Blowback ef-5

by Peter May

  By 7:55 he was standing with his back to the wall next to the door of his room, listening. There were a couple of false alarms; another guest heading down for breakfast; a maid delivering a breakfast tray to a room further along the hall. Each time he heard a movement, he opened the door a crack to see who it was.

  Finally, a little later than on previous mornings, he heard a door opening along the hall, and brisk footsteps softened by the deep pile of the runner. He eased his door open just after they passed, and saw Elisabeth heading for the staircase.

  He allowed her several minutes to get herself ensconced in the dining room before slipping out into the hallway and hurrying along toward her apartment. At the door to Marc Fraysse’s study he stopped and tried the handle. To his dismay it was locked. And he wondered if somehow Elisabeth had found out about his foray into it the other night. But he dismissed the idea. This was a classic case of shutting the barn door after the horse had bolted. Only now, the horse had returned, and couldn’t get back in.

  He cursed under his breath. This was going to make things a little more difficult. He moved quickly along the hall toward the double doors leading to Elisabeth’s suite. With hope more than expectation, he tried the handle, and almost to his surprise discovered that it was not locked. He stepped quickly inside and closed the door behind him.

  He could hear the blood pulsing through his head. Now he really had crossed a boundary. And there was no way back from here if caught.

  He slipped like a ghost through the sterile stillness of her living room, and into the bedroom. It was warm in here, with the smell of bedsheets and bodies. Tangled covers were thrown carelessly aside, a pink nightdress lying in a heap on the floor. Presumably such things were attended to by the staff.

  The clothes which Marc Fraysse had once worn still hung from the rail in the wardrobe. Neat rows of laundered shirts, jackets, trousers. Not much chance of his scent surviving the washing machine, or a trip to the dry-cleaners. His shoes, perhaps. Enzo’s eyes ran along the neat row of shoes lined up beneath the hanging clothes. But concealing a shoe as he tried to leave the hotel might prove more difficult in practise than in theory. Shelves rose one above the other at the far end of the armoir, beyond the rail. Underwear. Underpants and undershirts. Socks. All crisply laundered. And then above them, a pile of neatly folded winter scarves. He remembered Dominique’s story of her aunt’s inherited scarf, and the smell of her it had retained for years beyond her death. In general, scarves were things that people wore and put away, wore and put away. How often, if ever, were they washed or laundered?

  He reached up and took down a folded Paisley patterned silk scarf lined with camel-colored cashmere. As he opened it up he immediately saw the dead man’s hairs still clinging in places to the wool. He lifted it to his face and breathed it in. There was a faintly damp smell, like something you might find in the cellar. A hint of something perfumed. Aftershave perhaps. And something else with a slightly sour note, like stale body odour. This was, he felt certain, the best example he was likely to find of something that still bore the dead man’s scent.

  The sound of the door opening into Elisabeth Fraysse’s living room caused his heart to freeze. His face stinging with shock, he stood stock still, listening, almost paralysed. He heard her clearing her throat and knew that he was trapped. His mind went into superdrive, computing every possible alternative open to him. There weren’t many, so it didn’t take long.

  He closed the wardrobe door and moved toward the door to Marc’s study with all the care of a man walking barefoot on glass. If it was locked, the game was up. To his enormous relief the handle turned in his fingers and the door opened with the faintest creak of its hinges. In his head it sounded like a saw cutting through steel. He moved quickly from one room to the next and pulled the door shut, just as he heard the bedroom door opening from the living room.

  He looked around in a panic. There was nowhere to hide. And then he saw the key in the door leading the hall. Three long, soft, strides took him to the door. He turned the key and pushed down the handle, and was out into the hall, even as he heard the door to the study opening from the bedroom.

  He almost ran along the hallway, fumbling for his keycard to let himself into his rooms, shutting the door behind him and leaning back against it, hearing and feeling the thump of his heart as it hammered against his ribs. If anyone tried the study door, he or she would know it had been unlocked from the inside. But nobody had seen him, and he had left no traces. There was nothing to point to him. Any member of the housekeeping staff might have unlocked it for access and forgotten to re-lock it.

