Instead he felt himself buckle and fall, felt himself caught, lifted . . .
A sleeve rolled up . . .
And that was it.
20
JACQUOT DROVE INTO CAVAILLON POLICE headquarters, dropped down to the basement car park and found a space. It was a Thursday lunchtime, the last in May, and he’d spent the morning walking through a belt of woods on the heights above Apt. A farmer there had lost his dog, a truffle hound, and all the man could think of was who to blame, who to point the finger at. The dog had been stolen or, more likely, killed, he’d told Jacquot, by one of his competitors, of whom there were many, though none so talented as he, nor so lucky with their own hound. A dog that earned him a healthy income each year – though he was wary of putting a figure to it. Which was how the complaint had filtered through to the squad room in Cavaillon. With little to do in terms of the ongoing Gilbert investigation, Jacquot had taken the call and paid the visit.
Two hundred thousand francs a year, the farmer had finally whispered, as they trudged through the wood: a light cover of holm oak that let in the early summer sun, low branches scraping their shoulders, the leaf litter rustling with every step. Eight years old and the mutt had paid his bed and board a thousand times over, the farmer confided as Jacquot paused on the slope to light a cigarette, wondering how much farther they’d have to walk. It wasn’t the first time a complaint like this had been made, and it wouldn’t be the last, reflected Jacquot, taking a grateful pull on his cigarette. Every year some truffle hound went missing and the owner called it in.
Killy, the dog was called, after the skier. A spaniel. ‘Ran smooth as a torpedo through calm seas,’ the farmer said. ‘Never took his snout more than a couple of centimetres off the ground. Knew a truffle like a car knows a Stop sign. And never greedy. Non, non, non. Not like those fat old pigs up in the Périgord. Snuffle up the tubers before you can get a hand to them, with the bulk and temperament to keep you out of the picture. My old Killy’d just sit there and point and watch you scuff up the earth with your hands till you found it. Just so long as you had a biscuit in your pocket, Killy was happy.’
They’d found Killy thirty minutes after Jacquot’s cigarette break, curled up at the base of an old pine that looked as though it had only the slimmest of holds on the earth, a web of sinewy roots rising up out of the ground they clung to as though hating the touch of dead leaves. The dog looked as though it was asleep, nose tucked into hindquarters, tail tidily curled. It was the nose that gave the game away. Two bright-red, pin-prick puncture marks. Bitten by a snake, its money-making snout too close to the ground.
On other occasions when Jacquot had helped locate valuable truffle hounds, the grateful owners had pressed a nugget of the tuber into his hand, as thanks. This time, however, when Jacquot pointed out the tell-tale snake bite, the farmer just turned on his heel and stomped off without another word. It was difficult to say whether he was angry that his dog was dead, or that his competitors could not now be brought to account. Whichever it was, Jacquot was left to find his own way back to his car.
Back in his office, nursing a coffee and wondering how he was going to spend the rest of his day, he saw Brunet striding across the squad room.
‘How was Duplessis?’ he asked, pulling out a chair and swinging it round so his legs straddled it, arms hanging over the back.
‘Disagreeable,’ replied Jacquot, looking at the file dangling from his assistant’s hands.
‘Never happy, that one. Grumpy as all hell.’
‘You could have mentioned that.’
Brunet spread his hands in an I-suppose-I-could-have-done way that directed Jacquot’s attention to the file he was carrying.
‘What have you got there? More lost truffle hounds?’
‘Something you’ll like, Boss.’
Jacquot waited a beat. When no response was forthcoming, Brunet apparently more concerned about some loose stitching on his jacket, he said, ‘Tell me before I die of old age.’
Still working the loose thread, Brunet said, ‘Berri. Antoine. Twenty-six. Single. Lives down in L’Estaque. Your part of the world.’
‘And?’
‘Works at Delacroix et Fils. Maybe you know it?’
Jacquot nodded. Anyone who lived in Marseilles had heard of Delacroix et Fils. For a short while in the late-fifties his own mother had worked for the company, sketching designs for their catalogues and producing art work for their advertising posters. She had taken him there once. He remembered the sharp smell of wood and the ear-splitting screech of saws.
‘And?’ he asked.
‘Lost an arm to a table saw. Saturday evening. Bled to death before anyone found him.’
