by Peter May
‘It’s gone.’
‘The letter from your GP?’ Commissaire Taillard was looking at him sceptically.
‘Yes.’
‘The one with the date and time of your appointment with the oncologist?’
‘Yes.’
‘How very convenient.’
‘It’s not at all convenient. Maybe Sophie or Kirsty took it.’ Enzo could feel the colour rising on his cheeks. ‘Look, why don’t we just cut straight to the chase. If you just take me to see the oncologist, that puts an end to it once and for all.’
She sighed, patience stretching to its limit. ‘What was it you were seeing him for?’
Enzo’s eyes dipped away towards the floor. Only Kirsty and Roger knew the truth, and each time he had been forced to say it out loud it just seemed to compound its inevitability. ‘I’ve got terminal cancer,’ he said. And looked up to see the shock in her face.
* * *
The Rue des Trois Baudus looked different in the sunshine. In Enzo’s memory it had been a very dark place. Now sunlight spilled down between the buildings, bringing colour to brick walls and painted shutters. They had walked up the Rue du Château du Roi from the Place de la Libération, where the police driver had parked. The assistant in the music store had waved as they passed, but his hand had frozen in mid air when he saw that Enzo was in handcuffs. Sunshine struck the building at the far end of the Rue des Trois Baudus where it took a right-angled turn to the left out into the Rue du Portail Alban. Even the graffiti, in black and purple, seemed more decorative than defacing.
They stopped outside the pale oak door of number 24 bis. The window to the left was still shuttered and barred, but the oncologist’s plaque had been removed, leaving only four small screw holes in the wall to bear witness to its ever having been there. Enzo stared at the blank space in confusion. The boîte postale to the right of the door was stuffed to overflowing with publicité.
‘Is this it?’ Commissaire Taillard was beginning to lose patience.
Enzo tried to stay calm. ‘Yes. There was a plaque on the wall right here. The doctor’s name was Gilbert Dussuet. And there was a sign below the bellpush saying ring and enter.’ But there was no sign there now. Commissaire Taillard pressed the bellpush and they were greeted by silence.
‘Sounds like it might have been out of commission for some time,’ she said.
Enzo lifted his chained hands and made fists to bang on the door. There was no response. ‘I’m not lying.’ He turned towards her troubled gaze. ‘This is where I was the morning Audeline was murdered. This is where Docteur Dussuet had his cabinet.’ He shrugged in frustration. ‘He must have moved.’
‘What’s all the damned noise down there!’ A voice rang out from above, and they all swung their heads up to see an elderly woman leaning from a window on the first floor opposite. She had thrown her shutters wide, and was so pale you might have thought she had not seen daylight in months.
‘Police,’ the Commissaire said. ‘Who occupies this property here at 24 bis?’
The woman looked down at them as if they were mad. ‘No one. Place has been empty for a couple of years.’
‘There was a doctor’s surgery here,’ Enzo called up to her. ‘A Docteur Dussuet.’
‘No.’ The old woman shook her head. ‘Never been a doctor here in all my time. And I was born in this house.’
Enzo felt the world falling away beneath his feet. The certainty that had fuelled him was dissolving into bewilderment and confusion. He turned to meet his nearly lover’s cold stare. Her cellphone rang, and she put it to her ear.
‘Commissaire Taillard…’ She listened in silence for a long time. Then, ‘Thank you,’ she said, and hung up. Her eyes never left Enzo’s. ‘Well, well, well. It seems that the sample of hair that we took from you yesterday matches the hair found on the body.’ She pursed her lips, all sympathy and willingness to believe him long since vanished. ‘What do you suggest we do now?’
* * *
Clémont Marot had been a fifteenth century French poet, a protégé of Marguerite de Navarre, the sister of the then king, François Premier. A famous son of Cahors, it seemed slightly insulting to have named such a mean little square after him. You might pass it without noticing. But it was through a large, arched portail on its northeast corner, that Enzo’s GP had his practice, in a building shared by several notaires.
