Peter May: Blowback

It had taken a plough to clear the road up to the auberge and make it accessible for the phalanx of police vehicles and ambulances that was gathered now at the front entrance of the hotel. Blue and orange lights flashed out of sync, casting alternating color tints across the virgin snow that lay thick all around.

It had stopped snowing now, and with a clearing sky temperatures were plunging, forming a hard crust on the snow, and ice in the tire tracks up the hill.

Forensics officers from the police scientifique were still meticulously photographing the scene in the cave before the waiting medics could remove the body. Enzo had already briefed the first gendarmes on the scene, but he knew that a long night of interrogation and official statements lay ahead.

Sophie’s cheek, where Guy had struck her, was swollen and already darkening. One of the Samu had washed and dressed the broken skin where blood had been drawn. She was shaken, but otherwise alright.

She stood on the top step, wrapped in a blanket, her father’s arm around her, still slightly dazed, shocked by the trauma of the last hours. Enzo could feel her trembling against his body.

They moved aside to allow two officers to lead an ashen Elisabeth Fraysse to a waiting van. She glanced at them both, but passed without a word. Enzo and Sophie watched the gendarmes put her in the back of the van, and saw for the first time that she was handcuffed.

“It’s so sad,” Sophie said. “What will happen to her?”

“I’ve no idea. But I can’t imagine that anything could be worse than what she’s already suffered.”

“She saved our lives.”

Enzo nodded. “She did. And killed the murderer of the only man she ever really loved. A man she was prepared to forgive anything. Even his affair with a hotel receptionist.”

Sophie said, “It’s a terrible thing, papa, when two brothers fall out like that. When hate is stronger than blood.”

Enzo raised his eyes toward the firmament, and saw a nearly full moon rising over the pine clad hills. “It is,” he said.

Glasgow, Scotland, November 2010

It was milder here than up in the frozen wastes of central France. The Gulf Stream brought lower temperatures, but more rain. And it was raining now. A fine rain, like mist, that the Scots called smirr.

Enzo stood on the hillside, gazing out over the roofs of rain-streaked tenements toward the slate grey of the river Clyde, silent, rusting cranes rising all around it. They were like dinosaurs from a lost age when men built boats that sailed out from the firth and around the world. An age long gone.

The grass was winter withered, dead now, like the men and women buried beneath it all across the hill, a skyline broken by marble plinths and granite crosses.

It was more than half-an-hour since Enzo had ventured up through the dead leaves, feet crunching on the gravel, and he had stood growing cold before the grave of his father long enough now to have lost the feeling in his feet and his hands. He could hear the distant rumble of traffic from Maryhill Road down below.

It was strange how little he felt. In truth, he knew that his father was not really here. Not the man he had known, and respected, and loved. A man whose integrity, and honesty, and sense of justice had been a bright guiding light in his life. The man was long gone, only his bones lay here. And if he lived on at all, it was in Enzo, and in Jack.

How, he wondered, was it possible that brothers who had sprung from the same loins could be so irreconcilably different? Surely to God, sharing a father gave them more in common than could ever separate them. And yet more than thirty years of silence gave witness to the contrary.

He heard footsteps on the gravel and turned to face a stranger. An older man, balding and grey, and only very faintly familiar. He was so much thinner than Enzo remembered. Diminished, somehow, by age. His long, dark coat, glistening in the rain, hung loosely from narrow shoulders.

“Hello, Jack.” Enzo’s own voice sounded strangely distant to him. “I wasn’t sure you would come.”

Jack nodded. “Neither was I.”

They stood for a long time, then, neither sure what to say next.

“How’s Fiona?”

“Died five years ago, Enzo. Cancer.”

And unaccountably, Enzo felt tears fill his eyes. “Jesus, Jack! I’m sorry. I didn’t know.” All those years of anger and pride. And where did it all end? In death. Where all things end, leaving nothing but regret for wasted lives. “I’m sorry for everything, Jack. I really am.”

Jack looked at him for what felt like an eternity, and for the first time in his life, Enzo saw his father in his brother’s eyes. Jack bit his lower lip. His voice was barely a whisper. “So am I.”

Enzo held out his hand. The older man looked at it for a moment, then stepped forward, and in a spontaneous gesture that neither of them could ever have imagined, they embraced. Enzo closed his eyes and knew that he held a part of his father in his arms, a part of himself. And if Sophie and Kirsty had grown up never knowing their uncle, then certainly Laurent would not.