‘So, what is this place?’ Inspector Lucas Rocco stepped up alongside the solid figure of Detective René Desmoulins, who was squinting through the late afternoon heat haze across a stubble-covered field towards a building in a slight depression at a crossroads some five hundred metres away. The structure was decrepit, sagging, with holes in the roof and shutters hanging off the walls like an old man’s inside-out pockets. Surrounded by rusted and broken barbed wire hung with faded notices warning people to keep out, it seemed to be a long way from anywhere, and Rocco wondered what had driven the original owner to settle at such a remote spot.
Checking the map for directions before leaving the office in Amiens, Rocco had noted that the minor routes which joined at the crossroads were no longer accessible, having been replaced by a single diversionary road and closed off several years ago. The move had been the death knell for the already isolated building, as if fate had been determined to make sure that it eventually sank into decay and ruin.
‘It was a café once, a long time ago,’ said Desmoulins. He was young and fair-haired, with a nascent moustache that struggled to achieve a full growth, much to the amusement of his colleagues in the Amiens commissariat. ‘Then the authorities discovered an old map showing a huge World War One ammunition dump in the back garden. They didn’t have the money to move the ammunition, so they declared the place out of bounds. The owner couldn’t get compensation and went bust.’ He shook his head. ‘Nobody goes near it any more.’
‘Except for two out-of-town bank robbers looking for a place to hide.’ Rocco had scanned the incident report from earlier in the day. Two men had entered the Rue Massena branch of the Crédit Agricole in Lille late yesterday afternoon, just before the weekly armoured van collected the cash from the tills and safe. The amount taken was unknown but thought to be considerable, due to recent livestock sales and harvest revenues from farms in the area. One of the two robbers had been armed with a shotgun and, whether by accident or deliberately, had blown a hole in the ceiling on the way in, bringing down a large quantity of plaster and lathes. Two members of staff had been slightly injured by the debris and, in the confusion, the robbers had made their escape in what had been described by onlookers as a new white Mercedes.
Rocco borrowed a pair of binoculars from the detective and studied the building. ‘And they definitely headed this way?’
‘They were tracked because of the car,’ Desmoulins said. ‘Not many Mercs in this part of the world, and both men were covered in plaster dust from the ceiling.’ He grinned. ‘You could say they stood out a bit.’
‘Not your top-of-the-heap robbers, then.’ Using a white Mercedes was hardly brilliant planning, especially in a rural area not known for fancy forms of transport. And drawing attention to themselves by using a gun to scare people was stupid. It might and sometimes did work in big cities like Paris, Rocco conceded, where confusion and fear allowed robbers to disappear among the streets and back runs before any alarm could be raised; but out here they might as well have tied a skull and crossbones to the car aerial and played loud pirate music on their way out of town. ‘How come you’re here?’ he asked. ‘I thought this was a Lille case.’
‘It is.’ Desmoulins gestured towards two uniformed officers standing nearby, armed with MAS-49/56 rifles. They were staring at Rocco as if he was a being from another planet. No doubt they had heard of his exploits in the area since arriving from Paris, but seeing him in the flesh was evidently hard to take in. ‘These two were here keeping a watch with a Detective Aubrey, but his wife went into labour an hour ago and Commissaire Massin sent me to fill in until more men got here.’
‘From Lille.’
‘Yes. There’s been a breakdown in communication, apparently. I think they mean a balls-up.’
Rocco was about to question whether the robbers had managed to slip away unseen in the meantime when he noticed movement at one corner of the building. He focussed quickly on a face pressed against the crumbling wattle and daub wall. It disappeared again in seconds, leaving behind a puff of smoke from a cigarette. But the glimpse he’d caught of the person’s features was enough to leave him with a feeling of surprise.
‘Fontenal?’ he said softly. ‘What the hell—’
‘You know him?’ Desmoulins had also seen the man appear and duck back.
‘I wish I didn’t.’ Rocco explained that ‘Bam-Bam’ Fontenal, nicknamed after his liking for letting off guns, was a career criminal operating around the outer reaches of the Paris area, who only occasionally ventured into the city proper. He’d spent years in and out of prison, but so far had avoided lengthy sentences because his crimes, in spite of the guns, had never netted him more than a handful of cash or cheap jewellery. He had never actually killed anyone. Rocco had arrested him more than once for low-level robberies in the Clichy district, putting him away twice for a couple of years. It seemed Fontenal hadn’t benefitted from the experience.
