The Critic

Chapter Twenty
I

Early sunlight fell in wedges between buildings, casting the shadow of Christ across the warm tarmac in the Place Jean Moulin. Enzo squeezed his 2CV into a blue zone parking space and set the dial on his permit for the maximum hour and a half of free parking. He stepped out to breathe air freshened by the storm, and felt the sun warm on his face.

The events of the previous night had, like a nightmare, retreated with the clearing of the sky and the rising of the sun. He had watched Bertrand’s van disappearing down the chateau ’s tree-lined drive towards the road, Sophie’s continued protests still ringing in his ears. And when they were gone, he had turned back to the gite with a deep sense of depression that even the yards of sailor blue sky above him could not lift.

Now he turned down the Avenue Jean Calvet towards the electronic gate of the gendarmerie. The same attractive gendarme with the Mediterranean eyes greeted him at the accueil, but this time she wasn’t smiling. When he asked for Gendarme Roussel she told him to wait.

It was several long minutes before she returned and instructed him to follow her. The sway of her hips ahead of him, emphasised by the movement of the holstered gun on her belt, was hypnotising as he trailed her upstairs and into a long corridor. Halfway along it, she knocked on a door and opened it into a large office. Enzo saw the plaque on the door. Adjudant Brigade. And he began to get a bad feeling.

A secretary showed him into the adjutant’ s office, and a tall man in full uniform turned from the window to cast a cold eye of assessment over him. His office was bigger than the one Roussel shared with two other officers downstairs. His desk was enormous, and groaned with papers and files, all stacked and grouped in meticulous piles. On the wall behind it was a large chart of the Gendarmerie Departementale du Tarn, with the Groupement at Albi at the head of a pyramidic command structure. The Compagnie at Gaillac was highlighted in orange, as were the eleven communes that it controlled.

The adjutant offered Enzo a cursory handshake. ‘You seem to be very popular with would-be assassins, Monsieur Macleod.’

‘ Failed would-be assassins,’ Enzo told him.

The adjutant raised an eyebrow, then rounded his desk to drop into a well-worn leather swivel chair and balance a pair of reading glasses on the end of a thin nose. As he opened a file in front of him, he waved a hand vaguely in the air. Which Enzo took to be an invitation to sit. So he drew up a chair and sat down to wait expectantly. It gave him a moment to weigh up the senior ranking officer of the Compagnie. The hair was almost all gone from his crown, the remaining growth from around the sides slicked across it in a poor attempt to disguise his baldness. Where it had gone grey, black hair dye had taken on a ginger hue. He had long, feminine hands, with immaculately manicured fingernails. His face was shaved to a shiny smoothness, and Enzo could smell the lingering traces of his aftershave. That he had been brought here at all, was worrying to Enzo. The adjutant’ s hostility was evident in his body language, and Enzo knew that vanity like his meant he would never willingly put his rank to one side.

The a djutant dragged his eyes away from the file. ‘What do you want with Roussel?’

This was not a question that Enzo had anticipated. ‘You’re aware that the juge d’instruction at Albi has made me a lay consultant on the Petty murder.’

‘I am.’ His disapproval was apparent in the curl of his lip.

‘Gendarme Roussel sent several samples to Toulouse for forensic examination. At my request. I was looking for the results.’

The adjutant reached across his desk, lifted a large buff enveloped and slid it towards Enzo. ‘Preliminary reports came back yesterday.’ He watched as Enzo took the envelope, pulled out a sheaf of stapled papers and gave them a quick glance. ‘Do you have any idea where he is?’

Enzo looked up, surprised, and let the papers fall back into their envelope. ‘What?’

‘Gendarme Roussel.’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’

The adjutant removed his reading glasses and folded his hands on the desk in front of him. ‘Gendarme Roussel took several days leave at short notice for what he described as personal reasons. He was due back the day before yesterday. Which is when I discovered that his wife had been here looking for him the day before that. Several of his colleagues suspect marital problems. I thought you might be able to throw some light on his whereabouts.’

Enzo was very still, hardly daring to think the worst. ‘He’s gone missing?’

‘Officially, he is absent without leave. Which means he will be arrested the moment he turns up.’

It was a short walk down to the roundabout, and the Place de la Liberation, but Enzo took every step as if he carried the weight of the world on his shoulders. And it seemed like a very long way. He moved like a man in a trance through the dappled shade of the chestnut trees, leaves and chestnuts falling around him, drying in the morning sun and crunching underfoot. And he slumped into a chair under the yellow awning of the Grand Cafe des Sports and gazed out across the square with eyes that did not see.

It barely seemed credible that Gendarme Roussel should have become one more case in his own missing persons file. Enzo had feared that someone else would go missing during this year’s grape harvest, but had never for one moment thought that it might be Roussel. He tried to convince himself that it was just coincidence. That there would be some rational explanation. But although he knew that life could throw up some extraordinary coincidences, he never believed in them when it came to an investigation. There were always reasons. For everything.

He searched through his mind for connections between Roussel and the other missing persons in the file. They were not hard to find. Like all the others, Roussel was a local man. He had been personally acquainted with one of them. And he had gone missing at the same time of year. But there had to be something else. Something he wasn’t seeing. His colleagues thought it was a simple case of domestic disharmony. But that’s exactly what Roussel himself had thought about Serge Coste. And Coste had ended up pickled in wine, just like Petty.

The thought of Petty took Enzo back to the day in the grande salle at Chateau des Fleurs when Pierric Lefevre had dug out the American’s family records from the old archive. In a strange sort of way, that made Petty a local, too. Or, at least, his antecedents. But it made no sense, for it had been Petty’s first trip to Gaillac. His only connection to the place was historical.

Enzo’s reflections were interrupted by a young waiter with dark, curly, gelled hair shaved close around the sides of his head. ‘ Bonjour monsieur. Je vous ecoute. ’

Enzo glanced up. ‘ Un petit cafe, s’il vous plait.’

The waiter cocked his head. ‘You’re the guy that went off with Braucol.’ He grinned, shaking his head, some affectionate memory of the puppy dog coming back to him. ‘How is the little guy?’

Enzo didn’t have the heart to tell him. ‘Doing good.’

The waiter laughed. ‘He was a pain in the ass, you know. But I kind of miss him.’

And as he went off to get the coffee, Enzo thought how he would miss him, too. He turned quickly to the envelope the adjutant had given him from the Police Scientifique in Toulouse, and drew out the preliminary report. He ran his eye down the text, nodding to himself as it confirmed what he had suspected. Petty’s DNA sample did not match the sample recovered from the speck of blood inside the glove. The chances were that if the blood in the glove did not belong to the killer himself, then it belonged to a relative. But if they got themselves a suspect, familial DNA matching could still secure a conviction. If they could find a suspect.

He flipped over a page and felt sudden goosebumps rise up all across his shoulders. He felt his face sting as if he had just been slapped. He stood up as the waiter arrived with his coffee, and dropped a couple of coins on the table.

‘Give it to someone else.’