A Twist of Orchids Read online

  PRAISE FOR MICHELLE WAN

  “Not since Nero Wolfe has such a fragrant combination of orchid lore and suspense found its way into a mystery novel.”

  —Booklist

  “Wan carefully sets the stage, introducing her cast of characters and weaving plot details into the tale’s fabric until, voila, there’s a full-blown, spellbinding mystery.”

  —Library Journal

  “Wan knows her plants and places, and has an excellent eye for the telling detail in a setting.”

  —The Globe and Mail

  “Wan’s pair of charming neurotics keep the pages turning.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Wan … expertly weaves the strands of legend, romance, the wine industry and the arcane world of orchids into an enchanting tapestry.”

  —Toronto Sun

  “Terrific… Wan’s characters are well made and the story really clicks.”

  —Margaret Cannon, The Globe and Mail

  ALSO BY MICHELLE WAN

  Deadly Slipper

  The Orchid Shroud

  TO DEAR FRIENDS MICHEL, MARIE-SYLVIE,

  GARRY, MARIE-PIERRE, AND BOB.

  TO TIM, WITH LOVE.

  AND ESPECIALLY IN MEMORY OF MARY WOODMAN.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am deeply grateful to many people at home and abroad who helped this book become a reality. In France, my heartfelt appreciation to Marie-Pierre Kachintzeff, Patrick Lemesle, and especially Garry Watt and Michel Renard. I cannot thank you enough for your unstinting and timely assistance. Not only did you correct my French, you enabled me to get my police and planning procedures straight and my facts right. I also wish to thank Maryvonne Chaumel, mayor of Carves, for further elucidating French planning regulations. In Canada, my thanks to Rana and Murat Fahrioglu for their help with the Turkish language; Larry Hawkins for his insights into the real world of undercover drug policing; Wayne Hawkins for generously sharing with me his knowledge of motorcycles and air transport; my agents, Frances and Bill Hanna, for their encouragement; my editor, Lara Hinchberger, for helping to make this a better book; and my computer guru, James Lewis, for keeping me up and running. I thank my sister, Grace, for her enthusiastic support, and last but far from least, Tim for his botanical guidance, his critical read of the manuscript, and most of all, his loving and steadfast presence in my life.

  Finally, I owe an enormous debt of thanks to Holger Perner for his friendship, for generously sharing with me his tremendous knowledge and love of orchids, and for the choice of Paphiopedilum sanderianum as one of the orchids appearing in this book.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This work of fiction takes place in the Dordogne (dor-DOHN-yuh), a département in southwestern France. The characters in this book are fictitious, and the landscape is a mix of real and invented places. The orchids, with the exception of one, exist. Long may they continue to bloom for the pleasure of all.

  PROLOGUE

  In the pre-dawn light, the ruin of the Temple of Vesunna rose as a shadowy hulk. Relic of a time when France was an outpost of the Roman Empire, it stood in a circle of parkland in the middle of Périgueux, departmental capital of the Dordogne. An empty pop can, wind-driven, skittered along its base. The can bounced and clattered down an incline to land on a walkway where it went careening off again, singing its hollow, tinny song. Tumbling and spinning, it eventually came to rest against a pair of boots.

  The boots, badly scuffed, pointed toe-down into the ground. Bare expanses of ankle above the boots showed that their wearer, a man, was without socks. Perhaps he owned no socks, or perhaps he had dressed in a hurry. He wore jeans and a denim jacket and lay on his stomach on the walkway, legs at a slightly higher level than his head. His arms were bent at the elbows, hands cupping, as if protectively, the sides of his face. A careful observer would have noted that the man’s clothes were frozen, that water had leaked from his mouth as he lay in this position, and that a small, icy pool of it had collected in a stony depression beneath his chin. An even more careful observer would have seen that the man’s nostrils were filled with dark vegetative matter, like soil, as if the very earth had risen up to stop his breath.

  At this early hour, the parkland surrounding the temple was still. Pigeons, roosting high in the broken masonry, slept. The pop can remained, rocking gently against the obstacle against which it had come to lodge. Until another violent gust of wind sent it dancing on its way.