‘He’s a long way from his normal base, then,’ Desmoulins commented.
‘Because he’s an idiot. He gets carried away with his own sense of ambition and tries to act like Bonnie and Clyde.’ Rocco handed back the binoculars and took out his service weapon. ‘Let’s get this settled, shall we?’
‘Our orders are to wait, Inspector,’ one of the Lille uniforms put in. ‘More help will be arriving soon, they said.’
Rocco looked at the officer. He was young, tough-looking and seemed capable and confident. He didn’t look like the sort of young cop accustomed to waiting for things to happen. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Officer Pouillot, sir.’ He gestured towards his colleague. ‘This is Officer Maté.’
‘Well, Officers Pouillot and Maté, right now there’s nobody else here, so this makes it your responsibility and your arrest. Detective Desmoulins and I are here merely as observers.’ What Rocco didn’t say was that he knew Fontenal well enough to figure that the crook would probably come out without a fight if they made the correct approach. ‘Waiting will only increase the risk that those two morons will do something stupid. You really want to wait for someone else to come along and grab the glory?’
‘Not a chance,’ Maté said quickly, and nudged Pouillot. ‘Come on, he’s right – let’s do it.’
Rocco didn’t wait for further discussion and said, ‘Spread well out and walk slowly. Watch for my signals. Give them time to see us but don’t shoot unless they do. I’d rather take them alive.’
The two men nodded and moved away, checking their weapons and separating themselves by a good twenty paces.
Desmoulins looked at Rocco with raised eyebrows. ‘You know this man that well?’
‘Well enough. I’ve put him away a couple of times.’
‘How do you know he won’t shoot or make a run for it?’
‘If he was going to run, he’d have done so already.’ Fontenal was too tied to his own base near Paris to stay away for long; he might have chosen this place to get out of sight for a while, but it would have been for one night only. After that he’d have felt the strong pull of the banlieue – the suburb he called home. ‘Something must have kept him from leaving. Car trouble, perhaps.’
‘With a new Mercedes?’
‘It happens. Anyway, I doubt it’s his and he probably got so excited he forgot to fill it up before he came out this way. He’s not used to long trips.’
‘Or something else intervened.’ The words seemed to come out before Desmoulins could stop them.
‘What do you mean?’
Desmoulins took a deep breath. ‘Don’t quote me on this, Lucas, but when the café was closed down the owner went bust. He also discovered his wife was cheating on him with one of his customers. The story is he took a shotgun to the pair of them, planning to shoot himself afterwards. But he’d run out of cartridges so he tied a rope to a beam in the bar and jumped off the counter.’
‘So?’
‘The place is haunted. Everyone says so. They won’t go near it.’
‘Nothing to do with there being a massive amount of old, highly unstable explosive in the back garden that would blow off peoples’ socks ten kilometres away?’
‘Maybe. Who knows?’
Rocco stared at him. ‘You believe that ghost stuff?’
Desmoulins shrugged and rubbed his moustache with the back of his hand. ‘Not really, but a couple of years back they got a priest to go in and do a… what do they call it?’
‘An exorcism. It’s mumbo-jumbo. Did it work?’
‘No. In fact the priest refused to go back in there. Said it contained forces beyond his control.’
Rocco shook his head. Cops were usually too cynical for talk of ghosts, but there were a few who might have claimed that anything that couldn’t be written up on a charge sheet must be from darker realms. ‘So apart from Fontenal and his pal we’re up against the spirits of a dead café owner and two adulterers, and an unknown quantity of old explosive. I wonder if Bam-Bam knows that. It’s about time something gave him a good fright.’
He set off across the field and waved the two uniformed men to advance, while Desmoulins jogged out to his right, drawing his own pistol. The ground was firm, and a covering of long, dry grass scratched at the cuffs of his trousers, chafing his ankles. High overhead a skylark sang, unaware of the human drama being played out below, while the rumble of a tractor engine drifted over the fields.
