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- Herausgeber: Alfredbooks
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
by Alfred Bekker Jeannot Duval, the head of a police station in Marseille, goes crazy and goes on the rampage as a sniper until he is shot dead by a colleague. Who drugged Duval beforehand? Is it revenge from organized crime, or is there more to it? Investigators Marquanteur and Leroc suddenly have to investigate within their own ranks. Alfred Bekker is a well-known author of fantasy novels, crime thrillers and books for young people. In addition to his major book successes, he has written numerous novels for suspense series such as Ren Dhark, Jerry Cotton, Cotton Reloaded, Kommissar X, John Sinclair and Jessica Bannister. He has also published under the names Jack Raymond, Robert Gruber, Neal Chadwick, Henry Rohmer, Conny Walden and Janet Farell.
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Commissaire Marquanteur And The Mad Colleague: France Crime Thriller
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Commissaire Marquanteur And The Mad Colleague: France Crime Thriller
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Commissaire Marquanteur And The Mad Colleague: France Crime Thriller
by Alfred Bekker
Jeannot Duval, the head of a police station in Marseille, goes crazy and goes on the rampage as a sniper until he is shot dead by a colleague. Who drugged Duval beforehand? Is it revenge from organized crime, or is there more to it? Investigators Marquanteur and Leroc suddenly have to investigate within their own ranks.
Alfred Bekker is a well-known author of fantasy novels, crime thrillers and books for young people. In addition to his major book successes, he has written numerous novels for suspense series such as Ren Dhark, Jerry Cotton, Cotton Reloaded, Kommissar X, John Sinclair and Jessica Bannister. He has also published under the names Jack Raymond, Robert Gruber, Neal Chadwick, Henry Rohmer, Conny Walden and Janet Farell.
Copyright
A CassiopeiaPress book: CASSIOPEIAPRESS, UKSAK E-Books, Alfred Bekker, Alfred Bekker presents, Casssiopeia-XXX-press, Alfredbooks, Uksak Special Edition, Cassiopeiapress Extra Edition, Cassiopeiapress/AlfredBooks and BEKKERpublishing are imprints of
Alfred Bekker
© Roman by Author
© this issue 2023 by AlfredBekker/CassiopeiaPress, Lengerich/Westphalia
The fictional characters have nothing to do with actual living persons. Similarities in names are coincidental and not intentional.
All rights reserved.
www.AlfredBekker.de
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Everything to do with fiction!
1
At some point, perhaps in another age, feelings were something that came over you.
Feelings could overwhelm you. They were just there. Good feelings and bad feelings.
They came and went, were triggered by good and bad experiences or by other people and the way they met us.
Because feelings just came and went like the bad weather, it was common and polite to ask sympathetically: How are you feeling?
Psychologists and other helping professions then had a somewhat invasive version of this at the ready: "How do we feel today?"
But at some point, the perception of feelings in our society has changed.
Maybe it was around the time a commercial was broadcast on TV that went like this: A woman is taking a shower. A voice asks: "How do you want to feel today?" And then a selection of different types of shower gel was shown, which supposedly made you feel a certain way.
"How do you want to feel today?"
The expectation that a shower gel will suffice as a chemical support for good feelings is probably one of the exaggerations that advertising works with. But the question itself is interesting. "How do you want to feel today?" - and not: "How do you feel today?"
Good feelings as something you are entitled to, not as a power that overcomes you.
And if the good feelings don't come on their own, then you just have to help them along.
A shower gel is rarely sufficient as a stimulant.
*
"Have you ever thought about what would happen if you couldn't think straight?" I asked my colleague François Leroc. We had managed to finish work a little earlier this time. That didn't happen often. But this time it did - and what had we done then?
We went to a fish restaurant. It's in the harbor area and supposedly serves the best plaice in all of Marseille. They also say that only original Marseille recipes are cooked there. However, the way the plaice on my plate was prepared seemed quite familiar. It tasted great, but I didn't understand what was supposed to be original Marseille about it.
But the whole thing was probably nothing more than a kind of marketing stunt anyway.
And as far as François Leroc and I were concerned, that also worked out.
After all, we were here.
And who do you spend the extra free time with?
Again with a colleague. But that's probably because you don't have a real private life in our job. At least not one worthy of the name.
That's just the way it is.
You go somewhere with colleagues.
Otherwise you wouldn't know anyone.
"How am I supposed to understand your question, Pierre?" François asked me, frowning. "No longer thinking clearly ... What do you mean? Until we have dementia? I hope that's still a while away."
