Jacquot and the Waterman (68 page)

Going through the classifieds? Looking for a job? Who did she think she was kidding? She already had a job. With the cops. Stood out a mile. Which was funny for a while, having her sit there, only a scatter of tables between them. But the message was clear. The police were getting close. They'd found the gym, and had clearly decided that the Cafe-Bar Guillaume was just the kind of place the Waterman might use as a lookout spot.

Smart. Very smart. Which meant that the time had probably come to move on, find somewhere else, just when all the fun was starting. And Marseilles was such a great place to be.

Pulling on a coat that Sunday evening, the Waterman knew what had to be done. A pleasant drive out to Callelongue and a stroll along the
quai,
looking out for a quiet spot to say goodbye, committing to the ocean the memory of friends: their watches, rings and bracelets, their gold chains, crosses and silver clips, even that weighty solitaire eased off the unresisting wedding finger of Madame Suzanne Delahaye de Cotigny.

And maybe on the way home from Callelongue - if something presented itself - just one last, little adventure. Something to keep that cop Jacquot on his toes.

Anais pulled at her watch, held up her wrist and  checked the time. Just past midnight. She sat up in bed and listened. Had she heard the door buzzer or not? She couldn't be certain. Had she dreamt it? Or was there really someone there? She waited in the darkness, listening for a second ring. Then she would know. Around her the silence was deep and pure. Not a sound, save for the sigh of her mattress springs, the warm whisper of her sheets and, stirring the air, the soft pulse of the ceiling fan.

Then it came again. Out of the darkness, a low insistent buzzing from her front door, jolting her fully awake. But who on earth could it be? At this time of night?

Paul. It could only be Paul, thought Anais as she slipped from her bed. He must have left something - his phone, his briefcase, his glasses. The man was hopeless, always forgetting something. But that was ridiculous, she decided. He'd left two hours earlier. Why would he bother? He'd be home by now. In bed, asleep, like her, glad that everything had been sorted, arrangements made. And no explosive tantrum this time, just an acknowledgement that what she was asking for wasn't that unreasonable, that she'd keep her word, that he'd never hear from her again.

As she tugged on a gown and tied the belt, Anais remembered what she'd been dreaming in the instant before coming awake. The small house in Martinique that she'd bought, in the hills above La Lamentin, where it was cool, close to her parents, with her child playing in the yard, with not a care in the world.

But she wasn't in Martinique now. She was in Endoume. At night. Alone.

Hugging the gown around her, Anais moved to the bedroom window and parted the blinds. The driveway was empty: no Porsche, no light, no movement. Closing the blinds, she went to the hall and, trailing her fingers along the wall, tiptoed to the front door and listened.

Nothing.

And then the bell rang a third time, making her jump from her skin, longer this time, more urgent, the sound so close, the finger pressing it only the other side of the door, inches from her.

'Who is it?' she called out and then regretted she'd said a word.'It's me,' came a whispered reply.

'Paul' she said with a burst of relief and slid the chain from its runner, turning the lock and opening the door.

'What on earth....'

Part Four

76

Vallon des Auffes, Marseilles, Monday

It was the seagull that saw it first, a fledgling, pink webbed feet splayed for a grip on the prow of a fishing skiff. His feathers were still grey, flecked with white, ruffling in the breeze, wide yellow eyes hard and sharp, and his call, screeching plaintively around the cove, still high-pitched, uncertain. And unanswered. The seagull was alone. Somehow he'd missed the others leaving, out of sight now, circling in the wake of a fishing boat edging past the Malmousque Heads and bound for the Vieux Port.

And so he stood there, waiting, looking. Hungry.

Which was when his attention was caught by a wink of something in the water. A flash of light catching the morning sun. A fin? A darting scatter of silvery scales? The young seagull blinked his honey-coloured eyes, straightened his neck and peered into the water not ten metres from his perch.

Whatever it was, it was not familiar. So not a fin, then, not scales. But something. Moving gently with the pull of the tide, breaking the surface. Something dark and shadowy. Caught, by the looks of it, in a shred of netting.

The seagull might have been young, but he knew netting. And he didn't like it. His sister had died dragging a webbed train of it from her ankle. Two weeks it had taken before they found her, washed up on the slipway, her thin pink leg still tangled in the net. That was enough for him.

