The Dying Minutes Read online

  The package was the last item she opened. A bulky brown envelope, crumpled from the sorting office and the postman’s trolley, postmarked Avignon and addressed to her.

  She sliced it open, put away her penknife and peered inside.

  For a moment or two, she didn’t say a thing. Wasn’t able to say anything. Couldn’t believe her eyes, which started to prick with tears.

  ‘Le Bon Dieu,’ she whispered at last, and her hand trembled.

  Across the desk, Sister Odette’s kindly old face, pinched tight by her wimple, creased with concern.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘You’re white as a ghost. Are you all right?’

  Sister Mercy swallowed. ‘I don’t know … I don’t understand …’

  And she turned the package in her hand and tipped out its contents on to the desk.

  Tightly wadded rolls of green, each the size of a man’s fist, each secured with a rubber band, a tumble of paper tubes that rolled across the desk and spilled on to the floor. Sister Odette reached down and picked one up, turned it in front of her disbelieving eyes, her mouth opening in a silent ‘Oh’ as she registered the thickness of the wad, its particular shade of green and the engraved face of Marie Curie.

  Five-hundred-franc notes, rolled into a tube.

  Many thousands of francs, certainly.

  Thirty thousand? Forty thousand? Just the one roll was heavy enough.

  And so many rolls. Forty? Fifty? Maybe more.

  For a moment the two women looked at the surface of the desk, at the pile of money between them.

  A million? Two million? More?

  And then, together, they began to laugh and cry, and they stood, and they hugged, and they patted their chests to ease their pounding hearts, and took handkerchiefs from their sleeves and wiped away the tears.

  Laughing and crying at the same time.

  The good Lord had provided.

  The lease was theirs.

  There’d be no leaving on Monday.

  11

  JACQUOT KNEW WHERE he was before he opened his eyes. On a boat. His boat. Berthed in Marseilles’ Vieux Port. In the heart of the city.

  At the millhouse in the Lubéron, he woke to the summoning buzz of the bedside phone, or the low peep-peep-peep from his alarm clock, or the smell of baking bread or perking coffee on those occasions when Claudine got up before him. Here, it was the cackling screech and stuttering caw-caw-caw of seagulls, and the distant mournful hoot of a cargo ship leaving the docks of La Joliette, that had broken into his dreams. And when he finally opened his eyes, rubbing the sleep from them, he saw not the beamed ceiling of their millhouse bedroom and the cypress trees outside their windows, but the planked roof of the for’ard cabin and a square of deep blue sky through an open skylight. And somewhere, hardly registering, there was a sense of motion, a lulling, barely discernible pitch and tilt.

  And as he lay there, loosely covered by the unzipped sleeping bag, listening to the sounds of the harbour and the city, Jacquot thought of Claudine, on the other side of the world, beyond the curve of the globe, on an island in the Caribbean. With their baby inside her. Very soon he was going to be a father, and he thrilled at the thought. Boy or girl, they had no idea, had agreed not to ask, though there’d been a moment’s hesitation when Claudine’s doctor asked if they wanted him to tell them. But it was just a moment, and afterwards they’d smiled – ‘For a moment there …’ ‘Me too …’ – and then laughed, happy and relieved that they’d resisted.

  The prospect of fatherhood filled Jacquot with a warmth and a wonderment he had never known. Claudine had been pregnant before with Midou, knew what it meant, this new life growing inside her. But for Jacquot the feelings were new and urgent and exciting.

  But what, he wondered, would Claudine make of this? The boat? Constance? She’d love it, he knew that, and he could see her – and their child – sitting in the shade of the wheelhouse as he motored them along the coast, to the islands, to the calanques, to Cassis. To small coves and deserted beaches, and to three-table shack restaurants where they grilled the morning catch under slatted split-cane roofs.

  But knowing Claudine she’d be sensible, too. The practicalities. And all the impracticalities that he had not thought – or chosen – to consider. At least there was no large financial burden for her to settle on, to take into consideration. A few thousand francs a year, that was all. They could manage that, even with the new addition on his or her way.

