Downfall

by Sally Spedding

  Irène Rougier thanked him, then remembered an old hunting pistol and its ammunition had gone missing from her parents’ shared bedroom.

  Valon swore under his breath just as his strained-looking Lieutenant took her seat. They conferred for a moment before he let her speak. As if to patch things up, she began by apologising for her temper and bad language, then eventually said, “Captain Valon thinks it best if, at this stage, no-one knows about that particular weapon, because should any adversary attack your husband, he’d have some protection.”

  Delphine clasped her mother’s hand. Imagining such an encounter had brought a fresh spasm of fear.

  The Lieutenant eyed Valon, then each of them in turn as he picked up his phone. But instead of trying Martin’s number again, asked for the sous-lieutenant who’d delivered those uneaten snacks, to escort the Rougiers home. “But before you go,” he added, “you should also know that Michel Salerne and Josette Lecroix are in a safe house for the duration. The least we could do.”

  “Where?”

  “I’m sorry, that’s confidential,” said the Lieutenant. “And meanwhile, we’re trying to get you round-the-clock protection too.”

  At that point, the caped, holstered figure of Noah Baudart bustled in, saying it was time for both civilians to leave.

  “Why?” Irène Rougier, stood up, smoothing down her shabby clothes.

  “Why what?”

  “Are we to be protected?”

  Confrère seemed embarrassed. Perhaps to do with her recent outburst. But no.

  “Because you need it. And you’ve helped us.”

  Delphine thanked her and meant it. “Surely law enforcers would be better deployed looking for Adriana Facchietti and her unpleasant brother?” She then glanced at Valon. “Also locating Martin Dobbs, Doctor Henri Seghers and his son?”

  “That is our aim.”

  *

  Moments later, sous-lieutenant Noah Baudart pulled open the gendarmerie’s outer door, letting in a vindictive blast of freezing air. Delphine realised this was the least of what lay beyond the walls of that warm base. A devious man so warped, so ruthless, that she feared she might never see her mixed-up father ever again.

  “I hope the whole of the Lot is being searched as well,” said her mother as if reading her thoughts; clasping her hand because of the car park’s already slippery tarmac. “There must be a garage or CCTV camera that’s already picked out Lucius Seghers’ car.”

  “It is,” growled Baudart who’d elected to drive in front of them. “And there will be, but these things take time, especially if he’s using pseudonyms and maybe false number plates.”

  “This doesn’t sound terribly urgent. And a young girl’s been harmed too.”

  With a jolt, Delphine realised the injured Roza had been eclipsed by all the other news, and she reminded herself to call Patrick Gauffroi once back in St Eustache.

  “You need to be careful, Madame. Due process will illumine more than mere supposition…”

  He seated himself in the night-coloured Peugeot and switched on its eerie, blue headlights fractured by the glittering sleet. As he reached the main road and turned left, Delphine, following close behind, noticed a distinctive green light appear next to the bulk of his body. Perhaps he was phoning Valon to say he’d set off, but the call seemed to last some time. Meanwhile, he almost missed the correct turning off the roundabout.

  “He’s not concentrating,” observed Irène Rougier. “And he’s the law.”

  “I know.” Yet Delphine just wanted him to get a move on. Be focussed.

  Overtake…

  Without using her indicator, she made a move, but her mother held her back.

  “Don’t! There’s too much at stake. We need all the help we can get.”

  Not surprising, given her history, but this really was a pain in the arse. Sous-lieutenant Baudart was doing well under 50 kph on an open road.

  His green light went out and gradually, more traffic appeared. A van tried to squeeze in between them both, and immediately he braked, freezing the interloper out on an unbroken white line.

  “That’s plain dangerous,” observed her mother. “I know he’s protecting us, but…”

  The sign for St Eustache was just twenty metres away, but instead of slowing down, Baudart’s unmarked car picked up speed, then braked sharply, causing Delphine to almost perform an emergency stop behind it. By then, the turning for home had gone.

