Babazouk Blues Read online

  As if a switch had been thrown, the young man froze. ‘Yes I am. And I pay my taxes.’

  Darac turned, smiling. ‘I’m glad.’ He flexed his hand. ‘Because we’ve lost good people to that shit before.’

  ‘True.’ Luc fired up a spliff. ‘A couple of times.’

  Rama’s sticks resumed their utterly precise rhythm. ‘Oh. Sorry I misunderstood, guys. But you know how it can be.’

  ‘We know.’ Darac joined Didier and Luc. The three of them raised their bottles.

  ‘Rama, here’s to you, man,’ Didier said. ‘In the years to come, you’re going to win things in jazz. When you do, I hope you’ll remember tonight.’

  For a moment, it looked as if the boy might cry. ‘I’ll never forget it.’

  As Rama raised his Evian bottle, Ridge swept massively into the room. ‘Gabron, what does that sign say? Put it out! After you’ve hit me.’ Luc took a long toke and passed on the joint. ‘To jazz. And to France!’ Ridge sucked the thing practically inside out before crushing the lit end. He turned to Rama. ‘Stretch, you living at home?’

  ‘By home, you mean?’

  ‘With your parents.’

  ‘My parents are gone but I live with my brother, Modibo.’

  ‘Older brother?’

  ‘Seven years older.’

  ‘He do the cooking?’

  ‘Mostly.’

  ‘Well, he’s not feeding you up. I’ve been watching those twiggy little arms of yours and I’m scared they’re going to break clean off. You need to start—’

  Khara’s voice stole through the beaded curtain. ‘Ridge? The drinks guy is here.’

  ‘Now? Shit.’ Turning on his heel, he lashed the curtain aside and headed off. ‘Twenty minutes, you guys,’ he called out, his footfalls shaking the floorboards. ‘Garfield? No pissing in the sink. I got the toilet fixed yesterday.’

  Rama turned to Darac. ‘Why does Monsieur Clay call you Garfield?’

  ‘Maybe he thinks I’m a cat.’

  ‘Ah.’

  A warm round of applause greeted the returning quintet. Nods and smiles from the guys first to the audience and then to each other; a moment to check tuning and they were ready. Fuelled by their interval beers, the quintet always opened the second set with a Thelonious Monk number. Leffe Blonde seemed to lend itself to skew-whiff scampers through the man’s elusive, off-kilter melodies.

  Cued by Didier to take the first solo, Darac flexed his sore hand a couple of times, upped the volume control on his instrument and prepared to take flight. Getting into an up-tempo Monk solo was like chasing a three-legged gazelle but after a few lunges in the thing’s general direction, he began to home in on it. The goal wasn’t to bring down the beast but to jump on its back and see where the mood took them. It took them far and wide, further and wider indeed than was sensible; that was the joy of it. The band played variations on the number’s main themes as they waited to welcome the wanderer back into the fold. And then, just when it seemed Darac had gone so far that there could be no way back, a series of notes suggested itself to him that solved the problem; new material that formed the bottom rungs of an escape ladder out of the remote place he’d strayed into. The moment of discovery drew smiles from the band and then the audience. A few bars later, Darac came surfing out of the solo on a warm wave of applause.

  The possibilities of the evening seemed endless to him now: the band was playing like some fabulous composite being powered by a single beating heart; his hand was coping with everything he asked of it; and his head felt freer than it had in weeks.

  But as he relaxed back into the jinking groove that would carry the quintet on to the next solo, his heart sank. With no curtain of smoke to lessen the impact of the moment, the huge figure of Lieutenant Roland Granot of the Brigade Criminelle hove into view at the back of the room. A hot twinge ran across Darac’s knuckles. Not now, surely? Couldn’t it wait?

  An exchange of looks across the floor confirmed that what Granot wanted was Darac. And he wanted him now.

  3

  Darac was thankful for his mask as he entered the exam tent. ‘Professor Bianchi here, Lami?’

  ‘No, she isn’t.’ The lab assistant’s smile was a transparent attempt to appear upbeat. ‘She assigned the case to Dr Barrau.’

  ‘Right.’ It sounded more professional than ‘shit’.

  ‘Careful where you’re walking there, sir. We haven’t examined that yet.’

  Darac looked down. At his feet was an empty champagne bottle, lying forlornly on its side like a spent firework. ‘Many at the party?’

