Death on the Marais

CHAPTER ONE

To Inspector Lucas Rocco, the gathering in the churchyard looked too casual to be a riot, too small to be a funeral. Newly exiled from his home base in the Clichy-Nanterre district of western Paris under Interior Ministry orders, and assigned to the village of Poissons-les-Marais, in Picardie, north-west France, it was a welcome distraction. He turned off the car radio, killing in mid-sentence Johnny Hallyday, the current singing heart-throb de choix, and left his Citroen Traction outside the local cafe to find out what was commanding such a gathering in this flyspeck of a place.

‘It’s a bomb, I tell you.’ A compact, nut-brown man in a greasy old bush hat was speaking round a spit-stained Gitanes with the assurance of one who knew about such things. The focus of everyone’s attention was a large, cylindrical object lying in a shallow depression in the chalky soil next to the gravelled pathway. Tapping the rusted metal casing with the toe of his boot brought a sharp intake of breath among the crowd, who all stepped back a pace.

‘Probably from the Great War,’ said a phlegmatic woman in a black headscarf and chequered apron. She stood hugging an armful of leeks to her ample bosom like a character from an old painting. ‘It looks old enough.’

‘No way,’ Bush-hat disagreed. ‘Those little kites wouldn’t have been able to lift anything this big.’

‘Doesn’t look that much to me,’ muttered an old man in traditional bleus — the uniform jacket and baggy trousers of the working man in rural Picardie. In spite of the warm weather, the trousers were tucked into a pair of enormous rubber boots, the tops reaching his knees.

Bush-hat lifted an eyebrow, assured of his audience’s attention. ‘You think? A bomb this big would take out an area about three hundred metres in radius, no problem.’

Since three hundred metres was roughly the length and width of the village, a remote spot too small and insignificant to even figure on the map of northern France, and they were standing right in the centre, it caused the crowd to move back another respectful, but entirely useless, three paces.

Rocco found himself standing next to a heavy-set man in a green vest and thick corduroys. The man turned and nodded affably.

‘Did he say bomb?’ Rocco wasn’t yet used to the accent in this part of the country, although he’d understood most of what was said.

‘That he did,’ the man replied. He had a deep, almost melancholy voice. ‘Don’t worry: it’s what passes for excitement in these parts. You the inspector?’

‘I am.’ Rocco was surprised: news had travelled faster than he’d expected. ‘Lucas Rocco. How did you know?’

The man thrust out a calloused hand, which Rocco shook. ‘Lamotte. Claude will do. I know lots of things. Also,’ he nodded back towards the Traction, ‘the big black cop machine is a bit of a giveaway.’ He turned and called, ‘Hey, everyone — it’s our resident flic.’ He smiled shyly at Rocco. ‘No disrespect; better out than in, as they say.’

‘None taken.’ Rocco waited as the crowd turned to stare at him. Their reactions were mixed. He reckoned suspicion — a natural response to policemen everywhere, even among policemen — won out by a long nose, with surprise and fleeting interest not far behind. He let it wash over him. At just over two metres in height and built like a useful prop forward, he’d long given up on the idea of blending in anywhere among normal society. Crims, prizefighters and soldiers, OK; others, forget it. ‘I’ve been called worse.’

‘Not yet, you haven’t.’ Claude gave Rocco another inspection, eyes dwelling on the heavy shoes, the broad shoulders and the angular, powerful face topped by a scrub of black hair. ‘Stick around, though, and you might.’

‘They don’t like the police?’

‘They don’t like anyone. Comes of living in a rural shithole, ignored by everyone, including our esteemed general.’ He spoke with quiet cynicism, but if he was worried about causing offence, he didn’t show it.

Rocco shrugged. Charles de Gaulle, soldier and current president of the Fifth Republic, lauded and loathed in fairly equal measures, was a man he rarely thought about. ‘I think he’s got other things on his mind at the moment.’

