Death on the Marais
( Inspector Lucas Rocco - 1 )
Adrian Magson
Adrian Magson
Death on the Marais
PROLOGUE
Picardie, France — 1963
She was going to die. She could feel it, her life ebbing away as surely as fine sand through fingers. The thought caused her more sadness than fear; less a sense of foreboding than a cause to wonder what lay ahead.
Maybe it was the drugs. She didn’t know much about the effects of what a doctor at one of the parties had called hallucinosis, but she’d sensed this odd disconnection before. It wasn’t usually this bad. And never in water.
The water. Seconds ago it had been over her chest and soaking into the heavy uniform jacket with the hated decorations. Now it was lapping at her chin, the waterlogged material dragging her down like lead weights. A splash, and she tasted it, cold and oddly chalky on the palate. She clamped her lips shut, fighting to breathe through her nose, eyes tight shut. But the bruised tissue around her septum hurt too much. In desperation, she inhaled… and choked. It could only have been a drop, but it felt like a bucketful, instantly blocking her airways and inducing panic.
God, how her chest hurt! She wondered if she had a broken rib. She could only recall one punch, but that was last night and seemed to be an age away. There must have been others.
She pushed back the pain, managing to thrust her head above the surface. She tried to shout, but her throat was constricted by fear. Besides, she was too far from any source of help and her cries would go unheeded, lost among the trees and in the shrill dawn calls of the marshland birds.
The water was intensely cold, especially around her feet. She kicked out, fearful at what she could not see, too terrified to look. She had never liked swimming; her imagination always too colourful to dismiss as benign the depths beneath her or whatever creatures might be lurking there. Yet oddly, seeing her hands floating before her, this water seemed as clear as day. And there was an unnatural brightness around her. It reminded her of when she was a child, pretending to swim as her mother filled the bath. Back then, when her mother was alive, swimming was always safe.
She reached out desperately for the bank, and felt a slimy texture beneath her hands. Her fingers sank into a chill, paste-like substance with no solidity, offering nothing onto which she could hold. She felt like a spider she’d once seen trapped in a soup bowl, tiny feet scrabbling for purchase until it had stopped, too exhausted to go on.
She began to slide further down, the water a rising blanket around her face and now tinged red by the blood from her broken nose. She kicked harder, bubbles bursting in a thin trail from where air had been trapped in her clothing. Another brief respite. She took a deep breath, felt the urge to cough. If only she could take off the jacket that was weighing her down, then she might have a chance. But the uniform buttons had been hard to do up in the first place; they would be even harder to undo.
A crackle of vegetation sounded from nearby, and she looked up, desperate for a helping hand, a friendly face. Maybe a villager out hunting early. Or maybe not. Scared out of the copse where she had been hiding since last night by the sound of a car arriving, she had tripped and plunged head first down a steep bank, the flash of cold water replacing one panic with another.
‘Help… help me!’
A familiar shadow, framed by the thin dawn light, loomed over the water’s edge. She felt pathetically grateful, reaching up to take the helping hand.
But grasped only empty space.
Then strong fingers clamped down on her scalp, and suddenly she had no buoyancy left. Her kicks were futile. Instead, she watched through the clear water as the bank, brilliant white, slid past her face, and below her the bottom of the pool, like a funnel leading into blackness, approached all too quickly.
CHAPTER ONE
Lucas Rocco? Insubordinate bastard. And insolent. A good cop, though.
Capt. Michel Santer — Clichy-Nanterre district
To Inspector Lucas Rocco, the gathering in the churchyard looked too casual to be a riot, too small to be a funeral. Newly exiled from his home base in the Clichy-Nanterre district of western Paris under Interior Ministry orders, and assigned to the village of Poissons-les-Marais, in Picardie, north-west France, it was a welcome distraction. He turned off the car radio, killing in mid-sentence Johnny Hallyday, the current singing heart-throb de choix, and left his Citroen Traction outside the local cafe to find out what was commanding such a gathering in this flyspeck of a place.
