Death on the Rive Nord

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

The atmosphere closed around Rocco as he became accustomed to the sounds and smells of the factory site. Looking through a narrow gap above his head, he saw bats darting to and fro, their jagged movements touching the edges of the security lights. Elsewhere he heard scurrying movements on the ground as other night creatures took opportunity where it presented itself.

He’d moved along the back of the building earlier, looking for a hiding place, and found one of the rubbish skips near the front corner covered with a plastic tarpaulin. It was almost full of cardboard packaging and offcuts of cladding used on the exterior of the factory, and he guessed it was ready for collection. It smelt of plastic and paint thinner, but gave him a good view of the gate and security cabin.

He’d slipped inside and made himself a gap, then settled down to wait and listen.

After a while he dozed, the effects of the paint thinner and the warm air of his own breathing captured beneath the tarpaulin acting as a soporific. His mind whirled with images, the way it often did when in the thick of an investigation: of Nicole, tall and smooth-skinned and strong; of Massin, hell-bent on being his nemesis; of Caspar, the tortured undercover cop; of the cold canal and the rotting hulk where men had slept, dreaming of a rescue from desperation and the chance of a better life.

He came awake as a breeze shook the plastic above his head. It made a sharp, crackling sound, amplified in the metal frame of the skip. He peered under the edge of the tarpaulin, careful not to disturb the rubbish around him. Looking towards the front, he could just see the security guard in his cabin. He looked as if he were half asleep.

Something wasn’t right, and it took him a moment to realise what it was.

All he could hear was silence. No machinery, no voices, none of the sounds of activity that he’d heard when he followed Demai along here the previous night. Just the faint hum of the heating system coming from a vent on the wall some way above his hiding place.

He climbed out of the skip and padded along the rear of the factory, stopping to test a fire door on the way. It was locked, as he’d expected. The same with the access door to the delivery bay. He bent and listened at a gap in the roller door, but there was no light, no sound.

The place was deserted.

Fifteen minutes later, he and Desmoulins were back at the station, and it was soon clear when the teams began drifting back, empty-handed and disconsolate, that the rest of the night’s activities had been a failure.

‘It’s a bloody disaster!’ Captain Canet, whose uniformed men had been the main thrust of the sweep, was prowling the corridors, quietly furious. ‘How can they all have so conveniently shut down on the same night?’ His mood was echoed by a number of others. All their concerted efforts had netted was just two men, working late at a small vegetable processing plant. And they had only been discovered because they happened to turn the wrong corner at the wrong moment and walked smack into a group of disgruntled officers who demanded to see their papers. They had none and were arrested. It was a small but bitter victory.

Massin dismissed the men and called all senior officers and detectives into his office, where he rounded on them the moment the door was closed.

‘This is unbelievable!’ he snapped, his eyes flaring with anger. ‘How did this happen? Someone please tell me!’

Canet took a deep breath. ‘Someone warned them,’ he said, aware that the question was rhetorical, but wanting to voice the unspeakable anyway. He glanced at his colleagues. ‘Someone deliberately put the word out that we were coming. A simple leak would not have caused them all to shut up shop on the same night.’

‘Who?’ Massin stared around the room. He wasn’t expecting an answer, but the meaning was clear: he wanted a name, sooner or later. Someone had to pay for the failure of what should have been a straightforward operation.

Rocco thought back to the briefing. It had to have been from that point on. Instinct had him placing his money on Tourrain, although he was trying not to give way to prejudice about the man’s racist leanings. But the detective had been looking a little too quietly pleased with himself, as if he knew something nobody else did. For an officer about to go on a sweep, which was pretty much standard police work, he should have been no more affected at the prospect of trawling through factories at the dead of night for illegal workers than the next man. Yet his expression had been oddly animated.

Unfortunately, Rocco knew that there was no way of proving it without an admission from the detective himself or one of the men organising the workers.