Blowback (15 page)
Enzo waved a hand at the emails. “So what does all this mean?”
“Just dates, and races, and horses, and the amounts he wanted to bet. Take this line, for example…” He pointed to the top sheet, first line:
PV: 18/12: 3e: 14: 150; 7e: 4: 130; 9e: 5,9,10: 200.
“PV is the
hippodrome
at Paris Vincennes. 18/12 is the date. Third race, horse number fourteen. One hundred and fifty euros. And so on.”
“So the initial letters always indicate the racecourse?”
“Sure. Paris Vincennes, Deauville, Longchamp, Paris d’Auteuil, Marseilles Borely. There’s a lot of racecourses in France.”
Enzo did some quick calculations based on the emails he had looked at. “So Fraysse was putting upwards of a thousand euros a day on these horses.”
Fred nodded. “Looks like it. And that’s in addition to what he was putting on with me, above and below the table.”
Enzo exhaled through pursed lips. “He was a seriously addicted gambler, then.”
“He was.”
And on the basis of the figures Fred had already quoted him, Enzo realized that Fraysse’s losses must have been enormous.
Evening service was in full flow in the dining rooms when Enzo got back to the
auberge
. There was no one at reception, but as the s
ommelier
emerged from the
cave
with a bottle of Beaune he gave him a very odd look. Enzo caught a glimpse of himself reflected in the window, and realized just what a state he was in. His ponytail was a shambles, with stray strands of hair hanging down over his shoulders. His jacket and trousers were covered in dried mud, and stained green in patches by moss. No wonder Fred had looked at him so strangely. He hurried up the stairs before anyone else would see him.
In his room he changed back into his shirt and cargos, washed his hands and face, and sorted his hair. He examined his face in the mirror. There was quite a swelling on his right cheek that was already beginning to show signs of bruising. He cursed Philippe. And Sophie for encouraging him. She was, no doubt, flattered by the attention.
He went through to the living room and picked up the phone, dialling Elisabeth’s room, and waiting while it rang, and rang, unanswered. Finally he hung up and slipped out into the hallway. The door to Marc’s old study was just three doors along. He hurried past the others and hesitated in front of the study, listening for a moment in the stillness of the house. He could only distantly hear the chatter of guests downstairs, and the chorus of voices delivering and acknowledging orders in the kitchen. Half-fearing that he would find the door now locked, he tried the handle. But to his surprise and relief it turned and opened. He stepped quickly inside and closed it behind him. The room was in darkness, and he knew he would have no option but to turn on the light.
It had been embarrassing to be caught here yesterday. If he were found again today, it would be more than that. It was likely that he would be asked to leave. Elisabeth had made it clear she expected him to ask for anything he wanted to see. But he didn’t want to alert anyone to this new focus of his interest.
Almost holding his breath, he flicked the light switch down and bathed the dead man’s study in cold yellow light. He moved silently across the room to roll back the lid of the desk and open up the laptop. The start-up chorus reverberated around the room, and the operating system seemed to take forever to load. At last the desktop appeared on the screen, and he opened the mailer and quickly navigated his way to the archive folders. He stared at the screen with incomprehension, before scrolling up and down the row of folders. But there was no doubt. The
Cheval
folder was gone. Erased. All evidence of Marc Fraysse’s gambling relationship with Jean Ransou lost forever, along with any record of exactly how much he had placed in bets. All that remained were the two printouts he still had in his pocket.
He had always known that it would be possible for any computer-savvy person to retrace his steps through Marc Fraysse’s laptop to see exactly what he had looked at the day before. Erasing those files would have been a simple matter.
And it seemed to Enzo that the only possible person who could have done that was Elisabeth Fraysse.
***
Back in his room he stripped off, leaving a trail of clothes behind him as he headed for the bathroom and turned on the shower. Hot water cascaded over his face and shoulders, down his back and over his belly, warming his thighs. He stood for several minutes feeling the healing heat of the water relax muscles tight with tension and stiff from unaccustomed exertion.
He rubbed himself with a big, soft bath towel, and dried his hair vigorously before slipping into the soft silk of his black embroidered dressing gown and padding back into the living room. There he poured himself a large single malt from the fridge, diluted it with a little water, and sank into the seductive softness of the settee.
