Blacklight Blue

Chapter Fifteen

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.

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 camera. 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

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.

‘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

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 eyes 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

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 investigating 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.’

Kirsty raised her eyes to the heavens and sighed. It was typical of her father to live out the world’s stereotypical view of the mean Scot. She said, ‘You cut our father’s hair.’

Xavier looked at her blankly. ‘Who’s your father?’

‘Enzo Macleod,’ Sophie said. ‘And he’s in prison on a murder charge because of you.’

Xavier blanched. ‘Me? I’ve never murdered anyone in my life.’

‘It’s running down my neck.’ The bird-like lady squirmed in her seat, and Xavier glanced at the trails of red on white skin that disappeared beneath her plastic shoulder cover. But he was distracted.

Kirsty said, ‘Hair found on the body of a woman murdered in Cahors three days ago matches my father’s.’

Sophie pressed the point home. ‘But that’s not possible, since he wasn’t there.’

Kirsty finished the tirade. ‘And he didn’t kill that woman.’

Xavier’s pallor quickly turned pink as blood rushed to the surface of his skin. ‘I don’t see what that has to do with me.’

‘Xavier, I can feel it running down my back.’

Bertrand took a threatening step towards the hairdresser who instinctively flinched, oblivious to the distress emanating from the red head at his fingertips. ‘There’s an easy way of doing this, Xavier, and there’s a hard way. Your choice.’

‘Okay, okay.’ Xavier raised his hands in self defence. Red for stop. ‘I admit it. I did give him some of Monsieur Macleod’s hair.’

‘Who?’ Sophie looked as if she were about to physically attack him.

‘He said it was for a joke.’

‘Who!’

‘I don’t know who he was. He came in here about a month ago, just after Monsieur Macleod had left, and said he wanted to buy some of his hair.’

‘You mean you took money for it?’ Sophie was incredulous, and her vehemence caused Xavier to take a further step back.

‘I refused at first. But he was very persuasive. And in the end, I didn’t really see the harm.’

‘Well, you see it now.’ Bertrand glared at him. ‘How much did he pay you?’

‘Honestly, I’d stick needles in my eyes before I’d do anything to hurt Monsieur Macleod.’

Bertrand said, ‘That might still be an option. How much?’

‘A hundred euros.’

They stared at him, their disbelief reflected in Kirsty’s astonishment. ‘A hundred euros! For some strands of hair?’

‘Xavier…!’ the woman in the chair wailed.

Xavier ignored her. ‘He didn’t want clippings. He wanted the hair that had come away in the comb. I hadn’t even had a chance to clean it out. Monsieur Macleod’s chair was still warm.’

‘So this guy paid you a hundred euros for a few lengths of my father’s hair, and you didn’t think that was odd?’ Kirsty’s belligerence seemed almost as threatening now to Xavier as Bertrand’s.

‘Like I told you, he said it was for a joke.’

‘Some joke!’

Xavier looked at Sophie and noticed for the first time, quite incongruously, the faint strip of white running back through her dark hair. ‘You’ve got the same badger stripe as your father,’ he said, as if he thought they might be distracted by this and forget about his transgressions

‘Magpie,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘It’s Magpie they call him, not Badger.’

Bertrand said, ‘I think you need to shut up your salon, Xavier, and come up to the caserne with us. The police are going to have to take a statement.’

‘I don’t want to get into any trouble.’

‘Maybe you should have thought of that before you went selling your customers’ hair.’

Xavier sighed theatrically, then took in the stripes of red on the neck of the client wriggling below him in her chair. ‘Oh. My. God! What a mess!’ He immediately began dabbing it with a wet sponge, but it had already begun to dry. ‘It’ll take me a few minutes to sort this out.’

‘We’ll wait,’ Bertrand told him.

And Kirsty said, ‘What did he look like? This guy that bought Enzo’s hair?’

Xavier waved a distracted hand in the air. ‘Oh, I don’t know. I hardly remember him.’

‘Try.’

Another theatrical sigh. ‘I suppose he must have been about fortyish. Quite good looking, really. His hair was short. I do remember that. Sort of fair. And, oh…’ His eyes lit up. ‘Ears. Hairdressers always look at ears. You have to in this business. Too easy to cut one off.’

‘What about his ears?’ Kirsty was staring at him intently.

‘Well, it looked like he’d had a nasty accident in a barber’s shop. His right earlobe was completely gone.’

Chapter Nineteen

Commissaire Taillard viewed the pink-faced hairdresser and the three young people sitting on the opposite side of her desk. The sombre figure of the Scottish lawyer, Simon Gold, stood behind them, leaning his hands on the back of a chair. Whatever his faults, Enzo Macleod certainly inspired loyalty among his family and friends. And she felt a tiny pang of regret with the thought that she, too, might have been one of that inner circle, that sérail, had things turned out differently between them.

‘It doesn’t prove that he wasn’t there,’ she said.

Simon straightened himself, and tugged at his beard with long, bony fingers. ‘And the fact that you found his hair at the scene doesn’t prove that he was. He was having a relationship with the woman, for God’s sake. People shed hair. You might expect to find some of his hair on her clothes.’

Kirsty cut in. ‘The point is, why would someone pay a hundred euros for some of my father’s hair if it wasn’t to incriminate him?’

Sophie added, ‘And why would somebody set him up with a phony doctor’s appointment if it wasn’t to blow his alibi out of the water?’

Commissaire Taillard shook her head. ‘This is all just speculation.’

Simon said, ‘In the same way, commissaire, that the only evidence you have is circumstantial.’

But the police chief was conceding nothing. ‘We have a computer diary entry that places him at the scene at the time of the murder. We have hair that ties him to the body of the victim. And his alibi is laughable. People have been convicted on less.’

Simon said, ‘Just stop and think for a moment, commissaire. If you were going to commit a murder, wouldn’t you come up with a better alibi? You know that Enzo is not a stupid man. Why would he invent such a ridiculous story in the full knowledge that it wouldn’t stand up to a moment’s scrutiny?’

There was a knock at the door, and it was opened by a uniformed officer. But Commissaire Taillard’s thoughts were focused elsewhere. ‘No one is suggesting that the murder was premeditated. It might well have been a crime of passion, a moment of anger. And Enzo Macleod left town almost straight afterwards. He probably never imagined that we might tie him to the scene. He never had time to concoct a credible alibi. And the fact is that the building in the Rue des Trois Baudus had been empty for two years.’

‘No it hadn’t.’

Everyone turned towards the door. Nicole stood clutching a beige folder and looking very pleased with herself. She was breathless and slightly flushed.

‘I’ve been round every agence immobilière in Cahors trying to find out who had 24bis Rue des Trois Baudus on their books. Turned out to be an estate agent at the foot of the Boulevard Léon Gambetta.’ She waved her beige folder in the air. ‘And guess what? They rented the building to a Paris-based company three weeks ago. A one-year lease.’

Hélène Taillard gave a tiny gallic shrug of dismissal. ‘I don’t see how that helps Monsieur Macleod.’

Nicole said, ‘Well, if you check with the registrar of the Commercial Court in Paris, as I just did, I think you’ll find that the company which took the lease doesn’t exist.’

Everyone took a moment to digest this.

Then Sophie leaned forward on the desk and looked earnestly at the police chief. ‘Madame Taillard, you know my dad didn’t do this. You guys were…’ She stopped suddenly, halted by an image of the semi-undressed Hélène Taillard on the canapé with her father, a shared memory which brought a flush to the older woman’s cheeks. ‘Well…you were pretty close. You know there’s not a bad bone in his body. He’d be incapable of killing anyone.’

The commissaire sat back in her seat and sighed deeply. ‘I wouldn’t disagree with you, Sophie. But it’s not my call to make. I am the chief of police. I am bound by rules and procedures. There is a limit to how much I can intervene. The juge d’instruction already thinks I am compromised because I know your father socially.’

Simon took the folder from Nicole. ‘But surely, commissaire, the testimony of the hairdresser, and the fact that the building in the Rue des Trois Baudus was leased by a company which doesn’t exist, throws further doubt on an already weak case.’ He smiled. A persuasive smile of reassurance, normally reserved for a jury during summing up. ‘Perhaps, in the light of developments, you might consider discussing with the juge d’instruction, the possibility of letting Enzo out on police bail.’

