‘And the garage door,’ added Jacquot as they drew closer, the house only ten metres ahead of them now, close enough for them to make out the dark hollow of a garage and the garden gate standing a few inches ajar. They hadn’t noticed that from the other side of the street.
A few steps further on, without any hesitation, as though they had reached their destination, Jacquot turned in at the gate, with Marie-Ange following behind. Together they climbed the steps and he rang the doorbell. There was no answer. He tried the bell again, longer this time, gave the door a couple of knocks, but no sound came from inside the house.
‘Why don’t we try the garage?’ asked Marie-Ange. ‘Maybe there’s a connecting door.’
There was, indeed, a connecting door. And it was unlocked. Without making any sound Jacquot pushed it open and looked down a narrow passageway that smelt of cheap cooking oil and stale vegetables. There were no lights on and it took a moment for his eyes to grow accustomed to the darkness – on the left a washing machine and spin-drier, a cabinet freezer, and on the right a drying rack for clothes. At the end of the passage was a door. Placing his feet carefully and quietly, feeling for the movement of floorboards as he let his weight down, he crept towards it, wishing he had his gun.
Pausing at the door, he held up his hand to keep Marie-Ange back. But she came up right behind him and reached for his arm. He could feel her hands shaking.
‘It’s not good,’ she managed. ‘There’s something not right . . .’
‘It’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘Just stay here. I’ll be back for you.’
63
AS JACQUOT EDGED OPEN THE door, the smell of cooked food grew stronger. But there was something else too . . . other scents he recognised. The sharp carbon reek of cordite mixed with something heavier, more pungent. He reached out his hand and felt for the light switch. His fingers found it and, taking a breath, he pushed it down.
A click, a buzz, a blinking strobe of blue light from a neon tube in the centre of the ceiling that sent shadows flickering around the room. A kitchen, just as he had guessed. And then the light caught and held and the neon hummed into life, blue turning to electric cream.
At once the shadows stopped racing and the room settled into its shape and form. Through the angle of the door he could see oak-fronted wall cupboards, a porcelain kitchen sink and wooden draining board, the corner of a kitchen table with two chairs, and a bulging black bin liner set beside what appeared to be a back door, waiting for someone to take out to the trash. There was a saucepan and casserole dish on the stove, an open cutlery drawer, a yellow plastic cloth on the kitchen table, and from where he stood he could see a bowl of fruit, an ashtray, a teaspoon, and a mortar with blue pills in it. The same pills, he was prepared to bet, that Xavier had bought from Petitjean.
It was then, stepping round the door, that Jacquot saw the body. A man. Head on the table, cheek to the cloth, hair spilled over his face, arms hanging down past his legs. He could have been sleeping, but Jacquot knew a corpse when he saw one – the slump of muscle, the heaviness, the punctured vital presence – confirmed by a deep dark puddle clotting beneath the table.
Jacquot drew closer, watching where he stepped, and brushed aside the long, curling black hair, touched the man’s neck. Cold and hard, his eyes closed, his lips parted, a pale steely colour that made the white teeth look yellow, almost a smile in the two-day stubble. Young, maybe mid–thirties, and strikingly good-looking. He moved around the body, looking for the killing wound, and found it under the man’s left arm – clean to the heart, the blood soaked through his T-shirt and cream linen trousers. Jacquot touched the bloodied cloth – sticky, nearly dry, the material stiffening.
It was then that he spotted a glint of brass on the edge of the puddle of blood. He reached down and picked it up, tipped it to the light. A shell casing. On the base, set around the dent from the gun’s hammer, were the letters ber/g/gn. He slipped it into his pocket.
‘There’s another body,’ said Marie-Ange. She hadn’t waited, as she’d been told to do, but had followed Jacquot into the kitchen. Her voice was low, measured, as though she wasn’t surprised by her discovery, not in any sense shocked. She was standing by the sink, looking at the back door.
