With a groan, Marie-Ange pushed herself out of her chair and without a word hurried from the room, ran along the echoing passageway and crossed the stone-flagged hall. Snatching up her car keys, she leapt down the front steps and threw open the door of her old 2CV. The engine caught on the second turn and a moment later she was racing down the drive, screeching through the gates and out into the road without pause.
How far ahead was he?
Could she get to him in time?
Before he reached that curve in the path, where the shadows waited.
Abandoning the car past the bridge she scrambled up the slope, following his route, the sweat soon popping from her pores, running down her back. Up and up she went, stumbling, panting with the effort, pausing to draw breath and shout out his name. ‘Léo! Léo! Where are you? Wait for me. Wait for me!’ Then on again.
She knew she was too late before she saw him. Felt a drenching chill of dread as she came round that last bend just below the ridgeline, where the path narrowed and tightened into a sharp right-hand turn . . . the section of path that she had ‘seen’ in the morning room.
And there he was, her Léo, sprawled on the ground up ahead, his left leg caught in the metal jaws of some monstrous kind of trap, his wrists bound, a strip of duct tape plastered across his mouth.
She flung herself down, leant over him, tugged aside the tape as he opened his eyes, recognised her. A rictus of a smile creased his lips, before pain and doubt and fear slid across his features and snatched it away.
‘Who did this?’ she cried. ‘What’s happened to you . . . ?’ She started to tug off her scarf, to tie a tourniquet, to stop the bleeding.
‘There’s someone here,’ he whispered. ‘Someone . . . in the trees.’
As if on cue, Marie-Ange heard the swish of a branch from behind her and spun round. Two figures had stepped out from the cover of the trees, one from either side of the path, one close, one a little further back.
A man and a woman.
A skirt and trousers.
But then Marie-Ange saw she was mistaken. Not a man and a woman, but two women. The one in trousers, farther back, looked taller and older; her companion was younger, shorter and, by the look of it, carrying something behind her back.
‘We need help,’ said Marie-Ange, knowing instantly that there was no help to be found here, not from these two women. She had seen them before, just a distant blurred image, but she recognised them immediately from the photos that Daniel Jacquot had shown her at Chez Jules et Jules in Marseilles. They’d seemed dangerous to her then, put a chill in her blood, but now they looked even more menacing. She scrambled to her feet, put herself between the women and Léo, an instinctive defence.
But it made no difference. The woman closest to her brought a hand from behind her back, and Marie-Ange saw the gun.
Beside her, she heard Léo grunt and try to get to his feet, to do something, to protect her. But there was nothing he could do, and Marie-Ange stood rooted to the spot, her gaze fastened on the gun as the woman raised it and levelled it at her chest.
There was a curiously blank expression on the woman’s face.
Cold, clinical, unmoved.
An executioner’s face.
And Marie-Ange knew with a deep and numbing certainty that this unknown woman, on a bright summer morning, on this sun-spilled hillside above Cruis, was going to pull the trigger.
And that there was nothing she could do about it.
That she would die.
Just seconds left to live; the time it takes to squeeze a trigger.
Marie-Ange didn’t hear a thing, didn’t feel any pain, just the thumping impact of a 9x19mm Parabellum bullet which lifted her clear off her feet and sent her spinning backwards.
31
‘SO ARE YOU GOING TO grow it again, or not?’ asked Midou. She sat back from the kitchen table with a twinkle in her eye and reached for Jacquot’s cigarettes, tapped one out, lit it. She loved teasing him almost as much as she enjoyed shocking her mother. The smoking was a new development and though there wasn’t much her mother could do about it – she smoked herself, after a fashion – Claudine had still not quite got used to seeing her daughter with a cigarette.
Jacquot ran a hand across his scalp. He knew what Midou was talking about. A few months after that visit to a barber’s shop in Paris – where he’d had pretty much the whole damn lot taken off – his hair was starting to thicken again, and lengthen. Not yet long enough for a ponytail but definitely heading in that direction; already long enough to show the start of a wave off the roughly central parting, to cover his ears and curl over his jacket collar. Black hair, Corsican hair, that showed up his tan and sage green eyes. When he slept now, there was no prickling stubble pressing against his head from the pillow, no itch on his scalp.