‘It’s a bomb, I tell you.’ A compact, nut-brown man in a greasy old bush hat was speaking round a spit-stained Gitanes with the assurance of one who knew about such things. The focus of everyone’s attention was a large, cylindrical object lying in a shallow depression in the chalky soil next to the gravelled pathway. Tapping the rusted metal casing with the toe of his boot brought a sharp intake of breath among the crowd, who all stepped back a pace.
‘Probably from the Great War,’ said a phlegmatic woman in a black headscarf and chequered apron. She stood hugging an armful of leeks to her ample bosom like a character from an old painting. ‘It looks old enough.’
‘No way,’ Bush-hat disagreed. ‘Those little kites wouldn’t have been able to lift anything this big.’
‘Doesn’t look that much to me,’ muttered an old man in traditional bleus — the uniform jacket and baggy trousers of the working man in rural Picardie. In spite of the warm weather, the trousers were tucked into a pair of enormous rubber boots, the tops reaching his knees.
Bush-hat lifted an eyebrow, assured of his audience’s attention. ‘You think? A bomb this big would take out an area about three hundred metres in radius, no problem.’
Since three hundred metres was roughly the length and width of the village, a remote spot too small and insignificant to even figure on the map of northern France, and they were standing right in the centre, it caused the crowd to move back another respectful, but entirely useless, three paces.
Rocco found himself standing next to a heavy-set man in a green vest and thick corduroys. The man turned and nodded affably.
‘Did he say bomb?’ Rocco wasn’t yet used to the accent in this part of the country, although he’d understood most of what was said.
‘That he did,’ the man replied. He had a deep, almost melancholy voice. ‘Don’t worry: it’s what passes for excitement in these parts. You the inspector?’
‘I am.’ Rocco was surprised: news had travelled faster than he’d expected. ‘Lucas Rocco. How did you know?’
The man thrust out a calloused hand, which Rocco shook. ‘Lamotte. Claude will do. I know lots of things. Also,’ he nodded back towards the Traction, ‘the big black cop machine is a bit of a giveaway.’ He turned and called, ‘Hey, everyone — it’s our resident flic.’ He smiled shyly at Rocco. ‘No disrespect; better out than in, as they say.’
‘None taken.’ Rocco waited as the crowd turned to stare at him. Their reactions were mixed. He reckoned suspicion — a natural response to policemen everywhere, even among policemen — won out by a long nose, with surprise and fleeting interest not far behind. He let it wash over him. At just over two metres in height and built like a useful prop forward, he’d long given up on the idea of blending in anywhere among normal society. Crims, prizefighters and soldiers, OK; others, forget it. ‘I’ve been called worse.’
‘Not yet, you haven’t.’ Claude gave Rocco another inspection, eyes dwelling on the heavy shoes, the broad shoulders and the angular, powerful face topped by a scrub of black hair. ‘Stick around, though, and you might.’
‘They don’t like the police?’
‘They don’t like anyone. Comes of living in a
rural shithole, ignored by everyone, including our esteemed general.’ He spoke with quiet cynicism, but if he was worried about causing offence, he didn’t show it.
Rocco shrugged. Charles de Gaulle, soldier and current president of the Fifth Republic, lauded and loathed in fairly equal measures, was a man he rarely thought about. ‘I think he’s got other things on his mind at the moment.’
‘The Algerian thing?’ Claude nodded sombrely. ‘That’s all done and dusted, bar the shouting. Up to them, now.’ As if sensing Rocco’s lack of interest in the political desires of the once French-held North African territory, now just a year on from independence, he nodded at a tall, skeletal character standing to one side. ‘Monsieur Thierry over there,’ he said, returning to the matter in hand, ‘looks after the churchyard. It’s his way of getting a free pass into Heaven. He found the bomb while returfing. Looks a big bugger.’
