The Critic ef-2

by Peter May

  Enzo stood in the dark of the hall, listening for the slightest sound. Then he heard the creak of a floorboard, the clatter of something fallen or dropped. A soft curse. The intruder was in the grande salle.

  In that moment, when he knew where his adversary was, Enzo sprinted up the staircase to the half-landing and pressed himself against the stone wall, trying to stop his own breathing from drowning out other sounds. He was in the deepest shadow here. Distant lightning flashed through the windows on the floor above, to zigzag down the steps towards him and then vanish, and Enzo ran swiftly up to the second floor while the image of the stairs was still burned in his mind’s eye.

  One hand pressed against the wall to guide him, he worked his way along to the huge studded door of the grande salle. It stood open, but the density of darkness beyond it was suffocating. He reached a hand inside the door to feel for the light switch. It clicked loudly in the vast stillness of the room. But there was no light. He did not have the courage to venture into the darkness, and retreated to the landing, where he stood for several long minutes, reflecting on his stupidity. He had been suckered in here on someone else’s terms, someone who knew exactly where he was. Someone who knew exactly what their next move would be, while he could only guess at it. But it was not too late for Enzo to change the rules, withdraw from the game. It was not too late for common sense to prevail.

  More lightning briefly illuminated the staircase, and he saw a shadow move from the landing above him, the rasp of leather soles on stone. And the memory of Braucol dangling, bloody and dead, from the rafters of the pigeonnier, fuelled fresh anger.

  ‘You bastard! Come out and face me like a man!’ His voice echoed back at him from cold stone and died in the dark. With his knife held at arm’s length ahead of him, he began up the final two flights of stairs to the top of the chateau, one soft step at a time.

  From the half-landing he looked up towards the gallery and saw the faintest moonlight edging broken clouds in a ragged sky beyond. But the rain was still falling, heavy now, relentless, drumming on the roof, drowning out all other sound. With barely enough light to see by, Enzo edged himself up the last of the steps, moving out and onto the gallery just as the far-off lightning underlit a turbulent sky and cast momentary flickering light all along the open corridor. Tiled floors. Wattle and daub walls, bleached timbers. The blade of his knife flashed briefly in the dark. And a shadow rose up in front of him. A shadow without face or form. And pain shot up his forearm to his elbow as his knife went clattering away across the tiles. He had no time even to call out before something dark and heavy swung out of the night to catch him square on the side of the head. He dropped to his knees and fell face-forward to the floor. A boot sunk into the soft muscle of his stomach and robbed him of his ability to breath. He rolled over, away from the pain, and looked up as his attacker raised a blade level with his head. The final gasp of the storm breathed light across the sky behind him, and he saw the killer in full silhouette as he crouched down to deliver the final, fatal blow. The lightning passed in a moment, and darkness absorbed him again into obscurity. The rain still hammered on the roof.

  Enzo’s outstretched hand found the handle of his dropped knife. He grasped it, and in desperation, lunged towards where his opponent had been. He felt contact, the sound of his blade slicing through soft flesh and heard a scream. In an unexpected flood of moonlight, he saw his attacker recoil and turn around as a second figure appeared behind him. For several ludicrous moments, both men appeared almost to be dancing, locked in furious embrace, each grunting from the effort of trying to gain ascendancy over the other. Then they took several forced steps backwards and toppled to the floor in a tangle of arms and legs. Enzo heard the sickening crack of skull on terracotta, a gasp of pain, and then one man detached himself from the other to fly past Enzo, heading for the stairs. Even above the thrum of the rain Enzo could hear his panicked retreat down the staircase. Rasping breath, a sob of pain, footsteps clattering on stone. The other man groaned.

  The nausea which had filled Enzo’s world for several long moments retreated, and he managed to get to his feet. With shaking hands he found his penlight and snapped it on. The figure on the tiles rolled into the tiny pool of yellow light thrown by the torch, and Enzo saw with a shock that it was Bertrand.

