Blowback

by Peter May

  “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 shiver 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.”

  It was clear that Guy did not believe a word of it, but saw the futility of pursuing it further. His eyes turned toward Dominique. “What do you want?”

  But it was Enzo who replied. “Why did Marc invite the whole Paris press corps down here the day he died?”

  Guy’s eyes darted warily back toward Enzo. “I have no idea.”

  “I think you do, Guy.”

  “And I suppose you’re going to tell me.”

  “We both know that Marc was in deep trouble. Whether or not he was actually going to lose a star is irrelevant. He thought he was. Add to that a gambling debt of more than a million that would take the sale of the auberge to pay off, and you have a man cornered by his addiction, plus his own paranoia.”

  The color was slowly draining from Guy’s face.

  “He believed he was on the point of losing everything he had spent his life to create. Chez Fraysse. His reputation. His public image. He faced ruin and humiliation. But he wasn’t going to go out with a whimper, was he?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes, you do. He wanted to go out in a blaze of publicity, didn’t he, Guy? He wanted all those journalists whom he’d spent his life cultivating, right here on the spot to cover his suicide. Everything was lost, but he was going to make one last, grand theatrical gesture. As flamboyant in death as he’d been in life.”

  Dominique said, “The only trouble was, the insurance wouldn’t have paid out if he’d committed suicide.”

  “And he might not have cared,” Enzo said. “But you did. And so did Elisabeth. Because, with Marc gone, and no insurance payout, you’d have lost everything, too. When you went up there that afternoon and found him dead in the buron, you knew that you faced ruin. That’s why you doctored the scene to make it look like a murder, isn’t it?” Enzo drew a deep breath. “Whose idea was it, Guy? Yours? Elisabeth’s?”

  But it wasn’t a question that Guy was about to answer. He returned their stares, blue eyes clouded and surly. “I think,” he said, “that you are going to have a helluva job trying to prove that.”

  And Enzo realized just how true that was.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Elisabeth Fraysse was nowhere to be found in the auberge, and none of the hotel’s staff seemed to know where she was. Enzo walked Dominique through the reception area to the front door.

  “She’s bound to show up sooner or later,” Dominique said. “But Guy’s right. How on earth are we going to prove it?”

  Enzo shook his head. “I have no idea.”

  “I’d better get back down to Thiers. I’m going to have to write up some kind of report, even although I can’t draw any definitive conclusions.” She hesitated. “There have been questions asked by divisional HQ about just how much cooperation I’ve been extending to you on this investigation. I guess someone at the gendarmerie has been shooting his mouth off.”

  “I’m sorry, Dominique, if I’ve got you into trouble.”

  She grinned. “Don’t be. I can look after myself.” She hesitated. “How did you get on in Paris?”

  He briefed her on his encounters with the ex-Michelin man and Graulet. She listened in thoughtful silence.

  “Actually, I meant with Charlotte.”

  And she immediately saw a wistful smile crease his eyes.

  “I was introduced to my son for the first time.”

  Dominique’s face lit up. “Oh, my God, Enzo, that’s wonderful. How did you change her mind?”

  “I didn’t. My daughter did.”

  “Sophie?” Dominique was taken aback.

  “No, Kirsty. It’s ironic, really. My daughter, who’s not really my daughter, was the only one who could make Charlotte see how important it was to her son that he had a father.”

  Dominique’s eyebrows gathered in a frown. “Not really your daughter?”

  He smiled sadly. “That’s a story for another day.” They passed through the revolving door out on to the step. “I’ll go up and get my stuff from my room, and see you back down in Thiers.”

  She nodded, holding him in her dark eyes for a moment, intrigued and beguiled, and then reached up to touch his face with her fingertips before turning and hurrying down the steps toward her van.

  He watched her go, and felt a pang of regret with the knowledge that their relationship, however nascent and intense, was destined to be stillborn.

  He went back inside, then, and up to his room. It was clear to him immediately that someone had been through the few items he had left. Some shirts and underwear in a drawer, some books and papers in his canvas bag, were not as he had left them. He felt a bad taste in his mouth. He packed quickly and went back downstairs, leaving his keycard at the deserted reception, and headed out to the car park in search of his car.

  As he rounded the east wing of the auberge, he almost collided with a large man wheeling a barrow full of garden r
efuse. It was Lucqui, his cap pulled down low on his brow, big hands and fingernails ingrained with the black, volcanic soil of the plateau. Enzo had not seen him since the night Lucqui had pulled him out of the stream below the waterfall. Lucqui barely acknowledged him as he wheeled his barrow past. But Enzo stopped, turning to call after him. “I never had the chance to say thank you, Lucqui.”

