Impure Blood (34 page)

Shards of ice chilled the sweat running down Darac’s back. Bonbon had worked on the case of Jean-Marie Gartreuix, a killer who had concealed the remains of his many victims in an old wine cellar that extended under his garage.

‘After we’ve checked out the house, we’ll get right back out here.’

‘I know it’s… Just a second.’ Bonbon took the whisper down a notch. ‘Did someone just open that curtain a crack?’

Keeping very still, the pair stared at the ground-floor window of the house.

‘That’s how it was, I think.’ He gave Bonbon a tap on the knee. ‘Alright, let’s do it. Quiet and careful, now. Or we may as well have sent for Freddy Anselme.’

As far as they could tell, nothing stirred inside the house as they ghosted their way to the back door. It took Darac precisely three seconds to pick the lock. Standing well to the side, he gave the door a gentle push but it opened only as far as a security chain allowed. It took another ten seconds to retrieve the wire lasso from his tool roll, hook it around the track bolt and disengage it. The door swung wide open. For the moment, they remained still.

Poised to fire if necessary, Bonbon slipped quietly inside. The lobby was dark but his eyes were sharp. No one was there. Torch in one hand, automatic in the other, Darac swept quickly past him and through a half-open door into the kitchen. No one there either. And there was no sound from the rest of the house. He gave Bonbon a beckoning nod.

‘Bread and bleach,’ Darac whispered, sniffing.

‘You’re supposed to say “clear”.’ Bonbon’s eyes darted between the two doors that gave off the room. ‘Santoor might be lurking around here somewhere.’

‘If he is, he might just get his head blown off. By mistake.’

The living room was next. No one. Silent. And dark enough for Bonbon finally to switch on his torch. Alternating entry and cover, the pair worked their way through another three rooms until there was just one left – the larger of the two bedrooms. They shared a look and then went in together. Torch beams criss-crossed as they pierced the silent gloom.

‘Jesus Christ.’

The two of them almost sank to their knees but they knew the relief they felt was no more than a temporary respite. They still had no idea where Agnès and Vincent were; nor even if they were alive.

Nor had they encountered the owner of the house – Madame Corinne Delage.

Bonbon wasted no time in peeling off his shirt.

‘At least we can get out of these vests now.’ They headed back down the stairs. ‘Before we do anything else, I’m going to shift those bricks. Only take a minute.’

‘Take half a minute if we do it together.’

Darac didn’t believe in an afterlife from which the dead could somehow communicate with the living. But he knew from experience that places in which a violent death had occurred, or in which a victim’s body had been dumped, sometimes retained an atmosphere of pain and hopelessness that could live on for years. Atmospheres, though, made very unreliable witnesses. As he and Bonbon stepped into the outbuilding, he detected nothing whatever out of the ordinary except to wonder what use an old woman like Delage had for a pile of broken bricks.

Resting the torches on a couple of battered old paint tins, they donned exam gloves and set to work, picking at the pile. Reliving earlier memories, Bonbon hesitated as they finally got down to the base layer. He hadn’t known any of Gartreuix’s victims. Agnès was a different story.

‘It’s going to be alright, Bonbon.’

‘Yeah.’

They shifted the bricks, then swept away the rubble and dust.

‘Fucking hell.’

It
was
alright. There was nothing. More relief. More temporary respite.

Darac was already speaking to Lartigue as they walked back through the lobby.

‘There’s no one here, Lartou. Get that? Not Agnès, Vincent or Corinne Delage, for that matter. So send Roulet and the dog in and get Flaco on to the neighbours. Tell her to begin with the one who identified Delage in your photo.’

‘Check.’

‘It would make life a lot easier if we could put the lights on in here. The curtains seem pretty thick.’

‘Go for it. We’re watching.’

Bonbon’s torch found the wall switch.

‘They’re on, Lartou.’

‘You can’t tell from outside.’

‘Good. Keep watching – we’ll turn some others on.’

One by one, Darac and Bonbon put on as many lights as they thought useful.

‘That’s all good, chief.’

‘Excellent. Keep Ormans and the others back until I call again, okay?’

‘Will do. Out.’

‘Let’s start in the kitchen.’

The various cupboards and drawers revealed nothing of interest. Then in a pantry, Bonbon found several keys hanging from a row of hooks. One of them caught his eye.

‘Sweet Mary… Look at the serration profile.’ He handed it over. ‘Familiar?’

