Rocco and the Nightingale Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine

  Forty

  Forty-one

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  ROCCO AND THE NIGHTINGALE

  Adrian Magson

  To Ann, who always saw Rocco as a slow burner, and never let me give up.

  One

  1964 – Picardie, France.

  JoJo Vieira didn’t know what to make of back-country roads. A Paris-born voyou and proud of it, anywhere outside the familiar streets of the city’s north-western banlieues was an alien world. He especially didn’t care for any location where food, drink, entertainment or a chance to make an easy few francs weren’t immediately available. And this remote spot, deep among the fields of northern France, had none of those.

  He swore in frustration, his smoker’s rasp startling a few birds and a solitary cow nearby. The battered moped he’d been riding until a couple of minutes ago was deader than yesterday’s cold mutton, and his efforts to propel the machine forward had proved futile. He’d tried working the pedals, but his legs weren’t up to it, weakened by a lifetime of bad habits and little exercise. He took the cap off the petrol tank and shook the handles, hearing only a faint movement of liquid inside. Barely half a kilometre from where he was now standing, the engine had begun to cough intermittently, before giving a death-rattle and drifting to a complete stop.

  The moped was already a step down from the motorbike he’d borrowed from his brother-in-law, Nico; but that had developed a flat tyre yesterday and he’d been forced to abandon it on the outskirts of Beauvais. Even if he’d possessed a repair kit he wouldn’t have known how to use it, yet another of life’s skills that had eluded him. Short of cash and desperate to avoid public transport, he’d stolen the moped from outside a café. It was a poor choice, as he’d just discovered; it had held barely sufficient fuel to get him even this far.

  Now he was on a narrow, deserted patch of rough tarmac in the middle of nowhere, the surface dotted with cowpats old and new, shining wet from a recent fall of early morning summer rain. To cap his misery, his shoes, made of finest Italian leather according to the market stall owner in Clichy, had turned out to be cheap Moroccan fakes and were now little more than damp cardboard. His once sharp suit, of which he’d been proud, now hung like a rag around his skinny shoulders, the fabric dotted with fragments of straw from a cold and uncomfortable night in a filthy, rat-infested cowshed back down the road.

  He hurled the petrol cap away in impotent fury. It glittered briefly in the sunlight before falling into the ditch a few metres away. He’d have to walk, there was no other choice. Worldly-wise JoJo wasn’t, but he had instincts enough to know that he couldn’t stand around waiting for good fortune to come along, because it so rarely did.

  He had to reach Amiens. Then he’d be safe.

  JoJo had followed a deliberately meandering route north out of Paris to this point, avoiding major roads and shying away from contact with other travellers apart from the forced diversion into Beauvais, wary of seeing a known face that would only mean disaster.

  The face he wanted to see instead was that of a man who might save his life. A cop, to be sure, one of the hated breed for a career criminal with JoJo’s background. But it belonged to the one man he’d decided might guarantee his safety… in exchange for the right information.

  Information that might save the cop’s life as well as his own.

  He unstrapped a leather bag from the rack on the back of the moped before kicking the machine over on to its side. It crashed to the ground and the small residue of petrol left in the tank gurgled out as if mocking him, forming a multi-coloured patch that shimmered in the light. He was debating giving the machine a vengeful kick when he thought he heard an engine somewhere in the distance. He glanced back along the road, but saw nothing save for rolling fields, a few straggly trees and a crow feasting on a piece of roadkill.

  A tractor, he guessed, too far off to be of any use. He had only the vaguest notion that the bird might be a crow, and even less knowledge about what the mess of fur and blood might once have been. You didn’t get much roadkill in the city; and what there was usually wore clothes and was drunk.

  He shivered and scoured his pockets for a smoke, finally dragging out a dog-end from last night. He straightened it out with care before taking out a cheap metal lighter and flicking the wheel. The flame caught, puttering faintly in the breeze as it sucked fuel out of the wick. The first mouthful of smoke was sharp and bitter, part pleasure, part pain as it scorched his throat. He took it deep into his lungs before coughing harshly, bending with the effort and wincing at a familiar stabbing sensation in his chest. He spat to clear his mouth, and stood up, watery eyes blurring the landscape around him. If he could find anywhere in this wilderness that boasted anything like a shop or café, he’d get some more smokes, along with a couple of stiff drinks to repel the cold that was penetrating his bones in spite of the sun.

  As he straightened up, he caught a movement from the corner of his eye and saw a grey Citroën van bumping along the road towards him. As common as a new day’s dawn, it was the kind used by market traders, bakers and delivery men all over France, and he relaxed. Where he came from the sound was a constant you learned to ignore, a background feature in a city that rarely slept. But out here it was a stroke of luck not to be passed up: the chance of a lift to civilisation. And safety.

  The van pulled to a stop and the driver leaned out, a sun-bronzed arm hanging over the sill. He was young, wearing a blue shirt, sunglasses, and a beret pulled down over his forehead. A second person was sitting in the passenger seat alongside him but JoJo couldn’t see him clearly.

  ‘You look like your horse just died,’ the driver said with a sympathetic smile. ‘Want a lift?’

