Blowback ef-5

by Peter May

  As he rounded the corner of the building, he was stopped in his tracks by the sight of Sophie standing unhappily on the steps outside the main entrance, her suitcase at her feet.

  He frowned his consternation. “Where are you going? I thought you didn’t finish till the end of the week.”

  She could hardly meet his eye. “That was the plan. Until that little shit, Philippe, went and told Guy that I was your daughter.”

  Enzo sighed. With her cover blown it was likely his access to Guy and Elisabeth, and anyone or anything else, would be cut off. “Why did he do that?”

  “We had a row.”

  “I thought I told you to keep away from him.”

  “I tried. But he seemed to think that knowing about you gave him some kind of leverage over me. I made it plain to him it didn’t.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Guy sacked me.”

  “Damn, Sophie!”

  “I’m sorry, papa, but it’s not my fault!” He saw a quiver in her lower lip. “Bertrand can’t come and get me till the end of the week, and I’ve nowhere to stay.”

  He raised his eyes to the heavens. There was a good chance that all his work of the last week had been wasted. “We’ll get a hotel room somewhere. I guess they’ll want me out of mine, too.”

  “There aren’t any hotel rooms, papa. All the hotels up here close down at this time of year, and the ski stations won’t be open for another month yet. The nearest hotels are in Clermont Ferrand.”

  Enzo thought about it for a moment, then took out his cellphone.

  “Who are you calling?”

  “A friend.”

  Dominique arrived outside her apartment at almost the same moment as Enzo and Sophie. She drew her blue gendarmerie van into the kerbside and stepped out, still in uniform, to meet them. Both she and Enzo were restrained in their urge to be intimate in their greeting, and shook hands formally.

  “This is my daughter,” he said. “Sophie.”

  Dominique smiled and shook her hand warmly. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  Sophie flicked a curious look toward her father. “Have you?”

  “I would never have guessed you were father and daughter. You don’t look at all like him.”

  “She gets her good looks from her mother.”

  Sophie pulled a face. “Actually, if my hair wasn’t dyed, you’d see that I do look quite like him. Same dark hair, same white stripe.”

  “Ah, so you inherited the Waardenburg.”

  Sophie cocked her eyebrow and threw her father another glance. “He has been telling you a lot.”

  Enzo shuffled uncomfortably. Dominique unlocked the front door and led them upstairs to her apartment on the third floor.

  “I’m afraid I’m going to be short of somewhere to stay, too,” Enzo said as Dominique opened the door to let them in. Tasha began barking immediately, bounding around the hallway with excitement, paws up on Enzo, almost knocking him over. He greeted her like a long lost friend, ruffling her neck and ears and dodging her tongue.

  “I’ve only got one spare room, I’m afraid,” Dominique said and she and Enzo exchanged looks.

  He said quickly, “Maybe I could share with Sophie, then.”

  “Well, it is a double bed, and I suppose you two aren’t exactly strangers.”

  Sophie pulled a face.

  “Go on through to the sitting room, and I’ll look out some clean sheets.”

  Tasha followed Enzo and Sophie into the front room. The log fire that had warmed Enzo and Dominique on their first night together was long dead. He looked from the window at the conurbation in the valley below, almost lost in the flatness of the cold, grey light. Sophie tugged on his arm and brought her face close to his.

  “Papa!” she said in a stage whisper. “You’re sleeping with her!”

  He wasn’t quite sure what to say, but denial didn’t seem like an option. Her eyes were wide with disbelief.

  “You are impossible, papa!”

  “I’m human, Sophie.”

  She glared at him for a moment, but couldn’t stop a half smile from sneaking around her lips. “Well, it’s crazy for you to share with me, then.” She paused. “And I don’t want some big hairy man in my bed, anyway. Even if he is my father.”

  Dominique appeared in the doorway. “The room’s through here, Sophie.” And Sophie dragged her suitcase off after her, throwing the merest backward glance at Enzo. He sighed. His life, it seemed, was one long succession of women giving him grief.

