Confession Read online

  This was where the girl had come from: an overnight lorry park, wide and long enough to accommodate forty or maybe fifty trucks, a disused lot awaiting redevelopment, somewhere for drivers to rest for the night before catching a ferry, or delivering or picking up loads. Somewhere close by, Lucienne Viviers had climbed up the bank on the other side of the fence.

  But where had she got through?

  Looking to the right Marie-Ange could see no obvious opening, so she set off to the left and found the tear in the wire mesh not thirty steps further on. Holding the edges apart, she stepped through carefully but still felt her coat sleeve snag. She worked it free and wondered whether Lucienne had had time to be so careful, or whether she’d just pushed through regardless. Had the torn mesh scratched her? Snatched at her face? Her arms? Tugged at her hair? But Marie-Ange knew that there would have been no time for such considerations. Lucienne Viviers was on the run, needing to escape. That was all. She wouldn’t have cared about a couple of scratches.

  Once through the fence, Marie-Ange side-stepped and slithered her way down the muddy bank. Finally she reached the bottom of the slope and looked around. The lorry that had just arrived was now forty metres away, one of half-a-dozen trucks parked in a line. While Marie-Ange watched, the driver doused his headlights and engaged his hydraulic brakes with a slow and final wheeze. Moments later the cabin was bathed in a blue light. A television. He was settling down for the night.

  With nothing to light her path save a scatter of twinkling lights from tenements on the slopes around the lorry park, Marie-Ange made her way across the rough, stony ground. The first lorries loomed out of the rain and darkness, their cabins high off the ground, lit and unlit, their towering sides billboarded with haulage company logos – Spanish, Portuguese, German, French – all of them parked up for the night.

  Picking her way past them, she circled the lorry park, waiting for something to lead her on, point the way. But there was nothing. The trail she’d been following stopped here, and, without even real-ising it at first, she began to note the sounds of the city gradually gaining in volume – a distant beeping of horns, a police siren, a distant susurrus of traffic heading into and out of the city. And high in one of the lorries’ cabins she heard the taped applause of a TV game show.

  It was as if she had taken out ear plugs. She could no longer hear the pulsing of blood in her ears, no longer feel Lucienne’s presence. And the rain seemed to grow if not stronger then certainly louder.

  Marie-Ange looked around for a moment, moved her head from side to side like an animal tracking a scent, then acknowledged that there was no scent to follow, nowhere left for her to go. The trail had gone cold.

  All she could say for certain was that this was where Lucienne Viviers had begun her dash for freedom.

  And death.

  7

  AFTER REGAINING THE LITTORAL FLYOVER it took Jacquot another twenty minutes to drive around Marseilles’ Vieux Port, negotiate the lanes and lights on Quai des Belges and head up rue Breteuil, leaning forward into the steering wheel as the road steepened. And the higher he went the harder the rain fell, gushing along the gutters in furious torrents, bubbling over the drains and streaming in glistening neon-ripples across the road, as though the golden spikes of La Bonne Mère’s crown on Notre-Dame de la Garde had slashed open the swollen belly of a rain cloud.

  But even in the rain, at night, it was good to be back in the city and Jacquot felt a stirring of fondness for the place. It had been six months, maybe more, since his last visit, yet it felt like a century. Such a long absence surprised him, now that he thought about it, and shocked him too. That he could stay away so long. How could he be so close – what, maybe seventy kilometres? – yet not visit more often?

  Finding somewhere to park – a back wheel on the pavement, the Peugeot’s front wing jutting a dangerous few centimetres into the one-way street – Jacquot spent a further ten minutes dodging through drenching rain trying to locate the restaurant Solange Bonnefoy had chosen for their meeting. After seeking directions from a bar on the corner of rue du Dragon, he finally found Kuchnia in a dead-end alley, just an old shopfront with a low sash window to each side of a glass door, the name ‘kuchnia’ painted in gold-shadowed green paint, the lower-case letters faded and peeling. It looked as if it had stood there for ever – the woodwork worn and buckling, any trace of an awning long gone – and Jacquot wondered again that he’d never heard of it. In Marseilles, he knew his restaurants. Hurrying towards it through the rain, he could just about make out a shadowy sense of movement beyond its lit but misted windows, confirmed when he pushed open the door and stepped into a wall of steam and heat and clatter and muffled conversation.

