Blacklight Blue

Chapter Forty-Three

There was an embarrassed silence in the room. No one knew quite where to look. Sophie’s instinct was to leap to her father’s defence, but she saw the warning look in Bertrand’s eye and held her peace. Their stay in this big, rambling “safe” house, hidden away in what others might have viewed as an idyllic mountain valley, was turning into a nightmare. Endless days of boredom and frustration, lives on hold while the world passed them by. It had become like a prison. And now this.

Nicole, too, was tempted to speak up for her mentor, but she knew better than to interfere in another family’s conflict. And so it was with difficulty that she kept her own counsel, and sat staring at her hands, pink-faced with embarrassment.

Anna, across the hall in the kitchen, could hear every word, but carried on with the preparations for lunch as if nothing was happening.

‘You’re unbelievable, you know that? Unbe-fucking-lievable!’ Kirsty’s face was pink too, but with anger verging on tears. She was still in shock. The shock of learning that Roger had been shot, and then anger that Enzo hadn’t even phoned. That it had happened forty-eight hours ago and she’d known nothing about it.

She’d called Roger several times in the last few days, and couldn’t understand why he never answered, either his home number or his cellphone. Now she knew.

‘If I hadn’t been here to stop you, you’d have gone running off the Paris without even stopping to think.’ Enzo tried to reason with her.

‘Damned right I would.’

‘And put yourself straight into the firing line.’

Kirsty shook her head vigorously. ‘No. Not as long as I kept well clear of you. You’re the one who’s caused all this. You’re the Jonah. You ought to have a fucking health warning stamped on your forehead. Stay away! Anyone who gets too close is in danger of being blown up or shot!’ A look flicked at Bertrand. ‘Or having their world burned to the ground.’

As she turned away, Enzo grabbed her arm. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Where do you think? I’m going to Paris.’

‘No, you’re not.’

And so now they were in a state of stand-off.

‘You can’t tell me what to do.’

‘I can stop you being an idiot. Going to Paris will not make a blind bit of difference to whether Roger recovers or not.’

‘So what are you going to do? Ground me? Lock me in my room?’

‘If I have to.’

‘Oh, fuck off. I’m not five any more. There’s nothing you can do to stop me.’

‘So how are you going to get there? Walk?’

‘Bertrand’ll give me a lift to the station at Aurillac.’

Bertrand flushed deeply.

‘No, he won’t. Because he knows I’m right. And because he’s not going to do anything that would put you at risk.’ Enzo looked at Bertrand. A look that required no words. Bertrand’s nod was almost imperceptible. ‘And neither will Anna.’

Kirsty stared at him, eyes wide and glazed with tears. ‘You’ve no right…’ She was starting to lose control. ‘You can’t tell me what to do.’

‘Yes, I can.’

‘No, you can’t!’

‘I’m your father.’

Anna appeared in the doorway, the movement registering in Kirsty’s peripheral vision, and she turned her head quickly to catch Anna’s look, the tiny shake of her head. She turned back to meet her father’s eye. She wanted to shout, no you’re not! You’re not my father, you’ve never been my father! The words were right there in her mouth, balanced precariously on the tip of her tongue. But something stopped her, some instinct that made her swallow them before they could escape. Instead she said, ‘You never liked Roger, did you? You never wanted me to be with him.’

Kirsty’s dam finally burst, a flood of tears sweeping her out of the room and up the stairs. They could hear her sobbing all the way up to the landing, and then the door of her room slamming shut.

In the silence she left behind, Enzo could hear the slow tick, tick of the grandfather clock in the hall. Motes of dust hung in suspended animation in the sunlight. Outside, the sound of children in the playground of the village school came to them across a frosted field. A normal, happy world, that seemed to exist in another universe entirely.

Enzo found Nicole in the computer room. It was half an hour after Kirsty’s outburst. Sophie and Bertrand had gone out. For a walk, they said. Anything, Enzo figured, to escape the awful atmosphere in the house. Anna had returned to the kitchen, and Enzo had found himself alone, reliving his conflict with Kirsty.

He felt a sudden surge of anger towards Rickie Bright. All of this was his fault. None of them would be here if it wasn’t for Bright. The man had set out to deconstruct Enzo’s life, to stop his investigation, but he could never have known just how successful he would be. In many ways, Enzo no longer cared why Bright had murdered Lambert. He just wanted to get him. To make him pay. To peel away all the layers of his deception, to reveal him to the world for the callous, cold-blooded killer he was. A destroyer of lives. A purveyor of pure, undiluted evil.

Nicole was embarrassed to meet his eye. She had retired to the safety of the computer room immediately after Sophie and Bertrand went out, seeking solace in the ether where she controlled the world with her fingertips.

‘I’ve got some more faces for you to look at,’ she said.

‘Faces?’ For a moment he had no idea what she was talking about.

‘Your phony doctor.’

‘Oh. Yes.’ He wasn’t sure how much that mattered any more.

‘I came across a really good website. An annuaire called the Bellefaye Directory. It’s a listing of all the writers, technicians, directors, and actors working in the French film and television industry.’

She ran nimble fingers over her keyboard and brought the Bellefaye Directory up on screen.

‘It’s really great if you’re a producer or director wanting to cast someone with very specific looks.’ A row of different coloured boxes along the top of the screen allowed you to choose from among Actors, Agents, Technicians, Companies, Film Schools. Nicole clicked on Actors. More boxes appeared. Gender, Type, Language, Age, Height, Weight, Eyes, Hair. ‘It’s easy, you just select each of these criteria in turn and define what they should be.’ She clicked on Gender and selected Male. Then Type, and chose European from a selection of nine ranging from African, through Nordic and Asiatic, to Indian. She looked up at Enzo, I just entered your description of him in each category. Hair and eye colour, height, weight. And it came up with a list of fifty-six actors matching those criteria.’

She slid her mouse across its mat and pulled up a page saved in Bookmarks. It was the list produced by the Bellefaye Directory. She scrolled down it.

‘As you can see, they don’t all have photographs. But twenty-one of them did. I pulled them all out and copied them into a single folder for you to look at.’

She brought up the folder, selected the jpegs and opened them up in a full-screen slideshow. Images of men in early middle-age, with short, dark, greying hair, mixed one into the other, all smiling for the camera. What felt like an endless sequence of unfamiliar faces. Enzo stared at the screen, almost without seeing. He was still replaying the fight with Kirsty. And he was finding it hard to rid his mind of the image of Raffin lying in his bed in intensive care, tubes and wires trailing from his broken body to machines that beeped and flashed, delivering blood and fluid to replace the litres he had lost. His face had been unnaturally pale. Unreal. Like a death mask laid over living features. And Enzo hadn’t needed Kirsty to tell him that he was to blame.

Suddenly he became aware that a man he knew was looking back at him from the monitor. ‘Stop!’ Nicole paused the slideshow, and Enzo found himself staring at the face of the man who had told him he was dying. How could he ever forget what he had taken for the sympathetic sincerity in those cold blue eyes? Only now they were smiling, full of warmth, hoping to persuade some producer or director to cast him in a starring role. And maybe he deserved to be. The role he had played for Enzo had been brilliantly convincing. ‘Who is he?’

Nicole toggled back to the Bellefaye list and clicked on the name Philippe Ransou. Up came his CV. She scanned it. ‘French-Canadian. Also speaks English. Seems to get a lot of work. But mostly small roles in action movies and TV dramas. Military types, or thugs. Sometimes does his own stunts. No one seems to have cast him as a doctor, though.’

‘Until Bright. I wonder how he chose him.’

‘Is it him?’

‘Yes.’

She beamed with pleasure. ‘I told you I’d find him. What do you want me to do with the information?’

‘Print out a couple of copies of his photograph and CV, his agent. Everything you’ve got. We’ll send them to the chief of police in Cahors, and to Monsieur Martinot in Paris.’ One way or another, Enzo was determined that Philippe Ransou would pay now for the pain he’d caused. ‘But before that, there’s something else I need you to do, Nicole.’ He had to force himself to focus.

‘Anything.’

‘I want you to try to get hold of a list of all hemophiliacs living in the Roussillon.’

He saw her surprise. The question forming behind her eyes. But all she said was, ‘That’s the département of the Pyrénées-Oriental, isn’t it?’ Enzo nodded. ‘So Perpignan’ll be the administrative capital.’

‘Probably.’

‘Okay. Hemophiliacs.’ She paused. ‘Is there anything in particular I should be looking for?’

Enzo drew a deep breath. ‘Yes. A woman.’

Chapter Forty-Four

The afternoons were getting shorter as November wore on. The sun was low in the sky now, shadows lengthening almost as you looked. There wasn’t much warmth left in the air, the heat of the day, such as it was, rising into the big, wide, empty sky above. A sky that paled to yellow in the west, and then orange and finally red, as the earth turned on its axis. The ghost of a full moon was already visible in it.

Kirsty had not come down for lunch, and the five of them had eaten in uneasy silence. Afterwards, Nicole had retired to the computer room, and Bertrand and Sophie sat down to compose the latest response to an ever increasing traffic of forwarded correspondence with the insurance company over compensation for the gym.

Enzo and Anna walked through the village wrapped in coats and scarves, their breath condensing in the final, cold light of the day. She had wanted to know how much he had found out, and it helped him clarify his own thoughts to go through it all for her, step by step.

‘It’s the strangest tale. A kid, just twenty months old, abducted from a holiday hotel on the Costa Brava nearly forty years ago. A kid who grew up to be a killer. Stolen by an Englishwoman and brought up, probably somewhere in the Roussillon, just a couple of hours away from where he was snatched. All the time unaware that just a short drive to the south his mother had refused to leave the scene of his abduction. Determined to stay there in case he should ever return.’

He looked at Anna and saw the warmth in her dark eyes, transported by his words to another time, another place.

‘At some point, sometime in his teens, he must have discovered the truth. Found out who he really was. By the time he was eighteen, he’d tracked down his real family, and found that he had an identical twin brother living in London. He stole his money, his clothes, and his identity, and embarked on a new life as his own twin.’

‘You think he’s still masquerading as his brother?’

‘I doubt it. He probably only used that as a stepping stone to another persona. But at least we know now what he looks like, and it’s a good starting point for our search.’

‘So how likely do you think it is that you’ll catch him?’

‘Oh, I’ll get him.’ There was steel in Enzo’s voice. ‘If he doesn’t kill me first. I also know where to look for the woman who abducted him. It may be that I’ll find something there, some clue that’ll take me another step closer.’ He drifted off into speculative thought before coming abruptly back to the present. ‘And we found the actor he employed to masquerade as my doctor in Cahors. Another loose end. Another thread that could to lead us to him. I’m closing in on him, Anna. Almost got him on the end of my line. And when I have, one way or another, I’m going to reel him right in.’

She slipped her arm through his and gave it a small squeeze. ‘You told me last time you were here that you thought he was some kind of professional.’

‘That’s right.’

‘So…what did you say his real name was…?’

‘Bright. Rickie, or Richard Bright.’

‘So Bright didn’t kill Lambert for personal reasons.’

‘I don’t think so. I think he was probably hired to do it.’

‘And are you any nearer to figuring out who it was who hired him, or why?’

Enzo shook his head. ‘Not at all. I figure the only way we’re ever going to know that is by getting Bright into custody and persuading him to tell us.’

They walked past the row of trees in front of the church, brittle, frosted leaves crunching underfoot. The granite stone of the village houses sparkled in the dying sunlight all along one side of the street, and the streetlights flickered and shed ineffectual electric light into the gathering gloom on the other.

Anna said, ‘You mustn’t take what Kirsty says too seriously.’

Which brought Enzo’s mind back from that other place it had wandered to again. ‘She always seems to want to hurt me,’ he said. ‘To lash out and do damage.’

‘Sometimes when we’re hurting, the only people we can take it out on are the ones we love.’

‘She spent her whole life blaming me for all the hurt in it. I thought she’d got over that.’ He wanted to tell her about the night at Simon’s. To share it with someone, to offload the burden. But he was afraid that to give it voice would make it somehow more real. And he still didn’t want to believe it. He had no way of knowing that Anna already knew, that his own daughter had told her. And so they were two people divided by a common knowledge they couldn’t share.

‘You can’t underestimate how vulnerable she is right now, Enzo. She barely escaped with her life in Strasbourg. Her best friend was killed. She thought her father was dying, and then he was arrested for murder. And now her lover’s been shot, and she doesn’t know if he’s going to survive.’ There was more, but like Enzo she wasn’t going to go there. ‘You’re at the centre of it all. So who else is she going to blame?’

Enzo stopped and took her face in his hands. He gazed into the dark eyes she turned on him, and kissed her softly on the lips. ‘I don’t know what I’d have done without you, Anna. I really don’t.’

She kissed him back. ‘You and me both.’

