‘Have you met her?’
Jacquot said that he had, the first time at the house in Roucas Blanc on the night of the raid, and just a few weeks ago in Marseilles.
‘What did you think of her?’
‘Cold,’ replied Jacquot. ‘A young, attractive woman,’ he continued, ‘but . . . cold, isolated. As though her heart has been lead-lined, insulated from any kind of feeling.’
‘Oh, she has feelings, all right,’ said Solange, peeling the skin from her fish and slicing into it. ‘They’re just not the right kind. The word I would use is malicious. Cold, as you said, but conniving and cruel too. And absolutely heartless. Dis-moi, Daniel, you think she could have brought someone in? Contracted out the killings?’
Jacquot shrugged. ‘The brothers’ family in Corsica seemed the obvious place to start. Revenge . . . an eye for an eye . . . it’s a national sport over there. But we’ve checked. The whole family’s where it should be. Aged parents, a couple of daughters, one married with kids, the other not, some cousins and nephews too young to carry off anything like this . . . As for bringing people in, well, old man Cabrille probably had a pretty useful phone book for this kind of work. But again, there’s nothing we’ve been able to find.’
‘So who are the other victims?’
Jacquot went through the list, from the Blanchard bride to Antoine Berri, Minette Peluze, and the two most recent victims at Cruis, Léo and Marie-Ange.
‘Buhl? Marie-Ange Buhl. The girl I met?’
‘The same,’ replied Jacquot. ‘Léo Chabran was her lover. They were going to get married.’
Solange looked deeply shocked. ‘I can’t believe it. She was so beautiful, so young, so . . .’ She narrowed her eyes on Jacquot. ‘I have to say, Daniel, that when I met her I suspected there might have been something between you. The two of you seemed very close.’
It wasn’t a question, but Jacquot felt an answer was due. ‘No, there was nothing. And she was very young, as you once observed. Too young for the likes of me.’ He gave her a smile which he managed to hold. ‘But it doesn’t make it any easier.’
Once again their plates were cleared and peach crèmes brûlées served to them in tiny copper dishes.
‘Forensics? Ballistics? Witnesses? Rumours?’ asked Solange, tapping through the crust of her dessert and scooping out the cream. ‘Do you have anything?’
Jacquot shook his head. ‘Every scene-of-crime is clean. I mean, professionally clean. No fingerprints, footprints, tyreprints, no cartridges to retrieve, no shell casings. The only thing they’ve left at the scene is an animal trap, the smell of this Dyethelaspurane they’ve used in two of the murders, some threads of clothing and a tiny sprig of vine. And all we have to go on is a dark-coloured VW and two women – who may or may not be involved. But if the pattern continues, as it has so far – eye, tooth, hand, foot – what we’re left with now is wound for wound, stripe for stripe.’
‘You forgot burning,’ Solange remarked, digging the last of the crust from the side of her dish.
‘No I didn’t,’ he replied. ‘I just didn’t mention it.’
‘You’d have made a good lawyer, and an even better prosecutor, Daniel.’
‘I didn’t like the costume.’
She chuckled, a little tearfully. ‘So what now? Where to from here?’
Jacquot shrugged. ‘The next on the list. So far they’ve kept it in order, so it’s wound for wound. Then stripe for stripe. A whipping? A flaying?’
‘A bruising? A battering?’
‘The problem is I can only think of one other name involved in the Lafour case who hasn’t yet been hit.’
‘I was just coming to that,’ said Solange, giving him an anxious look. ‘What does Claudine think?’
‘She’s not thrilled. But she understands what this is all about. And that there’s not much else we can do. A forced hand.’
‘You’re presumably taking precautions?’
‘In every possible way,’ Jacquot assured her. ‘There’s a direct-link home-alarm wired through to headquarters, there are two handguns in the house – Claudine’s daughter is staying with us at the moment, just to complicate things – and while I sit here with you, three armed képis from the local police are playing gardeners, front, sides and back of the house.’
Solange finished her crème brûlée, laid down her spoon and settled a hard, uncompromising look on Jacquot. ‘So it could be both of them. Wound and stripe. You had thought of that, I suppose?’
Jacquot nodded. ‘It’s a possibility, yes.’
‘You could have sent them away.’
‘Better they stay where they are so I can keep an eye on them,’ he replied.
‘And use them as bait.’
‘Can you think of any other way?’
Solange Bonnefoy shook her head, then lifted her empty glass. ‘But if you thought about getting me a refill, I might just come up with something.’
44
AS THE DAYS PASSED, JACQUOT grew increasingly jumpy. A slammed car door in the street, an exhaust backfiring, a horn blaring were enough to have him tense, start to reach for his gun – a gun he usually left in his desk drawer but now buckled diligently to his belt.
