by Peter May
He crawled at a snail’s pace up the hill, ignoring traffic lights. To stop would have been fatal, and there were no other vehicles on the road. No sensible person was out on a night like this.
Almost at the top of the hill, snow still piling down between the buildings that towered above him on either side, he turned right along a level stretch of road toward Dominique’s apartment. He immediately saw the cluster of blue and orange flashing lights gathered outside the building.
He slewed to a halt beside two gendarme vans and an ambulance. A couple of uniformed gendarmes stood among a gathering of curious neighbours sheltering under black umbrellas, stamping icy feet in the snow. Enzo jumped out and almost fell.
“What’s happened here?”
One of the gendarmes turned, and Enzo immediately recognised him as the sandwich-chewing officer who had responded to his buzzer at lunchtime the previous day. He recognised Enzo, too. “Dominique was attacked in her apartment.”
“Jesus!” Enzo felt his heart almost stop. “My daughter’s up there, too.”
And before either of the officers could stop him, he was past them, through the door, and pounding up the steps in the pale flicker of feeble yellow stair lights, his breath exploding in clouds ahead of him.
Dominique’s apartment door lay wide open, bright light spilling out on to the dark of the landing. Another gendarme stood at the end of the hall, and beyond him two medics were crouched around the prone figure of a woman lying on the floor. Heads turned with Enzo’s sudden arrival, and he saw Dominique’s bloodied face as she pulled herself up on to one elbow. Her skin color was whiter than the snow falling outside her window, and her dark eyes filled with confusion.
“Enzo…” She reached a hand toward him.
He pushed between the medics and knelt beside her, taking her hand and squeezing it. “What happened? Are you okay?”
She seemed to be struggling to find words. One of the medics said, “She needs attention. She’s concussed. There could be a fracture.”
But she waved a dismissive hand. “I’ll be alright. I just… I don’t really remember what happened. I was coming back to the apartment. I opened the door, and… I guess someone must have struck me from behind. When I came to, it was something like four hours later, and I was lying in the hall. I managed to crawl in here and call the Samu.”
With the help of the two medics, he got her to her feet, and then into a chair. One of them began cleansing the wound at the back of her head with a cotton pad and disinfectant, and she winced from the pain.
“Dominique, where’s Sophie?”
“I don’t know. Her boyfriend called this morning… Bertrand?” Enzo nodded. “Well, Bertrand called and said he was on his way to get her. He must have picked her up before I got back.”
The gendarme at the door said, “There was no one else in the apartment.”
Enzo frowned. “But if Bertrand picked her up, why’s she not answering her phone?” He stood up and hurried through to the spare bedroom, and felt fear like cold fingers closing around his heart. Her suitcase was still there, clothes spread across the bed.
By the time he got back through to the sitting room, Dominique was on her feet and waving aside the attentions of the Samu.
He said, “Bertrand didn’t pick her up. He must have been held up by the snow. All her stuff’s still here.”
Pain and confusion mixed with the blood on Dominique’s face. “Then where is she?”
Enzo closed his eyes, trying to control his breathing. “I don’t know for sure. But I think maybe I can guess.”
He turned toward the door.
“Wait!” Dominique called after him, and as he turned back, she was reaching into her leather brief case. “I brought these with me from the gendarmerie so you could see them when you got back.” She pulled out a large manilla envelope. “They’re the pics of the hands taken at autopsy.”
He hesitated just for a moment before turning back. She laid the photographs out on the coffee table and he knelt down to look at them, holding them between trembling fingers. A dead man’s hands. Cold and white, and spattered by tiny droplets of blood blown back from the head wound that took his life.
He felt her eyes on him. She said, “What do you think?”
And in spite of everything, the professional in him calmed his panic and took control of his perception. He looked closely at the photographs. This was his area of expertise. And those tiny drops of blood were telling him everything he needed to know. “The pathologist wasn’t wrong in his original assessment.”
Dominique frowned. “You mean that Fraysse was murdered?”
Enzo nodded. “Guy and Elisabeth might have confessed to making his suicide look like murder, but the blood spatter says otherwise.”
“How can you tell?”
“If he had shot himself, the blood droplets would be on the backs and tips of the trigger finger, the third and fourth fingers, and the front and tip of the thumb. Certainly on the gun hand. And they would appear in similar areas of the hand used to hold it steady. Which is common when you’re turning a gun on yourself.”
Dominique peered through her pain at the photographs. “I see what you mean. The blood spatter is on the back of both hands.”
“Exactly. As if he had been facing his shooter, and raised his hands to protect himself.”
“So he didn’t kill himself.”
“No, he was murdered. But I’d already guessed that.”
“How?”
“From of a handful of words recovered from Marc Fraysse’s supposed suicide note.” He dropped the photographs and stood up suddenly. “I’ve got to go.”
Dominique stood to go after him, but staggered, and grabbed a medic to stop herself from falling. “Enzo where? Where are you going?”
“The killer’s got Sophie, Dominique. It’s the only explanation.”
She gasped her frustration. “I don’t understand. Why? Who?”
“I won’t know any of that for certain till I get up to the hotel.”
