The Night Gate - Enzo MacLeod Investigation Series 07 (2021)

by Peter May

  ‘He is also the grandfather of the murder suspect in the case I’ve been consulting on. Which bears out my instinct to be sceptical about coincidence.’

  ‘So that explains what Bauer was doing in Carennac,’ Raffin said. He stuffed another forkful of chou farci into his mouth, quickly followed by a mouthful of Vin de Savoie rouge. Enzo hadn’t seen him this animated since his illness.

  He and Kirsty, and Enzo and Alexis, were all seated around the dinner table in the apartment in the Rue de Tournon, well separated despite the almost negligible risk. Alexis had his father’s hair and his mother’s dimples, and his latest hearing aids were both highly efficient and almost invisible. It would have been impossible to tell from his ease of interaction that the boy had hearing difficulties caused by the Waardenburg syndrome inherited from his grandfather. Ten years old now, he was sprouting rapidly, and demonstrating that he had also inherited his grandfather’s intelligence. But for the moment, he was engrossed in the stuffed cabbage.

  ‘It might explain what led him to Carennac,’ Enzo said, ‘but it doesn’t tell us what he was doing there. Or what passed between him and Narcisse in Paris. Or why both men were in Anny Lavigne’s house the night of the murder.’

  ‘Not yet. Though I’m sure you’ll find out,’ Raffin said. ‘The possibilities are intriguing. All the players in this little narrative have some connection with art. Narcisse was a dealer. Bauer ran an art gallery. Karlheinz Wolff stole art for the Nazis. I mean, do you think this whole thing could have something to do with stolen Nazi art?’

  Enzo didn’t respond. For the moment he seemed lost in thought and forked his chou farci absently into his mouth. Raffin noticed that his wine glass was still full.

  ‘Drink up, man,’ he said. ‘You haven’t touched your wine.’

  Enzo looked up to find Kirsty watching him, concerned. A daughter’s instinct. ‘What is it, Papa?’

  Very quietly he said, ‘I’m going to visit Charlotte in prison tomorrow.’

  The silence around the table was broken only by the scrape of Alexis’ fork on his plate. He was oblivious to the bombshell that his grandfather had just dropped into the middle of dinner.

  ‘You have got to be joking!’ Kirsty stared at him in disbelief. ‘I mean, really, you’re not serious? You can’t be.’

  ‘I am.’ Enzo glanced at Raffin and saw that the blood had left his face. It was easy to forget that Raffin and Charlotte had once been lovers, before Enzo ever met her.

  Kirsty turned to Alexis. ‘Go to your room.’

  His face crumpled in dismay. ‘Aw, Mama, I haven’t finished my dinner.’

  ‘Take it with you. You can watch TV while you finish it.’ Which broke a golden rule. Dinner was always eaten as a family, around the table. Alexis’ dismay was displaced by delight. He grabbed his plate and made off with it before his mother changed her mind. When he had gone, Kirsty turned back to her father and scrutinised his face. ‘You really are serious.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Papa, she tried to kill you. Twice!’

  Enzo closed his eyes and the image of the dark figure who very nearly drove a knife through his heart high up in the Château des Fleures in Gaillac flashed painfully through his memory. And then Charlotte standing over him in the rain, a gun pointed at his head, ready to pull the trigger. And he knew that she would have done it if Sophie had not knocked her to the ground with a wheel brace.

  Raffin found his voice, finally. ‘You can’t just go visiting prisoners at a moment’s notice, Enzo. It takes time to set these things up.’

  ‘Which is why I called in a favour earlier today. I’m cleared to visit her tomorrow morning.’

  ‘But why?’ Kirsty wouldn’t let it go. ‘Why, for God’s sake?’

  ‘Because Bauer is an enigma, Kirsty.’ He laid down his knife and fork. ‘Here is a man prone to reckless violence and then instant regret. He is accused of a murder that I have reason to think he might not have committed. He is the grandson of a wartime art thief, obsessed with the idea that such a thing as an evil gene might actually exist. Or, at the very least, an inherited propensity for violence. The only person I know who can give me an insight into the psyche of a man like that – a man who is still missing, by the way – is Charlotte Roux.’