  Squeezing into a narrow entrance hallway, made even smaller by overloaded coat-racks, Jacquot closed the door behind him, wrestled off his leather jacket and felt suddenly bulky and awkward. There seemed to be no room to move or turn, to go forward or backwards, so crowded was the hallway and the room it opened on to – a dozen Formica-topped tables with paper squares laid in diamonds crowded with diners, the whole place resounding to the kettledrum roll of cutlery on china and the muffled hum of guarded conversation. There was something canteen-like about the place, a workers’ soup-kitchen free from any embellishment beyond the scruffy pleating of red gingham half-curtains, dulled brass curtain rails and wrought iron sconces on the wall, no more than forty watts shivering from their candle-shaped bulbs. The only other thing that Jacquot could make out on the walls was the same thin glistening sheen of condensation that covered Kuchnia’s windows, reaching as far as he could see, into two more rooms at the back, each packed as tight with diners as a jar of Collioure anchovies. There didn’t look to be a spare seat in the house.

  Either the food was cheap, he thought, or it was very, very good. Judging by the smell, it was certainly going to be good, and by the look of the clientele it was more than likely going to be cheap. There was something creased and crumpled and well-used about their clothing, shiny and tight about the shoulders, the way they spooned and forked the food into their mouths, as though they were in a hurry to be out of there, or hadn’t eaten a decent meal in weeks. Once more Jacquot ran the word through his head – Kuchnia, Kuchnia, Kuchnia. Was it someone’s name? A place? It sounded eastern European, maybe Czech, Polish, Hungarian; one or the other. What he knew for certain was that he had never heard of the place before. And living and working in Marseilles for as long as he had, that was saying something. The fact that Solange Bonnefoy, Marseilles’ leading examining magistrate, knew of it – and ate here – made it all the more intriguing.

  Piling his coat on top of a dozen others, Jacquot glanced around the first room, his eye settling on a glass display counter filled with salads and pickles and cuts of cold meat in plastic containers that ran the length of the side wall. Behind its sweating panels, wedged between counter and wall, stood a large, white-aproned woman in her late fifties, working away with concentrated energy and a practised efficiency. Her hair was caught up and bound in a scarf, her chubby round face red with effort, and her bare arms squeezed sausage-like out of tightly rolled sleeves. For someone her size she managed uncannily well in the limited space available. With what looked like an octave span of fingers she hefted a pile of dirty plates off the glass counter, deposited them with a clatter on the top shelf of a dumb-waiter, removed a tray of fresh orders from the bottom shelf, shouted new ones into a small intercom, tugged on the rope then turned back to supervise the distribution of the steaming food to a line of hovering waiters – old, thin men in black jackets worn over stained white aprons who snatched up the plates with unlikely speed, balanced them skilfully on scrawny arms and scurried away with them. It was one of these old men who now approached Jacquot with an enquiring expression on his face.

  ‘Bonnefoy. There is a table reserved,’ said Jacquot.

  ‘Ach, Dobrawiara,’ the man replied, as though in greeting, and after a short bow led Jacquot past the glass display counter an
d into the second room where a single free table was crammed into a far corner. Pulling out the table an inch or two for Jacquot to squeeze in against the wall, the waiter smiled. ‘I come back,’ he said. ‘Just to wait, please, and I return.’

  The man’s French was gruff and heavily accented, almost Germanic, and as Jacquot settled himself, freeing a corner of the white paper table-cloth that had caught on his belt buckle, he tried to place it. Eastern European, certainly. Possibly Yiddish? He remembered the two Hassidim sipping orange juice in the bar where he’d asked for directions, payot side-locks dangling beneath their fedoras, dark suspicious eyes, thick red lips and pale bearded cheeks, and he recalled there was a synagogue near by, just a block or two beyond rue Breteuil.

  It was that rasping accent, his own language but spoken differently, that made him wonder suddenly about Solange Bonnefoy. Was she eastern European? Slavic? Jewish even? He’d never have guessed. There was, Jacquot had always thought, something classic, haughty, and old French about her. Pure Gallic stock – descended from one of those familles anciennes who’d survived the attentions of Madame Guillotine. With her height and her bearing and that searingly disdainful way she glanced at anyone who stepped on the wrong side of her, there was something almost regal about her, something undeniably magisterial.

