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urgently, ignoring Mme Denis’s look. He jumped in the passenger seat before Rocco could kill the engine and stretched, showing an expanse of hairy belly. While Rocco was in Amiens talking to Rizzotti, he had instructed Claude to check the canal all the way back as far as the last lock on the other side of Poissons. If the dead man had been tipped in approximately where the barge owner had first noticed his vessel misbehaving, theremight be signs on the banks or the towpath. Even dragging a body a short distance left some marks behind. All one had to do was look closely.
    ‘Where?’
    ‘I’ll show you.’ He pointed back towards the village and gave Mme Denis a casual salute as they roared off. She frowned and stomped off into the house.
    Ten minutes later, Rocco stopped his car where Claude indicated. They were on an empty stretch of road bordering the canal, with fields undulating away on either side, empty save for a few cows chewing disconsolately on meagre tufts of grass. Claude got out and led the way through a wooden gate to a parapet which acted as a footbridge over the water. He pointed at a metal railing embedded in the concrete. Brownish stains showed on the metal and rough brickwork, and further down, a piece of cloth had been caught on a protruding bolt head.
    ‘I saw it by chance,’ Claude admitted. ‘If you were to tip a body over here,’ he demonstrated heaving a heavy load over the parapet just above the bolt head, ‘it might catch as it went down.’ He shrugged. ‘Of course, it might be nothing to do with the poor unfortunate—’
    ‘It is,’ said Rocco. Even from here he could see it was a match for the material of the dead man’s trousers. ‘The weight would be enough to rip the material. Well spotted.’
    While Rocco held him, Claude leant through the railing and managed to recover the scrap of cloth. Then Rocco went back to the car for his boots. They checked the canal for a hundred metres on both sides, studying the area close to the banks where reeds flourished andthe current was at its most static. He was hoping to find something which might have been swept off the body as it moved along, but the water was too murky from the recent flow of rain running off from the fields. Whatever evidence might have been there had long gone, covered by a cloud of shifting silt. He returned to the area inside the gate, but found nothing of significance other than their own footprints in the soft ground. He was about to give up when he noticed a handful of torn grass stems lying to one side. Breaking a stick from the hedgerow, he bent and turned the grass over. There were brown stains on the underneath, where the rain had not penetrated and washed them clean.
    Dried blood.
    ‘Somebody ripped this up to wipe their hands.’ He stood back and studied the immediate area, and saw a stake with a white triangle on top lying crushed into the earth at the bottom of a long depression.
    ‘Looks like a vehicle parked here,’ said Claude. ‘Heavy one, too, like yours.’ He nodded at Rocco’s black Citroën Traction, where the front tyre had sunk into the soft, water-soaked soil.
    Rocco agreed. ‘Heavier, though. Bigger tyres, too. A truck.’ The tread of his car tyres had sunk by maybe six centimetres; this depression was considerably deeper and wider. He tugged at the stick, which had been broken in the middle and bore a faint zigzag pattern of a tyre across its surface. ‘Ever seen a marker like this before?’
    Claude shook his head. ‘It’s not official, I know that. And I’m pretty sure none of the locals would use anything like it. You think it’s relevant?’
    Rocco stood up. ‘Not sure. But if there’s one thing I’ve learnt over the years, if something looks out of place, it’s because it is. That makes it relevant.’
     
    ‘The Calypsoa sailed to Barcelona with a cargo of rope.’ Bouhassa heaved himself into the passenger seat of an old Renault van. Farek was at the wheel, waiting. The