The Dying Minutes Page 7

  And thanks to that stamp – Banque Nationale d’Algérie – René Duclos knew exactly where that gold bar had come from. How many bars there had been.

  And he now knew that Garnolle must have been involved.

  Somehow. Somewhere along the line.

  But his friend had never said a word about it. Not a fucking word. Kept the Famille Duclos right out of the loop. The first he, Duclos, had heard about it was on the news the morning after the heist. Three security trucks, seventy-five bars in each. Two picked up fully loaded, the third … empty. A ton of gold missing. The newspaper, Le Figaro, had even printed a picture of what a ton looked like. The bars were stacked high in a metal cage. On a pallet. That much fucking gold.

  And Garnolle had known about it.

  And said nothing.

  ‘The fucking two-faced, cheating, bastard traitor,’ whispered Duclos through gritted teeth. A con-salaud of all cons-salauds.

  As he passed beneath the slanting shade of the Mourillon Gardens’ palms that Saturday morning, with Salome skipping about his heels, it was that sense of betrayal, even more than the gold, which really bothered René Duclos, the fact that his old friend had fucked his arse.

  And he, René Duclos, hadn’t known.

  René Duclos had been taken for a fool, and had played the part to perfection.

  Duclos felt another tug as Salome paused to sniff at the base of a prettily-trimmed palmetto. Without turning he pulled at the lead, hard enough to elicit a yelp in return and hear the skitter of the dog’s claws on the polished stones.

  15

  BERNARD SUCHET, OWNER, chairman and chief executive of Transports Suchet International, put down the newspaper and sighed. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Murder in the street. In broad daylight. A savage, fatal beating, Marseilles-style, and hang the consequences. Arab or Jew, Muslim or Christian, communist or conservative, black, white or yellow, Marseilles never changed. Always ready with its fists and its guns and its knives to settle a score whenever a score needed settling. Which was what had happened on rue Guillot just the day before, according to a stop-press paragraph, bottom-right on the front page of La Provence. A fatal assault. One man dead, another man arrested.

  Normally Suchet would have turned to the business pages but this particular stop-press item had caught his eye. A familiar name, the man who had died. Jean Grandet, head of Customs at La Joliette. There was a photo accompanying the piece, but Suchet didn’t recognise the face. Just knew the name from somewhere. For a minute or two he racked his brains – Grandet, Customs. Grandet, Customs. And then he had it. Of course … Grandet! That thieving bastard down in Toulon a few years back. Twice this Grandet character had delayed quayside loading and unloading for TSI rigs. No reason; he’d just pulled them over. Spot searches. Documents check. Other firms had been brought in too, but most of the rigs were TSI rigs. That’s what Suchet’s chief of operations had reported, adding that said bastard Grandet would be happy to ease the inconvenience on receipt of fifty thousand francs. And on two separate occasions Suchet had nodded it through and TSI had paid the bribe. They’d been hit again when Grandet moved to Marseilles, more rigs pulled over, further ‘considerations’ put his way. But now, it appeared, the man was dead. Tant pis. Tough shit. What goes round comes round, mused Suchet.

  Of course, Grandet was not alone in his grafting. Everyone did it, one way or another. It was the way business worked; the way Marseilles worked. And in his time he had done his fair share, thought Suchet, getting up from his desk and going to a window. He was in his private office, a newly refurbished suite of rooms on the sixth floor of an eighteenth-century townhouse on rue Grignan in Marseilles’ prestigious seventh arrondissement, so high that his view of the street was seriously diminished. All he could really see were the top floors of the buildings opposite and a tiled and leaded roofscape that stretched as far as the rising slopes of Le Panier. He wasn’t high enough to see the sea, but he knew that if he opened a window he’d be able to smell it.

