Death on the Rive Nord

CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

Godard was white with anger when he returned from the sawmill accompanied by several of his men, all with their weapons drawn. His jump boots were scratched and dusty and he looked as if he had been rolling in cobwebs. He slapped his cap against his leg in disgust.

‘He’s gone. There’s a rope down the far side of the building where he abseiled down. Tyre tracks indicate he had a motorbike and rider waiting. Merde!’ He kicked at a tin can with the toe of his boot. ‘We missed a trick. Sorry.’ He held out a gloved hand and showed Rocco two brass shell casings. ‘He left these behind.’

‘He knew what he was doing. They won’t lead anywhere.’ Rocco sipped water from a bottle and spat it out, then stood still while a uniformed officer wiped blood off his face with a piece of damp cloth. ‘He waited to see what was going to happen, then took them out.’

Massin appeared, scowling at Farek’s body lying nearby and stepping round the spray pattern of blood across the ground.

‘You seem remarkably calm, Inspector, considering you were standing right next to him when he was shot. How can you be sure you weren’t the target?’

‘Because he was too good.’ He looked across at the Cafe Emile, where a second, larger body was lying close by the front door. Bouhassa had tried to run for cover the moment he’d heard the first shot. But a second bullet had caught up with him. ‘Two shots, two clean kills. One of them a head shot on the move.’

Godard nodded and spat dust to one side. ‘A professional.’

Massin looked unconvinced. ‘But why kill Farek?’

‘Someone wanted him silenced; to protect others or to protect their interests. That’s the usual reason.’

‘But at his level? Who could have ordered it?’

‘Most likely his brother, Lakhdar. Or one of the gangs. We’ll soon find out. The Paris gang task force will either see Lakhdar Farek emerge as the new overall boss, or everything will go back to the way it was.’

‘Pity. It would have been a major coup to get this man behind bars.’

Rocco said nothing. Massin, thinking of glory again, and his reputation in the Ministry. It would have been a coup indeed, no doubt earning him considerable kudos among the suits and senior brass who judged these things. Somehow, though, he doubted Farek would have remained inside for long. Sooner or later he would have talked his way out, cutting a deal in exchange for leniency. A man like Farek knew an awful lot of secrets.

Like those closest to him.

Rocco returned to the station after the cafe was secured and found the custody officer waiting for him. Alix was hovering in the background.

‘You said you wanted to question one of the illegals,’ the officer said. ‘We need to process him out of here.’

‘Right.’ With everything else that was happening, he’d forgotten about the man and his willingness to talk. He wasn’t sure what the worker could tell him, but as part of the investigation, he needed some corroborative evidence about what had happened on the truck. ‘Do we need an interpreter?’

‘No. His French is good.’

‘Does he have a name we can believe yet?’

The custody officer smiled. ‘Ali Dziri is the latest, but since he’s got it stencilled on his foot, we reckon that’s the real one.’

‘His foot?’

‘He claims his brother did it while he was asleep as a kid.’

Rocco signalled for Alix to follow and called Desmoulins. They followed the custody officer to a room in the basement, where the illegal worker was brought in and told to sit. He was in his late forties, grey-haired and shrunken by the elements and a hard life. He looked terrified but eager to talk in exchange for a sympathetic hearing.

‘Ali Dziri,’ said Rocco, towering over the man. ‘Is that your real name?’

Dziri nodded, eyes wide as he stared up at Rocco’s hardened gaze. Then he looked at Alix in confusion. He’d probably never seen a female cop before, Rocco guessed.

‘Better be, because if I find it’s not, you’re on the next plane back.’ Rocco dragged up a chair and sat down. God he felt tired. He needed his bed and a good night’s sleep. ‘Tell us what you know.’

Dziri talked fluently and steadily, with no embellishments, for fifteen minutes. Rocco listened carefully and nodded when he finally stopped. It was enough. It matched up to what Nicole had told him.

Except for some important details.

‘Sounded genuine enough to me,’ Desmoulins commented, when the man had been taken back to his cell. ‘Hell of a thing, though, eh? What do you think?’

‘I think he was telling the truth.’

‘Me, too,’ Alix agreed, when he looked at her.

The journey had been just as Nicole had described, in all its awfulness. Cramped and lacking any degree of comfort, more suited to animals than humans. Maybe not even them. Only at the end, when they were on the truck heading north, did the details begin to differ. According to Dziri, Slimane had never brandished a knife, never mentioned being a slaughterman. He had simply been a vile bully and disrespectful of women. A bad man.

