Granier

Granier chose the car park.

Yassine understood that only when he turned into it, at seven in the evening on the Wednesday after the funeral, and saw the long low shape of the supermarket against the sky and the trolleys herded under their shelter and the lamp posts not yet lit, and remembered where he had seen it before. Not here. In a folder, on a hot desk on the fourth floor, under a fan that turned its head from side to side. A man found in his car in a supermarket car park on the edge of Lunel, in April, with the engine still running.

He parked at the far end, where the tarmac gave out into rough ground and a line of oleanders, and sat for a moment with the engine off and the windows down, listening to the swifts screaming over the roof of the supermarket and the distant traffic on the bypass. He wondered whether Granier had done it on purpose. He decided that Granier did very few things that were not on purpose, and that this was either a reminder or a test, and that it did not matter which.

There was a white Renault three bays along, nose to the oleanders. Its engine was running. Its windows were shut.

He got out, and took the two plastic bags of shopping he had bought inside as his reason for being here, bread and coffee and rice and a sack of dog biscuits Magali had asked for, and walked past the Renault without looking at it, and put the bags in the boot of the Peugeot, and closed the boot, and then walked back and opened the passenger door of the Renault and got in.

The cold hit him like water. Granier had the air-conditioning on full.

"You've lost weight," Granier said.

"Somebody told me I'd got fat."

"Somebody was wrong." Granier looked at him for a moment, the long assessing look that Yassine had seen him give suspects across the table in the interview rooms, and then looked away, out through the windscreen at the oleanders. He was in shirtsleeves. His jacket was folded on the back seat. There was a thin file on the dashboard in front of him and a paper cup of coffee from the supermarket going cold in the holder. "I'm sorry about Segura."

"So am I."

"You were close."

"He taught me to run."

Granier nodded slowly. He did not say anything else about it. Yassine had not expected him to, and found, to his surprise, that he was grateful.

• • •

"First," Granier said, "the gendarmes."

"I know."

"You know what?"

"The captain from Vauvert. At the school, Thursday morning. He looked at my car."

"He did more than look at it. He ran the plates." Granier picked up the paper cup, looked at it, put it down again without drinking. "Lyon. A false address, a real company that went bust three years ago, all very nice, all very boring. He ran it on Thursday afternoon, and on Friday morning he rang Montpellier and asked, very politely, whether we had anybody in his area he ought to know about. In connection with a homicide on his ground. Two homicides, now, on his ground."

Yassine waited.

"I told him no." Granier's voice did not change. "I told him that if we had anybody in his area I would naturally have informed him, as a courtesy between services, and that I was surprised he felt the need to ask. He said he was surprised too. We had a very pleasant conversation about the importance of trust." He turned his head. "He doesn't believe me. He'll go on not believing me. He's a good officer and he's angry and he's got two bodies in six weeks and a car with fake plates parked at one of them. If you're in a room with him again, you leave the room."

"I left the car."

"Leave the room. Leave the village. Leave the département if you have to." Granier looked back at the oleanders. "And your mother rang the office."

That went in under the ribs, where Granier must have known it would.

"She rang the switchboard on Saturday. She'd seen something on the news about a killing near Saint-Laurent and she'd remembered you used to go there, as a boy. She wanted to know if you'd heard. She said she couldn't get you on your phone." Granier paused. "They put her through to me. I said you were in Paris and the course was very intensive and the trainees had to hand in their phones during sessions, and that I'd make sure you rang her. She thanked me. She asked me if you were eating properly."

"What did you say?"

"I said I'd ask." Granier did not smile. "Are you?"

Yassine did not answer. He looked at the dashboard, at the thin file, at the paper cup of coffee with its plastic lid. Out beyond the oleanders the sky was going orange over the flat land towards the sea, and somewhere out there, twenty kilometres away, the bulls were coming in to the near pasture for the night and Magali was checking the troughs and Fredo was sitting on the step with a cigarette not talking to anyone, the way he had sat every evening since Thursday.

"I'll ring her," he said.

"Do."

• • •

"Second," Granier said, and opened the file.

It was Yassine's reports. All four of them, printed out, with Granier's handwriting in the margins in green ink, small and neat and slanting. Underneath them was a photograph, enlarged from something, grainy: a dark grey German saloon on a road somewhere, with a man in the passenger seat.

"Thierry Arnaud," Granier said. "Born Marseille, fifty-one. No convictions. Never so much as a parking ticket. Owns a company that imports olive oil and table linen from Tunisia and Spain, and another that leases refrigerated lorries, and a share in a restaurant in the Vieux-Port that the stups down there say has been laundering money for twenty years and have never once been able to prove it. They know him. Everybody knows him. He's a businessman." Granier tapped the photograph. "They were very interested to hear we'd seen him sitting at a kitchen table in the Petite Camargue offering a manadier a fortune to move cocaine. Very interested. They'd like to know more. They'd like to know, for instance, the date."