Jacquot winced. Not a good way to go.
‘And our interest in the case?’
Brunet shrugged.
‘Just thought you ought to know.’
‘And why, particularly?’ Sometimes, with Brunet, it was like drawing blood from a stone.
‘Ah, because before he lost his arm, Monsieur Berri was drugged.’
Jacquot sat up at that.
‘Dyethelaspurane?’
Brunet flicked through the file in his hand. Found what he was looking for.
‘Le même,’ he said. The same.
21
BERNIE MUZON, ONE OF THE squad from rue de l’Evêché, was waiting for Jacquot outside the Delacroix works entrance. Jacquot had called him from Cavaillon. Set it up. As he pulled into the kerb, Muzon recognised Jacquot and levered himself out of his car. He wasn’t as tall as Jacquot, but he was still a big man, well-muscled and broad in the shoulder, with a grin to match, brown hair thick and curled, eyes blue and jaw coated in a rough five-o’clock shadow. As usual he was dressed in blue jeans, black T-shirt and scuffed trainers. He reached back into his car and pulled out a blue linen jacket, slipped it on. He was straightening the sleeves as Jacquot came over.
‘Sorry about the wait,’ said Jacquot, noting the deep tan.
‘It’s nothing. De rien. Better here than a desk at headquarters,’ said Muzon, shaking Jacquot’s hand.
Jacquot smiled. No change there, then. Muzon was a ferret, a real door-knocker, the kind of cop who loved getting behind the wheel of a car, and going after someone. Loved sizing up some new face, and framing the questions right. Getting to the bottom of something. Anything but sit at his desk. Muzon was a man who liked being out on the streets.
‘Hear you guys had quite a time at Minette’s?’
Jacquot admitted that they had.
‘I’m sorry I missed it. She was a grand lady.’
Both men knew why he hadn’t been contacted, told about her death. He’d been on holiday with his wife and kids, two weeks in the French Caribbean that they’d been saving for. If someone had told him about Minette’s murder, Bernie Muzon would have been back there for her funeral in La Bouilladisse and hot on the trail of whoever had killed her, leaving the wife and kids on the beach, the holiday ruined.
‘So what’s the interest here?’ asked Muzon, as they headed for the Delacroix Reception, a few metres along the pavement from the arched and cobbled works entrance.
‘The report said this Antoine Berri was drugged, prior to the . . . amputation. Dyethelaspurane?’
‘That’s what the pathologist said. Trouble is, this Dyethy-stuff . . .’ Muzon always hated having to pronounce difficult drug names ‘. . . is widely available. Not over the counter, of course, but easy to get hold of if you know how. Either at source – the factory in Switzerland – or from a hospital pharmacy. There’s around twelve thousand of those, by the way, if you were thinking of checking. But why the interest?’
‘We had the same drug crop up in another investigation.’
Muzon frowned as he pushed open the Reception door, held it for Jacquot.
‘That should have been flagged. It should have come up.’
Jacquot sighed, a regretful spread of the hands, a sly smile.
‘Sometimes the big cities don’t work a
s fast as the provinces.’
After signing in at Reception, Muzon sending out another sly smile of his own at the pretty blonde receptionist, the two men pushed through another door, walked down a corridor lined with portraits and sepia pictures of past Delacroix family members and stepped into the main yard. Stacked eight metres high with islands of tarped timber, it was wide enough for a pair of trucks to turn without touching, cobbled, and set round on all sides with brick warehouses. In the centre of each warehouse wall was a massive loading gate from which came the searing screech of saws and the scent of split timber, the only things Jacquot could remember from his long-ago trip here with his mother.
‘It’s over there,’ said Muzon, steering Jacquot to the nearest door – much smaller than the others, in a corner of the courtyard. Once inside, the screeching of heavy guage saws gave way to the quieter buzzing hum of smaller gauge equipment.
The room was about thirty metres long and roofed in slanting corrugated sheets, its stone floor carpeted with sawdust, strewn with offcuts and furnished with a dozen workbenches and saw tables set along the walls. Half of these tables were in use, carpenters bent over their work, glancing up at Jacquot and Muzon, but the first of the work stations just inside the door had been sealed off with a line of police tape, its yellow and blue chevrons looped around workbench and saw table.
