Extraordinary People

I

White dust rose from the wheels of a tractor like smoke. Everything was white. The dust, the soil. Even the sky was bleached white by the afternoon sun. The chalk gave the grapes their distinctive dry flavour, and turned the rivers and lakes a strange, milky green.

The rolling hills that folded one over the other looked as if they had been combed. Enzo had never seen such fastidiously pruned vines. There was something almost manic in their neatness, endless unwavering lines of green and white stretching away into a hazy distance.

Neither had he seen so many castles, as he drove through the tiny stone villages nestling in the folds and valleys of the Aube.

Épernay was surrounded by twenty thousand hectares of vineyards. It was a classic eighteenth century French provincial town in the heart of champagne country, just a few miles south of the cathedral city of Reims. It was home to many of the most famous brands of champagne, household names in wealthy homes around the world. But in Épernay, everyone drank champagne, from the street cleaner to the lord of the manor. It had been said that drinking champagne in Épernay was like listening to Mozart in Salzburg.

Enzo had booked two rooms in the Hôtel de la Cloche in the Place Mendès-France. The last two rooms available. They had told him he was lucky to have got one room anywhere in town, never mind two. Raffin had called him on his cell phone earlier in the afternoon to confirm that he would be arriving at seven forty-five that night on the train from Paris. Enzo arrived shortly after five, and passed the time with a glass of wine on the terrasse looking out over a square dominated by the municipal theatre and a host of restaurants serving it. Trees grew in a small park in the centre of the square, and fountains played in the early evening sunlight. The station stood at the end of a short boulevard on the far side of the Place. Enzo resisted the temptation to make the ten-minute drive out to the tiny village of Hautvillers. He had promised Raffin that they would go together in the morning. But the waiting was almost more than he could bear. One glass of wine became three, and he watched with impatience the slow progress of his watch towards eight.

At seven-thirty, he crossed the square and walked down to the station. Le Nivolet restaurant was doing brisk business. The station concourse was filled with people waiting for the Paris train. Enzo went out on to the platform, slipping between two Asian nuns in champagne white, to stand gazing out towards the distant vine-covered hills. There did not seem to be a single square meter that was not given over to the growing of grapes.

He saw the tall figure of Raffin, a head higher than most of the other passengers streaming on to the platform from the train. The collar of his neatly pressed white shirt was open at the neck and turned up, and his jacket was, as usual, slung carelessly across his shoulder. He carried a handmade leather overnight bag. No matter how hot it was, Raffin always looked cool and unruffled, as if he had just stepped from the dressing room immediately after a shower. At his shoulder, Enzo saw a flash of dark curls, and his stomach flipped over. Charlotte slipped out from Raffin’s wake and smiled when she saw Enzo waiting, eyes flashing darkly, full of fun and mischief. She wore pale pink tennis shoes and white cotton calf-length trousers. A man-sized denim shirt hung loosely from her shoulders. She had a canvas bag slung over one of them. She and Raffin made a handsome couple.

Raffin shook his hand warmly. ‘You’ve been busy.’

‘I have,’ Enzo acknowledged with a grin.

‘Hi,’ Charlotte said, and she reached up to kiss him on both cheeks.

He breathed in the familiar scent of her perfume and felt the first hint of desire stir in his loins. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘There was no keeping her away,’ Raffin said. ‘When I told her where I was going she cancelled all her appointments for today and tomorrow.’

She smiled up at Enzo. ‘I’m hooked. I want to know how the story ends.’

Enzo laughed. ‘So do I. But there may be a problem.’

‘What’s that?’

‘There are no hotel rooms left in town, and I’ve only booked two.’

Raffin said, ‘She can always share with me.’

And Enzo felt a sudden, unpleasant jolt of jealousy. They had been an item until recently. It was not an unreasonable suggestion. But he was relieved when Charlotte said, with a slight tone, ‘I doubt if there’ll be any need for that, Roger. There’s almost always a bed available somewhere, if you ask nicely.’

They ate on the terrasse at La Cloche, clouds of swallows dipping and diving across the square in the dying light, their chattering chorus taking over from the roar of traffic as the roads emptied and the restaurants filled. Charlotte pulled up a chair and joined them as the entrées were being served. She looked pleased with herself. ‘They gave me a single room up in the attic. It’s kept for staff who have to stay over. I told you there’s always a bed somewhere.’

Raffin seemed disappointed. He turned to Enzo. ‘So tell us why we’re here.’

Over the meal, Enzo took them step by step through his deconstruction of the clues found with Gaillard’s arms. ‘Everything leads to Hautvillers.’

‘Except for the dog clues,’ Charlotte corrected him.

‘I have to figure that’s something that’s going to become apparent. Like the scallop shell in the garden in Toulouse. I had no idea what we were looking for until we got there.’

They drank pink champagne with their meal and sat on the terrasse until almost midnight drinking Armagnac. At a quarter to, Charlotte stood up suddenly and announced that she was going to bed. Enzo and Raffin stayed on for one more drink. Raffin seemed pensive, almost distant. Finally, he turned to Enzo and asked, ‘Is there something going on between you and Charlotte?’

Enzo was surprised by his directness and by the hint of jealousy that was apparent in his tone. He had thought the relationship was over. ‘I wish. She’s a very attractive woman.’

