The First Fingerprint

by Xavier-Marie Bonnot, Ian Monk, Ian Monk

Genres: International Crime & Mystery; Police Procedurals

Synopsis

In an underwater cavern off the coast west of Marseille are the first human engravings known to man. Among them is a crude drawing of a three-fingered hand, which has long puzzled archaeologists. Is it a hunting signal? A mystic sign invoking the spirits? Or is it, as many believe, evidence of ritual mutilation in a Shamanistic world?"The Hunter" evidently believes the latter. Driven by inhuman voices to maim and kill, he severs the body parts of his victims - and signs his savagery with a print of a three-fingered hand. Commandant Michel de Palma, of the Marseille murder squad, heads to the university in Aix-en-Provence to investigate further, but the clique of pre-history professors he encounters are as hard to unravel as the meaning of the cave-drawing itself. As he gets closer to the truth, the group of academics close ranks. Slowly and alone, de Palma begins pursuing a mystery that dates back to the Ice age. The First Fingerprint introduces a policeman as polished as he is brutal, as charming as he is deceptive. Michel de Palma, called "the Baron" by his colleagues, knows the dark underside of the city of Marseille as do none of his rivals. But his enemies are everywhere: in the crime-infested sinks of the suburbs; in the sleek and squalid bars of the old quarter; even in the police ranks themselves.

Release date: March 29, 2012

Publisher: MacLehose Press

Print pages: 339

Sample

For some time, there had been only a diffuse glow in the sky, a faint light whose source was presumably somewhere behind the jagged row of black rocks, high up there, far above the tiny form now hurrying along, guided by the narrow beam of a torch pointing at the ground.

The will-o’-the-wisp was dancing, a yellow and white elf skimming over the sloping surface in a jerky motion. A lonely and malicious light providing just enough visibility so as not to trip over any of the hundred and one stumbling blocks along its winding way. Just enough not to be seen.

But who could possibly have been watching a sleepwalker out in such a place?

No-one could have known she was there. No-one.

Now, the moon had risen over the huge cliff-face which plunged straight down into the sea, and a milky light slipped its way into the sea creek of Sugiton, making its enormous blocks of white limestone look like mighty diamonds standing out against the dark ink of the Mediterranean. Only the outlines of a few scrubby pine trees added life to this mineral chaos.

It was brighter, the walker turned off her torch, her shadow now could be clearly seen to her right: a strange, long, complex shape of sharp angles, a walking petroglyph which had nothing human about it, inching along the contours of the cliff and losing itself sometimes in a hole before surging back at once on to the pointed spine of a rock. The monstrous apparition of a mythical being risen from the depths of creation, an evil god, forgotten by mankind, come to commit some black deed against humanity in this half-night.

This moving shadow belonged to Christine Autran, leaping lightly from rock to rock, following a precise path, without making a single slip. If an imaginary onlooker had been there to observe the scene, he would have recognised that she knew this place like the back of her hand.

But no-one knew that Christine Autran was there. No-one.

The east wind had just got up and waves were beginning to slap hard against the jagged rocks. At each blow, the sea compressed the air trapped in the gaps of the coastline with its slow motion, before tumbling backwards into a furious swirl. The surges of water were rhythmic, the creek was being filled with a dull rumble like the gigantic resonance of a titan’s drum.

The tide was coming in, foul weather was brewing out at sea; before long it would bite even further into the coastline.

Christine Autran stopped for a moment and breathed in the mood of the sea spray. She looked up at the moon, then turned towards the sea: that cold eye was making beautiful silvery glitters on the surface of the waves. She sat on a flat stone and took off her rucksack. The sea breeze bit into her sweat-soaked clothes and an icy chill gripped the small of her back. She got out a fleece pullover, slipped it on and then from one of the rucksack pockets took a cereal bar which she chewed while thinking over the events of the day. Far off, a bird was whistling.

No-one could know she was there. No-one.

She looked at her watch: 8.00 p.m. It was now exactly one hour since she had left the terminus of the number 21 bus in front of the university at Luminy. First, she had gone one kilometre along the broad pathway which leads towards Sugiton pass, while sticking to the signposting of the hiking path GR 98. Night was falling, a few finches were giving their final bursts of song. Christine had then passed through a scrub of Aleppo pines and stunted holm oaks before reaching the Sugiton pass. She had sat there for a moment to make the most of the last moments of daylight.

