Knock 'Em Dead, page 1
PRAISE FOR THE CAPTAIN DARAC MYSTERIES
IMPURE BLOOD: U.S. Library Association’s Pick of the Month
“Engrossing... An auspicious début” – Publishers Weekly
“Great plot, appealing hero, glorious setting plus taut writing – a real winner” – Martin Walker, bestselling author of the Bruno Courrèges novels
“Impressive... will delight fans of international crime” – Booklist
“A vibrant, satisfying read” – The Crime Review
FATAL MUSIC: One of Strand Magazine’s Top 25 Books of 2017
“A thoroughly satisfying novel... Morfoot brilliantly captures the sights, smells and attitudes of southern France as well as giving us an engaging hero”– Mike Ripley, Shots eZine 5 Picks of 2017
“In Morfoot’s intriguing second whodunit featuring French police captain Paul Darac (after 2016’s Impure Blood)... The road to the logical solution is full of surprises” – Publishers Weekly
“Pulls you along like an iron bar to a magnet. Crime and mystery readers will consume every last morsel of this book.” – David Cranmer, Criminal Element Magazine
“Deftly interwoven plot lines… vividly captured Riviera setting… This strikingly well-written crime novel should appeal strongly to many.” – Bruce Crowther, Jazz Journal
BOX OF BONES:
“An accomplished piece of crime fiction. Captain Paul Darac... has become, without doubt, my favourite foreign detective created by a Brit since the late Michael Dibdin gave us Aurelio Zen.” – Mike Ripley – Shots eZine, 5 Picks of 2018
“The plot, filled with enough twists and turns for a corkscrew, is intriguing while never losing touch with either reality or humanity.” – Crime Review
“Darac leads an engaging and distinctive team of officers, all of whom grow as the reader learns more about them. Not only are the good guys well drawn, but so too are the bad guys and the plot is intriguing and filled with many twists and turns.” – Bruce Crowther, Jazz Journal
Captain Darac Mysteries
Impure Blood
Fatal Music
Box of Bones
Galileo Publishers
16 Woodlands Road
Great Shelford Cambridge
CB22 5LW UK
www.galileopublishing.co.uk
Distributed in the USA by:
SCB Distributors
15608 S. New Century Drive
Gardena, CA 90248-2129
ISBN 978-1-912916-18-4
First published in the UK 2020
© 2020 Peter Morfoot
All rights reserved.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Printed in the EU
For Katherine
Contents
PROLOGUE
Main
About The Author:
Acknowledgements:
Darac’s track playlist referenced in Knock ’em Dead
PROLOGUE
The man was no longer watching the trains go by. He had seen quite enough of the Régionales clattering off towards Nice or Cannes. Even the Vintimille-bound TGV, pushing a pressure wave that thumped the windowpane next to his ear, had failed to claim his attention.
Two empty bottles of La Poche’s house red sat on the table in front of him. For a moment, he considered ordering a third but decided against it. Time to call it a night. Casting no more than a glance across at the station, he got to his feet and made for the bar where a boy wearing a rapper T-shirt and earphones was swilling out glasses and muttering something rhythmically to himself.
‘I may as well go up,’ he said to the boy’s back.
No response. The man shrugged and, slapping a beaded curtain aside, began picking his way through a dank-smelling storage area towards a windowless stairwell, its entrance flanked ceremonially by a pair of defunct fridges. He heard a click and the overhead light went off. Timed out? He could hardly have covered the ground any faster if he’d sprinted.
‘Hey!’
He waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. They didn’t. He called out again, louder this time. The only response was a sound of scuttling somewhere away to his left. Hoping to trigger further meted-out illumination, he took a couple of faltering steps but succeeded only in bumping his knee against something hard. He explored it. Cast iron, louvres, some sort of rack on top – an old radiator. He stepped back and, feeling blindly for further obstacles, edged forward on a different line. After a moment, a strip light flickered into life on the landing above. He hurried to the stairs, taking them two at a time until a maddening realisation stopped him. He’d left his shoulder bag in the bar. The bag containing all his notes and photos. And he a pro, too. Now he would have to run the gauntlet of the lighting all over again.
‘Monsieur Férion?’
Salvation.
The voice was coming from the storage area. It had to be the boy from the bar: they were the only two left in the place.
‘Here.’
‘Where are you going, Monsieur Férion?’
He gave a dry laugh. ‘Where indeed?’
One earphone dangling free, the boy appeared below. ‘You left this.’ He tossed the bag on to the bottom step and, plugging himself back in, was gone as quickly as he had come.
‘Too kind.’
Férion was half-way down the stairs when he heard a click and the lights went out once more.
1
The voice in Mayor Hervé Montand’s ear was loud, angry and in a hurry.
‘Yes, I was just about to call you, Monsieur...’ Clamping the phone under his chin, Montand fished the letter from the pile on his desk and rolled his eyes. ‘… Lhatib.’
