‘I already did that through the local registry. It’s not much help, though.’
‘Try me.’
‘J-P Boutin died two years ago and the house has no current occupant listed.’
‘You sure about that?’ Rocco strode through to the kitchen area, dragging the telephone wire after him. ‘The records aren’t out of date?’ He knew that local files were notoriously unreliable in parts of the country, relying on overworked administrative clerks toiling with ancient paper-and-card systems to keep them updated. With tight budgets and untrained personnel, it was an uphill struggle which had caused many a police investigation to flounder, starved of current detail about people and their movements.
‘I double-checked. The only way to make sure is to go find the place and take a look. You want me to do it?’
‘No need. It’s just down the road from me. Anything from Massin on the photo shop?’
‘Nothing yet. I’ll chase him up.’
Rocco disconnected and dialled Claude’s number. ‘Boutin, Jean-Paul,’ he said without preamble. ‘3, Rue d’Albert. You know him?’
‘Jean-Po? Sure. He’s dead,’ said Claude. ‘He lived along the main street — that’s Rue d’Albert. You working beyond the grave now?’
‘You could be more right than you know. Meet me there in fifteen minutes.’
‘Make it twenty and I’ll bring coffee.’
Rocco put down the receiver and got dressed, grateful for Desmoulins and his desire to work, and Claude for his perception. The combination of helpers might make this job a whole lot easier.
He walked down to the village centre and along the main street. He saw Francine outside the co-op, arranging a display of fruit. She looked slim and lithe, dressed in a skirt and blouse. He waved when she looked up but received a cool look in return. He dropped his hand and walked on.
At least she hadn’t thrown rotten fruit at him.
There were few other people about and no traffic. A paper bag blew across in front of him, catching on a telegraph pole and fluttering in the breeze. It felt like a scene from a western movie, where the white hat walks towards certain death and dubious glory against the black hats at the other end of town.
Cue a cowboy’s lament.
Claude was standing by his car outside a ragged plaster-faced cottage with shuttered windows. Posters had been plastered all over the available surfaces, displaying everything from soft drinks to the latest appearance of the overmuscled Shadow Angel and his fellow wrestlers.
Claude handed Rocco a mug of coffee and gestured at the cottage. ‘This is it. Not much to look at, I’m afraid. Boutin left it to a daughter nobody’s been able to find yet. What’s the story?’
Rocco sipped his coffee, then told him what Desmoulins had found. Claude looked dumbfounded at the idea of the man who had lived here being connected in any way with Nathalie Berbier.
‘Jean-Po? You’re kidding me. I knew the man. He was a bit reserved, didn’t talk much, but he was just an ordinary man. No side, no attitude. Worked on the railways as an inspector and kept himself to himself.’
‘Yet he had a telephone. Not many people do, here.’
‘That’s a surprise, I’ll grant you. Could have been part of the job, though.’
Rocco tried the front door. The wood was weather-worn but solid, as if fastened firmly on the inside, with no play in it. Bolts, he guessed, top and bottom.
He stepped back and checked either way along the street. The cottage stood on the corner of the main street and the lane leading to Didier Marthe’s house. To his left the street curved over a slight rise towards Claude’s end of the village, while to his right a farm building and a few houses led back towards the co-op and the cafe, which was out of sight around a bend in the road. A telephone pole stood a few metres away, with a wire stretching across to the eaves of the Boutin cottage.
‘How did Boutin die?’
‘He tripped and fell on his way back from the cafe one night. They reckoned he’d had a heavy night at the bar. He was unsteady but otherwise OK. Someone thought they heard a car go by at about the same time but we never found any trace of one. He’d hit his head on a kerbstone, so it was written down as an accident while under the influence.’ Claude pulled a face. ‘Poor sod. A lonely life cut short.’
Rocco finished his coffee and handed the mug back. ‘I don’t suppose you have a crowbar in your car?’
‘Actually, I do. What for?’
‘I want to get inside. Find the phone.’
Claude looked doubtful. ‘Shouldn’t we check with the mayor first?’
‘Only if you want a lecture on town hall semantics. Is there a back way in?’
