15

THE BOYS FROM THE SQUAD were among the last to leave Laura’s house, and they took Claude with them, back into Marseilles, telling his daughter he’d be fine, they’d look after him. They were lying, of course, and as Jacquot made his way carefully home to Cavaillon the following morning – aching neck, tight squinting eyes, a dozen sharp clamps screwed into his skull – he wondered if Claude was feeling the same, and how the rest of them were coping on rue de l’Evêché. None of them, surely, could have escaped the night’s activities unscathed. Minette Peluze would have been proud of them.

As far as Jacquot could remember the evening had begun at Bon Mou, a members’ club off rue Paradis, with more beers and whiskies, and from there they had moved to Le Vieux, a restaurant down on the port run by an ex-con who owed some favours. Jacquot couldn’t remember reaching for his wallet once, and hadn’t seen anyone else do it either, until they stumbled out of Le Vieux and he’d spotted Laganne pass their waitress a green Curie – a five-hundred franc note. Just to say thanks, for putting up with their bad behaviour – nothing more than that.

Afterwards, with the smell of the sea in their nostrils and a bellyful of food to soak up the booze, they’d settled at Paragon, a squad favourite, beyond the Joliette quay. They’d taken a corner table in the back room, squeezing round it, and at some stage in the proceedings, for reasons he couldn’t now recall, Jacquot had mentioned the couple he’d spotted at the cemetery, and how, for a moment, he’d considered checking them out. Something to do with always being on the beat, never being able to leave off being a cop.

Why? Charlie Serre had asked. What about them?

And Jacquot had told him about the investigation in Cavaillon – the murder of Gilbert’s wife, the wedding pictures, more than three hundred people identified and all, save two, accounted for. Two people. In black. One tall, one short. Just like the ones at Minette’s funeral.

‘Men or women?’ asked Serre.

Jacquot shook his head. ‘We can’t be sure.’

‘Then maybe you should have,’ suggested Serre with a twinkle in his eye. ‘Checked ’em out, I mean.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Where did you say you saw them again?’

‘Just inside the front gate, top path, at the edge of the trees.’

Serre had taken a moment to work out the exact position. ‘Well, I’ll tell you one thing for free,’ he’d said. ‘They wouldn’t have been there to visit their old dad.’

‘How come?’

‘How come?’ Serre began to chuckle. ‘Because up there, it’s a plague pit – that’s how come. A common grave. A few hundred people buried there, back in seventeen hundred and something. No names, just a small plaque. But, hey, maybe the pair of ’em were tourists, historians, lovers looking for a bit of privacy amongst the crypts. And then two hundred of us pile in . . . you know what I’m saying?’

And as Jacquot turned off the autoroute and rattled over the reedy, gravelled bed of the Durance into the dusty, glaring outskirts of Cavaillon – which made him squint even harder – he wished now that he had checked them out. Were they two women, two men, or a man and a woman? He’d never know now. Nor would he know how they might have reacted, as they saw him approach. Would they have made a run for it? Or would they have stayed to answer his questions, provide plausible reasons for their presence there? A couple of history scholars, like Serre had said, checking out the plague pit. Or tourists. Or lovers – however unlikely. Five minutes, that’s all it would have taken. Nobody would have missed him. But he hadn’t, and though he could see no reasonable cause to have done it, he was still irritated with himself.

He should have.

He should have gone. Should have taken a closer look.

And he certainly would have done if he’d known it was a plague pit up there, and they couldn’t have been visiting family graves. Standing in a perfect position to watch Minette’s funeral, shading their eyes against the sun the better to see. Just like the two at the Blanchard wedding all those weeks before.

But were they the same people? It seemed so unlikely.

And what could possibly link the two events?

The wedding of a country girl to a Marseilles flic, and the funeral of the middle-aged wife of a Homicide officer on rue de l’Evêché.

Two cops, that’s all. A gendarme and a Chief Inspector. And their murdered wives . . .

But two murders so different in style.

One, an expertly executed shooting; the other a clumsy smothering.

One clearly planned; the other most likely a burglary gone horribly wrong.

It was way out there . . .

But still . . .