It had been warm for late November, so warm that a fine blue mist had risen from the sea to mingle with the last glimmers of the day. Slowly, the emerald and sapphire of the water had melted into a still-hot pewter brown amid the whiteness of the limestone, while the matt green of the bushes of mastic, sarsaparilla and sabline de Provence had become black blotches in the scars of the contours.

In the background, to the left of Sugiton creek, the familiar outline of Le Torpilleur had vanished into the grubby shadows, its limestone prow stuck into the shallows some thirty metres from the coast; this mineral vessel, as big as a frigate, had beached itself in the middle of the creek like a navy ship which, in the hollows of the cliffs, had lost its battle against an invisible submarine.

Christine had decided to pass to the right of the signpost indicating the hiking track and instead took the winding path that led straight into the valley of Sugiton. She let herself be drawn down by the slope, taking care not to trip over the roots of the pines which stuck up from the dusty ground like huge snakes. Twenty minutes later, she had reached a panoramic viewpoint which she knew well. It was there that the night had enveloped her.

No-one could have known she was there. No-one.

She had left her comfortable flat, at 125 boulevard Chave, at about eight that morning. Tuesday was the day she taught at the Aix-en-Provence faculty of Literature and Human Sciences: three hours in the morning from 9.00 to 12.00 with bachelor degree students, then one and a half hours starting at 2.00 p.m. with history research students. She preferred the morning lessons – une unité de valeur in the university jargon – which allowed her to dwell on her favourite subject, the Magdalenian era in Provence. She had devoted her entire academic career to its study, starting with a bulky thesis on the sharpened flints found in Upper Palaeolithic sites in south-east France and Liguria.

Once lessons were over, she had had to talk for some time with Sylvie Maurel, a researcher from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique who wanted some details about the site she was studying. Christine did not like Sylvie because of her self-assurance, her daredevil poise, her bourgeois manner and the way she hovered around Professor Palestro, Head of the Department of Prehistory. Christine had to admit to her herself that she was jealous, and that this jealousy was a point of weakness, which was probably what she disliked most of all. She hated hearing the Professor talking to her rival in a familiar way and using her first name. She had the impression that the only man she had ever respected was doing it on purpose, to mortify her. Sylvie was the reflection of what she might have been, had she not sunk her life into the depths of academic literature.

Sylvie Maurel was radiant, with refined gestures, a body that was both firm and supple, a head of heavy, black hair, amber skin, ebony eyes that darted about, and fine features with slight traces of make-up as the one and only sign of any concession to age awareness. She was always discreetly dressed, generally in jeans and plain tops as though to disguise her bourgeois origins. There was only one nod towards the wealth of her class: a large diamond on her left hand.

Christine had always had a problem meeting Sylvie’s classiness eye to eye. She shuddered when her hand brushed against her enemy’s hand, or when she was taken in by her delicate voice and felt a luxurious sweetness dissolve into her stomach, like the essence of a rare opiate; her scalp tingled, she crossed her legs quickly, in a game of attraction and repulsion around this sensual beauty that dominated her.

So Christine Autran had been late and had had to speed along the northern motorway so as to reach Marseille before the evening rush hour.

In the stairwell of her building, she made as little noise as possible, so as not to let the old lady on the first floor know that her second-floor tenant had come home at the usual time. This old woman owned the building and was forever on the lookout, like an eel in its lair, watching the comings and goings of her tenants through her spyhole. On her way out Christine took the precaution of going downstairs in her stockinged feet. She had then leaped on to the first tram and travelled as far as Vieux-Port métro station. One anonymous person among all the other anonymous people on the move at the close of the afternoon.

In the town centre, beside the Bourse shopping mall, she took the number 21 bus and nobody had so much as glanced at her. Not even the driver, a fat, bald lump with an enormous moustache who, at each stop, started clicking his gold signet ring against the black plastic steering wheel in time to a Johnny Hallyday song, which played on a loop throughout the entire journey. At the back of the bus, some architecture students on their way back to their halls of residence in Luminy were chatting noisily about their final degree projects without paying any attention to this eccentric woman in a dusty, sweat-stained rain-hat.

And taking an excursion to the creeks at the end of November at 5.00 in the afternoon was indeed eccentric.

