Death on the Pont Noir (4 page)

‘All hands on deck,’ Desmoulins murmured. ‘The bosses have landed.’

Rocco looked up from the case file he was working on to see
Commissaire
Massin striding along the glass-walled corridor running the length of the building, heading for the stairs to his office. Impeccable in his uniform, he was trailing behind him three men in dark suits, well coiffed and austere of face. Two looked neither right nor left, as if homing in on a target. The third man, a more leisurely three paces to the rear, ran a sharp look over the office, finally settling on Rocco and lingering a moment before flicking away. This man was tall and slim, with the athletic build and easy stride of a soldier.

Officials. Ministry men.

Rocco watched them go. No doubt Massin would put in an appearance later, showing off his terrain and his men, anxious to impress his visitors from the big city.

He knew Massin of old. The autocratic, ascetic and by-the-book police
commissaire
had been the same in the army in Indochina, when Rocco had witnessed him having a serious crisis of courage under fire. He hadn’t set eyes on the man since escorting him off the battlefield to safety, until fate had intervened several months ago. Rocco had found himself transferred out from Paris on a new policing ‘initiative’ to spread investigative facilities around the provinces.

From Clichy to Picardie had been quite a change, from gangs to … well, anything, strange crash sites on a country road being the latest. But as Rocco had discovered very quickly, crime here was the same animal as anywhere else. It sometimes came disguised as something different, but crime it remained.

Coinciding with his transfer to the Amiens region, Massin had turned up in his life once more. The atmosphere had been strained ever since, with Rocco fully expecting to be transferred out again at any moment. That it hadn’t happened yet was a minor miracle, and probably due to Massin needing a period of calm and playing a waiting game until Rocco tripped up and gave him the excuse he needed.

Surprisingly, Massin and his three visitors stayed upstairs out of sight, with instructions issued for them not to be disturbed. Deputy
Commissaire
Perronnet did a brief tour instead, checking shift details and ongoing tasks while skilfully avoiding answering any questions about the identity of the three men.

‘Bloody strange,’ said Desmoulins.

The comings and goings went on for the rest of the day. Massin and his visitors went out for a late lunch, returning at the end of the afternoon when the shifts were changing. They looked sombre in spite of the break, raising speculation among the officers and staff who watched them pass by.

‘Something’s going on,’ one of the desk sergeants professed knowingly. ‘The top kepis don’t act this secretive unless it’s going to be bad news for the troops.’

‘We could be in for a pay rise,’ Desmoulins countered. ‘Of course, I have been known to underestimate our esteemed superiors on numerous occasions before.’

Rocco continued working, using the period of calm to make sure his paperwork was in order. Joining in with the speculation was pointless; it broke down the barriers between the ranks in an entirely damaging way and encouraged rumour. But his cop’s nose was beginning to make him uneasy. The men were right; something was going on.

Then the identity of the military-looking man came to him in a flash. He was neither Interior Ministry nor police. Rocco had seen the man once, maybe twice before, but only in passing. Colonel Jean-Philippe Saint-Cloud eschewed any kind of publicity, but was always much closer to the public than many would have believed, moving among them and seen only by those who knew where to look. Never identified by the press or Government, he had one purpose in life and one only: to run a top-class protection squad.

He was, in name at least, the president’s chief bodyguard.

The three visitors and Massin were already in when Rocco arrived next morning. The atmosphere in the building
was still tense, but Perronnet and Captain Canet were surprisingly calm, which gave Rocco a degree of confidence that nothing serious was about to happen. The brass had a way of channelling news without saying anything, so maybe the general feeling of suspicion had been misplaced.

He checked the overnight list of reports and early calls, and noted one from Claude Lamotte. A local vagrant known as Pantoufle had been reported missing by the priest of a village called Audelet, not far from Poissons and within Claude’s patch. The man had a regular circular route around the area, which took in Audelet village church each Friday. That was the day Father Maurice handed out parcels of bread and cheese to the needy. His failure to turn up was sufficiently unusual for the priest to have alerted Claude.

Rocco was about to pass the task back to Claude to deal with, when he happened to glance at the large wall map of the region, idly tracing the usual route taken by Pantoufle from Audelet through Poissons and around the other nearby hamlets until he fetched up again back at Audelet.

The route ran along the same stretch of road where they had found the blood and the tooth.