  II

  Floodlights on the chai illuminated the forecourt, casting the long shadow of the pigeonnier towards the trees. The rain had washed away most of the blood on the steps and the grass, except where it had pooled in the shelter of the pigeonnier. The gendarmes had untied Braucol and removed the body, evidence in a criminal investigation. The child’s swing stirred gently in a current of damp air. The night was sticky warm. The storm and its rain had passed, and mist rose now from all around the castle grounds. A police van was parked beneath the trees, its blue light flashing hypnotically. All the lamps outside the chateau had been turned on, and through the back window of the gite, Enzo could see the two gendarmes who guarded its entrance, installed for the night, smoking and talking in low voices that carried on the brume.

  ‘Hold still, Papa!’ Sophie’s face was close to his, dabbing disinfectant on the grazing at the side of his head. He could see her tear-stained eyes, and was unsure whether she had wept in grief for Braucol or in relief because her father was safe. Both, perhaps, or maybe it was just the shock. ‘You poor thing,’ she said. ‘I hate that man! He could have killed you.’

  ‘I think that was his intention, Sophie.’

  ‘He could have killed us both.’ A subdued Bertrand held a bag of frozen peas to the back of his head.

  ‘You’re perfectly capable of looking after yourself,’ Sophie told him. ‘But my Papa’s an old man.’

  ‘Thank you, Sophie,’ Enzo said. ‘That makes me feel so much better.’ He was sitting on a chair in the sejour in his boxer shorts, having stripped off his blood-soiled clothes and washed his hands. But he still felt dirty.

  The gendarmes had spent nearly an hour taking statements. Enzo had half-expected to see David Roussel, but of the gendarmes who appeared, none was familiar. Bertrand had described to them how he and Sophie had returned late from a meal out to find Enzo’s car at the foot of the stairs, blood on the steps, the dead dog. And then seen lights and heard shouting from the chateau. If it hadn’t been for his intervention, Enzo’s would-be assassin might well have succeeded in killing him.

  But Bertrand was still furious with himself. ‘I had him,’ he kept saying. ‘I was stronger than him, I could have taken him.’ And Enzo thought how Bertrand was probably stronger than most men he knew.

  But when they had fallen, it was Bertrand who had struck his head and was momentarily disabled. All that he had been left with, when Enzo’s attacker made his escape, was a handful of blood-stained material torn from a jacket pocket. Enzo had told him to keep that to himself when the police arrived. He did not want the piece of pocket disappearing into some repository in a rural gendarmerie, where it would probably languish, wasted evidence, for weeks, months, or even years.

  He asked for it now, and Bertrand handed him the scrap of torn green fabric. ‘Linen,’ he said, as he held it up to the light, and winced as Sophie dabbed more disinfectant in his face. There was the remains of some embroidered emblem along one edge, unidentifiable with its shreds of ripped and broken thread. ‘And good silk thread. He’s not short of a few euros, our killer.’

  ‘Is it his blood, do you think?’ Bertrand said.

  ‘Probably. I definitely cut him. Although it could be Braucol’s. But it won’t be hard to establish if it’s human or animal.’ He reached for his shoulder bag and took out a clear plastic ziplock evidence bag and dropped it in. He closed his eyes, and the image of the puppy dangling on the end of the rope was still there, engraved in his memory. ‘This man’s a psychopath. And every one of us is going to be in danger until he’s caught.’

  He opened his eyes to find Sophie looking into them, concern etched all over her face. ‘Oh, Papa, I don’t l
ike this.’ She sat on his knee, as she had so often as a little girl, and put her arms around him.

  ‘No, I don’t like it either, Sophie. Which is why you and Bertrand are going back to Cahors first thing in the morning.’

  She pulled away. ‘No!’

  ‘We can’t leave you here on your own, Mister Macleod.’ Bertrand stood up, pushing out inflated pectorals, as if somehow his youthful macho posturing would make the old buck back down.

  ‘That’s exactly what you’re going to do, Bertrand. I’m putting Sophie in your care. Anything happens to her, you’ll have me to answer to.’ And he raised a quick finger at Sophie to preempt her protests. ‘This is not up for discussion, Sophie. You’re out of here. Both of you. First thing.’