Rocco had seen bigger in Indochina, but scrubbed that mental picture. Best not go there; barely ten years ago, it was still too recent to forget and offered only dark shadows waiting to greet him.
Besides, it didn’t look much like any bomb he’d ever seen.
‘Who’s the expert?’ Bush-hat was now bending and sniffing noisily at the object like a terrier inspecting a rat hole, dribbling cigarette ash all over it. Small and brown as a nut, the man looked as hard as the soil he was standing on, as much a product of the land as the crops in the fields.
‘Didier Marthe. He’s a scrap man. Anything worth selling, he’ll break it down and flog it. He spends all day hitting things with a big hammer.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘I think the vibration affected him over the years.’
Didier, Rocco noticed, was missing the thumb and first two fingers of his left hand, and his face looked shiny on one side.
‘Looks like he suffered for his art.’
Claude laughed. ‘He hit a grenade a little too enthusiastically one day. It was a dud, but still had enough life in it to stop him playing the accordion.’
‘Now there’s a blessing.’ Lucas paused, did a double take. ‘He hit a live grenade?’ It made him wonder if there was, after all, some truth to the slanderous rumours about country folk circulated among his former colleagues, who rarely, if ever, ventured outside the city limits. ‘Tell me you’re kidding.’
‘Unbelievable, but true. World War Two, British, I think it was. He doesn’t usually bother with them — they’re too small and not worth the effort. He prefers artillery shells, the bigger the better. And bombs like this one.’
‘You make it sound like a full-time job.’
‘It is. The last big one he found was next to the school eighteen months ago. He’d just finished clearing the ground around it and went to get some lifting gear when it blew up. Knocked him flat on his arse and blew the roof off the schoolhouse. Luckily, the kids were on holiday.’
‘For him, too.’
‘Not the way he saw it. All that metal, fragmented to hell; he got totally tanked and cried for three whole days.’
Rocco grunted. No wonder the scrap man was so interested in this find. Large, oblong and rounded, it had a hefty hexagon nut at the end protruding from the ground. The casing was covered in a thick scale of rust, no doubt through being buried in the chalky soil of the Poissons-les-Marais churchyard with only the ancient village dead for company. Quite how such a monster had lain overlooked for so long was a mystery, although he knew these things worked their way to the surface from time to time, like pebbles in the garden.
‘Lucas Rocco,’ murmured Claude, stretching out the words and pronouncing Lucas the American way, with the ‘s’. ‘You’re not from these parts, are you?’
‘I’m relieved you can tell.’ Rocco wondered how long the dissection would go on for. Probably days, given the fact that so little else seemed to happen here.
‘Easy. You don’t look shifty enough.’
‘What have people here got to be shifty about?’
‘Everything. Nothing. Living and dying, mostly.’
‘I’ll bear it in mind.’
‘You’ll be looking for somewhere to doss down, I suppose?’
Rocco decided he might get to like this man — if he didn’t have to arrest him for something first.
‘I might. Are you the local psychic, or a letting agent?’
‘If I was either, I’d die of boredom. You’ve seen the cafe?’
‘I have. Not my thing.’ His recommended billet above the bar-tabac, where he’d just stopped to check out the facilities, was too public, and the smell of stale beer and cigarette smoke too invasive, for his tastes; he’d lodged in too many similar fleapits over the years to look on them with affection. It was at best a stopgap until he found something better; somewhere he could call his own space while he considered what the hell he was supposed to be doing out here.
‘Go see Mme Denis, down Rue Danvillers.’ Claude tilted his head towards a lane running off at an angle from the village square. ‘Last but one on the left. She has the keys to an empty house down there. Plenty of room to park the cop machine, too.’ He grinned knowingly. ‘In your line of work, you’ll feel right at home.’
‘Why?’
‘A man was murdered there years ago.’
CHAPTER TWO
Rocco? Arrogant and disrespectful.
Lieut. Andre Thomas — head of administration and accounts, Clichy-Nanterre district
‘Say again?’ Rocco stared him down, his voice a growl, and the grin faded quickly.
