Knock 'Em Dead, page 5
‘Good old Monsieur La Chute was a bit of an arsehole by the look of it,’ Darac said.
Granot selected “You Haven’t Thought This Through” from his repertoire of looks. ‘Imagine being the centre of attraction all the time, though. I’d be just the same.’
‘He seemed very particular about where to stand to have the shot taken, didn’t he?’
‘That’s the old pro in him. Perfectionist.’
Darac wasn’t convinced. ‘Maybe. Lartou, what next?’
‘A couple of minutes later, it gets more interesting, still. As the Marseille train is on the point of leaving, I’ve got a well-built male, aged anywhere between 30 to 50, walking purposefully down the Nice-bound platform in Paillaud’s direction. This one is no fan. By his body language, he looks as if he wants to give Paillaud a pasting. I’ve split-screened the footage from both cameras.’
The man was wearing light-coloured knee-length shorts, sandals, and a blue-ish short-sleeved shirt, the summer uniform of half the men in France. His face was a pixilated mush under the peak of his dark casquette.
‘That’s what you call making a bee-line for someone,’ Granot said.
‘He certainly seems to be on a mission. No looking around; angry set to the shoulders.’
‘He could be about to pick a fight.’
In the frame, the peak of the man’s casquette acted like a falling curtain over his face as he advanced toward the foot of the camera pole.
‘And so... he disappears.’ The pair kept watching. ‘And doesn’t reappear the other side. So he’s joined Paillaud under the camera.’
‘How long before the train hits?’
‘Another fourteen seconds,’ Lartou said. ‘The forward-facing camera catches it. Brace yourselves.’
Suddenly, there was Paillaud, his life held in suspended animation over the rails, his body strangely graceful even as it was offered up to instant, unstoppable, annihilation. And then the TGV whooshed through the frame and bloody fragments misted the air. As Darac and Granot revisited language expressing the relationship between sex, defecation and hell, the rear-facing camera had a story of its own to tell. No flying debris here; the momentum of the train shot everything out in front. But it did show the angry man retreating in some haste.
‘Let’s get this timing sorted out,’ Darac said. ‘Could Casquette have pushed Paillaud?’
They played the twin sequences twice more. ‘What’s your take on it, Lartou?’
‘Inconclusive. Just before the impact, Casquette is not in the frame so yes, he could’ve pushed Paillaud. But he may’ve already been leaving the scene before that.’
Running the sequence again, Granot put in his own two cents-worth. ‘When he appears back in the frame, he takes a pace or two and then turns. And he throws up his hands. We can’t see his face but it’s a shocked reaction, isn’t it? It was news to him, what happened.’
‘Nevertheless, he still may have pushed the old man. We don’t know how far he may have staggered before he went over the platform edge.’
Granot nodded. ‘If it took a second or two, Casquette might well have reached the point we see in the frame. If he had pushed him, it may not have been deliberate, though. He goes over to Paillaud to have it out with him over something. They scuffle. Shoving match. He’s a much younger man so Paillaud inevitably winds up flying off.’
‘It could have been that way. Casquette doesn’t hang around, notice. Makes him look guilty of something.’ Another thought struck Darac. ‘Not many people around, Lartou?’
‘A train hadn’t long gone, clearing the platform.’
‘Ah.’
‘If you run that footage on, chief, you’ll see Casquette disappearing back down the platform towards the booking hall. He doesn’t look around again and the few passengers who are there don’t look at him. Their eyes are on the tracks.’
‘We need to find Casquette, obviously.’
‘There’s not much point flying a still from these images, chief.’
‘Not yet, anyway. What about the departing Marseille train, the one Selfie Man got on? Could anyone on board that have seen what happened?’
‘Someone in the rear part of the very last carriage might have, I suppose. But I think even they would have lost the sightline by then.’
‘We need to follow that up and talk to Selfie Man. For one thing, someone may have been standing in the blind spot with Paillaud when he went over to him.’
‘Before Casquette got there, you mean?’
‘Indeed. And it may be that person who shoved Paillaud. Have you had time to check whether everyone who was in the frame earlier is accounted for?’
