The Critic (25 page)

The nausea which had filled Enzo’s world for several long moments retreated, and he managed to get to his feet. With shaking hands he found his penlight and snapped it on. The figure on the tiles rolled into the tiny pool of yellow light thrown by the torch, and Enzo saw with a shock that it was Bertrand.

II.

Floodlights on the
chai
illuminated the forecourt, casting the long shadow of the
pigeonnier
towards the trees. The rain had washed away most of the blood on the steps and the grass, except where it had pooled in the shelter of the
pigeonnier.
The
gendarmes
had untied Braucol and removed the body, evidence in a criminal investigation. The child’s swing stirred gently in a current of damp air. The night was sticky warm. The storm and its rain had passed, and mist rose now from all around the castle grounds. A police van was parked beneath the trees, its blue light flashing hypnotically. All the lamps outside the
château
had been turned on, and through the back window of the
gîte
, Enzo could see the two
gendarmes
who guarded its entrance, installed for the night, smoking and talking in low voices that carried on the
brume
.

‘Hold still, Papa!’ Sophie’s face was close to his, dabbing disinfectant on the grazing at the side of his head. He could see her tear-stained eyes, and was unsure whether she had wept in grief for Braucol or in relief because her father was safe. Both, perhaps, or maybe it was just the shock. ‘You poor thing,’ she said. ‘I hate that man! He could have killed you.’

‘I think that was his intention, Sophie.’

‘He could have killed us both.’ A subdued Bertrand held a bag of frozen peas to the back of his head.

‘You’re perfectly capable of looking after yourself,’ Sophie told him. ‘But my Papa’s an old man.’

‘Thank you, Sophie,’ Enzo said. ‘That makes me feel so much better.’ He was sitting on a chair in the
séjour
in his boxer shorts, having stripped off his blood-soiled clothes and washed his hands. But he still felt dirty.

The
gendarmes
had spent nearly an hour taking statements. Enzo had half-expected to see David Roussel, but of the
gendarmes
who appeared, none was familiar. Bertrand had described to them how he and Sophie had returned late from a meal out to find Enzo’s car at the foot of the stairs, blood on the steps, the dead dog. And then seen lights and heard shouting from the
château
. If it hadn’t been for his intervention, Enzo’s would-be assassin might well have succeeded in killing him.

But Bertrand was still furious with himself. ‘I had him,’ he kept saying. ‘I was stronger than him, I could have taken him.’ And Enzo thought how Bertrand was probably stronger than most men he knew.

But when they had fallen, it was Bertrand who had struck his head and was momentarily disabled. All that he had been left with, when Enzo’s attacker made his escape, was a handful of blood-stained material torn from a jacket pocket. Enzo had told him to keep that to himself when the police arrived. He did not want the piece of pocket disappearing into some repository in a rural
gendarmerie
, where it would probably languish, wasted evidence, for weeks, months, or even years.

He asked for it now, and Bertrand handed him the scrap of torn green fabric. ‘Linen,’ he said, as he held it up to the light, and winced as Sophie dabbed more disinfectant in his face. There was the remains of some embroidered emblem along one edge, unidentifiable with its shreds of ripped and broken thread. ‘And good silk thread. He’s not short of a few euros, our killer.’

‘Is it his blood, do you think?’ Bertrand said.

‘Probably. I definitely cut him. Although it could be Braucol’s. But it won’t be hard to establish if it’s human or animal.’ He reached for his shoulder bag and took out a clear plastic ziplock evidence bag and dropped it in. He closed his eyes, and the image of the puppy dangling on the end of the rope was still there, engraved in his memory. ‘This man’s a psychopath. And every one of us is going to be in danger until he’s caught.’

He opened his eyes to find Sophie looking into them, concern etched all over her face. ‘Oh, Papa, I don’t like this.’ She sat on his knee, as she had so often as a little girl, and put her arms around him.

‘No, I don’t like it either, Sophie. Which is why you and Bertrand are going back to Cahors first thing in the morning.’

She pulled away. ‘No!’

‘We can’t leave you here on your own, Mister Macleod.’ Bertrand stood up, pushing out inflated pectorals, as if somehow his youthful macho posturing would make the old buck back down.