  Now, looking towards those distant slopes and the unseen quays beyond them, Suchet remembered the days when he had crossed the line. A little more stylishly, a little more professionally than Grandet, he hoped, but still a crossing of the line. Three or four years of it, back end of the sixties and early seventies when he was starting out, with a young family to support. It was scary and tough, but exciting too. That pump in the balls you’d get when a game was going down. The thrill of it. And when it was over, watch out whatever girl happened along! Stiff as a flagpole, he’d be; bursting for it. But he had changed. He might have been down there once, with blood on his hands, but not now. Now he was legit, more than twenty years on the straight and narrow, just that horseshoe-shaped scar across the top of his broken nose to remind him of those distant times, and a fading memory of the bent cop who’d given it to him.

  There was a tap at the door and Monique, his senior assistant, came in. She was in her fifties, elegantly turned out, and a formidable barrier between him and the outside world. She carried a cream-coloured envelope in her hand.

  ‘This just arrived,’ she told him, placing the envelope on his desk. ‘The courier said it was urgent. And for your eyes only.’

  ‘Merci, Monique,’ he said, coming back to the desk, dropping into his chair.

  ‘And Bruno is waiting downstairs. Your flight to Paris …?’

  The flight to Paris. A weekend of meetings. Another big step for TSI. This time next week, all being well …

  Suchet reached for the envelope, his name and address hand-written in slanting capital letters. But not a familiar hand.

  ‘Tell Bruno I’ll be down in a moment,’ he said, and as Monique turned for the door Suchet slit open the top of the envelope and tipped out its contents.

  16

  AFTER THE LATE-NIGHT meeting with Polineaux, Didier Lacombe had returned to the casino in Beaulieu in an attempt to recoup his earlier losses. Didier was not a man who liked to lose – money, games, women, anything – and the hundred thousand francs he’d wagered between a ‘split’ pair of nineteen and twenty at the baccarat table had seemed a certainty … until the croupier slid a two and a five of hearts from the shoe to add to his three of clubs, six of spades and five of diamonds. Vingt-et-un. Merde. A hundred thousand he could ill afford to lose.

  By the time Didier made it back to the casino’s salle privée, however, the croupier with the magic numbers had been replaced by a woman. And Didier didn’t like playing against women. You might take them to bed with you, you might use and abuse them, but you never played games of chance with them. Even if they looked like the replacement croupier, tall and lean and stripper pretty, with a large swell of something luscious hidden away beneath her tightly buttoned white shirt and accentuated by the equally tight lines of her black waistcoat. Nothing more than a clever ruse to divert attention from the cards, to distract the players. Didier was no fool, and distractions were for another place and time.

  Since there was only the one baccarat table in the room, he settled at the petite roule with its mahogany wheel, cherrywood track and numbered ivory slots, splitting his remaining chips between the seven and eight, and the Rouge and Impair. When the tiny ivory ball accommodated these various wagers, he placed fifty thousand each on Impair and Noir and left his chips – and subsequent winnings – in the same positions for two further spins. When he left the casino an hour later, he was three hundred thousand up on the night, fifty thousand of which he had paid in to the casino account of a certain Madame de Ternay. Thirty minutes after returning to his apartment in Nice’s old town, one of de Ternay’s girls was fitting a shiny, high-heeled red Louboutin between Didier’s naked thighs and asking him to take off her stocking.

  The girl had stayed two hours and left with another ten thousand francs for her time and her … engaging expertise. Now Didier lay in his bed, watching the TV morning news and wondering how best to initiate the enquiries required of him by his boss the night before.

 
The first place to start – the only place to start, he decided – was Baumettes. A prison visit with Pisco, one of Polineaux’s boys serving a three-year stint for receiving. Pisco would find out all there was to know about Lombard, if he didn’t know it already, which would leave Didier free to work out how best to deal with Monsieur Bernard Suchet.

  If the gold was out there somewhere, Didier was going to find it.

  And if he did, and if there was any of it left after all this time, who was to say the old man need ever know about it?

