Rocco shrugged. Charles de Gaulle, soldier and current president of the Fifth Republic, lauded and loathed in fairly equal measures, was a man he rarely thought about. ‘I think he’s got other things on his mind at the moment.’
‘The Algerian thing?’ Claude nodded sombrely. ‘That’s all done and dusted, bar the shouting. Up to them, now.’ As if sensing Rocco’s lack of interest in the political desires of the once French-held North African territory, now just a year on from independence, he nodded at a tall, skeletal character standing to one side. ‘Monsieur Thierry over there,’ he said, returning to the matter in hand, ‘looks after the churchyard. It’s his way of getting a free pass into Heaven. He found the bomb while returfing. Looks a big bugger.’
Rocco had seen bigger in Indochina, but scrubbed that mental picture. Best not go there; barely ten years ago, it was still too recent to forget and offered only dark shadows waiting to greet him.
Besides, it didn’t look much like any bomb he’d ever seen.
‘Who’s the expert?’ Bush-hat was now bending and sniffing noisily at the object like a terrier inspecting a rat hole, dribbling cigarette ash all over it. Small and brown as a nut, the man looked as hard as the soil he was standing on, as much a product of the land as the crops in the fields.
‘Didier Marthe. He’s a scrap man. Anything worth selling, he’ll break it down and flog it. He spends all day hitting things with a big hammer.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘I think the vibration affected him over the years.’
Didier, Rocco noticed, was missing the thumb and first two fingers of his left hand, and his face looked shiny on one side.
‘Looks like he suffered for his art.’
Claude laughed. ‘He hit a grenade a little too enthusiastically one day. It was a dud, but still had enough life in it to stop him playing the accordion.’
‘Now there’s a blessing.’ Lucas paused, did a double take. ‘He hit a live grenade?’ It made him wonder if there was, after all, some truth to the slanderous rumours about country folk circulated among his former colleagues, who rarely, if ever, ventured outside the city limits. ‘Tell me you’re kidding.’
‘Unbelievable, but true. World War Two, British, I think it was. He doesn’t usually bother with them — they’re too small and not worth the effort. He prefers artillery shells, the bigger the better. And bombs like this one.’
‘You make it sound like a full-time job.’
‘It is. The last big one he found was next to the school eighteen months ago. He’d just finished clearing the ground around it and went to get some lifting gear when it blew up. Knocked him flat on his arse and blew the roof off the schoolhouse. Luckily, the kids were on holiday.’
‘For him, too.’
‘Not the way he saw it. All that metal, fragmented to hell; he got totally tanked and cried for three whole days.’
Rocco grunted. No wonder the scrap man was so interested in this find. Large, oblong and rounded, it had a hefty hexagon nut at the end protruding from the ground. The casing was covered in a thick scale of rust, no doubt through being buried in the chalky soil of the Poissons-les-Marais churchyard with only the ancient village dead for company. Quite how such a monster had lain overlooked for so long was a mystery, although he knew these things worked their way to the surface from time to time, like pebbles in the garden.
‘Lucas Rocco,’ murmured Claude, stretching out the words and pronouncing Lucas the American way, with the ‘s’. ‘You’re not from these parts, are you?’
‘I’m relieved you can tell.’ Rocco wondered how long the dissection would go on for. Probably days, given the fact that so little else seemed to happen here.
‘Easy. You don’t look shifty enough.’
‘What have people here got to be shifty about?’
‘Everything. Nothing. Living and dying, mostly.’
‘I’ll bear it in mind.’
‘You’ll be looking for somewhere to doss down, I suppose?’
Rocco decided he might get to like this man — if he didn’t have to arrest him for something first.
‘I might. Are you the local psychic, or a letting agent?’
‘If I was either, I’d die of boredom. You’ve seen the cafe?’
‘I have. Not my thing.’ His recommended billet above the bar-tabac, where he’d just stopped to check out the facilities, was too public, and the smell of stale beer and cigarette smoke too invasive, for his tastes; he’d lodged in too many similar fleapits over the years to look on them with affection. It was at best a stopgap until he found something better; somewhere he could call his own space while he considered what the hell he was supposed to be doing out here.
‘Go see Mme Denis, down Rue Danvillers.’ Claude tilted his head towards a lane running off at an angle from the village square. ‘Last but one on the left. She has the keys to an empty house down there. Plenty of room to park the cop machine, too.’ He grinned knowingly. ‘In your line of work, you’ll feel right at home.’
‘Why?’
‘A man was murdered there years ago.’
CHAPTER TWO
Rocco? Arrogant and disrespectful.
‘Say again?’ Rocco stared him down, his voice a growl, and the grin faded quickly.
‘Only kidding. It’s a nice place. Peaceful.’
Then the crowd moved and the man named Didier Marthe was in front of them. No doubt aware that he’d lost his audience’s attention in favour of the new arrival, he stared belligerently up into Rocco’s face, craning his head with difficulty.
‘What are you doing here, flic?’ he demanded, cigarette bobbing angrily. ‘We’ve done nothing wrong. It’s a bomb, that’s all. Not a drama; not an arrestable offence… unless you go around locking up explosive devices these days?’ He turned and sniggered at the crowd, seeking support against the outsider, the cop. ‘They turn up all the time, these things, like turds on a sheep farm. The whole area was one big munitions dump back in forty-four, and what wasn’t stored here was dropped like bird shit by the British as they scuttled back to England.’
‘Easy, Didier,’ murmured Claude. ‘He’s a newcomer. Show some respect, huh?’
‘Respect?’ Didier spat on the ground, easing the gobbet around the cigarette. ‘He’ll have to earn it like everyone else!’
Rocco stood his ground, although he was trying not to gag. It wasn’t the little man’s aggressive demeanour, nor even the potentially deadly object sitting just a few feet away which bothered him: rather, Didier’s breath, which was toxic enough to kill a chicken at ten paces. A mixture of vin de pays, cheap tobacco and several other unnameable substances, it wafted out in a vicious cloud whenever he spoke, enveloping anyone within range in its evil embrace.
‘We’d best call the gendarmes,’ Monsieur Thierry called out anxiously. ‘Before it goes off and flattens the village.’ He looked in a state of shock, staring in awe at the spot where his shovel had hit the casing with some force. A silvery scar was clearly visible where the rust had been chipped away.
‘What?’ Didier spun round in horror, and Rocco could guess why. The fire brigade was the first force called on in emergencies, but the local brigade probably wasn’t equipped to deal with explosives. The gendarmes, while less popular — and likely viewed by cynics as expendable — would keep whatever they dealt with as evidence. ‘Why let those thieving maggots get their hands on it?’ Didier turned back to Rocco, including him in his contempt and huffing out a fresh wave of halitosis.
Rocco fought to hold on to his breakfast. The idea that this man might take a hammer to the thing simply to prevent the police from confiscating it was frightening. But short of surrounding it with armed guards or decking him, he couldn’t think of any way of preventing it.