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.
23
THE SUN WAS BEHIND HIM as she turned, swiftly, as though taken by surprise, and she lifted her hand to shade her eyes, to see who it was.
He gave her a smile – a big easy smile. Despite any discomfort or uncertainty he might have been feeling, he knew he was pleased to see her and that there was nothing he could do to hide that delight.
‘Daniel. C’est toi!’ she cried, and flung her arms round his neck and hugged him to her, there on the corner of rue Francis and Canebière, as the lights changed, the traffic stopped and lunchtime crowds swarmed past them. Her body was warm and young and close against his, and he felt an unexpected burst of longing. ‘But . . . but what are you doing here?’ she asked, releasing him, but catching hold of his hands and swinging them between them. ‘How come . . . ?’ It was clear she was as pleased to see him as he was delighted to see her, but he wondered how he would have managed if the roles had been reversed, if she had come up on him, tapped him on the shoulder. It didn’t bear thinking about, and he was pleased that he’d had a chance to compose himself.
‘It’s lunchtime,’ he said. ‘I was hungry.’
It had been a joke between them that no case in which he was involved could be properly investigated without stopping for lunch. And on cue she let out a peal of laughter, rocking back on her feet, putting a hand across her mouth. The first time Jacquot had heard that laugh, in the hot-house in St Bédard, it had sent a shiver through him, the most beautiful laugh he’d ever known. He’d been childishly pleased that it was something he had said that had made it happen.
‘So you just happened to be here, looking for somewhere, or you came to invite me to lunch?’ Marie-Ange gave him a shrewd, amused look. ‘In which case, Chief Inspector, I do believe you must have followed me from the shop. That’s right, isn’t it? You’ve been following me.’
Strangely flustered Jacquot replied, ‘You’re right, you’re right. I was coming to invite you to lunch. I was on my way to the shop when I saw you come out. But you were a good way off, and it’s taken me till here to catch up.’
She gave him another long look and he felt as if she could see right through him, right into his heart. It was as unnerving and disconcerting as it ever was with Marie-Ange Buhl.
‘Then you’re in luck, Chief Inspector. I am free for lunch. And a long lunch too, si tu veux. It’s my half-day and I have nothing planned.’
With the time to spare – he’d expected a rushed lunch break meal somewhere close to the shop – Jacquot reached past her and flagged down a cab.
‘I know just the place,’ he said.
Twenty minutes later, on the far side of the Vieux Port, after excited greetings and smothering hugs from Madame Jules, proprietress of Chez Jules et Jules, Jacquot and Marie-Ange took the last of six small tables squeezed into line in a dead-end passageway off place Gombert. In less than a minute napkins had been brought, a basket of bread, a bowl of olives, glass tumblers and a pitcher of Provencal rosé, Madame Jules bustling out from a door at the end of the passageway with everything in a single armful, cutlery in her apron pocket. Behind her, in the house’s shadowy interior, her husband, Jules, worked a shelf of bottles and a simple open grill. When he caught Jacquot’s eye, he waved a griddle fork and shouted out another greeting.
‘Do you know the owner of every restaurant in Marseilles?’ asked Marie-Ange.
‘Only the good ones,’ Jacquot replied, more composed now. ‘The rest are in jail.’
And so it went, light talk to begin.
‘I meant to call,’ he said. ‘See how you were. But . . .’ he shrugged. ‘You know how it is?’
‘But you’re here now. That’s the important thing. And it’s good to see you. Like old times.’
‘St Bédard. The docks.’
‘Exacte. So, Monsieur Restaurant Marseilles,’ she said, looking around for a menu, a blackboard, ‘what do you recommend?’
‘Absolutely nothing. We leave it all to Jules and Jules . . . whatever Madame found in the market and however her husband’s cooked it.’
They didn’t wait long to find out: a dish of grilled red peppers cut into seared strips, doused in olive oil and studded with sea salt; a jellied terrine of octopus, its curling tentacles braised with a wine cork, Jacquot explained, to keep the flesh soft; and a trio of thumb-sized chicken boudins in a speckled tarragon sauce.
It was over the boudins, branded from the griddle, that Jacquot mentioned Léo Chabran’s name for the first time.
‘Do you ever see him? Do you keep in touch?’
‘This is just delicious,’ said Marie-Ange, dropping her eyes to her plate and making a business of scooping up the boudins’ buttery sauce with a piece of bread.
Jacquot knew a curved ball when he saw it and knew what it meant, and for a moment he wasn’t quite sure how he felt about it. Having it confirmed that this woman, sitting with him here at Chez Jules et Jules, this woman who had so occupied his own thoughts, should have taken a lover. For that, clearly, was what she had done.
When she finally looked up from her plate, a little flustered, unsure how to respond, he managed a smile.
‘I wouldn’t have been much of a detective if I hadn’t seen that one coming.’
Marie-Ange blushed, lowered her eyes again.
