The Critic

II

Three hundred metres past the turn-off to La Croix Blanche, a gate stood open to a track which left the road and made its stony progress up through the vineyard towards a brooding treeline. Moonlight spilled across the slope etching lines of silver between the dark rows of vines, as if a comb had been drawn through black hair revealing the white scalp beneath. Enzo’s 2CV rolled and bounced over the uneven surface on its soft suspension. He had read once that 2CV owners congregated in annual competition to try to overturn their cars in bumpy fields. So giving was the suspension that it was almost impossible to do. He was grateful for that now as he steered his way towards the blaze of headlamps and the flash of blue and orange up ahead.

A gendarme stepped into the light of his headlamps, one hand raised, the other resting nervously on his holster. Enzo flipped up the window, and the gendarme leaned in, shining a flashlight in his face. ‘You can’t come up here.’

‘I’m looking for Gendarme Roussel.’

The gendarme cocked his head suspiciously. ‘And you would be…?’

‘Enzo Macleod. I’m a forensic specialist consulting on the Petty case.’

The police officer eyed him thoughtfully for a moment. ‘Park up here and follow me.’

Enzo pulled his car into a tight space between two rows of vines and followed the gendarme up the slope. At the end of the track, where the land rose steeply to the woods, a small knot of people stood talking and smoking. There was a cluster of police vehicles, blue and orange lights flashing out of sync, and unmarked cars pulled up at odd angles, abandoned for the final climb on foot.

‘Monsieur Macleod!’ Nicole detached herself from the group and hurried towards him.

‘Nicole, what are you doing here? How did you know about all this?’

‘She just happened to be in the right place at the wrong time.’

Enzo had barely noticed the young man in the baseball cap who had followed behind her. He eyed Enzo with obvious dislike, the reflected light of police headlamps cutting deep shadows into a fleshy face. He was a big man, a powerful presence in the dark. He sucked at a cigarette and the shadows that masked his face glowed red in its light.

Nicole cleared her throat uncomfortably. ‘Monsieur Macleod, this is Fabien Marre. He’s the owner of La Croix Blanche.’

‘My family owns the vignoble,’ Fabien corrected her. ‘I make the wine.’

Enzo looked again at the young man, then back at Nicole. ‘So what are you doing here?’

‘She’s staying here, monsieur.’

Fabien Marre’s insistence in answering for her was beginning to irritate Enzo. ‘I’m not asking you.’

Nicole was almost beside herself with embarrassment. ‘I didn’t know when I took the room, Monsieur Macleod, honestly. I mean, I’d read all the stuff about Petty, but La Croix Blanche is a pretty common name. I didn’t realise until…well, until I’d blown your cover.’

Enzo sighed. He could imagine exactly how it had happened. Nicole, he knew, enjoyed the sound of her own voice.

‘So you needn’t bother turning up for the vendange tomorrow,’ Fabien said. ‘And you can tell Laurent de Bonneval that we’ll be having words.’

Enzo realised there was no point in recriminations. And, in any case, everything had changed now. He looked at Nicole. ‘You said they’d found another body.’

‘Up there in the woods.’ Nicole pointed vaguely towards where they could see flashlights pricking the dark and the shadows of officers moving among the trees. ‘There’s a source up there. La Source de la Croix. Apparently it’s been a rendezvous for young lovers for centuries.’ She glanced at Fabien, almost as if looking for his permission. But he just shrugged. She turned back to Enzo. ‘A young couple came banging on the door of the house at La Croix Blanche just after midnight. She was hysterical. By the time I’d got into my dressing gown and slippers and gone down to see what all the noise was about, Fabien and his mother were there, and the girl was in floods of tears. Her boyfriend could hardly stop shaking.’

‘What had happened?’

‘They’d gone up to the source to…well, you know, do whatever it is young couples do in places like that.’ Nicole had grown up on a farm. Animals had sex. People had sex. She’d never really drawn the distinction. But now, discussing it in the presence of Enzo and Fabien, she was suddenly self-conscious. ‘Anyway, they heard someone moving about in the woods, and they thought it was a Peeping Tom. The boy got angry and went after him. That’s when he found the body.’

‘So you called the police?’

‘Not right away. Fabien wanted to see for himself.’

Enzo looked at the young winemaker. ‘Why?’

‘I’m not going to go calling the police out on a wild goosechase on the say-so of a couple of kids.’

‘And I went with him.’

Anger flashed in Enzo’s eyes. ‘You took Nicole?’

Fabien shrugged dismissively. ‘You know her better than me, monsieur. Have you ever tried saying no to her?’

Enzo glanced at Nicole with irritation and silently conceded the point.

‘It was horrible, Monsieur Macleod. I mean, I read all the descriptions people gave of Petty’s body when they found it. But nothing prepares you for the real thing.’