‘The Algerian thing?’ Claude nodded sombrely. ‘That’s all done and dusted, bar the shouting. Up to them, now.’ As if sensing Rocco’s lack of interest in the political desires of the once French-held North African territory, now just a year on from independence, he nodded at a tall, skeletal character standing to one side. ‘Monsieur Thierry over there,’ he said, returning to the matter in hand, ‘looks after the churchyard. It’s his way of getting a free pass into Heaven. He found the bomb while returfing. Looks a big bugger.’

Rocco had seen bigger in Indochina, but scrubbed that mental picture. Best not go there; barely ten years ago, it was still too recent to forget and offered only dark shadows waiting to greet him.

Besides, it didn’t look much like any bomb he’d ever seen.

‘Who’s the expert?’ Bush-hat was now bending and sniffing noisily at the object like a terrier inspecting a rat hole, dribbling cigarette ash all over it. Small and brown as a nut, the man looked as hard as the soil he was standing on, as much a product of the land as the crops in the fields.

‘Didier Marthe. He’s a scrap man. Anything worth selling, he’ll break it down and flog it. He spends all day hitting things with a big hammer.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘I think the vibration affected him over the years.’

Didier, Rocco noticed, was missing the thumb and first two fingers of his left hand, and his face looked shiny on one side.

‘Looks like he suffered for his art.’

Claude laughed. ‘He hit a grenade a little too enthusiastically one day. It was a dud, but still had enough life in it to stop him playing the accordion.’

‘Now there’s a blessing.’ Lucas paused, did a double take. ‘He hit a live grenade?’ It made him wonder if there was, after all, some truth to the slanderous rumours about country folk circulated among his former colleagues, who rarely, if ever, ventured outside the city limits. ‘Tell me you’re kidding.’

‘Unbelievable, but true. World War Two, British, I think it was. He doesn’t usually bother with them — they’re too small and not worth the effort. He prefers artillery shells, the bigger the better. And bombs like this one.’

‘You make it sound like a full-time job.’

‘It is. The last big one he found was next to the school eighteen months ago. He’d just finished clearing the ground around it and went to get some lifting gear when it blew up. Knocked him flat on his arse and blew the roof off the schoolhouse. Luckily, the kids were on holiday.’

‘For him, too.’

‘Not the way he saw it. All that metal, fragmented to hell; he got totally tanked and cried for three whole days.’

Rocco grunted. No wonder the scrap man was so interested in this find. Large, oblong and rounded, it had a hefty hexagon nut at the end protruding from the ground. The casing was covered in a thick scale of rust, no doubt through being buried in the chalky soil of the Poissons-les-Marais churchyard with only the ancient village dead for company. Quite how such a monster had lain overlooked for so long was a mystery, although he knew these things worked their way to the surface from time to time, like pebbles in the garden.

‘Lucas Rocco,’ murmured Claude, stretching out the words and pronouncing Lucas the American way, with the ‘s’. ‘You’re not from these parts, are you?’

‘I’m relieved you can tell.’ Rocco wondered how long the dissection would go on for. Probably days, given the fact that so little else seemed to happen here.

‘Easy. You don’t look shifty enough.’

‘What have people here got to be shifty about?’

‘Everything. Nothing. Living and dying, mostly.’

‘I’ll bear it in mind.’

‘You’ll be looking for somewhere to doss down, I suppose?’

Rocco decided he might get to like this man — if he didn’t have to arrest him for something first.

‘I might. Are you the local psychic, or a letting agent?’

‘If I was either, I’d die of boredom. You’ve seen the cafe?’

‘I have. Not my thing.’ His recommended billet above the bar-tabac, where he’d just stopped to check out the facilities, was too public, and the smell of stale beer and cigarette smoke too invasive, for his tastes; he’d lodged in too many similar fleapits over the years to look on them with affection. It was at best a stopgap until he found something better; somewhere he could call his own space while he considered what the hell he was supposed to be doing out here.

‘Go see Mme Denis, down Rue Danvillers.’ Claude tilted his head towards a lane running off at an angle from the village square. ‘Last but one on the left. She has the keys to an empty house down there. Plenty of room to park the cop machine, too.’ He grinned knowingly. ‘In your line of work, you’ll feel right at home.’

‘Why?’

‘A man was murdered there years ago.’