Blood Counts

by Martin O'Brien

  ‘There’s something else,’ said Brunet, a dismissive wave of the hand, as though whatever he had to say really was of no importance, and he couldn’t think why he’d bothered to bring it up.

  Jacquot knew that wouldn’t be the case. His assistant loved keeping the best for last. When Brunet didn’t say anything, Jacquot had to press him.

  ‘Eh bien,’ began Brunet, perching on the edge of his boss’s desk. ‘We have a maybe identification. From the photos.’

  ‘Who? Where? When?’

  ‘A friend of one of the uniform boys, Gaston Lapierre. He manages the Total garage on Avenue de Verdun. Coming into town from the autoroute, you drive right past it. No good for servicing, of course, now that Gaston’s boss has run down the workshop,’ added Brunet, for a little bit of local colour, ‘but the gas is cheaper than Briol’s place.’

  ‘Oui, oui, thank you,’ said Jacquot. ‘But what did he see? And when?’

  ‘A man and a woman. In a VW. A Beetle, he thinks. Dark colour: black, blue, green . . . he can’t quite recall. Filled the tank late afternoon, a few days before the Gilbert wedding in St-Florent. At first glance, from behind the till, he thought the driver was a man – wearing trousers and a trucker’s cap – but when he came in to pay, Gaston realised it was a woman.’

  ‘She pay card or cash?’

  Brunet spread his hands, regretfully. ‘Cash, what else?’

  ‘Registration?’

  A shrug this time from Brunet.

  ‘Young or old?’

  ‘Mid to late thirties, Gaston reckoned.’

  ‘And the passenger?’

  ‘He didn’t get a good look, but reckoned it was the husband. Tall, thinnish, a little older, wearing what looked like a leather jacket. Said the one who paid was wearing jeans tucked into black boots, and a blue jumper. Well-built girl, he said. Which means she had tits on her.’

  A blue jumper. Jacquot remembered the threads taken from the service hatch at Le Mas Bleu, snagged on the rough wood.

  Blue threads. Maybe, maybe . . .

  ‘I get the picture. Anything else. Voice? Accent?’

  ‘Two words was all she said. “M’sieur” when she went in to pay, and “Merci” when she took her change and left. The only reason he remembered her was the boobs.’

  ‘And they were coming into town, or leaving?’

  ‘Gaston thinks they were heading out, but he couldn’t say for certain.’

  Jacquot gave this some thought.

  ‘So a few days before the wedding, if it’s them, they’re either heading for the autoroute or they’ve just come off it, which suggests they don’t live locally.’

  ‘If it’s them.’

  ‘Any luck with hotels, pensions, chambres d’hôtes . . . ?’

  ‘Nothing between Cavaillon and Apt and a dozen kilometres north and south – Cadenet, Lourmarin, Pertuis and up to Gordes, Roussillon. But like you said, maybe they came further. Drove in for the day and then hit the autoroute back home.’

  In other words, Jacquot realised, there was no point pursuing that particular avenue. The further they went from Cavaillon, the more places they’d have to screen. It wasn’t worth the effort right now – not on such a slim chance, and with such limited resources. Of course, if he’d followed the plague pit ‘mourners’ at Minette Peluze’s funeral, he might have got to see what they drove. If it had been a VW, then they’d have had something to go on.

  If only, if only.

  Instead . . .

  17

  MORE THAN A MONTH AFTER Noël Gilbert had woken to find his new wife dead in bed beside him, the police investigation into her murder had got no further than two suspects, a man and a woman, in their thirties, maybe forties, driving a black or dark blue or green VW, last seen at a Cavaillon garage a few days before the murder, possibly the same two people in the three pictures taken at the church in St-Florent, in the procession down its main street, and outside the gates of the Blanchards’ farmhouse. And possibly the same couple that Jacquot had taken for ‘mourners’ at the cemetery in La Bouilladisse.

  Possibly. Nothing more certain than that.

  As far as he and his team had been able to ascertain, their two suspects had not been guests at the church ceremony, or at the reception and hog roast that followed, and no one they had interviewed remembered seeing them with the exception of Noël Gilbert and the garagiste Gaston Lapierre. As for the murder weapon, a 9mm automatic with silencer, police had searched the grounds of Le Mas Bleu, swept the storm culverts either side of the Maubec–Robion road, and retraced the killers’ route through the vineyards, but found nothing.

