He was quite obsessed, you know. And, frankly, I was more interested in a vodka martini than wine.’ She glanced back through the glass towards the wine wall. ‘Oh, I open a bottle occasionally. Something he’d have treasured. But I only ever have a glass and usually pour the rest of it down the sink.’
It was clear to Enzo that this was something that gave her pleasure. An ironic, bitter, retrospective revenge on her dead husband.
‘What about Michelle?’
‘Oh, she was obsessed, too. Not with wine. With her father. She always thought it was something personal. That he rejected her because of something she’d done. She never could grasp that it was nothing to do with her or me. That there was no way for either of us to compete with his precious wine.’ She took a long pull at her cigarette and flicked ash towards the water. ‘I suppose that’s why she followed him to France.’
Enzo frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘The year he went to Gaillac. She flew out to France the week after he left. She said it was a trip to Paris to see friends. But I never believed her. She just couldn’t let it go.’ She snorted her derision. ‘And then, of course, he goes and vanishes. Murdered, as it turns out. And she never did get to have it out with him.’
Enzo found himself taking short, shallow breaths, and everything he thought he’d known about Michelle went up in flames around him, conviction buried beneath the ash of sudden uncertainty.
‘But the obsession’s never left her, Mister Macleod. Since her father’s death there have been a string of older men in her life, almost as if by making them love her she’s proving to herself that it wasn’t her fault that her father didn’t.’ She glanced at Enzo. ‘Of course, all that these men are really interested in is sex. Imagine. Men your age. Older. With a young girl like that. It’s disgusting.’
And Enzo felt himself slide from uncertainty into guilt and shame.
Chapter Nineteen
I
It was late by the time he got back. And dark. Distant lightning lit up a brooding sky.
He had stopped several times on the long drive south from Paris, pouring coffee down his throat to try to stay awake. Now he was suffering from caffeine overload, his head buzzing, his hands shaking. He had flown out of San Francisco late afternoon, unable to sleep throughout the flight, and landed in Paris with almost a full day ahead of him.
He turned into the driveway leading up through the trees to Chateau des Fleurs. An enormous wave of fatigue washed over him. Like a runner at the end of a long race, the sight of the finish line almost robbed him of his ability to reach it.
All he wanted was to fall into bed. But it crossed his mind that Sophie and Bertrand might well have occupied it in his absence. He would probably have to make do with the clic-clac. Again. They would, no doubt, be asleep by now, and he didn’t have the heart to wake them.
There were no lights on in the chateau. The Lefevres had told him that they would be away when he got back. The gite, too, was in darkness, and he groaned as the prospect of the clic-clac beckoned. He drove past the parking area to the foot of the steps. He would get his stuff out of the trunk tomorrow. Lightning flashed closer, a shorter gap now before the following thunder.
It was on the second or third step, that his foot slid from under him, pitching him forward. He grazed his hands trying to break his fall. He cursed under his breath. Someone had spilled something slick on the stairs. Something like oil. It was profoundly dark, but he could see something darker pooling on the steps, sticky and wet. It was on his clothes and hands. Lightning flashed again and by its light the spillage looked almost black. He made his way up to the door, fumbled for his keys with sticky fingers and unlocked it. He reached inside and turned on a light. With a shock he saw that his hands were red. He looked down and saw that his trousers were stained the same colour. For a brief, irrational moment he thought someone had spilled red paint on the steps. Then the realisation that it was blood hit him with the force of a baseball bat catching him full in the chest.
‘Sophie!’ He shouted through the open door into the house, seized by a sudden and almost paralysing fear. But he was greeted only by silence. He could see that the bulk of the blood had run down from one step to the other, before being smeared over the gravel path at the foot of the stairs as if something, or someone, had been dragged across it.
He hurried back down the steps, careful this time not to slip. The blood was still a vivid red. Fresh. Not yet the rust brown it would turn when dried and oxidised. He could see it in the grass now, a bloody trail leading away from the house towards the trees and the shadow of the pigeonnier. He could hear the approaching storm moving through the trees above him. The light from the terrasse made little impression on the night. Beyond its circle of illumination, the castle parkland seemed even more obscure. But the blood almost glowed. Caught in a sudden flash of lightning it was like the ghostly trail of a giant slug.
Enzo had forgotten his fatigue, all rational thought displaced by an all-consuming fear for his daughter. The thunder crashed ever closer. He ran across the pelouse, leaving tracks in wet grass, and could see the drag of other footprints left there, straddling the path of the blood. Into the impenetrable shadow beneath the ancient pigeonnier, and smack into something soft and heavy suspended from the beams overhead. With fingers made clumsy by fright, he fumbled to switch on the penlight on his keyring and shone it in front of him.
‘Jesus!’ The blasphemy slipped involuntarily from his lips, as he felt bile rising from his stomach. More lightning threw the image in front of him into stark relief against the black beyond.
Braucol was strung up by the neck. His killer had used the child’s swing as a gallows rope, and slit the puppy’s stomach open from neck to pubis. Tears stung Enzo’s eyes, like the coming rain. He could imagine Braucol greeting the stranger on the steps, trusting and playful, trying to untie his shoelaces. Quite unprepared for the thrust of the knife coming out of the dark. The amount of blood on the steps and the trail of it through the grass told Enzo that the first blow had not been fatal. Braucol had still been alive when his murderer strung him up and slit him open.
Revulsion fuelled anger and incomprehension. Why would someone do something like that? Then fear returned, and he looked back towards the gite. A sudden, dreadful picture filled his head. Tangled bedsheets soaked in blood. Sophie and Bertrand murdered as they slept. He sprinted back through the night, powered by panic, a dread desire to banish the image from his mind’s eye, to know that it wasn’t true. Lightning ripped through the night, and thunder struck like a blow, almost immediately overhead. He took the steps two at a time, calling their names aloud as he burst through the door into the bedroom. A flick of the light switch revealed the bed neatly made up, undisturbed. He stood for a moment, staring at it blindly, then ran back through to the sejour and up creaking stairs to the mezzanine. Both bunk beds were empty.
Confusion filled his head like a fog. Where were they? Why weren’t they here?
And why in God’s name would someone slaughter a defenceless dog. Poor Braucol.
‘Bastard!’ He roared his frustration into the night after the retreating thunder, then froze on the spot. Through the window at the back of the gite he saw a light moving along the gallery at the top of the chateau. It flashed through the dark in the direction of the cottage and was then extinguished as suddenly as it had appeared. Sheet lightning crossed the sky, illuminating the shadow of a man leaning on the rail of the gallery looking across the gardens towards the gite.
For the briefest of moments Enzo wondered if it might be a burglar in the castle, a thief taking advantage of the absence of its owners. But a burglar wouldn’t have killed and strung up a puppy. And Enzo knew with an absolute certainty that Braucol was a calling card, an unmistakable message. The light in the gallery flashed on again, for several seconds, and then off. Whoever was up there was letting Enzo know it. Banking on anger dispensing with caution. Making Enzo come after him. Luring him into the dark halls and corridors of the chateau where his adversary would have every advantage. And though all of that rationale passed through Enzo’s mind in just a fraction of a second, the red mist that Braucol’s killer had foreseen robbed him of his reason.
He hurried down swaying steps to the kitchen and drew a long, sharp chef’s knife from the block. Someone was waiting for him up there. Someone who had tried to kill him in the vineyard, someone who had murdered a defenceless animal just to inflame his anger. It was time to put a stop to it, one way or another.
