Impure Blood (46 page)

‘Jarret’s father’s been in an ICU for the past three months.’

‘There you have it. But listen – any breaks in the hunt for Agnès?’

‘Not yet, Deanna.’

Darac swung the Peugeot into Boulevard du Tzarewitch. Against the cerulean sky, the domes of the Russian Orthodox cathedral glinted like Fabergé eggs. The road turned back towards a cluster of road and rail bridges. Somewhere beneath them was the final address on Darac’s list.

Adrenalin had loosened Agnès’s tongue. But her words still emerged as a parched croak.

‘Delage. Corinne Delage… Think, Papa. Think because I’m at a loss. She has no grudge against either of us that I can see. She’s a racist, that much is clear. I warned her to co-operate with one of our juniors who is black but all this just for that? No. Obviously not. We let her go. And the Caserne didn’t even deal with her earlier…’

The back door of the van flew open. Two blinding lights. Two silhouettes. One was Delage. The other was far taller, slimmer.

‘Yes!’ Vincent said, his chain rattling through the eyebolt as he extended one hand to the newcomer. ‘Thank God!’ He wept. ‘We’re saved… Water – give us water, for God’s sake!’

‘There’s no water for you.’ Delage’s voice was a slap in the face. ‘Not to drink.’

As the taller shape shone his torch at Vincent, Agnès’s scrunched eyes picked out odd details of a uniform. She didn’t trust it. Delage had locked the door on them and then returned with help? No. It didn’t make sense. She tried to make out the face gradually filling in behind the silhouette.

‘As the laws of this country stand… you are guilty of a very serious offence but if you let us go without further harm, I can assure you—’

‘Shut up. Shut up, you filth!’

The shout reverberated in the rank air. A male voice. What men were in Delage’s life? Agnès couldn’t think of any.

‘Yes, you and Corinne shouldn’t have kept us in this condition but I repeat…’

Crouching, the silhouette advanced behind the beam. Spittle splattered across Agnès’s face. A hand swatted her head to the side. Pain hotwired her neck to her coccyx.

‘No!’ Vincent cried out. ‘Do what you like to me but don’t touch my daughter!’

‘Let me put the electrics on, David. I want to see better.’

Ignoring the pain, Agnès turned her head towards her attacker. Bulbs in the ceiling came on. The torches were extinguished. In a thin bluish light, she saw him clearly.

‘You?’

David Jarret smiled.

‘Yes, me. A trusted police officer. Incredible, isn’t it?’

Agnès tried to put her mind in gear but it stalled. She had no handle on this. There was nothing to go on. Nothing to connect.

‘And I fooled you, didn’t I?’ Delage sneered as she threaded her arm through Jarret’s. ‘Fooled all of you. I knew who Emil Florian was, alright. And I knew what had happened to him. I knew everything.’ The sneer disappeared. ‘Tell David I fooled you.
Tell
him!’

‘You fooled us,’ Agnès parroted, thinking hard.

‘Hear that, David? I did do some things right.’

Jarret’s eyes were boring into the motherlode that was Vincent Dantier.

‘Me and David planned it together. We were going to get Emil at home but he went out sooner than usual. I knew his route. I knew he’d go to Rue Verbier.’

Jarret’s eyes hadn’t moved.

‘Be quiet. How I managed to shake your hand at the briefing…’ He got in closer. ‘So how does it feel, Vincent? To be lying here in your thin little nightie?’

Delage gave a delighted little chuckle.

‘Lying with your stinking shit just centimetres away? And just out of reach – your beloved daughter lying in
her
stinking shit, vulnerable, abused, uncomprehending? Degrading, isn’t it? Painful. Desperate. Hopeless – that you have come to this.’

Delage clapped her pudgy hands together.

Vincent’s eyes clotted with grief.

‘Water. We need water.’

‘Water’s coming. I repeat – how does it feel?’

‘It feels… execrable; so if you could…’

‘Yes? Go on. Finish what you were going to say. If I could do what?’

‘David?’ Agnès winced as she shuffled her bottom back against the van side. ‘You killed Emil Florian.’ She swallowed, trying to make spittle. ‘But Florian was a rapist, did you know that?’

Jarret and Delage shared a look. And then the old woman let out a disbelieving snort.

‘No he wasn’t. He was a rotten bastard alright but—’

‘Be quiet. Go on, Filth.’

‘Florian
was
a rapist.’ Agnès was beginning to feel a little encouraged. ‘A rapist of children, indeed. Killing him might even be interpreted as a citizen’s moral duty. So there’s every chance that your punishment for that crime would be relatively slight. However, harming my father and me will not be interpreted so leniently. I cannot imagine what you, a respected officer, expect to gain by this.’