"It can happen quicker than you'd like," I said.
"Yes, yes, but ..."
"Someone puts something in your glass, some kind of drug cocktail that might make you pretty funny at first, and then maybe nothing will ever be the same again."
"Don't go up against the wall, Pierre!"
"It can happen!"
"Yes, that's right."
"Or you experience something and can't process it properly, and afterwards nothing is as it was."
"Pierre, no matter what happens: It's never the same afterwards. It's the law of the universe or something: time always runs in one direction. If I eat this plaice, I'll be so full afterwards that I won't be able to eat anything else. Nothing is the same as it was before. I won't be hungry again until tomorrow morning. If at all."
"That's different, François."
"No, it's nothing else. It could be that what we do is dangerous. It could also be that someone spills something in our coffee and we're knocked out afterwards. That happens. But worse things happen to others, and we can't just stop what we're doing because it's not entirely safe."
"That's not what I'm getting at," I said.
"What are you getting at, Pierre? That drugs are dangerous? We all know that. It's only those who should pay special attention to it who don't give a damn and take them anyway - and are surprised that the substance then turns them into crazy zombies."
François was apparently very aggressive by his standards today.
Not that he was usually a sleepyhead, but I had rarely seen him so engaged in a discussion.
"My point was that none of us has everything under control, François," I finally said. "No matter how well we think we have it under control."
"Maybe," said François. "But I don't intend to test that out in my case."
*
My name is Pierre Marquanteur. I'm a commissaire and part of a special unit based in Marseille that goes by the somewhat cumbersome name of Force spéciale de la police criminelle, or FoPoCri for short, and deals primarily with organized crime, terrorism and serial offenders.
The serious cases.
Cases that require additional resources and skills.
Together with my colleague François Leroc, I do my best to solve crimes and dismantle criminal networks. "You can't always win," Monsieur Jean-Claude Marteau often says. He is the Commissaire général de police and therefore the head of our special department. And unfortunately he is right with this statement.
Monsieur Marteau is a very special guy anyway.
You can't really make heads or tails of him.
He's the first to come into the office in the morning and the last to leave in the evening. I wonder how he keeps it up.
He seems to have a particularly low need for sleep. There's no other explanation. He lost his family in an attack by gangsters, and that drives him. That's why the fight against crime is so important to him. Perhaps more important than all of us. I can certainly understand that. The day of the attack was probably also one of those moments when nothing is ever the same again. At least not for Monsieur Marteau.
Since then, he had this very special restlessness that I had never noticed in any other person.
I think there have to be people like him. Otherwise we would never make progress with such a difficult task. It takes an immense amount of effort to achieve even the smallest progress.
Sometimes, when Monsieur Marteau looks thoughtfully out of his office window, his shirtsleeves rolled up as usual, I wonder whether he might sometimes think that it was all for nothing after all. All the hard work, all the effort. I think he does have those depressive moments, even if he would never let them get out. Only those who know him very well can recognize them, and I imagine I know Monsieur Marteau well.
*
Marseille, Trouvaille shopping center...
Jeannot Duval staggered into the shopping center. His eyes were wide open. As if in a frenzy. He knocked over a rack of postcards, which crashed to the floor. Several passers-by turned to look at him.
A lunatic.
That had to be the first impression on anyone who saw him now.
Duval unfastened the first button of his shirt and then his tie with his left hand, while his right hand reached under his jacket and pulled out a gun. Beads of sweat glistened on Duval's forehead.
His face looked like a disfigured grimace.
He let out a muffled, barely human sound.
He now whirled around, visibly struggling to keep his balance, and fired three shots in quick succession with his pistol. Several screams rang out.
Duval fired another shot.
And one more.
"Help!" someone shouted.
The newsagent ducked behind his counter just in time before several bullets shot over him and burned their way into the shelves.
"A spree killer!" a woman screamed.
Jeannot Duval stumbled forward.
His face twitched restlessly. His pupils were huge. Sweat beaded down his forehead and cheeks.
He now gripped the weapon with both hands. Like the red tongue of a dragon, the muzzle flash now licked out of the barrel as he fired again. A man from the security service of the private security company assigned to guard the Trouvaille shopping center in Marseille took one of the bullets right in the forehead before he could reach for the walkie-talkie and the service weapon. He slumped down and lay motionless. A few meters away, a man was lying on the ground who had been hit by a ricochet. His right trouser leg had turned dark red. He couldn't get up and tried to stop the bleeding with his hands. His eyes widened in fear as he looked up.