The gendarme at the door caught his arm. “The auberge up at Saint-Pierre?”
“Yes.” Enzo almost hissed it in his face.
“You can’t go up there, monsieur. The road’s closed. It’s impassable.”
Enzo tore his arm free. “Try stopping me.”
Chapter Forty-three
Several times on the ascent out of Thiers, he thought he wouldn’t make it. Wheels spinning sent his car slithering sideways, before catching and propelling him forward again.
The landscape caught in his headlamps was smothered in snow. And still it fell. Thick and wet.
He had left the town behind him now, and the road climbed less steeply, but was almost indistinguishable from everything else around it. Only the red and white stripes of the snow poles kept him from losing his way and ending up in a ditch. The falling snow almost obliterated his vision. Beyond his lights everything was black, like the fear in his heart that drove him on.
Twenty to twenty-five centimetres of snow had fallen in just a matter of hours, and he knew that when the road rose steeply toward the auberge, he was going to have to abandon his car. It would take a four-by-four to get him up there.
When he saw the stone pillars, marble plaques engraved with the Chez Fraysse logo at the road junction, he tried to keep the Citroen in third gear and turn gently without stalling it. Front wheels spinning, he only just succeeded in making the turn, and began to inch slowly up the incline. He thanked God for Lucqui’s snow poles. Without them he would certainly have lost the road.
If there had been another vehicle up here ahead of him, then its tracks had long since been covered by fresh snow. Not even the faintest impression of them remained. For a moment Enzo began to doubt everything. Perhaps, somehow, he had got it all wrong. Maybe Bertrand had picked Sophie up after all, and the battery in her cellphone was simply dead. But if Bertrand had come for her, why were her things still at Dominique’s apartment?
He was f
inding it difficult now to recognize the lie of the land. The dark of the pine forest pushed up out of the snow, branches laden and dipping under the weight of the wet snowfall. He thought the flat stretch cut away to his right might be the parking area at the foot of the track leading up to the buron, but he couldn’t be sure.
Then his wheels began spinning hopelessly, the car drifting left toward the drop down to the stream below the waterfall. He tried to accelerate, but it only made things worse. He dropped down to second gear and stalled the engine. The car juddered to a halt.
“Damn!” he shouted at the night and slammed the steering wheel with the heels of both hands. No point in even trying to restart it. He would never get the tires to grip again from a first gear start. He pulled on the handbrake and reached into the glove shelf to retrieve his flashlight.
Before stepping out of the vehicle, he swithered about leaving the headlights on, and decided in the end that he would. They would provide illumination up into the darkness ahead for perhaps a couple of hundred meters, then reflected light beyond that.
The wet snow creaked underfoot like old floorboards as he began the long, difficult climb. As the light from his headlamps receded behind him, he became more and more reliant on the beam of his flashlight to guide him. His thighs ached from having to lift his feet so high for each step forward through the snow. Long before he got to the top, cold and exhaustion were sapping his strength.
Finally, as he reached the end of the road, and rounded the bend, the dark shape of the auberge loomed ahead of him. There was not a light anywhere to be seen.
Guy’s yellow Trafic sat out front, several inches of snow gathered on the roof. There were no tracks in the snow. It had clearly been sitting there for some time.
From the front entrance, Enzo was unable to see if there were any other vehicles in the car park, so he made his way around the side of the hotel to direct a beam of light toward it. There were two vehicles parked beneath the plane trees. Elisabeth’s Mercedes, and a mud-spattered Land Rover. Both with snow piled on their roofs. But no sign of tire tracks in or out. He returned to the front of the auberge and turned off his flashlight. He raised a hand to push the revolving door, and found himself sucked through it into interior darkness. He had no idea where the light switches might be located, but as his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, he realized that emergency night lights were providing some kind of illumination, and the empty hotel began to take shape around him. Somewhere inside it, he knew, were at least three people, maybe more.
He did not want to use his flashlight and make himself an obvious target to anyone who might be waiting in the dark. So he contained himself until the dark outline of the reception desk took form, then began moving cautiously forward and into the corridor leading to the kitchen.
He found some switches just inside the sliding door and turned them on. Fluorescent strips flickered and flooded the kitchen with light. Cold, hard stainless steel, where so many three-star meals had been conceived and cooked, gleamed in the silence. But there was no one here. Guy’s office, too, was empty. He went back out and wandered through the lounge and the two dining rooms. Tables and chairs were draped with dust covers for the winter. From the panoramic glass frontage, he could see the lights of Thiers twinkling in the valley below, the vast white plane of the central plateau vanishing into the night beyond.
The hotel was freezing cold, as if the heating had been turned off, and Enzo felt the chill of it seeping into his bones. He was about to head up the stairs when a sound from somewhere in the bowels of the building stopped him where he stood. Uncertain of what exactly it was he had heard, he listened intently for more. It could have been a voice. It could have been the creak of a door. But there was no further sound.
He moved slowly forward into the reception area once more, and this time noticed the line of a dark shadow down one side of the door to the cave. He approached it cautiously and realized that it was not shut. It lay a few centimetres ajar. With his heart in his throat he pulled it open, and felt a rush of cold, damp air in his face as he stepped inside.
