Confession

by Martin O'Brien

  84

  GASTAL CAME OUT OF MADAME Bonnefoy’s chambers on Cours Pierre Puget with his teeth clenched tighter than a clam. He couldn’t remember being in such a rage, not since . . . not since the Palais de Justice in Lyons when that Chabert case had been snatched away from him at the very last minute. By that espèce de merde Jacquot, no less. Gastal’s bosses in Lyons hadn’t liked that at all. Not one little bit.

  And now Jacquot was at it again. Working undercover on the Lafour case, in a private capacity for Madame Bonnefoy. That’s what the examining magistrate had told him when he called by to see her, explaining that Jacquot had lost his gun after being put down by Xavier Vassin (three cheers for him, thought Gastal, wishing he’d been there to see it – maybe add a kick or two of his own), and that the arrest order he, Gastal, had obtained through Jean Davide’s office would be rescinded forthwith. Madame Bonnefoy would vouch for Jacquot if and when it was necessary to do so.

  Reaching his car, Gastal flung himself in behind the wheel and spat out a torrent of abuse. The night before he had gone to sleep thinking how it would feel to apprehend Jacquot himself, dreaming of a shoot-out in which Jacquot went down. Now, thanks to Madame Bonnefoy, the connard could operate with impunity; there was nothing Gastal could do about it. He had tried to explain, of course, that having someone working undercover could seriously compromise the operation he himself was running. But Madame Bonnefoy would have none of it. When he saw her shoulders square and that gleam in her eye harden to a steely glint he knew he was on dangerous ground. ‘Live with it, monsieur,’ she had told him sharply, showing him to the door, the implication quite clear that she valued Jacquot’s input and skills and chances of success a great deal more highly than his own. Which had made him madder still.

  But he was closer than she imagined. Just steps away, he was certain of it. He’d already called DGSE for an update on the Cabrille fleet’s status and had established that three freighters were currently berthed in Marseilles and slated for unloading later that day. Of course, just being a Cabrille vessel didn’t necessarily mean it was carrying contraband. Sometimes the questionable cargoes came in with other shippers. The Cabrilles liked to play the odds. Nothing was predictable with them. Until he had the name, one that Mademoiselle Carinthe Cousteaux had promised to try and remember for him, his hands were tied and the possibility of making a fool of himself was greater than he dared risk. Search the wrong ship and he could kiss goodbye to any chance of promotion.

  Starting up his car, Gastal pulled out into the traffic without bothering to indicate, accelerated down to Rive Neuve and swung left for the Sofitel. It was time for another chat with Carinthe Cousteaux.

  Rain was rattling off the palms surrounding the Sofitel forecourt as Gastal parked. A doorman stepped forward to redirect him to other parking facilities but he flashed his badge. Park it for me, connard, or leave it where it is, his look said.

  Inside Gastal strode towards reception, gave his name and asked for a call to be put through to Mademoiselle Cousteaux’s room. As soon as he said the name, he saw the receptionist falter.

  ‘Is there a problem?’ asked Gastal.

  ‘Un moment, s’il vous plaît, monsieur,’ the receptionist replied. She went over to a colleague and whispered in his ear. The man looked at Gastal and acknowledged him with a short nod. He said something to the receptionist and then came over.

  But before he could say anything, Gastal saw Peluze and Serre step out of a lift. Not bothering with the manager, he went over to them, a nasty feeling bubbling up in his guts.

  ‘What are you two doing here?’ he asked, squaring up to them.

  ‘Your lady from Saturday, Mademoiselle Carinthe Cousteaux, was murdered this morning at Galerie Duchamp,’ said Peluze. ‘Stabbed three times. They found her hotel key in her bag. We came here to check her room out.’

  ‘Merde alors. And?’

  ‘Nothing we can find of any interest. Just a room. Booked for two weeks. Maids have been in and done it over. Spick and span.’

  ‘Whose name? The reservation?’

  ‘Hers,’ replied Peluze, thankful that he’d thought to check.

  ‘Any witnesses in the shop?’

  Peluze shook his head. ‘Looks like a professional hit,’ he said. ‘A load of people around, but no one saw a thing. One minute she’s shopping, the next she’s down.’

