‘He could have killed us both.’ A subdued Bertrand held a bag of frozen peas to the back of his head.
‘You’re perfectly capable of looking after yourself,’ Sophie told him. ‘But my Papa’s an old man.’
‘Thank you, Sophie,’ Enzo said. ‘That makes me feel so much better.’ He was sitting on a chair in the sejour in his boxer shorts, having stripped off his blood-soiled clothes and washed his hands. But he still felt dirty.
The gendarmes had spent nearly an hour taking statements. Enzo had half-expected to see David Roussel, but of the gendarmes who appeared, none was familiar. Bertrand had described to them how he and Sophie had returned late from a meal out to find Enzo’s car at the foot of the stairs, blood on the steps, the dead dog. And then seen lights and heard shouting from the chateau. If it hadn’t been for his intervention, Enzo’s would-be assassin might well have succeeded in killing him.
But Bertrand was still furious with himself. ‘I had him,’ he kept saying. ‘I was stronger than him, I could have taken him.’ And Enzo thought how Bertrand was probably stronger than most men he knew.
But when they had fallen, it was Bertrand who had struck his head and was momentarily disabled. All that he had been left with, when Enzo’s attacker made his escape, was a handful of blood-stained material torn from a jacket pocket. Enzo had told him to keep that to himself when the police arrived. He did not want the piece of pocket disappearing into some repository in a rural gendarmerie, where it would probably languish, wasted evidence, for weeks, months, or even years.
He asked for it now, and Bertrand handed him the scrap of torn green fabric. ‘Linen,’ he said, as he held it up to the light, and winced as Sophie dabbed more disinfectant in his face. There was the remains of some embroidered emblem along one edge, unidentifiable with its shreds of ripped and broken thread. ‘And good silk thread. He’s not short of a few euros, our killer.’
‘Is it his blood, do you think?’ Bertrand said.
‘Probably. I definitely cut him. Although it could be Braucol’s. But it won’t be hard to establish if it’s human or animal.’ He reached for his shoulder bag and took out a clear plastic ziplock evidence bag and dropped it in. He closed his eyes, and the image of the puppy dangling on the end of the rope was still there, engraved in his memory. ‘This man’s a psychopath. And every one of us is going to be in danger until he’s caught.’
He opened his eyes to find Sophie looking into them, concern etched all over her face. ‘Oh, Papa, I don’t like this.’ She sat on his knee, as she had so often as a little girl, and put her arms around him.
‘No, I don’t like it either, Sophie. Which is why you and Bertrand are going back to Cahors first thing in the morning.’
She pulled away. ‘No!’
‘We can’t leave you here on your own, Mister Macleod.’ Bertrand stood up, pushing out inflated pectorals, as if somehow his youthful macho posturing would make the old buck back down.
‘That’s exactly what you’re going to do, Bertrand. I’m putting Sophie in your care. Anything happens to her, you’ll have me to answer to.’ And he raised a quick finger at Sophie to preempt her protests. ‘This is not up for discussion, Sophie. You’re out of here. Both of you. First thing.’
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
