Peter May - Extraordinary People

They stopped at the gate of the Conseil Général and shook hands, and Préfet Verne pushed through wrought-iron into the cobbled courtyard beyond, to vanish into his own administrative empire. Enzo crossed the square opposite the cathedral with a lightness in his step. The Saturday market was over, and a truck with large rotating brushes was cleaning away the débris . He reached the brick arches of La Halle at the foot of the Place Jean-Jacques Chapou and strolled in through the back entrance of the covered market with his hands in his pockets. Past the poissonerie , with all its fresh fish laid out on crushed ice; Le Chai the wine seller, where you could fill your own container from huge stainless steel vats; Monsieur Chevaline, the butcher; the charcuterie where Enzo sometimes bought pre-cooked plats Asiatique to carry out. The wine seller waved and shouted salut . The butcher called that he had some very tender filet mignon just in. But Enzo wasn’t buying. He was just revelling in being back. Where everything was a known quantity and everyone was familiar. Such a contrast with the hostile anonymity of Paris.

His good mood lasted for as long as it took him to open the door of his apartment and trip over something lurking in the shadows of the hall. It was hard and unyielding and caught him squarely on the shin. He cursed, and saw that it was Bertrand’s metal detector.

It had been there since before his trip to Paris, arriving unexpectedly one night as Enzo was heading down for a nightcap at the Café Le Forum. He had been confronted by Bertrand out on the landing, cradling the long-necked creature with its disc-like head in strong, muscular arms.

Enzo had never made any attempt to disguise his disapproval of this young man with his spiky, blond-tipped brown hair, and pointless pieces of metal piercing eyebrow, nose and lip. ‘What the hell…!’

‘Hi, Papa.’ Sophie’s bright, smiling face, appearing at Bertrand’s shoulder, had made Enzo momentarily forget his irritation. It happened almost every time. Whenever he wasn’t expecting to see her, and she caught him unawares, he always saw her mother in her. Those bright, dark eyes, her elfin face, long blue-black hair fanning out across her shoulders. And the memory of Pascale would wash over him, powerful and melancholic. The only part of Sophie which was identifiably him was the pale streak in her hair which ran back through it from her left temple, not as pronounced as his own, although there was no mistaking the stubborn streak they both shared with equal vigour. ‘You don’t mind if we leave it here for a couple of days?’ she’d said. ‘There’s no room at Bertrand’s mum’s, and the health and safety people would object if he left it lying around the gym.’

In spite of his antipathy towards Bertrand, Enzo could never bring himself to be angry with his daughter for long. ‘What on earth is it?’ he had asked.

‘A metal detector. Bertrand got it cheap at a brocante . Lots of the kids have got them now. Ever since they found those old Roman coins along the riverside above the Pont Louis-Philippe. They’re worth a fortune, you know.’

‘It wouldn’t be for long, Monsieur Macleod,’ Bertrand had promised. ‘Just until I can clear a space in my mother’s grenier .’

But as the pain on his shin testified, it was still there. Enzo glanced at his watch. It was well into the afternoon now, but Sophie’s bedroom door was shut tight, and he figured she was probably still asleep. Kids! They thought nothing of sleeping their lives away. It seemed criminal, somehow, when you had lived longer than you had left, to think of wasting a single moment of your youth. It was gone before you knew it. He thought of that most famous of verses from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

It seemed, too, particularly appropriate to Jacques Gaillard. Although not a young man, he’d had, from all accounts, an abundance of both piety and wit. And neither tears nor time had washed away his blood, spilled on the steps of the altar of St. Étienne du Mont. It made Enzo all the more determined to find his killer. He pushed open the door into the front room to see if the workmen had finished.

The séjour was in chaos. The ouvriers had removed the bookshelves along the far wall, and piled the hundreds of displaced books untidily on tables and chairs, and on most of the available floor space. Mounted in their place was a huge whiteboard, three meters by two. Enzo looked at it with satisfaction and began clearing a way to get to it. He would need to make some space on the table to set up his computer.

There was a knock at the open door from the landing, and a girl’s voice called, ‘Monsieur Macleod?’

‘Through here.’

A young girl, about Sophie’s age, appeared in the doorway. As soon as Enzo saw her he knew why she was there, and cursed inwardly at his forgetfulness. She was not an ugly girl, but physically awkward, big without being tall. She had what in Scotland would have been called good childbearing hips. She wore jeans stretched tightly across them, and a V-necked tee-shirt which strained to contain breasts which one of Enzo’s fellow lecturers had once lasciviously described as being like cantaloupe melons. They had a tendency to draw the eye, and to his shame Enzo had found his eyes drawn to them on more than one occasion. She had a pretty face, and very long, dark, wavy hair which she often tied back in a loose ponytail. Her cheeks burned with the pink bloom of embarrassment.

‘I’m sorry, Monsieur Macleod…I hope I’m not disturbing you.’

‘Nicole.’ Enzo raised both hands in surrender. ‘I’m sorry, I completely forgot. You know, things have been…well….’ He gave up trying to find excuses. ‘I just forgot, that’s all.’

‘I know. I’ve been to the hospital. They didn’t know anything about it.’

‘Well, they wouldn’t. Because I never got around to speaking to Docteur du Coq.’

‘They said that I was too late and they’d already taken their complement of students for the summer.’

‘Shit,’ Enzo muttered under his breath.

‘Only, I’d been kind of counting on it. You know, for the money.’ She dropped her eyes to the floor, too self-conscious to meet his. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know what else to do, or where else to go.’

‘Oh, God. Nicole, I’m sorry.’ He wanted to give her a hug and tell her everything would be all right. But he wasn’t sure how close those breasts would let him get, and in any case he knew that everything wouldn’t be all right. Student jobs everywhere had been filled by now. He had let her down badly. And then he had an inspiration and said impulsively, ‘Look…why don’t you come and work for me here?’ Almost as soon as the words were out of his mouth he regretted them. How could he pay her? He supposed that if he won the bet — a thousand euros each from the Préfet and the chief of police — then he could afford to pay her handsomely. If not…well, that was something he would face up to later.

She looked up in astonishment, embarrassment replaced suddenly by a flush of slow-burning pleasure. ‘For you?’

‘I have a sort of project I’m working on this summer. I could do with an assistant. Someone smart. Someone good on computers, and the internet.’

‘Well, that’s me,’ she said eagerly.

‘I know.’

‘I’ve been online ever since I can remember. You know, “Nicole calling the world.”’

Enzo nodded, thinking that this was definitely a mistake. She might be his brightest student, and there was no doubting her academic brilliance. But there was no doubting, also, that she lacked certain social skills. Her upbringing as a single child on a remote hill farm in the Aveyron had not prepared her for sophisticated student life in France’s fourth-largest city. Her first year in Toulouse had been hard, not least because of the cruelty of some of her fellow students.