His receptionist said that Docteur Julliard was with a patient and that they would have to wait. So the two police officers and a dishevelled Enzo sat in the crowded waiting room for more than ten minutes, studiously avoiding the openly curious stares of patients awaiting their appointments.
When, finally, the receptionist showed them into his surgery, Docteur Julliard rose, startled, from his desk. He looked at Enzo in disbelief. ‘Good God, man, what’s happened to you?’
Commissaire Taillard said, ‘Monsieur Macleod is being questioned in connection with a murder which took place in the town three days ago.’
‘No!’ Docteur Julliard could not conceal his disbelief.
‘Monsieur Macleod insists that at the time of the murder he had a rendezvous with an oncologist which you made on his behalf.’
Now the doctor turned his disbelief towards Enzo. He shook his head. ‘I don’t understand, Enzo.’
‘You sent me a letter, following my blood tests. An appointment with a Docteur Gilbert Dussuet.’
‘I’m afraid I didn’t. I would only have written to you if anything abnormal had shown up.’
‘And it didn’t?’ the Commissaire asked.
‘No. Everything was as it should be.’
‘So you didn’t refer Monsieur Macleod to an oncologist?’
‘Certainly not.’
Enzo stood staring at his doctor, uncertain whether to laugh or cry. At a stroke his death sentence had been lifted, and he had become the prime suspect in a murder.
The Commissaire clearly shared the thought. She turned to him, a tiny sarcastic smile playing around the corners of her mouth. ‘You see? Nothing wrong with you, Monsieur Macleod. You’re not going to die after all. You’re just going to spend the rest of your life in prison.’
Chapter Seventeen
Guildford, England, July 1986
Richard walked through the carpark towards the nineteenth century Artington House with its brick gables, and twisted wisteria. It stood behind manicured lawns shaded by tall trees in full summer leaf. The roar of traffic from Portsmouth Road retreated behind him as he climbed the steps to its main entrance.
At first she had denied it. Insisted he had made some kind of mistake. But when he threatened to go up to the attic to retrieve the certificate, she had forbidden him. He had never to go up there again. It was off limits. And then she simply refused to discuss it. He had exams to study for, and better things with which to fill his head.
And as far as she was concerned, that was an end to it.
But for Richard it was just the beginning.
He had retired to his room then, and looked around it for the last time without the least sense of emotion. These were the walls that had contained him for most of his seventeen years. Home to the accumulated junk of childhood. His collection of toy soldiers, posters and paintings and albums, his old rugby strip hanging over the back of a chair. His Spanish guitar. So many things he knew he would never miss.
He packed a sports bag with some underwear, a couple of tee-shirts, a pair of jeans, tennis shoes, and a pair of open-toed sandals. He took all his savings from the envelope he had taped beneath his desk drawer and stuffed it in his wallet. He lifted his favourite denim jacket from the back of the door, slipped his passport into an inside pocket, and released the catch that held his bedroom window.
He dropped through the dark into the little square of garden behind the arched gate that led to the lane beyond, and crouched there for a moment listening to the sound of the cicadas. The warm evening air was filled with the scent of bougainvillea and pine and the smell of the sea. As his ey
es adjusted, he glanced down to where phosphorescent waves broke over glistening black rock fifty feet below. The sea felt alive. His sea. He could hear it breathing. It was the only thing he would miss.
* * *
The woman behind the desk in the office smiled at him. He said he had phoned earlier about acquiring a copy of his brother’s death certificate. She remembered him, and he was struck by how readily she took him at face value. He might have been born in this country, but he had spent all his conscious life in France. He spoke French with a southern accent. He listened to Francis Cabrel and Serge Gainsborough. He had a crush on France Gall. And yet his English was so convincing this woman took him for a native. Perhaps he even looked English. One more chip out of his sense of self.
She produced the freshly printed extract and signed it, and he paid for it with the strange notes and coins for which he had exchanged his francs at the bureau de change in London, before catching the train down to Surrey. He glanced at the certificate, and felt again the touch of icy fingers on his neck when he saw his name on it. ‘Can I see the original?’
