Extraordinary People ef-4

by Peter May

  ‘So I gathered.’ Charlotte and Bertrand shook hands, and she touched a fingertip to her nose. ‘Love the stud. Is it a real diamond?’ Enzo felt as if she was only saying it to annoy him. But, then, they had never discussed Bertrand, and she had no idea what he thought of facial piercing.

  Bertrand nodded enthusiastically. ‘Yeah. Eighteen carat.’ Then, ‘Do you live here?’ He sounded incredulous. ‘It took us forever to find this place.’

  ‘It’s a holiday home. I live in Paris.’

  ‘Are you coming with us to Metz?’ Sophie asked eagerly. She was evidently anxious to learn more about her Papa’s “friend.”

  ‘I’m afraid not.’ Charlotte was awkward. ‘Your father said you would drop me off at Tulle. I’m getting the train back to Paris from there.’

  ‘Oh.’ Sophie was disappointed. ‘Sure.’

  ‘Do you have any idea how long we’re going to be away?’ Bertrand asked Enzo. ‘I’ve had to pay someone to look after the gym.’

  ‘I’ll pay you back,’ Enzo said abruptly. ‘Can we go? It’s getting late.’

  But before anyone could move, the back door of Bertrand’s van swung open and a sleepy-looking Nicole jumped out. She stretched, thrusting juddering bosoms toward the treetops and blinking in the late evening sun. ‘Why did no one wake me?’

  Sophie and Bertrand exchanged looks.

  Then Nicole’s gaze fell upon Enzo and she rushed to give him a crushing hug. ‘Oh, Monsieur Macleod, are you all right? I’ve been so worried about you.’

  Enzo prised himself free of her, and glanced self-consciously towards Charlotte. ‘What are you doing here, Nicole?’

  Sophie pulled a face. ‘She’s been hanging around the apartment for days waiting for you. As soon as she knew you’d phoned, there was no dissuading her from coming with us.’

  III

  The sun had dipped behind the hills, but there was still light in the sky when they dropped Charlotte at the station in Tulle.

  Enzo had squatted on the floor in the back of the van, Nicole prattling in his ear, while Charlotte sat up front in the passenger seat, with Sophie squeezed in between her and Bertrand. The teenager had chatted animatedly to Charlotte, eliciting more information in half an hour than her father had managed in over a week.

  They all got out of the van in the station car park. Sophie kissed Charlotte on both cheeks. ‘You’ve got to come and see us in Cahors,’ she said. ‘You’d love it there, and Papa’s a great cook.’

  ‘Charlotte’s a very busy woman,’ Enzo said.

  Charlotte avoided his eye. ‘That’s right.’ She shook Bertrand’s hand. ‘Thanks for the lift, Bertrand.’

  ‘De rien.’ He gazed at her admiringly.

  She turned to Enzo. ‘You’ll let me know how you get on?’

  ‘Of course.’

  And she turned and walked into the station. Sophie looked at her father. ‘You didn’t kiss her goodbye.’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  Sophie cocked an eyebrow. ‘Lover’s tiff?’

  ‘Don’t even go there,’ Enzo growled.

  ‘She’s a beautiful looking woman,’ Bertrand said.

  Sophie tipped her head at him. ‘And don’t you go there, either.’ And then she grinned.

  ‘Can we go, please?’ Enzo opened the passenger door and held it open for Sophie.

  She flounced past him and jumped in. ‘You’re in a right mood tonight, aren’t you?’

  They got on to the A89 autoroute for Clermont-Ferrand just outside Tulle, Enzo, Sophie and Bertrand all squeezed into the front, Nicole in the back, the roar of the engine and the smell of diesel filling the cab. It was Bertrand, finally, who broke the silence. ‘You said you were run off the road by a truck.’

  ‘That’s right?’

  ‘On purpose?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Nicole leaned forward from the back and peered at him in the gathering darkness. ‘Why?’

  Enzo took a deep breath. ‘I suppose you all have the right to know.’ He hesitated. ‘This murder I’ve been trying to solve….’

  ‘Jacques Gaillard?’ Sophie said.

  Enzo nodded. ‘I’ve found three of his killers so far. Two of them are dead, and the third one has tried to kill me at least once.’

