Peter May - Extraordinary People

They left the church and followed her quick footsteps into the graveyard, and she took them along a narrow path between rows of tombs, to a vault like a miniature temple. It was weathered and streaked with black, and a sad bunch of wilting flowers was placed at its door. The earliest inscriptions had been eroded by time and were almost unreadable. But the most recent was sharp and clear. Dated October, 1999, it was dedicated to the beloved memory of Hugues d’Hautvillers and his wife, Simone, who died together on October 26th that year in a car accident on the road between Épernay and Reims.

Enzo stared at it in disbelief. Hugues d’Hautvillers. So perhaps the clues had been leading, not to the place, but to the person.

‘It’s a very old family vault,’ Charlotte said. She knelt down to touch the dying flowers. ‘But there’s still someone around who cares.’

There was a bell push set in the wall beside the gate to the priest’s house. A sign read, Sonnez et entrez . Enzo did as bid, and they heard a bell sounding some way off beyond the wall. He pushed one half of the white gate and it opened on to an overgrown path between two lawns, leading to a small house almost adjoining the front end of the nave. The door opened before they reached it, and the curé looked at them with mild irritation. ‘Can I help you?’

‘I wonder what can you tell us about the d’Hautvillers family vault in the graveyard?’ Enzo said.

The curé seemed surprised. Apparently it was not a question he was asked very often. ‘There’s nothing to tell. It’s the family vault of the d’Hautvillers. They’ve lived at Château Hautvillers for centuries.’

‘Hugues d’Hautvillers died in a car crash in 1999, is that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did he have any heirs?’

‘His son still lives at the château.’

‘What’s his name?’ Raffin asked.

‘The eldest son of the family has been called Hugues since the days of the Knights Templar, and probably before.’

‘So there’s an Hugues d’Hautvillers living at the château now?’ Enzo said.

The curé was running out of patience. ‘I think that’s what I just said.’

‘How do we get there?’ Charlotte asked.

Château Hautvillers was less than three kilometers away in the next valley, rebuilt in the seventeenth century from the remains of a mediaeval fortress. An odd hybrid of French country manor and fortified château , it stood foresquare at the end of a long drive flanked by lime trees, and was surrounded by a deep, wide moat. Well-kept parkland rose up behind it to the treeline, and a fountain sparkled and frothed in the centre of a cobbled courtyard in front of the house. Horses snorted and snuffled and stamped in stables along the west wing of the courtyard. A group of working farm buildings huddled along the east bank of the moat. As Enzo turned his car into the drive, they saw the blue-flashing lights of several police vehicles on the far side of the stone bridge. A white ambulance stood in the courtyard, backed up to the main entrance. Its rear doors were open. A group of people stood at the near side of the bridge watching the proceedings in silence. Staff from the château , and farm workers, and a couple of gendarmes . They all turned at the sound of the arriving vehicle.

Enzo swung his car off the drive just before the bridge and parked under the trees. One of the group detached himself and approached as they stepped out on to the grass. He was a man in his late sixties or early seventies, with silver hair short-cropped around a polished bald pate. He had the demeanour of a maître d’hôtel , and wore a dark suit with polished black shoes. ‘Can I help you?’

‘What’s going on?’ Charlotte said.

‘There’s been a suicide, madame.’

‘Oh, my God. Who?’

‘I’m afraid it was young Hugues d’Hautvillers.’

‘Suicide?’ Enzo could hardly believe it.

‘Yes, Monsieur. He hanged himself in the grande salle . Did you know him?’

Raffin said quickly, ‘We came from Paris to see him.’

‘Oh, I see. Were you friends? At ENA together, perhaps?’

‘That’s right.’

Enzo marvelled at the way Raffin could lie so easily.

‘Then, I’m terribly sorry to be the bearer of such bad news.’ The old man turned and glanced across the moat towards the château . ‘They’re just removing the body. Perhaps if you’d care to wait fifteen minutes or so, I can speak to you, then.’

‘Of course,’ Raffin said.

‘Why don’t you take a walk in the grounds?’ The old man nodded towards the gardens, evidently anxious not to swell the ranks of the voyeurs . He returned to the group, and Enzo, Raffin and Charlotte followed the moat to its south-west corner where a gate opened on to wooded parkland. A brown hen and a clutch of chicks went clucking away across the lawns ahead of them.

Raffin turned to Enzo. ‘Interesting that the man whose name is evoked by the items found in Toulouse should turn up dead just three days later.’

‘Do you think he had something to do with Jacques Gaillard’s murder?’ Charlotte asked.

Raffin raised an eyebrow. ‘Who knows? But if he had, then perhaps he knew that exposure was inevitable, and killed himself to avoid the consequences. What do you think, Macleod?’

But Enzo felt less than happy with the thought that his actions had caused a man to kill himself, even if he was a murderer. ‘I don’t know.’ He half-hoped that Hugues d’Hautvillers had nothing to do with any of it, and that his death was just a strange, sad coincidence. He looked back along the moat towards the bridge with its stone balustrade and four arches rising out of the dark water, and saw that the ambulance was leaving. As it crossed the bridge the onlookers moved aside to let it past. Enzo was overtaken by an odd sense of despair. It seemed as if his investigation would end here, with the death of a man whose body was being taken away even as he watched. Literally, a dead end.

He stuck his hands in his pockets and walked off along the edge of the moat. The three meter drop was guarded by a low, mossy wall. Pointed turrets were built out into the water at each corner of the castle. There were arrow slits in the thick stone walls, from where defenders had once drawn bows to repel attackers. Away to his left, ancient trees grew among well-tended lawns, leading to woods beyond. A gardener with a wheelbarrow was tending flowers in a rockery, apparently unaffected by the activity at the château . A group of deck chairs sat around a wooden table, flapping gently in the hot breeze. Enzo reached the north-west corner of the moat, where the ground rose away steeply, and sat on the edge of a retaining wall. Unlike the patterned brick façade at the front of the château , the back of it was rendered in grey concrete, damp creeping up from still water, seeping into its very foundations.

As he looked back along the moat, Enzo saw Charlotte approaching. Raffin had remained by the gate, leaning on the wrought iron, watching the proceedings in the courtyard. Enzo looked up as Charlotte stopped in front of him, and had to shade his eyes from the midday sun. ‘Did you tell him about us?’

She said, ‘There is no us . I told you, I’m not ready for another relationship yet. We had sex, that’s all.’

Enzo was wounded by her words. It had felt like more than just sex to him. He took the shading hand from his forehead and leaned forward on his knees, staring at the grass. ‘Why’s he so pissed off? It is over between you, isn’t it?’

‘Oh, yes.’ She hesitated. ‘But it wasn’t his idea. He’s having trouble letting go, that’s all.’ She sighed, and sat on the wall beside him, and scuffed idly with her tennis shoes at a slab of stone set in the grass. ‘I’m sorry, Enzo. It’s just a little difficult right now.’ And she took his hand briefly in hers and gave it the smallest of squeezes.