When they were a hundred metres away from the building, Rocco stopped and signalled to Pouillot for him to fire a single shot over the roof.
The man nodded, aimed and fired. The shot was loud and flat, drowning out the tractor and silencing the skylark. The men instinctively looked up for signs of feathers. Echoes of the shot drifted away over the café and were quickly absorbed by the landscape.
The reaction from the café was instantaneous. A section of shutter still clinging to the building’s rotting exterior was thrown back and a face appeared in the dark space behind. Another appeared alongside it, followed by the glistening barrel of a shotgun.
‘Don’t be an idiot, Bam-Bam,’ Rocco called out, and lifted his service weapon above his head so that the men inside could see it. He didn’t want to use it, but there were always instances where it was the only option. ‘You couldn’t hit a stationary train if you were standing on the platform. Give it up before you get hurt.’
A momentary silence was followed by a voice, shouting, ‘Rocco? Is that you? What the hell! So, this is where they sent you!’ The man swore fluently, cursing his bad luck.
‘Yes, it’s me. And that means you’re on my turf – again. And the men with rifles are military sharpshooters trained to shoot the buttons off shirt fronts. Think about it.’
He saw Maté beginning to bring up his rifle as if to prove it, and waved a hand to stop him. Fontenal may have been hopeless with a gun, but if he got nervous and let loose at this distance, even he might, for once in his life, hit someone.
The two faces disappeared and there was silence. Ten seconds went by, then twenty. Just as the counter in Rocco’s head reached thirty, and he was about to send the men off to the sides of the building with orders to place a couple of intimidating shots through the windows, the shotgun appeared again. This time it dropped from the window to the ground with a clatter.
‘Is that it?’
‘Yes. That’s it – my word of honour.’
‘Right. You know what to do,’ Rocco called, and signalled for the officers to spread out further and wait. Hopefully Bam-Bam had prevailed on his colleague to come out quietly and not to try something idiotic like shooting from concealment.
A puff of cigarette smoke at the corner of the building was followed by the familiar beanpole figure of Bam-Bam, a hand-rolled yellow mégot hanging off his lower lip. Behind him came another man, a stranger to Rocco, shorter and rounder and wearing the same air of defeat. Both men had their hands on top of their heads, a sure-fire indication that they’d been through this before and knew the drill.
‘What’s the game, Bam-Bam?’ said Rocco, as they drew close and Pouillot and Maté moved forward to cuff them and check them for other weapons. ‘This isn’t your usual kind of stunt, coming out this far from civilisation. I’m surprised you haven’t got a nose bleed.’
Bam-Bam scowled and winced at the tightness of the cuffs. ‘We thought we’d chance our luck out this way for a change. It was the Merc let us down, otherwise we’d have been home and clear, enjoying a few drinks by now.’
Rocco nodded at Desmoulins, and the young detective walked across to the Merc to check it out.
‘Nice car. Bit above your usual level, though. What did you do, win the Loto?’
‘I acquired it, if you must know,’ Bam-Bam muttered haughtily, ‘from a mate.’
‘Of course you did.’ Rocco’s scepticism was unconcealed. ‘And this “mate” was a kind garage owner who gave you the pick of his fleet. Nice to have mates like that.’ He knew that when they came to verify the details the car would be logged as having been stolen sometime within the past few days in the Paris area.
Bam-Bam said nothing. He watched as Desmoulins climbed into the car, bending to the ignition.
‘It’s a load of German rubbish, anyway.’ Bam-Bam’s voice was heavy with resentment. ‘It worked fine when we picked it up, but when we came to leave here last night, nothing. The battery was dead. You’ll probably have to tow it out of here.’
As the words left his lips the Mercedes burst into life, ticking over with the smooth hum of a quality piece of engineering. Desmoulins gave a wry grin and a thumbs-up. When he got out of the car, he was dragging two large bags with him, no doubt the proceeds of Bam-Bam’s clumsy bank heist.
Fontenal looked incredulous and spat on the ground. ‘I don’t believe it! It wasn’t working last night, I swear.’
‘Never mind,’ said Rocco. ‘You must have upset the spirits of the dead.’
‘Eh?’
