‘I almost forgot, there was someone asking for you earlier, Inspector. By name. Said it was urgent, but she wouldn’t give any details. I thought you might know who she was. She looked stressed, apparently.’
‘What did she look like?’
‘Can’t say – I wasn’t on duty then. The desk sergeant said she was quite a looker, although a bit … on the dusky side, if you know what I mean.’
Rocco bit back an instinctive reprimand. It wasn’t the younger man’s fault, and tearing a strip off him would serve no purpose.
‘Was that all?’
He handed Rocco a slip of paper. ‘She left this.’
Rocco thanked the officer and headed home.
The description of the woman, skewed as it was, would have meant nothing by itself. But the words scribbled on the piece of paper gave him a good idea who she might be.
The canal, go west of the village where we met. 10.00 tomorrow.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
It was 09.30 the following morning when Rocco stepped onto the parapet over the canal where Claude had found the piece of cloth. He was early through long habit. Being early meant you weren’t on the back foot, giving someone else the advantage. Being early allowed you to control your approach and tactics, not be controlled by the actions and plans of others.
He looked both ways along the water. Behind him lay Poissons, about a kilometre away. In front was Amiens, distant and over the horizon, more kilometres than he would care to trudge. The canal banks were deserted and still, the water in between a dark-grey ribbon of coldness, barely moving.
On the far side of the canal was a towpath, where horses and men had once used muscle power to move the barges along. It was now overgrown in places, used mostly, according to Claude, by fishermen who looked more for solitude and the occasional tickle rather than the combat of challenging waters and bigger fish who could fight back.
He dismissed taking the path back towards Poissons; instinct told him he was meant to follow the towpath to the west. But why so coy – even secretive? Would it mean something to anyone else who saw the note? Or was she playing a game with him?
He looked towards Amiens and remembered what Maurat had said about giving directions to the illegal immigrants. ‘… cross the canal to the rive nord and turn left.’
Left was west.
He stepped onto the towpath and stopped. Heard a crackle of movement in the undergrowth among a belt of tall, spindly maples heavy with tangled wind-felled branches.
‘Call yourself a hunter?’ he said calmly. He avoided looking towards the trees in case anyone else was watching. ‘My grandmother could move more stealthily than that.’
A dry chuckle drifted out of the treeline. ‘Pity she’s not here, then, isn’t it? I could still be tucked up in bed.’ It was Claude Lamotte, waiting where they had arranged earlier that morning. Claude knew the area well and was going to shadow Rocco along the canal, staying well back in cover. If this was some kind of trap, it would be useful having Claude watching his back.
‘Take it at an easy pace,’ Claude continued, ‘so I can keep up and check ahead. If I shout, hit the ground immediately and stay down.’
‘Got it.’ Rocco nodded minutely. Claude had briefed him on the kind of terrain that lay ahead; it was towpath all the way, some clear, some overgrown, bordered by trees and thick bushes. No buildings, no houses. There was an abandoned barge about two kilometres away. Canal traffic was unpredictable but mostly quiet.
He began to walk at a steady pace. As a former soldier, he regarded walking as a simple mechanism for getting from A to B. It gave him no particular pleasure, and stopping to admire the scenery along the way had never been much of a priority. In any case, right now, the cold coming off the water was enough to blur any scenery and make him duck his head into his coat collar.
He ignored the discomfort and focused on Nicole instead, wondering whether he was walking into something bad. She hadn’t looked like someone running anywhere, nor had she looked like any illegal workers he’d seen before. She wore good-quality clothes and even had a car, which Gondrand had admitted she’d bought with cash. It was hardly the economic hardship normally faced by those wretched enough to be travelling from one country to another by underground channels.
Yet it was the only explanation that tied her to this place and to Poissons. There was no other that he could think of.
But why come looking for him at the station? He’d told her he was a cop, which usually killed any personal interest stone dead. Either she was totally on the level, and had a problem only a cop could fix … or she was an illegal and prepared to bluff it out for whatever reasons he had yet to discover.