  “Shit! Thanks for that!” She yelled.

  “What the hell’s he up to now?” demanded Irène Rougier. “He wasn’t drunk, was he?”

  “No, and he’s turning left. Off the bloody road!” And before Delphine could manoeuvre her little car past him, she became aware of another, much bigger vehicle closing in behind her. Darkish-coloured complete with an already familiar giant-sized bull-bar that nudged her 2CV through that same wide-open gateway. All the while, its male driver kept relentlessly shunting her rear bumper. His one memorable feature being a pair of piercing, hawk-like eyes as she and her mother became vulnerable prey.

  ‘We know where you are and how to reach you…’

  27.

  14.40 hrs.

  No more icy rain, which was something to be thankful for, but precious little else. Neither Delphine nor her mother had a clue where they were. Suddenly stranded on their own in the middle of an unrecognisable nowhere. The petrol gauge too near empty for comfort. Tension crackled between them, because Irène Rougier hadn’t let her overtake the suddenly vanished unmarked car.

  They stayed silent in the 2CV. Doors locked, lights out, surrounded by a vast, stubble field of cut barley, with not a single sign of human habitation for as far as the eye could see. Delphine opted to wait, because although she’d twice tried to contact the Labradelle gendarmerie – even Lise Confrère’s own number – without success, she wanted them to see where they’d ended up.

  “Try again,” urged her mother.

  “I am.” And as before, nothing.

  “I could never pray after Oradour,” her passenger said suddenly. “But I can now.” And she did, crossing herself every few seconds, while Delphine fiddled with her mobile, careful not to let even the smallest light from it be visible. For God alone knew where those two men were who in different ways had forced them through that field’s open gateway before swerving away in a haze of mud.

  Finally, after her last ‘Amen’ Irène Rougier rummaged in her bag and produced a bar of dark chocolate. She bit off the first row of squares and handed it over. “This’ll keep your strength up. Eat.”

  But chocolate was the last thing Delphine needed. The first was for someone to answer the phone to explain who exactly had been driving the car in front, and why they’d behaved like a dangerous lunatic, clearly in cahoots with the car behind.

  “It was a warning to us.” She said. “Me, you, whatever. But it’s too late. I’m not giving up. And the more I think about it, the more I think that guy with the bull bar behind us was Lucius Seghers.”

  “And why sous-lieutenant Baudart? What’s his game?”

  “I’m trying to find out, aren’t I?

  “No night driving for the time being, hein?”

  Delphine recalled that advice he’d given her on Monday, and how he’d recently dispensed the baguettes with a look of concern. There had to be another explanation. “Could someone else have taken his place while we were still indoors?” She thought aloud.

  “It was him. Get used to the idea.”

  She did.

  “You’re right, because I’m trying not to admit that when I first came across him on Monday morning, he creeped me out.”

  Irène Rougier pulled her coat closer around her thin frame. “We should go. Now,” she said. “While we can. Supposing they both come back here?” She turned to Delphine; her lined skin as pale as Brie cheese. “You’re all I’ve got.”

  *

  Delphine’s inner shiver was deep and prolonged. Her voice showing more bravura than she felt.


  “If we’re the hunted, let them show themselves in the light of day.”

  The Labradelle phone number kept ringing, with yet again, no reply. The same for Confrère’s Ericsson.

  “I’ve got my Luger, remember?” Said her mother, out of the blue. “Do you think I’d have let François take it, after what he did?”

  “To me?”

  “No.”

  Cold and fear were rolled into one as Delphine cleared the inside of the misted-up windscreen with her cuff. Still no answer from Labradelle.

  “You mean, he’s the cause of everything?”

  Her mother tapped the end of the gear stick jutting from the steering wheel. “Let’s go.”

  To say that Delphine’s insides seemed even more hollow than a cheap Easter egg, was an understatement. The chink in the parental armour had opened too far. Even more than survival, this held her back from engaging first gear.

  “I said go.”

