Death on the Rive Nord (34 page)

Suddenly his hands were out of the water and into cold air.

Gulping back the instinct to breathe in, he pushed towards a patch of grey shimmering up ahead. Bits of debris swirled around him and something curled round his leg. He kicked frantically, barely resisting panic. It was a length of rope. He doubled over and ripped at it with his hands until it dropped clear, then lunged forward again. His lungs, sore from breathing the foul air, were now in agony.

Something heavy bumped against him. He pushed it away and felt rough material bisected with heavy stitching. What felt like a plastic bag moved against his face, cold and slimy. He brushed it off. Another, larger object bobbed alongside him, heavy and cumbersome. He pushed through and saw the patch of light growing bigger.

Another kick and he surfaced, coughing and retching. He was in a long cabin lined with small, square windows covered in heavy curtains. The water was halfway up the walls of the cabin, which he could now see vaguely through the gloom, his eyes already accustomed to darkness. A clutter of debris: plastic cups, food containers, cigarette packets, pieces of fabric and torn paper, and the edge of what appeared to be the mattress off a bed.

He was on the boat Nicole had shown him; the rotting hulk where the people from the truck had hidden. The atmosphere up here was stale and rancid, branded with the memory of unwashed bodies and damp clothing, of desperate men hiding until they could move on. But for Rocco it was almost sweet. He knew without being able to see that the ceiling and walls would be dirty yellow.

Then he remembered something else Claude had told him about the canal just here: a fault line on the bottom full of soft sediment which could swallow the barge whole.

He stilled the onset of panic, breathing raggedly. Still time to get out.

At the far end lay some wooden steps and the door to the rear deck. He pushed gently on the floor of the cabin and floated towards freedom. But the sudden movement caused a wash to break against the cabin’s walls, the water slapping like a mocking handclap, daring him to rush. The boat yawed
lazily, debris floating and bucking like small boats on a rough sea. Then something heavy brushed Rocco’s leg. Whatever it was seemed to take hold, unwilling to break contact, and he kicked against it, imagination burning unseen horrors into his brain. After everything down in the hull, it was too much to ignore. He had to look. He turned as a dark shape lifted out of the water and rolled slowly away from him, shedding water from a cold, grey face and sightless eyes and a bright-red shirt.

The worker from the factory. Metz’s final victim.

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

‘If I didn’t know better, Inspector, I’d say you suffered from suicidal tendencies. Were you in the habit as a child of throwing yourself out of very tall trees?’

Doctor Rizzotti dabbed at a cut on Rocco’s forehead, spreading a yellow-orange stain of iodine across the skin, then stood back with a smile to admire his handiwork. ‘Not bad, though I say it myself,’ he commented. ‘Although I’ve seen healthier-looking corpses after a Saturday-night bar brawl.’ He handed Rocco some tablets and a glass of water. ‘Take two of these now, then two every four hours. They’ll help with the headaches but not with being beaten up.’

‘You finished?’ Rocco stood up, swallowed two of the tablets dry and made for the door. His clothes had been swapped for clean ones, but still consisted of dark slacks and a black shirt. His English brogues were at the bottom of the canal, but he’d replaced them with an older pair.

‘Yes, off you go.’ Rizzotti shook his head. ‘Do come back
soon. I must say, it makes a change from examining corpses. Not as much fun, but at least they lie still.’

After surfacing out of the sinking boat, Rocco had walked to the nearest road and hitched a lift to Poissons, where he’d washed and changed out of his wet clothes. Then he’d got Claude to bring him to Amiens while a team had been called in to search the sunken barge and bring up the body of the factory worker. Lambert’s plan had been simple. Get rid of Rocco and the dead man by placing them both on the barge, then sink it in the deepest part of the canal and nobody would be any the wiser. If the bodies did surface later, it would be next to impossible to make a connection with the factory.

‘You should have called me,’ Claude had muttered, when he told him what had happened. ‘I would have helped. You think my work here takes all my time?’ He puffed his cheeks in mild exasperation. ‘Mother of God, you could have been killed twice over! Barbarians!’

‘You were looking after Nicole.’

