Death at the Clos du Lac

by Adrian Magson

  ‘Gents.’ The bar owner spoke automatically, but his nerves showed in the lick of his lips and the flick of the cloth across the counter.

  ‘Set them up,’ said the short man, carefully lighting up a Stuyvesant from a new packet as if it were a sacred ritual. The lighter looked like gold, expensive. ‘Your best whisky all round. Big ones. We’ve got business to discuss, right?’

  Whisky, thought Rocco. The drink of choice for criminals like this. As if they’d know a good whisky from a jar of paraffin.

  Maillard went through the motions and slid three full glasses across the bar. The first two men took theirs and sipped as if they had all the time in the world. The third man reached past them and picked up his glass, throwing it back in one go.

  A bad sign, Rocco reflected. A gunman who drinks like that is an amateur. Dangerous.

  ‘Hey. You.’ It was the stocky man. He was looking at Rocco, standing square on, crowding him. ‘You mind giving my friends and me some space? Go drink somewhere else. We want to talk in private.’

  ‘He’s OK,’ Maillard said quickly. ‘He won’t say anything.’ He was clearly worried that Rocco might be too far away to stop anything blowing up in his face.

  ‘I don’t care if he goes and plays the “Marseillaise”, I don’t want him here.’ The man pushed at Rocco’s shoulder. ‘Go on, get lost.’

  The bar had gone quiet. The men at the far end of the room were standing still, the click of a final ball rumbling into a pocket chute the only sound.

  Rocco straightened up and looked down at the man, who seemed to realise belatedly how tall he was, and moved back a step. In the following silence, he heard a rasp of material, then an ominous metallic click. The hairs on his neck prickled, and a glance at Maillard’s shocked expression told him all he needed to know.

  He turned his head. The gunman had produced a short, double-barrelled shotgun from under his coat. It was a lupara. Easy to hide and popular for use on bank jobs, to intimidate. It had no range to speak of, but in a crowded place like this, it would be horribly indiscriminate and deadly.

  ‘He said move, big fella,’ the man murmured, his words sliding together. Clearly the whisky hadn’t been his first drink of the day. As he spoke, the barrels lifted, catching the overhead lights and revealing a faint layer of oxidisation on the metal and a network of scratches.

  An old weapon held by an amateur, Rocco thought. But still dangerous. He guessed that the drinks deal had been a bluff; they were here to take whatever they could get. It made him wonder how many other places they had hit today. The Bonnie and Clyde tactic: select an area, go for the easiest targets, hit them one after the other, then get out. Quantity before quality, the sign of limited aspirations.

  His attention veered to the man with the shopping bag. He’d been silent throughout, not moving, just watching the play develop. Another danger. Yet his hands were empty of weapons.

  Time to end it.

  Rocco nodded and muttered thickly, ‘OK, OK, no need to get rough. I’m leaving.’ He pushed himself away from the bar like a man exhausted, and stepped towards the door. Past the stocky man who was now grinning, stepping alongside the man with the shopping bag. As he went to move past the gunman with the lupara, he turned and ground the barrel of his service pistol hard into his neck, just below the earlobe. Up close the man reeked of drink and cigarettes and an overlaying aroma of stale sweat.

  ‘This is a MAB with seven rounds in the magazine,’ Rocco said softly. ‘Move a muscle and I’ll use the first one to decorate this room with your brains.’ He flicked a glance at the shopping bag man and said, ‘You’ll get the next.’ Finally he looked at their leader, whose mouth had dropped open in shock, the Stuyvesant dropping to the floor at his feet. ‘Then you.’

  It was overdramatic, the language of cheap gangster films and barroom bravado. But it was something the three men understood.

  Yet still the man with the shopping bag made a move. His hand slid down inside the bag. Before he could touch what he was reaching for, however, Claude Lamotte stepped through the doorway and rested the tip of his Darne shotgun against the man’s shoulder.

  ‘I wouldn’t do that, my friend. You’d never even hear the noise this thing makes before your head bounces round the room like a dead chicken.’

