The Dying Minutes

by Martin O'Brien

  Easy enough to fake, thought Jacquot. Just mix a healthy stool with water, smear it around, clutch your belly and groan. There was a kid at the orphanage Jacquot had been sent to, after his mother died in an anarchist bomb blast, who did it to get off the work rota.

  ‘Did Castel have anything to do with Lombard? asked Jacquot. ‘Did the two men know each other?’ He finished his cigarette and dropped it into an empty soda can; he’d stopped flicking his butts into the harbour after being told off by Michel Charbon.

  Isabelle shook her head. ‘Castel was kept in solitary, away from the general prison population, so their paths wouldn’t have crossed. And it seems unlikely they’d have known each other outside. As far as Ranque and the prison doctor were concerned, Lombard died of natural causes. They’d been expecting it.’

  ‘Did you tell them about Clisson’s findings? The bite-marks?’

  ‘Just Ranque. He’s promised to look into it, but he did say that there’s not a lot he can do. Castel is hardly likely to confess anything – why should he? And how much time can one man serve, when he’s already in for life and no parole? He’ll die in Les Baumettes.’

  ‘Tell me about Ranque.’

  Isabelle sighed, played with her wine.

  ‘Slimy. You know the sort. Slick, smart and charming on the outside, but underneath …’ She shook her head. ‘I didn’t like him.’

  ‘How well do you know him?’

  ‘I’ve met him just once. When I went to see Lombard.’

  ‘He was there? With you?’

  ‘No, he asked to see me after the visit.’

  ‘Was he there with Dupont, do you know?’

  ‘Not with him. Lawyer-client privilege, he told me. But he was waiting outside. I remember in his office, he was keen to know what was going on. The interest in Lombard. First his lawyer, then the police, just weeks apart.’

  ‘Did you tell him about Dupont? That you believed he’d been given something by Lombard. Something he’d likely been killed for.’

  Isabelle nodded.

  ‘And how did he react?’

  ‘He didn’t really. Just … interested.’

  Jacquot took this in.

  ‘Why?’ asked Isabelle. ‘Do you think Ranque might be involved? In the Dupont thing, with Lombard?’

  ‘Who knows?’ sighed Jacquot. ‘But it all feels just … too close, too comfortable.’

  And then the mood changed.

  ‘So what’s a girl have to do to get some food around here?’ she began. ‘Or are you going to take me to Mirador?’

  ‘Not quite the Mirador, but pretty close,’ replied Jacquot.

  52

  WHILE ISABELLE STAYED on deck with her wine, Jacquot went below and prepared some food, handing up a dish of sliced hams and salamis and a tub of rillettes from Charcuterie Brignolards on rue Cevennes, a green pepper salad, three different cheeses from Fromagerie du Port on rue Cartone and a grande rustique from Chamère, the boulangerie just a block back from the harbour. He could have set up the trestle table he had bought and kept stowed in the for’ard cabin, but he spread out a rug instead, took the cushions from the seats and laid everything out picnic style. Hunkered down like that all you could see were masts and sky and the top floors of the buildings along Quai Rive Neuve, the rising slopes of Le Panier and the spotlit spire of Les Accoules.

  ‘I forgot to tell you,’ she began, pulling a cork. ‘I saw you on TV the other night.’

  Jacquot groaned. He knew what was coming. With the Rugby World Cup fast approaching, the sport channels had started running old footage of the French national squad. Great tries, great victories. In recent years there had been few to compare with Jacquot’s own try, the length of the pitch at Twickenham. A Five Nations final. Against the English. The winning try, with just minutes to go to the final whistle. It was the first and last time Jacquot had played in the blue strip, with the gold coq on his chest, seen off the pitch with a snapped Achilles tendon just weeks after that debut appearance. Twenty years on, it seemed like another life, another person, but even without the ponytail he wore back then, there were people who still recognised Jacquot, the size of him, the broken nose, the name. For some, that’s all it took before a drink came his way, or a hand slapped his back, or someone caught his eye, gave him a nod of recognition.

  That’s what his life had been back then. The rugby. Playing for club and country. Sometimes it was difficult to escape, impossible to forget.

  ‘You looked very young,’ she said, filling their glasses.