  85

  Paris

  MADAME ESTELLE LAFOUR WAS STILL in her dressing gown when the maid tapped lightly on the door of the library at La Résidence Camille. She had settled there after breakfast – a pot of strong coffee, a buttered crust of petit pain and three cigarettes – and hadn’t left her chair.

  ‘Entrez,’ she called.

  The maid entered with a bob of her head and went over to Estelle. ‘This has just been delivered. The messenger said it was urgent.’ She offered the envelope and Estelle took it from her, spilling ash on her gown as she reached for it. ‘Thank you, Marie. C’est tout.’

  After the maid had gone, Estelle put out her cigarette and examined the packet. The envelope was padded, weighty, her name and address written in black capital letters, the single word Urgent in the top right corner underlined three times.

  With a sigh, she pushed her forefinger into the sealed flap, tore it open and pulled out two sheets of paper.

  She read the letter first. Just three lines. Short and concise. But she read it again, trying to make sense of it; then a third and a fourth time. Putting it aside, she reached for the second sheet. This took her longer to read, to take in. As she did so a frown settled across her forehead and then her breath caught. Tears filled her eyes and she started to shake her head. ‘Non, non, non, c’est pas possible . . .’

  And then she remembered the envelope’s weight; there’d been something else inside. She reached for it, tipped it over into her lap, and Elodie’s hairclip came tumbling out.

  Across town, in a fifth-floor boardroom on rue Baranot, Georges Lafour was taking his Monday heads of department meeting – planning the week ahead, assigning duties, outlining targets – when his eye was caught by the gentle swell of Déanna Gombert’s breasts as she leaned down to retrieve notes from her attaché case. She was four places away from him on the right of the boardroom table, but that single, slight exposure was like a beacon, holding his eye as his assistant, Félix, went through the social stuff – lunches, dinners, guests, contacts.

  Gombert was head of Banque Lafour’s Far East acquisitions programme, in her mid-thirties, and attractive in a prim, efficient, short-blonde-hair-and-Chekhov-spectacles sort of way. This morning she was wearing a mauve silk blouse tucked into a tight pencil skirt. It was the loose opening at the top of this blouse that had attracted Lafour’s attention. He had never really thought of Mademoiselle Gombert in any kind of sexual context but he could see now that, naked, she might well be a remarkable sight. As she leafed through her case, he noticed a thin red strap and followed it down into the shadowy pull and tug of her breasts. But she was staff. Madness. Utter madness. Unless, of course . . . He allowed himself a moment’s distraction.

  It was then that his secretary, Monique, came over the speaker phone.

  ‘Monsieur Lafour. Your wife on the line.’

  ‘Thank you, Monique,’ he said, and guiltily pressed the flashing red light rather than pick up the receiver.

  His wife’s voice, sharp and bitter and filled with hatred, spat through the boardroom.

  ‘You shit, you shit, you shit . . .’ she managed before her husband was able to snatch up the receiver and silence the speaker.

  Around the table a dozen faces looked on in astonishment, stunned by the outburst. And even though the speaker phone was now off, those executives closest to the head of the boardroom table could still hear what Lafour’s wife was shouting down the line: ‘You damn well better do what they say!’ she screamed at him. ‘Or I’ll do it for you. You hear me? You hear what I’m saying, you bastard?’

  86

  M
arseilles

  AFTER CALLING AT RIBERO AGENCE Maritime and at Ribero’s apartment block in Vauban, it took Jacquot and Marie-Ange the rest of the morning to check out the five addresses he had found in the directory listed under the name ‘Léonie’. They found the first, a wholesale fashion outlet called Maison Léonie, on a small trading estate just a short distance from the Littoral behind the rain-swept sidings of Gare du Canet. This time Marie-Ange did the call-in but came back within minutes, shaking her head as she hurried through the rain.

  ‘Just a small office,’ she told Jacquot. ‘Racks of clothes in one room, and a dozen women at sewing machines in another. As far as I could see there was no basement and no loft. Nowhere hidden away. Nowhere to keep Elodie without somebody noticing.’

