They liked a good gathering, Rocco remembered. Anything for a bit of excitement.
The men turned when they heard the vehicles and stepped away from the door. Rocco told Desmoulins to stop and jumped out. Leaving Godard and his men to take a look round, he walked into the cafe, nodding at the men, and found two uniformed officers with a dejected-looking Calloway slumped in a chair, his wrists handcuffed.
‘Where is he?’ Rocco felt dirty and tired and damp and didn’t want to waste his time talking to this man, but to get on with tracking down Tasker. But he needed to get something from Calloway while he still could. His attitude clearly conveyed itself to the Englishman, because he drew his feet together and sat up straight, eyes wary.
‘I dropped him off near the church,’ he said quickly, without being asked. ‘He said he was going to kill you.’
‘Is that all?’
‘Isn’t that enough?’
‘I mean, does he intend hurting anyone else?’
‘I doubt it. He doesn’t know anyone else. He’s pretty much a mental mess right now; too much to think about and he’d explode.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He’s over the edge. It’s as if he’s lost all reason. Rambling, playing with his guns and threatening anyone who disagrees. He kicked Biggs out of the car because he said something he didn’t like and he needed a decoy, and he only got me to bring him here by sticking his gun in my ribs. I think he’s nuts — and he wasn’t exactly the most stable of men, anyway. Then he met you.’ When Rocco didn’t say anything, he continued, ‘Tasker’s been pretty much top dog in his own world for years now. There are men above him on the human ladder of pond life, but far more below. He enjoys throwing his weight around but hasn’t got the brains to run his own show, so he’s been playing second fiddle to someone who does.’
‘Ketch, you mean.’
‘Yes. And I think Ketch knew how he felt. Which is probably why he sent him on this suicide mission. Tasker’s problem was, he was too thick to turn it down.’
‘You came, too,’ Rocco pointed out.
Calloway smiled grimly. ‘Yes. What does that say about me? Thing is, none of us knew what we were signing up to, not really. I suspect that in the long run, neither did Tasker.’
‘The bank robbery.’
‘Yes. It was supposed to be the real thing: in, out and away to the ferries, easy money. But it was no such thing. There was no cash drop, Tasker said, and another bunch of gunmen was already inside. I don’t think we were meant to come out of that one.’
Calloway was no fool, Rocco recognised. He’d come along knowingly on an illicit venture, but had clearly put two and two together since it had gone wrong. ‘What do you think it was really about?’
‘We were a giant decoy squad, weren’t we? You remember Fletcher — the big lug? He drove the Renault truck when we did this the first time round. But this trip he was off doing it solo, on direct orders from Ketch himself. The rest of us were assigned to the bank job. On the surface, all a bit disconnected, but we were being paid, so why question it?’
‘You had no idea what Fletcher was doing?’
‘No. He was given specific instructions about today, I know that — and told to keep his mouth shut. He could barely keep it in he was so made up, like a bloody kid in a toyshop. What was he doing?’
‘He tried to kill President de Gaulle.’
‘What?’ Calloway shook his head. ‘Fletcher? That’s crazy. He wouldn’t…’ He stopped, eyes going wide. ‘The idiot.’
‘What?’
‘I should have guessed,’ Calloway said bitterly. ‘It didn’t take Einstein to figure out something big was going on… the black DS, the ramming and the Molotovs and pistols. I thought it was all a test run for someone else. But Fletcher?’ He stared at Rocco. ‘I mean, he wasn’t political — he wasn’t anything. He was a thug and a haulage driver, but that was it. Are you sure it was him?’
‘I saw him.’ Rocco wondered about it. Calloway sounded too shocked to be play-acting. Maybe Fletcher hadn’t known what he was doing either; maybe he thought the target was someone low-grade — a business rival. But they’d never know now. ‘If you thought it was something big, why did you go along with it?’
Calloway gave a wry smile. ‘I needed the money, didn’t I? I have gambling debts with people who break legs and things if they’re kept waiting.’
‘Nice friends you have.’
‘Yeah, I know. It wasn’t just us, though, running this thing. A French group was involved — some big man in Paris, according to Tasker.’
‘Name?’
‘He never said. The French provided the plans to the bank, too. Tasker pretended he was in the know all along, but all he really knew was that Ketch had been paid by this French crew to stage a “scenario”, and we were the players.’
‘A scenario?’
‘That’s what he called it. It was all part of some weird plan to tie up and confuse the cops in the area. Now we know why, right?’ He squinted up at Rocco. ‘Did it work?’
Rocco refused to answer. He wondered how Godard was getting on out in the village. He responded instead with another question of his own. ‘What about the body of the tramp?’
Calloway’s face paled and he clamped his lips shut. But he was beyond denying anything. ‘Was that what he was? Poor bugger. That was Tasker’s idea. He found the body under the truck… I reckon he’d been sitting on the verge or had collapsed, and the truck ran over him. None of us saw him until we found him underneath the wheels. Anyway, Tasker reckoned you’d never find him in the burnt-out truck as long as we piled in some wood and lots of petrol.’
‘But burning the truck was still part of the scenario?’
‘Yes.’
Rocco wondered whether Calloway had been truly in the dark as much as he said, or was simply a very good actor. He was inclined to think a bit of both. ‘What about the first DS?’
‘What about it?’
‘We found it at the scrapyard. Before it was broken up.’
‘Now that wasn’t part of the plan. It was supposed to disappear completely. I reckon it was hot from a previous job and we were using it for the last time. The scrap merchant — Bellin? — had orders to torch it and cut it up immediately.’
‘Did he supply the car?’
‘No. Both vehicles were supplied by someone else; we just collected them from a prearranged spot. They came fitted with the harnesses and the timber. We just had to drive them according to instructions.’ He gave another dry smile. ‘A rare case of hands across the sea, wouldn’t you agree?’
Rocco said nothing. A babble of voices came from outside the cafe door, and Claude appeared with Desmoulins close behind. Godard was in the background, shaking his head.
‘They can’t see him anywhere,’ said Claude. He shuffled his feet. ‘I called home, but Alix isn’t there. Thierry said he saw her walking down the lane towards your place less than twenty minutes ago.’
Then came the sound of a gunshot.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
Commissaire Francois Massin was suffering a mix of emotions.
A part of him was still recoiling at the earlier idea that Rocco, whom he’d found himself believing capable of many things, could be guilty of taking a bribe from a known criminal. For any commanding officer, discovering an officer under his command guilty of corruption was almost inevitably a stain on his own record, ignorance being rarely forgiven among the higher ranks of the Ministry. But now he was facing incontrovertible evidence that Rocco had been set up, and the possibility that he himself had been too easily led into believing the worst of a subordinate.
He walked around his office, trying to make sense of the thoughts swirling around in his head. How had this happened? One moment everything was proceeding smoothly, the next an unwelcome focus of attention was on him, evidenced by the extended volley of telephone calls from the Ministry demanding reports and updates on the events leading up to the attack on de Gaulle’s car, closely followed by the press requesting comments about the bank robbery at Bethune and rumours of an attack on an unnamed VIP at an unknown location.