66

JACQUOT AND BRUNET DID NOT return immediately to Cavaillon. Once back in the car, Jacquot drove south out of Salon heading towards Lançon past the town’s small airstrip, then west to Cornillon and Miramas, before turning north towards Eyguières. He drove slowly, an elbow poking out of the side window, looking to left and right across fields of maize and droop-headed sunflowers, to distant wooded slopes and rocky hilltops, his eye holding on any building – barns, farms, drying sheds, and huddled pantiled roofs. At Eyguières, he turned right and followed a narrower road whose surface sent up a thin stream of rust-coloured dust behind them. From here he joined the Chemin de la Liberté before finally crossing the concrete levees of the Durance and slipping beneath the autoroute. Rather than join it and head for home, Jacquot continued on his cross-country route, gear-changing up into the foothills of Roque Rousse, before starting down towards Pélissanne, keeping, as far as he could, within a ten-kilometre radius of Salon. The time it might take to bake a pizza.

By now the sun was up and casting long shadows, the car’s interior filled with the warm gusting scent of the countryside, occasional stands of roadside cypress flicking fingers of shadow across its bonnet. Somewhere along this route, thought Jacquot, somewhere within this rough circle that he had marked out, or just outside it, were Claudine and Midou. Within, say, twenty minutes’ drive of Pizzeria Blazots. Maybe, right this minute, actually within sight. In one of those farm buildings down there on the valley floor, or somewhere amongst that scattering of terracotta roofs. The thought was tantalising – so close, so near.

Yet all it did was fill Jacquot with a gut-knotting sense of frustration, a sense of powerlessness that made him grip the wheel, clamp his teeth and badly misjudge a turn, clashing his gears on a particularly sharp right-hand bend as he dropped down towards Aurons and Vernegues.

Because this was about as far as the Cavaillon taxi that the sisters had hijacked had been able to reach. Of course they could have refilled, but as Brunet had established no Citroën had been reported on the security videos of any garage forecourt within a fifty kilometre range of Cavaillon. And so early on a Sunday morning, all the smaller filling stations in-country would have been closed for the night.

He wondered how they were fixed for transport, wherever they were, now that they had lost the VW. They might have made it back to base last night but they’d never be able to use the Citroën now, not a stolen car, with the registration number so widely spread.

Or did they have some other means of transport, a back-up to the VW?

Not for the first time in this investigation, Jacquot wished he’d had Marie-Ange sitting beside him. In Marseilles, while they’d worked on the Lafour case together, she had had an uncanny ability to zero in on a house – to know that it was somehow significant. And as far as Jacquot could recall, she was usually right. If she’d been sitting here now instead of Brunet she could probably have directed him to the very door.

But Marie-Ange was gone. This time he was following his own hunches. Which, at this moment, were thin on the ground.

‘We’ve probably just driven right past them,’ said Brunet, giving voice to what Jacquot was thinking. ‘This house, that house – down that driveway, through the trees over there. You want to stop at every house and knock on the door and see who answers.’

‘Tell me about it,’ said Jacquot, levelling out on to the flatlands west of Lambesc. ‘But we don’t have the time and, as usual, we don’t have the resources either. We’re just going to have to wait for a break. And hope it comes soon.’

‘Maybe la Mademoiselle back at headquarters has decided to come clean, admit everything, and take us to the sisters.’

Jacquot grunted.

‘You know something? I just can’t see that happening.’

Five minutes later, with a lazy swing of the wheel, he turned on to the autoroute slip road and pressed his foot to the floor for the drive back to Cavaillon.

‘You want a biscotto?’ asked Brunet, indicating the napkin in his lap. Of the half-dozen that Condotti had given them, there were now just two remaining.

Jacquot’s eyes were fixed on the road ahead. For a moment it seemed as though he hadn’t heard what Brunet had said.

‘I said, do you want a biscotto?’

This time Jacquot glanced down at the napkin, then back at the road.

A moment later he shook his head.

‘All yours,’ he said.