Peter May - The Critic

She rediscovered her control, and Enzo saw her expression harden. It was not attractive.

‘We just shouted at one another. And I stormed off. Then, when he went missing, it crossed my mind that maybe he’d killed himself. Because of me; because of our row.’ She laughed, a sad, bitter little laugh without humour. ‘But I should have known better. That might have meant he’d cared.’ She drew a deep breath. ‘Anyway, I never told anyone I’d been there. And when he turned up dead, murdered, it was twelve months too late. And wouldn’t have helped anyway.’

She examined his face for a response, and whatever she saw there brought with it a look of resignation. Her eyes flickered away from his. It was as if she suspected that he had seen her truly for the first time, and that there was no longer any point in pretending with him. She gazed away across the valley, the hum of insects filling the air around them, the distant sounds of the harvesters carried on the warm vent d’autan.

‘So where does that leave us?’ she said.

‘There is no us, Michelle.’ And he was struck by the irony of the words that Charlotte had used so often with him. ‘It’s very flattering for a fifty-year-old guy like me to have some young girl half his age fawning over him, offering him sex, giving him back maybe just a little of his lost youth. But there’s no future in it for you. Go home. Get yourself a real life. Someone of your own generation. Forget your father. Sometimes people are just flawed.’ And his own daughter’s voice rang around his head: ‘I couldn’t believe that the man who didn’t care about leaving his seven-year-old daughter would turn up twenty years later telling her who she could and couldn’t see.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘Even dads.’

The road curved up around the edge of the hill, the land falling away to the left, a dramatic sweep of empty vines straddling the slope. Beyond, the vast flood plains of the Tarn shimmered away into a distant haze, the river snaking lazily through it, towns and villages in red brick dotted along its banks.

Enzo’s 2CV strained against the gradient and then picked up speed as it reached the top of the hill. Suspension rocked and rolled through the narrow streets of a tiny stone village, before the road swooped down again towards the church on its distant promontory.

A chalk-white track left the road to curl around the hillside, past the towering apse of the twelfth century Eglise de Verdal, depositing Enzo finally in the shade of the oaks that clustered around its ancient forecourt. He got out of the car and felt the wind whip warm in his face. The three bells in the church tower swayed in gentle acknowledgement of its rising strength. Vines dropped away on all sides, and from here the view to the south was an unbroken panorama. You could almost believe that on a clear day you might see all the way to the Mediterranean.

He found himself looking down on the cluster of buildings that was Domaine de la Croix Blanche, perhaps a kilometre away, in the valley below. He could make out the chai, and the salle de degustation, a group of red-roofed barns, and the Marre’s house on the far side of the yard.

He turned away to look at the old church. The stained glass in tiny arched windows high up on the wall had somehow survived intact. Windows at ground level were all boarded up, wooden shutters bleached and rotten. Concrete rendering was crumbling to reveal golden stone walls beneath it. A sign on the door told randonneurs that the eglise was a stop on an historic walk, and that Lisle sur Tarn was ten kilometres away.

Enzo had come here to escape from people, to breathe and to think, to try to focus on the myriad morceaux d’informations he had accumulated in the last two weeks. To see where they fit and how they related, to visualise in his mind’s eye the picture they might create if only he could make sense of them.

But he was finding it hard to get Michelle out of his mind. The pain she felt at her perceived rejection, the lies she had told, her seemingly endless capacity for self-deception. And always that tinge of regret that he had not, in the end, slept with her, even if it would have left him with a bitter aftertaste of guilt. For a fleeting moment, he wondered what it was she had been going to tell him at Chateau de Salettes before he confronted her about her lies. But he knew he would never know.

He walked down to the highest edge of the vineyard, closed his eyes and let the wind fill his mouth. It tugged at his shirt and his cargos, carrying to him the distant sound of a motor car. He opened his eyes and saw it following the road up from the river towards La Croix Blanche. Even from here he could tell that it was an old vehicle, a muted grey-green. One of those old French cars that just seem to go on forever. Like the Citroen 2CV, or the Renault 4L. And he felt a sudden stab of apprehension. He ran back to his car to retrieve a pair of binoculars from the parcel shelf, and returned to his vantage point on the edge of the hill. As he brought the vehicle into focus, it pulled up in the yard at La Croix Blanche and a familiar figure stepped out.

‘Shit!’ Enzo lowered his binoculars. What the hell was Nicole doing there?

Dust rose from the castine, quickly dispersing on the edge of the wind, as Enzo pulled his 2CV in behind Nicole’s 4L. Several vehicles sat around the yard. A tractor stood idling in the shade of a barn with a corrugated red tin roof. He could smell the fermenting juices of this year’s harvest coming from the chai. But there was no sign of life. Enzo started up the path towards the house, past an old stone bread oven. Apple trees were dropping ripe red apples in the grass. As he reached steps leading up to the front door, Fabien emerged from the cave below, dragging a coil of yellow plastic tubing.

He stopped when he saw Enzo. ‘What the hell do you want?’

‘To see Nicole.’

‘Maybe she doesn’t want to see you.’

‘Well, why don’t we ask her?’ Enzo’s eyes dropped to the coil of yellow tubing, and he saw that Fabien’s right hand was heavily bandaged. Fresh white gauze wrapped around the thumb and palm. Blood had seeped through lint from the fleshy area at the base of the thumb and dried a dark brown. ‘What did you do to your hand?’

Fabien seemed surprised by the question and looked down at the bandage. ‘I cut it.’

‘Doing what?’

‘None of your damn business!’ He dropped the tubing and pushed past Enzo to start up the steps. ‘If you want to talk to Nicole, you’d better do it. Then get off my land.’

Enzo followed him into the cool of the shuttered house, past the disapproving glare of Madame Marre, and up creaking stairs to the landing. Nicole turned in surprise as Fabien moved aside to let Enzo step into her bedroom doorway. The large suitcase that accompanied her everywhere lay open on the bed, the wardrobe doors stood ajar, and clothes were strewn over chairs and pillows. ‘What are you doing here, Monsieur Macleod?’

‘That’s just what I was going to ask you.’ He turned towards Fabien. ‘In private.’

Fabien gave him a long, surly look, then headed back along the landing. Enzo heard him on the stairs, and closed the bedroom door behind him.

‘For heaven’s sake, Monsieur Macleod! What’s all the drama about? When I got the call about my mother, I never even stopped to pack. I’m just back to collect my things.’

‘And to see Fabien?’

She bristled. ‘That’s my business.’

‘Mine, too, Nicole.’

She thrust defiant breasts at him. ‘I don’t see how.’

‘I’m responsible for you being here at all. And Fabien Marre’s still very much in the frame for these killings.’