Blowback

Chapter Twenty-seven

Guy’s bright yellow Renault Trafic wound down the hill in the dark toward the autoroute. Empty crates rattled and clattered about in the back. Enzo held on with white knuckles to the handle on the passenger door, but refrained from expressing the opinion that Guy was driving far too fast on wet roads. He had obviously done it many times over the years, in all weathers, and was still here to tell the tale. Presumably he knew the road as well as the map of broken veins he saw on his face each morning as he shaved. And that he had found time to shave before leaving this morning was evinced by the powerfully pungent smell of aftershave that filled the cab.

He had been oddly quiet when they met up in the car park just after five, and they had driven in silence over to Thiers and then down into the valley to connect with the motorway. It wasn’t until a curling slip road took them on to the A72 west, and the lights of vehicles heading toward the city became a dazzle in the rearview mirror, that Enzo broke the silence. In fact, he did more than break it. He dropped a bomb into it.

“Did you know about your brother’s gambling problem, Guy?”

Whatever thoughts had occupied him until now, Enzo’s question startled them away. He flicked a frown toward the Scotsman. “Marc liked to put a few euros on the horses, sure. But a problem? Where did you hear that?”

“His wife.”

Guy’s head snapped around again. “Elisabeth told you Marc had a gambling problem?” He seemed incredulous.

“No, she denied that he had. Unprompted. Which, in my experience means that he did.”

“Well…” Guy seemed to be focusing his attention on the road again. “He loved a wager, I’ll give you that. All his life. But when he bet his wages on a game of petanque all those years ago, he was gambling on his own ability.”

“Maybe he thought he knew a thing or two about horses.”

Guy laughed, but it was a laugh without humour. “Marc? I don’t think so. Nobody wins putting money on horses, Enzo.” He paused, and Enzo thought he saw the slightest curl of contempt at the corner of Guy’s mouth. “Except the bookies.”

Guy backed his Trafic up to the tradesman’s entrance of the St. Pierre indoor market in the old town. The market itself was housed in an ugly modern building of blue and yellow that stood in the shadow of the twin spires of the cathedral. The contrast with an age of elegance, in which aesthetics had once counted for something, could hardly have been more stark. Graffiti covered the doors and shutters, but the real vandalism lay in the building itself. It defaced this otherwise charming square overlooked by the wrought-iron balconies of gracious eighteenth century apartments, and lined with speciality food and flower shops.

Enzo followed Guy inside where traders were setting out fresh produce straight from the surrounding farms of the Massif. A bewildering display of fruit and vegetables, meat, and cheeses. Raised voices echoed among the rafters in the cold as the commercants called out early morning greetings and cracked jokes, fingerless gloves on chilled fingers, feet stamping on hard concrete for warmth. Breath misted and swirled around their heads like smoke, while the freshly hosed floor reflected overhead lights as if it had just been painted and not yet dried.

Guy strode among the stands, shaking hands and calling out greetings. Everyone knew him and called him Monsieur Fraysse. And although they used the familiar tu, there was a sense of respect in the way they addressed him. He was one of them, but had somehow risen above them. And that, it seemed, was worthy of their deference. A country boy made good.

He glanced back at Enzo. “I won’t buy any vegetables here. I like to get them straight from the farmer, but my butcher is incomparable.” He stopped at the Boucherie Clermontoise and shook hands with the boucher. They bantered for some minutes before getting down to the serious question of what was available, what was best quality, and how much it was going to cost. The butcher was a ruddy-faced man with hardly any hair and cracked, blood-red hands. He displayed several cuts of meat, still on the bone, the butchered carcasses of sheep and pigs, great dark mounds of liver. Guy inspected the quality of the meat and the duck, the poules and the poulets. Whatever he ordered it was going to be in bulk, enough at least to feed several hundred mouths over several days, and they haggled keenly over the price, almost coming to blows apparently, before finally shaking hands, smiling and winking as if it had all been a game. Which it probably was.

Guy turned to Enzo as they headed back toward the exit. “He’ll package it all up for me and I’ll come and pick it up later. We’ll head out to the warehouse at Brezet now and choose the vegetables. Then on to the fish market.”

“Could I meet you back here? There’s some business I’d like to attend to while I’m in Clermont.”

Guy seemed surprised, a little disappointed. “Sure.” They went down the ramp into the square, where Guy had left the van’s engine running to keep the cab warm. “Anything I can help you with?”

“I need to find a phone shop,” Enzo said. “I’ve got a problem with my cellphone.”

“Who are you with?”

“SFR.”

“Oh, well, no problem, then. I think there’s one just around the corner there in the Rue des Gras.” He waved a hand vaguely toward the far side of the square, then nodded toward the Coq Argente next to the cheese shop. “Why don’t I meet you in the cafe in about an hour or so, and we can have breakfast?”

The SFR store was at the foot of the steep and narrow, pedestrianized Rue des Gras. At the top of the street the cathedral gazed down on to the city below, tasking the faithful with the punishing climb up the hill to pray and confess and show their penitence. There was no forgiveness without pain.

Enzo had to wait for some time, stamping his feet in the cold, till the store opened. Eventually, sliding glass doors in a stone arch admitted him to its help counter where a young man with long, nimble fingers and hair gelled into spikes examined Marc Fraysse’s old cellphone with a dismissive shrug.

