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Chapter Twenty-nine

The temptation had been to stay over. But Enzo was concerned that he had not seen Sophie for a couple of days. Not since the night that her aspiring boyfriend had attacked him at the
château
. And he wanted to be around if she needed him. So it had been with some difficulty that he had managed to tear himself free of Dominique’s arms and get dressed again for the drive back up to the hotel.

It was almost midnight, and the road was deserted. The cloud was low over the hills, the air made opaque by the damp delineating his headlamps in misted white beams that raked across hectares of thick pine forest as he navigated the winding road up the hill.

Finally he reached the turn-off and took a left, accelerating up into the private road that cut through the trees toward the auberge. The dark seemed particularly impenetrable here, and the two horsepower engine of his old
deux chevaux
strained as he pulled back into third and pushed the accelerator to the floor. He passed the beaten parking area at the foot of the track that led up to the
buron
, following the curve of the road past the point where he had seen the men putting in snow poles the day he arrived. The red-and-white striped poles reflected the light of his headlamps now. With the road falling away, first on the right, then on the left, he could see why they would be vital for keeping a vehicle on the road in heavy snow.

With the warm air powering out of the heating vent below the dash, Enzo felt a wave of fatigue wash over him, and he remembered the taste and scent and touch of the woman he had been lying in bed with just half an hour before.

He rounded a bend, and a dark shape loomed up at him suddenly out of the night. He jammed on his brakes and skidded to a halt centimetres before making contact with the tree that lay directly across the road blocking his path. Cursing his luck, he got out of the car to take a look, his body cutting through the beam of his headlights and casting a long shadow ahead of him into the night.

The old pine tree was half-rotten and must have been on the verge of falling for some time. Pine needles stabbed him through his pants as he clambered over the trunk to see if there was any way it could be rolled aside. But it was completely immovable. It would take a mechanical digger to shift it.

It was only then that he became aware of the light around him fading, and he looked up to see the headlights of his car receding as the vehicle started rolling backwards down the hill.

“Hey!” he shouted. As if it might somehow hear him and stop. He clambered back over the trunk, feeling branches tearing at his clothes, and started running after it. For a moment he seemed to be catching it, but with the steepness of the descent it was rapidly picking up pace, and he realized it was hopeless. Still he ran, arms windmilling now as he too started losing control, stopping himself from falling at the last moment only by jarring his feet against the pitch of the incline. He brought himself to a shuddering halt just as his car disappeared silently from view, tipping backwards down the slope at the bend in the road, its headlights tilted suddenly upwards, like spotlights searching the sky.

Enzo ran on to the bend and stood at the edge of a steep precipice, looking down at his car half buried in bracken at the foot of the slope. It was cradled by a mesh of sapling branches and undergrowth in an impossible position, its headlamps still pointed straight up, the engine racing.

Enzo was almost tempted to go down after it, but it was a treacherous, crumbling scree, and in the dark he risked a fall that could break his neck. And to what end? There was no way he could get the car out of there. All he could have done was extinguish the engine and the lights and plunged himself into complete darkness.

So he stood, breathing hard, his heart pounding, wondering how in God’s name it could have happened. He had secured the handbrake before leaving the car. Either the brakes had failed or the cable had snapped.

He turned and peered back up the hill through a darkness so dense he could almost touch it. Mist and cloud cover effectively blacked out any light from the sky. He could only see his hands in front of him because of the reflected light from his car’s headlamps in the gully behind him. But as he started up the hill that quickly faded, and he felt the night wrapping its blindness around him. Very soon he could see nothing ahead of him at all, and almost fell, stumbling as he blundered into the fallen tree. Needles and branches scratched and tore at him and he clambered clumsily to the other side of it.

He had no option but to try to follow the road up through the trees until he could see the lights of the auberge. But strain as he might through the veil of darkness that lay all around, he could discern no sign of them. Not even a distant glow in the sky. For the first time in his life he experienced how it must feel to be blind. Only his feet beneath him would tell him that he was still on the paved road, his outstretched hands preventing a collision with some unseen obstacle. He had rarely felt so helpless.

Progress was painfully slow as he took one careful step at a time, only too conscious of how the land dropped away to his left. After several minutes, the sound of the waterfall that he had seen many times as he drove up the road began to impinge more powerfully on his consciousness. What had begun as a background ambience had grown to something close to a roar. The expectation of his experience that somehow his eyes would gradually become accustomed to the dark remained unfulfilled. He could still see nothing.