Enzo stepped out from the glass-fronted Hôtel de Police and drew his first breath as a free man in nearly forty-eight hours. Brittle leaves from the plane trees in the car park lay in drifts among the cars, and rattled across the tarmac in the icy breeze that blew down from the old city walls.

Inside him welled a great, burning sense of anger. Greater even than his sense of injustice, or his relief at being released unexpectedly on bail. Someone had murdered an innocent woman, just to set him up as a suspect. In order to create a false alibi, he had been duped into a consultation with a phony doctor, and suffered through two days of believing he was dying from an incurable disease. That same someone had tried to murder his daughter, and burned down Bertrand’s gym.

It had all been one-way traffic. All designed to ruin his life, to distract him from an investigation that someone feared would uncover a murderer. A murderer who, until now, had escaped justice. Of that Enzo was certain.

But he was certain, too, that he had reached a turning point. A moment in this whole sad and sordid tale, when his adversary had done his worst, and in doing so revealed enough of himself to give Enzo a starting point to fight back. He clung to that thought with a grim tenacity.

‘You don’t look very happy to be out.’

Enzo turned to look at Commissaire Taillard. She had walked him up to the front door from the cells. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t mean to be ungrateful. I ought to thank you for everything you’ve done.’

She took his arm and led him through the trees towards the Musée de la Résistance on the corner. ‘Don’t thank me yet, Enzo. This isn’t over. There is still a killer out there. And a few of my officers still think it’s you.’

‘But you don’t?’

Her concession was reluctant. ‘I never really did, Enzo. In fact, I might even have put money on you being innocent.’

His smile was rueful. ‘You bet on me once before and lost.’

‘You got lucky on the Jacques Gaillard case. I don’t hold that against you.’

They stopped and she turned to face him, her breast lightly brushing his arm. There was a moment between them, a tiny frisson suggesting that perhaps the flame hadn’t been entirely extinguished.

He said, ‘The only way I’m going to clear my name here is by catching the killer myself.’

She shook her head. ‘That’s our job.’

He gave her a look, but refrained from comment. ‘There must be something you can tell me Hélène. About the murder or the crime scene. Something that would give me a starting point.’

‘Absolutely not. You’re just out on bail, Enzo. I can’t go divulging information like that to a suspect.’

‘If I really did it, you wouldn’t be telling me anything I didn’t already know. At least tell me how she was murdered.’

Commissaire Taillard held him in a long, hard stare before blowing through pursed lips in exasperation. ‘She was struck on the face. Sufficiently hard probably to render her unconscious. But that’s not what killed her. The pathologist’s preliminary autopsy report says her neck was broken.’

Enzo stiffened. ‘Deliberately? I mean, she didn’t break it accidentally when she fell?’

‘Oh, no. The médecin légiste was quite clear. The neck was broken by a clean, twisting movement that severed the spinal cord between the third and fourth disarticulated vertebrae. A real pro job was how he described it.’

Enzo whistled softly. ‘Then I know who did it.’

‘What?’ the Commissaire looked at him in disbelief.

‘At least, I know who else he’s killed. In a Paris apartment, nearly seventeen years ago.’ His eyes shone with the cold, hard steel of revenge. ‘Which also means I know where to start looking for him.’

Chapter Twenty

He had been surprised at how easy it was. The newspaper’s archives were open for anyone to see, transferred now to microfiche, viewable on any one of a number of machines in the reading room.

Richard had found the offices of the Daily Mail easily enough. It was before the Associated Press had moved its headquarters to Kensington, and its suite of newspapers was still to be found in the old Northcliffe House in Whitefriars Street, not far from Fleet Street.

He was not quite sure why he had chosen the Daily Mail, except that it seemed a little classier than the other tabloids, but still certain to carry stories of popular interest. He had no idea what he was looking for. But he had a starting date. One imprinted in his memory, just as it had been burned in red into the bottom corner of the photograph. July 23rd, 1970. Almost exactly sixteen years ago.

Outside, the City of London baked under the hot July sun, bankers and journalists finally abandoning coats and jackets for open-necked shirts and summer frocks. But in here it was dark and cool, and Richard’s focus was on the screen in front of him as he wound the spool through the reader. He found July 23rd quickly enough, but if anything newsworthy had happened, it would surely have come after that date. Nothing up until then, at least, had disturbed the happiness of a family on a Spanish beach. He spooled quickly through that day’s news stories before moving on to the 24th. But it wasn’t until the 25th that he found what he was looking for. And it shook him to the core.

Snatched, was the headline. And the sub-head read, Toddler Taken From Spanish Holiday Hotel. Richard ran hungry eyes over the text of the story:

There were photographs of the whitewashed Mediterranean houses of the old port with an inset picture of the bizarrely moustachioed surrealist, Salvador Dali. A snapshot of the missing boy grinning at the camera. Richard stared for a long time at the picture, a shock of blond curls above a chubby round face. He had seen enough photographs of himself at this young age to be in no doubt that he was the abducted child.

He wondered if the strange fragmented images that now flooded his thoughts were real memories or imagined ones provoked by the shock of reading about his own abduction. He thought he could remember a darkened room, a woman bending over his cot, lifting him into safe arms, his fingernail catching her cheek, sticky blood on his fingers. His panda falling to the floor. And, then, out of the darkness, being carried from a car. The sound of the sea somewhere far below, exhaling into the night, filling cool air with its salted perfume.

So his mother was not really his mother. And all that suffocating love, her soft warm bosom and rose-scented cologne crowding his senses, throttling his childhood, had in the end driven a wedge between them. He realised now it had really been some desperate attempt to win him over. As if, somehow, he had known the truth.

Was it possible that he really did remember something? That it was those memories that in some way prevented the two of them from ever having a normal relationship? How disappointed by him she must have been.

He spooled through the ensuing days. The story was never off the front pages, with background pieces and feature articles inside. Experts speculated on the reasons for the abduction. Everything from the white slave trade and sexual abuse to a secret sale on the underground adoption market. Kidnapping for financial reasons had been ruled out when no ransom demand was made. And in any case, Rod Bright, while a successful businessman in Ilford, could hardly have been described as wealthy.

There was an in-depth article about the Bright family themselves, Rod and Angela and their three children, but Richard couldn’t bring himself to read it. Not yet, anyway. Days and weeks passed before his eyes as gradually the story slipped from the front pages, a tale of frustrating police failure confining itself to smaller and smaller paragraphs on the inside, until finally it simply disappeared. Upheavals in Northern Ireland were now grabbing the headlines. The Social Democratic and Labour Party had been formed to fight for Catholic civil rights in the troubled province.

And then suddenly, six weeks later, a young female journalist from the newspaper’s features staff had flown out to Spain to interview Angela Bright. She was still in Cadaquès and refusing to leave until either her child was returned to her, or he was proven to be dead. The blood, it had turned out, was not his. To leave, she told the journalist, would be a betrayal of her son. It would be to abandon him, to admit that he was gone forever. And she simply couldn’t do it. And so this picturesque resort, where discerning people took their holidays, had become a prison, a gilded cage that would hold her until either she found her Richard, or she died. She had already rented a house and was discussing with the local authority the possibility of putting her children into the state school.

Her husband, meantime, had returned to England, where his business interests demanded his presence.

There was a photograph of her sitting in a wicker chair staring forlornly at the camera. Richard stared back at her for a very long time. He had evidently inherited his colouring from his mother. Fair hair, and even from the black and white photograph, he could see that she had the palest of eyes, almost certainly blue like his. But she looked substantially older than her thirty-three years. Drawn, haunted.

He looked away, unable to maintain eye-contact with this ghost from his past, blinking hard to disperse the tears that filled his eyes.

He stood up and went in search of the index. Now that he knew what story he was following, he would be able to find all future references and go straight to them. As it turned out, there were very few. How quickly the world forgot the suffering it shared over breakfast for a few brief days or weeks.

The last reference he could find was in September, 1976, on the occasion of his eighth birthday. Some news editor had figured it was an anniversary on which to hang a story. Perhaps it had been a poor month for news. And so a reporter had been dispatched to do a follow-up interview with Angela Bright, who was still in Cadaquès. A free holiday for a journalist from the features desk.

