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A poor immigrant who rose to become a billionaire is found brutally slain.
Was he really seeking the lover he was forced to leave behind?
Or was he masterminding an evil trade in people and drugs?
Barney Mains is no longer a cop.
But he's been hired to uncover the truth, a quest which suddenly puts the people he loves in mortal danger.
Now, between the horrors of desperate migrants drowning at sea and the luxury lifestyle of those who profit from death, he must go it alone.
And track down the most ruthless killer he's ever known..
Nice, France
I wake and it feels like everything has changed. Like the first day of school, the first kiss, the first roll in the hay.
The rising sun floods the room with honey light. I kiss the sleeping angel next to me and swing my legs out of bed.
I’m ready to see the world through different eyes, to be surprised. I’ve torn off my straightjacket, two actually; my life as a DI in Police Scotland but also my day job assigned to the Police Nationale of France. Two decades of learned attitudes and behaviour as a cop.
I dress as slowly as I can, aware of everything; the stillness, the steady breathing of my slumbering woman, even the potential for adventure, out there in the big bad world.
Downstairs, I help myself to coffee and a croissant. I carry them outside to the pool and take my time over them. The palm trees stir in a mild autumn breeze which wafts up the hillside from the bay. For an Edinburgh boy, it doesn’t get much better than this.
Finally though, I’m ready to pick up my jacket and keys and stroll down towards the rail station. The narrow alleyway is like a tunnel under scented greenery which tumbles over high walls on either side. The church-like silence is broken only by the shuffle of leather on ancient stone.
As I arrive on the platform the sea next to me is such a perfect mirror of the clear blue sky that it’s downright surreal. The deserted beach smells of childhood.
I turn as the train bursts out of the mountain and starts to sweep around the bay towards me and my fellow commuters. In no time at all it glides smoothly and almost silently to a halt. I step on board and find a little space to stand before we’re off and into the long tunnel. Even the five-minute ride into town amidst a battlefield of perfumes turns out to be, well, dreamy.
We arrive and the city’s main station is another world, alive with overlapping announcements and people hurrying. I go with the flow and my conga line carries me off until I’m pitched out into blinding sunshine and the din of rush-hour traffic.
It’s a strange feeling but I have to consciously resist the Pavlovian urge to walk due south, towards Police HQ. I turn west instead, along busy Avenue Thiers. Then it’s up under the old iron bridge, past bundles of clothes and blankets with humans in them. For them, it’s just another day to get through.
I’m first to arrive, which gives me the chance to familiarise myself with my new base of operations, my own office with its grand antique desk and certain more challenging essentials such as a really fancy coffee machine which on closer inspection turns out to be far too clever for me.
Then the phone rings and I jump. Who could possibly know that I’m here? Hell, nobody even has this number yet.
I lift the receiver with the illogical yet no less uncomfortable sense that this is someone else’s phone, someone else’s office.
But her very first words make me feel right at home. And I’m glad to be so suddenly reminded that some things never change.
‘There’s a body. You need to get there, right now.'
It always starts thus. The only difference this time, well, one of the only differences, was that the caller wasn’t an officer in the police Operations Room but my landlady, the formidable, red-haired criminal lawyer, Maitre Bridget O’Brien.
Half-French but as Irish as her name, she inherited this impressive two-level stone building and from here she plies her lawyerly trade with remarkable success, despite the inbred misogyny of her profession.
The fact that she calls a spade a fucking spade immediately endeared her to me when we first met on a case a couple of years ago. True, we’d had a bit of a run-in back then but I’d come to rate her. And besides, this time we were on the same side. I took a moment to get used to this idea while she fed me the news.
The body, she said, was that of a billionaire client. It had been left in plain view, in one of the city’s least salubrious neighbourhoods to the east, somewhere his sort wouldn’t be seen dead, given any choice in the matter.
I roughly knew the location and reckoned a fast cab could get me there within fifteen minutes.
As I headed to the door I wondered how it would be this time, this first time, outside the crime scene tape. I’d be pushed well back and probably despised by my former colleagues, no longer a barely tolerated outsider from Brexit Britain but a turncoat.
No longer DI but PI Barney Mains. What a difference in a letter.
His name was Leopold Degrange. He’d hired Bridget to defend him in what would have been a particularly high profile case.
My job was to have been to dig into his life, to find any vulnerabilities which could give the prosecution leverage for a sentence to make his eyes water.
But now, according to Maitre Bridget O’Brien, someone had leveraged a spike up under his jaw and straight through his brain.