When he had slid through the darkness towards the woman, his intentions had been evident. But nobody had moved to defend her because they hadn’t had to. Slimane had attacked her… and died. In the dark, they couldn’t tell how, only that he’d stopped breathing. Maybe a heart attack — who knew? They had left him behind on the truck.

Rocco sighed, and wondered where the knife had come from. Maybe the man was an exceptional liar, and had helped Nicole but didn’t want to spoil his chances of staying in France by admitting it. Complicity in a death would automatically bring a conviction, followed by deportation. On the other hand, plenty of men carried knives, for self-defence and through habit, to make themselves look big. But he couldn’t see this one doing it. Appearances, though, as he knew well, were deceptive.

He was conscious of a lack of resolve earlier, when he’d spoken to Nicole on the old barge. He should have pressed her then for more details. So why hadn’t he? He had no clear answer.

He was wondering what to do next when Claude’s friend, Jean-Michel, appeared in the doorway, accompanied by an officer from the front desk. He looked flustered.

‘Lucas, I’m sorry. She has gone.’

‘Gone?’

‘The young woman, Nicole. The rudder got tangled in some fishing line and I had to clear it. When I got back on the boat, she and the boy had gone. We were close to the road… I’m sorry.’ He almost squirmed with the embarrassment of having allowed her to leave.

Rocco stood up. He thought he knew where she might be. He told Jean-Michel not to worry, that he would deal with it. He asked Alix to follow him out to his car. This was a visit where he might need her presence to allay the fears of any women he met.

He drove quickly to the address Nicole had given him, filling in Alix with any missing details about Nicole’s story on the way. She listened in silence until he had finished.

‘You think she could still be in danger?’

‘No. Not really.’

‘Then why are we here?’

He had to admit that he wasn’t quite sure. Closing doors, perhaps; wrapping up loose ends. He pulled up outside a row of three-storey houses broken up into apartments and they both got out.

It was beginning to get dark. A few children were in the street, oblivious to the cold and stretching out their last moments of play before bedtime. Several women watched from front doors, but there was no sign of men in cars, or anyone who looked out of place.

He knocked on the door of the house where Nicole had been staying. It opened to reveal a tall, elegant woman with smooth, black skin and a pretty face. She frowned when she saw Rocco, and looked surprised to see Alix’s uniform.

Rocco held up his badge. ‘Amina? My name’s Lucas Rocco. Is Nicole in?’

She shook her head. ‘No, sir. She came a short while ago, but she has gone now.’ Her voice was soft, the words carefully enunciated. The word ‘now’ sounded very final.

‘Can you tell me where she went?’

Another shake of her head.

Alix stepped forward and smiled. ‘Can we see her room? It’s very important.’

Amina moved aside, then led them down a passageway to the rear of the building. She opened a door. It revealed a single room with a small cooker, a table and a bed. There were no personal items, no clothing, only the hasty disarray of someone having once been here but now gone.

‘She said nothing to me for my own safety,’ Amina explained. ‘Only that she had to move on for Massi’s sake. I told her that it was all over the community that a man from her home city of Oran had been killed by police, and she said it did not concern her. But I know it did. She was relieved, I think. He was not a nice man.’

‘You knew her real name?’ said Rocco.

‘Yes. Massi told me one day. I said I would keep it as our secret, that I would not tell anyone else.’ She smiled at the memory, but her face was tinged with sadness.

‘We didn’t kill him,’ said Alix. ‘The police, I mean. You must have some idea where she might have gone.’

‘Back home, I think.’ Amina shrugged, adding, ‘She did not come here for the same reasons others do. Here was not where she felt good. It was an escape… a refuge.’

A logical assumption, thought Rocco. Back home she would be safe. No Farek, no threat, no fear. She could take up her life again. He moved around the room, checking the single wardrobe, a small cupboard and underneath the mattress on the bed. Nothing. She had left no more sign of her presence here than a sparrow.

‘She asked me to keep something,’ Amina said, watching him search. ‘I will get it.’ She disappeared along the passageway, returning moments later with something wrapped in cloth and tied with string.

Rocco took it, and knew instinctively what it was by the feel and weight. He untied the string and unwound the cloth. The object inside was black and metal, with a ribbed rubber handle and a needle-sharp point. A faint crust of brown had dried at the top of the blade beneath the guard.

‘She gave you this?’

Amina nodded, her eyes wide. ‘She said that she did not want it near Massi. That I should keep it until she asked for it.’ She gave an elegant lift of her shoulders. ‘She never did.’