‘Anyone free to come up to Levens with me?’ he said.
55
Backed by the higher peaks of the Férion range, Levens was a full twenty-five kilometres north of the city. From its tree-lined approaches, the village perché looked typical of the genre: a warm-toned spiral of masonry winding around a cone of rock surmounted by a church tower. It was the landscape at its foot that gave the place its unique character: a vast plateau of pan-flat meadows.
‘The Prix du Jockey Club is going on over there, look,’ Bonbon said.
Away to their left, horses were being galloped across a field the size of Nice airport.
‘It looks more like a John Ford movie. Stagecoach or something.’
‘You’re talking my language now, chief. They used to call me Tex Busquet, back home, you know.’
‘They called you Tex?’
‘Yep.’
‘In Perpignan?’
‘Uh-huh. Well, one guy did.’
‘Who was that? The Banyuls-sur-Mer Kid?’
‘Oh, you know him?’
Bonbon kept the nonsense going all the way up into the village – anything to let a little light into Darac’s darkness. He picked up his radio handset. ‘Flak? You read me? Over.’
She and Perand were following immediately behind.
‘Loud and clear. Over.’
‘All the roads down from the village funnel into this one, so in case our phantom motorcyclist decides to make a run for it, park…’ He assessed the options. ‘…right where you are now. We’ll be in touch. Over.’
‘Check. Over and out.’
Flaco faded from the rear-view mirror as Darac continued the pull uphill. Turning away from the village, the road levelled out on to a bare shelf with a view clear across to Mont Férion itself. The target address was the last property on the road – a shabby old place with a couple of rundown outbuildings to the side and chickens pecking around a dirt yard in front. A line of washing blew in a strong breeze sweet with mountain air.
‘Male and female clothing on the line,’ Darac said, sotto voce, as they began crossing the yard. ‘No sign of the motorbike.’
Bonbon’s foxy eyes were darting between the house and the outbuildings that flanked the yard to their left.
‘No lookout, as far as I can see, chief.’
‘Want the front door or back?’
‘I’ll take the back.’
‘I’ll knock – you hold.’
‘Safeties off?’
‘Safeties off.’
As they walked on, the view of the outbuildings opened out.
‘There’s the bike, Bonbon. And someone owns a shotgun, look.’
The machine was parked on its stand in what looked like an old bakehouse. A brace of rabbits was hanging from a row of hooks behind it.
Bonbon nodded. ‘No keys in the ignition by the look of it but they could be secreted on the frame. I’ll go and disconnect the battery, then take that path into the back yard.’
‘Eyes everywhere. Remember the shotgun.’
It took Bonbon a matter of seconds to immobilise the bike. Jetting glances all around, the pair set off toward their respective stations at the same pace. Arriving at the front door, Darac stood for a moment, listening. Chickens murmured busily behind him. Sheets slapped briskly on the line. There were no sounds of raised voices inside the house, or of sudden panicky movements. No one jumped through a window or peppered the step with shot. So far, so good.
The door was opened by an auburn-haired woman wearing jeans and a Breton-style top. A harassed expression put some hard edges on what was a pretty face.
‘Relax, madame,’ Darac said, unfolding a piece of paper, ‘and you might look more like yourself.’ He showed her Astrid’s watercolour from Café Grinda. ‘Don’t you agree?’
The woman tried to slam the door but Darac put his shoulder against it, easing it gently back. He reached for his ID, and, holding it where she could see it, flipped it open.
‘Darac. Brigade Criminelle.’
‘Police?’ She looked anxiously back down the hall. ‘Why didn’t you say so? I wouldn’t have reacted like that. But police?’ she repeated, louder this time. ‘Why are you here?’
A navy-blue crash helmet was hanging from a row of coat hooks behind her. ‘A1’ was stencilled on its back.
‘Is Artur in, Madame Rigaud?’
In the house, a door slammed loudly. And was that a shout? And then another, fainter.
‘It’s the wind. It does that. Artur? Uh… no. He went into…’ Her eyes were everywhere. ‘Why do you want to see him?’