  Chapter Twenty

  I

  Early sunlight fell in wedges between buildings, casting the shadow of Christ across the warm tarmac in the Place Jean Moulin. Enzo squeezed his 2CV into a blue zone parking space and set the dial on his permit for the maximum hour and a half of free parking. He stepped out to breathe air freshened by the storm, and felt the sun warm on his face.

  The events of the previous night had, like a nightmare, retreated with the clearing of the sky and the rising of the sun. He had watched Bertrand’s van disappearing down the chateau ’s tree-lined drive towards the road, Sophie’s continued protests still ringing in his ears. And when they were gone, he had turned back to the gite with a deep sense of depression that even the yards of sailor blue sky above him could not lift.

  Now he turned down the Avenue Jean Calvet towards the electronic gate of the gendarmerie. The same attractive gendarme with the Mediterranean eyes greeted him at the accueil, but this time she wasn’t smiling. When he asked for Gendarme Roussel she told him to wait.

  It was several long minutes before she returned and instructed him to follow her. The sway of her hips ahead of him, emphasised by the movement of the holstered gun on her belt, was hypnotising as he trailed her upstairs and into a long corridor. Halfway along it, she knocked on a door and opened it into a large office. Enzo saw the plaque on the door. Adjudant Brigade. And he began to get a bad feeling.

  A secretary showed him into the adjutant’ s office, and a tall man in full uniform turned from the window to cast a cold eye of assessment over him. His office was bigger than the one Roussel shared with two other officers downstairs. His desk was enormous, and groaned with papers and files, all stacked and grouped in meticulous piles. On the wall behind it was a large chart of the Gendarmerie Departementale du Tarn, with the Groupement at Albi at the head of a pyramidic command structure. The Compagnie at Gaillac was highlighted in orange, as were the eleven communes that it controlled.

  The adjutant offered Enzo a cursory handshake. ‘You seem to be very popular with would-be assassins, Monsieur Macleod.’

  ‘ Failed would-be assassins,’ Enzo told him.

  The adjutant raised an eyebrow, then rounded his desk to drop into a well-worn leather swivel chair and balance a pair of reading glasses on the end of a thin nose. As he opened a file in front of him, he waved a hand vaguely in the air. Which Enzo took to be an invitation to sit. So he drew up a chair and sat down to wait expectantly. It gave him a moment to weigh up the senior ranking officer of the Compagnie. The hair was almost all gone from his crown, the remaining growth from around the sides slicked across it in a poor attempt to disguise his baldness. Where it had gone grey, black hair dye had taken on a ginger hue. He had long, feminine hands, with immaculately manicured fingernails. His face was shaved to a shiny smoothness, and Enzo could smell the lingering traces of his aftershave. That he had been brought here at all, was worrying to Enzo. The adjutant’ s hostility was evident in his body language, and Enzo knew that vanity like his meant he would never willingly put his rank to one side.

  The a djutant dragged his eyes away from the file. ‘What do you want with Roussel?’

  This was not a question that Enzo had anticipated. ‘You’re aware that the juge d’instruction at Albi has made me a lay consultant on the Petty murder.’

  ‘I am.’ His disapproval was apparent in the curl of his lip.

  ‘Gendarme Roussel sent several samples to Toulouse for forensic examination. At my request. I was looking for the results.’

  The adjutant reached across his desk, lifted a large buff enveloped and slid it towards Enzo. ‘Preliminary reports came back yesterday.’ He watched as Enzo took the envelope, pulled out a sheaf of stapled papers and gave them a quick glance. ‘Do you have any idea where he is?’

  Enzo looked up, surprised, and let the papers fall back into their envelope. ‘What?’

  ‘Gendarme Roussel.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’

  The adjutant removed his reading glasses and folded his hands on the desk in front of him. ‘Gendarme Roussel took several days leave at short notice for what he described as personal reasons. He was due back the day before yesterday. Which is when I discovered that his wife had been here looking for him the day before that. Several of his colleagues suspect marital problems. I thought you might be able to throw some light on his whereabouts.’

  Enzo was very still, hardly daring to think the worst. ‘He’s gone missing?’

