Adrian Magson - Death on the Rive Nord

The phone on Massin’s desk rang, cutting off further talk. Massin made a motion for Rocco to stay, listening for a few moments and glancing at Rocco before replacing the receiver.

‘Trouble seems to follow you around like a rabid dog, doesn’t it?’ he muttered. ‘That was a message from your local rural policeman — Lamotte, is it? A body, thought to be male, has been discovered in the canal not far from Poissons. It was being dragged under a barge.’

Rocco was relieved. It meant he could get out of this place before he said something he truly regretted. ‘Probably a drunk or a vagrant,’ he said, and turned to go.

‘I doubt it.’ Massin’s words stopped him. ‘The body is trapped underwater, but there was a rough description.’ He lifted an eyebrow. ‘You said you haven’t met any Algerians here yet, Inspector. I think that’s about to change.’

In Es Senia, Samir Farek left the building where his men were preparing to dispose of the dead taxi driver, Abdou. The body would be transported in an old packing crate and eventually found in a convenient alleyway in the old town. A robbery victim, sniffed over by dogs and rats. Unfortunate, but it happened all the time.

‘Find me the Calypsoa,’ he said, walking towards his Mercedes. ‘Find the agent who dealt with the addition of passengers on board. I want to know where the ship went from here and what stops it was due to make along the way.’

Bouhassa shuffled heavily along beside him, djellaba flapping around his huge belly. He nodded and licked his lips. ‘The agent. Right. Then what?’

‘Then kill him, of course.’

Later, at his home in Al Hamri, Farek walked through every room, feeding the anger that had begun when he returned from a lengthy business trip to Cyprus to find his wife gone. There was no trace of her here now, save for some clothing and a few cheap trinkets. The good jewellery was all gone, as was the emergency cash from his desk drawer.

And the boy.

She had left him. He couldn’t believe it.

The place was so quiet. He found that strange until he remembered how she had always been playing music on the radio; mindless modern pap, mostly.

He ended up in the bedroom, and standing breathing in the atmosphere of her perfume, found himself wondering whether she had ever soiled this place with another man.

He shook off the idea and went to the living room, staring at the expensive furnishings, the leather and polished hardwood, the glistening floor tiles and rugs from Afghanistan, the magazines from Paris and New York which she had persuaded him to buy her.

Felt the fury beginning to tip over as he thought about his generosity while ignoring the times he had gone with other women, soiled his own promises to her, threatened her very life for daring to question any decisions he made.

He kicked out, sending a fragile coffee table spinning across the room, smashing an ornate mirror from Florence. They were nothing, merely trappings; he could buy a dozen, a hundred more like them if he chose.

She had betrayed him. It was all he could see, all he could think about. Betrayed and made a fool of him in the eyes of the world. But she also knew too much, his whore of a wife. And in betraying him, she had brought about her own destruction.

He picked up the telephone to call first his brother Lakhdar, in Paris, then Bouhassa. Because of her betrayal he was going to have to bring forward his plans. It was earlier than he would have liked, but maybe this was a sign from the gods.

How did that saying go? Faire d’une pierre deux coups. Yes, he liked that. It was strangely appropriate.

Kill two birds with one stone.

Rocco recognised the smell the moment he stepped from his car. It was one he’d encountered all too often whenever a ‘floater’ — often a misnomer but darkly descriptive — surfaced after a period underwater.

He walked down a narrow footpath, where he found Claude Lamotte in conversation with two men in work clothes, breathing vapour and slapping gloved hands against the cold rolling off the canal. The call to Amiens had come from a cafe in the next village, where Claude, huddled in rubber boots and a heavy hunting jacket and wearing a cap with ear flaps jammed down over his head, had sent a messenger. His uniform shirt was just visible at the lapels, proving that he had, at least, made an effort to meet official dress requirements.

‘What have we got?’ asked Rocco.

Claude pointed into the murky water at the barge’s stern, to where a bundle of dark-green cloth was visible just below the waterline. Further down was the outline of a bare foot, the skin dark and shrivelled. ‘The boatman said he felt it being dragged by something in the water. He thought it might be a submerged log or a dead cow.’ He met Rocco’s sceptical look with a shrug. ‘It happens, believe me. Cows are good at getting into the canal but not so clever at climbing out again. After a while they give up and drown.’ As a rural policeman, part of Lamotte’s job was monitoring the canal and other waterways in the area, which meant taking calls involving accidental deaths by drowning.

‘Hell of a surprise for him, then.’

‘He hooked the cloth and gave it a tug, but it was stuck. The clothing must have snagged on a loose rivet. The body surfaced briefly before going under again. Says he got a good look at it before it got dragged under again. It gave him a turn so he left it alone and called me. He’s had a few drinks since then, so I wouldn’t stand too close — and don’t light a cigarette; he’ll go up like a Roman candle.’

Rocco nodded. The boatman was short, grubby and grizzled, with a tangle of grey beard and a head topped by a battered peaked cap. ‘I’ll pass, in that case. But I need to know where he’s come from and where he thinks he might have picked it up.’

‘Easy.’ Claude pointed along the canal, which ran straight for several hundred metres before bending away out of sight behind a line of poplar trees. ‘He set out from two kilometres away early this morning, this side of Poissons. It’s all straight from there, with no locks for a long way,’ he gestured behind them with his thumb, ‘and he reckons it was about half a kilometre back when he felt the barge’s nose coming round, like she’d grounded. Is a barge a ‘she’ or a ‘he’, d’you think?’

‘If she won’t do what you want,’ Rocco countered dryly, ‘what do you reckon?’ He studied the vessel, which was about fifteen metres long and sitting low in the water like a giant slug. It looked a brute of a workhorse, battered and scarred and weighed down with sacks of coal, and not the least bit feminine. ‘Would he have noticed it in a thing this size?’

‘Sure.’ Claude nodded. ‘Apparently they can tell by feel when a barge isn’t running right. He said it was pulling to one side.’

Rocco took his word for it. His own experience with boats had been confined to jumping in and out of assault craft. He looked along the canal in the direction the barge was facing. It wasn’t an area he was yet familiar with. ‘Where does this lead?’

‘It’s part of the River Somme. It goes through Amiens and up to Abbeville.’

‘OK. Let’s get the body out of there. We can’t tell what happened until we see it properly. Make sure you hook the clothing.’

Claude asked the boatman to get his boathook. But after much arguing, it was obvious the man was too unsteady on his feet to be of any help. Claude jumped on board and found the tool himself, then began tugging at the submerged body. After a few minutes, he managed to work the clothing free and carefully manoeuvre the corpse clear of whatever was holding it in to the bank. Rocco enlisted the help of the two bystanders to haul it dripping onto the towpath.