The minister didn’t look happy. ‘So, far from not giving me adequate protection, which I had been assured would be provided by your own interior ministry, instead I am being watched over by one policeman and… someone else.’ He was staring at Claude’s clothes with obvious scepticism.
‘He looks this way so he can blend in.’ Rocco batted the argument right back in a reasonable voice. It was easier than trying to explain that Claude’s normal duties, which included policing the marshes, lakes and riversides of the area, made wearing a serge uniform every day impractical. In fact Claude was the most reluctant wearer of the blue shirt and trousers that Rocco had ever met. ‘He’s also a professional hunter and an expert shot.’
That seemed to be an acceptable explanation to Bouanga, who stood up and moved towards the door. ‘Very well. I suppose that will have to do. I will leave you to carry out your work, gentlemen. You will find Excelsiore, Delicat’s wife, in the kitchen, but don’t expect to get a lot from her – she doesn’t talk much with anyone, save her husband.’
‘Will any of your family members be joining you here?’
‘No. My wife has been taken across the border to a safe address in Cameroon. While I’m here her brother will look after her. He’s the local chief of police there.’ He gave a dry smile. ‘If I have to move again, it will be easier if it is just the three of us.’
‘I understand. And will you be leaving the property at any time?’
‘I’m not sure. Why do you ask?’
‘Because if anyone does intend making an attempt on your life, they might wait for you to go out. The roads around here are narrow, and setting up a roadblock would be easy. If I’m to protect you properly, I’ll need your assurance that you won’t leave without letting us know first.’
Bouanga inclined his head in agreement, but said nothing. With a flick of his head for Delicat to follow, he disappeared along the hallway.
Claude watched them go before saying, ‘Not the easiest to get on with, is he?’
‘Not really.’ Rocco scowled at Claude. ‘Did you really say reporting for duty? You’ve never reported for duty in your life.’
Claude grinned. ‘Well, you said he was a VIP so I thought I’d better play the part of the willing and obedient servant.’ He indicated his clothes. ‘Sorry – I thought if I was going to be spending time here and blending in, as you cleverly pointed out, I might as well be comfortable. Who’s the little fella, by the way?’
‘His name’s Delicat. He’s Bouanga’s bodyguard and I suggest you don’t refer to his size in front of him. I get the feeling he might take offence.’
Claude kept a straight face. ‘Eh bien. I hope he’s up to the job. This place is like an open field. I thought the Ministry wanted to keep this man safe.’
‘They do. All we can do is make sure the house is tight and keep our eyes open and ready to repel uninvited strangers.’
They set about checking the house from top to bottom. He could only guess at the original use of several rooms. Most were devoid of furnishings and had clearly been empty for many years, with the heavy smell of damp lingering in the air and layers of dust on every surface. Rocco led the way, inspecting the shutters and windows, especially to the rear of the house overlooking the fields where he felt any attack might originate. Fortunately, the structure was in good condition, and it took a matter of minutes to confirm that, save for the conservatory, intruders were unlikely to gain access very easily without the use of a battering ram.
They finally came to the kitchen, where a lady sporting a beautiful, multi-coloured head-cloth was tending a cooker and surrounded by steam. Excelsiore was considerably taller than her husband. She gave a shy half-smile, but offered no greeting. Rocco smiled back and checked the door to the gardens was secure before returning to the front hallway, where he’d noticed a telephone. He picked it up and heard a dial tone. The device looked new and he guessed it had been freshly installed, no doubt on the instructions of the Ministry. They had evidently moved fast to make sure Bouanga had the means to contact them in an emergency. As he replaced the handset, the former minister appeared, flanked by Delicat.
‘I take it we’re safe, Inspector?’ the minister queried. He glanced at Claude as he spoke, and added, ‘At least, as safe as we can be given the absence of more security personnel.’
