Blowback

by Peter May

  Blowback

  Blowback

  The Fifth of the Enzo Files

  Peter May

  www.petermay.co.uk

  POISONED PEN PRESS

  Copyright © 2011 by Peter May

  First Edition 2010

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2010932095

  ISBN-13: 978-1-59058-841-3 Hardcover

  ISBN-13: 978-1-59058-843-7 Trade Paperback

  ISBN-13: 978-1-61595-289-2 ePub

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  Poisoned Pen Press

  6962 E. First Ave., Ste. 103

  Scottsdale, AZ 85251

  www.poisonedpenpress.com

  info@poisonedpenpress.com

  DEDICATION

  This book is dedicated to the memory of my friend and mentor,

  Tom Wright

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Epilogue

  More from this Author

  Contact Us

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to offer my grateful thanks to those who gave so generously of their time and expertise during my researches for “Blowback”. In particular, I’d like to express my gratitude to Michel Bras, three-star Michelin chef and owner of the “eighth best restaurant in the world”, for giving me unfettered access to his kitchen, and feeding me some of the best food I have ever tasted; pathologist Steven C. Campman, M.D., Medical Examiner, San Diego, California; Grant Fry, Lead Forensic Specialist, Orange County Sheriff-Coroner Department, California; Patrick Nolan, Ponderosa Kennels, Maryland, USA; Linda Sperco, Blue Ribbon Dog Sports Coaching, New Jersey, USA; NDZ; Bob Dartnel, managing director, Foster & Freeman Ltd., Evesham, England; Karteek Alahari, Oxford Brookes University, England; and John Hally, my brother-in-law, and former pupil of Hutchesons’ Grammar School, now resident in upstate New York, USA. I would also like to offer my thanks and congratulations to Rudolph Chelminski for his excellent book, “The Perfectionist”, on the death of Bernard Loiseau. I found it to be both an inspiration and an indispensible reference book on the history of modern French cuisine.

  EPIGRAPH

  La nature parle et l’expérience traduit.

  —John-Paul Sartre

  PROLOGUE

  Massif Central, France, February 2003

  Dominique slipped the two wooden stakes under her arm and zipped her standard issue waterproof jacket up to the neck. It was still winter cold. Wet now, although the snow remained thick on distant volcanic peaks. She pushed off up the track through the trees. Pine needles lay thick in the mud, the smell of them filling damp air, a powerful, bitter scent of decay, like the smell of death that awaited her at the end of her climb. She felt the chill anticipation of it in her bones.

  Beyond the treeline the hill rose steeply. The little track, bounded by a crumbling dry stone wall, followed its ragged contour before turning sharply to circumvent a stand of dark trees. There it rose again toward the summit where the hill flattened out and stretched away into the misted distance of the high plateau.

  Dominique stopped at the turn and, looking back, was surprised at how far she had climbed. She stood, breathless, for a moment, and saw the blue flashing light of her van at the foot of the track, and the string of parked vehicles that snaked up the narrow road beyond it toward the auberge. She saw a group of tiny figures clustered on the road, an upturned parabole beaming its signal to the gods of some edit suite in Paris where its images, accompanied by some well-chosen sound bites, would be dissected for ease of digestion. A great story! A tragedy! A shock aperitif for prurient consumers of the evening news all over France.

  Wearily the young gendarme turned to face the last few hundred meters of her climb. As she neared the summit she saw, at last, the old ruined stone buron breaking the horizon. It was hard to believe now that such a place had once been inhabited. But only in summer, with the beasts feeding on the great banks of wild flowers and sweet grasses that blanketed the plateau. And maybe then, with its soft estival winds and its unbroken views across the roof of France, it was a good place to be. An escape from the world below. A sense of elevation. Of godliness.

  But today clouds sat low on the peak, drizzling their misery on the world, losing distance in grey mist. And Dominique saw two figures in dark, shiny waterproofs huddled in the shelter of the wet stone, one sitting on broken rocks, bent over, head in hands. The other stood by the opening that led to the shadowed interior of the buron. Its stone roof appeared almost intact, crumbling lauzes that kept out the light but let in the rain, supporting a chimney that had not felt the heat of a fire in years. A second, more dilapidated, roof rose at an angle above it, shelter for the animals when the weather closed in.

  The standing figure stepped forward to shake Dominique’s hand. A familiar face. He was a big man, broad as well as tall, but diminished somehow by grief. His dark blue béret was pulled down low on a furrowed brow, from beneath which grim eyes met hers.

  Dominique glanced at the seated figure, and saw the torment in the woman’s briefly upturned face, before it fell back again into black despair. It was the merest of acknowledgments, but no shake of the hand. The gendarme turned back to the man.

  “Show me.”