After walking for what he judged was nearly a kilometre, he still hadn’t worked it out.
Then he saw her.
She was sitting back from the canal on a stack of heavy timber pilings. She was wearing the coat he had first seen her in, but this time her head was bare. She looked wary, as if she, too, was having doubts about the sense in having this meeting in such a remote spot.
Rocco turned to look down at the water, taking the opportunity to check his back. Nobody there. No barges, no people. Nobody waiting in the bushes to sneak up on him. Too cold for anglers and canoeists, and walking on water was a skill not seen anywhere in nearly two thousand years.
Nicole stood up as he approached, smoothing down her coat with a quick, nervous movement of her hands.
‘I’m sorry for being so mysterious,’ she said, and held out her hand. It felt ice-cold and her face looked blue beneath her dusky skin. She smiled tightly, but he sensed it was to prevent her teeth chattering. ‘I couldn’t be sure who to trust.’
‘This isn’t the best place for a chat,’ he suggested. ‘It will only get colder.’
She nodded and looked behind her, no doubt the way she had come. ‘I know. But there’s something I want you to see. Do you have time?’
‘Sure. How about a hint. Are you in trouble?’ He didn’t want to lead her, but neither did he feel like waiting too long for her to say what had brought her here. The one thing he was certain of was that it wasn’t in response to his rugged good looks or his sartorial tastes.
‘Is that why people usually ask to meet you in isolated spots – because they’re in trouble?’
‘Not always. Sometimes they want to cave my head in or bury me in concrete.’ He smiled. ‘I’m guessing that’s not you, though.’
They began walking, with Rocco half a pace behind due to the narrowness of the towpath. It gave him a chance to study her a little more. She had poise, and walked with the confidence of someone with no social inferiority complex, the swing of her hips a natural move rather than deliberate. In profile, she was attractive, with good bone structure, and her hair was glossy and rich.
She turned and caught him looking. ‘Is something wrong?’ He could have sworn there was a trace of a smile on her lips.
All that did was confuse him even more. To make him wonder why she was here. He shook his head. ‘No. Nothing.’
‘You are right,’ she said, after they had walked for a while in silence. ‘I have … a problem. Well, two problems, one more worrying than the other. What I’m going to show you is the only way I have of demonstrating that I am telling you the truth.’
‘Fine. So what’s the lesser of the two problems? I’m a bad news before worst news kind of person.’
‘All right.’ She turned and stopped, hugging her arms to her waist. Caught out, he almost bumped into her. He smelt the cleanliness of her in the cold air, the faint softness of her perfume, and saw the shadows under her eyes. Beneath the make-up was another face entirely, but this one showing a history of … something. ‘The first thing I have to tell you,’ she continued, ‘is that I entered the country without any papers.’
‘How come? You look and sound French. And you don’t look like someone who never had a passport.’
‘Oh, I have one – a French one, of course. But I wasn’t
able to travel with it, nor could I go through the process of acquiring another. So I came without.’ She shrugged. ‘There was no other way.’
‘I see. Well, that’s not exactly a disaster. And the bigger problem?’
‘The bigger problem is, my husband is a criminal and he’s going to kill me.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The road out of Chalon-sur-Saône was low on traffic, which suited Farek well. After dealing with Tappa, he and Bouhassa had got back in their car and headed north, leaving the wretched people-smuggler as a vivid message for any of his friends or colleagues who came by. Now they were onto the next stop in the pipeline.
Farek grunted as they passed a stretch of woodland on the right-hand side of the road. In there would have been a good place. He liked trees; they had a certain aura, absorbing sounds and emotions, yet reminding those who were about to face punishment that life was a fragile but short-lived moment in time.
‘Is this it?’ Bouhassa nodded to the front. A village was coming up. Le Villard. But before that, a metal-and-brick building stood out by the side of the road, surrounded by a high wire fence housing a jumble of farm machinery and equipment, including pallets of sacks, fencing and blue gas canisters.