‘Shit… And there’s us thinking Delage was only incidentally linked to Florian and therefore Manou.’

‘Looks as if she’s a keyholder to their secret world.’

‘Let’s be sure.’

Darac took Florian’s key from a pocket and put the two together. ‘Yes it…’ He looked more closely. ‘No, we’re wrong. It doesn’t match. See?’ He indicated the one incongruent jag. ‘It should go in there, not out.’

‘Yes it should.’ Bonbon rubbed his eyes, feeling tired suddenly. ‘Jumping to conclusions. Let’s calm it down.’

‘Especially as there’s a hell of a lot to do here and we don’t know how long we’ve got.’

Bonbon put back the key as sounds behind them signalled the dog-handler’s arrival. He was dressed casually, as if he were out walking his pet.

‘How’s it looking on the street, Roulet?’

‘No one would know there’s a surveillance op going on, chief. If and when Delage or anyone else comes back, they’ll walk right up to the house, no problem.’

‘Armani or Martinet would grab them first.’

Roulet’s receding hairline receded still further.

‘They’re not out there, are they?’

‘Yes they are. Okay – let Félix do his stuff.’

The dog set to work, laying down a soundtrack of scampering and sniffing under Darac and Bonbon’s own searches. As the seconds ticked by, the one thing they had wondered if they would find was conspicuous by its absence.

‘Still out shopping at this time of night?’

‘Maybe she ditched the trolley.’ Bonbon shook his head. ‘Pointlessly, if she did. She never denied ramming it into Florian.’

Nothing else leapt out at them in the kitchen. Félix was already exploring the stairs as they moved through into the living room. An impressive flower arrangement caught Darac’s eye.

‘They look fresh.’ He lifted the bouquet carefully out of the vase. ‘And so does the water.’ He sniffed it. ‘Fresh today, I would say. So Delage has been home.’ He lowered the arrangement carefully back into the vase. ‘Or someone has.’

‘Where has the old girl got to?’

Looking for anything at all that might help them, they examined the room in more detail. Modestly furnished, it was clearly an older person’s domain. But apart from a few framed photographs and a small collection of ornaments on a sideboard, it wasn’t a space in which the past spoke louder than the present. Because of that, Darac decided to look first at what few mementoes there were.

‘Do those ornaments tell us anything about her, Bonbon?’

‘They’re country pieces, interestingly enough. Sentimental value only…’ He picked up a plain cylindrical pot. ‘This is worth a couple of hundred euros, though. It’s a confit jar. Salt glaze, probably early nineteenth century.’

Darac glanced at the object and then turned back to one of the photographs.

‘It’s the one in this photo.’ He held it up. ‘Isn’t it?’

‘It’s just like it, certainly.’

‘When was it taken – early 1950s?’

In the photo, three adults and a child were sitting around a table in a farmhouse-style kitchen. The adults were a couple in their late forties, large-boned, with kind faces, and a lad in his early twenties who was the spitting image of them. The mother was simply dressed and wore a crucifix. Father and son looked as if they had just come in from working in the fields. The child was aged about eight and she was tucking into a huge plate of something hearty. The confit pot was sitting in the middle of the table.

Bonbon looked more closely at the little girl.

‘That’s a young Corinne, isn’t it? The age is right and although it must be sixty or so years ago, you can see a resemblance.’

‘That squashed little face. Like a pug. You’re right – I’m sure it’s her.’ Darac turned the photo frame around. His luck was in – there was a note written on the back:
The whole family. Mama, Papa, Antoine and me. Summer 1949.
Darac shook his head. ‘Family fun on the farm? That’s not the childhood I’d have pictured for someone as bitter and twisted as Corinne Delage.’

‘They look serene there but who knows? They could have been at each other’s throats the rest of the time.’ Bonbon took a wad of papers from the inside pocket of his jacket. ‘Let’s see what light Perand’s case notes shed.’ He straightened the paper. ‘Here goes: “Delage née Groismont. Birth re-registered as 10 October 1940, Grandeville, Île-de-France”.’

‘Grandeville? Never heard of it.’

‘It’s fifty kilometres south-east of Paris, according to Perand. He continues: “Grandeville sounds the sort of place that if it had a horse…” What?’ Bonbon’s brow creased in incomprehension. He had a second stab at it. ‘“Grandeville sounds the sort of place that if it had a horse… it would rise to the status of a one-horse town.” He looked at Darac. ‘Bloody idiot. He means…’

‘It’s a small rural community, yes. I’ll have a word with him.’