  ‘Don’t do it, Papa.’ Kirsty reached out to place a hand over one of his. ‘There are other forensic psychologists you could consult.’

  Enzo nodded. ‘Yes. There are. But none of them is the mother of my son. And I haven’t set eyes on her for nearly ten years.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Enzo felt sick as he drove into the visitors’ car park in front of the women’s wing of the maison d’arrêt at Fleury-Mérogis. It was just under an hour’s drive from Paris, directly south of the city and close to the edge of the Forêt de Sénart.

  This was the largest penitentiary in Europe, built in the 1960s in the conventional style of French prisons. Five blocks, each with three wings, radiated from a polygonal central building. The MAF, or maison d’arrêt pour femmes, hosted more than 270 female prisoners in fewer than 170 cells, which meant that many of the women were forced to share.

  A time-worn French flag fluttered listlessly in the autumn sunshine of this October morning. And somehow it seemed wrong for the sun to be shining, when people were locked away in tiny cells where the light of freedom was limited by small barred windows that provided only a tantalising glimpse of the world left behind. Parking slots were arranged around a scrubby patch of lawn boasting a few stunted shrubs. Enzo switched off the engine and sat holding the steering wheel for some minutes in an attempt to stop his hands from shaking. He was aware that he was under observation from security cameras left and right and knew that he could not sit here for any length of time. He drew a deep breath and stepped out into the cold morning air.

  At reception in the tour centrale, they checked his identity and authorisation, and handed him a bar-coded security badge to pin to his coat. A female prison officer escorted him up a large spiral staircase to the couloir des parloirs, a long, pale blue corridor with tall, narrow windows along one side that spilled incongruous sunlight across a polished grey floor. A row of shiny, blue-painted doors on the wall opposite opened into the parloirs themselves, the private visitors’ rooms. Narrow floor-to-ceiling windows next to each door allowed for observation by prison officers.

  The officer who led Enzo along the corridor wore a dark blue skirt and open-necked pale blue blouse with dark blue epaulettes. Her hair was dyed blond and tied back in a ponytail, and her shoes slapped softly on reflecting sunlight. She stopped at a door halfway along the corridor and opened it for Enzo to step inside. This was a narrow room with an identical door and window at the far end of it leading to the cells beyond. It was divided in half by a thick wall that stood a metre high, designed to separate prisoner from visitor. It was clad in tiny flaking mosaic tiles, and Covid precautions had seen the installation of a Plexiglas screen that extended from the wall to the ceiling.

  There was a solitary chair on Enzo’s side and the prisoner officer said curtly, ‘Sit one metre back from the screen.’

  It wasn’t until she closed the door behind him, and the reflected sunlight vanished from the Plexiglas, that he saw Charlotte seated in a chair on the other side of it. At first he thought there had been some mistake. That they had brought him to the wrong room. Before he realised, with a shock that almost stopped his heart, that this, after all, really was Charlotte.

  In his memory she had always been the woman he had fallen for all those years ago. A sardonic smile playing about full lips. Lustrous dark hair tumbling in glistening curls to her shoulders. Dark eyes which had held him in their thrall from the moment they met. He could still hear the laughter that spilled so freely from the mouth he had kissed so often, the cries of passion that accompanied their lovemaking. The vibrant young woman who had stolen his heart and his rea
son.

  And here sat a woman he barely recognised. An old lady with grey hair cropped to an unruly shag. Dark shadows beneath dull eyes that seemed to absorb rather than reflect the light. A blue mask hid half of her ravaged face. She wore a short-sleeved smock, exposing skin stretched tightly over fleshless arms. Shrunken hands were clasped together in her lap, outsized knuckles on painfully thin fingers.

  Instinctively she raised a hand to her mouth as she barked into her mask, a retching cough that left her breathless and brought tears to her eyes. The first light he had seen in them since he stepped into the room.

  She blinked them away and stared up at him for several long moments. ‘For God’s sake, sit down,’ she said. ‘And don’t look at me like that. The shock on your face is like looking at a reflection of what I’ve become. One I never look at myself.’ She was breathing with difficulty, and her breath rattled in her throat.

