Enzo nodded. ‘Something like that.’
Sally snorted. ‘And what makes you think you’ll be any more able to deliver it than she was?’
Enzo slipped his phone back in his pocket. ‘We get you away from this place, I can pretty much guarantee it.’
Dominique stood up. ‘You need to get dressed fast, Sally. And put whatever you need in an overnight bag.’ She glanced at Enzo, then back at the older woman. ‘We’ll wait for you downstairs.’
There was a chill pervading the darkness of the house, and a smell of damp that Enzo had not been aware of on his previous visit. They wandered through into the main hall, where the double doors to the large sitting room stood open. Light leaked in around the edges of all the shutters, casting deep shadows in the gloom. Enzo found the rocker switch for an electric roller blind on the French windows and half raised it to bring some real light in from the outside. But it was a grey light, suffused with rain and pessimism. In the distance, yet more rain pitted the surface of the rectangular water feature set into the lawn, but the fountains had been switched off. There was enough water falling from the sky.
Enzo’s thoughts were full of Sophie. There had been no news of her for days. But as soon as they had got Sally Linol safely away from this place he could begin to open negotiations. He glanced at his watch, anxious now to be gone.
Dominique said, ‘So Raffin must have killed his own wife to protect Devez.’
Which dragged Enzo back from gloomy thoughts. ‘I suppose he must have. Although I can’t figure out why. We know by now what it was that Devez offered Régis by way of inducement to murder those girls. Blanc sacrificed them, and himself, for his daughter. But what kind of hold must Devez have had over Raffin to make him do something like that?’
Dominique shrugged. ‘Who knows? But maybe the offer to take him on as his press secretary is some kind of sop, now, to keep him sweet.’
Enzo kicked a footstool and sent it clattering away across the floor, the sound of it resounding around the house. ‘To think I trusted that bastard. That my own daughter gave him a child!’
Dominique crossed to the door and listened for Sally on the stairs. ‘He won’t come himself, will he? Raffin, I mean. He must know by now that we’ve figured out his part in all this.’
‘Whoever comes,’ Enzo said ominously, ‘it’s not just Sally Linol they’ll be wanting to silence.’
Dominique flashed him a look of apprehension. And she, too, glanced at her watch, as if it might tell her when Raffin’s unwelcome emissaries would arrive. Under her breath she muttered, ‘Come on, Sally. Hurry up!’
The ringing of Enzo’s mobile phone in the deep silence of the house made them both jump. Enzo fished it out of his pocket and looked at the display. ‘Hélène Taillard,’ he said and set it to speaker. Dominique crossed the room to listen in.
Hélène’s voice was tinny, and seemed inordinately loud in the hush of this grand salon. ‘Enzo, I got the sample you sent first thing this morning. Raffin’s razor. I had it couriered immediately by motorbike to the lab in Toulouse with instructions to give it priority over everything else. They just faxed me the results.’
Enzo was aware that he had actually stopped breathing. ‘And?’
‘There’s no match, Enzo. The blood on the torn jacket pocket is not Raffin’s.’
For a moment it felt as if not only his breathing, but his heart, too, had stopped, along with a world which had ceased to turn. He was drowning in a sea of confusion. ‘But... it must be. If it’s not Raffin’s blood, whose is it?’
There was a laden silence at the other end of the line that lasted perhaps a second, maybe two. To Enzo it seemed like an eternity. Then Hélène said, ‘Let me put it this way, Enzo, there’s good news and bad.’ Another pause. ‘There was some kind of mix-up at the lab. A misunderstanding about what samples were to be run against the database. I’d already sent them that sample of Laurent’s hair that you gave me to check for paternity.’
Enzo frowned. His confusion was deepening with every word of Commissaire Taillard’s that his mobile brought to him across the ether. He glanced up to find Dominique’s brown eyes open wide and watching him closely. She shrugged.
‘I don’t understand,’ he said, and he heard Hélène sighing softly.
‘They ran both Raffin’s DNA and Laurent’s against the database. The good news is that you are definitely Laurent’s father.’ Enzo barely had time to absorb this before she added, ‘But they also found a familial match for Laurent’s DNA.’
He frowned. ‘A match with what?’
‘The blood on the jacket pocket.’
Enzo’s confusion morphed now from incredible to surreal. How could that possibly be? ‘I don’t understand,’ he said again. Three words wholly inadequate to communicate his complete stupefaction.
Hélène’s voice took on a hard edge as she spelled it out for him. ‘It’s his mother’s blood that’s on the pocket, Enzo. It was Charlotte Roux who tried to kill you in the château that night.’
Now Enzo’s entire universe had come to a stop, as if somehow God had pushed the pause button, and all known things had fallen into a state of suspended animation.
‘Enzo...?’ Hélène’s voice came to him as if from some distant planet. He saw the look in Dominique’s eyes. He saw the dust suspended in the light that fell through the half-raised roller blind. He knew that he had died and woken up in the place they called Hell.
And then the sound of a car door slamming crashed through consciousness, and everything wound up to speed again with the revving of a motor and tyres spinning on gravel.
Dominique was at the door before him, and he followed her, running in a daze of bewilderment through the darkness of the main hall and into the corridor that led to the side entrance. The door stood open.
They ran out into the rain and the mist in time to see Sally’s green Renault Clio skidding on the gravel at the end of the drive and slamming, side on, into a white SUV which had just turned in from the gate through the trees.
Steam rose up from a fractured radiator. Dominique sprinted up the drive towards the cars and Enzo chased after her, still dazed and numb, and praying that sometime very soon he would wake up from this nightmare.
The door on the driver’s side of the Clio swung open, and Sally, in jeans and trainers and a camel coat hanging open, fell out into the drive, blood streaming from a gash on her face. She crawled for half a metre before managing to stagger to her feet. The driver’s door of the SUV opened and Charlotte stepped out into the rain. Her dark coat fell to below the knees, her face chalk white by contrast. Within moments her black curls were glistening with raindrops. She took three swift paces towards the dazed Sally Linol and ripped away the collar of her coat and her blouse to reveal the feather tattoo on the side of her neck. In one single movement, she drew a pistol from her coat pocket and shot the one-time prostitute in the head at close range. Even before Enzo could summon the breath to scream NO!
He saw the blowback from the shot spray fine blood in her face, red-speckling the white. Black saucer eyes swivelled then towards the approaching figure of Dominique. She turned her gun to aim it at the chest of the former gendarme, and Dominique stopped abruptly. Enzo drew up by her side seconds later.
Charlotte’s arm was fully extended towards them, the gun trembling in her hand at the end of it. Her eyes were wild in a way that Enzo had never seen them before. This woman, the mother of his child, who had just shot Sally Linol dead in cold blood. Who had tried to kill him high up in the dark of a château in Gaillac. Whose bed he had shared on countless occasions. A whole kaleidoscope of memories spun through his head. A million fragments of light and colour. Laughter and love. Moments in time, shared over years. And he was almost blinded by it all. He felt tears burn hot on his cheeks. He couldn’t even find his voice to ask why.