increasing the risk of discovery.
Enzo could see why the murderer had been unable to get Petty’s hands fully into the gloves. They were tiny, and must have belonged, originally, either to a very small man-or to a woman. He remembered seeing at least two women amongst the members of the Ordre in Josse’s photograph album. So it was not unheard of, even if it was uncommon. He said to Roussel, ‘There’s a good chance these gloves belonged to a female. You should be able to get a list from Jean-Marc Josse of all the women members of the Ordre since its inception. Just the dead ones. There can’t have been many. That could seriously narrow the field for us, in terms of identifying families with access to old robes.’
Roussel nodded grimly. It was almost as if each fresh thought of Enzo’s was another nail in the coffin of the gendarme’s self-esteem. Belief in himself was visibly ebbing.
Enzo returned his focus to the gloves and carefully pushed the fingers of each into their palms and teased them inside out. The backs and palms were wine-stained from Petty’s fingers, but the fingers of the gloves themselves were almost pristine white. He examined the end of each one in turn, stopping only when he reached the ring-finger of the left hand. He slipped his reading glasses down to the end of his nose and brought the glove up close to his face to examine it. ‘Ah-hah!’
‘What?’ Roussel moved closer to see what Enzo had found.
Enzo pointed to a tiny, dark-stained fleck close to the top of the back of the finger. ‘Almost certainly blood.’ He smiled. ‘It’s amazing how often you’ll find it inside the fingers of a glove. A little tear in the cuticle, a tiny bit of bleeding. Happens to us all. Can’t be Petty’s though, because his fingers never got up there.’
‘How on earth did the lab at Toulouse miss that?’
‘You’ll have to ask them. But I suspect it’s because they didn’t look. Or, at least, didn’t look carefully enough.’
‘Is there enough to get a DNA sample?’
‘Should be. Though it’s almost certainly not the killer’s blood. Like Petty, he’d never have got his hands in there. But it’ll mean we can confirm a family connection if we get ourselves a suspect.’
Roussel nodded. ‘I’ll make a call right now. Arrange to have it couriered to Toulouse this afternoon.’
When he’d left the room, Enzo took a look at the other plastic evidence sacks. The first label he looked at was marked “Contents of Bin.” He cleared away the robe and hat from the table and emptied the sack on to the white paper. Every item was separately bagged in clear plastic ziplocks. Enzo sifted through them. An empty toothpaste tube, a used razor head, pieces of toilet paper scrunched up around what looked like dried mucus. There was a blood-stained wad of some kind. Enzo held it up to examine it more closely and realised it was a used sanitary pad. He crinkled his nose in distaste and moved on to find an empty pop-out pack of Hedex painkillers, several open plastic sheaths for hemorrhoid suppositories, a piece of chewing gum wrapped in tissue paper.
He stopped suddenly, realising where these items must have been found. The Hedex, the suppositories-these were things he and Michelle had come across in Petty’s toilet bag. These discarded medications and toiletries must have been recovered from the bathroom wastebin at the gite. Then consternation drew his brows together in a frown. A used sanitary pad?
The door opened, Roussel returning from his phone call. ‘It’s all arranged. A dispatch rider will take the gloves to Toulouse later today.’
Enzo held up the bag containing the sanitary pad. ‘Might be an idea if he took this, too.’
‘Why?’
‘Didn’t it strike you as odd that a man living on his own would have a soiled sanitary pad in the wastebin of his toilet?’
‘Of course it did. But there was no evidence of anyone else staying there. And neither the Lefevres nor anyone working at Chateau des Fleurs, saw Petty with a woman, or even saw a woman coming or going to the gite.’
‘You didn’t think to DNA-test it?’
‘Why would we? We had nothing to compare it to.’
‘I’d like it tested now, please.’
‘Okay.’ Roussel snatched the bag from him, his earlier self-pity turning now to irritation. ‘Anything else, Monsieur Macleod?’
Enzo was thoughtful for several moments. ‘Yeah. There is.’ He cast an eye over the contents of Petty’s bin strewn across the table. ‘How come you kept the contents of his bin, when you didn’t know he’d been murdered until a year after his disappearance?’
‘Because by the time he’d been missing for a week, alarm bells had started ringing.’
‘You told me people go missing all the time.’
‘They do. But not famous people. Not celebrities. You or I, we could disappear into the ether. But someone like Petty?’ He shook his head. ‘Not so easy just to vanish when half the world knows your face.’
‘So alarm bells began to ring…’ Enzo prompted him.
‘Missed appointments, conference calls he never logged in for. His agent started hassling us. Then the US embassy. We started taking it more seriously. He’d booked the gite for a month. There were still ten days of the rental left, and he’d been missing for well over a week. All his stuff was still there, including the contents of the bathroom wastebin. So we bagged it all, as a precaution.’
‘Did something right for once.’
Roussel turned sullen eyes away from Enzo’s. ‘Anything else we can do for you, monsieur?’
‘Yes, there is.’ From his shoulder bag, Enzo took the ziplock bags containing the samples of Petty’s hair, and the gunk from his razor. They were labelled and dated, and he held them out to Roussel. ‘It would be useful to have a sample of Petty’s DNA as well.’
III
From the lab, in its tiny, hidden square in the heart of the old town, Enzo walked through to the Eglise Saint- Pierre. The repeating pattern of arches in an elaborate stone doorway were reflected in the redbrick architecture of its towering facade. Coloured fragments of sunlight, glimpsed beyond the half-open door, fell in through stained- glass windows to cast light in the gloom of its vast, echoing interior. But Enzo did not go inside. Neither prayer nor confession were high on his list of priorities.
He turned left into the Rue Portal and followed the narrow, cobbled street up between oddly canted apartments to the big, leafy Place de la Liberation, where sunlight danced in the shade of tall chestnuts whose leaves were stirred by a light wind. All along its length, old people sat on benches watching leaves fall and time slip away.
Sophie and Bertrand were sitting at a table outside the Grand Cafe des Sports with Nicole, Michelle, and Charlotte. As soon as he joined them, Enzo became aware of an unspoken tension between Charlotte and Michelle-aware, too, that he was probably the cause of it. He was neither flattered nor pleased by the thought, reflecting only that his life would be much less complicated if there were fewer women in it. Sophie was being extra bright in an attempt to gloss over the discordant atmosphere.
‘We went to the Maison du Vin,’ she said. ‘They’ve got an amazing tasting room down in the cellars of the old abbe. Rows and rows of sinks for spitting your wine into.’
Nicole humphed. ‘A waste of good wine.’
Sophie ignored her. ‘Trouble is, Papa, we’re out of season now, and they’re only doing tasting classes on Thursday nights.’ She delved into her bag. ‘But we got these.’ And she produced a sheaf of photocopied documents. ‘ Les etapes de la degustation. Everything you need to know about tasting wine.’ She thrust them at her father, and he flicked through sheets of paper with illustrations of wine glasses being looked at, sniffed, swirled, and quaffed. La vue. La nez. Le gout. There was a list of colour nuances for red, white, and rose wine, categories of smells and tastes, an illustration of the human tongue with its clusters of taste buds capable of distinguishing everything from sweet to acid to salty to bitter.
‘And I used to think wine was easy,’ he said. ‘You drank it, and you liked it. Or you didn’t.’
‘There’s much more to it than that, Monsieur Macleod,’ Bertrand said earnestly. ‘It’s full of subtlety and