  Moments later, all three were sitting in chairs, hands and feet tied together by two of the farm workers with rope from Maillard’s back room, while another stood over them with a raised billiard cue.

  Rocco called the office in Amiens and arranged for a team to come out and collect the men, while Claude searched them for weapons and identification. It didn’t amount to much: a couple of cheap knives and a set of brass knuckledusters, and some documents showing the men to be from Cambrai in the north. The shopping bag contained an ancient revolver pitted with rust. And a baguette with a chewed end.

  Amateurs.

  ‘Hey, Inspector,’ one of the farm workers called out. ‘Is it true you stuffed a live grenade down Didier Marthe’s pants and made him run into the marais?’

  ‘No,’ Rocco replied. He knew the man wouldn’t believe him. There were already some lurid stories circulating about how he’d dealt with the former Resistance worker who’d tried to blow him up. After this evening, the rumours would only get stronger and more colourful.

  ‘Seriously?’ one of his friends urged. ‘I’d have paid to see that, the little shit.’

  ‘Seriously. I made him walk, in case he tripped and hurt himself.’

  ‘Mother of God,’ Maillard breathed later, as the three robbers were untied and led out to a police van. ‘You had me fooled back there, for a moment. I thought… Never mind what I thought.’ He looked a little tight around the eyes, and reached for the whisky bottle. He poured shots for everyone in the bar and sank the first one himself, then pushed one each across to Claude and Rocco. ‘Glad you were here, Inspector. Anytime you want anything… well, let me know. I owe you.’ Rocco drank his in three sips, then said, ‘You don’t, but thank you. You did well, Georges. Stay safe.’ He bid goodnight to Claude, who looked as if he’d suddenly had hero status conferred upon him, and waved to the other patrons, then went home to bed.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Next morning, after a brisk early run down the lane and back to shake the cobwebs loose, Rocco arrived at the office to find Massin waiting for him. The commissaire flicked an imperious finger and led him upstairs to his office. He told Rocco to close the door before retreating to stand behind his desk.

  ‘Inspector Rocco, would you mind explaining why you were in Paris yesterday?’ Massin stared at him for a second before sitting down, his authority imposed. ‘Only I feel you may have forgotten that your transfer here last year means you no longer have to work the Clichy district. Or can they not cope without your valued assistance?’

  ‘I should have spoken to you first, I know,’ Rocco conceded mildly. He wondered how Massin had found out. ‘But I had a lead to follow up on and I didn’t want to leave it too long. You were out.’

  ‘Yes, I was. Part of the reason I was out was because I was having my ears chewed off by my superiors from the Ministry, due to an investigator under my control finding it impossible to follow orders.’ He tapped a rapid drumbeat on his desk, then said more evenly, ‘I hear you and Lamotte apprehended three men last night in the course of an armed robbery. Well done. Was it anything to do with the Clos du Lac business?’

  ‘Thank you. But no. They were gutter rats looking for an easy hit.’ He brought Massin up to date on his investigations into the sanitarium deaths, carefully omitting any mention of Rotenbourg and concentrating instead on the possibility that one of the inmates had been Stefan Devrye-Martin, who was supposed to have died in Thailand. ‘As soon as I have a photo, I’ll be able to prove it.’

  ‘I see. That could prove… awkward for someone to explain.’

  ‘Someone in the Ministry, certainly. It would have needed a signature to get him in there.’

  ‘In that
case,’ Massin reached down and slid a brown envelope across his desk. It was addressed to Rocco. ‘I think this might be what you’re waiting for. I picked it up from the front desk.’

  Rocco opened the envelope and slid out a large black and white print. It showed a fat man climbing out of a car. In the background was a flurry of pennants and bunting, and a crowd of people dressed in summer clothes. The man was grinning at somebody off to one side, a lock of hair damp with sweat clinging to his face as he heaved his corpulent body out of the passenger seat. Around his neck was a professional-looking camera.