Taking care not to stand in the blood and trail footprints around the kitchen, Jacquot went over to her and looked down at what he had first thought was a bag of rubbish. As he drew closer, opening up the angle between them, he could see now that he’d been mistaken. It was a woman. An old woman in a dark-blue dressing gown, crumpled in the doorway, her legs tucked under her, hands in her lap, her thin fingers curled. Santarem’s mother, more than likely. The head had fallen forward, the greying hair gripped in coloured plastic rollers that had earlier looked to him like items of rubbish at the open end of a black bin liner. Jacquot went down on his haunches, noted the exit wound at the back of the skull, and tipped the head back with his index finger under her chin. In the space between her eyebrows was a small black-rimmed hole, a thin dried trickle of blood trailing down the side of her nose. There was also a dark bruise on her temple, as though she had struck her head against the corner of the work surface as she fell.
Jacquot didn’t need any forensic team to give him the basics. The chill flesh, the drying blood, the stiffness of the bodies. A day dead. The pair of them. Sometime the previous night, he reckoned.
Jacquot got to his feet and looked around the walls. He found what he was looking for. A splintered hole in the side of a wallcupboard, dressed in dark red, with drying shreds of grey tissue and bony splinters caught in it. She’d been shot right there, close to the cupboards. The bullet had gone straight through the old lady’s head, taking fragments of skull with it, and lodged in the woodwork. But there was no misshapen plug of lead filling the hole. This bullet had been prised out and the casing picked up, pocketed, taken away.
A professional hit, no question, thought Jacquot.
He looked back at the other body. A body shot. Ejected casing left at the scene. Not so professional.
‘Mother and son,’ said Marie-Ange. ‘She was not well. She was . . . confused. She . . .’
But Jacquot held up a finger, silenced her.
From behind an understairs door, which looked like it led down to the basement, came a soft scuffling sound. Once again Jacquot wished he had a gun.
For a moment there was silence, so deep they could hear the soft battery-driven tick of the clock on the wall and the whisper of neon. Then it came again, further away this time, and what sounded like muffled voices.
Stepping up to the edge of the door, Jacquot waved Marie-Ange to one side, out of any possible gunshot range, then he reached for the handle. He turned it slowly, tried to open the door, but it was locked. Releasing the handle, he reached for the key, felt the lock roll back and come to a rest. This time the door opened with a gentle squeak.
The warm, airless stench was immediate, a sinuous stream coiling up out of the darkened staircase and spilling into the kitchen. It was enough to make Jacquot step back and Marie-Ange cover her mouth and nose. It was clear there was something bad, something rotten, down there in the darkness. And alive. With the door open, the scuffling grew louder, attended by whispers, a frightened whimper and soft sobbing.
Jacquot put his hand inside the door, found a switch but no light came on. He looked around the kitchen, saw a torch hanging from a hook and snapped it on, the thin beam of light piercing the darkness beyond the basement door. He took the stairs carefully, bare wooden steps that creaked under his weight, breathing through his open mouth all the way down. At the bottom, wood gave way to bare earth that was soft beneath his shoes and smelled sweetly of vomit and urine. He swung the torch beam around the basement, shadows spinning away from four vertical wooden beams that supported the floor above. And there they were, huddling in a corner at the far end of the basement: pale dirty faces, wide frightened eyes, filthy hair.
‘It’s okay,’ he called out, trying to make his voice sof
t, encouraging. ‘I’m a policeman. You’re okay.’
Behind him, Marie-Ange came down the stairs. She slid past him, looked at the huddle of girls in the far corner and whispered, ‘You sort out upstairs. I’ll go to them.’
64
THANKS TO GUILLERMO’S DIRECTIONS, Taddeus and Tomas had no trouble finding Xavier Vassin’s home. They spotted it straight away, a narrow two-storey box of a house, with green garden gate and green front door, set in the middle of a sloping line of houses. Each property was divided by creeper-covered wire fences and narrow alleys, a shallow flight of red-tiled roofs dropping down just one side of the street, a basketball court and two residential blocks on the other side.
