by Simon Toyne
Solomon looked at Léo, strapped into a booster seat beside him, a nest of superhero comics scattered in the footwell below his seat. ‘I like your mama,’ he said.
‘Me too,’ Léo said.
‘I like that she swears in front of you.’
‘She does that all the time.’
‘I do not.’
Léo leaned in closer. ‘Mostly it’s when she thinks I’m not listening. Mama swears a lot.’
‘Well, Mama has a lot to swear about. You should be grateful I don’t beat you too.’ She glared at Solomon. ‘And stop trying to change the subject.’
Solomon looked in her eyes and saw the fire inside her, burning with the intensity of a protective mother and a grieving granddaughter. It made her look fierce and beautiful. ‘We’re going to Toulouse because we need to switch cars,’ he said. ‘Yours will be registered in your name and I imagine they’ll ramp up the search for you pretty soon. So if we want to stand any chance of getting to Dijon without being stopped, we need to swap this car for one that has no ties to you and is less distinctive – hopefully one that’s also a tiny bit less fragrant. The turn up ahead will take us to Toulouse by the back roads and we need to stay off the péage for now because there are cameras at the toll booths linked to registration recognition software. Unless you want to get pulled over and spend the next few hours explaining exactly why you were driving away from Cordes with me in the back, I suggest you put the car in gear, and drive.’
Marie-Claude held his gaze for a long few seconds. ‘I could say you kidnapped me.’
‘You could, but I’d deny it because it’s not true, and you’d be bogged down in witness statements. You would also be making it much harder for me to protect your son. So drive if you’re going to, or call the police if you’ve changed your mind. I wouldn’t blame you at all if you have. But I hope you haven’t.’
Marie-Claude looked over at Léo. Solomon could see she was weighing things up, having an internal debate about whether to dump him by the side of the road or not.
‘I think we should throw him out and call the cops,’ Léo said, his face creased in seriousness.
‘Really?’
Léo’s face exploded into a smile. ‘Only kidding. I say we go to Dijon and find this friend of Grampy’s. I’d like to ask him about the bad camp and I figure if we have Monsieur Creed with us wearing his waistcoat, he might not mind talking about it.’
Marie-Claude shook her head slowly and softened. ‘Well, aren’t you your mother’s son?’ She looked back at Solomon and stiffened again. ‘Don’t get too comfortable, it’s a long way to Dijon.’ She faced front and forced the car back in gear. ‘And my car smells fine.’
32
Amand’s battered Citroën limped back to the Commissariat, something loose knocking against a wheel every time they turned a corner. Verbier glared at Amand each time it happened as if to say, This is what you’re doing to your body, and Amand did his best to ignore him. They rattled to a halt outside the Commissariat and Verbier leaned in.
‘Don’t forget what I said. Slow down or I’ll slam the brakes on for you.’
Amand nodded. ‘Understood.’ He opened the bent car door with a screech of metal against metal and something fell off the front and shattered on the cobbles when he slammed it shut again.
‘What was that about?’ Parra murmured as they entered the Commissariat.
‘Nothing,’ Amand replied, pushing through the door to the main office.
The room was noisy with ringing phones and conversations between people in uniform that Amand mostly didn’t recognize. Henri stood in the centre of it all, phone clamped to his ear, frown on his face.
‘Where’s the new suspect?’ Amand asked him.
Henri covered the mouthpiece with his hand. ‘Down in the cells.’
‘Anyone talked to him yet?’
Henri shook his head and held up a booking sheet. ‘Only just signed him in.’
‘What about the potential weapon they found?’
‘It’s on your desk in a bag.’
Amand frowned. ‘You didn’t send it over to the PS lab at Albi?’
‘Figured you might want to see it before the Police Scientifique got their hands on it.’
Amand was annoyed that it hadn’t been fast-tracked but Henri was up to his ears so he let it slide and headed to his office instead, closing the door behind him to muffle the din of the outer office.
