way to get to the bottom of it was to clarify at least this aspect and prove that this particular person wasn’t involved.
‘About Alix,’ Claude continued after a while, sounding uncomfortable. ‘I didn’t mean to imply anything before – you know that, right? It’s just that … well, I worry about her. She’s not as tough as she makes out.’ He clamped his mouth shut and looked out the window at the passing greenery.
‘You have every right to worry,’ Rocco replied. ‘Let’s be honest, she’s what the Americans would call a hot dame. Of course, we’ll make sure you’re the first to know when we decide to get together.’
Claude’s head snapped round, his mouth open. ‘What?’
‘Calm down, you idiot. I’m kidding. Anyway, how do I know she won’t turn out to look like you in a few years?’ He shuddered. ‘That doesn’t bear thinking about.’
‘Bloody cheek!’ Claude pretended to be disgruntled. ‘She looks like her mother, if you must know – and she was a real beauty. You could do worse than—’ He stopped. ‘What am I saying? It’s just that … Alix speaks highly of you. Says you’re an honourable cop – for a man.’ He reached out for the radio. ‘It’s just that I—’
‘I know what you were thinking. Stop worrying.’
Honourable. That wasn’t a word Rocco or any other cop heard too often. And he was pretty sure it didn’t apply to him. He’d bent the rules occasionally when it suited him, although usually to get closer to securing evidence and a conviction, never to implicate an innocent man. Not very long ago, days after Alix had joined the Amiens district, he’d deliberately disposed of a piece of evidence from a murder case. He’d done it knowing that an investigation would have achieved nothing, unless you called it nothing to track down and prosecute a terrified young mother fighting for her life and the life of her child. A conviction hadn’t been likely, anyway, in his view, even if they’d managed to find her.
Fortunately, she’d disappeared like smoke, probably out of the country, and Rocco had thrown away the one bit of evidence likely to have been used against her: the weapon she had used to defend herself.
Although Alix had been close when he’d disposed of the weapon in the canal, it had been too dark for her to have seen. But she had to have known what he’d done. She hadn’t spoken about it, then or since. The shared knowledge had bound them together, somehow, loosely knotted but unbreakable. Yet distant.
Audelet turned out to be larger than Poissons, but not by much. A collection of houses, a church, two cafés, a small garage and a crumbling chateau with a sad, neglected air and sheep grazing around the grounds. Rocco counted two cars and a tractor as they entered the village, and two pedestrians. And a horse walking along the road untended, minding its own business. Compared with Poissons, it was almost humming with activity.
He pulled into the inevitable square and parked in front of the church. It was neat and solid, the way of all churches in the region, and grimly austere. Or maybe it was just him.
He and Claude climbed out and walked up the path alongside the church to a small house with flowers around the door. At least that was a good sign.
Father Maurice was waiting for them. He poured coffee into thick brown cups and offered a box of sugar lumps and a metal jug of fresh milk, the kind children carried to the farm to fetch their daily quota, with a handle and a metal lid. After Clichy and its air of sophistication, where milk came from a store in a cold sealed container, it was like stepping back in time. But Rocco was getting used to it, like lots of things around here.
Such as a priest who wasn’t wearing a dog collar.
Father Maurice was dressed in baggy corduroys and a heavyweight knitted jumper. He was smoking a dark-brown cigarillo, waving away the smoke with a beefy hand, and looked more fisherman than cleric. In Clichy, Paris, priests wore their uniform like a badge, to give them an identity in a bustling, impatient world. Out here, not everyone conformed to type.
‘Pantoufle is a complex character,’ the priest said, pushing the filled cups across the table. ‘He’s war-damaged, like many others, and deserving of our understanding.’ He eyed Rocco keenly. ‘A man of your age and experience, I imagine you’ve been there, Inspector?