Rocco ignored the dig, as there was nothing he could do about it. ‘Safe enough, if you keep the windows locked and any shutters you don’t use shut tight. Also keep the front gates closed. And I’d avoid sitting for too long in the conservatory, if I were you. You’ll make an easy target if your enemies try for a long shot.’ He indicated the phone. ‘Does anybody from back home know you’re here?’
‘No. I have not announced my movements, if that’s what you are asking. Why?’
‘Just a precaution. If you receive any calls and the caller hangs up without speaking, you should let me or Officer Lamotte know immediately. It could be a way of finding out if you’re in.’
‘Of course. In the meantime, I trust you will pass on my concerns about security to your superiors?’
Rocco nodded. ‘I will.’ He stepped outside followed by Claude, and the two men went for a walk around the outbuildings. It was a relief to be out of the musty atmosphere and Rocco breathed deeply in the fresh air.
Claude evidently felt the same way. ‘If I never have to go in there again it’ll be a relief,’ he murmured. ‘Depressing place, isn’t it? If it was me I’d want to throw open all the windows and play some loud music just to stir up the dust.’
‘You might think differently,’ Rocco said, nodding towards the open fields, ‘if you knew somebody was out there waiting to take a shot at you.’
‘True enough. Not much of a life, though, is it, stuck out here and waiting for someone with a gun to come bursting through the door? And that little feller – Delicat? He might be deadly for all I know, but he doesn’t look it.’
‘That’s possibly his main strength,’ Rocco replied. He’d come across protectors before, and the really good ones were inconspicuous to the point of being invisible. ‘People don’t notice him until it’s too late. In any case, in Bouanga’s position, I doubt he’s got a lot of choice. If he’s got a lot of enemies, there probably aren’t too many bodyguards queueing up to protect him.’
After checking the outbuildings, which had been cleared long ago save for old farming junk like feed troughs and rotting hessian sacks, they walked out across the field behind the house and made a wide loop, studying bushes, trees and dead ground for obvious hiding places. It would be simple for an attacker to lay out here unseen, but getting up and crossing the last two or three hundred metres of open ground would present them with a problem.
Rocco noted the positions of three sturdy trees and a couple of convenient hollows in the ground which would be ideal range markers if they were attacked. They crested a gentle rise of pastureland, the long grass swishing as they walked, and found themselves looking down a long, sloping field with a narrow lane running across the bottom. It was only when Rocco saw a flash of Rizzotti’s familiar marker tape and a figure moving along the lane that he realised they were looking down on the ditch where the dead man in the suit had been found.
‘I didn’t realise we were this close to that road,’ he murmured.
‘That’s your mate Desmoulins, isn’t it?’ said Claude, a hand shading his eyes. ‘Looks like he’s been mixing with you too much; he can’t keep away from the scene of the crime.’
Rocco grunted, non-committal. The truth was, he wanted nothing more than to be down there with him, not stuck up here looking after a man on the run from enemies half a world away. Maybe Bouanga did need protecting, but whether the threats he feared were real remained to be seen. In the meantime, sitting here wouldn’t solve a crime that had happened down there.
He made a decision. ‘Claude, stay and watch the place, will you? I’m just going down for a quick look.’
‘Of course you are.’ Claude
smiled. ‘I’d have been worried if you hadn’t, to be honest. Policing’s like being a ball on a roulette table, isn’t it? Always moving towards the centre.’
Or a hamster, thought Rocco, as he hopped over the fence. On a wheel.
Twelve
‘We could take him here, don’t you think?’ Romain and Lilou were watching from the van parked down a side track not far from the entrance to the house called Les Sables. ‘It’s nice and quiet, and off the main road. We could be in and out, job done in no time.’
‘Too risky,’ Lilou said. ‘We don’t yet know who else is in the house; we’d be going in blind.’ She took a drink from a bottle of lemonade. The inside of the van was growing uncomfortably warm as the sun climbed, the breeze too light to make any impression, and there was still a strong smell coming from the back where the moped had left a trace of its presence. ‘It must be nice to have a house like that, don’t you think? Big garden, fields, trees… I could live in it quite easily… hold parties and things for all my friends, maybe build a swimming pool if it doesn’t have one. Be the country lady – what do you think?’
