A fourth figure, the hit. Pausing cautiously in the shadows like an animal sniffing for predators, he'd looked one way and then the other before stepping out into the light. According to Carnot he lived six blocks along in a basement room off République. He didn't have a car or a bike, and he never took the bus. They'd watched him pass, head down, hands in pockets, keeping close to the shop windows across the street. Fast, steady, anonymous. Coupchoux had turned the wing mirror, adjusted the rear-view mirror. Take your eyes off him a second and he'd be gone.
Coupchoux was the same. Coupchoux could lose you. It was one of his many talents. Sliding through the city, day or night, unseen, silent as a cat. Do the job and disappear, like he'd never been there. He practised, of course. Like the flexing. All the time. You had to keep the edge sharp. Like this afternoon, after dropping those kids back in town, he'd parked the car and paid a call on Galerie Samaritaine. Just coasting - fingers tingling - and saw his chance. A lighter on a velvet presentation square, while the customer pointed out another model and the assistant reached down for it. They'd never even known he was standing there, waiting his turn. They could have been working it together, the customer and him, it was so seamless. Perfect timing. A team hit.
But Coupchoux never worked doubles. Coupchoux only worked by himself. It was a lesson he'd learnt early on.
Then, in the very same shop, not thirty seconds later, with the lighter feeling heavy in his pocket, an open bag, up ahead, swinging on an arm. A tricky steal but too tempting to resist. The gentle acceleration, brushing alongside in the crowd of shoppers at the door, fingers like darts, a single, fleeting dip. And into his own pocket a long, leather purse stuffed with the woman's cards and cash. Later he'd slid out the notes and dumped the purse. Which was a pity. He'd like to have kept it, for the leather had her scent on it, warm, lingering, intimate. But the cash made up for it, a little under three thousand francs. For five seconds' initiative. Now that's what he called work.
Coupchoux could have stolen the guitar strings too, neatly coiled in their see-through packet on a rack in Sacha's Music Store. But he didn't. He paid cash, waited for the assistant to bag it, give him his change, and then left. Never once looked up, never gave the assistant a glance at his face. Practice, that's what it was. Every day, in every way, you got better and better.
Of course, he couldn't help but feel guilty. He always did. Thieving like that, and the killing. But Coupchoux knew how to ease the pain, and five minutes after leaving Sacha's he slid through the felt-backed doors of the Basilica Grandes Carmes. Not as clean and lean as the church in Cassis, and not as dark as the Reformes at the top of Canebière, but it was still a peaceful, comforting space. Dipping his fingers into the holy water, he made his way down the aisle and took a seat. It was too early for confession, so he knelt forward in the pew and began his litany of prayers, pleadings and promises.
Afterwards he'd gone home to prepare, and at a little after ten he'd found this parking space on Tamasin, one of the guitar strings he'd bought at Sacha's lying on the passenger seat beside him.
It had taken him an hour to get it right, winding the tape around the ends of the nickel-wrapped E-string, doubling them over, thickening them up, then reversing the tape for a grip. Satisfied with his handiwork, he'd gone through the motions in front of the mirror, stripped to his shorts, watching his pectorals flicker beneath the skin as he raised the wire, crossed his hands, right over left, and looped. Slow at first, then speeding up as he got the rhythm. Fifty, sixty times, working the stiffness out of the springy coil, conditioning his limbs to the movement. For the job he had in mind, the crossover was essential. If you looped the wire, you could pull straight out, left and right, keep the victim on his feet. If you didn't do the loop, you had to pull back and down, which meant you could lose your balance, your hit could twist free, turn, come at you. But looped, there was nothing they could do. Fifteen seconds and they go limp. Thirty and its over. But only if you used the E-string, Coupchoux had learnt, the thick one. The other strings were just too fine, with a tendency to cut, and that could be messy.
The lights in the shop window beside him blinked out, but Coupchoux didn't take his eyes off the entrance to Molineux's backyard. Five of the crew had already come out, but they'd all turned left. Doisneau would go right, up avenue Tamasin, heading back home. Like he always did.
He should have known better, thought Coupchoux. Break the pattern. Pattern was never good.
And then, there he was, stepping out from the archway and turning, head down, hands in pockets. Almost a lope. Passing Coupchoux and making for the steps down to Republique, where lights were few and doorways deep and shadowy.
Reaching for the wire, Coupchoux wrapped it around his fist and slid out of the car, his eyes never once leaving his quarry.
62
Saturday
Jacquot had slept in the same sheets all week. Boni might have taken everything that belonged to her, but she'd left her scent, intoxicatingly close on the pillow. It was the first thing that Jacquot recognised when he woke on Saturday morning, staying still a while, breathing her in. Like he'd done at exactly the same time the week before, her head right there beside him. The spread of hair, the sprinkle of freckles between her shoulder blades, the sheet draped over a hip. The soft rise of her breath.
That was the moment when Jacquot decided he'd try his best to make it up. He didn't think it was for him to do, but that wasn't the point. She was unhappy about something and he needed to know what. Getting dressed, quietly so as not to disturb her, he'd made up his mind to give it one more go, tomorrow, when he got back from his trip to Salon-le-Vitry. They'd talk it through. Sort things out. It would be all right, she'd see.