  He looked down at the scarf still clutched in his hand. This was, perhaps, the longest shot that he had ever taken. But he needed evidence, hard evidence. A place to start. Without it, he knew, there was little or no chance of ever finding out who had killed the most famous chef in France.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Enzo met Dominique in the parking area at the foot of the track which led up through the woods to the old buron. He parked his 2CV beside the dark blue gendarme van and was greeted by an affectionate assault from an excited Tasha, who danced and leapt around him like a demented dervish.

  There was a moment of strangeness between him and Dominique. Her uniform created a distance between them, and neither was sure if a kiss was appropriate. All the intimacy of the night before had vanished, it seemed, like snow melting on water. Some unspoken agreement that somehow passed between them put business ahead of personal pleasure. They were, after all, investigating a man’s murder.

  “Did you get something?”

  He nodded and patted a bulge beneath the zip of his anorak. “A scarf. It still has some of his hair on it.”

  “Good. Let’s go.”

  And they started up through the trees. Rain drifted down through the unaccustomed stillness around them, like a mist, soaking everything it touched. Tasha ran on ahead, barking at shadows, picking up the scent of rabbits or deer, and zig-zagging away through the dripping pines on fruitless tangents.

  When, finally, they broke cover of the trees, Enzo felt the rain seeping into his soul. His pants were sodden, the collar of his shirt beneath his waterproof was wet, his hair plastered to his head. Even his feet felt damp. Dominique’s face was pink and shining wet as she turned to wait for him to catch her up. Tasha was already bounding away through the dead grasses of the hillside, ignoring the track, revelling in her freedom.

  Enzo and Dominique, however, followed the track to where it doubled back on itself and climbed steeply up toward the plateau. The wet stone shadow of the ruined buron appeared on the horizon above them like a ghost. By the time they reached it, Enzo was short of breath, and they stood inside sheltering from the rain until he recovered.

  Dominique called Tasha and the dog came leaping and bounding inside to join them. The gendarme made her sit. Enzo took out Marc Fraysse’s scarf to let her sniff it. Tasha buried her nose in the wool, snuffling with interest at these new and unexpected smells, millions of tiny receptors in her nose registering and translating them into coded messages to be sent and stored in her brain.

  Dominique watched her absorb the scent left in this world by a dead man more than seven years before. “It’s amazing. As if her sense of smell is even more important than her sight.”

  “It is,” Enzo said, “Smells, for a dog, create a kind of architecture of the world around them that their brains translate into a mental picture. Tasha’s sense of smell is a thousand times better than ours. She has around two hundred million nasal olfactory receptors, and can detect odours at concentrations nearly one hundred million times lower than us. If we asked her to, she could detect one drop of blood in five liters of water.”

  She glanced at him, her eyes wide with wonder. “You know your stuff.”

  He grinned. “I do.”

  Dominique reached into her pocket and produced the black ball that was the object of Tasha’s obsession. It excited her interest immediately, cau
sing her to abandon the scarf, but Dominique instantly withdrew the ball to hold it behind her back and re-introduce the scarf.

  Tasha’s training kicked in. She remembered the game, and her eyes shone with excitement. She barked, then, as Dominique held the ball out of reach and pointed at the door.

  “ Allez! Allez!” she shouted, and Tasha went bounding out into the rain. Enzo and Dominique went after her, struggling to keep up as Tasha went running left and right, her nose to the ground, absolutely focused on finding the scent that she knew would bring the reward of her ball. For a while she followed the path above the treeline, then went haring off among the rocks on the plateau, lifting her head occasionally to sniff the air, sampling the scents it carried.