As they pulled in off the road, Farek lowered the window. He could hear the screech of metal and saw the flare of sparks coming from inside the open doorway. He parked the car so that it was shielded from the road behind a stack of wooden fence posts. A battered Renault was parked nearby.
The man inside the depot had seen them arrive. The metal noise ceased and he appeared in the doorway, lifting a pair of safety goggles from his face and dropping them to his chest. He was wearing grubby, dark-blue overalls and heavy work boots, and scratching at a three-day beard with a gloved hand, squinting against the daylight. Work-hardened but not street-hard, Farek decided. Strong, probably, and capable of violence. But it wouldn’t be enough. Even so, there was plenty here that the man could use as a weapon if they let him.
The man lifted his chin. ‘Help you?’
‘Yes. Is your name Pichard?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is that your car?’ Farek pointed at the Renault.
Pichard didn’t even bother looking. He nodded. ‘Yes. You want to buy it?’ The way he grinned showed it would be a lousy deal. Then he looked past Farek … and did a double take as he saw Bouhassa levering himself from the car, grunting with the effort. It was a standard reaction, and one Farek had long grown accustomed to. Maybe, he thought, fat men in djellabas and safety glasses weren’t common out here in the fields of the Burgundy region.
Or maybe it was the gun Bouhassa was clasping in his fist.
‘Hey – what the hell—?’ The man put out a hand as if to ward them off. ‘What’s going on? I don’t keep cash on the premises …!’
Farek stepped right up to him and straight-armed him hard in the chest, sending him stumbling back inside the building. The air smelt of burnt metal, of dust and oil and rubber and diesel. A set of harrows sat on wooden blocks of wood in the centre of the floor, the metal showing where a grinder had been in use when they arrived.
‘You processed – I think that’s the word for it – seven men, a woman and a child through here recently,’ said Farek conversationally. He picked up a hoe with a broken handle and ran his fingers across the blade. ‘Did you not?’
Pichard shook his head. ‘That’s crap,’ he muttered. ‘Who are you? I don’t know what you’re talking about. Now take your fat friend and his little gun and fuck off out of here!’ He reached behind him and grabbed a length of metal angle iron, and swung it experimentally, slapping it into his gloved hands with a solid smack.
‘Tough guy.’ Farek dropped the hoe. ‘You want to reconsider?’
‘No. Do you?’
But he’d talked too much and taken his eye off the main danger. Suddenly Bouhassa was by his side, moving with deceptive speed for one so big. Before Pichard could react, the gun was touching his forehead.
‘Stand very still.’ Farek stepped in close and relieved him of the angle iron. Then he swung it hard and low in a vicious scything movement. Pichard screamed as the rigid metal cut him across the shins with a sickening crack, and fell to the floor.
Farek squatted down next to him and waited for the groans and swearing to quieten down, patting him almost paternally on the shoulder.
‘Sorry – shouldn’t have done that. I have a few anger problems. They stem from someone not being honest with me!’ The last few words were directed in a scream into Pichard’s face. Then he smiled calmly and jerked a thumb at Bouhassa. ‘Mind you, nowhere near as bad as his problems. He likes to shoot people.’
Pichard was struggling to ignore the pain, rubbing gently at his legs where blood was seeping through his overalls. ‘OK. OK,’ he muttered, forcing the words through gritted teeth. ‘No need for that. There were eight people – but I didn’t see any kid, I promise. The woman, though, she had trouble walking, like she might have been pregnant. Or maybe carrying something heavy. I didn’t look because it wasn’t my problem.’ He scowled. ‘Who told you about this, anyway?’
‘Maurice Tappa,’ said Farek. ‘Now he’s a little chatterbox, isn’t he?’ He thought it unlikely that the man would have heard about Tappa yet. If he had, he wouldn’t have been hanging around here playing with his tools. First rule of a network being bust was for everyone to scatter until the heat died down.
‘Putain! I’ll kill him!’ The man spat on the ground and tried to sit up, but Farek stopped him.
