Blowback

Chapter Thirty-seven

Anne and Georges Crozes lived in a converted stone farmhouse on the back road south out of Saint-Pierre, in a fold of the valley with hills rising all around it, dark evergreen and bleak winter brown. It was an impressive building, beautifully pointed, its roof recently remade with traditional lauzes tiles. It spoke of money and the share that the Crozes had enjoyed in the success of Chez Fraysse. There was only one vehicle sitting outside the house when they arrived. A black BMW. There was no sign of Anne’s Scenic.

“Doesn’t look like she’s here,” Enzo said.

Dominique pulled her van in behind the BMW. “We’ll see. She’s not at the hotel, I know that. Her contract for the season finished yesterday.”

They stepped out into the chill air and heard the valley echo to the cawing of distant crows, the only sound to break the silence. Blue smoke rose straight up from the chimney and hung in strands like mist above the house. Away down in the valley, Enzo saw a hawk drop from the sky like a stone and knew that some unsuspecting creature was about to die.

Georges Crozes opened the door before they got to it. Enzo barely recognised him out of his chef’s whites. He seemed less imposing somehow. A god in the kitchen, but an ordinary mortal in the real world. He wore torn old jeans that hung loose from narrow hips, and a grey sweatshirt that seemed to drown him. He looked older, too, glancing from Dominique to Enzo, and glaring at the Scotsman. “What do you want?”

“Is Anne at home?” Dominique said.

“What do you want her for?”

“I’d like to speak to her.”

“What’s it got to do with him?” He flicked his head toward Enzo.

“He’s helping with our inquiries.”

He turned penetrating green eyes on Enzo. “Not get enough information from your little spy, then?”

So everyone knew about it. Enzo chose to ignore the barb. “Where is she, Georges?”

“I haven’t the first idea. She doesn’t tell me anything these days.” And he thrust out his jaw as if challenging them to question his veracity.

Dominique said, “Okay, well tell her, when you see her, that I need to speak to her as a matter of urgency. And if she does not come to me, I will come back for her with a warrant.”

Crozes’ face darkened. “What’s she done?”

“Just tell her, Georges.”

He watched them all the way back to the van before closing the door. Enzo wondered what was going through his mind on the other side of it.

“What do you think?” Dominique said when they got back in the vehicle.

“I think he was very hostile.”

She nodded. “Attack being the best form of defence. What do you reckon he knows?”

“A lot more than he’s ever going to tell us.”

Enzo’s battered and bruised 2CV toiled its way back up the hill from Thiers. The mechanic at the garage had given it a clean bill of health, but still it didn’t feel quite right, especially after driving the rental car in which he had made the return trip to Paris, a sleek, fast Peugeot. Perhaps it was time, he thought, to get himself a new car. Or, as Sophie would say, a real car.

He turned off the main highway on to the private road that wound up through the trees to the auberge. He had left things in his room and knew that in going to get them he would probably also have to face the music with Guy and Elisabeth. A prospect he did not relish.

Up ahead he saw a car pulled into the parking area at the foot of the track leading up to the buron, and as he got nearer he realized that it was Anne Crozes’ Renault Scenic. He drew in behind it and got out of his car, to stand listening in the silence. But all he heard was the ticking of his engine as it began to cool quickly in the cold, and the plaintive calls of the ubiquitous crows echoing around the woods. He checked the driver’s door of the Scenic, but it was locked, and he peered up into the green gloom of the forest. Nothing moved.

He locked his own car and started off up the track. Ten breathless minutes later, he emerged from the darkness on to the open hillside and followed the path to the point where it doubled back, leading up to the plateau. Despite the cold, he was perspiring by the time he got to the top, and breathing hard. A solitary figure stood on the rise above the buron, gazing out across the valley to the east. He recognised the tall, thin, figure of Anne Crozes, but she had her back to him, and hadn’t heard him coming. So he stood for a moment, watching her, and catching his breath, before climbing the last few meters.

She turned, startled, at the sound of his approach. What light there was from a sullen sky reflected dully on the tears that wet her cheeks. When she realized who it was, momentary fear turned to resignation and she hurriedly used the flats of her palms to wipe her cheeks dry. He stopped a little short of her, and they stood staring at each other in the unaccustomed still and silence of the plateau. The cold wrapped itself around them like icy fingers.

“You know the police are looking for you?” he said.

She nodded. “Georges called me on my cell.” She searched his face. “I guess that means you know, then.” It wasn’t a question.

“We know that you arranged by text to meet him here on the day he died. Which puts you in the frame for his murder, Anne, especially since he had ended your affair just a matter of days before.”

The tears came again. Silently. “I met him that afternoon, yes.” She shook her head. “But I didn’t kill him. I couldn’t have. I loved him. I still do. And I always will.”

“Why did he break it off with you?”

She bit her lower lip, pained still by some distant, haunting memory. “He said we had no future.”

“Did he say why?”

“Not in so many words, no. He’d been behaving so strangely in those last weeks. He’d always been so much fun, but it was like it had all just been some kind of front he’d put on for me. Then the mask slipped, and he was this morose, unhappy creature. I hardly recognised him.”

“Why did you want to meet him that day?”

“I thought if I could talk to him. Just sit him down and talk to him. Maybe he would open up, maybe he would tell me what was wrong, what it was that troubled him so much. And that if he did, I could win him back.”

“And did he? Open up to you, I mean.”

She shook her head disconsolately. “He was like a closed book. I couldn’t read him, I couldn’t get near him.” She looked at Enzo with a sad plea for understanding in her eyes. “He seemed manic that afternoon. I’d never seen him behave so strangely. He’d been depressed before, but this time it verged almost on madness. A bizarre kind of elation. Like there was no way out but he didn’t care any more. I knew he had gambling debts. I had no idea how much. But occasionally he would let things slip, and I would get a glimpse of a man I hardly knew. A man driven by something beyond his control. I think, in a way, that’s really why he broke up with me. He didn’t want me to see that man, and I don’t think he could hide him any longer.” She drew a long, trembling breath. “I had been so sure he believed he was going to lose the auberge. But he just stood there with a fire burning in his eyes, as if he had somehow risen above it, and it no longer mattered.”

“Had he told you he feared to lose the hotel?”

“Not in so many words. It was just bits and pieces of things he said. Like disparate parts of a jigsaw. I was desperately trying to put them together.”

“And do you think you got an accurate picture?”

“I think I got the picture of a man at the end of his rope. And the speculation about Michelin taking away his third star just seemed to tip him over the edge.”

Enzo looked at her intently, a sense of everything he had learned about the dead man coming together in Anne Crozes’ words. In the picture she was painting of a lost soul in search of redemption. “Do you think he was suicidal?”

“I had feared it, yes. He’d been so low. And he stood there that day in the entrance to the buron, tears streaming down his face like a baby, though to this day I’m not sure why.” Her own tears returned. “But to me, he really was just a child. A little boy lost.”

Perhaps, Enzo thought, the child she’d never had with Georges. Maybe Marc had aroused the mother in her as much as the lover.

“It wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that he’d killed himself, monsieur. But murder!” He saw the anguish in her eyes as she caught and held him in her gaze. “Who would want to kill him? Why would anyone want to do that?”

And in that moment, Enzo thought that perhaps he knew exactly why.