  The youngsters were shocked to silence. Then Sophie said in a very small voice, ‘Why are we going to Metz?’

  ‘To find another body part, and the clues that’ll lead us to the fourth killer.’

  * * *

  By midnight, Enzo could not keep his eyes open. His head was rolling about on his chest. At Vierzon, Bertrand left the autoroute and took a D-road cross-country towards Troyes. Metz was an industrial town in north-west France, not far from the German border. It would be several more hours before they got there.

  Bertrand said, ‘Why don’t you lie down and sleep, Monsieur Macleod? There’s a mattress rolled up in the back there. Nicole was using it earlier.’ He flicked his head towards the back of the van.

  ‘It’s very comfortable,’ Nicole said. ‘And I could do with some company back here.’

  Sophie stifled a smile. ‘On you go, Papa. We’ll wake you up when we get there.’

  Bertrand pulled in at the side of the road, and Enzo got out into the warm night air. There was nothing else on the road. He went around the back and climbed into the dark interior. The courtesy light below the rear view mirror barely reached beyond the driver’s seat, but what little light it cast illuminated Nicole’s beam of pleasure. ‘Over there behind the seats,’ she said, pointing. ‘I tied it up again.’

  Enzo fumbled about until he found the mattress, rolled up and tied with string. As he untied it, the mattress flopped open across the floor of the van, and something struck him a glancing blow on the side of the head

  ‘Ow!’ he yelled. ‘What the hell….’

  Bertrand retrieved a flashlight from the glove compartment and shone it into the back. Caught in its beam, Enzo saw the familiar shape of Bertrand’s metal detector.

  ‘Bloody thing!’ It was as if it were following him. And he heard a muffled snigger coming from the front. He kicked it to one side and lay down on the mattress as Bertrand extinguished the flashlight and forced his gearbox through shot synchromesh into first gear. They moved off with a jerk.

  ‘Night, Papa,’ he heard Sophie saying, then after a moment felt the warmth of Nicole’s body as she plumped herself down next to him.

  ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ she said in the dark. ‘There’s plenty of room for both of us.’

  He had no recollection of whether or not he responded. The rhythm of the engine, the thrum of tyres on tarmac, very quickly dragged him down into a dark, dreamy sleep where he was chased by salamanders and confronted by creatures with bloodied faces. He had no idea how much later it was that he awoke with a sudden, startling thought in his head. It was still dark, and the ever-present roar of the diesel seemed never-ceasing. Like jet engines on a transcontinental flight, it had become part of the very fabric of his existence. Nicole was fast asleep. He scrambled on to his knees and pulled at Bertrand’s shoulder from behind. Bertrand half-turned his head and Sophie looked back in surprise and alarm.

  ‘Are you all right, Papa?’

  ‘Why have you got a mattress in the back of your van?’

  Bertrand turned away and fixed his eyes on the road. He said nothing. Enzo was sure he could see colour rising on his neck.

  Sophie laughed. ‘Don’t be silly, Papa. What do you think it’s for?’

  This was not a thought that Enzo wanted to entertain. ‘For heaven’s sake, Bertrand, she’s my daughter,’ was all he could think to say. And immediately it occurred to him that his concern was more for himself than for his daughter, his fear of losing her.

  Bertrand kept his eyes front. ‘I’m sure Sophie’s mum was someone’s daughter, too. And I’m sure you loved her just as much as I love Sophie.’

  Sophie reached out to touch Bertrand’s cheek. Enzo could almost feel her pleasure i
n Bertrand’s words.

  ‘There’s no room at my mum’s,’ Bertrand said to Enzo. ‘And I know you don’t approve of me. So…’ He left the sentence hanging, with all its implications. Where else were they to go? Enzo was depressed by the thought that somehow he was to blame. Forcing them to make love on some seedy mattress in the back of a van. He felt even more uncomfortable on it now, and he retired silently into the back of the van like an animal with a self-inflicted wound.