It was five days since the killing but there were bloodstains everywhere. The spinning blade, fed by the rushing pulse of Berri’s sliced artery, had seen to that, spattering blood across the saw-hood and engine housing, over the shiny metallic surface of the saw table itself, and in a spraying arc up the nearest wall, across three dusty window panes and onto the ceiling. As Jacquot bent under the tape, he could also see that the blood had dripped down into the sawdust, a dried scarlet stalactite still hanging from the bottom half of the blade beneath the saw table.
‘Kid was working on his first piece, finishing it off for the judging,’ Muzon explained. ‘The apprentice thing, you know? Working late, like he’d done before, but being Saturday night he was the only person in this part of the works. He was found by one of the security guards. Apparently the saw was making an odd noise – juddering, the guy said, catching – so he came over to take a look.’
‘No chance of an accident?’
Muzon stood aside while Jacquot inspected the work station.
‘Not a chance,’ he replied.
‘The arm and hand were taped down?’
‘That’s right. Industrial duct tape. Common brand. Whoever did it set that saw there in gear, started it up and fed the lad down to the blade. Like a piece of timber.’
‘What’s your bet? Killer or killers?’
‘You ask me, I’d say two perps, possibly more. Berri was a big guy to put down, even with the drug. And as dead weight, big and heavy to haul up onto the table. I’ll tell you one thing for sure . . . whoever it was must have been covered in blood.’ Muzon nodded to the stains on the walls and windows.
‘Maybe they came in overalls, like the workforce,’ said Jacquot. ‘Just stripped them off after the killing and dumped them.’
‘If they did, they didn’t dump ’em around here. Nothing’s been found in a four-block radius.’
‘Many people about, that time of night? On a Saturday?’ Jacquot scuffed the toe of his shoe through the flattened sawdust, stained a dark brown from the spilt blood and sticking to the stone beneath.
‘Security, like I said. Three of them in all. And a couple of the trimmers across the yard doing overtime. That’s it.’
‘Anyone see anything? A man and a woman, say? Or maybe an old VW Beetle, dark colour, parked out front?’
Muzon shook his head.
‘Nothing like that. Everything as normal for time and place.’
‘To get in here they’d have had to come the way we did?’
‘Nope. Reception’s closed on a Saturday, so they’d have come in through the works entrance near where we parked.’
‘So they knew their way around? They didn’t have to ask for directions?’
‘Maybe they scouted the place out. Easy enough to do. Maybe someone visiting the showroom and company museum,’ said Muzon. ‘There’s regular guided tours – school trips, tourists, customers, that kind of thing.’
‘Any motive? Someone didn’t like this Berri guy? He owed money? Dealt drugs? Slept with someone’s wife, daughter?’
‘That would help, but no. Nothing. The kid was popular, told a good story, worked hard. Had talent, too. No girlfriend, but straight.’
‘And someone saws off his arm,’ murmured Jacquot. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’
After a final look round, the two men stepped back into the sunshine and started across the yard, passing down a line of tattooed timber, heading for the street where they’d parked.
‘Of course, Police Nationale are all over it,’ said Muzon. ‘And all over us, too, to get it sorted.’
‘Why’s that?’ asked Jacquot. ‘Straight homicide surely?’
‘Antoine Berri had a brother. A twin, Jean.’
‘So?’
‘He’s one of ours. A képi. Works on rue Garibaldi. The PN.’
Jacquot stopped dead in his tracks.
‘His brother’s a flic?’
Muzon nodded.
‘That’s right. Just like you and me.’
22
AFTER PARTING COMPANY WITH BERNIE MUZON, Jacquot did not return immediately to Cavaillon. There was something he had to do first, something he’d been meaning to do for some time, yet somehow had never got round to. The trip down to Marseilles for Minette Peluze’s funeral might have been hijacked by the squad, but his visit to Delacroix provided him with a second chance, another opportunity to do what he’d been planning. And, if he was lucky, he’d maybe kill two birds with one stone.
Jacquot saw her a hundred metres off, halfway down rue Francis, coming out of Fleurs des Quais, the flower shop where she worked. She didn’t see him and he didn’t wave or call out her name. All he did when she turned away from him and headed off in the same direction was quicken his pace. He would catch her up.