  17

  THE FOLLOWING MONDAY, Isabelle Cassier peeled off the A7 autoroute, rattled across the reedy bed of the Durance river and drove into Cavaillon. It was four years since she’d last made the journey here from Marseilles and when she reached the centre of town, she turned to the left, down Cours Bournissac. The street hadn’t changed: the Vietnamese restaurant with its pink paper lanterns strung up in the window; the pâtisserie, Auzet’s, with its mouthwatering confections; and the pavement fruit stall under its striped awning, always ripe with the sweet smell of melons. Slowing down she leaned over the wheel and looked up at the rooftops, between the branches of the plane trees, until she spotted the three mansard windows set in a tilting row, and, behind them, the one-bedroomed loft apartment she had found for Daniel Jacquot and where she had spent every weekend with him for three long months.

  But she didn’t stop. She carried on through place Tourel and up Sadi-Carnot, turning into police headquarters a hundred metres short of the traffic lights and parking in the shade.

  ‘Isabelle Cassier, for Daniel Jacquot,’ she told the desk sergeant, flipping open her wallet to show her badge.

  ‘Alors, he isn’t here, Chief Inspector. On sick leave, he is.’

  ‘I know that,’ replied Isabelle. ‘What I want to know is where can I find him? His home?’

  ‘Ah … that would be the millhouse. Out on the Apt road. A left past the turning for Goult and Saint-Pantaléon. But I don’t think he’s there.’

  ‘Any idea where he might be?’

  The desk sergeant spread his hands. ‘Would you like to leave a message?’ he offered. ‘I’ll see he gets it.’

  ‘No. No message. I’ll leave a note at the millhouse instead. Thank you.’ And with that, Isabelle Cassier returned to her car and followed the sergeant’s directions, out of town, taking the road for Apt. Twenty minutes later, at the top of a steep country lane that petered out into a stony farm track, she pulled in through the gates of the millhouse and drew to a halt under the shade of a drooping willow. She switched off the engine, pushed open the door and stepped from the car’s air-conditioned interior into a blaze of late-summer, mid-morning heat, the still, breathless air filled with the battering static of insects.

  Leaving her bag and badge in the car she went to the front door, a hefty piece of timber blanched to a grainy grey, studded with blackened nail heads and hung on four banded iron hinges. She rang the bell but knew the sergeant was right; the ground floor shutters were open but all the windows she could see, on both floors, were closed, no sound from within – no radios, no voices, no creak of floorboards or approaching footsteps in answer to the bell.

  She rang again, waited a few moments then stepped away from the door and set off around the side of the house. Maybe there was someone in the back, someone who hadn’t heard the car or the doorbell; she knew it was unlikely, but it gave her an excuse to poke around, take a look, see where Daniel had ended up.

  It didn’t take her long to discover that her old lover had done well for himself. Set on a stretch of level ground half-way up a steep slope of land and canopied by a belt of holm oak, willow and cypress, the millhouse was everything that a Provençal dwelling should be: centuries old with a low pantiled roof, stone-collared windows, and planked shutters painted the palest blue. At a set of French doors she stepped close to the glass, held up her hand to cut the reflection and peered inside. Fat, plump sofas, bookshelves, paintings, an enormous stone hearth leading up to a vaulted ceiling, and in a shadowy corner what looked like the original wheels and gearing for the millhouse. Lived in certainly, a little worn maybe, but beautifully and stylishly renovated – the kind of house that, if it came up for sale, would take its own page in the property magazines. And the asking price? Isabelle wondered. Eight million francs? Ten? Maybe more.

  And flowers everywhere, the garden and pathway bordered with terracotta pots and tubs and stone urns and chiselled troughs draped with blossoms – scarlet, pink, blue and white. Not the kind of display she’d expect to find after such a long, hot summer. But then this was a millhouse, probably built near some ancient spring – a likelihood confirmed when Isabelle came round the back of the house: a lawn as green as new moss, banks of flowering shrubs along the borders and a vegetable patch thick with growth sloping up to the trees that edged the property.