  • 1 •

  The young man was an exoticism, a flamboyant figure against the mid-March backdrop of a small-town street market in southwestern France. He was dressed in an elaborately embroidered saffron-yellow vest worn open over a long white cotton robe. His hips were draped in a wide, colorfully striped sash, his feet clad in bright red shoes with pompoms at the toes. A length of green silk was twisted around his neck and knotted fancifully at the front. A red cap sat like an overturned flowerpot on his black, curly head.

  As if his outfit were not remarkable enough, the young man was strapped to a large, chased brass and silver urn. Or rather, in the manner of traditional Turkish salep sellers, it was strapped to him, secured to his back by way of a diagonal sling that passed over his right shoulder and under his left armpit. The urn narrowed at the neck before swelling out again into an oriental cupola that rose behind him like a second head. The spout of the urn, long and curved, was hooked under his right arm. A faint swirl of steam escaped from its ornate beak. A circular metal tray attached to the young man’s waist held Styrofoam cups.

  “Hadi oĝlum daha canlī baĝir, Kazīm. Orda korkuluk gibi duruy-orsun …” urged a large, middle-aged, mustachioed man in Turkish. He stood nearby before a bulwark of spices and foodstuffs from Anatolia, homemade baklava and glistening dolmas at two euros fifty each. These articles were equally out of place among the stands filled with the usual offerings: root vegetables, bread, baskets of eggs, loops of sausages, walnuts, farm-cured hams, cheeses, fish, tubs of honey, and bottles of dark fruit wine. Flattened duck carcasses, picturesquely called “overcoats,” shared display space with plucked chickens that lay heads dangling, feet crossed. What the man, Osman Ismet, said was: “Put some life into it, Kazim. You’re standing there like a scarecrow. How do you expect to get their attention like that? Drum up business, can’t you? Do your spiel. A real salepar’s got to have a spiel,” and so on. The Turk’s mustache flowed magnificent as a stallion’s mane on his upper lip. Kazim shot Osman, who was his father, a bitter look and muttered something, also in Turkish, the general import of which was: “This was your stupid idea. You do the spiel. I’m freezing my ass off.”

  It was true. Kazim’s face was pinched with cold, despite the fact that under his getup he wore a second set of clothing. The skirt and sleeves of his robe snapped and fluttered in the wind, exposing banal glimpses of frayed sweater cuffs, faded blue jeans, and gray wool socks.

  “Watch your tongue,” the father reprimanded, prodding the son forward into the path of shoppers who filled the central square of the town. “Show some respect.”

  It was getting on for noon, and the market was beginning to wind down. People, loaded with purchases, were drifting away. Some of the vendors were already closing up their stalls. Business for the Turks had been slow all morning. Soon it would be time for them to pack up as well.

  Sullenly, ironically, and in French, Kazim began to call out: “Okay, folks! Here it is! All the way from Istanbul, the Aphrodisiac of Sultans!” He said it, emphasizing each syllable: “Aff-ro-dee-zee-ack of Sul-taaaans!” His dark eyes flicked glumly over the slowly moving throng, focused momentarily on the buildings on the side of the square opposite his family’s stall, took in the steep stairway leading up to the high porch of the Two Sisters Restaurant, and swept on. />
  “Good, good,” encouraged Osman Ismet. “Aphrodisiac. That always gets their attention.”

  And indeed, some shoppers, attracted by the young man’s cry, were stopping, willing to be momentarily amused, because street markets in the Dordogne, indeed everywhere in France, were always a form of entertainment as well as commerce. Kazim’s eyes continued to roam while his mouth formed a version of the prescribed salepar’s pitch:

  “Got the wilts? A slurp of Elan will perk you up. Do wonders for the little woman, too. Made with a secret ingredient from a centuries-old formula. You don’t think Scheherazade’s old man kept it up for a thousand and one nights without a little help, do you? Here it is, folks. Elan, the drink of drinks. Three euros a cup, or buy a pack of powder mix for twelve, make it at home, the Viagra of Sultans …”

