Babazouk Blues, page 28
Darac heard her mumble, ‘Soap… space… spacious…’
‘Here it is: bêche.’
Darac’s stomach turned over as he repeated the word.
‘Yes, that’s it.’
Darac was already picturing the scene at L’Ancienne Bastide. ‘Mademoiselle Coteel, exactly where are you now?’
* * *
The car containing the American backpackers bounced to a stop outside the site office. A couple of days into his one and only camping trip, Darac had looked and smelled like a mountain goat. LaWanda and her special-time boyfriend Davis stepped out of the car like nominees arriving for Ebony magazine’s Young Couple of the Year Award.
‘I am Darac. Thank you very much for to come here,’ he said in the sort of Francophone tones English speakers always seemed to adore. He offered his hand.
‘You’re welcome.’ The young man had a steam-hammer grip. ‘Davis Chadburn.’
LaWanda shook Darac’s hand only slightly less powerfully.
Darac indicated the woman standing next to him. ‘This is Officer Monique Bayet and she will translate anything I do not understand.’ Darac and Bayet had never worked well together and had the matter not been so important, he would have preferred to have busked it. ‘Monique?’
‘So where are you guys from?’ she said in English.
‘Oh cool!’ LaWanda shook her hand. ‘Washington DC. Davis and me both.’
‘I know DC very well…’
At the head of a dozen-strong entourage that included a dog-handling team, the quartet set off toward the woods that screened off most of the site from the road. By the time they reached the outermost curtain of trees, Monique had elicited answers to a wide range of background questions, not once treading on Darac’s toes.
‘Captain Darac,’ LaWanda said. ‘We can guess something heavy has gone down in there. We’d rather not see it.’
Darac knew the idiomatic usage of ‘heavy’ but Monique insisted on translating the entire sentence before he could reply. He gave her a look and continued. ‘We have looked only between the trees—’
Monique broke in, explaining that the investigation had not got properly underway and there would be nothing grisly to see. They just needed the visitors to pinpoint the exact spot they had seen Voska.
Davis nodded. ‘Surely. Although it was around midnight, there was one particular tree I would recognise again.’
Monique looked astonished. ‘How?’
‘It had a plate fungus formation we’ve never seen before.’
‘I see,’ Monique said, readily understanding the term.
‘We got photos of it the following day.’ Davis displayed the images on his camera screen. ‘The guy… Voska? He came out of the trees right next to it.’
Darac nodded. ‘Let’s go there.’
They found the tree with only minor difficulty. Darac turned to the couple.
‘Thank you. This is so far as you go. What we will do now is use our dogs to—’
‘Backtrack into the woods,’ Monique continued. ‘We have articles belonging to Voska that the dogs have scented. We will examine the ground carefully. The fact that the guy was carrying a spade is obviously suggestive.’
Feeling physically sick at what might lie ahead, Darac turned to Monique. ‘After you have seen our American friends back to the car, take full statements and all relevant details, then tell the driver to take them wherever they want to go. Within reason.’
He shook hands with the pair again as Monique relayed the information, and then the trio began to make their way back through the woods. Darac turned to the officer leading the dog-handling team.
‘Let’s do it, Roulet.’
The dogs found the trail and followed it through a mixed area: clearings alternating with tangles of dense undergrowth. It was a terrain that matched Darac’s mental state. He didn’t want to find Rama dead and buried but from the moment he’d known what fate had had in store for Jeanne Mesnel, he had wanted to do more than catch her tormentors, he had wanted to make them suffer. Now he didn’t know what he wanted.
After no more than five minutes, the dogs were excited to come on what seemed an impenetrable patch of gorse. They found a way in immediately.
Roulet turned to Darac. ‘This is it, Captain.’
Darac stood them down, sent in the diggers and then rang pathologist Djibril Mpensa, who was awaiting further orders back at the site office. ‘I’m afraid you’re needed.’
‘We’ll be with you in ten minutes.’
Darac ended the call and turned to Jean-Jacques Lartigue. ‘Lartou, get the tape and start cordoning off the area.’
