Jacquot took the envelope, sifting through its contents.
‘I’m from Rotterdam?’ he asked, flicking open the passport and finding his own photo from police files, with unfamiliar details.
‘It’s as close as we could find – comparable age and height. You were difficult to match, but we managed. Although the hair could be a problem.’ She forced a thin smile. In the photo, Jacquot’s hair was tied back in a ponytail.
‘Let’s hope no one asks me anything in Dutch.’
‘I thought of that,’ said Madame Bonnefoy. ‘You may have been born in Holland, but your Dutch father died and your French mother returned to the family home in La Rochelle. How’s that?’
‘Not bad,’ Jacquot replied, putting aside the passport and examining the union card and fold-out maritime service log, both suitably battered and shabby. He wondered how an examining magistrate could have put together such convincing documentation in such a short time. Someone in prison, Jacquot guessed; someone who wouldn’t miss their papers. If they ever turned poacher, the magistrates’ office would surely lead the police a merry dance.
‘It all looks very good. May I ask where you got it?’ he asked, pocketing the documents, then reaching into his duffel bag to return the briefcase she’d given him with the Lafour file.
Like the fleuriste in Paris, Madame Bonnefoy tapped the side of her nose. ‘Just someone I happen to know,’ she replied. ‘So? What next?’
Jacquot peeled off some notes from a clip and laid them on the table.
‘I’ll start in the port. Sign up for crew, sniff around. Then the marinas. I’m assuming you booked me in somewhere appropriate?’
‘Auberge des Vagues. It’s a seamen’s hostel. Because of the strike there are a lot of crew around at the moment, so I could only get you a dormitory bed. I hope you don’t mind?’
Jacquot got to his feet, reached for Madame Bonnefoy’s coat. ‘Dormitory’s good,’ he said, shaking out the garment and holding it up for her. ‘More chat, more contacts. Where is it?’ he asked.
‘Impasse Massalia,’ said Madame Bonnefoy, sliding her arms into the coat sleeves and shrugging it up over her shoulders. ‘A few streets away from the Chamant and Mirabe wharves. If you like, I can drop you there. Or close by, if you prefer?’
‘It’s near enough from here. I’ll walk. Work in the clothes. Get myself into the part.’
‘As you wish,’ she said.
Out on the pavement, rain spilling off the diner’s awning, a stop-start snarl of traffic beeped its way down to the Vieux Port. She reached for his hand, blinked away tears. ‘Good luck, Daniel. Anything you need, just call me.’
‘I’ll be in touch,’ said Jacquot, taking her hand and placing three swift kisses on her cheeks. ‘And we’ll find her, I promise you.’
25
BY THE TIME MARIE-ANGE got home from the lorry park, flagging down a cab for the journey rather than take the bus or Metro, she was sure of two things. The first was that Pascale sometimes got it right about men. ‘Snap back at them,’ she’d once told Marie-Ange, ‘and the chances are they’ll hold off, think twice – if that’s possible for men.’
It had certainly worked in the lorry park. The lorry driver with the Tintin jersey had actually taken a step back in surprise when Marie-Ange turned on him, content just to spit out a ‘putain’ as she gathered her nerve and her dignity and hurried away.
The other thing Marie-Ange knew for certain was that the serpent hairclip she had found in the lorry park did not belong to Lucienne Viviers.
It belonged to someone else.
Another girl.
Like Lucienne.
Tall, blonde and scared.
But definitely not Lucienne.
Yet somehow connected to Lucienne, she was sure of it.
Did Lucienne have a friend with her there in the lorry park? Marie-Ange wondered . . . Another girl in the same danger? Another girl who, for some reason, was unable to make the run with her friend?
As she held the hairclip in her hands, its warmth seeping between her fingers, Marie-Ange could feel the energy pulsing off it. Keep me. Hold me. Use me. I will show you the way, it seemed to be telling her.
Which was why, after a warming bath, a bowl of soup and a tumbler of reviving rouge, she’d slipped the hairclip into her pocket, picked up her car keys and set off for the web of streets around the lorry park, convinced that somehow the hairclip would guide her. And driving round in her battered old 2CV certainly beat walking, she decided. She covered more ground. But for two hours she got nothing from the hairclip. Just its warmth, in the pocket of her jeans, pressing against her thigh.
