Box of Bones (A Captain Darac Novel 3) Page 10

  ‘Good. Tell him to be careful.’

  The door was opened by a slight, elderly woman with prominent cheekbones and sparse white down for hair. A questioning expression suggested she was a sharp-witted old soul. Still holding the mobile to his ear, Perand showed the woman his badge. She shrugged noncommittally but didn’t retreat.

  ‘Okay, the next-door neighbour is in, Lieutenant. I’ll get back to you.’ Perand turned off his mobile. ‘Sorry about that, madame. Do you know a Monsieur Pierre Delmas?’

  The woman nodded as if she’d known that someone like him would come eventually.

  ‘I was wondering if you had any idea when he might be back?’

  ‘In a couple of years, isn’t it?’

  That was one hurdle crossed.

  ‘Uh, no, actually. He was released a couple of days ago.’

  ‘Time off for good behaviour?’ She gave an enigmatic little smile. ‘Come in.’

  Perand loped lankily into a surprisingly upbeat space of pastel-washed walls and light-toned wood. ‘You are…?’

  ‘Otaphu, Katja.’

  She directed Perand into a bentwood armchair. At his back were bookshelves containing several works on ancient history by one K.J. Otaphu – the one place in the room a visitor wouldn’t notice them.

  ‘So you haven’t seen Delmas, Madame Ota…?’

  ‘Phu. O-ta-phu.’ She sat in the chair’s twin, opposite him. ‘No, I haven’t. But when I do, I shall ask him in for a coffee.’

  She hadn’t offered him one, Perand noticed. ‘It’s clear Monsieur Delmas’s criminal past doesn’t revolt you.’

  She made a sound halfway between a disdainful snort and a laugh. ‘There are things in this life far more worthy of one’s revulsion than the unarmed robbery of a bank, don’t you think?’

  ‘We don’t think, Madame O-ta-phu. We just find things out. Do you expect to see Delmas on his return?’

  ‘Unless his period of incarceration has induced amnesia.’

  It seemed Madame was not acquainted with the state of Delmas’s health.

  ‘Was he a friend of yours, particularly?’

  ‘No. I scarcely said a word to him in the…’ A raised eyebrow appeared to be necessary for the calculation. ‘Fifteen years, it must be, that we’ve lived next door to one another.’

  ‘Was he a friend of anyone else in the building?’

  ‘I don’t think so. And I don’t recall any visitors. He was a man who very much kept himself to himself.’

  Perand produced Sylvie Galvin’s photo. ‘Have you ever seen this person?’

  ‘No. But she bears quite a resemblance, does she not, to Monsieur Delmas?’

  As bright as he was, knowing which questions to ask, when to ask them, and when to stop asking them was sometimes a struggle for Perand, but the interview at last concluded with a thought-provoking observation.

  ‘Overall, how would you describe Pierre Delmas?’

  ‘Cool. Reserved.’ She thought about it a moment. ‘Proper.’

  ‘Proper? He may have been the brains behind a nineteen-million-euro bank raid.’

  Madame Otaphu gave another little snort. ‘The other members of the gang, the ones who weren’t caught, they were brainier still, it seems.’

  * * *

  A1 Security occupied part of the top floor of a glass and concrete block in Saint-Augustin. Perhaps worryingly for its clients, the building was ideally sited for its staff to make a quick getaway: Nice Côte d’Azur Airport, the busiest in France outside Paris, sprawled behind the chain-link fence on the opposite side of the boulevard.

  Darac had decided to open with managing director Vincent Leroux, a handsome individual with a strong jawline and a matching handshake.

  ‘Let’s go back to 2003,’ Darac said, once the preliminary niceties had been observed. ‘You were Pierre Delmas’s immediate superior?’

  ‘Briefly, yes.’ Leroux had the air of a man used to being called superior. ‘The company has a policy of blooding new senior staff on the shop floor, as it were.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I am sorry but could we limit this to ten minutes?’ Swivelling his chair, he turned to face the windows that formed the side wall of his office. ‘I’m leaving for Geneva shortly.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’ Darac was speaking to the man’s profile. ‘The world is still out there.’

  ‘It’s not the world that worries me. It’s my flight. Our pilot gets very upset if we’re late. So… Pierre Delmas, the most infamous employee in the company’s history. That’s all there is to say, really. What more can I tell you?’