"The new moon in August."

"Which is a date for an astronomer. I need a date for a juge. A night. A beach. A boat. Arnaud's people on the sand with the stuff in their hands. Not the Spanish, not the mules. His people. Him, if God is kind, which in my experience He isn't." Granier closed the file. "But that's the second thing. The first thing is this. The juge has read your reports, and so have I, and so have the people in Marseille, and we're all agreed. We have enough."

"Enough for what?"

"For the Plantiers."

The air-conditioning hummed. A trolley rolled somewhere across the car park on its own, rattling, pushed by the wind.

"Nine years," Granier said. "Four or five times a year. By the old man's own admission, to you, an officer of the judicial police, in the course of an authorised operation. A landing, witnessed. A vehicle, identified. Resin, quantity estimated. Conspiracy, importation, transport, possession. That's not a feeling and a map any more. That's a case. The juge could sign the warrants tomorrow. We go in at five in the morning with the BRI and a dog, we turn that mas upside down, and the old man and the son and the daughter go to Marseille in the back of a van." He looked at Yassine. "And you come home."

"And Arnaud?"

"Arnaud has lost his route. That's something."

"Arnaud will have another route by Christmas. You know that. He'll go back to the lorries. He'll find another manade, another beach, another old man with a letter from the bank." Yassine heard his own voice and made himself bring it down. "You take the Plantiers, you get three mules and a few hundred kilos of resin and a nice photograph in Midi Libre. Fredo won't talk. He'd die first. You know what he said to me? He said if Arnaud's people ever came off that boat with a gun in their hands he'd turn his horses round and go home. He means it. He's not a trafficker. He's a man carrying a vice across a field to pay the vet."

"He's a man who's been importing drugs for nine years."

"He's been refusing cocaine for nine years. Every year. To Arnaud's face." Yassine turned in his seat. "And now Arnaud's put a price on it and a deadline on it, and a week later the old man's best friend is dead in his chair with two bullets in him. You think that's a coincidence? That's the message. That's Arnaud saying, look what happens when you say no. And Fredo's still saying no." He took a breath. "You go in now, you take the only people in that whole business who said no. And the people who shot Manolo walk away and do it again somewhere else."

Granier said nothing for a while. He looked at the oleanders. The light had gone from orange to red, and the lamps in the car park had begun, one by one, to flicker on.

"The August moon," he said at last. "You think he'll go ahead without them?"

"I think he'll try to make them. I think he'll push until the last night. And I think if I'm still in there when he pushes, I'll know when and where. And you can be on the beach."

"And if he doesn't push? If he simply kills the old man and takes the horses?"

"Then you'll have lost nothing you haven't already got."

"I'll have lost you, possibly." Granier said it without emphasis, a man noting an item on a list. "I'd find that administratively inconvenient." He picked up the coffee cup at last and drank from it and made a face at it and put it back. "The juge won't like it. He'll say we have a bird in the hand."

"Tell him it's a mule."

That almost made Granier smile. Almost.

• • •

"Two weeks," Granier said.

He said it after a long silence, with the engine humming and the car park filling up with the evening shoppers, families with children, an old couple with a trolley full of bottled water, a boy on a skateboard weaving between the bays. He said it to the windscreen.

"Two weeks. Not one day more. By the end of two weeks you give me the night and the beach and Arnaud's people, or you give me something that tells me it's coming. Or I go to the juge on the Monday and we take the Plantiers at five on the Tuesday, and you're out." He turned his head. "And Yassine. If anybody on that farm so much as looks at you sideways, if you so much as feel it in your back, you get in that ridiculous car and you drive to Montpellier and you don't stop for petrol. Understood?"

"Understood."

"Good." Granier picked up the file from the dashboard and held it a moment in both hands, squared, the way he had held the thin folder in his office in June, the way you hold a card you are not yet sure you mean to play. Then he opened it again, to the third report, and turned it on his knee so that Yassine could see it, and put one finger, quite lightly, on a line in the middle of the page, where the green ink had made a small neat circle round two words.

Five pack animals.

And above it, in the line Yassine had typed on the closed lid of a toilet with the tap running, the word he had put in place of the one he had taken out.

Four riders.

Granier did not say anything about it. He did not need to. He let his finger rest there for a moment, between the two lines, on the white space where a name had been. Then he looked up from the page, and his face in the green glow of the dashboard was quite calm and quite tired and not unkind at all, which was worse than anything else it could have been.

"Now," he said. "Tell me what you're leaving out."