‘That’s exactly what you’re going to do, Bertrand. I’m putting Sophie in your care. Anything happens to her, you’ll have me to answer to.’ And he raised a quick finger at Sophie to preempt her protests. ‘This is not up for discussion, Sophie. You’re out of here. Both of you. First thing.’

Chapter Twenty

I.

Early sunlight fell in wedges between buildings, casting the shadow of Christ across the warm tarmac in the Place Jean Moulin. Enzo squeezed his 2CV into a blue zone parking space and set the dial on his permit for the maximum hour and a half of free parking. He stepped out to breathe air freshened by the storm, and felt the sun warm on his face.

The events of the previous night had, like a nightmare, retreated with the clearing of the sky and the rising of the sun. He had watched Bertrand’s van disappearing down the
château
’s tree-lined drive towards the road, Sophie’s continued protests still ringing in his ears. And when they were gone, he had turned back to the
gîte
with a deep sense of depression that even the yards of sailor blue sky above him could not lift.

Now he turned down the Avenue Jean Calvet towards the electronic gate of the
gendarmerie
. The same attractive
gendarme
with the Mediterranean eyes greeted him at the
accueil
, but this time she wasn’t smiling. When he asked for Gendarme Roussel she told him to wait.

It was several long minutes before she returned and instructed him to follow her. The sway of her hips ahead of him, emphasised by the movement of the holstered gun on her belt, was hypnotising as he trailed her upstairs and into a long corridor. Halfway along it, she knocked on a door and opened it into a large office. Enzo saw the plaque on the door.
Adjudant Brigade
. And he began to get a bad feeling.

A secretary showed him into the
adjutant’
s office, and a tall man in full uniform turned from the window to cast a cold eye of assessment over him. His office was bigger than the one Roussel shared with two other officers downstairs. His desk was enormous, and groaned with papers and files, all stacked and grouped in meticulous piles. On the wall behind it was a large chart of the
Gendarmerie Départementale du Tarn
, with the
Groupement
at Albi at the head of a pyramidic command structure. The
Compagnie
at Gaillac was highlighted in orange, as were the eleven
communes
that it controlled.

The adjutant offered Enzo a cursory handshake. ‘You seem to be very popular with would-be assassins, Monsieur Macleod.’

‘
Failed
would-be assassins,’ Enzo told him.

The
adjutant
raised an eyebrow, then rounded his desk to drop into a well-worn leather swivel chair and balance a pair of reading glasses on the end of a thin nose. As he opened a file in front of him, he waved a hand vaguely in the air. Which Enzo took to be an invitation to sit. So he drew up a chair and sat down to wait expectantly. It gave him a moment to weigh up the senior ranking officer of the
Compagnie
. The hair was almost all gone from his crown, the remaining growth from around the sides slicked across it in a poor attempt to disguise his baldness. Where it had gone grey, black hair dye had taken on a ginger hue. He had long, feminine hands, with immaculately manicured fingernails. His face was shaved to a shiny smoothness, and Enzo could smell the lingering traces of his aftershave. That he had been brought here at all, was worrying to Enzo. The
adjutant’
s hostility was evident in his body language, and Enzo knew that vanity like his meant he would never willingly put his rank to one side.

The a
djutant
dragged his eyes away from the file. ‘What do you want with Roussel?’

This was not a question that Enzo had anticipated. ‘You’re aware that the
juge d’instruction
at Albi has made me a lay consultant on the Petty murder.’

‘I am.’ His disapproval was apparent in the curl of his lip.

‘Gendarme Roussel sent several samples to Toulouse for forensic examination. At my request. I was looking for the results.’

The adjutant reached across his desk, lifted a large buff enveloped and slid it towards Enzo. ‘Preliminary reports came back yesterday.’ He watched as Enzo took the envelope, pulled out a sheaf of stapled papers and gave them a quick glance. ‘Do you have any idea where he is?’

Enzo looked up, surprised, and let the papers fall back into their envelope. ‘What?’

