Blacklight Blue (8 page)

Chapter Seventeen

Guildford, England, July 1986

Richard walked through the carpark towards the nineteenth century Artington House with its brick gables, and twisted wisteria. It stood behind manicured lawns shaded by tall trees in full summer leaf. The roar of traffic from Portsmouth Road retreated behind him as he climbed the steps to its main entrance.

At first she had denied it. Insisted he had made some kind of mistake. But when he threatened to go up to the attic to retrieve the certificate, she had forbidden him. He had never to go up there again. It was off limits. And then she simply refused to discuss it. He had exams to study for, and better things with which to fill his head.

And as far as she was concerned, that was an end to it.

But for Richard it was just the beginning.

He had retired to his room then, and looked around it for the last time without the least sense of emotion. These were the walls that had contained him for most of his seventeen years. Home to the accumulated junk of childhood. His collection of toy soldiers, posters and paintings and albums, his old rugby strip hanging over the back of a chair. His Spanish guitar. So many things he knew he would never miss.

He packed a sports bag with some underwear, a couple of tee-shirts, a pair of jeans, tennis shoes, and a pair of open-toed sandals. He took all his savings from the envelope he had taped beneath his desk drawer and stuffed it in his wallet. He lifted his favourite denim jacket from the back of the door, slipped his passport into an inside pocket, and released the catch that held his bedroom window.

He dropped through the dark into the little square of garden behind the arched gate that led to the lane beyond, and crouched there for a moment listening to the sound of the cicadas. The warm evening air was filled with the scent of bougainvillea and pine and the smell of the sea. As his eyes adjusted, he glanced down to where phosphorescent waves broke over glistening black rock fifty feet below. The sea felt alive. His sea. He could hear it breathing. It was the only thing he would miss.

***

The woman behind the desk in the office smiled at him. He said he had phoned earlier about acquiring a copy of his brother’s death certificate. She remembered him, and he was struck by how readily she took him at face value. He might have been born in this country, but he had spent all his conscious life in France. He spoke French with a southern accent. He listened to Francis Cabrel and Serge Gainsborough. He had a crush on France Gall. And yet his English was so convincing this woman took him for a native. Perhaps he even looked English. One more chip out of his sense of self.

She produced the freshly printed extract and signed it, and he paid for it with the strange notes and coins for which he had exchanged his francs at the bureau de change in London, before catching the train down to Surrey. He glanced at the certificate, and felt again the touch of icy fingers on his neck when he saw his name on it. ‘Can I see the original?’

‘I’m afraid not. The originals are all kept in our vaults, and are not available for public scrutiny.’ She had a sense of something lost in his demeanour and glanced again at the extract she had given him. ‘He died very young. Still a baby, really.’

‘Yes. He never had the chance to grow up.’

She looked at him and smiled again. ‘Maybe he’d have turned out a bit like you.’

Richard flashed her a look, and felt his skin darkening. ‘No!’ His contradiction was unnecessarily abrupt. ‘He wouldn’t have been anything like me!’

***

The traffic on The Mount was a distant whisper behind the walls of the cemetery. Somehow everything seemed quieter here. Richard sat in the grass next to a small headstone, discoloured by time and moss, and traced the outline of his own name with tentative fingers. How many people, he wondered, got to visit their own graves? It was a hollowing experience. He felt tears burn his cheeks, and the emptiness inside him ached.

If Richard really was dead, then who was he?

Chapter Eighteen

Cahors, November 2008

Enzo felt foolish. Almost embarrassed. He wasn’t going to die after all. At least, not in the next three months. Not if he could help it. And all that depression and self-pity in which he had been wallowing since his appointment with the phony oncologist, seemed horribly indulgent. But he had learned something very valuable. Life was for living. To the full. Every last, precious second of it.

He held both his daughters in an embrace that he wanted to go on forever. Sophie’s tears were staining his shirt. She’d only had a single day to live with the knowledge of her father’s impending death. A day that had seemed like an eternity, eyes burned red raw by endless tears, spilled now in happiness rather than grief.

And Kirsty. He drew back to look at her. The proximity of death had taught them something about themselves, forced both a confrontation and a reconciliation. There was no past, no history. Today was the first day of the rest of their lives. Lives to be lived in the moment.

Unfortunately, at this particular moment, Enzo still stood accused of murder. And whoever it was that was trying to ruin his life was still out there, capable of God only knew what else.

His tiny cell seemed full of people. He hardly knew who they all were. Nicole insinuated herself between the half-sisters, to thrust large breasts at her mentor and crush him with a bear-hugging ferocity.

‘Shouldn’t you be at university?’ he said.

She cocked her head at him. ‘Classes have been cancelled, Monsieur Macleod. Apparently our professor’s been arrested on some trumped up murder charge. And he’ll probably need my help to solve it, like he usually does.’

