Suddenly, apropos of nothing, she said, ‘Why have Kirsty and Roger not married?’
Enzo was startled, both by the sudden sound of her voice and the question it had framed. ‘I’ve no idea. I’ve asked her about it myself, but she seems a little evasive. They were due to marry before the baby was born, but it never happened.’
‘Good. Let’s hope it stays that way. For Kirsty’s sake.’
Enzo stole a glance at her, but her eyes were still fixed on the road ahead. ‘Why? Are you jealous?’
Now she laughed, and her amusement seemed genuine enough. ‘Good God, no. It was over with Roger and me a long time ago.’
‘And yet you still maintain regular contact.’
She shrugged. ‘What is it they say? Keep your friends close and your enemies closer?’
Enzo was surprised. ‘You think of Roger as your enemy?’
She half turned her head towards him. ‘Not exactly. But as I’ve told you before, I know him too well. I neither like nor trust him. I’d rather keep him in plain view in front of me than suddenly feel his knife in my back.’
And Enzo remembered the night on the terrace at Gaillac where she had expressed dark thoughts about him. He glanced in the mirror again at Kirsty, and the misgivings he had always had about Raffin came bubbling once more to the surface. Yet again he felt a stab of concern for his daughter, and Charlotte put his thoughts into words. ‘Pity they had the baby. Children have a habit of tying people together more closely than marriage.’
And the irony in that was not lost on him. He glanced at her and their eyes met for a moment in unexpected communion. He returned his gaze to the road. ‘You know he’s been offered a job by the Mayor of Paris?’
He felt her head turn towards him. ‘Devez?’
He nodded.
‘What kind of job?’
‘Press secretary. If Devez gets the nomination for the presidential candidacy.’
He heard a tiny puff of air expel itself from between her lips. ‘That figures, I suppose. With Roger’s left-wing credentials and his association with Libération, it’ll put the socialists on the wrong foot. Give the UMP a little street cred.’ She paused. ‘You know that Roger and Marie were great friends of Devez and his wife back in the nineties?’
‘I do. Though I don’t really know very much about Devez himself. Except that he’s the front-runner for the UMP nomination.’
‘Oh, he’s a smart one, Enzo. A real smooth operator. Cut his political teeth in Bordeaux in the early days. He was deputy mayor for some years, with responsibility for finance, human resources and administration. One of the youngest ever to be entrusted with the job. I guess even then people saw him as a future star. Bright, intelligent, personable. But he had something else. That magic something you need to get to the very top. Charisma. The kind of charisma that marked out Bill Clinton as special. It shines through, even once removed, on television, or in press photographs.’
Enzo half smiled. ‘Sounds like you’ve fallen for him.’
She laughed. ‘Oh, he’s an attractive man. There’s probably not a woman in France who wouldn’t be tempted to slip into his bed. Though he’s happily married from all accounts. With a young adult family.’
Enzo said, ‘It’s a big leap from provincial deputy mayor to Mayor of Paris.’
‘It is. But there was never any doubt when he made the move to the capital that that’s where he was headed. Even though he was still just a baby, in political terms.’
‘And now he has the presidency in his sights. Will he win?’
‘If the party picks him, I think he will.’ She turned to look at Enzo. ‘Which will make Roger a very powerful man.’
Enzo nodded. ‘Do you know him? Devez, I mean.’
He heard a tiny snorting laugh burst from her nostrils, her lips pressed tightly closed. Then, ‘I’ve met him, yes. But know him?’ She shook her head. ‘Does anyone really know a man like that? Charisma is a wonderful and attractive quality, Enzo, but who knows what it conceals?’
Chapter twenty-five
Mist lay all across the plain, filling the contours of the land in swirls and eddies, and, from the slight elevation of the road, it looked like a lake.
The distant motorway was lost in it, but the man could see the faintest trace of fog lamps delineating its route along the horizon, and the sound of early-morning traffic reached him with an odd clarity, the way that sound travels across water.
The sky above was clear, and the southern sun was already spilling its warmth across the treetops to disperse the chill that had settled overnight with the mist.
The road was still wet from last night’s rain, and his dog, a lively Scots border collie, took great pleasure in splashing her way from puddle to puddle. Turning back at frequent intervals to check that her master was still following, and to seek his approval.
As the road curved gently towards the west, she left the pitted tarmac and went bounding off through the tangle of creeper and briar that washed up on the very edge of the mist, like detritus on the beach after a storm. She snagged her fur as she went, barking with excitement. The man imagined she had picked up the scent of a rabbit, or some rodent, or maybe even a fox. Suddenly she stopped and began pawing at the ground. He called after her. ‘Fanny!’ Unusually, she ignored him, snuffling and barking, and circling whatever it was she had found. ‘Fanny!’ He injected a tone into his voice that brought her head up to look at him. But only for a moment, before she returned to her new-found obsession.
He sighed. She was still young. This time he shouted, and still it had no effect on her. Leaving the road, he strode off through the tangle of dead undergrowth left behind in some distant past by the felling of trees. He reached her in a few short strides, and then stopped in his tracks as he saw what it was that had so focused her attention.
The body of a young man lay face down in the bracken, his right leg twisted at an unnatural angle. He wasn’t moving or responding in any way to Fanny’s barking. The man crouched down, with the dread sense that he was in the presence of death, and saw blood dried on the young man’s forehead. Removing his gloves, he lightly brushed his fingers on the skin of the face. It was cold to the touch, and its pallor suggested that life might have departed some time ago.
Now he reached around to the neck, searching with his fingers for what he knew to be the jugular venous pulse. At first he could not find the vein, and when he did, no pulse. Fanny’s constant barking produced a bellow from him that caused the dog to retreat, startled, standing off to stare at him in bemused silence. And it was almost as if the silence itself found the life in Bertrand’s prone body, and the man suddenly felt the faintest of pulses.
He stood up quickly, and with trembling fingers reached for his mobile phone.
Chapter twenty-six
Lannemezan lay in the great southern plain that sprawled in the shadow of the Pyrenees. The high-security maison centrale and centre de détention was an ordered, modern prison complex behind a rectangle of concrete walls, built in the eighties and set in agricultural country outside the town itself. It was bounded on two sides by railway lines, and no doubt the 170 prisoners held within its cells could hear the trains that passed in the night, and dreamt of long-lost freedom.
It must, Enzo thought, as they turned off the main road and drove up to the entrance, be quite galling to look out from behind these bars to see the mountain range that was once the escape route for allied soldiers and resistance fighters fleeing the Nazis. The Pyrenees had long been a symbol of freedom, and he wondered if there was some deliberate irony in the choice of Lannemezan as the setting for a place to take it away.