  Rocco handed over the photo. ‘That’s him.’ Stefan had lost a lot of weight since the picture was taken, and his hair was shorter. But there was no mistaking him: it was the man he’d talked to in the pool house.

  ‘And he’s supposed to be dead, you say.’

  ‘According to Captain Antain in Evreux. Blood poisoning following an accident.’

  ‘This is serious. Extremely serious.’ Massin placed the photo on the desk and took a turn around his office, lips pursed. Rocco knew instantly what he was thinking: Stefan had been hiding in a government facility; if his ‘death’ were true, then they were faced with what amounted to possible state-sponsored deception.

  ‘I’d like to sit on this for a while,’ Rocco said, giving Massin a way out of reporting this to his superiors. Instinct told him that if this went up the chain of command, it might disappear and never be mentioned again.

  ‘Why?’ Massin sounded unsure, no doubt weighing up his options to find the least damaging one.

  ‘I still think the death of the security guard, Paulus, is tied in with the murder at the Clos du Lac,’ he added. ‘It’s too coincidental that they died on the same night.’

  ‘How so?’ Massin sounded distracted.

  ‘Paulus either helped kill him and was then disposed of to keep him quiet, or he saw what was happening and the killer was forced to deal with him. The business about a crime of passion is a nonsense.’

  Massin lifted his eyebrows. ‘Why? Do they not go in for that sort of thing around Poissons?’

  It was the nearest Rocco had ever come to hearing Massin make a joke. ‘I’m sure they do,’ he replied dryly. ‘But crimes of passion in the countryside involve shotguns, axes or knives – maybe poison. Not nine-millimetre pistols. And Paulus was navy-trained; he wouldn’t have been easy to fool or overcome.’

  Massin lifted his chin and stared at the ceiling. ‘So he was killed by someone he knew or trusted?’

  ‘I believe so.’

  Massin looked down at the photo. ‘So where do you go from here? How does this “dead” man walking figure in all this?’

  ‘I think he might know more than he was letting on when I met him. According to nurse Dion, he didn’t always take his medicines and was in the habit of wandering the corridors at night, looking for anything he could pry into or steal. She described him as highly manipulative. I’d like to find him and see if he saw anything.’

  What he didn’t say was something that would have had Massin flying into a panic: that if Stefan Devrye-Martin was hiding in the Clos du Lac with official connivance under an assumed name, who were the other patients whose names were not their own? And why were they being hidden?

  ‘Inspector Rocco?’

  A call had been put through to Rocco’s desk. The caller was Pascal Rotenbourg.

  ‘Speaking. Thank you for calling, Mr Rotenbourg. I’m sorry to disturb you on what might be an irrelevant matter, but I wonder if you can answer a question for me?’

  ‘Of course. How may I help?’ The man sounded cultured, his voice calm and measured. Not normally the case, Rocco thought, when members of the public had messages to call the police and expected bad news.

  ‘Do you have any male family members, by any chance?’

  A momentary hesitation, then, ‘I do, as a matter of fact. A younger brother. What is this about, Inspector?’

  ‘Could you tell me his name?’

  ‘Yes. It’s Simon.’

  Chapter Twenty-six

  The woman felt faint when she came to this time. The food supplied by the man had been plentiful and edible, pasta and fruit, but she’d had no appetite beyond a slight nibble to show willing. It was obvious the men were looking after her for a reason, yet that made little difference to her situation.

  She was still a prisoner.

  She tried to work out how many days it had been since she’d been taken. It felt like a lifetime already, but she knew she was suffering the effects of dehydration and fatigue. She tried to relate it to her inner sense of time and the regularity of food, then by bodily functions. On the first night of captivity she had been provided with a hospital bedpan of uncertain vintage, and water to wash herself. But the trauma of being kidnapped and the ever-present fear at what might happen to her since then had played havoc with her system, obliterating any kind of feel she might have once possessed for her own body’s functions. It could have been anywhere between two and five days, she couldn’t tell for sure.

