Peter May - The Critic

No reply. His mouth was dry from sudden fear and too much alcohol.

‘God damn you! Come out of there, will you!’ The bellow of his voice echoed around the ramparts. He was no more than a hundred metres from the safety of the house where they had been drinking wine all evening. But it was down the steepest of inclines, and he doubted if he would make it. And up here, on the top of the hill, there wasn’t another soul around. No light, no sign of life. He felt absolutely alone and horribly vulnerable. Why in the name of God had he let Sophie and Bertrand go off without him? And where the hell was Braucol? Just the presence of the dog might have given him courage.

A sudden movement, and a clatter in the shadows, provoked a surge of adrenalin to fuel the opposing instincts of fight or flight. He was in no condition to fight, so turned instead and ran. Slithering over the cobbles on shaky legs. He heard sounds of pursuit behind him, but was afraid to look round. The street ahead dipped away into darkness, and he was afraid that if he went that way he might be lost in it for good. Beneath the wall on his right, where he had been sitting just moments earlier, a slope thick with shrubs and bushes fell away to a lower street transecting the hillside. It was caught in full moonlight and seemed like the safer option.

He scrambled over cold stone and felt fresh air beneath his feet as he dropped into the bushes below. It was not as soft a landing as he had hoped for. Jagged branches and thorns tore at his clothes and face and hands. Then he began tumbling uncontrollably down the slope. Even as he fell, he was aware of a streak of movement off to his left. But he was unable to focus on it, as the world turned over again. He came to a cushioned halt, cradled in the branches of a young tree. Branches that creaked and dipped, and broke beneath him, to dump him unceremoniously into the middle of the street below.

The fall took away his breath, and pain shot up his arm from his elbow. He heard his head crack hard on the cobbles, and his whole universe was shot through with light. A roaring sound filled his ears, to be replaced by a sudden squealing. He screwed up his eyes against the light and saw that it came from two blinding orbs no more than a metre from his face. He lifted an arm to shield his eyes and a car door slammed.

‘My God, Papa, what are you doing?’ To his great relief, Sophie loomed out of the darkness, her silhouette crouching against the light.

‘Someone was trying to kill me.’

‘What?’

‘Up there.’ He waved an arm vaguely through the air. ‘There was someone up there.’

Bertrand dipped into the light and helped him up off the road. ‘Did you see them?’

‘Well…no. But there was someone.’

‘Where’s Braucol?’ Sophie said. And almost as if he had heard her, Braucol came haring out of the undergrowth, growling and barking, a streak of black cat ahead of him, just inches beyond his reach.

With three agile leaps, the cat mounted a wall, a window ledge, a roof, and sprinted away across the tiles. Braucol was left barking in frustration below the wall.

Sophie shouted at him. ‘Braucol, shut up! You’ll wake the whole town.’

Enzo wondered if there was anyone in the whole town to wake. It had seemed so impossibly deserted just minutes before.

And as Braucol flapped big paws and crossed the cobbles to join them, disconsolate and defeated, Sophie said, ‘So that was who was trying to kill you, then? A cat?’

Enzo shook his head and found that it hurt. Surely it wasn’t just a cat that had spooked him. ‘There was someone up there,’ he repeated, but with less conviction than before.

‘We’d better get you home,’ Bertrand said.

Fabien parked his four-by-four at the top of the rubble track where the police had left their vehicles the night before. An abandoned length of black and yellow crime scene tape was the only evidence that they had ever been there. He gave Nicole his hand to help her up the slope towards the trees.

‘I used to play up here all the time when I was a boy,’ he said. ‘The woods were my world. I fought battles against the crusaders, hid from the Germans, got shipwrecked. The cellars of the old Cathar chateau still exist, right below the hill. Just bits of broken-down wall and the remains of a flagstone floor. But it became my chateau, my hideaway. I loved it.’ He stopped and breathed deeply. ‘And the smell of the woods takes me back every time.’ He looked at Nicole. ‘Almost as if all the years between then and now had never been.’ His face shone with some distant, happy memory. Then a shadow crossed it, like the moon slipping behind a cloud. ‘That tree, where they found Serge Coste. I used to climb it, and hide in the hollow where the killer put the body. It was my tree. Seeing the body there like that, I felt…violated.’

They turned at the treeline and looked back down the vine-covered slope towards the flood plain below. The moon was a bright globe in a star-encrusted firmament, turning night almost into day. They heard the wind moving through the treetops, brittle leaves whispering to the night. Fabien still held her hand, and she felt a strange, aching sensation in the pit of her stomach. Not unpleasant but accompanied by a sense of apprehension verging on fear. She could feel the beat of her heart, and it seemed to be in her throat.

‘Anyway, the source is up here.’ Fabien turned and led her along a well-beaten path through the trees to a small clearing where stones had been set into the earth centuries before to protect the precious water.

‘This is it?’ Nicole was disappointed. She had been expecting more, although she was not sure what.

‘There hasn’t been much rain in the last six weeks, so the water table’s low. When she’s in full flood, she bubbles out of the ground like she’s alive.’

And still he held her hand. She could feel his anxiety through it. Shattered moonlight fell among the trees to sprinkle them with bits of silver. Beyond the source, the forest seemed dark and impenetrable. Nicole looked up into Fabien’s face and thought how much she liked its soft cadences and the dark of his eyes. ‘What age are you, Fabien?’

He shifted uncomfortably, unsettled by her question. ‘Thirty-one.’

‘Why have you never married?’

Which brought a tiny smile of regret to his face. ‘There have been one or two close things. I guess I never met the right woman.’ His smile turned wry. ‘Certainly, my mother thinks so.’

‘So do you think twelve years is too much?’

He frowned. ‘Too much what?’

‘Of an age difference.’

She was certain he blushed, but his embarrassment was masked by the night. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Between you and me.’

He laughed. ‘When I was twenty, you’d have been eight. A primary school kid.’

‘I’m a big girl now, though.’ And then, realising what she’d said, added self-consciously, ‘Too big, most people seem to think.’

Fabien took her other hand and stared earnestly into her face in the dark. ‘ I think you’re lovely.’

She could barely hide her pleasure. ‘A lovely spy.’

‘A beautiful spy.’ He let go of her hand and slipped his arms around her, drawing her tenderly towards him. She put her hands around his neck and stretched up to meet his lips as he bent to kiss her. For such a big, clumsy man, he was very gentle. The aching in her belly had spread to fill her whole body. She wished he would put his hand on her breast. Men were always looking at her as if they wanted to, but few of them had ever had the courage to actually do it. And Fabien was much too much of a gentleman. So slowly she drew one of his arms out from behind her, and slid his hand up to cover one of her breasts, an erect nipple pushing hard against the taut cotton of her tee-shirt. She felt his tension, and then an almost uncontrollable wave of desire as she pressed her body against his to feel his passion pressing right back.