  And a familiar smell. Sweet, sun-warmed and heady. Isabelle walked along the side of the vegetable patch, until she found what she was looking for. Three thickly stemmed plants more than two metres high, the weight of their swollen heads bending the branches. She reached out a hand, fingered the tight, sticky buds. Ready for harvest. Same old Daniel, she thought with a fond smile. So some things hadn’t changed.

  From the vegetable patch Isabelle strolled back to the house, noted the swimming pool off to her left, two hammocks strung out in a copse of trees, and stepped up on to the terrace. It was enclosed on three wisteria–clad sides by the house, with a firepit and spit grill in its centre, a pair of wickerwork recliners and an outside cuisine d’été furnished with a long oak table and a dozen canvas-backed chairs. She pulled one out and sat herself down, looking across the terrace to the garden. She could see him there, cooking at the firepit or smoking one of his spliffs in the hammock, dressed in his signature shorts, T-shirt and battered espadrilles – big and strong and lumbering, yet always calm and gentle – and she wondered about the woman he lived with. A painter or sculptor, early forties according to the boys in the squad. A divorcée who’d lived there alone until Daniel turned up. As far as Isabelle had been able to establish they’d been together a few years but had yet to marry, their affair probably starting soon after she and Daniel had split up.

  Isabelle sighed, took one last look around the terrace then pushed away from the table, walked back to her car, trailing her fingers along the stonework.

  Sooner or later she’d find him.

  Sooner or later she’d see him again.

  Because she had to.

  There were questions that needed to be asked.

  And Daniel Jacquot was the man who might know the answers.

  18

  IT HAD BEEN a hellish few days. When Suchet landed at Marignane airport on Tuesday evening he should have been thrilled at the way everything had worked out during his meetings with the bankers and the brokers and the lawyers in his suite at the Plaza Athenée: a new share issue, more funds, and a long anticipated, meticulously-planned expansion into eastern Europe. With its workforce in excess of four thousand in France alone, a growing fleet of articulated Scania and Route-King lorries, twenty-six garages and workshops around the country to service that fleet, and nearly a million square metres of temperature-controlled warehousing shared between twelve regional depots, TSI was one of the biggest names in Europe’s road haulage market. And now it was set to be bigger still. The biggest.

  Yet through it all – the dealing and negotiation and fine-tuning that had led to the final, satisfying thumbs-up – all he’d been able to think of was the cream-coloured envelope that had landed on his desk the previous week.

  Bernard Suchet had come a long way from his 1966 two-seater Peugeot transporter running small loads – no questions asked – at competitive prices between La Pomme and the quays of La Joliette. Hard work, good luck and a little bending of the rules early on had seen him become a very rich man, with a seventeenth-century bastide in the countryside outside Aix, a six-bedroom chalet on the Salvette ridge in Hauts des Aigle
s, and a thirty-metre Pegasus cruiser berthed in Saint-Tropez, which his wife and daughter were currently using as a base for expensive shopping jaunts. In six weeks his daughter was marrying the son of a Minister in the Chirac government, and life, and business, looked set to become a whole lot more interesting.

  But now, suddenly, all of it was in jeopardy following the arrival of that envelope marked Private and Confidential, underlined twice, an envelope that contained nothing more than a parking ticket and a shell casing in a Zip-lok baggy. At first the two items had made no sense. But Suchet’s puzzlement had lasted no more than seconds.

  After all this time, his past had come back to haunt him.

  When everything in his life was about to come together.

  Just that one slip. That one mistake.

  Taking the wrong job, and paying for it big time when that fucking cop came after him.

  And a single shell casing and grubby ticket stub were enough to bring it all back.

  No note. Nothing.

  Didn’t really need anything else.

  Sooner or later he’d get a phone call, or another Private and Confidential envelope, outlining what would happen if the shell casing’s three missing companions were to fall into the wrong hands, and what it would cost to stop that happening.

  And the call would come from Pierre-Louis Lombard. That slimy, two-faced, double-dealing little con with his duck-arse hair and swivelling eyes.

  Even behind bars the bastard was still a threat.