‘Just promise me…If I have to leave again, you won’t let her go to Paris.’

She smiled. ‘I won’t let her do that, Enzo. I promise.’ And then her face darkened, as if a cloud had passed over it. ‘You know why he left?’

‘Who?’

‘Roger. Why he really left?’

Enzo tensed. ‘He said he needed to get back to work.’

‘He made a pass at me. Damned near raped me. If I hadn’t been as fit as I am he might have succeeded.’

‘Jesus! Does Kirsty…?’

‘No, of course not. I made it clear to him that if he didn’t pack his bags and get out, then I would tell her. And that the only reason I wouldn’t was to protect her, not him.’

Enzo felt a wave of fatigue wash over him. He wasn’t sure how much more of this he could take. It just seemed to be one thing after another. ‘She mustn’t know, Anna. You mustn’t ever tell her. If Raffin survives, then I’ll deal with him myself.’

It was dark by the time they got back to the house. Light from the kitchen spilled out into the unlit hall. Sophie and Bertrand were watching television in the séjour. Some girl singing badly, and a voice-over which Enzo recognised as belonging to the host of Star Academy. There was still no sign of Kirsty. The door to the computer room stood ajar, and a crack of light zig-zagged its way up the first few steps of the spiral staircase. Nicole’s voice called out of the darkness. ‘Is that you, Monsieur Macleod?’

‘Yes, Nicole.’

‘I’ve got some information for you.’

When he went into the computer room she turned and beamed at him, clearly pleased with herself. Anna leaned against the door jamb and listened.

‘What did you find?’

‘Well, it’s not easy getting access to confidential medical information online, Monsieur Macleod. So I telephoned the Hôpital St. Jean, the centre hospitalier in Perpignan, and told them I was a researcher at the Ministry of Health in Paris. I said I needed access to the register of hemophiliacs living in their département.’

‘And they believed you?’

‘Why wouldn’t they? I mean, why would anyone else want that kind of information?’ She grinned. ‘Anyway, I did a little research before I made the call. You know, there are only about three-and-a-half thousand hemophiliacs in the whole of France. Which means that, statistically, in an area like the Pyrénées-Oriental, with a population base of less than half a million, there are only likely to be around twenty-three.’

‘It’s a rare disease, Nicole. Where’s this leading us?’ Enzo was struggling to contain his impatience.

‘Well, statistically again, they’re all likely to be men.’ She paused dramatically. ‘So guess what?’ But she didn’t wait for them to guess. ‘There were actually twenty-two on their list.’ She lifted a sheet of paper from the printer and handed it to Enzo. ‘And contrary to statistical expectation, one of them is a woman.’

Enzo looked at the printout held in trembling fingers. He remembered Raffin’s words in Paris. He’s just a breath away. I can feel it. And for the first time he felt it, too. That Rickie Bright was just around the corner. Very possibly biding his time, simply waiting for Enzo to appear.

He barely heard Nicole’s triumphant coup de grace. ‘Her name is Elizabeth Archangel. She lives in an old fishing port on the Mediterranean, not far from the Spanish border. It’s called Collioure.’ The tiniest pause for emphasis. ‘And she’s English.’

Chapter Forty-Five

Enzo parked in the Place du 8 Mai 1945, in the shadow of the Château Royal. In the tourist season, he knew, it would be virtually impossible to find parking here, but hors saison the town was almost deserted, a creeping air of neglect in the cool haze of misty morning air that dropped down from the foothills of the Pyrénées. Shops and galleries and restaurants had closed up for the winter. Pavements, stripped bare of colourful summer displays of goods and art, seemed sad and empty. The plane trees all along the Avenue Camille Pelletan had shed their leaves along the quayside, where only a month before people would have sat dining at tables in the soft, Mediterranean autumn. Now these same tables and chairs were stacked up and covered over until next Spring.

There were a few vehicles parked in the gully below. A dangerous place to leave your car during summer storms, when heavy rainfall would bring run-off from the hills coursing through its dry stone bed to sweep out into the bay. But today there was no hint of rain in the chill-edged breeze that blew off the sea.

Enzo made a mental note of the sign in the window of the Café Sola on the far side of the Rue de la République—Accès Wifi, wireless internet access — and walked along the Quai de l’Amirauté, past the boulodrome, to the little bridge that spanned the gully. He stopped on the bridge and watched as soldiers under the command of the Centre National d’Entraînement Commando, were put through their paces by barking officers. Young men burdened by full kit, with close-cropped hair and lean, determined faces, pushed rubber dinghies out into the bay. The same routine, though he wasn’t to know it, that the young Rickie Bright had watched daily on his walk home from school thirty years earlier.

He got a street map from the tourist office opposite the Police Municipale in the Place du 18 Juin, and walked through an arch in the old town wall to the Boulevard du Boramar. From here there was a view across the shingle beach and the bay to the diving school opposite, where boats rose and fell on the gentle pewter swell, tethered and covered over for the winter.

At the south end of the boulevard was the Eglise Notre Dame des Anges, with its golden domed bell tower. At the north end was the quay made famous by André Derain’s painting of garishly coloured fishing boats with canted masts and rolled up sails. A couple of them still remained, a reminder for tourists of what life had been like here in Derain’s day, nearly a century before. Collioure was a town rich in art and history. A refuge for Spanish and French artists fleeing war and persecution. A place where penniless painters had paid for food and lodgings with paintings alone. Desperate men who really had lived by their art. And innkeepers who had profited handsomely from their future fame.

He turned south and then north into the old fishing port which climbed the hill towards the fort. The Rue Bellevue, on its south side, was bounded by the remains of an ancient fortified wall. Enzo stopped to peer through a crumbling arrow slit down to the grey seawater breaking green and white over the black rocks below. Three-storey pink, and cream, and peach-painted former fishermen’s dwellings, dominated the north side of the street as it rose steeply to the top of the hill, where a row of stone cottages was built along the edge of the cliff. Red-leafed vines twisted around rusted iron trellises that in summer would provide a shady respite from the southern sun. A fleshy-leafed cactus looked tired and careworn. A cobbled passageway led to a flight of steps beside an arched gate, and Enzo climbed them to a small parking area that served the clifftop cottages.

Below him, the little brick-arched gateway led to a private garden full of flowering winter shrubs, a stone fish perched precariously on its wall. Off to his left, an area of coloured paving, filled with trees and terracotta potted plants, led to the first door in the row. An old wrought-iron sewing table and folding chair sat on a tiny, shaded terrace. Blue shutters were closed over square windows. There was an old, rusted ship’s bell attached to the wall beside the door, and Enzo pulled its rope. The sharp, resonant ring of metal on metal vibrated in the cool air, and after several moments, Enzo heard a lock turning in the door.

It opened into a long, narrow hallway, and beyond it Enzo could see into a sitting room with large windows looking out over the Mediterranean. A small lady with short cut white hair peered at him from the gloom. A lady in her late sixties or early seventies. Her skin was remarkably unlined, but her age was betrayed by the brown blemishes on the pale skin of her face and hands. She wore a knitted cardigan over a white blouse and a checkered tweed skirt and had a short, pink, silk scarf tied at her neck.

Enzo said nothing, and she looked at him for a long time with blue eyes so pale they were almost colourless. And then realisation washed over her, and she wilted visibly, eyes clouding suddenly as if by ripened cataracts.

‘You know, don’t you?’ Her voice was a whisper barely audible above the sigh of the sea thirty feet below. Enzo nodded and she said, ‘I’ve been expecting you for nearly forty years.’

She served them tea in bone china cups, pouring from a long-spouted teapot in the sitting room with the sea view. It was a small room, in which all her furniture seemed large. A walnut buffet against one wall, a Welsh dresser against another, and a big, soft, old sofa with two matching armchairs, hand-embroidered antimacassars on the arms. Every wall and shelf space was covered by framed photographs. A record of a life, a young boy in all his stages from toddler to teenager. A record that seemed to stop abruptly in midteens. In most of them he appeared to be scowling, but there was one that stood out from all the others, his face transformed by a radiant smile, blond curls tumbling across a wide forehead. He wasn’t smiling at the camera, but at something to camera left. An unusually happy moment caught in an unhappy life.

Elizabeth Archangel followed his eyeline. ‘Yes, it does stand out, doesn’t it? He was not a boy prone to smiling, or to expressing any kind of emotion. I often felt, during all those years, that he somehow knew, that he had always known, and resented me for it. But, of course, he couldn’t have. Sugar?’

She held out the bowl, but Enzo shook his head. ‘No thank you.’

‘Of course, it wasn’t me he was smiling at. He would never have smiled like that for me. It was Domi. His dog. Normally I wouldn’t have had animals in the house. Too big a risk of scratches or bites. But there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t have done for Richard, even if he never did appreciate it.’

And Enzo realised that she had kept the boy’s name. His real mother had called him Rickie. The woman who had stolen him preferred the more formal Richard. So he had grown up as Richard Archangel.

‘Of course, it was me he blamed when we had to have the dog put down. Even though I wasn’t the cause of it. It had been alright at first, but he somehow developed an allergy to the animal. So bad my doctor felt it could be life-threatening. I had no choice.’ She paused, lost in sad recollection. ‘He never forgave me.’

Enzo looked again at all the pictures, and felt nothing but a simmering hatred for this child who, even then, must have borne the seeds of destruction in his soul. He had to force himself to remain objective. He turned to the old lady. ‘Why did you steal him?’ It seemed odd to speak of stealing another human being.

She closed her eyes and her head trembled a little. ‘Be careful what you wish for, lest it comes true. That’s what they say, isn’t it?’ She opened her eyes again. ‘I had a difficult childhood, Mister Macleod. I couldn’t take part in any of the games the other children played. I was wrapped in cotton wool and kept safe from the world. There can’t be anything much worse that watching life slip by your window and never be able to participate in it.

‘My parents were paranoid. That it was their fault never seemed to occur to them. My mother always claimed she didn’t know she was a carrier, but I’m certain now she knew and wanted a child anyway.’ She added quickly, ‘Not that I blame her. I didn’t understand then. But when I became a woman, I knew what it was to want a child of your own. And when you know you can’t have something, you want it more than anything in the world.’

She sipped her tea and gazed out over water reflecting a leaden sky. The wind was rising, banishing the mist, and raising little white crests on the ruffled surface of the sea. ‘I don’t have the worst form of hemophilia, Mister Macleod. My blood was always possessed of at least a few clotting agents. And with obsessive parental care, I made it through childhood almost without incident. But they couldn’t protect me from puberty. That’s when the real nightmare began. With menstruation. There were times it simply wouldn’t stop. I had repeated transfusions, and then they put me on drugs, hormones, to try to control it. They kept me alive just long enough for the introduction of the birth control pill in 1960. I was one of the very first to take it, prescribed and paid for by the good old British health service. Estrogen and progestin to make my body think it was permanently pregnant, to make it stop producing eggs, and to hold my endometrium together so I wouldn’t bleed. The irony being, of course, that I could never get pregnant in reality. Not without facing almost certain death.’

‘So you stole someone else’s child.’

‘Oh, no, Mister Macleod. I wasn’t that desperate. Not yet. And I did something much worse before I resorted to that.’

Enzo frowned. What could be worse? ‘I don’t understand.’

‘I fell in love. Met a man who stole my heart, and all my reason and married me. Not that any of it was his fault. He knew, right from the start, that we couldn’t have children. He knew that making love to me would be a tentative and dangerous thing. That he would have to take the utmost care never to make me bleed. And he never did. I’ve never known anyone so gentle and caring. It was always me who wanted to throw caution to the wind. I had a passion in me, don’t you see? I needed to live, after all those years of deprivation, even if it meant I would die in the process. Which is why, in the end, I stopped taking the pill.’

She exhaled deeply.

‘Of course, I didn’t tell him. He had no idea why I was making such sexual demands of him night after night. Not that he objected. But I knew, that if I could get pregnant in reality, then I would survive stopping the pill. The only question then, was whether I would survive giving birth.’

‘And did you? I mean, get pregnant?’

‘To Reginald’s absolute horror, yes. He couldn’t believe I had put myself at such risk. He had always accepted that we would never have children. But I couldn’t. And I was prepared to die trying. He just couldn’t comprehend that.’

Enzo looked at the little old lady sitting in the armchair across the coffee table, and realised that she must have been driven in a way that he, just like her husband, would never comprehend. What instinctual urge could possibly motivate you to want children more than life? He found himself drawn into the horror of the Archangels’ lives, empathising with the distraught husband who had unwittingly made her pregnant, and who lacked any real understanding of his wife’s obsession. ‘So what happened?’