He gave Agnès a humouring look.

‘Can’t you?’

More delight for Delage. Agnès persisted with her point.

‘David, if we’re going to resolve this, you have to release us…’

‘We’re going to resolve it, alright. Vincent – tell your daughter what this is all about.’

The old man’s head was on his chest.

‘Look at me, Papa. Don’t let go.’

‘I don’t know… what this is all about.’

‘You don’t know?’ Jarret’s eyes were burning. ‘Let me help you.’

‘Look at me, Papa.’

Vincent slowly raised his head. But he kept his eyes forward.

‘The story starts with a family named the Djourescus. Adam was a contemporary of your father’s here. A contemporary at the Caserne, I mean. He was bright, wasn’t he? Accomplished. Beat you to the André Fonsec Medal in ’41. Beat you to everything, in fact. And you couldn’t stand that. But you got your own back on Adam, didn’t you?’

‘Don’t… listen to him, darling.’ Vincent’s voice sounded false, almost other-worldly. ‘It’s nonsense.’

‘It’s not, you arsehole!’

Delage kicked Vincent hard on the knee. He let out a keening sob and sagged forward.

In a rattling of chain, Agnès extended a hand towards him.

‘Papa! Don’t! Be careful.’

Jarret turned to her.

‘He’s lucky he got a kick in the knee. Because for what he did next, a kick in the balls would have been more fitting.’

‘No – don’t tell… He’s lying, darling.’

‘I know, Papa.’

‘It’s time we got rid of this stink. Go organise the showers.’

‘Alright, David.’ Delage climbed happily out of the van. ‘Hope you brought towels.’

Her mind still struggling to put a coherent story together, Agnès peered through the open door. They were in some sort of workshop. A roller door was less than ten metres away. She prayed for a hiatus in the thunder overhead. With the van door open, a loud scream might just summon someone.

‘Adam had a wife. Elena. Pretty little thing, wasn’t she, Vincent? His pride and joy. Your papa tried to get her into bed. She laughed at him.’

In the midst of her terror, Agnès began to gain strength. Her father, behaving like that? It was ludicrous.

‘I don’t see where Emil Florian fits in with this but you’re what – Adam Djourescu’s grandson? And you’ve staged this hideous charade because you’ve believed some lie from nearly seventy years ago?’

‘It’s not a lie.’ Jarret got in close to Vincent once more. ‘Elena, my grandmother, and Emil Florian’s mother Louise used to talk about you, Vincent. They thought you were pathetic. They laughed about you and your little, very little, wiles and ploys.’

Vincent returned the look, saying nothing.

Overhead, the thunder began to subside. Agnès swallowed hard, trying to make spittle.

‘But I’m jumping the gun.’ Jarret jumped out of the van. ‘Enjoy!’

The thunder was almost gone. Now was the time. Agnès filled her lungs. But before any sound came, a jet of water hit her in the chest, a crushing, lung-bursting shock. She tried to turn, to hunker down, to make herself as small as possible. Pulling against the chain, she drew a deflecting arm in front of her, a skinny strut against a flaying plume of pain. Momentary release. And then the jet hit her in the face. She tasted salt as her head wrenched back. She couldn’t lower it. There was no escape. She couldn’t breathe. She was drowning. On and on the torment continued. Another salvo in the face. And then it stopped.

She lay on her side, broken, heaving, spluttering. Vincent stared at her, his mouth opening and closing uselessly.

‘Better?’ Jarret handed the nozzle to Delage as their victims’ waste drifted on the tide out of the van. ‘Watch your footing there, Auntie.’

‘You make them all nice and clean.’ Delage shook her head as she carried the hose away. ‘And this is all the thanks you get.’

Jarret climbed into the van.

‘And you want to be pristine for the journey, don’t you? It’s going to be fun. The van’s going to the pleasure park. I think that’s what they called it, didn’t they, Vincent? In the camps?’

Agnès felt Jarret’s hands grab her shoulders. She almost blacked out at the pain as he yanked her upright.

‘What’s this I hear you say? Camps? Oh yes. You see, filth, in October 1943, your father sent my grandparents and my aunt there to the best of the lot. Auschwitz. It proved a letdown, though. Not so much fun. Forced labour. Gassing. Bodies shovelled into heaps. Not mannequins – real people. Burning. Smoke. Ashes.’

Still recovering from the water jet, Agnès could only manage a single word.