As he waited for the noise to cease, Montand swivelled in his chair and gazed out over the Var river basin below. Laid out on an east-facing shelf on the ground rising behind the coastal resort of Saint-Laurent, the village of La Crague overlooked an uninspiring stretch of the waterway. Ten or so kilometres from its egress into the glittering Baie des Anges, the Var was no gorge-quickened torrent; it was little more than a network of parched, gravelly shallows flanked by the sprawl of a zone industrielle. Yet it was one of Montand’s two favourite views in the world. The other was the reverse angle, the massif of La Crague viewed from the zone.
His eye settled on the bottle-shaped chimneys of a white-walled factory unit. From the mayoral chamber, a visitor would have needed binoculars to have made out the name emblazoned on the flag flying over the site. On this still July morning, it was hanging limply against its pole, anyway. But it was Montand’s flag, Montand’s factory, and above it, La Crague was Montand’s commune and always had been.
‘I can assure you that the account will be paid in full, Monsieur Lhatib, but we need a little breathing space. A little more time. A deferral, in fact.’
Lhatib responded with a stream of abuse.
‘I understand your anxiety but as our long-term position has never been so assured, I am willing here and now to offer you a generous one-off payment to be made at the conclusion of our—’
Lhatib’s stream turned into a flood. Surely, Montand thought, the man understood the principle of the inducement? The others all had. He decided to spell it out. ‘Monsieur, you have my word as mayor of the ancient commune of La Crague-du-Var, that—’
Abuse gave way to laughter. When Lhatib spoke again, it was to state his conviction that in no other country would La Crague, among the smaller of the 36,000-plus communes in France, merit a parish councillor, let alone a so-called mayor; one, moreover, who couldn’t pay his bills on time and had to resort to offering his creditors bribes.
Montand’s bald head flushed red as a cock’s comb and it was all he could do not to tell the nonentity to piss off back to whichever cesspit in the sand he’d crawled out of. But Montand kept quiet long enough to hear that if his outstanding account were not settled by the end of business today, he would soon be explaining himself to the regional prefect. He and his office would be exposed, shamed and sued. Criminal charges were likely.
As if summoned, his gaze rose to the portraits hanging on the wall opposite him, each a Montand wearing the sash of mayor. His head dropped. ‘Monsieur,’ he began again, but Lhatib had hung up. Montand looked at the bottom line on the account. Could he cover it personally, right away? Probably, but not without attracting some awkward questions from his wife, Mathilde, in whose name his business was registered.
He was still considering the matter when the phone rang again. A different voice and a different threat, this one promising a more straightforwardly painful outcome if payment were not made forthwith. And when, only minutes later, Montand took a third call, he was forced to acknowledge that a new picture was emerging. From all sides the ante was being upped and he couldn’t allow it to rise any higher.
His eyes bored into the piles of bills sitting in mute accusation in front of him. Something snapped in his head and with a series of thrashing swipes, he cast them wildly to the floor. The effort shot a searing pain up his back and he yelped. Now, on top of everything else, he would have to squeeze in a visit to the surgery but at least his painful little fit had cleared his head. As his forebears looked down on him, Montand reached for the mayoral phone and tapped in a number. After several unanswered rings, he heard three sounds in succession: a soaring and swooping Swanee whistle; a crash of breaking glass; and finally, the forlorn fart of a deflating whoopee cushion. That it ended in a triumphant upward flourish offered scant solace as he began leaving his message.
2
A slender shadow fell across the bar.
‘Perrier.’
The boy’s fingers stopped dabbing at his iPad. Pulling out one of his earphones released a tinny barrage of voices into the air. ‘Huh?’
The woman had the case-hardened look of someone who wasn’t used to asking twice. ‘Perrier,’ she said, mooring her shades in the artful casualness of her brushed-over bob. ‘A cold one.’
Caroline Rosay dropped her car keys into her black leather daysack and glanced around. There was no sign of the client she was meeting, nor of anyone else. Approaching lunchtime and the place was deserted? La Poche was evidently not Saint-Laurent-du-Var’s answer to Les Deux Magots. As a train pulled into the station across the street, Caroline heard the chiller cabinet door close stickily behind her.
‘Make sure it’s in-date.’
‘Huh?’
She checked the label herself. ‘Forget it.’ She considered returning to her car – she had a couple of litres of the stuff in her cool box – but decided to stay put. ‘Alright if I sit in the shade? Of course it is.’
The boy’s eyes followed Caroline as she walked through a swirl of sunlit dust motes into the seating area. Hoping her Dior silk would survive the examination of the folding aluminium chairs, she found a clean one and set it down at a table next to the window. It was open almost to the floor, a boon on a hot July day. She found the view itself uninspiring. Masked intermittently by trees, the platforms of Saint-Laurent station were bounded by a chain-link fence. Standing in sharp silhouette against the mesh, passengers lined up on the Nice-bound side looked to Caroline like prison camp inmates waiting for news from outside.
She understood now why her client had chosen to meet here rather than the station’s other café, a popular alfresco spot outside the booking hall. “I have a train to catch,” he’d said. “But I’d like a few quiet words with you first.” If by “quiet” he had meant “unlikely to be overheard”, Monsieur Ambroise Paillaud could hardly have chosen a better place.
‘The bitch ain’t straight!’ declared the boy at the bar, loudly and out of tune.