‘Before we let you do that, where did they go?’
‘Somewhere north … I don’t recall where.’
Farek said nothing, but stared at the man, blinking patiently. The silence lengthened, interrupted only by a bird flitting among the steel rafters above them and a faint tick of cooling metal coming from the harrows. A car approached along the road outside, and for a brief second, the man’s face showed a grain of hope. But it didn’t stop.
Farek stood up and nodded.
Bouhassa moved in, flipping the safety glasses down over his eyes. He grabbed Pichard by his hair, forcing his head back and pushing the silencer into his mouth. The man gurgled, waving his hands for him to stop, and Farek nodded. Bouhassa withdrew the gun barrel.
‘Amiens,’ the man gabbled. ‘Amiens – but that’s all I know. They were picked up by a driver named Maurat … works out of Saint-Quentin. His details are over there.’ He pointed towards a desk and bulletin board in the corner of the building. ‘That’s all I know.’
Farek nodded and walked away. ‘Good. That’s all you ever will.’
As he reached the car he heard a brief scuffle, then the muffled spat of the gun.
But only just.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
‘Before anything else, though,’ Nicole continued, jumping in before Rocco could ask any questions, ‘I need to show you something.’ She turned and led the way along the canal bank, ducking beneath a cluster of willow fronds, then stepping carefully over fallen branches from a clump of wind-damaged maples. The trees had concealed a gradual curve in the canal, and Rocco could now see a longer stretch of water running in a straight line for some distance. A hundred metres ahead, the hulk of an ancient barge was moored to the bank with a boarding plank running onto the stern.
He turned and looked back. Caught a slight movement as Claude moved closer to the canal.
As they approached, it became clear that the vessel wasn’t in its prime. It was low in the water at the front, with a rash of rust showing across the metal hull above the waterline. The cabin, a wooden superstructure covered with peeling paint, occupied the first third of the vessel, with a door at the rear and three square windows covered by filthy curtains facing the bank. Nicole led the way up the boarding plank and opened the door into the cabin.
‘You will have to duck,’ she advised him. ‘It is very low inside. I’ll go first.’
Rocco slid his hand into his coat pocket. He’d been i
n situations like this before, and wasn’t about to take chances, even with a woman. At least she was in front, not behind him, which was where he’d rather keep her.
She stepped down into the boat and Rocco followed.
The atmosphere inside was cold and clammy, reeking of stale bodies and damp, of mould and something Rocco didn’t want to think about. It was kitted out with cheap, plastic-covered benches and unmade bunks, a small gas cooker and some cupboards, all put together for convenience and economy, not style. A fold-down table next to the cooker held a scattering of stale bread, a serrated knife and fragments of rotten fruit. Rat droppings and dust lay everywhere. The ceiling and walls were painted a sickly yellow.
He prowled the small space, noting details. He doubted anyone had been here for a few days. A dead blackbird lay huddled in one corner, one wing covering its head like a shroud, and a large, green, metal water container lay on its side under the table, TRINKWASSER just legible on the fading paint. A war relic. Rocco bent and sniffed at the hinged opening. Water. Stale.
Nicole watched him and said, ‘I bet you could list everything in here right down to the breadcrumbs, couldn’t you?’
He nodded. ‘Force of habit.’
She gestured to one of the benches and sat down herself. ‘These aren’t too bad. But don’t touch the bunks – they’re revolting.’ She looked at the bread and fruit with a grimace. ‘The food was already stale when we got here. The people who prepared this did not care for the ones coming through.’
He looked at her. ‘You were one of them.’
She nodded and folded her hands into her lap, composing herself. ‘I have to tell you this immediately … otherwise I will not be able to. You understand?’
‘OK.’
‘I come from Oran in Algeria. My name is Nicole, and I am married to a man named Samir Farek and we have a small son, Massi. Samir is not a good man, although when I married him, he was very different and … normal.’ She wasn’t looking at Rocco, he noted, but staring at her feet as if reading the words from a script.
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