morning sun and crunching underfoot. And he slumped into a chair under the yellow awning of the Grand Cafe des Sports and gazed out across the square with eyes that did not see.
It barely seemed credible that Gendarme Roussel should have become one more case in his own missing persons file. Enzo had feared that someone else would go missing during this year’s grape harvest, but had never for one moment thought that it might be Roussel. He tried to convince himself that it was just coincidence. That there would be some rational explanation. But although he knew that life could throw up some extraordinary coincidences, he never believed in them when it came to an investigation. There were always reasons. For everything.
He searched through his mind for connections between Roussel and the other missing persons in the file. They were not hard to find. Like all the others, Roussel was a local man. He had been personally acquainted with one of them. And he had gone missing at the same time of year. But there had to be something else. Something he wasn’t seeing. His colleagues thought it was a simple case of domestic disharmony. But that’s exactly what Roussel himself had thought about Serge Coste. And Coste had ended up pickled in wine, just like Petty.
The thought of Petty took Enzo back to the day in the grande salle at Chateau des Fleurs when Pierric Lefevre had dug out the American’s family records from the old archive. In a strange sort of way, that made Petty a local, too. Or, at least, his antecedents. But it made no sense, for it had been Petty’s first trip to Gaillac. His only connection to the place was historical.
Enzo’s reflections were interrupted by a young waiter with dark, curly, gelled hair shaved close around the sides of his head. ‘ Bonjour monsieur. Je vous ecoute. ’
Enzo glanced up. ‘ Un petit cafe, s’il vous plait.’
The waiter cocked his head. ‘You’re the guy that went off with Braucol.’ He grinned, shaking his head, some affectionate memory of the puppy dog coming back to him. ‘How is the little guy?’
Enzo didn’t have the heart to tell him. ‘Doing good.’
The waiter laughed. ‘He was a pain in the ass, you know. But I kind of miss him.’
And as he went off to get the coffee, Enzo thought how he would miss him, too. He turned quickly to the envelope the adjutant had given him from the Police Scientifique in Toulouse, and drew out the preliminary report. He ran his eye down the text, nodding to himself as it confirmed what he had suspected. Petty’s DNA sample did not match the sample recovered from the speck of blood inside the glove. The chances were that if the blood in the glove did not belong to the killer himself, then it belonged to a relative. But if they got themselves a suspect, familial DNA matching could still secure a conviction. If they could find a suspect.
He flipped over a page and felt sudden goosebumps rise up all across his shoulders. He felt his face sting as if he had just been slapped. He stood up as the waiter arrived with his coffee, and dropped a couple of coins on the table.
‘Give it to someone else.’
II
She was sitting at the table where he had first seen her. She was reading, just as she had been then. But she greeted him somewhat differently. When his shadow fell across her book she looked up, irritation replaced immediately by a smile that broke like sunshine across her face. ‘You’re back. I’m so glad. I had a thought about my dad, and those vineyards he visited…’ She took off her sunglasses, green eyes flashing and stood up to kiss him.
His recoil was almost imperceptible, but it was like a shutter dropping between them. Her smile was gone in an instant. ‘What’s wrong?’
He dropped the buff envelope on the table and sat in the free chair opposite, leaving her to stand looking down at him. He glanced out across the shimmering green and red vines. The harvesters were out again after the rain to gather the last of this year’s recolte. Then he looked up to meet the concern in her eyes and remembered how attractive she was. Clasps held chestnut hair clear of her face. Her lips were pale in a lightly tanned face, and he remembered the feel of them against his. Soft, sensuous. And he recalled her mother’s words in Sacramento: ‘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.’
‘Why have you been lying?’
Her skin paled beneath her tan, and she sat down. ‘What do you mean?’ Her voice was small and uncertain.
‘Four years ago when your father came to Gaillac, you followed him here. You went to see him at the gite.’
But she wasn’t going to admit it easily. ‘How can you know that?’
‘Familial DNA matching, Michelle. It was in my mind for quite another reason, even before I read the report.’
Her self-confidence was evaporating as he looked at her. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Back in 2003, in the UK, a kid dropped a brick from a bridge on a motorway. It smashed through the windscreen of a car and killed the driver. Forensic scientists managed to salvage a sample of the kid’s DNA from the brick. The British have got the biggest DNA database in the world. More than three million people in it. The kid wasn’t one of them. But a relative was. They matched sixteen points out of twenty, and secured a conviction in March 2004. The world’s first conviction using familial searching.’
He could see that she made no sense of this.
‘Michelle, when you went to see your father it was… how can I put this delicately? It was that time of the month. You left a used sanitary pad in a plastic bag in the trash can in the bathroom.’ He saw realisation breaking over her like an ocean wave. ‘For some reason, the police kept the contents of the bin as evidence. I sent the pad for DNA testing, along with those samples of your father’s that we found among his things. And guess what…’
But he didn’t need to elucidate further. She shook her head despondently. ‘You don’t think I killed him?’
He looked at her for a long time, searching those green eyes, trying to divine what complexity they masked. Then he sighed. ‘No. No, I don’t. But I know you lied, Michelle, then and now. And I want to know why.’
He watched as tears bubbled up in her eyes, and she tried hard to control them. ‘I wanted to confront him. I wanted to make him meet my eye and tell me why. Why some goddamned bottle of fermented grape juice was more important to him than his own flesh and blood. But even then, even to my face, he wasn’t going to give any part of himself away. It was the same old blind he always drew on his emotions. He accused me of being like my mother. Possessive and territorial. He said that marrying her had been the biggest mistake of his life. And by implication, I was just an extension of that mistake. He couldn’t even see me as being a part of him, of belonging to him. I’d have given anything…’ She broke off, her voice cracking, and she clenched her fists on the table in front of her, fighting hard to control her emotions, to sublimate them again behind cool, green windows of obfuscation. And Enzo thought how like him she was. How for all her feigned affection, she hid everything real behind the same blind her father had always drawn.
She rediscovered her control, and Enzo saw her expression harden. It was not attractive.
‘We just shouted at one another. And I stormed off. Then, when he went missing, it crossed my mind that maybe he’d killed himself. Because of me; because of our row.’ She laughed, a sad, bitter little laugh without humour. ‘But I should have known better. That might have meant he’d cared.’ She drew a deep breath. ‘Anyway, I never told anyone I’d been there. And when he turned up dead, murdered, it was twelve months too late. And wouldn’t have helped anyway.’
She examined his face for a response, and whatever she saw there brought with it a look of resignation. Her eyes flickered away from his. It was as if she suspected that he had seen her truly for the first time, and that there was no longer any point in pretending with him. She gazed away across the valley, the hum of insects filling the air around them, the distant sounds of the harvesters carried on the warm vent d’autan.
‘So where does that leave us?’ she said.
‘There is no us, Michelle.’ And he was struck by the irony of the words that Charlotte had used so often with him. ‘It’s very flattering for a fifty-year-old guy like me to have some young girl half his age fawning over him, offering him sex, giving him back maybe just a little of his lost youth. But there’s no future in it for you. Go home.
