Macron had been present at only one single police siege during the course of his career. He had just turned twenty and had passed his police primaries six days before. Neighbours had reported seeing a man threatening his wife with a gun. A building in the 13th arrondissement had been sealed off. Macron had been all but forgotten about. His police mentor at the time had been a trained negotiator and had been called in at the very last moment to defuse the situation. Macron had asked if he might come along as an observer. The man had said yes. Just so long as he kept out of the way. Far out of the way.
Five minutes into the siege the negotiations had broken down. The wife had made a comment to her husband which had driven him over the brink. He had killed her, killed the negotiator and then killed himself.
It was the very first time that Macron had seen and understood the innate fallibility of the police machine. Which was only as good as the cogs that made it up. If one of the cogs skipped a ratchet, the whole machine could go kaput. Faster than the Titanic.
He had liked that mentor. Macron had counted on the man to monitor and encourage his career. Shepherd him through his rookie-ship.
After the siege he had been forgotten about a second time. As good as abandoned. No more mentors. No more helping hands up the greasy pole. And now it was all happening again. The Marseillais detectives would come in and take over his case. Cosy up to Calque. Shunt Macron to the sidelines. Take all the credit that was his by right.
The eye-man had hurt him. Once, personally, out in the field and once, professionally, on the road to Millau. And now the man was sitting, like a staked-out pigeon, in a partially lit room, expecting to dominate proceedings for the third time.
But Macron would be the spoke in his machine. He had a gun. He had the crucial element of surprise. The eye-man had made himself a sitting duck. Who would know, in the chaos of a shootout, what had really gone down?
If he killed the eye-man, his career would be made. He would forever remain the man who had cracked the twin fatalities of the Paris gypsy case. The gypsy didn’t matter, of course. But security guards were honorary police – at least when it came to being murdered. Macron could already imagine the envy of his peers; the admiration of his fiancee; the grudging respect from his normally detached father; the triumphant revenge of his downtrodden mother who had fought long and hard for his right to leave the bakery and attend police college.
Yes. This was it. This would be Paul Eric Macron’s moment of truth.
57
Sabir was standing by the side of the road, just as arranged. Macron recognised him immediately from the image he kept on his cellphone. Sabir had lost weight in the intervening period and his expression lacked some of the bumptious self-confidence he exuded in the publicity photograph they had downloaded from his agency website. Now his face looked washed out in the artificial light from the stationary Simca’s headlights – an airport face – the face of a man in endless transit.
The idiot was even stripped to the waist. Why had the other motorist stopped? If Macron, as a civilian, had happened upon a half naked-man, in the middle of a lonely road, at dusk, he would have hurried on past and left him to the next fool down the line. Or called the police. Not risked a mugging or a car-napping by stopping to pick him up. People were strange, sometimes.
Macron drew up beside the Simca, his eyes scanning the road for traps. At this stage he wouldn’t put anything past the eye-man. Even setting up an ambush, with Sabir as the bait, in order to procure himself a police hostage. ‘Are you alone? Is it just you two here? Where’s the other gypsy?’
‘You mean Alexi? Alexi Dufontaine? He’s injured. I’ve left him with the horse.’
‘The horse?’
‘We rode in. At least Alexi did.’
Macron sifted a little air through his front teeth. ‘And you, Monsieur. You decided to lend this man your phone?’
The farmer ducked his head. ‘Yes. Yes. He was standing in the road with his hands held up. I nearly struck him with my car. He said he had to call the police. Are you the police? What is going on here?’
Macron showed the man his warrant card. ‘I’m going to record your name and address on my cellphone and take a picture of you. With your permission, of course. Then you may go. We will contact you later if we need to.’
‘What’s happening here?’
‘Your name, Sir?’
Once the formalities were over, Sabir and Macron watched the Simca disappear into the darkness.
Sabir turned towards the policeman. ‘When is Captain Calque coming?’
‘Captain Calque is not coming. He is coordinating the operation from the gendarmerie in Les Saintes-Maries. The paramilitaries will be here in two hours.’
‘The Hell you say? You told me fi fty minutes. You people must be crazy. The eye-man has had Yola standing on a stool for God knows how long, with a noose around her neck and a sack covering her head. She must be scared witless. She’ll fall. We need an ambulance on standby. Paramedics. A fucking helicopter.’
‘Calm yourself, Sabir. There’s an ongoing crisis in Marseille. The detachment of CRS we would normally be counting on for operations of this nature are fully occupied with other matters. We have had to address ourselves to Montpellier instead. Permissions have had to be given. Identities checked. That all adds to the time frame.’ Macron was astonished at how easily the lies tripped off his tongue.
‘What are we going to do then? Just wait? She’ll never hold out that long. And neither will Alexi. He’ll crack and go powering in. And so will I. If he goes, I go.’
‘No you won’t.’ Macron tapped the waist of his blouson, just above the hip. ‘I have a pistol. If necessary, I will handcuff both of you to my car and leave you for my colleagues to find. You, Sabir, are still wanted for murder. And I have reason to suspect that your companions – Dufontaine and the girl – have been using this house illegally. Have you any idea who it actually belongs to? Or have you just been house-sitting on spec?’
Sabir ignored him. He pointed up the track leading towards the house. ‘When’s your local back-up coming? You need to cut through all this bullshit, surround the place and make immediate contact with the eye-man. The sooner you start putting pressure on him, the better. Make it clear that he will gain nothing by harming Yola. That was the deal we had. The deal I made with your boss.’
‘My local back-up will be here in fifteen minutes. Twenty at the outside. They know exactly where to go and what to do. Show me the situation, Sabir. Explain to me exactly what trouble you have all managed to get yourselves into. And then we will see what we can do to get you out of it.’
58
Macron had settled on his plan. It was absurdly simple. He had reconnoitred the house and understood the layout perfectly. A wide-open window led to the back of the Maset. He would wait for Sabir and Alexi to show themselves and then he would pass through it, counting on their voices – and the eye-man’s concentration on them – to mask the sound of his movements. The minute he had a clear sight of the eye-man he would take him out – a shot to the right shoulder ought to do it.
For Macron wanted his day in court. It wouldn’t be enough just to kill the eye-man – he wanted the bastard to suffer. Just as he had suffered with his feet. And his back. And his neck. And the muscle at the top of his buttock that had been crushed by the car seat and which ticked incessantly since the accident – particularly when he was attempting to drift off to sleep.
He wanted the eye-man to suffer all the tiny humiliations of bureaucratic procedure that he, Macron, had to suffer in his position as a junior police officer. All the stone walls and the Chinese whispers and the unintentionally intentional mortifications. He wanted the eye-man to rot for thirty years in a ten foot by six foot jail cell and to come out an old man, with no friends, no future and with his health in tatters.