‘You finished?’ Rocco stood up, swallowed two of the tablets dry and made for the door. His clothes had been swapped for clean ones, but still consisted of dark slacks and a black shirt. His English brogues were at the bottom of the canal, but he’d replaced them with an older pair.
‘Yes, off you go.’ Rizzotti shook his head. ‘Do come back soon. I must say, it makes a change from examining corpses. Not as much fun, but at least they lie still.’
After surfacing out of the sinking boat, Rocco had walked to the nearest road and hitched a lift to Poissons, where he’d washed and changed out of his wet clothes. Then he’d got Claude to bring him to Amiens while a team had been called in to search the sunken barge and bring up the body of the factory worker. Lambert’s plan had been simple. Get rid of Rocco and the dead man by placing them both on the barge, then sink it in the deepest part of the canal and nobody would be any the wiser. If the bodies did surface later, it would be next to impossible to make a connection with the factory.
‘You should have called me,’ Claude had muttered, when he told him what had happened. ‘I would have helped. You think my work here takes all my time?’ He puffed his cheeks in mild exasperation. ‘Mother of God, you could have been killed twice over! Barbarians!’
‘You were looking after Nicole.’
‘Sure. But Jean-Mi kept telling me to get lost; said I was spoiling his fun and he could keep her perfectly safe without me hanging around like the angel of doom.’
‘Where are they?’
‘Some inlet off the canal the other side of Amiens. He wouldn’t tell me where exactly; said it was better that way. But I think I know where.’
‘Can you take me there? I need to speak to her.’
‘Sure, but only after you see a doctor.’ Claude eyed the cuts and bruises on his face. ‘You could be suffering from concussion.’
He’d resisted, but in the end, to stop Claude’s nagging, it had been easier to let Rizzotti take a look at him. Fortunately, it had proven to be superficial, with no serious damage.
He sat back while Claude drove out to the west of the town, where he negotiated a series of narrow roads until they arrived at the canal. A small inlet was concealed by a line of poplar trees, with Jean-Michel’s boat anchored at the far end. The former police officer saw them coming and waved. A shotgun was resting on the roof of the cabin.
Claude turned off the engine and looked at Rocco. ‘You don’t look happy. This has nothing to do with what happened last night, does it?’
‘No. It doesn’t. At least, not directly.’
‘She’s been through a lot, that one.’
‘I know. But there’s something I need to ask her.’ He’d considered getting Alix to come with him, but decided against it. The presence of another woman might inhibit Nicole in some way, and he needed to hear her story without fear of hidden details.
‘OK. You know best. I’ll watch the approaches.’ Claude got out of the car and turned to survey the main canal. Rocco walked towards the boat, and Jean-Michel nodded towards the rear door, then wandered away to join his friend.
‘I need to know what happened,’ said Rocco, sitting down in the cabin across from Nicole. Massi was asleep in a bunk, wrapped in a blanket. The cabin was snug, warmed by a small but efficient log stove. ‘On that truck.’
Nicole nodded, her hands clasped in front of her. She looked suddenly small, and no longer as physically confident. Yet there was a resolve about her, as if nothing was going to penetrate her armour. The soft murmur of Claude and Jean- Michel talking on the canal bank gave the boat an oddly leisurely atmosphere, yet Rocco felt anything but relaxed.
‘What happened to you?’ she asked, eyeing the patch of iodine and his bruised skin.
‘I fell in the canal.’
She nodded, accepting his businesslike approach. ‘Very well.’
They had slipped off the boat from Oran under cover of darkness, a line of figures scurrying across the narrow stretch of open ground between the quayside and the warehouses lining the dock. A crew member saw Nicole and whispered that they were now in France, and wished her well.
She swept up her son, Massi, clutching his slim shape to her, and hurried after the man in front, praying that it would not all end here, so close to freedom. She almost wept at the freshness of the sea air blowing across the dockside. She was shivering after being kept in the confined storage room below deck, where the pounding of the ship’s engines on the other side of the bulkhead had cooked the atmosphere and made the journey unbearably noisy and claustrophobic.
Freedom. It represented different things to so many people. To these men with her, it was an opportunity to start a new life, to earn money to send home, a chance to avoid the grinding poverty that embraced them in their homeland.
To her it was the opportunity to hold on to life itself, to keep her son and watch him grow; to free him from the threat of death and brutality and the cruelty which would be his lot if they stayed in Oran.
And to prevent him growing in the image of Samir Farek.
Ever since she had slipped on board the boat named the Calypsoa, a rusting, old cargo boat which stank of diesel and dirty seawater, and rattled with every surge of its engines, she had been aware of the men watching her. Uncomfortably close to them, she had felt intimidated at first, by their presence and their haunted eyes, by their expressions of desperation, of exhaustion. By their curiosity, too, about her and what she was doing here. As disturbing as it was, though, as they had chugged out of the Vieux Port, the rattle of winches and chains pounding through the boat’s hull, she had heaved a sigh of relief. This was only the first stage of her journey, but she was content to be at least this far ahead of the fate which had been her due had she stayed.
‘A woman should not travel alone like this,’ said one man, whose name she later learnt was Slimane. ‘Especially a mother.’ He was of medium height, slim but strongly built, and boasted of being a slaughterman, one who could open the throat of a full-grown bull with the same ease as he kissed a whore. As if to prove the point, he produced a wicked-looking knife which he claimed was the tool of his trade, and stared intensely at Massi, who was watching from behind his mother’s back, eyes huge and round.
‘Are you married?’ he asked later in the journey, nodding at Massi. ‘Or are you just a whore with a paid-for bastard?’
She did not respond, flinching at the harsh words and the brutal tone, and looked to the others for support. But they all looked away, some not wanting to hear that she was running from a husband, others embarrassed by the possibility that she was a woman of low repute.
Slimane kept needling her at regular intervals, pulling out his knife for no good reason and testing the blade. All the time he would watch her, until she felt his eyes were boring into her soul.
‘I have seen you before,’ he said, as the boat slowed after the second day, and wallowed in a cross-current. She could hear the sounds of a motor some distance away, but enclosed in the storage room, none of them could see out, their next destination known only by the men who were transporting them.
She said nothing to Slimane, knowing that would encourage him.
‘Yes, I’ve definitely seen you before,’ he repeated. ‘But not in any whorehouse.’
That night they were dropped off at an unnamed port, and taken through a warehouse and hurried on board a truck, secreted among a cargo of rope. It had been uncomfortable and smelly, the air filled with dust and fibres, and the driver had given them containers of fresh water and a handkerchief for Massi to tie around his mouth to stop him coughing. Coughing, he had told them, would mean discovery and a return trip across the Mediterranean.