by Peter May
Raffin said, ‘But why wouldn’t he just kill you?’
‘Someone already tried at Gaillac. But that was before I caught the killer there. If someone were to assassinate me now, it would seem pretty obvious that it was one of the remaining murderers. And someone else might start going after them. But if he just wrecks my life, takes it apart piece by piece, my investigations will simply stop. And it’s highly unlikely that anyone else is going to step in to fill my shoes.’
They lapsed again into silence, absorbing Enzo’s theory, picking at its flaws, unravelling its frayed edges to see if it would still hang together.
Then it was Enzo who broke the silence once more. ‘If only he’d known I was going to die anyway, he wouldn’t have had to bother.’
They were approaching the tollbooths now, and beyond the lines of traffic ahead, saw for the first time what was causing the tailback. There was a phalanx of blue gendarmerie vans parked off to one side, and twenty or more gendarmes checking papers before allowing anyone through the booths. They wore tall, kepi hats, and waterproof capes to protect them from the rain, nervous hands never far from holstered guns.
‘Must be a terrorist alert,’ Raffin said. It was unusual for every car to be stopped for a simple traffic check.
As they approached the head of their line it became clear that the gendarmes were carrying out identity checks on all the occupants of every car, driver and passengers alike. Raffin fumbled for his ID card, and Kirsty took out her passport. Enzo found his carte de séjour and flipped it absently between his fingers, brooding still on the man who had so nearly killed his daughter just to ruin his life. Whichever of the five remaining killers he might be, Enzo’s investigations to find him would no longer revolve around a professional re-examination of the evidence. This was personal. And he didn’t have much time.
Raffin drew up and three gendarmes peered in through wet glass. He rolled down the driver’s window and held out his ID card. But the gendarme was looking beyond him, towards the back seat. He flicked a quick glance at his colleagues, and one of them opened the rear passenger door and drew his gun in one swift movement.
‘Hey!’ Raffin turned in alarm to see Enzo being pulled from the car. He turned back to find a pistol pointed at his face.
‘Out of the car! Everyone out of the car!’ Suddenly all the gendarmes were shouting at once. There came the sound of feet running through the wet, men in dark blue crowding around their car, Raffin and Kirsty dragged roughly out into the rain.
Kirsty saw her father face down on the tarmac, five gendarmes around him. His arms were pulled behind his back and she heard the snap of handcuffs locking in place. It all happened so fast, there was no time even to think about it. But now she screamed as loud as she could, before being spun around and banged up against the car. All the breath was knocked from her lungs, and she couldn’t even find a voice to raise in protest. But she could hear Raffin’s angry admonitions.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing? I’m a journalist!’
And the voice that replied, tight with tension. ‘So maybe you’d like to tell us why you have a killer in the back of your car?’
Part Two
Chapter Fifteen
South of France, June 1986
Richard had mixed memories of the place. He had hated school. In those days it had been on the Rue de la Démocratie, opposite the boulodrome and the beach, with a view out across the bay to the red-roofed Eglise Notre Dame des Anges, with its distinctive Byzantine bell tower. There was something not quite right about being stuck in a classroom, with all that blue Mediterranean on the other side of the glass.
On fine days, when stormy seas allowed, he would follow the stone quay beneath the towering walls of the Château Royal to the Quai de l’Amirauté, where yellow and blue painted sail boats with their crooked crossed masts bumped and creaked and strained against the swell. A quayscape made famous by the paintings of André Derain.
He would lean on the railings and watch the commandos training, streaming out from the château and into the water in full kit to launch rubber dinghies into the bay. Sometimes they would be taken out beyond the harbour wall and tipped overboard, to make their own way back to shore.
With his home in the Rue Bellevue being almost directly below Fort Miradou, he had grown up with the sight of soldiers in the street. He had always admired the way they carried themselves and how their hair was cropped, and the green khaki of their uniforms above shiny black boots. It was here, perhaps, that the seeds of later ambition had been sewn.
The Rue Bellevue was aptly named, running along the clifftops above the old town, looking out to sea. He lived with his mother at the end of a row of stone cottages at the far end of the street. When it was stormy, the house took a battering. When it wasn’t, he would spend hours perched on the rocks at the end of the garden watching the sea break against the cliffs below.
There was a time when he was bullied at school. Until he jabbed a pencil into the eye of the school bully and nearly blinded him. No one had come near him after that.
It had been the beginning of the end of the relationship with his mother. There had never been any love lost between them. She had been unbearably protective, smothering him with a love that had been suffocating and selfish. And as he grew into his teens, he had become rebellious, argumentative, disobedient. Their relationship, finally, had been fatally fractured when she’d had his dog put down. It had been done at her insistence after he’d suffered a severe allergic reaction which nearly killed him.
It had been inexplicable. Domi and Richard had been best friends for five years, ever since his mother had brought the dog home as a puppy. Richard had never once suffered a reaction in all that time. But the doctor had said that almost anything could trigger an allergy.
Richard had never believed it was Domi. Not then. Not till later. But that came after the discovery that would shake his life to its very foundations.