‘Sure. But Jean-Mi kept telling me to get lost; said I was spoiling his fun and he could keep her perfectly safe without me hanging around like the angel of doom.’

‘Where are they?’

‘Some inlet off the canal the other side of Amiens. He wouldn’t tell me where exactly; said it was better that way. But I think I know where.’

‘Can you take me there? I need to speak to her.’

‘Sure, but only after you see a doctor.’ Claude eyed the cuts and bruises on his face. ‘You could be suffering from concussion.’

He’d resisted, but in the end, to stop Claude’s nagging, it had been easier to let Rizzotti take a look at him. Fortunately,
it had proven to be superficial, with no serious damage.

He sat back while Claude drove out to the west of the town, where he negotiated a series of narrow roads until they arrived at the canal. A small inlet was concealed by a line of poplar trees, with Jean-Michel’s boat anchored at the far end. The former police officer saw them coming and waved. A shotgun was resting on the roof of the cabin.

Claude turned off the engine and looked at Rocco. ‘You don’t look happy. This has nothing to do with what happened last night, does it?’

‘No. It doesn’t. At least, not directly.’

‘She’s been through a lot, that one.’

‘I know. But there’s something I need to ask her.’ He’d considered getting Alix to come with him, but decided against it. The presence of another woman might inhibit Nicole in some way, and he needed to hear her story without fear of hidden details.

‘OK. You know best. I’ll watch the approaches.’ Claude got out of the car and turned to survey the main canal. Rocco walked towards the boat, and Jean-Michel nodded towards the rear door, then wandered away to join his friend.

‘I need to know what happened,’ said Rocco, sitting down in the cabin across from Nicole. Massi was asleep in a bunk, wrapped in a blanket. The cabin was snug, warmed by a small but efficient log stove. ‘On that truck.’

Nicole nodded, her hands clasped in front of her. She looked suddenly small, and no longer as physically confident. Yet there was a resolve about her, as if nothing was going to penetrate her armour. The soft murmur of Claude and Jean-
Michel talking on the canal bank gave the boat an oddly leisurely atmosphere, yet Rocco felt anything but relaxed.

‘What happened to you?’ she asked, eyeing the patch of iodine and his bruised skin.

‘I fell in the canal.’

She nodded, accepting his businesslike approach. ‘Very well.’

They had slipped off the boat from Oran under cover of darkness, a line of figures scurrying across the narrow stretch of open ground between the quayside and the warehouses lining the dock. A crew member saw Nicole and whispered that they were now in France, and wished her well.

She swept up her son, Massi, clutching his slim shape to her, and hurried after the man in front, praying that it would not all end here, so close to freedom. She almost wept at the freshness of the sea air blowing across the dockside. She was shivering after being kept in the confined storage room below deck, where the pounding of the ship’s engines on the other side of the bulkhead had cooked the atmosphere and made the journey unbearably noisy and claustrophobic.

Freedom. It represented different things to so many people. To these men with her, it was an opportunity to start a new life, to earn money to send home, a chance to avoid the grinding poverty that embraced them in their homeland.

To her it was the opportunity to hold on to life itself, to keep her son and watch him grow; to free him from the threat of death and brutality and the cruelty which would be his lot if they stayed in Oran.

And to prevent him growing in the image of Samir Farek.

Ever since she had slipped on board the boat named
the
Calypsoa
, a rusting, old cargo boat which stank of diesel and dirty seawater, and rattled with every surge of its engines, she had been aware of the men watching her. Uncomfortably close to them, she had felt intimidated at first, by their presence and their haunted eyes, by their expressions of desperation, of exhaustion. By their curiosity, too, about her and what she was doing here. As disturbing as it was, though, as they had chugged out of the Vieux Port, the rattle of winches and chains pounding through the boat’s hull, she had heaved a sigh of relief. This was only the first stage of her journey, but she was content to be at least this far ahead of the fate which had been her due had she stayed.

