The Dying Minutes

by Martin O'Brien

What Suchet couldn’t fathom out was why now?

  What was the point?

  And how much would he have to pay to make this go away?

  He’d find out soon enough, he thought.

  19

  IN THE HOMICIDE squad room three floors above rue de l’Évêché, sitting at her corner desk, Isabelle Cassier played the tape for the third time that morning, the volume low, just a murmur. Voices on a phone, back and forth. Two separate calls.

  The tape and two accompanying Zip-lok baggies had arrived in a large cream-coloured envelope the previous week, addressed to Yves Guimpier, her boss, who had promptly handed the investigation over to her, her first solo job since rejoining the team. Nearly four years away, working with the Paris Judiciaire and watching her mother die. Waiting for her mother to die. There had never been any love lost between them, but Isabelle was an only child, no one else to keep the old lady company, caring for her until she was moved to a small hospice in Neuilly, then visiting every week. Three years watching her die, a year spent tidying up, cutting the links, and then walking away.

  Across the room, Isabelle saw Laganne cruise between the desks, heading in her direction. She switched off the recorder and took her feet off her desk. She shouldn’t have worn a skirt. She could see Laganne’s eyes sharpen as she tucked her legs down under her desk. Laganne … sweet, lovely Laganne; he’d tried so hard. A good-looking guy, no question, with the smile and the toothpick and those smoke-squinched grey eyes. But the bitten fingernails cut him out of any running. The thought of those fingers on her, sweet as he was … no way.

  ‘Any luck?’ he asked, sidling up to her desk.

  ‘I’ve been up there twice. The house is empty. Locked up, but not shuttered. According to the local boys the woman’s on holiday. With her daughter. No one knows when they’re due back, but Jacquot didn’t go with them.’

  ‘And no sign of him?’

  Isabelle Cassier shook her head, wondering what was coming. She knew Laganne well enough to realise that he knew something she didn’t. That slight, hovering smile, the way the toothpick moved as he chewed.

  ‘Out with it,’ she said, bending sideways to pull on her shoes, regretting it immediately as she saw Laganne’s eyes latch onto the gap at the top of her blouse.

  Jesus. Men! Didn’t they ever stop …?

  As if the roving eyes and chewed nails weren’t enough, Laganne now perched on the edge of her desk. Something else that she didn’t much like. Some man’s arse parked on her desk without so much as a by-your-leave. Did she do it to them? Perch herself on their desks? No, she did not. Even if they might have liked it.

  The toothpick swivelled to the other corner of Laganne’s mouth.

  ‘He’s here. In Marseilles. Charlie bumped into him the other night at Gallante. Seems he’s got himself a boat. Moored off Rive Neuve. Couple of the lads have been over, dropped by for a drink, and it’s like Danny’s turned sailor boy.’

  ‘And no one thought to mention it to me? That he’s here, in Marseilles. That I didn’t have to haul myself all the way to Cavaillon and waste a couple of days …’

  Laganne tipped back, not expecting the broadside.

  ‘Me. I’m here, aren’t I? I’m telling you.’

  Isabelle drew a breath, calmed herself. She’d overreacted. She knew why. Finding the house in the Lubéron all closed up had been a relief, truth be told. Not having to face him again. Postponing it. Even after four years. But now there was no avoiding it. The time had come. He was here, in Marseilles. In the Vieux Port. Just minutes away from rue de l’Évêché.

  ‘Address? I mean, a mooring? A name?’

  ‘Tasty little cabin cruiser, Charlie said. Old, but nice lines. Very snug …’

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Laganne.

  Isabelle didn’t need to ask. Charlie, and whoever else had called in on Jacquot, had probably drunk too much, couldn’t recall what or where. She reached for her phone, nodded a curt thanks to Laganne and dialled the switchboard.

  ‘Can you get me the Capitainerie? That’s right. Le Vieux Port.’

  20

  IT WAS STRANGE to be back in the city and not working, Jacquot decided. For nearly twenty years he’d been with the Judiciaire on rue de l’Évêché, just the other side of the harbour, working with the homicide squad and rising to Chief Inspector before a forced reassignment to run a serious-crime unit in Cavaillon. He’d recognised a dead-end posting when he saw one, but so far Cavaillon had kept him surprisingly busy. It wasn’t Marseilles, but six months into the new posting he’d met Claudine again, and his life had changed, and he was happy with it and settled.

