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

by Peter May

  He buttoned his coat up to the neck and briskly climbed the narrow street opposite the post office towards Anny’s house. Medieval stone buildings rose on either side, leaving only a sliver of sky on view above. A gibbous moon was veiled, its light diffused by brume as he emerged into the metalled area before the park. The gnarled, misty silhouettes of ancient trees stood stark against the night sky all along the railing above him, the stone cross at the gate casting its moon shadow long over the tarmac.

  He wondered if he should have told Arnaud that he was coming in case the house had been locked up. It was a crime scene, after all. But he did not want to share his thoughts just yet with the gendarme, and in any case he need not have worried. Although a criss-cross of crime-scene tape had been stapled across the doorway, when he reached the landing at the top of the steps, the front door of Anny’s house opened at the turn of its handle. He pushed it into darkness.

  The house breathed softly in his face. The faint perfume of stale cooking, and body odour, and damp. And the unmistakable metallic smell of blood. Enzo ducked under the tape and stepped inside, realising immediately that this is how it would have been for Narcisse as he had entered the house just a couple of nights earlier. It was around the same time. And stepping from street lights outside into the dark was like walking blind into the unknown. Or, in the case of Narcisse, to meet his maker.

  Enzo left the door open at his back and took three short steps into the kitchen before his fingers found the table on his right. Still he could see nothing, his eyes taking an age to make the adjustment. This must have been just about as far as Narcisse had come before the blade came out of the darkness to cut open his throat.

  A noise somewhere in the kitchen ahead of him brought his heart pounding up into his throat and he froze on the spot. In a moment of blind panic he imagined the same blade that killed Narcisse arcing out of the night to take his life, too.

  ‘Who’s there?’ His voice died in the stillness the instant it left his mouth. He was greeted by silence.

  He turned quickly, stepping back towards the door, and found the light switch. Harsh yellow light flooded the kitchen and he saw, back arched, a black cat on the far end of the table, watching him with wide green eyes. Relief escaped his lips in a long breath, and he was aware of his heart hammering an erratic rhythm against his ribs. Only to be startled as the cat made a sudden and unexpected dash for the door, bills and letters and junk mail scattering in its wake.

  It was gone before Enzo could turn, and he wondered if perhaps the cat had been witness to the murder. Not much use, even if it had. He stooped to pick up the bits and pieces that had fallen to the floor and saw that someone had made a clumsy attempt to wash the blood from the floorboards. And he felt a prickle of annoyance. The victim was barely cold; there had been no arrest. This was still a crime scene in an ongoing investigation. It was just as well he had taken photographs for himself.

  He straightened up and saw a bloody plastic bucket and mop leaning against the far wall. Whoever had tried to erase the stains had underestimated just how stubbornly blood is absorbed into wood. In all likelihood, this physical manifestation of the murder which had taken place in the kitchen would outlast them all. An ever-present stain on the future, a reminder that here a man had died.

  A man, Enzo thought, whose reason for being in this house at all remained obscure.

  He stepped over the bloodstains and walked along the hall to the grand salon. Moonlight shone through all the stained glass. A dead light. The light of the night that brought illumination only in black and white. In faded fulguration and deep shadow. By its feeble luminescence, Enzo crossed the room to try the handle of the door on the far wall. It opened, allowing a wide shaft of naked moonlight to lay itself across the flagstones. Enzo broke it with his own shadow as he stepped out on to the terrace. The pavings extended to his right and broadened out into a decent-sized sitting area where chairs were tipped against a wooden table. Beyond the terrace, the old chapel and the park were washed in misted moonlight. Overhead, a Roman-tiled canopy sheltered the doorway, and to the left a stone staircase descended steeply to a narrow alleyway running between the houses, beyond the reach of street lights, and profoundly dark.

  After a moment’s hesitation, Enzo descended the steps to the darkness below. On his left the alley ran along the end of the house to the street beyond, where the steps Enzo had climbed to the front door only a few minutes earlier were hidden from view. He turned to his right, and using the torch app in his phone, made his way along to a sharp turn, where the path led away between gardens and houses towards the main road above the village. The abandoned Auberge du Vieux Quercy stood in silent silhouette, dominating the village below.

