Blowback

Chapter Thirty-nine

Elisabeth Fraysse was nowhere to be found in the auberge, and none of the hotel’s staff seemed to know where she was. Enzo walked Dominique through the reception area to the front door.

“She’s bound to show up sooner or later,” Dominique said. “But Guy’s right. How on earth are we going to prove it?”

Enzo shook his head. “I have no idea.”

“I’d better get back down to Thiers. I’m going to have to write up some kind of report, even although I can’t draw any definitive conclusions.” She hesitated. “There have been questions asked by divisional HQ about just how much cooperation I’ve been extending to you on this investigation. I guess someone at the gendarmerie has been shooting his mouth off.”

“I’m sorry, Dominique, if I’ve got you into trouble.”

She grinned. “Don’t be. I can look after myself.” She hesitated. “How did you get on in Paris?”

He briefed her on his encounters with the ex-Michelin man and Graulet. She listened in thoughtful silence.

“Actually, I meant with Charlotte.”

And she immediately saw a wistful smile crease his eyes.

“I was introduced to my son for the first time.”

Dominique’s face lit up. “Oh, my God, Enzo, that’s wonderful. How did you change her mind?”

“I didn’t. My daughter did.”

“Sophie?” Dominique was taken aback.

“No, Kirsty. It’s ironic, really. My daughter, who’s not really my daughter, was the only one who could make Charlotte see how important it was to her son that he had a father.”

Dominique’s eyebrows gathered in a frown. “Not really your daughter?”

He smiled sadly. “That’s a story for another day.” They passed through the revolving door out on to the step. “I’ll go up and get my stuff from my room, and see you back down in Thiers.”

She nodded, holding him in her dark eyes for a moment, intrigued and beguiled, and then reached up to touch his face with her fingertips before turning and hurrying down the steps toward her van.

He watched her go, and felt a pang of regret with the knowledge that their relationship, however nascent and intense, was destined to be stillborn.

He went back inside, then, and up to his room. It was clear to him immediately that someone had been through the few items he had left. Some shirts and underwear in a drawer, some books and papers in his canvas bag, were not as he had left them. He felt a bad taste in his mouth. He packed quickly and went back downstairs, leaving his keycard at the deserted reception, and headed out to the car park in search of his car.

As he rounded the east wing of the auberge, he almost collided with a large man wheeling a barrow full of garden refuse. It was Lucqui, his cap pulled down low on his brow, big hands and fingernails ingrained with the black, volcanic soil of the plateau. Enzo had not seen him since the night Lucqui had pulled him out of the stream below the waterfall. Lucqui barely acknowledged him as he wheeled his barrow past. But Enzo stopped, turning to call after him. “I never had the chance to say thank you, Lucqui.”

Lucqui put down the barrow. “No thanks necessary. I’d have done the same for a dog.”

Enzo raised a wry smile. “Well, that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.”

And for the first time since he’d met him he saw Lucqui smile.

“You wouldn’t have seen Madame Fraysse, would you?”

The big gardener retreated behind his black eyes. “No.” And he picked up the handles of his barrow. Then stopped and put them down again. “First of November, isn’t it?”

“That’s right.”

“You’ll probably find her at the cemetery, then. She always visits Marc at Toussaint.”

The cemetery at Saint-Pierre was just outside the village, on a west-facing slope. It had an uninterrupted view of the Massif laid out below it, such a view to take with you to eternity that it must have seemed almost welcoming to those reaching a certain age of infirmity. But Marc Fraysse had been nowhere near that time when folk might start to think of death. He had taken his own sortie de secours far too early. A sad choice for a man with so much more to offer.

Enzo pushed open the gates in the high east wall, and wandered down among the tombs and headstones newly bedecked with fresh flowers, to the Fraysse family tomb on the lower slope. Elisabeth stood by the huge marble slab engraved in gold with the name of her late husband, his parents and grandparents, the bones of three generations lying together in the infinite darkness below. She turned at the sound of his footsteps on the gravel, and he saw the anger in her eyes as she turned away to gaze down again at her husband’s tomb.

He stopped beside her, and without looking at him she said, “I remember the very first time I set eyes on him in the boat shed on the lake. He seemed so young. And innocent. Those beautiful big eyes of his fixing themselves on me, and casting their spell, even then.” She shook her head. “For all his faults, Monsieur Macleod, and they were many, I never stopped loving him.” And she turned, to fix him with steel cold eyes. “I don’t like being spied on.”

He nodded, and saw that those tiny flocons of snow he had seen earlier in Thiers were starting to fall now on the hill. But so light and insubstantial were they, an existence immeasurably ephemeral, that they vanished the moment they touched the ground. As did, in the grand scheme of things, the lives of the men and women lying here beneath it. He said, “I know that you and Guy faked Marc’s murder to hide his suicide.”

Her face turned almost instantly pale, and he saw the shock in her eyes, followed by resignation, and then something that seemed almost like relief. “Guy told you that?”

