Peter May: Blowback

He crawled at a snail’s pace up the hill, ignoring traffic lights. To stop would have been fatal, and there were no other vehicles on the road. No sensible person was out on a night like this.

Almost at the top of the hill, snow still piling down between the buildings that towered above him on either side, he turned right along a level stretch of road toward Dominique’s apartment. He immediately saw the cluster of blue and orange flashing lights gathered outside the building.

He slewed to a halt beside two gendarme vans and an ambulance. A couple of uniformed gendarmes stood among a gathering of curious neighbours sheltering under black umbrellas, stamping icy feet in the snow. Enzo jumped out and almost fell.

“What’s happened here?”

One of the gendarmes turned, and Enzo immediately recognised him as the sandwich-chewing officer who had responded to his buzzer at lunchtime the previous day. He recognised Enzo, too. “Dominique was attacked in her apartment.”

“Jesus!” Enzo felt his heart almost stop. “My daughter’s up there, too.”

And before either of the officers could stop him, he was past them, through the door, and pounding up the steps in the pale flicker of feeble yellow stair lights, his breath exploding in clouds ahead of him.

Dominique’s apartment door lay wide open, bright light spilling out on to the dark of the landing. Another gendarme stood at the end of the hall, and beyond him two medics were crouched around the prone figure of a woman lying on the floor. Heads turned with Enzo’s sudden arrival, and he saw Dominique’s bloodied face as she pulled herself up on to one elbow. Her skin color was whiter than the snow falling outside her window, and her dark eyes filled with confusion.

“Enzo…” She reached a hand toward him.

He pushed between the medics and knelt beside her, taking her hand and squeezing it. “What happened? Are you okay?”

She seemed to be struggling to find words. One of the medics said, “She needs attention. She’s concussed. There could be a fracture.”

But she waved a dismissive hand. “I’ll be alright. I just… I don’t really remember what happened. I was coming back to the apartment. I opened the door, and… I guess someone must have struck me from behind. When I came to, it was something like four hours later, and I was lying in the hall. I managed to crawl in here and call the Samu.”

With the help of the two medics, he got her to her feet, and then into a chair. One of them began cleansing the wound at the back of her head with a cotton pad and disinfectant, and she winced from the pain.

“Dominique, where’s Sophie?”

“I don’t know. Her boyfriend called this morning… Bertrand?” Enzo nodded. “Well, Bertrand called and said he was on his way to get her. He must have picked her up before I got back.”

The gendarme at the door said, “There was no one else in the apartment.”

Enzo frowned. “But if Bertrand picked her up, why’s she not answering her phone?” He stood up and hurried through to the spare bedroom, and felt fear like cold fingers closing around his heart. Her suitcase was still there, clothes spread across the bed.

By the time he got back through to the sitting room, Dominique was on her feet and waving aside the attentions of the Samu.

He said, “Bertrand didn’t pick her up. He must have been held up by the snow. All her stuff’s still here.”

Pain and confusion mixed with the blood on Dominique’s face. “Then where is she?”

Enzo closed his eyes, trying to control his breathing. “I don’t know for sure. But I think maybe I can guess.”

He turned toward the door.

“Wait!” Dominique called after him, and as he turned back, she was reaching into her leather brief case. “I brought these with me from the gendarmerie so you could see them when you got back.” She pulled out a large manilla envelope. “They’re the pics of the hands taken at autopsy.”

He hesitated just for a moment before turning back. She laid the photographs out on the coffee table and he knelt down to look at them, holding them between trembling fingers. A dead man’s hands. Cold and white, and spattered by tiny droplets of blood blown back from the head wound that took his life.

He felt her eyes on him. She said, “What do you think?”

And in spite of everything, the professional in him calmed his panic and took control of his perception. He looked closely at the photographs. This was his area of expertise. And those tiny drops of blood were telling him everything he needed to know. “The pathologist wasn’t wrong in his original assessment.”

Dominique frowned. “You mean that Fraysse was murdered?”

Enzo nodded. “Guy and Elisabeth might have confessed to making his suicide look like murder, but the blood spatter says otherwise.”

“How can you tell?”

“If he had shot himself, the blood droplets would be on the backs and tips of the trigger finger, the third and fourth fingers, and the front and tip of the thumb. Certainly on the gun hand. And they would appear in similar areas of the hand used to hold it steady. Which is common when you’re turning a gun on yourself.”

Dominique peered through her pain at the photographs. “I see what you mean. The blood spatter is on the back of both hands.”

“Exactly. As if he had been facing his shooter, and raised his hands to protect himself.”

“So he didn’t kill himself.”

“No, he was murdered. But I’d already guessed that.”

“How?”

“From of a handful of words recovered from Marc Fraysse’s supposed suicide note.” He dropped the photographs and stood up suddenly. “I’ve got to go.”

Dominique stood to go after him, but staggered, and grabbed a medic to stop herself from falling. “Enzo where? Where are you going?”

“The killer’s got Sophie, Dominique. It’s the only explanation.”

She gasped her frustration. “I don’t understand. Why? Who?”

“I won’t know any of that for certain till I get up to the hotel.”

The gendarme at the door caught his arm. “The auberge up at Saint-Pierre?”

“Yes.” Enzo almost hissed it in his face.

“You can’t go up there, monsieur. The road’s closed. It’s impassable.”

Enzo tore his arm free. “Try stopping me.”

Several times on the ascent out of Thiers, he thought he wouldn’t make it. Wheels spinning sent his car slithering sideways, before catching and propelling him forward again.

The landscape caught in his headlamps was smothered in snow. And still it fell. Thick and wet.

He had left the town behind him now, and the road climbed less steeply, but was almost indistinguishable from everything else around it. Only the red and white stripes of the snow poles kept him from losing his way and ending up in a ditch. The falling snow almost obliterated his vision. Beyond his lights everything was black, like the fear in his heart that drove him on.

Twenty to twenty-five centimetres of snow had fallen in just a matter of hours, and he knew that when the road rose steeply toward the auberge, he was going to have to abandon his car. It would take a four-by-four to get him up there.

When he saw the stone pillars, marble plaques engraved with the Chez Fraysse logo at the road junction, he tried to keep the Citroen in third gear and turn gently without stalling it. Front wheels spinning, he only just succeeded in making the turn, and began to inch slowly up the incline. He thanked God for Lucqui’s snow poles. Without them he would certainly have lost the road.

If there had been another vehicle up here ahead of him, then its tracks had long since been covered by fresh snow. Not even the faintest impression of them remained. For a moment Enzo began to doubt everything. Perhaps, somehow, he had got it all wrong. Maybe Bertrand had picked Sophie up after all, and the battery in her cellphone was simply dead. But if Bertrand had come for her, why were her things still at Dominique’s apartment?