  Immediately ahead, a small gate opened into the garden of a large house on his left. There were no lights, no signs of life in the house. Enzo tried the latch on the gate and it swung open. A stone-tiled path fell steeply away through the garden towards large double gates at the foot of the hill, some fifty metres distant. Beyond them, he could see the lights of the main street where he had driven past the Fenelon on his way into the village.

  His sense of the geography of this place was sketchy, and he determined to return in daylight at some point to make himself more familiar with its layout.

  He turned back towards the alley, and was startled by the eyes of the black cat from the house glowing in the light of his phone. Staring at him out of the darkness, before slinking away to be absorbed by the night. For some reason, Enzo was spooked by it, and he hurried back up the steps to re-enter the house by the side entrance, closing the door behind him and making his way rapidly through the kitchen and out again into the light of the street lamps. He turned off the house lights and closed the door.

  His breath billowed about his head like smoke as he ran down the steps to the street and headed back towards the main street. At the junction of the roads he stopped, hesitating just for a moment. It was clear that Anny had not yet returned to the house, and was likely still staying at the Fenelon. He turned to his right and walked towards the light that fell from the hotel across its terrace and out on to the road.

  He pulled on his face covering before pushing open one half of the glass doors and walking into the warmth of the hostelry. From a door to his right, a young man emerged to greet him from the other side of a high wooden counter. ‘Table for one?’ he asked, his voice muffled by his blue cotton mask.

  Tempted as he was to eat, Enzo shook his head. ‘I’m looking for Anny Lavigne.’

  The young man nodded towards the dining room. ‘Over by the window.’

  In fact she was the only diner, sitting on her own at a table for two. Windows all along the far side of the dining room would, he assumed, give on to a view in daylight of the river below. But for now, only darkness lay beyond.

  Enzo approached across a tiled floor and stopped a respectful two metres short of her table. She didn’t see him coming, lost in some private reverie, and only looked up at the last moment. ‘Mademoiselle Lavigne?’ he asked.

  Brown bewildered eyes looked at him uncomprehendingly. ‘I’m sorry, do I know you?’ she said. ‘You must forgive me, my memory is not what it was.’

  ‘No, mademoiselle, I’m sorry. It’s me who should apologise for disturbing your evening meal. My name is Enzo Macleod. I’m consulting for Capitaine Arnaud on the murder that was committed in your house.’

  A pained expression flitted across her face. ‘Oh.’ She seemed almost disappointed. ‘I thought you might be someone I knew. Would you like to join me?’

  ‘I would love to. But I have to get home tonight, and there will be food waiting for me on the table.’

  ‘Where’s home?’

  ‘Cahors.’

  She raised her eyebrows in surprise. ‘That’s a good hour or more away. You’ll be eating late.’

  He nodded. ‘Also, I don’t want to risk coming too clo
se. At our age, we’re both vulnerable to the virus.’

  She sighed. ‘Yes. I’m beginning to fear that this life we are being forced to live – masks, social distancing, friend and family bubbles – is going to see me out. And that a long and interesting life, that has taken me halfway around the world and back, will end with imprisonment in my own home.’ She paused, and her frown gave way to a smile. ‘At least take a seat at the next table. I’d enjoy a little company.’

  Enzo pulled out a chair and sat at the far side of the next table along the window wall.

  ‘Do you know,’ she asked, ‘when I’ll be allowed home? I’d rather not spend my last days in the Fenelon.’ And she smiled, a warm smile that twinkled in eyes that seemed now flecked with green. She ran age-spattered hands back through an abundance of silver-grey hair gathered in an untidy accumulation at the back of her head. ‘It’s so hard to keep up appearances without the lotions and potions and implements of destruction that one is accustomed to in one’s own boudoir.’