With the rain drumming down on the sagging stretch of the Citroen’s roof and the wipers screeching across the windscreen, Marie-Ange swung from one street to another, street lights flicking past, the warm air from the heater blasting up from under the dashboard. So far she’d covered a four-street radius to all sides of the lorry park, up from Boulevard Cambrai to rue de Lyon and from Avenue Malpense to rue Gujon. Now she was running down a street whose name she’d missed, a combination of warehouses and supply shops, their windows barred, their doors bolted closed – a chandlery, a hardware shop, a carpenter’s yard, a gated coal depot.
That was when she saw him, a lone figure coming down the street towards her, picked out in her headlights, hunched against the drifting rain, a duffel bag slung over his shoulder. The collar of his jacket was up and his head was down, a woollen hat glistening with raindrops. In an instant she had passed him, and in that same instant she felt a strange sense of recognition.
Pulling into the kerb, she watched the figure in her wing-mirror, angling her head to keep him in view. After just a few steps, he turned to the left and disappeared.
Without thinking, Marie-Ange engaged reverse and whined back down the street, nearside tyres catching against the kerb as she tried to keep the car straight. A few metres short of the turning she braked to a halt, killed the engine and lights, locked the car and set off after him, now a good fifty metres ahead. Jogging through the rain, she soon narrowed the distance between them, getting close enough for him to hear her approach had it not been for the downpour.
And then he disappeared a second time, ducking through a door to his right.
Marie-Ange slowed to a walk, then slowed even more as she approached the door, its bottom half wood-panelled, its top set with a square of reinforced glass that sent a spill of blue neon light onto the pavement. On a board above the door, in flaking white stencil, were the words Auberge des Vagues and in smaller bracketed print beneath, (Maison des Marins). A seamen’s hostel. Somewhere, she guessed, like the lorry park, for merchant sailors to rest up before joining, or after leaving, a ship. Cheap, anonymous and, like the lorry park, close to the docks.
Stepping away from the pavement and keeping out of the light, Marie-Ange stood back and looked through the glass panel. The man she’d been following was standing at a desk, at the end of a narrow hallway. He’d taken off his woollen hat, dropped his duffel bag at his feet and appeared to be talking to someone. He was large in the confined neon-lit space, with long, wide-set legs, broad shoulders and dark bristle-cut hair. When he leaned forward to sign what was presumably a guest register, Marie-Ange could see the person he’d been talking to. An older woman, with a set wave of dyed red hair and cheeks to match. She wore a thick woollen jacket over her substantial bosom, had a stern, frowning expression, and looked, Marie-Ange decided, as if she’d be able to deal with any damn’ sailor-boy looking to cause trouble on her watch.
And that was that. Without showing his face the stranger reached down for his duffel bag, picked up his hat and headed for a flight of stairs to the left of the desk.
Outside, with rain gusting off her hood and trickling into her collar, Marie-Ange wondered what to do next. What was so important about this man that she’d had to stop her car and follow him here? Did she know him from somewhere? Was he somehow involved in the death of Lucienne Viviers? Wa
s it the hairclip leading her on?
There was only one way to find out.
After the street, the hallway was warm and dry, with a welcoming scent of food coming from somewhere. A lot of garlic. And spices. A chilli dish of some kind. There was tobacco in the mix, too, and the smell of wet wool and salt and men’s bodies. Like a locker room, Marie-Ange decided, as she made her way down the hallway, its floor made up of lino tiles scuffed down the centre and curled at the edge, its walls pinned with messages and fliers, a plasticcoated sea chart, a ferry timetable, and the details of a local medical centre. All you really needed if you were the seafaring type, thought Marie-Ange, as the old lady came out from her loge behind the desk and took up position, fixing Marie-Ange with a long, cool look.
‘Men only, mam’selle. Crew quarters here,’ she said, her voice low, level and almost menacing – like a zoo-keeper warning that Marie-Ange should come no closer, there were dangerous animals about.
‘I just wondered if you could help me, madame?’
The concierge gave her a knowing look then lowered her head, her ruby hair and rouged cheeks picking up the blue tint from the neon tube. I’m listening, her posture said. Tell me something I haven’t heard before, from a pretty young girl alone in a seamen’s mission.