  ‘There was only one glass. That’s about all we know at the moment.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘It’s not a pretty sight, Captain.’

  Fifteen years of shootings, stabbings, beatings and stranglings had all but immunised Darac against the grotesque but a wave of nausea broke in his stomach when he looked into the hot tub. Hideously bloated, the corpse appeared to be made of patched green rubber. The left arm had been chewed off at the shoulder, the right at the elbow. But strangely, the tongue, protruding from the maw like the end of a good boudin noir, had remained untouched. The dogs or foxes or rats of Chemin Leuze had missed a trick. Darac shook his head. Drowning and mutilation. What a coda to the evening.

  ‘At least she didn’t catch fire as well,’ he said, to no one in particular. Although if she had, it would at least have taken care of some of the insect life. If the sight was bad, the smell might have been worse: a sweetish, rancid stench that before the introduction of forensic overalls would have stayed on his clothes for hours. He turned to the white-suited figure bent low over the mess. ‘Barrau. Care to offer an opinion?’

  The pathologist’s long, lancet-thin fingers stopped moving all at once. Maintaining an imperious silence, he waited a moment before resuming his work.

  ‘Thank you, Doctor.’ It sounded more professional than ‘arsehole’.

  Senior crime scene analyst Raul Ormans was examining the hot tub itself. A man who usually took his time, his hands were moving like an assembly-line worker on piece rate.

  ‘R.O. Anything?’

  ‘Hot tub works.’ He handed a stack of bagged-up CDs to an assistant. ‘We’ll run further tests on it in the lab tomorrow.’ His gloves slapped the air as he pulled them off. ‘Now I’m going home.’ He marched away. ‘And I mean now.’

  ‘Hey, nobody wants to be here.’ Darac risked another glance at the bag of stinking green matter that was the corpse. ‘Especially her.’

  A young woman carrying a specimen box obliged Darac to take a step back.

  ‘Look, I’m in the way here so I’ll leave you to it, Doctor. Guys.’

  Darac lurched out of the tent, picked his way around the rest of the forensic team’s gear and then took the steps up to the villa. Pulling back the hood of his suit, he gave a tentative sniff. The Blue Devil’s drains had nothing on this. He exhaled, his breath condensing into vapour in the chill night air. He met Granot coming the other way. ‘The victim was seventy, you said?’

  ‘Seventy-one according to her cleaner, one Alphonsine Loret.’

  ‘She found the body?’

  ‘Yes. She hadn’t seen anything of Madame Mesnel for a few days so she called round to check on her. Flaco’s talking to her now up in the house. Or trying to. The woman’s hysterical, for some reason.’

  ‘How’s Flaco coping?’

  ‘OK for a youngster. Only threw up twice.’

  ‘That’s good.’ Their shadows flickered as they passed under a faltering arc lamp and climbed the steps. ‘You know what I’m wondering about all this?’

  ‘What the hell are we doing here?’

  Darac ducked under the tape that marked out the red zone, the hot-spot at the heart of a crime scene. He held it up for Granot. ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And why did it have to be tonight?’ The big man negotiated the hazard with the touching grace of a circus elephant. ‘My first night off in three weeks and le Gym are live on telly. PSG
away. Ten minutes to go, we’re one-nil up. We win a corner. Never got to see it.‘

  Darac reflected that he’d missed out on some corners of his own. The quintet’s take on Monk’s ‘Brilliant Corners’ had been going spectacularly well until the interruption.

  A fresh-faced woman wearing overalls stepped forward and offered Granot a clipboard. ‘Autograph, if you wouldn’t mind?’

  ‘Come on, Patricia – I was only down there a minute.’

  ‘You signed into the red zone, Lieutenant; you have to sign out.’ She handed him a pen. ‘And PSG equalised.’

  ‘See?’ Granot cast a filthy look at the hot tub as if the Nice side’s concession of a late goal was all the corpse’s fault. ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘Penalty,’ Patricia rolled her eyes. ‘Ten seconds from the final whistle.’

  Granot scrawled his name, signature and the time in the appropriate boxes. ‘Idiots… Definite, was it?’

  ‘Definite.’ She gave Darac a look as he took the clipboard. ‘Trust our boys, eh?’

  A weak smile was all he could come up with. So ‘our’ team hadn’t beaten ‘theirs’. How could it matter to anyone?