  A quartet of teenage girls gathered around him, giggling. A middle-aged couple, trundling a wire shopping cart laden with vegetables, baguettes, and a spit-roasted chicken, paused. Moving toward him through the thinning crowd, like a galleon in full sail, came a big man in a green-and-brown checked overcoat. He was accompanied by a thin man dressed in black. The thin man’s face was as narrow and gleaming as the blade of a knife. A pair of gendarmes strolled up from the opposite direction. Kazim took in the man in the overcoat and his companion as well as the approaching gendarmes. He bent forward swiftly, causing the spout of his urn to give forth a stream of hot, creamy liquid that he caught somewhat inexpertly in a Styrofoam cup.

  “Voilà, monsieur.” He shoved the cup into the hands of a fat fellow in a black beret and a bulky zip-up sweater who happened to be passing. “Free to you. Special promotional offer.”

  The fellow, a pig farmer from Saint-Avit-Sénieur, sniffed it suspiciously. “What is it?”

  “Something you’ll thank me for. Old fart like you could use a stand-up-and-salute,” said Kazim the salepar very loudly, to the laughter of some bystanders. Jeeringly, he addressed them at large: “You French are all alike. Don’t know what you keep in your pants.”

  “What the hell—” objected the old fart at the same moment that the father, mustache leaping, hissed in Turkish, “Are you crazy? That’s no way to talk to customers. What’s gotten into you?”

  “Watch your mouth, shithead Arab,” yelled a tough-looking, acned youth.

  “Yeah,” yelled a couple of his mates.

  Kazim’s dark eyes singled out the pockmarked face. “You call me a shithead, you come and talk to me. Or don’t you have the guts?”

  “I’ll send you back where you came from, minus something, sale bougne,” offered Pockmarks, surging forward. The crowd, interested in a fight, surged with him. More people hurried over to catch the action. Vendors left their stalls.

  Kazim, the erstwhile salepar, slipped swiftly out of his harness. The heavy urn dropped with a clang to the ground, rolled, trailing a sudsy stream of Elan, and came to a stop against one of the wooden legs of the table bearing the family’s wares.

  “Filthy terrorist!” another voice shrilled.

  The gendarmes, alerted by the hubbub, pushed through the growing crowd of people.

  “Please! Please!” shouted the father, switching to heavily accented French. He stood arms and legs outspread before his minor international enterprise. “Stop. I beg you. Is no way to talk. We are people of peace—”

  At that point, his son crashed into him, propelled by the acned tough and his two mates. The Turk himself was driven backwards onto his stand. It collapsed beneath the combined weight of the five men in a rain of spices, olives, baklava, dolmas, stuffed peppers, and paper packets containing the Aphrodisiac of Sultans.

  “Break it up!” yelled the gendarmes, wading in to quell the brawl.

  On his back, piled atop his father, Kazim planted a pompommed shoe in the stomach of the first gendarme.

  Because he was the only one looking up, Kazim alone saw the woman fall from the restaurant porch. She came flying at a slant down the diagonal of the stairway, arms outstretched, mouth straining open like an avenging djinn.

  • 2 •

  Madame Chapoulie, hurrying out of her flower shop to see what the commotion in the square was all about, nearly tripped over the body of the old woman lying at the bottom of the Two Sisters’ stairs.

  “Mon Dieu!” screamed the florist, terrified by the thin sound that came from the woman’s gaping mouth, by the staring eyes that already seemed to be taking on an awful vacancy. “Au secours!”

  Her cries drew people from the fight. By then the gendarmes had things more or less under control anyway. The crowd flowed out of the square toward the hysterical florist. The gendarme who had been kicked came, dragging Kazim with him; the other followed with the pimply-faced youth in tow. The youth’s mates had seized the opportunity to run for it. The first gendarme let go of Kazim to check for a pulse in the fallen woman’s neck. Kazim obliged the officer by sticking close. The other gendarme held on to his captive. He took in the position of the body, the steepness of the flight of eighteen stone steps that rose above it, and observed: “Must have missed her footing.”

