He stood, breathing heavily for some minutes, watching his own breath billowing in front of him. He was not a superstitious man, and he did not believe in the supernatural, but there was something about this encounter with the white stag in the dark of the woods, miles from anywhere, that left him feeling deeply unsettled. And a shiver ran through him that was not attributable to the cold.
Finally, he shook himself free of the spell that the stag had somehow cast, and he carried on down towards the water’s edge. When he reached the point where the trees opened out to reveal the expanse of still lake that filled the valley, he saw mist rising gently from its surface, like smoke, filtering moonlight through spectral gauze.
This was Lucie’s final resting place. Her killer had dumped her body in the deepest part of the lake, never imagining that one day the water would dry up in the summer heat to reveal his handiwork. But how, Enzo wondered, did he know where the deepest part of the lake was? Was it just chance, or did it suggest local knowledge?
The relationships in this penultimate case from Raffin’s book were endlessly complex. There were the Bordeaux Six, of which Lucie was one. Their links to the serial killer, Blanc, who might or might not have been responsible for their deaths or disappearances. Tavel, the jilted lover who was unusually anxious that his wife knew nothing about his involvement with Lucie, even though it was more than twenty years ago. The love letter from Blanc himself, which seemed so totally out of character with anything anyone knew about him. And then Tavel’s assertions that Blanc and Lucie were involved in a secret affair that no one else appeared to know about. And, of course, Lucie’s father, determined to defend her honour by denying the remotest possibility that Blanc and his daughter had been having an affair, despite it lending credence to his belief that it was Blanc who had killed her.
Enzo pushed his hands deep in his pockets and trudged around the edge of the lake to the man-made barrier at the west end of it, where he crossed to the other side. From there he climbed up a chalk track to a farm road that ran around the perimeter of a vineyard, its remaining leaves flaming red, discernible even in the colourless light of the moon.
Following the farm road, he came across the metalled single-track that climbed the hill from the main route into Duras, and he could see the lights of the town twinkling in the distance.
Richard Tavel and Lucie had been going out together for years. This would all be familiar territory to him. Local knowledge. If he had been up here before, perhaps many times, wouldn’t he know which was the deepest part of the lake? And how easy would it have been to drive here, unseen from the main road below, just a handful of kilometres from where he lived in Duras? Except that he had been in Paris the Saturday Lucie went missing. Or so the story went. Impossible to disprove now, after all these years.
By the time he had made his way back down to the lake, the first light was dawning in the sky, and the mist rising from the water that filled the valley. As he crossed the lake, trees grew, wraithlike, out of the hillside, and Enzo imagined that this was how it all must have looked at the very dawn of time.
Climbing up through the trees, he kept a wary eye open for the stag which had so startled him in the dark, and the sense of foreboding it had provoked returned to him now. But there was no sign of it.
When he emerged on to the open hillside he saw that it was frosted white, as he had imagined earlier, and he was struck by a sudden clarity which seemed forged out of the cold and his lack of sleep.
There was only one person alive who knew the truth about the relationship, alleged by Tavel, between Lucie and Blanc. Régis Blanc himself. And there was only one way to find out what he knew, which was to ask him. But since Blanc was still incarcerated in the high-security maison centrale prison at Lannemezan, Enzo also knew that getting access to him would be next to impossible.
When he got back to the house he saw lights on in the kitchen, and as he stepped inside breathed in the smell of warm bread and pâtisseries.
Martin looked up, surprised, when Enzo pushed open the door into the kitchen. He was brewing coffee on a worktop by the fridge. ‘You’re up early. Sleep well?’
‘No,’ Enzo said. ‘Hardly at all. I’ve been out walking.’
Martin cocked an eyebrow. ‘Cold out there. You could probably do with a coffee. And I’m heating some croissants in the oven.’
‘That would be fantastic,’ Enzo said, and he sat down at the end of the table, rubbing his hands to try to get the blood circulating in them again.
Martin delivered a basket of croissants to the table and placed a mug of steaming hot coffee in front of Enzo, who gulped down a burning mouthful of it before dipping in the end of a croissant and filling his mouth with soft, buttery pastry. Martin watched him and smiled. ‘You’ve been in France too long, monsieur!’
He pulled up a seat and dunked a croissant of his own. ‘Mireille won’t be up for a while yet. She’s not an early riser.’ A trail of drips fell on the table as he transferred the soggy pastry to his mouth.
Enzo eyed him a little warily, anxious not to arouse the ire of the previous night, but knew there were questions he still had to ask. He took another mouthful of croissant. ‘What happened to Lucie’s bones?’
Martin just shrugged. ‘They’re buried in the garden.’ He took in Enzo’s surprise, and explained, ‘We have a family graveyard out there. Goes back about three hundred years. Most of my ancestors are buried in it.’ He stood up. ‘Come on, I’ll show you.’
Enzo stood reluctantly. He would rather Martin just told him about it, so he could stay in here, in the warmth, with his coffee and croissant. But the old man crossed to the back door and opened it to let in a rush of cold air, and Enzo was obliged to follow him outside.
Beyond a stone terrace and a thick grove of tall bamboo in full leaf, a small graveyard nestled in the shadow of high hedges on three sides, and the ivy-covered wall of the old chai on the fourth. Fallen leaves, frosted and brittle, crunched underfoot, and Enzo saw a shambles of moss-green gravestones set randomly into the ground.
Martin knelt down to scrape away the moss and lichen that covered the stone plaques on the gravestones, and took Enzo through the litany of ancestors who lay here, going all the way back to some of Gandolfo’s earliest successors.
Some of the stones had circular holes set into them. As he stood up again, Martin explained, ‘On the anniversary of each death, the descendants of the dead would come to the grave with a bottle of wine which they would share in a toast to the deceased. Then they would leave the remaining wine in the hole, here, so that the departed could have a drink with their also departed friends.’ He grinned. ‘They always had a good excuse for a drink.’
Then his smile faded as he turned to the most recent of the stones. It had been kept free of growth and discolouration, and the inscription on the plaque was clearly legible: Lucie Martin, beloved daughter of Guillaume and Mireille (1969–1989).
‘Just a handful of bones,’ he said. ‘That’s all we had to bury.’ And, with some rancour, ‘They took away her whole skull for the dental comparison and we never got it back. I wrote several times and didn’t even get a reply.’ He turned towards Enzo, who could see him containing his anger with difficulty. ‘I rather suspect they mislaid it. But we went ahead and buried her anyway. The skull is lost, and I wouldn’t open up the grave again to bury it with the other bones, even if we had it. That would seem like sacrilege now. Let her rest in peace, I say.’