Enzo flicked at a look at Fabien. ‘So you trampled all over the crime scene before you called the police.’

‘So?’

‘So if they find your traces there, then there’s a perfectly logical reason for it.’

Nicole frowned. ‘Why wouldn’t there be?’

Enzo didn’t answer. He kept his eyes on Fabien. ‘You were there when they found Petty.’

‘I was.’

It was with a shock that Nicole suddenly realised where this was heading. ‘Monsieur Macleod! You can’t possibly think…’

But Fabien talked over her, his voice low and steady and filled with a latent anger. ‘I never made a secret of the fact that I didn’t like Petty, monsieur. Nothing personal. But there are those of us who produce the wine, and there are others who leech off it. Those who produce nothing but fancy words, impose their tastes and fill their pockets. They’ve never broken their backs during all the hours and weeks and months of pruning or lost a crop to the vagaries of the weather. So if you want to know what I think, I think whoever killed Petty deserves a medal.’ He drew a deep breath. ‘But it wasn’t me.’

Nicole turned to look at him, shocked by the intensity of his words and silenced by their virulence.

Enzo said, ‘Murder is never to be congratulated, Monsieur Marre.’ He paused for a moment’s reflection. ‘But it’s an interesting coincidence, don’t you think, that both bodies should turn up on your land?’

Fabien dropped his cigarette and ground it into the stones with the toe of his boot, refusing to meet Enzo’s eyes.

Enzo gave Nicole a look that would have wilted flowers, and turned back towards the waiting gendarme. ‘Where’s Roussel?’

‘Straight up to the treeline, monsieur.’

Roussel was on his way down as Enzo climbed up. They met halfway, and the investigator shone his flashlight in Enzo’s face. ‘How the hell did you get up here?’

‘I told them I was a forensic expert consulting on the Petty case.’

Roussel glared at him. ‘I could have you arrested for that.’

‘Why? It’s true. I am consulting on the Petty case-for his daughter.’

Enzo couldn’t see his expression beyond the glare of his flashlight, but he could feel the intensity of Roussel’s gaze before he heard his lips part in a smile. Roussel turned off the lamp, and as Enzo’s eyes adjusted he saw a weary amusement in the palest of faces. ‘You’re a character, Monsieur Macleod. Un vrai personnage. I’ll give you that.’

‘You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.’

‘Maybe because I have.’ He drew a deep, tremulous breath, and wiped a thin film of perspiration away from his forehead with the back of a hand that Enzo noticed was shaking.

‘You know the victim?’

‘I spoke to you about him just a couple of days ago. One of my missing persons. The one I was at school with.’

Enzo remembered the file on Roussel’s desk and his glib assertion that people went missing all the time. ‘So there was something sinister about his disappearance after all?’

Roussel gave him a darting look. He did not miss the echo of his own words. ‘He’s not pleasant to look at, monsieur. Submerged in wine probably since the day he went missing. But there’s only enough alcohol in red wine to inhibit decay, not prevent it entirely.’

Enzo said, ‘When Admiral Lord Nelson was killed by you people at Trafalgar, they shipped him back to Gibraltar in a barrel of wine. There they changed the wine for brandy, and sent the body back to Britain for burial. It’s how they preserved bodies for the long trip home in colonial days.’ He rubbed a hand over the stubble on his jaw. ‘Legend has it that in Nelson’s case, the barrel was nearly empty by the time the ship made port.’

Roussel pulled a face. ‘Thank you for that thought, monsieur. It makes me feel so much better.’

Enzo nodded towards the woods. ‘Who’s up there?’

‘Two gendarmes and an adjutant from the STIC.’

Enzo shook his head. ‘Which is what?’

‘ Section Technique d’investigation Criminelle. The Police Scientifique from Albi. Officially known as the IRCGN these days. And a police photographer.’

‘Can I have a look?’

‘No.’ Roussel was emphatic. ‘You shouldn’t be here at all.’

‘You’ve seen my qualifications, Gendarme Roussel. You know that crime scene analysis is one of my specialities.’

‘I know that I’d get shot if I let you anywhere near it. We have our own people, Macleod.’

‘Just a glimpse. That’s all.’

Roussel looked at him long and hard-although perhaps it was through him, rather than at him-as he engaged in some inner dialogue, a silent argument with himself. Then he delved into the pockets of his jacket and pulled out a couple of plastic shoe covers. ‘Put these on. And touch nothing. This is strictly unofficial.’

The source was dry, moss-covered stones carefully built around the opening of an underground spring from which water would bubble when the water table was high and tumble down the hillside to irrigate the vines. It was only three or four metres inside the treeline, a path trodden through tangling saplings and briars. Enzo could not imagine what possessed young people to come here. If sex was the object of the exercise, he could think of many more appropriate places.

