dog, and the odds against her finding something that might not even be there.
Dominique stood with her hands on her hips. “Looks like a waste of time,” she said and called out Tasha’s name. Her voice rang across the hillside before being soaked up by the rain. But Tasha’s fixation was making her deaf, or at least impervious, to her mistress’ call. She was two or three hundred meters away, and disappeared down into the trees. Dominique sighed and looked up into the low cloud that hung, it seemed, just above their heads. The rain was more than a mist now, and Enzo could hear it beating a tattoo on their waterproofs. “I guess she’ll give up in time. We should get back to the shelter of the buron. She’ll know where to find us.”
They trudged wearily back across the plateau to the old ruined shelter and squeezed into the damp and dark beneath the lauzes, to peer out miserably into the gloom. The valley below them had been swallowed up by cloud and rain. The chill in the air was raw, and Enzo was not sure if he had ever felt quite so cold.
Dominique reached up to lean against the cracked stone lintel above the door, her face set in grim acceptance of failure. “What will you do when this is all over here?”
“Go back to Cahors, the university in Toulouse. In a few months I’ll start looking at case number six.”
She nodded, knowing that this man who had come so unexpectedly into her life would leave again just as suddenly. In twenty-four hours, everything had changed, and yet nothing had changed. “Will this be your first failure?”
Enzo allowed himself a wry smile. “I haven’t given up yet.”
“But you have no real evidence. Nothing to work with. And that’s what you need, isn’t it? I mean, what do you know that you didn’t know before?”
“I know a lot more about Fraysse himself. I know that he and his brother had a feud that lasted nearly twenty years, and that the falling out between them was over Elisabeth. I know that Marc Fraysse had a gambling problem. Elisabeth’s word, not mine, although she used it in denial. But he had an addiction, that is certain, and owed somebody a lot of money. I know that he’d been having an affair with the wife of his second. An affair that he ended abruptly just days before he was murdered.”
He had been over it all with her the previous night, but condensing it now, like this, made him realize just how little he really had to go on. And he saw in her eyes that she knew it, too.
Somewhere in the far distance they heard Tasha barking. A bark that echoed dully among the trees, absorbed by the stillness and the wet, but which was repeated and persistent.
Dominique looked alarmed. “Oh, my god, I hope she’s alright. I know that there have been poachers up here recently. I suppose they could have set traps. I never thought about that.” Even as she spoke, Tasha’s distant bark seemed to turn hoarse, almost into a whine. Dominique rushed out on to the hillside, and Enzo followed, filled with a dread sense of guilt, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to forgive himself if anything had happened to her dog.
They followed the track, Enzo struggling to keep up, to the point where they had seen Tasha disappearing among the trees. The barking was much closer now, and if anything, more frantic. Dominique thrashed through the undergrowth, finding herself eventually on a deer track that cut through the woods. Both she and Enzo found rain- laden webs bursting on their faces as they broke through virgin territory where spiders had labored in the dark the night before.
They saw Tasha in a small clearing below them, an area of fern beaten down by gathering animals, probably deer. Moss-covered rocks had been exposed in the slope at some point by tiny mud slides. A fallen tree lay across the track. Enzo scrambled after the young gendarme as she climbed over it, and they found Tasha digging frantically at the foot of one of the rocks. Barking and whining, excited, almost frenzied.
Dominique crouched beside her, to be greeted by a flapping pink tongue in her face and muddy feet scrabbling at her thighs. She produced the black ball. Tasha snatched it from her hand, moving away then, chewing it and growling, dropping it and snatching it. Job done. Obsession rewarded.
Enzo crouched down beside Dominique. “What did she find?”
“I don’t know. Something buried here beneath the stone, maybe.”
Enzo took a pair of latex gloves from his pocket and snapped them on before starting to move away the earth and pebbles disturbed by the dog. He reached a slab of flat stone a matter of inches below the surface, and dug away the earth with his fingers until he found its edge, then pulled it up.
There, in a shallow hollow beneath the stone, lay a discolored purple waterproof fanny bag still attached to its belt.
The Scotsman and the gendarme exchanged looks. “Marc Fraysse’s missing bag.” He allowed himself a tiny smile. He had played very, very long odds, and won. Fraysse himself would have approved.
Enzo ripped off his soiled and torn latex gloves and replaced them with a fresh pair. Carefully, he removed the pouch from its seven-year resting place, and with almost trembling fingers unzipped it. Both he and Dominique peered inside.
“My god,” she whispered. “The phone and the knife are still there.”
The Thiers knife, a Nokia cellphone, and the bag that Marc Fraysse had once worn around his waist lay on Dominique’s desk in clear plastic evidence bags. All three items would be dusted for prints and subjected to minute forensic examination. But Enzo was only too acutely aware of the fact that while he had been responsible for their discovery, he had no claim over them whatsoever. On finding them, they had immediately become official evidence in a murder enquiry that could no longer be considered ‘cold’.
Dominique slumped into her chair, her waterproofs still dripping on the coat stand. “I’ll have them couriered to the police scientifique labs in Clermont Ferrand. We should have results back in a few days.”
Enzo gazed at the dead man’s possessions recovered from the hill, frustrated, eaten up by impatience. “How about holding off on that for twenty-four hours?”
She looked at him in surprise. “Why?”
He shrugged. “They may, or may not, turn up something interesting. But on balance, I figure probably not.”
“What difference would it make to wait twenty-four hours?”
“Maybe all the difference in the world. And what’s one day after seven years?”
She narrowed her eyes and cocked her head to one side. “So what are you proposing?”
“You can dust the phone for prints here, right?”
She nodded. “I could, yes.”
“Well, why don’t you do that, and then let me borrow it? Just until tomorrow.”
She frowned, and then laughed. “Why? I mean, you can hardly make calls with it. The battery’s been dead for years.”
“I’m figuring there are some decent-sized cellphone shops down in Clermont.”
“Sure. All the major providers. SFR, Bouygues, Orange… I know it was in a waterproof bag, Enzo, but surely you don’t think they could get it working?”
“No.” He sat down opposite her. “But the sim card is intact. And it should be a fairly simple matter to access the information on it. Addresses, phone numbers. Calls made. Calls received. We know now for certain that theft wasn’t the motive for the murder. The sim card should be able to tell us out who was the last person he spoke to on that phone. And that could be crucial.” He tilted his head and gave her his most appealing smile. “Is that not worth a one-day wait? I’m going down to Clermont with Guy Fraysse early tomorrow. We could know by lunchtime.”
She drew a deep breath. “You’re taking advantage of me.”
“Of course.”
“It could cost me my job.”
He shook his head. “I won’t tell if you don’t.”
Chapter Twenty-seven
Guy’s bright yellow Renault Trafic wound down the hill in the dark toward the autoroute. Empty crates rattled and clattered about in the back. Enzo held on with white knuckles to the handle on the passenger door, but
