Lucqui put down the barrow. “No thanks necessary. I’d have done the same for a dog.”
Enzo raised a wry smile. “Well, that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.”
And for the first time since he’d met him he saw Lucqui smile.
“You wouldn’t have seen Madame Fraysse, would you?”
The big gardener retreated behind his black eyes. “No.” And he picked up the handles of his barrow. Then stopped and put them down again. “First of November, isn’t it?”
“That’s right.”
“You’ll probably find her at the cemetery, then. She always visits Marc at Toussaint.”
The cemetery at Saint-Pierre was just outside the village, on a west-facing slope. It had an uninterrupted view of the Massif laid out below it, such a view to take with you to eternity that it must have seemed almost welcoming to those reaching a certain age of infirmity. But Marc Fraysse had been nowhere near that time when folk might start to think of death. He had taken his own sortie de secours far too early. A sad choice for a man with so much more to offer.
Enzo pushed open the gates in the high east wall, and wandered down among the tombs and headstones newly bedecked with fresh flowers, to the Fraysse family tomb on the lower slope. Elisabeth stood by the huge marble slab engraved in gold with the name of her late husband, his parents and grandparents, the bones of three generations lying together in the infinite darkness below. She turned at the sound of his footsteps on the gravel, and he saw the anger in her eyes as she turned away to gaze down again at her husband’s tomb.
He stopped beside her, and without looking at him she said, “I remember the very first time I set eyes on him in the boat shed on the lake. He seemed so young. And innocent. Those beautiful big eyes of his fixing themselves on me, and casting their spell, even then.” She shook her head. “For all his faults, Monsieur Macleod, and they were many, I never stopped loving him.” And she turned, to fix him with steel cold eyes. “I don’t like being spied on.”
He nodded, and saw that those tiny flocons of snow he had seen earlier in Thiers were starting to fall now on the hill. But so light and insubstantial were they, an existence immeasurably ephemeral, that they vanished the moment they touched the ground. As did, in the grand scheme of things, the lives of the men and women lying here beneath it. He said, “I know that you and Guy faked Marc’s murder to hide his suicide.”
Her face turned almost instantly pale, and he saw the shock in her eyes, followed by resignation, and then something that seemed almost like relief. “Guy told you that?”
“I’ve just come from the hotel.” Not a lie. But he knew she would put her own construction on it. “I know about the suicide clause in the life assurance policy. And Marc’s gambling debt. I spoke to the man he owed the money to.”
She closed her eyes and let out a long, slow breath, as if she had been holding it in all these years. “I’m glad,” she said at length. “It was a secret almost impossible to bear. The tears I cried over those few words he left me. And still do.” He saw those same tears well again in her eyes now. “I suppose I always understood why he did it. The debt, the rumors about losing a star. But it was typically selfish of him not to think, or care, how it would leave me, or Guy. He never could resist the grand gesture, the encore, the bow at the end of the show. It was always about him. No one else.”
“Tell me how it happened.”
She glanced at him, but her eyes flickered away, unable to hold his gaze. “The statement we gave the police was true, up to a point. Marc had gone off for his usual afternoon run, but failed to return on schedule. It was approaching prep time for the evening service, and when he didn’t answer his cellphone, Guy went off to look for him. Which is when he found him dead inside the buron. He had shot himself, and left a note.”
Enzo said, “A man intent on taking his own life wouldn’t normally go to the trouble of burying his phone and his knife?”
She turned, almost startled. “You know about that?”
“I recovered them both. Do you want to tell me how that came about?”
“Guy buried the pouch and got rid of the gun. But not immediately. Not before he had come back down to the hotel and broken the news to me.” She paused, lost for a moment in painful recollection. “I suppose I must have been pretty difficult for him to deal with. I was close to hysteria. It… it didn’t seem possible that Marc was gone. Just like that. A flame extinguished. Vanished. Out of my life forever. Like he’d never even existed. But Guy was so calm. He forced me to sit down and face the reality. He’d only recently found out about the extent of the gambling debts himself. And he made me look at the suicide clause in the life policy. Not only had we lost Marc, we were going to lose everything else as well.”
“So it was his idea to make it look like murder?”
She nodded. “He persuaded me to come back up to the buron with him. I couldn’t go in. Couldn’t get past the entrance. I sat outside on a rock and wept like I have never wept in my life. I suppose it didn’t matter whether he had been murdered or taken his own life, my grief was just as great.”
“And just as genuine.”
She glanced at him through tear-filled eyes. “Yes.” Her breath trembled as she breathed, trying to control herself, salvage something of her dignity. “Guy removed the suicide note and the gun, and buried the pouch to make it look like a robbery. He’d even had the presence of mind to take another pair of boots up with him, a size smaller than his own, to make another set of footprints in the mud.”
Enzo then realized that the fifth set of prints must have belonged to Anne Crozes.
“That’s when we called the police and waited for someone to come. It seemed like an eternity, trapped up there by our own deception, lost in guilt and grief for the man we both loved. I read his suicide note again and again. Words burned into my memory forever. I look at it still. On the anniversary of his death. On his birthday. At Toussaint. And the pain never diminishes.”
“You still have it?” Enzo hardly dared to believe it was possible.
“Of course. They were his last words, Monsieur Macleod. How could I throw them away?”
As they drove into the car park at the auberge, Enzo following Elisabeth Fraysse in her Mercedes Sports, he noticed that Guy’s yellow Renault Trafic had gone. Although there were still one or two staff vehicles there, the hotel itself seemed deserted. Snow fell through the gloom like tiny vanishing fireflies, and the darkness gathering beyond the clouds gave witness to the coming night.
Enzo followed in the wake of the widow’s grief, past the door of the suite he had occupied, before they stopped outside the door of Marc Fraysse’s study. Elisabeth produced a key, and unlocked it, with the merest flicker of a glance at Enzo. There was no doubt that both Elisabeth and Guy knew exactly who had been in Marc’s study, and when.
She crossed the room to his roll top bureau, pushing back the roller and turning on a desk lamp. The laptop computer and blotter, and the profusion of papers that lay scattered across the desktop, blazed in a pool of intense illumination. She reached into the light, a pale, long-fingered hand, speckled now with the first brown marks of age, and felt beneath a shelf to release some hidden catch. A drawer, which had seemed like a decorative panel, sprung open. Inside it lay Marc Fraysse’s suicide note. Enzo realized how frustratingly close he had been to it every time he had sat at this desk. But how could he have known?