by T. M. Logan
My legs were rubbery and weak. With every step over the uneven ground of the vineyard, I thought they would give way and buckle under me. Our footsteps, sandals and flip-flops crunching over dirt and stones and leaves, were the only sound as we made our way into the woods. There were no running men, no more sirens, no beating rotors of an approaching helicopter; no sounds of desperate activity, no lifesaving urgency.
Just the three of us with Lepine walking stolidly ahead, a tarpaulin in a sealed plastic bag under his arm.
Here was the worn dirt path that wound around the big oaks and sycamores, here was the dip, the hollow, then up and around again, past the big rock and the fallen tree where Odette had hidden. The sign stuck lopsidedly into the ground, ATTENTION! in faded red lettering. We reached the clearing and the edge of the bluff, let Lepine lead us down the steps carved into the limestone cliff face, my legs threatening to buckle all the way. I realized, absently, that this was the first time I’d been down into the gorge since we got here.
I didn’t know what the fireman had said to Rowan, I didn’t know much French, but at the same time I knew. Against my will, against every fiber of my being, I knew what we would find. Ahead of me, Rowan was already sobbing softly, her shoulders hitching up and down as she walked, arms crossed tight over her chest. Seeing her, I couldn’t hold it in any longer. My tears started when we were halfway down into the gorge, and by the time we reached the bottom I was sobbing, too.
The youngest of the firemen was there, his hat in both hands in front of him. He couldn’t have been much more than eighteen, his face ghost pale. He looked close to tears himself.
He cast his eyes down and stepped aside as we approached.
“Madames,” he said, his voice choked.
She was there. Arms outstretched against smooth rock, at the foot of the cliff.
Motionless.
Izzy.
66
She lay on her back, her head encircled by a dark halo of blood.
Her eyes were open, staring up at nothing. One leg was tucked under the other, both arms flung out to the side, on one of the flat slabs of rock that formed the bottom of the gorge. Blood dripped slowly from the back of her head, down the edge of the rock and into the stream gurgling below, deep red drops diluting and mixing and disappearing, carried away downstream by the mountain water. A fly buzzed around her, settling next to the blood dripping down her grotesquely bent arm until I waved it angrily away, swatting at more flies circling her head.
Rowan spoke to Lepine in rapid, urgent tones, staccato questions one after the other. But he simply looked at her and shook his head slowly, apologetically. Izzy was gone.
Alistair stood back, his face frozen in shock. Rowan and I approached her body slowly, arm in arm, not wanting to see. To see would make it real. Make it permanent.
Our friend.
“Oh God.” My voice sounded weird, disembodied, not my own. “Oh no.”
Rowan was shaking in disbelief, a hand over her mouth, deep, racking sobs that echoed off the walls of the gorge. I hugged her and we held on to each other for a few minutes, crying and trying to give comfort even though we both knew there was none to be had. Not anymore.
“How could…” Rowan started through her sobs. “How could she have fallen?”
“I don’t know. I can’t believe she’s…”
I couldn’t finish the sentence. It felt as if I were floating above the scene, not part of it. I’d seen photographs of dead bodies before in the course of my job—it was an occasional but inevitable part of what I did—but never anyone I knew. Never anyone who had meant so much to me, shared so much of my own history, my own past. My own life.
Lepine cleared his throat and spoke quietly in French, Rowan nodding and answering in a voice so low it was almost a whisper. From what I could make out, he was asking her to identify the body. Rowan nodded again and said something else in French, her voice cracking.
Lepine put a hand lightly on her arm, his severe features softening.
“Je suis vraiment désolé, madame,” he said.
He unfolded the tarpaulin and laid it gently, carefully, over the body.
I couldn’t bear to look at her broken body but I didn’t want her to be covered, either. It seemed so impersonal, so final, that she was beyond us and beyond all hope of help, beyond the bond of friendship that had bound us together for half our lives.
Without thinking, I knelt down and stroked her outstretched hand, the skin waxy but still warm to the touch.
My friend. Little more than an hour ago I had faced her across a table, trying to contain my fury, clenching my hands in my lap to stop myself from lashing out at her.
And now this.
Somehow it seemed as though it was my fault, my responsibility. My suspicion and ill will and anger toward Izzy had sent her over the edge of that cliff.
I’m sorry, Izzy. Truly, I am.
“We need to get in touch with her family,” Rowan said, her voice shaking. “Her brother. Ring the Irish consulate.”
“I think the police will take care of that.”
“Madame?” Lepine said, with an apologetic smile. He was gesturing for me to move away from the body.
“Of course.” I stood up. “I’m sorry. Pardon.”
“What’s the matter?” Rowan asked.
“We’re not supposed to touch anything.”
“Oh. Of course.”
The fireman spoke to her again, Rowan translating for my benefit.
“He’s going to put a call into the regional Police nationale office to report what’s happened,” she said. “One of his men will stay here until the police arrive. Stay with … Izzy.”
Alistair spoke for the first time, his voice flat.