Claude went to his car and produced a large crowbar, then led Rocco down the adjacent lane to the back of the cottage. A wooden door gave way with a good push to a small back garden, overgrown with weeds and bordered at the end by a wattle-and-daub barn or storehouse.
‘That’s Didier’s barn,’ said Claude.
Rocco put his shoulder against the back door of the cottage. Like the front, it was solid and unyielding. He tried the shutters. They felt a little lighter with a fraction of give. He held out his hand for the crowbar, but Claude shook his head with a grin.
‘Hey, let me have some fun, why don’t you?’ He went to the nearest shutter and inserted the thin edge of the bar and threw his weight backwards. The wood cracked and gave way with a squeal, and the shutter popped open.
Rocco used his elbow to break the window and carefully slid his hand inside, feeling for the catch. Seconds later, he was in the darkened house and unbolting the back door to admit Claude.
If there had been any tidying up after Jean-Paul Boutin’s untimely death, it had been minimal. Probably a local worthy doing an act of charity, Rocco surmised, and expecting a family member to come along soon afterwards to finish the job. Except that nobody had come, leaving a home, sparsely furnished but with evidence of a daily existence, suspended in time, a museum piece. Newspapers spilt over from a chair in one corner, while pots and pans, battered and blackened with age and heat, were piled beside the kitchen sink amid a jumble of plates and cups. A pile of men’s clothing lay on another chair, stiff and crinkled, covered in a green mildew, and a pair of brown boots by the rear door were cracked and curled, the soles heavy with dried mud. Everything was layered in dust.
He nodded towards an open door showing a flight of wooden stairs. ‘You check upstairs, I’ll do the front.’
Claude grunted and went to take a look.
Rocco stepped through into the front room and switched on the light, surprised to find it still connected. More dust, more clothing, some empty wine bottles in a wastebasket. One armchair, a table and some bits and pieces.
But no telephone.
A clomping sound echoed through the house as Claude made a tour of the upstairs. It was, reflected Rocco, the saddest of sounds; the kind that houses shouldn’t experience, but inevitably do.
He began at the front of the room and checked the walls at floor level, looking for signs of a telephone wire coming into the property. If the installation had followed the usual methods, it would come down inside one of the walls and exit somewhere convenient for the handset and cradle. All he found was a hole in the plaster where a wire might have been.
He checked the kitchen but found nothing there. He scowled. This didn’t make sense.
He called to Claude. ‘Is there a phone line up there?’
‘No. Nothing.’ Claude appeared at the top of the stairs. ‘Have you tried the cellar? The door’s right next to this one.’
Rocco turned off the light in the front room, then looked behind the stair door. Sure enough, there was another one. He opened it, found a light switch and descended a set of concrete steps, nose filling with the musky smell of mildew, damp and rodents. A bare light hung from the ceiling and revealed an empty, brick-lined lined room, unplastered and cold. Whatever might have been stored here once had been cleared out.
; He found the wire in the top rear corner. It had been channelled down the wall from upstairs, and was barely visible in the poor light. He followed it with his fingers, but instead of it leading downwards, it took a sudden turn and went towards a small vent on the cottage wall on a level with the back garden.
Suddenly, Rocco knew where it was heading. ‘Clever bastard!’ He ran back upstairs to where Claude was waiting and switched off the light. ‘Someone’s been very astute. Come with me.’ He led the way outside and turned left, then knelt down by the back corner of the building beside the air vent.
The wire was just visible coming through the vent, before dropping down and disappearing underground.
He looked towards the end of the garden, where it butted up against the barn. ‘We’ll have to do some digging,’ he said, indicating the wire’s probable direction, ‘to see where this goes.’
Claude looked mystified for a second, then he realised what Rocco was saying. ‘You think Didier took over Jean-Po’s phone? I didn’t see one in his house.’
‘You weren’t meant to. I think he broke in here when Boutin died and nobody came to claim the place, and re-routed the wire to his house. Nice free service and nobody the wiser.’
‘But that doesn’t mean he’s connected to this Tomas Broute… I mean, this is Didier you’re talking about!’