‘It’s . . . Well . . .’ She took a breath, glanced up at Jacquot. ‘You’re right. We are . . . seeing each other.’
‘I’m pleased,’ he said, which wasn’t altogether true. ‘That’s good,’ he continued, needing to convince himself as much as put Marie-Ange at ease, nodding at the prospect of it. ‘He seemed to me a very good man.’
As he spoke, Jacquot watched her expression – a mixture of relief, embarrassment and, possibly, sadness. It made him feel just a little better about it, this loss of her to someone else, to know that she had had feelings for him, and that in another life things might have worked out differently.
‘How is he? The wounds, I mean.’
Marie-Ange blushed again. Just like Claudine, he thought to himself. Sassy on the surface, but soft on the inside.
But not that soft.
‘Everything in working order,’ she countered.
Touché.
‘Is he back at work?’
She nodded.
‘The service gave him two months’ leave. When he was released from Témoine he moved back to his apartment in Toulon. I took some time off to look after him there, and . . . that’s when . . . you know . . .’ She gave a shrug, a nervous smile, pushed away her plate. ‘But you’re not here to find out about my love life, are you? There’s something else on your mind.’
And she was right. There was something else on his mind. The second bird he had come here to kill. If anyone could help with the Gilbert murder, it was Marie-Ange with her special gift, that second sight. As Madame Jules cleared their plates with a ‘trés bien, trés bien’ that they had done the meal justice, he slid a hand into his jacket pocket and pulled out the three photos he’d shown to Gilbert, handed them to Marie-Ange.
Like Gilbert she shuffled through them quickly, then examined each one more slowly. There were maybe twenty people in each of the photos, but she didn’t hesitate.
‘These two,’ she said, pointing out the same figures as Gilbert, the same blurred faces that Brunet had circled in red. ‘There is something not right about them.’
‘What exactly? Can you tell?’
She started to shake her head, still looking at the photos. ‘It’s just a feeling. They are not nice. They shouldn’t be there.’
‘So two men? Or a man and a woman, or . . . ?’
‘Ah, non, non. C’est
deux femmes. Two women.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Mais c’est clair, non?’
‘Not immediately.’
‘Well, I’m telling you now. Two women. For certain. What have they done?’
‘You don’t know?’
She glanced at him, sternly.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . .’ He grinned, held up his hands.
She handed back the photos.
‘Sometimes I can tell more. But with those . . .’ she gestured at the photos as Jacquot slipped them back into his pocket, ‘with those, it’s just a feeling that they are not good people to know. I would say that they are dangerous. Very dangerous. En effet, I would say . . .’ She closed her eyes, opened them a moment later. ‘I would say you should be very careful of them, Daniel. And catch them as quickly as you can. Whatever it is that they have done. And before they do anything else.’
And that was how it was left, as Madame Jules returned to their table with a platter of cheese and a dish of apple slices soaked in Calvados.
After their lunch together, out on place Gombert, Jacquot hailed a cab and held open the door for her.
She reached up and kissed him on both cheeks.
‘I won’t leave it so long next time,’ he said.
‘You had better not.’
And that was it. She slid into the back seat, he closed the door, and the cab swung away from the kerb.
Through the rear window, a raised hand, a look, a smile.
Which he returned.
And then she was gone.
24
AFTER HIS LUNCH WITH MARIE-ANGE, Jacquot headed back to Cavaillon, taking the littoral flyover past the Joliette quays, skirting L’Estaque and climbing into the hills above the city. By the time he’d swept through the road tunnel and out into open country he’d managed to put Marie-Ange and Léo out of his mind, and settled down to consider what she had told him over lunch.
About the photos.
Two women. Their suspects were two women.
Not two men, not a woman and a man. But two women.
And if that’s what Marie-Ange said, if that’s what she had got from the photos, then it was good enough for him. The fact that she’d also sensed danger from the blurred images, sensed a threat from them . . . well, that really did tie it all in.
But that was as far as it went. He might have had a clearer bead on Izzy Blanchard’s possible killers thanks to Marie-Ange’s insight, but what did Izzy and Antoine Berri have in common? Because there sure as hell had to be something, if only because of the anaesthetic Dyethelaspurane. In the Blanchard case it had been used to put down Noël Gilbert before his wife was shot, and at the Delacroix workshop to incapacitate Antoine Berri before his arm was sliced off. Two deaths in two months where Dyethelaspurane had been used as an incapacitating agent when, according to Bernie Muzon, there’d been no other recorded cases of the drug ever being used in criminal activity. Either it was a mighty coincidence, two different sets of killers getting their hands on the same drug at pretty much the same time, or whoever killed Izzy had also killed Berri.
But what was the link between them?
What was the motive?
All he could say for sure was that the husband of the first victim, Noël Gilbert, and the brother of the second victim, Jean Berri, had been cops. Both of them stationed at the Police Nationale headquarters on rue Garibaldi.