‘No one goes missing as far as I can tell.’
‘That’s something.’ Darac glanced at his watch. ‘If Selfie got off at Antibes or Cannes, he’ll be well away and we’ll have to do the usual things to find him. But if he was travelling some distance, he might still be on the train.’ He gave Granot a look, all that it took to kick-start the operation – radioing Florence Feilleu. ‘Anything else, Lartou?’
‘No, except to say that our best hopes for an eyewitness have got to be Flak and Perand. Quite a few windows overlook the station.’
‘Indeed.’ Nothing was said for a moment. ‘Run the collision sequence again, Granot.’
They watched it three further times.
Granot knew the look. ‘Something bothering you?’
‘Just once more,’ Darac said.
* * *
Over in the flats, an elderly, rotund woman with thinning hair opened her door to Max Perand. In the room behind her, a male clone lay stretched out on a day bed moored by an open window. Perand could feel it in his young bones. An elderly brother and sister with nothing to do all day but watch the world go by? He was sure that this would be the breakthrough moment.
‘We didn’t see anything,’ the woman said. ‘Did we, Jacques?’ Before Jacques had the opportunity to reply, she was already closing the door in Perand’s face.
‘Just a moment, please, Madame and Monsieur..?
‘Recolte.’
‘Thank you.’ He showed his ID. ‘May I come in?’
The woman shrugged. ‘Do I have any choice?’
‘No,’ Perand lied, thinking it unlikely that the Recoltes would be au fait with judicial developments in Luxembourg.
She shrugged once more and waddled aside. The room smelled of cat food and cigarettes.
‘Do you look out much?’ Perand said, joining Jacques at his window. Three floors below, the entire length of the station lay stretched out in plain view.
Jacques took a breath in.
‘No, he doesn’t,’ Madame Recolte said.
‘Please allow your brother to answer for himself.’
Madame Recolte stiffened. ‘Jacques is not my brother!’ She held up a work-worn hand, her ring finger garrotted by a gold wedding band. ‘Yes?’
Perand shrugged. ‘Alright, please allow your husband to answer for himself.’
‘Pah!’
In the bed, Jacques looked torn between condemnation and admiration for the visitor. Madame was evidently unused to being gainsaid in her own apartment.
‘We didn’t see anything,’ he said, tipping Perand a wink. Or was it a nervous tic? ‘I was engaged in other matters if you follow me when it happened. Didn’t see nothing.’
The wink once more. Did it mean something? Perand turned to Madame. ‘Would you make us some coffee?’
‘No.’
‘Or just bring a glass of water? It’s very warm today.’
Folding her arms, she made a show of standing her ground. ‘I’m not moving from this spot.’
‘We didn’t see nothing,’ Jacques said, winking repeatedly.
Standing with her back to the kitchen, Madame couldn’t see the fat ginger ball of fluff that was setting course steadily toward her. ‘So if that’s all?’ she said.
Like an overloaded ship attempting to pass under the Colossus of Rhodes, the cat butted between Madame’s feet suddenly, making her start and kick out. Brained by its own mistress, the animal became a hissing bladder of fury.
‘My baby, I didn’t see you!’
In the avalanche of self-recrimination and promises that followed, Jacques drew Perand toward him. ‘Come back about 4.30.’ he whispered. ‘The bitch is going out. Bring a bottle.’
‘What of?’
‘Anything.’
6
Hot at either end, an inferno in the centre, the firing tunnel was a hundred metres of graduated heat control. This morning, it had been a hundred metres of trouble.
‘How many cart loads?’ Hervé Montand shouted over the rumble of a lorry heading for the slip tanks.
‘It was...’ The foreman consulted his clipboard. ‘Eight.’ He made an effort to brighten. ‘But it’s all fixed now, monsieur.’
‘How many pieces were lost?’
The man braced himself. ‘Forty-four urinals, thirty shower trays, sixteen bidets.’
‘All after firing?’
‘After, yes.’
