“I want to know if you were having an affair with Marc Fraysse.”
She stared at him, eyes unflinching. “Yes.”
Which took Enzo completely by surprise. He was momentarily discomposed. She saw it in his face, and something like a smile stretched her lips.
“No point in lying to you about it. Everyone knew at the time anyway.”
“Even Madame Fraysse?”
“Of course.”
“And Georges?”
“It was an open secret, monsieur.” And Enzo was struck by her use of the same phrase he had employed with Dominique earlier. He had guessed it just right. “Open in that everyone knew. Secret in that nobody acknowledged it. But the relationship died with Marc, and those of us who were left behind just had to get on with it.”
“Get on with what?”
“Life. Work.”
Enzo frowned and shook his head in puzzlement. “I’m surprised that Madame Fraysse would have kept you on, in the circumstances. Why didn’t she just sack you?”
“Because she needed Georges. He was the only chef on the staff capable of keeping the three stars that Marc had got them.”
“And he would have gone if you’d been fired?”
“If Madame Fraysse had lifted one finger against me, it would have been admitting to the secret, Monsieur Macleod. As long as we all maintained the facade of ignorance, nobody lost face. Elisabeth Fraysse may still be my employer, but she hasn’t spoken to me in seven years.”
“And Georges?”
“Georges is a weak and spineless man. Marc was his lord and master in every sense. Georges would have done anything for him, including sacrificing his marriage. Which shows you just how much he thought of me.” Anger curled her mouth. “He turned a blind eye at the time, and has never referred to it since.” She glanced at her watch. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’m late. I don’t want to give Madame Fraysse an excuse to fire me after all this time.”
She side-stepped the big frame of the Scotsman and hurried off through the plane trees toward the hotel. Enzo turned to watch her go. She seemed a slight, almost frail figure as she rounded the corner of the east extension and disappeared from view.
Chapter Seventeen
Marc Fraysse’s kitchen garden was vast, spread over an acre of south-facing hillside below the auberge, and protected by a high stone wall. It was built on terraces linked by stone steps covered in lichens and mosses. Parts of it were shaded by fruit trees: apple, pear, cherry, and plum. Extensive rock gardens provided haven for many of the herbs and wild flowers that the chef had used to flavour his dishes. And a huge greenhouse ran along the top end of the potager where it would catch most sunlight for germinating seeds and cultivating bedding plants that would be transferred to the great outdoors in the late spring.
Now, however, large parts of it were being dug over in preparation for winter, with clear polythene sheeting stretched over ribbing to protect the winter vegetables. Along the far wall, huge orange pumpkins sat among fleshy green leaves in soft earth.
As Guy opened the gate to let them in, Enzo saw the dark-haired man with the haunted face who had been putting in snow poles on the road, and who had cast such dead eyes in his direction in the staff canteen that morning. He wore a cloth cap now, and was wielding a long-pronged fork to turn over rich earth near the bottom of the garden.
“Of course, the garden alone can’t supply all our needs,” Guy was saying. “We buy fresh vegetables at the market in Clermont three days a week, and we get a lot of produce from the local farmers.” He chuckled. “They generally turn up at the kitchen door with stuff they’ve just dug out of the ground. Marc always sent the sous-chef to check out the quality and haggle for a price. But we paid them well. Marc believed in supporting the locals. Most of our employees were born within ten kilometres of the auberge.”
He started off down the steps and Enzo followed him.
“But almost all of our herbs and wild flowers come from the garden. Marc laid out these terraces himself, you know. A labour of love. That was in the early days. But when success came, he no longer had the time, and so he asked Lucqui to look after it full time for him.”
The man turning over the earth looked up as they approached.
“Enzo meet Lucqui. Lucqui meet Enzo.”
Lucqui glowered at Enzo from beneath abundant eyebrows and thrust out a big hand to crush Enzo’s and leave it cold and muddy. Enzo tried not to wince, and nodded solemnly. Lucqui’s eyes never left his.
Guy said, “There’s not enough in the garden to keep Lucqui occupied all year round, so he does other odd jobs around the estate, and also acts as gamekeeper and water bailiff.”
“Ah,” Enzo said. “Looks after the flora in the summer and the fauna in the winter.”
Guy smiled, Lucqui didn’t. Guy said, “There’s some good fishing in the river, and we have deer and wild boar in the woods. We also have poachers. A problem which has kept Lucqui out of his bed for quite a few nights recently.” He looked at the gardener. “Still no luck, I take it?”
Lucqui shook his head.
Guy turned to survey the fallow potager at its end of season. “Marc and Lucqui spent a lot of time together here in the old days. God knows what it was they talked about all those hours in the garden. I always figured Lucqui knew Marc better than me.” He turned a grin on Lucqui. “That right, Lucqui?”
Lucqui pushed out his jaw in an unspoken acknowledgement.
Guy slapped Enzo’s shoulder. “Anyway, we should head up the hill before the light starts to go.” And Lucqui returned to forking the earth as Guy and Enzo climbed mossy steps back up to the gate.
“Talkative sort,” Enzo said.
Guy glanced at him. “What?”
“Lucqui. He never spoke a single word.”
Guy laughed. “That’s just Lucqui. Loquacious Lucqui I used to call him. But Marc always said there was nothing he didn’t know about what makes things grow. A real man of the soil. He never seemed to be short of words in conversation with my brother, but he’s pretty much kept his own counsel these past seven years.”
Enzo glanced back down over the terraces, and saw that Lucqui had dismissed them from his mind already, focused instead on the dark volcanic soil that he turned over and broke up with his fork.
By the time they reached the top of the hill the wind was strong enough to almost knock them over, whistling through clumps of already dead mountain grass. They had taken a path north from the auberge across the treeless, west-facing slope, and now it felt like they were scraping the sky. It really did seem like the top of the world up here.
Far off, Enzo could see the peaks of mountains pushing up out of the Auvergne, reaching much higher than where they stood now, but dwarfed somehow by the distance. The landscape formed an irregular mosaic of green and brown, land divided and sub-divided by generations of fractured French inheritance. Looking south toward the lower plateau, they could just see the old ruined buron where Marc’s body had been discovered.
Enzo’s ponytail whipped and blew about his neck and face, and Guy had to hold his beret to stop it blowing away. He said, “You know, in the whole history of mankind, only a handful of people will have stood on this spot, and seen what we see now. That gives me a sense of being very privileged. A privilege that goes beyond money or position.”
Enzo gazed around the panorama of the world laid out at their feet and knew what he meant. He turned suddenly to the surviving Fraysse brother and said, “What did you and Marc fall out about?” It was an interrogation technique he had learned long ago. Always open with a question to which you knew the answer.