Winding up his window, Jacquot reached for his cigarettes, lit one up, then re-opened the window, just enough to suck away the smoke and for tipping out the ash. Drawing in the first lungful he went through everything else they knew about the victims, looking for anything significant.
Both victims much the same age. Within a couple of years of each other.
One just married, the other about to finish his apprenticeship at Delacroix et Fils. As Muzon had said, that Delacroix apprenticeship was a big thing. After five years on the same salary, you got a raise, joined the team. Like a marriage, there was a sense of new beginnings, everything up for grabs. Only for those new beginnings to be taken away at the last moment.
But that’s where the similarities ended, and the stories diverged.
One victim a woman, one victim a man. So no likely sexual context – a serial obsession being played out, a rape gone wrong, infidelity, jealousy, rivalry.
Both victims murdered in different places – eighty kilometres apart – in the Luberon and Marseilles.
And murdered at different times of day – early morning and late evening – in bed and at work.
And in different ways:
A silenced gun and a bullet in the brain – cool, clean, professional.
A spinning table saw – violent, messy and amateur.
If the killers were the same, how come the style was so different?
Finding the link, making the jump . . .
Connections, connections, connections.
It was always the same, thought Jacquot, as he came off the autoroute and crossed the bridge into the dusty, sun-glaring outskirts of Cavaillon. Maybe he’d call Marie-Ange, ask for her help. Take her to the Gilberts’ room at Le Mas Blanc, to the Delacroix workshop. Maybe she’d pick something up, ‘sense’ something. Right then, he needed anything he could get.
The phone was ringing when he got back to his office. He hurried to pick it up if only to stop the clamour.
It was Claude Peluze. After using just a couple of weeks of his compassionate leave, the old cop was back on the beat – kept clear of Minette’s murder investigation but otherwise back with the squad.
‘I was just speaking to Bernie,’ he continued. ‘He said there might be a link between the Berri killing at Delacroix and your case up there in the Luberon. Some drug or other?’
‘That’s right. Dyethelaspurane. It’s a strong anaesthetic. Gilbert was put down with it before they shot his wife, and so was Berri’s brother before they dropped the saw across his arm.’
‘They?’
‘Possibly two women. That’s all I’ve got at the moment.’
‘Well, here’s something else for you, something which Bernie didn’t know,’ said Peluze. ‘Jean Berri and Noël Gilbert were two of the cops with me at Roucas Blanc when we paid a call on Virginie Cabrille. In fact they were the ones who took down her gorilles in the garage shoot-out.’
Jacquot’s heart leapt.
‘You’re kidding me? That’s . . .’
‘I know. It makes you wonder.’
‘But you were there too,’ said Jacquot, without thinking, instantly regretting it.
‘And look what happened to me,’ Claude fired back, as though he’d already thought it through and was expecting the response. ‘Which brings something else to mind,’ he continued. ‘If you add Minette into the mix.’
‘And what’s that?’ asked Jacquot.
‘You read the Bible, you’d know. Exodus. Old Testament. Gilbert’s wife shot in the eye. Minette they take out her dentures, remember? And now this hand thing . . .’
Jacquot grunted – that was a long shot, he thought. Claude, back at work but obviously still broken up with grief, sounded like he was letting his imagination run away with him.
‘And that’s not all,’ said Claude in a quieter, less Messianic tone. ‘If I remember rightly, it wasn’t just me and Gilbert and Berri involved. You were there, too. You were a part of it. En effet, you pretty much ran the whole show. Brought it all down.’
25
SO CLAUDE’S THEORY WAS THIS: someone had killed the nearest and dearest of three police officers who had been involved in the same operation, a shoot-out in Roucas Blanc eight months earlier. And for whatever reason – maybe out of religious conviction or simply to taunt the police – the killers, these two women, were following the old Biblical formula. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth.
Revenge, Claude had told him. Plain and simple. Someone getting their own back. On anyone who’d something to do with that shoot-out at Roucas Blanc.
And who
ever they were, the killers were still out there.
As far as Jacquot could see, there were only two possible lines of enquiry.
They were looking at someone close to the two gorilles who’d been shot – the Manichella brothers.
Or Virginie Cabrille, for whatever reason.
As in all the most perplexing cases, Jacquot decided, Claude’s theory was either a long shot, a very long shot that really should be discounted . . . Or it was right on the money.
And long shots – even the longest of long shots like this one – sometimes paid off.
Putting down the phone to Claude, Jacquot remembered that night at Roucas Blanc when the two brothers had been shot and their bodies were being bagged. He’d been standing beside Claude at exactly the moment when Virginie Cabrille was brought down from the house.
His friend was right. Jacquot had been there. And she had seen him.
And if what Claude had said about the eye, the hand and the teeth was right, then he’d better watch out. Or rather he’d better watch out for Claudine. The thought sent a shiver through Jacquot.
Blood Counts Page 10
