Peter May - The Critic

The adjutant from the STIC approached. He was a small man inside a tyvek suit that looked two sizes two big for him. The hood left only his face exposed, so Enzo could not see if he was bald. Or, if he had hair, whether it was dark, fair, silver. It was extraordinary how little you could tell about someone from the face alone. But he had thick brown eyebrows and looked to be man in his forties. He glanced cautiously at Enzo then addressed himself to Roussel. ‘There’ve been a lot of people tramping about here before we arrived, David. It’s a shitty crime scene. Doesn’t make our job any easier. But it looks like the kids disturbed him in the middle of trying to bury the body. The cigarette ends would indicate that he’d been here a while. Hard work digging a grave in ground as hard as this.’

‘Hardly much of a grave,’ Enzo said.

The adjutant turned hostile eyes in his direction. ‘Who’s this?’

‘A forensic expert from Scotland. He’s not here in any official capacity.’

The adjutant fixed him again with an unfriendly stare. ‘So what’s your point?’

‘My point is he wasn’t digging a grave at all. And the digging he did wasn’t done tonight.’

Roussel turned towards him in surprise. ‘How do you know that?’

Enzo said, ‘It’s a late fall this year.’ He nodded towards the pile of earth and the leaves that had settled on it. ‘Those leaves didn’t just come down in the last couple of hours.’

Both men looked at the pile of earth, but neither of them said anything.

‘He probably dug that up the night before.’

‘Why?’

Enzo shrugged. ‘Who knows? Probably preparing the ground before he brought the body.’

The adjutant’s voice was laden with skepticism. ‘So what did he bring the body here for if it wasn’t to bury it?’

Enzo said, ‘What does that corpse weigh, do you think? Seventy, eighty kilos? A lot for one man to handle. You can see that by the deep grooves left in the forest floor by the heels. So why would you go to the trouble of heaving it up into that tree cavity if you were just going to get it down again to bury it?’ He made a point of meeting the adjutant’s eye. ‘But you’re right about the cigarettes. He probably was here for quite a while. Waiting.’

‘Waiting for what?’ Roussel said.

‘Someone to come. I mean, why would you choose to bury a body right next to a well-known lover’s haunt? You’d pick somewhere a million miles from where anyone was likely to stumble across you. And even if you didn’t realise it was a popular meeting place, and you suddenly heard people nearby, you’d hold your breath and not make a sound. But this guy went crashing off through the undergrowth, drawing attention to himself.’ Enzo turned towards the path by which the body had been brought in. ‘And even if he’d panicked and wanted to make a getaway, it’s a clear path out. No need to make all that noise.’

‘I don’t get it,’ Roussel said.

But the adjutant from the STIC was nodding grimly, embarrassed, but professional enough to admit that he had missed what Enzo hadn’t. ‘I do.’

‘Well, what?’

The adjutant looked again at the leaves on the earth. ‘He only wanted it to look like he’d been interrupted burying the body. He wanted to be interrupted. He wanted the body to be found.’ He turned now towards the corpse. ‘Propped up there for the world to see.’

As they walked back down towards the vehicles below, Roussel said, ‘The adjutant from the STIC is going to be pretty pissed off at losing face like that, Macleod.’

‘At me?’

‘No, at me. For letting you anywhere near the place. There’s going to be hell to pay. I can feel it in my bones.’

Enzo glanced at him. ‘What rank do you have, Roussel?’

‘Gendarme.’

‘Just rank and file gendarme?’

‘That’s right.’

‘So how did you get put in charge of a case like this?’

‘I was the first officer on the scene.’

Enzo blinked in surprise. ‘And that qualifies you to lead the investigation?’

Roussel became defensive. ‘We are all trained in basic investigative and forensic techniques, monsieur. Of course, I answer to a higher authority, but I am perfectly well qualified to be the investigating officer.’

They walked in silence for a few steps before Enzo said, ‘When I went through Raffin’s notes, there were quotes from statements made to the Press by a police spokesman who wasn’t you.’

There was a tension now, in Roussel’s voice, a hint of buried resentment. ‘At the height of the inquiry, because it was such a high profile case, they appointed a PR officer from Albi to speak to the press. But he had nothing to do with the investigation.’

The group waiting down by the vehicles turned towards them as they heard their voices. Enzo stopped Roussel and lowered his. ‘I don’t know why the killer wanted us to find your friend tonight, Gendarme Roussel. But I figure it’s his first big mistake.’ Roussel waited for more. ‘There has to be a link between Petty and this man. And maybe others in your missing persons file. It’s just opened up a whole new avenue of investigation. We can’t let it slip by us.’

‘We?’

Enzo drew a deep breath. ‘Alright. You.’

Roussel held him steady in his gaze. ‘You don’t think I’m up to this, do you, Macleod?’

Enzo considered his response. He said carefully, ‘I think I can help you.’

The bedside lamp cast a pool of yellow light on the ceiling, and a circle of it spilled across her pillow. But the rest of the room seemed plunged into deeper shadow, dark and depressing.

Nicole sat on the edge of the bed ringing her hands, her nightdress hardly enough to keep her warm. Tears ran hot down cold cheeks, raising gooseflesh on her arms, and try as she might she couldn’t restrain the sobs that bubbled up from her chest to break in her throat and part her lips. Her head ached and her eyes burned.

She looked up, startled by the gentle knock on her bedroom door, and a wedge of soft light fell into the room from the hall. Fabien’s silhouette nearly filled the door frame. He stood there, hesitating on the threshold, and she could hear the bewilderment in his voice.

‘Why are you crying?’

‘You had no right to speak to Monsieur Macleod like that. He hasn’t done you any harm.’

‘He was coming to spy on us.’

‘He’s trying to find out who killed a man. Two men now.’ Her breath trembled as she sucked it in. ‘He’s a good man. I owe him everything, and I’ve let him down. I don’t know how I can face him tomorrow.’ And fresh tears tumbled over her cheeks.

Fabien stepped into the room and pushed the door shut behind him. He hesitated briefly before sitting on the bed beside her. ‘You don’t understand.’

‘I understand that I should never have come here. And when I discovered this was where Petty was found, I should have left immediately. I’ll leave first thing in the morning.’

‘You don’t need to do that.’

‘Yes I do.’

Fabien looked down at his hands, embarrassed and upset by her distress. ‘Look, I’m sorry. Don’t go. I don’t want you to go.’

Which set her off on a fresh squall of sobbing. He seemed at a loss for what to do before putting a clumsy arm around her shoulder in an attempt at comfort. She didn’t appear to notice, and so he left it there and they sat still for several minutes in a silence broken only by her sobs. Finally, she half turned towards him. ‘Why did you hate Petty so much?’

‘It wasn’t him. It was the system he represented. A system that serves only one man’s taste. That wants to deliver something as unvaryingly predictable as cola. A system that’s destroying diversity.’