Death on the Marais (10 page)

There was a long pause. ‘Any particular reason for that?’

‘I’m not sure. The body’s already been released.’

‘Jesus, that was quick. How come?’

‘Somebody had the right paperwork.’

‘Where from?’

Rocco smiled. Santer was right up there with him. For a body to be released so quickly and with no questions, only the best papers would have sufficed. And those could only come from one source. ‘Paris. I don’t know the details, but I hope to get them.’

‘Good luck on that one. Who was the dead Nazi – de Gaulle’s favourite niece?’

‘As soon as I find out I’ll let you know.’

‘Do that.’ Santer hesitated. When he spoke again, it was in a low voice. ‘Watch your back, big man. When the big fish start taking notice of minnows, it’s time to look for a handy rock to hide under. I don’t know what you’re getting into, but it could get messy.’

The phone clicked and Santer was gone.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Rocco? He’s a cop. Always will be.
When he’s not, he’s sweet.

Emilie Rocco – ex-wife

By the time he got back to Poissons, it was too late to do anything useful, so he drove to the house and parked the car. The day’s heat blanketed the front garden, oppressive and still, and he stood for a moment, enjoying the tranquillity. It was something he’d rarely found in Paris, where he had always been too close to others and their lives, too concerned with the next case on his list or the ones he had been forced by the pressure of work or political imperatives to consign to the backlog files.

He reached the front door and found a cardboard box on the step. A note was tucked inside the flap.

A man should eat. I hope you cook better than you grow tulips. The man installed your telephone already. You must be a Very Important Policeman.

Mme Denis was looking after his welfare. He glanced towards the hedge separating the two properties and made a mental note to slip some money for the food through her letterbox. He took the box inside. It contained the basics of survival which even he could live on: milk, butter, cheese, eggs, a knot of fresh-cut herbs which he guessed might be basil and coriander, a box of sugar cubes and a bottle of wine.

The phone was standard black, perched on top of a telephone directory. An official subscription form was tucked under the handset. The instrument looked worn with use, with a coil of wire long enough to reach anywhere in the house, and a number was written on a yellowed piece of card affixed to a slim tray in the base. Dédé had evidently used a spare model to jump the queue. Not that Rocco cared; at least he was connected. He picked up the handset and heard the welcoming burr down the line. Wondered for a moment who to call to test it out, then decided it could wait.

He made an omelette, which he could cook with his eyes shut, thanks to his ex-wife’s teaching, and listened for sounds of the fruit rats overhead. Silence. Maybe they’d gone out for the evening. Or they’d seen his gun and decided to find another home before he started blasting holes in the ceiling.

It reminded him that be hadn’t cleaned the weapon for a few days, so he hoisted it out of his coat pocket and laid it on the table for later. He had a cleaning kit in the car and would find it therapeutic to go through the familiar exercise. The gun was a MAB
.38 with a seven-round magazine. He had used it just twice in the police, and one like it a few times in the army. There were moves afoot to equip the police with another more up-to-date model, but Rocco had got used to the feel of the MAB and couldn’t imagine using something else just because it was to be the new standard model.

As soon as the omelette was ready, he scooped it onto a plate and poured a glass of wine, and sat down to eat his first meal in his new home.

He came awake with a rush at four in the morning. There was a scurrying sound overhead, but he knew it wasn’t the fruit rats which had disturbed him. Neither was it a physical intruder. Something more insidious had reached a hand into his sleep and dragged him to the surface; some dark thought at the back of his mind, nudging him awake.

His throat was dry and raspy. He’d been lying on his back. He scrambled up and reached for a glass of water, draining it in one gulp, then sat back in the dark and waited for whatever had been swirling around in his head to settle and become clear, as he knew it soon would. It had been one of the reasons Emilie had finally left; one of many, at least. She had accused him of living the job to the exclusion of all other facets of their life, evidenced by him often shooting bolt upright in the middle of the night in a eureka moment, dreams morphing back into reality. Like now. Sometimes the moments led somewhere tangible, sometimes not. But the damage had been
great enough to rob him of her patience, then finally, her love.