‘Unusable, therefore.’ Montand’s eyebrows rose, crazing his forehead. ‘Waste.’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘Oh, don’t be afraid, Bernis. Be sacked!’ He turned on his heel. ‘Go and see Zoë. Now!’
Montand’s next stop was the moulding shed. No issues there, he moved on to the glazing bays. It was a further twenty minutes before he got back to his desk and checked his landline phone. There were no messages which, under the circumstances, was a mixed blessing. He swivelled in his chair and gazed at the ground rising above the far bank. Wedged beneath its scrub-covered crest, La Crague was sunk in shadow, a closed eye in the face of the massif. Montand closed his eyes, too.
The office door slammed.
‘Napping, Hervé?’
Radiating a potent combination of brutality and sensuality, the unannounced visitor could have been anything from a slaughter-man to a gigolo. His cocksure expression said that killing floor or bedroom, it was all the same to him. If it had legs, it was going down.
‘What do you want, Guy?’
Guy Vaselle drew up a chair and sat down, knees wide apart. ‘You don’t look pleased to see me.’
‘If you were not my brother-in-law, I wouldn’t be seeing you at all.’
Vaselle looked affronted. ‘That’s no way to talk to your head of quality control. Even on his day off.’
‘What do you want, Guy? And remove that bloody hat!’
‘Sure.’ He tossed his blue casquette on to the desk, skittling a photo. ‘Don’t worry about Mathilde. She’s used to falling over, these days. Funny – hardly ever did it when we were kids.’
Montand let the remark, and the photo, lie. ‘What do you—’
‘I tell you one thing I want,’ Vaselle said, getting to his feet. A drinks cabinet stood behind Montand’s desk. ‘So what’s eating you today?’ He downed a whisky, and poured another before going back to his seat. ‘Same as yesterday and the day before that?’
Montand let out a long, slow breath. ‘It’s worse,’ he said, with the air of a suspect finally coming clean to his interrogator. ‘Far worse.’
‘I’ve told you where you’re going wrong. There are too many people working here. People who screw up, join unions, take breaks, get sick.’
Montand gave him a look. ‘And have days off.’
Vaselle leaned forward. ‘I’m not people. I’m management.’
‘And you should be grateful you bloody well are.’
Humiliation vying with bitterness, Vaselle sat back. ‘We need robots. Every other company in the area uses them extensively.’
Montand shook his head. ‘There may be some production advantages in automated technology but we have wider responsibilities here, do we not? What about the damage unemployment does, both to the individuals concerned and to the community?’
‘What about it?’
‘Almost everybody who works here lives up in La Crague. There are communes far nearer the factory but just in case you don’t know, it’s company policy to favour our own. If I laid off half my staff and replaced them with machines, what kind of place would La Crague become? I’ll tell you. A rural banlieue. A second L’Ariane. A place full of layabouts with nothing to do but get drunk, take drugs and worse.’
Vaselle grinned and shook his head. ‘You don’t give a shit about the individuals who work here. I’ve just seen Bernis coming out of Zoë’s office. In tears, the idiot. It’s money. Or the lack of it. You’d invest in robots tomorrow if you could.’
‘I... had to get rid of Bernis. I’ve told him before about the—’ He batted the point away, tweaking his back. ‘I don’t have to justify my actions.’ He stood and, resting his hands palms down on the desk, leaned forward. ‘My record shows I care just as deeply about La Crague and its people as my ancestors before me.’
‘You’re wincing, Hervé. Stand up too quickly? Sit down and I’ll tell you what I really wanted to see you about.’
‘I’ll remain standing.’
‘Then you can get me another drink.’
Montand thought about it, but muttering ‘Like brother, like sister,’ he did as he was told. Avoiding Vaselle’s outstretched hand, he rapped the glass down on the desk.
‘Cheers.’ Vaselle downed it in one, finishing in a teeth-bared snarl. ‘Hervé, my friend, I’ve been stringing you along. I’ve got good news. I was down in Saint-Laurent earlier. The station. Saw someone we both know. Someone who’s quite important to us.’
Montand sank slowly on to his seat.
