Confession Read online

  MARTIN O’BRIEN

  Confession

  A Daniel Jacquot Novel

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Part II

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part III

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Part IV

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Part V

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Part VI

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Part VII

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Part VIII

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781409050391

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Preface 2009

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Copyright © Martin O’Brien 2009

  Martin O’Brien has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  First published in Great Britain in 2009 by Preface Publishing 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road London SW1V 2SA

  An imprint of The Random House Group Limited

  www.rbooks.co.uk www.prefacepublishing.co.uk

  Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at www.randomhouse.co.uk

  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 84809 055 2

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  For Dottie and Joe and Rita,

  and long-ago milky coffees

  at 279 NKR

  Saturday

  7 November, 1998

  1

  Paris

  THE GIRL DIDN’T LOOK BACK. Not once.

  She came out of her building with a leopard-print plastic ruck-sack over her shoulder and a spring in her step. She wore pink Converse sneakers, grey drainpipe jeans and a blue woollen jacket belted at the waist, its shawl collar caught in a winding cashmere scarf just a shade darker than her sneakers. There was a warm bloom on her cheeks and her breath plumed in the chill winter air. She turned to the right, the concierge at La Résidence Camille later reported, as though she knew exactly where she was going, and from his desk in the foyer he watched her cross rue Camille, head down the slope towards place Saint Sulpice and pass out of sight.

  Elodie Lafour was four days away from her sixteenth birthday, tall for her age with shoulder-length blonde hair parted in the middle and held back by blue enamelled clips in the coiling shape of serpents. Her eyes were the same deep blue – round and large for her face, as though her other features hadn’t quite caught up – her nose thin and straight and freckled, her cheekbones high, sharp and haughty. She had a big wide smile that dimpled her cheeks, and a determined set to her chin. She could have been a model, hurrying for a go-see, all loose, long-limbed exuberance, not a care in the world, almost dancing down the street.

  At the corner of rue Camille, Elodie looked left and right and crossed place Saint Sulpice at a happy skip, scarf lifting off her shoulder, rucksack bouncing against her back. When she reached the other side she glanced at her watch – as though she was late for something, the flower-seller on rue du Toit remembered later – then she turned down passage Guillaume. A few minutes later, she emerged from the narrow shadows of Guillaume into a splash of wintry sunshine on Carrefour des Quatres Carrosses, and here she came to a stop. She looked around as though searching someone out, checked her watch again then sat at a café table. When a waiter approached she ordered a menthe frappée.

  Five minutes later, when the waiter returned with her drink, Elodie had gone, but had left a few francs on the table. The waiter remembered that when the police came by with her photo.

  While she waited for her drink, Elodie played with the straps of her rucksack, winding them round her fingers, then looked up and saw the battered white Renault van draw into the kerb, thin blue smoke rattling from
its exhaust. Leaving some coins on the table, she slung the rucksack across her shoulder and hurried over. The passenger door opened and Elodie climbed in.

  ‘You didn’t take anything?’ the man asked as he pulled out into the traffic. He was dark and handsome, with a fall of curling black hair that spilled across his brow and over soft, promising eyes.

  ‘Just like you told me,’ Elodie replied. ‘Toothbrush, some money . . .’

  ‘Clothes?’ He glanced at the rucksack on her lap.

  She shook her head. Smiled. ‘Just what I’m wearing. Like you said.’

  Up ahead on rue Raspail a set of lights glowed red. While he waited for green the young man slid his hand on to Elodie’s leg, leaned across and kissed her.

  She kissed him back, still trembling at his touch.

  So easy, he thought to himself.

  Just so easy.

  Wednesday

  11 November

  2

  Marseilles

  THE DREAM CAME AND WENT throughout the night. A girl running along a darkened street, rain lashing down, strands of sodden blonde hair licking across her cheeks. That was the dream, over and over again. Play, rewind. Play, rewind. But when Marie-Ange Buhl finally opened her eyes, woken by a coiling menstrual cramp, she could still see the girl, not so much running now as stumbling, desperate, head lunging forward, thin arms windmilling. How she didn’t fall . . .

