with dew. The shadows cast by the chestnut trees were almost impenetrable.
Candlelight flickered over all the soft surfaces of Charlotte’s face as she turned it towards him. ‘There was another reason I came down here to see you.’
Something in her tone rang warning bells. He turned his head sharply. ‘What?’
She hesitated for a long moment, as if undecided. Then she said, ‘Enzo…Roger’s seeing Kirsty.’
He could not have said why this news filled him with such dark foreboding. Except that there was nothing about it that seemed right, or natural. Enzo was only just on speaking terms with his daughter after their years of estrangement. She was raw and vulnerable, and he knew instinctively that a relationship with Roger Raffin was wrong.
Raffin was an intelligent and successful Parisian journalist in his mid-thirties who had been motivated to write his book on France’s seven most notorious unsolved murders by the failure of police to find the killer of his own wife. When Enzo began his investigation into the first of those killings, he and Raffin had reached an arrangement on shared publication rights. At that time, Raffin had just ended an eighteen month affair with Charlotte, and the separation had been acrimonious.
‘I suppose that means he’s not jealous about you and me any more.’
‘He’s never stopped being jealous, Enzo. And him being with Kirsty doesn’t change anything.’
He looked at her very directly. ‘I know why I don’t like the idea of Kirsty and Roger. Why don’t you?’
‘Because I know him too well. He’s not right for her, Enzo. He’s…’ She looked away, and he could see the tension gathered all along the line of her jaw. She finished her thought with a shadow in her tone. ‘There’s something dark about Roger, Enzo. Something beyond touching. Something you wouldn’t want to touch, even if you could.’
It was a full five minutes after Charlotte left him to go to bed, and the light went off in the bedroom, that he turned at the sound of movement in the doorway.
Sophie stood there in the dark, barefoot in her nightdress, her hair a tangle, and he had a sudden memory of her as a little girl standing in the dark of his bedroom telling him about the monsters under her bed, and how she wanted to spend the night with him. And how he’d led her back to her own room, and shown her there was nothing under the bed, and tucked her in again. He’d had to read to her for nearly half an hour before she finally drifted away, her little hand still clutching his so tightly he’d had to pry her fingers gently free.
‘I thought you were sleeping.’
‘Couldn’t get to sleep for the monsters under my bed.’
He looked at her in astonishment. Had she read his mind? And then he realised that, of course, it was a shared memory. As vivid for her as for him. Something in the moment must have evoked the recollection for them both. He smiled and held out his hand. She took it and sat on his knee, tipping her shoulder into his chest and tucking her head up under his chin, just as she had always done as a child.
‘Don’t go interfering in Kirsty’s life,’ she said.
He tensed. ‘How…?’
‘Voices carry in the dark.’
He sighed. ‘He’s not right for her.’
‘That’s for her to decide.’
After a long moment, he said, ‘Do you see her?’
‘I’ve seen her a couple of times. Up in Paris.’
‘You never told me.’ The half-sisters had met for the first time only very recently, each regarding the other with deep suspicion, even jealousy.
‘I don’t tell you everything in my life.’
‘You used to.’
‘I’m not a child anymore.’
‘What difference does that make?’
‘ You don’t tell me everything.’
‘That’s different.’
‘Why? I ask you about Charlotte and all I get is, “Don’t even go there.”’
She did such an accurate parody of his gruff Scottish voice that he couldn’t help but smile. Then, after a moment, ‘So you knew about Kirsty and Roger?’
‘It’s none of your business, Papa.’
He tipped his head down and kissed the top of her head.
‘I love you,’ she said.
‘I don’t have to tuck you in and read to you tonight, do I?’
She sat up grinning. ‘No, it’s alright. If there’re any monsters, Bertrand can get them.’
And as she padded off into the house he thought, with a pang of regret, about how the baton of responsibility for daughters as they grew up always got handed on from fathers to lovers.
But where Kirsty was concerned, despite Sophie’s warning, he did not want to pass that baton on to Roger Raffin.
Chapter Twelve
I
Nicole could smell coffee on the cool morning air as she climbed the steps to the gite. She had been awake early, to find La Croix Blanche blanketed in a fog that had risen up from the river. Without waiting for breakfast, she had left the house and climbed the hill to the old church, emerging from the autumn brume into brilliant sunshine, finding the church and hilltop like an island in a sea of mist. A studded wooden door closed off an archway of stone and brick, and standing on the steps she’d had a view out across the ocean of cloud below. It seemed to lap through the vines at the very foundations of the church.
Then, as she’d followed the path down to Chateau des Fleurs, the mist had simply melted away, rising on air warmed by the sun to evaporate and reveal a sky of the clearest, palest blue.
But her good spirits, which had risen with the mist, ended abruptly as she entered the gite, and Enzo turned towards her from his whiteboard without so much as a bonjour. His brow was furrowed in concentration. ‘I’ve been thinking, Nicole. You can’t stay at La Croix Blanche. In fact, if I’d thought about it, I wouldn’t have let you go back there last night.’
Her hackles rose. ‘Why not?’
‘Because Fabien Marre has made it perfectly clear that he had nothing but antipathy towards Petty. And since both bodies were found on his vineyard, he has to be considered a suspect.’
‘No!’
Her abrupt response startled him. ‘No, what?’
‘You’re wrong about Fabien.’
‘Nicole…’
She did all but stamp her foot. ‘I’m staying at La Croix Blanche, Monsieur Macleod. And if you don’t like it, then I’ll just go home. You’re not my father. You can’t tell me what to do.’
Charlotte turned from the kitchen worktop where she was grilling toast, and she and Enzo exchanged glances.
Enzo shrugged. Long experience had told him that when Nicole was in this frame of mind, rational argument was wasted on her. He raised his hands in self-defence. ‘Okay, okay. Just don’t come crying to me later telling me what a terrible mistake you made.’
Nicole did not consider this worthy of a response and instead installed herself noisily at the computer and hit the start-up button.
A creak on the stairs made them all look up, and Bertrand came down wearing only a pair of boxer shorts. Enzo was aware of both Charlotte and Nicole eyeing him with interest. He was stunningly well-built, smooth, tanned