  JoJo tossed the cigarette end away. The reference to a horse eluded him but he didn’t care; if these people could get him to where he was going they could say whatever they wanted. ‘I surely do, my friend. God bless you.’

  ‘I doubt that’ll happen, but a man can hope, right? Where do you want to go?’

  He hesitated. ‘Amiens. I need to get to Amiens.’ It was close enough now; there was no need to make any more detours. He’d be there in no time and he could get a load off his mind.

  ‘Lucky you. That’s where we’re going, too.’ The driver stuck out a hand. ‘I’m Romain.’

  JoJo took it and said, ‘JoJo.’ He looked past the driver but the passenger appeared to have gone. ‘Funny, I thought you had someone with you.’

  ‘I do. She’s called Lilou.’ The driver got out of the van and tossed his beret and sunglasses through the window onto the seat. He stretched, showing an impressive spread of broad shoulders.

>   ‘Hello, JoJo.’ It was a woman’s voice, soft and almost musical, and came from behind him. JoJo turned, surprised by her reappearance, and caught a glimpse of blonde hair and an open smile. Nice looking chick. But before the thought could materialise further, the driver grabbed his arm and slammed him into the side of the vehicle.

  ‘Hey, what–!’ He tried to pull away but couldn’t; the driver had an iron grip. Then he shifted his weight and JoJo felt a sharp blow to the side of his neck. A flash of unbelievable agony ran to the very top of his head and down his body. His legs felt weak and he tried to stop himself falling, but there was no grip on the smooth metal of the van.

  As he began to slide, JoJo turned his head and had a moment of pure clarity. That face… wait a second… he’d seen it just a few days ago. There was a name, too, if only he could remember. But his thoughts were mashed together by shock and pain. Then it came flooding back; it wasn’t a name… more like a title.

  His legs finally gave way and he sat down heavily, the cool wetness of a puddle soaking through his trousers in a final chilling indignity. He realised that any ideas of seeing the cop he’d come all this way for had just faded. He’d been followed after all. He tried to ask how. But the word came out as an unformed rattle, thickened by a flush of blood gathering in the back of his throat.

  ‘You left a trail, JoJo,’ the man explained. ‘First mistake, you told your idiot brother-in-law where you were going. All we had to do was ask him. He was surprisingly helpful, was Nico. Well, people usually are when you apply the right motivation. Here, let me help you.’

  JoJo felt a hand grasp his elbow and pull him to his feet. His vision clouded for a moment, then he felt himself being pulled away from the van to face the side of the road and the open fields beyond. A hand was pulling at his pockets, and he felt the meagre contents being lifted out. He wanted to protest, but any words were swept away on a wave of tiredness. If only he could lie down and rest… maybe back at the cowshed with the soft hay to lie on. Then he felt a push in the small of his back, shuffling him forward on shaky legs, feet stumbling on the grass verge. Two steps… three… four–

  There was nothing beneath his next step: no tarmac or grass, no hand holding him upright. He felt himself falling as if in slow motion. As he entered the cold embrace of the ditch, his final thoughts were of his sister, Miriam, and the name of the man he’d failed to reach in time. The man who might have saved him, but now could not.

  Lucas Rocco.

  Two

  ‘He has a what?’ Rocco pushed aside a stack of paperwork that was fast threatening to overwhelm his desk and checked the clock on the wall of the Amiens commissariat de police. Three o’clock in the afternoon already and another lunch break gone without warning. This wasn’t the way an investigator’s day was supposed to go, he told himself.

  ‘A hole. In his neck. He’s been…’ The voice faded on a bad line and Rocco winced as a ragged burst of static assaulted his ear. He put the phone down and waited for the caller to try again, which he did moments later.

  ‘Where are you, René?’ he asked, before he lost contact again. Dead bodies with holes in them were not that common in these parts and were therefore treated with urgency. And by the minute fragment of information he’d picked up so far, Detective René Desmoulins had discovered one.

  ‘It was down some rat-arsed road outside Danvillers, about six kilometres from Poissons,’ Desmoulins shouted, his voice suddenly clear. ‘My car radio’s useless and I had to come to a local café to use their phone. The line’s a bit unreliable.’

  ‘I get that. What have you found?’

  ‘A farmer named Matthieu called from here earlier, said he’d spotted a body in a ditch. I had a quick look and he was right. It’s a man and looks like he got stabbed in the side of the neck.’

  Wet or dry, thought Rocco pragmatically, we get them all. Either drowned or – as in this case – with one or more holes in them. The news that this one wasn’t far from the village of Poissons-les-Marais, where he was renting a house, was less of a surprise than it would have been when he first arrived in the region. Back then, he’d been resentful at being posted to the town of Amiens as part of an initiative to ‘spread crime prevention and investigation procedures’ as one Interior Ministry suit had explained in the national press. As a long-time city cop, Rocco had made the mistake of assuming that nothing unusual ever happened in rural backwaters save for poaching, drink-fuelled hunters shooting each other by accident and the occasional incident of assault and battery.

  He couldn’t have been more wrong.