I never asked how she discovered this unpleasant detail. I was only too aware that the Police Nationale leaked like a sieve. It was their cover-up of a corrupt senior officer’s links with an assassin which had finally sickened me with the boys in blue.
They initially accused me of blackmailing them for the deal I wanted. But in the end they settled for getting rid of a potential trouble-maker.
They weren’t to know that I had not a shred of evidence to prove what I knew; that said officer had become very rich over the years by feeding confidential information to the hitman. But with me gone and with both Commissaire Rousseau and Dmitri Yashnokov now six feet under, they reckoned they had well and truly buried the truth.
What did I get out of it? Their gracious help towards French residency and to set myself up in the private sector. Though if I should ever happen to chance upon that evidence…
‘Oi! You can’t stand there. Clear off!’
I looked around to see who it was then realised, hoped, that she was joking. ‘It’s Ok, Juliette. Mr Degrange won’t mind me being here.’
The Brigadier did a double take. ‘How the hell do you… I mean, what makes you think..? Oh, Ok, shit, so you know who it is. But I can’t tell you a thing. You’re not exactly flavour of the month around here, you know.’
‘Ha, never was.’
‘Compared to now, sunshine, you used to be a fucking pin-up boy.’
Juliette has a way with words and she knows how to deliver them with a wonderful snarl. She’d earned those taut, sinewy features racing her bicycle over the kind of mountain roads that scare goats.
She suddenly turned away and spread her arms, as if fending a startled flock of the animals. A press photographer had tried to sneak under the tape. She fired a broadside of characteristic invective. Even hardened pressmen knew not to mess with Juliette.
But now my own attention was drawn towards a sight I’d hoped to avoid on my first outing as a free man.
There was however a sense of the inevitable about this, as if the scene had been scripted to play out at precisely this moment.
‘Bonjour, Barney. Comment ça va?’
‘Hi Jean-Luc. Très bien, merci. Et toi?’
‘Ha, same old, same old.’
I immediately relaxed. Captain Jean-Luc Verten liked to show off his collection of English expressions. I’d taught him a few myself. My former partner had been a good friend when others in the force wanted me out and I never believed he’d drop me now. But still, it was good to have this confirmation.
‘So, JL, another opening of another show, eh?’
‘Yes, Barney. You’d have been up on the stage with me. But…’
‘It’s Ok. I don’t expect any favours. But, just so you know, I do have a spot in the wings.’
‘Ah yes, the lovely Maitre O’Brien, your new employer.’
‘Client, actually, but the point is that…’
‘That she represented our victim. I understand.’ He made to turn towards the crime scene tent. ‘Maybe meet up for a coffee sometime, Barney?’
‘I’d like that, JL.’
I watched as he raised his chin to greet a colleague. His silver goatee caught the sun. It was the oddest feeling to watch the stocky figure move away from me. I guess that was the moment when I knew there was no going back. I think I might have shuddered just a little. But then I felt the thrill of the new.
I took a deep breath. I began to properly take in my surroundings. Just what one of the richest men in France had been doing in a scuzzy housing estate like this was a puzzle. I would normally suspect that he’d been killed elsewhere and dumped. No one would think to look for a missing billionaire in a bay of communal bins in an anonymous back lane where the only signs of life were two scrawny dogs and a junkie who no doubt wondered what the hell he’d done to deserve all this attention.
Forensics would have fun sorting out potential evidence from various splashes of local colour, and worse. But I might not learn their findings this side of a court case. All I had to go on was the spike through his head, a particularly nasty way to kill someone. A crime of passion? An execution? Whatever the motive, it seemed that there could be much to learn about the late Leo Degrange.
The bins were at the near end of two facing lines of lock-ups with up-and-over metal doors. It seemed that every single door was covered by garish street art.
There was a wreck of an old Citroen at the far end of the lock-ups, its paintwork and interior long since sacrificed for a night’s warming blaze, or maybe just for the hell of it.
Out on the road where my taxi waited, some of the local intelligentsia hung around, trying to get close enough to a police car to leave their mark. The street itself looked like any other, long lines of terraced two-storeys, a mix of cars parked along its length, black plastic bins strewn across the pavements, the odd bin bag split open by gulls to spew dubious contents which now captivated members of the canine fraternity.
It wasn’t rocket science but Jean-Luc would be testing the theory that Degrange may have been dumped here after the last waste collection, which would normally have taken place between ten and midnight. JL would nail that down straight away, as could I.
On the other hand, it wasn’t up to me to find the killer, merely to discover what the victim had done to piss him off...
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