‘Gendarme Roussel.’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’

The
adjutant
removed his reading glasses and folded his hands on the desk in front of him. ‘Gendarme Roussel took several days leave at short notice for what he described as personal reasons. He was due back the day before yesterday. Which is when I discovered that his wife had been here looking for him the day before that. Several of his colleagues suspect marital problems. I thought you might be able to throw some light on his whereabouts.’

Enzo was very still, hardly daring to think the worst. ‘He’s gone missing?’

‘Officially, he is absent without leave. Which means he will be arrested the moment he turns up.’

***

It was a short walk down to the roundabout, and the Place de la Libération, but Enzo took every step as if he carried the weight of the world on his shoulders. And it seemed like a very long way. He moved like a man in a trance through the dappled shade of the chestnut trees, leaves and chestnuts falling around him, drying in the morning sun and crunching underfoot. And he slumped into a chair under the yellow awning of the Grand Café des Sports and gazed out across the square with eyes that did not see.

It barely seemed credible that Gendarme Roussel should have become one more case in his own missing persons file. Enzo had feared that someone else would go missing during this year’s grape harvest, but had never for one moment thought that it might be Roussel. He tried to convince himself that it was just coincidence. That there would be some rational explanation. But although he knew that life could throw up some extraordinary coincidences, he never believed in them when it came to an investigation. There were always reasons. For everything.

He searched through his mind for connections between Roussel and the other missing persons in the file. They were not hard to find. Like all the others, Roussel was a local man. He had been personally acquainted with one of them. And he had gone missing at the same time of year. But there had to be something else. Something he wasn’t seeing. His colleagues thought it was a simple case of domestic disharmony. But that’s exactly what Roussel himself had thought about Serge Coste. And Coste had ended up pickled in wine, just like Petty.

The thought of Petty took Enzo back to the day in the
grande salle
at Château des Fleurs when Pierric Lefèvre had dug out the American’s family records from the old archive. In a strange sort of way, that made Petty a local, too. Or, at least, his antecedents. But it made no sense, for it had been Petty’s first trip to Gaillac. His only connection to the place was historical.

Enzo’s reflections were interrupted by a young waiter with dark, curly, gelled hair shaved close around the sides of his head. ‘
Bonjour monsieur
.
Je vous écoute.
’

Enzo glanced up. ‘
Un petit café, s’il vous plaît
.’

The waiter cocked his head. ‘You’re the guy that went off with Braucol.’ He grinned, shaking his head, some affectionate memory of the puppy dog coming back to him. ‘How is the little guy?’

Enzo didn’t have the heart to tell him. ‘Doing good.’

The waiter laughed. ‘He was a pain in the ass, you know. But I kind of miss him.’

And as he went off to get the coffee, Enzo thought how he would miss him, too. He turned quickly to the envelope the
adjutant
had given him from the
Police Scientifique
in Toulouse, and drew out the preliminary report. He ran his eye down the text, nodding to himself as it confirmed what he had suspected. Petty’s DNA sample did not match the sample recovered from the speck of blood inside the glove. The chances were that if the blood in the glove did not belong to the killer himself, then it belonged to a relative. But if they got themselves a suspect, familial DNA matching could still secure a conviction.
If
they could find a suspect.

He flipped over a page and felt sudden goosebumps rise up all across his shoulders. He felt his face sting as if he had just been slapped. He stood up as the waiter arrived with his coffee, and dropped a couple of coins on the table.

‘Give it to someone else.’

II.

She was sitting at the table where he had first seen her. She was reading, just as she had been then. But she greeted him somewhat differently. When his shadow fell across her book she looked up, irritation replaced immediately by a smile that broke like sunshine across her face. ‘You’re back. I’m so glad. I had a thought about my dad, and those vineyards he visited…’ She took off her sunglasses, green eyes flashing and stood up to kiss him.

His recoil was almost imperceptible, but it was like a shutter dropping between them. Her smile was gone in an instant. ‘What’s wrong?’

