Confession

by Martin O'Brien

  Bracing himself, Jacquot lifted the basket and staggered to the kitchen door just as Claudine opened it in a warm, billowing cloud of blanquette. She was back in her jeans and Aix Festival d’Art ’96 sweatshirt underneath the apron she painted in, a brown care-taker’s smock smeared with swipes and blotches of colour. She’d tied her thick raven hair into a knot held in place by a paintbrush, and she smiled as he started up the steps. Gypsy, he thought, glancing up at her. That’s what she was. Pure gypsy. The dark hair, the tan, those laughing blue-grey eyes that knew every secret just by looking at you. Put up a tent and tell your fortune, you’d believe every word she told you. Forty. Twice married. A twenty-year-old daughter. But still a gypsy. A gypsy he loved.

  ‘It’ll be ready in an hour,’ she told him, stepping aside as he negotiated the basket through the kitchen door. She did it with a feline grace, elegant and supple, like a matador stepping aside for a bull. ‘You want to chop another forest of logs, or do you want to have a glass of wine with me?’ She closed the door behind him and went back to the stove and a steaming Le Creuset dish. ‘Make the wrong decision and you’ll be having your blanquette in the yard,’ she said, picking up a wooden spoon and waving it at him.

  ‘Glass . . . of . . . wine . . . s’il te plaît . . .’ he managed to pant.

  ‘Correct decision. There’s a bottle by the hearth.’

  ‘I’ll open it too, shall I?’ he called over his shoulder, as he staggered down the passage. ‘After chopping logs . . . and hauling this basket through the house . . . and lighting the fire?’

  Claudine shook her head and grinned. ‘That’ll be just fine. There’s a corkscrew on the mantel,’ she called after him. You big oaf, she thought fondly to herself.

  Struggling now across the salon, Jacquot dropped the basket by the hearth and, catching his breath, set to work on the fire. In no time at all, with just a handful of the kindling, he had the fresh-cut logs aflame and spitting.

  Voilà, he thought, and getting to his feet he reached for the wine. He was pulling the cork when he heard the phone in the kitchen ring.

  He stopped winding and listened.

  ‘Oui? Allo?’ he heard Claudine answer.

  He held his breath.

  ‘Attendez. Ne quittez pas.’

  Jacquot looked across the salon and saw her lean out from the kitchen, hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Daniel? Are you here?’

  ‘Who is it?’ he asked, going over to her, starting on the corkscrew again as though that single act would somehow dictate that the call wasn’t important, had nothing to do with work, wouldn’t spoil their evening.

  ‘Une femme,’ Claudine replied with a cock of the head and the teasing tilt of an eyebrow. ‘Never give them your home number. Haven’t I told you enough times?’ She held out the phone to him. ‘It sounded . . . important.’

  Jacquot took it. ‘Oui? C’est moi . . .’

  The voice on the other end of the line was instantly familiar.

  ‘Daniel, it’s Solange Bonnefoy . . . in Marseilles. I need to see you. Tonight, if possible. It’s urgent.’

  4

  Marseilles

  IT WAS DARK BY THE time Marie-Ange reached the Littoral flyover, after a long day in the shop on rue Francis, in a tail-end stream of rush-hour traffic threading its way west out of the city. Keeping to Boulevard Cambrai, with the darkened belly of the autoroute snaking above her, she followed the old coast road with the docks on her left and the shadowy suburbs of Madrague coming up on her right. It didn’t take long to find the ragged tear in the wire fence bordering the central reservation, the site plainly marked by criss-crossing ribbons of chevroned police tape. This was where the BMW had hit the girl and ploughed through the fence, and there the flyover’s supporting column which the car had smashed into.

  But even without the tape, and the story in the newspaper, Marie-Ange would likely have sensed that something had happened here.

  As she passed the spot a rush of goose-pimples prickled on her arms and spread across her shoulder blades. For a moment she wondered whether she shouldn’t just drive on, forget the dream, ignore the summons. But she didn’t. A hundred metres past the tape, she turned her Citroën 2CV to the right and parked in a side-street. For a moment she sat in the car, listening to the rain slap and smack on the stretched fabric roof, watching it smear across the windscreen. Then she pulled up the hood on her coat, opened the car door and stepped out into the rain.

