by Peter May
‘Oh, yes.’ She hesitated. ‘But it wasn’t his idea. He’s having trouble letting go, that’s all.’ She sighed, and sat on the wall beside him, and scuffed idly with her tennis shoes at a slab of stone set in the grass. ‘I’m sorry, Enzo. It’s just a little difficult right now.’ And she took his hand briefly in hers and gave it the smallest of squeezes.
They sat in silence then, and with the toe of her shoe she traced the outline of letters carved into the stone slab. He watched her, unseeing, distracted by all the emotional contradictions she had brought into his life. Until, quite unexpectedly, the letters she was following with her toe seemed to jump into sudden, clear focus, and he realised what those tiny movements had just spelled out. He grabbed her arm, fingers digging deep into the soft flesh above her elbow. She turned, alarmed, to see him staring fixedly at the ground in front of her. ‘What is it?’
‘Utopique.’ Even as he whispered the name he felt goosebumps raise themselves across his back and shoulders.
‘What are you talking about?’
He nodded towards the slab and moved her foot aside with his. He read, ‘This stone was set in the ground in the year 1978, in loving memory of our faithful family retriever, Utopique, who died in the act of rescuing his beloved eight-year-old master, Hugues, on the occasion of his falling into the moat. Utopique jumped after him into the water, keeping him safe from drowning until he could be rescued. Sadly, Utopique was drowned before he, too, could be saved. We will be forever grateful for his sacrifice.’
Enzo stared at the words he had just read aloud. Words that swam now in front of his eyes. Utopique had been Hugues d’Hautvillers’ dog! Finally, the dog tag and the shinbone made sense. ‘It’s got to be under this stone.’ He stood up.
‘What has?’
‘The next piece of Jacques Gaillard. Probably another trunk. And probably more clues.’ He looked at Charlotte, eyes shining with renewed anticipation, and saw that she had turned pale.
‘Right here? Beneath our feet?’
‘It has to be.’ Enzo looked around wondering what he should do, and saw Raffin coming towards them. Beyond him, he saw the gardener wheeling his barrow down the hill. Enzo shouted and waved, and the gardener stopped and turned to look. Raffin glanced behind him at the gardener, and then again at Enzo.
‘What’s going on?’
Enzo said, ‘Read the stone slab.’ And he shouted again to the gardener and waved him over.
‘Jesus!’ Raffin looked up from the slab. ‘You think it’s under here?’
‘What do you think?’
‘I think there’s a damned good chance of it.’
The gardener left his barrow and wandered across. He was a man in his sixties, weathered and worn by a life spent outdoors. He was wearing blue dungarees over a grubby white vest, his flat cap pushed back from a forehead beaded with sweat. He looked at them suspiciously, each in turn, then fixed Enzo with cloudy blue eyes. ‘Can I help you, monsieur?’
‘We think there might be something buried under this stone.’ Even as the words left his mouth Enzo thought how ridiculous they sounded.
The gardener looked at the slab and shook his head slowly. ‘Nothing under it but earth, monsieur.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because I laid it there myself. Monsieur Hugues senior had it engraved and asked me to set it in the ground.’
‘But after that,’ Raffin said. ‘Someone could have lifted it and buried something underneath.’
The gardener looked at them as if they were insane. ‘Why would anyone want to do that, monsieur?’
‘It would be possible, though?’ Enzo said.
The old man shrugged. ‘Of course. But I would have known about it.’
‘How?’
‘Because I’ve spent my life here, monsieur. Every single day of it. I’ve kept these gardens for nearly forty years, just like my father before me. I know every blade of grass. You couldn’t lift that slab and lay it down again without me knowing it.’
Enzo didn’t want to believe him. This had to be the place. ‘Do you remember young Hugues falling into the moat?’
‘It was me that pulled him out.’
‘And Utopique?’
‘Dead by the time I got to him.’
‘I suppose the dog is buried under the stone?’ Raffin said.
‘No, monsieur. The stone was just to commemorate the occasion and mark the spot. Utopique was buried in the same place the family have buried their dogs for centuries.’ He pointed towards the treeline. ‘Up there in the woods, with a view down to the château. There’s dozens of them buried up there, each with its own headstone. A kind of dog cemetery, you might say.’
