The choppers had been called in after Jacquot was hauled from the freezing water, his icy soaking clothes stripped off him out on the aft deck, his numbed, cramping body towelled dry and an insulating blanket flung round him. Dry clothes had been brought out to him, and with help from a member of the P.60’s crew he’d struggled into them, but it had taken half an hour for the trembling and the shaking and the teeth-chattering to subside. Back in the salon he was settled on a sofa where Marie-Ange brought him a tumbler of Cognac and set to rubbing warmth and feeling back into his arms and his back and his hands.
‘You are mad,’ she’d told him, in a proud, scolding sort of way. ‘Mad, mad, mad.’
But Jacquot wasn’t really listening. On the sofa opposite, curled up in a corner, was a young girl. She had blonde hair, tear-reddened eyes, and an angry red mark across her mouth from the duct tape her captors had slapped on her. The P.60’s medic was working on her.
‘Elodie?’ Jacquot asked. ‘Are you Elodie?’
The girl nodded and gave him a tight little smile that made her eyes well with more tears.
‘Is it really over?’ she asked in a tiny voice.
‘It’s over,’ he replied.
‘Are you taking me home?’
Jacquot nodded. ‘Yes, we are.’
The girl nodded again, then looked away, as though she had no more words.
‘She’s fine,’ whispered Marie-Ange. ‘Fine, but badly shocked. She was in that lift, the dumb waiter. When we opened the door, there she was, half-way down, packed away like a contortionist in a box. Her hands were bound, and there were chains on her too,’ continued Marie-Ange softly. ‘Around her ankles. It looked like they were going to dump her overboard. Another few minutes and she really wouldn’t have been here. We made it just in time.’
And now Elodie Lafour was sitting with them in the helicopter, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, her eyes wide with a kind of stunned disbelief, as though she still couldn’t quite credit what was happening. That she was going home, her ordeal at an end.
Jacquot looked at his watch. Nearly three hours’ sailing to reach Léonie, but a little less than twenty minutes to make it back to the coast, coming in to settle with a bump on L’Estaque’s floodlit football pitch. Looking through the window, he could see a police car and an ambulance waiting for them, lights flashing, and beside them a single black saloon. As the whine of the engine subsided, two figures emerged from the car. He recognised them both, the two sisters, Solange and Estelle.
On the seat opposite, looking out of the window, Elodie saw them too. In that single moment her young face crumpled and her body was wrenched by a hiccuping burst of tears, spilling down her cheeks. Marie-Ange put out a hand, squeezed her arm. The girl turned away from the window and looked at them both, tried to smile through the tears but couldn’t hold it.
‘I think I’m in trouble,’ she managed. ‘I am going to get so told off . . .’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Marie-Ange.
‘Maybe just a little,’ nodded Jacquot with a gentle smile.
With the smile came a sudden draft of cold wet air as the Puma’s door was pulled open, whipping into the cabin. One by one the stretchers were lifted out. When there was room to move, Elodie unbuckled her seat belt and rose to her feet, turning to Jacquot and Marie-Ange.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thank you for finding me.’
And then she went to the door and one of the aircrew held out a hand and helped her down the steps. Jacquot and Marie-Ange followed, in time to see Elodie break into a run across the pitch, arms wide, and her mother start forward. A moment later they reached each other, clung to each other, swaying together in the rain.
‘Don’t go crying or you’ll start me off,’ said Marie-Ange.
‘All in a day’s work,’ replied Jacquot.
She gave him a look. ‘If you say so.’
101
SOLANGE BONNEFOY JOINED MOTHER and daughter, briefly clasped them tight, then set out towards Jacquot and Marie-Ange. A metre away, with a soft rain shawling in across the stadium lights, she stopped in front of them.
For a moment, it seemed to Jacquot she didn’t quite know what to say, what to do. So he decided to do it for her and made to step forward. She beat him to it. Before he could react, her arms were around him, trapping his own in a tight hug. Two swift squeezes were followed by three darting kisses to his cheeks.
‘You will never know . . . you will never know how much . . .’
Each word came out as a kind of strangled sob. As though to keep herself in check, to provide some distraction, she turned to Marie-Ange and repeated the hug, the kisses.