  ‘Looked? I haven’t changed a bit.’

  She laughed. ‘It was a fantastic try. I never thought you’d make it.’

  ‘Nor did I,’ said Jacquot. ‘The longest seventeen seconds in my life.’

  ‘I knew you’d done it, of course. I’d heard the stories around headquarters. But I’d never seen it.’

  ‘They’d only just invented TV back then. The footage must have been black-and-white.’

  ‘That Englishman got so close. Catching you up. And then, when he went for the tackle, my heart was in my mouth.’

  ‘If it hadn’t been for the mud, I’d never have crossed the line. I just slid the last few metres. The great sliding try. I had more mud up my nose than on my boots.’

  Somewhere a police siren started up, a distant, rising whooh-whooh-whooh over the drone of harbour traffic. As they worked away on their supper, they listened to its pulse soften and disappear. When it had gone, they caught each other’s eye and laughed, hunkered down on Constance’s rear-deck like naughty children hiding from their parents.

  ‘The commentator said you never played again,’ Isabelle continued.

  ‘Not for La France. And only once more at club level, just a couple of weeks later. One of the scrum, a big fellow from Béziers … my own side, would you believe? … dropped himself on the back of my leg. My foot was pointing in the wrong direction. Snap.’ Jacquot flicked his fingers.

  ‘And that was that?’

  ‘That was that.’ He passed her a basket of the bread and watched her break off a wedge, wipe it through the remains of her salad.

  ‘Do you miss it?’

  Jacquot sighed, not sure how to answer truthfully. It was something he often wondered, as the years passed and he grew older. ‘Not the playing,’ he began. ‘I’d be dead meat on a field now. But watching it is wonderful. Sometimes, at the end of a match, my legs are aching from all the running.’

  ‘So tell me about your wife. Claudine, isn’t it?’

  It was an ordinary enough question, but coming so close after the rugby it threw Jacquot a little. He put aside his plate and reached for his cigarettes.

  ‘Not my wife. We’re not married. I asked her once but she said “no”.’ Jacquot lit the cigarette, blew out a column of smoke over their heads and gave a light chuckle.

  ‘She has a lovely voice.’

  ‘That’s exactly what she said about you. I had to tell her you looked like a wrestler.’

  ‘Well, thanks for that,’ laughed Isabelle. ‘So when did you meet? Tell me all.’

  The telling made Jacquot feel comfortable: the Gallery Ton-Ton here in Marseilles, Claudine’s first exhibition, the canvas with the lemons, the hotel in Luissac. It allowed him to construct a wall, to let Isabelle know in the kindest, most complete way that he was happily involved.

  ‘Does she come here much? To the boat?’

  ‘She’s been a couple of times, but boats and pregnant women don’t really mix.’ It wasn’t altogether true but it served its purpose, given the circumstances; letting Isabelle down gently, in case she had anything other than friendship or professional matters on her mind.

  ‘She’s pregnant? You didn’t say. I didn’t know. But that’s great. When’s the baby due?’

  ‘Christmas. The New Year,’ replied Jacquot, deciding to hold back on Claudine’s latest news about twins.

  ‘A new century baby, how lovely! Boy or girl? Do you know?’

  Jacquot told her they
didn’t know, hadn’t asked, didn’t want to know. They’d deliberately kept it quiet, he told her, and he hoped she wouldn’t say anything at headquarters. Not yet anyway.

  ‘So what’s it feel like to be a dad?’

  ‘Frightening,’ said Jacquot, with a nervous laugh.

  ‘I bet,’ said Isabelle.

  And that’s where their supper ended. When Jacquot dropped his cigarette into the soda can, Isabelle glanced at her watch, said it was time to go, that she mustn’t keep him. She offered to help with the clearing up but he waved the offer away. She didn’t press it, for which he was thankful. Instead he walked her along the pontoon, and saw her through the security gate.

  ‘Let me know how things pan out. Anything I can do.’

  ‘You can count on it,’ she said, and with a parting kiss, a smile, she turned and walked away along the streetlit Quai Rive Neuve.

