22

AFTER PARTING COMPANY WITH BERNIE MUZON, Jacquot did not return immediately to Cavaillon. There was something he had to do first, something he’d been meaning to do for some time, yet somehow had never got round to. The trip down to Marseilles for Minette Peluze’s funeral might have been hijacked by the squad, but his visit to Delacroix provided him with a second chance, another opportunity to do what he’d been planning. And, if he was lucky, he’d maybe kill two birds with one stone.

Jacquot saw her a hundred metres off, halfway down rue Francis, coming out of Fleurs des Quais, the flower shop where she worked. She didn’t see him and he didn’t wave or call out her name. All he did when she turned away from him and headed off in the same direction was quicken his pace. He would catch her up.

The woman he was following, in a pretty print dress, with a bag over her shoulder and a spring in her step, was called Marie-Ange Buhl and twice the previous year the two of them had worked together on cases that he’d been involved in. It had started the summer before in the Luberon where Jacquot was investigating the murder of a German family living in Provence. With her help he had uncovered a secret that had turned the investigation upside down. By chance they had met again just a few months later when Jacquot had been working undercover in Marseilles, searching for the missing schoolgirl, Elodie Lafour, and once again her help had proved invaluable, the ‘help’ in question being her special gift or an ability to ‘sense’, to ‘feel’ something. Of course he’d been as sceptical as the next man when she’d first tried to explain it to him, these special powers she had, but he had seen enough by now to know that she was no fraud, that there really was something ‘special’ about her.

But it was more than just a professional relationship; there had always been much more to it than that.

Special powers aside, Marie-Ange Buhl was one of the most beautiful women Jacquot had ever set eyes on. Slim, tall, effortlessly elegant, with a bob of shiny black hair, smooth, lightly tanned skin, and a smile to melt the heart. From the moment he first met her, in a hot-house orchidarium outside the village of St Bédard, he had been unmanned, enchanted, and gently, irresistibly seduced. Maybe not in the way he might have wanted, or at least sometimes thought about, but in a close and confidential manner all the same. Close enough for her to be dangerous, close enough for her to work her way into his dreams and imagination. He was old enough to be her father, felt his age every time he looked at her, yet it never stopped him being aware of her, aware of her beauty, her singleness, her possible availability. For there had always been a sense that his feelings, his imaginings, might not necessarily have been unfounded, that they might even have been reciprocated. There had been moments, moments when . . .

But recently, he suspected, that singleness, that availability – the possibility of something happening – had been compromised. Those ‘moments’ had passed. Which had made him feel a little safer, but at the same time a little sadder too.

The last time he had seen her, the previous November, they’d been at the Témoine Hospital in Marseilles, at the bedside of Léo Chabran, a skipper with the Gendarmerie Maritime. Chabran had been involved with the pair of them in a firefight in the Golfe du Lion, during which action he’d been seriously wounded, and airlifted to the hospital with bullet wounds in his arm and shoulder. In the months that followed, it was Chabran, Jacquot was certain, who had come between them. It hadn’t been difficult to see. From the moment he and Marie-Ange had met Chabran in the wheelhouse of his coastguard cutter, Jacquot would have been blind not to see the flush in her cheeks when Chabran looked at her, the tiny smiles she gave him in return, the covert glances she cast in his direction as he brought the cutter in on its target; the way she responded to his command, his authority. In such charged surroundings it was really no surprise that Marie-Ange’s interest in him should have been aroused. And as Jacquot stood at the man’s hospital bedside the day after the firefight, it soon became clear that Chabran was equally taken by Marie-Ange.

Which, Jacquot recalled, had made him feel a little uncomfortable, as though he was intruding, that he shouldn’t stay long. Which he hadn’t. It had also made him feel a little . . . jealous.

With promises to stay in touch, Jacquot had taken his leave of Chabran, and Marie-Ange had seen him down to the hospital entrance. Jacquot recalled how they’d stood in the lift with two porters and an empty trolley between them, the four of them held in an uneasy silence until the lift doors opened on the ground floor. It was there, in the hustle and bustle of the hospital entrance that they had said their goodbyes. Jacquot had offered his hand, not sure what else to do, but Marie-Ange had leant forward and given him a kiss, disconcertingly close to his mouth. There had, he remembered, been something weighted about that parting – as if there were things that needed to be said. Things that he should say. But then he’d thought of Claudine and their life together, thought of the man lying two floors above them, and in the end he had said nothing. The last Jacquot saw of Marie-Ange she was standing with her back to him in front of the elevators, waiting for a lift to take her back to Chabran’s bedside. As he watched the doors open, and then close on her, he’d known he had done the right thing. Holding back. Either he’d have made a fool of himself, or worse, far worse, he’d have made a fool of Claudine. But that didn’t mean it didn’t hurt. It did. And he’d felt an unexpected press of sadness as he drove away from the hospital.

And now there she was, Marie-Ange Buhl, just a few steps ahead of him, close enough for him to smell the scent of flowers on her, as she came to a halt on the corner of La Canebière, waiting for the lights to change so she could cross the road.

He drew close, reached out a hand . . .

‘Marie-Ange,’ he said, touching her shoulder.