She sighed heavily, draining the last of her tea, and placing the cup carefully in its saucer. ‘You may remember a plane crash near Manchester in March, 1968. No doubt you were just a teenager then, so maybe not. It was a flight from London to Glasgow. A hundred and thirty-three people died. My Reginald was one of them. I was three months pregnant, and the love of my life was gone. Somehow, then, it was all the more important that I go through with it. That I have my baby. It was all I had left of him.’

She was becoming agitated now, wringing her hands in her lap, unfocused, almost unaware of the presence of the big Scotsman sitting opposite. ‘The doctors did everything they could to prepare me for the birth. But it is almost impossible to avoid even the smallest tear. And I very nearly bled to death. It was touch and go over several days and many transfusions. The bleeding was internal, you see. Very difficult to stop. But they did, and within a week I was holding my own baby boy in my arms, the only surviving part of his father.’ Her face darkened. ‘But that’s where all resemblance between father and son ended. He owed too much of himself to his mother. I’d given him my curse. A fifty-fifty chance. But for him the coin had landed the wrong way up.’

Her focus returned, along with a certain calm, and she looked at Enzo as if she were surprised to see him. ‘More tea?’

‘No, thank you.’ He laid his cup and saucer in the tray. ‘What happened to your son, Mrs. Archangel.’

‘Why, he died, of course. Just eighteen months old. I had taken such care, Mister Macleod, to protect him against any possibility of injury. Worse than my own parents with me. I never let him out of my sight. I was planning, when it came time, to educate him at home.’ She shook her head. ‘Perhaps, in some perverse sort of way, it was better for him. What sort of life might he have had, isolated from the world in the bubble I would have built for him?’

She turned towards the window, biting on her lower lip. ‘I was with him when it happened. Saw him go down, and couldn’t do a thing about it. The exuberance of a toddler learning to walk, the lack of coordination. Clumsy feet. We were in the kitchen. A stone floor. Very unyielding. He tripped and pitched forward. Landed right on his face. I almost heard his nose burst. And then there was the blood. And I panicked. Oh, God, how I panicked. Because I knew, you see. I just knew. I phoned the ambulance straight away, but it was never going to get there on time. I did everything I could, but the bleeding just wouldn’t stop. Such a tiny body. Just a little person. Not that much blood to start with. He was dead within minutes.’

She lifted the teapot. ‘Are you sure I can’t help you to more tea?’

Enzo shook his head, and she poured another cup for herself, concentrating on the minute processes. The single sugar cube, stirred till dissolved. The splash of milk. The swirl of the spoon. The cup brought slowly to the lips for the tiniest of sips. Then she lifted her eyes again to the sea, that seemingly endless, ever-changing expanse of water that she must have gazed upon during untold solitary hours.

‘And so I was alone. My baby and my lover both dead. My whole world in ruins around me. I felt truly cursed, Mister Macleod. You can have no idea. I would never be with another man. No one could ever replace my Reginald. But I could give nurture to a child. Bring some meaning to a life that had lost all purpose. Although I knew that even if there had been someone to make me pregnant, I would never have survived another birth.’

She took several small sips of tea before replacing the cup in its saucer. ‘You know, everywhere I looked, all around me, women had children. Women who didn’t deserve to have children, or even want them. Women who got pregnant at the drop of a hat. A night of fun, a moment’s carelessness.’ She looked at Enzo, an appeal for understanding. ‘And I could never adopt. Not back then. A single woman. A hemophiliac. It was so unfair.’

‘And you thought it was fair to steal someone else’s child?’

‘Oh, I chose very carefully, Mister Macleod, I can assure you. It wasn’t a spur of the moment thing. I took several months to prepare. Reginald had left me well provided for in his will. I sold the house in England and came to France. I had no living relatives, so I had no ties, no one to know my history.

‘I found this house here in Collioure. I bought and furnished it. When, finally, I moved in, I would be the grieving English widow, escaping tragedy in England, bringing her young son with her to start a new life. I’d had Richard put on my passport, you see. I still had his birth certificate. The people at the passport authority had no way of knowing he was dead.’

A sudden understanding dawned on Enzo. ‘Richard. Your own son was called Richard?’

‘Oh, yes. Actually, that was what clinched it for me in Cadaquès. I had already selected the boy before I discovered that his name was Richard. It was too great a coincidence. I thought that it was fate. That it was meant to be. Although now I realise that, if anything, it was meant to be a punishment, not a blessing.’

Her smile was wistful and distant, full of pain not pleasure at the process of recollection. ‘I was staying at another hotel, just around the bay. I’d been there for a couple of weeks, and I would spend my days sitting around the pools of other hotels, watching families and their children. Sometimes following them. Sometimes striking up conversations. No one ever saw me as a threat, you see. A young woman on her own, a ring still on her wedding finger. If anyone asked, I told them the truth. My husband had been killed in a plane crash, and I was escaping the horror of it all for a few short weeks.

‘That’s when I first saw Richard. At the poolside with his family. And then later, on the beach. I even took a photograph of them and got a studio in town to develop it for me. He was such a beautiful boy. Fair, like my own Richard. But what made it so perfect, do you see, there were two of them. Identical. Whatever the pain of losing one child might be, his mother would always have the compensation of the other. And there was another sibling, too. An older sister.’

‘And that made it alright?’ Enzo couldn’t keep the disapproval from his voice.

She responded as if pricked by a pin, stung to self-justification. ‘She already had three children, and could have had more if she wanted. She was a Catholic, so she probably would.’

‘So you took him.’

‘Yes. I could give him so much more. And my attention would be undivided, not spread thin across a whole family. I spent several days devising a way of doing it. But in the end it was almost too easy. They made it that way for me. Leaving their children alone in the hotel room each night while they ate and drank and laughed with their friends in the restaurant. And that stupid girl who was supposed to check on them, too busy flirting with a boy from the kitchen. A rendezvous each night out by the bins. Adolescent groping. Disgusting. Taking Richard should have been so very simple.’

‘And it wasn’t?’

‘It was a disaster. As I lifted him from the cot, he was still half asleep, and his little hand came up to hang around my neck. As it did, the sharp corner of a fingernail tore the skin of my cheek and I started to bleed. Such a stupid, silly little thing. But I couldn’t stop it, do you see? When I bleed, I bleed. I’d been going to take his little panda as a comforter, but in the end I had to let it go. It was all I could do to carry Richard and try to staunch the blood at the same time. I nearly abandoned the whole thing. I was out in the corridor, in two minds about putting him back, when I heard someone coming up in the lift. So I ran. The die was cast. There was no going back.’

She lifted her teacup again, but the tea was tepid now, and she pulled a face and laid it down again. ‘It took just two hours to get him back here. But we’d crossed a border, and in those days the media was not as all-pervasive as it is now. There was virtually no coverage of the abduction in the French press. I knew the police would search the immediate vicinity, Cadaquès and its environs. And they’d probably search far and wide. Throughout Spain, and no doubt in the UK. But two hours up the coast, in France? I was fairly certain that no one would ever think of looking for us here.’

She smiled a strange little smile, full of bitterness and irony. ‘And so we were free to begin our dream life together. Except that the dream turned into a nightmare, and I only had him for sixteen years. Sixteen long, difficult years.’

‘What went wrong?’

‘Oh, nothing went wrong. It was just Richard. How he was. How, I suppose, he would have been, no matter what. A difficult, disobedient, sulky, sullen, solitary boy. Maybe he missed having a father figure, a role model like Reginald. He certainly didn’t want me. He recoiled from my touch, hated it when I kissed him, wouldn’t hold my hand. You can have no idea how distressing that was for a mother. How, in the end, I grew to dislike him so much, I think perhaps I started to hate him. When he went, it was both a heartbreak and a relief.’

Enzo noticed how easily she referred to herself as his mother, as if almost from the start she had believed it to be true. Some enormous capacity for self-deception. He doubted if she had even followed the story in the British press. British newspapers would have been available here, even then. But she wouldn’t have wanted to read about how she had devastated a family, ruined a mother’s life. That would have made the self-deception so much harder to maintain. ‘So what made him leave?’

‘I came home one day to find him in a state of extreme agitation. I had left him studying for his baccalauréat. He wasn’t particularly gifted academically, but he could have done better. He lacked concentration, motivation. Which is, I suppose, why he abandoned his studies that day and went exploring in the attic. That’s how he found all my old papers. The photographs I had taken in Cadaquès, birth certificates, marriage certificate. Reginald’s death certificate.’ She paused. ‘My Richard’s death certificate. Which, as far as he was concerned, was his own.’

Enzo could only imagine what kind of shock it must have been to stumble across your own death certificate. ‘What did he say?’

‘He demanded answers I couldn’t give him. I wasn’t prepared, you see. There was no convincing way I could lie to him. So I simply stonewalled. Accused him of prying, of meddling in things he didn’t understand, of jumping to all the wrong conclusions. He said in that case I should explain it to him so he would understand. But I refused to discuss it any further and sent him to his room.’ Her face lapsed into a set of weary resignation. ‘I didn’t dare try to speak to him again that night. And when I went to rouse him in the morning he was gone. Taken hardly anything with him. Just a few items of clothing. The window was open, so I assume he’d jumped down to the garden.’

‘And you didn’t report him missing to the police?’

‘How could I? Any kind of investigation would only have uncovered the truth, especially if they’d found him. No, Mister Macleod, he was gone and I just had to accept it. Alone again, like it seems I was always destined to be. I told his school he’d gone back to England, and that was an end to it.’ She looked at Enzo with sad, pale eyes. ‘I suppose you’ll be reporting me to the authorities.’

‘You committed a crime, Mrs. Archangel. A long time ago, perhaps, but you still have a debt to repay, particularly to his mother. She’s still there, you know. In Cadaquès. All these years later, waiting for her son to return.’

He saw the old lady draw in her lips to contain her emotion. These were things she had never wanted to hear, never dared to imagine. ‘And Richard? What’s become of him?’

His voice was empty, emotionless. ‘He murders people for a living, Mrs. Archangel. He’s a professional killer.’

The shock that flitted across her face was, for a moment extraordinarily vivid, a reflection of an inner emotional turmoil. Horror, fear, revulsion. And then it passed, to be replaced by a kind of acceptance, a silent acknowledgement that she had raised a monster, and that maybe she had known it all along.

‘It’s possible that he might be using the name of William Bright.’

Her eyes lifted sharply. ‘His family name.’

‘William is his brother.’

‘So he found them, then?’

‘So it seems.’

‘And do they…do they know?’

‘They do now.’

She closed her eyes. The lie that she had lived nearly all of her adult life was over. God only knew what the future would hold. When she opened then again, they were filled with tears. Of self pity.

‘Did you ever hear from him, after he left?’

She shook her head. ‘Never.’ Then some distant memory forced a revision. ‘Well, once. Just once. I’m certain it was him, though he didn’t say so.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Wait.’ She eased herself stiffly out of the armchair and crossed to the Welsh dresser. She rummaged in a drawer for several minutes, shuffling through a folder of papers, before turning with a postcard in her hand. Enzo could see that it was a vividly coloured sunset scene, red light on blue hills. ‘This came a few months after he’d gone.’ She lifted reading glasses and peered at the card. ‘Dated December 26th, 1986.’ She raised one hand in a small gesture of exasperation. ‘All it says is Au revoir. But it’s his handwriting. I’d have known it anywhere.’ She peered at it again. ‘Strangest thing, though.’

‘What is?’

‘He signed it, Yves.’ She looked up. ‘Why would he do that?’

‘Maybe, Mrs. Archangel, by December 26th, 1986, that was his name.’ He held out his hand for the card and she gave it to him. And he saw quite clearly from its postmark that it had been sent from a place called Aubagne.

Chapter Forty-Six

Yves watched from the Rue St. Sébastien as Macleod left the house. The tall, ponytailed Scotsman crossed the small car park and disappeared down the steps to the Rue du Mirador. But Yves lingered. He knew there was no danger of losing him, and so he was prepared to allow himself the luxury of a little bittersweet nostalgia.

He stepped out from the shadow of the trees and walked slowly across the tarmac to the house where he had grown up. Nothing much had changed. Everything had grown. The shutters had been repainted. At the top of the steps, he looked down at the little arched gateway through which he had made his escape all those years ago. He could see his bedroom window, and felt a pang of something unfamiliar. It might have been regret. The sea beyond was as it always had been. Like him. Moody, changeable. He listened to it breathing, the sound of his childhood. He smelled its salty fragrance. Breathed it in.

There was a new sign at the entrance to the cottages. Rue Sans Issue. Dead end. It had always been a dead end street, where he had lived a dead end life. On the wall next to it was a framed print of a painting someone had done of the cottages. Bright Mediterranean colours, sunlight lying in patches across the hills on the headland beyond.