Then a noise somewhere in the trees up to his right made him stop in his tracks, straining to listen above the thunder of the falls. There it was again. A sound like the rustle of branches, the crunching of brittle pine needles underfoot. An animal, perhaps. Guy had said that there were deer and wild boar in the woods. And poachers. His mouth was dry and he could feel his heart pulsing in his throat, almost restricting his breathing.

He called out. “Hello? Hello, anyone there?”

The blast of a shotgun almost deafened him. He saw a momentary flash of searing light among the trees, and felt the force of the pellets as they passed within centimetres of his head.

“Jesus!” he shouted involuntarily. He began running, in no way wanting to present a sitting target for the second barrel. Panic impelled him recklessly into the dark. He had covered only a few meters before becoming aware that he was no longer on the road. He could hear the sound of someone crashing through the woods above him in pursuit, and wondered how the hell the shooter could see him in the dark when Enzo couldn’t see him.

Almost as the thought went through his mind, his left leg tripped over the low wooden fence that ran along the side of the road, tipping him sideways. A second volley from the shotgun passed harmlessly over his head. But he was falling now, into the pitch black. Tumbling head over heels, making sporadic, jarring contact with the earth and rock of the hillside, before suddenly flying through space. Complete spatial disorientation felt almost like floating. Only the sound of the waterfall growing in deafening intensity provided him with any sense of his own movement, before he felt its spray in his face, and hit the pool at the foot of it with a force that took his breath away.

Now he was deaf as well as blind. Completely submerged, shocked by the extreme cold, and struggling desperately to hold his breath as he fought to break the surface. But even as he did, the force of the water falling on top of him forced him under again, and he felt his strength and energy being leeched away by icy liquid paralyzing muscles. In a moment of terrifying lucidity, he realized that if he lost consciousness he would never regain it. But it was slipping inexorably away, like sand through his fingers, the last moments of life before death.

***

Most people who return from near-death experiences talk about a blinding light, as of that at the end of a long tunnel of darkness. Enzo saw that light now. But there was no retreating from it. It sucked him toward it, filling his head and his mind, relentlessly, painfully, until it took him over completely.

If this were death, it brought no relief from physical sensation. The pain of the cold, the injuries sustained by his fall, were all acutely felt. He was shivering uncontrollably. He could hear his teeth chattering, and another, completely involuntary, sound coming from his throat. As if he was attempting to speak.

He heard a voice. “Man, another thirty seconds in there and you were a goner.”

The light in his eyes shifted, and he saw the tumbling white water of the falls caught in the beam of a flashlight. Now he saw the face of his rescuer looming over him. A hard, expressionless face, with dark brows gathered in what looked like a frown, beneath a peaked cap pulled down low. It was Lucqui, the gardener. Enzo registered the barrel of a shotgun rising up over his left shoulder, where it was strapped to his back.

“Can you sit up?” He was having to shout above the roar of the water. Strong hands helped Enzo into a sitting position. “See if you can move your arms and legs. Don’t want to go moving you any more if there’s something broken.”

Enzo tried his fingers, making fists with each hand, then bending and extending each arm. It was painful, but nothing seemed broken. Finally, he pulled his knees up into his chest, folding his arms around his shins in an embrace of self comfort, a fruitless search for warmth from his own body.

“Guess you’re still in one piece, then. Come on, let’s get you on your feet.”

Powerful arms helped him through the pain barrier to raise him unsteadily to his feet. Almost immediately, his legs gave way beneath him, and he grabbed on to Lucqui to stop himself from falling, his right hand finding the barrel of the shotgun then sliding quickly down to feel the bite of cold metal on his skin. This gun had not been fired any time recently. So whoever had shot at Enzo, it wasn’t Lucqui.

Finally, Enzo found his voice. “S..someone sh..shot at me.”

“I know, I heard it.”

“Wh..what the hell were you doing out here at this time of night?”

“Looking for poachers. And it’s a good job for you I was. I was up the hill there when I saw your car rolling backwards down into the gully. You must have left the handbrake off.”

“I didn’t!” Enzo’s denial seemed unnecessarily strenuous, even to him.

Lucqui was unconvinced. “You’re lucky you didn’t get your head blown off. Damned poachers! They shoot at anything that moves.”

***

The only illumination in the kitchen came from a handful of strategically placed night lights, and so areas of it remained mired in shadow. But it was warm, and light from the hall fell in long yellow slabs through the glass across the marble table at its center. Enzo sat swaddled in blankets, sipping on piping hot chocolate, his hair hanging in damp strands over his shoulders. In a few minutes he would retreat to his room and stand under a hot shower until all vestiges of the deep chill that had penetrated every cell of his body were banished. But life and warmth had already returned to much of him, bringing with it more pain and a hot, stinging sensation on the skin of his face and hands.