  For a moment Marie-Ange lay still, eyes wide, a cool, sticky sweat in the hollow of her neck, the pillow damp and oddly cold, watching the images play out on the ceiling above her bed. Then she pushed herself up on her elbows and tried to blink it all away.

  But the girl ran on, at the foot of the bed now, silently, the breath panting out of her, running towards Marie-Ange but never quite reaching her. For the closer she came, the more Marie-Ange seemed to draw away, until now there was a road between them, and traffic swishing past, headlights and streetlights lanced with a drilling, steely rain.

  Yet still the girl ran on, out of the side-street and into that wider, busier road.

  Marie-Ange tensed, drew in her breath, felt her guts coil.

  She knew what was going to happen.

  The girl had taken no more than three stumbling steps off the pavement, as though unbalanced by the drop from kerb to road, when she was swept off her feet by a pale-blue BMW. The driver braked too late, swerved on impact, his car mounting the central reservation, tearing through a wire fence and crashing into one of the concrete pillars that supported the flyover above. Over the gusting lash of the rain came a squealing of brakes and shrieking of tyres, a blare of horns from cars coming up behind, and under the cover of the flyover the tinkling of broken glass, the wincing creak of bent metal and a hiss of steam from a crumpled radiator.

  The images finally faded with that hissing sound. But it didn’t come from the ruptured radiator this time. It came from Marie-Ange, a long low breath forced out between her teeth.

  It had been a long time. More than four months since the last episode. Up in the Luberon, that sweet little flower shop, Fontaine des Fleurs, on the place in St Bédard. Long enough for Marie-Ange to forget the deepening silences that always preceded her special ‘moments’, the dry dusty taste in her mouth, and that chill shiver of anticipation. Once, back when she was a girl, it had just been sounds and voices she’d experienced, but now there were images too. Dark, grainy images, jerky as a sequence on a hand-held camera, the action never quite matching the soundtrack, either slightly ahead or just slightly behind . . .

  It had been raining in her dream and it was raining still, tapping and pattering against her window, flung around indiscriminately by a gusting offshore wind that had started up a few days earlier. Marie-Ange pulled aside the quilt, reached for her gown and pulled it round her. Barefoot, the tiled floor chill, she went to the glass door leading to her tilting one-chair balcony and raised the blind with a rattle of slats. Rubbing away a wet frost of condensation she looked across the stepped rooftops around Curiol towards the sea. On a clear day, she could see a small splinter of blue out beyond Fort Saint Jean and Marseilles’ Vieux Port, but darkness and rain reduced her view to a few lighted windows across the street. Even when the sun came up over the Marseilleveyre beyond Montredon, she knew it would never break through the low scud of black cloud that had settled over the city like a cold wet blanket, stubbornly resisting the wind’s efforts to shift it, move it on.

  Letting the blinds rattle back down, Marie-Ange accepted that she wouldn’t sleep now and set about preparing breakfast. The scratch of a match, the pop and rush of a flame as the gas on her stove caught. Three spoonfuls of café bleu into the percolator, top half screwed to bottom half. A slice of pain rustique squeezed into a squeaky-springed toaster. Hard butter and sweet confiture from the fridge.

  By the time Marie-Ange had cleaned her teeth, brushed her hair, and found her bed socks, the small apartment was filled with the scent of brewing coffee and warm bread. Taking her cup and plate to the kitchen table, she settled herself and reached for the previous day’s newspaper. She was looking for a story, a news item, something to point the way.

  Whoever that girl was, the girl in her dream, Marie-Ange had not the slightest doubt that she had died in Marseilles.

  And recently.

  The last day or two.

  3

  Cavaillon

  JACQUOT STEADIED THE LOG and reached for the axe. Raising it above his head, smooth haft sliding through his hands, he brought the blade down with a satisfying precision. The log split with a splintery wrench, and the two halves sprang away from the steel. Six more logs and he’d be done, he thought. Enough for a week. Just six more and he’d call it a day.

  He had come out to the yard an hour earlier, to find only the stack of thin kindling wood he’d been meaning to replenish, but hadn’t got round to. Despite the rain they’d had, it was good and dry and plentiful under its lean-to cover, and tempting, but he knew that in the mill’s mighty hearth it would burn too fast and be gone before the old stones began to warm. There was nothing else for it: he’d have to start chopping.