Now, all that was left was the smell of her, and a dull, deep pain that had squeezed at his heart all week. Always right there if he let his defences drop for a moment. Like Nocibe's shop window on St-Ferreol. Something stupid like that was all it took.
Jacquot rolled over and tried to get comfortable again, away from the scent of her. But it drifted back. Sinuous, sweet, breathing life into memory, begging for attention.
There was only one thing for it. Naked, Jacquot slid from the bed and pulled the pillows from their slips, hauled off the sheets until the mattress was bared, its buttoned depressions wadded with lint. Then he scooped up the pile and took it through to the kitchen, dropping it in a heap in front of an already loaded washing machine. He was contemplating the dubious pleasures of emptying it, hanging up the clothes to dry somewhere, to make room for the bedlinen, when the phone rang.
It was Isabelle Cassier.
'We've got another floater,' she told him. 'Man. Out at Radoub Basin.'
63
Max Benedict snapped shut his mobile phone and slid it into his breast pocket.
Since leaving La Ferme Magny, negotiating the turns down to Chant-le-Neuf with only one hand on the wheel, he'd made three calls. One to a sleepy security manager at JFK in New York, one to the reservations manager at the Crillon in Paris, and the third to his contact at the Nice-Passedat, Marseilles's most illustrious hotel - and certainly the most expensive - set on its own headland off the city's coastal Corniche.
Yes, he was told by his sources, the Delahayes' Gulfstream had departed JFK; yes, they had spent last night at their favourite hotel in Paris; yes, they were expected at the Nice-Passedat that very morning; and yes, of course . . . Monsieur Benedict's usual room? No problem.
It hadn't taken Benedict long to realise that the Marseilles double header - a murder and a suicide in the same family in a single day - was his beat. He'd realised that before the TV newscast was over. But he'd kept his cool, surrendered to the last traces of jet lag seeping into his bones and had gone upstairs to sleep on it.
Sometime in the early hours, Benedict had woken from a deep sleep, called his editor in New York, and run her through the story. Murder and suicide, he told her. An illustrious French family, socially connected, political. And a wealthy American
family, big-time New Yorkers, with much the same credentials.
'Absolutely your territory, Max,' she'd said, and the deal was done. Five thousand words, 'Postcard from the Riviera' kind of thing. She'd hold three pages for the next issue if he could make a Friday deadline. He told her he could and signed off with a punch in the air. A whole week. It was a shoo-in. He'd have it wrapped by Monday and the five thousand words e-mailed to New York just in time for the Friday deadline.
Sure he was tired, sure he wanted a rest after Palm Beach. But this story was irresistible. Equally irresistible was the notion of charging his flights, his jeep rental, his fuel, his accommodation at the Nice-Passedat and a bouillabaisse gourmande at Molineux's to the magazine. As to the fee, that would neatly cover the expenses he'd incurred by having the builder, Armande Vaison, look after the property during his latest, extended absence. As he skirted Cavaillon and followed signs for the autoroute, Benedict went over the facts that he'd picked up from the TV broadcast the night before. Madame Suzanne Delahaye de Cotigny, only daughter of Leonard and Daphne Delahaye of Park Avenue, Manhattan, and Bedford Hills, Connecticut, had been found dead by her gardener. She had drowned. She had also been murdered - how else could she have been found propped up in an inflatable pool chair? A grisly detail that Benedict just knew he would use to intro the story, already forming in his head. And then, not twelve hours after her body was discovered, the husband, Hubert, son of the late Auguste de Cotigny and his wife Murielle, went to his study, put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.
The question that needed answering was this: did de Cotigny kill his wife, or did someone else? And why?
For Max Benedict, it would be fun finding out.
As it happened, Benedict knew both families professionally. The de Cotignys were old-school aristocrats, Hubert's late father a war hero, senator and presidential confidant who'd come to prominence in the summer of 1968 when, from his seat in the Senate, he had railed against the student uprisings in Paris and given the French police every encouragement to be brutal. Water cannon, baton charges, give no quarter had been his remit. Which had proved the spark for even greater enthusiasm at the barricades. But his closeness to de Gaulle (the general and he had fought side by side during the Saar Offensive and at Sedan) had protected him in the political fall-out that followed, the satirical newspaper Le Canard Enchainé bold enough to suggest on its front page that the president wouldn't get out of bed unless his old friend was standing there with his slippers and dressing gown.
Which was how Benedict had first come to hear of old man de Cotigny, when he was sent to France on his first foreign assignment to cover de Gaulle's state funeral for the New York Times. Through their Paris correspondent, he'd secured an interview with de Cotigny, the only non-family member at the great man's deathbed. Benedict had found him an insufferable bore and snob, while the grieving senator, done out in starched collar and black tailcoat, had noted Benedict's long hair, jeans and open shirt with a cool, disapproving look. The interview had not gone well.
As for the Delahayes, they were closer to home. Benedict had written about Mister Delahaye during his spat with Winston Lowell over a disputed plot of land on the Hamptons; and again when Delahaye was finally voted chief executive of Wall Streets Gravyll-Windham; and, of course, when his daughter, Suzanne, was arrested for possession of cocaine after the home of a transvestite drug dealer was raided by police.