  Whatever it was, Darac felt like getting into Leroux’s face to hear it. But he stayed put. ‘He was released from prison a couple of days ago. Are you expecting to see him?’

  Leroux produced a derisory laugh. ‘It’s hardly likely.’ He swung his chair back into line. ‘Don’t you think?’

  ‘Is it likely he would seek out anyone else here?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  The next nine minutes simply flew by.

  A visit to HR proved more useful. At the end of it, Darac had compiled a list of all those who had been working at A1 at the time of the robbery. Aside from absences for ill health, Delmas had been considered a steady, reliable employee. Until he had tried to bust So-Pro for nineteen million euros, that is. Darac’s subsequent meetings with the Bank Protection Department and Accounts yielded little of further significance.

  Darac fared better in Maintenance. It seemed that Artur Rigaud, a short, lively individual in his mid-forties, had an ear in every office in the building. And a matchstick in every terminal in the gang socket he was repairing.

  ‘I’ll just finish this off while we talk.’ He glanced at a volt meter plugged into the socket. ‘Still flat-lining. And this connects to the most important bit of kit in the whole place.’

  ‘Not one of the servers, surely?’

  ‘My espresso machine.’

  Darac smiled. ‘I understand perfectly.’

  ‘So what did I make of Pierre Delmas? Quiet. Pleasant enough. A bit… dull, I suppose is the word. One thing that always struck me as funny: for a clever bloke, he could be a bit slow-witted. No, slow-witted isn’t the right way of putting it.’ Artur wiggled one of the matchsticks and then jammed a second in next to it. The needle on his power meter did a little dance to celebrate. ‘That’s got it… Yeah, you couldn’t tell him a joke, for instance. That kind of thing.’ The thought seemed still to perplex Artur. ‘I tell you what, though, you could have knocked me down with—’

  ‘A matchstick?’

  ‘Something like that – when what he’d been up to came out.’ Artur began filling in a job sheet. ‘And then, poor sod, he was the only one the’ – he grinned – ‘police caught. Didn’t get a penny, did he? Well, none of them did.’

  ‘Did anyone here ever wonder about the gang? We think there must have been at least four others in on it.’

  He looked a little defensive, suddenly. Darac sensed an opening. ‘Did someone say something, Artur?’

  ‘Someone? No, no. Nothing.’

  The implication seemed clear. ‘But you have a theory?’

  Artur craned his neck in several directions. The coast clear, he dropped his voice.

  ‘Well, I always wondered how he got together with the others. You know, where’s a bloke like that going to meet a gang? Doesn’t make sense. I can’t imagine he had much of a social life outside this place.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘If you catch me.’

  ‘So you believe the others probably also worked here?’

  ‘No, I didn’t say that.’ Quieter still. ‘But I must admit, I have wondered it.’

  ‘Who did he work with, mainly?’

  ‘The alarm team, theoretically.’ Artur scrawled his signature on the sheet, completing it with an extravagant flourish. ‘But he worked on his own, really.’

  ‘How many in the alarm team?’

  ‘There’s five… six guys in it now. In his day there were four but most of t
hem aren’t here any more. In two cases, literally.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘You know that big smash they had on the voie rapide up behind Gare Thiers a few years back? A couple of them were killed in that. Sad. Not that I cared, to be honest with you. Couldn’t stick either of them.’

  ‘The other two?’

  ‘One runs the place, nowadays.’

  ‘Leroux?’

  ‘Yes. Big-headed bastard. The other one, Thierry Artaud – he retired. Lives over in Riquier. Haven’t seen him in a long time.’

  ‘Thierry Artaud?’ Darac said, underlining the name on his list.

  ‘Yeah. He’ll be in his late sixties now. Nice fella. But who knows? Maybe he was the brains behind the whole thing.’

  ‘Artur!’