For several minutes he simply stood listening. He was surprised to discover that he was afraid. Afraid he might see her, meet her, hear her voice. The woman who had stolen his life. But the house was silent. No voices, no footfall in the hall. He moved on to the terrasse and saw the wrought iron sewing table where she used to make him sit and read his schoolbooks. The fold-up chair he had sat in so often. The metalwork was painted blue to match the shutters. In his day it had all been green.

She was there, somewhere just on the other side of the door. He knew she was at home. He had seen Macleod going in, and he had been there for more than an hour. No doubt he knew even more now about the young Richard Archangel, his history in both Cadaquès and Collioure. Yves had failed completely to stop him. He should have been dead by now. Only a fluke in Paris had saved his life. And here he was, still digging up the past, pawing through the shit.

Yves tried to control his breathing, to calm himself. Anger was not the answer. Success in killing the Scotsman would depend on cool calculation. And kill him he would. Of that he was certain.

From somewhere inside the house came the sound of breaking glass. He tensed and listened intently. But heard nothing more. He was breathing rapidly again, his heart punching against his ribs like a boxer in training. Stab, jab-jab, stab, jab. Gloved fists pounding the punchbag.

He had no idea what moved him to do it. Some morbid fascination, a strange sense of returning to the safety of the womb, no matter how unhappy his time there had been. He reached for the handle and opened the door, pushing it gently into the darkness of the hall. All his senses were assailed by a smell that summersaulted him back through time, momentarily robbing him of his composure. He reached out to touch the wall and steady himself. He felt like a ghost haunting his own past, and expected any moment to see himself emerge from his bedroom, to climb down the stairs to the sea-facing terrace where he had spent so much of his time reading, thinking, dreaming, crying.

There was not a sound. The living room seemed empty. Then, as he stepped into the room, he was shocked to see his image on every surface, on every wall. Like a place of worship, an altar where she prayed for the boy he had once been. Or, perhaps, the boy she had wanted him to be. He moved to the window and peered down on to the terrace. No one there. Then to his bedroom door. He hesitated for a moment, a sense of dread building inside him. Did he really want to open this door to his past? He pushed the handle down and let the door swing open, and found himself transported back through twenty-two years. All his posters were still on the wall, faded now, and curling around the edges. His guitar was leaned up in the corner. One of its strings had broken. The bed was made. The same bedspread that had covered it the night he left.

It was almost more than he could bear, and he pulled the door quickly closed again.

Where was she? She couldn’t have gone out. Unless she had somehow managed to slip through the arched gate into the lane below without him seeing her.

The tiniest sound caught his attention. At first he was unable to identify it. Then there it was again. A drip. The sound of water on water. It was coming from the bathroom. He moved with the silent steps of the ghost that he was, down the hall to the bathroom door. It was not quite shut. With a hand that he could not hold steady, he pushed it open.

She was lying naked in the bath. A strange, shrunken, white-haired old lady. Almost floating. Her arms at her sides, palms face up, blood issuing in bright red pulses from the dark gashes in her wrists. He glanced down and saw the bloody pieces of broken mirror on the floor.

She was still alive. Her eyes wide open, watching him with that same pale blue intent. For just a second he saw some fleeting emotion flare like the flame of a match before dying again as the phosphor burned out. He stood in the doorway and watched as slowly the eyes glazed over and the light went out. He knew she was dead when her heart stopped pumping blood into the water.

Chapter Forty-Seven

From his seat in the window of the Café Sola, Enzo could see across the street to the market square, and the repair truck from the garage parked next to his car. The mechanic, in his blue overalls, was pumping the handle of a pneumatic jack to lift up the far corner of the vehicle. Enzo had found that the trunk contained only an emergency spare, so there had been no point in changing the punctured wheel himself. The garage had sent a mechanic to come and remove the wheel. Now he had returned with a new tyre.

Enzo refocused on his laptop, and heard it ringing as he waited for Nicole to respond. His own image from its built-in webcam looked back at him from an open window on the desktop. Then the ringing stopped, and his head shrunk to a postage stamp in the top corner, to be superseded by Nicole’s smiling face.

‘Monsieur Macleod. Where are you?’

‘Still in Collioure.’

‘Did you talk to her?’

‘I did.’

‘And?’

‘I’ll tell you all about it later, Nicole. Right now, there’s something I need you to do for me.’

‘Of course.’

It was something he could have done himself. But he had other reasons for making the iChat call. ‘How’s Kirsty doing?’

Nicole shrugged. If she was embarrassed, she was masking it well. ‘Okay. At least she’s talking to us all again. Apparently Roger’s off the critical list, so it looks like he’s going to pull through.’

Enzo found himself entertaining uncharitably mixed feelings. But all he said was, ‘Good.’ Then, ‘Nicole, I need you to find out anything and everything you can for me about a place called Aubagne. Have you heard of it?’

She shook her head. ‘Do you know where it is?’

‘No idea.’

‘Okay. Let me have a look on the net. I’ll call you back.’

As he disconnected, the café door opened and the blue overalled mechanic came in. He sat in the seat opposite. ‘All done, Monsieur Macleod.’ And with scarred, oily fingers, broken nails delineated in black, he wrote out an invoice and tore off the top copy ‘One hundred and twenty euros.’

Enzo wrote him a cheque which the mechanic took and examined briefly before standing up. He hesitated, scratching his head through a thatch of thick, wiry hair. ‘It wasn’t no accident, monsieur.’

Enzo frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Your puncture. Someone put a blade through the wall of the tyre.’

Enzo felt his face tingle as if he had been slapped, and fear stabbed him suddenly in the chest like the blade which had pierced his tyre. All he could do was nod.

The mechanic gave him a peculiar look, then folded the cheque and slipped it in his pocket. ‘Bonne journée, monsieur.’ And he was gone. For the second time, Raffin’s words rang in Enzo’s recollection. He’s just a breath away. I can feel it. He looked up through the window and let his eyes wander across the square opposite, searching for a familiar face amongst the residents of Collioure going about their daily business. But he saw no one he recognised. The huge stone edifice of the Château Royal rose dark against the grey sky, and in the bay beyond, a sail boat was banked steeply in the wind, tacking out past the harbour wall. He was startled by the ringing of his computer.

Nicole’s face reappeared. ‘Aubagne is in Provence,’ she said. ‘Somewhere between Aix and Marseilles. In the département of Bouches-du-Rhone. It’s not very big. About forty thousand people. Nothing much to distinguish it. The only thing it’s really known for is being the home of the Foreign Legion.’

‘Jesus,’ Enzo said, as the full impact of what she had just told him sank in. ‘He must have joined the Legion.’

‘Do you think? Hang on…’ He could hear her tapping away at her keyboard. Then she was silent for more than a minute, and he could see her scanning something onscreen. ‘Well, that would make sense, Monsieur Macleod. Apparently joining the Légion étrangère, is a well-travelled route for foreigners wanting to change their identities. Frenchmen aren’t allowed to join. If they do they have to take on the persona of someone foreign, like French Canadian or French Swiss. Then everyone’s given a new identity as soon as they’ve enlisted.’

But Enzo knew that Bright had already acquired a custom-made foreign persona. That of his brother, William. An Englishman.

More tapping on Nicole’s keyboard. ‘It seems they have to sign up for a minimum of five years, but they’re allowed to take French citizenship after three.’

Enzo sat back in his seat as full realisation washed over him. ‘Bright had effectively laundered his identity. Stolen his brother’s, then traded it in for a new one in the French Foreign Legion. Five years later, at the age of just twenty-three, he would have rejoined the real world as someone else altogether, with no ties to the past. Fit, experienced, and trained to kill.

‘Thanks, Nicole. I’ll get back to you.’ He disconnected, and felt fear and excitement welling in his chest. Rickie Bright’s carefully managed trail of obfuscation was rapidly unravelling. Enzo already knew the Christian name of his new identity. Yves. All he needed now was the surname.

He went into his wallet and found a slightly dog-eared business card. He straightened its corners between thumb and forefinger and looked at it with a renewed sense of betrayal. Perhaps now Simon could do something useful for his old friend. He slipped the card into his pocket, and brought Google up on his computer screen. He searched for, and found, Mappy, the online French route planner, and plumbed in Collioure and Aubagne. The map and directions it presented were straightforward enough. It was autoroute nearly all the way, east across the southern fringes of France. A drive of less than four hours. He checked his watch. If he left now he could be there by late afternoon.

He closed down his computer and shut the lid, dropping a few coins by his empty coffee cup. As he got up he glanced through the window. Rickie Bright was standing in front of the Hôtel Frégate across the street, watching him.

Chapter Forty-Eight

By the time he had packed his computer into its bag and stepped out on to the street, Bright was gone. Enzo stood for several minutes with the blood pounding in his head, looking up and down the Rue de la République and across the square. The traffic filed past, belching its bile into the cool November air, but there was no sign of Bright. Enzo had taken his eyes off him for a only moment, but in that time he had somehow contrived to disappear.

His legs were like jelly as he crossed the road and placed his computer in the trunk of his car, all the while glancing around him, afraid that at any moment Bright was going to lunge at him from some unsuspected place of concealment. But nothing. No Bright. No attack. Just the old Mediterranean fishing port of Collioure going about its unhurried, out-of-season business.

Enzo sat in his car and gripped the steering wheel, made tense by a mixture of fear, anger and uncertainty. For a brief few seconds, he considered abandoning his plan to drive to Aubagne. But he had no other options open to him. What else could he do? He had embarked on a course and had no choice but to see it through.

He drove out of the square and up through the town, past the anchovy processing factory, and on to the road that wound up the hill to the dual carriageway that would take him to Perpignan. In his rearview mirror, he saw the town disappearing below, the sea levelling out towards a hazy, distant horizon. There were several vehicles on the road behind him. A solitary driver with dark hair, a car containing a family of four. He couldn’t see the others, and almost drove into the car in front as it slowed to take the exit to Argelès sur Mer.

It took nearly half-an-hour to get to Perpignan, and he spotted what he was looking for in a strip mall on the outskirts. He pulled into the parking lot and stood watching the other cars that turned in after him. Still no sign of Bright. He waited for several minutes before deciding that if the killer was anywhere around he wasn’t going to show himself. Which made the thought that he was still out there, unseen, all the more unnerving.

He went into the Halle aux Vêtements and selected an extra large, dark blue suit from a long line of hangers, and then an XXL white shirt. Enzo’s big frame would require the largest size in a range of clothes designed for the slighter built Mediterranean man. Finally, he chose a tie. He couldn’t remember the last time he had worn one. He paid for it all at the cash desk and asked if he could change in the store. He emerged from the shop with his old clothes in a plastic bag, and caught sight of himself reflected in a window. Someone he nearly didn’t recognise. A stranger in a suit, stiff and uncomfortable. Only the ponytail marked him out as less than the conventional figure he wished to present. And the scuffed white training shoes. They wouldn’t do at all.

He went into the Halle aux Chaussures next door and bought a pair of unyielding, black leather shoes. His feet felt constrained by them, constricted, and during the short walk to his car they had already started to chafe. In the driver’s seat he loosened his hair, and then pulled it back as tightly as he could to minimise the effect of the ponytail. In the end he decided that he had probably done enough to pass muster as a lawyer, even if he did look like one more used to chasing ambulances.

He drove out of the car park into the stream of traffic heading north on the ring road to the A9 autoroute, and glanced in his rearview mirror.

The car immediately on his tail was a black Renault Scenic. Rickie Bright sat at the wheel, his cold blue eyes obscured behind a pair of Ray-ban sunglasses.

Bright remained within a few cars of him all the way to Aubagne. It was the most stressful three-and-a-half hours Enzo had ever endured. He checked continually in his side and rearview mirrors. Bright was always there, no more than a car or two away, keeping Enzo constantly in his sights.

There must have come a point on their journey when Bright realised where it was that Enzo was going. And he must have known then, beyond doubt, that the Scotsman was on the point of putting the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle in place.

As they drove into Aubagne, the sun was starting to sink behind them in a sky streaked with pink cloud. Enzo followed the road out to the southern suburb where the Foreign Legion occupied a sprawling plot of land behind high walls and fences. Large signs read Terrain Militaire, and Défense d’entrer.

Bright pulled up on the sidewalk, fifty metres back, as Enzo turned into the main entrance. The gatehouse was a long, low building with shallow sloping red roofs. A pink stone wall was emblazoned with the name of the regiment. Beyond the barrier stretched a vast parade ground. At its centre was a globe mounted on a marble plinth above the legend, Honneur et Fidélité. It was guarded by four bronze Legionnaires. White barracks and administration blocks rose up the hillside on the south side, tall trees casting long shadows over manicured lawns.

A sentry stepped out to stop him at the barrier. Enzo handed him Simon’s business card. He had to work hard to keep the tremor out of his voice. ‘I’m a lawyer from the London law firm of Gold, Smith, and Jackson. We telephoned last week. I represent the estate of the late William Bright, an Englishman whom we believe spent a number of years in the service of the French Foreign Legion during the nineteen eighties. We’re trying to trace next of kin, and I’m here to see if the Legion can provide us with that information from its records.’