He shook his head and forced his mind back to the job in hand. The dead woman had to be someone: someone’s daughter, sister, maybe wife or mother. But whose? And someone important, if the paperwork to release the body was any indication. He would have to see whether Rizzotti showed some balls and came up with the names he needed. The bigger question was, where had she been prior to and immediately following her death? The wet clothing could be from any number of sources close by: the canal, the river or the lakes. But if Rizzotti was correct and his own instincts were right, the state of the body showed the drowning couldn’t have been in the last twenty-four hours. Alcohol and fresh water … and maybe drugs. A lethal combination. Yet not necessarily suspicious. It could have been a genuine accident: too much to drink, a few pills maybe, followed by a stroll too close to water.

Folly wasn’t necessarily murder.

Except that someone had discovered the body, but instead of alerting the authorities, had kept it for a while before placing it where it would eventually be discovered. Somebody with an acute lack of sensitivity.

The presence of alcohol raised a few questions. If a party guest goes missing – even one in a tasteless uniform – there would be questions asked. The police would be informed, the area searched, the family and friends expressing fear and loss, the usual
incomprehension when someone – especially a woman – disappears. The area would be buzzing with rumour, gossip and innuendo.

Yet none of that had happened.

Either nobody cared … or they didn’t know. Or did they not want to know?

He lay back down, then sat up again when a rooster crowed nearby, the harsh, gurgling sound drifting on the air with the clarity and reach of a bugle. He checked his watch. Almost five-thirty; time had passed swiftly. He shrugged on some old, lightweight cotton trousers and a T-shirt, and a pair of battered gym shoes: his training gear. His chances of getting back to sleep were less than slim, so he opted instead for a workout run. It was his first in three weeks, but it would help shake out the cobwebs.

He went out into the lane and turned away from the village. No sense in scaring the neighbours; he didn’t expect too many of them had a training regime other than the hard, physical labour which made up their days. He worked his way up to a gentle trot, breathing deeply and swinging his arms as he made his way out into the open countryside. The birds were just beginning their chorus, and he nodded a salute to them as he passed by, an intruder in their midst, wincing at the pain in his knees and already wondering if this wasn’t a few steps too far.

At seven, warmed by his run and a simple breakfast of toasted bread and coffee, Rocco reached the
marais
, taking a track off the road leading to the station and the
cemetery. Laid with a thin surface of aged and cracked tarmac, it meandered through a belt of tall poplars, skirting three small lakes and a vast, untamed stretch of reed beds, regularly dotted with notices saying
FISHING
–
PRIVATE
. The morning sun filtered through the branches of the trees and reflected in patterns off the water, giving the area a shimmering, unreal quality. Rocco felt the Citroën wheels dip each time he strayed off the tarmac, and his gut tilted at the idea that the ground here might swallow him and the car without warning at any moment.

He nosed the car into a large clearing with tyre tracks in the surface showing where other vehicles had turned to go back to the road. The end of the line for anything on four wheels.

He stopped with the nose pointing back along the track and killed the engine. Opened the door to let the air in. It smelt loamy, with a background scent of rotting vegetation and standing water. He got out and looked around.

A large wooden lodge dominated the clearing, standing proud of the trees behind it yet merging into the foliage as if camouflaged. It was plainly old, with peeling walls and weather-worn shutters over the windows, and a layer of soft moss on the shingle roof. A broad veranda ran the length of the front, with a wooden rail in the style of houses in the American Deep South. No rocking chairs, though, Rocco noted. No welcome mat, either.