He lifted his laptop on to his knees and checked his email, then opened the
moi.dssr
file and scrolled through it until he found the passage he was looking for. He had sped-read through it previously, but wanted to go back now and read it more carefully, to be certain that the impression he had come away with from that first scanning had been accurate. If so, then there was a puzzling inconsistency between what he’d been told and what he had read.
Saint-Pierre, France, February 1998
It had been a long, miserable winter. Like so many winters up here on the plateau, there had been snow, which kept people away. Certainly from Paris, and further afield. There were always a few regulars from Clermont, but local and passing business was never going to be enough. The dining room (I closed the west conservatory during the winter months) had remained stubbornly empty on some days, and on others only two or three tables were occupied. It was soul-destroying. I had two Michelin stars, and on some days fewer than two customers.
Elisabeth, as always, tried to persuade me that we should close for the winter. We would save on staff and heating, she said. And people wouldn’t forget about us. As soon as the spring came they would return, like the geese. But I always told her: how can we expect Michelin to give us a third star if we are only part-timers? I was convinced we had to stay open, regardless, if that third star was ever to come our way.
I had watched all through the winter months for the Michelin inspector. Every lone customer, man or woman, who came and sat in a quiet corner was a potential spy for the Guide. And yet I was never sure why I was so obsessed with the notion. Would I have treated him, or her, any differently? No. And, of course, I knew there was no point in trying to open a discussion on the subject. That would only have worked against me.
I just wanted to know. That Michelin had been, and seen, and eaten, and that there was at least the chance that my rating would be reconsidered before the publication of the next Guide. I had spent a lifetime in the kitchen working for that. The first two stars had come quickly, it seemed. The third was infuriatingly slow to arrive, and I was beginning to fear that it never would. The low cloud, bruised and dark, that hung over us that February, spitting sleet in our faces from the teeth of a bitter north wind, reflected my mood in more ways than one.
It was a miserable day late in the month when the call came. I can remember, we’d had three bookings for lunch and five for dinner, not enough to cover the cost of even one chef. The rain was driving in across the Massif from the north-west. It was Georges who answered the phone in the office and came running through the hotel to find me. There was a Monsieur Bernard Naegellen on the phone to speak to me, he said. And, of course, both of us knew that Monsieur Naegellen was the Director of Michelin’s Red Guides. I almost broke my neck to get to the kitchen, and then had to stand with my hand over the mouthpiece for almost a minute while I tried to control my breathing. When I spoke, finally, you would never have guessed how my heart was racing beneath my chef’s white blouse. “
Bonjour Monsieur Naegellen. Comment allez-vous
?”
But he didn’t beat about the bush. There were no niceties to be observed in the matter of Michelin stars. “Monsieur Fraysse,” he said. “As you know the 1998 edition of the
Guide Michelin
will be published next month. I am just calling to let you know that you will have a rating of three stars in the new Guide.”
I suppose it must have given great pleasure to successive directors of the Guide to deliver such news, and I have no doubt they were on the receiving end of many different reactions. I was so tense, I think that all I said was, “Oh? That’s good.” I could hardly have understated more the emotions that were bubbling up inside me.
He told me that, of course, this was not yet public knowledge, and that I was to keep it to myself until publication. But he must have known, even as he spoke, that there was not a cat in hell’s chance of that happening.
When I came off the phone, I realized that the entire kitchen staff was crowded into my office. Someone had told Elisabeth about the call, and she was there, too, pink-faced and wide-eyed. Everyone, it seems, was holding his breath. But it took me a moment to find my voice. “Ladies and gentlemen,” I said. “Welcome to Chez Fraysse. Saint-Pierre’s first and only three-star restaurant.”
The place exploded. I have never seen, nor felt, such unrestrained joy. If you work in this business, be you dishwasher or head chef, it feels like the crowning moment of your life. I remembered so well those celebrations in the kitchen of the Blanc Brothers all those years before, how the champagne had flowed, and how it seemed like my life had just begun in that moment. The moment when I knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that this was what I wanted. That this was what my life would be all about.
Beyond that, I remember very little. Except that I cried a lot, and drank a lot. Everyone who had reserved to eat in the restaurant that day, I declared, would dine on the house, the very first customers of the three-star Chez Fraysse.
It wasn’t until that night, when the dust had settled and the last customer been served, that I managed to find some time and space to myself. I went to my study and closed the door and sat at my writing bureau. There were unfinished and unresolved issues in my life. Regrets and sorrows. It had been in my mind for some time that if ever I won my third star I would put these things right. So I did it there and then, without pausing to think, or to remember the pain.