  He grinned, enjoying her self-deprecating sense of humour. ‘Well, it looks like they’ve already made a start on cleaning up the blood.’ And he stopped, realising how insensitive that was. ‘I’m sorry, that must sound pretty shocking to you.’

  ‘Monsieur Macleod, after seeing the body of that poor man lying in a pool of blood on my kitchen floor, there is very little I think that could shock me.’ She paused. ‘Have they managed to remove the stain from the floorboards?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘I didn’t think so. Blood comes very easily out of people, but not so easily out of floors. Perhaps I’ll lay a rug there.’

  Enzo said, ‘I think if you ask Capitaine Arnaud, they’ll probably be able to let you back in sometime tomorrow.’ He hesitated. ‘But perhaps you’d be better giving it a little more time. I might think twice myself before moving back on my own into a house where a brutal murder has been committed.’

  ‘Time is a commodity in short supply at my age, Monsieur Macleod. I have lived on my own ever since my mother passed. And the house is full of ghosts anyway. One more or less won’t make any difference.’ Again, that engaging twinkle. Then she said, ‘Macleod. It’s a Scottish name, is it not?’

  ‘It is, mademoiselle.’

  She threw up her hands. ‘For God’s sake, stop calling me Miss!’ She used the English word. ‘It makes me sound like some old spinster.’ And she grinned. ‘Even if I am.’ She drew breath. ‘Madame, or Anny will do. What’s a Scotsman like you doing in France?’

  ‘It’s a long story. But I’ve been here for well over thirty years.’

  She nodded. ‘And why are you consulting on a murder?’

  ‘Because forensic science was my speciality. Before I retired I was able to apply new science to some old cases that had been baffling the French police for years.’

  ‘And solved them?’

  He inclined his head in acknowledgement. ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘Bravo!’ she said. ‘So what do you want to know?’

  ‘The capitaine told me that you’d been dining with a friend in Vayrac on the night of the murder.’

  ‘Yes. Marie-Christine. We’ve known each other for years. Our mothers were friends before us.’

  ‘She came to pick you up and then brought you home afterwards?’

  ‘I no longer drive, Monsieur Macleod. I stopped feeling safe on the roads a number of years ago after a nasty accident. So I rely on friends now.’

  ‘And it was when you came home that you found the body in your kitchen?’

  ‘Yes.’ Her lips paled as she pressed them together, her eyes glazed and stared off into some misted distance where she replayed the images that had greeted her that night in her own home.

  ‘The capitaine also told me that the victim, Narcisse, had called on you earlier that same day.’

  She nodded.

  ‘You knew him?’

  ‘Not before he knocked on my door. Knew of him, of course, as I discovered when he introduced himself.’

  ‘What did he want?’

  ‘He was writing a book, apparently, about Rose Valland. And he’d heard that my mother had worked with her during the war.’

  ‘Rose Valland?’ Enzo thought the name seemed familiar, but he couldn’t place it.

  ‘Rose worked at the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris during the Nazi occupation, monsieur. The Nazis used it as a sorting house for all the art they were stealing from French collectors before shipping it off to Germany. Unbeknownst to them, Rose kept meticulous records of every piece that came through the gallery. Where it was sent to, and when. So that after the war, she was able to go to Germany and track it all down to restore to its rightful owners. A legend in the world of art, but little known by the public at large, alas.’

  ‘And your mother worked with her?’

  ‘Briefly. She later wrote a memoir of those times – never published, of course – though I don’t think there was much in it that could have thrown light on the activities of Rose Valland. I told Monsieur Narcisse that I was dining out that night, but that I would look through my mother’s papers in the morning, and that if he chose to return in the afternoon I would share with him anything that I had found.’ She turned sad eyes on Enzo. ‘It seems he returned earlier than anticipated.’

  ‘And the German, Hans Bauer, the man police think killed him . . . ?’

  She shook her head. ‘I know nothing about this young man at all, Monsieur Macleod. What either of them were doing in my house is a complete mystery.’ Her clear, pale skin crinkled in a frown and he thought for a moment that she was going to spill tears. ‘In a way, I feel quite . . . violated by it.’ And she gazed at him, a pained look in her eyes.

