He rolled his head to one side to look at her earnest face in the moonlight and smiled. ‘You’re right.’
‘Is it me? Us?’
‘No. You are everything that is not wrong with my life.’ He hesitated. ‘It’s Charlotte.’
He heard the tiny explosion of air that signalled Dominique’s irritation. ‘I don’t know why you still give her the time of day.’
‘Because she’s the mother of my son, Dominique.’ He closed his eyes and ran the next words through his head several times before he spoke them. ‘At least, I thought she was.’
Dominique pulled herself up on one elbow and stared at him in surprise. ‘What do you mean?’
He found it difficult now even to form the sentence. ‘She told me there had been someone else.’
‘When?’
‘She didn’t say. But...’ He was almost afraid to say it, in case speaking the words aloud would give them substance and truth. ‘She hinted there was a chance that Laurent might not be mine.’
He was aware of Dominique going limp. ‘What a bitch she is.’
Enzo said, almost as if apologising for her, ‘She doesn’t always endear herself to everyone.’
A silence lay between them, like the ghost of Charlotte herself. Then Dominique said, ‘Where are you going with her tomorrow?’
‘To the high-security prison at Lannemezan. To interview the serial killer Régis Blanc.’ And he explained about the Lucie Martin case, and Charlotte’s ability to get him access to Blanc.
Dominique listened in silence. She had played an important role in discovering who had killed the celebrity chef, Marc Fraysse. Now she said, ‘Let me help.’
‘How?’
‘I’m a trained police officer, Enzo. I can be useful in the investigation. You know how it can sometimes throw more light on a problem to have two minds working on it from different angles.’
‘I can’t take you with me to see Blanc.’
‘No, but you can brief me when you get back. We can do this together.’
And for some unaccountable reason Enzo felt a huge wave of relief. Almost for the first time since Pascale had died he didn’t feel alone anymore. Carrying the burdens of his life, his family and sometimes, it seemed, the whole world. All on his own. He turned to her again, suffused by a nearly overwhelming sense of affection, cupping the back of her head in his hand and drawing her to him to kiss her. He wanted to tell her he loved her. But he was scared to say the words. Three simple words, said too easily, that carried a weight far greater perhaps than any other three words in human history. He knew she wanted to hear them, but still they wouldn’t come.
Suddenly she turned away and slipped out of bed. She leaned over to dip into her overnight bag and pulled out a sheer satin dressing gown. He heard the smoothness of it on her skin as she drew it around her. Then she held out her hand towards him. ‘Come on.’
He shimmied across the bed and slid out to stand up beside her. She seemed so small next to him. ‘Where are we going?’
‘To lay your ghosts to rest. The only way to remove uncertainty is to know the truth.’ She took his hand and led him across the room. He snatched his dressing gown from the door, black silk with embroidered dragons, and pulled it on as she drew him out into the hall. There was not a sound from the other rooms. Streetlight lay in squares across the floor, divided and subdivided by the panes of glass in the double doors leading to the séjour. They stepped through them, avoiding the lines, almost like the games of peever Enzo remembered playing in the school playground.
Nicole had left a bag of Laurent’s things sitting on the table. Dominique rifled through them until she found what she was looking for. A hairbrush with fine soft bristles, wisps of gossamer dark hair trapped between them. With thumb and forefinger, she teased some free and held it up to Enzo. ‘You of all people, my love, should be able to use his DNA to test for paternity.’
Then he saw a shadow cross her face, as if a cloud had passed before the moon.
‘But one thing you should know. I can’t ever give you a son. Or a daughter. We tried, my ex and I, and failed. They tested us. He was declared fertile.’ There was the slightest catch in her voice. ‘And I was told I would never bear a child.’
Chapter twenty-three
When consciousness returned it brought only darkness. Bertrand’s eyes flickered open and saw nothing. Neither could he feel anything, except for the constant tattoo of rain on his chest and face. Where the raindrops touched his skin they felt like needles. His clothes were soaked and immeasurably heavy. Almost heavier than the limbs he seemed incapable of moving.
There was no sensation in his broken leg now, as if it had been amputated while he slept. He was unable to feel his feet. His hands seemed huge, swollen and clumsy.
But, even as he gazed into darkness, the world about him slowly began to take form. Shadows delineating shapes. The silhouette of a fallen tree. The bowed and sodden leaves of autumn fern. Hard black rock shot through with seams of marbled limestone. And they were moving. Slowly crossing his field of vision from right to left.
Then the sound of a motor. And, filtering through the fog that filled his head, the realisation that a vehicle was coming, the twin beams of its headlights raking this barren landscape, a place that had somehow trapped him for a day and a night in its dead arms.
With an effort that robbed him of almost all his remaining strength, he rolled on to his side and found his right hand grasping the broken branch of a fallen tree. Strong enough to support his weight as he used it to get himself to his knees, pulling himself up to transfer that same weight on to his one good leg. He stood, trembling on it, swaying in the rain, using the dead branch to keep his balance.
What had begun as the distant sound of a vehicle’s engine had turned into a roar that filled the night. Its headlights, set high in the cab of a tractor trailer dragging a huge container behind it, burned out the landscape like an overexposed photograph. Bertrand levered himself forward, almost blinded by it, transferring weight between his left leg and the broken branch, his other leg dragging uselessly behind him.
By some light in the cab he could see the face of the driver, pale, focused, averted in that moment from the road, concentrating on something that he held in one hand. And it dawned on Bertrand that he was either sending or receiving a text on his mobile phone. He waved his arm uselessly and shouted at the huge, lumbering vehicle as he tried desperately to put himself level with the road. But even as he forced himself on he knew he was too late. The driver hadn’t seen him, and the great sweep of its wheel arch caught him a glancing blow that threw him back into the undergrowth, broken branches and briars tearing at his clothes and his skin, leaving him unconscious and barely breathing.
And still the rain fell.
Chapter twenty-four
The gap between carriageways of the motorway was on fire with leaves in full blaze of autumn colour. It had been dark when they left Cahors, and now a low sun was slanting through the rear windscreen as they headed west and south. Toulouse was behind them, and away to their left the Pyrenees cut a purple silhouette against the palest of clear blue skies. Some of the most distant peaks already bore snow.
Enzo glanced in the mirror and saw Kirsty keeping a measured distance behind them, her brown hair almost red, backlit by the sun.
For someone who had been so keen to talk to him the night before, Charlotte had stayed strangely silent for most of the last hour, gazing straight ahead at the lines counting themselves off beneath the car, lost in her own private world. She had handed her car keys to Enzo and insisted he drive.