‘She is,’ Raffin agreed. ‘But she’s been on her own too long. Do you know what I mean? She’s not easy to live with.’ And Enzo had the impression that without actually warning him off, Raffin was doing his best to put him off.

‘I’ve been on my own for twenty years.’ Enzo grinned. ‘I’d probably be impossible to live with.’

They climbed the stairs together and shook hands outside Raffin’s door, and Enzo carried on along the hall to his own room. Light from the floodlit Église Saint Pierre-Saint Paul, on the other side of the street, fell unevenly across the room, following the ruffled contours of the bed. As he closed the door, he became aware of her perfume hanging in the still, warm air, and as his eyes adjusted to the light, he saw her dark curls fanned out across the pillow. His mouth was so dry he could hardly speak. He said, in a whisper, ‘I thought you had a room in the attic.’

‘I lied.’ He could hear her grin.

‘How did you get into my room?’

‘I told them I was with you and they gave me the key to bring my bag up. I left the door on the latch when I took the key back.’

So she had been planning this from early evening. ‘That’s pretty devious of you.’

She sighed. ‘Are you coming to bed or not?’

He released his hair to tumble over his shoulders, and undressed in the light of the church. Butterflies hatched out and flew around inside him, before he slipped under the sheet and felt the warmth of her skin next to his. He turned his head and looked into her eyes, and her smile made him almost giddy. He could not remember wanting anyone so much in a very long time. She moved towards him and kissed him gently, and he felt her breath soft on his face and the sweet taste of champagne on her lips. This was nectar. He let himself go, drawn into all the folds and softnesses of her mouth and her body, his hardness pressing into her belly as she climbed on top of him and slid slowly down his chest and stomach with her lips and her tongue, until finally she found and swallowed him whole. He drew a sharp intake of breath and held on to each side of the headboard, hips lifting as she worked him into a state of complete helplessness. She was relentless and unforgiving, taking complete control and leaving him with none. Until years of frustration exploded inside, and she sucked him dry, leaving him limp and spent and regretting his selfishness.

‘What about…?’

‘Shhhhh.’ She put a finger over his lips, and slid up to pepper his chest with kisses. ‘It’s my gift to you.’

But he didn’t want it to be just about him. He wanted it to be about her, too. About them. He slipped out from beneath her and turned her over so that she was face up. She seemed so slight and fragile in his hands. He found her neck with his mouth and felt her shiver as he kissed her and dropped down to the rise of her full breasts. He heard her moan as he grazed her nipples with his lips and moved down again, across the soft swell of her belly. A fine fuzz of hair led down to a soft triangle of dark, damp growth, and he breathed in the musky smell of her sex. She gasped aloud as he found her with his tongue and worked it as relentlessly as she had hers with him. She arched and arched against him, until finally she shuddered and called out, and he felt both of her hands clutching his hair and holding him there between her legs.

Her pleasure had aroused him again, and before she had time to recover, he moved up to find her mouth with his and force her legs apart with his knees. Her fingers dug into his back, and then found his hair and pulled on it hard as he slipped inside her. Again she arched herself to meet his thrusting, frantic and fighting and pushing until they both arrived at a shuddering climax and collapsed, exhausted, and perspiring, and wrapped around each other in a tangle of sheets and pillow.

They lay for a long time, breathing hard, exchanging tiny kisses. There was nothing they could say that wouldn’t be an anticlimax. And as he slipped away into a languid, dreamy sleep, Enzo briefly and belatedly wondered if Raffin might have heard them through the wall.

II

Hautvillers nestled in a cleft of the hillside, surrounded by trees and looking out across endless miles of vineyards. They passed the Moët et Chandon factory at the foot of the hill as they turned off the main road and drove through the early morning sunshine up towards the village.

Charlotte had been gone when Enzo wakened, leaving only her scent, and the impression in the pillow where her head had lain. He found evidence in the bathroom that she had taken a shower before she left. He could not believe that he had slept through it. When he got downstairs, he found Raffin and Charlotte having breakfast. She greeted him with a subdued bonjour and a perfunctory kiss on each cheek. There was not the slightest hint of acknowledgement in her eyes of what had passed between them the previous night. Raffin offered him a cursory handshake, and was reserved all through coffee and croissants. The three of them drove out to Hautvillers in silence.

The village was already filling with tourists, who were arriving by the coach load. Enzo found a parking place just off the Place de la République, and he and Raffin waited while Charlotte went into the tourist office. She emerged with a map and a handful of leaflets. Raffin took the map and led them along the Rue Henri Martin in the direction of the abbey. As they walked, Charlotte flicked through her leaflets. ‘You know, this place is pretty old. The village was founded in the year 658. It’s supposed to be the birthplace of champagne. It says here that the méthode champenoise was invented at the abbey of Hautvillers more than three hundred years ago by the Benedictine monk Dom Perignon.’

‘Actually,’ Enzo said, ‘they’d been making sparkling wine in the south of France for a hundred years before that.’

Raffin glanced at him curiously. ‘How do you know that?’

Enzo raised his shoulders casually. ‘I have a friend who knows these things,’ he said, and felt a twinge of shame. The thought that he had been premature in his judgment of Bertrand had haunted him through all the long drive north.

