He reached up and took down a folded Paisley patterned silk scarf lined with camel-colored cashmere. As he opened it up he immediately saw the dead man’s hairs still clinging in places to the wool. He lifted it to his face and breathed it in. There was a faintly damp smell, like something you might find in the cellar. A hint of something perfumed. Aftershave perhaps. And something else with a slightly sour note, like stale body odour. This was, he felt certain, the best example he was likely to find of something that still bore the dead man’s scent.
The sound of the door opening into Elisabeth Fraysse’s living room caused his heart to freeze. His face stinging with shock, he stood stock still, listening, almost paralysed. He heard her clearing her throat and knew that he was trapped. His mind went into superdrive, computing every possible alternative open to him. There weren’t many, so it didn’t take long.
He closed the wardrobe door and moved toward the door to Marc’s study with all the care of a man walking barefoot on glass. If it was locked, the game was up. To his enormous relief the handle turned in his fingers and the door opened with the faintest creak of its hinges. In his head it sounded like a saw cutting through steel. He moved quickly from one room to the next and pulled the door shut, just as he heard the bedroom door opening from the living room.
He looked around in a panic. There was nowhere to hide. And then he saw the key in the door leading the hall. Three long, soft, strides took him to the door. He turned the key and pushed down the handle, and was out into the hall, even as he heard the door to the study opening from the bedroom.
He almost ran along the hallway, fumbling for his keycard to let himself into his rooms, shutting the door behind him and leaning back against it, hearing and feeling the thump of his heart as it hammered against his ribs. If anyone tried the study door, he or she would know it had been unlocked from the inside. But nobody had seen him, and he had left no traces. There was nothing to point to him. Any member of the housekeeping staff might have unlocked it for access and forgotten to re-lock it.
He looked down at the scarf still clutched in his hand. This was, perhaps, the longest shot that he had ever taken. But he needed evidence, hard evidence. A place to start. Without it, he knew, there was little or no chance of ever finding out who had killed the most famous chef in France.
Chapter Twenty-six
Enzo met Dominique in the parking area at the foot of the track which led up through the woods to the old buron. He parked his 2CV beside the dark blue gendarme van and was greeted by an affectionate assault from an excited Tasha, who danced and leapt around him like a demented dervish.
There was a moment of strangeness between him and Dominique. Her uniform created a distance between them, and neither was sure if a kiss was appropriate. All the intimacy of the night before had vanished, it seemed, like snow melting on water. Some unspoken agreement that somehow passed between them put business ahead of personal pleasure. They were, after all, investigating a man’s murder.
“Did you get something?”
He nodded and patted a bulge beneath the zip of his anorak. “A scarf. It still has some of his hair on it.”
“Good. Let’s go.”
And they started up through the trees. Rain drifted down through the unaccustomed stillness around them, like a mist, soaking everything it touched. Tasha ran on ahead, barking at shadows, picking up the scent of rabbits or deer, and zig-zagging away through the dripping pines on fruitless tangents.
When, finally, they broke cover of the trees, Enzo felt the rain seeping into his soul. His pants were sodden, the collar of his shirt beneath his waterproof was wet, his hair plastered to his head. Even his feet felt damp. Dominique’s face was pink and shining wet as she turned to wait for him to catch her up. Tasha was already bounding away through the dead grasses of the hillside, ignoring the track, revelling in her freedom.
Enzo and Dominique, however, followed the track to where it doubled back on itself and climbed steeply up toward the plateau. The wet stone shadow of the ruined buron appeared on the horizon above them like a ghost. By the time they reached it, Enzo was short of breath, and they stood inside sheltering from the rain until he recovered.
Dominique called Tasha and the dog came leaping and bounding inside to join them. The gendarme made her sit. Enzo took out Marc Fraysse’s scarf to let her sniff it. Tasha buried her nose in the wool, snuffling with interest at these new and unexpected smells, millions of tiny receptors in her nose registering and translating them into coded messages to be sent and stored in her brain.
Dominique watched her absorb the scent left in this world by a dead man more than seven years before. “It’s amazing. As if her sense of smell is even more important than her sight.”
“It is,” Enzo said, “Smells, for a dog, create a kind of architecture of the world around them that their brains translate into a mental picture. Tasha’s sense of smell is a thousand times better than ours. She has around two hundred million nasal olfactory receptors, and can detect odours at concentrations nearly one hundred million times lower than us. If we asked her to, she could detect one drop of blood in five liters of water.”
She glanced at him, her eyes wide with wonder. “You know your stuff.”
He grinned. “I do.”
Dominique reached into her pocket and produced the black ball that was the object of Tasha’s obsession. It excited her interest immediately, causing her to abandon the scarf, but Dominique instantly withdrew the ball to hold it behind her back and re-introduce the scarf.
Tasha’s training kicked in. She remembered the game, and her eyes shone with excitement. She barked, then, as Dominique held the ball out of reach and pointed at the door.
“ Allez! Allez!” she shouted, and Tasha went bounding out into the rain. Enzo and Dominique went after her, struggling to keep up as Tasha went running left and right, her nose to the ground, absolutely focused on finding the scent that she knew would bring the reward of her ball. For a while she followed the path above the treeline, then went haring off among the rocks on the plateau, lifting her head occasionally to sniff the air, sampling the scents it carried.
After fifteen minutes, her obsession was driving her further and further from the buron, without success. Enzo and Dominique were finding it hard to keep up, and something about the vast open space of the plateau and the density of the hillside forest brought it home to Enzo just how hopeless this was. The words needle and haystack came to his mind, but even they seemed inadequate to measure the enormity of the task they had set the dog, and the odds against her finding something that might not even be there.
Dominique stood with her hands on her hips. “Looks like a waste of time,” she said and called out Tasha’s name. Her voice rang across the hillside before being soaked up by the rain. But Tasha’s fixation was making her deaf, or at least impervious, to her mistress’ call. She was two or three hundred meters away, and disappeared down into the trees. Dominique sighed and looked up into the low cloud that hung, it seemed, just above their heads. The rain was more than a mist now, and Enzo could hear it beating a tattoo on their waterproofs. “I guess she’ll give up in time. We should get back to the shelter of the buron. She’ll know where to find us.”
They trudged wearily back across the plateau to the old ruined shelter and squeezed into the damp and dark beneath the lauzes, to peer out miserably into the gloom. The valley below them had been swallowed up by cloud and rain. The chill in the air was raw, and Enzo was not sure if he had ever felt quite so cold.