Señora Bright, as she was now known locally, had purchased a large house just below the church which sat up at the top of the town overlooking the bay. The elder of her remaining children, Lucy, had just started secondary school. Richard’s brother, William, was still in primary school. Angela and Rod had separated eighteen months previously. A good Catholic, Angela was refusing to give him a divorce. But their marriage was over. He had wanted to move on. And she was unable to do so. Still locked up in her gilded cage, resigned to spending the rest of her days there, believing that her son might be dead, but never quite able to release her grip on that last shred of hope that he might somehow, somewhere, still be alive.

She prayed for him each morning in the church, just a few paces from her door, and spent her days in quiet solitude behind shuttered windows or in the cool shade of her tiny, walled garden. In the photograph she seemed to have aged twenty years.

There were photographs, too, of his brother and sister, and short interviews with each. And Richard realised for the first time what he had missed by skimming through all those previous pieces, what would certainly have become clear to him had he read the article on his family background.

He stared at the screen with an extraordinary sense of déjà vu and felt himself freefalling once more into the unknown.

Chapter Twenty-One

As they crossed the square, Enzo looked up beyond the red brick of the old town to the tree-covered hills rising all around the far side of the river, cutting a high, dark line against the deep blue of the winter sky. ‘I’m going to get the bastard.’

As if he hadn’t spoken, Simon said, ‘I have a flight from Toulouse at four.’

They had walked together without speaking down through Cahors, past the imposing Palais de Justice, where Enzo might yet stand trial, across the busy Boulevard Gambetta and into the Rue Marechal Foch, leading into the Place Jean Jacques Chapou.

The cathedral stood in chilly silence, casting its shadow of Christian disapproval on the thoughts of revenge that filled Enzo’s head. He had been so wrapped up in them as they passed through the town that he had failed to register Simon’s unusually sombre mood.

Simon had always been mercurial. At one moment the manic extrovert, saved only by his charm from the consequences of a destructive impulsiveness. At another, the manic depressive who, in the blink of an eye, might descend into a black funk from which it could be almost impossible to rouse him.

His mood this cold November morning, as a pale sun sent long shadows sprawling north across the square, was neither manic nor depressive. He was subdued, and his breath clouded in frigid air as he spoke.

‘I’m in the middle of a court case in Oxford. I only got the judge to agree to a two-day suspension of proceedings by pleading a family emergency.’

A woman with big, yellow rubber gloves was packing ice around freshly displayed fish in the L’Océan fishmonger on the corner.

‘Well, at least come up to the apartment and have a glass of wine with me. I could do with a drink.’

‘No, I need to talk to you.’

‘We can talk in the apartment.’

‘In private.’

For the first time, Enzo detected something ominous in his friend’s tone. He glanced at him, and saw the shadows beneath his orange-flecked green eyes. ‘I’ll buy you a drink in Le Forum, then.’

He steered him past a blue and white 2CV with a crumpled fender and into the café on the south side of the square, opposite the indoor market of La Halle. A butcher’s van was unloading fresh meat in the street under the watchful gaze of an alsation dog whose dreadlocked owner squatted in a doorway, begging cup on the sidewalk in front of him.

Inside, steam issued from a coffeemaker behind the redbrick bar. Enzo ordered a couple of brandies, and several customers shook his hand as Simon followed him in back. A rerun of a rugby game was being shown on a television screen high up above the door. They slipped into leather bench seats to face each other across the booth by the cheminée. They both felt the warmth of smouldering oak embers that filled the place with a sweet scent of winter woodsmoke.

They sat in silence until the brandies came, and Enzo could feel Simon’s tension. ‘Santé.’ He lifted his glass to his lips and the liquor burned its way down into his chest.

Simon just stared at his glass before looking up and meeting his friend’s eye with a curiously loaded stare. ‘You’re a fucking idiot, Magpie, you know that?’

‘What?’ Enzo was startled. This was no idle jibe made half in jest. This was a heartfelt criticism made whole in earnest.

‘She was better off before.’

‘Who?’

‘Kirsty. When she wasn’t talking to you. When you had no contact. Nobody was trying to kill her then.’

Enzo sighed and let himself slip back in his seat. So that’s what this was all about. After Enzo and Linda had broken up, Simon had stayed in touch with Enzo’s ex, playing the role of surrogate father to the surly Kirsty. It was Simon who had been there on school sports day. It was Simon who had taken Kirsty and her mother out for a celebration meal when Kirsty graduated. It was Simon, during all the years that Enzo wasn’t around, who had kept a mindful eye on his absent friend’s daughter.

‘She almost died in the catacombs in Paris. Someone’s just tried to murder her in Strasbourg. And why? Because of you. Because of your stupid bets and your stupid pride, and this crazy crusade to solve every cold case in France.’ He paused. ‘Or, at least, all the ones in Raffin’s book.’ He was on a roll. ‘Just to show the world how fucking clever you are. Enzo Macleod. Great mind, great scientist. Smarter than all the rest. Look at me, mammy, I’m dancing.’

Enzo’s face stung as shock brought colour to cold cheeks. He felt as if he had been struck. There was vitriol in Simon’s accusation, searing words smeared with Scottish sarcasm. And he wasn’t finished.

‘Do you care at all that you’re putting at risk the very people you profess to love?’

Enzo remembered how Simon had been the leading light in the school debating society. And while he could at times be vulgar and foul-mouthed along with the rest of them, he’d had a talent for being able to articulate his opinions with cutting clarity. Making him, of course, an ideal lawyer. And if he meant to pour petrol on the coals of Enzo’s anger, then he succeeded.

‘Don’t lecture me on fatherhood, Sy. You’ve never stayed in a relationship long enough to be one. You’re more likely to be having sex with a girl Kirsty’s age than worrying about her well-being.’

Simon glared back at him, stung by the rebuke. Perhaps because there was more than just a grain of truth in it. ‘You just walked away from her.’

‘Not my choice.’

‘Of course it was. You were the one who left. Not Kirsty. She didn’t ask for that. Now she’s suffering the consequences of reconciliation. And what are you going to do? You’re going to go after this guy. You’re going to put her in even more danger. You just don’t care, do you?’

‘Of course I care! Jesus Christ, man! If I don’t stop this guy, no one else will. And now that I know it’s not just me he’s after, do you not think I’m going to do everything I can to protect the people I love?’

‘How? How are you going to do that, Magpie? Send them to Mars? Get real. You don’t know who this guy is. You don’t know the first thing about him. But he knows everything about you. He could be sitting in this café and you wouldn’t even know it.’

Involuntarily, Enzo’s eyes strayed beyond the booth to the customers smoking and drinking at other tables. It was true. Apart from the regulars whom he recognised, he could not have said who any of the others were. A young man, La Dépêche open on the table in front of him, was sipping a steaming noisette. He glanced up and caught Enzo watching him, before his eyes dipped self-consciously back to his newspaper A middle-aged man at the bar was engaged in an animated conversation with the proprietor. He was dark, muscular, a fading tattoo on his right forearm. Enzo had never seen him before. He forced himself to meet Simon’s critical gaze. ‘Nothing’s going to happen to Kirsty or Sophie or anyone else. I’ll die before I’d let that happen.’ Even as he spoke the words, he realised how hollow they were. And he could see in Simon’s eyes that he knew it, too. How could he possibly keep his children safe from an enemy he couldn’t even see?

Simon leaned slightly towards him and lowered his voice. ‘Just so you know, Enzo…Anything happens to that girl…’

‘And what?’

But whatever response might have reached the tip of Simon’s tongue remained behind pursed lips. He simply got up, his brandy untouched, and weaved his way between the tables to where cold sunlight slanted across the cobbles outside.

Enzo had forgotten that Raffin was there. The journalist had not visited him at the caserne, but Enzo remembered seeing his bag in Kirsty’s room when Commissaire Taillard brought him to the apartment to look for the doctor’s letter. He was not particularly pleased to see him. And barely had time to consider why Simon’s disapproval did not extend to Kirsty’s relationship with Raffin, before he was mobbed by the girls. They took it in turns to hug and kiss him and fretted and fussed collectively. Enzo caught Raffin watching him with a slight, sardonic smile. The old sage surrounded by his adoring acolytes.

He had been surprised, too, to see Nicole. ‘Where are you staying?’ he asked her.