  ‘What about the car?’ asked Guy Fourcade, Cavaillon’s examining prosecutor, who had called Jacquot in to review an investigation that was rapidly grinding to a halt. The two men were sitting in Fourcade’s office in the Magistrates’ building, a set of three french windows behind his desk overlooking place Lombard in the old town. One of the windows was latched open, the leaves on the plane trees outside shifting gently in an afternoon breeze. It was not a meeting that Jacquot had been looking forward to. When investigations stalled, it was Fourcade’s job to get them started again, or know the reason why.

  Fourcade was in his late forties, still fresh-faced with bright enquiring eyes and a tidy crop of short black hair, and though he projected an air of easy camaraderie – all on the same team, kind of thing – Jacquot wasn’t taken in. After their first few encounters he had mentioned it to Claudine: the frosty edge to Fourcade, that thin, covering smile.

  She had told him all he needed to know. ‘He played rugby to club level, but unlike you he never made it any further. And he was not a happy man when I had to make it clear to him a few years back that I was not interested in taking him to my bed. Oh, and the hair is not his own.’

  Three very good reasons, Jacquot supposed, but still no excuse.

  ‘According to the garage-man, Lapierre, it wasn’t anything special,’ replied Jacquot. ‘A Beetle, he thinks. Dusty, dirty. Done some travelling, he said.’

  ‘So not a rental then? Privately owned?’

  ‘That’s how it looks,’ said Jacquot. ‘But without a registration number . . .’ He spread his hands. He didn’t have to say anything more. Both men knew that Volkswagen Beetles might not have been the most popular car in France, but there were enough of them around to make tracing one an almost impossible undertaking. And, as Brunet had speculated, it didn’t even need to be French. It could as easily have been registered in Germany, or the Netherlands, or Switzerland. Indeed anywhere in mainland Europe.

  The two men fell silent, Fourcade with his elbows on his desk, twisting a pencil between his fingers, Jacquot sitting back in his chair, legs crossed.

  ‘So what’s next, Daniel?’

  ‘We have an alert out for any incident involving our likely suspects, a man and a woman in their thirties, early forties, driving a dark-coloured VW, and on the drug used on Gilbert. Right now, there’s nothing more we can do – until something else happens, something we can tie into the Gilbert murder.’

  ‘You don’t believe this is a stand-alone?’

  Jacquot could tell from his tone that Fourcade thought it was.

  ‘There’s just no reason for it, Maître. A country girl? New husband put out for the count while she gets a bullet in the eye? And the killer uses a silencer? We’ve been through Gilbert’s background and there’s nothing of note, nothing to explain it. There’s something else going on here; we’ve only got a part of the story. It’s just . . . we need something else to go on. And we haven’t got it yet.’

  ‘Well, let’s hope you get it soon,’ said Fourcade, his voice sharpening a little, his eyes narrowing. ‘People aren’t happy, Daniel. The Blanchards are well-known around here, and popular. There are going to be some awkward questions coming my way very soon and I’ll need some answers. Just as soon as you can supply them, s’il te plaît.’

  And then the smile was switched back on, a friendly hand resting ligh
tly on Jacquot’s arm as Fourcade walked him to the door and bid him adieu.

  Outside on place Lombard, Jacquot lit up a cigarette and wondered again about the ‘mourners’ at the cemetery in La Bouilladisse. For some reason he couldn’t shift them from his memory, still cross with himself for not checking them out. If only to eliminate them from the enquiry.

  18

  IT WASN’T JUST GUY FOURCADE, the town’s examining magistrate, who was asking questions. That same evening, back at the millhouse, Claudine went over the same ground.

  ‘It’s been weeks,’ she said, as she settled at the table that Jacquot had laid on the terrace. The sun had slipped behind the hillside at the back of the millhouse, but the evening shadows creeping down from the woods that surrounded the property were still warm and smelled of resin. Salad was tossed, wine poured, and the carré d’agneau he had grilled on the fire-pit divided between them.