  Dominique reappeared after a few moments. She lowered her voice. “I suppose she’s guessed, then?”

  He nodded.

  She smiled, half in regret. “Women have an instinct for these things.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  Dominique pushed the door closed and turned back to him, keeping her voice low. “I got word back this morning from the phone company. About the owner of that cellphone number. I was just about to head off to make an arrest when you called.”

  Enzo felt all his focus return suddenly to the murder of Marc Fraysse. “Whose was it?”

  “Anne Crozes.”

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Anne and Georges Crozes lived in a converted stone farmhouse on the back road south out of Saint-Pierre, in a fold of the valley with hills rising all around it, dark evergreen and bleak winter brown. It was an impressive building, beautifully pointed, its roof recently remade with traditional lauzes tiles. It spoke of money and the share that the Crozes had enjoyed in the success of Chez Fraysse. There was only one vehicle sitting outside the house when they arrived. A black BMW. There was no sign of Anne’s Scenic.

  “Doesn’t look like she’s here,” Enzo said.

  Dominique pulled her van in behind the BMW. “We’ll see. She’s not at the hotel, I know that. Her contract for the season finished yesterday.”

  They stepped out into the chill air and heard the valley echo to the cawing of distant crows, the only sound to break the silence. Blue smoke rose straight up from the chimney and hung in strands like mist above the house. Away down in the valley, Enzo saw a hawk drop from the sky like a stone and knew that some unsuspecting creature was about to die.

  Georges Crozes opened the door before they got to it. Enzo barely recognised him out of his chef’s whites. He seemed less imposing somehow. A god in the kitchen, but an ordinary mortal in the real world. He wore torn old jeans that hung loose from narrow hips, and a grey sweatshirt that seemed to drown him. He looked older, too, glancing from Dominique to Enzo, and glaring at the Scotsman. “What do you want?”

  “Is Anne at home?” Dominique said.

  “What do you want her for?”

  “I’d like to speak to her.”

  “What’s it got to do with him?” He flicked his head toward Enzo.

  “He’s helping with our inquiries.”

  He turned penetrating green eyes on Enzo. “Not get enough information from your little spy, then?”

  So everyone knew about it. Enzo chose to ignore the barb. “Where is she, Georges?”

  “I haven’t the first idea. She doesn’t tell me anything these days.” And he thrust out his jaw as if challenging them to question his veracity.

  Dominique said, “Okay, well tell her, when you see her, that I need to speak to her as a matter of urgency. And if she does not come to me, I will come back for her with a warrant.”

  Crozes’ face darkened. “What’s she done?”

  “Just tell her, Georges.”

  He watched them all the way back to the van before closing the door. Enzo wondered what was going through his mind on the other side of it.

  “What do you think?” Dominique said when they got back in the vehicle.

  “I think he was very hostile.”

  She nodded. “Attack being the best form of defence. What do you reckon he knows?”

  “A lot more than he’s ever going to tell us.”

  Enzo’s battered and bruised 2CV toiled its way back
up the hill from Thiers. The mechanic at the garage had given it a clean bill of health, but still it didn’t feel quite right, especially after driving the rental car in which he had made the return trip to Paris, a sleek, fast Peugeot. Perhaps it was time, he thought, to get himself a new car. Or, as Sophie would say, a real car.

  He turned off the main highway on to the private road that wound up through the trees to the auberge. He had left things in his room and knew that in going to get them he would probably also have to face the music with Guy and Elisabeth. A prospect he did not relish.

  Up ahead he saw a car pulled into the parking area at the foot of the track leading up to the buron, and as he got nearer he realized that it was Anne Crozes’ Renault Scenic. He drew in behind it and got out of his car, to stand listening in the silence. But all he heard was the ticking of his engine as it began to cool quickly in the cold, and the plaintive calls of the ubiquitous crows echoing around the woods. He checked the driver’s door of the Scenic, but it was locked, and he peered up into the green gloom of the forest. Nothing moved.