‘So he can tell me the truth about Pierre Delmas.’
In the yard, chickens began to scuttle, squawking noisily.
‘Pierre Delmas?’ More glances behind. And into the yard. Her eyes widened. ‘You’d better come in and wait for Artur, then. Please.’
Looking past her down the hall, Darac took a step inside but went no further.
‘Yes, go through into the kitchen.’ She reached to pull the front door closed behind him. ‘Come right in, please.’
‘So now you want me indoors?’ Her face fell as he stood his ground and turned. Chickens scattering ahead of him, Artur was running his bike across the yard. ‘Stop there!’ Darac called out, moving to intercept him. ‘Stop!’
Artur jumped on to the saddle, releasing the clutch. The engine failed to catch. He hopped off and kept pushing.
‘Forget it, Artur!’ Darac closed in, his arms spread wide. His eyes on the man, he didn’t notice madame creeping up behind him. ‘Your bike’s not going anywhere.’
‘Don’t even think about it!’ Bonbon warned her, hobbling through the front door.
She didn’t think about it. She acted, throwing herself over Darac like a fire blanket. Artur seized his chance. Letting go of the bike, he escaped Darac’s blind flailing and ran toward the lane. A gunshot rang out. All at once, the chickens stopped squawking, and Artur stopped running.
‘Alright. Alright,’ he shouted, raising his hands. He looked across at his wife. ‘It’s over, sweetheart.’
Darac pulled sweetheart up out of the dust, taking a kick on the shin for his pains.
‘This thing can fire just as well horizontally,’ Bonbon said, waving his automatic. ‘Get inside. Both of you.’ Bonbon winced as he flexed his arm. ‘And by the way, you’ll need to re-hang that cellar door, Artur.’
‘I’m sorry about shoving you down there, mate. I panicked.’
‘You in one piece, Bonbon?’ Darac said.
‘Just about.’ He made a shepherding gesture with his automatic. ‘Move!’
‘Hold it a second, Bonbon. Train it on the house.’ Darac drew his own weapon. ‘Where’s your shotgun, Artur?’
‘Inside, mate.’ The situation seemed not to have blunted the man’s bonhomie. ‘But there’s no one in there with it.’
‘I’m scanning the upper storey.’ Bonbon took aim. ‘You take the lower.’
‘Is there an exit out of the back yard?’
‘No. If anyone else is here, they’re in the house.’
Darac glanced behind him. A short section of chest-high wall was all that was left of the right-hand boundary to the property. ‘Let’s get behind there.’ Sights trained on the house, he began backing toward it. ‘You two as well. Come on. Back!’
Reaching the wall, they took cover behind it.
Artur shook his head. ‘This is pointless. There’s no one in there. Is there, Odette?’
‘No.’
‘So Pierre Delmas is not at home, then?’
‘What?’ Artur’s look of astonishment was comically false.
‘If he isn’t, Artur, why were you trying to lead us away from the house?’
At last, the man seemed discomfited. ‘Look, I don’t know why I tried to run off like that. I panicked. But there’s no need for guns.’
‘Pierre? You in there?’ Darac shouted. ‘If you are, come out with your hands up. We don’t want any accidents,
do we? Just come out nice and easily and everything will be fine.’
Artur clicked his tongue in exasperation. ‘I’m telling you, there’s no one—’
‘Shut up.’
Darac kept his eyes on the windows and the rear corner wall of the house. Looking for a shape, movement, shadows – any sign of Delmas or the shotgun. In the no-man’s land of the yard, the motorbike lay jagged in the dust like a slaughtered animal.
No sign coming, Darac took out his mobile. ‘Flak? We’ve apprehended the Rigauds. There’s just a chance Delmas is in the house and he could be armed. If you don’t hear from me in the next five minutes, get back-up.’
‘Check.’
He outlined what he wanted. ‘Have you had anything from Erica?’
‘There have been three calls since the tap went in. Two in, one out. Just routine stuff.’
‘Thanks. Out.’ Darac eyeballed Artur. ‘Alright, you go in first. Then you, madame. We’ll be right behind you.’
