The Night Gate

Chapter One

A notice pinned to the door warned that the maternity unit was open only from 7 a.m. until 8.30 p.m., and Enzo wondered what happened if a woman’s waters broke in the middle of the night. Or were all births scheduled to fit into working hours these days?

He held the door open for Sophie who stepped out carefully, her left arm linked through Dominique’s right. They all removed their masks, and watched their breath billow in the cold afternoon air that blew up the Rue Wilson from the River Lot and the historic Valentré bridge that spanned it.

Sophie was radiant and just six weeks from full term. Her check-up had gone well, and she had gazed in wonder at the ultrasound images of her baby boy. But she was thirty-five now, and with two miscarriages behind her, and a pandemic still sweeping the country, it was impossible to be too careful.

Enzo walked behind his daughter and the woman who had been such a large part of his life these past nine years and felt a wave of emotion wash over him. They were just like mother and daughter, even though Sophie’s birth mother, Pascale, had died giving birth to her all those years ago. He found himself fighting an internal conflict between happiness and regret. But only briefly. How could he be anything but happy for them both?

He listened to their excited chatter in the late autumn chill and felt a twinge of sadness for Dominique. They had both known from the start that she could not have children, and she had claimed to have come to terms with it. But he had seen that look in her eyes when glimpsing a baby in a pram, or a heavily pregnant woman, and knew that the absence of children would always mean there was something missing in her life.

In a way she had lived through Sophie’s pregnancy vicariously, and Enzo knew that she anticipated the imminent birth with the same unbridled joy of any grandmother. She had, too, been the only mother that Laurent had ever known beyond the first few months of his life. The child that he and Charlotte had made together. And even after all these years, Enzo could not shake off the image of Charlotte standing over the father of her son in the rain, a gun in her hand. Preparing to kill him.

They passed plasticised posters tied to rusted railings, and on the other side of the street the spreading branches of a pin parasol cast its shadow over the facade of the Banque de France. At the post office they took a right, and turned down towards the Place Gambetta.

‘Can’t wait till this is all over,’ he heard Sophie say, ‘and I can have a drink again!’ He grinned. Like father, like daughter.

In five minutes they were crossing the Boulevard Léon Gambetta opposite the Théatre de Cahors, to stroll down the Rue Georges Clemenceau to the little tree-lined square in front of La Halle. The trees were almost naked now, drifts of brittle, brown leaves blowing along the gutters. Tables and chairs still stood on the pavement outside La Lamparo pizzeria, peopled by a few hardy customers huddled in coats, to smoke or avoid wearing masks.

A familiar figure stood outside the door to Enzo’s apartment. She was in uniform, her brown hair neatly pinned beneath her hat. She had put on a little weight, but was still an attractive woman. Enzo had not seen her for some years, and his first thought was that something bad had happened. But her smile when she saw them allayed his misgivings. His instinct was to kiss her on each cheek, but he forced himself to leave a socially distanced two metres between them.

‘Hello, Hélène,’ he said, a little awkwardly. It must have been fifteen years since their nearly relationship.

‘Enzo!’ She beamed at him. ‘You’ve aged.’

He didn’t dare return the compliment.

Sophie said, ‘My dad’s always been old. Ever since I’ve known him.’

‘Ancient,’ Dominique chipped in.

Enzo spread his arms in despair. ‘My life is full of women who do nothing but abuse me.’

Hélène examined him more closely and frowned. ‘What happened to your hair?’

‘It’s still there,’ he said, reaching back to grasp his ponytail and run it through his hand, as if for reassurance.

‘A little thinner, perhaps. But that’s not what I meant. Your white stripe. It’s gone!’

Enzo pulled a face. The white stripe in dark hair running back from one side of his forehead had been a distinguishing feature for most of his life. A physical manifestation of a condition known as Waardenburg syndrome, which had also gifted him one brown eye and one blue, but left him otherwise unaffected. At school it had earned him the nickname Magpie. ‘It’s still there, too,’ he said. ‘You just can’t see it any more for all the grey.’

‘Shame.’ Hélène stifled a smile. ‘Now you’re just plain old Enzo Macleod. Nothing to distinguish you from any other Enzo Macleod.’

‘Except for the ponytail,’ Sophie said, ‘and the donkey jacket, and the cargoes.’

‘And the hippy canvas shoulder bag.’ Dominique gave it an affectionate tug.

And Sophie added, ‘He still looks like an exile from the sixties.’

Hélène seemed to notice her bump for the first time. ‘Looks like you and Bertrand have been busy.’

Sophie’s pleasure showed in her smile. ‘Due next month.’

‘Well, congratulations.’

‘Are you coming up?’ Enzo said.

But Hélène shook her head. ‘I won’t invade the Enzo bubble.’ It’s what the government was calling allowed family groupings to prevent spread of the Coronavirus. ‘I just came to pass on a message.’

‘See you upstairs, then,’ Sophie said, and she and Dominique pushed open the door of the brick tenement to release a breath of warm, damp air into the late October afternoon.

When they were alone, Enzo said, ‘So who’s trying to get a message to me?’

‘An old friend.’

‘Who?’

‘Professor Magali Blanc.’

‘The forensic archaeologist? Why didn’t she get in touch herself?’

‘Lost your contact details it seems. She’s based in Paris these days, and her request for help in finding you landed on my desk.’

Enzo frowned. ‘What would she want with me? It’s years since I worked with her.’

‘She appears to be engaged on a rather interesting unsolved murder, not far from home. Your home, that is.’