As the Corsicans edged their black Volkswagen into a space twenty metres down from the house, the streetlights in rue Artemis blinked on, one by one down the slope, a soft rain drifting on the breeze past the glowing goldfish-bowl lamps. It was still early, too early for them to make a move, so they settled down to wait. There was no discussion between the two men. When Taddeus killed the engine he reached into the VW’s door pocket for his copy of Montaigne, opened it, found the page and angled it to catch the light from the nearest streetlight. Tomas, meanwhile, folded his arms and settled into his seat, his eyes fixed on the house with the green gate. Exactly fifteen minutes later, Taddeus put down Montaigne and Tomas flipped open the glove compartment and pulled out a book of crossword puzzles. Always general knowledge. And he never needed to fill in the spaces. Once he had the answer, the word or phrase was there in his head. He’d finish a crossword in less than an hour and there wouldn’t be a mark on the page.
The two brothers waited patiently, for more than two hours, as life on rue Artemis began to slow: the last of the street’s Saturday workers coming home on foot or by car, double-parking if they couldn’t find a space; the younger kids called in first for their supper and bed; the older kids hauled off the basketball court not long afterwards. It was only when all was quiet that the two men stirred – crosswords and pensées put aside.
Taddeus found some breath freshener and sprayed it into his mouth. Chewing the taste into his cheeks, he put the aerosol away and, in a simple reflex, raised a hand to his left armpit, as someone else might check for their wallet. Tomas did the same.
It was time to go to work.
Out on the pavement, the two men put up their umbrellas and parted company. Tomas walked up the street and Taddeus walked down, coming back together in the shadow of a white Renault van. With a final glance around, Taddeus eased open the gate and started up the short path. There was a single curtained light on the ground floor but nothing in the upper rooms.
At the front door, Taddeus turned to his brother. ‘Montaigne says that the greatest happiness we can know comes from a liberation of the soul.’ It was the first time either of them had spoken.
‘Is that so?’ replied Tomas, lowering his umbrella, shaking it out and standing it against the wall.
Taddeus did the same, then leant forward, ear cocked to the green door.
Behind it, somewhere in the house, came the unmistakable sound of running feet.
65
ELODIE LAY ON THE BED waiting for him, whoever he was, chill with a trembling fear but coiled tight with a desperate determination. She wasn’t going to kill him – or at least she didn’t intend to. What she wanted to do was hurt him or knock him off balance just long enough to make her escape. The man downstairs, the man holding her prisoner, thought she was drugged. But she wasn’t. Not any more. All she had to do was make that advantage work for her. Because it was the only advantage she had. That, and the small pair of nail scissors she’d found under a chest of drawers in her room and now clutched in her hand.
As far as she could tell, she had been locked away in this tiny single bedroom from darkness to darkness, a passage of time she had measured by the brightness of the pinprick holes in the metal blind rolled down on the outside of the locked window. And in that time she had slowly but surely regained her senses. She still ached from the drugs she’d been fed, and her limbs felt soft and floppy from lack of exercise, but she was finally starting to think straight.
She might not have been able to say exactly how long it had been since she’d climbed into the passenger seat of Murat’s van on rue Raspail, but she knew it had been long enough for her to start smelling. Her blonde hair was greasy and lank, her teeth thickly coated in a soft velvet mat, and her skin so filthy that when she rubbed her fingertips along her arm, the dirt rolled away in grimy black balls. She had never gone so long without a bath or a shower, and to make matters worse she felt horribly constipated, slow and fat and bloated. She’d also been badly bitten by whatever bugs had inhabited the mattress she’d been dumped on in that cellar, her legs and arms, face and neck – any patch of bare skin – reduced to a rough, itchy swelling of hard spots and crusted heads where she’d scratched too enthusiastically.
But there was nothing she could do about any of that now – the smell of her body, or the foul taste in her mouth, or the itching, or the bloating, or the dull echo of a headache. What she had to do now was concentrate on getting out of there. The next time he came to check on her or feed her, hopefully leaving the door open behind him as he’d done the last time he’d looked in on her, she was going to stab him and make a run for it, maybe even slam the door on him and lock him in if she had enough time.
