He nodded towards an open door showing a flight of wooden stairs. ‘You check upstairs, I’ll do the front.’

Claude grunted and went to take a look.

Rocco stepped through into the front room and switched on the light, surprised to find it still connected. More dust, more clothing, some empty wine bottles in a wastebasket. One armchair, a table and some bits and pieces.

But no telephone.

A clomping sound echoed through the house as Claude made a tour of the upstairs. It was, reflected Rocco, the saddest of sounds; the kind that houses shouldn’t experience, but inevitably do.

He began at the front of the room and checked the walls at floor level, looking for signs of a telephone wire coming into the property. If the installation had followed the usual methods, it would come down inside one of the walls and exit somewhere convenient for the handset and cradle. All he found was a hole in the plaster where a wire might have been.

He checked the kitchen but found nothing there. He scowled. This didn’t make sense.

He called to Claude. ‘Is there a phone line up there?’

‘No. Nothing.’ Claude appeared at the top of the stairs. ‘Have you tried the cellar? The door’s right next to this one.’

Rocco turned off the light in the front room, then looked behind the stair door. Sure enough, there was another one. He opened it, found a light switch and descended a set of concrete steps, nose filling with the musky smell of mildew, damp and rodents. A bare light hung from the ceiling and revealed an empty, brick-lined  lined room, unplastered and cold. Whatever might have been stored here once had been cleared out.

He found the wire in the top rear corner. It had been channelled down the wall from upstairs, and was barely visible in the poor light. He followed it with his fingers, but instead of it leading downwards, it took a sudden turn and went towards a small vent on the cottage wall on a level with the back garden.

Suddenly, Rocco knew where it was heading. ‘Clever bastard!’ He ran back upstairs to where Claude was waiting and switched off the light. ‘Someone’s been very astute. Come with me.’ He led the way outside and turned left, then knelt down by the back corner of the building beside the air vent.

The wire was just visible coming through the vent, before dropping down and disappearing underground.

He looked towards the end of the garden, where it butted up against the barn. ‘We’ll have to do some digging,’ he said, indicating the wire’s probable direction, ‘to see where this goes.’

Claude looked mystified for a second, then he realised what Rocco was saying. ‘You think Didier took over Jean-Po’s phone? I didn’t see one in his house.’

‘You weren’t meant to. I think he broke in here when Boutin died and nobody came to claim the place, and re-routed the wire to his house. Nice free service and nobody the wiser.’

‘But that doesn’t mean he’s connected to this Tomas Brouté … I mean, this is Didier you’re talking about!’

‘So?’

‘But the man’s a moron … he plays with bombs, for God’s sake!’

‘Which means,’ Rocco pointed out, ‘he’s probably unhinged but not entirely stupid. He’d have the nous to rewire a phone from one house to another, no problem. That’s why he planted it underground.’

Claude whistled. ‘Out of sight, out of mind. Jesus, that is clever.’

Rocco picked up the crowbar and dug the sharpened end into the hardened soil around the base of the house, creating a small trench near the wire. Seconds later, he was able to pull the wire upwards, and was rewarded by seeing it moving away from the house towards the barn. Within minutes, they had reached the barn’s wall, where they dug down and found where the wire had been fed through a hole in the plaster.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Minutes later, they were deep inside Didier’s barn, clearing away a mountain of old farm tools, rotting hessian sacks, rusting bicycles, a seed drill and several worn car tyres. When they reached ground level and brushed away a thick layer of soil, it revealed the wire coming through the wall and disappearing under the floor. Using the crowbar, Rocco dug down just enough to confirm the direction the wire was going in.

‘Straight towards the house,’ he said. ‘Come on.’

The building was a sorry mess, with the windows empty of glass and the shattered front door barely staying upright. Rocco kicked it open and began a search of the building, opening cupboards, moving mounds of clothing, old papers and broken household furniture. The air was foetid and nauseous, every item layered with a coating of grease and dust, with no apparent order to anything. Didier Marthe evidently lived his life in chaos, picking up things as and when he found or needed them, then casting them aside where he stood. In spite of that, it took very little time to search the downstairs. The upstairs was even easier, consisting of two bedrooms, both empty and filthy with age and neglect.

There was no sign of a telephone.

Rocco returned downstairs. Claude was inspecting a narrow cupboard close by the back door. It was fitted with a bolt and latch, but had been left open with a strong padlock hooked through the eye. Inside were the only clean items in the house. One was a conventional side-by-side twin-barrelled shotgun, the metal and butt scratched and pitted; the other was shorter, with up-and-over barrels, and had been well oiled and maintained, with a decorative stock and inlaid butt.

Rocco took out both weapons and checked them. Unloaded but clean. The smaller gun was light, balanced and comfortable to the grip. He wondered how a man like Didier Marthe, scratching a living from dismantling ancient ordnance, could afford a superior piece like this.

He replaced the weapons and locked the cupboard and moved over to the one entrance he hadn’t been able to investigate. The cellar door was solid, with a large lock, and he noticed something he hadn’t seen before: that the door frame had been reinforced, probably where the wood had rotted and given way over the years. Given the state of the rest of the house, he couldn’t see why Didier had bothered.

‘No key?’ said Claude.

‘No.’ He was guessing that Didier was a one-trick pony: if he’d found a way of concealing the wire in the Boutin house, he’d use the same trick in reverse here. Which meant it would emerge somewhere underground – in the cellar.

‘We going to break it down?’ Claude was swinging the crowbar expectantly, eyeing the door with a faint smile. ‘Wouldn’t take that much, not the way I feel.’

But Rocco shook his head. He had a bad feeling about this house. Something wasn’t right. Everything he’d seen so far had been too easy, too open and obvious. Yet all the indications about Didier’s character said the complete opposite. Which meant they were only seeing what they were meant to see.

He pressed against the door. Immoveable. No give whatsoever. Even in new houses, doors gave a little. In old hovels like this, they flexed like paper. ‘No. This is too easy. If Didier goes to the trouble of locking this cellar door, what is it that he doesn’t want anyone to see?’

‘The telephone?’

‘Probably. But what else? He plays with bombs, you said that yourself. What’s down there that would warrant a secure door like this?’

Claude’s eyebrows shot up. ‘You think he might have booby-trapped it?’ He stepped back a pace, licking his lips. ‘He’s certainly crazy enough, I’ll give you that. Anyone who’d do it to a bridge to stop kids trespassing is hardly sane, right?’

‘Maybe.’ Rocco broke off as a car drew up in the yard outside. Doors slammed, followed by footsteps approaching. As a shadow appeared in the doorway, he reached into his coat and put his hand on his gun.

It was a uniformed officer with a colleague a few feet behind him. Both looked wary and had their hands on their weapons. The lead man, tall and thin with a heavy, drooping moustache, waved his colleague to move to the side to cover him and gave Rocco a questioning look. ‘Stand still, please. Who are you?’