‘She’s sharing with me.’ Something in Sophie’s tone communicated a certain discontent. ‘Where’s Uncle Sy?’

Enzo turned away towards the séjour. ‘He’s had to go back to England.’

Bertrand rose from the table, where he was poring over papers and catalogues. He gave Enzo a strong handshake. ‘Good to see you back in the land of the living, Monsieur Macleod.’

Enzo nodded towards the papers strewn across the table. ‘What’s all this about?’

‘Just trying to work out how much I need to borrow from the bank to cover the cost of new equipment.’

‘How much?’

‘A lot. I don’t think I can afford my wish list, so I’m trying to cut it down.’

Enzo crossed to his bureau and returned to the table with his cheque book. He sat down opposite Bertrand and held out his hand for the two estimates. ‘Let me see.’ He scanned the sheets that Bertrand had handed him, then opened his cheque book and started writing.

Bertrand watched him, perplexed. ‘What are you doing, Monsieur Macleod?’

Enzo tore out the cheque he had written and held it for Bertrand to take. ‘Get your wish list, Bertrand. Tell the bank you don’t need their loan. You can pay me back when the insurance money comes through.’

Bertrand looked at the cheque and shook his head. ‘You can’t afford this, Monsieur Macleod.’

‘With all due respect, Bertrand, how would you know what I can afford?’ He snapped his cheque book shut. ‘I’ve been to the bank and transferred money from my savings account to my checking account.’

‘Papa, that’s all the money you’ve got in the world.’ Sophie was staring at him in disbelief.

Enzo smiled. ‘You know, one thing that occurred to me, Sophie, when I thought I only had a few months left? What a crime it would be to die with money in the bank.’

‘But you’re not going to die now.’

‘We’re all going to die sometime, Soph. And, anyway, I expect Bertrand to pay me back before then. So don’t worry, your inheritance is safe. Or, at least, what’ll be left of it after the French government have taken their pound of flesh.’

‘Oh, Papa!’ she scowled at him.

Bertrand stood, still frozen, with the cheque in his hand. ‘I can’t take this, Monsieur Macleod.’

‘Of course you can. And anyway, I need a favour in return, Bertrand. There’s no such thing as a free loan.’

‘Anything.’

‘I need you to come with us. Someone to look after my girls.’

Nicole pre-empted both daughters, including herself without a second thought as one of Enzo’s girls. ‘Where are we going?’

‘There’s someone out there trying to destroy me, Nicole. Someone who burned down Bertrand’s gym, who tried to kill Kirsty. Someone who murdered a woman the same way he murdered a young man in a Paris apartment nearly seventeen years ago.’ He lifted his eyes to meet Raffin’s, and he saw the journalist frown.

‘The Pierre Lambert case?’ And when Enzo nodded, ‘How do you know that?’

‘M.O. A trademark killing. Spinal cord severed between the third and fourth vertebrae. A mistake, because it gives us a starting point. But this guy is still a ruthless, cold-blooded killer who’s prepared to do anything to stop me finding out who he is. So no one’s safe. None of us. Not until we get him.’ He let his gaze wander around the five sets of eyes fixed upon him. ‘We need somewhere that’s not known to him. Somewhere safe. A base from where we can start to track him down.’

Sophie said, ‘What about Charlotte’s cottage in the Corrèze?’

Enzo shook his head. ‘He knows everything about me, Soph. Charlotte’s in the States right now, so she’s safe. But he’s bound to know about her. So he’ll know about the cottage. We need to make a complete break with everyone and everywhere we know.’

Kirsty said, ‘Do you have someplace in mind?’

Enzo reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of hotel notepaper. ‘Actually, I do.’

Chapter Twenty-Two

Bertrand drew his van into the curb beneath the stark, leafless skeletons of the plane trees in front of the station. Enzo held the door open for Nicole to step down and glanced anxiously across the street.

There were a couple of men in the Hertz car rental office, bent over the counter, intent on signing paperwork. The Maison du Vin de Cahors appeared deserted. A man sat reading a newspaper in the weak winter sunshine outside the bar of the Melchior brasserie. He didn’t look anything like either Kirsty or Xavier’s description of the man with the missing earlobe. But that made no difference. The man whom Kirsty had seen in Strasbourg was not necessarily the killer. And the murderer had already employed someone to play the role of Enzo’s oncologist. They had no way of knowing who else might be in his employ.

Sophie leaned out to kiss her father and squeeze his hand. ‘Take care,’ she whispered. Only by dividing and subdividing themselves, could they hope to shake off anyone with a watching brief. Raffin had already set off in a hire car with Kirsty.

Enzo slammed the door, and Bertrand revved his engine, peeping on his horn before pulling away, and accelerating up the steep incline of the tree-lined Avenue Charles de Freycinet.

Nicole clutched her suitcase nervously. It was, as always, huge, and packed to capacity. Enzo had no idea what she took with her on her travels, but her valise was invariably too heavy for her to lift. He was pleased to see that she had invested for the first time in a case with wheels and offered to take it from her without fear of slipping a disc. ‘Do you think he’s watching?’ she said in a low voice, trying not to move her mouth.

‘Probably not, Nicole. But even if he is, I doubt if he can lip-read.’

He trundled her case across the tarmac, and doors slid open to admit them to the main concourse. It was crowded with passengers awaiting the imminent arrival of the train to Paris. Others were gathered to greet friends and family travelling up from Toulouse. Through yet more sliding doors, they stood in a queue at the billetterie, until waved forward to a guichet. The girl behind the glass said a weary bonjour. Enzo slipped her a sheet of paper containing the code and details of the booking they had made on the internet just an hour before.

The girl glanced at the two faces watching her through the window. ‘Just the one ticket?’

Enzo nodded. ‘Just the one.’

A dot-matrix printer chattered and spat it out. The girl slid it under the glass. ‘Bonne journée.’

They passed back through to the concourse, and Enzo made an extravagant show of validating the single ticket in the borne by the door to the platform, and then handing it ostentatiously to Nicole. The message would be clear to anyone watching. Only Nicole was travelling. Enzo bumped her case downstairs to the underpass, and then up again to the platform, where they stood shivering in the cold wind that blew down the railway lines from the north.

‘I’m scared, Monsieur Macleod,’ Nicole whispered. Her eyes were darting back and forth along the length of the quai, flickering from face to face, assessing each as a potential killer, ruling some out and some in. ‘Do you really think he might be here?’

‘Impossible to know, Nicole. Which is why we’re not going to take any chances.’

The SNCF jingle echoed high among the steel girders of the steeply pitched glass roof, and a voice warned passengers to stand back from the edge of the platform. The Paris train from Toulouse would be arriving in just a few moments. Enzo peered south and saw the train rounding the bend in the distance.

When finally it groaned and creaked to a halt, doors flew open up and down its length and passengers streamed out to fight for space with those queuing up to get on, a confluence of conflicting interests. Enzo waited until others ahead of them had climbed into the train before he hoisted Nicole’s case up to chest level to push it through the door. The effort left him perspiring, tiny beads of sweat turning immediately cold as they formed around his eyes. Nicole threw her arms around him and kissed him on both cheeks. ‘Goodbye, Monsieur Macleod.’ Enzo could almost believe she had tears in her eyes.

He stood back as she climbed aboard and swung the door shut, and then he walked along the platform, following her progress through the coach until she found her seat. She sat by the window and pressed her forehead against it, looking down at him with concern. She gave a tiny wave. Enzo waved back, and as the crowds thinned, swallowed by the stairway that led down to the underpass, the guard raised his hand and gave a sharp blow on his whistle.

Several more doors slammed, and the train jerked and sighed, and began its slow progress out of the station. Enzo walked with it, waving at Nicole as it gathered speed, until he could only have kept up with it by running. He glanced down the platform. There were just a handful of people left on it now, and he grabbed a door handle as it passed, running with it and swinging the door wide. He heard the shouts of the guard somewhere behind him. If he mistimed his leap he would be in serious trouble.

He took off, and felt himself flying through the air, hovering for what seemed like an eternity on the swing of the door, before his feet found the steps, and he scrambled up into the train. As he leaned out to pull the door closed, he glanced once more back along the platform. No one else had attempted to jump aboard the moving train, and he felt confident that if anyone had been following him, then they had just lost him. The door slammed shut and he stood breathing hard, back pressed against the wall. He was too damned old for this.