‘My God….’ Charlotte still had her nose buried in the leaflets. ‘Did you know that all the major champagne houses have their caves down in Épernay? Well, actually, down below Épernay. According to this, over the last three hundred years, they’ve dug a hundred and twenty kilometers of tunnels out of the chalk under the town, and there’s more than two hundred million bottles of champagne stored down there.’ She looked up, her eyes shining. ‘Two hundred million bottles!’

‘That’s a lot of bubbles,’ Enzo said.

Everywhere they looked there were makers and sellers of champagne. Gobillard, Tribaut, Locret-Lachaud, Lopez Martin, Raoul Collet, Bliard. At the Square Beaulieu, they turned into the Rue de l’Église, and climbed the hill, past the walled garden of the priest’s house, to a mosaic path of polished and unpolished granite leading to the back of the nave. The side door of the abbey stood ajar beneath the steeply pitched roof of a stone porch. They had arrived at this holiest of shrines to the God of champagne before the tourists, and as they entered the dark cool of the church, they felt subsumed by its silence, compelled to take soft, careful steps, and to communicate by eye contact and the merest of whispers.

For Enzo, there was a powerful sense of déja vu. Sunlight fell through the three tall windows behind the altar just as it had on the website. The polished black slab inscribed to the memory of Dom Perignon lay side by side with the the tomb of Dom Jean Royer, the last abbé régulier of the monastery, who died in 1527, nearly two hundred years before Dom Perignon. Enzo ran his eyes along the wood panelling which lined each side of the front half of the nave. He supposed it might be possible to somehow hide a body, or parts of a body, behind it. But it would not have been an easy matter to remove and replace pieces of the panelling without leaving obvious traces.

‘Look at this,’ Raffin whispered, and all three of them gathered around a carved and gilded casket which stood on a marble-topped table to one side of the altar. It held the remains of St. Nivard, the archbishop of Reims who founded the abbey in the year 650. The bones of the archbishop were clearly visible through two oval portholes, tied together with ancient ribbon. His skull stared back at them from the shadows. ‘You don’t think…?

Enzo shook his head. ‘There was still flesh on Gaillard’s bones when they hid them. They would have been rather obvious behind glass. And I think someone might have noticed the smell.’

Raffin wrinkled his nose in distaste and turned away. He looked along the length of the nave to the organ pipes rising to the ceiling at the far end. ‘Not easy to hide body bits anywhere in here,’ he said.

Enzo found himself in reluctant agreement. He was not sure what he had expected to find. He had been hoping that something obvious would suggest itself, just as the shell fountain had done in Toulouse. But the naked whitewashed walls, the stark wood panelling, the statues of saints, the paintings of biblical scenes, and the cold, stone floor did nothing to excite the imagination. He walked to the back of the church and inspected a marble memorial to the dead of two wars. Enzo gazed at the names of dead men and wondered if they had any relevance. But somehow he felt that the trail had just gone cold. He glanced back along the length of the church to the stone altar, with its pillars and cross and praying angels, and had no confidence that there was anything of relevance here.

Quite unexpectedly, the church was filled with the sudden, eerie sound of soprano voices echoing back from ancient stone walls. A stereo system on a timer, hidden speakers. The effect was almost chilling, and Enzo felt all the hair stand up on the back of his neck. He also felt depression descend on him like a cloud. He had raised his expectations to a level which made it hard, now, to accept failure. But he had no idea what he was looking for, or where to turn when he couldn’t find it.

Charlotte was sitting among the pews, still going through her leaflets. She looked up and turned to see where Enzo was. Her voice rose boldly above those of the soprano choir. ‘One of the clues was a bottle of 1990 Dom Perignon, right?’ Enzo nodded. ‘Well, suppose they didn’t actually hide the body here, in Hautvillers, but in the caves of Moët et Chandon? Down below Épernay, where the 1990 vintage is stored.’

Raffin turned towards Enzo. ‘That’s possible, isn’t it?’

Enzo was less certain. The clues had led to Hautvillers, not Épernay. But he had no alternative suggestion. He shrugged. ‘I suppose.’

III

Brick tunnels with arched roofs led off into a fog of humid air clouding around electric lights. ‘The temperature in the caves remains constant all year round,’ the girl was saying. ‘Between ten and twelve degrees. Humidity is a constant seventy-five to eighty percent.’

Enzo felt the chill seeping deep into his bones after the heat of the morning sun. Thousands upon thousands of dark green bottles, laid on their sides between rows of wooden slats, lined the walls as far as he could see. A-framed racks called pupitres held yet more bottles, at angles that kept them neck down.

‘The bottles in the pupitres are turned just a little every day by expert remuers,’ the guide said. ‘This is to encourage the remaining sediment to gather in the necks, which are then rapidly frozen. The sediment is trapped in the ice, and when the bottles are reopened, natural pressure expels the ice and the sediment with it. Which is when the winemaker completes the process. A small quantity of liqueur d’expédition, composed of sugar and some wines from the company’s reserves, is added before the bottles are finally corked and wired.’

