Blowback ef-5

by Peter May

  She turned a weary expression toward him. It was a subject which had almost certainly worn thin. “I don’t know that he believed it. But he was certainly afraid of it.” She sipped at her steaming herbal tisane. “It is the nightmare of every three-star chef. The achieving of each star is a long hard road of blood, sweat, and frustration, Monsieur. Of terrible uncertainty in an uncertain world. Each star won is a cause for celebration. When you have one you want two. When you have two, you want three. But when you have three, there is nowhere to go but down. It was Marc’s constant dread that he would lose a star. It drove everything he did, almost to the point of obsession.”

  “But where did the speculation come from? Michelin?”

  “Oh, no. Michelin would never be so indiscreet. It originated entirely in the media.”

  “Something must have given rise to it.”

  She sighed. “It was all sparked, seemingly, by a single, malicious article published by one particular Parisian food critic. A freelance critic, Monsieur Macleod, who writes for several of the more distinguished Paris publications, but also has his own online blog. An unpleasant man.”

  “You knew him personally?”

  “I didn’t, no. But Marc did. He and a few other Michelin-starred chefs were frequently criticised in his columns. He was, and still is, a fierce critic of the Michelin system, and likes to think that he alone should be the judge of good taste in French cuisine.” She paused, some dark thought passing like a shadow across her face, reflecting the shifting patterns of light and shade in the landscape beyond. “There was an enmity between him and Marc which dated back to the time when he was awarded his third star.”

  Enzo frowned. “You told me yesterday, Madame Fraysse, that your husband did not have an enemy in the world.”

  Her smile was rueful. “With the sole exception, perhaps, of Jean-Louis Graulet. But Graulet didn’t murder Marc, Monsieur Macleod. He was in Paris the day that Marc died.”

  Enzo finished dipping the remains of his croissant in his coffee and poured himself a fresh cup from the fine Limoges china jug on the table. He sipped on it thoughtfully. “Did Marc have a biographer?”

  “No, he didn’t. But he talked several times about writing a memoir. An autobiography.”

  “A lot of people in his position would hire a professional to ghost write something like that for him.”

  “Oh, not Marc. He would have wanted to do it himself.”

  “And did he?”

  “Not that I know of. I went through all his papers and his computer disks at the time, but there was nothing.” She paused. “Strange, though.”

  “What is?”

  “He had trouble sleeping in the last months. I used to wake at maybe two or three in the morning to find his side of the bed empty and cold. Then I would find him in his petit bureau, huddled over the computer on his desk, tapping away. He was always strangely evasive when I asked him about it. I always had the impression that he was, in fact, writing his memoir and for some reason didn’t want to tell me. A surprise maybe. Which is why I searched for it after his death. But I guess I was wrong.”

  Enzo scratched his chin thoughtfully and realized he hadn’t shaved that morning. “What do you think he was doing on his computer, then, in the small hours of the morning.”

  She shook her head. “I haven’t the faintest idea, Monsieur Macleod.”

  Chapter Seven

  Dominique’s office was small, but unusually well-ordered. Crime prevention posters, calendars, newspaper cuttings, official documents, all were pinned in neat groupings to the yellowing cream-painted walls. Her desk was a paragon of good organisation: in-trays, out-trays, a spotless blotter, a computer screen angled against the wall, and a mouse with mat and keyboard placed side by side in perfect alignment. An empty coffee cup sat on a cardboard coaster. The polished surface of the desk itself was unmarred by unsightly rings or watermarks.

  It was, in its own way, a reflection of Dominique herself. Small, but almost perfectly formed. Only now, in the confines of her office, did Enzo realize just how small she was. At least, in comparison to his six feet, two inches. Outdoors they had both been dwarfed by the landscape.