‘What do you know about this Pantoufle?’ Rocco was driving his black Citroën Traction, with Claude in the passenger seat fiddling with the radio. They were on their way to see Father Maurice in Audelet. Rocco had never met the priest, and had asked Claude to come along in case he needed the familiarity of a known face. He had little time for men of any cloth and felt uncomfortable in their presence, as if they were trying to read his soul. It was fanciful rubbish, he knew that, but he preferred not to encourage them.

‘He’s a
clochard
,’ Claude replied. ‘A tramp. Always has been, I think – or as long as anyone can remember, anyway. Some say he was wounded in 1918 by a shellburst, and lost his memory. He’s been wandering around the district ever since, sleeping in barns and under hedges. It’s not his real name, by the way.’

Pantoufle
. Slipper. Rocco thought the name oddly
appropriate for a tramp, a gentleman of the road. A hobo, as the Americans called them. A hobo in slippers. ‘What is his real name?’

‘Nobody knows. He popped up in the area about forty years ago, I gather. People asked his name, but he always went blank. I asked him myself once; it was like looking into an empty bottle. Nothing there. After a while, people gave up. Then some wag gave him the name Pantoufle because he always wore slippers, even on the road. Reckoned proper shoes hurt his feet. He must have gone through a few thousand pairs over the years. The name stuck. He’s genial enough and harmless, so they leave him alone.’

Rocco wondered if they were chasing a false line of enquiry. All the indications at the crash scene pointed to a serious injury or death. But add in the report of a missing person – a tramp – who frequented the very road where the crash had happened, and it was hard to ignore the possibility that the two might be connected. While he was certain that Massin would want him to concentrate on more serious issues, there was something about the information at the crash scene which had remained with him, as if it were trying to convey a message. The only way to get to the bottom of it was to clarify at least this aspect and prove that this particular person wasn’t involved.

‘About Alix,’ Claude continued after a while, sounding uncomfortable. ‘I didn’t mean to imply anything before – you know that, right? It’s just that … well, I worry about her. She’s not as tough as she makes out.’ He clamped his mouth shut and looked out the window at the passing greenery.

‘You have every right to worry,’ Rocco replied. ‘Let’s be
honest, she’s what the Americans would call a hot dame. Of course, we’ll make sure you’re the first to know when we decide to get together.’

Claude’s head snapped round, his mouth open. ‘What?’

‘Calm down, you idiot. I’m kidding. Anyway, how do I know she won’t turn out to look like you in a few years?’ He shuddered. ‘That doesn’t bear thinking about.’

‘Bloody cheek!’ Claude pretended to be disgruntled. ‘She looks like her mother, if you must know – and she was a real beauty. You could do worse than—’ He stopped. ‘What am I saying? It’s just that … Alix speaks highly of you. Says you’re an honourable cop – for a man.’ He reached out for the radio. ‘It’s just that I—’

‘I know what you were thinking. Stop worrying.’

Honourable. That wasn’t a word Rocco or any other cop heard too often. And he was pretty sure it didn’t apply to him. He’d bent the rules occasionally when it suited him, although usually to get closer to securing evidence and a conviction, never to implicate an innocent man. Not very long ago, days after Alix had joined the Amiens district, he’d deliberately disposed of a piece of evidence from a murder case. He’d done it knowing that an investigation would have achieved nothing, unless you called it nothing to track down and prosecute a terrified young mother fighting for her life and the life of her child. A conviction hadn’t been likely, anyway, in his view, even if they’d managed to find her.

Fortunately, she’d disappeared like smoke, probably out of the country, and Rocco had thrown away the one bit of evidence likely to have been used against her: the weapon she had used to defend herself.

Although Alix had been close when he’d disposed of the weapon in the canal, it had been too dark for her to have seen. But she had to have known what he’d done. She hadn’t spoken about it, then or since. The shared knowledge had bound them together, somehow, loosely knotted but unbreakable. Yet distant.

Audelet turned out to be larger than Poissons, but not by much. A collection of houses, a church, two cafés, a small garage and a crumbling chateau with a sad, neglected air and sheep grazing around the grounds. Rocco counted two cars and a tractor as they entered the village, and two pedestrians. And a horse walking along the road untended, minding its own business. Compared with Poissons, it was almost humming with activity.

He pulled into the inevitable square and parked in front of the church. It was neat and solid, the way of all churches in the region, and grimly austere. Or maybe it was just him.

He and Claude climbed out and walked up the path alongside the church to a small house with flowers around the door. At least that was a good sign.

