Jacquot and the Waterman (61 page)

It was Isabelle Cassier.

'We've got another floater,' she told him. 'Man. Out at Radoub Basin.'

Max Benedict snapped shut his mobile phone and slid it into his breast pocket.

Since leaving La Ferme Magny, negotiating the turns down to Chant-le-Neuf with only one hand on the wheel, he'd made three calls. One to a sleepy security manager at JFK in New York, one to the reservations manager at the Crillon in Paris, and the third to his contact at the Nice-Passedat, Marseilles's most illustrious hotel - and certainly the most expensive - set on its own headland off the city's coastal Corniche.

Yes, he was told by his sources, the Delahayes' Gulfstream had departed JFK; yes, they had spent last night at their favourite hotel in Paris; yes, they were expected at the Nice-Passedat that very morning; and yes, of course . . . Monsieur Benedict's usual room? No problem.

It hadn't taken Benedict long to realise that the Marseilles double header - a murder and a suicide in the same family in a single day - was his beat. He'd realised that before the TV newscast was over. But he'd kept his cool, surrendered to the last traces of jet lag seeping into his bones and had gone upstairs to sleep on it.

Sometime in the early hours, Benedict had woken from a deep sleep, called his editor in New York, and run her through the story. Murder and suicide, he told her. An illustrious French family, socially connected, political. And a wealthy American family, big-time New Yorkers, with much the same credentials.

'Absolutely your territory, Max,' she'd said, and the deal was done. Five thousand words, 'Postcard from the Riviera' kind of thing. She'd hold three pages for the next issue if he could make a Friday deadline. He told her he could and signed off with a punch in the air. A whole week. It was a shoo-in. He'd have it wrapped by Monday and the five thousand words e-mailed to New York just in time for the Friday deadline.

Sure he was tired, sure he wanted a rest after Palm Beach. But this story was irresistible. Equally irresistible was the notion of charging his flights, his jeep rental, his fuel, his accommodation at the Nice-Passedat and a
bouillabaisse gourmande
at Molineux's to the magazine. As to the fee, that would neatly cover the expenses he'd incurred by having the builder, Armande Vaison, look after the property during his latest, extended absence. As he skirted Cavaillon and followed signs for the autoroute, Benedict went over the facts that he'd picked up from the TV broadcast the night before. Madame Suzanne Delahaye de Cotigny, only daughter of Leonard and Daphne Delahaye of Park Avenue, Manhattan, and Bedford Hills, Connecticut, had been found dead by her gardener. She had drowned. She had also been murdered - how else could she have been found propped up in an inflatable pool chair? A grisly detail that Benedict just knew he would use to intro the story, already forming in his head. And then, not twelve hours after her body was discovered, the husband, Hubert, son of the late Auguste de Cotigny and his wife Murielle, went to his study, put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

The question that needed answering was this: did de Cotigny kill his wife, or did someone else? And why?

For Max Benedict, it would be fun finding out.

As it happened, Benedict knew both families professionally. The de Cotignys were old-school aristocrats, Hubert's late father a war hero, senator and presidential confidant who'd come to prominence in the summer of 1968 when, from his seat in the Senate, he had railed against the student uprisings in Paris and given the French police every encouragement to be brutal. Water cannon, baton charges, give no quarter had been his remit. Which had proved the spark for even greater enthusiasm at the barricades. But his closeness to de Gaulle (the general and he had fought side by side during the Saar Offensive and at Sedan) had protected him in the political fall-out that followed, the satirical newspaper
Le Canard Enchainé
bold enough to suggest on its front page that the president wouldn't get out of bed unless his old friend was standing there with his slippers and dressing gown.

Which was how Benedict had first come to hear of old man de Cotigny, when he was sent to France on his first foreign assignment to cover de Gaulle's state funeral for the
New York Times.
Through their Paris correspondent, he'd secured an interview with de Cotigny, the only non-family member at the great man's deathbed. Benedict had found him an insufferable bore and snob, while the grieving senator, done out in starched collar and black tailcoat, had noted Benedict's long hair, jeans and open shirt with a cool, disapproving look. The interview had not gone well.

As for the Delahayes, they were closer to home. Benedict had written about Mister Delahaye during his spat with Winston Lowell over a disputed plot of land on the Hamptons; and again when Delahaye was finally voted chief executive of Wall Streets Gravyll-Windham; and, of course, when his daughter, Suzanne, was arrested for possession of cocaine after the home of a transvestite drug dealer was raided by police.