  Her chestnut brown hair was pulled over in a side ponytail and pleated, before being drawn back across her head and pinned in place. It was executed with immaculate precision, allowing for the wearing of her hat when necessary. Enzo wondered why she would have gone to such trouble when there was no man in her life. That’s what she’d told him, hadn’t she? That she was single. Or had he misunderstood? He replayed their conversation on the hill from the previous day. No. She had told him she had never known a man who would spend the kind of money on her that would buy a meal at Chez Fraysse. But still, his original impression persisted, emphasised by the lack of a ring on her left hand, and he wondered if it was just his imagination that she had made an effort to present herself more attractively today.

  Unlike yesterday, she wore a little make-up. A slight rouge coloring of her lips, and a smudge of blue on the lids of her brown eyes. That touch of color somehow lifted her face out of plainness. The collar of her pale blue blouse was immaculately pressed and turned out over the neck of her darker blue jersey with its white stripe and rank epaulettes. Her black holster seemed very large, resting on slim hips, and her pants were tucked into ankle-length boots. Her eyes were filled with their usual warmth, and her cheeks flushed a little as she rounded her desk to spread out a selection of photographs for him to look at.

  “These are the casts we took of the footprints in the buron. You can see how much shallower the treads are on Marc Fraysse’s running shoes. All the other prints seem to have been made by either hiking boots or gumboots.”

  She cross-referenced the photographs of the casts, with pictures of the prints left in the mud.

  “These are Guy’s prints. And Elisabeth Fraysse’s.” She traced their tracks with the tip of finger. “Madame Fraysse didn’t venture far inside. These are Marc’s prints. They are all over the place, and here’s where they back up against the wall when he was shot. But there doesn’t seem to have been a struggle.”

  Enzo looked at the two unidentified casts. “These are both smaller than either Guy’s or Marc’s. Did the Fraysse brothers have particularly large feet?”

  “No, they were both average.”

  “So either or both of these unidentified sets could have been made by a woman.”

  “Or a man with smaller feet. Or a boy. A teenager, maybe. They are only one size smaller.”

  Enzo studied them in silence for a long time before Dominique reached for a stapled document of a dozen or more pages.

  “The autopsy report,” she said. “You can keep that if you like. I made a copy for you.”

  Enzo glanced up to find her big brown eyes examining him closely, and for a moment his stomach flipped over. It was extraordinary how a mutual attraction could be conveyed without a single word. Of course, it was always possible to misread the signals. He smiled. “I really appreciate that, Dominique. Thank you.” He riffled through the pages until he came to the pathologist’s description of the wound.

  Dominique pressed close against him so that she could read as he did. And he felt the distant pangs of arousal that her proximity excited. He forced himself to focus.

  The wound is centered 6.5 centimetres from the top of the head, and on the midline is an 8 millimetre round defect surrounded by a 3 millimeter-wide collar of abrasion. Surrounding the wound is sparse stippling in a 5 centimetre by 4 centimetre distribution.

  “What causes the stippling?” Dominique glanced up at him.

  “Bits of gunpowder hitting the skin and causing abrasions. The closer the gun the more dense the stippling. Any more than about two feet, or sixty centimetres, away and there wouldn’t be any.”

  “So this was close.”

  “Probably about thirty centimetres.” Enzo turned then to the description of the exit wound.

  The exit wound was centered 7 centimet
res from the top of the head, 1 centimetre to the right of the midline, and measured 1.5 centimetres with no evidence of abrasion, soot, or stippling. As this was a perforating wound, no projectile was recovered from the body. The projectile entered the head through the location described, caused an inward-beveled and comminuted defect of the frontal bone, passed through the left cerebral hemisphere, causing a wide hemorrhagic and disrupted path surrounded by contusion, and exited the occipital bone through an outward-beveled bony defect in the location described. The direction of the projectile was backward, slightly downward, slightly rightward.

  “Hmmm.” Enzo re-read it thoughtfully.

  “What?”

  “The path of the bullet. Someone shooting you would generally raise the gun, at arm’s length, to eye-level. Theirs. For the bullet to have taken a slightly downward path would suggest somebody taller than the victim.”

  “Or someone standing on higher ground.”

  “As I recall, the interior of the buron was pretty flat.”