  Yet now, without planning it, he was back in the city, right in the heart of it, the city where he’d been born as well as worked. A true Marseillais. And apart from an overnight stay at the millhouse on Sunday, to check the place was still in one piece, to pick up supplies and some suitable clothes, and for his final session with the physio Monday morning, he’d been here for six days now. Six days afloat, and loving every minute of it, each day simply divided into mornings and afternoons and evenings, with nothing more serious than lunch and supper to consider, and nothing beyond a few simple jobs to see to on Constance.

  As Salette had said, there wasn’t much that needed doing beyond a little care and attention here and there. The interior was immaculate, the panelling, shelves, drawers, table and decking smartly varnished and in good order, and thanks to the tarp cover the exterior had been spared the worst of the damage sun and salt could wreak. Apart from a few scuff marks from the fenders on the curved black-painted hull, there were just a few patches of woodwork that needed sanding and varnishing, and some blistered paint on the cabin roofs to deal with – all of them small jobs that took little time to complete, paint and varnish drying quickly in the sun.

  He’d also set up a sound system, with a simple tape deck that didn’t drain too much of Constance’s batteries, and had brought in a selection of tapes from his car. Maybe down the road, he thought, he’d fix some speakers on deck, but for now just the background hum of some old favourites coming up from below was just fine. And as he worked – sanding the woodwork on the mahogany transom, laying the varnish over the smoothed timbers – he listened to those old favourites, a pleasing, gentle soundtrack to his new life afloat: Stan Getz, some Nina Simone, J. J. Cale, Ella and Clapton; blues and Latin and samba and rock. Never too loud, just there, at the level of the breeze, enough to cover the murmur of traffic.

  As for the accommodation on board Constance, it may have been cramped quarters after the millhouse, and the bed in her for’ard cabin neither as wide nor as long nor as soft as his bed back home, but what Constance lacked in space, she made up for in one particular and important regard. With Claudine away, the millhouse had been cold and lonely, but on Constance there was nothing of her to pick at his guts or trouble his mind. And while he still missed Claudine, and longed for her return, he had to admit that his time with Constance had not only eased the loneliness, it had been an unexpected delight. Indeed, he wondered how he would have coped without her.

  He’d also got to know his neighbours. Not that there were many to know. From Friday evening until he left for Cavaillon on Sunday afternoon, the pontoon had swayed and squeaked with weekend sailors, at least twenty of the sixty or so craft moored along his pontoon visited by their owners: tinkering around, taking them out, even just coming for a lunch or a dinner on deck in the late-summer sunshine. But since he’d got back on Monday afternoon, there’d been hardly a movement, just a sense of the two other resident boat owners living on their vessels between him and the quay.

  When you live on a boat, on a hundred-metre length of pontoon, it’s not easy avoiding your neighbours, that slatted pathway between sea and dry land taking you close enough to them to exchange some form of greeting, introduction, explanation, an instant closeness and comforting camaraderie not often evident on land. Contact was made on Jacquot’s first morning back after the weeken
d sailors had departed, on his way to the boulangerie.

  ‘If you’re passing Chamère’s, be a darling and bring me back a couple of almond croissants.’

  The voice, rich and gravelly from too many Gitanes, belonged to a woman in her early-sixties, rising out of the hatchway on a beaten-up old ketch called Joya. She had ashy grey hair that was more straggly than straight, and was dressed in a dirty cream shift that looked like one of Claudine’s studio smocks. Her name, as he discovered when he duly returned with her almond croissants and was invited aboard, was Gala Desfornado – her maiden name, she informed him after the introductions had been made. Jacquot liked her immediately. A big, bold woman who didn’t look like she took too many prisoners.

  She asked if he had met their other neighbour – a wiry, tanned fifty year old who lived close to the quay on a twelve-metre Jeanneau named Les Vents – and when Jacquot told her that he had not, she told him all he needed to know.