All she had to do was wait. And be brave. And hold her nerve. If she didn’t, there was no telling what might happen to her.
It had begun the night before – the sound of raised voices somewhere above her, followed by a muffled gunshot. Her first thought had been that they were being rescued, that the police had come for them, and there in the darkness she had felt like shouting out: ‘I’m here. We’re here. We’re down here.’
But something had made her stay silent, some sixth sense, as the basement door creaked open and a figure came down, flashing a torch around, moving from one girl to the next. She could hear his voice, gentle, persuasive – ‘Elodie? Es-tu Elodie?’ – but she’d stayed silent, suddenly not sure. Why was he asking only for her? And then it was her turn – ‘Elodie? C’est toi?’ He was close enough for her to smell his breath on her face – beery and stale. And in the torchlight she’d seen the scarf, and the scar, and from somewhere she felt a dim distant sense that she had seen him before. He was one of them. She was sure of it.
But there’d seemed little point in not responding so she’d nodded her head, pretending to be more dazed and confused than she was. And suddenly he was sliding his arm round her and helping her sit up, whispering to her in the torchlight – he was a policeman, she would be home soon, with her parents, everything would be fine.
And for a moment she’d wanted to believe him, wanted to believe he was telling her the truth, that he had come to rescue her. But then he had a bowl of that horrible stew in his hand, and a bottle of water, and he was telling her to eat, to drink, she needed to get her strength back. And she’d known then, for certain, that he was lying, that he wasn’t a policeman, that he hadn’t come to take her home, and that if she ate or drank anything he offered her she would go to sleep again.
So she’d pretended to take the food, to eat it, to swallow, but as he spooned it into her mouth she had coughed and choked it out unseen, into her hand, smearing it along the edge of her mattress. And then, after only half-a-dozen mouthfuls, she’d brushed the spoon away, and let herself go loose.
Now, lying on her bed in the darkness, with the scissors clenched in her fist, nerving herself to attack him and make a run for it, Elodie listened for sounds from below. For most of the day she’d heard the distant chatter of a radio station, then a hi-fi playing rock and roll, but now there was the canned sound of laughter from some TV game show. And, for the last twenty minutes, the smell of cooking. She was sure of it. He was getting her something to eat. If only to feed her more drugs.
Any time now, she thought, any time now . . . and a moment later the T
V went off and she heard a thomp-thomp-thomp as he came up the stairs.
And there he was, pushing open the bedroom door, carrying a tray, a shaft of light from the landing spilling in behind him.
She held her breath, waited, fist tightening on the scissors, watching through half-closed eyes as he approached the bed, bent down to put the tray on the bedside table. And as he did so she swung her arm up with all the strength she could muster and plunged the scissors into his side, heard him grunt with surprise and stagger sideways, and the tray crash to the floor.
But she didn’t wait to see what damage she might have caused. She was up, struggling off the bed, racing for the door as best she could, the first time in days that she had properly moved her legs, suddenly a dangerous and unexpected liability, thin and weak and clumsy beneath her as though they belonged to someone else. But at least she was moving, getting somewhere, through the open bedroom door and out on to a landing, no time to lock him in, the stairs to the right and just ahead of her.
In a jerky, jumping, downward rush she bounded down to the ground floor. Into a low-lit salon, a muted TV flickering in the corner, posters on the wall, a single leather armchair, a low coffee table, a long ratty sofa covered in throws. Past a small kitchen area and breakfast bar. Where to go? she screamed to herself. Which way now? How did she get out of there? And then she spotted the hallway and knew where to run.
But he was coming after her. She could hear him crashing his way down the stairs, lumbering through the salon, stumbling over the furniture. As she turned into the hallway, she chanced a look back, just an instant, to see how close he was, how much time she had, whether she could get to the front door, open it and get out of there before he caught up with her, praying the door wasn’t locked, praying she was far enough ahead. And there he was, charging after her, one hand pressed to his side, a red stain spreading over his white T-shirt, his face clenched with pain and rage.
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