  ‘Ah, looks as if I’m wanted.’ Patricia indicated a figure summoning her to the exam tent. ‘Just put the clipboard on the table, Captain. Sorry, I keep forgetting! Commissaire, I mean.’

  ‘Acting commissaire,’ Darac called to her retreating back. ‘I’m still just a captain.’

  He turned to Granot. ‘Thank God.’

  ‘You took the words right out of my mouth.’

  Darac ran an eye over the scene. ‘Apart from Flaco, who’s here from our lot?’

  ‘Perand, and one, two… three uniforms. And Malraux’s floating around somewhere.’ Granot made a clicking sound with his tongue. ‘So to speak.’

  ‘What have we got so far?’

  Granot was probably the last trench-coat-wearing detective in France. Slipping his notebook from an inner breast pocket, he angled it to catch the light. ‘So… the deceased is one Jeanne Mesnel. Seventy-one years old. Seamstress. Widow. Lived alone. Health: poorish. The hot tub is brand new—’

  ‘And works, according to R.O.,’ Darac said. ‘By which he means it didn’t electrocute her, I guess.’

  Granot gave a little grunt. ‘An empty bottle of Bollinger was found next to the hot tub. There’s no sign of a break-in or anything obviously missing. No suicide note. That’s it.’

  ‘And there’s a suggestion Madame was alone when it happened. Whatever it was.’

  Granot’s signature hangdog expression hung even lower as he pocketed the notebook. ‘It’s got natural causes written all over it.’

  ‘Yet in his usual whistle-stop tour, our beloved public prosecutor seems to have thought otherwise.’

  Granot swept an arm across the scene. ‘Look at all this. Ridiculous.’

  The Cirque du Meurtre was in town. On Public Prosecutor Frènes’s say-so, it had rolled in and pitched its tent on Madame Mesnel’s patio: nine police officers in total; a four-strong pathology team; two forensic analysts; and two trolley dollies from the morgue. Then there was the hardware: portable generator, lighting, cameras, laptops, recorders, cabling, cordon tape… The list was endless.

  Darac keyed a number into his mobile.

  ‘Chasing public prosecutors,’ Granot said, spitting out the words. ‘He should bloody well still be here.’

  ‘Answerphone…’ Darac waited for the tone. ‘Monsieur Frènes, we’re at the Mesnel house over in Beaulieu. Call me or Lieutenant Granot when you can.’

  Granot gave Darac a nudge in the ribs. ‘Hey, I’ll bet this Jeanne Mesnel is somebody. Ex-mayor’s wife or whatever. Hence all the brouhaha.’

  ‘We don’t really know anything yet, do we?’

  Further thoughts were interrupted by an other-worldly sound. The men turned to see a little wisp of a woman hurrying toward them in a whirr of flailing arms and sobs. In pursuit was the short but strapping figure of Officer Yvonne Flaco. A blanket in lieu of a net, she looked like a butterfly collector chasing an evasive specimen.

  ‘The corpse finder?’ Darac said.

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  The two men braced themselves. The steps behind them were steep and the upper patio was slippery with dew.

  ‘Whoa there, ladies!’ Granot called out. ‘You’re going to have us all down. Steady!’

  Skidding to a halt, Flaco netted her quarry only a centimetre or two from disaster. Madame Loret’s monologue continued without a pause.

  ‘Captain! Thank God, I can’t tell you how—’

  ‘You’ve got the wrong one, madame,’ Granot said. ‘I am Lieutenant Granot. This gentleman is in charge. Captain, indeed, Acting Commissaire Paul Darac.’

  ‘Him?’ Rearranging the drape of the blanket, Madame Loret seemed suddenly in possession of her faculties. ‘He’s far too young.’

  Madame had a point. At thirty-three, Darac was young for the role. But his promotion was only a stop-gap measure while the squad’s actual head, Commissaire Agnès Dantier, remained on extended leave.

  ‘Let’s not worry about any of our ages, madame. You’ve had a terrible shock and it’s cold out here so let’s go inside, shall we?’

  ‘Very well.’ The blanket rose from her sides. ‘Support me, gentlemen.’

  Delving under the material, the pair engaged with the woman’s stuck-out elbows. A quail’s wishbone having greater tensile strength, they took care not to pull against each other as they slow-marched her back to the house.