The evidence bag lay on his desk in a nest of Post-it notes. Inside was one of the bamboo poles the vignerons used to support younger vines, about a metre long and as thick as a man’s finger. It was splintered and bent, and a dark, sticky, reddish brown substance covered half of it. Amand pictured the straight wounds he had seen on Josef Engel’s back and frowned. He picked up his desk phone, pushed a button to speed-dial a number and scanned the Post-it notes on his desk. The phone connected.
‘Could you connect me to Doctor Zimbaldi please, coroner’s office … I’m calling about a homicide victim currently being processed.’
He was placed on hold and a scratchy Debussy recording filled the silence. The Post-its were filled with the names of people to call back and numbers to ring – none of them were Marie-Claude.
The Debussy cut out and a woman answered. ‘Zimbaldi?’
‘Doctor Zimbaldi, this is Benoît Amand from the Commissariat de Cordes. I know you’re in the process of examining the body of Josef Engel, but there has been a development. We found a cane with blood on it. I’m sending it over now for analysis, but I’m also about to interview the suspect whose home we found it in and it would be useful to know if, in your opinion, a bamboo cane might have been the weapon, one of the weapons, used on the victim?’
‘Monsieur Amand, I have barely even begun my examination, so I can hardly …’
‘The cane is about the thickness of a man’s index finger, maybe a centimetre and a half in diameter. Your opinion might give me some leverage in the interview.’ There was a pause. Amand imagined her looking down at the battered and bloody corpse of Josef Engel on an examination table, studying his wounds. The thought made him shudder.
‘That sounds too thick for the lash wounds I’m seeing,’ Doctor Zimbaldi said.
Amand nodded. ‘That’s what I thought too.’
‘That’s only an observation. I’d need to properly measure …’
‘Of course. I’ll get the cane sent over right away. Let me know what you think when you’ve had time to consider it. Any information gratefully received, as and when you have it. You can always get hold of me here. Thank you, Madame Doctor.’
Amand hung up, grabbed the evidence bag and headed into the noise of the outer office.
‘I need this to go to Albi right away,’ he said, dropping the bag on Henri’s desk. ‘Drive it yourself if you have to and fast-track the shit out of it. Doctor Zimbaldi is expecting it. Who tipped us off about the suspect?’
‘Michel LePoux. The man is one of his workers. He said he’d overheard him talking about the Jew tailor a few times and when he found out what happened this morning he thought he should report it. Suspect’s name is Madjid Lellouche. Algerian. Muslim, no doubt. That’ll be the cause of all this.’
‘What!?’
‘You know what these migrants are like. They’re all thick as thieves and they hate the Jews. That’s what it will be about, I’d bet money on it, some kind of Jew-Arab thing.’
‘I don’t want to hear that again. It’s dangerous speculation. Has LePoux even given us an official statement about what he heard?’
‘No, he just called it in. We went out to investigate, found a weapon, arrested the Arab, that’s where we are now.’
‘So at the moment we have nothing to suggest this is a religiously motivated hate crime. Get hold of LePoux, tell him to come in and give us a proper statement. If this Monsieur Lellouche is our man we’ll need a solid chain of evidence, not idle speculation.’
Henri flushed red. ‘I’ll give him a call.�
�
‘You do that. What about Marie-Claude and Léo? Solomon Creed? Any news on them?’
‘Nothing yet, but there are alerts out everywhere: physical descriptions, details of her car, everything.’
‘Let me know as soon as you get any new information. I’m going down to have a preliminary talk with Monsieur Lellouche. You find LePoux and get him in here as quick as you can. We can’t interview this suspect properly until we know exactly what LePoux heard.’
33
Michel LePoux’s phone rang as he turned his battered Renault 4 on to a track running between his vineyard and Chateau Montels. Belloq was in the passenger seat smoking a thin cigarillo and blowing smoke out of the open window. He picked up the phone and recognized the number. ‘Cops.’
LePoux fidgeted uncomfortably in his seat. ‘You think I should answer it?’