  ‘Michel’s his name. Michel Charbon. The pair of us are divorced. Not from each other, you understand. It’s just the way we ended up. His ex took the house and left him the boat. Me, I took the boat and left that salaud I married with the house he’d grown up in. A mausoleum, it was. No loss. As for Michel, he’s a nice enough fellow. Keeps to himself, he does, and a real sailor. Always off on jaunts. Me, I stay put. Last time this old bird was out – the boat, not me – Giscard was running the country.’

  Michel Charbon might have kept himself to himself, but later that afternoon he’d called by asking for a ball-peen hammer he’d lent Niko a few months earlier. Jacquot had invited him on board, found the hammer and returned it, and offered a glass of wine, which Michel had accepted. Twenty minutes later, after explaining how he’d inherited Constance, just as he’d told Gala, he learned that Michel was off the following day for a one-hander to Corsica.

  ‘A lovely island,’ Michel had told him. ‘Have you been?’

  When Jacquot informed him that his father was Corsican, and that he had been there many times, Michel beamed.

  ‘Then I’ll bring back some prizutto to make you feel homesick. Best ham in the world. I’ll be gone a month, but when I return you must come on over and have some.’ And with that, Michel had taken his hammer, bade Jacquot adieu and bonne chance, and scurried back along the pontoon to complete his preparations for a dawn departure.

  By the end of that first week, Jacquot felt as though he’d spent a lifetime aboard Constance. He’d met his neighbours, bumped into some old friends on his trips into town, gone to some of his favourite haunts, and in just a few days Constance had a shine to her, if not as good as new then certainly close to it, as though Jacquot’s gentle pampering and attention and simple occupation had brought something to her, like a woman flattered, spoiled and loved. The painted cabin roof shone, the varnished woodwork gleamed, the wheelhouse windshield and the glass faces of the instrument panel had been polished free of salty deposits and the brass framings of the portholes buffed to a rich golden glow. As for the engine, a pair of Volvo turbo diesels recently serviced, Salette’s assurances were borne out when he took Jacquot out on his maiden voyage.

  ‘She’s a tough old girl,’ Salette told him as they left the main harbour and met heavier water beyond the bar. ‘But not wide enough to take a big wave from the beam, or head on. Whenever you can, take them on the shoulder, so she’ll rise to them.’

  It was evening and the sun was setting behind them, a shimmering gold disc that sank into the shouldering bulk of the Sausset headlands. As they passed Cap Croisette, riding between Île Maire and Les Goudes, they followed the bare white limestone slopes until Salette told Jacquot to bring her round to port, pointing out where he wanted to drop anchor in the narrow calanque he’d selected.

  ‘If you take her out on your own, you’re going to have to be able to do all this without my help. So, fais attention, s’il te plaît.’ And he’d guided Jacquot through the approach and the manoeuvring until the anchor was over and Jacquot left panting up in the bow, just a warm ache in his buttock and thigh reminding him of his injury. ‘Voilà, we’ll make a sailor of you yet.’

  They’d stayed overnight, moored in the calanque, warming up a thick, meaty broth that Salette had brought with him, spooning it up under a narrow canopy of stars, talking about Constance and Philo and the old days when Salette had crewed with his father, Vincent. They’d stayed up too late, talked too much, and drunk too much – the sea seemed to do that, Jacquot decided – and by the time he’d successfully reversed into his Vieux Port berth the following morning, Jacquot was relieved to find that the heavy head had lightened. Something else the sea seemed to do.

  An hour later, Salette long gone, Jacquot was back at work, down on his knees and greasing the brass runners on the cabin hatchway, when a shadow fell across the deck.

  ‘Permission to come aboard, skipper?’

  21

  IT WAS A woman’s voice. A voice Jacquot knew. That familiar lilt, the softness bordered by a rougher edge. He looked up, wiped a forearm across his eyes, and squinted into the sun.

  ‘They said I’d find you here,’ the voice continued.

  And then he saw her.

  ‘C’est pas possible … I don’t believe it.’

  He jumped to his feet without thinking and a sharp pain started up in his thigh, as though the muscles were a beat or two behind any sudden movement.

  ‘Old age?’ she asked, as he came down the gangplank and stepped carefully on to the pontoon.

  ‘A nine-millimetre slug that passed perilously close to all I hold dear.’