Still intoxicated by my news, I wrote a long and rambling letter to my estranged brother, Guy. It was time, I told him, that we put the past behind us and together built a future for the place our parents had left us. Something that would honour their memory. Something that would have made them proud. I knew that my life was about to change irrevocably, and that I would no longer be able to run the kitchen
and
the business. Who better to take over the business side than my own brother? I posted that letter the next day.
Before the end of the week he called me. It was the oddest feeling to hear his voice again after all those years.
“I received your letter,” he said. “And I have only one thing to say.” I remember holding my breath, thinking that he was going to turn me down. And then he said, simply, “Yes.” And somehow my life felt whole again.
Guy arrived from Paris the very next day with a crate of champagne. We hugged and cried and got drunk together, and I realized what folly it had been to have wasted so many years locked in such bitter enmity.
Enzo closed the laptop and allowed himself to sink back into the settee. Two entirely different accounts of the same moment. Guy had told him that Marc had called him the day he received the news. That there had been a party going on in the background.
According to Marc, that telephone conversation had taken place several days later, after Marc had sent him him a letter.
In essence, both accounts conveyed the same information, and the same emotions. Only the detail was at variance. But Enzo knew that memory often plays tricks. That a series of moments can be condensed in recollection into a single event. Several conversations into one. Guy’s account of hearing celebrations in the background of their phone call rang true, somehow. It didn’t seem like the kind of detail you would invent. Perhaps there had been some more formal celebrations going at the time of his call, and that’s what he remembered. At any event, there seemed no reason to doubt Marc’s account of the writing of the letter, the return call, and the tearful reunion.
In fact, there seemed no reason to doubt either account, and Enzo decided that he should focus his thinking on Marc’s gambling, which seemed like a more fruitful line of investigation.
A soft knocking at the door startled him. He glanced at his watch. It was after eleven. If it was Guy again with more mirabelle he would have to find some diplomatic way of putting him off. He eased himself stiffly out of the settee and crossed to the door, opening it just a crack. In the light that spilled out into the gloom of the hallway, he saw Sophie’s anxious face, and quickly opened the door wide to let her in.
She breezed into the room, dragging the usual cold air behind her, and turned to face him with shining eyes. Excitement was bubbling out of her like champagne overflowing from a glass poured too quickly.
“Papa, I’ve got news.”
“Good.” Enzo strode past her to recover his whisky from the table. He was not feeling particularly well-disposed toward his daughter since his encounter with Philippe.
“Well, don’t you want to hear it?”
“Sure.” He took a sip of his whisky and she glowered.
“Don’t I get a drink?”
He nodded toward the fridge. “Help yourself.”
And she did, opening a fresh bottle of Chablis and pouring herself a glass, before rediscovering the enthusiasm which had propelled her into his room in the first place. “You’ll never guess,” she said, turning to face him.
“Not if you don’t tell me.”
“Everyone knew Marc and Anne Crozes were having an affair, right?”
“So it seems.”
“But what isn’t common knowledge is that they broke up very shortly before his death.” She beamed triumphantly.
Enzo frowned. “How do you know this?”
Her smile contained an element of smugness. “I’ve been cultivating the
Maitre ‘d
.”
“Patrick?”
“Yes.” She twinkled. “He’s got a little fancy for me, I think.”
Enzo pressed his lips together in disapproval. “It seems it’s not safe to let you out these days.”
But she just laughed. “Anyway, I managed to wheedle it out of him after lunch today. He likes a drink, does Patrick. And he’d had one or two more than he should have.”
“With your encouragement, no doubt.”
She grinned. “Apparently he found Anne Crozes in tears one day in the locker room out back. Just about a week before Marc Fraysse was murdered. She told Patrick that Marc had dumped her, and that she didn’t know how she was going to be able to carry on. Really distressed, Patrick said she was.”
“Did she tell him why Marc had broken it off?”
Sophie shook her head. “No. Just that it had come out of the blue. A complete surprise.”
Enzo absorbed Sophie’s news in thoughtful silence and swilled some whisky around his mouth. Why would he have split up with her? Had he been under pressure from Elisabeth, who clearly knew about the affair? Or had he simply felt that the relationship had run its course? If Elisabeth knew that it had come to an end, then that would surely have taken away any motive she might have had for killing him. Anne Crozes, on the other hand, might have been motivated by grief, or revenge, to do just that.