  And soon, in another couple of weeks, Jacquot would make the introduction and Claudine would see Constance. He’d lead her down the pontoon, telling her nothing, doing what Salette had done to him. And let Constance work her magic.

  But first things first, thought Jacquot, throwing off the sleeping bag, and crawling from the bed, feeling that tight morning ache in the back of his thigh and hip. What he needed, he decided, was a good breakfast, and a little light exercise. Struggling into his clothes, he knew exactly how to get both.

  12

  THE PHOTOS WERE damning, shockingly explicit. Seven of them. Black and white. A little creased and faded. Interior shots. Église Saint Ignace off Marseilles’ rue Kléber, the stone panels of its altar clearly visible. And equally visible, the action being played out on the altar’s runnered steps that long-ago night.

  As far as Curé Pascal Dominici could tell, the photos had been taken from one of the side chapels, without a flash. Someone hidden. Someone they hadn’t known about. And in each of the photos there was Curé Pascal himself, younger, fitter, and with more hair, a white, lacy shift-like rochet riding up over his thighs as he clutched hungrily at his young companions. Three of them. Choirboys. Thin and lithe, naked as the day they were born.

  Eighteen years ago. A parish priest just a few years out of the Seminary of Saint-Joseph in Équirre. Now assistant secretary-general to the office of the Archdiocese of Avignon. Forty-seven years old, nearly thirty in the service of the Church, with elevation to a full position on the Curia only a matter of weeks away.

  The photographs had arrived that morning, mercifully not opened by his secretary thanks to the Private and Confidential instruction on the front of the envelope. Not that it mattered now. Standing at his office window, with its angled views of the Place des Papes and the misted countryside north of Avignon, Curé Pascal felt his stomach twist and clamp and turn chill as he shuffled, disbelieving, through the photos, hands shaking, reading and re-reading the brief note that accompanied them. It was written on a plain sheet of cream paper, heavily milled, silky to the touch, the words in the very centre of the page, just above the fold, in short, business-like capitals, so there could be no mistake with the message, the meaning:

  AH, THOSE WERE THE DAYS …

  Just that one line.

  And beneath it, also in neat capitals:

  COPIES TO THE RESIDENCE OF THE ARCHBISHOP.

  With the full and correct address written below. The small second floor apartment below the Petit Palais overlooking the Bénézet Gardens where His Grace was even now considering applications for the post of Secretary General to the Office of the Archdiocese, a post which he, Curé Pascal, had recently applied for, a post he had every hope of securing.

  But no longer.

  Turning back to his desk, a wide oak table drawn up beside a brick-floored hearth, a Cardinal’s tasselled galero carved into the high stone mantle, Curé Pascal placed the photos and the note on his blotter and felt another icy shudder spread through his belly. With the strength draining from his legs he slumped into his chair, put his elbows on the desk and laid his head in his hands. He stayed like that for more than a minute, trying to steady his breathing, trying to calm his nerves.

  Somewhere beyond his window, the bells for morning Mass started up. Their clear ringing peals seemed to revive him and with the shaking now under some kind of control Curé Pascal got to his feet, pushed away from the desk and like a man on a tightrope steered himself across the room to a high, glass-fronted cabinet. Opening one of its
doors he reached in and pulled out a packet of cigarettes, a lighter, and a small silver disc, like a woman’s compact, that served as a portable ashtray. He slipped them into his cassock, and from a cupboard beneath the shelves he drew out a bottle of Glenfarclas 30 year old and a thick glass tumbler. Back at his desk, he poured a large measure and left the bottle uncorked. There’d be a second and a third, he reckoned, lighting up a cigarette, before he was done.

  And as he smoked and drank, he tried to work out who had sent those photos.

  The person who had taken them in the first place? All those years ago.

  Or someone else?

  Someone from his past?

  Or from his present?

  One name sprang to mind. Massanet, the Curé from Saint-Sulpice, who had also applied for the Curia post. Pascal Dominici wouldn’t have put it past him. A weaselly individual with small greedy eyes and a tight thin mouth. The man didn’t drink, didn’t smoke. The two of them had never got on …

  But how had he got hold of those photos? And after all this time.