‘So?’
‘But the man’s a moron… he plays with bombs, for God’s sake!’
‘Which means,’ Rocco pointed out, ‘he’s probably unhinged but not entirely stupid. He’d have the nous to rewire a phone from one house to another, no problem. That’s why he planted it underground.’
Claude whistled. ‘Out of sight, out of mind. Jesus, that is clever.’
Rocco picked up the crowbar and dug the sharpened end into the hardened soil around the base of the house, creating a small trench near the wire. Seconds later, he was able to pull the wire upwards, and was rewarded by seeing it moving away from the house towards the barn. Within minutes, they had reached the barn’s wall, where they dug down and found where the wire had been fed through a hole in the plaster.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Minutes later, they were deep inside Didier’s barn, clearing away a mountain of old farm tools, rotting hessian sacks, rusting bicycles, a seed drill and several worn car tyres. When they reached ground level and brushed away a thick layer of soil, it revealed the wire coming through the wall and disappearing under the floor. Using the crowbar, Rocco dug down just enough to confirm the direction the wire was going in.
‘Straight towards the house,’ he said. ‘Come on.’
The building was a sorry mess, with the windows empty of glass and the shattered front door barely staying upright. Rocco kicked it open and began a search of the building, opening cupboards, moving mounds of clothing, old papers and broken household furniture. The air was foetid and nauseous, every item layered with a coating of grease and dust, with no apparent order to anything. Didier Marthe evidently lived his life in chaos, picking up things as and when he found or needed them, then casting them aside where he stood. In spite of that, it took very little time to search the downstairs. The upstairs was even easier, consisting of two bedrooms, both empty and filthy with age and neglect.
There was no sign of a telephone.
Rocco returned downstairs. Claude was inspecting a narrow cupboard close by the back door. It was fitted with a bolt and latch, but had been left open with a strong padlock hooked through the eye. Inside were the only clean items in the house. One was a conventional side-by-side twin-barrelled shotgun, the metal and butt scratched and pitted; the other was shorter, with up-and-over barrels, and had been well oiled and maintained, with a decorative stock and inlaid butt.
Rocco took out both weapons and checked them. Unloaded but clean. The smaller gun was light, balanced and comfortable to the grip. He wondered how a man like Didier Marthe, scratching a living from dismantling ancient ordnance, could afford a superior piece like this.
He replaced the weapons and locked the cupboard and moved over to the one entrance he hadn’t been able to investigate. The cellar door was solid, with a large lock, and he noticed something he hadn’t seen before: that the door frame had been reinforced, probably where the wood had rotted and given way over the years. Given the state of the rest of the house, he couldn’t see why Didier had bothered.
‘No key?’ said Claude.
‘No.’ He was guessing that Didier was a one-trick pony: if he’d found a way of concealing the wire in the Boutin house, he’d use the same trick in reverse here. Which meant it would emerge somewhere underground — in the cellar.
‘We going to break it down?’ Claude was swinging the crowbar expectantly, eyeing the door with a faint smile. ‘Wouldn’t take that much, not the way I feel.’
But Rocco shook his head. He had a bad feeling about this house. Something wasn’t right. Everything he’d seen so far had been too easy, too open and obvious. Yet all the indications about Didier’s character said the complete opposite. Which meant they were only seeing what they were meant to see.
He pressed against the door. Immoveable. No give whatsoever. Even in new houses, doors gave a little. In old hovels like this, they flexed like paper. ‘No. This is too easy. If Didier goes to the trouble of locking this cellar door, what is it that he doesn’t want anyone to see?’
‘The telephone?’
‘Probably. But what else? He plays with bombs, you said that yourself. What’s down there that would warrant a secure door like this?’
Claude’s eyebrows shot up. ‘You think he might have booby-trapped it?’ He stepped back a pace, licking his lips. ‘He’s certainly crazy enough, I’ll give you that. Anyone who’d do it to a bridge to stop kids trespassing is hardly sane, right?’
‘Maybe.’ Rocco broke off as a car drew up in the yard outside. Doors slammed, followed by footsteps approaching. As a shadow appeared in the doorway, he reached into his coat and put his hand on his gun.