Enzo let his eyes wander towards La Halle and the little bistro that had opened on the terrace. He and Dominique quite often caught lunch there. In the square beyond, in the shadow of the twin-domed cathedral, he still took coffee every morning at the Café Le Forum. Life in south-west France, in this 2000-year-old Roman town contained by a loop of the river, flowed by as gently as the Lot itself. No stress. And he was enjoying it. He sighed. ‘I’m retired from all that these days, Hélène. Five years since I packed in my position at Paul Sabatier.’

‘I thought cold cases were your speciality.’ There was mischief in this.

He narrowed his eyes. ‘Only when I get conned into it by accepting a bet after too many glasses of wine.’ He had solved all seven murders in journalist Roger Raffin’s book on French cold cases, but still lost his bet with Hélène and the préfet on a technicality.

‘I wouldn’t have thought that a man with your forensic talents would ever lose his appetite for the challenge.’

Enzo smiled wryly. ‘You’re a wind-up merchant, Hélène, you know that?’

‘Is that a technical term, or one of your quaint Scottish witticisms?’

He glared at her. ‘What’s the case?’

A smile divided her face, ear to ear. ‘I knew it.’

‘Hélène!’ The warning was clear in her growled name.

‘It’s an old one, Enzo.’

‘If Magali’s looking at it, it must be a very old one.’

‘Seventy-five years or more.’

He frowned. ‘That would make it Second World War. A lot of people died then. What makes anyone think it was a murder?’

‘The remains of a ranking officer of the Luftwaffe with a bullet hole in his skull, shallow-buried in a tiny medieval village on the banks of the River Dordogne, wouldn’t exactly fit a conventional wartime scenario.’

‘They’re not likely to catch whoever did it now.’ He was interested, in spite of himself.

‘I don’t think that’s the object of the exercise. Isn’t it the job of archaeologists to unravel the mysteries of history? I think she just wants you to cast a professional eye over the grave, if one could call it that. She’s been unable to visit the site herself.’

‘Where is it?’

‘The village is called Carennac. It’s in the north of the Département. Not much more than an hour away.’

The grey cast in the cold southern sky had been dispelled by the dark. Enzo came through from the kitchen to find Laurent sprawled in his father’s armchair by the light of a standard lamp at the window, idly picking out chords on his father’s guitar. He stopped in the doorway for a moment, gazing with unadorned affection at his son, who was oblivious to his presence.

He was a gangly kid, tall for an eleven-year-old, puppy fat shed during a recent sprouting. He took his hair from his mother, dark and falling across his forehead in luxuriant curls. He showed no signs of having inherited his father’s Waardenburg. Alexis, Enzo’s grandson by his Scottish daughter, Kirsty, had hearing issues, the faulty gene having skipped a generation. And although tests on Sophie’s unborn child had proved negative, it was still a niggling worry.

Laurent’s long fingers spidered across the fretboard of the guitar. He was showing real promise. Enzo approached silently from behind and suddenly lifted the guitar away.

‘Hey!’ Laurent protested.

Enzo arranged his fingers on the frets. ‘Try the A minor 7th diminished,’ he said. ‘It follows beautifully from the B.’ And he demonstrated by stroking his thumb across the strings.

Laurent sat up and looked at the shape of Enzo’s fingers, then snatched the guitar back. ‘Let me try it.’ He found the chord almost instantly, then slid down to it from the B. ‘Cool,’ he said.

‘It is,’ Enzo said and took the guitar away again.

Laurent reprised his objection. ‘Hey!’

‘You’ve got homework to do.’

‘Aw, Da-ad.’ And Enzo heard his own Scottish drawl in his son’s plea. They always spoke English together, and Laurent had quickly acquired his father’s accent. Like Sophie. But also like Sophie, he was truly French, culturally and linguistically.

‘Come on, Lo-Lo, I’ll give you hand with your maths.’ Dominique swept in from the hall and sat down at the table, placing both hands flat on its surface. She was well practised now at home-schooling. ‘Where’s your bag?’

‘In my room.’

‘Go get it, then.’

‘Aw, Mama, do I have to?’

She canted her head and raised one eyebrow, which was enough to force him out of his chair to slope off to his bedroom, hands pushed deep into his pockets.

Sophie, in coat and scarf, passed him in the doorway and went to the French windows that overlooked the square. She pressed her nose to the glass. ‘Bertrand’s late. I’ll expire from heat if he’s any longer.’ She turned back into the room. ‘So what are you going to do, Papa? Are you going to go and take a look at that burial site?’

Dominique cast an enquiring look in his direction. ‘Are you?’

He slumped into the chair that Laurent had vacated and strummed a chord on the guitar. ‘I don’t really feel like travelling far from Cahors during this bloody pandemic.’

‘You’ll be alright if you wear a mask,’ Sophie said.

‘It’s alright for you, Soph. You’re not in a high-risk age group.’

‘I’ll go with you, then,’ Dominique said. ‘We’ll go in the car. I’ll drive. We don’t have to mix with anyone.’

‘What about Laurent?’ The schools had been closed again after a spike in cases.

‘Bertrand and me can look after him,’ Sophie said. And they all turned at the sound of a whooping noise in the doorway.

A grinning Laurent, satchel hanging from one hand, punched the air with the other. ‘Yesss! Bertrand is ace at Resident Evil.’

Enzo glanced at the discarded PlayStation controller and thought that maybe escape from the house for a few hours might not be such a bad idea after all.