“Shouldn’t we take her up to the villa? We could make a stretcher out of something, perhaps put a couple of the—”
I cut him off, my professional instincts kicking in. “No,” I said.
“We can’t just leave her down here!”
“They have to preserve all the evidence, and the police will want everything left as it is.”
“Evidence?” He sounded confused. “What do you mean?”
I hesitated, not wanting to say it, hating myself because I knew I had to. “This is a potential crime scene.”
67
No one could speak.
We sat in horrified, shell-shocked silence in the living room, all of us gathered in one place, trying to absorb the horrifying news we had carried up from the gorge. Some crying, arms around shoulders, others staring at the carpet. Lucy and Daniel sat close together by my side, both in tears, holding hands. They hadn’t done that for years.
A pair of officers from the gendarmerie office in Béziers had been notified and would be here within the hour, Lepine had told us. Despite his promise that one of the firemen would stay in the gorge until then, he had pulled his young crewman out at the last minute, insisting he needed his whole team to attend a road accident on the nearby D909. Izzy’s body was covered and marked off with red-and-white tape, and Alistair had volunteered to go down and wait, to ensure nothing was disturbed before an officer could get here. We were told—strictly and without exception—that no one was to touch or move the body.
Finally, Russ spoke up. “A crime scene? Really?”
“Potential crime scene,” I said.
“I suppose I assumed that it was an accident.”
Sean nodded grimly, tears on his face. He looked wretched. Broken. “Me too,” he said.
I wiped my eyes with a tissue that was already sodden.
“Yes, but the police will have to start from an assumption that all possibilities are open, then work their way back from that. They have to rule out all other options before they declare it an accident. That’s what UK police would do.”
Jennifer sat with her boys, each hand tightly clutching one of theirs, staring ahead, unseeing. She looked shattered, defeated, devastated. I suppose we all did.
“I
can’t believe she’s gone,” she said, almost to herself.
“But what if it wasn’t an accident? What if it was something else?” Russ asked.
“Like what?” Sean said.
There was more silence, for a long moment. No one wanted to say it. Eventually, I spoke up.
“Foul play,” I said quietly.
“But that’s crazy,” Rowan said, looking around the room. “Isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Sean said abruptly.
“Of course,” Russ said.
“Crazy,” Jennifer agreed.
I studied the faces arranged around the living room, ten of us where just an hour ago there had been twelve. Friends and families. Rowan and Russ, Jennifer, Jake and Ethan, Lucy, Daniel, little Odette.
And Sean, sitting next to me with his strong arm around my shoulders.
Even though I knew what it meant, it wasn’t until that moment that the enormity of it hit me. It felt as if all eyes in the room were on me.
Izzy had been involved with my husband. She had been about to confess to their affair, about to detonate a bomb under his marriage. About to expose his adultery and lies.
And now she was dead.
I couldn’t stop glancing at the scratches high on my husband’s right cheek, three small vertical lines of angry red, close together, from his temple to his ear. He’d said he’d fallen, been scratched by a thornbush amidst the smoke and chaos while searching for our children. But they didn’t look consistent with that kind of injury to me—they were too regular, too uniform. Too straight.
They looked like fingernail marks.
An ugly, twisted thought came crawling right after it: Izzy was left handed. A left-handed person would lash out on the right side of an attacker’s face …
After the fire started, Sean was in the woods the longest. On his own. He went back in on his own. He came out on his own. I didn’t see what he was doing. No one did. So no one saw how he got those injuries.
Perhaps he hadn’t been on his own the whole time.
The logical part of my brain laid out a horribly plausible scenario, displaying it like a reel of found footage. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get rid of it. Couldn’t turn the projector off. Every time I tried, it just came back louder and brighter and more convincing than before: Jake and Ethan, angry that they had to fly home early, messing around with matches in the woods, accidentally starting fires not in one place but in two. That was why my first view of the fire had struck me—because it was not just in one spot. Two separate fires, thirty feet apart. Perhaps a competition between teenage brothers, to see who could get flames going the quickest? And then panicking when it spread, running away and leaving it to burn. In among the smoke and chaos, Sean finds Izzy out by the bluff. Or she finds him. A chance meeting, and their lovers’ argument is reignited—she wants to get their affair out in the open; he is desperate to keep it a secret. Passions are high and tempers flare, things get out of hand. She had always been feisty but he is almost a foot taller than her and so much stronger. She makes an ultimatum: perhaps she lashes out and he is just defending himself, perhaps he doesn’t realize they’re dangerously close to the edge of the cliff and then—
All of a sudden I can’t stand him touching me.
The scenario plays on a loop in my head, a grimly credible montage of images that becomes more and more real, the longer I think about it. The hairs on the backs of my arms rise.
What have you done, Sean?
My God, what have you done?
68
“Crazy or not,” I said, trying to keep my voice level, “if the police end up going down that road, they’ll have an immediate short list of suspects.”
“Who?” Rowan said.
“Well, the people in this room.”
She was shaking her head. “One of us?”