Enzo thought about the dog’s shinbone found in Toulouse, and he and Raffin exchanged glances. An unspoken communion on a single, shared thought. ‘Can you show us?’
The old gardener sighed. ‘I suppose I could.’
As they walked up the hill Charlotte said to him, ‘You know what’s happened down at the château?’
‘I do.’
‘Are you not concerned to see what’s going on?’
‘There’s nothing about the family that concerns me, mademoiselle. I’ve never had any time for the aristocracy.’
‘They pay your wages,’ Raffin said.
‘And I look after their estate. It doesn’t mean I have to like them. I saved that young boy’s life, but it pleased them better to credit the dog. And now he’s killed himself. Good riddance, I say.’
When they reached the treeline, the cut grass gave way to long, tangling undergrowth. Young saplings grew in all the open spaces, trying to reclaim the land taken from nature by man. The gardener led them through the trees to a clearing bounded by the remains of a dry stone wall and a tumbled-down gate. Ancient headstones poked up at odd angles through long, dry grass. There was a sad air of neglect about this hidden burial place.
‘You don’t look after the cemetery, then?’ Raffin said.
‘I never come here. It’s none of my concern.’
‘So somebody could have buried something up here and you wouldn’t know.’
‘The only thing that gets buried up here are dead dogs, monsieur.’
They found Utopique’s grave at the far side of the plot. The headstone was marked simply, Utopique 1971-78. It seemed as undisturbed as all the other graves, but then it would after ten years. Raffin turned to the gardener. ‘We’ll need a couple of shovels.’
The old man looked at him distrustfully. ‘What for?’
Raffin opened his wallet and took out two fifty-euro notes. He folded them and held them out to the gardener. ‘You never come up here. You don’t need to know.’
It took him ten minutes to return with two stout spades. A small enough request in return for a hundred euros. But he was determined to stay and watch, nonetheless. He might have no loyalty to the family, but his curiosity was aroused.
Enzo threw his jacket and satchel to one side and began digging like a man possessed. Raffin laid his jacket carefully on the remains of the wall, and neatly folded back the sleeves of his shirt. He set his feet carefully on the ground to try to avoid getting dirt on his shoes, and joined in. Within minutes both men were perspiring freely, and for all his precautions, Raffin’s shoes were quickly covered with dry, chalky dust. His shirt, wet with sweat, was sticking to his back.
About a foot down they began uncovering bones. Not a skeleton, but individual bones, as if perhaps they had been dug up once before and tossed back in when the hole was refilled. They gathered them in a small pile on one side.
Charlotte leaned against the wall and watched them in silence, her dark eyes deeply brooding. Whatever was in her mind, she kept her own counsel, chewing anxiously on her lower lip as the hole got deeper.
Through the trees they could see blue lights flashing down at the château. Although the body had been removed nearly half an hour earlier, the gendarmes were still there. Taking statements, perhaps, awaiting officers from the
police scientifique to confirm that it was, after all, just a suicide.
Enzo struck something solid. Metal on metal. Both men stopped digging, and Enzo told Raffin to step back. The journalist moved away from the open grave, his neatly coiffured hair falling across a face smeared now with dirt. The gardener stepped forward to take a closer look as Enzo began working more carefully to scrape the earth away from around the lid of a battered, military-green tin trunk. It was just like the others. When, finally, he had removed all the dirt from around the latches, he stepped out of the hole to take a pair of latex gloves from his satchel. He snapped them on and crouched over the trunk again. Carefully, he released the catches and opened the lid. Rusted hinges protested loudly. A fusty, damp smell rose to greet him, and he recoiled with disgust. ‘Jesus….’ The others crowded around to look. The skeletal remains of two legs were folded back at the knee and tied loosely together with plastic twine. The bones were yellow and stained, but undamaged, every tiny metatarsal in the feet preserved intact.
Enzo heard Charlotte gasp. And the gardener said, ‘What the hell is that?’