  The newspaper report she’d read over breakfast – a single paragraph on page five of La Marseillaise – had told her where to come. Boulevard Cambrai. Drunk Driver Deaths, the headline ran. Henri Proche, 47, according to the report. From Carpène near Aix. Multiple injuries. Dead on the scene. And it was true. He had been drunk. Marie-Ange could almost taste the alcohol as she read the article. Sweet and strong. Cheap Cognac and beer. Not a man to kiss.

  And the girl he’d hit, the one in the photo that the newspaper had run with the story, was the girl in her dream. Marie-Ange had recognised her immediately, even though the hair was dry and shorter, and the eyes wrinkled with laughter rather than wide with panic, glazed with terror. A pretty girl. Lucienne Viviers, 16. From Paris, a pupil at the Lycée Gordonne there.

  And that was it. Nothing more.

  Somewhere along Boulevard Cambrai, Lucienne Viviers had died. Just after midnight on Sunday. And Marie-Ange had found the place in an instant.

  Locking her car, she turned to the left and hurried along the block. When she drew level with the police tape on the other side of the road, tied to the torn wire fence, she paused and peered through the rain, loud enough as it smacked off her hood and clouded around her boots to drown out the sound of unseen traffic from the flyover above, leaving only the intermittent whooshwhoosh of cars passing by at street level.

  There was no need to cross the road, to push past that tape, to rest her hands against the concrete span. Despite the rain, she could hear the shattering of glass again, that final crumpling crunch of metal on concrete, and the violent hissing of a split radiator. Now all she had to do was walk to the end of the block where Lucienne Viviers had run out into the road from a shadowy turning, to be hit by a bleary-eyed tiling salesman from Carpène.

  Marie-Ange was nearly there, maybe ten metres from the turning, hunched against the rain, when from somewhere behind her a lorry let out two long klaxon blasts, horribly, shockingly, amplified under the arched flyover. She turned in time to see an old Peugeot come off a set of intersection lights, jerk itself into the right gear, spurt forward and speed away ahead of the lorry as though the klaxon burst had nothing to do with it. Heart beating wildly, Marie-Ange hurried on, pulling her jacket tight, and as she did so she sensed a silence settle around her and a dry dusty taste fill her mouth.

  5

  AS HE CAME OUT OF L’Estaque’s road tunnel, two long sloping concrete pipes drilled through the hills above Marseilles, Jacquot wound down the window and breathed it in. The sea. The ocean. He’d been waiting for it, knew that this was where he’d smell it first. An iodine reek carried on the rain spattering through his window. Sharp, salty and strident, it reached up to him from the coastline below, gusting in from that wide black shadow on his right, a shadow dotted with a random sprinkling of ships’ lights, its border defined by the sinuous golden glow of Marseilles’ water-front and the warm twinkling reach of the city. A million souls unseen amongst the lights, in the dark geometry of squares and triangles and oblongs between them, going about their business, good and bad. Marseilles. Jacquot’s city. Where he was born, brought up. Where he learned to pick a pocket in a crowd, steal fruit from a market stall, kiss a girl, ride a scooter, shoot a man. He might have left the city for a while, before the wrong track became the only track, but Marseilles was in his blood, as surely as the scent of the sea in his nostrils.

  It was the ocean that had made him take the Martigues road, always his approach of choice, dropping down behind L’Estaque on to the Littoral flyover and sliding past the wharves
and quais of Marseilles where that sharp salty tang acquired an oily sheen. Commerce. Trade. The great port of the Mediterranean. What the city was all about. On his right ocean and docks, on his left a floodlit sprawl of container yards and railway sidings and warehouses, and the suppliers and traders and workshops that serviced them. And there, up ahead, rising above the cranes and rooftops, the slopes of Le Panier where he’d grown up, the layered marbled bulk of Cathédrale de la Major, the squat stone buttresses of Fort Saint Jean and the quays of the Vieux Port.

  Marseilles.

  Home.