The soldier looked at him as if he had two heads, then did what all foot soldiers do when presented with an insoluble problem. Passed it on up the chain of command.

‘One moment, sir.’

He disappeared inside the gatehouse, and Enzo could see him speaking animatedly on the telephone, glancing frequently at the card Enzo had given him. Finally, he hung up and emerged into the fading sunlight. He leaned down to Enzo’s open window and pointed.

‘If you turn around and go back out, turn left and left again, and then follow the road round to the museum. You’ll see it behind the fence on your left. Park there and wait inside. Someone will come and get you.’

As he turned out of the entrance, he saw Bright’s car bump down off the sidewalk further along the street, and then trail him at a discreet distance. He turned left and followed the sentry’s instructions, cruising slowly along a tree-lined country road to the museum, which was housed in a two-storey white and brownstone building on the far side of the parade ground.

The car park was empty. Enzo pulled into the slot nearest the museum. He climbed out of his car as Bright turned his Renault into the lot behind him and drew up at the far side of it. He left his engine idling, and watched Enzo from behind his dark glasses. No attempt at concealment now. Enzo looked back at him across the tarmac. Only twenty metres separated them. The hunter and his prey. The palm trees, the pink sunlight on blue hills, warm air filled with the fragrant scent of Mediterranean flowers in winter bloom. None of it seemed quite real. It could hardly have been less threatening. But all of it served somehow only to heighten the sense of menace that hung incongruously in the air between them. Enzo felt sick.

He turned and walked by the mementos of the Legion’s military past carefully placed among the trees. A tank, an armoured jeep, a cannon, a machine gun. Carved blocks, like tombstones, were set in the grass, a commemoration of battles fought and lives lost. Ile de Mayotte. Indochine. Algérie. Maroc.

Inside, military mannequins in glass cases stood guard over a celebrated history. Rifles lined the walls, flags and emblems, display cases filled with medals and memorabilia. A red képi, a pair of white gloves, a belt, a letter written to a long forgotten lover but never sent. Enzo peered into the darkness of the room where they kept the wooden hand of Capitaine Jean Danjou, one of the most decorated officers in the history of the Legion. With only a few hundred troops at his disposal, he had taken on the might of the Mexican army in 1862, and fallen in battle. Only two of his soldiers survived the fight, and were spared to accompany his body back to France.

‘Monsieur Gold?’ Enzo turned, and a young soldier in khaki emerged from a brightly lit bureau. ‘Follow me, please.’

They went down a corridor and out through a door at the back of the building. As they climbed the steps towards the long, white administration block at the top of the hill, Enzo glanced back and saw that Bright was still waiting for him in the car park.

‘Who was it you spoke to on the phone?’ Captain Mérit examined him with uncomfortably intelligent eyes from the other side of his desk.

‘I didn’t. It was a legal secretary in the office. She was simply told that if we wished information of that sort we would have to present ourselves in person.’

‘Our records are confidential, Monsieur Gold.’

‘I understand that Captain. I have no wish to see them. Only to obtain the names of next of kin, if any.’ He reached into his bag for a notebook. ‘The young man is dead, after all, so we won’t be compromising his right to anonymity.’ He started flipping through his notebook. ‘From my records, I see that William Bright joined the Legion in December, 1986, at the age of eighteen. You provided him with a new identity. Yves…Yves…’ Enzo flipped through more pages, as if had momentarily forgotten the surname and was searching for it.

Captain Mérit conveniently filled the gap. ‘Labrousse.’ Enzo could hardly believe his luck. He would have been happy to leave there and then. But he was obliged to continue with the deception for at least a little longer. Mérit opened the folder on the desk in front of him and lifted up the top file. Enzo could see that there was a photograph attached to it. ‘Applied for and was given French citizenship in 1989. Was honourably discharged at the end of 1991. Saw active service in Chad in 1987, and the Gulf War in 1990, where he was wounded and lost half of his right ear.’ He riffled through the other sheets of paper attached to the file and cursed. ‘Merde! It seems his application form and background checks are not in this file.’ He closed the folder. If you’ll excuse me for a moment.’ He got up and left the room.

Enzo sat listening to the silence. It was almost dark outside now, the last red glow fading on the western horizon. He twisted his head to read the label on the front of the folder on Mérit’s desk. Recruitment Intake, December, 1986. On an impulse, he turned it towards him and somehow managed to spill its entire contents over the floor. ‘Jesus!’ In a panic he scrambled to retrieve it all and stuff everything back in the folder. As long as Mérit didn’t look inside again, he wouldn’t notice that it was all now in a different order. Enzo was about to close it and put it back where he had found it, when his eye was caught by the photograph clipped to the file which was now on top. He caught his breath, and found himself looking at the face of the man who had condemned him to death. Philippe Ransou. French-Canadian. Real name Jacques Of. So Bright, or was it Labrousse, had not chosen Ransou at random to play the good doctor. They had joined the Legion in the same month. Had probably trained together, been comrades in arms together. Someone he could trust without question.

He heard footsteps outside the door and quickly closed and replaced the folder. Mérit came back in holding a sheet of paper. ‘I’ve copied this for you. He only listed three names under next of kin.’ And he proceeded to reel them off. ‘Parents Rod and Angela. Sister Lucy.’ He handed Enzo the photocopy. ‘And I’m afraid there’s really not much more that I can tell you.’

And Enzo thought that, actually, there was nothing more he needed to know.

Chapter Forty-Nine

The car park was floodlit, white buildings on the hill stark against a black sky. He had only ever spent three weeks here, but it felt to him like he was back on home ground. Day had departed with the final setting of the sun, and Yves’ sunglasses now sat on the dash. His face was stinging from shock and anger. If he had looked at himself in his rearview mirror he would have seen how his skin had darkened. He slipped his cellphone back in his pocket. He had wanted to finish it here. Tonight. Back in the place where, in many ways, it had all started. He could not understand the instruction to wait. But like the good soldier he was, he always followed orders.

He saw Macleod, accompanied by a legionnaire, coming back down the steps and into the museum. A few moments later the Scot emerged on his own to walk through the trees to the parking lot. He stopped by his car and glanced across the asphalt towards Yves. He looked weary. Yves had no idea why he had bought himself a suit, but it seemed oddly out of character. Their eyes met, and Yves saw the indecision, before suddenly Macleod began walking towards him.

Yves was startled. Perhaps the Scotsman felt safe here in the full glare of the floodlights, several hundred armed soldiers working, eating, sleeping in the garrison behind him. Not that it would have mattered to Yves. A single shot and he’d have been gone. Soldiers would have run out to find a man dead by his car, lying in a pool of his own blood. And if they’d seen Yves at all, it would have been the merest glimpse of a dark car vanishing into the night.

He leaned forward to start the engine. Still Macleod was striding purposefully towards him. He slipped the car into gear, revved the motor and accelerated hard from a standing start, to the accompaniment of squealing tyres. His Ray-bans flew off the dashboard. Macleod stopped, frozen like an old stag caught in the headlights. How easy it would be simply to run him down. To spin him through the air, then reverse over the body just to be sure. He could see fear, and the certainty of death in Macleod’s eyes, before he pulled the wheel hard to his right. He missed him by centimetres, leaving tracks of rubber on the tarmac, then accelerated out through the gate and off into the darkness.

Enzo stood breathing hard, the revving of Yves car fading into the night. He knew just how close he had come to dying right there and then in the car park of the Légion étrangère. It had been madness. Trying to beard the lion in his own den. Enzo was not sure what had possessed him. Why had he ever thought he might be safe anywhere from a man like Yves Labrousse? A professional killer desperate to keep his identity to himself. And yet he had just given the man every opportunity to kill him, and he hadn’t taken it. Why not? Was he toying with Enzo? Playing some kind of game? Procrastinating for pleasure? Somehow Enzo doubted it. This man was a professional. He killed for money, not pleasure. And he was desperate to stop Enzo in his tracks. So why hadn’t he?

Enzo walked slowly back to his car and slipped into the driver’s seat. He was shaking from head to foot, trembling as if from the cold. But the night was warm, almost balmy. The worst thing was the unpredictability of it all. Not knowing. Not understanding. He would have to find a hotel room now, and he saw a long, sleepless night ahead of him.

Chapter Fifty

Kirsty sat staring at herself in the mirror. The soft glow of the bedside lamp barely reached across the room to the dressing table. She looked terrible. Perhaps it was just the light, or the lack of it. But her eyes were lost in dark smudges, her cheeks seemed hollow. Her hair had somehow lost its lustre, and she had drawn it back to tie in a loose ponytail, just like her father. Except that he wasn’t her father. No matter what had happened, the thought still haunted her.

She rose suddenly from the dressing table, cursing herself. How many times was she going to replay it? Like the words of a song you can’t get out of your head, it just kept going round and round and round.

She left the room, and the old floorboards on the upstairs landing creaked beneath her feet. As she wound her way down the spiral stairs, she heard the murmur of the television from the séjour. Voices, laughter. It seemed like such a long time since she had laughed. The laughter subsided as she walked into the room. Sophie and Bertrand and Nicole looked almost guilty. Nicole said, ‘How’s Roger?’

‘Out of intensive care. They say it’ll take time, but they expect him to make a full recovery.’

‘So cheer up, for God’s sake!’ That Sophie had lost patience with her was clear. And she probably harboured resentment towards her for the way she had treated Enzo. He was her father, after all. Her real father. And Kirsty knew that she loved him unconditionally.

It seemed that everyone loved Enzo, including her. But she was the only one who didn’t know how to express it.

‘You’ve been moping around for days. You’re not the only one affected by this, you know. We’re all in it together.’

‘I think, perhaps, that Kirsty’s had more to deal with than the rest of you.’ Everyone turned at the sound of Anna’s voice as she emerged from the computer room. She gave Kirsty’s arm a tiny squeeze, a silent acknowledgement of a secret shared, an implicit understanding. ‘I’ll get dinner on.’ And she headed on through to the kitchen.

‘I’ll give you a hand.’ Nicole leapt up from her armchair and hurried through after her. If there was going to be a scene, she didn’t want to be any part of it.

But Kirsty had no intention of staying around to trade accusations with Sophie. ‘I’m going to get some air.’ She lifted her coat and scarf from the coatstand on the way out. But once she had closed the door behind her, she had no desire to go walking off into the night on her own. So instead she stayed on the terrasse at the front of the house, leaning on the wrought-iron railing, and gazing out across the frosted field to the floodlit church and school. She lowered her head to rest on her clasped hands, and closed her eyes.

There was nothing she could do to change the past, to alter the events that had so transformed her life. But as Anna had said, she could still play a major role in shaping its future. She still had that power within her gift. Anna was right. There was no future in secrecy. If there was love between people there should be no secrets. She thought about her mother, and the truth she had kept from Enzo all those years. And Simon, and how he had shared in that secret with Linda. An ugly, deceitful secret that, in the end, could only ever destroy them. He might be her blood father, but in truth she didn’t think she really liked him very much.

She stood up straight, pressing her hands into the cold metal rail. She breathed deeply and made a decision. She couldn’t continue to live the lie with Enzo. She had to come clean and tell him that she knew.

Chapter Fifty-One

The hotel was in a commercial park on the east side of Aubagne, a vast, sprawling suburban shopping mall ringed by hills on the edge of town. By the time Enzo had eaten and driven out there, it was completely deserted. Acres of empty parking lots shimmered under yellow street lamps. The hills cut dark shapes against a starry sky, and the air was filled with the smell of pine from the Mediterranean pins parasols that lined the streets.

He drove past fast food restaurants closed up for the night, brooding, boxy, corrugated stores with flashing neon and dimly lit windows. A motor mall, rows of shiny cars gleaming under floodlights. Citröen, Renault, Peugeot, Mercedes. There was not a living soul in evidence, not another vehicle on the streets.

He saw a sign for the Palais des Congrès, and his mind drifted back to Strasbourg, where the nightmare had begun. But Aubagne could hardly be further removed from the sleet and snow of a frigid Alsace, and it was simply a reminder of how far he had come in only a few days, and of how much everything on which he had built his life had shifted seismically beneath his feet.

He had found the man who murdered Pierre Lambert in Paris all those years ago. But the killer was still free, and still intent, it seemed, on despatching Enzo to the same fate. The only thing Enzo didn’t know was where and when. Yves Labrousse, aka Richard Bright, aka Richard Archangel had spurned the opportunity just a few hours earlier, but Enzo was certain that it wasn’t the last he would see of him.

