Jacquot and the Waterman Read Free Page A

Boni. . .
For a while he persuaded himself that he didn't mind. It wasn't important. And she still loved him, regardless, the thing he was sure of. But then, sometime later, they'd argued about some silly, stupid trifle - the way she always left a coffee ring on the bathroom windowsill and how she never wiped it away, leaving the job to him, the lack of consideration - and before he could take it back he'd said it, said what he should have kept quiet about. Seeing her at the Novotel, adding something spiteful about the last flight from Paris, not going all the way to Djibouti, just for good measure. At which she'd given him a stunned, then pitiful look and slammed out of the apartment.
Six days later she was back, tearful, tanned and sorrowful. And he'd forgiven her, and they'd made it up, under the stars, out on the balcony.
Then, not six months later, she was pregnant, throwing up into the basin he'd just washed his face in. The sheer wonderful joy of it for him. Fatherhood. He'd walked to the office, the morning she told him, with a spring in his step and a whistle on his lips. But a week into the third month, Boni lost it. A smeared stain on the bedsheet and a gentle smile creasing her bloodless face, her head settling back on the pillow, no tears brimming in her eyes. And he'd known, kneeling beside the bed, known as certainly as he could, that she was relieved, known too that the child she'd lost had not been his.
    Now, thought Jacquot as he made his way along the lanes of Le Panier, now it looked like Boni had gone for good.
     

Yves G uimpier, Chief of the Marseilles Police Judiciaire, turned from the window when Jacquot knocked and entered.
     
Guimpier was tall, gaunt and round-shouldered, a short-sleeved singlet visible beneath his cream striped shirt, the loose knot of his tie not quite hiding the collar button. His hair was a comb-tined mix of grey and white, slicked straight back off a high forehead, his eyes blue and slanted, lips thin as splinters, cheeks long and hollow. Le Chef. The Man. He might look like he'd been squeezed out of a tube but Jacquot knew that Guimpier could handle himself. Thirty years with the force and only the last four behind a desk.
Guimpier nodded to a chair and Jacquot sat down. Guimpier stayed standing, slid his shaking hands into his pockets and looked back down into the street where a jackhammer grunted. The shaking hands were the reason he found himself behind a desk.
'You hear?' began Guimpier, keeping his back to Jacquot.
'Hear what?'
'Rully. Broke his leg. All we need.'
Jacquot closed his eyes. Opened them. 'When?'
'Saturday.'
'How?'
'How do you think?'
'Where is he?'
'Conception. You should call in, see him.'
Jacquot nodded.
'Any luck with the body?' continued Guimpier.
The body. The reason Jacquot had been out of town. There'd been no need to go but it beat staying in the apartment. Boni had returned home Friday evening, still in her uniform, and they'd started straight in. The way it had been the last few weeks. The sniping, the scratching. Little things. Then a weighted silence. Moving around the apartment like shadows, no word spoken.
The drive north had soothed him, the chalky bluffs, the clear, snaking highway, a high blue sky and the lulling salsa rhythms of Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto. And then in Aix the company of his old friend Desjartes, from way back. He'd arrived in time for lunch, a little place off Cours Mirabeau, just the two of them talking over old times, then seen the body and noted the tattoo - eleven letters in red and blue and green, elegantly scrolled and stitched into the skin high up on the inside of the thigh. The tattoo and the welts, a web of them criss-crossed over her buttocks and the tops of her legs, the original red stripes leached by the water into a cross-hatching of black lines. The third body they'd retrieved in as many months.
'Like they said,' Jacquot shrugged. 'Nothing. Except the tattoo. We're checking prints and missing