Nicole was watching for him as the carriage door slid open, and he staggered unsteadily along the central aisle. She gave him another hug. ‘I was so worried you were going to break your neck, Monsieur Macleod.’

‘Yeh, well that’s exactly what’ll happen to me if we let this guy get too close.’ He slumped into the seat beside her and glanced at his watch. They would be at Souillac in an hour and meet up again with Bertrand and Sophie. He looked up and saw the conductor approaching from the far end of the carriage. He sighed. The more immediate problem was going to be trying to explain why he didn’t have a ticket.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Late afternoon sunlight slanted yellow across a landscape that lay somewhere between fall and winter. Trees clinging to the hillsides that rose up around them had retained much of their foliage, late autumn colours of russet and ochre smeared on green.

As the sun sank lower, the valleys fell into deep shadow, while the rocky volcanic outcrops that broke a reddening skyline glowed orange in the last of the sun. The streams and rivers that cut and wound their way through them lay like silvered pink ribbons. Everything magnified into pin-sharp focus by the cold, clear mountain air.

The motor of Bertrand’s van strained as they continued to climb, leaving below them the lush pastures of southwest France for the rocky wastes of the country’s central plateau. Enzo could almost feel Raffin’s impatience in the car behind. The road was climbing more steeply now, and their progress had slowed since leaving Aurillac. As night approached, the temperature was dropping fast. Even in the blast of hot air from the van’s heating system, they could feel the cold creeping into their feet.

Nicole sat in the front, between Sophie and Bertrand, the map on her knee. Enzo and Kirsty sat in the back watching the changing landscape unfold, lit from behind them by a dramatic sunset. Nicole peered through an increasing gloom, into which their headlights now barely penetrated. ‘There should be a left turn just up ahead. I guess it’ll be signposted.’ Conifers scaled the slopes around them, and night seemed to fall suddenly, like a cloak of darkness settling on the land. ‘There it is!’

The signpost caught their lights. Miramont 4. Bertrand dropped to second gear and swung them into the narrow, single-track road. There would be a problem if they met another vehicle in the next four kilometres.

They continued to climb through the trees for several minutes, before suddenly the road took a sharp turn and they emerged on to a high plateau bathed in unexpected moonlight. Away to the west, the sky still glowed the deepest red. Above them it was already crusted with stars sparkling like frost. The road followed a straight line then, for two kilometres or more before beginning a slow descent through folds of rock and stubbled pasture into a shallow, tree-filled valley, and they saw the lights of Miramont twinkling their welcome in the gathering night.

Although the school and the church were floodlit, there was no sign of life in the village. Granite cottages huddled together under steeply pitched Auvergnat roofs of hand-chiselled stone lauzes, shutters closed already against the cold and the night. The water in the fountain in front of the church would be frozen by morning.

‘She said it was a right turn at the head of the village.’ Enzo leaned forward from the back, then pointed. ‘There, I think that’s it.’ And across a barren winter field, surrounded by tall trees, stood a big, square house, lights blazing into the night from its tall, arched windows. They passed a swimming pool covered over for the winter, and a pigeonnier with a double-tiered roof, before drawing up in front of stone steps climbing to the front door from either side of it. Raffin pulled in behind them, and they all got out stiffly on to the pebbled drive. Gardens dipped away below to a wall, and the field beyond. And the lights of the distant village spilled towards them across its fallow, furrowed rows.

The front door opened, throwing light on to a slabbed terrace, and Anna stepped out to lean her hands on the wrought iron rail. She smiled down at the upturned faces and found Enzo’s.

‘Glad you could make it,’ she said. She cocked an eyebrow. ‘I hope I have enough rooms.’

Her breath billowed in the chill night air. ‘I have to confess, I didn’t really expect to see you again.’ She glanced at him by the yellow of the streetlights in the deserted main street of this ghost village. The only sign of life came from behind the steamed up windows of the Bar Tabac Restaurant, Chez Milou. They could hear voices raised in laughter inside.

Enzo had known that they needed to talk and suggested they take a walk somewhere away from the house. She had wrapped up in a winter coat and scarf, and slipped her arm through his for added warmth. He glanced at her now and saw the lights in her coal dark eyes, and remembered how attractive she was. He remembered, too, the touch of her skin, the firm, fit body of an athlete. He had made love to her, a dying man in desperate need of comfort. Now that his death sentence was lifted, he found himself wanting to make love to her again. This time slow and sure and gentle, in the knowledge that tomorrow could always wait. He smiled. ‘I was convinced of it.’

She tipped her head and looked at him quizzically. ‘There’s something different about you, Enzo. Hard to define. When we met in Strasbourg you seemed like a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders. But now you seem…I don’t know…less burdened.’

‘When we met in Strasbourg, I had three months to live, Anna. Now, I’ve got as long as the next man. However long that might be.’

She frowned, and he laughed.

‘Some day, maybe, I’ll tell you about it. But right now, I owe you an explanation about why we’re here. It wasn’t something I could tell you on the phone. And if you want us to go, then we’ll leave first thing in the morning.’

She tightened her grip on his arm. ‘Why would I want you to go? Even if I don’t have you to myself, I’m not going to turn you away. It was starting to get pretty lonely up here. This is almost like having a family again.’

They passed the mairie with its French and European flags and tattered notice board, and he told her everything. About his history in forensic science in Scotland before coming to France to teach biology in Toulouse. About cracking the cold cases in Raffin’s book of unsolved murders. About how one of the murderers was out to stop him any way he could. The attempt on his daughter’s life, the burning of Bertrand’s gym, the killing of an innocent woman to set up Enzo as the prime suspect.

She listened in thoughtful silence, and as he glanced at her it seemed to him that she had paled just a little. They needed a place, he said, where they would be safe from the killer. From where they could figure out who he was and how they could catch him.

When he had finished, they walked on for some way in silence. Past the three storeys of the floodlit school to the end of the village, where finally she stopped and gazed across the ploughed field to the lights of the house. They could see Bertrand heaving Nicole’s case up the steps to the door. She turned suddenly towards Enzo. ‘That’s pretty scary stuff.’

‘If you want us to go, I’ll understand. But if we stay, we’ll pay for our keep. And the kids’ll do what needs to be done around the house.’

She pursed her lips, lost in momentary thought. ‘And if you didn’t have here, where else would you go?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. We’d find a hotel somewhere, I guess.’

She looked very directly into his eyes. ‘I don’t know anything about you, Enzo. Not really.’

He smiled ruefully. ‘But you’ll let us stay tonight, at least?’

She hesitated for a long moment. ‘You can stay as long as you like. That night in Strasbourg, I knew nothing about you then. We were complete strangers. But you made me feel…I don’t know…safe somehow. You still do. And if I can offer you safety in return…’ She reached out and took his face in her hands, and he put his on her waist and leaned forward to kiss her. A soft, gentle kiss on cool lips. Then he took her in his arms and held her there. ‘Thank you, Anna.’

He felt her soft breath at his ear. ‘Are you sure your daughter won’t be jealous of me? She didn’t seem very pleased to find me in your room in Strasbourg.’

‘Daughters, plural,’ Enzo said. ‘And since I have no say in their love lives, I don’t see why they should have any in mine.’

‘A one-night stand?’ Sophie looked at Kirsty incredulously.

‘Well, that’s just typical,’ Nicole said, and the sisters turned to look at her. She flushed with embarrassment and back-tracked. ‘Well, I mean, when your father’s around, there never seems to be a woman very far away.’

Sophie turned back to Kirsty. ‘Someone had just tried to kill you, and he was picking up a woman in a bar?’

They were in a wood-panelled sitting room with double doors opening off a long stone-flagged hallway. Immediately opposite, the doors of an enormous kitchen stood wide, and good smells issued from a Raeburn stove set in the original cheminée. In the séjour a log fire burned in a marble hearth laden with ornaments and candlesticks. The room was filled with big, comfortable sofas and armchairs, its walls hung with myriad paintings of washed-out, watercolour countryscapes of an alien land.

Kirsty slouched in an armchair, relaxing for the first time in days, and felt guilty for having betrayed her father’s secret. ‘I guess he had other things on his mind. He thought he was dying, after all.’