He was due to sit his baccalauréat the week he found out. Which is why he never took the exam. His mother had been out somewhere, and he was studying. Or, at least, trying to. But he’d been distracted by the sunshine, bright light coruscating like scattered diamonds across the deep blue waters of the bay. Looking back, he could never remember what had drawn him to the attic. Boredom, probably. It was years since he had been up there in the dust and the heat.
A bright slash of sunlight falling from the skylight lay across the forgotten junk of a lifetime in dazzling, jagged splinters. And it was amongst that junk that he found his mother’s old trunk and its treasure of family memorabilia, the detritus of a life he knew nothing about.
His father was dead. She had told him that much. But she had never spoken of grandparents or siblings or cousins or aunts and uncles. And here were photographs of people he had never seen. Family albums filled with fuzzy black and white prints, faded names written in English in an old-fashioned hand. Grandfather Peglar, Granny Topps, Aunt Hylda, Selena and Frank. Richard looked at unfamiliar faces staring back at him from a long forgotten past.
Of course, he knew his mother was English. It was the language she had insisted they always speak in the house, but it had never occurred to him that there might still be family back in England. The pictures in the album, however, were from another era, and these folk, at least, were long dead.
He rummaged through the trunk and found a pack of coloured photographs that looked as if they might have been taken in his lifetime. He squinted at the top picture and saw the date burned red into the bottom corner of the photograph by the developer.
23/07/70
He shuffled through the photographs. Views across a bay to white Mediterranean houses clinging to a steep hillside leading to a large church, a jumble of rooftops, red terracotta Roman tiles. Shops along a seafront. Posters in Spanish promoting a local corrida. This was Spain.
Then a family on a beach. A mother and father and three children. They were posing for a photograph, smiling at the camer
a. But not the one that took this photograph. There was an unseen photographer somewhere off to camera right. There were two boys and a girl. The boys were little more than toddlers. The girl was about five. One of the boys had his head turned away, and the other was looking straight towards the lens that had captured his image. Straight towards Richard.
If it was possible that your heart could stop, and yet you could go on living, Richard would have said that his heart had stopped. Because there was absolutely no doubt in his mind. He was looking at himself. And in some very strange way, he was almost able to conjure a recollection of the moment.
But even stranger was that none of these other people was familiar.
He flipped quickly through the other photographs, but that was the only one of the group on the beach.
He was unsettled. Who were these people? His mother had never spoken of a holiday in Spain. He put the photographs aside and delved deeper into the trunk, finding a worn leather document holder. He opened it up to find a collection of yellowing family papers, extracts from the register of births, marriages, and deaths. There was his mother’s birth certificate. Selina Anne Peglar, born 19th May, 1939. A certificate of marriage to his father, Reginald Archangel, on September 9th, 1964. Then his father’s death certificate, dated just six months before the birth of his son in September, 1968. Beneath that was his own birth certificate. September 20th. He looked at the entry for his father, which described him simply as Schoolmaster, and wondered briefly what he had been like. But he quickly put away the thought. It made no difference now.
He slipped the final certificate out from its plastic sleeve, and everything he had ever thought he knew about himself fell headlong into a place of impenetrable darkness. In trembling hands he held the death certificate of an eighteen-month-old boy who had died from heart failure on March 18th, 1970. The boy’s name was Richard Archangel.
It was his own death certificate.
Chapter Sixteen
Cahors, November 2008
The mist and cloud which had hung over Cahors for days had finally lifted. A winter sun hung low in the clearest of blue skies, banishing the dreary November damp, and replacing it with cold, crisp air.
Enzo could see cracks of sunlight around the edges of shutters closed firmly on the barred windows of his interrogation room somewhere in the bowels of the caserne. It was a small room, walls scarred by graffiti, witness to the hundreds of prisoners who had spent time here under the harsh glare of fluorescent light, claiming innocence, just like him.
The police had heard it all before.
Enzo was restless, like a caged animal. He couldn’t stay in his seat for more than a few minutes at a time, prowling the room, angry and depressed, in desperate search of a way out of all this.
The gendarmes had told him nothing, treating him like a criminal already tried and convicted by the courts. He had remained handcuffed during the long, eleven hour journey back to Cahors in the back of a darkened van, cramped and uncomfortable, allowed out only twice to relieve himself at the side of the road, blinded by the sudden daylight.
Now, after a night in the cells of the Police Nationale in Cahors, he faced the woman he had once considered as a prospective lover.
Commissaire Taillard was still an attractive woman, silky brown hair tied in a bun at the back of her head to reveal a strong, faintly slavic face with high cheekbones and gently slanted almond eyes. Her dark cherry red lips were full, and set in an unaccustomed line of genuine gravitas as she gazed at him with dark, disappointed eyes across the interrogation desk.
He tried to remember why it was they had never quite hit it off. On the face of it they’d had a lot in common. The local chief of police, and a man who had once been the top forensic scientist in his native Scotland. They had dated on a number occasions. She had been his partner on invitations to several dinner parties. People had begun to talk about them as a couple, to speculate. Oddly, he had preferred her in uniform. Out of it, there was something strangely old-fashioned about her, and although she was a passionate woman, she had failed to arouse the same degree of passion in him. Perhaps, had they consummated their relationship, that might have changed. They had come close one night after dinner at his appartment. Things had advanced to a state of semi-undress when Sophie returned with Bertrand, catching them in flagrante delicto, an inconvenient and embarrassing coitus interruptus that they somehow never managed to complete on any future occasion.