She had gone back thus far over her day, when the east wind got up. From where she stood, she could just make out the presence of the islands of Riou, Plane and Jarre; to her right, but out of sight, lay Maire island and, in front of Marseille, Frioul archipelago; to her left were the wildlife sanctuaries of Port Crau and Porquerolles. She pictured this fantastic landscape during the Magdalenian era, 20,000 B.C.E., when the sea level was twenty metres lower and a vast valley ran down to these islands.

She often told her students that the coastline at the time looked rather like Norway’s does now. A fossil beach had been discovered there, at a depth of forty metres, with shellfish otherwise found only in northern Scandinavia. The universe of the Provençal Cro-Magnons was a steppe covered with vegetation and colonised by angel’s hair, grasses and juniper bushes. A few Austrian pines, Scots pines and alders scraped an existence in the shelter of the limestone rock-faces, beside streams and little lakes where men and beasts came to drink. The sea temperature barely exceeded six or seven degrees. Pack ice probably covered a large part of the mare nostrum.

For thousands of years, the first men had lived there, hunting, fishing and gathering as described in children’s books. It was a primitive life spent tracking bison, aurochs, Irish elk and Mediterranean monk seals. Everything they needed was there, at arm’s reach: the sea, big and small game, as well as dozens of caves for shelter when night fell.

Christine liked to imagine Cro-Magnons in the evening, dressed in their clumsily stitched furs, with their long, filthy hair, going back to the dark caves which the sea had now submerged. Sheltered by the depths of the earth, around a fire which had been cunningly kept burning for days on end, they would grant themselves a moment’s rest, away from the women who had gathered life’s essentials during the day: fruit, roots and fungi. The men would think about the next day’s hunt, one of them sharpening flints in staccato blows, turning the hard stone into pedunculate tips, scrapers, saw-edges and rudimentary knives – the equipment of the great hunters and fishers of the Palaeolithic era.

Like Professor Autran that evening, the first men must have looked up at the self-same monochromatic, pale light coming down from the sky. They must have questioned the moon, invented answers to the grand mysteries of existence and peered into the future. Beliefs were born in the world of spirits, which had then been painted, sculpted or engraved in the gloomy living spaces of their prehistoric caves. An art of shadows and rock was born: the first men had wanted it to be different from their crude daily existences and had conceived the fantastic bestiary of their wall paintings.

For a long time it had been known that Provençal prehistory had sunk beneath the waters. This hypothesis had been verified by a large number of finds, such as the underwater caves of Le Figuier and La Triperie near Morgiou creek. Then, in 1991, a diver from Marseille discovered a decorated cave, like a Provençal Lascaux sleeping beneath a roof of stone. Its entry lay at a depth of thirty-seven metres, at the foot of the colossal slopes of Sugiton creek. It had a narrow entrance that led to a tunnel measuring a hundred and fifty metres, at the end of which lay the now famous frescoes of silence: negative and positive hands, horses, bison, penguins … The cave had been named after its discoverer, Charles Le Guen, and its entrance had been sealed by a heavy iron gate and blocks of stone. Beside the opening, there was a notice which looked strange at such a depth:

A whistling noise woke Christine Autran from her meditations. She stood up, ran her fingers through her hair and looked at her watch: 9.00 p.m. She set off once more, going from rock to rock, silently reproaching herself for giving in to such reflections. It was something she rarely did, and never in these circumstances. She had no time to lose.

She reached the last rock, and from there she could just make out the tiny beach of smooth pebbles she was looking for. She leaped from her perch and at once found herself surrounded by the massive limestone rocks she had just crossed, with the threatening sea to her right and in front of her the huge cliff-face that rose up towards the infinity of the sky. Only a skilled climber could have gone any further than the mousetrap in which Professor Autran now stood.

She could scarcely see. The moonlight was feeble in this little creek. She advanced a few more paces, as far as the cliff, her feet sinking slightly into the damp stones. Blindly, she felt around for a dry place on which to put her bag.

The noise of the sea was ever more present, like the breathing of a savage beast on the move only a few metres from her. Further out, Christine could see the lights of a cargo ship which must have left Marseille at nightfall and was now going full steam ahead for Corsica or North Africa.

Without wasting any more time, she removed her torch and a notebook from the right-hand pocket of her bag. She laid them beside her, then plunged her hand into the main section of the rucksack to take out a small, folding spade. She picked up the torch and aimed its beam at the foot of the cliff, where the limestone met the pebble beach. She examined the rock inch by inch, then stopped when she located a barely perceptible bulge. The whistling noise could be heard once more. Christine shivered. It came from somewhere close by. Just a few metres away. Her whole body trembled. She played her torch across the rocks.