‘I’m so sorry if I was rude to you, my dear, or unfriendly. I had no right to be.’ She sniffed loudly, wiped her eyes, glanced over her shoulder. Her sister and niece were getting into the car.
‘You’ll miss your ride,’ said Jacquot.
‘They’re going back to my apartment by themselves. It’s been arranged.’ She shook herself, squared her shoulders. ‘And anyway, there’s still some business we need to attend to.’ The examining magistrate was quickly gathering herself. ‘We have been busy during your pleasure cruise.’
‘Why don’t I leave you to it?’ said Marie-Ange, reaching for both their arms, a double goodbye. ‘I’ll go in the ambulance with Captain Chabran and Willi. See them settled. If you need me, I’ll be at the hospital. Or home.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Or maybe I should go to work.’
At the edge of the pitch, the second stretcher was lifted into the ambulance and secured. A paramedic started to close the doors, the lights began to revolve and flash.
‘I’d better hurry,’ she said, and started off, calling out to the paramedic as he jumped up into the cab. He waited for her, and Jacquot watched Marie-Ange clamber aboard, the door close, and an arm reach out of the window and wave to him.
It was the wave that did it. He felt a sudden twist of regret that it was all over, at an end – the time they’d spent together – and that they would soon be going their separate ways again, had already started to do so. He also remembered the flush on her neck when Chabran had smiled at her, and felt another unexpected twist. When Léo Chabran woke up, he’d find Marie-Ange at his bedside. Lucky, lucky man, he thought.
‘She’s a beautiful young girl,’ said Solange Bonnefoy.
‘You’re not the first who’s remarked upon it,’ replied Jacquot, aware of the word ‘young’, and, deliberate or not, the attendant ‘too young for you’ subtext.
‘But let’s be going,’ she continued, taking his arm and leading him to the squad car. ‘I’m getting soaked.’
Settled in the back seat, with the ambulance leading the way out on to Boulevard de Rove and turning right for the city, Solange Bonnefoy brought Jacquot up to date.
‘While you were gone, we found out about MY Léonie,’ she said. ‘It took my new best friend, the Préfet Maritime, to provide the information, with no need to go through official channels. She might be registered in some South Pacific atoll, but the Préfet knew her. Apparently she had once been owned by his uncle, would you believe? And he had actually sailed on her as a young man. She was called Calypso back then, he told me. He also knew the man his uncle had sold her to, the man who changed her name.’
‘And that would be?’
‘Monsieur Arsène Cabrille.’
The name instantly rang a bell. ‘The one who died? He was buried yesterday. Or Sunday.’
‘Correct. Wreathed in noble causes, but still smelling of the sewer. Everything above board, but a great deal unseen below – though we never managed to pin anything on him. A very clever man by all accounts. A wily old fox. And now it’s his daughter in charge. Virginie Cabrille.’
‘And it was this daughter, Virginie . . .?’
‘It would seem so. A warrant has been issued for her arrest and there’s a squad getting ready to serve it. Should be fun.’
‘Gastal will love it. Headlines. Just what he
always wanted.’
‘Not Gastal. It’s one of your boys, Peluze, in charge. He couldn’t locate Gastal. Gone missing. The last time Peluze saw him was yesterday afternoon, at the Sofitel.’
It was then, as they left the tree-lined avenues of L’Estaque, that something struck Jacquot. It hadn’t been more than two hours since they’d found Elodie. Yet there was her mother, Estelle Lafour, waiting for them. There was no way she could have made it to Marseilles so quickly.
‘Madame Lafour got down here very fast?’
‘She arrived last night. In quite a state. Apparently there was a ransom demand.’
‘From Virginie Cabrille?’
‘She wouldn’t say. Wouldn’t tell me. But I assume so. Apparently Georges was dealing with it. She just said that it was over. That he had done what they wanted.’
‘He paid? How much?’
Madame Bonnefoy shook her head. ‘I don’t know. But I’m sure we’ll find out soon enough.’
Up ahead the domed bulk of the Cathédrale de la Major loomed out of the darkness.