  It was the general consensus. The restaurant spanned the upper stories of a pair of houses that in former times had been owned by two English sisters, the reason that the restaurant’s name was rendered in English rather than French. The houses were separated by a narrow alley and bridged at the top by an elevated porch. In summertime, the porch was a pleasant spot for a meal or a drink. In winter, except for waiters hurrying from one house to the other—that is, one part of the restaurant to the other—or customers crossing to use the toilets located on the right-hand side, it was deserted.

  “It’s those damned steps,” a man muttered, and there were murmurs of agreement. “She must have been distracted by the fight at the Turkish stall and tripped.”

  “Should have used the cage,” someone else said, referring to an old-fashioned elevator that crawled up and down the back exterior of the restaurant. It doubled as a goods lift and a means of conveying those not inclined to use the stairs, which was the majority of customers, since parking was also around the back.

  Kazim’s gendarme stood up. He looked grave. “I’m afraid she’s had it.” He pulled out his cellphone and began punching numbers.

  •

  The death was reported on the eight o’clock news that night: Amélie Gaillard, eighty-five years old, wife of Joseph, resident of the hamlet of Ecoute-la-Pluie. Cause of death: a massive cerebral hemorrhage caused by an accidental fall. There was some discussion of the condition of the Two Sisters’ stairs, which were in fact sound and equipped with a sturdy handrail. The restaurant owner was interviewed. “We absolutely urge patrons to use the elevator,” he declared.

  Amélie’s death, however, was overshadowed by the evening’s main story. In the early hours of the morning, Périgueux municipal workers had discovered the body of an unidentified male near the Temple of Vesunna. The man was described as of European type, brown hair, blue eyes, 180 centimeters tall, weighing 78 kilograms, and between thirty-five and forty years of age. Needle marks in his arm tagged him as an intravenous drug user and possibly a petty pusher. For these reasons, it was assumed that his was a gangland killing.

  • 3 •

  After the service, everyone went to the cemetery, situated a short distance beyond the church. Amélie’s coffin was borne by a pair of nephews (the only two who had not left the region), three immediate neighbors—Louis Boyer, Jean-Marie Roche, and Olivier Rafaillac—and another man from elsewhere in the commune. Joseph, Amélie’s husband, ten years her junior and suffering from Parkinson’s disease, shuffled along behind, supported by Francine Boyer and the notaire, Maïtre Joffre. A small, gray man in his sixties, Maïtre Joffre had attended to the Gaillards’ affairs for nearly thirty years. After them trailed the nephews’ wives, followed by the rest of the residents of Ecoute-la-Pluie, where the Gaillards had lived for more than half a century, among them Mara Dunn, la canadienne, the couple’s closest neighbor. Mara w
alked with nurse Jacqueline Godet, who provided home care for Joseph. Bringing up the rear were other people from the commune at large.

  Because of Joseph, the pace was excruciatingly slow. Already there was a widening gap between the coffin and the mourners. At one point Joseph simply froze in place, causing the procession to come to a halt. But the pallbearers, unaware of this fact, continued down the path so that the gap was now almost unseemly, as if Amélie were bound for a destination unrelated to the knot of people who waited patiently for something to click on again in Joseph’s brain, for his feet to resume their laborious forward shuffling.

  The walled cemetery was a cluster of sad marble monuments made even more desolate by a litter of faded plastic flowers. Perched on a hillside, it overlooked muddy fields and wooded valleys that in this season stood stripped and bleak. A fine rain had begun to fall, and a raw wind gusted out of an unforgiving sky. The coffin was lowered into the earth. At the graveside, the mourners huddled tightly, perhaps for warmth. Mara was aware of surreptitious glances. It was the artichoke farmer, Olivier Rafaillac, who started it by looking over his shoulder. Other heads turned, eyes met eyes. Their faces said it: she hadn’t come. At this late hour, wouldn’t come. But whether their expressions held censure, anger, or relief, Mara could not tell.

  A latecomer of only nine years’ standing in the hamlet, Mara had never met the Gaillards’ daughter. All Mara knew was that she had left home years ago, that her name was never mentioned. It was as if Christine Gaillard had somehow ceased to exist. And of course Mara had never thought it proper to ask why.