Peter May: Blowback

His smile clouded a little, and he nodded. “Actually I’m leaving for Puy de Dome in the morning.” He paused. “An early start.”

Which she took as a hint that he did not anticipate her staying the night. She raised the wine glass to her lips to mask her disappointment.

A cold rain as fine as mist swept down from the extinct volcanos that ringed this vast plateau at the very heart of the country. The autoroute looped around the grey conurbation that was Clermont Ferrand, apartment blocks and factories climbing the hills around its northern fringes and vanishing in the fog like so many mirages in an industrial desert. Here, incongruously, was the home of Michelin, the tire manufacturer that had spawned the world’s most prestigious guide to good eating. The Guide Michelin had been ranking French restaurants since 1933 with one, two, and three stars.

Enzo turned off the A72 which was headed east in the direction of Saint Etienne, and swung south toward Thiers, one of the five principal administrative towns of the departement of Puy de Dome. Dating back to the fifteenth century, this ancient cite was the cutlery capital of France, and home of the Thiers knife. Windshield wipers smeared his vision as the town emerged slowly from the mist and rain, rising up a steeply-pitched volcanic slope toward a ragged summit. Clusters of soiled white and pink houses were built into the gradient, four stories high at one side, two at the other. From the foot of the hill, the road snaked its way up between them, walls and windows and balconies rising up on either side of it like cracks and ledges in the walls of a canyon.

Narrow streets turned off left and right, up and down, leading away into the shadowed heart of the mediaeval city, where centuries-old cantilevered houses overhung cobbled squares.

As he neared the top of the hill, the town opened out into a balustraded place with a spectacular view over a jumble of red-tiled roofs toward the valley below. Homes clung precariously to rocky outcrops among the trees on the far side of a ravine that cut deep into the hillside. Enzo found parking for his beloved, mud-spattered Citroen 2CV below the square and walked up past an ugly, modern building that housed the Hotel de Ville. A line of blue gendarmerie vehicles stood nose to tail along one side of the street.

The gendarmerie itself, next to the Cafe Central, lay on the other side of the square, a handsome building of yellow brick and white stone, inlaid with patterns of red. Enzo climbed a short flight of steps and walked through a tall, arched doorway into the reception area. A middle-aged gendarme behind the desk wore a dark-blue pullover with a single white stripe across chest and upper arms. He looked up. Whatever he might have expected to see, it certainly wasn’t this tall, pony-tailed Scot in baggy cargo pants, hiking boots, and khaki anorak, a large canvas satchel slung over one shoulder. Curiosity raised a single eyebrow as Enzo gave him his best smile.

“I’m looking for Gendarme Dominique Chazal.”

Curiosity gave way to mild suspicion. “Are you?”

“I am.”

“And who should I say is looking for her?”

“Enzo Macleod.”

The gendarme hesitated for a long moment, as if reluctant to submit to the notion that he might actually be a public servant rather than simply a wielder of power over the populace. Then he turned and disappeared briskly through a door behind him. It was less than a minute before the door opened again and a young woman in uniform emerged, wide-eyed and smiling. She reached across the counter to shake Enzo’s hand.

“Monsieur Macleod.”

Enzo tipped his head in acknowledgment, impressed by the warm firmness of her handshake.

“I’ve been expecting you for quite some time.”

Enzo followed her blue van north on the D906 toward Vichy, where the collaborationist regime of Marshal Petain had once set up government during the Nazi occupation. Several kilometres out of Thiers they turned off east toward the small village of Saint-Pierre, a clutch of houses gathered around an indulgent church built from the local rusted ochre stone. The village nestled in the fold of a valley between two impressive volcanic crags, and just beyond it, a private road turned off to the right, flanked at its entrance by two stone blocks, each bearing a grey marble plaque

chiselled with the monogram, MF.

The road climbed through a pine forest that rose darkly above it on both sides. After a couple of hundred meters, Dominique pulled off into a beaten parking area where a dirt track headed up through a fire-break in the trees. She was already out of her van and standing at the foot of the track before Enzo could get out of his driver’s seat. “The Auberge Fraysse is at the top of the road, about a kilometre further up the hill. Marc used to go running every day in the afternoon. He came down the road to this point, and then followed the track up through the woods to the plateau.”

Enzo slammed the door of his 2CV shut and peered up into the gloom. “And came back down the same way?”

“No, the track skirts the edge of the plateau and comes back down the south facing elevation to the main road. He would follow the road back round here, then on up to the auberge.”

“He inherited the hotel and restaurant from his parents, didn’t he?”

“He and his brother, Guy, yes. But Guy only got involved after Marc got his third star.”

Enzo tipped his head toward the opening in the trees. “You’d better take me up.”

It was steep, and hard going, roots and ruts making the track beneath the pine needles uneven and treacherous. Enzo could not imagine running up it. After a few dozen meters he was breathing hard. He looked up to see Dominique striding confidently ahead of him. She was a slim girl, somewhere in her mid-thirties he guessed, and the sway of her hips, and the alternate tensing of taut buttock muscles in tight-fitting uniform pants, combined to spur him past his age-induced pain threshold. Only the gun in its black holster attached to her white leather belt gave him pause for thought. Women with guns were not to be messed with.

Although the rain had stopped, the mist still hung in wreaths and strands among the trees like smoke, while rainwater slow-dripped from a million pine needles, soaking them as they climbed. As they emerged, finally, from the woods, Dominique turned to face him, barely out of breath. Enzo, red-faced and trying to control his gasps, struggled the last few meters to catch her up.

“Want to take a rest?”

“Nooo, no, I’m fine,” Enzo lied. And then, casually, “Is it much further?”

“We’re about a third of the way up.”

His heart sank. He smiled. “I’m right behind you.” And inwardly he cursed the stubborn male ego that refused to admit that he wasn’t as young as he used to be.

It took them another fifteen minutes to reach the summit, and Enzo several more minutes to recover. He stood with one foot resting on the rock on which Marc Fraysse’s widow had sat seven years earlier when Dominique first arrived at the scene. As he tried to subdue his breathing, he looked around. The buron was half hidden by the cloud that lay across the plateau. Here the mist swirled in pools and eddies that followed the contours of the breeze stirring among the tall wet grasses. Enzo let his eyes wander over the half-collapsed structure. “What was this place?”

“A buron. It’s where a farmer used to bring his family, June through September, when he took his sheep or cattle up to the plateau for the summer grazing. You find them all over the Auvergne.”

Enzo nodded. “In Scotland, they’re called shielings. But it’s the same thing.” He stood up. He had been over the details provided by Raffin’s account of the murder many times, but he wanted to hear it from the young gendarme herself. After all, Dominique Chazal had been the first law officer on the scene. “Tell me what you saw, Dominique, when you first arrived.” And he listened intently as she took him through the events of that bleak February afternoon in 2003. The media parked up in the road at the foot of the hill. Guy Fraysse, and Marc’s widow, Elisabeth, waiting for her by the buron. The body lying in a pool of rainwater inside, blood turning water red.