‘You want me to drop you at headquarters?’ she asked, as they approached the turning for rue de l’Evêché. ‘You up to it?’
‘I wouldn’t miss it. So long as Peluze doesn’t mind.’
102
CLAUDE PELUZE HAD ALREADY LEFT for Roucas Blanc by the time Solange Bonnefoy dropped Jacquot at police headquarters. Being Jacquot, it didn’t take long for him to persuade the desk sergeant to provide a squad car and one of the night-duty uniform boys to drive him out there.
Peluze was a good cop and hadn’t taken any chances. He’d known this was likely going to be more than a cuff and custody job, and as Jacquot and his driver turned into Chemin de Roucas they came up against a pair of squad cars drawn across the road, lights flashing. A hundred metres further on another couple of squad cars had been similarly deployed, effectively blocking off the road outside the gates of Maison Cabrille. Police tape had also been strung across the road and across rue Cornille. Some early risers stood behind it, looking up the slope.
Jacquot didn’t have a badge, but his arriving in a squad car convinced the two gendarmes manning the tape that he was who he said he was, Chief Inspector Daniel Jacquot of the Cavaillon force, formerly with the homicide squad in Marseilles. They let him through.
‘There’s been shooting,’ said one of the gendarmes, as he passed. ‘We got the all-clear a few minutes ago. But you’d better watch yourself all the same.’
Jacquot nodded his thanks and set off down the road, turning into the impasse where a group of caped gendarmes stood beneath the trees, smoking and talking amongst themselves. As he passed, there was the sound of a screw cap being removed from a flask and a couple of tipped heads. Up ahead, two ambulances had been reversed into the entrance of a double garage. Slipping between them, Jacquot smelled the sharp, antiseptic warmth of their brightly lit interiors, and as he stepped past and headed into the garage, the equally familiar scents of gunfire and spilled blood and emptied bowels drifted up to him. Someone had been shot in the guts, thought Jacquot. That’s what often happened with a stomach wound. You just . . . popped it.
There were four cars in the garage, their sides punctured with bullet holes, not a single intact windscreen or window between them. With shattered glass fragments crunching underfoot, Jacquot made his way down the gentle slope, taking in a vivid, still-dripping splash of blood on one of the garage’s white breeze-block walls – a headshot, had to be; a puddle of blackening blood backing up against the wide front wheel of a Jeep Cherokee and leaking around it; and a broad smudge of it slanted across the humped bonnet of a vintage Porsche. Its matt green paintwork made the bloody smear look more blue than red. Over by a workbench, beside a pockmarked limousine, paramedics were working on one of the uniform boys, the last of four body-bags being zipped up.
As Jacquot stepped away from the cars and through what had clearly once been a set of sliding glass doors, he heard a familiar voice.
‘I heard you were back in town.’ The gravelly voice belonged to Peluze, sheltering from the rain under a striped awning. His collar was up, his tie undone and a cigarette smouldered between his fingers. ‘You just missed the fun.’
The two men embraced. It had been a long time.
‘You’re looking good,’ said Jacquot, taking in the stubble and the military buzz-cut. ‘Just as I remember you.’
‘Sorry I can’t say the same for you. You look like shit. I should have you in a line-up. And what the fuck happened to the ponytail?’
‘Line of duty,’ replied Jacquot. ‘So what’s been happening here? One of the guys outside said there’d been shooting, but I wasn’t expecting this.’
‘Who was? We didn’t bother to ring the doorbell, but we weren’t expecting World War Three.’ Peluze nodded as the first of the black body-bags was wheeled past on a gurney. ‘Two gorilles. Just two of ’em, but they took out three of ours. One of them was working at the bench back inside, the other was upstairs doing crosswords, would you believe? Crossword puzzle books all round. He couldn’t have been much good. Not a single clue filled in. Down here, the guy at the bench didn’t wait to ask who we were. Just took one look and started firing. His buddy joins him and it’s fireworks, Bastille Day, but we got them in the end.’
‘And the woman, Virginie Cabrille?’
Peluze nodded over Jacquot’s shoulder.
‘Quand on parle du loup,’ he said. Speak of the devil.