‘No.’

‘Yes.’ He went back to Vincent. ‘Tell her.’

Vincent looked into Jarret’s eyes.

‘I was following orders just as your grandfather did the first time. He consigned countless Jews to their deaths in ’42.’

Jarret got in closer.

‘
He
followed orders.
You
acted on your own initiative. You informed on him. Informed! And you did it just to gain an advantage at work. To no longer be second best.’

Vincent’s head lowered. Jarret’s eyes slid to Agnès.

‘That’s right, my grandparents died in choking agony because your lovely father, a man you so worship, saw a chance to get rid of a rival and advance himself in one fell swoop. All the pain and suffering just for that.’

Making a monumental effort, Agnès took in a long breath.

‘It isn’t true, David.’

‘It’s true, alright. They suffered every conceivable torture because of him.’ A wilder look shone in his eyes. ‘Shall I rape her, Auntie? Just for good measure?’

Delage thought about it.

‘Why not?’

‘No!’ Vincent screamed.

Closing her eyes, Agnès painfully drew in her legs. The van shuddered as Jarret’s boots banged down closer. She felt leather scud against her knees.

‘Go on, David. What are you waiting for?’

‘Leave her alone! Please God!’

‘Give it to her.’

‘Maybe I… No. She disgusts me.’

It was Jarret’s boot kicking Agnès’s legs from under her that finally made Agnès cry out in pain. She lost consciousness for a second or two. When she opened her eyes, Jarret was crouching in front of Vincent.

‘How did that feel? Eh? I could have avenged the family by just killing you. But for you to really suffer, you had to see your own flesh and blood suffer.’

‘Please.’ Vincent swallowed. ‘No more.’

‘Of course, to begin with, I had only your forename to go on. But I got there in the end. Should have joined the Brigade, shouldn’t I? Oh – there’s one final thing. Your plan didn’t work quite as well as it should, monsieur. As you can see, my aunt was given another chance. And so was my father, the not-stillborn baby who took on another life as Jean Florian. You didn’t know that, did you? It was a life that was ruined and in turn ruined other lives. But it was through him I embarked on this long journey.’ Jarret stared hard into Vincent’s shattered eyes. ‘What do you think of that, Vincent?’

‘A son?’

In her corner, Agnès recoiled as if punched. There was a strange longing in her father’s eyes, and a catch in his voice.

‘All these years, I’ve had a…’

‘What?’ Jarret slapped Vincent’s face. ‘What are you saying?’

Agnès was sitting open-mouthed, her head shaking.

‘You’re lying,’ Delage said. ‘You never had my mother.’

‘Whose child do you think she was carrying? It wasn’t me your mother used to laugh at, David. It was your—’

‘Shut up!

He grabbed the collar of Vincent’s sodden nightshirt, pulling his head forward. He slapped him again, harder this time.

‘Papa – no, it’s not true. Say it isn’t. For God’s sake!’

Vincent turned to Agnès.

‘I… I was thinking of others. I couldn’t tell… your mother… Look, David – you couldn’t kill your own grandfather, could you? And Aunt Agnès? We could get you off the charge. Get you off the whole thing.’

Agnès began to weep.

Jarret threw Vincent’s head back and jumped out of the van.

‘Very clever. You almost had me convinced there for a moment. But you are very definitely not my grandfather. And my only aunt is Corinne, here…’

Delage smiled, as if David’s confirmation guaranteed the truth of the assertion.

‘She and my father are going to get together when this is all over, by the way. He doesn’t know it yet. I’ve kept the fact that his big sister survived a secret from him. Too ill. But when he’s stronger, what a reunion that will be.’

‘I knew
where
I’d come from, you see,’ Delage said, as if chatting with friends over a coffee, ‘but until David came to see me, I had no idea of
who
I’d come from.’

‘We… we should be at the reunion too.’ Vincent essayed a smile. ‘Yes – the family all together.’

‘Oh yes, we’ll do that.’ Jarret gave one last smile. ‘But first, it’s the pleasure park for you two. Have fun!’

The door slammed shut.

* * *

Overhead, rail tracks and roadways led off one another in Escher-like complexity. Between the ground-shaking rumble of the trains and the Doppler-shifted whoosh of the traffic, Darac was having difficulty hearing his radio. He upped the volume as he headed towards a row of lock-ups built into adjoining arches at the far end.

A pick-up was parked outside the first of them. Inside, a bald-headed man in overalls was stripping a pine chest of drawers. He cast Darac a suspicious look through his goggles as he got out of the car.