Jacquot shrugged.
‘Maybe. It depends on your mother.’
‘I like it as it is now. It suits you. It suits your age. But the ponytail . . .’ Claudine grinned ‘. . . the ponytail was good, too. It was the first thing I noticed. The ponytail and your eyes.’
He had had the ponytail for years, from his earliest rugby days, and after playing in the blue shirt with the gold coq on his chest, scoring the winning try against Les Rosbifs at Twickenham in his one and only appearance in the national side, Jacquot had become known for it, been recognised on account of it. Not that he wore it in that style to be recognised. He wore it that way because he was used to it, liked the feel of it. And, of course, he’d been younger.
‘Perhaps I should grow a beard or moustache,’ he said.
‘No,’ cried Midou. ‘Jamais!’
‘Absolutely not,’ said Claudine, suddenly looking stern, as though he might be serious.
Jacquot grinned at her, started to chuckle. As if . . .
She picked up her napkin and flung it at him.
It was a Sunday afternoon at the millhouse and the three of them had just finished lunch, taken at the kitchen table. It was too hot to sit outside, all the doors and windows jammed open to catch a breeze. A lunch cooked by Midou with no help from her mother or Jacquot beyond making sure her glass of wine was kept filled. She had announced this service – the cooking of this Sunday lunch – midway through the week.
‘I’m going to cook something called Ayam Batutu,’ she had told them. ‘It’s this chicken coated in spices and steamed in banana leaves. There’s a little Indonesian place in Pointe-à-Pitre where they cook it – just fabulous! You’ll love it.’
And so, for two days, Midou and Claudine had toured every market and specialist shop from Apt to Aix to Avignon in a search for the right ingredients. And every time the two of them set off on one of their jaunts in Claudine’s rattle-bag Renault with its temperamental dashboard gearstick, Jacquot whispered a prayer for them, making the little Sign of the Cross that his own mother had taught him, to keep them from harm.
The thought that Claudine or Midou might be names on a killer’s list simply because they were his nearest and dearest – their deaths guaranteed to cause the real target, himself, the most extreme grief – had begun to hit home: Noël Gilbert losing his new bride; Peluze losing his wife; that cop Berri losing his twin brother. Another murder would surely confirm it, whoever else was on that list. But there was already this growing sense of a pattern to the killings, and the more Jacquot thought about it the more anxious he became.
At least now, as Claudine rose to clear the table and Midou reached over to pour him a fresh glass of wine, they wouldn’t be tramping around the countryside together, shopping for exotic ingredients and presenting an easy target. Claudine had some paintings to finish for an autumn exhibition at Gilles’ gallery in Aix, and Midou had some research notes to type up for her doctorate. For the next few days, they would be where he could keep an eye on them.
‘Can you eat a ripe camembert after Ayam Batutu?’ asked Jacquot.
‘If anyone can, it’s probably you,’ replied Midou. ‘And why not? We drank red win
e with it. Back on the island it’s usually beer.’
Jacquot got to his feet and crossed to the cellar door, careful to lower his head as he stepped through it, and went down the stairs. Claudine, who normally liked her cheese but had recently complained of its ripening smell in her kitchen, now made him keep it where they stored their wine. It was an imposition that Jacquot had gently railed against, but somehow the smell of his cheeses seemed to complement the surroundings: the hard-packed earth floor of the cellar, its coolness, the low-wattage light, the tick and wheeze of the old deep-freeze. Jacquot was coming back up the wooden steps, closing the door behind him, when the phone started to ring.
Claudine reached for it.
‘Oui? Allo?’
Jacquot prayed for it to be a friend. A social call. But when he heard the words, ‘Ne quittez pas, il arrive maintenant’, he knew his prayer hadn’t been answered.