The official tour of the caves of Moët et Chandon had seemed like the easiest way to check out Charlotte’s suggestion, and so they had joined a tour group of more than twenty, and followed a guide through the tunnels immediately below the company’s headquarters in the Avenue de Champagne.

Enzo was learning things he had not known about champagne. That it was a blend of three grapes: Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier. That two of those grapes were red, and must be pressed very gently in order not to transfer colour from the skin to the juice. That the vines of Champagne were the most northerly in France, and were constantly pruned to ensure that the sun got to the grapes. That the chalk soil, which so characterised the bleached, white landscape, retained the warmth of the sun, as well as the rain, which it released gradually to regulate the growth of the vines.

They had stopped, now, in front of a deep recess set into the tunnel wall. Racks of champagne bottles disappeared into the shimmering darkness beyond. The girl continued with her mechanical commentary. ‘Notice the plaque, with its six digit code which identifies what year and brand of champagne is stored here. These are secret codes, known only to the cellar master. They are constantly changing as the champagnes move through the processes of fermentation, remuage, dégorgement, dosage, et cetera.’

Enzo interrupted her. ‘So if you knew what these codes were, you would be able to identify where a champagne from any given year was stored?’

The guide seemed irritated by the interruption to her well-practised flow. ‘In theory. But as I just told you, the codes change as the wines move.’

‘Which they do all the time?’ Charlotte asked.

‘Space in the caves is at a premium,’ the girl said. ‘Bottles are moved on, and eventually out, displaced by each new harvest.’

Raffin said, ‘So the Dom Perignon 1990, for example, wouldn’t be stored in the same place as it was ten years ago?’

‘Absolutely not. In fact, I’m not sure how many bottles of that particular vintage we have left. But even if I knew the cellar master’s codes from ten years ago, I wouldn’t know where to find the 1990 today.’

They emerged, blinking, into the sunlight, the bubbles from the three free glasses of champagne they had received at the end of the tour still fizzing on their tongues. Charlotte spread her palms apologetically. ‘Sorry. It seemed like a good idea at the time.’ Body parts hidden behind or amongst bottles of the Dom Perignon 1990 would have been discovered years ago.

Fourteen grand villas, each one home to one of the prestigious Maisons de Champagne, marched up the hill to the top of the Avenue. Across the street, the Hotel de Ville stood in its own park behind a high stone wall. They crossed the road and wandered into the park, uncertain of what to do next. None of them had voiced it, but it was clear that each of them was convinced their trip was turning out to be little more than a wild goose chase. Enzo gazed despondently across a small, blue lake surrounded by willows. He felt personally responsible for their failure. And yet, there was no doubt in his mind that the clues had led him irrevocably to Dom Perignon and Hautvillers. Raffin was idly skimming stones across the surface of the lake, and Charlotte had wandered up uneven steps to a pavilion whose roof was supported on a circle of pillars.

‘We’ve got to go back,’ Enzo said.

Raffin turned to look at him. ‘Back where?’

‘Hautvillers. We must have missed something.’

‘What?’

‘Well, if I knew that, we wouldn’t have missed it.’ Enzo was annoyed with himself for getting irritated.

But Raffin just shrugged. ‘If you like.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘But I’ll have to be getting back to Paris soon.’

Enzo looked up and saw Charlotte watching them from between the pillars. She inclined her head and offered him the palest of smiles. ‘Let’s go.’

They drove in silence once more over the huge expanse of rusting railway junctions on the outskirts of town, abandoned rolling stock mutilated by vandals and left to rot. The waters of the Marne, on the far side, were a soupy chemical green. In a matter of minutes they were out among the vines, hills rising around them, Hautvillers cradled amid the trees and basking in sunshine. It was hard, now, to get parked, and by the time they got back to the abbey it was filled with tourists wandering the aisles, cameras flashing in the gloom.

‘I’m going to have a wander around the graveyard,’ Charlotte said, and she headed off through a small gate in the cemetery wall.

Enzo and Raffin walked again through the abbey looking at the same things they had looked at two hours before. Nothing had changed. Nothing new struck them. Enzo pulled down a folding seat below the wood panelling and sat down, gazing despondently along the length of the nave. Raffin stopped in front of him and lowered his voice. ‘I don’t like being lied to.’

Enzo looked at him, startled. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘You and Charlotte.’

‘For God’s sake, man!’ Enzo’s raised voice turned heads in their direction. He lowered it again. ‘I thought it was over between you and Charlotte.’

Raffin’s jaw set. ‘It is.’

‘So what’s the problem?’

‘I asked you last night if there was anything going on between you….’

‘And I told you there wasn’t. Which was true. Then.’ Enzo looked away self-consciously. ‘Things change.’

‘Yes, so I heard.’

Enzo wondered if he meant that Charlotte had told him. Or that he had heard them, after all, making love the night before. ‘Do you have a problem with that?’

Raffin looked at him hard for a very long time, and then let his eyes drift away towards the altar. ‘No,’ he said finally.

The church door creaked as it opened again and light flooded across the flags. Charlotte’s voice cut through the hush. ‘Enzo….’ They turned to see her framed in the doorway, and she waved an urgent hand towards them. ‘There’s something you should see.’

