The Dying Minutes
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.