He laid the cheese on the table and took the phone from Claudine. He put his hand over the mouthpiece and raised his eyebrows at her.
‘A man. An old man by the sound of it,’ she said. ‘I didn’t catch the name.’
Jacquot raised crossed fingers, leant over to kiss her cheek, then turned his attention to the caller.
‘Oui, c’est moi, Daniel Jacquot.’
‘Monsieur Jacquot. Please excuse me for calling you at home on a Sunday.’
Claudine had been right. The voice was old. And weary. But at least it wasn’t Brunet. He wasn’t being called in for something. His Sunday with Claudine and Midou was safe. More wine with the cheese. Then coffee, a stroll in the garden and a snooze on the sofa.
‘It’s not a problem. How can I help, Monsieur . . . ?’
‘Chabran. My name is Davide Chabran. From Cruis, near Forcalquier. I believe you know my nephew, Léo?’
At the table mother and daughter whispered together, both of them hoping that this call would not mean Jacquot’s hurried departure from the dining table. They had had a grand lunch, they were having fun, the rest of the afternoon and evening stretched ahead of them – it would be such a shame if it were to finish now.
But one glance was all it took for them to know that something was wrong, to see the look on Jacquot’s face. He seemed to slump at the phone and the colour drained from his cheeks. He reached for the pad and pencil that Claudine kept nearby and wrote something down, scribbling away. Then he listened for a moment longer.
‘I am very grateful for your call,’ he said at last, his voice struggling to contain both shock and emotion, and with a whispered ‘adieu’ he settled the receiver onto its cradle.
‘What is it?’ asked Claudine. She knew it was bad news.
‘Someone I know . . . two people, in fact.’ Jacquot took a deep breath and sat down, somehow managed a smile. ‘I’m afraid it’s not good.’
32
THE FIRST THING JACQUOT DID that Monday morning was call up a crime report from the investigating team in Forcalquier. The relevant papers were faxed through and Brunet brought them in as soon as they arrived.
‘Anything I should know? Anything I can do?’ he asked. He’d clearly taken a look at the documents before handing them over to Jacquot.
‘Let me read through this, and then we’ll talk.’
Brunet nodded and swung out of the office.
It didn’t take Jacquot long to take it in, the murders of Léo Christian Chabran, nephew of the gentleman he had spoken to on the phone the previous afternoon, and Mademoiselle Marie-Ange Buhl, from Metz, where her father, Jacquot remembered her once telling him, managed the railway marshalling yards.
The first reports he read comprised the various statements taken after the discovery of the bodies – from the two hikers who had found them, and from a duty officer at the local gendarmerie in Cruis where their discovery had been reported – and an initial scene-of-crime report from the Forcalquier police.
The hikers had found the bodies on a wooded path more than a kilometre from the road. Jacquot read their signed statements, taken down in small capital letters by the reporting officer in Forcalquier: ‘They looked like they were, you know, in the act, the woman on top of him,’ one of the hikers had said. ‘For a minute or so, it felt like we were intruding. We nearly turned back. But then we realised they weren’t moving.’
Within an hour, the hikers had reported their discovery and returned with the local gendarme from Cruis, the nearest settlement. His report indicated two bodies found at approximately 2.47 p.m. The woman was in her late twenties or early thirties, he’d guessed: dark hair, jeans, trainers, and a white T-shirt heavily bloodied from a bullet wound in her back – actually the exit wound. The man she was sprawled across the gendarme had recognised immediately, a local, Léo Chabran, dressed in running shorts, trainers and a blue T-shirt. He lay on his back, the lower half of his left leg caught in a hunter’s trap.
These initial observations were added to by the scene-of-crime team from Forcalquier. No sign of a struggle, beyond the male victim squirming around on the layer of pine needles on the path, presumably in an attempt to free his leg from the trap; no sign of any cartridge cases; and no sign of any ambush spot – flattened grass, cigarette ends, sweet papers, footprints – in the surrounding area. In the investigating officer’s opinion, a double homicide committed by a person or persons unknown. Enquiries were on-going.