  53

  ISABELLE CASSIER HAD taken three lovers since she and Daniel Jacquot had parted company four years earlier. The last of these had been her superior officer at Police Headquarters on Île de la Cité in Paris. They met at least twice a week in a small pied-à-terre he rented for just such assignments off place Joubert in the Latin Quarter. It was up in the eaves of an old house overlooking a corner of the Luxembourg Gardens. There was a small sitting room with a bed that came out of the wall, an electric kettle, a one-ring camping stove, and a cramped, windowless shower-room with a sink, bidet and lavatory. They rarely used the stove or kettle. If they were hungry, they stopped for a coffee and Danish in the small café on the ground floor.

  At first, Isabelle had found it exciting and sexy but she soon tired of it, just as she tired of the five floors she had to climb every time he left a note on her desk. The same note. Just two words. Rue Cayenne. And the time – anything between breakfast and supper.

  When, eventually, the officer’s wife found out about their liaison, she had reported them both. It was in the way of these things that Isabelle had been the one disciplined, a transfer hastily arranged to a posting of her choice. She had asked for Cannes or Biarritz; somewhere far from Paris but close to the sea. So they gave her Marseilles. No choice. No argument. No room for manoeuvre. The last time she saw her lover, he was putting a note on his new secretary’s desk. After he’d left the building she stopped at the girl’s desk, took a look at the note. Just two words. Rue Cayenne, 2:45. She’d changed the time, the two to a three. Let the bastard wait. It was a small revenge, but it made her feel better.

  Back in Marseilles once more, Isabelle had been surprised how often she found herself thinking of Jacquot, how far he strayed into her thoughts. He might have moved to Cavaillon but at police headquarters on rue de l’Évêché, up in the squad room on the third-floor again, he was everywhere. The ghost of him. And despite herself she regretted that she had let him go so easily, calling him from the very desk she now occupied to tell him that she could not continue with a man who did not feel the same for her as she felt for him.

  For that was what it had been.

  That was what had come between them.

  Jacquot was a great cop – intuitive, focused, almost magically talented. And he had been a caring, glorious lover. But from that first night in Marseilles – the dinner at Mirador, the house bourride and lemon soufflé, his wide bed beneath the rooftiles in Le Panier – his heart had not been in it.

  A reluctant lover, marking time.

  And now, four years later, soon to be a father.

  The news had stunned her. But as she cut up past the spotlit Hôtel de Ville into the stepped warren of Le Panier she decided that it was not necessarily an obstacle.

  Because there was still something there between them, she was sure of it.

  Maybe she had been wrong four years ago.

  Maybe she had just misread it.

  Maybe his heart had been in it.

  And maybe now was the time to win him back.

  54

  PATRIC POLINEAUX LAY on his bed and looked the girl over. She was young, mid-twenties he guessed. A blonde, as requested, in a flower print dress, a red scarf tied bandeau-style across the top of her head, knotted at the back of her neck, lifting the wavy curls just so.

  ‘Go to the window,’ he growled. ‘Open the shutters.’

  The girl did as she was told. Crossing the room she flipped the latches and pushed the shutters open, pressing them back against the outside walls, moonlight spilling over her, turning the blonde hair a silvery white.

  Polineaux sighed. So like her. Every movement, from the swirl of the dress down to the bare legs and tip-toes as the girl leaned out of the window to secure the shutters.

  ‘Now rest against the window ledge, look out into the garden, and touch yourself, your breasts. Just softly. Nothing more. As though you are dreaming of your lover.’

  Again the girl did as she was told, everything going as the younger man who’d greeted her had said it would. A bit of a hulk, she thought as her fingers slid between her breasts. Didier was his name. She’d like a bit of that, she thought. Instead she was here with the old man, her first time.

  ‘Just do whatever he tells you,’ Didier had told her, taking her coat, looking her over, then leading her up the stairs to the old man’s bedroom. ‘There’s nothing to be frightened of. It’s really very easy.’

  ‘I know who he is,’ she whispered. ‘Madame told me.’

  ‘And what did Madame say?’ asked Didier.

  ‘She said he was a dangerous man. A real parrain. And to do as I was told or else.’

  ‘So there you are. That’s all you have to do. And it’s nothing that you can’t handle. Now then,’ he said, coming to a stop outside Polineaux’s room, his voice dropping to a whisper. ‘Take off the shoes, you have to be barefoot. And remember, don’t speak to him, don’t say a word.’