But Sophie wasn’t about to be so forgiving. ‘So his answer was to go off and spend the night with someone he doesn’t know.’

‘Leave him alone.’ Bertrand perched on the sofa beside Sophie. ‘The only reason we’ve got somewhere to stay is because he met this woman in Strasbourg.’

‘And we don’t know any more about her than he does!’ Sophie was incensed. ‘What do you think, Monsieur Raffin?’

They all turned towards Raffin, who was sitting at a small table by the window with his laptop running and a book open beside him. He looked up when he heard his name. ‘What?’

‘Never mind, Roger, it’s not important.’ Kirsty waved a dismissive hand and turned towards her sister. ‘Let it go, Sophie, please. We’re here now. Like her or not, she’s given us a roof over our heads when we had nowhere else to go.’

‘How much to do you think she knows?’ Bertrand said.

‘As much as Dad’s telling her right now, I imagine.’ Kirsty ran long fingers back through silky hair. ‘Though how much that is, who knows? It’s a lot to dump on someone out of the blue. Particularly someone you’ve only known for one night.’

They heard the sound of the front door opening and turned expectantly towards the hall. Enzo and Anna brought the cold in with them, chilled faces flushing pink in the warm air. Anna smiled uneasily. The awkward silence made it clear that she and Enzo had almost certainly been the topic of conversation.

She said, ‘I’ve got a stew keeping warm on the stove. Should be enough to feed us all. But we’d better sort out the sleeping arrangements first. There are only five bedrooms.’

A further few moments of awkward silence were broken by Sophie. ‘Bertrand and I will share,’ she said boldly, daring her father to contradict her. Enzo held his tongue. ‘And Kirsty and Roger.’

Roger looked up from his computer and caught the glare that Enzo turned in his direction.

‘Good,’ Anna said. ‘That solves any problems, then. Enzo and…’ she turned towards Nicole, ‘…the young lady, can have a room each.’

Enzo was stung. He had imagined that he and Anna would be sharing, as had everyone else in the room. No one wanted to meet his eye. To cover his embarrassment, he said, ‘We’d better get settled in then, and have something to eat. I’d like Roger to brief everyone on the Pierre Lambert case tonight.’

Chapter Twenty-Four

‘The point is this,’ Enzo said. ‘If he is so keen to stop me investigating this crime, he must believe there is something in all the old evidence that could lead to him. And he thinks I’ll find it.’

The debris of the meal lay scattered across the long dining table. The civet de sanglier, wild boar stew, had been rich and delicious, served with steaming new potatoes, and haricots verts with garlic. They had got through three bottles of wine, and Enzo and Roger were sipping cognacs with their coffee.

Oak doors opened on to the kitchen, and French windows led onto what, in summer, would be a shaded terrace that looked out across the fields. An oil painting of an English hunt scene hung on the end wall. A retractable lamp had been drawn down from the ceiling so that the table was brightly illuminated, but the faces around it were half in shadow.

Anna had sat at the opposite end from Enzo, and he had watched from a distance as Raffin chatted easily to her, exerting the full force of his charm. He had noticed, too, how Raffin’s attentions had put Kirsty’s nose out of joint. He wondered what she had ever seen in him. He was a man obsessed by his own image, convinced of his own intelligence. And while he had a certain charisma, there was a sense that his charm was something he could turn off and on at will. That it was phony, a façade that failed to reflect the real Raffin. Whoever that might be. Enzo certainly had no idea, and wondered if his daughter had somehow managed to find something more substantial beneath the veneer. But he doubted it, and remembered someone once saying of a shallow acquaintance, Scratch away that surface veneer and what do you find? More veneer. Enzo suspected that something a little more sinister lay behind the image the journalist presented to the world. Something dark, as Charlotte had once said to him. Something you might find lurking under a stone. For all her twenty-eight years, Enzo feared that Kirsty’s experience of life was limited, and her interpretation of it naïve. He was afraid that her relationship with Raffin would only end in tears. Hers.

Raffin had brought his laptop to the table. The book he had been examining earlier was his own. Assassins Cachés. Hidden Killers. He had reread the chapter on Lambert, and consulted his computer notes for further detail. He eyed Enzo down the length of the table. ‘You’re absolutely convinced it’s the Lambert case?’

Enzo folded his hands on the table in front of him. ‘It was sealed for me by what the pathologist who autopsied Audeline Pommereau said. Hélène Taillard told me he’d described the occipital disarticulation of the third and fourth vertebrae as a real pro job.’

Raffin nodded. ‘The same words used by the pathologist on the Lambert case.’

‘It’s too big a coincidence, Roger. And too specific a skill to be a copycat killing designed to put us off the scent. So let us assume that we are dealing with whoever killed Lambert.’ He unfolded his hands and waved one towards Raffin. ‘Maybe you should start by telling everyone the facts of the case?’

Raffin glanced around the curious faces all turned in his direction, and Enzo sensed how he enjoyed the limelight. The journalist took a sip of his brandy. ‘Pierre Lambert was a homosexual. A rent boy, operating out of an apartment in Paris. But he wasn’t someone you would pick up on the street. He made his appointments by telephone. According to his friends, he kept a diary of his engagements and an address book full of phone numbers. Neither of those was ever found.’

He paused as he scrolled through a document on his computer.

‘Lambert was rumoured to have had an affair with someone high up in government. But that rumour was courant only among his friends and derived from his own boasting. Boasting that never included a name, or any other details. He had been known to embroider his life with fanciful exaggerations. So no one really knows how much truth there was in it. If any. The police wasted a lot of time pursuing that line of enquiry to no avail.’

An extraordinary silence had settled over the table, curiosity morphing into fascination.

‘He advertised his services in the classified columns of various Parisian newspapers and magazines, and while by all accounts he was never out of work, his income could never have been enough to explain the very large amounts of money being paid on a regular basis into one of his bank accounts.’

Nicole leaned into the light. ‘What kind of sums?’

Raffin consulted his notes. ‘Various. Ranging from one hundred thousand to five hundred thousand francs.’ It was amazing how, in only eight years, the value of the franc had retreated into the mists of history. Everyone around the table did the calculation, turning francs into euros. But Raffin voiced it for them. ‘That’s around fifteen thousand to seventy-five thousand euros. Payments were made, on average, every two months, amounting over a period of eighteen months to nearly half a million.’

‘Blackmail?’ Kirsty said.

Raffin gave a tiny shrug. ‘Perhaps. But there is no evidence of that. If it was blackmail, we don’t know who or why. The money was always paid in cash, into an offshore account on the Isle of Jersey in the Channel Isles. And it was never declared for tax purposes.’

He opened his book at a place he had marked earlier with a slip of paper, and ran the heel of his hand between the pages, breaking the spine to keep it open. ‘We really don’t know that much more about him. I did some research into his family background, which was entirely unremarkable. He came from a working class family in a Paris banlieue. His father died when he was very young and he grew up in a household that consisted of his mother, his sister, and an aunt. So his role models were all women. He played with dolls, and indulged in girls’ games with his older sister. Make-believe games like hospital. He was a low achiever at school and left early to train as a waiter. He worked for a couple of years at a restaurant on the Left Bank, which is where he met his first pimp, and discovered that there was more money to be made by exploiting his sexuality. He knew a lot of people, but didn’t have many friends. From all accounts he was not a very likeable young man. He was twenty-three when he was murdered.’

He flipped through a few pages to his next marker.

‘Now this is where it gets interesting.’ He looked up, a slight smile widening the corners of his mouth. He had his audience in the palm of his hand. ‘He had just taken on the rental of a pretty expensive furnished apartment south of Chinatown, in the thirteenth arrondissement. The apartment building was in the Rue Max Jacob. It had been recently renovated, and his apartment was one up, overlooking the Parc Kellerman. He was found murdered in his séjour by his cleaner on the morning of Thursday, February 20^th, 1992. As best the pathologist could tell, he’d been dead for around fifteen to sixteen hours. Which puts his time of death at sometime the previous afternoon.’

Enzo said, ‘I haven’t studied the case in any great detail yet, but as I recall from my original reading of it, it was a very curious crime scene.’

Raffin inclined his head in acknowledgement. ‘It was. In various respects. The murder itself, for a start. Lambert appears to have been half-strangled, before his killer finally decided to break his neck. A manoeuvre performed, apparently, with well-practised precision. A real pro job, as the médecin légiste said.’

