Peter May: Blowback

“Out of bounds, Sophie.”

“Oh, papa…”

“Goodnight.” He opened the door and pushed her gently out into the darkness of the hallway. She hesitated a moment before turning back to kiss him lightly on the cheek. “You can’t just accept it. You’ve got rights. And he’s my blood, too.”

But she was away before he could respond, and he saw her hurrying off along the carpeted passageway to be absorbed by the dark, his mind a complex confusion of thoughts he had successfully been keeping at bay. Until now.

As he turned to go back into his room, the merest hint of a movement at the opposite end of the hall flickered in his peripheral vision. He stood stock still, heart thumping, and peered into the darkness, eyes growing accustomed to the lack of light as he did. But there was nothing. No movement. No sound. After several long moments, he began to doubt that he had seen anything at all. He returned to his room and shut the door firmly behind him.

Sunlight flitted about the vast landscape spread below them as clouds scudded across a sky torn and broken by a cold north-west wind. The rain and low-hanging cloud of the day before was gone, and from their table in the south conservatory dining room, the view was breathtaking, as if seen from some hidden vantage point in the sky itself.

“Saint-Pierre,” Elisabeth said, “is the closest you can get to heaven without passing through the gates.” She smiled. “So they say.”

“It’s aptly named, then,” Enzo said. “If this is, indeed, where St. Peter resides, then we must be at the very gates themselves.”

Elisabeth tilted her head and broke off a piece of croissant with long, elegant fingers. “Marc would certainly have had you believe that. He loved this place, you know. He had our bedroom fashioned from the room which had once been his parents’. He was born in that room. And his children were conceived there, too.” The brightness in her eyes clouded a little. “He might well have died there, had he lived.” And then her face broke into an unexpected smile. “If that doesn’t sound a little too… Irish, you would say, yes?”

Enzo grinned. “Yes.” He dipped his croissant into his grande creme and had raised it halfway, dripping, to his mouth, before realising that Elisabeth was watching him. Perhaps, he thought, his predilection for dipping croissants in his coffee was not quite de rigeur in a three-star restaurant. But it was too late now, and his momentary pause had allowed the coffee to soften the soaked segment of croissant to the point where it broke off and fell back into his coffee cup, splashing and staining the pristine white linen around it.

He felt his face reddening. “Excuse me.” He dabbed at the tablecloth with his napkin.

He wondered if her smile was just a little patronising. “Don’t worry, Monsieur Macleod, Marc would have approved. He loved to tremper his croissants.” It almost seemed like a way of affirming her husband’s humble origins while placing herself on a slightly higher plane.

A young female server approached the table with a replenished pichet of freshly squeezed orange juice. She hovered it over Elisabeth’s glass. “Madame Fraysse?” But la patronne simply dismissed her with a wave of the hand, and the server immediately shrank away to present herself at Enzo’s side of the table. “Monsieur?”

Enzo gave her a friendly smile. “No thank you.”

The girl bowed and moved discreetly away. Enzo glanced at Elisabeth, but the widow was now gazing from the window at the view below, lost in some distant thought.

He said, “In everything I have read about your husband, the speculation about Michelin being poised to remove one of his stars is ever-present. Did Marc really believe that was about to happen?”

She turned a weary expression toward him. It was a subject which had almost certainly worn thin. “I don’t know that he believed it. But he was certainly afraid of it.” She sipped at her steaming herbal tisane. “It is the nightmare of every three-star chef. The achieving of each star is a long hard road of blood, sweat, and frustration, Monsieur. Of terrible uncertainty in an uncertain world. Each star won is a cause for celebration. When you have one you want two. When you have two, you want three. But when you have three, there is nowhere to go but down. It was Marc’s constant dread that he would lose a star. It drove everything he did, almost to the point of obsession.”

“But where did the speculation come from? Michelin?”

“Oh, no. Michelin would never be so indiscreet. It originated entirely in the media.”

“Something must have given rise to it.”

She sighed. “It was all sparked, seemingly, by a single, malicious article published by one particular Parisian food critic. A freelance critic, Monsieur Macleod, who writes for several of the more distinguished Paris publications, but also has his own online blog. An unpleasant man.”

“You knew him personally?”

“I didn’t, no. But Marc did. He and a few other Michelin-starred chefs were frequently criticised in his columns. He was, and still is, a fierce critic of the Michelin system, and likes to think that he alone should be the judge of good taste in French cuisine.” She paused, some dark thought passing like a shadow across her face, reflecting the shifting patterns of light and shade in the landscape beyond. “There was an enmity between him and Marc which dated back to the time when he was awarded his third star.”

Enzo frowned. “You told me yesterday, Madame Fraysse, that your husband did not have an enemy in the world.”

Her smile was rueful. “With the sole exception, perhaps, of Jean-Louis Graulet. But Graulet didn’t murder Marc, Monsieur Macleod. He was in Paris the day that Marc died.”

Enzo finished dipping the remains of his croissant in his coffee and poured himself a fresh cup from the fine Limoges china jug on the table. He sipped on it thoughtfully. “Did Marc have a biographer?”

“No, he didn’t. But he talked several times about writing a memoir. An autobiography.”

“A lot of people in his position would hire a professional to ghost write something like that for him.”

“Oh, not Marc. He would have wanted to do it himself.”

“And did he?”

“Not that I know of. I went through all his papers and his computer disks at the time, but there was nothing.” She paused. “Strange, though.”

“What is?”

“He had trouble sleeping in the last months. I used to wake at maybe two or three in the morning to find his side of the bed empty and cold. Then I would find him in his petit bureau, huddled over the computer on his desk, tapping away. He was always strangely evasive when I asked him about it. I always had the impression that he was, in fact, writing his memoir and for some reason didn’t want to tell me. A surprise maybe. Which is why I searched for it after his death. But I guess I was wrong.”

Enzo scratched his chin thoughtfully and realized he hadn’t shaved that morning. “What do you think he was doing on his computer, then, in the small hours of the morning.”

She shook her head. “I haven’t the faintest idea, Monsieur Macleod.”

Dominique’s office was small, but unusually well-ordered. Crime prevention posters, calendars, newspaper cuttings, official documents, all were pinned in neat groupings to the yellowing cream-painted walls. Her desk was a paragon of good organisation: in-trays, out-trays, a spotless blotter, a computer screen angled against the wall, and a mouse with mat and keyboard placed side by side in perfect alignment. An empty coffee cup sat on a cardboard coaster. The polished surface of the desk itself was unmarred by unsightly rings or watermarks.