  ‘I just can’t believe that nothing’s happened,’ she continued. ‘I know you’re doing everything you can, but it’s just so . . . unfair. That no one has been brought to book for it.’

  Jacquot glanced across at her as she sliced through her cutlet, took a small mouthful then sat back from the table. She looked drawn and tired, and he could see how the investigation’s lack of progress, lack of leads, lack of everything, had started to wear her down. She was too close to it, he realised. She knew the victim, knew the family, their farm just a few kilometres away. And the killing of a young woman, on her wedding night, with a new husband in her bed and the future all ahead of them, had been particularly cruel.

  ‘Think of a car,’ said Jacquot. ‘With a full tank and an empty road ahead of it. That’s what a police investigation is like. At first it’s full speed ahead, but then the tank starts to empty and other things get in the way. Diversions, distractions, wrong turnings. What’s needed is more fuel, something to keep that car rolling along. And right now, it seems, we’re a long way from any filling station.’

  Claudine reached for her wine, swirling it in the glass, staring into its depths.

  ‘You need another murder, don’t you? That’s the filling station, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m afraid it is. Another scene-of-crime. That’s what we need. Wherever it happens. Just so long as we hear about it, make the right connections.’ He picked up a curved bone with his fingers and stripped away the remaining meat with his teeth.

  ‘You don’t think this is local then, someone living around here?’

  He shook his head, swallowed, wiped his lips with a napkin.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he began. ‘The silencer . . . leaving the scene so clean. It’s just too professional. Too carefully thought out. What really worries me is that, for some reason we don’t yet know, the murder really was a case of mistaken identity. If that’s what it was, then we’re pretty much wasting our time, and I’m sorry to say that I doubt we’ll ever get to the bottom of it.’

  ‘That poor, poor girl. Everything to live for.’ Claudine pushed away her meat, barely touched, and turned instead to her salad, scooping up some leaves.

  ‘And her poor, poor husband, Noël.’

  ‘Is it true what I heard?’ she asked.

  ‘Madame Tapis?’

  Claudine nodded.

  ‘Apparently . . .’ she began.

  ‘. . . He’s been transferred to a psychiatric unit? Once again your Madame Tapis is correct. The Institut Briand near Courthézon. He recovered from the first suicide attempt, but there’s real fear that he might try again.’ Jacquot fell silent, remembered his visit. The pleading, the desperation, the biting grip of his fingers, the tears, and, most disturbing, that haunting belief that Izzy was still alive, that she hadn’t been shot, that she would help him, she would look after him, care for him.

  Somewhere in the woods, an owl hooted. For a while they sat in silence, listening to the sounds of the night – the slowing buzz of insects, a crackle and tumble of burnt logs in the fire-pit.

  With a long sigh, Claudine pushed herself away from the table.

  ‘I’m off to bed. You coming?’

  ‘Maybe a last glass . . .’

  She made to gather up the dishes.

  ‘Leave them. I’ll do it,’ said Jacquot.

  She nodded, smiled, came over to kiss him. He could smell a light flowery scent he didn’t recognise.

  ‘Nice perfume.’

  ‘Eau de toilette. Not so expensive. I’ve been wearing it a week. Some flic you are.’

  She stood up and turned to go. If he had hoped to ease her sadness over supper, he knew he hadn’t quite managed it. She still looked tired, he thought, and she seemed somehow relieved that the perfume had not sparked too much interest, that she would have the bed to herself for a little while yet.

  ‘You okay?’ he asked, letting her fingers trail through his.

  ‘Gloria Gaynor . . .’ she replied. It was a game of theirs. The name of a singer, and the title of a song.

  ‘“I will survive . . .”’

  ‘You got it.’

  Later, the table cleared, the fire-pit left to glow in the dark and die, Jacquot went through to the salon, poured himself a small cognac and turned on the television.

  Let her rest, he thought, plumping up the sofa cushions. A good night’s sleep would do her the world of good.