  She nodded. “Yes, it is.”

  “Sadly, however, there is nothing very conclusive in the trajectory, Dominique. Marc Fraysse might have cowered as he raised his hands to protect himself, so that his killer was shooting slightly downwards.”

  He turned back a page, to the preliminary description of the body as a whole.

  Dominique peered at the report. “What are you looking for now?”

  “To see what the pathologist says about the hands.” Almost as he said it, he found the relevant passage.

  “Blood blowback on the backs of the hands and fingers,” Dominique said. She was still intimately acquainted with the details of the case. “Blood spatter blowing back from the entry wound was identified on the backs of his hands and fingers, as if he had his hands facing the shooter, raised to shield himself.”

  Enzo read through the pathologist’s description for himself. “You said the pathologist still has the pics?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would there be any chance of acquiring them? Just for a quick look.”

  “Sure. I’ll ask.”

  He slipped the autopsy report into his satchel. “Did anyone look at his computer?”

  “I believe someone from the police scientifique went through it. But it was never brought in for forensic examination.”

  “Why not?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess no one thought it was relevant. Forensics is not my area of expertise, and the powers that be seemed to think that Fraysse was just the victim of a random crime. In the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “You think he was murdered for his phone and his knife?”

  “Personally, no. That never seemed to me like sufficient motive. But then some people don’t seem to need a motive to kill.” She laughed, a little self-consciously. “Not that I’m any great expert on that either. There aren’t very many murders committed around here.” She looked at him curiously. “What do you think?”

  “I think the chances that it was a random killing are almost zero. No one would be waiting up that hill in the hope that someone might pass by with valuables to steal. Marc Fraysse took that route every day. Everyone knew that. So someone was waiting specifically for him. Whether they meant to kill him or not, that’s another matter. But kill him, they did.” He perched on the edge of Dominique’s desk and found her a willing and attentive audience. “The fact is that eighty percent of murder victims know their killer. Of those, sixteen percent are related to their killers. And half have a romantic or social relationship with them. It’s something you have to keep very much in mind when you’re looking at a murder.”

  “I thought your specialty was forensic science. The evidence.”

  “It is. But in the absence of evidence you have to look for motive, then try and put the two together to nail your killer. In this case, because of lack of evidence, or any other evidence to the contrary, your superiors seem to have been very keen to write off a celebrity murder they couldn’t solve by putting it down to a random killing. That kind of crime is almost impossible to resolve. It’s a face-saver.”

  “So you think someone had a reason for wanting to kill him?”

  “Or to threaten, or to harm him.”

  “Do you have some idea who that might be?”

  Enzo smiled and shook his head. “No, I don’t.”

  “So where will you begin?”

  Enzo gazed thoughtfully from the window, across the square toward the balustraded view of the valley below. “In his computer.”

  Chapter Eight

  He was not quite certain why he was reluctant to ask Elisabeth for permission to examine her late husband’s computer. But lurking somewhere at the back of his mind was the fear that perhaps she might refuse him, in which case a valuable line of investigation would be permanently closed off. Why he thought it was even remotely possible that she might do that was unclear to him. But he didn’t want to take the chance.

  And so when he returned to the hotel he made sure that both Guy and Elisabeth were downstairs before he headed up, ostensibly, to his suite. Service staff were in all the rooms, making beds, cleaning bathrooms. Service carts stood about in the hallways, the sound of vacuum cleaners coming from several open doors. He slipped past his own rooms, nodding to a middle-aged lady in green and white who was taking toilet rolls from her cart to re-stock one of the bathrooms, and when she went back into the room, he turned the handle on the door of Guy’s study to slip quickly inside.

  He closed the door behind him and stood, with his back against it, controlling his breathing for several moments. It occurred to him how ridiculous this was. Why hadn’t he just asked her? Still, he was here now. He crossed quickly to the bureau and rolled up the top. The MacBook Pro sat where he had last seen it, and he lifted the lid to press its power button. Its start-up chorus chimed loudly and he tensed, waiting nervously for it to boot up. When, eventually, the desktop loaded on to the screen, he sat down to look at it and take stock.

