Box of Bones (A Captain Darac Novel 3) Read online

  ‘Shock does all sorts of funny things.’ He took it and tossed it on to the back seat. ‘Did Saxe say he was going to meet anyone after work?’

  ‘No, he didn’t.’

  ‘Did anything happen today or over the previous days that gave you any inkling about what ultimately took place?’

  ‘No, nothing on that scale but something strange did happen today. A man got on and sat at the back of the first carriage. Perfectly pleasant. He rode around the whole route and got off just along there at the Porte de la Santé. Next time around, he got on and did the same thing again. The tickets are hop-on hop-off so you can do that as many times as you like. On the last circuit of the day, Alain recognised him. He called him up to the front of the carriage and started talking to him as he drove on. Things started to get a bit agitated between them. And then they proceeded to have a proper row. At this point, there were only the three of us on board. Alain dropped me off. The two of them went on and that was the last I saw of him. Until just now.’

  ‘This man. Was he sitting alongside Alain in the cab?’

  ‘No. He was in the front carriage.’

  ‘Definitely not in the cab?’

  ‘No, but as I say, he was still on board when I got off. I don’t know what he might have done afterwards.’

  ‘Can you describe him?’

  ‘Uh… tall, quite a big man all round. Fleshy face. His eyes – I don’t know why I noticed this – but they were deep set and close together.’

  ‘Danielle, would you open the glove compartment? And take out the photo. The one on top.’

  She looked at it. ‘That’s him,’ she said.

  31

  It had been a long night after a long day and it wasn’t over yet. Agnès had already gone home, but not before addressing the squad room on two contentious issues. She’d gone over the various mistakes she had made on the So-Pro investigation, and she had supplied the context to her latest in flagrante delicto encounter with Darac. Her complete candour had eased Granot’s mind in particular over the old case, and her way with a story had taken everyone’s mind off the rumours about herself and Darac.

  Darac scanned the faces all around him as he took over the session. Few would have made the cover of Health and Vitality magazine. He glanced at his watch. Twenty-one hours straight, he’d been working. Parting the high rises of espresso cups populating his desk, he parked his backside on it and yawned.

  ‘Let’s give it another half-hour, shall we? And then we can stagger off home. Providing we can remember where home is.’ Behind him, a whiteboard headed with Alain Saxe’s name was set alongside those of Michel Fouste and Carl Halevy. Darac pointed to them in turn. ‘All three are dead. Dead within three days of Pierre Delmas’s release from prison. So all three were members of the So-Pro gang with him. Discuss.’

  Settling in for one last push, Bonbon sat sideways in his chair and draped his legs over the arm. ‘On the deaths themselves, the first one looks like a classic see-what-you-expect-to-see thing, right? Because Fouste was blind drunk and belligerent, no one suspected he’d only started to barge into people because he’d spotted someone he was desperate to get away from: the very pleasant and polite gentleman we now know as Pierre Delmas. Fouste made it as far as the front float in the parade.’ Bonbon put his hands together in the manner of a diver. ‘Whooosh! And that was the end of him. Carl Halevy we’ve discussed at length and we know how he died. And now tonight, thanks partly to an eyewitness account by the wonderful Mademoiselle Danielle Veron, Delmas is squarely in the frame for the murder of Alain Saxe. And that’s a definite escalation because the first two deaths were accidental, fundamentally.’

  ‘Indeed.’ Darac got to his feet. He wrote the name Artur Rigaud on a flipchart headed A1 SECURITY and sank back on his desk. ‘Artur’s the maintenance man at the firm’s HQ. When I interviewed him, he posed an interesting question: “Where would someone like Pierre Delmas meet a gang?” he said. Granot, you’ve spoken to Artur, as well. What do you reckon?’

  ‘The trouble is that we know so little about Delmas.’ On the desk in front of him was a stack of files, mostly thin. ‘Until So-Pro, he seems to be one of these people who just ghosts through life.’

  Perand was sitting slumped forward on his desk as if waiting for a back massage. ‘That’s implied in Artur’s question, isn’t it?’