Jacquot turned to see a young woman coming down the garden pathway, escorted by two gendarmes, hands cuffed behind her back. She looked like a librarian, he thought: well-tailored slacks, twinset and pearls, penny loafers.
Except for the gelled hair. It gave her a punky, rebellious look.
And the blood. It was everywhere. All over her clothes. Her throat. Her cheeks. It clearly wasn’t hers.
As she drew closer, she caught Jacquot’s eye and held it, a searching, quizzical look, then turned her attention to Peluze. With a disdainful shrug, she pulled free from her escorts, and headed in his direction. It was clear she wanted to say something. The gendarmes tried to hold her back, but Peluze raised his hand. He could deal with this.
For a moment she didn’t speak, just looked at Jacquot’s companion. The only sound was the distant moan of an ambulance or squad car down on the Corniche and probably heading in their direction, and the soft breezy whisper of rain on the awning above their heads.
‘Je suis vainqueuse encore,’ she said, at last. I still win.
Just that.
Then, with a smile at the two men, she turned back to the gendarmes and they led her away, into the garage and out of sight.
‘Win what?’ asked Jacquot.
Peluze shrugged, took a drag on his cigarette.
‘She’s mad as a fox, if you ask me.’
‘How’s that?’ asked Jacquot.
‘She lives in the lodge over there,’ replied Peluze, pointing towards a cluster of lights in the trees to their left. ‘That’s where we found her. Watching TV, smoking dope and drinking scotch.’
‘And that makes her mad? Far as I remember it’s what most of the squad do on their nights off.’
Peluze grunted, then nodded to the lodge path. ‘Well, here’s one who won’t be doing it ever again,’ he said.
Coming down from the lodge, Jacquot made out the reflective jackets of three paramedics pushing a stretcher trolley, its wheels skittering along the path.
‘An old friend of yours,’ said Peluze, indicating the body-bag as the trolley passed them. ‘I can’t say I’m sorry, but no one deserves what he got from La Mam’selle.’
The name just sprang into Jacquot’s head. ‘Gastal?’
‘Le même. According to the medics it was a heart attack. But what he went through, there were a dozen things he could have died of first.’
‘She did it?’
‘Crazy. Mad. Like I told you. She had a basement . . . soundproofed, the lot. You wouldn’t belie
ve what we found down there.’ Peluze gave another grunt, shook his head as though he couldn’t find the words. ‘And I’m supposed to have given up,’ he said, looking at the cigarette between his fingers, taking a last drag, then flicking it away. ‘Some hope.’
103
Paris
AS VIRGINIE CABRILLE HAD INSTRUCTED, the message she had sent to Georges and Estelle Lafour appeared in Le Monde that Tuesday morning, first edition only, a boxed announcement in the centre of page three, printed in a bold eighteen-point typeface and bordered in black like a funeral notice. Which, to all intents and purposes, it was.
The message ran:
My name is Georges Lafour, President and Chief Executive Officer of Banque Lafour et Finance Mondiale, in Paris.
In 1986 I raped a young woman. Her name was Nathalie, she was twenty-three, and at that time she was a scholarship student at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques.
Afterwards I told her that if she reported the incident I would deny it, and that I would ruin her career. Like many others, she did as she was told.
When she fell pregnant, I forced her to have a termination. During the procedure, one of many I have paid for, her heart stopped. She did not recover.
I declare myself personally responsible for her death, and the death of her unborn child. And I declare myself guilty of the crime of rape.
Georges Lafour
Banque Lafour et Finance Mondiale
Rue Baranot
Paris 75004
But Georges Lafour never saw that page in Le Monde, did not wait to see what would happen when Virginie’s message was published – the strict condition for the release of his stepdaughter. Nor did he wait to see how many other women would step forward, how quickly his world would come tumbling down, how swiftly and certainly he, in his turn, would be ruined.
Instead, as Virginie Cabrille was led from her home, and as bound bundles of the first morning edition thumped on to pavements around Paris, around France, Georges Lafour felt a cold winter rain spatter on to his trembling shoulders and soak through his shirt as he opened his office window and climbed out on to the fifth-floor parapet above rue Baranot.
Confession Page 34