He looked around as the doors slid open and Guy returned with the promised bottle of mirabelle and two shot glasses. He sat down opposite the Scotsman and placed them on the table between them, looking at him with concerned blue eyes. “Feeling any better now?”

Enzo nodded. “A bit.”

Guy poured them each a stiff measure. “This’ll help.” He pushed a glass at Enzo, who lifted it to his lips and poured it back in a single gulp. It almost took his breath away as he felt the heat of it burning all the way down to his stomach. His face flushed. Guy grinned. “See what I mean?” He refilled Enzo’s glass, then took a much smaller sip from his own.

Enzo looked at him. “How the hell could they see me in the dark like that, Guy, when I couldn’t see them?”

But Guy just shrugged. “On a night like tonight they’d probably have been using night-sight goggles. Lucqui’s got a pair himself.” He took another sip of mirabelle. “They must have been having a bit of fun with you. You had a lucky escape, Enzo. Not to have been either shot, or drowned. It could have been a fatal accident.”

Enzo knocked back his second glass, and banged it down on the table. “It was no accident, Guy. Someone deliberately tried to kill me tonight.”

Chapter Thirty

The drizzle settled on them like a fine mist. A penetrating wet. The road, the forest, the drop to the pool at the foot of the falls, all seemed strangely unnatural in the sulphurous light of the morning after.

The tree had been moved off the road. Only a little debris remained as witness to it ever having been there. The revving of a powerful diesel engine filled the still air as the tractor on the bend winched Enzo’s vehicle painfully up the scree. A breakdown truck with a flashing orange light was standing by to take it down to a garage in Thiers. Several other vehicles were parked at the roadside, including Dominique’s blue van.

Her waterproof jacket shone wet in the dull morning light, her dark eyes troubled and searching his face with concern as they walked down toward the tractor, retracing Enzo’s steps of the night before. He moved stiffly, although more freely now than when he had first woken. “You’re not still thinking of going to Paris after this?” she said.

“Of course. What else am I going to do? Sit around here waiting for someone to try to kill me again?”

“You don’t know that someone was trying to kill you, Enzo.”

But he just dug his hands in his pockets and kept his thoughts to himself. “Well, anyway, I’ve not been wasting my morning while they cleared the road. I made a few phone calls. Arranged a few rendezvous.”

“Jean Ransou?”

“Among others. I’m having lunch with Ransou tomorrow at the racetrack at Vincennes.”

Dominique’s eyes opened wide. “He agreed to meet you, just like that?”

“I didn’t think he was going to be very cooperative at first. But the mention of the name Marc Fraysse changed everything.”

She frowned. “Be
careful
, Enzo.”

He nodded solemnly. “I will.”

By the time they reached the bend in the road, Enzo’s car was back on the tarmac, and the roar of the tractor had subsided. Enzo walked around his 2CV inspecting it with critical eyes. In fact, the damage was not as bad as he had feared. The paintwork was scratched, and the rear wheel arches and the lid of the trunk were dented in places. A mechanic in blue overalls was hooking it up to winch it on to his truck.

“What do you think?” Enzo nodded toward his battered car.

The mechanic shrugged indifferently. “I don’t think there’s much mechanical damage. The engine stalled, probably within a few minutes, and the lights drained the battery.”

Dominique peered inside the car. “What about the handbrake?”

“When I first climbed down to take a look at it, the handbrake was in the off position. The idiot who was driving it must have got out without putting it on.”

Enzo bristled. “I’m the idiot who was driving it, and I can assure you, I put the handbrake on before I got out of the car.”

“If you say so, pal.” He climbed into his cab to start up the winch.

Dominique glanced thoughtfully at Enzo. “You couldn’t have.”

Enzo restrained the urge to raise his voice. “Look at the incline of the road up there where the tree was,” he said. “If I’d got out of the car without putting on the handbrake it would have started rolling backwards immediately. As it was, I was out of the car and over the other side of the tree before it began to move.”

“So how come the handbrake was in the off position?”

His indignation was beginning to get the better of him. “Well, obviously someone was hiding in the woods, watching for my arrival, waiting to ambush me. I left the driver’s door open. He must have slipped in and released the handbrake while I was climbing over the tree. And then he tried to shoot me.”

“But why, Enzo? Who would want to kill you?”

“Whoever killed Marc Fraysse. Which only tells me that we must be getting pretty damned close to finding out who that is.”