‘The men haven’t found anything yet, Captain.’
‘Get the tape.’
As preparations were made, Darac’s mobile rang.
‘The dogs are still interested, Captain. Looks like there’s a second site around here.’
‘Get them on it and keep me posted. Thanks, Roulet.’
Darac started as a hand clasped his shoulder.
‘Holding up?’
‘Just about, Granot.’
‘Why don’t you wait in the car?’
Darac shook his head. The pair stood shoulder to shoulder as the first spade went in. Neither spoke for some moments.
‘Any further thoughts about the Mesnel house purchase?’
‘Some.’
‘Want to share them?’
‘Not just now, Granot.’
Darac could think only of what might be about to emerge from the cold, hard ground. Minutes went by. As Mpensa and his team arrived, one of the diggers gave a shout.
‘Something here!’
The team leader stepped forward. ‘Spades down!’ At the bottom of the pit, he parted the earth with his hands. ‘Captain? Polythene sheeting. Several layers thick.’
‘Right.’ Picturing the scene in Battail’s loft, Darac steadied himself. ‘Carry on.’
Smaller hand tools were produced and the process continued as an archaeological dig. It was some minutes before the whole shroud was freed from the earth.
‘Cut through it one winding at a time,’ the team leader said. ‘Carefully, now.’
As each layer was removed, the colour of the victim’s skin and clothing became more visible, the smell of death more pungent. At the final reveal, it was clear that no textbook incision wound would be found this time. Wearing a vibrant, palm-print agbada, the corpse had the look of a tropical island that had been ravaged by hurricanes.
Granot stared at the mess. ‘Rama N’Pata?’
Darac exhaled deeply. ‘Modibo.’
No other remains were found in the grave.
‘But for the polythene routine, you wouldn’t think it was the same killer, would you?’ Granot gave Darac a sideways glance. ‘He wasn’t expecting anyone to find this body.’
‘No.’ Darac turned to Mpensa. ‘Preliminary thoughts?’
The young man gave as full an account as he could. He believed Modibo had not been overcome immediately. Multiple knife cuts to the hands and arms indicated he’d attempted to fend off his attacker’s strikes several times. A box cutter, its blade retracted, was found in his pocket.
‘Unused.’ Mpensa showed it to Darac. ‘Probably didn’t have time to get it out.’
Lab tests would confirm it but Mpensa believed that the kill strike itself was a thrust through the neck that had severed the jugular. The nature of the blow meant it might be possible to determine the type, size and condition of the knife used. He also suspected that the body had sustained a range of bone-breaking injuries post-mortem.
‘The time?’
‘Can’t pinpoint it until we get him back to the lab, obviously, but it was no earlier than last Saturday morning and no later than Sunday afternoon.’
‘That puts it before Brigitte Andreani’s murder. And it was probably the catalyst for it. Thanks, Map.’ He looked around. ‘Granot?’
‘Before you go on, Captain, I have something else for you.’
Darac turned back. ‘The towel evidence findings?’
‘That will come later. Step into my office.’ They took a couple of paces away from the action. Mpensa looked around, checking no one was in earshot. ‘What I have for you is advice. I’ve known you for three years and I have never seen you so overwrought. And if that doesn’t mean anything, Deanna has known you for twelve and neither has she. It is our professional opinion that you need a rest. Two or three days at least.’
He didn’t have a defence prepared. ‘Uh… Could you take two or three days off in the middle of a case? Besides, I’m fine.’
‘Poète Policier Paul Darac is a doctor now as well, is he? We say you’re not fine.’
‘There’s a gig at the club tonight. And I’m playing there with my band on Thursday. Depending on how things go, I’m intending to do both. That’s all the rest I’ll need.’
‘Not enough.’
Forestalling further debate, Darac’s mobile rang. Excusing himself with a shrug, he took the call.
‘Paul. It’s Taylor. Don’t hang up.’
As if shielding her, Darac turned his back on the bloodied corpse of Modibo N’Pata and looked through the trees toward Cap Ferrat.