  This part of northern France, he’d quickly learned, had more than its fair share of violence and criminality lurking beneath its innocent, bucolic surface. Look beyond the rolling fields, gloomy marshlands and tiny, scattered villages making up the patchwork of life just a few hours from Paris, and you’d find just as much greed, venality and plain old-fashioned blood-lust as anywhere in the country. If Rocco had once missed the excitement of his previous job of gang-busting, which he’d pursued in Paris and other parts of France, Picardie had more than made up for it.

  ‘I’ll get Rizzotti and some men out there,’ he told Desmoulins. ‘Seal off the area and I’ll be out shortly.’

  ‘Got it. Don’t worry about the men – they’re on their way. You’ll need your funeral coat, though; it’s been raining out here.’ Desmoulins signed off, leaving Rocco to pick up his coat and car keys and head for the rear exit of the station, passing Doctor Bernard Rizzotti’s office on the way. Rizzotti, the local stand-in expert on the unexplained dead, was ploughing through a late lunch of baguette and cheese at his desk, and looked round guiltily at the intrusion. Visitors to his small workroom were few and usually wheeled in on trolleys, not always in a presentable condition. The advantage to Rizzotti was that it kept the healthier occupants of the building away.

  ‘We’ve got a dead one,’ Rocco announced, leaning in the doorway. ‘You want a lift?’

  ‘Not likely,’ Rizzotti grunted, the light reflecting off his spectacles. ‘I’ve been in that black heap you call a car quite enough, thanks. I’ll follow you.’ He stood up, clamping the baguette between his teeth and reaching for his car keys. ‘Where are we going?’ he mumbled.

  Rocco gave him the directions and the two men headed for the car park. Rizzotti clambered into the safety of his Renault while Rocco headed for his black Citroën Traction. With the sweeping design of a bygone age and a reliability unmatched by more modern cars, he refused to part with it for something ‘more in keeping with a modern police force’, even if colleagues like Rizzotti claimed both car and driver possessed a death wish. Rocco had been forced by senior orders to watch as a technician had brutalised the inside by installing a radio, a modern function he would approve of if it was reliable and clear. As it was, it gave him the feeling of being constantly under scrutiny, and in a regular act of rebellion he left it switched off whenever he could.

  Thirty minutes later he was standing above a ditch at the side of a narrow country lane while Rizzotti clambered down the slope and began a careful examination of the body. The rain Desmoulins had mentioned had moved on, leaving behind a welcome smell of wet grass and clean, fresh country air.

  The deceased was a male, in a suit, shirt and stringy tie. He lay at the bottom of the V-shaped gulley, his body twisted at an angle unintended by nature. A leather bag lay by his side. Rocco judged him to be in his late forties, with the narrow features of a man accustomed to a hard life, like most men around here, he decided, although the suit looked out of place. In this area suits were reserved for funerals, weddings and suspects trying to make a good impression on a magistrate.

  ‘Go on, surprise me,’ he murmured after a couple of minutes. ‘Drowned, punctured or broken?’ It had to be one of the three.

  ‘Don’t rush me,’ muttered Rizzotti, his voice distorted in the hollow. He scratched his head, disturbing a wispy frame of hair that gave him the appearance of a mad scientist. Although not a pr
ofessional pathologist, unlike others Rocco had worked with, Rizzotti had quickly established his authority when working a crime scene. His rules were applied equally to senior and junior personnel: stay back, give him time and don’t intrude on the scene until he said it was safe to do so.

  Rocco was happy to let him do things his way. The Ministry of the Interior constantly promised to release funds and authority for a full-time pathologist, but as they hadn’t come even close in the five years that Rocco was aware of, he wasn’t about to hold his breath. In any case Rizzotti, who’d been a local doctor, was no slouch when it came to analysing causes of sudden and violent death, and Rocco doubted if a so-called professional would do much better. In his experience, all they did was dress up their reports with fancy language and technical detail, leaving him and other investigators none the wiser until provided with a translation.

  Finally Rizzotti grunted and pulled himself up the side of the ditch, grabbing Rocco’s hand to reach the top.

  ‘Thank you. As far as a preliminary examination shows,’ he puffed, eyeing the dead man, ‘I’d say he died less than twelve hours ago. He was stabbed in the side of the throat with some sort of sharp instrument.’

  ‘Not a knife?’

  ‘Not like one I’ve ever seen. Too narrow and rounded in profile – a spike, perhaps, maybe a pitchfork, although there’s no sign of anything like that by the body.’ He nodded towards a group of uniformed officers scouring the road and the fields on either side. ‘Maybe they’ll find something out there.’

  ‘A spike?’ Rocco shivered involuntarily as a rush of cool air whipped across the fields and brushed his face. They were in the middle of summer and it seemed as if autumn was already on its way. He was glad of the coat he’d picked up on the way out. Long and dark, and described by Desmoulins as giving him the appearance of a funeral director or an avenging angel, depending on one’s viewpoint, this one was a summer-weight version, his one concession to the time of year.

  ‘I’d say so. Over a centimetre across at a guess, although the flesh around the wound is swollen, which tells us quite a bit.’