In the Hampton's debacle it wasn't difficult taking the Delahaye side, when you knew what a twister Winston Lowell could be; and tipping his editorial in Delahaye's favour during the battle for Gravyll-Windham had been more about supporting the underdog than approving his corporate ethics - if GW's directors hadn't behaved so disgracefully in trying to keep Delahaye off the board, it would have been a more difficult tale to tell. As for the daughter's drugs bust, it was the story of stories, and there had been no other way he could spin it. Anyway, it was widely acknowledged that the girl had had it coming.

Suzanne Delahaye, younger of two children, had led a charmed life. Her mother was independently wealthy, her father a self-made man, and her brother Gus married by the time she hit her teens and head of his own brokerage firm by the time she was twenty. Spoilt and wilful, quietly sacked from The Mercy School in Manhattan and sent down from Vassar at the end of her first semester, she'd provided grateful gossip columnists with yards of salacious copy, not an inch of which came anywhere close to the spirit of the truth.

More than the drugs, the drink and the shoplifting, more than the tantrums in restaurants and nightclubs and a wildly acrimonious divorce from her first husband, it was Suzie's questionable sexual orientation and dubious low- life liaisons that raised eyebrows among those in the know. People like Benedict, whose diary column in one of New York's hottest society magazines often required the closest legal scrutiny prior to publication.

It was in that same column that Benedict broke the news of Suzie Delahaye's engagement to Hubert de Cotigny, following a chance summer meeting in Martha's Vineyard. But despite all the predictions of doom, the marriage seemed to have worked. For the last five years, living in France with her new but not so young husband, not a word had been heard of the wayward young lady. Until now.

Up ahead, Benedict saw the toll-booth outside Salon swing into view across the autoroute. He slowed the jeep, took a ticket and, when the barrier was raised, sped on towards Marseilles, a little less than an hour south.

And beckoning.

T
he Radoub Basin, in th
e shadow of the autoroute, was one of the smaller docking bays beyond the Quai d'Arenc, with enough berths and turning space for six large motor cruisers awaiting service or refit in the Radoub works. That Saturday morning the cranes threw long, fretted shadows across the cobbled quays while a stiff breeze off the sea feathered silent spray over the breakwaters and kept the roar of the autoroute to a background hum.

Isabelle Cassier was waiting for Jacquot just inside the main gate. She was wearing a black leather jacket over belted jeans and a blue T-shirt which rippled with the breeze, her bob of black hair flicking around her cheeks. Tucking the ends behind her ears, she briefed him on the circumstances surrounding the discovery: the crane operator who'd spotted the body floating in an empty berth and raised the alarm; the two mechanics who'd hoisted the body out of the water; and the crane operators boss who'd phoned the police. As for Isabelle, she just happened to be in the squad room before anyone else and took the call.

The body had been laid out on the cobbles and covered by a tarp. Neither Clisson nor Jouannay had yet made an appearance and it was a small and sombre group that stood around the crumpled, featureless shape, not quite knowing what to do with themselves, huddled, smoking, whispering to each other.

'It's not like the others,' Isabelle told him, as the four men around the body stepped aside to make room for them.

'You mean it's a man?' asked Jacquot.

'Fully dressed, not naked. And garrotted. Very professional job, by the look of it.'

Jacquot knelt, and reached for the tarpaulin.

The face hit him like a thunderbolt. The punctured cheeks, the hook nose and tented eyebrows, a jagged line of browning teeth revealed by the snarling lips, eyes already glazed from exposure to the water.

It was the fifth body that Jacquot had seen in the last eight days. Apart from Hubert de Cotigny it was the only face he recognised.

Doisneau.

Tipping up the chin, Jacquot saw the red wire-burn across the throat, a scarlet necklace trimmed with an edging of black that disappeared into Doisneau's collar. Isabelle had been right. A very professional job. A crossover loop, had to be. The skin only broken below the Adam's apple, more like a graze than a cut. On the right-hand side of the throat, close to the ear, the red line was interrupted by a large yellowing bruise.

Isabelle, kneeling beside Jacquot, lifted Doisneau's right hand and opened the palm. Traced along the tops of his fingers was the same red line that stretched across his throat.

'It looks like he managed to get his fingers up before the wire went tight,' said Isabelle. 'But that's all.'

Jacquot looked at the fingers Isabelle held in her hand and, from somewhere far back in the past, he remembered those same long fingers, the dirty nails, expertly working a palmful of tobacco with a crumbling nub of Moroccan hash that the
Chats
had got hold of, rolling the mix in a cigarette paper, licking it down and lighting up. 'Here, Danny, try this . . .' he'd said.

Jacquot dropped the tarp over the corpse's face and stood up, took a short, sharp breath of salt air and looked around. An empty, desolate, weekend landscape. The cranes, the workshops, the empty offices of La Joliette, oily black cobbles scabbed with tarmac, the pillared flyover beyond the gates and, far above them, a scatter of clouds so high they looked like they could pass behind the sun.