‘I have no intention of hanging up, Taylor, but I can’t talk now.’ Granot’s news from Pari Mutuel Urbain came back to him. ‘May I ring you later?’
‘On this number, please. I’ll look forward to speaking to you then.’
In the time it took Darac to ring off, the dogs appeared to have scented further buried treasure. He and Granot looked on as the process began again. The big man couldn’t help voicing what he was thinking.
‘Butchered, rolled up, chucked into a hole. What an end to a life.’
The tension built with every strike of the spade but then the dogs began to lose interest and nothing was found. Twenty minutes later, a second false alarm shredded Darac’s nerves still further. Throwing out a wider net, he called Officer Serge Paulin who was coordinating the squad detailed to interview anyone within a six-kilometre radius of the campsite. Another blank. What had become of Rama N’Pata?
‘We’re not doing any good here, chief. Let’s leave the diggers to it.’
The no-news theme continued as Darac and Granot arrived back at the commissariat. There was nothing from Aix on the DVD time stamp or from the Musée Granet. The men were drinking cardboard espresso when a burly uniform wearing a sheepish expression appeared at the office door.
‘Captain? Compliments of Monsieur Frènes, sir, but as acting commissaire your presence is required in the press-conference suite. I am to escort you.’
‘The media has finally realised we’ve been finessing them,’ Granot said. ‘Good luck.’
Exhaling deeply, Darac got to his feet. ‘How did Agnès keep this up?’
A full hour later, he returned to find Bonbon waiting for him in his office.
‘The time stamp, chief. It’s not what we’d been hoping for.’
‘Shit… Coffee?’
‘Never touch either.’
At the machine, Darac opted, faute de mieux, for an Amerikano. ‘They couldn’t straighten out the figures, then?’
‘They did but they came out as 23 December at 2.41 in the afternoon. Ten days before the murder.’
‘Sod it.’
‘Granot’s updated me on everything here. Rough.’
‘We’ve had better times. Let’s see those few frames, Bonbon.’
They watched what was effectively just a still of Jeanne Mesnel standing next to her hot tub. It affected Darac deeply, nevertheless.
‘At the briefing, you said Voska asked Madame Mesnel if he could come back later to shoot a test sequence? That’s what this DVD is, isn’t it? The beginning of it.’
‘Almost certainly. But the evidence against Voska is building all the time. If we can catch the bastard, he’s going down a hundred different ways.’
‘We’ve got DNA from Modibo and Rama N’Pata to be matched up now, haven’t we?’
‘The lab’s on it.’ Tasting the Amerikano, Darac binned it immediately.
‘So how did the press conference go?’
‘Frènes did most of the talking so we came out of it brilliantly. He’s still there now, feeding off-the-record scraps to the newshounds.’
‘Arsehole.’ Bonbon got to his feet. ‘One last thing. This surveillance and stealth role you want me to take on. I can’t stand Malraux but I think he deserves another chance. I’m not certain I’d have fared any better in preventing Brigitte’s murder. And I doubt if we would’ve got any closer to reeling in Voska if I’d been the one casting the line.’
Darac could see where Bonbon was going. ‘You don’t know that.’
‘With the sole exception of Agnès, we all make mistakes, chief.’
Darac knew he’d been hard on Malraux. ‘I know, I know. It wasn’t that he’d stuffed up. It was that he didn’t give a shit.’ Darac was starting to feel riled up all over again. ‘A woman he’d had sex with a couple of days before was lying there like a slaughtered animal and all he could do was crow about bringing Battail in.’
‘He’s a shithead. But that doesn’t make him—’
‘Alright. Give him back his contacts list. I’ll look the other way if you make a copy of it, first.’
Bonbon chuckled as he took his leave. ‘Already have.’
Darac went to sit behind his desk and it was only then he spotted the answer phone light was blinking. He played back the message. The caller was a Madame Lecamier of the Musée Granet in Aix. She reported that she and her team had studied the image he’d emailed and all had endorsed the comments he’d made about it.