The gunman pulled the trigger again. He let out a sound that sounded like a growl.
He shot around seemingly at random.
The projectiles whizzed through the air. Glass panes shattered. The skylights through which daylight fell into the shopping center shattered. A rain of broken glass came down.
Somewhere a small child was screaming, which apparently caused the gunman to turn around again. His gaze wandered searchingly. The muzzle of his gun whirled around.
"Police! Drop the gun!" shouted a man in a gray three-piece suit. His hair was ash blonde and cropped short. He held his service weapon in his fist. A policeman in plain clothes.
For a moment, everything hung in the balance.
Jeannot Duval blinked. Then he bent his arm with the gun. The next moment he was hit by several shots. Three in the upper body, a fourth in the head. The force of the bullets sent Duval staggering back. He staggered, holding himself on his feet for a moment before finally falling down lengthwise with a thud.
A pool of blood formed.
2
The man in the three-piece suit approached the dead man, still pointing his gun at the gunman lying on the ground. He was still clutching the handle of his gun. Only when the man in the three-piece suit was able to take it out of Duval's hand did he seem to calm down a little.
Security forces from the private security service now approached the scene from several sides. They approached with their service weapons drawn.
The man in the three-piece suit was already bending over the corpse.
"Who are you?" asked one of the security men, who were now approaching from all sides, guns in hand.
"Commissaire Bertrand, Marseille CID," said the man in the gray three-piece suit. "And this man here is my boss, head of department Jeannot Duval."
Bertrand carefully took the dead man's ID card from his pocket.
"Leave everything as it is and put your weapon on the ground!" one of the security guards ordered. "Now!"
"But I told you, I ..."
"We'll check that," came the reply.
3
That morning, my colleague François Leroc and I drove to Pointe-Rouge. From Noailles, you can cover the distance in a quarter of an hour. At least that's what the route planner says. But it's better to plan double the time, and that's what we did.
In Pointe-Rouge, the investigation team of the Recognition Service worked, whose services were available to us in our function as commissaires. Their laboratories were also attached to the police academy in Noailles.
Mr. Marteau had put us on a new case that was really puzzling, and even for us, who are confronted with every conceivable type of crime on a daily basis, it was something special.
The special thing was that the perpetrators and victims were colleagues.
That didn't happen often.
A special case then.
Very special.
Jeannot Duval had run wildly through a shopping center, killing one person and injuring several. Like a man running amok, he had apparently fired indiscriminately at anything that moved.
However, Duval was not just any commissaire. He had been the head of the 11th police department. And it was one of his colleagues, a certain Commissaire Damien Bertrand, who had stopped his rampage with several shots.
No one had yet come up with a plausible explanation for the background to this drama. What had prompted Jeannot Duval to indulge in an orgy of violence, seemingly completely uncontrolled and uninhibited? After all, this was a man who had dedicated his entire life to fighting crime. Had he been on drugs? Were there signs of an unrecognized mental illness? We would have to investigate all of this. The media were already indulging in speculation of all kinds. A number of spectacular cases of unjustified police violence have recently made headlines in France. The media were naturally sensitized accordingly and immediately jumped on this case too, even though it was probably not comparable to this type of incident.
I accelerated the sports car a little, but only up to the maximum permitted speed. There are hardly any stretches of road on which you can really drive such a vehicle.
"My colleague Jeannot Duval was always described as a calm, level-headed guy," said François, who had read a few documents on his laptop during the journey. In particular, of course, what could now be called up via the data network system on this case, but also the first interrogation reports, plus official assessments from superiors and whatever else was available. "Well, if you ask me, a pharmacological explanation for this outbreak of insanity is the closest thing to it."
"You mean drug poisoning," I said.
"You can give this thing different names, but it always comes down to the same thing, Pierre."
"So if there is something like that, our Breton doctor will certainly be able to find out."
The forensic scientist on the investigation team was the Breton Gerard M. Herbreteau, who would probably not even have taken this description as an insult. On the other hand, Herbreteau was described by many as someone with the disposition of a journeyman butcher, who regularly offended his colleagues and superiors with his coarse shirtlessness.
François and I got on well with him, though. You just had to know how to take him properly, and there really wasn't the slightest doubt about his qualifications as an excellent forensic scientist.
We finally reached Pointe-Rouge.
After I had parked the sports car in one of the parking lots, François and I made our way to the laboratories and dissection rooms.
Dr. Herbreteau was not expecting us. We had to wait a quarter of an hour for him because he had just started a histological examination and didn't want to be interrupted. At least that's what he told us through an intern.