  Not that it mattered any more. It was all over. Massanet was a certainty now. Nothing he could do to change that. Except pour another shot of Glenfarclas, light another cigarette and weigh up his options.

  It didn’t take Curé Pascal Dominici long to realise that he didn’t have any.

  Or rather, just the one.

  An hour later, at ten thirty that morning, the Curé’s secretary knocked at the door and waited for a response. He was carrying a hand-delivered letter from the Bénézet Palace, a summons from the Archbishop’s office, his seal stamped into a puddle of blue wax on the back of the envelope. When no answer was forthcoming, the secretary knocked again and reached for the doorhandle.

  He had closed the door behind him and was three steps into the room before he smelled the cigarette smoke and saw the whisky bottle on the desk. The next thing he registered was an overturned chair and Curé Pascal Dominici dangling above it, a pair of pointed black shoes peeping from beneath his cassock.

  13

  IT HAD TAKEN Jacquot nearly thirty minutes to hobble round the quay, increasing the weight and pressure on his left leg and hip, just as the physio had instructed, and using his walking stick for just the last twenty metres, when he was brought up short by a green light on Quai des Belges and had to wait at the kerb for passing traffic.

  Despite the time it had taken him to make the journey, Jacquot managed to arrive early enough at Café Samaritaine on the corner of rue République to find his favourite table unoccupied. With a grateful gasp, he pulled out a chair and settled himself carefully on it, pleased to note that the pulsing ache in his hip and the back of his thigh – a few centimetres below the crease where buttock properly becomes leg – had started to ease by the time the waiter returned with his petit pain, conserves and café-Calva.

  Jacquot loved the Café Samaritaine. There were plenty of cheaper places in Marseilles to order up a café-Calva breakfast but none that offered such a sunny, bustling view: the quays, the traffic, the apartment blocks on the far side of the harbour, still in shadow, rising up like a stone pedestal beneath Marseilles’ hilltop Madonna, the golden Dame de la Garde. Four years back, when he’d been working homicide on rue de l’Évêché, the Sam had been a regular stop. He’d sit here at this same table working through a case, a list of suspects, or simply observing the other customers, watching the little dramas that played out at surrounding tables: shop girls whispering about their previous night’s activities; single ladies of a certain age feeding their poodles pampering titbits under the table; tourists with suitcases and backpacks sorting through their small change or tickets or hotel reservations; and always lovers, or soon to be lovers, or lovers who’d moved on but were still friends, leaning over their tables, fingers touching, oblivious to everything around them. All life was here, he thought. You just had to look around and take it in: the whispered bustle of the café and, out on the pavement, the daily ebb and flow of people passing by, with their briefcases and shopping bags and prams and dogs, brisk or dawdling, old and young, all of them heading somewhere – things to do, people to meet.

  Jacquot liked bars, too. Much the same kind of shifting dynamic and lay-out as a café – all the comings and goings. Yet somehow darker, more conspiratorial: the whispering barman, the dodgy businessman with his tie pulled loose, the local soak with his demi of beer or petit jaune, and after dark the working girls and the pimps and the thugs, night-time people with an altogether different agenda.

  And whether it was here in Marseilles or up-country in Cavaillon, Jacquot always had his tables préférées. At Samaritaine it was out on the terrace, where he now sat, in the left-hand corner, under the awning, with his back to the wall. At Café de la Paix on Sadi-Carnot, the table was inside, in the small corner alcove, two steps from the front door where you could keep an eye on the street and every table in the room without moving your head. At La Tasse, it was the rickety tin table on the pavement unless it was raining when he took the table inside by the newspaper rack, or at Aux Coqs the table furthest away from the hiss and rattle of the ancient Gaggia.

  As for bars, it was usually a favourite stool, elbows on the zinc, always on the corner where it turned towards the cigarette machine or coat-rack, never with his back to the door, unless there was a mirror he could keep an eye on. Théo’s on rue Delion in Le Panier if he wanted a quiet word with someone, or Chinou in the fifth arrondissement where the lawyers gathered, or Mer Rouge if he wanted to know what the hacks from La Provence were talking about, or, back in Cavaillon, at Fin de Siècle, first booth on the right, behind the front door.