‘No. They’ll want you to make a formal statement about the Arab and we don’t want to help their investigation, we want to hinder it. You’re a busy man with many hectares to tend and a harvest looming. Let them chase you.’
The phone rang a few more times, La Marseillaise filling the interior of the car, before falling silent.
‘There might not be a harvest this year,’ LePoux grumbled. ‘Look at my vines, this fucking esca comes back as fast as I cut it out. I swear those bastard Arabs brought it with them and are infecting the vines to make more work and laughing behind my back the whole time.’
Belloq blew a thin stream of smoke out into the dry air. ‘The esca has been here since Roman times,’ he said. ‘Not everything is the fault of the Arabs.’
‘Well, the Romans were immigrants too,’ LePoux snorted.
‘The Romans were invaders, not immigrants. They brought law and order, and roads, and wine. Not like these modern immigrants with their empty pockets and their hungry mouths. These people are nothing but parasites, sucking the country dry like the esca.’
‘Esca isn’t a parasite,’ LePoux muttered, ‘it’s a fungus.’
‘Whatever,’ Belloq waved his hand and sent a shower of ash floating down to the floor, ‘the principle’s the same.’
They were bouncing along a rutted track between a field of yellow sunflowers and one of vines. The sunflowers were vibrant and bright, the vines were squat and gnarled, their leaves streaked brown. Belloq didn’t know much about vineyards but he could see that LePoux’s vines were in a bad state. The clusters of grapes dangling in bunches beneath the discoloured leaves were small and shrivelled and he couldn’t imagine the wine produced from them would be either plentiful or tasty. But his politician’s brain, always searching for a strong image to dramatize the peril his country was in, seized on it and he began to compose a speech in his mind:
‘The other day I was driving through a vineyard …’
No, not ‘driving’ – too passive, too detached.
‘… I was walking through a vineyard and I saw how a disease – an ugly disease – was taking hold of the sturdy old vines: brown streaks creeping across green, healthy leaves to slowly poison the sweet grapes from within.’
It was a great image. Nothing was more French than a vineyard and he liked the way he could demonize the colour brown as something rotten. Muslims didn’t even drink wine, which told you everything you needed to know about them.
They reached a fork in the track and turned away from the bright sunflowers and headed deeper into the blighted vines. In the distance, Belloq could see a squat stone building, nestled in the lowest part of the valley, a single, shuttered window on the upper floor and a small door beneath a rickety porch. A thin tendril of smoke curled up from a chimney.
Belloq drew deeply on his cigar and realized he was feeling a little nervous. He’d had to ask people for all kinds of things – trust, money, support – but he had never had to persuade someone to risk their freedom or potentially kill someone before and he felt anxious and honoured at the prospect. It was as the Leader said: one of the biggest tests of leadership was the ability to persuade a person to do your bidding, and he was about to be tested.
They pulled to a halt outside the barn in a cloud of dry dust and the Renault coughed and spluttered like an old smoker before it shuddered and fell silent. Belloq got out and felt the heat of the day wrap around him. He listened to the sounds of the place – the buzz and whirr of insects in the fields, the distant clang of a church bell carrying across the fields, and the dull, wet thud of something coming from inside the barn. He could hear a voice too, someone saying things in German then repeating them in French.
He took his handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the back of his neck. The heat seemed greater here, like it had pooled in the bottom of the valley, yet he shivered at the sight of a hare hanging on a hook in the shade of the small porch, its eyes bugged out in surprise or horror or both. LePoux marched towards the barn, hitching up his trousers as he went. Belloq opened the back door of the car, retrieved a small cool box and a heavy-duty supermarket bag from the floor, and followed him.
Stepping through the door of the barn felt like climbing into an oven. A small window on the far wall let in some light and air, but the building was stifling and smelled of blood and cooking meat. A rough ladder led up to a half-timbered hayloft with a bedroll spread out on it. The ground floor was mostly taken up by a large oak table with something large and dark and bloody lying on it. A man stood next to it, stripped to the waist, his skin mired with sweat and blood. He raised a cleaver high above his head and brought it down hard, making the noise Belloq had heard outside.