  ‘Partly, yes.’ Granot closed one file and opened another. ‘Take the child, Sylvie. Delmas fathers her with a woman who gives her up to the Sisters of Mercy at birth and then the mother dies not long after. Sylvie has no other relatives. According to the convent, Delmas never once visited or wrote to the girl. It looks as if she, like the authorities, had no idea who her father was. Neighbours at his apartment building have very little to say about Delmas except Madame Otaphu, who doesn’t really know him but has an opinion on everything, it seems. Then, there’s A1, the company for which he worked for twenty years. Apart from Artur, no one has anything significant to report. Vis-à-vis his idea that the gang may also have worked at the firm – a plausible idea on the face of it – we’ve moved on from that now we have Fouste, Halevy and Saxe, none of whom have ever worked for A1.’

  ‘We may have moved on from A1,’ Darac said. ‘But I’m assigning it to the back burner rather than forgetting about it altogether. There’s something about that set-up I don’t like.’

  Granot sniffed. ‘Up to you. Prior to his release, I’ve got nothing that links Delmas to Fouste, Halevy and Saxe. But I have come up with something that links them. It’s a bit…’ Granot made a so-so gesture with his hand. ‘But all three have worked in construction at one time or another. The jobs they did might have fitted them for tunnelling, digging and so on.’

  Her head propped on the heel of her hand, Flaco looked up from her note-taking. ‘So Halevy wasn’t always an accounts manager for a lift company?’

  ‘No, he’d done all sorts.’

  Darac gave him a look. ‘They ever work for the same outfit?’

  ‘Loosely – different parts of the Telonne empire. I’m checking but it seems they may well have worked at the Rue Lamora site at the same time. I know a lot of the city’s hard hats did. But it would be something.’

  While the debate continued around him, Darac sat back in his chair, ideas chasing one another around his head like a series of chord progressions. After several stalled choruses, one of them took flight and kept going. He was about to run it past the team when a junkie wearing torn jeans hustled into the room.

  ‘Out on the prowl in a minute, guys.’ Armani winked at Bonbon and sat down. ‘But I couldn’t hit the streets without catching the latest instalment of “Captain Busy Hands and the Delmas Case”.’

  ‘Sorry, mate.’ Darac gave him a rueful look. ‘There’s only Delmas left. We’ve been all through the other thing already.’

  ‘Already?’ Armani bore the expression of a dog who’s just seen its dinner whisked away. ‘It’s no fun here any more.’

  ‘Want to stay?’

  ‘I’ll give it ten minutes. Excite me.’

  ‘I just might be able to. I think I’ve got something.’

  Like a magnet passing under iron filings, these words made everyone in the room sit up. Even Perand.

  ‘It takes us only part of the way but what do we think of this? Pierre Delmas suffers from NCL, a terminal condition that has usually proved fatal by the age he is now. One of the few things people have had to say about him is that he’s quiet, respectful, even proper. We don’t know the how and why of his fathering of Sylvie—’

  ‘I’ll tell you all about that later,’ Armani said. ‘It’s catching on, they say.’

  ‘Shhh!’ Flaco said, before she’d thought about it.

  Amused at her uncharacteristic cheek, Armani made a mea culpa gesture. ‘I humbly apologise, ma’am. Carry on, Darac.’

  ‘We don’t know at what point Delmas knew of Sylvie’s existence. You’d imagine it might have been the moment her mother knew she was pregnant, but
it could have been years later. Sylvie might even have been in her teens by then. Whatever, let’s say Delmas wanted to make amends for missing out on her childhood.’ Eyebrows raised, he looked from face to face. ‘Make amends in the little time he thought he had left. Can you see where this might lead and what sense it makes of some of the other things we know?’

  Bonbon clicked his fingers. ‘I can see where it starts.’

  The half-smile that so often played around Darac’s lips widened a little. ‘Go on, Bonbon.’

  ‘To set up his neglected daughter with a trust fund, Delmas dreams up a scheme to rob A1’s biggest banking client, So-Pro. Or perhaps someone comes to him with the scheme. Either way, he’s vital to it and he’s in. Three members of the gang that eventually pull the robbery are Fouste, Halevy and Saxe. All the stuff you’ve shown about the direction of tunnelling et cetera is there to convince Agnès of Delmas’s part in it. He was the willing fall guy…’

  The sound of pennies dropping all around the room heralded a free-for-all.

  ‘Bonbon’s got the floor,’ Darac called out, quietening the hubbub. ‘Carry on.’