  Lucqui put down the barrow. “No thanks necessary. I’d have done the same for a dog.”

  Enzo raised a wry smile. “Well, that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.”

  And for the first time since he’d met him he saw Lucqui smile.

  “You wouldn’t have seen Madame Fraysse, would you?”

  The big gardener retreated behind his black eyes. “No.” And he picked up the handles of his barrow. Then stopped and put them down again. “First of November, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You’ll probably find her at the cemetery, then. She always visits Marc at Toussaint.”

  ***

  The cemetery at Saint-Pierre was just outside the village, on a west-facing slope. It had an uninterrupted view of the Massif laid out below it, such a view to take with you to eternity that it must have seemed almost welcoming to those reaching a certain age of infirmity. But Marc Fraysse had been nowhere near that time when folk might start to think of death. He had taken his own sortie de secours far too early. A sad choice for a man with so much more to offer.

  Enzo pushed open the gates in the high east wall, and wandered down among the tombs and headstones newly bedecked with fresh flowers, to the Fraysse family tomb on the lower slope. Elisabeth stood by the huge marble slab engraved in gold with the name of her late husband, his parents and grandparents, the bones of three generations lying together in the infinite darkness below. She turned at the sound of his footsteps on the gravel, and he saw the anger in her eyes as she turned away to gaze down again at her husband’s tomb.

  He stopped beside her, and without looking at him she said, “I remember the very first time I set eyes on him in the boat shed on the lake. He seemed so young. And innocent. Those beautiful big eyes of his fixing themselves on me, and casting their spell, even then.” She shook her head. “For all his faults, Monsieur Macleod, and they were many, I never stopped loving him.” And she turned, to fix him with steel cold eyes. “I don’t like being spied on.”

  He nodded, and saw that those tiny flocons of snow he had seen earlier in Thiers were starting to fall now on the hill. But so light and insubstantial were they, an existence immeasurably ephemeral, that they vanished the moment they touched the ground. As did, in the grand scheme of things, the lives of the men and women lying here beneath it. He said, “I know that you and Guy faked Marc’s murder to hide his suicide.”

  Her face turned almost instantly pale, and he saw the shock in her eyes, followed by resignation, and then something that seemed almost like relief. “Guy told you that?”

  “I’ve just come from the hotel.” Not a lie. But he knew she would put her own construction on it. “I know about the suicide clause in the life assurance policy. And Marc’s gambling debt. I spoke to the man he owed the money to.”

  She closed her eyes and let out a long, slow breath, as if she had been holding it in all these years. “I’m glad,” she said at length. “It was a secret almost impossible to bear. The tears I cried over those few words he left me. And still do.” He saw those same tears well again in her eyes now. “I suppose I always understood why he did it. The debt, the rumors about losing a star. But it was typically selfish of him not to think, or care, how it would leave me, or Guy. He never could resist the grand gesture, the encore, the bow at the end of the show. It was always about him. No one else.”

  “Tell me how it happened.”

  She glanced at him, but her eyes flickered away, unable to hold his gaze. “The statement we gave the police was true, up to a point. Marc had gone off for his usual afternoon run, but failed to return on schedule. It was approaching prep time for the evening service, and when he didn’t answer his cellphone, Guy went off to look for him. Which is when he found him dead inside the buron. He had shot himself, and left a note.”

  Enzo said, “A man intent on taking his own life wouldn’t normally go to the trouble of burying his phone and his knife?”

  She turned, almost startled. “You know about that?”

  “I recovered them both. Do you want to tell me how that came about?”

  “Guy buried the pouch and got rid of the gun. But not immediately. Not before he had come back down to the hotel and broken the news to me.” She paused, lost for a moment in painful recollection. “I suppose I must have been pretty difficult for him to deal with. I was close to hysteria. It… it didn’t seem possible that Marc was gone. Just like that. A flame extinguished. Vanished. Out of my life forever. Like he’d never even existed. But Guy was so calm. He forced me to sit down and face the reality. He’d only recently found out about the extent of the gambling debts himself. And he made me look at the suicide clause in the life policy. Not only had we lost Marc, we were going to lose everything else as well.”

  “So it was his idea to make it look like murder?”