  Except, for some inexplicable reason, Jacquot suddenly found himself in the wrong lane, spinning down the Chamant sliproad rather than keeping to the Littoral. He couldn’t imagine what had possessed him to make such a stupid mistake. He’d been out of town too long, he decided, as he pulled up at a red light directly beneath the flyover and tried to work out how best to get back on it. As far as he could recall, he’d have to follow Boulevard Cambrai as far as the Pinède or Joliette sliproads before he could rejoin it and, in the process, add another ten minutes to his journey.

  Not that Jacquot was running late. Half-an-hour after receiving the call from Solange Bonnefoy, he’d kissed Claudine goodnight – quiet and tight-faced when he’d told her he had to go – and was driving down the impasse which led from their millhouse to the Apt road. Twenty minutes after that he was through Cavaillon, across the Durance and heading south on the autoroute.

  The call from Madame Bonnefoy had come as a surprise. It was two, maybe three years since they’d last spoken – also on the phone, Jacquot remembered, three months after his transfer to Cavaillon, at the end of the Waterman investigation. Marseilles’ leading examining magistrate had called for a debrief and then, in an unlikely exposure, had asked when he was coming back. They missed him, she’d said. He’d been touched by her concern, and by her annoyance at the dead-end posting he’d been given, taken off the fast track to serve out his time in the provinces.

  For a policeman Jacquot had always had an unlikely fondness for Madame Bonnefoy. He’d enjoyed their sparring, the mutual respect. They’d worked enough cases together for Jacquot to know that she was never less than thorough and resourceful, and it was a rare case when they didn’t get their man. Hers was an intimidating presence, in court robes or casual clothes, easily a metre eighty in stockinged feet, with a long disapproving face set beneath a cap of wavy grey hair, blue eyes sharp and chill when she chose to pin them on you over the top of her bifocals. Madame Bonnefoy was no pushover; try it and she’d be down on you like a ton of bricks. It didn’t matter who.

  But the voice he’d heard on the phone this evening held none of the grit and growl he was used to. Instead there was a softness to her tone, an anxiousness and vulnerability that had surprised him. She wouldn’t say anything specific and Jacquot hadn’t pressed her. That she had called him, asked him to come to Marseilles, was all that was needed. He would find out soon enough what it was all about.

  Jacquot came to another set of lights, changing green to red seconds before he could have chanced a crossing. Instead, he braked hard and waited while a convoy of lorries pulled out in front of him, backing away from a set of chained dock gates. There was no way through. The strike he’d been reading about had clearly started, with braziers already lit, hooded figures huddled around them. Dock transport this time, the newspaper had reported. Anything with a motor closed down until demands were met. Beside him the smaller set of traffic lights at window height ran through red and green three times before the lorries successfully negotiated their reversing and set off under the autoroute. Just his luck to get held up behind them, with another truck looming in his rear-view mirror.

  It was then, waiting there at the lights, that Jacquot’s eye was caught by a fluttering ribbon of blue police tape stitched across a rent in a stretch of wire fencing. Car crash, he decided. Some drunk piling into a support column of the flyover that he was now trying to get back on to. When they’d taken a few too many pastis, Jacquot knew, drivers preferred to stay off the flyover, and keep a lower, slower profile on this older section of road. There was less chance of being picked up down here by the gendarmerie, or getting into trouble, though there was always the risk, late at night, stopped at the lights, of a tap on the window from the muzzle of a 9-millimetre – an invitation to leave your keys in the ignition and step out of the vehicle, s’il vous plaît, monsieur. In Marseilles it happened all the time, some random car-jacking that left you in the middle of the road, heart beating fast, relieved to be alive, watching your tail-lights race away.

  From behind Jacquot came two massive klaxon blasts that shuddered through his old Peugeot. The light was green and the road now clear. Jesus, he thought, as he slammed the car into gear and jerked away from the lights, I’m getting slow in my old age.

  Five minutes later, he reached the sliproad at Joliette, slid past the convoy of lorries and joined the autoroute for the last stretch down into the Vieux Port. All he had to do now was find the restaur -ant where he and Madame Bonnefoy were meeting.

  At the top of rue Breteuil, she’d said.

  A place called Kuchnia.

  He’d never heard of it.

  Which surprised him.