The pathology report didn’t take the investigation much further. The male victim’s lower left leg had been caught in a large mammal spring-trap, the points of its teeth clamping tight either side of the leg, just a few centimetres below the knee. As well as excessive muscle and ligament trauma, the popliteal artery had been ruptured and the victim’s leg broken in two places – both fibula and tibula. Since the breaks were splintered rather than clean, it was the pathologist’s opinion that the break had been caused not, primarily, by the snapping teeth of the trap, but by the subsequent fall forwards putting pressure on the weakened, possibly cracked, bones. In conclusion the pathologist judged that the victim had died from his injuries due to trauma shock and extensive blood loss. As an addendum, he also noted that the victim’s wrists had been tightly bound and that glue residue had been found around the mouth, suggesting that some kind of restraint had been used, and that adhesive tape had been used to keep the victim silent, maybe to stop him screaming from pain or crying out for help, though neither cord nor tape had been found at the scene.
As for the woman, she had suffered a fatal frontal gunshot to the heart. The bullet had smashed through the third thoracic rib, pulped most of the right side of her aorta and severed one of the pulmonary arteries, nicked her right lung and exited a few centimetres above the right hip. But it wasn’t the only killing shot. The victim had also taken a second bullet to the forehead, fired at close range, close enough for the muzzle blast from the gun to leave powder marks on the skin.
The inference, Jacquot knew, was clear. Whoever had shot her in the chest had followed through with a second, closer shot to the head, just to make sure. Though no bullets or cartridge cases had been found, both wounds were consistent with the kind of damage caused by a 9x19mm Parabellum.
According to the pathologist’s report, time of death was estimated at between ten and midday, for both victims. Given the male victim’s injuries and consequent blood loss, the pathologist reckoned the first attack – the ambush with the trap – had taken place maybe an hour prior to the woman’s death. It was difficult to be certain, but in the pathologist’s opinion they had both died as near simultaneously as dammit.
The final two pages contained personal information for the two victims. Age, sex, last known address, employment details, next of kin. Everything reduced to that.
Jacquot put down the file, dismayed by what he had read. Here were the details he had not learnt the day before from Léo Chabran’s uncle – who had found Jacquot’s name in his nephew’s address book and was simply calling to pass on the bad news. On the phone it had been hard enough to take it all in, to comprehend that th
ey were gone, without pressing for more information. Now he knew.
And what registered – with a cold and dread certainty – was the likely reason for their deaths: their closeness to the Manichella killings. Even though they had never been at the house in Roucas Blanc both Marie-Ange and Léo had contributed to the shoot-out simply by their involvement in the Lafour case.
Just like Noël Gilbert, Jean Berri and Claude Peluze.
And then there was the manner of their deaths.
A near-severed lower leg.
‘Foot for foot’.
And a bullet to the heart; a bullet in the forehead.
‘Wound for wound’.
Jacquot had read the reports on the shoot-out at Roucas Blanc, knew how the Manichella brothers had died. The only thing he couldn’t remember was which brother was shot in the head, and which one in the heart.
But there was now no doubt in his mind that this double murder confirmed the pattern of killings suggested by Claude Peluze. Right now that long shot was beginning to look a great deal more credible.
Which meant that all that was left was ‘burning for burning’ and ‘stripe for stripe’. That’s what it stipulated in the Bible. Exodus, 21:23. He had checked – just out of interest. ‘An eye for an eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.’
Which meant two more murders to go.
It also confirmed that he, too, would almost certainly be a target.
Or rather, someone near and dear to him.
‘So, Boss?’ It was Brunet. Standing in the doorway. Knowing that something was up.
Jacquot snapped to.
‘Get us a car. We’re taking a drive.’
33
IT WAS A FAST ROAD from Cavaillon to Céreste. Under the railway line, out through the melon fields and on to the D900, past the impasse that led up to Claudine’s millhouse. Forty minutes after leaving headquarters they were through Céreste and heading up towards Forcalquier.
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