‘Don’t worry, you’ll have plenty of time to think about it. How’s Edith?’ Edith, Bam-Bam’s common-law wife of many years was as pleasant and cheery as her man was inept. It could have only been love that had kept her by his side in spite of his numerous prison terms regularly disrupting their life.
‘She’s fine, thanks for asking. She’d be happier if you let us go, though.’
Rocco shook his head. ‘Nice try.’ He indicated to the two officers to take them to their patrol car up the field.
As Bam-Bam went by, he leaned towards Rocco, his stale tobacco breath strong enough to choke a horse. He said, ‘If this is your new patch, Rocco, I feel sorry for you. Why’d you bother coming out here? It’s a dump.’
An hour later, checking in at Amiens while the two robbers were taken back to Lille, Rocco found an envelope on his desk. The room was deserted save for a duty officer in one corner, busy on the phone. The envelope contained a letter of instruction from Commissaire François Massin, Rocco’s boss. It was ordering him to present himself at the café tabac in the village of Douligny-la-Rose the following morning, where he would meet a man from the Ministry of the Interior. The man’s name was Marcel Dreycourt and Rocco was to comply with whatever might be requested of him.
‘Another Ministry job?’ Rocco muttered. ‘I thought they’d had their litre of blood from me after the last business.’
‘Problem, Inspector?’
Rocco turned and saw Deputy Commissaire Perronnet standing in the doorway. Stiff as a board and immaculate as always, Perronnet believed implicitly in the rulebook as laid down by the Ministry of the Interior, and made sure everyone knew it.
‘No,’ said Rocco, and folded the letter into his pocket. Arguing with Perronnet would be like fencing fog. He would go to the meeting as ordered and speak to Massin afterwards to see if he could be excused whatever it was they wanted him to do. Having only recently completed an assignment directed by the Interior Ministry, which had involved babysitting a foreign government minister taking refuge in France after a coup in his home country, he’d been foolish enough to think that might be the last he’d hear from them for a while.
To his surprise, Perronnet said softly, so that the duty officer could not hear, ‘We all know you have reservations about the Ministry’s occasional calls to unusual assignments, Rocco. I sometimes share your puzzlement, especially with an ever-increasing case load in our normal policing matters. But there are some things we cannot choose not to do. Besides, this could be one of your last cases here and I think you might find this one particularly interesting. I’m sure you’ll carry it out to the best of your abilities. Good evening.’
Rocco watched him go, and wondered at Perronnet’s words. He’d been referring to the recent job offer which had dropped in Rocco’s lap, although Rocco himself was trying hard to put off thinking about it for as long as possible. Going back to Paris to work offered both attractions and disadvantages. Evidently others had not forgotten and were keen to remind him.
By the time he arrived home in the village of Poissons-les-Marais, most of the day’s light had leached away, bringing a soft dusk and a welcome breeze. He locked his car and walked up the path to his rented house, then stood by the front door for a moment, enjoying the quiet hum of the countryside, so very different to the bustle and noise of his old patch in Clichy, Paris. There, the very idea of a quiet evening was a joke. Even retreating to one of the parks, where an impression of space might be found, rarely brought escape from traffic noise and voices raised in laughter or anger, often both.
He’d been in Picardie just over a year, and now he was being offered the chance to leave and head back to the city, his old beat. A chance of advancement, a move up the ladder and an opportunity to get back to the kind of policing he knew best: fighting gang crime.
Before he could dwell further on the problem, a small figure appeared at the gate and bustled up the path. It was his elderly neighbour, Mme Denis. Motherly by nature and inquisitive by inclination, she had immediately welcomed the tall outsider to the village and looked after his wellbeing with a regular supply of eggs, vegetables and good advice, in return for whatever inside information he could share about his latest investigation. On occasion she’d even traded local gossip culled from her network of friends in the area, although none of it turned out to be the kind that would draw Rocco’s professional attention.
This evening, however, she didn’t seem inclined to pass the time of day. Instead she thrust a small basket containing half a dozen eggs into his arms and said briskly, ‘I don’t know what the hens are going to do,’ she muttered, before turning away. ‘But at least they’re lucky enough not to realise when they’re being kept in the dark, unlike the rest of us. Enjoy your eggs.’
With that she turned and disappeared into the gloom without a backward glance, leaving Rocco thoroughly confused.