They left the church and followed her quick footsteps into the graveyard, and she took them along a narrow path between rows of tombs, to a vault like a miniature temple. It was weathered and streaked with black, and a sad bunch of wilting flowers was placed at its door. The earliest inscriptions had been eroded by time and were almost unreadable. But the most recent was sharp and clear. Dated October, 1999, it was dedicated to the beloved memory of Hugues d’Hautvillers and his wife, Simone, who died together on October 26th that year in a car accident on the road between Épernay and Reims.

Enzo stared at it in disbelief. Hugues d’Hautvillers. So perhaps the clues had been leading, not to the place, but to the person.

‘It’s a very old family vault,’ Charlotte said. She knelt down to touch the dying flowers. ‘But there’s still someone around who cares.’

There was a bell push set in the wall beside the gate to the priest’s house. A sign read, Sonnez et entrez. Enzo did as bid, and they heard a bell sounding some way off beyond the wall. He pushed one half of the white gate and it opened on to an overgrown path between two lawns, leading to a small house almost adjoining the front end of the nave. The door opened before they reached it, and the curé looked at them with mild irritation. ‘Can I help you?’

‘I wonder what can you tell us about the d’Hautvillers family vault in the graveyard?’ Enzo said.

The curé seemed surprised. Apparently it was not a question he was asked very often. ‘There’s nothing to tell. It’s the family vault of the d’Hautvillers. They’ve lived at Château Hautvillers for centuries.’

‘Hugues d’Hautvillers died in a car crash in 1999, is that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did he have any heirs?’

‘His son still lives at the château.’

‘What’s his name?’ Raffin asked.

‘The eldest son of the family has been called Hugues since the days of the Knights Templar, and probably before.’

‘So there’s an Hugues d’Hautvillers living at the château now?’ Enzo said.

The curé was running out of patience. ‘I think that’s what I just said.’

‘How do we get there?’ Charlotte asked.

IV

Château Hautvillers was less than three kilometers away in the next valley, rebuilt in the seventeenth century from the remains of a mediaeval fortress. An odd hybrid of French country manor and fortified château, it stood foresquare at the end of a long drive flanked by lime trees, and was surrounded by a deep, wide moat. Well-kept parkland rose up behind it to the treeline, and a fountain sparkled and frothed in the centre of a cobbled courtyard in front of the house. Horses snorted and snuffled and stamped in stables along the west wing of the courtyard. A group of working farm buildings huddled along the east bank of the moat. As Enzo turned his car into the drive, they saw the blue-flashing lights of several police vehicles on the far side of the stone bridge. A white ambulance stood in the courtyard, backed up to the main entrance. Its rear doors were open. A group of people stood at the near side of the bridge watching the proceedings in silence. Staff from the château, and farm workers, and a couple of gendarmes. They all turned at the sound of the arriving vehicle.

Enzo swung his car off the drive just before the bridge and parked under the trees. One of the group detached himself and approached as they stepped out on to the grass. He was a man in his late sixties or early seventies, with silver hair short-cropped around a polished bald pate. He had the demeanour of a maître d’hôtel, and wore a dark suit with polished black shoes. ‘Can I help you?’

‘What’s going on?’ Charlotte said.

‘There’s been a suicide, madame.’

‘Oh, my God. Who?’

‘I’m afraid it was young Hugues d’Hautvillers.’

‘Suicide?’ Enzo could hardly believe it.

‘Yes, Monsieur. He hanged himself in the grande salle. Did you know him?’

Raffin said quickly, ‘We came from Paris to see him.’

‘Oh, I see. Were you friends? At ENA together, perhaps?’

‘That’s right.’

Enzo marvelled at the way Raffin could lie so easily.

‘Then, I’m terribly sorry to be the bearer of such bad news.’ The old man turned and glanced across the moat towards the château. ‘They’re just removing the body. Perhaps if you’d care to wait fifteen minutes or so, I can speak to you, then.’

‘Of course,’ Raffin said.

‘Why don’t you take a walk in the grounds?’ The old man nodded towards the gardens, evidently anxious not to swell the ranks of the voyeurs. He returned to the group, and Enzo, Raffin and Charlotte followed the moat to its south-west corner where a gate opened on to wooded parkland. A brown hen and a clutch of chicks went clucking away across the lawns ahead of them.

Raffin turned to Enzo. ‘Interesting that the man whose name is evoked by the items found in Toulouse should turn up dead just three days later.’

‘Do you think he had something to do with Jacques Gaillard’s murder?’ Charlotte asked.

Raffin raised an eyebrow. ‘Who knows? But if he had, then perhaps he knew that exposure was inevitable, and killed himself to avoid the consequences. What do you think, Macleod?’

But Enzo felt less than happy with the thought that his actions had caused a man to kill himself, even if he was a murderer. ‘I don’t know.’ He half-hoped that Hugues d’Hautvillers had nothing to do with any of it, and that his death was just a strange, sad coincidence. He looked back along the moat towards the bridge with its stone balustrade and four arches rising out of the dark water, and saw that the ambulance was leaving. As it crossed the bridge the onlookers moved aside to let it past. Enzo was overtaken by an odd sense of despair. It seemed as if his investigation would end here, with the death of a man whose body was being taken away even as he watched. Literally, a dead end.