  It was the same story with the other Léonies. The stove shop, Léonie Fourneau, was empty and had a rental sign in the window; the corsetière on rue Saint Ferréol was strictly by appointment only, mam’selle, just a small reception area and various fitting rooms on the fourth floor, Marie-Ange reported back. And it was no different at the dry-cleaners, Pressing Léonie on rue Castellane, or at Léonie Beaux Chiens in Endoume. Not a single one of these businesses looked a likely hide-out for whoever had snatched Elodie Lafour from rue Artemis.

  It was just as Jacquot had expected, the unrewarding tedium of police work – a slog around town with no return save names crossed off a list.

  ‘What now?’ asked Marie-Ange, as they followed the Corniche road back into town, crossing the viaduct over the tiny fishing cove of Vallon des Auffes.

  ‘My meeting with Madame Bonnefoy,’ he replied. ‘Here, take the next right, now a left, that’s fine. A shortcut,’ he explained, as they swung along Avenue de la Corse and place Corderie and a few minutes later dropped down into place de la Bergasse.

  Jacquot spotted Solange immediately, standing under the awning of a supermart, its sloping corner premises set with a stepped display of fruit and vegetables. She was wearing a belted mackintosh over her court robes and carried a briefcase and umbrella. She did not recognise the 2CV, despite Jacquot’s wave as they passed.

  Marie-Ange parked in a side-street and watched Jacquot cross the square and disappear inside the grocery store with the magistrate. Five minutes later, Madame Bonnefoy came out alone and set off up the street towards Cours Pierre Puget. After a few more seconds, Jacquot appeared, carrying a small bag.

  Back in the car, he checked for passers-by then reached into the bag and brought out a gun and a box of cartridges. He pulled out the clip from the pistol grip and fed in ten shells. Pushing it back into the pistol, he pumped a round into the chamber, removed the clip once more and added another shell.

  Sitting behind the wheel, Marie-Ange might have been watching a card sharp, eyes wide as she tried to follow the Queen of Hearts. Or, in this case, the practised ease of Jacquot’s click-clunk, click-clunk gun handling.

  ‘Do you think you’ll need it?’ she asked, as though she couldn’t believe he ever would.

  ‘This is Marseilles. And I’m a policeman. I might not like them,’ he said, with a sad smile, ‘but it is a comforting companion when I’m tracking down people who would probably kill us without a second thought – like you or me buying a newspaper or ordering a coffee.’ He emptied the box of remaining shells into the bag and slotted it on to the dashboard shelf, sliding the gun away into the inside pocket of his pea-jacket.

  ‘Where to now?’ she asked.

  ‘Lunch. Salette. He called this morning. Bruno’s got something for us.’

  Marie-Ange gave him a look. ‘Is there ever an investigation in Marseilles that happens without lunch?’

  ‘None that I’m working on,’ replied Jacquot.

  87

  AFTER LEAVING THE SOFITEL, Gastal drove just three streets before he saw the sign and pulled over. A neighbourhood bar – a few tables in the window, a zinc counter set with three stools, football pennants hung like a pelmet above the shelves of bottles, a stale sandy scent of sea and cigarettes. He was still so incensed by his meeting with Madame Bonnefoy and the loss of Carinthe Cousteaux that he found it hard to spit out the word ‘Cognac’.

  The barman – shirtsleeves rolled up, arms heavily tattooed, thick neck and hairy wrists hung with clunking gold chains – raised an eyebrow at his customer’s abruptness but set a glass on the counter and poured the measure requested without comment. At that moment, if anyone had said anything to Gastal, or not done what he wanted, on the double, he’d have bunched his fist and thrown it. He knew it; and the barman had probably known it too. Gastal would have hit anyone. Anything. Very hard. He was just so damned furious, so seething, so boiling with rage, that it wouldn’t have taken much to set him off. The barman had been lucky to get away with that raised eyebrow.

  Gastal was so hot with anger that the Cognac he tossed back had as much effect as a shot of cold milk. He tapped the glass on the counter and another measure was poured. He waved his hand up and down – a larger measure. And quick about it.

  Taking up the Cognac, Gastal hoisted himself on to a stool, rested his elbows against the bar and looked through the rain-smeared window. He sat like that for some time, eyes fixed on the traffic sluicing along the Corniche, unblinking. Then he tossed back the drink, left a handful of change on the bar and hurried back to his car.