  The first thing he checked was the Airport connection and was pleased to see that the computer was still connected wirelessly to the hotel’s wifi system. So he was online.

  From the dock along the foot of the screen he selected the mailer and clicked on it to load. The in-box was, as he expected, empty. He checked for Sent mail. Also empty. Then scrolled down a long list of folders in the left-hand window. A complete archive of all Marc Fraysse’s emails, sent and received. There was an odd sense of prurience in going through a dead man’s private correspondence, but Enzo had no time to dwell on it. He scanned the titles of the folders. Many of them were simply people’s names. Jacques, Paul, Michel, Pierre. Others catalogued bills and invoices, correspondence with amazon. fr, exchanges between Fraysse and his website designer. There were folders filled with the emails that had passed back and forth between the chef and his various suppliers. Then one titled, RECIPES, which brought Enzo’s scrolling cursor to a halt. Had a three-star Michelin chef really exchanged emails with others about recipes? He clicked to open it. Apparently he had. They were sub-divided into folders: Boeuf, Agneau, Lapin, Cheval, Porc… Enzo’s cursor hesitated and hovered over the folder titled Cheval. It seemed inconceivable, somehow, that horsemeat would ever be served up to customers in a three-star restaurant. He opened the folder. Information across the top of the mailer told him that it contained nearly 600 messages. They had all been sent to a single address: ransou. jean@wanadoo. fr. None had been received in reply. Enzo double-clicked to open one, and was puzzled to be greeted by a series of apparently random letters and numbers:

  PV: 18/12: 3e: 14: 150; 7e: 4: 130; 9e: 5,9,10: 200

  D: 1re: 3,7,15: 125; 4e: 13: 175; 12e: 2,5,12: 150

  L: 6e: 11: 200; 8e: 10: 125; 9e: 1,7,8: 150

  There was no name and no signature. Enzo gazed at it uncomprehendingly, then checked the date that the email had been sent. 18th December, 2002. So the 18/12 was the date. He checked the time at which the email was sent. 2:14am. He opened the
next mail down. More of the same.

  MB: 19/12: 2e: 9: 175; 5e: 3,6,9: 150; 6e: 16: 200…

  This one sent on December 19th at 2:53am. Enzo frowned. These were not recipes for horsemeat. He opened several in quick succession, all filled with the same mysterious code. He had no idea what the letters indicated. PV, D, L, MB, but another thought was beginning to coagulate in the stream of information uploading to his brain.

  Quickly he checked to make sure that the computer was still connected to the printer. It was. He turned the printer on, and winced at the noise it made during start-up, praying that it was still in use and that the ink had not dried up completely. He selected two of the Cheval emails at random and chose Print. The old ink-jet printer whirred and clattered and churned out two print-outs, faded but legible. He folded them together and slipped them into his jacket pocket, then returned to the computer.

  He felt as if he had been in the dead man’s study for an inordinately long time now, although in reality it had been no more than a few minutes. He pressed on. Scrolling rapidly through the Finder desktop, he clicked on the Home folder, which was named frayssemarc. Near the top of a column of folders was one named Documents. He opened it. It was filled with sub-folders whose headings seemed to indicate lists of recipes and ingredients. Opening up just a few of them confirmed Enzo’s suspicions. So this, it seemed, was where Marc Fraysse had actually kept his culinary secrets. He stopped scrolling on one, mid-list. It was titled, simply, Moi. Me. He opened it. Inside was a single document called moi. dssr. Enzo had no idea what that was. He double-clicked it, and saw a piece of software called Dossier opening up on the dock. The document moi. dssr then appeared on the screen as a blank pane containing one large window, and one narrow one down the left-hand side, which was headed Title, and 0 entries. A slide-out pane to the left of that contained one single icon called Unfiled Entries. Enzo felt a wave of disappointment. It seemed that the document was empty.