He smiled at her fondly. She was his brightest student and had already proved an invaluable assistant in helping him solve two of the murders in Raffin’s book. A big girl of farming stock, what she lacked in the social graces she made up for in intelligence. Long, straight hair that reached down almost as far as her ample hips, was pulled back severely from a round, pretty face, and tied in a ponytail. She frowned at him.

‘I can’t let you out of my sight for a minute, can I?’

He looked beyond her and saw Bertrand at the open door, uniformed officers at his back, and he felt the desolation in the young man’s eyes. There was something different about him, odd. Then Enzo realised that the nose stud and eyebrow piercings had gone. His face seemed strangely naked without them. Gone, too, were the spikes gelled into hair which was now swept simply back from a pale forehead. He looked older, as if suddenly, in the face of tragedy, he had been forced finally to discard his youth.

Enzo held out his hand, and the boy shook it firmly. ‘What’s the situation with the gym?’

Bertrand made a face. ‘It’s history. The fire chief says it was arson. There was an accelerant used.’ Years of study and work lost in a single night of flames.

‘I’m so sorry, Bertrand.’

‘Why? It’s not your fault.’

‘I feel responsible.’

But Bertrand wouldn’t have it. ‘Don’t. Whatever I’ve lost I can rebuild.’ He glanced at Kirsty. ‘You nearly lost a daughter.’ Kirsty reached out to touch his arm. The bond between them was evident. When someone saves your life, you owe him forever. When you are the one who saved the life you become, in some way, responsible for it. Bertrand and Sophie were lovers, and while that might some day come to an end, his relationship with Kirsty was for life.

Sophie said, ‘The Maison de la Jeunesse has offered him temporary space, and the bank have said they’ll give him a bridging loan to re-equip until the insurance money comes through.’

Bertrand shrugged bravely. ‘All I’ve got to do is figure out how to make the payments.’

Out in the hallway, they heard a metal door slam shut, and voices, and a man appeared behind Bertrand. He was wearing a suit, thinning dark hair dragged back from a bearded face. It was so rarely that Enzo saw Simon in a suit that he almost didn’t recognise him.

‘Uncle Sy!’ Sophie threw herself at him with the unrestrained pleasure of a child greeting a favourite uncle. Except that he wasn’t really her uncle. Kirsty took his hand and kissed him on both cheeks, strangely formal, before Simon turned towards his oldest friend. He wasn’t smiling.

‘How come they let everyone in here?’

‘I’ve got influence with the boss.’

‘Not enough to get you out, though.’

‘No. Not quite that much.’

Simon glanced at Kirsty. ‘Well, we’d better see what
we
can do to get your dad out, then.’ He stepped forward, and the two men stood looking at each other. They had started school together on the same day, aged five. They had played in a band together through all their teen years. And now here they were in their fifties, facing one another across a police cell, one of them suspected of murder, the other his lawyer. The only call allowed to Enzo had been made to Simon in London. He couldn’t practice law in France, but he had some influential connections in the French legal world.

Enzo’s first instinct was to hug him. But Simon pre-empted the embrace by holding out his hand for a formal handshake. ‘We’ll get you the best
avocat
in the Southwest. I’ve already spoken to some people in Toulouse.’ He seemed unusually detached, coldly professional. ‘They’re allowing me a half-hour interview. You brief me, I’ll brief the
avocat
. We’ll need to clear the cell first.’

‘Not before we figure out what we can do in the meantime.’ They all turned towards Nicole who became suddenly self-conscious. And then defiant. ‘Well, I’m not hanging about twiddling my thumbs while Monsieur Macleod rots in here. There must be something we can do.’

‘She’s right, Dad,’ Kirsty said. ‘You must have some thoughts. You’re an expert on crime scenes, after all.’

‘Oh, I’ve given it a lot of thought, believe me,’ Enzo said with some feeling. ‘And if I was investigating this thing myself, I’d start with the phony surgery in the Rue des Trois Baudus. Someone had access to that place. Someone with a key.’ He paused for just a moment. ‘And the hair they found on the victim’s body? I’ve got a pretty damned good idea where that came from.’

***

The cathedral of St. Etienne stands at the cultural and religious heart of the old Roman city of Cahors, a stunning example of the transition from late Romanesque architecture to Gothic. Resembling a fort, more than a church, it was built in the eleventh century by bishops who were also powerful feudal lords defending their roles as counts and barons of the town. Now it stood in the repose of more tranquil times, a perch for pigeons, a repository for their guano, and the magnificent stained glass of the arched window in the apse looked out on to the barren winter gardens opposite the salon of Coiffure Xavier.

Xavier was performing a red henna rinse on the head of a bird-like-middle-aged lady whose hair had gone prematurely grey and begun thinning alarmingly. She wanted her scalp to be the same colour as her hair to disguise the fact that she was balding. Xavier was trying to persuade her that the disguise was unlikely to work. The door opened, and the bell above it vibrated shrilly in the hot, ammoniac air of the salon.