“I’ve just come from the hotel.” Not a lie. But he knew she would put her own construction on it. “I know about the suicide clause in the life assurance policy. And Marc’s gambling debt. I spoke to the man he owed the money to.”

She closed her eyes and let out a long, slow breath, as if she had been holding it in all these years. “I’m glad,” she said at length. “It was a secret almost impossible to bear. The tears I cried over those few words he left me. And still do.” He saw those same tears well again in her eyes now. “I suppose I always understood why he did it. The debt, the rumors about losing a star. But it was typically selfish of him not to think, or care, how it would leave me, or Guy. He never could resist the grand gesture, the encore, the bow at the end of the show. It was always about him. No one else.”

“Tell me how it happened.”

She glanced at him, but her eyes flickered away, unable to hold his gaze. “The statement we gave the police was true, up to a point. Marc had gone off for his usual afternoon run, but failed to return on schedule. It was approaching prep time for the evening service, and when he didn’t answer his cellphone, Guy went off to look for him. Which is when he found him dead inside the buron. He had shot himself, and left a note.”

Enzo said, “A man intent on taking his own life wouldn’t normally go to the trouble of burying his phone and his knife?”

She turned, almost startled. “You know about that?”

“I recovered them both. Do you want to tell me how that came about?”

“Guy buried the pouch and got rid of the gun. But not immediately. Not before he had come back down to the hotel and broken the news to me.” She paused, lost for a moment in painful recollection. “I suppose I must have been pretty difficult for him to deal with. I was close to hysteria. It… it didn’t seem possible that Marc was gone. Just like that. A flame extinguished. Vanished. Out of my life forever. Like he’d never even existed. But Guy was so calm. He forced me to sit down and face the reality. He’d only recently found out about the extent of the gambling debts himself. And he made me look at the suicide clause in the life policy. Not only had we lost Marc, we were going to lose everything else as well.”

“So it was his idea to make it look like murder?”

She nodded. “He persuaded me to come back up to the buron with him. I couldn’t go in. Couldn’t get past the entrance. I sat outside on a rock and wept like I have never wept in my life. I suppose it didn’t matter whether he had been murdered or taken his own life, my grief was just as great.”

“And just as genuine.”

She glanced at him through tear-filled eyes. “Yes.” Her breath trembled as she breathed, trying to control herself, salvage something of her dignity. “Guy removed the suicide note and the gun, and buried the pouch to make it look like a robbery. He’d even had the presence of mind to take another pair of boots up with him, a size smaller than his own, to make another set of footprints in the mud.”

Enzo then realized that the fifth set of prints must have belonged to Anne Crozes.

“That’s when we called the police and waited for someone to come. It seemed like an eternity, trapped up there by our own deception, lost in guilt and grief for the man we both loved. I read his suicide note again and again. Words burned into my memory forever. I look at it still. On the anniversary of his death. On his birthday. At Toussaint. And the pain never diminishes.”

“You still have it?” Enzo hardly dared to believe it was possible.

“Of course. They were his last words, Monsieur Macleod. How could I throw them away?”

As they drove into the car park at the auberge, Enzo following Elisabeth Fraysse in her Mercedes Sports, he noticed that Guy’s yellow Renault Trafic had gone. Although there were still one or two staff vehicles there, the hotel itself seemed deserted. Snow fell through the gloom like tiny vanishing fireflies, and the darkness gathering beyond the clouds gave witness to the coming night.

Enzo followed in the wake of the widow’s grief, past the door of the suite he had occupied, before they stopped outside the door of Marc Fraysse’s study. Elisabeth produced a key, and unlocked it, with the merest flicker of a glance at Enzo. There was no doubt that both Elisabeth and Guy knew exactly who had been in Marc’s study, and when.

She crossed the room to his roll top bureau, pushing back the roller and turning on a desk lamp. The laptop computer and blotter, and the profusion of papers that lay scattered across the desktop, blazed in a pool of intense illumination. She reached into the light, a pale, long-fingered hand, speckled now with the first brown marks of age, and felt beneath a shelf to release some hidden catch. A drawer, which had seemed like a decorative panel, sprung open. Inside it lay Marc Fraysse’s suicide note. Enzo realized how frustratingly close he had been to it every time he had sat at this desk. But how could he have known?

Elisabeth Fraysse laid her husband’s last words on top of the computer and smoothed them out with the palm of her hand, an almost loving sweep of it across the curled sheet.

Enzo looked at it, intensely curious. He immediately recognised Marc’s distinctive curlicued handwriting. The note was written on a flimsy sheet of stationery. The ink had already begun to fade, and the top third of the sheet was so badly stained by blood and rainwater that the words had been completely obliterated. The very bottom portion of it was equally disfigured.

Two words remained from the damaged portion at the top of the note

…things differently.

It went on, I have so many regrets. I just wish I could wipe out the past. I can offer apologies, but I know that forgiveness is more than I have the right to ask for. And in the end, apologies are only words, and words can’t change anything. They can’t take away the hurt. They can’t wipe out the mistakes. And that’s what I want to do. Just wipe it all out. I am so sorry.

His signature was lost in the water and blood damage.