Almost as if reading his mind, Roussel said, ‘It’s the romance of the legend that draws the kids. I don’t know the whole story, but needless to say it involves young lovers meeting in secret, defying families and fate. There was a chateau here in the woods at one time, but it was destroyed during the Albi crusades. The cellars and foundations still exist somewhere, pretty much buried by the centuries. The old church that served it is still up there on the hill looking out over the valley.’

He turned towards a path freshly beaten through the undergrowth.

‘This is the way the boy went when he heard the killer and thought it was a Peeping Tom.’

‘What exactly did he hear?’

‘Someone moving through the undergrowth, he said. Making quite a noise, apparently.’

‘Did he see anyone?’

‘Not until he stumbled across the body.’

They followed his path through the trees, a chaos of decaying wood matted with moss, fresh saplings, broken branches, trunks choked by ivy leaning one against the other. Leaves wet with condensation slapped their faces. In the distance, light shone through the mesh of vegetation, splintered and fragmented, hanging in the mist that now rose from the rotting forest bed beneath their feet.

Lamps powered by battery were raised on unsteady stands to throw light across a clearing where someone had broken the ground with a shovel, scraping fresh, rich earth to one side in a shallow pile that was peppered with fallen leaves. The outline of what looked like a grave was clearly marked out, but it was no more than a few centimetres deep. The clearing was delineated on the south side by the gnarled trunk of a huge chestnut tree that must have been three hundred years old. It was long dead, its twin trunks collapsed and rotten. One of them had fallen across the clearing at an angle, creating something like an arch, a natural entrance, old branches propping it up, like so many crumbling columns, to prevent complete collapse. It looked as if the tree might have received its fatal blow from a lightning strike, which had split the central trunk in two, creating a deep, natural cradle about two metres from the ground. It was this cradle that held the body, purple and shrivelled, naked legs dangling like withered sticks, arms stretched out on either side as if to hold it upright. The head was canted forward, grotesque in the harsh lamplight. There were no eyes, just deep, dark shadows, thin lips stretched back across red-stained teeth in a ghastly grimace. Black hair was smeared across the forehead. There was an odd stench of alcohol and decay in the air.

Several uniformed gendarmes hovered around the perimeter of the clearing, just beyond the light, in which three figures in white tyvek suits moved around in careful concert searching for evidence. The splat and whine of a flash camera filled the night air as a photographer took pictures of the corpse.

Roussel said, ‘The killer entered the wood from the east side. You can follow his path through the trees. It’s a pretty well-worn trail. I guess people must come up here quite a lot. It looks like he held the corpse under each arm and dragged it backwards. You can see the tracks the heels left through the fallen leaves.’ He shone his flashlight in the direction from which the killer had come, and Enzo saw the grooves made by the heels. ‘There’s an old farm track runs along the east side of the forest, so it was easy for him to get up close with it.’

‘Did the young couple hear him drive away?’

‘They did. No lights, though. It’s a nearly full moon, so I figure he wasn’t taking any chances.’

‘Tyre tracks?’

Roussel shook his head. ‘It’s stony ground up here, monsieur. And it hasn’t rained in weeks.’

Enzo craned his neck and gazed up into the dark above them. The nearest leaves were illuminated by the light from the clearing, but beyond it was just blackness. The warm September weather had retarded the fall, and only a few leaves had begun to turn. The bed of old, dead leaves through which the killer had dragged his victim, was from another year, another fall.

One of the STIC techniciens called out suddenly. He was crouched down on the west side of the shattered chestnut. With careful precision he lifted up between white-gloved fingers what looked like a discarded cigarette end. ‘There’re three of them,’ he said. He sniffed at it. ‘Fresh. If there’s any saliva on these there’s a good chance we’ll get DNA.’

Enzo pursed his lips thoughtfully. DNA seemed like missing the point.

The technicien put the cigarette butts into separate ziplock bags, and labelled them each in turn.

Enzo said to Roussel, ‘So how did you identify the victim?’

‘I recognised him.’

‘Really?’ Enzo looked again at the shrunken, shadowed face of the corpse. ‘I’m not sure I would have.’

‘We were best pals when we were kids. When he was about ten he had a terrible biking accident. Front wheel caught in a railway line as we went over a crossing. Turned it right around and threw him over the handlebars. Nearly killed him. Fractured skull, depressed fracture of the cheek, broken jaw. He was a terrible mess. They just about had to rebuild his face. And didn’t do a very good job. You could always see the scars.’ He paused. ‘Still can. Have to get his wife to make the official ID, though.’ He looked less than thrilled at the prospect, and was lost for a while in private contemplation. Then he said, ‘After we left school we sort of, you know, went our separate ways. But I still saw him. We had some good nights out. I always kind of found it hard to believe that he would just take off like that, without saying anything to me. But then I thought, if it had been me, would I have said anything to him? And I figured probably not.’ He shook his head. ‘But I never dreamt of anything like this.’