  He nodded and bowed his head to duck beneath the lintel as she followed him into the darkness beyond. Their shadows fell across a mud floor where water lay in pools, reflecting broken light from the doorway. A mess of footprints pitted the mud. Dominique unclipped the flashlight from her belt and let its beam wander back through the dark until it found the twisted figure of a man in a tracksuit half-lying in a pool of rainwater turned red by his blood. She felt a short, sharp, involuntary intake of breath briefly inflate her chest. Ten years in the gendarmerie and this was her first murder. While she had, in that time, pulled horribly mutilated corpses from car wrecks, nothing had quite prepared her for looking into the dead, staring eyes of a man whose face was known in every household in France. A face marred by a single bullet wound in the dead center of his forehead. The bullet had passed straight through. She saw the white, grey mess of brain streaked amidst his bloodied hair, and down in the mud, and felt her stomach heave. She let her eyes follow the beam of her flashlight around the body, just barely in control. She heard the quiver in her own voice. “No gun?”

  “None that
I could see.”

  “Anything missing?”

  “He always wore a belt with a pouch to carry his portable and his Thiers. It’s gone.”

  Dominique glanced at him, and felt a tiny frown settle across her eyes. “You think someone killed him for his cellphone and his knife?”

  The man shrugged, a helplessness in the slight movement of his shoulders.

  Dominique felt the first flush of nausea subside. She tipped her head toward the door. This was a crime scene. She knew well enough that nothing should be disturbed until the experts arrived. She followed the man outside, and took the stakes from under her arm to hammer them into soft ground with the mallet she had brought from the van. One on either side of the entrance. Then she stretched a length of blue and white tape between them and watched as it flapped and fibrillated in the breeze.

  “Who found him?”

  “I did.” The man turned painfully blue eyes toward the soft brown of hers. “He left to go for his run as usual, immediately after the lunch service.”

  “He went running every day?”

  The man nodded. “Always the same route. Down the road from the auberge, then up through the trees to the buron, and along the ridge and back down toward the main road.” He sighed. “When he wasn’t back by four we started to get worried. Elisabeth was scared in case he’d had a fall.”

  “Wouldn’t he have phoned?”

  “If conscious yes, I suppose he would.”

  “Why didn’t you phone him?”

  “I did. There was no reply. That’s why I went out looking for him.”

  “What made you look in the buron?”

  “I didn’t at first. When I couldn’t find him I backtracked and checked inside.” He drew in his lips to contain his emotion. “It’s not an easy thing to find your little brother like that.”

  Dominique nodded. She couldn’t really imagine how that must have felt. “What about all these footprints?”

  “There seemed to be a lot of them. Certainly more than he could have made himself. And I guess mine are among them now, too.”

  “Did you touch the body?”

  “No. I approached close enough to see that he was dead. I mean, that was obvious. Then I went back down to the hotel and called you people.”

  Dominique let her gaze fall on the forlorn figure of the woman on the rocks.

  The man answered the unasked question. “She insisted on coming back up with me. Said she wouldn’t believe it if she didn’t see it for herself. She was very nearly hysterical.” His mouth settled in a grim line. “Catatonic now.”

  Dominique walked toward the edge of the track where it began its descent through the falling gloom toward the smudged line of trees below. The arrival of darkness would make access difficult for the police scientifique. It would be morning before a proper search of the area could begin. The vehicles on the road had their lights on now. She turned back toward the figure of the man to find him watching her. “How did the press get here so quickly?”

  A look of sad resignation flitted across his face. “They were already here. Marc had invited them all down from Paris. He loved to entertain, to be the center of attention. And, of course, no journalist in his right mind would refuse an invitation to dine at the table of Marc Fraysse.”

  “What was the occasion?”

  He hesitated. “He was in deep despair. Maybe you were aware of the speculation in the media. That Marc was about to lose a star.”

  “Would that have been so bad?”

  The man’s smile was wry and sad and filled with disbelief. It conveyed with its simple turn of the lips all the history and sophistication which he possessed, that a country gendarme could never acquire. It verged on the patronising. “It would have been everything. Everything he had dedicated his life to achieve. It would have been shocking, humiliating, devastating.”

  Dominique knew that she must appear gauche and guileless to this man, but pressed on. “So why did he invite the media?”

  “He said he wanted to make an announcement.”

  “Which was?”

  The dead man’s brother laid his open palms out before him. “He never made it. We’ll never know.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  Cahors, south-west France, October 2010

  He had bearded and washed the scallops, wonderful fat, succulent noix St. Jacques that the fishmonger in the covered market across the street had reserved for him. They purveyed the delicious aroma of the sea without a hint of fish. He had sliced them in half, along the round, with a razor sharp knife to make medallions, then left them to drain on kitchen paper, their milky sweet juices absorbed by the softness.