‘Only kidding. It’s a nice place. Peaceful.’
Then the crowd moved and the man named Didier Marthe was in front of them. No doubt aware that he’d lost his audience’s attention in favour of the new arrival, he stared belligerently up into Rocco’s face, craning his head with difficulty.
‘What are you doing here, flic?’ he demanded, cigarette bobbing angrily. ‘We’ve done nothing wrong. It’s a bomb, that’s all. Not a drama; not an arrestable offence… unless you go around locking up explosive devices these days?’ He turned and sniggered at the crowd, seeking support against the outsider, the cop. ‘They turn up all the time, these things, like turds on a sheep farm. The whole area was one big munitions dump back in forty-four, and what wasn’t stored here was dropped like bird shit by the British as they scuttled back to England.’
‘Easy, Didier,’ murmured Claude. ‘He’s a newcomer. Show some respect, huh?’
‘Respect?’ Didier spat on the ground, easing the gobbet around the cigarette. ‘He’ll have to earn it like everyone else!’
Rocco stood his ground, although he was trying not to gag. It wasn’t the little man’s aggressive demeanour, nor even the potentially deadly object sitting just a few feet away which bothered him: rather, Didier’s breath, which was toxic enough to kill a chicken at ten paces. A mixture of vin de pays, cheap tobacco and several other unnameable substances, it wafted out in a vicious cloud whenever he spoke, enveloping anyone within range in its evil embrace.
‘We’d best call the gendarmes,’ Monsieur Thierry called out anxiously. ‘Before it goes off and flattens the village.’ He looked in a state of shock, staring in awe at the spot where his shovel had hit the casing with some force. A silvery scar was clearly visible where the rust had been chipped away.
‘What?’ Didier spun round in horror, and Rocco could guess why. The fire brigade was the first force called on in emergencies, but the local brigade probably wasn’t equipped to deal with explosives. The gendarmes, while less popular — and likely viewed by cynics as expendable — would keep whatever they dealt with as evidence. ‘Why let those thieving maggots get their hands on it?’ Didier turned back to Rocco, including him in his contempt and huffing out a fresh wave of halitosis.
Rocco fought to hold on to his breakfast. The idea that this man might take a hammer to the thing simply to prevent the police from confiscating it was frightening. But short of surrounding it with armed guards or decking him, he couldn’t think of any way of preventing it.
He shrugged, wondering what made them think he was an expert on bomb disposal. Then it hit him: if anything went wrong, blame the flic. It was probably an English bomb, made in Coventry or some such hellhole, and since the English were probably no more popular in these parts than the police, what could be more fitting? Barely twenty years since the end of the last global conflict centred on France, the debris of two wars was just as fresh in people’s minds as it was in the ground beneath their feet.
He was about to suggest evacuating the immediate area and calling in the gendarmes, as Monsieur Thierry had suggested, when a man pushed through the crowd. He was dressed in filthy overalls and carried a canvas tool bag.
‘Philippe Delsaire,’ Claude informed Rocco helpfully. ‘He’s what passes as a plumber in these parts. Also farms a small plot outside the village. Gambler, too.’ He rubbed his fingertips together. ‘Not a bad plumber or farmer, but lousy at cards.’ He grinned knowingly.
Everyone watched as Delsaire stared hard at the object. Then he stepped forward with a large wrench, and without warning, gave the hexagon nut a resounding thwack.
In spite of his doubts about the object being a bomb, Rocco felt his testicles shrink and witnessed fleeting images of his past life go by at speed. A collective groan testified to others sharing this same life-death experience. Even the mad bomb-basher, Didier, looked fleetingly alarmed, while Thierry crossed himself and muttered something obscene.
The newcomer struck the object again. But instead of the expected flash and monumental explosion that should have sent Poissons-les-Marais into orbit like a space rocket, the nut simply fell off, and out onto the grass glugged a stream of rust-coloured water.
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