Romain looked at her with a wry smile. ‘No, you couldn’t. You’re like me; you’re too much of a wanderer. You don’t like being tied down. Anyway, what friends would that be?’
She touched his face, running the backs of her fingers down his cheek, and smiled. ‘That’s a bit brutal. But I suppose you’re right. I couldn’t stand it for long; I’d be bored out of my brain with all that respectability. But it’s nice to dream occasionally.’ She sat up. ‘Maybe after we’ve dealt with this one we can take time off and go somewhere nice and quiet. We haven’t had a real holiday in… well, months.’
‘Sure. If you say so.’ He gave her a look loaded with doubt. ‘We could eat lots, top up our tans and get flabby, like the old folks on the coast gradually dying of inactivity and a lack of excitement.’
‘Cynical boy. Oh, look.’ She pointed towards the house, where a tiny figure had appeared at the front door and was walking down the side of the building. There was a screen of vegetation in the way that prevented them seeing much detail, but the figure’s skin colour was obvious. ‘Is that a kid? I thought you said it was just three adults in there.’
‘That’s what I heard. Maybe the information was rubbish.’
‘What was it again?’
‘They said Rocco was guarding some VIP minister from Gabon on the run from his enemies. He had to leave the country in a hurry and came here after receiving death threats, apparently. There’s a female cook, they said, and a servant. But there was no mention of kids.’
‘We need to check that out. We can’t go in hard with children about. You know what people can be like: a cop’s fair game but someone would rat us out for the price of a drink if a kid got hurt.’
Romain nodded. ‘I’ll see what I can find out. This place is pretty remote, and if Rocco comes back this way, we might just get a chance to take him. Better than trying for him in town, anyway.’
‘What if he doesn’t?’
‘Then we do it somewhere else. We adapt, like always.’
‘Didn’t Farek say he could get us some help if we needed it?’
‘He did. What are you thinking – a full frontal assault?’
‘No. That would take a team with skills. This job is not for sharing. Maybe we can draw Rocco out with a diversion so we can hit him when he’s least expecting it.’
Romain smiled, his eyes lighting up at the thought of some action. ‘I see what you mean. That’s a good idea. Once I find out what’s happening here, we can give Farek a call.’
‘And then we can take that holiday I was talking about.’ Lilou giggled and fluttered her eyelashes at him, although he didn’t seem to notice. But that was fine. She knew he hung on her every word, even though he pretended not to.
Thirteen
As he walked down the hill towards the road, Rocco knew it wasn’t just the proximity of this crime scene that was drawing him; like a lot of cops he hated leaving a puzzle for somebody else to unravel. He knew he was going directly against orders, but he figured it was worth the risk if he could get even a tiny clue to pass on to Desmoulins and his team. Return visits to crime scenes didn’t always produce results, but occasionally he gained a renewed sense of what might have happened at a particular site and how events might have flowed. That included spotting possible witnesses who might have been overlooked in the initial investigation, although he doubted that was going to work out here in this isolated spot.
By the time he reached the lane his shoes had lost their lustre to the rough grass, and the cuffs of his trousers were showing signs of damp. He stopped short of the fence running parallel to the lane where Desmoulins was now waiting for him. The young detective’s car was parked further along under a tree.
‘I know I shouldn’t be here,’ Rocco explained, ‘and I’m not trying to tread on your toes. I just wanted to give you a hand.’
‘I’m glad of the help, you know that,’ Desmoulins said honestly. ‘It’s too easy to miss something on the first sweep.’ He paused, then said, ‘It makes no sense to any of us at the station that you’ve been taken off this work to play bodyguard to some minor foreign bigwig.’
Rocco shrugged to show that there was nothing he could do about it. ‘Have you found anything new?’
‘Not yet. I just got here. How about we double up? You check the fields on both sides of the road while I do the lane, then we swap over.’
