Death on the Marais

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

After giving Detective Bertrand a potted version of his own investigation so that he could complete an outline report for his superiors, Rocco made his way back to Poissons, his mind in a whirl. So far, he had a puzzle of several disjointed parts, and no signs of being able to connect them with any degree of logic. He ticked them off in his mind. A young woman is murdered in a tiny rural village, her death quickly glossed over by her father, a rich industrialist and former Resistance hero. Living in the same village is a scrap man who appears to have covertly taken over the phone of a previous subscriber, for reasons not yet clear. According to a wartime photographer, the same man was part of a Resistance group, and was pictured alongside a French SOE agent. That agent is now the same highly placed industrialist and war hero… and father of the dead woman. Yet the agent and the rest of the Resistance group were allegedly wiped out by the Germans.

And now the photographer linking the two men had been murdered.

Rocco wondered if Poudric had realised the identity of the SOE man and talked to someone he should not have.

He was accustomed to having to shuffle leads like cards in a pack; it came with the job and required a degree of objectivity and creative thought which he mostly enjoyed. But so far in his career, gang murders apart, the majority of his cases had involved people known to one another and often in close proximity in their local community, which made connecting the links relatively simple. This one, however, not only stretched across distance and time, but social levels, too.

He pulled up along a straight stretch of deserted road. He felt a headache coming on. A run of fields looped off into the distance, bare and empty of movement. He turned off the engine and lowered the window, allowing a breeze and a few crows in a nearby spinney to keep him company.

He got out and walked away from the car, hands thrust into his pockets while trying to make sense of it all. Clearly Didier Marthe knew Philippe Berbier. And the phone number in the Felix Faure flat just as clearly linked Didier with Berbier’s daughter, Nathalie. Yet logic said they could not have been further apart, by all the factors of birth, wealth and social backgrounds, as well as the generation gap and the kind of fashionable circles the young woman had moved in.

He stopped and took out his gun. The MAB felt warm and comfortable, nestling in his hand with solid familiarity. He spotted a make-do scarecrow standing in a sugar beet field fifty yards away. It was a simple cross of sticks wearing a threadbare waistcoat and a holed trilby, and served little useful purpose if the casual proximity of the crows was any indication.

Rocco took aim. It was too far for anything sophisticated, but he took a deep breath, released it slowly, then squeezed the trigger in a double tap followed by a single. The old hat snapped off at a wild angle and the sticks holding it exploded in pieces. The crows protested loudly, hauling themselves scrappily into the sky as the gunshots rolled away across the fields. Lucky, he decided pragmatically. Against regulations, too; Massin would have his balls if he knew. But it had served to release the tension and frustration he was feeling.

And in spite of the lack of clarity about who knew whom, he was a step closer than he had been earlier that day. He had another connection, another link in the chain.

He pocketed the gun and walked back to the car.

Rocco was dreaming, running through a cold, grim marshland, tendrils of mist hanging around his face, strangely immobile and vertical like the hanging fronds of exotic vegetation. He was trying to reach the other side, pushing desperately with his feet but going nowhere, the ground as sticky as glue. A bell was ringing, insistent and piercing. Did that mean his time was running out and the exercise was nearly over?

He snapped awake, mouth gummy and sour. That bloody phone again. He groped in the dark and found it, snatching it to his ear.

‘Inspector Rocco?’ It was a young woman’s voice crackling down the line. Distant, but clear enough. ‘It’s Sophie Richert.’

‘Jesus. One moment.’ He struggled out of bed and switched on the light, shook his head to clear away the last fragments of sleep. He took a glass of water off the table and swallowed a mouthful. It tasted tepid and gritty, metallic. He sat down, composing his thoughts. He’d convinced himself that he would never hear from Sophie Richert again, not outside the fashion pages of some magazine, anyway. He said calmly, ‘My apologies. Are you back in Paris?’

‘No. New York. Sorry — were you asleep? I haven’t got used to the time difference yet.’

‘No matter. What can I do for you?’

‘I have to talk to you… there are things I need to say.’ She stopped as if suddenly unsure.

‘That’s good. But why now and not earlier?’

‘Because it’s safer. From here, I mean. I hope you understand.’

‘I see. Go ahead.’

‘I didn’t want to say before, but Nathalie… she was thought of as a poor little rich girl; her father a war hero and a rich businessman, connected to diplomats, all that.’ She hesitated, and for a moment Rocco thought he’d lost her, that her nerves had got the better of her. Then she continued. ‘It wasn’t like that.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘She wasn’t rich. Her father was, but he never gave her anything. Her mother died several years ago, and that tore her apart. Her grandmother was still around, but all she really cared about was her son. Everything Nat had, she earned herself. She wanted to be independent… to be her own person, you know?’

‘I understand.’

There was a choking sound. ‘She should not be dismissed as just a

… a spoilt girl who got into trouble. That’s so unfair.’

‘I agree, it is.’ Rocco wondered where this was going. An attack of the guilts for running out after her friend’s death, perhaps? Then he recalled Viviane saying that Nathalie’s father paid her rent. ‘She had the flat, of course.’

‘That was just for show. He wanted to be seen as generous and caring… but it was to keep Nathalie under his thumb. Beholden to him. They didn’t get on.’

‘Why not?’

There was a long pause.

‘Sophie?’ Rocco prompted her.

‘She knew things.’

The line pinged with static.

‘What sort of things?’

‘Stuff about how her father made his money… how he managed to become rich and powerful at a time when so many others had lost everything.’

‘Did she give you any details?’

‘No. She said it was too dangerous to talk about. She mentioned it once when she got drunk, after she found out she was pregnant. She was so unhappy… I think it very nearly all came out. But something stopped her.’ Sophie cleared her throat as if she had found this difficult. ‘The only thing Nathalie ever said was that for a man who started out as a simple army captain, her father managed to end up owning lots of land. He acquired it just after the war, when he began buying things.’

‘Things?’

‘I think she meant companies damaged by the war. “Corporate rescue”, she said he called it, like it was heroic or something.’

Or profiteering, as it’s called in some parts, thought Rocco cynically. ‘Go on.’

‘She said that, in spite of him being rich, some of the land he had acquired in his business deals was useless. He was always moaning about how he’d been cheated because there was nothing he could do to profit from it.’

‘Why useless?’ Any land, Rocco thought, was worth something. Especially if you didn’t have any to begin with. It gave most people a feeling that they belonged somewhere. No doubt to an industrialist like Berbier, however, different rules applied.

‘She said some of it was mountainous and good only for a few sheep. The rest was all lakes and marshland.’

Marshland.

Rocco felt a cold chill go through him. ‘Where was this marshland?’

‘Somewhere in the north, I’m not sure. I think she was talking about where she… where it happened. North and boring, she reckoned. All beetroot and cabbages and people scratching a living in the fields. I don’t think she meant that how it came out; she was actually a very nice person.’

Rocco had never met Nathalie Berbier, but in his experience, breeding came through at times of great stress. And sometimes that breeding was revealed as an ugly truth. Still, that was all over now; a pattern was beginning to emerge. The only question was, would it lead anywhere? A distant father-daughter relationship, parental meanness, a soured and suspicious atmosphere based on resentment. Cue almost any family in the land. It didn’t amount to a crime.

Then Sophie spoke again, her voice dull. ‘I told you Nathalie hated the man Broute.’

‘Yes.’

‘She hated her father more.’