The woman he was following, in a pretty print dress, with a bag over her shoulder and a spring in her step, was called Marie-Ange Buhl and twice the previous year the two of them had worked together on cases that he’d been involved in. It had started the summer before in the Luberon where Jacquot was investigating the murder of a German family living in Provence. With her help he had uncovered a secret that had turned the investigation upside down. By chance they had met again just a few months later when Jacquot had been working undercover in Marseilles, searching for the missing schoolgirl, Elodie Lafour, and once again her help had proved invaluable, the ‘help’ in question being her special gift or an ability to ‘sense’, to ‘feel’ something. Of course he’d been as sceptical as the next man when she’d first tried to explain it to him, these special powers she had, but he had seen enough by now to know that she was no fraud, that there really was something ‘special’ about her.
But it was more than just a professional relationship; there had always been much more to it than that.
Special powers aside, Marie-Ange Buhl was one of the most beautiful women Jacquot had ever set eyes on. Slim, tall, effortlessly elegant, with a bob of shiny black hair, smooth, lightly tanned skin, and a smile to melt the heart. From the moment he first met her, in a hot-house orchidarium outside the village of St Bédard, he had been unmanned, enchanted, and gently, irresistibly seduced. Maybe not in the way he might have wanted, or at least sometimes thought about, but in a close and confidential manner all the same. Close enough for her to be dangerous, close enough for her to work her way into his dreams and imagination. He was old enough to be her father, felt his age every time he looked at her, yet it never stopped him being aware of her, aware of her beauty, her singleness, her possible availability. For there had always been a sense that his feelings, his imaginings, might not necessarily have been unfounded, tha
t they might even have been reciprocated. There had been moments, moments when . . .
But recently, he suspected, that singleness, that availability – the possibility of something happening – had been compromised. Those ‘moments’ had passed. Which had made him feel a little safer, but at the same time a little sadder too.
The last time he had seen her, the previous November, they’d been at the Témoine Hospital in Marseilles, at the bedside of Léo Chabran, a skipper with the Gendarmerie Maritime. Chabran had been involved with the pair of them in a firefight in the Golfe du Lion, during which action he’d been seriously wounded, and airlifted to the hospital with bullet wounds in his arm and shoulder. In the months that followed, it was Chabran, Jacquot was certain, who had come between them. It hadn’t been difficult to see. From the moment he and Marie-Ange had met Chabran in the wheelhouse of his coastguard cutter, Jacquot would have been blind not to see the flush in her cheeks when Chabran looked at her, the tiny smiles she gave him in return, the covert glances she cast in his direction as he brought the cutter in on its target; the way she responded to his command, his authority. In such charged surroundings it was really no surprise that Marie-Ange’s interest in him should have been aroused. And as Jacquot stood at the man’s hospital bedside the day after the firefight, it soon became clear that Chabran was equally taken by Marie-Ange.
Which, Jacquot recalled, had made him feel a little uncomfortable, as though he was intruding, that he shouldn’t stay long. Which he hadn’t. It had also made him feel a little . . . jealous.
With promises to stay in touch, Jacquot had taken his leave of Chabran, and Marie-Ange had seen him down to the hospital entrance. Jacquot recalled how they’d stood in the lift with two porters and an empty trolley between them, the four of them held in an uneasy silence until the lift doors opened on the ground floor. It was there, in the hustle and bustle of the hospital entrance that they had said their goodbyes. Jacquot had offered his hand, not sure what else to do, but Marie-Ange had leant forward and given him a kiss, disconcertingly close to his mouth. There had, he remembered, been something weighted about that parting – as if there were things that needed to be said. Things that he should say. But then he’d thought of Claudine and their life together, thought of the man lying two floors above them, and in the end he had said nothing. The last Jacquot saw of Marie-Ange she was standing with her back to him in front of the elevators, waiting for a lift to take her back to Chabran’s bedside. As he watched the doors open, and then close on her, he’d known he had done the right thing. Holding back. Either he’d have made a fool of himself, or worse, far worse, he’d have made a fool of Claudine. But that didn’t mean it didn’t hurt. It did. And he’d felt an unexpected press of sadness as he drove away from the hospital.
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