Nothing.

She tried to reassure herself by telling herself that her imagination must be working even faster than her concentrated senses. It was an illusion.

Several times, she swallowed back the saliva which was sticking in her throat, then she let the adrenaline dissolve into the most distant extremities of her body and started to dig. Methodically.

Her spade made a sharp, rhythmic sound. She scarcely heard the heavy footsteps on the gravel just behind her.

“Già nella notte densa

s’estingue ogni clamor…”

Commandant Michel de Palma was humming out of sheer boredom: Verdi’s “Otello” – mezza voce – the Moor’s shades mingled with the discreet symphony of police headquarters.

“Gia il mio cor fremebondo

s’ammansa in quest’amplesso e si rinsensa.”

De Palma was sitting at his desk, on the second floor, to the left out of the lift, last door on the right, beyond the photocopier and the coffee machine. The murder squad.

“Tuoni la Guerra e s’inabissi il mondo

se dopo l’ira immensa

vien quest’immenso amor!”

Slumped in his chair, his muscular legs stretched full length beneath his desk, he was killing his last hour on station duty by flicking again and again through his bumper school exercise book, in which he noted down everything, from the smallest to the most significant details of the investigations he was conducting.

One exercise book a year. An old-school policeman’s habit which he had inherited from a grumpy old commissaire when he had started out on the force.

“Mio superbo guerrier! Quanti tormenti,

quanti mesti sospiri et quanta speme

ci condusse ai soavi abbracciamenti!

Oh! Come è dolce il mormorare insieme: te ne rammenti?”

Before the end of November, the book had been filled by a case which had been obsessing him for months. A murder: Samir, aged seven, raped, then his throat slit with an industrial cutter. In cold blood. And no-one had heard a thing, of course. He had been found at the end of August, in the rubbish chute of a ten-storey block of flats in the La Castellane housing estate, far off in the northern suburbs of Marseille.

De Palma had stood for a long time in silence in front of that child’s body, wound in a bin-liner, its eyes half-closed, its throat agape. He had taken little Samir’s cold hand, leaned over his puffy face, holding his breath to stop himself from vomiting, and had spoken to him tenderly, the way you speak to a child who cannot go to sleep in the dark: “I’ll get whoever did it. Trust me, kid. I always get them. I’m the best. I’ll make him eat his fucking mother.”

Duriez, director of the regional police department, had told Commissaire Paulin, the head of the murder squad, to put de Palma on to the case because he was an ace. Since which time the affair had grown in importance: young Arabs were crying out for justice, the Maire wanted the police to be irreproachable, and Duriez had put him under immense pressure by declaring to the press, with his hand on his heart: “I have no doubt that this case will be solved in the very near future.”

De Palma ran through the details of the Samir case for the umpteenth time. Occasionally he frowned as he examined a telephone number jotted in the margin, or a name followed by a question mark. His intense dark stare, as sharp as a facetted sapphire, darted out from his angular face, then faded again in an instant before returning to its journey through the tiny handwriting which went off in all directions, like rapacious weeds, across this great hunter’s pages of memories.

“Quando narravi l’esule tua vita

e i fieri eventi e i lunghi tuoi dolor,

ed io t’udia coll’anima rapita

in quei spaventi e coll’estasi nel cor.”

De Palma would soon celebrate twenty-five years on the force. Five had been spent at 36 quai des Orfèvres, the holy of holies of the national police; the next twenty at the regional police department in Marseille. That made twenty-five exercise books. His retirement day was approaching slowly but surely, and with it the great emptiness of his future life.

He would not be celebrating that.

He looked up from his exercise book and peered around. The desk opposite was immaculately spick and span. Its occupant for the past six months was Lieutenant Maxime Vidal, a tall, dark lad who was as dry and thin as a capital I, and who smiled innocently in all circumstances. He had left the office at about 6.00 p.m. just like any other young officer who still had some kind of life outside of his job.

De Palma’s gaze strayed over the white walls, lingered for a moment on the empty chair in front of him, then went back up to the grey metal ring hanging from the wall. He tried to remember various faces, but none came to him.

“Venga la morte! E mi colga nell’estasi

di quest’amplesso

il momento supremo!”