  He lay on his back, then, leaving a discreet distance between Nicole and himself, and thought of Pascale. How she had turned his life upside down, touched him with a forbidden happiness, and then left him with only the memory of it. He remembered Bertrand angrily saying to him of Sophie, She’s not your little girl any more. So maybe it’s time you started letting her grow up. Sophie was just three years younger now than her mother had been when Enzo first met her. But all Enzo could think of was the little girl he had raised, all her moments of tears and triumph. Her tearful first day at school, the first wobbling moments on a bicycle. Don’t let go, Papa, don’t let go! The hours spent in the open-air pool on the ële de Cabessut teaching her to swim. The joy of passing her baccalaureate. Moments replayed, some of them too close to those he had lived through once before with Kirsty as a child. Only, he had lost Kirsty through his own selfishness, and had no idea what he would do if he lost Sophie, too. Bertrand would never know how hard it was for him to let go.

  He closed his eyes and succumbed to dreams of Charlotte, with her beautiful black eyes, and the soft touch of her fingertips on his face. Even in sleep there was no escape from the melancholy reminders of his life’s failures. And somewhere, in the last shreds of consciousness he found regret again that he had not handled his confrontation with her differently.

  IV

  Sunlight poured in the back window and splashed across the mattress, hot through the glass, burning his clothes and his skin. Enzo stirred and rolled over, turning face-first into the large, round sensor pad of Bertrand’s metal detector. He awoke, startled and disorientated.

  ‘Morning, Papa.’

  He turned to see Sophie smiling back at him from the passenger seat. ‘Where are we?’

  ‘Metz. We got here in the middle of the night. It seemed a shame to wake you. And, anyway, there was nothing you could do while it was still dark. So we just snatched a few hours sleep here in the front.’

  The driver’s door opened, and Bertrand’s face appeared. ‘Is he awake yet?’

  ‘Yes, he is,’ Enzo said.

  Bertrand grinned at him. ‘Morning, Monsieur Macleod.’

  Enzo looked around. ‘Where’s Nicole?’

  Sophie couldn’t resist a smile. ‘Still in seventh heaven after spending the night with you. If only her father could have seen you.’

  Enzo glared at her and Bertrand said, ‘She went for a wander round the stadium.’

  Enzo opened the back doors and climbed stiffly out into the morning sunshine, blinking in its glare. He slipped on his jacket and saw that they were parked beside a small river running along behind the stadium. He also noticed, with some disappointment, that they were not in the Rue du 19 Mars 1962. This was the more prosaically named Rue du Stade. Trees grew alongside the river, opposite a row of terraced houses and a sports shop. He turned to see the main stand stretching away towards the distant motorway. Stade Symphorien. The home of FC Metz since 1987. He saw the club shield on the side of the north stand, the double-cross of Lorraine on one side, a salamander on the other.

  And then Nicole appeared from behind the east stand. As she approached them Enzo saw that she was frowning. ‘Why are we here, Monsieur Macleod?’

  Enzo sighed. Facts were easier to explain than instinct. ‘Because Metz won the League Cup in 1996. A replica trophy was one of the clues we found at Hautvillers. And because the club’s emblem is a salamander. That was another of them.’

  ‘Do you have photographs?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Let’s have a look at them, then,’ Sophie said, and they all crowded around Enzo at the open back door as he took the prints out of his bag and laid them along the floor of the van.

  Bertrand craned his neck to see. ‘Is that the trophy?’ He stabbed a finger at the picture of the cup.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then that’s not the League Cup. Not even the old one. The League Cup’s a unique design. Unmistakeable.’

  ‘So what it is, then?’ Nicole asked.

  Bertrand lifted the photograph. ‘This is the Coupe de France.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’ Sophie said.

  ‘The difference is that in 1996, the Coupe de France was won by Auxerre. Not Metz.’

  Chapter Twenty

  I

  The mediaeval city of Auxerre stood on a hill on the banks of the river Yonne, one hundred and seventy kilometers south-east of Paris, in the heart of the Bourgogne. It was early afternoon by the time they reached it, and ominous, dark clouds had already begun rolling in from the west. The air was humid, hot, filled with the promise of summer rain. As they crossed the Pont Paul Bert, daylight darkness settled like a shroud on the towers and buttresses of St. Étienne Cathedral, which dominated the skyline on the west bank. Cruise boats lined up along the quays opposite, rising and falling as if in slow motion on the gentle slate grey swell of the river.

  The Stade Abbé Deschamps stood along the banks of the Yonne at the south end of town, surrounded by playing fields and running tracks. Bertrand turned left off the main road into the car park in front of the main stand, and Enzo got out of the van stretching and flexing limbs that had stiffened up during the three-and-a-half hour drive.