  “Wait.” First, she had to make sure she and her mother were quite alone, because their pursuers might still be lurking out of sight, lights off, behind that untrimmed hedge lining the road. She inched towards it; that frightening warning filling her mind.

  “Don’t you think it’s odd there’s been no reply from the gendarmerie?” Irène Rougier complained as they finally bumped and lurched their way forwards. Her Luger held in expert fashion, at the ready.

  “Everything’s bloody odd,” barked Delphine. “And here’s me, pretty sure Martin Dobbs is part of it all…”

  Then, all at once, her phone began to ring.

  *

  “Sssh… Listen!” hissed her mother some ten minutes later. “See those lights?”

  Within a few seconds, Lieutenant Confrère and Captain Serge Valon’s Subaru had sped into that same field and they’d run together like joggers in training through the bristling, cut barley, to where the hunted were waiting.

  “You must have been terrified,” said Confrère, finally having joined them, barely out of breath. Her keen gaze immediately fixed on the old pistol.

  “We still are,” its owner swiftly returned it to her handbag. “We’ve been got at, and no-one was answering my daughter’s calls. It’s a disgrace.”

  “I’m sorry. Something cropped up in Labradelle.”

  But why wasn’t Delphine quite convinced by her apology? Perhaps she’d been forced to stay on board there against her will.

  “I’m afraid you may not be so lucky next time,” Valon added, checking the 2CV from all angles. “And we may not always be available.”

  “Well, that’s reassuring.”

  “Did either of these guys act suspiciously near this car once you’d stopped?” he asked, to shift a tricky atmosphere. “Or touch it?”

  “No. They just circled us twice, then drove off,” said Delphine. “Why?”

  “Not sure yet.”

  “Which way did they go?” Confrère who’d been busy examining where three sets of tyre tracks had crushed the recent harvest’s bristly remains, looked up.

  Delphine pointed towards a broken line of bare trees which, under that sunless sky, could have been north, south, east or west. She couldn’t tell.

  “St. Armand’s that way.” Valon removed his black gloves to punch in a number on his phone with bare fingers. “Best call Cousteaux to make enquiries there, because right now, we’re taking you home.”

  “Exactly what sous-lieutenant Baudart said,” snapped Delphine despite being cold, hungry and scared witless. “So, what the hell was he playing at? Helping us get killed?”

  Confrère threw her a warning look. She didn’t like that one bit. “We’ve been in touch with him already. He’d been threatened too, and is in a bad way.” She tapped the side of her head, making Delphine wonder for a split-second, whose side she was on.

  “How was he threatened?”

  “By phone. That’s all he’s said so far.”

  “When?”

  “We don’t know yet.”

  Delphine glanced at her mother who looked ten years older, “I spotted him either making or answering a call on his mobile as we drove away from your gendarmerie.”

  Valon seemed deeply puzzled but said nothing.

  “You won’t get anything out of them,” whispered her mother deliberately loudly. “Remember the investigations after Oradour? One cover-up after another? Was it Diekmann or was it Lammerding who gave the final order? Did the FTP really kill Major Helmut Kampfe in Breuilaufa hours beforehand? And so on…”

  “Voilà!”

  Lise Confrère who’d nimbly crouched down again by the thinner set of tyre tracks leading away from the spot where the 2CV had been forced to stop, stood up. “Could be interesting.” She was delicately holding half a smoked cigarette, before slipping it into a self-seal plastic bag from their police car. “It’s fresh enough to have come from one of your waylayers, except,” she eyed Delphine, “sous-lieutenant Baudart never smoked.”

  “Come to think of it, he’d not seemed his usual self for the past few days,” Valon observed, still checking out the 2CV’s exterior. “And I don’t just mean the ‘flu.’”

  “He seemed fine to me.” His colleague contradicted too quickly. “Soon fought it off.”

  “Delphine, you’ve mentioned a few times the feeling of being followed,” Valon broke in, which was obviously a bad move. “Do you still say that?”