  But she didn’t look anything like that now. Glancing up, he saw Madame Bonnefoy bearing down on him, as tall and elegant as he remembered but looking somehow diminished, her eyes red and cheeks hollow.

  ‘Daniel,’ she said, taking his hand and leaning over the table to press rain-damp cheeks against his. An uncertain smile flickered across her lips as she drew back. ‘It’s good to see you again,’ she continued, in a low voice as wavering as her smile. ‘And, vraiment, so good of you to come.’

  8

  Cavaillon

  CLAUDINE THREW A LOG ON the fire and dumped herself on a sofa. She’d eaten her blanquette in the kitchen, alone, washed up her single plate, slotted it into the rack and come through to the salon. She reached for the TV remote and flicked through some channels – the nine o’clock news on TF1, a Schwarzenegger film on M6, a travel documentary on Canal+, a repeat on Arte. And the ads, of course. She couldn’t be bothered to wait for them to finish, or to check TV listings. She just switched the TV off. Got up from the sofa to pour herself more wine, flicked on the CD without looking to see what was in it. A Pachelbel fugue. Appropriate, she thought, going back to the sofa. One of Daniel’s. For a flic, he had an eclectic taste in music. Anything good seemed to be the rule, whether it was rock ’n’ roll or the classics. Mozart and Howlin’ Wolf; Handel and Dylan.

  A flic. A cop, she thought to herself, punching a cushion into shape. So this was what it was all about. Always on call. Never off duty. Claudine didn’t know if she liked it. Correction. She knew she didn’t like it. He’d left the millhouse an hour earlier and she was still cross about it. Put out. That blanquette de veau had been as good as any she’d cooked. And it had taken time. Hours. The slow braising of that plump shoulder, getting the roux just right . . . and then being interrupted by Daniel coming home early, infuriatingly – and delightfully – seducing her away from her pots, making love to her, pretending to her he hadn’t had anything to eat when she could smell the garlic in his sweat. It was their lovemaking then that made his absence now all the worse, the more pointed. Everything had been so perfect: the warmth of the kitchen, the ripening scent of the food, the sound of logs being chopped in the yard – just exactly how many logs did he think they needed? And then, fire lit, wine opened, the damn’ phone. A woman. An old colleague, he’d told her when the call was ended. He was sorry. He had to go. Something had come up.

  Just like that. No discussion. A done deal.

  Well, merci beaucoup, monsieur. Thanks a lot.

  Claudine took a deep breath and blew it out. Men, she thought. And a cop to boot. She must be mad, mad, mad.

  Except . . .

  Except she’d grown to love him. No matter what he did. Even if, sometimes, he let her down, like tonight, or did or said something without thinking, making her lips thin and tighten with annoyance.

  She looked at the log she’d thrown on the fire, now starting to catch, curling yellow flames licking around it, and wondered where he was. In Marseilles, for sure, by now. She wondered if it was raining there too. If it was, that leather jacket wasn’t going to do him much good.

  And this Madame Bonnefoy . . . the one he was meeting, probably having dinner with. He hadn’t said they were, she just assumed they would. And the word ‘Kuchnia’ she’d heard him repeating. Maybe that was the name of the restaurant. Sounded like kitchen in a foreign language. She wondered how old this Bonnefoy woman was. Married? Single? On the phone she’d sounded, well, it was hard to tell. She’d sounded . . . afraid? Or looking for a shoulder to cry on? Claudine knew the feeling. She just hoped that that was as far it got.

  Over on the hi-fi Pachelbel gave way to Cesaria Evora.

  The seventeenth century to the twentieth.

  Nuremberg to Cape Verde.

  Organ to soul.

  Daniel Jacquot, she thought, I could wring your neck.

  9

  Marseilles

  ‘THE LAST TIME ANYONE SAW Elodie was late Saturday morning, just before lunch. The concierge at her parents’ apartment block, a street-corner fleuriste, and a waiter. That was it. She simply . . . vanished.’

  Solange Bonnefoy sat back in her chair as though the effort of describing the disappearance in Paris of her niece, Elodie Lafour, had quite exhausted her. She looked spent, just a shadow of herself, thought Jacquot, as she reached for her bag, took out a tissue and blew her nose. As she did so their waiter, the same old man who had greeted Jacquot, bustled between them to clear their table.