Bonbon went back to the notes.

‘“Corinne’s parents Jeanne and Albert Groismont were thirty-nine and forty-four at the time of her birth. Tenant farmers. She had an older brother, Antoine…”’ Bonbon closed his eyes to aid the calculation. ‘Fifteen years older, in fact… “All now dead. Corinne married one Yves Delage 2 June 1970 in Paris. No children. Divorced 1978. Yves Delage died 2001.”’ He turned the page. ‘Her rap sheet we know about… “Lived in Nice since ’79. Patchy employment history. Worked mainly as a florist.”’ As if there were a need to illustrate the point, he indicated the flower arrangement. ‘“Retired seven years ago through ill health – rheumatoid arthritis.”’

‘Fifteen years is quite a long gap between siblings with none in between.’

Sitting on the mantelpiece was a shot of Corinne aged about twenty. Smiling at the photographer, she was behind the wheel of a battered Renault Dauphine. Darac picked it up and checked it for an inscription.
My first car – June ’65
.

‘She’s twenty-four in this shot. About as old as Antoine was in the one of the kitchen.’ Darac looked at it once more. ‘They don’t look a thing alike. In fact, she looks like no one else in the family.’

‘Adopted? There’s nothing to indicate that.’ Bonbon checked through the paperwork. ‘No – not a thing. But there is one detail worth noting – the Groismonts’ birth certificates are re-registrations. The originals were lost during the war, it seems.’

‘The same thing happened to my maternal grandmother’s family.
Mairies
lost scores of documents through shelling, bombs, fires, et cetera.’ A bureau stood in the corner of the room next to the window. Darac went over to it. ‘What’s in here might help us.’

‘How does Delage connect to the boss, though? That’s the pressing question.’ As Darac patted ineffectually around, Bonbon pressed a pair of catches hiding under the overhang of the lid. The bureau’s writing slope released. ‘And Agnès met her, remember – at the Caserne just last night when Flaco and Perand were questioning Delage. According to them, there were no fireworks, no flash of recognition or anything. On either side.’

Félix padded into the room, back from his searches upstairs.

‘Yes but that doesn’t necessarily mean—’

‘Gentlemen?’ Roulet wore the expression of a man who knew he had an important message to deliver. ‘I’m as certain as I can be that the boss was never here. We had a scent control for her father this time, as well. He was never here either.’

‘Thank you.’ Darac was already thinking through the implications as he flipped his mobile. ‘Lartou? Send the others in now, please.’

Bonbon gave Félix’s ears a scrunch as Roulet put him on the lead.

‘He’s earned one for the road, hasn’t he?’

‘Always.’

Bonbon tossed up a kola kube. The dog caught and crunched it in one.

‘That was really helpful, Roulet.’ Darac turned back to the bureau. ‘Thanks again.’

‘Just before I go.’ He brought Félix to heel. ‘I know you discounted Delage from the Florian killing but since it turns out she almost certainly provided the vehicle for these kidnappings, are you revising that? The cases must be linked, don’t you think? It’s too big a coincidence.’

‘They’re linked at some level, yes. But all we can say for sure is that we need to find the Dantiers as soon as we can. If anything about the Florian case can help us do that, we’ll follow it up, believe me.’

‘I know you will.’ He led Félix away. ‘All the very best, gentlemen.’

‘And to you.’

The contents of the bureau looked promising.

‘Marcel will be here in a second. He can photograph all of this.’

Bonbon took out an embroidered case that was plump with correspondence.

‘Difficult to disagree with Roulet, isn’t it?’ He unfastened its pink ribbon tie and began laying out the pages on a gate-leg table. ‘Though it’s weird to think Delage could hold the key to this thing.’

‘
A
key, perhaps,’ Darac said, picking up another useful find – Delage’s address book. ‘And because of that, I think we ought to release Manou this evening. I was only delaying it until tomorrow because we’re concentrating on the abductions. Now we know there’s some sort of link, we should do it.’

‘So Erica’s finished the project, then?’

‘She has and all the tails are in place.’

‘In that case, let’s go for it. I don’t suppose any of us was expecting to see our bed tonight, anyway.’

The organ note blared. Bed? What did that mean to Darac now? His mobile rang, halting the slide into mawkishness. If there was any wallowing to be done, it could wait.