He stuck his hands in his pockets and walked off along the edge of the moat. The three meter drop was guarded by a low, mossy wall. Pointed turrets were built out into the water at each corner of the castle. There were arrow slits in the thick stone walls, from where defenders had once drawn bows to repel attackers. Away to his left, ancient trees grew among well-tended lawns, leading to woods beyond. A gardener with a wheelbarrow was tending flowers in a rockery, apparently unaffected by the activity at the château. A group of deck chairs sat around a wooden table, flapping gently in the hot breeze. Enzo reached the north-west corner of the moat, where the ground rose away steeply, and sat on the edge of a retaining wall. Unlike the patterned brick façade at the front of the château, the back of it was rendered in grey concrete, damp creeping up from still water, seeping into its very foundations.

As he looked back along the moat, Enzo saw Charlotte approaching. Raffin had remained by the gate, leaning on the wrought iron, watching the proceedings in the courtyard. Enzo looked up as Charlotte stopped in front of him, and had to shade his eyes from the midday sun. ‘Did you tell him about us?’

She said, ‘There is no us. I told you, I’m not ready for another relationship yet. We had sex, that’s all.’

Enzo was wounded by her words. It had felt like more than just sex to him. He took the shading hand from his forehead and leaned forward on his knees, staring at the grass. ‘Why’s he so pissed off? It is over between you, isn’t it?’

‘Oh, yes.’ She hesitated. ‘But it wasn’t his idea. He’s having trouble letting go, that’s all.’ She sighed, and sat on the wall beside him, and scuffed idly with her tennis shoes at a slab of stone set in the grass. ‘I’m sorry, Enzo. It’s just a little difficult right now.’ And she took his hand briefly in hers and gave it the smallest of squeezes.

They sat in silence then, and with the toe of her shoe she traced the outline of letters carved into the stone slab. He watched her, unseeing, distracted by all the emotional contradictions she had brought into his life. Until, quite unexpectedly, the letters she was following with her toe seemed to jump into sudden, clear focus, and he realised what those tiny movements had just spelled out. He grabbed her arm, fingers digging deep into the soft flesh above her elbow. She turned, alarmed, to see him staring fixedly at the ground in front of her. ‘What is it?’

‘Utopique.’ Even as he whispered the name he felt goosebumps raise themselves across his back and shoulders.

‘What are you talking about?’

He nodded towards the slab and moved her foot aside with his. He read, ‘This stone was set in the ground in the year 1978, in loving memory of our faithful family retriever, Utopique, who died in the act of rescuing his beloved eight-year-old master, Hugues, on the occasion of his falling into the moat. Utopique jumped after him into the water, keeping him safe from drowning until he could be rescued. Sadly, Utopique was drowned before he, too, could be saved. We will be forever grateful for his sacrifice.’

Enzo stared at the words he had just read aloud. Words that swam now in front of his eyes. Utopique had been Hugues d’Hautvillers’ dog! Finally, the dog tag and the shinbone made sense. ‘It’s got to be under this stone.’ He stood up.

‘What has?’

‘The next piece of Jacques Gaillard. Probably another trunk. And probably more clues.’ He looked at Charlotte, eyes shining with renewed anticipation, and saw that she had turned pale.

‘Right here? Beneath our feet?’

‘It has to be.’ Enzo looked around wondering what he should do, and saw Raffin coming towards them. Beyond him, he saw the gardener wheeling his barrow down the hill. Enzo shouted and waved, and the gardener stopped and turned to look. Raffin glanced behind him at the gardener, and then again at Enzo.

‘What’s going on?’

Enzo said, ‘Read the stone slab.’ And he shouted again to the gardener and waved him over.

‘Jesus!’ Raffin looked up from the slab. ‘You think it’s under here?’

‘What do you think?’

‘I think there’s a damned good chance of it.’

The gardener left his barrow and wandered across. He was a man in his sixties, weathered and worn by a life spent outdoors. He was wearing blue dungarees over a grubby white vest, his flat cap pushed back from a forehead beaded with sweat. He looked at them suspiciously, each in turn, then fixed Enzo with cloudy blue eyes. ‘Can I help you, monsieur?’

‘We think there might be something buried under this stone.’ Even as the words left his mouth Enzo thought how ridiculous they sounded.

The gardener looked at the slab and shook his head slowly. ‘Nothing under it but earth, monsieur.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because I laid it there myself. Monsieur Hugues senior had it engraved and asked me to set it in the ground.’

‘But after that,’ Raffin said. ‘Someone could have lifted it and buried something underneath.’

The gardener looked at them as if they were insane. ‘Why would anyone want to do that, monsieur?’

‘It would be possible, though?’ Enzo said.

The old man shrugged. ‘Of course. But I would have known about it.’

‘How?’

‘Because I’ve spent my life here, monsieur. Every single day of it. I’ve kept these gardens for nearly forty years, just like my father before me. I know every blade of grass. You couldn’t lift that slab and lay it down again without me knowing it.’

Enzo didn’t want to believe him. This had to be the place. ‘Do you remember young Hugues falling into the moat?’

‘It was me that pulled him out.’

‘And Utopique?’

‘Dead by the time I got to him.’

‘I suppose the dog is buried under the stone?’ Raffin said.

