The Dying Minutes Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Martin O’Brien

  Title Page

  Dedication

  November, 1972: Madrague de Montredon

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  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

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Part Two

  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

  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

  Part Three

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Part Four

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  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

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Chapter 109

  Chapter 110

  Chapter 111

  Chapter 112

  Chapter 113

  Chapter 114

  Chapter 115

  Chapter 116

  Chapter 117

  Chapter 118

  Chapter 119

  Chapter 120

  Chapter 121

  Chapter 122

  Chapter 123

  Chapter 124

  Chapter 125

  Chapter 126

  Chapter 127

  Chapter 128

  Chapter 129

  Chapter 130

  Copyright

  About the Book

  A gold bullion robbery takes place on the outskirts of Marseilles in 1978. No one is ever arrested for the crime, nor is the gold ever found.

  But twenty years later, two men receive an unexpected gift. Chief Inspector Daniel Jacquot’s is from an old fisherman who recently passed away. And lawyer Claude Dupont’s is from a gangland boss on his prison deathbed.

  Why?

  The clues will lead Jacquot and Dupont into a bitter war against two of the most feared criminal families on the Cote d’Azur and a race against time to find the lost bullion.

  But after twenty years, is the gold still there?

  And if it is, who will get to it first?

  About the Author

  Martin O’Brien was educated at the Oratory School and Hertford College, Oxford. He was travel editor of British Vogue in the 1970s and has written for a number of international publications. After more than thirty years on the road Marseilles remains one of his favourite destinations.

  Also by Martin O’Brien

  Jacquot and the Waterman

  Jacquot and the Angel

  Jacquot and the Master

  Jacquot and the Fifteen

  Confession

  Blood Counts

  Writing as Jack Drummond

  Avalanche

  Storm

  For Olly and Chris,

  Jaimie and Jacqueline,

  and for all the fine times

  around la table noire

  November, 1972

  Madrague de Montredon

  SHE WAS STRONG and she was fit and she was young.

  And very determined.

  Matched the two men she worked with, the older and the younger, load for load, back and forth, from truck to vessel.

  The night was black as pitch. Somewhere in that dead, silent space between three and four in the morning. There was no moon, so no real form or shape to the blackness, just a few distant lights across the harbour, glimmering over the water. Even the stars had gone, put out by a band of low storm clouds that had moved in the evening before, filling the air with a salty crackle of electricity. She may have been sweating but she could feel the hairs on the back of her neck prickle with fear and excitement.

  None of them checked the time but it had to be three hours since the take. And they were nearly done. Better than expected. Ahead of schedule. Maybe thirty bars still stacked on that pallet. Three bars at a time. Ten more trips between the three of them. They’d brought the truck as close to the boat as they could but it was still thirty metres between pallet and mooring.

  Slotting the bars into the sailcloth waistcoats she’d made for them, panting past each other, back and forth, coming and going.

  No shadows, just that inky blackness, the repeated shuffle of their feet, and the hungry suck and slap of water on stone. All that, and the heavy clunk and clink of the bars as they set them down in a double line from for’ard cabin to aft deck, spreading the weight.

  A ton of gold.

  A little over nine hundred kilos.

  Seventy-five bars.

  If their arms and shoulders didn’t cramp from the loads, or their legs buckle as they scuttled back and forth across the quay, they’d be away. Another thirty minutes and they’d be free and clear.

  And very, very rich.

  Everything had gone so well, so smoothly. Just as they’d planned. Up in that chill midnight air on the Col de la Gineste, and down here in the port of Madrague. While she and her older companion had prepped the boat, their man on the inside had hidden out with the others, up among the rocks on the high pass road between Marseilles and Cassis, city lights spread out beneath them like gems twinkling on a cloth of black velvet.

  They’d crouched there from ten until midnight, twenty in the gang, either side of the road, waiting for the convoy in that whispering darkness, finally spotting the headlights winding up towards
them, hearing the engines rumble and strain on that last juddering bend before they brought the makeshift barriers crashing down. Ahead of the convoy and behind it. No way on and no way back, the three trucks brought to a standstill, brakes wheezing on the slope.

  In short order they’d dealt with the four outriders, then cracked the three trucks. A cake of C4 taped to each windscreen, primers set, had seen to that. Security crews scrambling out, their own crews clambering in. The C4 bars removed.