The décor was no longer quite what it had been since the false ceiling collapsed on to the heads of the officers in the Murder and Organised Crime Squads. It smelled of wet paint, enamel, fresh plaster and wallpaper paste. A heavy, heady, glycerophtalic smell still hung in the air.

De Palma sat up on his chair, stretching his arms to waken the network of muscles that covered his solid bones, then he cracked his resin-brown fingers. The night before, he had had bad dreams. A quarter of a century in the force had no doubt driven him somewhat crazy, maybe semi-paranoid, and definitely insomniac. But he had gone to bed early, with the firm intention of snoring like a sawn log so as to recover from all those long nights spent looking at night-birds dressed up to the nines in the flashy bars on Carré Thairs.

Around 2.00 in the morning, fatal crime scenes burst into his mind without any warning. Always the same images of lacerated bodies, faces with eyes rolled upwards, guts torn open, corpses blue under the striplights in the morgue. Women and men of all sizes, all colours, going in and out of the morgue’s drawers, mechanically, like the staging of some modern play.

And then children. Many too many children. Like night-watchmen, the lifeless faces of the little dead invaded his sleep and kicked him awake pitilessly, asking again and again for impossible justice. The image of his brother, a close-up of his fine, soft eyes, had finally replaced all the others.

He had spent a couple of hours on the balcony, staring into the night, listening to the murmurs of his sleepy neighbourhood. His wife, Marie, had hated this quartier more than anything. It was the ugliest part of the eastern sprawl of Marseille, and one of the poorest too, despite its lovely name which filled your mouth like a zest: La Capelette. He had always lived there.

Marie had left a month ago.

His policeman’s salary had allowed him to buy a spanking-new three-bedroom flat on boulevard Mireille Lauze, in a leafy, “classy” cluster of buildings, named Paul Verlaine Residence by its inspired promoters: three cubes of compressed concrete, each of four floors, built over a stretch of what were once gardens of the convent of the Holy Sisters of Saint Joseph of the Apparition. The rest of the park was now occupied by a psychiatric hospital and a nursing college. On summer nights, when the nice and normal slept with their windows open, lugubrious howls tore through the purring of the televisions, providing a strange ground bass of human suffering to this theatre of shadows.

“Già nella notte densa

s’estingue ogni clamor,

già il mio cor fremebondo

s’ammansa in quest’amplesso e si rinsensa.”

Capitaine Anne Moracchini pushed open the office door and slipped her head of long brown hair through the gap. She flicked back her locks gracefully and gave de Palma a wicked look.

“You doing overtime, Michel? We’re going for a drink at Le Zanzi. Want to come?”

“No thanks. I’m going to have a quiet evening at home. Tomorrow, if you want.”

“Come on now. You’re not going to play at being dark and mysterious again?”

“Oh yes I am,” he answered, forcing himself to smile. “I’ll take you to dinner tomorrow.”

“I can’t tomorrow.”

“Some other time then?”

“You’re not trying it on with me, are you? Watch yourself, Michel, I might end up taking you seriously.”

De Palma liked Capitaine Moracchini. First of all, he respected her for what she was: a police officer of rare qualities. She was the only woman on the squad. All the boys had more or less had a go at her, including Duriez, the big boss, and Paulin, the squad’s head. Every one of them, except de Palma, who had never betrayed the slightest sign of physical attraction, even though her supple, slim body, as gentle as it was dangerous, provoked waves of desire in him which he sometimes had trouble controlling. As far as he knew, she had not had a serious relationship with anyone since she had divorced a dentist in Vitrolles two years before on the grounds of their political incompatibility.

“Goodbye, Michel. See you tomorrow.”

“Goodbye, my lovely,” he answered, slipping his exercise book into the top drawer of his desk.

When he was alone again, de Palma repeated to himself the oath that he had sworn to Samir’s body. He had now to go back to La Castellane. His plan was in place, he would just have to wait two more hours before putting it into action. Instinctively, he checked the cylinder of his Bodyguard and went out into the city, with no special destination in mind and just one desire: to get this case over and done with as soon as possible – along with that “Otello” air which he could not get out of his head.

“Venga la morte! E mi colga nell’estasi

di quest’amplesso

il momento supremo!”