  ‘Delmas is the willing fall guy because he expects to live only a short time in prison. All that matters to him is that his share of the haul goes to Sylvie. In the end, the haul was seized so she never got it.’ As he warmed to his theme, the rapid Catalan clatter of Bonbon’s Perpignan accent became more and more extreme. ‘That’s Variation From The Plan Number One. Variation Number Two is that, defying all expectation, Delmas doesn’t die shortly after going to prison. He serves his term and out he comes. So he naturally seeks out the gang. Now we… Hang on, let me get this straight.’ Bonbon stared at the ceiling for a moment. When he continued, his delivery gave way to something more adagio and deliberate. ‘Yes – we originally thought there was no connection between Halevy and Fouste because Halevy had been waiting at the cemetery for Delmas the morning before he met up with Fouste at the Parade of Lights. Therefore Halevy’s attempted shooting of Delmas couldn’t have been a case of revenge. Maybe Halevy, who everyone has described as a nervous individual, went along on that first morning simply to check on Delmas. But maybe, fearing exposure, he’d intended to kill him all along. Hearing of Fouste’s death at the carnival can only have strengthened his resolve.’

  Flaco held up her hand. ‘But as the captain said, Delmas could’ve shopped the gang at any time while he was in prison.’

  Perand gave an almost Granot-like grunt. ‘Yeah, he could’ve shopped them. But he couldn’t have iced them from his cell, could he? Not personally, anyway.’

  ‘I think we’ve all been forgetting something,’ Darac said. ‘Ask yourselves why Delmas might want to kill the members of the gang.’

  Tapping his watch, Granot mugged, It’s obvious now, isn’t it?

  ‘Because of what they did to Sylvie,’ Bonbon said. ‘And didn’t do.’

  Darac nodded. ‘Exactly. What we were failing to grasp is the significance of the false bank statement and the double burial.’

  Granot hauled himself on to his feet. ‘And that kind of oversight is a sure sign we’re too tired to carry on and should all go home to bed. Preferably separately.’

  ‘Well, we’ve got squads out looking for Delmas,’ Darac said. ‘We’ve got media up and running. We’ve got Lartou and co. looking at CCTV and stuff from tourists’ cameras.’ He stood, stretching out his back. ‘That can all go on without us. Let’s call it a day, a night, or whatever it is.’

  Around the room, computers were shut down, shoulder bags and rucksacks were dragged out from under desks, chairs were scraped back. Everyone was on the move except Armani. He’d had his dinner whisked away. Now he saw his nightcap following it.

  ‘You can’t leave it there. It was just getting good. What did the gang do to Sylvie? Or not do?’

  ‘They cheated her out of four hundred thousand euros. Delmas goes to jail, believing he’s not going to come out, happy in the knowledge that he’s finally done something right by his daughter. I think we got so fixated on the idea of the gang not being able to divide up the spoils of the robbery that we didn’t consider other possibilities. One is that Delmas might have negotiated a flat fee with them beforehand – to get them into the vault and out again. And it was that sum that was earmarked for Sylvie. But it never reached her.’

  Granot paused in the doorway. As bleary-eyed as he felt, he couldn’t resist putting in a last two cents’ worth.

  ‘The agreement was that Delmas alone would go down for the robbery, and he stuck to his side of it. Delmas knew he couldn’t run the four hundred thousand through his own bank account before transferring it to Sylvie’s or the State would have seized it. So he asked the gang, who were completely unknown to the police, to pass on the fee for him. They didn’t, as we’ve seen, but they tricked up a bank statement bearing her name in order to convince Delmas they had.’ Granot gave the squad room a ceremonial wave. ‘And now I bid you all goodnight.’

  ‘And the trickery didn’t end there, did it?’ Bonbon said. ‘But you tell them about that, chief. I’m going to escort my young friend here off the premises.’

  Granot harrumphed. ‘I think I can just about make it to the exit myself.’

  ‘Don’t want you collapsing with fatigue, though, do we? If you block a gangway, none of us is going home.’

  ‘See you tomorrow, boys.’ Darac turned to Flaco, Armani and Perand as he picked up his bag. ‘Sure you three have got it?’

  Flaco switched off her desk lamp. ‘Think so, Captain.’

  Perand nodded. ‘Yeah, yeah.’

  ‘Armani?’