Xavier immediately sensed hostility. One of the two young women seemed faintly familiar. And he had certainly seen the young man before. A body like his, sculpted during hours of patient exercise, was one you wouldn’t forget in a hurry. Attractive though he was, however, there was something distinctly aggressive in his manner. Xavier took a step back from the henna’d head. ‘
Bonjour messieurs dames
.’ He regarded them cautiously. ‘Can I help?’

Kirsty looked around the cramped little salon with undisguised contempt. Why on earth would her father come here to get his hair trimmed? And almost as if she had read her sister’s mind, Sophie said, ‘He comes once a month on Thursdays. Thursday’s training day.’

Kirsty raised her eyes to the heavens and sighed. It was typical of her father to live out the world’s stereotypical view of the mean Scot. She said, ‘You cut our father’s hair.’

Xavier looked at her blankly. ‘Who’s your father?’

‘Enzo Macleod,’ Sophie said. ‘And he’s in prison on a murder charge because of you.’

Xavier blanched. ‘Me? I’ve never murdered anyone in my life.’

‘It’s running down my neck.’ The bird-like lady squirmed in her seat, and Xavier glanced at the trails of red on white skin that disappeared beneath her plastic shoulder cover. But he was distracted.

Kirsty said, ‘Hair found on the body of a woman murdered in Cahors three days ago matches my father’s.’

Sophie pressed the point home. ‘But that’s not possible, since he wasn’t there.’

Kirsty finished the tirade. ‘And he didn’t kill that woman.’

Xavier’s pallor quickly turned pink as blood rushed to the surface of his skin. ‘I don’t see what that has to do with me.’

‘Xavier, I can feel it running down my back.’

Bertrand took a threatening step towards the hairdresser who instinctively flinched, oblivious to the distress emanating from the red head at his fingertips. ‘There’s an easy way of doing this, Xavier, and there’s a hard way. Your choice.’

‘Okay, okay.’ Xavier raised his hands in self defence. Red for stop. ‘I admit it. I did give him some of Monsieur Macleod’s hair.’

‘Who?’ Sophie looked as if she were about to physically attack him.

‘He said it was for a joke.’

‘Who!’

‘I don’t know who he was. He came in here about a month ago, just after Monsieur Macleod had left, and said he wanted to buy some of his hair.’

‘You mean you took money for it?’ Sophie was incredulous, and her vehemence caused Xavier to take a further step back.

‘I refused at first. But he was very persuasive. And in the end, I didn’t really see the harm.’

‘Well, you see it now.’ Bertrand glared at him. ‘How much did he pay you?’

‘Honestly, I’d stick needles in my eyes before I’d do anything to hurt Monsieur Macleod.’

Bertrand said, ‘That might still be an option. How much?’

‘A hundred euros.’

They stared at him, their disbelief reflected in Kirsty’s astonishment. ‘A hundred euros! For some strands of hair?’

‘Xavier…!’ the woman in the chair wailed.

Xavier ignored her. ‘He didn’t want clippings. He wanted the hair that had come away in the comb. I hadn’t even had a chance to clean it out. Monsieur Macleod’s chair was still warm.’

‘So this guy paid you a hundred euros for a few lengths of my father’s hair, and you didn’t think that was odd?’ Kirsty’s belligerence seemed almost as threatening now to Xavier as Bertrand’s.

‘Like I told you, he said it was for a joke.’

‘Some joke!’

Xavier looked at Sophie and noticed for the first time, quite incongruously, the faint strip of white running back through her dark hair. ‘You’ve got the same badger stripe as your father,’ he said, as if he thought they might be distracted by this and forget about his transgressions

‘Magpie,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘It’s Magpie they call him, not Badger.’

Bertrand said, ‘I think you need to shut up your salon, Xavier, and come up to the
caserne
with us. The police are going to have to take a statement.’

‘I don’t want to get into any trouble.’

‘Maybe you should have thought of that before you went selling your customers’ hair.’

Xavier sighed theatrically, then took in the stripes of red on the neck of the client wriggling below him in her chair. ‘Oh. My. God! What a mess!’ He immediately began dabbing it with a wet sponge, but it had already begun to dry. ‘It’ll take me a few minutes to sort this out.’

‘We’ll wait,’ Bertrand told him.

And Kirsty said, ‘What did he look like? This guy that bought Enzo’s hair?’

Xavier waved a distracted hand in the air. ‘Oh, I don’t know. I hardly remember him.’

‘Try.’

Another theatrical sigh. ‘I suppose he must have been about fortyish. Quite good looking, really. His hair was short. I do remember that. Sort of fair. And, oh…’ His eyes lit up. ‘Ears. Hairdressers always look at ears. You have to in this business. Too easy to cut one off.’

‘What about his ears?’ Kirsty was staring at him intently.

‘Well, it looked like he’d had a nasty accident in a barber’s shop. His right earlobe was completely gone.’