  ‘I’ve known Madame for years. Worked for her for nearly two. Two years and now this! The stench of rotting flesh. My God.’ She swallowed a sob. ‘That was my greeting here this evening. And when I saw… saw her poor—’

  Short on patience when it came to children, old people and humanity in general, Granot grasped the nettle. ‘Having seen her, can you confirm the deceased was indeed Madame Jeanne Mesnel? Just unofficially.’

  ‘She was unrecognisable but I know it was her.’

  ‘If she was unrecognisable—’

  The wishbone gave a tug. ‘Who else could it be? It’s Madame Mesnel. Definitely!’

  Darac decided to spare Granot further pain. ‘Go on ahead, would you, Lieutenant? Make a start upstairs.’

  ‘If you insist, chief.’

  Darac had seldom seen the man move so fast. ‘Flak? In here, please.’

  Madame Loret accepted the substitution of Flaco for Granot. Slowing with every stride, she was still talking away as they approached the back door of the villa.

  ‘Madame, on second thoughts, I think we’ll leave it there for now. Let’s reconvene—’

  ‘The sight of her poor swollen body, Captain. I’ll never forget it. Never!’ A graunch of gears suddenly shifted her into a happier place. ‘She was still so slender, you know. Slender and quite, quite lovely.’ Back with a jolt into first. ‘And now here she was… all blown-up and green as a frog.’

  Flaco craned her neck around Loret’s shaking head. ‘Sir, may I assist the Lieutenant? Or anyone?’

  ‘You can assist me by taking Madame Loret home.’

  Madame was having none of it. ‘Go home? No, no. I have more to tell you, Captain. A lot more!’

  ‘You can tell me tomorrow morning. You’ll feel better after a good night’s sleep and your thoughts will be much more clear and concise.’ He hoped. ‘Alright?’

  ‘Sleep? After this… horror?’

  ‘You must try.’ Darac gave Flaco an expectant look. ‘Flak?’

  ‘Just a moment.’ Madame Loret raised a staying hand. ‘Perhaps tomorrow might be preferable. On the other hand—’

  ‘Flak – take the lady home.’

  ‘Yes sir. This way, madame.’

  ‘I know which way it is, young lady. Haven’t I been coming here every Friday for two years? And let me tell you this…’

  As Flaco began to lead Madame Loret away, her full-on pout told Darac she knew she’d drawn the short straw. But that was the l
ot of the junior officer.

  ‘Be sure to come, Captain!’ Madame Loret took a closer look at the blanket she had been issued. ‘I wouldn’t give this to a dog. I’ll keep it, nevertheless.’

  As Darac watched them go, a wave of tiredness broke over him. Just that morning he had concluded an investigation into the armed robbery of a security van in which two guards had been blinded and half a million euros stolen. After eight long months, the culprits had been caught and virtually all the cash recovered. Congratulations to Acting Commissaire Darac and Nice’s Brigade Criminelle. Ten hours later, it was as if it had never happened.

  The combination of Allure mixed with formaldehyde signalled Patricia had come back. He turned to her. ‘Let me ask you something.’

  ‘If it’s “Do you like jazz?” you already asked me.’

  ‘This is one you won’t get wrong.’ He ran a hand through his hair. ‘How long have you been with the pathology unit?’

  ‘Ten… eleven years.’

  ‘So Madame Mesnel, alias Free Willy, down there. What would you say was the most likely cause of death?’

  Patricia’s eyebrows disappearing into the hood of her white overalls gave her the look of an astonished nun. ‘You want my opinion?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I just check people in and out, you know.’

  ‘You do a lot more than that.’

  ‘We-ell—’

  ‘Patricia, we’ve worked on hundreds of cases together, right? You’ve seen it all.’

  ‘You think you’ve seen it all. Poor woman, being… chewed up like that.’

  ‘I know.’ Darac gave a sympathetic nod but he also felt a little ill-disposed toward Madame Mesnel. Taking alfresco dips in this weather? At her age? ‘So?’

  Patricia dropped her voice. ‘How’d you like to know what Barrau thinks? I overheard him dictating into his recorder. He didn’t realise I was there.’

  ‘This is gold. Go on.’

  She raised a latex-covered finger. ‘You didn’t hear this from me, right?’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘What he’s thinking is that the lady was in seriously failing health; that she died between three and ten days ago and…’ Hearing voices below, Patricia glanced toward the tent. Barrau had finished his examination and was on his way toward them. ‘And that all the visible injuries appear to have been caused post-mortem.’