  ‘Go for it.’

  ‘Alright. Someone with four hundred grand in the bank isn’t likely to have had the sort of funeral referred to by the undertaker as a “plywood and niche job”. The gang believed that the terminally ill Delmas would die in prison and never discover what they had done. It wasn’t until they learned that, against all the odds, Delmas was going to serve out his prison term, and therefore might well discover the truth, that they dragged the poor girl’s remains off her shelf and reburied them in the Arc du Triomphe. And it might have worked but for the intervention of Carl Halevy.’

  Armani put his arm around Darac’s shoulder as they filed out into the corridor. ‘Know something? I don’t blame Delmas. Wanting to kill them, I mean. So would I.’ His face a mask of outrage, he pressed the thumb and fingertips of his free hand together and shook it. ‘Halevy was a nervous one, right? He didn’t want to take any chances the reburial scam wouldn’t work. If that arsehole hadn’t tried to kill Delmas, the man might never have realised the bastards had cheated him. And now three of them are dead. Good! Let’s hope he gets the others!’

  Darac gave him a look. ‘But how many more of them are there? Two? Five? Ten? And maybe some of them didn’t go for this part of the plan.’

  ‘A gang is a gang.’

  Without waiting for a response, Armani kissed Darac and Flaco on the cheek, shook Perand’s hand, and then, talking animatedly to himself, hustled away to his night shift in the city.

  Perand looked a little slighted. ‘It’s a story of cheats, this case. Cheats and deception. Delmas and the gang deceive Agnès, the gang cheat Delmas and Sylvie, Delmas cheats death…’

  Flaco seemed unimpressed. ‘Isn’t that the nature of all crime?’

  They had reached Darac’s office.

  ‘I’ll leave you two to continue that one,’ he said. ‘Good work today.’

  The pair carried on the debate as they headed off home.

  Darac felt exhausted by the time he finally took the steps down into the compound. It was a spectacularly starry night. Or was he just seeing stars? He closed his eyes. And could still see them. Lungfuls of cool night air failed to revive him and his mind began to wander as he headed for the parking lot, wander almost as if in a dream.

  ‘Night, Captain.’

  ‘Oh – night, Mireille.’

  People were criss-crossing the com
pound: coming on shift, going off shift; sweeping headlights, flaring tail-lights; it was a busy, blurry scene. And then he saw Frankie walking ahead of him, held like a stage performer in a cone of following light. She looked as tired as he felt and she lived in La Turbie, a good twenty-minute drive over dark, precipitous roads. It was not a terrain in which to fall asleep at the wheel. He resolved to catch up with her in the parking lot.

  ‘Hi, Captain.’

  ‘Oh, hi, Cabriet.’

  ‘You playing tonight?’

  ‘What day is it?’

  ‘Thursday.’

  ‘We’re playing.’

  ‘Might see you at the club.’

  ‘Thanks, man.’

  Darac continued, his tiredness increasing with every leaden step. Ahead, Frankie disappeared into a patch of shadow. Disappeared to the point of invisibility. His mind was not so much wandering now as galloping, galloping far and wide and further still. Frankie may appear to be invisible… Could you appear to be invisible? But she would still be beautiful. Wouldn’t she? Yes. It had been proven that reality existed independently of the observer. What did they call that? There was a name for it. In any case, Frankie would always be beautiful because her looks were only part of the story. There was a name for that, too.

  He paused, took a deep breath and then another. He began to come round a little.

  Frankie…

  He had always felt more than everyday friendship for her. But during the four years he’d lived with Angeline, seeking an illicit love affair with anyone was the last thing on his mind. Lately, he’d been wondering if Frankie had ever felt more than just friendship for him. If he were being honest, he’d never detected any real sign of it.

  Beauty…

  If they worked together long enough, detectives got to know almost everything about their closest colleagues. Traditionally, the bigger revelations happened during overnight stakeouts. Sitting side by side for hours in the dark lent itself to sharing confidences like few situations in life. It was on one such night that Darac learned Frankie didn’t think she was at all beautiful. She saw herself as too short, too broad in the hips, too heavy in the breasts. After a couple of hopelessly bland rebuttals, Darac had been on the verge of saying: Look, Frankie, you’re gorgeous, alright? when shots rang out and the topic had been shelved.