“May I see it?” Enzo held out his hand, a distant echo somewhere at the back of his mind of the perfume-stained suicide note left for Jack by Rita.

Elisabeth nodded, and Enzo took the note carefully between his fingers, turning it over, before holding it against the light of the lamp. He had half-hoped there might be some way to recover the lost words by holding them to the brightest source of light. But the lamp provided no illumination.

“I’d like to keep this for the moment if I may.” And he stilled her objections before she could voice them by raising his hand. “I promise to return it to you.”

“I doubt if you’ll be allowed to, Monsieur Macleod. I am sure that the police will want to keep it as evidence.”

He nodded grimly. “I’d also like a sample of one of Marc’s handwritten menus, if I may?”

Her eyes searched his face, full of unasked questions, then she turned silently to the filing cabinet and drew out a menu to hand to him. She looked at him very directly, and he saw fear now in her eyes. “What will happen to us?”

“I imagine you’ll be charged with defrauding the insurance company, and probably also obstruction of a police investigation, tampering with evidence, giving false statements.” He shrugged helplessly. “Just as you understood why Marc killed himself, I understand why you covered it up, Madame Fraysse. But I’m afraid the law will not.”

Dominique looked at the suicide note that Enzo had spread out on her desk in front of her. The blood that stained it was rust brown, the paper distorted by pools of blistered blue where the ink had run in the rainwater. She read it in silence then looked up at Enzo with searching eyes. “And she just confessed to everything?”

“She thought that Guy already had. It was like a damn had burst inside her, Dominique. Guilt and grief and fear given vent in a moment of absolute relief after seven years of deception. She wanted to tell me.” He laid out the menu next to the note so that she could make the comparison herself. “He hand-wrote the menus every day, so we are not short of examples of his handwriting.”

Dominique studied the two documents. “They certainly look identical. But I guess we’ll need a handwriting expert to verify it.” She shook her head then, perching on the edge of her desk and allowing herself a rueful smile. “So that’s it. Not a murder at all. A suicide covered up to defraud the insurance company. How could we ever have guessed that?” She folded her arms. “There’ll be charges, of course. Fraud. Obstruction. Tampering. Providing false statements to the authorities.” She glanced at Enzo and immediately saw the doubt in his eyes. She was almost startled. “What?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

She stood up again. “Yes, you do. You’re not convinced, are you?”

He thought for a long moment before finally responding. “No,” he said.

“Why not?”

“For one thing…” he picked up the suicide note and rubbed it gently between his thumb and fingertips, “…the quality of this paper.”

She frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“Elisabeth told me that after Marc got his third star nothing was too good for him. He had high quality stationery specially watermarked with the logo of the auberge.” He held up the note to the flickering fluorescent strip in the ceiling. “This is bog standard writing paper, not particularly good quality. And there’s no watermark. Would it not be reasonable to assume that he would have used his best writing paper to record his last words?”

But he didn’t give the gendarme too much time to dwell on that thought.

“He also habitually used a fountain pen. A very expensive fountain pen with which he wrote out his daily menus. Why didn’t he use it to write his suicide note?”

“Didn’t he?”

“Look at these together.” Enzo laid the note out on the desk again, next to the menu. “See how the nib of the fountain pen used to write the menu creates a variation in the thickness of the up and down strokes? But the pen used to write the note doesn’t. And it couldn’t have been a ballpoint. Ballpoints use oil-based inks, which wouldn’t have run when exposed to water. This was more likely to have been a rollerball pen, which uses water-based ink and wouldn’t have produced any variation in the up and down strokes.” He looked at Dominique. “He would almost certainly have written this note sitting at his roll-top desk in his private study. Why didn’t he use his beloved fountain pen and his watermarked writing paper?”

Confusion had written itself all over Dominique’s face. “You think it’s a forgery, then?” She glanced once more the two sheets of paper lying side by side on her desk. “If it is, someone’s done an amazing job.”

But Enzo shook his head. “No, I’m pretty sure it’s Marc Fraysse’s own handwriting.”

Dominique’s frown deepened. “Then what on earth are you thinking?”

Enzo scratched his head. “Have the autopsy pics that the pathologist took of the dead man’s hands arrived yet?”

“No. Are they that important?”

“I’d really like to look at them.”

“Then I’ll call him personally, and get him to fax them as soon as possible.”

Enzo nodded. “And I have a big favor to ask.”

She sighed. “What now?”

“Hold off on reporting any of this until I get back from Paris.”

She seemed shocked. “You’re going to Paris again?”

“I’ll catch the night train from Clermont Ferrand and be back by tomorrow night.” He hesitated, then lifted up the suicide note. “But I’ll need to take this with me.”

She gasped her frustration. “Enzo, I could be in so much trouble over this already.”

He grinned. “I thought you told me you could look after yourself.”

A smile spread reluctantly across her lips. “Don’t you just hate it when someone uses your own words to back you into a corner?”

“That’s why you should always choose your words very carefully in the first place.”

She glared at him. “Bastard!”

“Is that a yes?”