Rocco shook his hand. ‘No problem. Did you get him?’
‘Yes. His dad’s a local councillor, would you believe? He had the cheek to deny it — and there was his little git of a son stinking of petrol and smoke right there in the living room.’ He shook his head at the thought. ‘I was tempted to flick a match near him: he’d have gone up like a Roman candle.’
‘What’s with the heat?’ said Rocco. The air was heavy and musty, as if the heating had been jacked up to its maximum temperature.
‘It was like this when we got here. We turned it down so we could work, but the place is well insulated.’ Bertrand bent his head towards the study. ‘We haven’t moved the body yet. Thought it best to let you take a peek first.’
Inside the study, two men were checking through the papers on the desk, having to work over the reclining form of Ishmael Poudric lying in his chair. His head was thrown back and his arms hung by his sides, as if he had simply fallen asleep, too tired to find a more comfortable position. His mouth was open, Rocco noted, but there was no shock or surprise on his features, no frozen expression of pain.
He moved round for a better look. A patch of blood no bigger than a small child’s hand showed on the front of Poudric’s jumper.
‘No sign of other wounds?’ he asked.
Bertrand shook his head. ‘None. He didn’t answer his door to the postman this morning. There were a couple of parcels for him and a signature was needed. When the postman called back later and pushed the door, it opened. Poudric was right here, where you see him. The postman called us immediately.’ He lifted his shoulders, suggesting a complete lack of ideas. ‘No bad history, no rows with neighbours who, between you and me, are too old and infirm for this kind of nonsense, anyway — and no sign of a robbery.’ He puffed his cheeks in frustration. ‘If there’s anything you can tell me, I’d be glad of the help. Our local medic reckons he’s been dead over ten hours, but it’s not easy to be certain because of the heating. I think the killer knew what he was doing.’
Rocco understood. Concealing or blurring the time of death usually had one purpose only: to allow the killer to prepare a convincing alibi for being somewhere else at the time.
He bent closer. There were no cuts to Poudric’s hands, no defensive wounds to suggest the photographer had seen the knife thrust coming. Whoever had stabbed the old man had taken him by surprise.
‘We think he was standing when he was stabbed,’ Bertrand continued, pointing to the floor beneath the desk, where one of Poudric’s slippers had come off. ‘He probably fell back and the killer eased him into his chair.’ The detective pulled a face. ‘At a guess, I’d say he knew his killer and was comfortable having him in here.’
Rocco couldn’t argue with that. He played the scene in his head, picturing the sequence of events. An elderly photographer, welcoming someone he knew. No threat, no sign of danger, relaxed in his own home. It fitted.
‘You found my card. Where was it?’
‘Ah.’ Bertrand nudged one of his colleagues, who handed him a buff folder from the corner of the desk. Rocco’s card was stapled to the top right-hand corner. ‘This was it, on his desk but under a pile of other stuff. He was building a library of war pictures, it seems, cataloguing photos from the period.’
‘That’s right.’ Rocco opened the folder. Inside were two black and white photographs. One showed the diminutive figure of Didier Marthe standing next to a tall man with his back half-turned to the camera. They were close, as if deep in conversation. The second snap was the one Poudric had mentioned. It showed the tall man by himself this time, sitting at a rough table in a clearing. He was wearing a heavy coat, work boots and a soft cap pushed to the back of his head, and seemed unaware of being captured on camera. He was busy examining what Rocco recognised as a British Sten gun. On the table alongside him were a revolver and a box of ammunition.
But Rocco wasn’t looking at the weapon. He was more interested in trying to control his reactions when he saw and recognised the face of the man who was holding the Sten with such easy familiarity. A man who, according to the late Ishmael Poudric, was long dead, a victim of German repression.
Philippe Bayer-Berbier.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
After giving Detective Bertrand a potted version of his own investigation so that he could complete an outline report for his superiors, Rocco made his way back to Poissons, his mind in a whirl. So far, he had a puzzle of several disjointed parts, and no signs of being able to connect them with any degree of logic. He ticked them off in his mind. A young woman is murdered in a tiny rural village, her death quickly glossed over by her father, a rich industrialist and former Resistance hero. Living in the same village is a scrap man who appears to have covertly taken over the phone of a previous subscriber, for reasons not yet clear. According to a wartime photographer, the same man was part of a Resistance group, and was pictured alongside a French SOE agent. That agent is now the same highly placed industrialist and war hero… and father of the dead woman. Yet the agent and the rest of the Resistance group were allegedly wiped out by the Germans.
And now the photographer linking the two men had been murdered.
Rocco wondered if Poudric had realised the identity of the SOE man and talked to someone he should not have.
He was accustomed to having to shuffle leads like cards in a pack; it came with the job and required a degree of objectivity and creative thought which he mostly enjoyed. But so far in his career, gang murders apart, the majority of his cases had involved people known to one another and often in close proximity in their local community, which made connecting the links relatively simple. This one, however, not only stretched across distance and time, but social levels, too.
He pulled up along a straight stretch of deserted road. He felt a headache coming on. A run of fields looped off into the distance, bare and empty of movement. He turned off the engine and lowered the window, allowing a breeze and a few crows in a nearby spinney to keep him company.
He got out and walked away from the car, hands thrust into his pockets while trying to make sense of it all. Clearly Didier Marthe knew Philippe Berbier. And the phone number in the Felix Faure flat just as clearly linked Didier with Berbier’s daughter, Nathalie. Yet logic said they could not have been further apart, by all the factors of birth, wealth and social backgrounds, as well as the generation gap and the kind of fashionable circles the young woman had moved in.
He stopped and took out his gun. The MAB felt warm and comfortable, nestling in his hand with solid familiarity. He spotted a make-do scarecrow standing in a sugar beet field fifty yards away. It was a simple cross of sticks wearing a threadbare waistcoat and a holed trilby, and served little useful purpose if the casual proximity of the crows was any indication.
Rocco took aim. It was too far for anything sophisticated, but he took a deep breath, released it slowly, then squeezed the trigger in a double tap followed by a single. The old hat snapped off at a wild angle and the sticks holding it exploded in pieces. The crows protested loudly, hauling themselves scrappily into the sky as the gunshots rolled away across the fields. Lucky, he decided pragmatically. Against regulations, too; Massin would have his balls if he knew. But it had served to release the tension and frustration he was feeling.
And in spite of the lack of clarity about who knew whom, he was a step closer than he had been earlier that day. He had another connection, another link in the chain.
He pocketed the gun and walked back to the car.
Rocco was dreaming, running through a cold, grim marshland, tendrils of mist hanging around his face, strangely immobile and vertical like the hanging fronds of exotic vegetation. He was trying to reach the other side, pushing desperately with his feet but going nowhere, the ground as sticky as glue. A bell was ringing, insistent and piercing. Did that mean his time was running out and the exercise was nearly over?