Past Imperfect

PROLOGUE

Provence, June, 1995

The three figures walked along the rough track alongside the wheat field. Two men and a boy of eleven.

The older of the men, Dominic Fornier, was in his late fifties. A stocky figure just short of six foot with dark brown hair cropped short and almost totally grey at the sides. Another twenty metres ahead would be the best vantage point, he thought, his eyes scanning the broad expanse of the wheat field. Soft brown eyes with a faint slant at the corner. A slant that somehow made them sharper: knowing eyes, perceptive eyes. Eyes that had seen too much.

The younger man, Stuart Capel, was an inch shorter and slim with light brown almost blonde hair. Mid-thirties, the first faint worry lines showed more prominently as he squinted against the sun and the glare of the bleached white field. Dominic could see the slight resemblance between Stuart and the young boy; though the boy's hair was a shade lighter and a few freckles showed across his nose and cheeks. Fresh faced, happy, but Dominic could still sense the slight barrier, a distance and detachment in the boy's eyes that betrayed the pain and scars of the past months.

As they shuffled to a stop, Stuart asked: 'So is this where it happened?'

'Yes, more or less.' Dominic pointed. 'About five metres ahead on the left.'

Stuart looked at the area of wheat, and it told him nothing. Barely a foot high after being cut down to stubble in the early summer, it was silent, eerie. No hint of the events which now brought them to this spot. What had he expected? He looked across, at young eyes and a distant look that now he knew so well; but there was no glimmer of recognition. As usual, little or nothing while the boy was awake. Probably now even the ghostly shadows finally faded from the edges of his dreams. Acceptance. Stuart wondered.

Six months? It seemed far longer as Stuart's mind flicked through the nightmare odyssey which had finally led them here today. And now the with the trial, so much would hinge on the events of the next days and weeks. Is that what he'd hoped for by asking Dominic Fornier to bring them out here: a final closing of the book, a laying to rest of the ghosts in both their minds?

To the right of the lane were pine trees and thick bushes clinging to an embankment which dipped down towards the small river tributary thirty yards away. Stuart could hear its faint babbling above the gentle wind that played across the field.

He reminded himself that whatever pain and anguish he'd felt, for Dominic Fornier it must have been much worse. The case had plagued Fornier for over thirty years. From a young gendarme to a Chief Inspector, from a provincial case to now one of the largest and most intriguing in French legal history. 'The trial of the decade,'Le Monde had apparently headlined it. And equally it had ripped apart Fornier's own family life.

Dominic lifted his eyes from the field and into the distance, towards the village of Taragnon. Blood patches dried brown against the bleached sheaves. The small face swollen and disfigured. Dominic shuddered. The images were still stark and horrific all these years later.

The field and the view had remained constant, thought Dominic, but everything else had changed. Everything. How many times had he stood in this same field the past thirty years? Searching for clues and the missing pieces of his own life. One and the same. The last time he'd visited in the Spring just past, he'd cried: cried for the lost years, cried for the family and loved ones long departed, cried for his own and Taragnon's lost innocence. One and the same. Cried and cried until there was nothing left inside.

For a moment he thought he could hear the goat's bells again. But as he strained his hearing above the soft sway of the wind across the field, he realized that it was the distant church bells of Bauriac, calling morning prayers… the many services through the years: christenings, marriages… funerals…

Dominic bit his lip. He could feel the tears welling again with the memories, and turned slightly from Stuart and the boy as he scanned the silent panorama of fields and the rich green Provence hills beyond. And as the pain of the images became too much, he closed his eyes and muttered silently under his breath, 'Oh God, please forgive me.'