‘Well, well…’
With the rider that a definitive judgement would have to be deferred until the object itself could be examined, she signed off assuring him of the museum’s assistance at all times. Darac needed no further assistance: it was the principle he was trying to establish and now that he had, he could test the next link in the chain. He called the Mairie and spoke to Granot’s contact in the estates department, Monsieur Dubroqua. As city officials tended to respond, ‘No, that’s quite impossible!’ to any direct request, Darac opened by stressing the difficulty of the challenge he was setting. Dubroqua wouldn’t be able to help with such a ludicrously taxing query, would he?
‘Of course I can find out for you, Captain. No problem at all.’
Thanking him profusely, Darac rang off and finally called Taylor. As before, he soon found himself on the back foot.
‘Paul, I wanted to say that I’m sorry we got – I got – kind of derailed when we last met. Not for the first time and probably not the last, I got things wrong. I know you’re just doing your job. My only excuse is I’m feeling very vulnerable at the moment.’
At the moment? He thought it something of a miracle that anyone with Taylor’s past managed to fare as well as she did. On the surface, at least. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘But anyway, I was wondering if you were free to come over to Villa Rose soon. I have a treat for you. At least I hope you’ll think it’s a treat. I’m sure you will, actually.’
Offering treats? So much for believing he’d got their relationship on to a proper footing. Still, the request played nicely into his hands. ‘Mademoiselle—’
‘Taylor.’
‘Taylor, would you mind telling me what you have in mind?’
‘That would spoil the surprise.’
‘Alright. How about tomorrow morning?’
‘Oh, I hadn’t expected you to be available quite so soon. I’m afraid tomorrow morning is our weekly progress meeting.’
‘Our’ presumably included Philippe de Lambert.
‘I’m afraid of progress meetings also. Although I imagine Monsieur de Lambert creates a cordial atmosphere for such things?’
‘Oh yes, he does, but this one promises to be stormy.’
‘Oh?’
‘Just an internal thing. I’ll be free from two o’clock.’
‘I’ll give you a ring beforehand.’
Taylor’s call had set Darac’s options for the following morning. Plan A was to respond to anything that came up relating to Voska; Plan B involved a trip to Villa Rose. While Taylor and the management team were busy, Darac intended to break the law.
43
Ensconced in a pair of rooms in the Belsunce quarter of Marseille, Gilles Voska was preparing dinner when he heard his own name emanating from the TV behind him. He turned and there, for the first time, he saw the face of the officer charged with the responsibility of catching him. A caption put a name to him and the man in overall charge of the investigation. Voska turned off the stove.
As Public Prosecutor Frènes outlined the case, Voska’s eyes stayed on the officer. He saw immediately that the oily and voluble Monsieur Frènes didn’t impress Captain Paul Darac. But Voska was reasonably satisfied with Frènes’s account of the abduction of Madame Alicia Simon that followed. As he knew she would, she had done exactly as she had been instructed.
A photo of Modibo N’Pata flashed up on the screen. The expected MISSING caption failing to materialise, Voska began to feel uneasy. Footage of the burial site rolled. They had found his body. Voska’s eyes bulged. ‘How?’ he shouted.
And then, Brigitte Andreani looked back at him. The programme’s anchor turned to Frènes. ‘Monsieur, how was the second victim killed?’
The prosecutor’s head filled the screen.
‘The dog! Tell them it was the dog!’
‘It was a stabbing,’ Frènes said. ‘A stabbing in which the perpetrator made a botched attempt to disguise the knife wound. The victim’s dog was found nearby.’
‘Botched?’ Voska spat out the word. ‘Where’s the skinny drummer boy? Where is he? He was the one you were supposed to find!’ In an adjoining room, someone banged on the wall. Voska’s eyes bored into the screen. ‘Show him!’
As the broadcast ended, Voska knew he was ahead in one battle only. Frènes had stated the need to locate ‘Voska’s associate, the lorry driver, Pazzo’. But it would be difficult, he’d said, because the police had no photofit nor any detailed information.