  After fifteen minutes, her obsession was driving her further and further from the buron, without success. Enzo and Dominique were finding it hard to keep up, and something about the vast open space of the plateau and the density of the hillside forest brought it home to Enzo just how hopeless this was. The words needle and haystack came to his mind, but even they seemed inadequate to measure the enormity of the task they had set the dog, and the odds against her finding something that might not even be there.

  Dominique stood with her hands on her hips. “Looks like a waste of time,” she said and called out Tasha’s name. Her voice rang across the hillside before being soaked up by the rain. But Tasha’s fixation was making her deaf, or at least impervious, to her mistress’ call. She was two or three hundred meters away, and disappeared down into the trees. Dominique sighed and looked up into the low cloud that hung, it seemed, just above their heads. The rain was more than a mist now, and Enzo could hear it beating a tattoo on their waterproofs. “I guess she’ll give up in time. We should get back to the shelter of the buron. She’ll know where to find us.”

  They trudged wearily back across the plateau to the old ruined shelter and squeezed into the damp and dark beneath the lauzes, to peer out miserably into the gloom. The valley below them had been swallowed up by cloud and rain. The chill in the air was raw, and Enzo was not sure if he had ever felt quite so cold.

  Dominique reached up to lean against the cracked stone lintel above the door, her face set in grim acceptance of failure. “What will you do when this is all over here?”

  “Go back to Cahors, the university in Toulouse. In a few months I’ll start looking at case number six.”

  She nodded, knowing that this man who had come so unexpectedly into her life would leave again just as suddenly. In twenty-four hours, everything had changed, and yet nothing had changed. “Will this be your first failure?”

  Enzo allowed himself a wry smile. “I haven’t given up yet.”

  “But you have no real evidence. Nothing to work with. And that’s what you need, isn’t it? I mean, what do you know that you didn’t know before?”

  “I know a lot more about Fraysse himself. I know that he and his brother had a feud that lasted nearly twenty years, and that the falling out between them was over Elisabeth. I know that Marc Fraysse had a gambling problem. Elisabeth’s word, not mine, although she used it in denial. But he had an addiction, that is certain, and owed somebody a lot of money. I know that he’d been having an affair with the wife of his second. An affair that he ended abruptly just days before he was murdered.”

  He had been over it all with her the previous night, but condensing it now, like this, made him realize just how little he really had to go on. And he saw in her eyes that she knew it, too.

  Somewhere in the far distance they heard Tasha barking. A bark that echoed dully among the trees, absorbed by the stillness and the wet, but which was repeated and persistent.

  Dominique looked alarmed. “Oh, my god, I hope she’s alright. I know that there have been poachers up here recently. I suppose they could have set traps. I never thought about that.” Even as she spoke, Tasha’s distant bark seemed to turn hoarse, almost into a whine. Dominique rushed out on to the hillside, and Enzo followed, filled with a dread sense of guilt, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to forgive himself if anything had happened to her dog.

  They followed the track, Enzo struggling to keep up, to the point where they had seen Tasha disappearing among the trees. The barking was much closer now, and if anything, more frantic. Dominique thrashed through the undergrowth, finding herself eventually on a deer track that cut through the woods. Both she and Enzo found rain-laden webs bursting on their faces as they broke through virgin territory where spiders had labored in the dark the night before.

  They saw Tasha in a small clearing below them, an area of fern beaten down by gathering animals, probably deer. Moss-covered rocks had been exposed in the slope at some point by tiny mud slides. A fallen tree lay across the track. Enzo scrambled after the young gendarme as she climbed over it, and they found Tasha digging frantically at the foot of one of the rocks. Barking and whining, excited, almost frenzied.

  Dominique crouched beside her, to be greeted by a flapping pink tongue in her face and muddy feet scrabbling at her thighs. She produced the black ball. Tasha snatched it from her hand, moving away then, chewing it and growling, dropping it and snatching it. Job done. Obsession rewarded.

  Enzo crouched down beside Dominique. “What did she find?”

  “I don’t know. Something buried here beneath the stone, maybe.”

