Twenty-two

Rocco thanked Caspar for his help and put the phone down, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. He’d grabbed a quick nap for thirty minutes, and been woken by the call. But he felt elated; they now had confirmation that the dead man was Vieira. It was an enormous step forward, although the revelation that Vieira had been on his way to seek his help had left him feeling puzzled. Criminals, whatever their position on the underworld ladder, rarely looked on policemen as any kind of saviour; they were usually the bringers of their downfall or, at the very least, a constant source of harassment in their daily lives.

On the other hand, he was aware that some criminals had a sneaking, if rarely voiced, respect for cops who had a reputation for honesty and fairness. Where Vieira had got the idea that Rocco would protect him he had no clue but, in desperate times, men did strange things. And there was no doubt that JoJo Vieira had, in becoming an informant, crossed a line that would ultimately lead to his demise. In the narrow world of criminality in which he moved, it seemed he’d formed an inflated view of Rocco’s powers of protection.

He made a mental note to pass on the information to Desmoulins. It wouldn’t necessarily bring them any closer to finding the killer, but as it was part of the puzzle, it was necessary to include it on the crime report. He was debating whether to go back to sleep ready for the following day, or to get up and do something useful, when the phone rang again. He scooped it up.

‘Lucas?’ It was Claude, sounding harassed. ‘You couldn’t come over here, could you? Only Alix is being… difficult about her assignment.’ His voice dropped. ‘She’s just popped outside, but I wonder if you could talk to her for me.’

‘I’ll be five minutes.’ Rocco walked out to the car to drive to Claude’s house on the far side of the village, then thought better of it and stepped out into the road. It was a nice day and a good excuse to stretch his legs and see some of the village at a more leisurely pace.

The main road through the village was straight, starting at the church overlooking the square at the end of his road. He passed a group of three people outside the church, all dressed in black. That constituted a crowd in Poissons, he reflected. Two of them were women who nodded amiably enough and murmured a greeting. The third was the village priest who, since discovering Rocco had no religious leanings, had taken to giving him the kind of dark look he might have reserved for the Devil himself. Pulling his soutane around him, he excused himself to the woman and scurried back into his church as if Rocco was about to bring down famine and pestilence on Poissons and the surrounding area.

Rocco watched him go and shook his head. He’d given up worrying about it. The man clearly liked a more impressionable audience.

The main road had a few houses on each side, three farms, a small garage with a single fuel pump and the village school. It was quiet, with the rustle of birds in the trees lining the road, a cock crowing and the distant sound of a tractor engine from one of the farms. It made him realise just how noisy the cities were by comparison, and how he’d come to appreciate the rural setting that was now his home base.

He reached Claude’s house and knocked on the door. It was opened by Alix, Claude’s daughter. She had a firm set to her jaw and rolled her eyes when she saw who it was.

‘Oh, great, he’s called in reinforcements,’ she muttered. ‘How typical.’ She stepped back and beckoned him inside. ‘Don’t think this is going to make me any happier, because it won’t.’

Rocco stepped inside and found Claude seated at his living room table, cradling a mug of coffee and looking as if he’d been pinned down and beaten into submission.

‘Problem?’ said Rocco.

‘Yes, there’s a problem,’ Alix said forcefully before Claude could speak. ‘I’ve spent the last three weeks helping to set up the programme for road closures and crowd control for when the Tour comes through the region. It’s taken a lot of time getting the people involved to sit around a table and agree their tasks, and taking on this… this menial bodyguard job means somebody else will be taking over my work. I object to being selected for something without any consultation. I wasn’t trained to spend my time out in a field protecting some disaffected and probably corrupt politician who’s been forced out of his own country.’

Rocco waited for her to finish, then nodded and picked up a sugar lump from a box on the table, and popped it into his mouth. He crunched it firmly between his teeth and said, ‘I sympathise entirely. I really do.’

‘What?’ Claude spluttered on his tea.