  Leather Jacket had remained all but mute, keeping his conversation to instructions about when to move, what to do, what not to do. He had not repeated his earlier threats, but she doubted that was out of kindness. His tone of voice seemed to be that of a man who was comfortable with himself and certain that he would not be disobeyed. A man doing a job.

  The harsher threats might come later.

  He was a soldier, she thought at one point. Or had been. But in post-war France, like the rest of Europe, soldiers were common enough, so what did that tell her?

  She tried to judge where they might be, but she was finding it hard to marshal her thoughts. The stuffiness in the van was at times intense, until the man opened the door and allowed in some fresh air. But for all the good that did, in terms of seeing her surroundings, she might as well have been sealed in a cardboard box.

  The van had been moved three times now, a mobile prison cell. But never far. A few streets, perhaps, or kilometres, she couldn’t tell. It started up, it moved, she was thrown around, and all the time the man sat in the back with her. He never answered her questions, never said anything to show her the slightest comfort. But then, he never actually mistreated her, either.

  It was her one consolation. Surely, if he ultimately meant her harm, he would care little about how she fared physically or mentally. But did that mean she would be allowed to one day go free?

  She felt greasy and grubby; the first from not being allowed to do more than cat-wash, the second from being thrown around on the dirty mattress and the metal floor of the van. And each time the vehicle moved, it set up a curtain of dust which she could taste even through the hood that was always over her head. As for her hair… she thought with a grim sense of the banal what a waste of money that had been. Going to Marcel, only to have these men throw her around like a parcel moments after leaving the salon, must rate as some kind of wicked joke. Maybe, she reflected sadly, that should tell her something.

  * * *

  Levignier thought long and hard before making his next two phone calls. The first was slightly risky and could blow up in his face. But news from a reliable contact had confirmed that Rocco was closing in on a possible source of information, and where he would be later that evening. In addition, Levignier’s own emotions were driving him to ignore the minimal risks. Partly it was the desire to win, and the awards that would bring if men like Girovsky kept their part of the bargain. He hadn’t set out on this plan out of a desire to be the loyal servant, expecting no reward for himself; the Pole had made it very clear what he could expect if Levignier played his part and the negotiations with the Chinese went as expected. But this particular idea had been fuelled by recalling an image of the person he was thinking of, who worked not two hundred metres away from his own office, several floors down. He dialled an internal number which got him the research section of the Ministry.

  A woman’s voice answered. Cultured, smooth, like silk on bare skin.

>   ‘Marcel Levignier,’ he said, his throat suddenly dry with excitement. ‘I have a job for you. It’s very important.’

  He described what he wanted done, that it needed her attention right now and how he couldn’t entrust the task to anyone else. The agreement was immediate, if slightly wary, as he’d expected. She wasn’t, after all, a case-hardened officer. When he was asked about risk, which he’d also anticipated, he added smoothly, ‘Don’t worry. There’s no danger, I promise. It’s not that kind of job. But since you ask, I have arranged to have two of my men close by at all times, watching.’

  ‘So I just find out who this man is and what he’s doing?’

  ‘That’s all. You’ve been trained on constructing chance encounters?’ He knew the answer to that one.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Very well. Make the contact, talk, a drink, maybe coffee – somewhere public, of course, with lights. But be discreet.’

  ‘Of course. Is he likely to be suspicious?’

  The basic training course for all low-level officers, he remembered, with its bullet points of steps to consider when making a first ‘cold’ contact. It was kids’ stuff, really, and he could have recited the questions she was asking like a rota. Still, at least she was remembering the lessons.

  ‘He has absolutely no reason. Trust me.’ He read out Pascal Rotenbourg’s address in Montrouge, and gave a detailed description of Rocco so that she couldn’t make a mistake, then said, ‘Go there at seven forty-five and wait. Be discreet, but when you see him arrive, check the area and see where he goes. Remember the training. The rest is up to you. Afterwards, ring me and I’ll tell you where to come. I want a personal report. This is not for paper or telephone.’