“You don’t seem very pleased.”
Enzo smiled. “No, I am. It’s valuable information, Sophie. Sadly, I’m not sure it does anything more than muddy the waters. What I lack is any kind of real evidence… of anything.”
She frowned suddenly, taking a sip of wine and approaching to touch his cheek with her fingertips. “What happened to your face?”
Some of his anger from earlier returned. “Your boyfriend is what happened to my face.”
She frowned her confusion.
“Philippe.” He took another comforting mouthful of whisky. “I had a rendezvous with a contact at the Château de Puymule earlier this evening. Your little puppy dog must have followed me down there. He jumped me in the dark.”
Disbelief exploded from her lips. “You’re kidding!”
“I wish I was.” Enzo rubbed his cheek ruefully. “The little shit thought I was some kind of dirty old man having an affair with you. Warned me to stay away.”
Sophie’s eyes opened wide in astonishment. “What did you say?”
“I told him I was your father, and that if he didn’t quit bothering you I’d set Bertrand on him.”
If possible, her eyes opened even wider, embarrassment verging on humiliation coloring her cheeks. “You didn’t!”
“I did. And sent him away with a flea in his ear, and maybe a couple of cracked ribs for his trouble.”
Fear now drained the earlier rush of blood to her face. “Oh, papa, he’ll tell. My cover’ll be blown.”
But Enzo just shook his head. “I don’t think so. I warned him what would happen to him if he did.”
Now anger colored her face again, as she thought about it. “The stupid idiot! What did he think he was doing? He doesn’t own me. He’s not even my
copain
!”
“He seems to think he is.”
“I’ll kill him!”
“No you won’t, Sophie.” Enzo’s voice carried a threat in it that she knew well from childhood, and it stopped her in her tracks. “My advice is to stay away from him whenever possible. I’ve warned him off, but there’s no telling what he might do if you start laying into him. We can’t afford for people to find out who you really are.”
She was barely mollified and cast sulky eyes over her father’s bruised face. “He had no right.”
“No, he didn’t. But let’s just leave it at that for the moment.” Enzo crossed to the fridge to replenish his glass. He poured slightly more whisky into it this time.
She was briefly silent, turning it over in her mind. Then, “Okay,” she said. “I will let it go for the moment. On one condition. You tell me about you and Uncle Jack.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Sophie! You don’t have an Uncle Jack!”
“Yes, I do. If he’s your brother…”
“Half brother.”
“Half brother… He’s still my uncle. And I want to know why you and he haven’t been on speaking terms for thirty years.”
“I told you, it’s a long story. And I’m not at all sure I want to tell it.”
“Well, I’m not leaving until you do.” She planked herself down in the settee, curling her legs up beneath her, and poured another glass of wine. “I’m listening.”
“Damn you, Sophie!”
“Don’t damn me, just tell me.” She sipped calmly on her Chablis, while Enzo turned away, emptying his glass and refilling it again. When he looked up he caught his own reflection in the black of the window. For a moment, it was like a window on his past, and he saw himself as he had been all those years before. A gauche young man in search of his place in the world, and trying to find a way through it.
“I was still at primary school when Jack went to university,” he said. “Still a child, while he was a young man. But a young man who’d been educated in the sexually enclosed world of an all-boys school. Like so many of his peers, he had no idea how to relate to the opposite sex.”
“Didn’t they have school dances?”
“Sure. Once a year. They bussed in the opposite sex from Hutchie Girls, and they were just as inexperienced as the boys.”
He recalled his own exposure to those annual events where adolescent hormones were released to pulse frustratingly through the bodies of hopelessly ill-prepared teenage boys and girls who stood eyeing each other up across the breadth of the school hall, without the first idea of how to conduct themselves.
“Back then, and probably still, all the female roles in the school play had to be performed by boys.” He smiled. “An early introduction to the idea of cross-dressing.”
Sophie laughed. “Did you ever have to do that, papa?”
In spite of himself Enzo blushed. “Once, yes. I was dressed up as a geisha to play one of the little maids in the school production of The Mikado.”
Sophie sat up, her face shining. “Oh. My. God. You don’t have any photographs, do you?”
Enzo laughed. “Even if I did, I wouldn’t let
you
see them. I’d never hear the end of it, and you’d have them all over the internet before I could say Gilbert and Sullivan.”