The darkness here was profound, and he was obliged to turn on his flashlight. He raked its beam along the rows of dusty dull bottles resting in their racks below, before picking out the wooden steps that led down into the musty smell of dampness and stale wine that rose to greet him. He clutched the wooden rail at his left hand and made his way down to the stone flags that lined the floor. By the reflected glow of his flashlight, he could see icy water condensed in droplets on the bedrock walls, like cold sweat.
He sensed, more than heard, a presence in the cellar. Nothing that he could positively identify, but he knew that he was not alone. One careful step at a time, he moved along the near end of the rows, flashing light along each in turn, finding nothing but silent bottles and cold air misted by the damp.
Suddenly he was blinded by a light that seemed to come from nowhere, flashing confusion and fear into his brain. He half lifted a hand to shade his eyes, and at the far end of a canyon of wine saw Guy and Sophie. They were caught in the full glare of his own beam of light. Guy held an electric torch in a fist he made with his left hand, his arm wrapped tightly around Sophie’s neck, the gun in his right hand almost touching her temple. She could hardly breathe, and Enzo could see the raw terror in her eyes. He felt his stomach lurch sickeningly at the thought that she might come to any harm.
“Hell, Enzo! You took your time.” Guy’s voice echoed around the cave. “Sophie and me got so damn cold waiting for you.”
“For God’s sake, man, let her go! What are you doing?”
“I knew she was the only thing that would bring you. Now the only people who know the truth are all down here in the wine cellar.”
“You’re wrong, Guy. It’s over. Everyone knows now.” But he could see in Guy’s eyes, and hear in his voice, that all reason had left him. And that made him unpredictable, dangerous.
“When Elisabeth told me she had confessed everything to you, I knew it was only a matter of time before the real truth came out.” It was as if he wasn’t listening, or didn’t want to hear. “Especially when I learned that she had given you the suicide note. I had no idea she’d kept it. It might have been good enough to fool her, but not some forensic expert. I knew that much.” He paused to draw breath. “I suppose you’ve already figured it out?”
Enzo nodded. “It was a page of the letter that Marc wrote to you when he got his third star. He was making peace, asking for your forgiveness, wanting to wipe the slate clean. The words you left readable on the page were well-chosen. They could easily have been construed as the words of a man about to take his own life.”
“Elisabeth thought so.”
Enzo glanced anxiously at Sophie. Guy was a big man. His grip on her neck was powerful. He could break it with a single twist of his arm. She knew it, too, and was making no attempt to struggle. Thoughts tumbled over themselves in Enzo’s mind, searching for clarity in confusion. He knew he had to keep Guy talking. “What I don’t understand is why you went to all the trouble of faking the suicide, only then to make it look like murder.”
Something close to a smile flitted over Guy’s face. As if he believed he had been so clever. “To convince Elisabeth, of course. I needed her to believe Marc had killed himself, so that she would collaborate in making it look like murder. A murder that nobody could possibly solve.”
“A murder that you committed.”
“Yes, but she didn’t know that. And nobody ever would as long as she believed it was suicide. Even if the murder story unravelled, she and I would be able to back each other up in telling the authorities he had killed himself.”
“And why did you kill him?”
Guy let air escape through pursed lips. “You tell me, Enzo. You’re the detective.”
Enzo glanced at his daughter, then back to her captor. “You were going to lose everything.” He paused to think. “What was he going to tell the Press that day? That he was going to sell up t
o pay off his debts?”
Guy’s mirthless laughter resounded in the silence of the cave. “Of course he wasn’t going to sell! Not the restaurant, anyway. He had too much of himself invested in it.” He drew a long, quivering breath. “My little brother’s problem, Enzo, was that he was too successful too soon. The future stretched ahead of him without any challenge. He was bored. So he found his excitement elsewhere. In his reckless gambling. In his affair with Anne. Only at the last did he realize he was on a course to self-destruction, that he was going to piss away everything he had worked for.”
“So what was he going to tell the press?”
“Toward the end he had been seeing some psychotherapist in Paris.” The word psychotherapist was laden with contempt. “She’d persuaded him that it wasn’t too late to save the situation. That he could still put things right. Which is why he finished it with Anne. A clean break, a fresh start. Marc Fraysse on top again. But I only found out what he was intending to do when I took a call from an assessor at an auction house in Paris. The man wanted to arrange a time to come and value the wine.” His voice trembled, still, with indignation. “ My wine, Enzo. The cave didn’t mean anything to Marc. He saw it only as a way of raising cash to pay off the goddamned debts. His debts. In theory he owned half of it, but it was my collection. My wine.”
“So you confronted him?”
“Damn right, I did. Do you know what the bastard was going to do? Announce the closing of the restaurant during the winter. Tell them he was going to use those dead months to develop new dishes, new menus, shake everything and everyone up. Take the time to do some renovations. Chez Fraysee would be reborn in the spring.” A snort of frustration and contempt exploded from his nostrils. “But it was all smoke and mirrors. A cover up. Renovations to mask a saving on overheads, new menus an excuse to reassess the wine, sell off the old to buy new.”