  Enzo took a pair of latex gloves from his pocket and snapped them on before starting to move away the earth and pebbles disturbed by the dog. He reached a slab of flat stone a matter of inches below the surface, and dug away the earth with his fingers until he found its edge, then pulled it up.

  There, in a shallow hollow beneath the stone, lay a discolored purple waterproof fanny bag still attached to its belt.

  The Scotsman and the gendarme exchanged looks. “Marc Fraysse’s missing bag.” He allowed himself a tiny smile. He had played very, very long odds, and won. Fraysse himself would have approved.

  Enzo ripped off his soiled and torn latex gloves and replaced them with a fresh pair. Carefully, he removed the pouch from its seven-year resting place, and with almost trembling fingers unzipped it. Both he and Dominique peered inside.

  “My god,” she whispered. “The phone and the knife are still there.”

  The Thiers knife, a Nokia cellphone, and the bag that Marc Fraysse had once worn around his waist lay on Dominique’s desk in clear plastic evidence bags. All three items would be dusted for prints and subjected to minute forensic examination. But Enzo was only too acutely aware of the fact that while he had been responsible for their discovery, he had no claim over them whatsoever. On finding them, they had immediately become official evidence in a murder enquiry that could no longer be considered ‘cold’.

  Dominique slumped into her chair, her waterproofs still dripping on the coat stand. “I’ll have them couriered to the police scientifique labs in Clermont Ferrand. We should have results back in a few days.”

  Enzo gazed at the dead man’s possessions recovered from the hill, frustrated, eaten up by impatience. “How about holding off on that for twenty-four hours?”

  She looked at him in surprise. “Why?”

  He shrugged. “They may, or may not, turn up something interesting. But on balance, I figure probably not.”

  “What difference would it make to wait twenty-four hours?”

  “Maybe all the difference in the world. And what’s one day after seven years?”

  She narrowed her eyes and cocked her head to one side. “So what are you proposing?”

  “You can dust the phone for prints here, right?”

  She nodded. “I could, yes.”

  “Well, why don’t you do that, and then let me borrow it? Just until tomorrow.”

  She frowned, and then laughed. “Why? I mean, you can hardly make calls with it. The battery’s been dead for years.”

  “I’m figuring there are some decent-sized cellphone shops down in Clermont.”

  “Sure. All the major providers. SFR, Bouygues, Orange�
� I know it was in a waterproof bag, Enzo, but surely you don’t think they could get it working?”

  “No.” He sat down opposite her. “But the sim card is intact. And it should be a fairly simple matter to access the information on it. Addresses, phone numbers. Calls made. Calls received. We know now for certain that theft wasn’t the motive for the murder. The sim card should be able to tell us out who was the last person he spoke to on that phone. And that could be crucial.” He tilted his head and gave her his most appealing smile. “Is that not worth a one-day wait? I’m going down to Clermont with Guy Fraysse early tomorrow. We could know by lunchtime.”

  She drew a deep breath. “You’re taking advantage of me.”

  “Of course.”

  “It could cost me my job.”

  He shook his head. “I won’t tell if you don’t.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Guy’s bright yellow Renault Trafic wound down the hill in the dark toward the autoroute. Empty crates rattled and clattered about in the back. Enzo held on with white knuckles to the handle on the passenger door, but refrained from expressing the opinion that Guy was driving far too fast on wet roads. He had obviously done it many times over the years, in all weathers, and was still here to tell the tale. Presumably he knew the road as well as the map of broken veins he saw on his face each morning as he shaved. And that he had found time to shave before leaving this morning was evinced by the powerfully pungent smell of aftershave that filled the cab.

  He had been oddly quiet when they met up in the car park just after five, and they had driven in silence over to Thiers and then down into the valley to connect with the motorway. It wasn’t until a curling slip road took them on to the A72 west, and the lights of vehicles heading toward the city became a dazzle in the rearview mirror, that Enzo broke the silence. In fact, he did more than break it. He dropped a bomb into it.