?’

Two repetitions later, enough connections were made in the recesses of his memory for him to grant that she might be telling the truth. He led her into the sitting room, opened the shutters, switched off the television, and removed a bottle of pastis from the coffee table. She would have assumed it was from the previous night, but she’d already caught the whiff of aniseed on his breath. He didn’t seem particularly embarrassed.

The daylight that poured through the windows dispelled the darkness in Buffet’s house, but had no effect on the blackout in his brain. The phone call remained a blank. Nonetheless, he agreed that he must have made it, and with the help of clues provided by Sophie, was even able to piece together what he probably said.

‘See this?’ From a jumble of plastic bags on a chest of drawers he extracted a clay donkey. ‘It was made in Tunisia.’

Sophie turned it round in her fingers, but saw no outward sign of nationality. ‘How can you tell?’

‘It’s identical to the ones you find in supermarkets.’

‘And that makes it Tunisian?’

Buffet was awake enough now to give a rambling account of his grievances. A genuine santon, like the ones he made – or used to, anyway, because admittedly, it had been a while, he’d fallen ill, and got depressed, and then had marital problems – a genuine santon was made in Provence, but this one could be bought for three or four euros a piece from Carrefour or Auchan. No problem with that, they made no secret of it, fabriqué en Tunisie on the label, but this actual piece she was holding – not a lick of difference from the ones in Carrefour – he’d got it from Vita Sempre, or rather, Michel had – his wife’s boyfriend – but that was another story – because he didn’t want to use his own credit card, didn’t want Vita Sempre to know it was him. ‘Twelve euros for this,’ he concluded. ‘Twenty-two for Joseph or Mary. You see?’

Sophie thought she did, up to a point. ‘Selling under false pretences. Isn’t that a job for the fraud squad? Why bring us into it?’

Buffet scoffed. ‘Fraud squad don’t give a toss. Not their problem.’

‘I’d have thought it’s precisely –’

‘Let me show you.’ He shuffled out of the room, coming back with a box from which he produced another donkey. ‘One of mine. See the difference?’

Undeniably, it booted the other right out of the park. Maxime’s donkey had a real donkeyness to it, a curl to its lip, and a look in its eye, that told the onlooker this was no ordinary ass. This was the transport chosen for the mother of the Messiah.

Sophie’s praise, delving into the technicalities of moulds and clay and firing, told him he was speaking to a connoisseur. ‘Not that I’ve ever made a santon,’ she said. ‘Though I’ve still got a number of warthogs I’m trying to sell. I don’t suppose they’d fit very well in a crèche.’

‘You can put whatever you want in a crèche.’ If they were restricted to the Bible, he said, they’d never make enough to live on. The nativity scene was taken in its largest sense. Anyone plausibly in the vicinity was welcome. ‘As long as it’s vaguely Provençal.’ He gave it a moment’s consideration. ‘Maybe not warthogs,’ he said.

Sophie withdrew a figure from the box. ‘A milkmaid. She’s beautiful!’

‘Not a milkmaid.’ His eyes lit up as if she’d pinned an award to his chest. ‘Angélique.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘The innkeeper’s daughter. She’s based on my own. Angélique.’

‘So alive.’ She had a bounce in her step, you could see the swing of her hips. ‘So pretty!’

‘Clever with it. She’s going to be a lawyer. Taking her bac this year.’

He reached for Angélique, holding her in the palm of his hand like a bird with a broken wing. Then he placed her gently back in the box and placed the lid on top. ‘Your job is to bring him down.’

‘Bring who down? The person importing the fakes?’

‘Not them, no. That’s Vita Sempre. You’re going after René de Coudray. The Mayor of Saint Célestin.’

Chapter 3

Roaming the Byways

‘She agreed to take over,’ said Magali, ‘but whether she really wants to is a different matter. I hope she wasn’t saying it just to please me.’

‘I wouldn’t be surprised, knowing Sophie.’ Fernande put a token in the trolley at Auchan and they made their way inside. ‘What I don’t get, though, is why it’s important. Why does the agency have to continue in any case? I thought you wanted to stop.’

‘I do. I mean, I have, pretty much. It’s just that when it came to winding it down, I found that I couldn’t. I was listening to a piece by Erik Satie, and it got me thinking of Enzo Perle, Charlotte’s son. He was working on some project to do with Satie when he was killed. And I thought the agency... Without it, I’d never have met her, so winding it down...’ She shook her head. ‘I couldn’t.’

The agency wasn’t a grand or extensive setup. For most of its life Magali had been the only person involved. It had a name, a legal identity, but no physical presence other than a list of contacts and a few folders in a filing cabinet. But however tiny its operation, the agency was a link to her time with Charlotte. ‘I suppose you could call it a form of homage.’

‘That’s ever so sweet,’ said Fernande. And after a pause she added, ‘And sad. Clinging to the memory like that.’

‘Sad? As in I need to get myself a life?’

Fernande laughed. ‘That as well, I suppose.’

Clinging to the memory. Really? Perhaps there was something in that. If she was honest, she had to admit that her life could do with a boost. Not her mood, which on the whole was equable enough, but her prospects. First a young mother, then a young grandmother, nothing was left before her now but old age. Love, marriage, and motherhood had happened in much