  Kids were playing football on the far side of a fence, aspiring future stars, shouting and chasing, attracted to the ball like metal filings to a magnet. Enzo left Sophie and Bertrand and Nicole in the van and walked along the length of the stand, past the boutique and the ticket office and the administration block. He had a sickening sense of déjà vu. One football stadium was much like another. Metz had been a wild goose chase. Auxerre might well be the same. He had no idea what he was looking for.

  Behind the Leclerc stand, which backed on to the river, youngsters were chasing one another up and down the concrete steps, their catcalls and laughter echoing between rows of grey plastic seats. In the dark beneath the overhang, he saw two young lovers backed up against a wall, oblivious to the kids playing on the staircases and landings above them, driven by adolescent hormones to fulfil some desperate fantasy amongst the broken bottles and discarded beer cans. Beyond the trees, two teams of rowers cut through choppy waters, the blades of their oars rising and falling in perfect unison, throwing cool spray into warm air.

  Even as he found his way between the stands to the very edge of the pitch, secure behind its moat and fences, he knew that there would be nothing for him here. Cut grass and advertising hoardings, rows of empty seats rising into the stands.

  When he got back to the van Nicole looked at him expectantly. ‘Well?’

  He shook his head. ‘I’m wasting my time here. And yours. We should go back to Cahors.’

  ‘It’s a long drive,’ Bertrand said.

  Enzo looked at him. The young man was exhausted. He had driven through the night to Metz, and then again all morning to Auxerre. It would be six or seven hours back to Cahors. ‘Why don’t we stay overnight?’ Enzo said. ‘I’ll pay for a hotel. We can head back in the morning.’ After all, what was there to hurry back for?

  * * *

  The Hôtel l’Aquarius was at the end of the Avenue Gambetta, east of the river, in the new part of town. The rooms were small, windows looking out over a shambles of red-tiled rooftops and seedy back yards. Nicole went off with Sophie and Bertrand to explore the old city, and Enzo lay down on his bed staring at the cracks in the ceiling. He thought again about all the clues which had brought him here. There were too many anomalies. The referee’s whistle with the numbers 19/3 scratched into the plating. They didn’t seem to fit
with anything else. The salamander which had sent him on a fool’s errand to Metz. How certain he had been that he would find the answers he was looking for at Metz football club. A certainty so easily punctured by Bertrand’s revelation about the Coupe de France and Auxerre. Perhaps Enzo had misread the clues completely. Perhaps there was no football connection at all. When conviction is fractured, doubt creeps in through all the cracks.

  The silence in Enzo’s room pressed in around him. He wondered what awaited him in Cahors. Was he still in danger? He wished he had never heard of Raffin and his seven most celebrated unsolved murders. It was one thing to make an argument in the abstract during the course of a dinner, to deliver bold statements and accept wagers, it was quite another to come face to face with reality. Real life. Real death. Murder. Personal tragedy. He thought of Charlotte, and of how things had been between them, and he remembered an old Chinese proverb. It is not an easy thing to mend a broken mirror.

  He reached for the remote control and turned on the television. The melodramatic orchestral overtures of some dubbed American soap filled the room. But anything was better than the silence which accompanied regret. He closed his eyes and let the sounds of it wash over him without listening.

  He was not certain how long he had been asleep, but something in the voice that wakened him penetrated deep into his subconscious to bring him bubbling back to the surface. The national television news was playing on France 3, and he realised with something of a shock that it was after seven. His thoughts were quickly focused on the commentary of the reporter. He squinted at the picture to see helicopter footage of long traffic tailbacks on the périphérique ring road around Paris. His heart was pounding, but he wasn’t quite sure why. It took firemen more than half an hour to cut through the wreckage to recover the body, the voice-over told him. An investigation has already begun into what caused the vehicle to swerve across three lanes of traffic and into the containing wall before bursting into flames. A still photograph filled the screen, and Enzo sat abruptly upright. It was the same photograph he had seen on the internet yesterday. A stock shot, apparently in use by all the media. Diop’s unmistakable lopsided smile. François Diop was being tipped for high office at the United Nations before today’s tragedy. He is survived by a wife and two young children.