  She nodded. “He persuaded me to come back up to the buron with him. I couldn’t go in. Couldn’t get past the entrance. I sat outside on a rock and wept like I have never wept in my life. I suppose it didn’t matter whether he had been murdered or taken his own life, my grief was just as great.”

  “And just as genuine.”

  She glanced at him through tear-filled eyes. “Yes.” Her breath trembled as she breathed, trying to control herself, salvage something of her dignity. “Guy removed the suicide note and the gun, and buried the pouch to make it look like a robbery. He’d even had the presence of mind to take another pair of boots up with him, a size smaller than his own, to make another set of footprints in the mud.”

  Enzo then realized that the fifth set of prints must have belonged to Anne Crozes.

  “That’s when we called the police and waited for someone to come. It seemed like an eternity, trapped up there by our own deception, lost in guilt and grief for the man we both loved. I read his suicide note again and again. Words burned into my memory forever. I look at it still. On the anniversary of his death. On his birthday. At Toussaint. And the pain never diminishes.”

  “You still have it?” Enzo hardly dared to believe it was possible.

  “Of course. They were his last words, Monsieur Macleod. How could I throw them away?”

  ***

  As they drove into the car park at the auberge, Enzo following Elisabeth Fraysse in her Mercedes Sports, he noticed that Guy’s yellow Renault Trafic had gone. Although there were still one or two staff vehicles there, the hotel itself seemed deserted. Snow fell through the gloom like tiny vanishing fireflies, and the darkness gathering beyond the clouds gave witness to the coming night.

  Enzo followed in the wake of the widow’s grief, past the door of the suite he had occupied, before they stopped outside the door of Marc Fraysse’s study. Elisabeth produced a key, and unlocked it, with the merest flicker of a glance at Enzo. There was no doubt that both Elisabeth and Guy knew exactly who had been in Marc’s study, and when.

  She crossed the room to his roll top bureau, pushing back the roller and turning on a desk lamp. The laptop computer and blotter, and the profusion of papers that lay scattered across the desktop, blazed in a pool of intense illumination. She reached into the light, a pale, long-fingered hand, speckled now with the first brown marks of age, and felt beneath a shelf to release some hidden catch. A drawer, which had seemed like a decorative panel, sprung open. Inside it lay Marc Fraysse’s suicide note. Enzo realized how frustratingly close he had been to it every time he had sat at this desk. But how could he have known?

  Elisabeth Fraysse laid her husband’s last words on top of the computer and smoothed them out with the palm of her hand, an almost loving sweep of it across the curled sheet.
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br />   Enzo looked at it, intensely curious. He immediately recognised Marc’s distinctive curlicued handwriting. The note was written on a flimsy sheet of stationery. The ink had already begun to fade, and the top third of the sheet was so badly stained by blood and rainwater that the words had been completely obliterated. The very bottom portion of it was equally disfigured.

  Two words remained from the damaged portion at the top of the note …things differently.

  It went on, I have so many regrets. I just wish I could wipe out the past. I can offer apologies, but I know that forgiveness is more than I have the right to ask for. And in the end, apologies are only words, and words can’t change anything. They can’t take away the hurt. They can’t wipe out the mistakes. And that’s what I want to do. Just wipe it all out. I am so sorry.

  His signature was lost in the water and blood damage.

  “May I see it?” Enzo held out his hand, a distant echo somewhere at the back of his mind of the perfume-stained suicide note left for Jack by Rita.

  Elisabeth nodded, and Enzo took the note carefully between his fingers, turning it over, before holding it against the light of the lamp. He had half-hoped there might be some way to recover the lost words by holding them to the brightest source of light. But the lamp provided no illumination.

  “I’d like to keep this for the moment if I may.” And he stilled her objections before she could voice them by raising his hand. “I promise to return it to you.”

  “I doubt if you’ll be allowed to, Monsieur Macleod. I am sure that the police will want to keep it as evidence.”

  He nodded grimly. “I’d also like a sample of one of Marc’s handwritten menus, if I may?”

  Her eyes searched his face, full of unasked questions, then she turned silently to the filing cabinet and drew out a menu to hand to him. She looked at him very directly, and he saw fear now in her eyes. “What will happen to us?”

  “I imagine you’ll be charged with defrauding the insurance company, and probably also obstruction of a police investigation, tampering with evidence, giving false statements.” He shrugged helplessly. “Just as you understood why Marc killed himself, I understand why you covered it up, Madame Fraysse. But I’m afraid the law will not.”