In the Hampton's debacle it wasn't difficult taking the Delahaye side, when you knew what a twister Winston Lowell could be; and tipping his editorial in Delahaye's favour during the battle for Gravyll-Windham had been more about supporting the underdog than approving his corporate ethics - if GW's directors hadn't behaved so disgracefully in trying to keep Delahaye off the board, it would have been a more difficult tale to tell. As for the daughter's drugs bust, it was the story of stories, and there had been no other way he could spin it. Anyway, it was widely acknowledged that the girl had had it coming.
Suzanne Delahaye, younger of two children, had led a charmed life. Her mother was independently wealthy, her father a self-made man, and her brother Gus married by the time she hit her teens and head of his own brokerage firm by the time she was twenty. Spoilt and wilful, quietly sacked from The Mercy School in Manhattan and sent down from Vassar at the end of her first semester, she'd provided grateful gossip columnists with yards of salacious copy, not an inch of which came anywhere close to the spirit of the truth.
More than the drugs, the drink and the shoplifting, more than the tantrums in restaurants and nightclubs and a wildly acrimonious divorce from her first husband, it was Suzie's questionable sexual orientation and dubious low- life liaisons that raised eyebrows among those in the know. People like Benedict, whose diary column in one of New York's hottest society magazines often required the closest legal scrutiny prior to publication.
It was in that same column that Benedict broke the news of Suzie Delahaye's engagement to Hubert de Cotigny, following a chance summer meeting in Martha's Vineyard. But despite all the predictions of doom, the marriage seemed to have worked. For the last five years, living in France with her new but not so young husband, not a word had been heard of the wayward young lady. Until now.
Up ahead, Benedict saw the toll-booth outside Salon swing into view across the autoroute. He slowed the jeep, took a ticket and, when the barrier was raised, sped on towards Marseilles, a little less than an hour south.
And beckoning.
64
The Radoub Basin, in the shadow of the autoroute, was one of the smaller docking bays beyond the Quai d'Arenc, with enough berths and turning space for six large motor cruisers awaiting service or refit in the Radoub works. That Saturday morning the cranes threw long, fretted shadows across the cobbled quays while a stiff breeze off the sea feathered silent spray over the breakwaters and kept the roar of the autoroute to a background hum.
Isabelle Cassier was waiting for Jacquot just inside the main gate. She was wearing a black leather jacket over belted jeans and a blue T-shirt which rippled with the breeze, her bob of black hair flicking around her cheeks. Tucking the ends behind her ears, she briefed him on the circumstances surrounding the discovery: the crane operator who'd spotted the body floating in an empty berth and raised the alarm; the two mechanics who'd hoisted the body out of the water; and the crane operators boss who'd phoned the police. As for Isabelle, she just happened to be in the squad room before anyone else and took the call.
The body had been laid out on the cobbles and covered by a tarp. Neither Clisson nor Jouannay had yet made an appearance and it was a small and sombre group that stood around the crumpled, featureless shape, not quite knowing what to do with themselves, huddled, smoking, whispering to each other.
'It's not like the others,' Isabelle told him, as the four men around the body stepped aside to make room for them.
'You mean it's a man?' asked Jacquot.
'Fully dressed, not naked. And garrotted. Very professional job, by the look of it.'
Jacquot knelt, and reached for the tarpaulin.
The face hit him like a thunderbolt. The punctured cheeks, the hook nose and tented eyebrows, a jagged line of browning teeth revealed by the snarling lips, eyes already glazed from exposure to the water.
It was the fifth body that Jacquot had seen in the last eight days. Apart from Hubert de Cotigny it was the only face he recognised.
Doisneau.
Tipping up the chin, Jacquot saw the red wire-burn across the throat, a scarlet necklace trimmed with an edging of black that disappeared into Doisneau's collar. Isabelle had been right. A very professional job. A crossover loop, had to be. The skin only broken below the Adam's apple, more like a graze than a cut. On the right-hand side of the throat, close to the ear, the red line was interrupted by a large yellowing bruise.
Isabelle, kneeling beside Jacquot, lifted Doisneau's right hand and opened the palm. Traced along the tops of his fingers was the same red line that stretched across his
throat.
'It looks like he managed to get his fingers up before the wire went tight,' said Isabelle. 'But that's all.'
Jacquot looked at the fingers Isabelle held in her hand and, from somewhere far back in the past, he remembered those same long fingers, the dirty nails, expertly working a palmful of tobacco with a crumbling nub of Moroccan hash that the Chats had got hold of, rolling the mix in a cigarette paper, licking it down and lighting up. 'Here, Danny, try this . . .' he'd said.
Jacquot dropped the tarp over the corpse's face and stood up, took a short, sharp breath of salt air and looked around. An empty, desolate, weekend landscape. The cranes, the workshops, the empty offices of La Joliette, oily black cobbles scabbed with tarmac, the pillared flyover beyond the gates and, far above them, a scatter of clouds so high they looked like they could pass behind the sun.
He turned to Isabelle.
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