“Yes.”
There was another uncomfortable silence while that sank in.
“In that case,” Rowan said finally, “we should probably get our story straight.”
“Our story?” I said. “What do you mean?”
“Just—you know. What happened.”
I wanted to hear Sean’s story more than anything. I was tired of suspicion, of guesswork, of only knowing half the facts and trying to work out the other half for myself. It had been five days since discovering the messages on his phone, five days of anguish and lies and heartbreak that had ended in tragedy. So I wanted to hear Sean’s truth. I owed it to my friend. But at the same time, I was terrified of what he might say.
“How about the truth?” I said.
“That’s what I mean,” Rowan said.
“OK. The truth.” I turned to look at my husband, my eyes drawn again to the three vertical scratches on the side of his face. “How about we start with you, Sean?”
“Me?”
“Did you see Izzy in the woods?”
He shrugged, shook his head. “Don’t think so. I found Lucy well off the path, then, when I went back in, Russ was already on his way back with Odette.”
Liar.
But Rowan was nodding. “I saw you heading back down to the clearing as we were coming out.”
“Then what?” I said.
“Then I looked around a bit more for anyone else, but the smoke was really thick by that point and I could hardly see anything. I blundered into that thornbush like a proper eejit and thought it was time to get the hell out of there.”
“You didn’t see Izzy?” I asked again.
“Nope.” His voice cracked. “I wish I had.”
“Did anyone else see her?”
Everyone shook their heads.
“No one saw her fall?”
Silence.
By virtue of my job, I knew something that no one else in this room did. Pushing someone from a significant height—a tower block window or a rooftop or a cliff edge—was tough for investigators because there were virtually no forensic traces unless there was a struggle beforehand. No murder weapon—just gravity; no blood spatter on the offender’s clothing. No defensive wounds. No forensics to link victim and perpetrator. Without a witness, CCTV, or a confession, it was incredibly difficult to prove the victim didn’t just fall.
From a forensics point of view, it was pretty much the perfect murder method.
“OK,” I continued. “What about the fire?” I turned to Jake and Ethan. “How about you two? Do you know how it started?”
Jennifer jumped straight in before they could respond, an indignant edge to her voice.
“Hold up just a minute! Why should my boys know anything about it?”
I ignored her.
“Did you boys see anything?”
Both teenagers shook their heads, but neither of them would meet my eye.
“Did anyone see how the fires started?”
More shaking of heads.
Jennifer said, “It could have been kids from the village, coming up through the gorge.”
“All right, did anyone see any local kids down there this afternoon?”
She shrugged. “Can’t say I did, no.”
“Has anyone seen any local kids down there on any day this week?”
There was a muttering of negatives from around the room.
“Maybe we should wait for the police before we start getting into this?” Russ said.
I turned on him, my frustration boiling over.
“We have to pool what we know, work out how it might have happened.”
Sean took his arm off my shoulders.
“One of the firemen found Izzy’s glasses in the clearing,” he said. “Near the edge of the gorge. He had them in one of those plastic evidence bags.”
Rowan nodded. “I saw that, too. One of the lenses was shattered.”
“She must have lost her glasses in the confusion down there,” Sean added, “and been disorientated by the smoke. She might have been running?”
There was a brittle, mechanical edge to his voice that I didn’t recognize.
Liar, I thought.
But once again, Rowan was nodding. “There was a lot of smoke blowing around,” she said. “Maybe she just didn’t see the edge.”
It was the third time in as many minutes that Rowan had done it. Every time Sean says something, she backs him up. Why? What does that mean?
But even as I asked myself the question, an answer arrived. An answer that was supremely cynical and cruel and unfair in the circumstances, but wasn’t that what my life had turned into? This was how my mind worked now.
You don’t want a scandal, do you, Rowan? No sordid affairs, no foul play, no criminal investigation. Just a tragic accident. Nothing that might derail your precious business deal—and your multimillion-pound payout.
69
Jennifer seemed to come to her senses, sitting up straighter in her seat.
“OK.” She looked pointedly at me. “What else will the detectives want to know?”
“I don’t know too much about French police procedure,” I said, “but I’d assume they’ll want to take statements from all of us, establish some facts, look at the scene, and make a decision from there.”
“And what else, Kate?”
“What do you mean?”
Jennifer looked at her sons, slumped on the sofa. “Hey, why don’t all the young folk go downstairs to the games room while the grown-ups talk about this? What do you think, guys, get some drinks and put a DVD on or something? Would you do that for me, Jakey?”
Jake shrugged and stood up, followed by his brother. Then Lucy and Daniel were on their feet, Lucy taking her brother by the hand and leading him out to the staircase. Of the five children, only Odette remained, thumb in her mouth and anchored to her mother’s lap, head against her chest. Normally a babbling spring of chatter, I had not heard her utter a single word since returning to the villa after the fire, and she didn’t speak now—but neither did she move. Rowan stroked her daughter’s long red hair, a gesture that said to everyone: my baby stays with me.