‘The gentleman who just arrived . . .’ Marie-Ange began.
A pair of thickly pencilled eyebrows slid up. And?
‘I think he may be my husband.’
Husband? Or the father of your child? The old lady knew from long experience that it was more likely the latter. She drew in a deep, disapproving breath, but let out a gentle, resigned sigh. It wasn’t the first time she’d heard that story, and she knew it wouldn’t be the last. But she still felt it, it still hurt. Sometimes they came with their babies, asleep or crying, bundled up in knitted shawls or blankets, or in buggies that didn’t fit in the corridor. That was the worst. Having to watch them back those buggies down the hall.
Without a word, she leaned below the counter and pulled out the register, licked a finger and flicked through it. When she found the page, she ran a bitten nail (still varnished red) to the last name.
‘Muller, Jan. Rotterdam. Didn’t sound like a low-lander but he’s carrying a Dutch passport.’
‘Muller, you say?’
‘That’s what he’s written. And that was the name in his passport,’ she replied, going back to the register. ‘Date of birth, April the fourth, 1951.’ The concierge looked up. ‘Bit old for the likes of you . . .’
Marie-Ange turned down her mouth, shook her head slowly, mournfully. ‘No. That’s not the name.’ Then she tried a brave smile. ‘And you’re right. He’s too old. I must have been mistaken. It’s not him. I’m sorry.’
The old lady smiled back kindly. ‘Next time, chérie, eh? Next time perhaps.’
Out in the rain, hurrying back to her car, Marie-Ange felt elated by her performance – far more polished than the one she’d tried earlier that day in the lorry park. But for all her delight – at her nerve, her inventiveness and her success – she still couldn’t quite understand what it was all about. Why she should have followed the man in the first place.
This Jan Muller.
Who the hell was he?
And how did she know him?
Because she did.
She was sure of it.
Friday
13 November
26
ELODIE RAISED HERSELF, SLOWLY, PAINFULLY, every movement reverberating through her head as though her brain had broken loose from its moorings and was crashing against the inside of her skull, hammering at the back of her eyes, tightening the tendons in her neck. She felt sick, too. And had been sick; when she swallowed she could taste a fine acid burn in the back of her throat, and the front of her T-shirt had a damp lumpy skin. But she couldn’t remember where she might have been sick, or when, or why.
As carefully as she could, Elodie propped herself up on her elbows, one after the other, gently locked her shoulders and squinted into darkness. Staying still, hardly daring to breathe, her dulled senses came into play gradually, like a slowly adjusted focus. Sight should have been next, but there was nothing she could properly identify – just subtle variations of black. Nothing distinct enough to put a name to, though she was increasingly certain she was in a room, the darkest shapes the walls around her. And within those walls, closer to, a number of odd black shapes, like low piles of coal.
Touch was altogether more defined, more real, more intimate – the crusty layer on the front of her shirt, still sticking to the skin of her chest, easing away with a slight resistance as she moved. The bunched tightness of her jeans behind her knees and between her thighs, and a sense that her clothing had somehow been rearranged. Then there was the stiff material beneath her that seemed to tip and roll like a tilting deck. Carefully she spread her hands, fingers dancing lightly off a rough buttoned surface. Off a . . . off a . . . a mattress. The word came slowly, but it exactly described what she was lying on. It felt thin and hard but she was grateful for it. Because she sensed the ground directly beneath it. Real ground, earth not flooring. Sloping slightly and lumpy, a cool dampness rising off it. She could smell it, too. Earthy, mouldy, like turned soil in a spring greenhouse. The kind of place, she thought, with a strange kind of whimsy, where you might grow mushrooms.
That’s when the soundtrack started up, softly, as a rising background, registering on several different levels. An occasional creaking above her head, a soft humming, and somewhere behind her a pattering, tinny sound that she narrowed down to rain on glass. She suspected that if she turned, or tipped her head back, she would see a window, high up on the wall behind her. But she knew that she didn’t dare do anything so foolhardy, or her brain would batter against her skull, launching fresh bolts of pain from the top of her neck to hammer and thud at the back of her eyes. At that moment it was enough to believe that the window was there, adding to the picture she was gradually putting together.