‘Oh God,’ Odette said, looking less and less happy with the situation.
Artur smiled at her. ‘You did great, sweetheart.’
‘And you didn’t. You should never have told him’ – she stabbed a finger in Darac’s direction – ‘about Café Grinda.’
‘Look, guys, before we go in, you’re right.’ Artur was talking as if the concession were somehow a gift. ‘Pierre has been here. And I know we’ve done wrong. But somebody had to extend the hand of friendship to the poor bloke, didn’t they?’
‘Where is he?’
‘Dunno. He left this morning. You’d never know he’d been here. Cleaned his room and everything.’
‘You’ve got a lot of ground to make up with me, Artur, so just do as you’re told. Get in the house. We’ll talk more when we’re sure the coast is clear.’
Darac went through every room in the place including the cellar and loft. Delmas was nowhere to be seen. Darac updated Flaco and Perand, then joined the others in the living room.
‘At one end of the scale, Artur, you and your wife have obstructed a police enquiry. At the other end, we could charge you with complicity in murder. We know you’re guilty of the first. How are you doing on the second?’
Muttering that it was the worst day of her life, Odette closed her eyes. Perhaps she was running a loop of all the other days of her marriage. They had little to recommend them, it appeared.
Artur gripped the sides of his chair. ‘We are not guilty. For one thing, Pierre hasn’t committed any murders. He’s as gentle as a kitten, isn’t he, Odette?’
She opened her eyes. ‘Yes.’
‘Where is Delmas now?’
‘I told you – I don’t know. That’s the truth.’
‘Madame?’
She shrugged.
‘How did Delmas come to stay here in the first place?’
‘What with everything he was up against, I felt sorry for the guy. I always did but this was beyond anything. So I asked him if he’d like to come up here. He said he would.’
‘When was that?’
‘The day he got out.’
‘Uh-huh. How did he strike you? What kind of a guest was he?’
‘No trouble. Quiet. Quieter than before, if anything.’ As if there were a sudden need for confidentiality, Artur dropped his voice. ‘He hasn’t got long, you know.’
‘It’s by no means impossible that he could live for several more years.’
Artur was struck dumb, momentarily. ‘Well, that’s good because he’s innocent of these murders, I’m sure of it.’
‘And you, madame? Are you so convinced?’
‘Yes. I am.’
‘And did you find him an easy guest, also?’
‘I’ll be honest with you, Captain…’
Artur’s earnest round eyes narrowed anxiously.
‘I didn’t enjoy having him here. In fact, I hated it.’
‘Odette!’
‘It was alright for you, you were at work during the day. Most of the time. I got so fed up with it yesterday evening, I told him I wanted him to leave. Immediately.’
‘He was still here this morning,’ Bonbon said.
Artur had been quiet for all of ten seconds. ‘I said we couldn’t chuck him out just like that. We had words over it, actually.’
‘But Madame held sway.’
‘We compromised. In the end, we decided to tell Pierre he could stay until tonight. But he’d made up his mind to go, anyway. And so off he went. He didn’t say where he was going.’
Bonbon’s pen was poised over his notebook. ‘We need a description of what he was wearing and what he took with him.’
Odette gave it in some detail.
‘Did he go out much when he was here?’
Artur nodded in the same amiable manner he seemed to adopt for everything. ‘Occasionally.’
‘Did you take him out?’
‘On the bike? Sometimes.’ His forehead creased in concern. ‘Well, the guy had been in prison for seven years plus. He pays his debt to society, comes out and has to bloody hide. Is that fair? I don’t think so.’
‘Did he ever wear a disguise when you were out?’
‘He had a couple of joke-shop beards. That’s all I saw.’
‘Madame?’
‘We don’t know what he had in that holdall of his. Who knows?’
‘When did he leave, exactly?’ Darac said. ‘And how? On the back of your bike?’
‘No, no, on foot. Then maybe he got the bus. Or cadged a lift. Or nicked a push bike. Dunno.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Two hours ago, it was. More or less on the dot.’
‘In a place like this, someone is bound to have seen him. We’ll check that timing, Artur.’