He turned right at the end of a long, straight avenue, and saw a sign for the Etap hotel where he had booked a room by telephone earlier in the evening. The car park, behind a high wire fence and locked gate, was nearly full. Moths battered about under tall lamps that washed it with light. Enzo drew up at the gate and got out of his car. An empty street ran past the hotel into a smudged, dark distance. Lights glowed in the hotel entrance, but there was no one at reception. They had told him on the phone that it was self check-in. They had taken his credit card number and all he had to do was slip his card into the machine at the door. It would issue him with a code, giving him access to the parking, the hotel, and his room. The charge would be lifted automatically.

He stopped at the door and turned to look back the way he had come, straining for the sound of a motor, watching for the flicker of a car’s headlamps. But there was nothing, except for the endless croaking of frogs in some nearby pond.

He turned back to the self check-in machine as the door opened and a dark figure emerged suddenly and unexpectedly, silhouetted against the backdrop of light in reception. Enzo stepped back, an exclamation escaping involuntarily from his lips. The figure raised a hand, and a sudden flame illuminated his face. He puffed smoke into the night. ‘Sorry mate. Didn’t mean to startle you.’ He wandered off across the paving stones towards the deserted terrace of a café opposite, still sucking on his cigarette.

Enzo waited until he had his breathing under control, before slipping his credit card into the slot and being issued with his six-digit code. He tapped it into the pad beside the gate, then drove his car into the parking lot. He retrieved his laptop from the trunk, and let himself into the hotel, walking the length of a long, featureless corridor until he found his room right at the very end.

It was a small, basic room with a toilet barely big enough to turn around in. A metal table was pushed into one corner opposite an unyielding double bed. But it didn’t matter. He had no intention of sleeping.

He took the room’s only chair and inserted the back of it under the door handle so that it angled to the floor and jammed it shut. He made sure the window was securely locked and drew the curtain. The room was in complete darkness now. He fumbled for the TV remote on the bedside table and turned on the television, immediately muting it. The screen provided him with just enough flickering light to see by.

For a long time he sat on the edge of the bed trying hard to relax, to let the tension of a traumatic day seep slowly from every straining muscle. And as his breathing slowed and his body unwound he was almost felled by a sudden wave of fatigue, and he immediately tensed again. He mustn’t let himself sleep. If Yves Labrousse was going to come for him tonight, then he wanted to be ready.

He opened up his computer bag and removed his laptop. It took around sixty seconds for it to load its system and log into the hotel’s wi-fi. He typed in his cellphone number and service provider, hit the return key and ten seconds later received a text on his cellphone with the password for the wi-fi. Now he was connected to the internet, and almost immediately his computer issued an alert to tell him he had mail. He clicked on his mailer, and with an unexpected jolt saw that there was an e-mail from Kirsty.

He hesitated for a long time before finally finding the courage to open it.

Dad…

The very word made winged creatures flutter in his chest

…I call you that, even though I know you aren’t…

Now they were everywhere, in his chest, his stomach, his head. Panicking wings beating in frenetic flight.

…I can’t speak about it in an e-mail. But I overheard you that night at Uncle Simon’s. I know he’s my blood father. And I have to talk to you. I can’t carry the secret around any longer. But not here. Somewhere we won’t be interrupted. Somewhere private. There’s a place that Anna took me to at Le Lioran. You know, the ski resort. It’s not far from here. I know it’ll take you most of the day to drive back tomorrow. So meet me at nine. Where the cablecars dock. There’s a stairway at the side of the téléphérique building.

He could almost feel her pause.

I love you.

Chapter Fifty-Two

Kirsty sat looking at the desktop on her screen. The computer room was in semidarkness, glowing in the light of all the monitors that Nicole had left running. She had just wakened her own laptop from sleep and knew immediately that someone had been using it.

She felt anger spike out of nowhere. Her computer was private. A place where she kept her life, her secrets. For someone else to use it without permission made her feel violated. She pushed back her chair and strode through to the séjour. ‘Were you using my computer, Nicole?’

The eight o’clock evening news had just started, and three faces turned towards her from the television.

‘No.’ Nicole was indignant. ‘Why would I use your computer?’

‘I don’t know, but someone did.’

Sophie said, ‘How do you know?’

‘Because the Finder was missing from the desktop. I never close the Finder.’

Bertrand shrugged. ‘Maybe it was Anna. She was in the computer room last night.’

Kirsty glanced across the hall towards the kitchen. ‘Where is she?’ Usually, at this time of night, she would be preparing dinner. But the kitchen was empty.

‘She went out somewhere this afternoon,’ Sophie said. ‘I didn’t hear her come back.’ She looked towards the others for confirmation.

Bertrand said, ‘I was out getting wood ten minutes ago, and the car’s not there.’

Kirsty glanced at the clock on the mantel. ‘She’s late.’

And Nicole said, ‘I suppose we’d better think about fixing something to eat ourselves, then.’ As she got out of her seat, they heard the crunch of gravel in the drive, and the lights of a car raked past the windows. ‘That’ll be her now.’

She went out into the hall to switch on the outside light, and opened the door. A car was idling at the foot of the steps, but it wasn’t Anna’s. A middle-aged couple stood with their car doors open staring hesitantly up at the house. They seemed alarmed when Nicole stepped out on to the terrasse. And there was something both frightened and aggressive in the man’s tone. He spoke in English. ‘Who the hell are you?’

Nicole was taken aback, and as the others filed out from the house behind her, it was Kirsty who responded. ‘Who are you?’

The woman’s voice was shrill as she turned to her husband across the roof of the car. ‘John, let’s just go and get the police now.’

But he was determined to stand his ground. ‘This is our house,’ he said, his voice filled with indignation. ‘We own it.’

Sophie’s face broke into a smile of relief. ‘Well, that’s alright then. We’re friends of Anna’s.’

‘Jo-ohn,’ the woman wailed.

Still he wasn’t giving up. ‘Anna who?’

Sophie and Kirsty, Bertrand and Nicole looked at him in astonishment. Kirsty said, ‘Anna Cattiaux. The former Olympic skier.’

The man glanced at his wife. Some unspoken communication passed between them and she immediately got back into the passenger seat and slammed the door shut. He turned his face up towards the terrasse again. ‘I’m going for the police. If you’re still here when we get back, you can explain yourselves to them.’

He got hurriedly behind the wheel and slipped the car into reverse. They saw him twist in his seat as he reversed at speed back along the drive.

Nicole turned towards the others, bewilderment all over her face. ‘What was all that about?’

But Kirsty’s mind was racing, cogs and counters in her brain clicking backwards and forwards searching for a combination that would unlock understanding. ‘Shit!’ she said suddenly. ‘We don’t know anything about Anna, except what she’s told us. And I never really thought about it before. But some of that just doesn’t add up.’

‘What do you mean?’ Nicole was becoming alarmed.

‘She told my dad that she was in Strasbourg to see her parents. Plural. But she told me her father was dead. She also told me she’d been in Strasbourg for the funeral of a friend.’

‘That’s funny,’ Sophie said. ‘We were just talking about that the other day. Well, not exactly that. But she told me she’d never had kids, and Bertrand said she’d told him her son was killed in a road accident. We figured one or other of us must have misunderstood.’

Nicole said, ‘Well, there’s one easy way to find out the truth.’ She pushed past them into the house and hurried through to the computer room. The others followed and gathered around the back of her chair as she brought up the Google homepage on her laptop and typed in “Anna Cattiaux” skier. There were more than sixty thousand hits. At the top of the first page of ten was the entry in French Wikipedia. Nicole clicked to open it. ‘There. Anna Cattiaux. French champion skier. Represented her country at two winter Olympics, narrowly missing out on the medals both times.’ She stopped, and her hand froze on the mouse. ‘Oh, my God!’

‘What?’ Bertrand leaned over to try to read what she was looking at.

Nicole’s voice was hushed. ‘Anna Cattiaux died in a freak skiing accident twelve years ago.’

There was a long silence as they absorbed this.

‘So who is she? I mean Anna, or whatever her name is.’ It was Sophie who voiced their common thought.

Kirsty said, ‘Nicole, put the name into Google Images.’

Nicole’s fingers rattled across the keyboard, and up came a screenful of images. A pretty, blond-haired girl, sometimes in ski gear, sometimes in jeans, occasionally in a cocktail dress at a function or dinner. Always smiling. And nothing like the Anna who had shared in their lives for the last ten days.

‘Jesus!’ Kirsty whispered. All the things she had confided in her, secrets shared, stories told. She felt tricked and cheated, and a single word kept bouncing around inside her head. Why? Why? Why the deception, why the lies? And what was it all about? Who was she, and where was she now? Then a thought returned to her. ‘So if it wasn’t any of you, it must have been Anna who was using my computer.’

Nicole said, ‘Well, let’s have a look and see. People always leave a trail.’ She turned her seat towards Kirsty’s laptop and hit the space bar to wipe off the screensaver. ‘May I?’

‘Go ahead.’

Nicole went to the Apple menu and scrolled down to Recent Items. Up came a long list of the applications and documents which had been most recently used. ‘Anything you see that you haven’t been using recently? Or any unfamiliar documents?’

Kirsty scanned the screen. Nothing stood out from the list of documents, and she raised her eyes to the applications. She saw her diary and calendar software. Word processing, her internet browser, her iTunes collection of music and videos.’ Suddenly her heart was beating more rapidly. ‘My mailer. I haven’t sent an e-mail since before the bombing in Strasbourg.’

Nicole opened up the mailer. ‘Your inbox is a mess,’ she said. ‘Don’t you file stuff?’

Kirsty ran down the long list of e-mails which had been received and read but remained in her inbox. ‘I always mean to. I just never seem to get around to it.’ There were several unread mails which must have been received during the last week to ten days, but never picked up from the server until whoever it was had used the computer and opened up her mailer. ‘Why would she want to look at my e-mails?’

Bertrand said, ‘Maybe it wasn’t your e-mails she was interested in. Look in the Sent box.’

Nicole clicked on the Sent folder, and up came a fresh screen, empty except for a single e-mail. Under Date Sent it said Yesterday. Kirsty said, ‘I never sent an e-mail yesterday!’ She ran her eye along the line. ‘Oh, God, it’s addressed to Dad! He’ll think I’ve sent it. What does it say?’ Nicole opened it up.

Only the hum of the computers broke the silence in the room as they crowded round to read it. Kirsty’s face burned, almost as if from a fever, and she felt sick to her stomach, hollowed out, betrayed.

Sophie’s head swung round to look at her, a strange light in her eyes. ‘Is that true? Uncle Sy’s really your papa?’

Kirsty nodded, unable to prevent the tears that welled in her eyes from spilling silently down her face. ‘I told her about it. There was no one else. Roger had gone, and I needed to share it with someone. And I was going to tell Dad I knew, I really was.’

‘Only she beat you to it,’ Bertrand said.

‘You can’t call him papa anymore.’ There was a hint of resentment in Sophie’s voice. Since Kirsty had come on the scene she’d had to share him with her. But not any longer.

Kirsty wiped the tears from her face. ‘Yes I can. Because that’s what he is. The biology doesn’t matter. He’s my dad, and he always will be.’

Suddenly Nicole said, ‘What time is it?’

Bertrand checked his watch. ‘Half past eight.’

‘Call him! Call his cellphone.’

Bertrand flipped open his cellphone and selected Enzo from its memory. He listened intently as it rang several times before a message told him that the number he was calling was not online. He left a message anyway, more in hope than expectation that Enzo would pick it up in the next thirty minutes.

Sophie was starting to panic. ‘Oh, my God, can we get to Le Lioran in half an hour? He thinks he’s meeting Kirsty at nine. But it’s some kind of a trap. It has to be.’

Chapter Fifty-Three

Sleet spattered softly on his windscreen, caught in his headlights like stars at warp speed, driven on the edge of an icy wind that gusted off the mountains. The temperature had dropped by more than twenty degrees during his six-and-a-half hour drive from the south. But it was warm in the cocoon of his car, and his eyes were heavy after a night with little sleep.

He had managed to stay awake until after 5 am, before slipping off to float through shallow seas awash with vivid dreams that carried him into the dawn, and the first light cracking around the curtains. He had wakened with a start shortly after eight and checked his route north on Mappy. With stops, it would take him more than six hours to get to Le Lioran, but he wasn’t due to meet Kirsty until nine, and so he had not checked out of the hotel until noon, waiting until the last possible moment before venturing back out into a world where somewhere, he knew, Yves Labrousse was waiting for him.

But there had been no sign of the killer, or his black Renault Scenic, and Enzo had found a restaurant near the Palais des Congrès. He had eaten there in silence, alone with the thoughts that had disturbed him through all his waking hours and the dreams that followed.