  Enzo thought how fragile she seemed, and vulnerable, sitting on her own in this cold, empty dining room, with the bloodstains of a violent murder still fresh on the floor of the only place she had ever called home. Which made him reticent about asking his next question. But he did all the same. ‘Your friend, Marie-Christine. I’d like to talk to her if I may.’

  Anny seemed surprised. ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s the nature of my profession, Anny. Forensics is the study of tiny details. She may have seen something that night when she came to pick you up, or on the way back. Something that hasn’t even registered in her own consciousness. If you could, perhaps, let me have her address?’

  ‘Well, of course. Though I’m not sure that she’ll be able to tell you anything very much. Goes around with her eyes shut half the time, that woman.’ She took out her phone to search for the address. ‘I’ll send you it.’

  Enzo said, ‘It’s been an eventful week. A murder in your home, and the remains of a body unearthed in the park next door. I don’t suppose you have any idea who was buried there?’

  She looked up, surprised. ‘Why would I? I must confess, I paid it very little attention. They say the body dates back to the forties. Whoever it was, he must have been put there before I was even born.’

  Enzo’s tummy was rumbling for most of the ten-minute drive across the flood plain of the Dordogne valley. Through the tiny village of Bétaille with its unique brick-built church standing proud on the hillside. And along the valley floor, following the railway line, to Vayrac. He found the Chemin Creux opposite the quincaillerie and drove down past an empty car park and an unfinished house with lights burning in all its windows. Someone had told him once that you didn’t have to pay the habitation tax until the final skin of crépie had been applied to the exterior of the house. Which explained why so many new-build homes in France were lived in without their final external coating.

  He parked half on the pavement beneath the feeble light of an old-fashioned street lamp, and crossed the road to climb a steep gravel path to the door of the house where Marie-Christine Bourges lived, apparently on her own.

  The shutters were clo
sed, but he could see light in the hall beyond the glass of the front door. He knocked and pulled on his face covering as he stepped back. A light came on above the door and almost blinded him, before the door itself opened and a small elderly lady in a pink dressing gown peered out from behind a mask that almost entirely covered her face.

  ‘I can’t tell you anything that I haven’t already told the police,’ she said, her voice muted by the mask.

  Enzo was startled. ‘How did you know what I was going to ask?’

  ‘Anny called me,’ she said. ‘To tell me you were on your way.’ She peered at him through the glare of the overhead light.

  Enzo said, ‘I just wanted to ask you a few questions, madame.’

  ‘Well, you’re not coming in, if that’s what you think. You can stay out there and keep your distance.’

  Enzo sighed and felt the first spots of rain start to fall. The moon had long since vanished behind clouds rolling in from the north-west. He would have to make this quick. ‘I’m told you live on your own.’

  ‘Widowed,’ she said quickly, as if to make clear that she was not some old maid, like her friend across the valley.

  ‘So when Anny came for dinner it was just the two of you here?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘What time did you pick her up at her house?’

  ‘She told me to be there at 7.25.’

  ‘That’s a very specific time. Is that not a bit odd?’

  Marie-Christine shook her head. ‘Not for Anny, no. She watches a TV programme every night which finishes at that time. And she’s not someone who likes to wait around. In fact, I was a little worried on the drive over that I might have left it late. Anny’s such a stickler for punctuality. But no, I arrived at 7.25 exactly. I checked my watch.’

  ‘So she was waiting for you?’

  ‘Yes. Ran down the steps and jumped into the car just as I pulled up.’

  ‘Was there anyone in the street when you picked her up?’

  ‘I didn’t see a single soul on the drive through the village, monsieur. Carennac is like a ghost town when the tourist season is over. Nor did we see anyone as we left. I drove to the top of the hill and turned on to the main road at the primary school. There was no traffic on the road there, either. In fact, I’m not sure I passed a single vehicle on the drive across the valley.’