‘Mate, there’s no need to use that tone. We know you’ll check what we tell you. Check away! We want you to check because we know it’ll help Pierre.’
Bonbon was still taking notes. ‘What did you do after he’d gone?’
‘Just started going about our normal day. Until you got here.’
‘Go out anywhere?’
‘No.’
‘Then why was your bike engine warm?’
The question threw Artur, for the moment. And then he slapped his forehead. ‘I tell you – if it weren’t screwed on… I nipped down into the village. Just for bread.’
‘Sure you didn’t drop Pierre Delmas off somewhere at the same time?’
‘No. I told you.’
If the man was lying, he was an expert in the art.
‘Let’s rewind a bit, Artur,’ Darac said. ‘How did you get in contact with Delmas following his release?’
‘I went round to his apartment and he asked me if he could come to my place. We got back here and that’s when he told us about the gang.’ He gave Darac a stare heavy with outrage. ‘Do you know they cheated his daughter?’
Darac made no reply.
‘He was so mad about that. Wasn’t he, Odette? Spitting, he was.’
Odette had a sweet face. But it was capable of an excoriating look.
‘Oh yeah,’ Artur said, taking his foot out of his mouth. ‘Well, I say mad. I don’t mean he was mad enough to do anything about it or anything. A gentle giant, he is. But I tell you what – I don’t know how I would’ve reacted in the circumstances. Do you?’
‘Did he name them – the gang?’
‘No, and I didn’t want to know who they were.’
‘Madame?’
‘No, he didn’t.’
‘Many years before this, you had dinner at Café Grinda with Delmas, madame. How did that come about?’
Odette’s features twisted disagreeably. ‘It was a treat for us. To say thank you for some little thing Artur had done.’
‘But I had a migraine – a blinder – and couldn’t go. I was going to cancel but then I thought – why? I trust the bloke. And I trust the wife – you’ve seen how loyal she is.’
Darac felt a sudden twinge in his shin.
‘So they went, just the two of them. Had a
lovely time.’
Odette stirred in her seat. ‘Lovely? I was bored stupid.’
As the questioning continued, Darac began to develop an uneasy feeling about Monsieur and Madame Rigaud. Odette was pluckily supportive of her husband one minute, utterly dismissive of him the next. It was a pattern he’d encountered before but there seemed something a little forced about it.
‘Returning to the murders of Messieurs Saxe and Aureuil: although you concede Delmas had a strong revenge motive, Artur, you say you’re certain he’s innocent?’
‘Definitely.’
Odette nodded.
‘Pierre is a big man but he’s a gentle giant.’ He dropped his voice. ‘Actually, he’s a wimp if I’m being really honest. Isn’t he, Odette?’ No response. ‘Take it from me.’
‘Okay,’ Darac said. ‘You’re both convinced of Pierre’s innocence and you want to help us prove that, right?’
‘Absolutely, mate.’ Artur seemed to particularly relish the idea. ‘I keep telling you.’
‘Got a pad of paper handy?’
The couple spent the next fifteen minutes constructing a timetable of Pierre Delmas’s movements as they themselves had witnessed them. Leaving them under Bonbon’s watchful eye, Darac went into the yard and made some calls. Throughout, he watched the chickens pecking away at the earth, intent only on what was in front of them. It seemed a life of enviable simplicity. The final call was to the duty officer’s desk at the Caserne.
‘Charvet – any developments in the hunt for the man in the parka?’
‘Tech have come up with something, Captain. But not enough to trouble you with at this stage.’
Darac had been leaning back against the house wall. He eased his weight forward.
‘No, no – go on.’
‘It seems that some of the components the perpetrator had built into your guitar had unusually high values. Only one shop in the area stocks them – a place in Riquier. R.O. has gone over there to see if he can find out more.’
The news buoyed Darac. For every case solved by a piece of inspiration, he knew a hundred more were solved by painstaking checking and slog. Unusually high-value components… If it worked out in the end, it wouldn’t be the first time that overkill had proved a killer’s undoing.
Box of Bones (A Captain Darac Novel 3) Page 28