  He locked his own car and started off up the track. Ten breathless minutes later, he emerged from the darkness on to the open hillside and followed the path to the point where it doubled back, leading up to the plateau. Despite the cold, he was perspiring by the time he got to the top, and breathing hard. A solitary figure stood on the rise above the buron, gazing out across the valley to the east. He recognised the tall, thin, figure of Anne Crozes, but she had her back to him, and hadn’t heard him coming. So he stood for a moment, watching her, and catching his breath, before climbing the last few meters.

  She turned, startled, at the sound of his approach. What light there was from a sullen sky reflected dully on the tears that wet her cheeks. When she realized who it was, momentary fear turned to resignation and she hurriedly used the flats of her palms to wipe her cheeks dry. He stopped a little short of her, and they stood staring at each other in the unaccustomed still and silence of the plateau. The cold wrapped itself around them like icy fingers.

  “You know the police are looking for you?” he said.

  She nodded. “Georges called me on my cell.” She searched his face. “I guess that means you know, then.” It wasn’t a question.

  “We know that you arranged by text to meet him here on the day he died. Which puts you in the frame for his murder, Anne, especially since he had ended your affair just a matter of days before.”

  The tears came again. Silently. “I met him that afternoon, yes.” She shook her head. “But I didn’t kill him. I couldn’t have. I loved him. I still do. And I always will.”

  “Why did he break it off with you?”

  She bit her lower lip, pained still by some distant, haunting memory. “He said we had no future.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “Not in so many words, no. He’d been behaving so strangely in those last weeks. He’d always been so much fun, but it was like it had all just been some kind of front he’d put on for me. Then the mask slipped, and he was this morose, unhappy creature. I hardly recognised him.”

  “Why did you want to meet him that day?”

  “I thought if I could talk to him. Just sit him down and talk to him. Maybe he would open up, maybe he would tell me what was wrong, what it was that troubled him so much. And that if he did, I could win him back.”

  “And did he? Open up to you, I mean.”

  She shook her head disconsolately. “He was like a closed book. I couldn’t read him, I couldn’t get near him.” She looked at Enzo with a sad plea for understanding in her eyes. “He seemed manic that afternoon. I’d never seen him behave so strangely. He’d been depressed before, but this time it verged almost on madness. A bizarre kind of elation. Like there was no way out but he didn’t care any more. I knew he had gambling debts. I had no idea how much. But occasionally he would let things slip, and I would get a glimpse of a man I hardly knew. A man driven by something beyond his control. I think, in a way, that’s really why he broke up with me. He didn’t want me to see that man, and I don’t think he could hide him any longer.” She drew a long, trembling breath. “I had been so sure he believed he was going to lose the auberge. But he just stood there with a fire burning in his eyes, as if he had somehow risen above it, and it no longer mattered.”

  “Had he told you he feared to lose the hotel?”

  “Not in so many words. It was just bits and pieces of things he said. Like disparate parts of a jigsaw. I was desperately trying to put them together.”

  “And do you think you got an accurate picture?”

  “I think I got the picture of a man at the end of his rope. And the speculation about Michelin taking away his third star just seemed to tip him over the edge.”

  Enzo looked at her intently, a sense of everything he had learned about the dead man coming together in Anne Crozes’ words. In the picture she was painting of a lost soul in search of redemption. “Do you think he was suicidal?”

  “I had feared it, yes. He’d been so low. And he stood there that day in the entrance to the buron, tears streaming down his face like a baby, though to this day I’m not sure why.” Her own tears returned. “But to me, he really was just a child. A little boy lost.”

  Perhaps, Enzo thought, the child she’d never had with Georges. Maybe Marc had aroused the mother in her as much as the lover.

  “It wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that he’d killed himself, monsieur. But murder!” He saw the anguish in her eyes as she caught and held him in her gaze. “Who would want to kill him? Why would anyone want to do that?”