As well as jumpy, Jacquot had also begun to get angry. This slow-burn anger had started up, almost without him knowing it, when he’d read through the pathologist’s report on Marie-Ange – the way the killer had fired that second shot to her head, to make sure she was dead. Point blank, the tip of the silencer just a centimetre or two from her skin, close enough for the muzzle flash to burn. There was something so cold and callous and ruthless about it, something so careless and merciless, and it was that single unnecessary action that had lit the fuse deep inside him. Now that flickering spark of anger had grown into a red-hot flame that made him screw up his eyes and set his teeth tight in his jaw, made him clench his fists and want to scream with rage – and not just because these shadowy killers had gunned down a young woman he had known, respected and . . . felt strongly for, but because those same killers were now threatening his own family, intent on killing them – in whatever manner they’d decided on – just to cause him pain.
Both Claudine and Midou, however, seemed far more at ease. They might have limited their trips to town – only doing so at planned times and along planned routes that could be covertly supervised – but in all other respects they followed an easy daily routine which, to someone watching, would have appeared quite normal. When Jacquot left for Cavaillon after breakfast, Claudine went to her studio at the back of the millhouse, while Midou sat in the kitchen working on her thesis. With the door between studio and kitchen left open they carried on an occasional, easy conversation – always aware of each other: the swish of a paintbrush being rinsed, the turn of a page, the tap of a keyboard, a cough, the scrape of a chair. And after lunch, at the kitchen table or under the vine on the terrace, the two women would take it in turns to have a siesta, one after another – a forty minute nap on the sofa while the other one stayed awake and kept watch. All the ground floor doors locked.
As the days passed, Jacquot also felt increasingly convinced that he, Claudine and Midou really were being watched. Without any kind of evidence to support this belief, he was suddenly certain of it. He could even pinpoint the moment he first felt it: getting out of his car in the police headquarters’ outdoor car park and walking across the gravelled yard to the front steps of the building. In the space of that thirty-metre walk, it was as though he could feel eyes burning into him, and in as casual and relaxed a way as he could manage, he’d glanced around him, as though someone had called his name, or he’d heard something, or something had caught his attention. Of course, there’d been nothing to see, just the church of St-Jean, the usual flock of pigeons taking off from its slatted wood belfry, a passing car, a woman pushing a pram. That was all. But as he went in through the front doors and strode over to the lifts, he was as certain of the sensation of being watched as if someone had actually tapped him on t
he shoulder.
There had been no giveaways then, and none since, either at headquarters, in town, or out at the millhouse – no distant wink of sunlight off the lenses of binoculars, no rustling in the undergrowth, no suspicious shadows, no tangible sense of being followed. But still he couldn’t shake off the feeling, a sixth sense that someone was there, close by, watching and waiting.
It wasn’t a pleasant feeling either.
Nor was it pleasant being so powerless.
Doing nothing – not being able to do anything.
It was even worse than the waiting.
At first it had felt like time was on his side, that the three- to four-week gap between murders during which, Jacquot supposed, the killers stalked their prey and planned their attack, gave him equal time and space to prepare.
But prepare for what?
The trouble was, he had no idea when an attack might take place, where it might come from, or how it might be effected. Which meant that instead of having time to prepare, all he had was time to fill. And while he waited there was never a moment when the words ‘wound for wound’ and ‘stripe for stripe’ didn’t scream through his head.
It didn’t take long for the strain of this hanging around, this waiting for something to happen, to make itself felt. For Claudine and Midou, too. The frequently repeated wish, usually brought up at the breakfast table or over supper, and certainly thought about in the hours between, that whatever was going to happen, would it damn well happen soon. In short, the waiting was unbearable.
It was for this reason that Jacquot decided to act, to follow up something that had been on his mind. Niggling away at him.
After clearing the assignment with Rochet, he called Brunet into his office.
‘I have a little job for you,’ Jacquot began.
Brunet looked suspicious.
Jacquot played it just as Brunet would have played it – stretching it out. It was a small pleasure but he enjoyed it.
‘Thought you might like it.’
Brunet said nothing, just raised an eyebrow. Jacquot wondered if he knew he was being played.
‘Maybe take your bike,’ he continued, recalling that drive the two of them had taken to Forcalquier and Brunet complaining about the road surface. ‘Challenging stuff up in those hills. Good practice for your time trials. And exercise too. Your legs’ll be aching after a couple of kilometres.’ Jacquot chuckled.
‘You want me to go cycling?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘And where do you have in mind?’
Jacquot gave it some thought.
‘Corsica.’
45
IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG FOR Brunet to report back.
‘It’s the sisters,’ he said, phoning in the news just three days after his departure for Corsica. ‘The Manichella sisters.’
Jacquot felt the sudden, warm pleasure of a hunch paying off. He knew those Corsican hills, and he knew how the local gendarmerie could be. Either money had changed hands or they’d been hoodwinked. They hate us over there, he’d told Brunet the day his assistant left; don’t believe a word they tell you. Find out for yourself.
And that’s what Brunet had done, riding his bike through Borredonico and Scarpetta and up into Tassafaduca, just as Jacquot had recommended, stopping at the small pension on its sloping main street to stay for the night. It hadn’t taken him long to cosy up to the inn-keeper’s daughter and find out all he needed to know.