Alix looked both surprised and suspicious. ‘You do?’

‘Yes. Unfortunately, you’re overlooking a couple of things. One, we don’t know if Bouanga’s corrupt or not, and anyway that’s beside the point. Two, being a police officer means following orders – and that includes orders you might not like. You’re also forgetting something else.’

‘And that is?’ Her eyes flashed dangerously at the direction the conversation was taking.

‘If being ordered to look after the safety of a visitor valued by the state is something your father and I have to agree to, why should you be given special treatment?’

Her mouth opened to reply, then snapped shut again.

‘Well said,’ Claude muttered and got to his feet. ‘Excellent. Lucas, would you like a glass of wine?’

Rocco shook his head. ‘Not for me. I should be getting home.’ He looked at Alix, aware that he had probably been a little rough on her. She was an ambitious young woman and was going to make a very good cop. He was already aware that she had the right mix of forcefulness, courage and clear thinking necessary for police work, and had proven herself in a difficult hostage situation where she had been the one being held with a gun against her neck. But she had to learn that in day-to-day matters, none of them had the power to refuse an order.

‘Look at it this way,’ he said carefully. ‘Organising crowd and traffic control on the local section of the Tour de France is important and might get you a thank you if you’re lucky. Maybe a small commendation for your personnel file. But I wouldn’t count on it.’

She started to say something but he forged on. ‘However, special assignments like this one come with the approval and awareness of the Interior Ministry. It won’t do me much good because they know me and I’ve been around the block. But if you do a good job and show that you’re not afraid to put yourself out there in what even Monteo thought was a potentially dangerous situation for a woman, it might help you.’

‘Dangerous? Nobody said that.’

‘Being a bodyguard implies it, don’t you think? And what if you have to use force to do your job? What if you have to shoot someone to protect this “corrupt” politician? Could you handle that, or should we get Officer Sabonneux instead? She’s a new transfer but I hear she likes a fight – and she’s an excellent shot.’ He hadn’t heard anything of the sort; in fact quite the opposite. He’d heard the firearms instructor saying that she’d have trouble hitting a barn on a sunny day on account of always closing her eyes as she pulled the trigger. But he couldn’t imagine Alix checking to see if it were true or not.

She took the bait, nodding reluctantly, as if she was conceding the point but didn’t want to be seen to be backing down too easily. ‘What if it goes wrong?’

‘That’s the part nobody ever talks about. Police operations don’t always go the way they’re planned, you know that. All you can do is make sure your bit goes right. It’s all any of us can do. Your father and I will be relying on you to watch our backs, just as we’ll be watching yours. We’re cops; it’s what we do.’

‘I understand. I won’t let you down.’ She looked subdued now, and lifted her chin, her earlier anger dissipated.

He nodded to signal that the conversation was over, and was about to let himself out when Claude’s telephone jangled, jarring in the silence.

‘Lamotte.’ Claude listened for a few moments, his eyebrows lowering in a scowl. He raised a hand to stop Rocco leaving, then thanked the caller and put the phone down. ‘That was Mme Duverre. She lives in one of the houses up the Chemin de Fosse. It’s a track off the main road a couple of minutes’ walk from here. The house next door to her has been empty for a while; it belongs to her sister but she’s moved down south to look after an elderly relative. Duverre says she’s heard noises coming through the wall, and thinks somebody’s using the place without permission. Fancy doing a spot of local detecting? Sorry – but since you’re here.’

‘Why not?’ said Rocco. ‘It’ll make a change from dead bodies.’ He looked at Alix. ‘You might want to join us. It can’t be too often that all three cops in the village show up in one hit.’