  19

  THE TIMBER MERCHANT DELACROIX ET Fils was based in Marseilles, in the west of the city, close to the freight yards of Le Canet, and just six blocks back from the wharves of Arenc and Mirabe. The Delacroix had run this yard for more than a century, a family of jobbing carpenters who’d started out in the repair and refitting of fishing boats, barges and sailing ships and ended up timber merchants as well as expert woodworkers. Not only did they now buy the wood – importing hard woods mostly, shipped to the wharves by suppliers in South America, West Africa and the Far East – they also worked it into whatever form or shape the city’s construction bosses wanted. Anything from simple architraving to bed-frames, from garden gates to windows, doors, flooring, and, in recent years, decking and the skeleton frames for conservatories. Coffins, too. Anything needing wood.

  Delacroix et Fils employed more than a hundred men, the workforce accommodated in four wings around a central yard, or in the receiving sheds at the docks. Raw timber was brought off the ships, stacked, sorted and trimmed in the company’s dock warehouse before being transferred to the main yard where the sawyers and carpenters set to work on whatever orders the firm had received. It was a prosperous, if noisy business – everywhere the whining scream of spinning steel: table saws, jig saws, trimmers; the tappety-tap of the joiners in their leather aprons, and the machine-gun spitting and snapping of the rivetters and staplers; the industrial clatter of the yards and dock warehouse all overlaid with the raw, red resinous scent of split and bleeding wood.

  Most of the workforce stayed at Delacroix their working life, down on the wharves or up in the yard, in some cases four generations of the same family employed by the company. It was that kind of place. And the best of those workers – those with the eye and the talent, who were prepared to take on, at the same wage, a five-year apprenticeship – became cabinet-makers, Delacroix cabinet-makers. For more than a century, these skilled artisans had supplied Marseilles’ most prestigious addresses: the shelving and counters for the Parfumerie Pagnon and Nouvelles Galeries on Canebière; the table booths at Restaurant Basso on the Quai des Belges; the banisters and panelling for the old Hôtel Splendide; even the ticket-booths and stage flooring at the old Grand Théatre.

  It was a fine tradition, and at the end of his apprenticeship twenty-six-year-old Antoine Berri was ready to put on the soft leather apron and move to the first floor studios where Delacroix’s cabinet-makers – the Cabbies – worked their bespoke magic. But before Antoine could do that, there was one final test: to design and make something, in his own time and out of hours but with full access to Delacroix tools and machinery, to showcase the skills he’d acquired. Antoine’s
maquette, his calling card for the Cabbies, was a matching pair of bedside tables in sandalwood and ebony. It had taken him a month to design them, a further month to select from Delacroix offcuts the woods and grain patterns he wanted, and the last three months to cut and fit – not a nail or a screw used – the constituent parts of the two tables. Eight finely tapered legs, perfectly matched marquetry tops in satinwood and ebony, bowed cupboard doors no larger than a handkerchief, and two sets of oval-fronted drawers, wood runnels waxed and chalk-dusted until they slid as easily as a powdered hand from a silk glove. In another month he’d be finished, the tables ready for waxing and polishing and finishing before presentation to, and judgement by, those Delacroix cabinet makers who had gone before him.

  At a little after six o’clock one Saturday evening in late May, with the last of the sun streaming in gold squares through the dusty workshop windows, Antoine was working on his tables’ back panelling. This should have been the easiest part of the job – the bevelled panelling out of sight against a wall – but Antoine knew the Cabbies, and knew that that would be the first place they looked. Make the back as good as the front, and you couldn’t go wrong. But it was the devil to carry off: sighting down a pencil line no thicker than a cotton thread, and feeding the panel of splinter-happy sandal-ply to the blade of a ten-inch table saw with teeth no bigger than, but just as sharp as, a kitten’s.

  So great was his concentration setting up the next crucial incision, so tight and muffling the ear protectors, that Antoine heard not a sound on the sawdust floor behind him. Nothing until a wrap of cloth came round the side of his head, brushed his cheek and was clamped over his mouth and nose.

  Pushing himself away from the work table, his first instinct was to turn himself round, to face his attackers – probably some of the lads from the first floor come in that Saturday evening to give him grief. But the grip on his mouth and nose held, and his breath became suddenly sweet, a strange scent in his nostrils, a little like the fine varnish he used – which was why he suspected his work-mates – until the power of it seemed to take the blood and muscle from his legs and arms, and drained away any desire to resist.