  The supervisor’s voice was loud and insistent and it brought an end to proceedings. Darac left the building but, needing a moment to disentangle his day, he decided not to drive away immediately. As if observing the miracle of flight might enable his own thoughts to take wing, he crossed the boulevard and stood gazing through the airport’s perimeter fence. His eye was taken by a private jet taxiing for take-off. He watched as it turned away from him, and then, framed in a single cell of the chain link, sped down the runway trailing twin vortices of heat in its slipstream. The nose tilted and cell by cell, the jet climbed free of the mesh into clear air. As it carved a wide arc over the Baie des Anges, Darac wondered if a Geneva-bound Vincent Leroux was on board. And whether he knew as little about Pierre Delmas as he had claimed.

  * * *

  It was remarkable that the case files, witness statements, and photos sitting in piles around the squad room were only part of the cache of documents Archive held on the 2003 SoPro bank robbery. Wearing a rapt expression, Darac was coming to the denouement of a particularly meaty-looking report.

  ‘Typical Agnès.’ He smiled, closing the cover. ‘When it comes to lateral thinking, there is no one to touch her.’ He picked up a spill of photos. ‘Let’s go through these, Flak. I’ll bring them over.’

  The photos recorded the concrete-walled vault, the tunnel the gang had excavated between the vault and an abandoned brick-lined culvert, and the shaft that rose from the culvert via a manhole to a short service road. At her desk, Flaco squared them into a neat stack and set the topmost shot down in front of her.

  ‘The site is right in the centre of the city. So how was it no one heard anything? How was it no one noticed all the gear and the vehicles?’

  ‘I know you weren’t on the force then.’

  ‘In 2003? I was still at school back in Guadeloupe.’

  ‘Of course. The first thing to bear in mind is that the bank abuts the Rue Lamora complex, one of the biggest redevelopments in the city’s history. At the time of the robbery, the block was one giant building site. Noise, constant activity – it was perfect cover.’

  ‘Ah, I see.’ Scowling in concentration, she flipped to the next photo. And the next. ‘What am I looking for, Captain?’

  ‘Things like…’ He leaned over her shoulder. ‘That, for example.’ He pointed to a mixture of earth and brick rubble piled up outside the tunnel that was cut into the vault’s rear wall. In front of it was a smaller heap of broken-up concrete and dust. ‘And those.’ His finger traced a series of tool marks incised on a rock wall at the opposite end of the tunnel. ‘No?’

  Pressing her full lips together, Flaco shook her head. ‘No.’

  ‘If the gang had followed normal practice and tunnelled out to in, that rubble is at the wrong end of the tunnel and those tool marks are back to front.’

  Flaco broke into an uncharacteristically broad smile. ‘So Commissaire Dantier worked out the gang didn’t tunnel into the vault, they tunnelled out of it?’

  ‘Yes, she did.’

  ‘That’s… superb.’

  ‘Isn’t it? And finding the heaviest tools the gang used lying in the culvert, rather than at the vault end of the tunnel, confirms the direction they were travelling in.’

  ‘So the robbery began in the vault. But how did the gang manage to get in?’

  ‘Pierre Delmas let them in. There were two teams. One cut into the safety deposit boxes and so on; the other excavated the tunnel. Considering the time constraints they were working under, you can see the advantage of this approach for the gang.’

  ‘It was quicker. If they had tunnelled in, they couldn’t have done both jobs simultaneously.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But why tunnel at all? If Delmas could let the gang into the vault, why couldn’t he just let them out again?’

  ‘Something to do with how the alarms worked at the time. I’ve sent the stuff over to Tech. R.O. is going to drop in and explain it to us.’

  Granot lumbered in. ‘Look at all those files,’ he announced, giving a little grin of satisfaction. ‘I feel like an author must feel walking into a bookshop.’

  ‘I’d ask you to sign them but you already have,’ Darac said. ‘Co-signed, anyway.’

  ‘I only work with the best. Present company excepted.’

  Flaco was still considering the ins and outs of So-Pro. ‘What they did – wasn’t it dangerous?’

  ‘Dangerous?’ Granot colonised a desk next to the window. ‘In what way?’

  ‘We were just commending the gang’s originality in tunnelling out, not in,’ Darac said. ‘And Agnès’s perspicacity—’

  ‘And mine.’

  ‘And yours, in working it out.’

  Flaco turned to Granot. ‘Supposing they hadn’t managed to complete the tunnel before the staff came in after the weekend? They would have been caught red-handed.’