  As he started up the engine, he decided he felt a great deal better. Finding that bar and getting himself a drink had been a first class idea. Given him the time and space to think.

  And now he knew what he had to do.

  88

  CHEZ HUIT WASN’T A RESTAURANT that appeared in any guidebook, the number eight referring to its position half-way down a sloping line of houses in the old quarter of Le Panier, overlooking a narrow rectangle of the Vieux Port. There was no sign outside its front door to indicate that these were business premises, and that a dozen tables – all doublettes, big enough for just two – filled the cramped ground-floor salon and terrace. The elderly widow who owned the house and kept kitchen was called Tant’Anne, and every lunchtime, from Monday to Friday, she welcomed a shifting band of salty regulars and their guests. Salette was one of these regulars, and Jacquot and Marie-Ange his guests. Because of the rain and a troublesome breeze, the terrace doors had been closed and the available tables reduced to just six, two of which, with Tant’Anne’s permission, Salette had pushed together to make room for his party.

  Salette had clearly been caught off guard at the previous day’s lunch, dressed in a rough and ready collection of week-old clothes. When he stood up from the table in Tant’Anne’s to greet them, taking Marie-Ange’s hand to kiss, Jacquot could see that the old fellow had gone to some effort to look more presentable for this meeting. He had shaved the chalk shading of white bristles off his chin, leaving his face more tanned than it had appeared the day before, his thick thatch of curling white hair was somehow more tutored than normal, and the old blue sweater and cream canvas trousers he always favoured now looked fresh and clean.

  The three of them had made their way through a dish of sliced fresh vegetables dipped into Tant’Anne’s legendary anchoïade and had seen off the best part of her chicken couscous when Bruno, the old harbour master from Montredon, came bustling into the room and made his way between the tables, pausing to shake a hand here, nod a salute there. In his other hand he carried a sheaf of papers.

  After more hand-kissing and greetings when he reached their table, Salette’s old friend settled himself and passed the papers to Jacquot.

  ‘I thought it might be useful, Daniel. A list of vessels berthing or departing port in the last seven days. Pleasure craft, that is. Fifteen metres and above. Sail and motor, just in case. Between Montredon and L’Estaque. I realise your girl’s maybe held somewhere else now, but you never know.’

  Jacquot felt a lurch of disappointment as he leafed through the sheets – columns of names, berthing quays, times of departure, ports of call, estimated times of arrival. The previous week he’d have
been delighted to get his hands on such a list, but with Elodie no longer at risk of transportation the movements of private vessels like these no longer had any real bearing on his investigation. But Bruno was a good man, and Jacquot didn’t want to let him down.

  ‘How did you manage to get all this?’ he asked. ‘And so quickly?’

  Bruno beamed, revealing a perfect set of white teeth bar a single gold incisor that gave him a piratical look. ‘I got it from my son-in-law down L’Estaque.’

  ‘And what does your son-in-law do to have access to information like this?’ asked Jacquot, flicking through the pages, nodding as though it was invaluable.

  ‘The boy’s a marine architect. Been brought in to rationalise – now there’s a word – to rationalise berthing facilities in small ports for larger craft. Part of his brief is to track movements between ports. Days in port, days out. One vessel taking up two berths kind of thing. Needs close attention.’

  But Jacquot wasn’t listening any more, hadn’t got any further than that first ‘rationalise’ before a smile spread over his face. He shook his head in a kind of stunned disbelief, chuckled at the sheer incredibility of it, and passed the last sheet to Marie-Ange.

  ‘Voilà,’ he said. ‘The tenth name down. Now you know why we do our business over lunch.’

  Marie-Ange took the page and counted down the list.

  The tenth name.

  It took her a moment to realise what she was looking at.

  MY Léonie.

  89

  BENEATH THE DRIPPING COVER OF a tilting Aleppo pine, Gastal sat in his car five metres back from the corner of rue Cornille and Chemin de Roucas. Just a hundred metres to his left, on the far side of de Roucas, was the main gate of Maison Cabrille, and at the end of a short and tree-shrouded impasse almost directly ahead of him were a set of double garage doors, sunk into the side of the slope on which the property stood. It was as good a stake-out spot as he’d been able to find. Close enough to keep effective watch, far enough away to remain inconspicuous.