  Six minutes after springing the trap, the higher barrier was pushed aside and they were out of there, one after the other, a seamless operation, up over the ridge and down into the city. Three security trucks, in a tidy line, nose to tail along the tree-lined straight of boulevard Michelet, only splitting up when they reached the higher Prado roundabout: the first truck straight on, through the green lights, direct to the city centre; the second truck taking the first exit off the roundabout, up along boulevard Rabatau to the A50 cross-town; and their man, driving the third truck, taking the last exit, south, as planned, towards the beach. Three different routes through the city to minimise any hold-ups, to lessen the odds, each truck heading for the same rendezvous in the unlit railyards behind the docks of La Joliette.

  Except their man had taken a left, not a right, at the statue of David on Prado Beach, had somehow got rid of his four companions – neither she nor the older man had asked how he planned to do it, just knew that he would – and made it alone to Madrague, switching off his headlights as he coasted down rue Tibido, turned in to the quay, reversed and braked. Engine killed, doors swung open.

  And now it was nearly done, just the last bars to shift, the older man staying on the boat, just her and the young one jogging back to the truck, breathing hard from the effort, waistcoat pockets empty, arms loose and aching at their sides, legs almost weightless from the work-out.

  It was then that a single gunshot rang out across the quay, the sharp cracking sound of it clattering and battering its way around the houses on the far side of the harbour, followed by a second and a third shot, brief muzzle flashes from the corner of rue des Arapèdes.

  And her companion, running beside her, suddenly grunted and pitched sideways, the breath punched from his body when he hit the stone quay.

  She knew when she touched him that he was dead. One of those three shots a lucky one to the side of the head that left the back of his skull mushy, warm and splintered.

  She couldn’t believe it. Wouldn’t believe it.

  Not now. Not him.

  Behind her, from the boat, she heard the older man call out. A desperate, whispered scream, ‘Vite, vite,’ not knowing what had happened to them, out there in the darkness, with guns firing.

  Then she heard the engines turn, chortle, splutter and catch, and she knew she had to run, knew she had to leave him, and prayed she’d make the twenty metres of open ground without another lucky shot taking her down.

  She pressed the young man’s shoulder, slick with blood, whispered her farewell and, stripping off her cumbersome waistcoat, she turned for the quay.

  This time the gunshots were closer, the bullets too, zinging past her like hot, angry hornets as she made her crouching, zig-zag dash for life and freedom.

  But now the twenty metres were thirty, and lengthening.

  While she’d delayed, the older man had cut the boat loose from its mooring, backed it out from the slip and turned it, low in the water now, heading for the harbour entrance, pushing the throttles forward.

  ‘Jump!’ she heard him call from the wheelhouse, his voice louder now, over the engines. ‘You’ll have to jump.’

  And as the bullets whined past her, she ran with what little strength she had left in her legs, reached the end of the quay and flung herself from it, flew through the air, arms and legs wheeling, into the darkness.

  Part One

  1

  August, 1999

  Madrague de Montredon

  SOMETIMES IT BEGINS with a death.

  Not a murder, just a natural passing.

  This one had been long and slow and painless, ending in an old man’s single bed. At night. In a shadowy, shifting darkness, with the distant shuffling sound of the ocean drifting through slanted wooden shutters and the sharp scent of sea salt and dried netting dampening the air he breathed. Long, slow, painless breaths, drawn in over toothless gums, sleeping breaths that softened, shortened and, in the dark hour before dawn, ceased with a final, wet, fluttering cough that might have woken a younger man.

  But not this one.

  Not Philo.

  Philo was a fisherman, born in the spring of 1922 in a cabanon on a calanque slope past Sormiou. Of course, Philo was not his real name, and nor was he French despite his place of birth. His father was Greek and his mother Italian, and it was her surname that she’d given him since she couldn’t remember the father’s.

  Whatever his real or adopted name, this old fisherman was known among friends and acquaintances as Philo, Le Philosophe, the scholar. Not that he was particularly clever or wise, not that he even thought he was, but because for as long as anyone could remember Philo had always had a book in his hand, something to read. He might just have been a fisherman, supplying local restaurants with the daily makings of a bouillabaisse, but he was a reader too. And in the port of Madrague de Montredon where Philo moored his six-metre skiff, there weren’t too many fishermen who lay back on their drying nets to read a book.

  If it was the sea that had given Philo his living, it was to the sea that he was returned, like a debt repaid, nine days after his thin, cold body was found in his bed.