The adjutant from the STIC approached. He was a small man inside a tyvek suit that looked two sizes two big for him. The hood left only his face exposed, so Enzo could not see if he was bald. Or, if he had hair, whether it was dark, fair, silver. It was extraordinary how little you could tell about someone from the face alone. But he had thick brown eyebrows and looked to be man in his forties. He glanced cautiously at Enzo then addressed himself to Roussel. ‘There’ve been a lot of people tramping about here before we arrived, David. It’s a shitty crime scene. Doesn’t make our job any easier. But it looks like the kids disturbed him in the middle of trying to bury the body. The cigarette ends would indicate that he’d been here a while. Hard work digging a grave in ground as hard as this.’

‘Hardly much of a grave,’ Enzo said.

The adjutant turned hostile eyes in his direction. ‘Who’s this?’

‘A forensic expert from Scotland. He’s not here in any official capacity.’

The adjutant fixed him again with an unfriendly stare. ‘So what’s your point?’

‘My point is he wasn’t digging a grave at all. And the digging he did wasn’t done tonight.’

Roussel turned towards him in surprise. ‘How do you know that?’

Enzo said, ‘It’s a late fall this year.’ He nodded towards the pile of earth and the leaves that had settled on it. ‘Those leaves didn’t just come down in the last couple of hours.’

Both men looked at the pile of earth, but neither of them said anything.

‘He probably dug that up the night before.’

‘Why?’

Enzo shrugged. ‘Who knows? Probably preparing the ground before he brought the body.’

The adjutant’s voice was laden with skepticism. ‘So what did he bring the body here for if it wasn’t to bury it?’

Enzo said, ‘What does that corpse weigh, do you think? Seventy, eighty kilos? A lot for one man to handle. You can see that by the deep grooves left in the forest floor by the heels. So why would you go to the trouble of heaving it up into that tree cavity if you were just going to get it down again to bury it?’ He made a point of meeting the adjutant’s eye. ‘But you’re right about the cigarettes. He probably was here for quite a while. Waiting.’

‘Waiting for what?’ Roussel said.

‘Someone to come. I mean, why would you choose to bury a body right next to a well-known lover’s haunt? You’d pick somewhere a million miles from where anyone was likely to stumble across you. And even if you didn’t realise it was a popular meeting place, and you suddenly heard people nearby, you’d hold your breath and not make a sound. But this guy went crashing off through the undergrowth, drawing attention to himself.’ Enzo turned towards the path by which the body had been brought in. ‘And even if he’d panicked and wanted to make a getaway, it’s a clear path out. No need to make all that noise.’

‘I don’t get it,’ Roussel said.

But the adjutant from the STIC was nodding grimly, embarrassed, but professional enough to admit that he had missed what Enzo hadn’t. ‘I do.’

‘Well, what?’

The adjutant looked again at the leaves on the earth. ‘He only wanted it to look like he’d been interrupted burying the body. He wanted to be interrupted. He wanted the body to be found.’ He turned now towards the corpse. ‘Propped up there for the world to see.’

As they walked back down towards the vehicles below, Roussel said, ‘The adjutant from the STIC is going to be pretty pissed off at losing face like that, Macleod.’

‘At me?’

‘No, at me. For letting you anywhere near the place. There’s going to be hell to pay. I can feel it in my bones.’

Enzo glanced at him. ‘What rank do you have, Roussel?’

‘Gendarme.’

‘Just rank and file gendarme?’

‘That’s right.’

‘So how did you get put in charge of a case like this?’

‘I was the first officer on the scene.’

Enzo blinked in surprise. ‘And that qualifies you to lead the investigation?’

Roussel became defensive. ‘We are all trained in basic investigative and forensic techniques, monsieur. Of course, I answer to a higher authority, but I am perfectly well qualified to be the investigating officer.’

They walked in silence for a few steps before Enzo said, ‘When I went through Raffin’s notes, there were quotes from statements made to the Press by a police spokesman who wasn’t you.’

There was a tension now, in Roussel’s voice, a hint of buried resentment. ‘At the height of the inquiry, because it was such a high profile case, they appointed a PR officer from Albi to speak to the press. But he had nothing to do with the investigation.’

The group waiting down by the vehicles turned towards them as they heard their voices. Enzo stopped Roussel and lowered his. ‘I don’t know why the killer wanted us to find your friend tonight, Gendarme Roussel. But I figure it’s his first big mistake.’ Roussel waited for more. ‘There has to be a link between Petty and this man. And maybe others in your missing persons file. It’s just opened up a whole new avenue of investigation. We can’t let it slip by us.’

‘We?’

Enzo drew a deep breath. ‘Alright. You.’

Roussel held him steady in his gaze. ‘You don’t think I’m up to this, do you, Macleod?’

Enzo considered his response. He said carefully, ‘I think I can help you.’