‘I’m afraid not. The originals are all kept in our vaults, and are not available for public scrutiny.’ She had a sense of something lost in his demeanour and glanced again at the extract she had given him. ‘He died very young. Still a baby, really.’
‘Yes. He never had the chance to grow up.’
She looked at him and smiled again. ‘Maybe he’d have turned out a bit like you.’
Richard flashed her a look, and felt his skin darkening. ‘No!’ His contradiction was unnecessarily abrupt. ‘He wouldn’t have been anything like me!’
* * *
The traffic on The Mount was a distant whisper behind the walls of the cemetery. Somehow everything seemed quieter here. Richard sat in the grass next to a small headstone, discoloured by time and moss, and traced the outline of his own name with tentative fingers. How many people, he wondered, got to visit their own graves? It was a hollowing experience. He felt tears burn his cheeks, and the emptiness inside him ached.
If Richard really was dead, then who was he?
Chapter Eighteen
Cahors, November 2008
Enzo felt foolish. Almost embarrassed. He wasn’t going to die after all. At least, not in the next three months. Not if he could help it. And all that depression and self-pity in which he had been wallowing since his appointment with the phony oncologist, seemed horribly indulgent. But he had learned something very valuable. Life was for living. To the full. Every last, precious second of it.
He held both his daughters in an embrace that he wanted to go on forever. Sophie’s tears were staining his shirt. She’d only had a single day to live with the knowledge of her father’s impending death. A day that had seemed like an eternity, eyes burned red raw by endless tears, spilled now in happiness rather than grief.
And Kirsty. He drew back to look at her. The proximity of death had taught them something about themselves, forced both a confrontation and a reconciliation. There was no past, no history. Today was the first day of the rest of their lives. Lives to be lived in the moment.
Unfortunately, at this particular moment, Enzo still stood accused of murder. And whoever it was that was trying to ruin his life was still out there, capable of God only knew what else.
His tiny cell seemed full of people. He hardly knew who they all were. Nicole insinuated herself between the half-sisters, to thrust large breasts at her mentor and crush him with a bear-hugging ferocity.
‘Shouldn’t you be at university?’ he said.
She cocked her head at him. ‘Classes have been cancelled, Monsieur Macleod. Apparently our professor’s been arrested on some trumped up murder charge. And he’ll probably need my help to solve it, like he usually does.’
He smiled at her fondly. She was his brightest student and had already proved an invaluable assistant in helping him solve two of the murders in Raffin’s book. A big girl of farming stock, what she lacked in the social graces she made up for in intelligence. Long, straight hair that reached down almost as far as her ample hips, was pulled back severely from a round, pretty face, and tied in a ponytail. She frowned at him.
‘I can’t let you out of my sight for a minute, can I?’
He looked beyond her and saw Bertrand at the open door, uniformed officers at his back, and he felt the desolation in the young man’s eyes. There was something different about him, odd. Then Enzo realised that the nose stud and eyebrow piercings had gone. His face seemed strangely naked without them. Gone, too, were the spikes gelled into hair which was now swept simply back from a pale forehead. He looked older, as if suddenly, in the face of tragedy, he had been forced finally to discard his youth.
Enzo held out his hand, and the boy shook it firmly. ‘What’s the situation with the gym?’
Bertrand made a face. ‘It’s history. The fire chief says it was arson. There was an accelerant used.’ Years of study and work lost in a single night of flames.
‘I’m so sorry, Bertrand.’
‘Why? It’s not your fault.’
‘I feel responsible.’
But Bertrand wouldn’t have it. ‘Don’t. Whatever I’ve lost I can rebuild.’ He glanced at Kirsty. ‘You nearly lost a daughter.’ Kirsty reached out to touch his arm. The bond between them was evident. When someone saves your life, you owe him forever. When you are the one who saved the life you become, in some way, responsible for it. Bertrand and Sophie were lovers, and while that might some day come to an end, his relationship with Kirsty was for life.
