Death in Provence by Serena Kent

Author:Serena Kent
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-11-06T16:00:00+00:00

20

PENELOPE JUMPED INTO THE RANGE Rover after a black coffee breakfast. If she could help the police—not catch a murderer all on her own, obviously, but show she was an upstanding citizen—she would be accepted all the sooner in St Merlot. That was how Penelope rationalised her plan. All she wanted was a normal life, but to get that she had to do something, especially as she still had a gut feeling that her suspicions about the axe were correct. It was all very well for Chief Reyssens to laugh at her, but that didn’t make him right.

Professor Fletcher had always trusted her instincts. Penelope’s excellent memory and great grasp of detail had sometimes led to connections that senior professionals had overlooked. She couldn’t override her sense that this was yet another example of a busy man, in this case the chief of police, being too quick to seize on what he wanted to believe.

Coustellet announced itself with a hypermarket and a cluster of bakeries, one of which had a lengthy queue outside and a small forecourt that was heaving like a bumper car rink at a fairground. The other was deserted. She turned left at the crossroads and found herself a space in a vast car park.

This large, workaday village where the Petit Luberon mountain ridge came to an end was an odd mix of wine cooperatives, modern streets, and business premises. A butcher’s shop stood between a sushi restaurant and a store that seemed to market a combination of organic food and hard bread at eye-wateringly high prices. A computer shop was shuttered.

Penelope consulted the map she’d sketched roughly from the Internet, walked on, and found a road that joined at a right angle: rue des Monts Sauvages. And there, a long yellow sign: Darrieux. An ironmonger’s with a display of power tools and a hundred-and-one varieties of hammer. The premises next door had posters of agricultural machinery in the window and an office.

Inside the shop were long rows of shiny new tools, hanging on pegs. And there, halfway along one wall, was a selection of axes. Her heart pounded as she searched for an exact match.

There it was.

She approached the large man at the service counter. “Bonjour, monsieur. I am looking for an axe to use in my garden.”

“Oui, madame.”

“Could you show me the axes you have, please?”

“Oui, madame.” The shopkeeper made no effort to move from behind the counter.

This is not going well, thought Penelope. How am I going to be able to engage him in conversation about the virtues of various makes of axe, if he only knows how to say “Oui, madame”?

“Could you help me select an axe—which do you think is the best make?”

“That depends, madame.”

Penelope felt a glimmer of hope at having upped his vocabulary, and launched in, hoping her French was up to the job.

“I have a friend who came in here a while ago and purchased a Strauss axe. For general work in the garden. She lent it to me, and I found it was exactly what I needed.

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