  Now he plated up the salad. A few fresh green leaves. Lettuce, baby spinach, rocket, and a drizzle of thick, sweet dressing made with a syrupy balsamic, carefully gathered in a corner of the plate. He turned back to the stove. His Calphalon nonstick sauté pan was smoking hot. Tiny pools of bubbling melted butter and shimmering olive oil ran across its surface as he tipped it one way, then the other, before dropping in the St. Jacques. The sizzling sound of searing scallops filled the room along with their sweet smell. Sixty seconds, and then he flipped them over, pleased with the caramelised crust on the cooked side. Another sixty seconds, and he slipped a thin metal skewer through the side of the fattest of them, deep into its center, before extracting it quickly and raising it to his lips. The merest touch told him that the scallops were warmed to the middle, and therefore cooked. But only just.

  Quickly he arranged five medallions in an elegant heap next to the salad on each plate and swivelled toward the table, one in each hand, to deliver them to the two facing place settings. He had already poured tall glasses of chilled, crisp Gaillac blanc sec from Domaine Sarrabelle. Hélène looked wide-eyed at the plate in front of her and breathed in deeply. “My God, Enzo, they smell fabulous. You’d have any woman eating out of your hand if you served up food like this every evening.”

  Enzo grinned. “Maybe that’s the idea.”

  Hélène raised a sceptical eyebrow. “Hmmm. If only.”

  “But in any case, I’d rather you ate them off the plate than out of my hand, commissaire. And quickly. They won’t keep their heat for long in these temperatures.” No matter how high he had turned up the central heating, the pervasive cold of this early onset winter weather seemed to fill the apartment. Only the heat of the oven and the gas rings seemed to hold it at bay. As he sat down to slice through a scallop and spear a forkful of salad, he glanced from the French windows across the square toward the floodlit twin domes of Cahor’s gothic Saint-Etienne cathedral. The rain slashed diagonally across his line of sight, and he almost imagined he saw an edge of sleet in it. Which would be unprecedented for late October in this ancient Roman city.

  “Delicious.”

  He turned his head to find Hélène beaming at him, as his St. Jacques melted in her mouth. She washed it over with a sip of blanc sec, then dabbed fine, full lips with her napkin.

  She was still a handsome woman for all her forty-odd years. Hair normally piled up beneath the hat of her uniform, tumbled in luxuriant elegance across square shoulders. Only the sixth woman in the history of the République to be appointed Director of Public Security to one of the country’s one hundred départements, she had never quite seen the joke in Enzo’s refusal to call her by her name. He referred to her always as commissaire, as if it were somehow amusing. She had reflected, more than once, that it might also be a subtle way of his telling her that their on-off relationship was doomed never to progress to intimacy. She popped another St. Jacques in her mouth. “I’m afraid there are still no developments in our attempt to identify who’s been trying to kill you.”

  Enzo studied her thoughtfully, distracted by the delicate caramel flavour of the scallops mixing with the sweet, vinegary flavour of the balsamic, and the crisp, slightly bitter tang of the greens. He prepared his palate for the next mouthful with a generous sip of wine and shrugged dismissively. “Well, it’s over a year
since the last attempt. So maybe whoever it was is already dead, or behind bars.” But he knew that was unlikely. With four of Roger Raffin’s celebrated cold cases already solved, and only three remaining, someone out there would be increasingly anxious to stop him.

  Hélène, too, looked less than convinced. But she decided on a change of subject and slipped the last morsel into her mouth before taking a piece of bread to mop up the juices that lingered tantalisingly on her plate. “Where’s Sophie these days?” She glanced around the apartment almost as if expecting to see her suddenly appear.

  “Ah,” Enzo said. “I’m glad to say I finally persuaded my daughter to resume her education. I was very disappointed when she dropped out of university to go and work at Betrand’s gymn.”

  “Oh?” Hélène feigned interest. “What’s she studying?” And she was surprised to detect a hint of evasion in Enzo’s response.

  He leaned across the table to take her empty plate and carried the two of them back to the breakfast bar. “Oh, she’s away on a stage. Just a few weeks’ work placement.” He paused. “I’ll be with you in a moment.”

  And he turned his attention to the main course. A filet mignon de porc which he had marinated in a hoisin, five-spice, and honey sauce, and then roasted in a hot oven. He removed it now from the tinfoil he had wrapped it in before cooking the St. Jacques, and cut it into moist, tender discs which he arranged on a warmed plate. Over the meat he drizzled a reduction of the marinade, then served the cubed, honeyed roast potatoes which had been crisping in the oven on a bed of rosemary.

  “Voila!” He delivered his plates to the table like a magician presenting the denouement of a complex trick. He grabbed a bottle of red and expertly removed the cork. “Some oak-aged syrah to go with it. Enough strength and fruit in it, I think, to stand up to the sweetness of the pork.” He poured them each a glass.

  “Mon dieu, Enzo!” Hélène surveyed the plate in front of her, breathing in its aromas. “Are you trying to seduce me?”