  Not that there had been a great deal eaten, neither of them with much of an appetite. But what Jacquot had managed was memorable.

  ‘Zupa grzybowa,’ Madame Bonnefoy had told him as the first course was served, a thick mushroom soup ladled into their bowls and a plastic basket filled with toasted crusts of nutty brown bread placed between them. ‘Good, wholesome, peasant food. Real home cooking. So we don’t forget.’

  ‘ “We”?’ asked Jacquot.

  ‘I’m Polish. Didn’t you know?’ Madame Bonnefoy seemed amused.

  Jacquot shook his head. ‘I had no idea. Your French is . . .’

  ‘. . . good, but my Polish, believe me, is better.’

  ‘But your name . . . Bonnefoy? And your father, wasn’t he a minister under Pompidou?’

  ‘That’s as may be. But it doesn’t alter the fact that my great-great-grandfather came from a town called Lomza in Masovia, eastern Poland, and was called Piotr Dobrawiara.’

  When he heard the name, Jacquot chuckled. ‘So that’s what the old man meant,’ nodding towards their waiter as he served out soup at another table. ‘I thought it was a greeting. Bonjour . . . ça va . . . you know?’

  ‘Translated from Polish, it means honesty, or sincerity, or good faith. Old Piotr changed the name as soon as he arrived. Paris first, then here in Marseilles. He was a cobbler by trade. And the family name wasn’t going to do him any harm so long as his customers knew what it meant. Hence Bonnefoy.’

  The small talk lasted as long as the soup. It was over the gulasz – ladled into the same bowls – that Madame Bonnefoy had told Jacquot about her niece, what had happened in Paris the week before. The reason she’d phoned him, called him down to Marseilles.

  ‘She’s sixteen today. Just sixteen,’ she said, wiping her nose as the waiter bore away their plates.

  ‘A runaway? It happens, at that age. Maybe a boyfriend?’

  Madame Bonnefoy shook her head. ‘No boyfriend I know of. Elodie’s not like that – not yet. Not that kind of girl. Very sensible. Very . . . composée.’

  ‘A problem at home? Some small thing. What about her parents? Your sister . . . her husband? Are they happy? Getting a divorce?’

  ‘Nothing like that
. And I would know.’

  ‘And you say there’s been no ransom demand?’ asked Jacqout. ‘You’re absolutely certain?’

  ‘I swear. My sister would have told me.’

  Jacquot stayed silent for a moment. He’d have far preferred a ransom demand. If the girl had not gone of her own accord, no demand from a kidnapper usually meant no intent to return. Which meant one of two things. Either rape, followed by death within hours of being snatched and a shallow grave somewhere, or transportation. The prettier ones to whorehouses in Africa and South America. The less attractive sold to clinics for their livers, hearts, kidneys . . . Kept alive for as long as it took, to keep the organs warm and fresh.

  Solange Bonnefoy tucked the tissue in her sleeve and held up her hands. ‘I know what you’re thinking, Daniel. I know, I know. A ransom demand would be better . . . But there you are. There hasn’t been one. And after four days, the chances of getting one are growing slimmer by the hour. Which is why I want you on the case, Daniel. I want you to find her. If anyone can, it’s you.’

  ‘Here? In Marseilles? If you’ll excuse my directness, Madame, if she’s not already dead, your niece could be in any of a dozen ports – Cherbourg, Rotterdam, Hamburg, Genoa . . . Why Marseilles?’

  Madame Bonnefoy leant forward, and Jacquot saw a thin gleam of hope in her eyes. ‘Early Monday morning,’ she replied, ‘just after midnight, a young girl was hit by a drunk driver on Boulevard Cambrai, down by the docks. Her name was Lucienne Viviers. She was reported missing by her parents, in Paris, last Thursday, just days before Elodie disappeared. If this girl, Viviers, was in Marseilles, then it’s entirely feasible that Elodie might be here as well. Part of a . . . consignment. And now, with the dock strike . . .’

  Jacquot let out a low whistle. ‘That’s quite a stretch, if you’ll forgive me, madame. Did they know each other? Elodie and Lucienne? Were they friends?’