A Killing in Concarneau

A Killing in Concarneau by Paul Bristow Bernd Dieckmann, a police inspector from Germany, and his wife, Susanna, are taking part in a town twinning visit to Brittany. Brückheim, where Susanna Dieckmann is a teacher, has been twinned with Pont-Saint-Laurent, near Concarneau, for thirty years, a link forged and maintained through the schools in the two towns. The anniversary visit brings together many former “twinners” who have otherwise not stayed in touch. Elke Winterbach is one of these. A young teacher when the towns were first twinned, she left Brückheim, and her teaching career, very soon after the first visit to Pont-Saint-Laurent. Elke Winterbach, and the Dieckmanns, are staying in the same hotel in Concarneau, as is Dieter Schulz another former teacher, who has only recently retired. Both were former friends of Franz Felber, the Brückheim teacher who launched the twinning and is still a prominent member. French hosts and German visitors have a full programme of sight-seeing and celebration. A highlight is a visit to the local Château de Kerbreou, a manor house with a history going back over several centuries. The Château hosts murder mystery enactments, and the “twinners” attend one such evening. But the evening takes a sinister turn when one of the performers leading the enactment suffers a heart attack. Subsequent medical tests indicate that the attack was provoked by drugs that the actor had unknowingly ingested during the mystery evening. Zelda Brigaut, a commissaire in the Concarneau police, leads an investigation into the poisoning, and involves Dieckmann. Brigaut's suspicions centre on other members of the troupe of actors around Louis Vasquet. But Dieckmann knows of tensions that exist among the “twinners”, brought to the fore again by this reunion after so many years; without voicing his doubts, he is not persuaded that Commissaire Brigaut is on the right trail. Dieckmann's instinct is sound. A dead body is found in the waters of Concarneau harbour; it seems that those tensions have finally boiled over. When Brigaut and Dieckmann find and interview the perpetrator, dark secrets come to light, and enmities hidden away for decades are exposed.