Caroline glanced at her Piaget. Paillaud had better be on time. It was less than three-quarters of an hour to her tennis lesson and the meter would start running whether she was there or not.
With the window wide open, Caroline could hear the station PA as clearly as if she had joined the inmates on the platform. Heralding a spoken announcement, a four-chime refrain sounded, the first three notes rising strongly and evenly, the fourth, a faint, falling echo cut short. She had never noticed before how much drama those four little notes conveyed. How much anxiety.
Voices in the doorway made her turn. One belonged to Paillaud.
‘I know you!’ the other man said, grasping Paillaud’s elbow from behind. ‘You’re the old film star. The comedian. “Monsieur La Chute”, they called you. “Monsieur La Chute, the Prince of the Pratfall!” You’re brilliant! What is your real name? Uh... Tati! That’s it. Jacques Tati. You are him, aren’t you?’
‘Yes I am,’ Paillaud said. ‘Now piss off and leave me alone.’
The PA announcement kicked in. News of a delay.
‘Was that the Marseille train?’ the man said, undeterred. Paillaud continued into the café, ignoring the question. ‘Well, I’d better go. Wonderful meeting you, monsieur!’
As the boy at the bar was still lost in the unsociable world of his social media, Paillaud entered without acknowledgement and went to join Caroline. Slipping his shades into the breast pocket of his white cotton jacket, he kissed her hand and sat down.
‘Forgive me, Jacques,’ he said, casting a heaven-ward glance.
‘Monsieur Tati might forgive you, monsieur, but what about your fan?’
‘Fan?’ Contrition gave way to disdain. ‘Didn’t even know who I was. Screw him. Screw the lot of them.’
Had his career taken a different turn, Caroline reflected, Paillaud would have aced The Misanthrope. ‘So – what is so urgent that we needed to meet here and now, monsieur?’
He handed her an envelope. ‘Ambroise, please.’
‘I hope this isn’t...’ She took out a hand-written sheet of A4. ‘Oh, Lord. You should have come to my office.’
He shrugged. ‘You can register it when you get back. I trust you.’
If the remark were intended as a compliment, it missed its mark. ‘Monsieur—’
‘I didn’t know whether to initial and number the page as there’s only one. I did, as you see. Is it alright? Technically?’
‘I’m sure it’s all fine.’ He had had plenty of practice, after all. ‘But that’s not the point.’
‘Read it, then.’
Her brow furrowing, Caroline read the opening few lines, then, lowering the document, took a quick glance over her shoulder.
‘Deaf lugs can’t see us,’ Paillaud said. ‘Pillar in the way.’ He smiled. ‘Like a side aisle seat in the old Théâtre Souris.’
Her steel-grey eyes met his. ‘You’re not serious about this? It’s a joke, surely.’
‘Caroline, this...’ Maintaining a straight face, he turned his toupée sideways. ‘... is a joke. Read on.’
Betraying not a flicker of amusement, she returned to the document. The handwriting was small, the pen strokes incised deeply into the paper. ‘You’ve dated it today, I notice.’
‘I wrote it just before I came out.’
‘In haste. A tearing hurry, even. Monsieur, I strongly suggest—’
She went to give it back to him but he threw up a hand. ‘I’ve been thinking about this for years.’ He repositioned the toupée. ‘I mean every word of it.’
Caroline ran her tongue over her lips. Perhaps it had been a mistake to have rejected the Perrier. ‘Monsieur...’ She marked the correction with a cool, professional smile, ‘Ambroise, does anyone else know about this?’
‘I’ve never discussed it with anyone until this moment.’
She believed him. Paillaud, a virtual recluse, was the most secretive person she had come across in her ten years as a notary public. ‘And this is the only copy?’
It was Paillaud’s turn to look surprised. ‘It’s a handwritten document, as you see.’
‘You could have had it photocopied.’
‘Why would I do that? No, no. Read on, mademoiselle.’
‘Caroline,’ she said absently.
‘Read on, Caroline.’ Inclining his head extravagantly, he made a sad clown face. ‘Do it for Monsieur La Chute.’
From nowhere, a figure materialised at the open window. A blur of heaving breath and sweat. Instinctively, Caroline’s hand went to her daysack but the man, a jogger wearing a grey hoodie, ran safely past. She continued without missing a beat. ‘You are certain you want to go ahead? You’ve changed your mind so often.’
‘No, I haven’t.’ Paillaud discarded the clown face. ‘Ever.’
Another tense little four-note clarion drifted across from the station.
‘Is that your train?’
‘Not quite yet.’
‘Alright.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Would you excuse me for a moment?’ She extracted her mobile from her daysack and stood. ‘I need to make a quick call.’
Paillaud lowered his black-dyed eyebrows in a look of such coy suspicion, it would have played to the cheap seats in any theatre. ‘To whom?’
Caroline pursed her lips. In any circumstances, it was an impudent question and she would have allotted more time for their meeting if she’d known its true purpose. ‘I won’t be a moment.’ She stepped over the window’s low sill and headed a little way down the street.
Paillaud’s face was suddenly damp with sweat. ‘Don’t be too long,’ he called out.