  6

  THE STREET MARIE-ANGE TURNED into was dark and cobbled, the stones rounded and irregular, glistening like raised boils in the rain, scabbed with patches of worn tarmac. The girl had been barefoot, that was Marie-Ange’s first thought. The girl in her dream had been running down this street without shoes. Over these cobbles. As the silence settled on her like a warm, insulating blanket, Marie-Ange could actually feel a bruising hardness against the balls of her own feet, a sensation that made her boots feel suddenly tight and every step a hobbling discomfort.

  There was more. A reeling breathlessness. A sweating, desperate panic. And the smell of vomit, the acid taste of it sliding across her tongue and puckering her cheeks and filling her throat. For a moment Marie-Ange stood still, looking into the street, the street from her dream. Just as she remembered it. The darkness, the rain-slicked shadows. No houses here, no cheerily lit windows. Just ancient brick warehouses, high double doors in the centre of each, barred darkened windows, and loading gantries jutting out like gallow rigs from the pitched upper storeys. On one of the brick façades, just below one of the gantries, Marie-Ange could make out the faded legend ‘Savon Maréchal’, in a blue wash thin enough to show the pattern of the bricks beneath. A soapworks from another time, as old as the flaking paint, but not yet as old as the narrow cart-ruts worn down the centre of the road.

  Not a nice place to be, at night, all alone, thought Marie-Ange, shivering in the sharp November cold, still undecided. Ahead, burrowing into a distant darkness, were just a few dim street-lights fixed high on the warehouse walls, a silvery rain slanting through their gold haloes of light. Behind her, out on Boulevard Cambrai, traffic swept silently past, headlights flashing.

  And there, suddenly, was the running, stumbling girl, or rather the sense of her, an invisible presence, rushing towards Marie-Ange.

  Catching her breath, she tried to swallow the dryness out of her throat but all it did was make her cough, a rough retching cough that went nowhere.

  Standing there on the corner, huddled under the rain, she knew what was coming next as that presence drew closer, passed her, a waft of air pressing against her. Instinctively, Marie-Ange tensed, as though expecting a blow, and a stinging bile rose in her throat, burning a sandpaper path into the soft tissue with every panting breath.

  And then that breath was snatched from her.

  The girl was out on to the Cambrai pavement, and from there into the road.

  And, once again, it was over.

  Just that sudden sensation of impact, brutal contact. Hit by a drunken Monsieur Proche, from Carpène, and flung high into the air, falling like a bag of dry, broken sticks on to the hard rain-slicked surface of the road.

  Marie-Ange waited a moment, heard
the distant blare of horns, the squeal of brakes, and then set off down the side-street the young girl had come from. Digging her hands into her pockets, feeling the rain kiss her cheeks, she retraced the girl’s last desperate steps, the cobbles hard against the soles of her boots.

  She couldn’t see the girl, but as she walked Marie-Ange could hear her, the sound of her rasping breaths on her right-hand side, coming from the middle of the road. Half-way down the street, Marie-Ange stopped and listened again, squeezed her eyes shut. The girl had crossed the road here, from left to right, and then come back into the centre, between the cart-ruts, where she’d stayed until Cambrai, as though she felt safer out in the open. But she hadn’t come the whole length of the street, from what was clearly a dead-end thirty metres ahead. She’d come into it another way.

  Marie-Ange took a few more steps and saw the opening, a shoulder-width passage between two of the warehouses. That’s where the girl had come from. Without being able to stop herself, Marie-Ange turned into it and followed it, hands raised to shoulder-level, fingertips tracing the stone walls on either side of her, feeling a chill air spill past her, fan across her cheeks. Lucienne. It was Lucienne Viviers racing past her down that narrow alley.

  Three times the passage Marie-Ange followed turned abruptly through ninety-degree dog-legs that finally opened out on to a patch of rough ground behind the warehouses. Some kind of overgrown track, a bank of weeds and a steel mesh fence laced with creeper that, in the darkness, looked like a black blanket draped over it. On the other side of the fence, through the rain, she saw the headlights of a lorry sweep into view, a few hundred metres away, and a good six metres below the slope that Marie-Ange stood on.