‘No, monsieur. The stone was just to commemorate the occasion and mark the spot. Utopique was buried in the same place the family have buried their dogs for centuries.’ He pointed towards the treeline. ‘Up there in the woods, with a view down to the château. There’s dozens of them buried up there, each with its own headstone. A kind of dog cemetery, you might say.’

Enzo thought about the dog’s shinbone found in Toulouse, and he and Raffin exchanged glances. An unspoken communion on a single, shared thought. ‘Can you show us?’

The old gardener sighed. ‘I suppose I could.’

As they walked up the hill Charlotte said to him, ‘You know what’s happened down at the château?’

‘I do.’

‘Are you not concerned to see what’s going on?’

‘There’s nothing about the family that concerns me, mademoiselle. I’ve never had any time for the aristocracy.’

‘They pay your wages,’ Raffin said.

‘And I look after their estate. It doesn’t mean I have to like them. I saved that young boy’s life, but it pleased them better to credit the dog. And now he’s killed himself. Good riddance, I say.’

When they reached the treeline, the cut grass gave way to long, tangling undergrowth. Young saplings grew in all the open spaces, trying to reclaim the land taken from nature by man. The gardener led them through the trees to a clearing bounded by the remains of a dry stone wall and a tumbled-down gate. Ancient headstones poked up at odd angles through long, dry grass. There was a sad air of neglect about this hidden burial place.

‘You don’t look after the cemetery, then?’ Raffin said.

‘I never come here. It’s none of my concern.’

‘So somebody could have buried something up here and you wouldn’t know.’

‘The only thing that gets buried up here are dead dogs, monsieur.’

They found Utopique’s grave at the far side of the plot. The headstone was marked simply, Utopique 1971-78. It seemed as undisturbed as all the other graves, but then it would after ten years. Raffin turned to the gardener. ‘We’ll need a couple of shovels.’

The old man looked at him distrustfully. ‘What for?’

Raffin opened his wallet and took out two fifty-euro notes. He folded them and held them out to the gardener. ‘You never come up here. You don’t need to know.’

It took him ten minutes to return with two stout spades. A small enough request in return for a hundred euros. But he was determined to stay and watch, nonetheless. He might have no loyalty to the family, but his curiosity was aroused.

Enzo threw his jacket and satchel to one side and began digging like a man possessed. Raffin laid his jacket carefully on the remains of the wall, and neatly folded back the sleeves of his shirt. He set his feet carefully on the ground to try to avoid getting dirt on his shoes, and joined in. Within minutes both men were perspiring freely, and for all his precautions, Raffin’s shoes were quickly covered with dry, chalky dust. His shirt, wet with sweat, was sticking to his back.

About a foot down they began uncovering bones. Not a skeleton, but individual bones, as if perhaps they had been dug up once before and tossed back in when the hole was refilled. They gathered them in a small pile on one side.

Charlotte leaned against the wall and watched them in silence, her dark eyes deeply brooding. Whatever was in her mind, she kept her own counsel, chewing anxiously on her lower lip as the hole got deeper.

Through the trees they could see blue lights flashing down at the château. Although the body had been removed nearly half an hour earlier, the gendarmes were still there. Taking statements, perhaps, awaiting officers from the police scientifique to confirm that it was, after all, just a suicide.

Enzo struck something solid. Metal on metal. Both men stopped digging, and Enzo told Raffin to step back. The journalist moved away from the open grave, his neatly coiffured hair falling across a face smeared now with dirt. The gardener stepped forward to take a closer look as Enzo began working more carefully to scrape the earth away from around the lid of a battered, military-green tin trunk. It was just like the others. When, finally, he had removed all the dirt from around the latches, he stepped out of the hole to take a pair of latex gloves from his satchel. He snapped them on and crouched over the trunk again. Carefully, he released the catches and opened the lid. Rusted hinges protested loudly. A fusty, damp smell rose to greet him, and he recoiled with disgust. ‘Jesus….’ The others crowded around to look. The skeletal remains of two legs were folded back at the knee and tied loosely together with plastic twine. The bones were yellow and stained, but undamaged, every tiny metatarsal in the feet preserved intact.

Enzo heard Charlotte gasp. And the gardener said, ‘What the hell is that?’

‘It’s a man’s legs,’ Enzo said. But they were not alone in the trunk. As before, there were another five items. Without looking up he said to Raffin, ‘Get my digital camera out of my bag, Roger.’ The journalist retrieved the camera and handed it to Enzo. Enzo said, ‘We have to be very careful. Don’t want anyone accusing us of contaminating the evidence.’

One by one he lifted the items out to place, singly, on the lid of the trunk and photograph them. There was a brooch, in the shape of a salamander, studded with precious and semi-precious stones. A large gold pendant made in the image of a lion’s head. A lapel pin flag with three vertical stripes of colour — green at the hoist side, yellow and red — a small, green, five-pointed star centred in the yellow band. A replica of a trophy, like a sports cup, with a lid and two large ear-shaped handles. It was engraved with the date 1996. The final item was what appeared to be a referee’s whistle, attached to a neck cord. There were three faint numbers, divided by an oblique, scratched into the metal plating: 19/3.

Enzo replaced each item in the trunk where it had lain and looked up at the faces around him. ‘We’re going to have to tell the gendarmes.’