It was verging on hot for a December night. He drove along the old port, with his window open, the smell of fuel and dry seaweed in his nostrils, then cruised up La Canebière, which was crammed with headlamps coming towards him and Christmas decorations – the same for last twenty-five years – forming two lines of light, one yellow and one white, leading towards the Reformed church. At the far end, he turned right in front of the church and went back up rue Thiers. It was dark and deserted, except for a pair of tatty transvestites who swivelled their hips grotesquely every time a car drove past. They were two black whores who used to work for the Beau Jacques and were now looking out for a pimp. Their previous one had been dug out of a blockhouse in Les Goudes the previous month, with his cute features full of lead. An occupational accident, so to speak. Case closed.

At the top of rue Thiers, he turned into the empty outskirts of La Plaine. Driving steadily in second gear, his arm leaning heavily on the car door, he surveyed the bars that were still open, now spewing out their clientele of students and dole boys. He almost pulled in to attract the attention of the small groups forming around the crouched figures of dealers. No reaction. Snatches of a blues song drifted out from a weary-looking club. The quavering notes rose up among the red lights of the belvedere only to rest in the branches of the nettle trees which the mischievous mistral had decked with plastic bags. As he passed in front of Les Nuits Bleues, he spotted Serge Pugliesi, or “Petit Serge” – the bent policeman’s godfather – sounding off, crotch forward, arms outstretched, waving his hands with their five fingers and six rings in the stinking atmosphere of his local bar.

He drove swiftly down to the town centre again, taking boulevard Salvator, then the bus lane along rue de Rome towards place La Castellane. His instinct told him that Samir’s killer was still right there, in the heart of the estate, and maybe in the very same block. Several clues backed up this hypothesis. He had been cruising round the neighbourhood for days, each time in a different car so as not to be spotted in such a vertical microcosm.

Samir had been murdered at 6.00 p.m. At that time of day, no-one could wander around the estate without being noticed by the kids, who acted as lookouts at its entry points. Samir had probably been a lookout too. Not one of the few witness statements he had so far managed to gather made mention of seeing a stranger in La Castellane. This was his only chance: he had to make the witnesses talk.

“At any price,” he said aloud.

One way or another, he had to break through the law of silence which governed the small world of drug pushers. He had to rid himself of that feeling of impotence and guilt which rose from his guts.

He accelerated. His life had a meaning once more. A quarter of an hour later, he was on boulevard Barnier. He parked in traverse des Transhumants and then walked over to the huge La Castellane housing estate.

A red light was glowing from the tops of the tower-blocks, refracted by the dampness of the cold air. At the entry to the estate, he spotted the group of kids who kept their eyes on any comings and goings. As de Palma walked by the group, he picked out the youngest of them, then went around the block to return to his car without drawing attention to himself. He started up and drove off into the night.

This kid’s name was Karim. He had heard it during the questioning after Samir’s murder. Karim lived in the same block as the victim, and had been his best friend. “Like a brother,” he had said. De Palma had sensed that the boy was hiding something, that he had been silenced by a terror which was indefinable, invisible, but definitely there. He had seen it from the way he squirmed in his chair during questioning, from the way he filled up all the silences which the police imposed on him, and from his disturbed gaze when he had been shown photographs so as to identify the deceased.

Ten minutes later, de Palma had reached the Commissariat of the third arrondissement: a concrete fortress, stuck there like a bad joke at the gloomy entrance of the Parc Bellevue housing estate. Everyone called it “Félix-Pyat”. Half of the population was Comorian and the other half Slavic. It was dangerous. With a sea view for those on the top floors.

Every time de Palma went there, he reminded himself that the Third World was not necessarily several hours’ flight away from Marignane airport. Félix-Pyat, with its smell of ozone, its façades eaten away by poverty, its walls towering over car parks full of decaying motors and gutted washing machines, exactly conveyed all of the failings of society. It was a pitiless zone amongst the blind zones of a great city.

Outside the Commissariat, a plain-clothes team was waiting for it to be 9.00 p.m., their arses parked on their Safrane’s bonnet. The Brigadier arrived and tossed that night’s equipment on to the back seat: truncheons, rifles and rubber bullets, walkie-talkies, Maglites. The men exchanged a few inaudible jokes. Then the Brigadier spotted de Palma.

“So you’ve come to see how the job’s really done.”

“Where are you going with that Safrane?” de Palma retorted. “Do you reckon you’re going to catch any hoodies in that thing? Wake up, use a Solex. That way, they won’t spot you so fast.”

De Palma went inside the Commissariat, gave a friendly wave to the officer who was fighting off sleep behind the switchboard, and walked round to the other side of rec