  He brushed off his hands against his shorts and reached for her, brought her into his embrace. ‘I don’t believe it,’ he said again, stepping back and holding her at arm’s length, the better to take her in. She looked just the same. The slim wiry figure, the lightly tanned skin not quite dark enough to cover the scatter of freckles across the bridge of her nose, the straight black hair cut to the shoulder, long enough to pin up at the back, or to swing to and fro when she laughed, when she made love … ‘Isabelle Cassier, as I live and breathe.’

  ‘The same. Also living and breathing,’ she replied, eyes twinkling with delight, her smile bright, dimpling her cheeks.

  ‘I bumped into some of the boys the other night,’ said Jacquot. ‘They told me you were back.’

  ‘So I heard,’ she replied. ‘Quite a reunion, I believe.’

  Jacquot grinned. ‘You know how it is. But I’m forgetting my manners. Please, won’t you come aboard? Here …’ And he held out a hand, helped her along the gangplank and down on to the rear deck, taking in the laced black bootees with a small heel, the tailored black blouse, a black skirt that looked tight on her but which he knew would be loose enough to run in if she had to, with a matching three-button black jacket that was roomy enough to take her badge and conceal the bulge of the Beretta service pistol she’d be carrying. Right side for a left-hander, and at the hip not under the arm like most of the boys working homicide on rue de l’Évêché.

  ‘You’re looking good,’ he said. And then, softly, ‘I heard about your mother. I’m sorry.’

  Isabelle shrugged it away. ‘It was time. For her, and for me. So here I am, back in Marseilles.’ She gave him a sly look as she dropped into the canvas chair he opened up for her, set in the shade of the wheelhouse. ‘And I missed the sun. You know it’s raining up there this morning, in Paris? Who’d want that?’

  A silence settled between them, and as Jacquot brought out another chair, set it up and sat himself down, Isabelle Cassier took the opportunity to look him over. The same large hands, the same deep scar-like laughter lines set around those green eyes, the same low, smoky voice. And in his shorts and T-shirt it was clear his body was just as she remembered. He may have lost some weight but he still looked hard and muscly. There was only one thing missing.

  ‘I see the ponytail’s gone.’

  ‘Line of duty,’ he replied, making himself comfortable. ‘Maybe I’ll grow it back.’
Then he nodded at the briefcase at her feet. ‘But I’m guessing this is not just a social call.’

  ‘You’re right, it’s not,’ she said, and for the first time Isabelle looked uncomfortable. ‘I’m afraid I have some questions you need to answer.’

  Jacquot gave a little grunt of surprise. ‘That sounds a little formal.’

  ‘And that’s exactly what it is.’

  22

  ‘TELL ME ABOUT Gilles Barsin.’

  Jacquot’s head snapped back as if he’d been slapped. This was something he hadn’t been expecting. Barsin. Just like that. Out of the blue. After all this time. Twenty-five years – maybe more?

  Jacquot could see him now. In the blink of an eye. Tall, with stooped shoulders. The close-cropped grey hair, the drooping, tired eyes, the big tombstone front teeth over a rat’s chin. And those silvery sharkskin suits he wore with the narrow lapels, the elastic-sided boots with the tabs to pull them on, and usually a blue and cream tie, Marseilles’ Olympique club colours, loosely knotted in a grimy unbuttoned collar.

  ‘You know the name, of course.’

  ‘Oh, yes. I know the name.’

  ‘You worked together.’

  ‘A long time ago.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘What’s this about, Isabelle?’

  ‘Just tell me what you know. That’s all you have to do.’

  ‘Tell you what exactly?’

  ‘About Barsin and you. Whatever you can remember.’

  ‘Should I call a lawyer?’

  ‘Do you want to?’

  ‘Do I need to?’

  Isabelle shrugged, tried on a smile for size. It didn’t quite work.

  Jacquot saw it, and smiled back. She might have caught him on the hop, but sensing her discomfort made him feel just a little more in control. Et alors, there was nothing to lose, nothing that he did need to worry about … as far as he could remember. But internal investigations, as he well knew, had a dynamic all of their own, and this looked like the start of one. Forget direct complicity or implication, sometimes simple association was enough to end a career. The wrong place, at the wrong time.