Night-time, walls, mattress, a window, the sound of rain . . .
And from the low shapes around her a restless, sleepy whimpering.
It was impossible to make out any movement, but Elodie sensed that those shapes were alive.
Wherever she was, she was not alone.
But it was too much. All too much.
Her shoulders began to ache, to stiffen, and a deep weariness settled over her. She felt heavy and sleepy and carefully, very carefully, she lay back on her mattress, closed her eyes and let sleep take her.
27
MURAT SANTAREM SLAMMED DOWN the phone and spat with anger.
That fucking Spaniard!
‘Salauds, salauds de la merde, et puis merde encore . . .’
‘Tsk, tsk, tsk,’ murmured his mother, turning from the sink where she was scrubbing a casserole dish. She smiled at him indulgently. ‘There, there, pauvre p’tit. Poor baby. Shall I make you a coffee? Would that be better? Your favourite milky coffee? Just the way you like it?’
Murat took a deep breath and slumped across the kitchen table, forehead on crossed forearms, close enough to smell the sour plastic of the tablecloth.
Why did his mother never use the tablecloths he’d given her, he thought, the stiff white damask ones he’d stolen all those years ago from the back of a hotel laundry van? No prizes for guessing. In the wash, of course. If the old lady so much as saw a smudge on the hem from where she’d drawn it out of the airing cupboard then the whole thing would be bundled up and put in the wash. He couldn’t remember a single occasion when one of those cloths had actually reached the table. But it kept her happy, put a smile on her face. The bundling up, the washing, the winding of the wet heavy damask through her mangle – only the mangle for the good stuff, she’d say – the airing and drying and eventual ironing. It was a performance, and no mistake.
Like the bastard performance he was having getting things set up with the Spaniard again, after that fuck-up on Sunday night. A real fucking performance, he thoug
ht. Because of that salope making a run for it half-way through the exchange, spooking the shit out of the Spaniard and his crew. And now that bastard dago was saying he wouldn’t do another pick-up till the strike was over. Leaving him, Murat, to look after the cargo, currently housed in the basement below him. And his supply of Zopamyn and Promazyl to keep them quiet running perilously low.
Five days now he’d been left with them. Five goddamned bastard days. When he should have been back on the street checking out the next consignment. Coming up to Christmas was always a good time in his line of work: the shopping, the crowds, the festive spirit. People let their guard down, made mistakes, were somehow more trusting and friendly. And Murat was there, marking them out, always the young ones. On the street, in a shop, a bar. There to be taken and traded. Just another commodity.
And up till last week, Sunday night, it had all been going so well. Two years building the network – France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Holland, even Hungary – and refining the operation: the pick-ups, the hand-overs and, most important, staying on top of the rates he paid his boys. All he had to do was make it worth their while, and then some. The Balkan, Milo, took the biggest wedge because he’d been with Murat longest, stayed consistent and covered the widest territory, the rest of them paid on a scale in the order they’d joined. He didn’t know whether they all out-sourced – Milo certainly did – but he didn’t really care so long as everyone worked by the rules, his rules, and they didn’t get greedy.
His first take, nearly four years ago now, he’d done by himself. Brought in three, secured in the back of a rental truck, Munich to Marseilles. Turned them over to old Fonton and pocketed a cool thirty thousand francs. With a new van and some cash to invest, he’d brought in Milo to handle Austria and Germany, then that Swiss pimp Jean-Marc in Zurich, Hennie in Bordeaux, and, a year later, Rudo in Budapest and Bernt operating out of Brussels and Liège. Five, maybe six, trips a year, each one starting in Paris which he’d set aside for himself, picking up all the way down – Dijon, Lyons, Valence or Avignon depending on the supply route – till he hit Marseilles with a full load. Never less than six, never more than ten. At twenty thousand a parcel, cash, it all added up. Take out fuel, accommodation, the team’s rates, and with a full load he’d walk away with eighty thousand in crisp five-hundreds. Half-a-mill in two years – clear. Sure beat packing the saddle of his old Vespa with quarter-ounce nuggets of Red Leb and two-gramme wraps of coke for the run between clients. These loads might be heavier – and alive – but the work and the payback were way better.
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