Sophie’s smile was wicked. “Note to self. Must search through papa’s family photos for incriminating evidence.”
Enzo cast her a dangerous look.
“Anyway. So Uncle Jack went to university knowing nothing about women…” Sophie offered him a cue to take up where he’d left off.
Enzo nodded, and a flood of memories broke over him. “He got himself into big trouble. Awash with testosterone and no idea how to handle it, he stumbled from one disastrous relationship to another. In fact, I figure he was probably still a virgin even by the time he went into his second year. Which is when he got himself into really deep doodoo.”
“What happened?”
He wasn’t quite sure now where all the details had come from. Things he had heard Jack say. Gossip among his peers. Conversations between his parents, conducted in hushed tones and overhead through half-shut doors. “One of his friends was having a New Year’s party at his house. One of those big red sandstone terraced houses off Highburgh Road in the west end. The father was some big wheel lawyer, but the parents had recently got divorced and the father had moved out. The mother, Rita, was this…” he hesitated, searching for the right word, “…diaphanous sort of creature. Almost winged. Beautiful and breathless. Delicate, like an Arthur Rackham illustration. She was lonely and sad, but sexually experienced. And she took a fancy to Jack. In fact, took him to bed that very night, from all accounts, and probably took his virginity, too.”
Sophie was rapt. Eyes fixed on her father, wide with wonder, and trying to picture the moment.
Enzo shook his head. “A chance encounter, really, and it changed his life. He fell for her. Completely, unreservedly, insanely.”
“What was wrong with that?”
“Rita was almost thirty years older than him. Nearly fifty.”
“So? An experienced woman, an inexperienced young man. Why shouldn’t they enjoy the moment?”
“They didn’t just enjoy the moment, Sophie. Rita took up almost every moment of his life from that day on. He dropped out of university before the end of the spring term, and they were married within six months.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Oh.” He paused. It had been a period of great turmoil in the Macleod household, with Enzo little more than a fascinated spectator. “My parents did everything they could to dissuade him. Of course, he never listened to my mum anyway, but dad couldn’t talk him out of it either. No one could. I suppose if I’d been older, I might have tried. But I was just a kid, way in the background somewhere, kind of aware of all the rows and tension in the house, but not really a part of it.”
“Did you go to the wedding?”
“Of course. We all did. A pretty lavish affair it was, too. Rita paid for it herself. Her divorce settlement had left her financially independent and she owned that big terraced house in the west end. As much for his own self-respect as anything else, Jack felt he had to work, having quit his studies. He got a job in the civil service, way below the level he’d have gone in at if he’d finished his degree. We hardly saw him for two years.”
“What happened?”
“Rita hated him being out of the house. Hated being left alone. She was lonely and depressed, and increasingly hypochondriac. It was clear to my parents, on the few occasions they saw him, that it wasn’t going well. He never brought her to the house. And any time they visited him she was ‘indisposed’. Not feeling well, and taken herself off to bed.”
“That must have been awful for him. Embarrassing.”
“It was worse than any of us knew. We didn’t find out the whole truth till later. It seems she had started drinking and took to her bed full-time, spending her life in a darkened room with the curtains drawn. Jack remained faithful and dedicated, doing everything for her. Bringing her meals to her room, organising a maid to come in three days a week, and learning to do the laundry himself.
“But increasingly she saw him as errant and absent. Finding fault with everything he did. Arguing over every little thing, flying off the handle at the slightest excuse.”
He paused, catching sight of his reflection again in the window, recognising that in retrospect he felt much more sympathy for Jack than he ever had at the time. Then, he had believed his elder half-brother to be foolish and selfish. But looking back, he could see now what a living hell it must have been for him. It was strange the way that time and experience changed how you saw things, lending an insight you’d never had in the moment.
“Anyway, one day he came home from work to find her dangling at the end of a rope in the stairwell. She’d left a note for him, full of self-obsession and self-pity, but somehow she had managed to spill a bottle of perfume over it and the ink had run, obliterating most of her words. So he never really understood why she had done it. Except that she had been a deeply troubled soul. He blamed himself, of course, even though he had been dedicated to her and done everything for her that he could. There was no consoling him.”
“I can imagine.” Sophie finished the last of her wine and filled the glass again. It was clear that her father’s story was not yet over.