‘Sanglier!’ LePoux exclaimed, moving round the table and inspecting the thing lying upon it. The cleaver came down again with a sound of splintering bone and the entire leg of the wild boar came away in the butcher’s hand. An old CD player on the window ledge continued to fill the stifling barn with a steady murmur of German phrases and French translations.
‘You’re learning German, Monsieur Baptiste,’ Belloq said, stepping forward and offering his hand out of habit before remembering the hand he would shake was currently holding a bloody leg.
‘It passes the time,’ the man replied, and threw the leg into a large bowl along with some other lumps of meat.
‘English would be more useful,’ Belloq said.
‘I already learned English while I was inside,’ the man replied. He placed his cleaver on the table and moved over to a large cauldron of blood bubbling on the stove and stirred it, his thick forearms so wet with dark smears of blood that it looked like he’d washed in it.
‘Big bastard,’ LePoux said, his large head nodding approval at the dead boar on the table. ‘Where did you kill it?’
‘Up on the southern slope. I saw it moving around in the trees and went up there last night. It made a change from snaring rabbits and birds, and there’s not much else to do out here. Take what you want, I can’t use all this meat and it will spoil in the heat.’
Belloq smiled. ‘I’m sorry you’ve been feeling under-employed out here.’ He held up the cool box and carrier bag. ‘I’ve brought some cold beers and something else you may be interested in. Why don’t we step outside and talk. You look like a man who could use some refreshments.’
34
Amand descended the stone spiral stairs into the basement for the second time that day. This time Parra was behind him, a witness processing pack in one hand and a small digital voice recorder in the other. He stood aside to let Parra unlock the door then stepped into the cell. The man inside looked up at the sound of the unlocking door. He was sitting at the table, hands clasped in front of him; he watched the two men enter the room and lock the door behind them.
‘Monsieur Lellouche,’ Amand said, pulling out a chair and sitting opposite him, ‘my name is Benoît Amand. I’m the lead investigator in the murder of Monsieur Josef Engel. This is Lieutenant Parra.’ Parra sat next to him and laid the paperwork and recorder on the table. ‘Anything you can tell us that helps with our investigation may also help you in the long run, do you u
nderstand?’
Madjid nodded, eyes wide, shoulders slumped. Parra set the digital voice recorder running and recorded the time and date as well as the names of the three men present. He uncapped his pen and prepared to take notes.
‘Perhaps we can start by establishing your relationship with the victim, Josef Engel.’
‘I don’t know him.’
‘You never met him?’
‘No.’
‘Ever heard his name before?’
Madjid hesitated, his eyes dropping to his hands. ‘Yes. I heard the name.’
‘Do you remember when?’
He shrugged. ‘I hear many names – from other workers, from the market. I knew Monsieur Engel was the tailor who lived in Cordes, just as I know Monsieur Arnaud is the Notaire and Monsieur Moulin is the baker. None of these things are secret.’
‘But you never had any dealings with Monsieur Engel.’
‘No.’
‘This morning, when the two police officers called on the vineyard where you work, they found you in the process of leaving. They also found a cane hidden in the barn where you live. Do you want to tell me about that.’
Madjid shook his head. ‘I know nothing about that. That stick is … I don’t know what it is. I don’t know why it is there.’
‘Why were you leaving?’
‘The harvest is failing. The land is no good. Disease in the vines. Why stay and watch it all die?’
‘But why this morning? Why not at the end of the week?’
Madjid glanced down at a raised red stripe on the nut-brown skin of his forearm. ‘It was time to go.’
‘How did you get that mark?’
Madjid covered it with his hand. ‘A scratch. From the vines.’
‘Can I see?’ Madjid reluctantly removed his hand again and Amand studied the mark. ‘You know the name Laveyron?’