  And in that moment, Enzo thought that perhaps he knew exactly why.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  It was well after midi by the time he got back down to Thiers, and there was no one at reception in the gendarmerie. He pressed a button marked sonnez on the counter top and heard a buzzer ringing distantly somewhere in the offices beyond. After several moments a gendarme, still chewing on his sandwich, appeared in the doorway and threw Enzo a sullen look. It was lunchtime, the sacred hour, and no one liked to be disturbed during it.

  Dominique, too, was eating, sitting at her desk with a cloth napkin spread in front of her, slices of tomato on a plate, a baguette torn in half, and a small tub of rillettes de porc, the shredded leftovers of cooked meat and fat from the carcass of the pig. An open half bottle of red wine, and a half empty glass stood side by side at her right hand. She seemed surprised to see him.

  “I thought you were going back to the hotel.”

  “I never got there. I met Anne Crozes en route. Or, at least, I saw her car parked at the foot of the track up to the buron, and found her up there.”

  “And you didn’t bring her in?”

  Enzo held up his hands. “Hey, that’s not my job.” He paused. “But anyway, I don’t think she killed Fraysse.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. But she’s a material witness and she withheld evidence from the police. Did she tell you anything?”

  “She told me she met Fraysse on the afternoon of his murder. His mood had been bizarre, she said, almost elated. Manic, was the word she used.” He took off his jacket and hung it over the back of the chair opposite. “Dominique, was there an insurance policy on Marc Fraysse’s life?”

  She thought for a moment. “Yes, I’m sure there was.”

  “Would you have a copy of it on file.”

  She shook her head. “No. But I could get the insurance company to send us one.” She looked at him curiously. “What’s on your mind?”

  “Just a vague thought, Dominique. But if it was possible to get a look at that policy, it might turn into something more than a hunch.”

  He stood once more by the window, staring out at the start of what promised to be a long, bleak winter, while Dominique made the call. The sky was tinted purple, the air a sad ochre, and even as he watched, he saw the first tiny flakes of snow fall sparsely across the valley. Nothing that would lie, but still the sight of it sent a shi
ver through his bones.

  Dominique came off the phone and spread some rillettes on a chunk of bread, topping it off with a slice of tomato. “They’re going to fax it. Should be through in a few minutes.” She took a bite and washed it down with a mouthful of wine.

  The fax arrived five minutes later. Dominique watched Enzo carefully as he pored over the pages of the insurance policy on Marc Fraysse’s life.

  “What exactly are you looking for?”

  He stood up, a light in his eyes. But he seemed a long way, away.

  “Enzo?”

  He blinked and looked at her as if waking from a dream. “This,” he said, turning one of the pages toward her and stabbing a finger at a paragraph halfway down. And as she drew it toward her to read, he elucidated. “A suicide clause. To guard against the possibility of the insured killing himself to guarantee a payout to the beneficiary. In the event that Marc Fraysse had committed suicide, neither Elisabeth nor Guy would have received a penny.”

  The kitchen was full of stagiaires scrubbing down counter tops, dismantling hotplates and grills to scour with wire brushes, sluicing water and disinfectant across the stippled floor, and scrubbing it with long-handled mops. The chatter of the young chefs died away, and curious eyes turned toward Enzo and Dominique as they made their way past the marble table toward Guy’s office at the far side.

  He saw them coming through the windows that offered him a panorama of his kitchen, and turned to face them with grim defiance as Enzo pushed open the door. Gone was all his bonhomie, and his sad blue eyes were heavy with disappointment. “I didn’t extend you the hospitality of my hotel, Enzo, so that you could spy on me,” he said.

  “I wasn’t spying on you.”

  “Then what was your daughter doing working in our kitchen?”

  “She wants to train as a chef.” Which was true, but didn’t quite answer Guy Fraysse’s question.

  “Under a false name?”

  “Merit was her mother’s name. It is more convenient for her to use a French name. Most people can’t pronounce Macleod.”