‘Apparently the Manichellas make the best honey in the region, so I dropped in unannounced to buy some. The old man’s a little weak in the head, and the old woman’s not far behind him, but it’s the two sisters who live either side of the farm who run the place and do the work. The elder one’s married, with a couple of kids, but her husband’s in clink; the younger sister’s single. And there’s no sign of them.’
‘Out at work?’
‘The farm’s the work – a few goats, the hives, some maize, chestnuts. But right now everything’s being looked after by two other women, cousins probably, who are just about old enough to play the part. If the local boys didn’t know the family set-up, they could easily have been fooled.’
‘And how exactly do you know that? That the women are cousins?’ asked Jacquot.
‘Because when I was leaving with my honey, I heard one of the kids ask her aunt – tatine – when her maman was coming home.’
Jacquot smiled. He wondered if the child had received a hiding for that slip.
‘We’ll need photographs,’ he said.
‘Already done. From the local paper in Corte. Last year Miel Manichella won an award at an agricultural show. Photos were taken at the prize-giving. And there they are, the two sisters side by side. Nothing like the cousins.’
‘Where are you now?’
‘Ajaccio.’
‘When are you back?’
‘Got a flight booked first thing tomorrow morning.’
‘Can you fax the pictures over?’
‘Check the machine in the squad room. They should be there already. I sent them twenty minutes ago.’
‘Good job. Thanks, Jean.’
‘There’s something else,’ said Brunet. ‘Could be a coincidence, maybe not, who knows?’
‘And that is?’
‘On the way up to Tassafaduca there’s a small settlement I rode through called Cabrillio. It reminded me of that woman, Virginie Cabrille? Just outside the village there’s this big old castello, so I called in and asked for directions. The owners are Italian, and had just moved in. Turns out they bought the place a couple of months ago, from . . . guess who?’
‘You’re joking?’
‘Exacte. Virginie Cabrille. Apparently her father was born there, the old family home. Seems that once upon a time they were pretty big in these parts.’
Thanking Brunet again, Jacquot put down the phone and, wondering at the coincidence, went through to the squad room. Just as Brunet had promised, there they were, four ink-smudged black-and-white photos and a photocopy of the accompanying newspaper story lying in the tray. He flicked through the images, two head-and-shoulder shots, and two full-length photos of the sisters receiving their prize. On the newspaper report a caption for one of the pictures read: Mme Marita Albertacce and Mlle Marina Manichella receive their prize. The fax machine and photocopying may have darkened the pictures but the faces were easily identifiable.
The two women were dressed in summer frocks, floral prints that pressed against their bodies in what must have been a pretty stiff breeze. As well as wearing similar frocks both women were dark-haired, but that was where any similarity ended. One, the elder by the look of her, had a gaunt, drawn face, lined by such fatigue and disappointment that the smile looked more like a tight grimace. She kept her hands thrust down into the pockets of a cardigan, and her shoulders stiffly around her ears, as though trying to ward off a chill. Her sister, a head or more shorter, was far prettier, her smile one of genuine delight, taking the prize with both hands. She seemed, even in those breezy conditions, to radiate warmth. The two sisters looked as though they had come from different worlds, different social spheres – the one pretty and privileged, the other plain and deprived.
But what really irked Jacquot was the fact that they had identified these women as possible, if not probable, killers so late in the day. If the Corsican gendarmerie had been more efficient, or less corrupt, he might have had these pictures a great deal sooner and been able to do something with them.
But better late than never, he decided, and he had a sheaf of copies run off. He had no intention of putting them out for public consumption – in local papers, or pinned to gendarmerie noticeboards throughout the region – but he told his officers to fax copies to all the hotels and pensions they had visited to see if anyone, this late, might recognise the two women.
46
THE FIRST CONFIRMATION CAME THROUGH the following morning, from the owners of a pension on the Manosque–Forcalquier road, no more than a dozen or so kilom
etres from the woods where Léo and Marie-Ange had been murdered.
‘They stayed two nights,’ said Madame Archant when Jacquot called at her house later that morning, at the end of a dusty track on the slopes above Manosque. At some point in its past it had been a small farmhouse, now much extended to provide four guest rooms on the first floor, all en suite Madame Archant was at pains to point out, as though Jacquot were planning to stay or writing a report for a tourist guide. There was a small dining room, with a terrace, across the hallway for guests, but the kitchen, she told him, showing him to a chair beside an empty blackened fireplace, was the family’s room. She was a pretty woman in her early forties, Jacquot guessed, with brown hair caught in a bun and a stout little body bound by an apron, her wide hips pressing against the kitchen table as she worked on a parcel of dough, glancing through the window at her husband and son sawing wood over a trestle.
There was something pointed about her show of exertion, Jacquot thought to himself, the way she set into the dough, as though she was angry about something, something to do with the two women who had come here to stay. It was clear she hadn’t taken much of a liking to them, but Jacquot decided to approach the subject slowly.
‘Last month, you said?’
‘That’s right. In the old stable. Two bedrooms. Self-contained. Like a gîte.’ The words came out staccato as she vigorously folded and worked the dough.
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