That Kirsty had overheard his exchange with Simon in London had shaken him to the core. But it had, at least, explained her mood at Stansted Airport when they’d said their strained goodbyes. He had no idea how to feel about it now, but all his instincts told him it was better out in the open than festering in the dark where there was every chance it could turn toxic. He knew it would never change how he felt about Kirsty. What he didn’t know was how it had changed the way she felt about him. The one thing he held on to was the way she had signed off her e-mail. I love you. Three small words that, in the circumstances, seemed to him to say so much more. It was that thought which had sustained him throughout the long drive.

Now, as he turned into the tiny ski resort at the base of the Plomb du Cantal, all his fears and doubts returned. And the confidence he had so carefully constructed during nearly five hundred kilometres travelled, evaporated in a moment.

The resort car park was spread over three levels, but there were only a handful of cars beneath its sodium lamps, sleet slashing through haloes of pale yellow light. A mere handful of lit windows pricked the dark squares and triangles of apartment blocks and chalets, and through glass doors Enzo saw that the dimly lit foyer of the hotel was empty. In just a few days the resort would be transformed as the season opened on the first weekend of December. By then, what was falling as sleet down here, would have covered the upper slopes in thick ski-able snow. The hotel and most of the apartments would be full, the car park jammed with winter holidaymakers. But for now it was like a ghost town.

Although he had watched the outside temperature drop on the digital display in his hire car, he was unprepared for the blast of ice cold wind that cut through him as he opened the car door. The wind chill factor was dragging the temperature down well below zero. He took his jacket from the back seat and buttoned it against the driving sleet, turning up his collar and thrusting hands deep into his pockets. He put his head down and ploughed off into the night, cleaving his way through the sleet, up a grilled metal stairway to the next level.

The téléphérique building was huddled in the dark on the edge of the resort, and he thought what a crazy place this was to meet. Why not in the bar of the hotel? They would almost certainly have had the place to themselves.

Pine trees rising up on all sides pressed around him as he followed the tarmac round the side of the building, to where five flights of red-painted metal staircase doubled back and forth up to the docking area where the two cablecars sat snugly side by side.

Enzo climbed the lower steps and leapt over the barrier at the first landing. The staircase rattled and shook beneath him, clattering above the noise of the wind. His face was wet and stinging with the cold. His hands and feet had already lost all their warmth. His jacket was soaked through, and he could feel the chill seeping into his bones. This was madness.

He hurried up the remaining stairs to the E-shaped concrete docking platform and saw that the nearer of the two cablecars stood with its lights on and its doors open. He looked around for Kirsty but there was no sign of her. He called her name, and the wind seemed to whip it from his mouth and throw it away into the dark. It brought no response. He checked his watch. It was just after nine, and for the first time he wondered how she might have got here. Perhaps Anna had loaned her the car. If he had thought, he would have checked for it in the car park.

He called again. ‘Kirsty!’ And followed the spine of the E past the second cablecar. There was no one here. He retraced his steps and looked inside the nearer one. Empty. He stepped inside, a brief respite from the wind outside, and saw that the door to the control panel on the opposite wall was lying open. Beneath a square of illuminated buttons, a telephone receiver hung from a cradle, and a sheet of white paper taped to its handle was flapping in the draft. Enzo crossed the car and pulled the sheet free. There were two words written on it. Call me. He didn’t recognise the handwriting, but the letters had been printed, and so he couldn’t say if it was Kirsty’s or not.

He held the piece of paper in his hand, staring at it blindly. Something was wrong. Why would Kirsty want to meet him in a place like this? Why would she leave him such a cryptic note taped to a telephone receiver in an empty cablecar? And yet there was no doubt in his mind that it was Kirsty who had written to him. Who else could possibly have known the awful secret which had been aired that night at Simon’s flat in London?

He lifted the telephone and put it to his ear, listening intently. It clicked several times and then began to ring. He waited, almost rigid with tension. On the third ring, someone lifted the receiver at the other end. Silence. Filled only by ambient sound. But there was someone there. Enzo was certain he could hear breathing. He said, ‘Hello?’ And immediately the doors slid shut.

He dropped the receiver and in two quick strides crossed the cablecar to try to stop the nearest door from closing. But he was too late, and he spun around to stand in the middle of the floor, breathing hard, looking about him in a panic, like a wild animal trapped in a cage.

The car jerked, and he grabbed for the handrail as it scraped and bumped its way out of its dock, before swinging free into the night. Enzo had a strange, awful sense of floating away in the dark. From its lit interior, everything beyond the windows of the cablecar seemed black. But he could see the lights of the car park, dropping away steeply below him. He felt the cablecar shudder, battered by the wind. The sleet melted and ran down the windows like tears.

He knew now that he had been tricked. And trapped. If Kirsty had written that e-mail she had been forced to do it. By someone who somehow knew their secret. But who? There was no way he could make sense of it. And he didn’t dare imagine in what circumstance she might have been made to do it.

But it had to have something to do with Labrousse and the murder of Pierre Lambert.

The car dipped suddenly in the dark as it passed the first support pylon, and rose yet more steeply. Enzo began to panic. There was absolutely nothing he could do. He went back to the control panel and pressed every button. Nothing happened. Somehow the cablecar’s independent controls had been disabled and it was being manipulated remotely. He felt quickly in all his pockets, before remembering that he’d let the battery in his cellphone run flat, and left it charging in the car. He couldn’t even call for help. He was trapped in this damned box, being winched up a mountainside in the dark to meet God knew what fate at the top.

His breathing was coming in short, sharp bursts, and he moved to the far window, pressing his back against it and grasping the handrail, preparing to meet head on whatever might be waiting for him up there.

The sleet had turned now to snow, coating the windows at the front, as they rose higher into the night. The car dipped again. The second pylon. Enzo glanced out of the side window, and saw village lights twinkling through the snow in a valley far, far below, somewhere away to the west. Light from the windows of the cablecar reflected darkly on the mountainside as they slid up through cut rock. Ahead Enzo saw the dark shape of the mountain-top terminal loom suddenly out of the night, and then the snow ceased as the cablecar bumped and rattled into the shelter of its dock. It jerked to a standstill and the doors slid open.

Enzo stood stock still. He could hear the wind howling through the cavernous concrete space around him. Cables and corrugated sheeting rattled and flapped and vibrated, the noise of it echoing all about him. The only light came from the cablecar. He could see a metal staircase leading up to an overhead access gallery for maintenance high up in the roof, where the cables turned around huge yellow wheels.

More steps climbed up to a metal platform, and a vast sliding door that opened on to a dark concourse. Sortie signs pointed towards a cafeteria and doors to the outside. He could see no one, nor detect any movement among the shadows.

He stood for a long time without moving. His instinct was to stay in the light, to remain within the protective shell of the cablecar. But he knew that any sense of safety here was illusory. He was in the full glare of the very light that comforted him, clearly visible to whoever was out there. The dark would be a better friend.

Almost on an impulse, he ran out of the door, clattering over the metal grille beneath his feet, the mountain falling away below him, and made a dash for the shadows. All the time he braced himself for the bullets or the blows that he was sure would come his way. He scrambled up the stairs, through the open door, and plunged into the darkness of the adjoining concourse. He found a wall and hunkered down against it, fingers pressed into the floor to keep him balanced. It was more fear than exertion that robbed him of his breath. He could hear it rasping above the roar of the wind that squeezed and whined through every space and crack.

It took several minutes for his eyes to adjust to the tiny amount of light that bled through from the now distant cablecar. It was reflected faintly in pools of water gathered on the concrete floor. The corrugated roof above his head thundered like a drum in the wind, and he saw, beyond a sign for Stella Artois, the passage that led out to the mountain. He had no idea why, but all his instincts pushed him in that direction. Out of here, out into the night, escape from this concrete prison into which he’d been lured.

‘What do you want with me?’ he bellowed at the top of his voice, all his fear and anger fuelling a vocal outburst of pure frustration. But only the wind replied, and he got to his feet and ran for the doors, punching the release bar and plunging through them out into the night.

The wind struck him a physical blow, snow swirling around him like the spirits of demented dervishes. A light came on, triggered by a movement sensor, flooding a snow-covered rise that led off towards the peak. He saw a radio mast disappearing into the white-streaked darkness, and realised what folly this was. He wouldn’t survive ten minutes out here.

He turned and stopped dead. A figure stood in the doorway, blocking his return. A tall figure in a dark parka with the hood up. One hand rose to pull back the hood, and Enzo saw that it was Yves Labrousse. The younger man smiled. ‘She said you’d come,’ he shouted above the wind, and Enzo wondered what he meant. Was he talking about Kirsty?

‘What have you done with her?’

Labrousse looked faintly bemused. ‘I haven’t done anything with her.’ He raised his right hand and pointed a gun directly at Enzo’s chest. ‘You have been such a pain in the ass. You have no idea.’

‘I know everything about you,’ Enzo shouted at him. ‘Your whole history. Your abduction from Cadaquès. Stealing your brother’s identity. Joining the Légion Étrangère. And I know about Philippe Ransou and how you met.’

‘And all that knowledge will die with you. But just a little sooner than Ransou predicted.’

‘No.’ Enzo shook his head vigorously. ‘You’re rumbled, Labrousse. Or Archangel. Or Bright. Or whatever it is you call yourself. Do you think I’d come here without passing on what I know? Do you think I didn’t know you’d be coming after me? I spent last night writing up the whole damned story, and this morning I uploaded it to my blog. It’s all out there on the internet. Whatever you do to me now can’t change that.’

Labrousse glared at him, hate and anger burning in blue eyes. ‘You fucker!’ He took a step towards Enzo and his foot skidded from under him. Loose gravel beneath wet snow. He stumbled and almost fell. Enzo turned and ran just as the light on the terminal building was suddenly extinguished. The mountain top was plunged into blackness.

Enzo felt the snow in his face, his feet slipping and slithering as he ran blindly into the night. He heard Labrousse shouting his name, a voice whipped away on the edge of the wind. The incline grew steeper as he climbed. He felt his legs becoming leaden, the sound of his own voice gasping, almost roaring, as he tried to gulp in more air. But everything was against him. The weather, the lack of oxygen, his age, and he felt himself wading as if through treacle, or like a man fighting in slow motion against the blast of a hurricane.

Until, finally, his legs folded beneath him and he dropped to his knees, utterly exhausted. He fell forward into the snow and rolled over on to his back, and saw the shadow of his pursuer loom over him. Labrousse was gasping, too, fitter and stronger than Enzo, but still disabled by six thousand feet of oxygen deprivation. ‘I never knew a man harder to kill,’ he said. He raised his gun and fired three times.

Enzo braced himself for the bullets and grunted in pain as the dead weight of Labrousse fell on top of him. He felt the warmth of the other man’s blood oozing through his clothes, compounding his confusion. He struggled to push Labrousse to one side, but couldn’t move him.

Then suddenly the weight was lifted, and Labrousse rolled off and into the dark. Another figure leaned over him, and he felt a warm hand on his face. The snow seemed to have stopped.

‘Are you hit?’

This was a dream. It had to be. He was certain it was Anna who had spoken. ‘No. I don’t think so.’ He tried to catch his breath. ‘Anna?’

‘Poor Enzo.’ She ran the back of her hand lightly across his cheek. ‘You really don’t deserve this.’

‘What are you doing here, Anna?’ He forced himself up on to one elbow, and in that moment the sky parted and the light of the moon washed silver across the white peaks of the Cantal all around them. He saw the gun in her hand. ‘You shot him?’ He knew for certain now that he was either dead or dreaming.

She said, ‘The scenario where two people shoot one another is never very believable. But if you shot Labrousse and then somehow lost your way and slipped and fell, you’d die of exposure long before the night was out and anyone found you. That would work. I’m pretty sure they’d go for that.’

‘Who? What are you talking about?’

She sighed and sat down in the snow beside him. ‘The people who employed Labrousse to kill Lambert never did trust him to shut you up. They were scared that anything that led to him would lead ultimately to them. So I was their back-up. If you got too close to Lambert I was to take him out. And you.’

Enzo looked at her in disbelief. ‘You’re going to kill me?’

She looked at him and smiled sadly. ‘Oh, Enzo. I don’t want to. I really don’t. You and me…well, in another life we could have, you know, been good together. But if I don’t kill you, they’ll kill me. Because I could lead you to them, and they don’t like loose ends. You’re too Goddamned smart for your own good. And mine.’

She got to her feet and pointed her gun at him. ‘Come on, get up.’

Enzo got stiffly, painfully, to his feet. ‘Are you going to shoot me?’

‘No, I couldn’t do that to you, Enzo. I’m going to leave you to fall asleep here on the mountain. Only, you’ll never wake up, and you won’t feel a thing. Turn around.’

‘I don’t understand…’

‘Just turn around.’