“Almost a museum-piece,” he said. Such was the pace of technology. “What exactly do you want me to do with it?”

“I was wondering if it would be possible to transfer the data from the sim card into one which I could use in my present phone.” And Enzo laid his own, much more recent model of cellphone, on the counter top.

The young man took a quick look at Enzo’s phone, and Enzo was certain that he detected a faint sneer in the pursing of his lips. Enzo’s cell was at least two generations old. No touch screen, no built in video or satellite navigation, no chipful of apps. Just a simple phone, with a camera that Enzo hadn’t even wanted. “Sure. You’re an existing client, right?”

“Yes.”

“No problem, then. Have to charge you for the sim card, though.”

“That’s fine.”

“Wanna keep your old one?”

“Yes please.”

“Okay.” His long, bony fingers opened up Marc Fraysse’s cellphone with amazing speed and dexterity and slid out the sim card. He took it away to snap into some kind of data reader and download its contents to a computer. Then he inserted a new sim and transferred the information back again. It took less than two minutes. He slapped the fresh sim card down on the counter. “There you go.”

With a growing sense of anticipation, Enzo made his way back along the Rue St. Barthelemy to the Place St. Pierre, and pushed through more glass doors out of the cold and into the steamy warmth of the Coq Argente. There he slipped into a black, tubular chair behind an orange-topped table opposite the bar, and in response to the raised eyebrows of the barman, ordered a petit cafe. He placed both phones on the table in front of him, and carefully snapped the fresh sim free of its holder card. With considerably less dexterity than the young man in the phone store, he opened up his own phone and slid out the sim card. Careful not to touch the patterned gold of the chip, he took the new card and clipped it into place. He closed up the phone, turning it around to press the red button.

The tiny screen flickered, delivered an annoying little melody, then booted up its welcome: a silvered graphic of cogs and wheels, a three-bar indicator that showed the battery was full, and a signal index that registered an almost full-strength signal. Using the up-down, left-right arrow keys on a control wheel beneath the screen, he navigated his way through the menu, finally finding and bringing up the calls register. It showed the telephone numbers of the last calls made, and received. There had been calls to and from both Elisabeth and Guy, and one from Georges Crozes. There were other names and numbers that meant nothing to Enzo. It could take some time to track down who was who, and who owned the numbers without names attached to them.

The last call registered had been at 2:15pm on the day he died. It was a call made to a number not in his address book, because there was no name appended. But it must have been made shortly before he set off on the run from which he would never return. Enzo felt unaccountably disappointed, as if he had thought the phone might somehow replay the conversations and share its secrets. And then it occurred to him that perhaps there might still be messages held by his answering service.

He dialled 123 and listened to it ring until a mechanical voice told him that there were no new messages. He followed the option to listen to archived messages, but was disappointed to be told that there were none. Perhaps they were only held for a limited length of time. Marc Fraysse’s actual account must have lapsed in the first year after his death.

He went back to the menu and selected Messaging. Any text messages sent or received would not be held by the server, but saved in the memory of the sim card.

There were over sixty messages in the Sent box. Enzo flicked through them. Many of them were cryptic SMS texts sent to a number he recognised from the scribbles on the blotter in the dead man’s study. Jean Ransou. Bookie to the stars, as Fred had described him.

The most recent had been sent to the same number he had called on the day of his murder, but twenty-four hours earlier. It said simply, Please forgive me. Like a dying man’s last words.

Enzo opened up the In box. It contained fifteen messages. The final text had been received on the actual morning of his murder, and it had come from the same number he had texted the previous day and called after lunch. It read, Meet me at the old buron at three. Enzo felt all the hair standing up on the back of his neck. There was a very good chance that this rendezvous had been requested by his killer.

He sipped on the coffee which had gone cold as he searched through the dead man’s phone history and wondered what it all meant. Marc had texted someone the day before his death with his request for forgiveness. The same person had responded the following morning, asking for a meeting at the ruined buron that afternoon. Shortly after lunch, he had made his final telephone call to the same number. Had it been a call to confirm the requested rendezvous? If so, whoever had asked for it was likely to have been the last person to have seen him alive? Which would also make that person his killer. Enzo knew that if could find out whose number it was, there was a good chance it would lead him to the murderer.

“How did it go? They fix your phone?”

Enzo looked up, startled, to see Guy approaching him across the cafe. He slipped his phone into his pocket, realizing only at the last moment that Marc’s old cell was still lying on the table. He snatched it quickly away, uncertain whether or not Guy could have registered that it was Marc’s, or if indeed he had even noticed it. He managed a smile. “Yeah, they gave me a new sim. Seems to have sorted out the problem.”

Guy dropped into a seat opposite and waved a hand at the barman. “Bring us a basket of croissants, Jacques. And I’ll have a grande creme.” He cast an enquiring look at Enzo.

“Same for me,” Enzo said. “Get everything you wanted?”

Guy grinned. “Several kilos of rouget, flash frozen on the quayside as it was landed off the boat at Sete, and a good selection of fresh autumn vegetables. Just got to pick up the meat and cheese after breakfast, and that should see us through till we close next week.”

But Enzo wasn’t listening. He was a million miles away, replaying text messages and telephone calls in his head.