that. It was likely that he would be asked to leave. Elisabeth had made it clear she expected him to ask for anything he wanted to see. But he didn’t want to alert anyone to this new focus of his interest.
Almost holding his breath, he flicked the light switch down and bathed the dead man’s study in cold yellow light. He moved silently across the room to roll back the lid of the desk and open up the laptop. The start-up chorus reverberated around the room, and the operating system seemed to take forever to load. At last the desktop appeared on the screen, and he opened the mailer and quickly navigated his way to the archive folders. He stared at the screen with incomprehension, before scrolling up and down the row of folders. But there was no doubt. The Cheval folder was gone. Erased. All evidence of Marc Fraysse’s gambling relationship with Jean Ransou lost forever, along with any record of exactly how much he had placed in bets. All that remained were the two printouts he still had in his pocket.
He had always known that it would be possible for any computer-savvy person to retrace his steps through Marc Fraysse’s laptop to see exactly what he had looked at the day before. Erasing those files would have been a simple matter.
And it seemed to Enzo that the only possible person who could have done that was Elisabeth Fraysse.
Back in his room he stripped off, leaving a trail of clothes behind him as he headed for the bathroom and turned on the shower. Hot water cascaded over his face and shoulders, down his back and over his belly, warming his thighs. He stood for several minutes feeling the healing heat of the water relax muscles tight with tension and stiff from unaccustomed exertion.
He rubbed himself with a big, soft bath towel, and dried his hair vigorously before slipping into the soft silk of his black embroidered dressing gown and padding back into the living room. There he poured himself a large single malt from the fridge, diluted it with a little water, and sank into the seductive softness of the settee.
He lifted his laptop on to his knees and checked his email, then opened the moi. dssr file and scrolled through it until he found the passage he was looking for. He had sped-read through it previously, but wanted to go back now and read it more carefully, to be certain that the impression he had come away with from that first scanning had been accurate. If so, then there was a puzzling inconsistency between what he’d been told and what he had read.
Chapter Twenty
Saint-Pierre, France, February 1998
It had been a long, miserable winter. Like so many winters up here on the plateau, there had been snow, which kept people away. Certainly from Paris, and further afield. There were always a few regulars from Clermont, but local and passing business was never going to be enough. The dining room (I closed the west conservatory during the winter months) had remained stubbornly empty on some days, and on others only two or three tables were occupied. It was soul-destroying. I had two Michelin stars, and on some days fewer than two customers.
Elisabeth, as always, tried to persuade me that we should close for the winter. We would save on staff and heating, she said. And people wouldn’t forget about us. As soon as the spring came they would return, like the geese. But I always told her: how can we expect Michelin to give us a third star if we are only part-timers? I was convinced we had to stay open, regardless, if that third star was ever to come our way.
I had watched all through the winter months for the Michelin inspector. Every lone customer, man or woman, who came and sat in a quiet corner was a potential spy for the Guide. And yet I was never sure why I was so obsessed with the notion. Would I have treated him, or her, any differently? No. And, of course, I knew there was no point in trying to open a discussion on the subject. That would only have worked against me.
I just wanted to know. That Michelin had been, and seen, and eaten, and that there was at least the chance that my rating would be reconsidered before the publication of the next Guide. I had spent a lifetime in the kitchen working for that. The first two stars had come quickly, it seemed. The third was infuriatingly slow to arrive, and I was beginning to fear that it never would. The low cloud, bruised and dark, that hung over us that February, spitting sleet in our faces from the teeth of a bitter north wind, reflected my mood in more ways than one.
It was a miserable day late in the month when the call came. I can remember, we’d had three bookings for lunch and five for dinner, not enough to cover the cost of even one chef. The rain was driving in across the Massif from the north-west. It was Georges who answered the phone in the office and came running through the hotel to find me. There was a Monsieur Bernard Naegellen on the phone to speak to me, he said. And, of course, both of us knew that Monsieur Naegellen was the Director of Michelin’s Red Guides. I almost broke my neck to get to the kitchen, and then had to stand with my hand over the mouthpiece for almost a minute while I tried to control my breathing. When I spoke, finally, you would never have guessed how my heart was racing beneath my chef’s white blouse. “ Bonjour Monsieur Naegellen. Comment allez-vous?”
But he didn’t beat about the bush. There were no niceties to be observed in the matter of Michelin stars. “Monsieur Fraysse,” he said. “As you know the 1998 edition of the Guide Michelin will be published next month. I am just calling to let you know that you will have a rating of three stars in the new Guide.”
I suppose it must have given great pleasure to successive directors of the Guide to deliver such news, and I have no doubt they were on the receiving end of many different reactions. I was so tense, I think that all I said was, “Oh? That’s good.” I could hardly have understated more the emotions that were bubbling up inside me.
He told me that, of course, this was not yet public knowledge, and that I was to keep it to myself until publication. But he must have known, even as he spoke, that there was not a cat in hell’s chance of that happening.
When I came off the phone, I realized that the entire kitchen staff was crowded into my office. Someone had told Elisabeth about the call, and she was there, too, pink-faced and wide-eyed. Everyone, it seems, was holding his breath. But it took me a moment to find my voice. “Ladies and gentlemen,” I said. “Welcome to Chez Fraysse. Saint-Pierre’s first and only three-star restaurant.”
The place exploded. I have never seen, nor felt, such unrestrained joy. If you work in this business, be you dishwasher or head chef, it feels like the crowning moment of your life. I remembered so well those celebrations in the kitchen of the Blanc Brothers all those years before, how the champagne had flowed, and how it seemed like my life had just begun in that moment. The moment when I knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that this was what I wanted. That this was what my life would be all about.
Beyond that, I remember very little. Except that I cried a lot, and drank a lot. Everyone who had reserved to eat in the restaurant that day, I declared, would dine on the house, the very first customers of the three-star Chez Fraysse.
It wasn’t until that night, when the dust had settled and the last customer been served, that I managed to find some time and space to myself. I went to my study and closed the door and sat at my writing bureau. There were unfinished and unresolved issues in my life. Regrets and sorrows. It had been in my mind for some time that if ever I won my third star I would put these things right. So I did it there and then, without pausing to think, or to remember the pain.
Still intoxicated by my news, I wrote a long and rambling letter to my estranged brother, Guy. It was time, I told him, that we put the past behind us and together built a future for the place our parents had left us. Something that would honour their memory. Something that would have made them proud. I knew that my life was about to change irrevocably, and that I would no longer be able to run the kitchen and the business. Who better to take over the business side than my own brother? I posted that letter the next day.
Before the end of the week he called me. It was the oddest feeling to hear his voice again after all those years.
“I received your letter,” he said. “And I have only one thing to say.” I remember holding my breath, thinking that he was going to turn me down. And then he said, simply, “Yes.” And somehow my life felt whole again.
Guy arrived from Paris the very next day with a crate of champagne. We hugged and cried and got drunk together, and I realized what folly it had been to have wasted so many years locked in such bitter enmity.