  Enzo lowered himself into his chair, face stinging as if she had slapped it repeatedly. He attempted to blink away involuntary tears and saw Charlotte flinch from his reaction. Somehow it had not occurred to him that the woman he had come to visit would not be the Charlotte he remembered. He could never have imagined that the woman he had once loved might be reduced by prison and time to the shadow that sat before him now.

  She said, ‘Last year a fashion designer came to the prison to dress us up and make us walk the walk, parade her clothes down the red carpet. Sakina M’sa. I’d never heard of her. Of course, she chose all the young ones. The girls who still had their looks. I remember her looking at me, and how quickly her eyes moved on. Had she been casting a pantomime, she’d probably have given me the role of the wicked witch.’ She forced a laugh. ‘Typecasting.’ Then launched into another bout of coughing that lasted a full half minute.

  Enzo could only watch from his side of the screen, shocked and unable to disguise his distress.

  When finally the coughing subsided, she said in a voice scraped thin, ‘I caught Covid in the spring. It was rampant in the prison. They say I have recovered from it, but it has left me without any sense of taste or smell. And this damned cough.’ She drew breath with difficulty. ‘Damage to the lungs. They say it’s permanent.’

  ‘Jesus, Charlotte,’ he said. Which seemed to amuse her.

  She shook her head. ‘Not often I’ve seen you at a loss for words, Enzo.’ But the smile which briefly lit her face quickly vanished. ‘How is Laurent?’

  Enzo found it hard to meet her eyes. ‘He’s doing well.’

  ‘Does he ever ask about me?’

  ‘He used to. All the time.’

  ‘And what did you tell him?’

  ‘I made excuses. You’d gone abroad. Work meant that you couldn’t come back. At least not immediately. He couldn’t understand why you never wrote or phoned, and it broke my heart to lie to him.’ He fixed his eyes on white-knuckled hands interlocked in his lap. ‘Of course, he knew I was. He’s a smart kid. In the end he decided you were dead.’ He looked up to see tears brimming on the brink of her lower lids. ‘And maybe that’s better than the truth. Though one day, I suppose, he deserves to know.’

  He saw her swallowing hard to try to control her voice. ‘I don’t think I’ll live long enough to see out my sentence. So I’ll probably not see him again before I die.’ She sucked in more air. ‘Then it won’t be a lie any more.’ She looked very directly at him. ‘I didn’t believe anything could ever be worse than death, until they brought me here. I wish Sophie had killed me that day.’ And Enzo could still see the scar on her temple. ‘I wish I was dead, Enzo.’

  This time Enzo couldn’t stop his tears. Hot and silent, springing from the depths of his despair and regret. He brushed them away with the backs of his hands.

  ‘Good to see we can still cry,’ she said, just a hint of the old Charlotte in her voice. ‘We spilled a lot of tears together in our time, you and I.’

  ‘We did.’

  He watched her use her mask to dry hers away, and was glad he had his own mask to hide behind. She said, ‘So why are you here?’

  The whole Bauer enigma seemed almost irrelevant now. And for a moment he considered not even raising it. But how else to explain his visit? ‘A case I’m working on,’ he said. ‘A murder suspect who is a complex and unusual individual. I thought your special insights might throw light into some dark places.’

  An exhalation of air filled her mask. ‘I might have known. You always did have an ulterior motive, Enzo. Your own priorities. Selfish, self-obsessed, regardless of others.’

  And he knew that this had been a mistake. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. And stood up. ‘Really. I thought you might have relished the challenge. A distraction from . . .’ He looked around and spread his hands out hopelessly to either side. ‘This.’ He sighed. ‘But I can see I was wrong. I won’t waste any more of your time.’

  He turned towards the door, and her voice came to him like an arrow out of the darkness, piercing him so painfully he almost cried out.

  ‘Don’t leave.’

  He stood for a moment, still with his back to her, before turning to see that she had risen to her feet. And he was shocked all over again at how much weight she had lost.