‘Which,’ Enzo interjected, ‘makes you wonder why his killer was trying to strangle him in the first place. It seems very untidy.’

‘It wasn’t the only untidy aspect of the crime scene. A coffee table had been shattered, apparently by the combined weight of the two men falling on it. So it seems there was a struggle. Bruises on Lambert’s back and skull led the pathologist to conclude that the killer had been on top of him when they fell. There were coffee stains on the carpet, a broken cup and two broken saucers. A second was still intact. There was a smashed sugar bowl, and lumps of sugar were scattered across the floor. It appeared that the men had been drinking coffee together before the attack, leading to an assumption by the police that the victim had known his killer.’

‘That’s quite an assumption to make on the basis of two broken coffee cups.’ It was Bertrand’s observation that broke the flow of Raffin’s narrative.’

Raffin raised a finger and waggled it. ‘No, there was more. But I’ll come to that in a moment. The next interesting piece, or should I say pieces, of evidence were in the kitchen. On the kitchen counter, next to the sink, investigators found a small, empty bottle. A brown medicine bottle which had contained pills, most of which were scattered across the kitchen floor, along with its plastic cap. The pills were short-acting prescription antihistamines known as terfenadine, sold under the brand name of Seldane. Although these were prescription drugs, this was not the bottle they had come in, so there was no label. And more curiously, no fingerprints. None at all.

‘In the sink there was a broken glass tumbler. One of a set of six. The remaining five were found in a kitchen cupboard. The only prints recovered from it were Lambert’s. Now here’s the thing…’ He looked around the rapt faces fixed upon his. ‘Antihistamines like terfenadine were taken to counteract the effects of severe allergic reactions, like hay fever or animal allergies. But Lambert had no history of allergy. None. His GP had never prescribed him an antihistamine.’

‘So they belonged to the killer,’ Sophie said. ‘He was having an allergic reaction.’

Raffin inclined his head in such a way as to cast doubt on her theory. ‘Maybe. Maybe not. The murder took place in February, so he couldn’t have been suffering from hayfever. Lambert didn’t keep cats or dogs, so it wasn’t an animal allergy. There was nothing obvious in the apartment that he would have reacted to.’

‘So why would he have spilled pills all over the place and left the bottle on the counter?’

‘If we knew that, Sophie, we probably wouldn’t be sitting here tonight.’

Bertrand said, ‘You said there was some other reason the police thought that Lambert knew his killer.’

Raffin nodded. ‘Yes. Probably the most enigmatic, and tantalising piece of evidence in the whole case. Sixteen years ago, people still used telephone answering machines that recorded messages on cassettes. On the cassette on Lambert’s answering machine, police found what appears to have been an accidentally recorded conversation. The machine was set to answer after four rings. Lambert must have picked up the receiver at the same moment the machine kicked in, unaware that it had done so. The whole conversation was recorded.’ He sighed. ‘Unfortunately, it was a very short conversation. No names were used. The caller was male, and made a rendezvous to meet Lambert at his apartment at three o’clock the following afternoon. The day of the murder. Coinciding pretty closely with the time of death estimated by the pathologist.’

‘In other words, whoever made that phone call was the killer,’ Bertrand said.

‘That’s what the police figured. The trouble is, it didn’t lead them anywhere. There was nothing in the conversation that gave the least clue as to the identity of the caller. The entire conversation only lasted about forty seconds. Very frustrating. They could listen to the killer’s voice, but they had no idea who he was.’

‘Or why they were meeting?’ Enzo had read the text of the call several months previously but couldn’t remember the precise nature of it.

‘No. Just that they needed to talk.’

Enzo’s brain was working overtime. ‘Remind me. There were no fingerprints recovered, were there?’

‘None. At least none that were of any use. Lambert’s of course. His cleaner. Some partial prints that matched the previous renters. A few others of unknown origin, that didn’t match anything in the police database. It was pretty much assumed that the killer was wearing gloves. The lack of prints on the medicine bottle. Or on the broken glass in the sink. Only Lambert’s prints were recovered from the coffee cups, the saucers, the sugar bowl. And the pathologist, in his report, said that the shape of the finger bruising around Lambert’s neck was consistent with his attacker being gloved.

‘Very odd,’ Enzo said, ‘that you would sit drinking coffee in someone’s house with your gloves on. And then the medicine bottle, if it was his, no label, no prints.’

‘He was being very careful,’ Nicole said.

‘So careful, in fact, that he could only have come to Lambert’s apartment with one intention. To kill him. So careful that he would carry his medicine in an unmarked bottle. Then careless enough to leave it lying on the kitchen counter. Which makes me think that Sophie might have been right. That he was having an allergic reaction to something and losing control. Spilling the pills, breaking a glass.’

‘A reaction to what?’ Raffin said.

‘I don’t know. We’re going to have to go back over all the old evidence. Is there any way we can access that?’

‘Maybe. The original investigating officer is retired now. But when I spoke to him, I got the impression that it still niggled. Unfinished business. You know, one of those unresolved cases that mars an otherwise outstanding career. I think we could count on his help.’

Enzo thought about it. ‘1992. It’s a long time ago. The trail will be pretty cold by now. But there must be something there. Something the killer’s scared of. And we shouldn’t forget that he’s left a more recent trail. Kirsty’s description of the man at the press conference in Strasbourg and at the station two days later. We both saw him, if just for a moment, in the taxi outside Kirsty’s apartment. The same man who purchased strands of my hair in Cahors. He may or may not be the killer. But at least we have a face.’

‘Two,’ Nicole said, and Enzo smiled.

‘You’re quite right. We also have the phony doctor who told me I was dying of cancer. That man’s face will live in my memory for a very long time. And he was good. You know, convincing. Like a professional.’

‘Like a real doctor, you mean?’

‘No, Nicole. Like an actor. And if there’s one thing we know about actors, they put their faces out there. For hire. Someone found him to hire him, so maybe we can find him, too. But first of all, I think we have to go to Paris.’

Kirsty seemed surprised. ‘All of us?’

‘No, just me and Roger. The minute we step into the frame again, we become targets.’ He glanced at Raffin who looked less than pleased at the prospect of making himself a target. ‘Because I’m already pretty much convinced about one thing now.’

Raffin frowned. ‘What’s that?’

‘Lambert’s murder wasn’t some random act of revenge, or a crime passionnel. The man who killed him really was a professional.’

He stood outside on the terrasse, leaning on the wrought iron at the top of the steps for a long time, warmed still by his anger. That this man should so cold-bloodedly have murdered a woman whose only crime was that she knew Enzo, that he had tried and only just failed to kill Kirsty, was fuelling a sense of outrage and revenge — the like of which Enzo had never felt before.

He became aware of how tightly he was gripping the rail, and forced himself to relax. The nearly full November moon had risen high over the village, and a frost was settling like dust across the fields. It seemed wrong that such a beautiful night should be spoiled by such base feelings.

He took a deep breath and turned away, opening the door and stepping into the darkened hall. A night light at the far end cast a faint illumination on the spiral staircase the led up to the floor above. Everyone else had gone to bed. Anna had said nothing more to him than a cursory bonne nuit. Perhaps she was regretting allowing them to stay. And then he remembered how animated she had been with Raffin during dinner, and a seed of jealousy stirred deep inside of him.

As he approached the stairs, he saw a line of light beneath doors leading to a study at the back of the house. Someone was still up. He nudged open the door, and Nicole turned from a desk pushed against the far wall, a bank of computer monitors flickering in the muted light of a desk lamp.

‘Oh, hi, Monsieur Macleod. I thought everyone had gone to bed.’

‘What are you doing, Nicole?’ He shoved his hands in his pockets and walked over to the desk.

‘It’s great, isn’t it? All this computer stuff. High speed internet, colour laser printer, fax, flatbed scanner. There’re four computers here, and about five hundred gigs worth of external hard drive.’

‘Yes, but what are you doing with it?’

‘Anna said it would be okay. I’ve plugged in my laptop, connected up to a thirty-inch cinema screen. I can drag files backwards and forwards between screens, backing up on to a firewire hard drive.’ She paused, eyes shining. An only child, a lonely girl raised on a remote farm in the Aveyron, Nicole had found her focus and her talent in an alternative, virtual world. ‘What did he look like?’