‘It’s a man’s legs,’ Enzo said. But they were not alone in the trunk. As before, there were another five items. Without looking up he said to Raffin, ‘Get my digital camera out of my bag, Roger.’ The journalist retrieved the camera and handed it to Enzo. Enzo said, ‘We have to be very careful. Don’t want anyone accusing us of contaminating the evidence.’
One by one he lifted the items out to place, singly, on the lid of the trunk and photograph them. There was a brooch, in the shape of a salamander, studded with precious and semi-precious stones. A large gold pendant made in the image of a lion’s head. A lapel pin flag with three vertical stripes of colour—green at the hoist side, yellow and red—a small, green, five-pointed star centred in the yellow band. A replica of a trophy, like a sports cup, with a lid and two large ear-shaped handles. It was engraved with the date 1996. The final item was what appeared to be a referee’s whistle, attached to a neck cord. There were three faint numbers, divided by an oblique, scratched into the metal plating: 19/3.
Enzo replaced each item in the trunk where it had lain and looked up at the faces around him. ‘We’re going to have to tell the gendarmes.’
V.
The old retainer who had first greeted them on their arrival walked with them now from the house across the uneven cobbles of the courtyard. He seemed older than just three hours ago. As if one death hadn’t been enough! He had served the family for more than forty years, he told them. He had known three generations of d’Hautvillers. And now they were gone. He had outlived them all, and it would fall to Hugues’ first cousin to carry on the line.
‘He was a very bright young man,’ he said of Hugues. ‘Too bright, really. They say the star that burns twice as bright burns half as long. But his light burned out when his parents died. He was an only child, you see. And his only raison d’être seemed to be gaining the approval of his parents. He did everything to please them. It broke his heart when they sent him to military lycée in Paris, the Pritanée Militaire de la Flèche. He was a gifted child, and it was a gift that required nurture. I think he understood that to achieve his full potential he had to go to Paris. But it was probably reason enough that it pleased his parents. All the same, it distressed him to be away from them.’
They crossed the bridge and turned west, past a couple of gendarmes and several unmarked police vehicles, and followed the moat along to the gate.
‘Of course, you know that he had a brilliant career ahead of him in the Conseil d’État.’
Enzo felt guilty that they had kept up the pretence of knowing the young Hugues.
‘But when news reached him of the death of his parents in that dreadful car crash, he simply bought himself out and came back here to mourn. Seven years of solitude.’ The old man shook his head. ‘He was not interested in company, or in travelling. Occasional trips to Paris to deal with legal and financial affairs. But he spent most of his time locked away in the library reading. Endlessly reading. Or walking the estate. He would be gone for hours on cold winter days, striding over the hills. Didn’t even keep a dog. Wouldn’t have one after…well, you know. Said no dog could ever serve him so well as Utopique.’
When they reached the gate, Enzo could see crime scene tape fluttering in the breeze up along the treeline, and a scribble of blue and pink where a group of gendarmes stood waiting. That was when they heard the first distant drone of the helicopter, thrumming rotors beating warm air as it dropped altitude over the vineyards at the end of its short flight from Paris.
The old man gazed up into the clear sky, searching for a first sight of it. When, finally, he saw it, he seemed disappointed and turned away. Enzo walked with him, and Raffin and Charlotte followed. He drifted along the edge of the moat, staring gloomily into its stillness. ‘You’ve no idea why he did it?’ Enzo asked.
‘Why he killed himself?’ The old man shook his head. ‘None. If he’d been going to do something like that, I’d have thought it would have been after his parents died.’ He lifted his arms, then let them fall again to his sides, as if signalling the futility of ever trying to understand what moved men to do what they did.
‘Had he been depressed recently?’ Charlotte asked.
‘He was a very melancholy young man. He was only thirty-six. But, of course, you know that. Hardly old enough to be carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. But he always seemed to.’ The old family retainer stopped to remember, and Enzo reflected that he must have known Hugues from cradle to coffin. ‘Not depressed, as such,’ the old man said suddenly. He searched for the right word. ‘Agitated. Yes, I’d say he was agitated these last days. Spent more time in bed than usual. Wasn’t eating properly. Drinking far too much. But, then, that had become something of a habit.’