He did as she asked and she hesitated for only a moment before felling him a with blow from the butt end of her pistol. He dropped to his knees and fell face-first into the snow. She turned him over and dragged him by his feet ten metres to a line of wooden fencing that ran along the edge of a steep drop. She kicked away the cross slats and stooped to press her gun carefully into Enzo’s right hand. She looked at him for a moment before bending over to kiss him lightly on the forehead. ‘I’m sorry, Enzo,’ she whispered. She stood up and pushed him with her foot through the gap she’d made in the fence. He slid over into darkness.

Chapter Fifty-Four

Bertrand clutched the tyre-iron from his van in gloved hands. It was the nearest thing to a weapon he could find. Kirsty had been here before, and so the others followed her as she pointed her flashlight into the sleet ahead of them. Clattering up grilled metal stairs from the car park and slithering across the concourse, past the tourist office, towards the brooding dark of the téléphérique building. The sleet in their faces was nearly blinding as they ran around the side of it to the red staircase that climbed up into the night.

The landing stage was deserted, and only one cablecar was in its dock. It stood in darkness, its doors locked. ‘There’s no one here!’ Kirsty shouted above the wind.

Nicole bellowed, ‘Look!’ She pointed, and they all peered up through the storm of sleet to a distant light on the mountain top. Which was suddenly gone.

‘They’re up there. They must be up there!’ Sophie’s voice wailed among the metal struts and beams overhead. She ran along the dock. ‘Can’t we get this thing to go?’ With icy fingers she tried to pry open the nearest of the cablecar’s doors.

Bertrand said, ‘Hang on.’ He crossed to examine a large metal box bolted to the outside wall of the téléphérique building. Thick cables exited from the bottom end of it, trunking fixed to the wall every few centimetres until it disappeared into the concrete of the floor. A stout steel clasp on its door was fixed with a heavy padlock. He started hacking at it with his tyre-iron.

‘’What are you doing?’ Sophie shouted.

‘Looks like this could be the power box. If I can get it open we might be able to start the cablecar. Kirsty, bring the flashlight over here.’

By it’s light they saw that the metal of the door was peppered now with small dents around the lock. But Bertrand was making little impression on it. He stopped and examined it for a moment, then slotted the straight end of the iron through the hoop of the padlock, and braced himself with his foot against the wall. He pulled with both hands, arm and shoulder muscles straining, veins standing out on his forehead. Years of pumping iron finding practical use beyond mere aesthetics. The metal of the box groaned loudly as the door buckled inwards. But still the padlock held.

Bertrand stopped to take fresh breath and gather himself, then got himself back into position and pulled again, yelling finally with the sheer effort of it, as the whole front of the box ripped free of its fixings. He almost fell as it gave. Inside was a large power switch, and when he threw it, the control panel below it lit up, and the whole landing stage was flooded with light. He punched the button marked Portes and the doors of the cablecar slid open. Fluorescent lights flickered inside it then filled it with luminous bright light.

‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Someone’s going to have to stay here to operate the thing.’

But Kirsty shook her head. ‘No. The operator rides up with it. There are controls inside.’

They all bundled in, and Bertrand found the control panel beside the far door. He closed the doors and hit the green start button. They heard the whine of a distant motor, and the cablecar jerked forward, scraping its way out of the dock before swinging clear and rising steeply towards the first pylon.

Only now did young imaginations start working overtime. None of them had the least idea what, or who, they might find at the top. And they stood avoiding each other’s eyes, afraid almost to acknowledge the sudden fear that moved amongst them like a fifth presence. Their silence was laden with anxiety. Bertrand tightened his grip on the tyre-iron.

They reached the dipping point at the first pylon, then rose rapidly again into a darkness almost obscured by snow.

It was Sophie who broke the silence. ‘Look, there’s a light.’ She pressed her face against the window at the front of the car, peering up towards the peak. A faint glow was threading it’s way through the snow and the dark towards them, descending at speed. Kirsty shielded her eyes from the interior light and strained to see.

‘It’s the other cablecar. It’s coming down.’

‘Shit,’ Bertrand muttered, and he examined the control panel. But there didn’t seem to be any way to stop the car in midascent. They all rushed to the side window, shadowing the glass to see out as the other cablecar approached. When the two converged, they almost seemed to pick up speed. The light of the other car arced out through the driving snow, and in the few seconds it took to pass, they saw Anna looking back at them, her face pale, angry, intense. Her lips moved in a curse they could read, and then she was gone, dipping away below them into the dark.

Silence returned to the ascending car. None of them knew what to say. Fear was replaced now by apprehension verging on dread.

Bertrand turned to Kirsty. ‘How much longer does this take?’

‘Just another few minutes.’

But it seemed like an eternity before the cablecar was sucked into the darkness of its concrete berth and shuddered to a halt. Bertrand took the flashlight from Kirsty. ‘Stay close behind me. We don’t want to get separated up here.’ And he stepped out on to the grilled walkway and shone the flashlight around the cavernous arrivals hall. The wind was so much stronger at the peak and the noise of it reverberated around the stark planes and angles of the concrete construction. The beam of the flashlight pierced its emptiness, pausing for a moment on the open door of a wall-mounted control panel like the one Bertrand had broken into down below.

There appeared to be nobody here, and cautiously Bertrand moved forward, tyre-iron held ready. The girls followed him up the steps and through to the concourse that led to the cafeteria. Here, too, there was no sign of life. Just the mournful holler of the wind. Bertrand lowered the beam of the flashlight and they all saw the trail of wet footprints across the concrete. There was something almost reassuring about them. Something that said people had been here, but were gone. Bertrand broke into a run, following them to the exit doors.

The blast of snow in the wind took their breath away. And as soon as Bertrand stepped through the doors, the motion sensor triggered the exterior light. Immediately he saw the tracks in the snow, footprints not yet covered over. He kept the beam focused on them, and followed their trail up the incline towards the peak. They hadn’t gone far before the lights behind them went out, and it felt suddenly very dark and exposed up here.

Sophie grabbed his arm and pointed beyond the ring of light. ‘There’s something on the track up ahead.’ Bertrand raised the beam and they saw the dark shape of a man lying in the snow, the scarlet glow of fresh blood glistening on virgin white.

Kirsty ran past them and knelt by the body, and as Bertrand brought the light up close, she found herself looking at the face of the man who had picked her off the floor of the convention centre in Strasbourg. The man with the missing earlobe. His eyes were open, staring emptily into eternity. She almost cried out in relief. Sophie’s voice rose above the wind. ‘Where’s Papa?’

‘What’s that?’ Nicole grabbed the flashlight from Bertrand. Something or someone had been dragged away through the snow. Blood was smeared among the tracks. ‘Oh, God.’ She started running. The others chased after her, an awful inevitability somehow in what they expected to find at the end of it.

The trail stopped abruptly by the broken fence, and Nicole leaned past it and shone the flashlight into darkness. Snow sliced through its beam as it scanned the slope beneath them, before picking out a huddled shape lying at the foot of a fifteen foot drop.

Bertrand snatched the flashlight back and plunged over the edge, slithering down the slope to the body below. As he reached it and turned it over, the girls came sliding down after him, and they saw blood all over Enzo’s chest.

‘Oh, my God, she’s shot him!’ Sophie was nearly hysterical.

But Bertrand was feeling the pulse in his neck. ‘He’s still alive.’ And he tore away Enzo’s bloody shirt. ‘It’s not his blood. There’s no wound.’

Kirsty stripped off her coat and quickly wrapped it around him. She leaned over and kissed his forehead, just as Anna had done ten minutes before. ‘We’ve got to get help,’ she said.

But Bertrand was already punching the emergency number into his cellphone.

Perhaps it was her warm breath on his face, or the familiar scent of her perfume. But Enzo opened his eyes and saw her bent over him, and from somewhere found a smile that made her cry. ‘Hold on, Dad,’ she said. ‘Hold on.’ And he took her hand and held it. Blood or not, she was still his little girl.

Anna strode across the car park in a fury and slammed the door of her car shut behind her. She sat gripping the wheel, teeth clenched, glaring at the sleet on the windscreen. For the rest of the descent, after she had passed them in the cablecar, she had been trying to figure out how they had known. What it was that had led them here.

And then it had come to her. Her own stupid fault. She hadn’t erased the e-mail after she sent it. She had meant to. But the sound of voices in the séjour had prompted her to close down the mailer prematurely. They must have found it, God knows how. They would find Enzo, she was sure, and the only way to be certain of putting an end to this, finally, would be to kill them all.

But she couldn’t wait for them to come back down. All of the kids, she knew, had cellphones. They were probably phoning for help right now. She banged the steering wheel with the heel of her hand and cursed her carelessness. Now she was the loose end. The only thing left for her to do was to run. And run. And hide. Looking over her shoulder for the rest of her life.

‘Damn you!’ she shouted at the night. And she slipped her key into the ignition.

They saw the explosion from the peak. A huge plume of fiery orange light that shot up into the night sky, before subsiding again almost as quickly. The sound of it came seconds later, like thunder following lighting.

Chapter Fifty-Five

From his hospital room he had a view out across the rooftops of southwest Cahors to the wooded blue hills that rose steeply on the far side of the river.

During the long transfer by ambulance, depression had settled on him like a winter fog. And now even the sunshine outside couldn’t lift it. He had found a killer, but not those who had hired him. He was no closer now than he had been before to knowing who had wanted Lambert dead or why. He had failed.

And even although she had tried to kill him, he mourned for Anna. He knew that wasn’t her name, but he couldn’t think of her as anything else. Poor Anna. There had, somehow, been something immeasurably sad about her. Who knew what truth there had been in anything she had told them? But that her life had been blighted in some way by tragedy seemed to him beyond doubt.

The only chink of light in his darkness had been the visits from Kirsty and Sophie. He had worked hard to put on a brave face for them. Strangely, the two seemed closer than they had before. Like real sisters. Blood sisters. Not even half sisters. And between Kirsty and Enzo there was a bond stronger now than blood. Unspoken, but shared nonetheless. The bond they had forged during those first seven years of her life, more durable than all the torment that had followed. Greater even than Simon’s revelations. Simon had never been her father and never could be.

Bertrand expected to have his gym functioning again in its temporary home of the Maison de la Jeunesse within two weeks. The insurance cheque might take a little longer, but Enzo had told him he was in no hurry for it.

Raffin had been moved from hospital in Paris to a recuperation unit in the suburbs, and was continuing to make a good recovery. But there was, Enzo knew, still unfinished business between them.

He turned his head from the window as the door opened, and Commissaire Hélène Taillard stood in the doorway clutching a dark green folder. Her uniform jacket was buttoned tightly against the swell of her bosoms, and carefully contrived licks of hair hung down from either side of the blue hat pinned to the coiffure piled up beneath it. She smiled at him. ‘You just can’t keep out of trouble, Enzo, can you?’

He forced a smile. ‘You always did look sexy in that uniform, Hélène.’

She crossed the room and sat on the edge of his bed, smiling at him fondly. ‘I always thought I looked good out of it, too.’

‘What, you mean…naked?’

She tilted her head and gave him a look. ‘You know what I mean.’

He grinned, but her smile faded.

‘We arrested Philippe Ransou in Paris. As soon as you’re able, they’ll want you to identify him. He’s already been picked out by the manager of the agence immobilière as the man who took the lease on the building in the Rue des Trois Baudus. He’s admitting everything, except any involvement in the murders.’ She forced a rueful smile. ‘But at least it gives you your alibi. You’re no longer in the frame for the murder of Audeline Pommereau.’

Enzo remembered poor Audeline with a stab of guilt, and grief. He knew that in the coming days and weeks her death was something he would dwell upon, feel responsible for.

The commissaire opened her folder and glanced inside it. ‘Amazingly the police scientifique in the Cantal recovered DNA from the burned out car at Le Lioran. Unfortunately, it wasn’t in any database we have access to, so we’re none the wiser about the true identity of the woman who called herself Anna Cattiaux.’ She closed the folder and looked thoughtfully at Enzo. ‘These people really didn’t want you to find them, did they? And they don’t seem to care who they have to kill to stop you. And that includes you.’ She paused, and her sigh was filled with concern. ‘You know there’s every chance they’re still going to try?’

Enzo nodded grimly. ‘I guess it all began with the attempt on my life at the château in Gaillac last year. That must have been Bright.’

But the chief of police was slowly shaking her head. ‘I’m afraid it wasn’t, Enzo. We ran a DNA check with the blood sample recovered from the château. It wasn’t Bright who tried to kill you in Gaillac. So you can probably assume it wasn’t even related to the Lambert case.’ She drew a long breath. ‘Which means it’s likely that there are still two unrelated sets of people out there who want you dead.’

Enzo glanced from the window to see the sunlight turning pink across the hills, the sky beyond them shading to a dusky blue. Then he turned back to the commissaire and contrived a pale smile. ‘I’m glad you dropped by to cheer me up.’