‘Thanks to my... involvement, let’s call it, I can report that all your troubles as the owner of this company and as mayor of good old La Crap-du-Var are at an end.’ He shrugged. ‘Once I’ve got over a little local difficulty, that is. But I’m working on that.’
Feeling the weight of his forebears on his shoulders, Montand sat forward.
‘What are you saying?’
‘What am I saying?’ Through the window, Vaselle watched the firing tunnel’s rejects being tipped into a skip with a great shuttering crash. ‘I’m saying that Paillaud is dead. Hit by a train.’
Montand let his head fall back. ‘Oh, my God.’
‘Say goodbye to debt, Hervé. Say goodbye to inefficient working practices. In short, say goodbye to the past.’
Montand didn’t reply immediately but when he did, his eyes appeared to be in danger of popping out of his head. ‘So Paillaud is dead?’
‘As dead as dead can be.’
‘And that, Guy, is your good news?’
Suddenly, the cock seemed not quite so sure. ‘But I thought—’
‘No you didn’t.’ Montand’s high-domed forehead was as red as a final reminder.
‘You’re not capable of thought.’
‘Watch yourself or I’ll kick you through that fucking window. What is this?’
‘Did you kill Paillaud?’
‘No.’
Montand stared at Vaselle’s large, wide-set eyes, his square jaw, his muscular torso. But he couldn’t see behind them and never had been able to. He really didn’t know whether the man was telling the truth or not. ‘Are you aware who Paillaud had another little tête-à-tête with this morning, Guy?’
‘Spit it out.’
‘It was Caroline Rosay.’
Vaselle reacted as if he’d been slapped. ‘What? How do you know that?’
‘Zep saw them together while he was out training. You think our troubles are over, Guy? They’re only just beginning.’
7
His arms tore into the water as if it had personally offended him.
‘Go hard now!’ the coach in Dr Arnaud Zep’s head shouted. ‘Come on!’
His tumble turn had all the grace of a threshing machine but it got the job done: thirty-six laps swum, fourteen to go. Fifty laps in Centre Sicotte’s pool, a thirty-metre affair, added up to just fifteen hundred metres. But at the pace Zep was maintaining, it made for a suitably punishing swim, the first of three in this session. In between them, the weight room beckoned and it was a call he usually answered. And at 10 o’clock in the evening, when everyone else was obliged to leave, he would return and have the pool all to himself; a perk for the local doctor from the Centre’s founder and owner, Martina Sicotte herself. He could swim all night if he wanted to. And on a couple of occasions, he had.
Over in the Centre’s main building, the Roland Garros Suite, masseuse Jodie Foucault was scrolling down her client list for the afternoon. ‘OK, what have we got?’
Sitting cross-legged on the floor behind her, a shiny, loose-limbed man wearing shiny, loose-fitting pyjamas was reciting a short prayer to an empty saucer.
‘Newsflash,’ Jodie said. ‘I’m not fully booked.’ She closed the file and brought up a page headed “Abha Yoga.” ‘You’ve got some gaps, yourself.’ She looked down at the cross-legged man. ‘And I’m not talking just about those pants.’
‘The wheel will turn.’
‘ “The wheel...” Park the patter, Deep. There’s no-one here but us.’
‘I know not what you mean.’
Deepak Abhamurthi could do spiritual strength. He could do erotic promise. Innocence was out of his range.
‘Save it for the customers. What there are of them.’ Jodie picked up her bag and headed for the door. ‘I’m off to my one-thirty. And remember what Tina said. No wandering off until Sonia gets back from her lunch.’
In one liquid action, Deepak stood and, letting out a long burp, leaned forward to check out the screen. But living ever in the moment, his attention was drawn immediately elsewhere. Two girls wearing skimpy tops and skimpier denim cut-offs were crossing the foyer. One of them glanced his way. Deepak’s long-lashed eyes glinted with wonder; the look of a fawn who had just discovered there was more to life than grass. The girl whispered something to her friend, drawing her glance, too. He smiled. The girls giggled, linked arms and went on their way.