It was a uniformed officer with a colleague a few feet behind him. Both looked wary and had their hands on their weapons. The lead man, tall and thin with a heavy, drooping moustache, waved his colleague to move to the side to cover him and gave Rocco a questioning look. ‘Stand still, please. Who are you?’
Rocco told him, and the man relaxed, nodding at Claude. ‘That’s a stroke of luck. Commissaire Massin says to get you to call in if we see you.’
‘You came all the way here for that?’ He wondered what could be so urgent, and whether Berbier had found another way of firing a shot across his bows, this time for good.
‘Hardly, no. It seems the owner of this place — Didier Marthe? — did a runner from the hospital. He’s wanted on charges of using unauthorised explosives… and now theft and criminal assault with an offensive weapon.’
‘What did he do?’
‘He smacked a male cleaner with a metal tray. Took out a row of teeth and damn near caused him to choke to death. Then he stole his clothes, wallet and car keys and locked him in a cupboard before going on the run. It took an hour for the cleaner to be missed, so Marthe could be almost anywhere. Detective Desmoulins said we should try here in the village first in case he heads back this way. Other units are checking the roads. What’s the story?’
‘We’re not sure yet. But you can probably add phone fraud to the charges, with more to follow.’
The man lifted his eyebrows. ‘Sounds like a real one-man crime wave.’ He looked around the room with distaste. ‘Christ, what a dump.’ He signalled for his colleague to return to the car. ‘We’ll head back, see if we can spot him on the way.’
Rocco nodded and watched them go. He didn’t give much for their chances: wherever Didier Marthe had disappeared to, he would be making sure that the car he’d stolen stayed well hidden.
As they left, he saw an old, mud-encrusted shoe on the floor. He nudged it so that it was touching the cellar door, then followed Claude out into the yard.
They ma
de their way back to the main street, Claude looking perturbed. ‘I don’t get it. I don’t know Didier that well, but all this seems so…’ He stopped, lost for words.
‘Unbelievable?’ Rocco suggested. ‘Out of character?’ He shook his head. ‘People are never quite what they seem. It’s always the quiet ones, the loners, who come up with the big surprises.’ He stopped and looked back towards the house, a ramshackle place tucked away down a side street in the middle of nowhere. Like so many other houses on the outside, yet with a big difference on the inside. Something told him that so far, they had not even come close to knowing all there was to know about Didier Marthe.
Back home, he found another card from another journalist, this time a radio station. The vultures clearly hadn’t tired of trying to find a story. He tossed it aside and rang Massin to fill him in on what he and Claude had discovered about the telephone switch. ‘I can’t fathom out yet where it all fits, but the number assigned to Boutin was written down in Nathalie Berbier’s flat alongside the name Tomas Broute.’ The moment he said it, he remembered too late that he had not told Massin about his visit to the Felix Faure address.
There was a lengthy silence, then Massin said softly, ‘How could you know that?’
He thought about lying, but decided against it. Lies begat lies and soon he’d be knee-deep in them with no way of explaining himself. And so far, for whatever reason suited him, Massin seemed to be giving him a fair degree of latitude and help. He didn’t know why, but neither did he want to push that too far. He explained about their search of Nathalie’s flat and the sudden arrival of the men in cars.
‘Did they see you?’
‘No. And we didn’t leave any traces, either.’
‘You trust this concierge woman?’
‘More than most. She’s an old friend.’
‘Very well. But if Berbier hears that you gained entry to his daughter’s flat, do not expect me to bail you out.’ He paused, then added, ‘As for the logo on the photo you found, it stands for Agence Photos Poitiers — APP. The shop closed during the war because of lack of chemicals for developing, but the owner opened up again afterwards before handing over to his son. He still has an interest, although he now lives near Rouen. His name is Ishmael Poudric. I told him you’d be dropping by and cleared it with the local police, so you shouldn’t run into any jurisdictional problems.’ He read out the address with directions, which Rocco scribbled on the reverse of the photo. He checked his watch. Nearly noon.
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