  And then he’d knocked softly, opened the door for her, and slipped away.

  Down in the gardens a frog croaked over the swish-click, swish-click of the arrosage, the lawns drenched and sparkling in the moonlight. She wondered what it would be like to walk over that wet grass, feel it spongy and soft underfoot. To live in a house like this … Some people had all the luck.

  ‘Undo the buttons,’ she heard the old man say, just a shadow on the bed in the silvery darkness, his voice a little croaky, his hand waving in the air, spinning a finger, like a conductor. ‘Slowly, slowly,’ he added as she set to on them, a little too swiftly. ‘That’s better. That’s better. And when you reach the waist just open the front of your dress, slip it from your shoulders.’

  When she’d finished with the buttons, the girl used both hands, left hand to right shoulder, then right hand to left shoulder, fingers slipping beneath the silk, lifting it, pushing it away. Shrugging out of it. Letting the top of the dress slide down her arms, to fall around her waist.

  She heard the sigh across the room, over the croaking of the frog and the swishing of the sprinklers. A long, drawn out sigh. Had she done enough? she wondered. Had he finished already? Money for old rope if he had, she thought; if that was all it was.

  ‘Move away from the window, ma chérie, but stay in the moonlight,’ she heard him say. ‘Voilà, just there, that’s perfect. Now slip off the dress …’ which she did with a coquettish wriggle, ‘… that’s right, and now raise your arms, like a dancer … untie the scarf, let it drop … and tip back your head, shake out your hair … Parfait, parfait.’

  She did exactly as he told her, beginning now to enjoy the performance, being directed like this, not having to think. And far enough away from the bed to feel safe, unless he had a gun to hand. She stiffened at the thought, felt a shiver race across her shoulders.

  He must have noticed. ‘You’re cold, chérie, come to the bed, sit beside me, with your back to me.’

  She did as she was told. The bed was hard and she could smell him now, a spray of cologne not strong enough to cover the scent of embrocation, bad breath, of those hidden places. Old man smell. And this one wit
h no legs. She prayed he wouldn’t want to kiss her.

  That’s when she heard the rustle of the sheet that covered him, sensed the give in the mattress and felt his fingers on her back. Long, soft strokes, the backs of his knuckly fingers.

  ‘In the bedside drawer,’ he said, ‘you’ll find a pack of cigarettes. Light one, smoke it.’

  She leaned forward, slid open the drawer, found the cigarettes, a lighter. She put one to her lips and raised the lighter. Lucky she smoked, she thought.

  ‘Turn away when you light it,’ she heard him say, and she did as she was told. Flick, flick; the flame held and she touched it to the cigarette, inhaled. Menthol. They were menthol cigarettes. She hated menthol. But she smoked it, breathing it in, softly whistling it out.

  ‘Where are you, my love?’ she heard him whisper, softly, wistfully, almost under his breath. ‘Where did you go? Why did you leave me?’

  She wondered what to do, whether she should respond in some way. She’d been told not to speak but it seemed wrong not to answer.

  What to do? What to do?

  And what should she do with the cigarette?

  Where should she put the ash?

  And then, from nowhere, out of the moonlit darkness, came the slap to the side of her head, a massive weighty blow that snapped her teeth together, rocked her head on her shoulders, and sent stars spinning across her eyes. The cigarette spun from her fingers, skittered across the tiled floor.

  ‘Bitch!’ he screamed. ‘Bitch, bitch, bitch!’ And she felt his fingers wrap round her arm, pull her to him, shake her. And another mighty slap followed the first, to the other side of her head this time, as she struggled to get away from him, sliding off the bed, knees on the floor, her arm still held by that clawing grip, desperately trying to pull free, too stunned to cry out, to fight back.

  ‘Whore-bitch. You whore-bitch,’ he swore, gripping her arm with one hand, swiping at her with the other. ‘How dare you do that? How dare you do that? To me. To me.’ One dizzying blow after another, punctuating the words, until she was aware of light from the bedroom door, light from the hallway, and Didier hurrying towards her, loosening the old man’s grip, pulling her away, scooping up her clothes, dragging her across the room, out of the door, the old man still swiping at thin air, ranting like a madman.