  An hour before dawn, with stars still glittering in the night sky, at the very time he had taken that last rattling breath, a twenty-metre sloop set out from Madrague a few kilometres along the coast from Marseilles. The air was still and cold, no breeze to fill the sails, just the oily scent of diesel and the rumbling chug of the sloop’s motor, a verdigrised prop churning up a steady phosphorescent wake, a lengthening lifeline leading back to land.

  There were five men aboard: one at the wheel, three in the cockpit, with Philo’s body stitched into a stiff sailcloth wrap, secured to the deck railing beside them, and weighted with a length of anchor chain. Four kilometres past the breakwater, heading south-west, a sharp slap of spray came off the bows, out of the darkness, stinging their faces, and the skipper ordered the jib and mainsail up. Cutting the engine, he spun the wheel to port, set a course south-east and felt the sloop heel and pull as the sails caught the breeze and they surged forward, four knots, then five, faster than the engine had driven them. But now there was no engine sound, just the splash and lash of the water, the straining tug of taut, stretched canvas and the creak of varnished timbers. Sounds each one of them knew well, fishermen all, coming to them as the steep slopes and crags of the Îles de Maire and Riou and Pénitents loomed ahead, jagged, crouching shadows set against a lightening dawn sky.

  ‘Old Philo would have liked this,’ said the man at the wheel, breathing in the sharp sea air.

  ‘Coming home, he wouldn’t,’ replied the netmaker from Madrague, wiping the salt spray from his cheeks.

  ‘He’d have stayed over at Sormiou,’ said the oldest man in the party, now that Philo was gone. ‘Or maybe chanced it closer to shore, other side of Jarre and Calseraigne.’

  ‘Anyone for more coffee?’ said the fourth man, making for the hatch.

  ‘Calva, too,’ the skipper called out, bracing his thighs against the wheel, legs apart, bare feet in tattered espadrilles. ‘Bring the Calva this time. In the cupboard under the charts. That’s what Philo would want.’

  An hour after they’d set out from Madrague, warmed by the coffee and apple brandy, the skipper had the sails trimmed and brought the sloop round into a stretch of dead black water downwind of Île des Pénitents, the furthest of the islands. Up in the bow a trailing anchor was thrown out and the sloop began to turn and drift astern, the distant mainland lights of Sormiou twinkling into sight as they
passed the headland seven kilometres offshore.

  ‘He always did well here,’ said the netmaker from Madrague, as they unclipped the tags that secured their old friend and shifted him closer to the railing. ‘Just smelled them down there, he did.’

  ‘Anyone want to say anything?’ asked the skipper, heaving up the length of chain and cradling it in his arms.

  ‘À Dieu should do it,’ said the oldest man among them. ‘That’s all he needs now.’

  ‘And fat nets, wherever he’s going,’ said the man who’d brewed the coffee and found the Calva.

  ‘And pretty girls, too. Don’t forget the pretty girls,’ added the netmaker, as the three men got a grip on the sail-cloth shroud and hoisted it up to the railing.

  ‘Philo first,’ said the skipper, and he watched as his three companions heaved their friend overboard, the canvas cocoon smacking on to the water, bobbing on the surface and starting to twist like the points of a compass, as though trying to decide which direction to take.

  There was only one direction.

  Leaning over the rail, the skipper let the length of chain unravel through his arms and splash down into the dark, lapping sea.

  For a moment more Philo bobbed there in his sailcloth coat, and then he was gone, as though snatched by an unseen hand, taken down into the depths.

  2

  Three weeks later

  THE LAWYER, CLAUDE DUPONT, did not hear the phone ringing. The call came through as he breakfasted on the terrace of his home off the Niolon road. He’d smeared the last of his petit pain with the remains of the plum jam, popped it into his mouth and was reaching for his newspaper when his wife, Francine, came out with the phone in her hand, a long lead snaking out behind her.

  ‘C’est pour toi,’ she said, offering the receiver with one hand, the other holding closed the front of her dressing gown. There was a tight, disapproving expression on her face. Francine Dupont did not like business calls coming through to the house, particularly at the weekend. She had made it clear often enough. Business was office, home was home – n’importe quoi. No matter what.

  Dupont swallowed his bread and jam, wiped his fingers on his napkin and took the phone with a nod of thanks and a weak smile.

  ‘Oui? Allo?’ he said, curtly, so his wife would register his annoyance as she left the sunlit terrace for the villa’s cooler, shadowed interior, a shared irritation at this unwanted, unexpected intrusion.