‘Who?’

‘The oncologist. The actor.’

Enzo closed his eyes and saw him as clearly as if he was right there in front of him. And he wondered if the man had the least idea of the hell he had put Enzo through. ‘He had short, dark hair. But it was flecked through with grey, receding from the temples. I remember thinking he was a good-looking man. He had blue eyes, dark blue, like deep ocean reflecting blue sky. A square sort of face. Tanned. Fleshy lips. I’d say he was early forties. Quite tall. Not as tall as me, but well-built. When I think about it now, he didn’t seem quite comfortable in his suit and tie. I guess I probably thought his uneasiness was because of me. Because of what he had to tell me. But looking back, the suit was probably not his natural habitat. If you were to cast him in a movie, he might well play a military man, or an action hero.’ He opened his eyes again and found Nicole staring at him.

‘If he can be found, Monsieur Macleod, I’ll find him.’

‘How?’

‘I’ll start with the internet. I already Googled acteurs and France. There are a lot of actors’ agencies and directories online, and most of them carry photographs. With a description like the one you gave me, I should be able to narrow them down pretty quickly.’

Chapter Twenty-Five

He wasn’t sure how long he’d been asleep. In fact, he wasn’t certain he had slept at all. He was in a large room at the front of the house, with views towards the village. He’d left the shutters open, and tall windows laid elongated arches of moonlight across polished wooden floors scattered with Chinese rugs. The light kept his demons at bay but his mind in an unsettled state that hovered indeterminately somewhere between sleep and consciousness.

He had been aware of the noises of the night. The house, like all old houses, had its own characteristic sounds. Sounds, that with time, you would stop hearing. The cracking of the central heating pipes as they cooled. A deep creaking in the roof as the stone tiles contracted, applying pressure to the oak they were nailed to. The scurrying of field mice finding shelter from freezing temperatures among the rubble between thick stone walls. Outside, an owl in the trees was exchanging hoots with another somewhere across the valley.

He lay on his back trying not to think, eyes half-shut, semifocused on a crack in the ceiling, when a floorboard creaked outside his door. Like the sound of a footstep in wet snow. He pulled himself up onto one elbow, wide awake now and stared towards the door as it opened to let in a sliver of light from the hall. The shadow of a figure slipped into his room and drifted through the moonlight like a ghost, until he saw the curtain of dark hair tumbling across her shoulders as she let her dressing gown slip to the floor. A swish of silk on smooth skin.

Black eyes found his in the dark. He said, ‘I thought…’

‘Shhhh.’ She put a finger over his lips. ‘This way no one has to be embarrassed about our sleeping arrangements. Especially your girls.’

Something about her discretion, her concern for his daughters, touched him, and he felt a wave of affection for her. As she bent over him, he took her head in his hands and kissed her.

He had meant to make love to her slowly, surely. A slow hand, a steady beat. But in the end he had consumed her quickly, devouring her almost in a single bite. Now they lay breathless from the exertion, side by side, damp sheets twisted around spent bodies, cold air on burning skin.

He had no idea how long they stayed like that, limbs cooling in the falling temperature of the bedroom. He was already drifting in some netherworld, when he felt her lips on his face, a soft, fond kiss, and then she reached over to cover them both with the quilt. He thought he heard her whisper, ‘I love making love with you.’ An echo of Strasbourg. But he couldn’t be sure.

It felt as if he had been asleep for hours. But when he woke, it was still pitch dark. The moon had dipped in the sky and was casting its light now on the wall above the bed. As he came to, in the silence he heard her breathing. Not the slow, steady rhythm of sleep. The shallower, more rapid beat of impatient consciousness. He was lying face down, and rolled on to his side to see her lying on her back, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling. He reached out a hand to touch her face and she turned towards him.

He said, ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing. I can’t sleep, that’s all.’

‘Why?’

‘Just…everything. You calling out of the blue like that. Arriving with your family and friends in tow. The whole, incredible story. I can’t stop thinking about it.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. It’s not just you. There’re other things in my head, too.’

‘What sort of things?’

‘Oh, you know, the sort of things that keep me awake on other nights.’

‘We all have our demons.’

‘Yes, we do.’ She smiled. Then turned away again to gaze at the ceiling.

‘I have no idea what yours are.’

‘That’s because I haven’t told you.’

He looked at her profile caught in the moonlight, and thought how its cold, colourless light aged her, sinking her eyes into shadow. ‘You haven’t told me much of anything.’

Her mouth widened slightly. A small smile. ‘I’m more enigmatic that way. Keeps the mystery alive.’

‘You ski in the winter and scuba dive in the summer. You once represented your country at the Olympics. Your parents live in Strasbourg. That’s about the sum total of my knowledge.’

‘So what else do you want me to tell you?’

‘I don’t know. Is it where you grew up? Strasbourg?’

She shook her head. ‘No. My mother comes from Strasbourg. But they only moved there when my father retired. I was brought up in Lyons.’ She inclined her head to find him watching her. ‘Is that really what you wanted to know?’

‘You told me, that night we met, that you never expected to be forty and alone.’

‘Does anyone?’

‘Why are you alone, Anna? You’re an attractive woman. You have a lot of life still ahead of you.’

She turned her gaze back to the ceiling and pressed her lips together, as if afraid of the words that might spill out if she opened them. She held her silence for a long time. When, finally, she spoke, it was in a very small voice. Little more than a whisper. ‘You look back on your life sometimes, and wish you’d made different decisions. You know, the big decisions. Career over personal life. One man over another. And then the little things that sometimes have even bigger consequences. Like deciding you don’t have time to go to the shops. There’s a laundry needing done, and you say, go on, don’t wait for me. The shops’ll be shut by the time I’m done here. And if you hadn’t, they might still be alive. Or you might be dead with them and it wouldn’t matter.’

Enzo saw a tear trickle from the corner of her eye and catch the light of the moon. ‘Who?’

‘My husband. My little boy.’

His voice was hushed. ‘What happened?’

She brushed the silver tear from her face. ‘Road accident. You know, the sort of thing you read about all the time and never think about the pain of the ones left behind. And how it never really goes away. You can replace almost anything but people.’

Enzo closed his eyes and shared her pain. ‘I know.’

But she was lost in her memories and missed his empathy. ‘I was so determined not to have children until my career was over, it was too late to start again. I only married André because he got me pregnant. But I kind of loved him, in a way. Because I knew he loved me.’ She drew a deep breath and he heard the tremble in it. ‘But none of that matters now. Can’t go back. Can’t undo it. Any of it.’

‘You’re not too old to still have children.’

‘Physically, maybe. But in my head, that time came and went.’ She turned her head towards him and forced a smile. ‘Anyway, I bet you’re wishing you’d never asked. Enigma’s more interesting than tragedy.’

He laid his hand on her cheek. ‘I’m sorry, Anna.’

‘Oh, God, can we change the subject? Or neither of us’ll get any sleep tonight.’

‘Sure. What do you want to talk about?’

‘I don’t know.’ She rolled her eyes in an extravagant show of thinking about it. ‘How’d you get in tow with that creep, Raffin?’

Which took Enzo by surprise. ‘You don’t like him?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘You seemed to be getting on very well with him over dinner.’

‘I was being polite. He’s such a phony, and I’m way too long in the tooth to fall for that crap. What on earth does Kirsty see in him?’

Her words echoed almost exactly his own earlier thought. ‘I wish I knew.’

‘At least you’re taking him away with you to Paris.’ She thought for a moment. ‘When do you plan to go?’

‘First thing tomorrow.’

She raised herself on one elbow and looked at him, half of her face caught in full moonshine, the other in deep shadow. ‘You’re kidding. You only just got here.’

‘My life’s on hold, Anna, until I deal with this. When someone is trying to destroy everything that is dear to you, the only way to stop him is by getting him before he gets you.’

She looked at him pensively. ‘I thought I’d have more time with you. When will you be back?’

‘I don’t know.’

She slipped a cool hand beneath the quilt to find the soft warmth between his legs, and he felt himself respond immediately to her touch. ‘Then maybe we’d better just do this again. Give ourselves something to remember, until the next time.’

And this time, he knew, he would make love to her the way he had meant to before. With a long, slow burn to warm the cold night.