He dropped the buff envelope on the table and sat in the free chair opposite, leaving her to stand looking down at him. He glanced out across the shimmering green and red vines. The harvesters were out again after the rain to gather the last of this year’s
récolte
. Then he looked up to meet the concern in her eyes and remembered how attractive she was. Clasps held chestnut hair clear of her face. Her lips were pale in a lightly tanned face, and he remembered the feel of them against his. Soft, sensuous. And he recalled her mother’s words in Sacramento: ‘There have been a string of older men in her life, almost as if by making them love her she’s proving to herself that it wasn’t her fault that her father didn’t.’

‘Why have you been lying?’

Her skin paled beneath her tan, and she sat down. ‘What do you mean?’ Her voice was small and uncertain.

‘Four years ago when your father came to Gaillac, you followed him here. You went to see him at the
gîte
.’

But she wasn’t going to admit it easily. ‘How can you know that?’

‘Familial DNA matching, Michelle. It was in my mind for quite another reason, even before I read the report.’

Her self-confidence was evaporating as he looked at her. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Back in 2003, in the UK, a kid dropped a brick from a bridge on a motorway. It smashed through the windscreen of a car and killed the driver. Forensic scientists managed to salvage a sample of the kid’s DNA from the brick. The British have got the biggest DNA database in the world. More than three million people in it. The kid wasn’t one of them. But a relative was. They matched sixteen points out of twenty, and secured a conviction in March 2004. The world’s first conviction using familial searching.’

He could see that she made no sense of this.

‘Michelle, when you went to see your father it was… how can I put this delicately? It was that time of the month. You left a used sanitary pad in a plastic bag in the trash can in the bathroom.’ He saw realisation breaking over her like an ocean wave. ‘For some reason, the police kept the contents of the bin as evidence. I sent the pad for DNA testing, along with those samples of your father’s that we found among his things. And guess what…’

But he didn’t need to elucidate further. She shook her head despondently. ‘You don’t think
I
killed him?’

He looked at her for a long time, searching those green eyes, trying to divine what complexity they masked. Then he sighed. ‘No. No, I don’t. But I know you lied, Michelle, then and now. And I want to know why.’

He watched as tears bubbled up in her eyes, and she tried hard to control them. ‘I wanted to confront him. I wanted to make him meet my eye and tell me why. Why some goddamned bottle of fermented grape juice was more important to him than his own flesh and blood. But even then, even to my face, he wasn’t going to give any part of himself away. It was the same old blind he always drew on his emotions. He accused me of being like my mother. Possessive and territorial. He said that marrying her had been the biggest mistake of his life. And by implication, I was just an extension of that mistake. He couldn’t even see me as being a part of him, of belonging to him. I’d have given anything….’ She broke off, her voice cracking, and she clenched her fists on the table in front of her, fighting hard to control her emotions, to sublimate them again behind cool, green windows of obfuscation. And Enzo thought how like him she was. How for all her feigned affection, she hid everything real behind the same blind her father had always drawn.

She rediscovered her control, and Enzo saw her expression harden. It was not attractive.

‘We just shouted at one another. And I stormed off. Then, when he went missing, it crossed my mind that maybe he’d killed himself. Because of me; because of our row.’ She laughed, a sad, bitter little laugh without humour. ‘But I should have known better. That might have meant he’d cared.’ She drew a deep breath. ‘Anyway, I never told anyone I’d been there. And when he turned up dead, murdered, it was twelve months too late. And wouldn’t have helped anyway.’

She examined his face for a response, and whatever she saw there brought with it a look of resignation. Her eyes flickered away from his. It was as if she suspected that he had seen her truly for the first time, and that there was no longer any point in pretending with him. She gazed away across the valley, the hum of insects filling the air around them, the distant sounds of the harvesters carried on the warm
vent d’autan
.

‘So where does that leave us?’ she said.

‘There is no us, Michelle.’ And he was struck by the irony of the words that Charlotte had used so often with him. ‘It’s very flattering for a fifty-year-old guy like me to have some young girl half his age fawning over him, offering him sex, giving him back maybe just a little of his lost youth. But there’s no future in it for you. Go home. Get yourself a real life. Someone of your own generation. Forget your father. Sometimes people are just flawed.’ And his own daughter’s voice rang around his head: ‘I couldn’t believe that the man who didn’t care about leaving his seven-year-old daughter would turn up twenty years later telling her who she could and couldn’t see.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘Even dads.’