  ‘Time is all I have.’ He saw her struggling for control. ‘Please stay. We have forty-five minutes before they throw you out.’

  He sat down again, and wondered if Bauer had only been a pretext, the excuse for seeing her that he had never been able to find before. He realised now it would have been better had he stayed away, held on to those memories of her as she had been. Now, forever, he would see this wasted creature behind the Plexiglas who wanted nothing more than forty-five minutes of his time. And to die.

  ‘Tell me.’

  And so he did. Everything from the remains under the dead tree to the familial DNA tying the cadaver to Bauer. The mystery of who killed Narcisse and why. The doubt that the blood spatter had created in Enzo’s mind about Bauer’s guilt. The young German’s temper-fuelled violence, his search for the truth about the existence of an evil gene, his obsession with his dead grandfather and the possibility that he had somehow bequeathed his grandson the curse of inherited violence.

  She listened in silence, interrupting him only once with a fit of coughing. When he had finished she said, ‘Quite a story.’ And he could see that in her mind at least she was no longer sitting in a visitor’s room at the woman’s prison in Fleury-Mérogis. There was light and intelligence again in her dark eyes, a brain left to atrophy in a prison cell now actively sifting through her extensive knowledge and years of experience as a forensic psychologist. ‘There is no such thing as an evil gene, Enzo. Evil itself is far too difficult a concept for a scientific enquiry. Though it hasn’t prevented people from trying. A couple of researchers in San Diego managed, after twenty-one generations, to breed a fruit fly that was intensely aggressive. In its brain they found higher levels of a particular enzyme that seemed to be the cause of the aggression. And that enzyme was produced by a single gene. But an evil gene? I don’t think so. And given that it would take twenty-one generations, it’s hardly an experiment that could be conducted with humans.’

  ‘What about inherited violence?’

  ‘Oh, there’s plenty of evidence for that. Several genes acting together, with the right environmental conditions, can drive people to pathological violence. Genes that are inherited and lead to a genetic predisposition for aggression. Plenty of evidence.’

  ‘So Bauer was right to search for something in his family history that might explain his behaviour?’

  ‘I can see why he would want to. Lets him nicely off the hook, doesn’t it? After all, from what you tell me, there doesn’t seem to have been anything environmentally that would have led him to violence. Except of course for a domineering mother, the absence of a male role model, and probably the need to vent his frustrations. Men often feel emasculated by a dominant woman.�
�� She smiled, and it almost broke his heart to see how it brought a glimpse of the old Charlotte to the ruined face. ‘Never had that effect on you, though, Enzo.’

  And had he been able to, he would have reached out to touch her. Brush her face with the tips of his fingers.

  ‘Those same researchers in San Diego studied a large number of males from birth to adulthood and found strong evidence of a genetic predisposition to violence. A couple of other studies showed a genetic variant in a particular enzyme called monoamine oxidase A, which had a significant impact on whether a man developed antisocial problems or not. A male with low levels of the enzyme was more likely to veer towards adult violence if someone had severely abused him as a child. High levels appeared to give protection against ending up in trouble, even if there had been earlier mistreatment.’ She paused. ‘It seems that only men carry this genetic variant.’

  A silence fell between them, each aware of the unspoken question about what might explain Charlotte’s predilection for violence. A question that neither of them was about to address.

  Enzo said, ‘There’s nothing that I know of in Bauer’s background to suggest that he had been abused as a child.’

  But she just shrugged. ‘It’s not an exact science, Enzo. But it’s true that behavioural patterns, or personality traits, or talent, often skip a generation. So it’s perfectly possible that Bauer might have inherited his tendency towards violence from his grandfather, particularly if there was no history of it in the rest of his family. The fact that he is abjectly apologetic afterwards suggests that he is engaging in an internal battle where violence wins out over an otherwise empathetic personality. A combination of psychology and genetics.’

  ‘A pity he didn’t have you as a therapist.’ Enzo attempted a smile which froze awkwardly on his lips.

  ‘Maybe I could have done with a therapist myself.’ That self-mocking look in her eyes that he recognised of old.