One blink and it was gone.
He saw her through the glass, sitting alone, her hands on the table in front of her, fingers intertwined. The cafe was empty, and she cut a lonely figure sitting there under the harsh fluorescent light. She looked up as the door opened, and her face darkened. There were no coffees on the table.
He sat down opposite her, and for a moment she refused to meet his eyes. Then, when she did, he saw that all the warmth had left hers. “Don’t ever do that to me again.” Her voice was low and controlled.
He felt the stab of her anger, and his own face colored. “He wasn’t going to say anything with you there.”
“Then you should have gone back later. I have to live here, Enzo. And you completely undermined me in front of him. Stripped me of all my power and authority. Turned me into some silly woman who can be brushed aside.”
Enzo drew a deep breath. “I’m sure he didn’t see it like that.”
“I’m sure he did.”
Enzo reached out to take her hand. “I’m sorry.”
She withdrew it quickly. “Don’t make it worse. I’m not some silly woman, and you can’t just appease me with a squeeze of the hand and a patronising apology.”
Enzo withdrew his own hands and pushed them into his pocket. “Ok. Then let me put it another way. I’m here to investigate a murder, Dominique. I have a few days at the most. They’re closing the hotel next week and everyone will be gone. I’m not going to pussyfoot around fragile sensibilities and risk losing any of the little time I have.” They glared at each other for a moment. Then Enzo sighed. “I’m genuinely sorry if I stepped on your toes. I didn’t mean to, and it won’t happen again.”
Her voice remained steady. “No, it won’t.” The tension between them almost crackled in the air, like electricity. Before suddenly she seemed to relent, and it dissipated. “What did he tell you?”
“Nothing. Yet.”
She searched his face. “I’ve been straight with you, Enzo. Shared everything I have.”
“And I’ll be straight with you, too. He didn’t want to talk in there. I’m meeting him tonight. And whatever he shares with me, I’ll share with you.”
“You told him that?”
“No, I told him that whatever he told me was between him and me.” He grinned. “But I gave him a hundred euros, so I figured that bought me the right to lie a little.”
A reluctant smile pushed its way on to Dominique’s lips and a little of the warmth returned to her eyes.
Enzo said, “Listen, what are you doing for lunch?”
She shrugged. “Don’t know. Probably open a tin of soup or something. I’ll get some bread at the boulangerie on the way back to the apartment.”
“No one to cook for you?”
A sadness dulled her smile. “Or to cook for.”
Enzo shook his head. “That seems incredible to me. An attractive woman like you.”
She caught his glance at her ring hand. “Oh, I used to be married. He was a fonctionnaire at the mairie. We had a little apartment away from the gendarmerie. Both employees of the state, but our hours never quite matched up. In the end he found someone else to share his time off with.” She shook her head and made herself smile. “And the kind of hours I work, I’m not going to find someone else in a hurry.”
Enzo gazed at her thoughtfully for some moments.
She said. “Don’t pity me. I don’t feel sorry for myself.”
Enzo shook his head. “I wasn’t feeling sorry for you. I was just thinking what a waste it was.” He hesitated. “Maybe I can offer you something better for lunch than a tin of soup and a baguette.”
She laughed. “Don’t tell me you cook, too.”
“I do actually. But that’s not what I meant. I’m having lunch at Chez Fraysse today. Why don’t you join me, since it’s your day off?”
Her mouth fell open just a little, before she became aware of it and snapped it shut.
“After all, you did tell me you’d never eaten there. And maybe at last you can say you’ve met a man who would be happy to spend that kind of money on you.”
She stared at him for some moments, almost in disbelief, before her face broke into a grin. “Oh, my God! What am I going to wear?”
Chapter Fourteen
The staff ate in a long recreational shed out back, behind the kitchen. Canteen style tables and chairs were laid out in two rows to feed the twenty kitchen staff and other employees of the hotel. The toilets and locker rooms stood at one end.
Morning service for the staff was at eleven, and lasted no longer than thirty minutes, so that the kitchen was geared up and ready for lunch service in the restaurant by midday. Most of the chefs had been in preparing for the day’s services since eight, and were more than ready to eat.
As Enzo wandered in, the shed was filling up. Big pots of steaming food were being placed along the two lines of tables: Andouillette sausage, bowls of pasta, salad, potatoes, several huge containers of hot brown lentils in a thick onion gravy. Bottles of water and cheap vin de pays stood at intervals along the tables. But no one was drinking the rough, red wine. Cutlery was grabbed from piles at the ends of the tables, but Enzo noticed that most of the cooking staff had their own Laguiole or Thiers knives that they unfolded from pockets and used for eating.
He noticed, too, the men he had seen putting in snow poles along the road the day he arrived. The big man with the dark haunted expression who had caught his eye then, caught it again now. He was unshaven, his hair long and greasy, hanging over his collar. Enzo nodded and smiled. But the man gazed back at him from behind unfathomable dark eyes, and made no acknowledgement whatsoever. He wore thick, workmen’s overalls and a fluorescent yellow vest. The treads of his green Wellington boots were caked with mud. His eyes dipped back to his food which he shovelled unceremoniously into his mouth with big, dirty hands.
Enzo squeezed past and scanned the faces of all those taking seats along the length of the two rows of tables. He saw Sophie, assiduously avoiding his eye. She was sitting amongst a group of young kitchen staff, obviously stagiaires, who were laughing and joking as they passed the food along and snatched chunks of rough cut bread from one of the many baskets.
And then his eyes fell on the person he was looking for.
Georges Crozes sat at the end of the far row, on his own. There were several empty chairs between him and the other staff, as if he either discouraged mealtime company, or the others were simply reluctant to sit beside the boss.
Enzo pushed along to the end of the row and sat himself in the seat opposite. He waved aside the offer of a plate from one of the chefs de partie, two seats away. He wasn’t here to eat. Georges Crozes raised his eyes to look at him, as if Enzo had just invaded his private space. Which he probably had.
“You don’t mind chatting for a few minutes while you have lunch, do you?”
Crozes shrugged. “Do I have any choice?”
“It’s up to you.”
Crozes ripped open a piece of sausage with his pearl-handled Laguiole, allowing its stuffing of pig’s intestine to burst out of it. The smell almost turned Enzo’s stomach. So this was how a three-star Michelin chef ate at lunchtime. “What do you want to chat about?”
“Marc Fraysse.”
“What about him?”
“How long had you worked for him before his death?”
“I was with Marc from the time he got his second star.”
“So that was about… seven years before he was killed?”
“I guess so.”
“You must have been pretty close.”
Crozes glanced up as if he suspected Enzo of loading the question in some way. “Professionally, yes. Personally, no.”
“But you must have spent, what, ten, twelve hours a day with him?”
“I must have done.”
“You spend that much time with someone every day over seven years, you must get to know them pretty well.”
Crozes sighed, and a mouthful of sausage was followed by a forkful of lentils. “The man was a genius. I never worked with anyone like him. His attention to detail was extraordinary, and he brought me to realize just how important those details were. He made me, Monsieur Macleod. He moulded me in his image. And I knew the only reason he did that was because he saw himself in me. He saw what I could be. And he made damn sure I fulfilled my potential.”