Father Maurice was waiting for them. He poured coffee into thick brown cups and offered a box of sugar lumps and a metal jug of fresh milk, the kind children carried to the farm to fetch their daily quota, with a handle and a metal lid. After Clichy and its air of sophistication, where milk came from a store in a cold sealed container, it was like stepping back in time. But Rocco was getting used to it, like lots of things around here.

Such as a priest who wasn’t wearing a dog collar.

Father Maurice was dressed in baggy corduroys and
a heavyweight knitted jumper. He was smoking a
dark-brown
cigarillo, waving away the smoke with a beefy hand, and looked more fisherman than cleric. In Clichy, Paris, priests wore their uniform like a badge, to give them an identity in a bustling, impatient world. Out here, not everyone conformed to type.

‘Pantoufle is a complex character,’ the priest said, pushing the filled cups across the table. ‘He’s war-damaged, like many others, and deserving of our understanding.’ He eyed Rocco keenly. ‘A man of your age and experience, I imagine you’ve been there, Inspector? War, I mean.’

Rocco said nothing. His war history was none of this man’s business. But he was prepared to let the priest get to the point, as long as it didn’t include a spot of God-fearing psychoanalysis along the way.

He made do with a shrug.

‘Of course, many men learn to live with it. But Pantoufle?’ Father Maurice flicked ash from his cigarillo. ‘Whatever happened to him left no visible scars … and no idea of who he used to be. Or maybe he chose to leave that person behind deliberately. A sad case but not unusual.’ He glanced at Rocco beneath bushy eyebrows. ‘You have some news about him?’

‘That’s what I’d like to establish,’ Rocco replied easily. They were back on the safe ground of earthly investigations. ‘We don’t have a body, if that’s what you mean. But we do have this.’ He reached into his pocket and took out the button he’d found at the crash scene. It was wrapped in a fold of paper. Without showing the priest what it was, he asked, ‘Did Pantoufle have a full set of teeth?’

Father Maurice looked surprised by the question, but
recovered quickly. ‘Um … yes, he did. Well, nearly a full set. There were a few gaps here and there, now I come to think of it.’ He looked at Claude for support. Claude nodded but said nothing. ‘Men of his lifestyle don’t, always. Hygiene and self-care are not high on their agendas and Pantoufle … well, he was eccentric and disconnected, I think one might call it. But he was no different in that respect. Why?’

Rocco unwrapped the button and placed it on the table. It lay there, winking in the daylight. He had cleaned off the worst of the blood and mud.

‘Goodness.’ It was obvious by his expression that Father Maurice recognised the button instantly. He crossed himself with an economic flick of his thumb, an instinctive warding off of evil. ‘Where did you get this?’

‘You recognise it?’

‘Yes, I do. It was one of several on the old man’s jacket.’ He stared at Rocco. ‘I know what you’re going to ask, Inspector: why should I recognise a simple button?’

‘And I hope you’re going to tell me.’

‘It’s very easy. One of our helpers, a wonderful woman – she used to be a mission worker in Gabon – noticed one day that Pantoufle had lost all the buttons from his jacket. He had a habit of twisting them – a bit like a child does when anxious – until they fell off. Anyway, she came in one Friday, when we were giving out food, and persuaded him to take off his jacket so she could replace the buttons. He wasn’t keen to begin with, but she showed him these birthday buttons from a child’s coat that was too damaged to give away, and he agreed. She sewed them on using fishing line so he couldn’t twist them off.’ He stared down
at the button and pushed it with the tip of his finger. ‘Where did you find it? Could it have fallen off and he’s out there wandering—’

‘I’m sorry, Father,’ Rocco interrupted him. This wasn’t a family matter and he saw no point in pretending there was any great chance of finding the missing vagrant alive. Besides, experience told him that most people preferred the truth rather than false hope. ‘We found it at the scene of a car crash. There was no sign of a body, but the indications are that he might have been hit by a car or a truck.’

‘Indications? Inspector, come on – I used to do work in Africa. I’m not going to faint with shock.’

‘There was a lot of blood.’

‘I see.’ A repeat flick of the hand as Father Maurice crossed himself. ‘I’ll say a prayer for him this evening.’

‘Do whatever you think is best.’ Rocco finished his coffee and scooped up the button. He would have to speak to Simeon again; the man might recall seeing Pantoufle in the area just before the crash. ‘Only I don’t think prayer’s done him a lot of good so far.’