He supposed it was he who had let the relationship wither. Not a conscious decision, just a gradual retreat. And he had the sense that she somehow blamed him.
Now he was being forced to deal with her on quite a different basis, and the presence of the armed officer guarding the door precluded the possibility of any communication between them on a personal one.
He wanted to say, For God’s sake, Hélène, it’s me. You know I’m not capable of anything like this. But all he said was, ‘It’s absurd, commissaire, completely insane.’
‘Do you deny knowing her?’
‘Of course not. I met Audeline at a party about six weeks ago. I’ve seen her a few times since.’
Commissaire Taillard consulted an open folder on the table in front of her. ‘You had dinner together last week at the Fils des Douceurs floating restaurant.’
Enzo flicked her a look. It was where he and Hélène had first dined alone together. But she was impassive. ‘Yes.’
‘Were you having sex?’
Enzo felt himself flush with unaccustomed embarrassment. It seemed like such a bald question on such a personal matter, especially coming from a woman with whom he had failed to become intimate. He glanced at the officer guarding the door, but if he had thoughts on the subject, his face did not betray them. He decided on flippancy. ‘Not during dinner.’ It felt as if the temperature in the room had dropped ten degrees. He revised his approach. ‘How is that relevant?’
‘There may have been a sexual element to the attack, Monsieur Macleod. The victim’s blouse had been ripped open and her bra torn off, so the question is pertinent.’
Enzo closed his eyes. It was easy to forget, as he drowned in a sea of his own troubles, that a woman who had aroused feelings in him had been murdered. Very probably because of him. He opened his eyes again to banish the unpleasant images that came to him in the dark.
Commissaire Taillard still held him in her gaze. ‘Your e-mails were certainly of an intimate nature.’
So she had read their e-mail exchanges. Enzo blushed, in spite of himself. He should have known better than to commit his feelings to writing. But sometimes the Italian in him would overcome the natural reticence of the Scot.
‘No,’ he said.
‘No what?’
‘No, we weren’t having sex.’
Still there was nothing in her expression to betray her emotions, but he noticed that her face, in contrast to the colour he felt rising on his own, had grown very pale. ‘What was the purpose of your visit to her apartment on the morning she was murdered?’
‘I wasn’t at her apartment.’
‘According to her computer diary you had a rendezvous at her apartment at 11am.’
‘I can’t help that. I wasn’t there.’
‘Where were you, then?’
He hesitated. ‘I had an appointment with an oncologist.’
She frowned. ‘An oncologist?’
‘A cancer specialist.’
‘I know what an oncologist is!’ The unasked question got as far as her lips but not beyond them. ‘Where?’
‘Here in Cahors.’
‘And presumably this…doctor, will be able to bear that out?’
‘Of course.’
She seemed torn, as if somehow wanting to believe him, and not. Both at the same time. ‘You should know that the sample of your hair that we took on your arrival yesterday has been sent to Toulouse for comparison with several long, black hairs recovered from the clothes of the deceased.’
Enzo shrugged. ‘So they won’t
match.’ He pulled up his chair suddenly and sat down opposite her, leaning forward with earnest intent. ‘Look, Hélène, I’ve got a cast iron alibi. A paper trail that leads all the way from my GP to the oncologist, and then the doctor himself at the end of it. Why don’t we just follow that trail and put an end to this nonsense?’
* * *
It was good to have the blue sky overhead, and fresh, cool air in his lungs again, even if only for a few moments. The police car pulled up outside Enzo’s apartment and a uniformed officer helped him out from the back seat. His hands were cuffed in front of him, and he caught a momentary glimpse of his reflection in the window of the Lampara restaurant. They had taken away his hairband, although the notion that he might have tried to hang himself with it seemed more than faintly absurd. So his hair was a straggling mess, tumbling over his shoulders. He hadn’t shaved in two days. His jacket was stained and dirty from where they had pinned him down on the wet tarmac.
He saw the faces of people he knew, shopkeepers, neighbours, regulars at the restaurant, turning to watch with shocked curiosity as he was led by a uniformed officer to the door of the stairwell. Commissaire Taillard followed stiffly in their wake. A woman of authority on public display.
On the first landing, she rang the doorbell and waited. There was no reply. She looked at Enzo as if he could explain why there was no one at home. He just shrugged, and she took his keys and unlocked the door.
As they went into the hallway Enzo saw, through the open door of the spare bedroom, Kirsty’s valise on the unmade bed, and Raffin’s distinctive soft leather overnight bag on the chest of drawers. So, they were sharing a room.
In the séjour he crossed to his desk and began searching through his papers. He had tossed his letter of appointment into a wire tray where he placed documents awaiting filing. He’d had no idea where to file it, or if he ever would. But it wasn’t there. It should have been on top of the heap. He lifted out the untidy pile of miscellaneous bills and letters and shuffled through them with an increasing sense of alarm.