Rocco nodded. ‘Suits me. Let’s do it.’ He made a sweep of the grass some fifty metres back from the fence, looking for anything that might have been used as a weapon. But it quickly proved futile; the grass here was shorter than further up the slope and the men on the original search would have had to be blind to miss anything larger than a razor blade. He stepped over the fence close to where the body had been found. There was little to show what had occurred, save for flattened grass and some scuff marks in the soft edges of the ditch where Rizzotti’s men had scrambled to haul out the body.
He moved with care, avoiding the murder spot and crossing further along. He stepped over a thin trickle of muddy water in the very bottom of the ditch and climbed to the top, turning to look back at the field from another angle. He wondered if there really had been a kid up there or whether Matthieu had been imagining things. Maybe he’d have to have another word with the old farmer to see if he could rattle his brains for anything he might have forgotten.
He checked the field on the far side of the lane, even though that, too, had already been scoured, but the ground was clear of all but a few strands of grass and hard-packed. As he stepped back into the lane, Desmoulins whistled to him and waved. He was standing on the edge of the tarmac a few paces away from the murder spot, looking down into the ditch. It was shallow at this point, with grass covering the water at the bottom.
Balanced on the grass was a silver petrol filler cap.
‘Could be nothing,’ said Desmoulins, ‘but worth a look.’ He stepped down into the hollow and picked up the cap, and returned to Rocco’s side. It was metal, and bore a familiar winged emblem – a capital M and the brand name Motobécane.
‘Odd place to lose one of these,’ observed Rocco.
‘That’s not all.’ Desmoulins stepped away a couple of paces and squatted at the edge of the lane. He pointed at a circular patch of damp earth which filled a fist-sized hole in the tarmac. ‘I spotted this just now but didn’t think anything of it. Maybe I was wrong. See the rainbow colours? ’
Rocco nodded. ‘Petrol or oil.’ He bent and pushed his finger into the earth and sniffed it. Petrol; the earth was soaked in it. Not necessarily important, especially where Matthieu’s tractor and several police vehicles had stopped recently. He dug down again, wondering how it hadn’t dried out completely, and found the hole was like a cup, with a solid base. That explained it; there was nowhere for the petrol to go. As he was about to stand up, he saw something irregular in the muddy mixture. Light-colour
ed and barely two centimetres across, it had jagged edges.
‘Here,’ said Desmoulins, handing him a knife.
‘Thanks.’ Rocco used the knife blade to lift the object and turned it over. The other side was a pale, sludgy green. He wiped off a film of mud for a closer look. He’d seen this colour before, but it took a few moments to remember where. Then it came to him: it was a brand colour used by moped manufacturers and common all over France. If they weren’t green they were a dull grey or a vague duck-egg blue.
‘So,’ said Rocco, ‘we’ve got a moped filler cap and a fleck of paint that could be from a moped.’
‘But no moped.’ Desmoulins pulled a face. ‘Are we making too much of nothing?’
‘Could be. But it’s more than we had before.’ He found an old envelope in his coat pocket and slid the fragment of paint inside while trying to build a coherent picture from the details they had before them. Somehow petrol had been spilled – or had leaked – just here; not a great deal but sufficient to have soaked the small amount of earth in the hole. A fragment of paint had fallen from a moped, too. Or had the moped fallen over and chipped it off? Either way the result would have been the same.
He walked along the lane away from the crime scene, scanning the ground for anything, no matter how insignificant. He’d gone no more than ten paces and was about to turn and go back, when he saw a faint impression in the soft earth at the side of the lane. It was a trick of the light that did it; one step sideways and he’d have missed it. A single tyre track, maybe three centimetres wide. Too wide for a bicycle and too narrow for a car or van. Thanks to the lack of traffic down here, the impression had remained firm enough to be visible.
‘I don’t believe it,’ Desmoulins breathed, eyeing the tracks. ‘Sorry, Lucas, I don’t know how we missed this.’
‘Don’t worry – it’s easily done. I didn’t see it either.’
Rocco and the Nightingale Page 6