  It was the slow, steady rhythm of the work that had kept him out there so long, adding to the woodpile – just one more swing, another splitting. The ring of the axe, the toppling woody sound of another log tossed on the pile. It hadn’t taken long for his shoulders to ache, his lower back to burn, and his breath to cloud on the air. But now the daylight was sliding away and the rain had started up again, spitting through the trees. Time to stop. Far off, across the valley, thunder rolled and growled along the ridgeline of the Grand Luberon. Another storm was on its way, and over the red scent of freshly chopped wood he could smell it now. Cold, metallic, electric. In the hour, he thought to himself; another hour and rain would be hammering down again.

  It had been a slow day at police headquarters in Cavaillon, and Jacquot had been pleased to get away from it – just tying up loose ends from his last case, noting down dates in his desk diary for forthcoming courtroom appearances, and checking forensic reports and number tags against evidence bags for those same appearances. Drudge work. Desk work. Everything he hated. Normally his assist -ant, Jean Brunet, would have done all this, but Brunet had called in sick. It had been building up, Brunet’s sharply pointed nose reddening over the last couple of days from constant swipes of a sleeve or tissue or the knuckles of his hand, even seeming to swell a little. He’d sounded rough on the phone, and Jacquot wondered whether he’d been alone. He doubted it. Even in the depths of misery, Brunet would have found himself some company, someone to soothe his fevered brow. A real tomcat, Brunet. Un vrai matou. In the four years he had been working in Cavaillon, the man had cut a swathe through the town’s womenfolk; it was astonishing there were any left for him to snag.

  It was thinking about Brunet and his conquests that had brought Claudine to mind, just a few short kilometres out of town on the Apt road. After a late lunch at Chez Gaillard, a stunning boeuf miroton made up with the remai
ns of Monday’s pot au feu – Jacquot had been lucky to get it; there was never much in the way of leftovers at Gaillard’s – he’d strolled back to headquarters to see if anything had come in. Since nothing had, he cleared his desk and headed for the car park. Twenty minutes later, he was back at the millhouse and steering a weakly protesting Claudine up the stairs. Afternoons in bed with your lover, thought Jacquot. After a good lunch. It really didn’t get better than that.

  Except lover wasn’t quite the word, he decided as he reached for another log. Technically correct, but somehow lacking in substance. In degree. It’s how they might have started out, as lovers, but two years after that first scrambling, breathless rush of passion in his apartment on Cours Bournissac, kicking the door shut behind them, knocking pictures off the hallway wall, he and Claudine Eddé had become so much more. The axe came down again and Jacquot stooped to pick up the split halves, toss them on the pile. In just two years. So much more.

  ‘Light me a fire,’ Claudine had told him, after they’d made love, pushing her feet against his backside, shoving him from their bed. ‘It’ll be cold downstairs.’

  When he’d tried to persuade her that staying in bed was as good a way as any to keep warm, she’d told him she needed to check the blanquette de veau she’d prepared for their supper.

  ‘You didn’t have any lunch, did you?’ she’d asked, and he’d shaken his head.

  ‘Presque rien,’ he’d replied, picking up his clothes. Almost nothing.

  So here he was, out chopping wood, not just to keep a fire fed and Claudine warm but to work up an appetite. And now it was done, enough logs to last a week. After the final swing and split, he laid down the axe, straightened slowly and tipped backwards, easing the ache out of his lower back. Too little exercise, too little action, he thought to himself, and too many lunches at Brasserie Chez Gaillard, or Scaramouche, or in the upstairs room at Cénacle. Back home in Marseilles, he took a meal when he could, en route to a robbery, or a murder, or a rape, or in his small apartment in the heights of Le Panier. In Marseilles he kept trim, worked off the excess. But here in the country . . . oufff, it was a different matter. Close on three years was starting to show where it shouldn’t. Or maybe he was just getting older, he thought to himself, stacking logs into the basket. Closing on fifty. Where had it all gone?