But still... he was hungry. And the glint. That promising glint. There it was again. Buried, so far as he could see, not in a web of netting but in a coil of shifting black seaweed, winking out now and then with the movement of the sea. It was big, too, whatever it was that produced the flash of light, rounded, and. . . somehow tentacled, limbs angled down, lost against the glare of the water.

Big enough to land on, the seagull speculated. Worth a look. So he pushed off from the prow of the
pointu,
a few half-hearted beats of his wings enough to reach the bundle. Legs down, feet spread for landing, neck and head rea ring back, wing-tips meeting, he felt himself make contact.

But not solid contact. The bundle was smaller and lighter than he'd estimated. Not bulky enough to bear his weight. For it dipped beneath the surface and sent him skittering up into the air, flapping for purchase, before dropping down again for a second try. Only this time the thing seemed to roll like a log, bringing those tentacles sparkling into the sunlight, fingers curled at the sky, slicking black coils of hair over an ashen face.

Twenty metres away, on the steps of Chez Fonfon, coming down from the restaurant to the quay, a woman looked hard at the water, pointed, and put a hand to her mouth.

S
enior Customs Officer Emile Jalons, of the State Customs and Immigration Department, arrived early, and nervously, at his office on Quai d'Arenc, parking his car in a spill of shadow. It was a little after eight o'clock in the morning and the sun was already starting to bite. In the warm, ticking silence, he sat at the wheel and fought down an impulse to turn the car round, head home and call in sick. But Jalons knew that he couldn't do that. It was bad enough as it was, but if he chickened out now, at the last minute, he knew there'd be a far higher price to pay than the one already on offer. Let them down, refuse to do what they wanted, and Jalons had not the slightest doubt that they'd come looking for him. Tomorrow. The day after. A year, even. But come they would. Of course he should have known right from the start that it was a set-up. The club, the boy, the apartment, the ease of the whole thing. Forty minutes after that first drink - so sweet, a fruit cola - the lad was sliding a key in the lock and showing him into a not-bad one-bed apartment overlooking the steps of the Gare St-Charles. Five hundred francs for the best personal attention he could remember receiving. Just the five! The boy must be new in town, Jalons decided, as he made his way home to his wife and children.

Three days later, the videotape of their activities that night in St-Charles had been left in a padded brown envelope on the front seat of his car. The accompanying note, sellotaped to the cassette, carried nothing more than a local phone number. After Jalons watched the tape that evening, he picked up the phone and tapped out the number with a shaky hand.

The voice that answered was cool and soothing. Knew who was calling without needing to ask. There was a little job they needed doing, the voice on the phone told him, and if he did exactly as he was told the original tape that recorded his indiscretions would be destroyed. Otherwise . . .

There'd been no need for Jalons to be told what the consequences would be. Better the offending video destroyed than on his boss's desk. Or, God help him, in the mail to his wife.

Up in the office, its ceiling fans turning slowly, its dusty, metal-framed windows giving onto a stretch of hawsered quay and the peeling hulk of a Japanese tanker, Jalons checked through the movements board behind Sergeant Dupuys's desk. He found what he was looking for and flicked through the three single pages on the merchant ship
Aurore,
just as he'd done every morning since receiving the tape.

Launched 1976. Registered Senegal. Eighteen thousand tonnes.

Current owners: Basquet (Maritime) et Cie.

Ship's Master: François Mallet. Three other officers all French. Mixed Asian crew.

Two for'ard holds. Three stern holds.

Incoming from Venezuela, Surinam and Cayenne in French Guyana, to Accra and Marseilles.

Mixed cargo of rubber, kaolin, timber, cocoa and groundnuts. And whatever else it was that Jalons was being asked to overlook. With South America as the ship's point of departure, it wasn't difficult to work out what that cargo might be.

Jalons had also noted that the
Aurore
was scheduled for a refit after her arrival and wondered whether the contraband - which she was surely carrying - was hidden amongst the cargo or somewhere in the superstructure. Concealing contraband in a ship's superstructure for pick-up during refit was harder to police than contraband hidden in the cargo. But given that the voice on the phone had instructed him to supervise unloading and arrange Customs clearance himself, Jalons could only assume that the drugs - for that was surely what this was all about - were part of the cargo about to be unloaded on his quay. Once cleared by Customs, the shipping line was then free to release that cargo direct to its owners.