  But this morning Jacquot wasn’t thinking about any ongoing investigation, or what the journalists or lawyers or informants were talking about. He was on sick leave, recovering from wounds received in the line of duty. Four months off. Another three to run. Instead he was thinking about the previous day. His lunch with Salette, his meeting with Constance, and the impossibility, the sheer implausibility, of his suddenly owning a boat, with a berth on the Vieux Port. And for nothing.

  As he sat there, watching the sun glance through his glass of Calva, he wondered whether Philo would have been pleased with Salette’s choice of owner for the boat. Jacquot certainly hoped so. Because he knew without a shadow of a doubt that he was going to keep Constance, and love her, just as Philo would have wanted. And when the time came to pass her on, he’d do just the same. Give her to someone who’d love her too. His son? His daughter?

  But for now, there was work to be done. Some catching up to do. Supplies for life afloat. Some fresh paint and varnish, some oil for the lamps, batteries for the torch, washing-up liquid, brass polish … he’d need to write a list, call in at the chandlers again, at the supermarché on Sainte-Catherine.

  He finished off his Calva and checked the bill, smiling to himself as he slid a couple of notes under the empty glass. Twenty-four hours earlier, back in the Lubéron, he’d spent a lonely breakfast thinking of Claudine. Now there was another woman in his life, and he had time on his hands to knock her into shape. He couldn’t think of a better way to spend it.

  14

  FIFTY KILOMETRES ALONG the coast, in Toulon’s Mourillon Gardens, René Duclos, head of the Famille Duclos, let out the extendable dog lead and continued on his slow, shuffling way. A dozen steps behind him his poodle bitch, Salome, settled her haunches on the sidewalk and hunched her back. She lifted her snout, flared her split black nostrils, and her thin white woolly body seemed to stiffen and shiver.

  When he got to the full extent of the lead, Duclos turned and flipped it, sending an irritable snap rippling down its length.

  ‘Alors. C’est tout. Viens,’ said the old man.

  With a delicate shake and bound, the little poodle hurried up to him. Ten metres behind them, Duclos’ minder, Beni, bent down with a carrier-bag glove and scooped up what the poodle had left him.

  Duclos was not a man who lost his temper easily, but this morning he wa
s angry. Very, very angry indeed. The envelope had arrived in the morning’s mail, clearly sent by some smart-arse shit-stirrer, and the photo and photocopied document it contained spoke for themselves. Most eloquently.

  A long shot of Jean Garnolle, hailing a taxi. Fanning his hat in the air like he always did, to attract the driver’s attention. The bald head, the big ears. Unmistakable. His friend, his advisor, the only man Duclos had ever really trusted. Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing remarkable.

  What was remarkable was the photocopied document that came with the photograph. A trading receipt made out in Garnolle’s name dated 13 February 1973. The letterhead on the receipt a finely scripted copperplate, elegantly and expensively printed by the look of it. The address, Bahnhoffstrasse, Zurich, Switzerland. Telephone numbers, fax numbers, and the name Jéromes Frères, Négotiants Suisses. With the single word ‘Gold’ in brackets beside it.

  The receipt had been delivered to Garnolle’s old address in Toulon, before he moved to Marseilles, confirming the sale of 12.267 kilogrammes of 24-carat fine gold. A single bar. Delivery Standard. Assayed at 999.9/1000. Bearing the legend Banque Nationale d’Algérie. The agreed price of three hundred and fifty French francs per troy ounce less non-resident tax, handling fees and commissions. Just that one bar and his old friend Garnolle was a little over a hundred thousand francs richer.

  A lot of money back then.

  Just the one bar.

  But how many more might have been traded, in the days and weeks and years that followed? Duclos wondered. How many more bars for which there were no receipts? From Jéromes Frères or some other unscrupulous négotiant in gold bullion. The transactions spread around over time, between dealers. Garnolle had always been a cautious man.