The Chemin de Fosse branched off the main street and was easy to miss. In fact Rocco couldn’t recall having noticed it before. Barely wide enough for a vehicle, and probably built in the days of horse travel, the ground level rose as they entered the narrow turning, revealing three cottages linked together down the left-hand side. The track, such as it was, petered out barely a hundred metres further on against a small patch of woodland. The cottages were old, with wattle-and-daub walls, corrugated metal roofs and ancient wooden shutters over the windows. Two of the front gardens were small but tidy, evidently looked after on a regular basis. The third, the one furthest away, was a small jungle of weeds with a neglected path leading to the front door, which had been crudely reinforced with two wooden planks. An elderly woman in an apron and headscarf was waiting for them at the middle cottage. She came forward to greet them, throwing Claude an expression full of dark emotion while he made the introductions.

‘I didn’t mean to get you involved, Inspector,’ she said, her voice loud with relief, and turned and pointed to the end house. ‘Only there’s someone in there who shouldn’t be, I’m certain of it. It’s my sister’s place although she’s not living there at the moment. She’s been down south for the last three months looking after a member of the family who’s ill. She intends to sell the place, but it’s not right that someone else should be using it. I was going to call her on the phone but I knew she couldn’t get away so I decided to call Lamotte, here, instead. I had a phone put in so I could keep in touch.’

Rocco held up a hand to stop the rush of information and said softly, ‘When did you last hear any movement, Madame?’ He was tempted to ask if there were fruit rats in the roof, like his own house, but suspected that might be taken badly. She seemed fairly touchy and reminded him in some ways of Mme Denis, his neighbour. They evidently bred them as a type in these parts, he decided, formidable women not to be taken lightly.

‘Yesterday evening. I’d just got back from buying butter at Vestier’s farm down the road. It was gone seven and very quiet as always up here. Even the birds had gone silent, so I know I wasn’t imagining things. The birds know when something’s not right.’

‘Can you describe what you heard?’

‘A thump.’

‘A thump?’ Claude lifted his eyebrows. ‘Is that all?’

Mme Duverre gave him a scathing look and snapped, ‘Isn’t that enough from an empty house?’ She glanced at Alix for support. ‘I’m a woman living alone and I should expect to be believed when I say I heard something. I didn’t ring earlier because I didn’t want to be thought of as a nuisance.’ She threw another glare at Claude as if he’d accused her of a heinous crime. ‘It could have been someone hitting another person – you don’t know.’

Alix put a reassuring hand on the woman’s arm and said, ‘That’s perfectly fine, Madame. We need to make sure of the detail, that’s all. But we’re here now and we’ll take a look. Do you have a key to the property?’

Duverre stuck a hand into the front pocket of her apron and pulled out a small block of wood with a key attached by a length of string. ‘It’s to the back door. My sister had to reinforce the front door when the lock got broken. Not that she ever used it, anyway.’ She handed it to Alix who set off for the rear of the property before the old woman could launch into another explanation.

Rocco followed, signalling Claude to go round the far side. He had no reason to expect anything out of the ordinary, but it didn’t do any harm to demonstrate a show of force when needed.

The back door was reached via a low gate and along a narrow path across a vegetable patch now overgrown and unkempt. The door had a shutter fixed across the usual glass panel, as did the two windows. Rocco tapped Alix on the shoulder and motioned her to wait a moment until Claude appeared on the far side of the cottages. If there was someone living here without permission, they would have surely heard the three officers by now, quite apart from Mme Duverre’s greeting them on their arrival. He had no reason to expect this to be anything threatening, but he’d learned over the years that going blindly into an empty property without taking precautions was a quick route to disaster.

He stood to one side of the door and motioned Alix to do the same, then leaned across and rapped sharply on the shutter. The sound echoed dully inside, and raised a couple of birds in the bushes nearby.

No answer.

He nodded towards the lock and Alix inserted the key, giving it a quick twist. But it wouldn’t turn. She pushed the door instead and it creaked open, bringing a cry of surprise from Mme Duverre. A rush of dry, musty air came out to greet them, of the kind Rocco had come across all too often when entering abandoned buildings. But that wasn’t all. With it came an underlying smell of something much more recent: tobacco smoke.