  ‘Officially, he is absent without leave. Which means he will be arrested the moment he turns up.’

  It was a short walk down to the roundabout, and the Place de la Liberation, but Enzo took every step as if he carried the weight of the world on his shoulders. And it seemed like a very long way. He moved like a man in a trance through the dappled shade of the chestnut trees, leaves and chestnuts falling around him, drying in the morning sun and crunching underfoot. And he slumped into a chair under the yellow awning of the Grand Cafe des Sports and gazed out across the square with eyes that did not see.

  It barely seemed credible that Gendarme Roussel should have become one more case in his own missing persons file. Enzo had feared that someone else would go missing during this year’s grape harvest, but had never for one moment thought that it might be Roussel. He tried to convince himself that it was just coincidence. That there would be some rational explanation. But although he knew that life could throw up some extraordinary coincidences, he never believed in them when it came to an investigation. There were always reasons. For everything.

  He searched through his mind for connections between Roussel and the other missing persons in the file. They were not hard to find. Like all the others, Roussel was a local man. He had been personally acquainted with one of them. And he had gone missing at the same time of year. But there had to be something else. Something he wasn’t seeing. His colleagues thought it was a simple case of domestic disharmony. But that’s exactly what Roussel himself had thought about Serge Coste. And Coste had ended up pickled in wine, just like Petty.

  The thought of Petty took Enzo back to the day in the grande salle at Chateau des Fleurs when Pierric Lefevre had dug out the American’s family records from the old archive. In a strange sort of way, that made Petty a local, too. Or, at least, his antecedents. But it made no sense, for it had been Petty’s first trip to Gaillac. His only connection to the place was historical.

  Enzo’s reflections were interrupted by a young waiter with dark, curly, gelled hair shaved close around the sides of his head. ‘ Bonjour monsieur. Je vous ecoute. ’

  Enzo glanced up. ‘ Un petit cafe, s’il vous plait.’

  The waiter cocked his head. ‘You’re the guy that went off with Braucol.’ He grinned, shaking his head, some affectionate memory of the puppy dog coming back to him. ‘How is the little guy?’

  Enzo didn’t have the heart to tell him. ‘Doing good.’

  The waiter laughed. ‘He was a pain in the ass, you know. But I kind of miss him.’

  And as he went off to get the coffee, Enzo thought how he would miss him, too. He turned quickly to the envelope the adjutant had given him from the Police Scientifique in Toulouse, and drew out the preliminary report. He ran his eye do
wn the text, nodding to himself as it confirmed what he had suspected. Petty’s DNA sample did not match the sample recovered from the speck of blood inside the glove. The chances were that if the blood in the glove did not belong to the killer himself, then it belonged to a relative. But if they got themselves a suspect, familial DNA matching could still secure a conviction. If they could find a suspect.

  He flipped over a page and felt sudden goosebumps rise up all across his shoulders. He felt his face sting as if he had just been slapped. He stood up as the waiter arrived with his coffee, and dropped a couple of coins on the table.

  ‘Give it to someone else.’

  II

  She was sitting at the table where he had first seen her. She was reading, just as she had been then. But she greeted him somewhat differently. When his shadow fell across her book she looked up, irritation replaced immediately by a smile that broke like sunshine across her face. ‘You’re back. I’m so glad. I had a thought about my dad, and those vineyards he visited…’ She took off her sunglasses, green eyes flashing and stood up to kiss him.

  His recoil was almost imperceptible, but it was like a shutter dropping between them. Her smile was gone in an instant. ‘What’s wrong?’

  He dropped the buff envelope on the table and sat in the free chair opposite, leaving her to stand looking down at him. He glanced out across the shimmering green and red vines. The harvesters were out again after the rain to gather the last of this year’s recolte. Then he looked up to meet the concern in her eyes and remembered how attractive she was. Clasps held chestnut hair clear of her face. Her lips were pale in a lightly tanned face, and he remembered the feel of them against his. Soft, sensuous. And he recalled her mother’s words in Sacramento: ‘There have been a string of older men in her life, almost as if by making them love her she’s proving to herself that it wasn’t her fault that her father didn’t.’