Sophie said, ‘The Maison de la Jeunesse has offered him temporary space, and the bank have said they’ll give him a bridging loan to re-equip until the insurance money comes through.’
Bertrand shrugged bravely. ‘All I’ve got to do is figure out how to make the payments.’
Out in the hallway, they heard a metal door slam shut, and voices, and a man appeared behind Bertrand. He was wearing a suit, thinning dark hair dragged back from a bearded face. It was so rarely that Enzo saw Simon in a suit that he almost didn’t recognise him.
‘Uncle Sy!’ Sophie threw herself at him with the unrestrained pleasure of a child greeting a favourite uncle. Except that he wasn’t really her uncle. Kirsty took his hand and kissed him on both cheeks, strangely formal, before Simon turned towards his oldest friend. He wasn’t smiling.
‘How come they let everyone in here?’
‘I’ve got influence with the boss.’
‘Not enough to get you out, though.’
‘No. Not quite that much.’
Simon glanced at Kirsty. ‘Well, we’d better see what we can do to get your dad out, then.’ He stepped forward, and the two men stood looking at each other. They had started school together on the same day, aged five. They had played in a band together through all their teen years. And now here they were in their fifties, facing one another across a police cell, one of them suspected of murder, the other his lawyer. The only call allowed to Enzo had been made to Simon in London. He couldn’t practice law in France, but he had some influential connections in the French legal world.
Enzo’s first instinct was to hug him. But Simon pre-empted the embrace by holding out his hand for a formal handshake. ‘We’ll get you the best avocat in the Southwest. I’ve already spoken to some people in Toulouse.’ He seemed unusually detached, coldly professional. ‘They’re allowing me a half-hour interview. You brief me, I’ll brief the avocat. We’ll need to clear the cell first.’
‘Not before we figure out what we can do in the meantime.’ They all turned towards Nicole who became suddenly self-conscious. And then defiant. ‘Well, I’m not hanging about twiddling my thumbs while Monsieur Macleod rots in here. There must be something we can do.’
‘She’s right, Dad,’ Kirsty said. ‘You must have some thoughts. You’re an expert on crime scenes, after all.’
‘Oh, I’ve given it a lot of thought, believe me,’ Enzo said with some feeling. ‘And if I was inve
stigating this thing myself, I’d start with the phony surgery in the Rue des Trois Baudus. Someone had access to that place. Someone with a key.’ He paused for just a moment. ‘And the hair they found on the victim’s body? I’ve got a pretty damned good idea where that came from.’
* * *
The cathedral of St. Etienne stands at the cultural and religious heart of the old Roman city of Cahors, a stunning example of the transition from late Romanesque architecture to Gothic. Resembling a fort, more than a church, it was built in the eleventh century by bishops who were also powerful feudal lords defending their roles as counts and barons of the town. Now it stood in the repose of more tranquil times, a perch for pigeons, a repository for their guano, and the magnificent stained glass of the arched window in the apse looked out on to the barren winter gardens opposite the salon of Coiffure Xavier.
Xavier was performing a red henna rinse on the head of a bird-like-middle-aged lady whose hair had gone prematurely grey and begun thinning alarmingly. She wanted her scalp to be the same colour as her hair to disguise the fact that she was balding. Xavier was trying to persuade her that the disguise was unlikely to work. The door opened, and the bell above it vibrated shrilly in the hot, ammoniac air of the salon.
Xavier immediately sensed hostility. One of the two young women seemed faintly familiar. And he had certainly seen the young man before. A body like his, sculpted during hours of patient exercise, was one you wouldn’t forget in a hurry. Attractive though he was, however, there was something distinctly aggressive in his manner. Xavier took a step back from the henna’d head. ‘Bonjour messieurs dames.’ He regarded them cautiously. ‘Can I help?’
Kirsty looked around the cramped little salon with undisguised contempt. Why on earth would her father come here to get his hair trimmed? And almost as if she had read her sister’s mind, Sophie said, ‘He comes once a month on Thursdays. Thursday’s training day.’