Peter May - Extraordinary People

They sat in silence then, and with the toe of her shoe she traced the outline of letters carved into the stone slab. He watched her, unseeing, distracted by all the emotional contradictions she had brought into his life. Until, quite unexpectedly, the letters she was following with her toe seemed to jump into sudden, clear focus, and he realised what those tiny movements had just spelled out. He grabbed her arm, fingers digging deep into the soft flesh above her elbow. She turned, alarmed, to see him staring fixedly at the ground in front of her. ‘What is it?’

‘ Utopique .’ Even as he whispered the name he felt goosebumps raise themselves across his back and shoulders.

‘What are you talking about?’

He nodded towards the slab and moved her foot aside with his. He read, ‘ This stone was set in the ground in the year 1978, in loving memory of our faithful family retriever, Utopique, who died in the act of rescuing his beloved eight-year-old master, Hugues, on the occasion of his falling into the moat. Utopique jumped after him into the water, keeping him safe from drowning until he could be rescued. Sadly, Utopique was drowned before he, too, could be saved. We will be forever grateful for his sacrifice .’

Enzo stared at the words he had just read aloud. Words that swam now in front of his eyes. Utopique had been Hugues d’Hautvillers’ dog! Finally, the dog tag and the shinbone made sense. ‘It’s got to be under this stone.’ He stood up.

‘What has?’

‘The next piece of Jacques Gaillard. Probably another trunk. And probably more clues.’ He looked at Charlotte, eyes shining with renewed anticipation, and saw that she had turned pale.

‘Right here? Beneath our feet?’

‘It has to be.’ Enzo looked around wondering what he should do, and saw Raffin coming towards them. Beyond him, he saw the gardener wheeling his barrow down the hill. Enzo shouted and waved, and the gardener stopped and turned to look. Raffin glanced behind him at the gardener, and then again at Enzo.

‘What’s going on?’

Enzo said, ‘Read the stone slab.’ And he shouted again to the gardener and waved him over.

‘Jesus!’ Raffin looked up from the slab. ‘You think it’s under here?’

‘What do you think?’

‘I think there’s a damned good chance of it.’

The gardener left his barrow and wandered across. He was a man in his sixties, weathered and worn by a life spent outdoors. He was wearing blue dungarees over a grubby white vest, his flat cap pushed back from a forehead beaded with sweat. He looked at them suspiciously, each in turn, then fixed Enzo with cloudy blue eyes. ‘Can I help you, monsieur?’

‘We think there might be something buried under this stone.’ Even as the words left his mouth Enzo thought how ridiculous they sounded.

The gardener looked at the slab and shook his head slowly. ‘Nothing under it but earth, monsieur.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because I laid it there myself. Monsieur Hugues senior had it engraved and asked me to set it in the ground.’

‘But after that,’ Raffin said. ‘Someone could have lifted it and buried something underneath.’

The gardener looked at them as if they were insane. ‘Why would anyone want to do that, monsieur?’

‘It would be possible, though?’ Enzo said.

The old man shrugged. ‘Of course. But I would have known about it.’

‘How?’

‘Because I’ve spent my life here, monsieur. Every single day of it. I’ve kept these gardens for nearly forty years, just like my father before me. I know every blade of grass. You couldn’t lift that slab and lay it down again without me knowing it.’

Enzo didn’t want to believe him. This had to be the place. ‘Do you remember young Hugues falling into the moat?’

‘It was me that pulled him out.’

‘And Utopique?’

‘Dead by the time I got to him.’

‘I suppose the dog is buried under the stone?’ Raffin said.

‘No, monsieur. The stone was just to commemorate the occasion and mark the spot. Utopique was buried in the same place the family have buried their dogs for centuries.’ He pointed towards the treeline. ‘Up there in the woods, with a view down to the château . There’s dozens of them buried up there, each with its own headstone. A kind of dog cemetery, you might say.’

Enzo thought about the dog’s shinbone found in Toulouse, and he and Raffin exchanged glances. An unspoken communion on a single, shared thought. ‘Can you show us?’

The old gardener sighed. ‘I suppose I could.’

As they walked up the hill Charlotte said to him, ‘You know what’s happened down at the château ?’

‘I do.’

‘Are you not concerned to see what’s going on?’

‘There’s nothing about the family that concerns me, mademoiselle. I’ve never had any time for the aristocracy.’

‘They pay your wages,’ Raffin said.

‘And I look after their estate. It doesn’t mean I have to like them. I saved that young boy’s life, but it pleased them better to credit the dog. And now he’s killed himself. Good riddance, I say.’

When they reached the treeline, the cut grass gave way to long, tangling undergrowth. Young saplings grew in all the open spaces, trying to reclaim the land taken from nature by man. The gardener led them through the trees to a clearing bounded by the remains of a dry stone wall and a tumbled-down gate. Ancient headstones poked up at odd angles through long, dry grass. There was a sad air of neglect about this hidden burial place.

‘You don’t look after the cemetery, then?’ Raffin said.

‘I never come here. It’s none of my concern.’

‘So somebody could have buried something up here and you wouldn’t know.’

‘The only thing that gets buried up here are dead dogs, monsieur.’

They found Utopique’s grave at the far side of the plot. The headstone was marked simply, Utopique 1971-78 . It seemed as undisturbed as all the other graves, but then it would after ten years. Raffin turned to the gardener. ‘We’ll need a couple of shovels.’

The old man looked at him distrustfully. ‘What for?’

Raffin opened his wallet and took out two fifty-euro notes. He folded them and held them out to the gardener. ‘You never come up here. You don’t need to know.’

It took him ten minutes to return with two stout spades. A small enough request in return for a hundred euros. But he was determined to stay and watch, nonetheless. He might have no loyalty to the family, but his curiosity was aroused.

Enzo threw his jacket and satchel to one side and began digging like a man possessed. Raffin laid his jacket carefully on the remains of the wall, and neatly folded back the sleeves of his shirt. He set his feet carefully on the ground to try to avoid getting dirt on his shoes, and joined in. Within minutes both men were perspiring freely, and for all his precautions, Raffin’s shoes were quickly covered with dry, chalky dust. His shirt, wet with sweat, was sticking to his back.

About a foot down they began uncovering bones. Not a skeleton, but individual bones, as if perhaps they had been dug up once before and tossed back in when the hole was refilled. They gathered them in a small pile on one side.

Charlotte leaned against the wall and watched them in silence, her dark eyes deeply brooding. Whatever was in her mind, she kept her own counsel, chewing anxiously on her lower lip as the hole got deeper.

Through the trees they could see blue lights flashing down at the château . Although the body had been removed nearly half an hour earlier, the gendarmes were still there. Taking statements, perhaps, awaiting officers from the police scientifique to confirm that it was, after all, just a suicide.