He stepped onto the veranda and felt the rough planks flex beneath his weight. His footsteps made a
hollow noise over the crawl space beneath, but the place had been built to last with seasoned hardwood – a wise move situated here in the marshes. He tried the front door, which had a shutter over the central panel, but it, too, was locked tight. He walked along the veranda to the end, and looked round the corner of the building. There was no garden to speak of and no fence – merely a patch of rough grass and weeds stretching back several paces to a reed bed. Beyond the reeds lay a large expanse of water, surrounded on all sides by trees, reeds and tangled underbrush. The nearest sign of life was a family of ducks about thirty metres away on the water, and the occasional plop of a fish jumping.

At the other end of the veranda he found the same scenery, with the addition of an overturned aluminium rowing boat lying just out of the reeds, a large barbecue bay and a metal rack which he guessed was for fishing rods. He hopped over the veranda rail and walked across the grass for a closer look at the boat. Worn and dented in places, the soft metal was scarred along the sides. There was no sign of an engine mounting, but he guessed that on a lake this size, oars were the best form of propulsion.

He turned to study the rear of the lodge. It boasted two large windows and a narrow door, all tightly shuttered. Whoever owned this place believed in security, and he wondered if the locals had a reputation for helping themselves when the owners were away.

It would be an ideal place for parties, he decided. Unusual, even slightly sinister, especially at night, but
maybe that’s what gave it a special cachet among its visitors. What better place to let loose and have a fling without anyone overlooking you?

He returned to the front of the building, making a mental note to find out whose name the place was registered in. City folk, no doubt.

He stopped.

Claude Lamotte was standing by the front steps. His feet were planted solidly, his weight balanced, and he had a shotgun slung across one arm.

Rocco felt his throat go dry.

The twin barrels were pointing right at his midsection.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Rocco? I barely remember the man.

Not one of our best, in my opinion.

François Massin – former brigade CO Indochina campaign – now divisional
commissaire
, Picardie

‘Taking a chance, bringing that thing in here,’ said Claude genially, nodding back at the car. ‘Ground’s very soft off the road. Swallow a man whole in the wrong places.’

The shotgun barrels hadn’t wavered and Rocco felt the muscles in his gut contract. The idea of it going off even accidentally at this range didn’t bear thinking about. He tried to ignore it.

Very carefully, he slid a hand into his coat pocket and felt the reassuring heaviness of the MAB.

‘So I gathered,’ he said. He moved across the front of the house as if to study a poster wrapped around one of the heavy wooden uprights. The move was to take him out of the line of fire, but when he stopped and looked back, Claude had turned with
him. ‘Could you point that thing somewhere else?’

‘Oh, sorry.’ Claude moved his hand and the gun broke. He extracted two red cartridges. ‘I was out hunting rabbits. You get used to walking around locked and ready to go in this place.’ A harsh sound broke the silence, and Claude glanced up into the trees behind the lodge. He inserted one of the cartridges, flicked the barrels up again. They locked into place with an efficient click, and he sighted at a crow sitting in the uppermost branches. Then he lowered it without firing.

By the time the barrel swung down again, Rocco had his gun pointed towards Claude through the fabric of his coat.

He still wasn’t sure about Lamotte. He was local, after all, and knew everyone and probably everything: which way was up, which was down; the good, the bad and the plain indifferent. He was genial, too, and appeared to have accepted Rocco’s arrival with genuine ease. Many would have been grudging at the very least, downright resentful at most. It didn’t mean he was up to anything, but Rocco had spent too many years learning not to take anyone at face value or to drop his guard too quickly.

As he stood there, wondering whether Claude was going to break the shotgun again, he detected the smell of the oil he’d used last night to clean the MAB, the aroma set off by the warmth of his hand. It had been relaxing, he remembered, and he’d taken his time, dismantling the weapon piece by piece, the movements practised and smooth.

The metallic aroma, coupled with the sunlight 
through the trees, the thick, green carpet of reeds and the enforced silence after the clicking of the shotgun, reminded him of a long time ago. The close atmosphere of the jungle rushed in on him like a train, filling his head with images of the thick canopy, the narrow trails with their booby traps and their brightly coloured flowers, the darting flight of small birds and the sudden heave of soil and greenery as someone stepped on a mine or snagged a tripwire.