‘A woman should not travel alone like this,’ said one man, whose name she later learnt was Slimane. ‘Especially a mother.’ He was of medium height, slim but strongly built, and boasted of being a slaughterman, one who could open the throat of a full-grown bull with the same ease as he kissed a whore. As if to prove the point, he produced a wicked-looking knife which he claimed was the tool of his trade, and stared intensely at Massi, who was watching from behind his mother’s back, eyes huge and round.

‘Are you married?’ he asked later in the journey, nodding at Massi. ‘Or are you just a whore with a paid-for bastard?’

She did not respond, flinching at the harsh words and the brutal tone, and looked to the others for support. But they all looked away, some not wanting to hear that she was running from a husband, others embarrassed by the possibility that she was a woman of low repute.

Slimane kept needling her at regular intervals, pulling out his knife for no good reason and testing the blade. All the
time he would watch her, until she felt his eyes were boring into her soul.

‘I have seen you before,’ he said, as the boat slowed after the second day, and wallowed in a cross-current. She could hear the sounds of a motor some distance away, but enclosed in the storage room, none of them could see out, their next destination known only by the men who were transporting them.

She said nothing to Slimane, knowing that would encourage him.

‘Yes, I’ve definitely seen you before,’ he repeated. ‘But not in any whorehouse.’

That night they were dropped off at an unnamed port, and taken through a warehouse and hurried on board a truck, secreted among a cargo of rope. It had been uncomfortable and smelly, the air filled with dust and fibres, and the driver had given them containers of fresh water and a handkerchief for Massi to tie around his mouth to stop him coughing. Coughing, he had told them, would mean discovery and a return trip across the Mediterranean.

By morning, they were in a large shed awaiting the next stage of their journey. Outside there were vineyards, said one man, and open countryside. He had been excited yet fearful, and when Slimane told him to shut up, he had sat down quickly, afraid.

That night they climbed onto another truck, this one filled with boxes and the smell of plastic. One of the men had told her in a whisper that the boxes were full of car parts.

That night, Slimane had tried to rape her.

CHAPTER SIXTY

She smelt him first. He’d been in the far corner of the truck, having secured himself some extra space away from the others. Nobody had tried to encroach on it, fearful of the knife and unable to see in the dark. He had remained apart, a brooding presence.

Then he began moving towards her.

Massi was fast asleep, exhausted by the journey and the lack of good food. But at least it prevented him from seeing what happened next. She became aware of movement and heard the man’s coarse breathing as he slid closer.

Nobody tried to stop him.

A rough hand closed around her ankle, the grip like a clamp. Then it slid upwards, forcing its way beneath her coat and dress, like a large, obscene spider. She struggled, kicking out, felt a spray of spit touch her cheek as he moved closer, his sour breath engulfing her along with the body smell of one who had not showered or bathed in days.

She fought back in silent, furious desperation, trying to push him off, to stop the hands moving over her, to stop the hot face pushing down towards hers.

In the background, one of the men protested.

Slimane turned, swore that he’d cut the throat of the boy if anyone tried to stop him. The protest ceased.

‘
Why are you doing this
?’ she hissed, aware of Massi’s sleeping body nearby. Whatever was about to follow, he must not witness it, should not hear it; there could not possibly be worse things for a child to know of his mother than that she had been defiled.

‘I know who you are, whore!’ Slimane whispered, grunting as he tried to move above her. ‘You belong to Farek. Farek the gangster.’ He chuckled knowingly, the sound full of menace and meaning, and devoid of humanity. ‘And we all know what kind of women gangsters bed down with, eh? Whores and bitches.’ He pushed against her, but she managed to get one leg between them, a slim barrier but a strong one. For now. ‘So which one are you, huh?
Madame
Farek.’ He made the title sound at once insulting and obscene, and she knew with utter certainty that she was not going to survive this night. If Slimane didn’t kill her, Farek eventually would.

Then she felt a sharp pain in her arm, and the warm trickle of blood on her skin.

She knew instinctively what it was: Slimane’s knife. The point was sticking through the material of his jacket and had pricked her arm.

She stopped struggling, trying desperately to think. How to stop him? She had to distract him, to focus his mind on one thing and one thing only. She would have only one chance.
After that … she couldn’t even contemplate what came after that.