The distant beat of the helicopter had become a roar, and they turned to look as it swooped down, slowing abruptly and then settling itself gently on the grass. Its near side door swung open and Juge Lelong climbed out, aided by a uniformed officer of the Police Nationale. A third, plainclothes officer, followed. The judge spotted Enzo. He ducked and hurried out from beneath the rotors, before straightening up and running a hand back through ruffled hair. His suit was creased from the flight, and he tried to tug a little style back into its skewed lines. He strode purposefully towards Enzo and the others, his minions trotting in his wake like well-trained dogs. Behind him, the helicopter pilot cut its motors, and the blades slowed with a descending whine. Enzo knew that the judge was not going to be pleased with him.
Juge Lelong stopped in front of Enzo and lit a cigar, blowing smoke into the hot afternoon air. ‘You’re a persistent man.’
‘So I’ve been told.’
‘You were told,’ said the judge, ‘to keep your sticky little fingers out of the honey pot. But you just couldn’t resist, could you?’
‘As far as I’m aware, we don’t live in a police state. Yet.’
The judge delivered a long look of withering contempt. ‘You’re an amateur, Macleod. And I think the Garde des Sceaux made it perfectly clear that you were to leave matters to the professionals.’
‘If we were to wait for the professionals to get a result, we’d all be picking up our pensions,’ Raffin said.
Juge Lelong swung his head slowly to encompass Raffin within his glare. ‘And who are you?’
‘Roger Raffin.’ Raffin smiled affably and held out his hand.
If Lelong saw it, he chose to ignore it. ‘Ah, yes. The journalist.’ He spat out the word journalist as if it had a bitter taste.
‘That’s right. I’m following Enzo Macleod’s investigation. He’s just uncovered what are certainly more of Jacques Gaillard’s remains. And when the story appears in Libération tomorrow, I think it’s you people who are going to look like the amateurs.’ He pulled a small notebook from his pocket and drew a pen from its spine. ‘Any comment?’
Juge Lelong’s comment was contained within
the look he drew the journalist. And if his look had been words, they would have been unprintable.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I.
The Rue des Tanneries, in the thirteenth arrondissement, was in the heart of what had once been the poorest quartier of Paris. The tanneries, which crowded the narrow streets and filled the air with noxious odours, washed their leather in the river Bièvre, polluting the water that powered the mills along its banks. And when Jean Gobelin opened his tapestry factory in the fifteenth century, his new techniques with scarlet dyes turned the river blood red. It was here, in the offices and warehouse of a former coal merchant, that Charlotte had chosen to establish her home and consulting rooms.
‘I’m told,’ she said, ‘that in the old days, on a moonlit midsummer’s night, the streets looked as if they were covered in snow. Everything was layered with a fine, white dust from the treatment of the leather. I guess people must have breathed that stuff in every day. No wonder life expectancy was low.’
Enzo looked from the open kitchen window down into the street below. Most of the buildings were commercial, occupied by offices and wholesale suppliers. The ground-floor windows of Charlotte’s place were barred, the door grilled and padlocked. A heavy, retracting metal door guarded the entrance to the ground-floor storage area of the old warehouse.
Enzo turned to watch her preparing food on the worktop. It was a bright, modern kitchen with a large, blue-painted table at the window. ‘What on earth made you set up base here?’
She smiled. ‘So I wouldn’t bump into any of my clients in the street when I go out shopping.’ She returned to the chopping of vegetables. ‘I’ve made a few changes to the place. Why don’t you take a look around?’
They had come in through a waiting room downstairs, and climbed up a narrow staircase to the first-floor living area. Another three steps led up from the kitchen to a huge, sprawling séjour beyond a sliding Japanese screen door. Venetian blinds diffused the light from windows which ran along the front wall from floor to ceiling. A superstructure of metal cross-supports held up a steeply pitched roof. Brick walls were painted white. A bank of computer screens and monitors flickered on a long table pushed up against the windows. Beyond them, two low settees defined a living space subdivided by shelves lined with files and books.