Rocco was barely listening. He was staring at the button retrieved from the ashes and reflecting on how often these investigations hinged on chance discoveries. If he hadn’t gone to see Father Maurice, he wouldn’t have known anything more about the button he’d found on the side of the road, or that it had come from a tramp’s jacket. Yet now its twin was staring up at him.
A child’s birthday coat button, clearly embossed with the number 5.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
‘We need to find the DS,’ said Rocco. He was more convinced than ever that he was now leading a murder hunt. It might have been an accident to begin with, whatever had happened out on that stretch of road. Pantoufle might have wandered into the path of the truck, befuddled perhaps by cold or drink or hunger. But covering up the death and burning the body changed everything.
They were back in the office, putting their thoughts together. Rizzotti was compiling detailed notes on the burnt truck and the body, prior to requesting some scientific confirmation, while Rocco and Desmoulins went over the facts they had amassed so far.
On paper, it didn’t amount to much, other than a dead body and an unexplained event involving a truck and a car. But there was something tugging at his instincts that told him this was far deeper than a cover-up of a dead vagrant. Why go to so much trouble? They could have left him lyingin the ditch and nobody would have been any the wiser. The road wasn’t used much; it could have been days, maybe weeks, before a body might be discovered, especially with snow on the way.
A phone jangled across the other side of the office. A uniformed officer listened for a moment, then held out the receiver to get Rocco’s attention. ‘Are you looking for a DS? Black, lots of side-impact damage?’
Rocco jumped up and strode across the office, snatching the phone from the man’s hand.
‘Rocco. You’ve found a DS?’
The man on the other end was a patrol officer who had stopped by a remote car breaker’s yard looking for a spare mirror, and had spotted a clean but badly damaged Citroën DS about to go under the breaker’s cutters. ‘It’s weird,’ he said. ‘The inside’s been fitted out like a race car – loads of reinforcing struts and padding. But it’s taken a hell of a bang on one side.’ He read out the car registration, which Rocco wrote down for checking later. ‘What do you want me to do, Inspector?’
‘Stay there and don’t let anyone near it,’ he ordered. ‘If anyone tries, shoot them in the foot.’ He dropped the phone back on its cradle and handed the registration number to the uniformed officer. ‘Check that, will you? Urgent.’ He looked at Desmoulins with a tight grin. ‘All good things come to those who wait. Let’s go.’
The breaker’s yard, a polite misnomer for a scrap metal dump, was located down a single-track lane on the northern outskirts of Amiens. Surrounded by a corrugated tin fence two metres high, with rolled barbed wire pinnedalong the top, it looked damp, unwelcoming and sinister. Like a hundred such similar sites Rocco had been to during his investigations, it was not intended as a place of beauty. But he also knew that places like this often hid by design a wealth of detail from passing eyes.
He drove through the entrance, a sagging pair of wooden frames covered in corrugated steel and wire, and stopped in the middle of an open, muddy space with a tired-looking office cabin on one side looking out at an expanse of broken cars and car parts arranged in rows. The place was sour and depressing, and he felt instantly unclean. A dog was barking somewhere close by, the noise angry and menacing, and he checked that his MAB 38 was within easy reach. He’d seen the mess some scrapyard dogs could make of a man, and had no desire to find himself on this one’s menu.
The yard’s owner, Olivier Bellin, was an overweight, rat-faced individual clothed in a grubby vest and trousers and a
A child’s birthday coat button, clearly embossed with the number 5.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
‘We need to find the DS,’ said Rocco. He was more convinced than ever that he was now leading a murder hunt. It might have been an accident to begin with, whatever had happened out on that stretch of road. Pantoufle might have wandered into the path of the truck, befuddled perhaps by cold or drink or hunger. But covering up the death and burning the body changed everything.
They were back in the office, putting their thoughts together. Rizzotti was compiling detailed notes on the burnt truck and the body, prior to requesting some scientific confirmation, while Rocco and Desmoulins went over the facts they had amassed so far.
On paper, it didn’t amount to much, other than a dead body and an unexplained event involving a truck and a car. But there was something tugging at his instincts that told him this was far deeper than a cover-up of a dead vagrant. Why go to so much trouble? They could have left him lyingin the ditch and nobody would have been any the wiser. The road wasn’t used much; it could have been days, maybe weeks, before a body might be discovered, especially with snow on the way.
A phone jangled across the other side of the office. A uniformed officer listened for a moment, then held out the receiver to get Rocco’s attention. ‘Are you looking for a DS? Black, lots of side-impact damage?’
Rocco jumped up and strode across the office, snatching the phone from the man’s hand.
‘Rocco. You’ve found a DS?’
The man on the other end was a patrol officer who had stopped by a remote car breaker’s yard looking for a spare mirror, and had spotted a clean but badly damaged Citroën DS about to go under the breaker’s cutters. ‘It’s weird,’ he said. ‘The inside’s been fitted out like a race car – loads of reinforcing struts and padding. But it’s taken a hell of a bang on one side.’ He read out the car registration, which Rocco wrote down for checking later. ‘What do you want me to do, Inspector?’
‘Stay there and don’t let anyone near it,’ he ordered. ‘If anyone tries, shoot them in the foot.’ He dropped the phone back on its cradle and handed the registration number to the uniformed officer. ‘Check that, will you? Urgent.’ He looked at Desmoulins with a tight grin. ‘All good things come to those who wait. Let’s go.’
The breaker’s yard, a polite misnomer for a scrap metal dump, was located down a single-track lane on the northern outskirts of Amiens. Surrounded by a corrugated tin fence two metres high, with rolled barbed wire pinnedalong the top, it looked damp, unwelcoming and sinister. Like a hundred such similar sites Rocco had been to during his investigations, it was not intended as a place of beauty. But he also knew that places like this often hid by design a wealth of detail from passing eyes.
He drove through the entrance, a sagging pair of wooden frames covered in corrugated steel and wire, and stopped in the middle of an open, muddy space with a tired-looking office cabin on one side looking out at an expanse of broken cars and car parts arranged in rows. The place was sour and depressing, and he felt instantly unclean. A dog was barking somewhere close by, the noise angry and menacing, and he checked that his MAB 38 was within easy reach. He’d seen the mess some scrapyard dogs could make of a man, and had no desire to find himself on this one’s menu.
The yard’s owner, Olivier Bellin, was an overweight, rat-faced individual clothed in a grubby vest and trousers and a
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