  Granot hauled himself up. ‘Let’s look at those photos,’ he said, implying that it would be a definitive assessment. He sorted through them and pulled one out. It showed a metre-wide aperture cut into the centre of the steel door that connected the vault with the bank proper. ‘This is the hole workmen had to cut into the vault door so staff could get into it on the Monday morning. At first, of course, they didn’t realise they were dealing with a robbery. Employees turned up for work as normal, someone went down to the vault and couldn’t get in. A fault with the door, they thought. When they finally cut through into the vault, they found it in a complete mess. Emptied boxes everywhere, strongroom door open, lumps of concrete and broken bricks piled up. And the famous message chalked on the wall, of course.’

  ‘Why did workmen have to cut through into the vault?’

  ‘Vis-à-vis your point about the danger of the gang being disturbed on the job, once they were inside the vault, they sealed the door behind them.’ Granot ran his finger around the photo. ‘Its outer edges are still welded to the inside of the frame, look.’

  ‘I see it bought the gang time. But wasn’t that even more dangerous?’

  ‘May I?’ Darac picked up the shot of the vault door.

  ‘More dangerous, Flak?’ Granot said. ‘How?’

  ‘What if the gang hadn’t been able to complete the exit tunnel? They would’ve trapped themselves in.’

  ‘Ah but…’ Granot searched through the stack for another photo. ‘One second… Here we are. That is the entire length of the tunnel. It’s less than six metres. Gives into that culvert, look. And it’s a shaft from there that led up into the building site.’

  ‘That isn’t very long. Still…’

  Lips pursed, Darac pulled out a written account of the sealed door. Every so often, he compared it with the photo.

  ‘How far above the culvert is the surface?’ Flaco said.

  Granot gave an approving grunt. He loved the young officer’s thoroughness, her voracious appetite for discovering the how and why of things. ‘I just had the shaft photo in my hand…’ Turning two and three shots over at a time, Granot’s thick fingers were not made for leafing but he found it. ‘Here, look. The climb is no more than… five metres. Steel rungs set into the side. Push the manhole cover off and you’re away. Easy.’

  ‘I see.’

>   Eyebrows lowered, Darac took one more look at the vault photo, stared into space for a moment, and then picked up a phone.

  ‘Adèle, could you send me a data file of all the So-Pro bank robbery photos?’

  ‘I asked you if you wanted that earlier.’

  ‘I didn’t want it then. Now I do.’

  ‘No need to get shirty, Captain.’

  ‘Thank you, Adèle.’

  ‘What do you want the data disc for?’ Granot said.

  ‘I just want to check something.’

  Erica walked in carrying a clear plastic folder containing pages of handwritten scrawl. ‘R.O. has had to go up to La Trinité so I’m delivering the great man’s words.’

  ‘No finer speaker,’ Granot said, his buoyant mood persisting. ‘La T – that’s Agnès’s stabbing, I take it?’

  ‘Double stabbing. Bonbon’s just joined her up there.’ Erica sat, crossed her legs and opened the folder. ‘Are we ready?’

  ‘If you can read his handwriting,’ Darac said.

  ‘I’ve had long practice. I’ll summarise it.’ She took out Ormans’ notes and read the first few sentences. ‘Ten weeks or so before the robbery, Delmas set up a pattern of triggering false alarms from So-Pro at the weekends. A “fault in the system”’ – she signed the inverted commas – ‘caused lights to flash on a central console. Officers from the Caserne and from Foch were dispatched to the bank the first few times. Then just officers from Foch. Then just a couple of prowl cars. Then one. Then a beat officer. Until finally, it got down to, “Oh there’s that flashing light on the console again – don’t worry, it’ll go out in a minute.” Once that stage had been reached, it opened the door, so to speak, to the vault.’

  ‘It’s like nobody takes any notice of a car alarm that goes off all the time,’ Flaco said. ‘On a bigger scale.’

  ‘Exactly. But there’s a problem with the method, apparently.’ Erica read ahead for a moment. ‘Right… The way the system works, the alarm signal is sent immediately when the door is opened in any period of activation – which usually means overnight but in this case, it meant the weekend. If the door remains open for any longer than thirty seconds…’ She skipped ahead once more. And then giggled. ‘R.O.’s actually written: After thirty seconds, big scary things happen automatically – like bars shooting out of the walls. Best avoid!’