  “Yes. Especially this morning in Cousteaux. I’m certain that same Nissan had tailed me, then did a u-turn in heavy traffic. At other times, too…”

  Valon checked his watch again as if the miserable afternoon was slipping away too quickly. “OK.”

  Delphine saw him through her rear-view mirror probing around beneath the boot.

  “I think I know what he’s doing,” said her mother. “You wait. This will be why you won’t trust anyone ever again.”

  “Has she been damaged?” Was Delphine’s first thought, but Valon was turning something over in latex-gloved hands. A small, silver-coloured object, no bigger than a five-euro coin. He gestured for Delphine to look. “A GPS tracker. And I bet your father’s car has one too. If he gets in touch, please alert him.”

  Jésu…

  “How long’s it been on there?” she said, having got over the shock, also imagining her father’s Mitsubishi as bait. “Hard to tell. But it’s the latest model,” he added. “We’ll try and trace local suppliers, but I know this particular make comes from China and is a big online seller.”

  The horrible afternoon had darkened to dusk and felt like an open grave where fear still stroked Delphine’s bones. She tried unscrambling her memory to work out who might have been responsible, but her mother interrupted. “Where were you last night?” she asked her.

  “You never told us.”

  Delphine didn’t need to answer. Instead, whispered a name to the Lieutenant who’d kept herself busy by the tyre tracks. A name that tainted her mouth.

  *

  Eventually, in poor light, accompanied by the beginnings of yet more rain, the small party reached that idyllic-sounding ‘Road to the South.’ Irène Rougier was on alert with her venerable Luger in both hands, while the Subaru kept close contact behind. Although Delphine could make out the Lieutenant’s eyes fixed on the 2CV as if in a trance, it was the Restaurant Manager’s caring touch and expressions of concern at the hotel, that sneaked in and out of her memory. Then later, that tension in his voice and body language.

  Surely, though, the accusations against him were preposterous. Yet deep down, hadn’t she suspected there was a secret life behind the suave, likeable guy she’d first fallen for?

  “Why can’t we go to a safe house?” Irène Rougier kept glancing in her wing mirror. “Especially after what’s happened? I mean, it’s not as if we’ve Julie to worry about…”

  Delphine knew her mother hadn’t meant to sound callous. She was being practical. She’d loved Julie too and often declared she preferred dogs to people.

  “No. I want to look thi
s bastard in the eye,” she said. Yes, those same eyes that she’d seen at the Auberge de l’Aube and on the way into that huge field. She glanced at her passenger just before the turning for St. Eustache appeared. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of you.”

  *

  Having searched the farmhouse from its chilly attic to the marginally warmer ground floor, Captain Valon and Lieutenant Confrère moved towards the back door.

  “Keep this locked and bolted at all times,” she said, pulling the thick, lined curtain tight across it. “And don’t either of you leave the house on your own. You’ve several outbuildings which could give useful cover. We’ll check them before we leave.”

  “Thanks,” Delphine said, aware that the Captain seemed anxious to be off.

  “At this early stage, there’s no hard evidence that it’s Lucius Seghers who’s behind everything that’s happened since Monday morning. But we’re re-checking that Nissan’s provenance and still trying to contact Monsieur Dobbs. Rest assured that as soon as any forensic results come through, you’ll be the first to know.”

  “Thank you. And Lieutenant Confrère told me the baby’s post-mortem is today.”

  “So it is.”

  The newly-lit stove made not the slightest difference to the sudden biting cold that stung Delphine’s bones. She stood closer to her mother as Valon continued. “Madame, we’re also trying to work out exactly why your husband took himself off, given he’s only three months to live.”

  “Wrong,” said his Lieutenant, facing the three of them.

  “What?” Barked her mother, and Delphine felt that too-old house wrap itself even tighter around herself.

  No, that mustn’t happen…

  “The clinic he attended in Le Mans have only just confirmed there is no brain tumour after all. The scan was misleading. He had all the symptoms of high cholesterol, and with various fatty deposits, actually needs to watch his liver…”