V

The old retainer who had first greeted them on their arrival walked with them now from the house across the uneven cobbles of the courtyard. He seemed older than just three hours ago. As if one death hadn’t been enough! He had served the family for more than forty years, he told them. He had known three generations of d’Hautvillers. And now they were gone. He had outlived them all, and it would fall to Hugues’ first cousin to carry on the line.

‘He was a very bright young man,’ he said of Hugues. ‘Too bright, really. They say the star that burns twice as bright burns half as long. But his light burned out when his parents died. He was an only child, you see. And his only raison d’être seemed to be gaining the approval of his parents. He did everything to please them. It broke his heart when they sent him to military lycée in Paris, the Pritanée Militaire de la Flèche. He was a gifted child, and it was a gift that required nurture. I think he understood that to achieve his full potential he had to go to Paris. But it was probably reason enough that it pleased his parents. All the same, it distressed him to be away from them.’

They crossed the bridge and turned west, past a couple of gendarmes and several unmarked police vehicles, and followed the moat along to the gate.

‘Of course, you know that he had a brilliant career ahead of him in the Conseil d’État.’

Enzo felt guilty that they had kept up the pretence of knowing the young Hugues.

‘But when news reached him of the death of his parents in that dreadful car crash, he simply bought himself out and came back here to mourn. Seven years of solitude.’ The old man shook his head. ‘He was not interested in company, or in travelling. Occasional trips to Paris to deal with legal and financial affairs. But he spent most of his time locked away in the library reading. Endlessly reading. Or walking the estate. He would be gone for hours on cold winter days, striding over the hills. Didn’t even keep a dog. Wouldn’t have one after…well, you know. Said no dog could ever serve him so well as Utopique.’

When they reached the gate, Enzo could see crime scene tape fluttering in the breeze up along the treeline, and a scribble of blue and pink where a group of gendarmes stood waiting. That was when they heard the first distant drone of the helicopter, thrumming rotors beating warm air as it dropped altitude over the vineyards at the end of its short flight from Paris.

The old man gazed up into the clear sky, searching for a first sight of it. When, finally, he saw it, he seemed disappointed and turned away. Enzo walked with him, and Raffin and Charlotte followed. He drifted along the edge of the moat, staring gloomily into its stillness. ‘You’ve no idea why he did it?’ Enzo asked.

‘Why he killed himself?’ The old man shook his head. ‘None. If he’d been going to do something like that, I’d have thought it would have been after his parents died.’ He lifted his arms, then let them fall again to his sides, as if signalling the futility of ever trying to understand what moved men to do what they did.

‘Had he been depressed recently?’ Charlotte asked.

‘He was a very melancholy young man. He was only thirty-six. But, of course, you know that. Hardly old enough to be carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. But he always seemed to.’ The old family retainer stopped to remember, and Enzo reflected that he must have known Hugues from cradle to coffin. ‘Not depressed, as such,’ the old man said suddenly. He searched for the right word. ‘Agitated. Yes, I’d say he was agitated these last days. Spent more time in bed than usual. Wasn’t eating properly. Drinking far too much. But, then, that had become something of a habit.’

The distant beat of the helicopter had become a roar, and they turned to look as it swooped down, slowing abruptly and then settling itself gently on the grass. Its near side door swung open and Juge Lelong climbed out, aided by a uniformed officer of the Police Nationale. A third, plainclothes officer, followed. The judge spotted Enzo. He ducked and hurried out from beneath the rotors, before straightening up and running a hand back through ruffled hair. His suit was creased from the flight, and he tried to tug a little style back into its skewed lines. He strode purposefully towards Enzo and the others, his minions trotting in his wake like well-trained dogs. Behind him, the helicopter pilot cut its motors, and the blades slowed with a descending whine. Enzo knew that the judge was not going to be pleased with him.

Juge Lelong stopped in front of Enzo and lit a cigar, blowing smoke into the hot afternoon air. ‘You’re a persistent man.’

‘So I’ve been told.’

‘You were told,’ said the judge, ‘to keep your sticky little fingers out of the honey pot. But you just couldn’t resist, could you?’

‘As far as I’m aware, we don’t live in a police state. Yet.’

The judge delivered a long look of withering contempt. ‘You’re an amateur, Macleod. And I think the Garde des Sceaux made it perfectly clear that you were to leave matters to the professionals.’

‘If we were to wait for the professionals to get a result, we’d all be picking up our pensions,’ Raffin said.

Juge Lelong swung his head slowly to encompass Raffin within his glare. ‘And who are you?’

‘Roger Raffin.’ Raffin smiled affably and held out his hand.

If Lelong saw it, he chose to ignore it. ‘Ah, yes. The journalist.’ He spat out the word journalist as if it had a bitter taste.

‘That’s right. I’m following Enzo Macleod’s investigation. He’s just uncovered what are certainly more of Jacques Gaillard’s remains. And when the story appears in Libération tomorrow, I think it’s you people who are going to look like the amateurs.’ He pulled a small notebook from his pocket and drew a pen from its spine. ‘Any comment?’

Juge Lelong’s comment was contained within the look he drew the journalist. And if his look had been words, they would have been unprintable.