But he heard the quivering in hers. ‘Roger called me last night. To tell me about your little discovery.’ She inclined her head slightly towards the prone form of Sally Linol, lying on the drive, her blood soaking with the rain into the gravel. ‘He thought I would be interested. He had no idea just how much.’
Finally, words forced their way beyond Enzo’s lips as his brain wound back up to speed and a million pieces of an impossible puzzle started dropping into place. ‘You killed Marie Raffin!’
She gave the most imperceptible of shrugs. And although she was trying hard to project cool, Enzo could see that she was shaken to the core.
‘Why?’
‘Many years ago, in science class at school, I learned that for every action there is a reaction. Consequences. All the things that have happened in the twenty-two years since my brother took the first steps on his road of no return have left me picking up the pieces in his wake. Everything I have done has been to protect him.’
‘Your brother?’ Enzo was incredulous.
But she ignored him, and almost as if she were trying to persuade herself, she said, ‘He had a weakness, and he made a mistake.’
Dominique said, ‘Murdering three women is hardly a mistake.’
Charlotte could not even meet her eye. Her gaze flickered in Enzo’s direction. ‘He was young, immature. Married with a young family. And, yes, he had certain... predilections.’ Enzo saw her mouth curl in distaste as she found a euphemism for his perversion. ‘But he is also a genius. He has intelligence, vision, charisma. Everything that is lacking in the generation of politicians who run this country today. I couldn’t allow the errors of youth to deny France the special gifts that he has to offer. And, God knows, we are in dire need of them now.’
Enzo had difficulty both breathing and thinking. He said again, ‘Your brother?’ And he saw some of her arrogance return as she focused her scorn on him.
‘The great Enzo Macleod.’ She shook her head. ‘You had no idea, did you? That when I went looking for my birth parents, not only did I discover who my real father was, but that I also had a brother. A twin brother. Not identical. But born thirty minutes before me. And while I was given for adoption to the Gaillard family retainers in Angoulême, Jean-Jacques went to my adoptive mother’s cousin, also afflicted by the family curse of infertility. All my years growing up, I only knew him as my second cousin, meeting at family get-togethers. Christmas, Easter, summer holidays.’
Enzo saw fond recollection cloud her dark eyes, like cataracts.
‘During all those long summers spent at the family cottage in the Corrèze we were inseparable. Understood things in a way that others did not. Sharing thoughts and secrets. Writing to each other when we were apart. I admired him, adored him, maybe even fell in love with him a little. And then I found out why. We weren’t cousins at all. But brother and sister. Flesh and blood. One and the same. Each of us a piece of the other.’ Her eyes cleared in a moment of anger. ‘They had no right to separate us. To break us up like that. They should have known. Blood is thicker than water.’
Her hair was hanging in wet ropes now around her face.
Enzo said, ‘And it was you who tried to kill me in the château at Gaillac.’
Something almost like a smile flitted across her lips. ‘That was a mistake. Reckless. And nearly cost us everything. I had one of Roger’s suits in my apartment. I had picked it up for him from the dry cleaner’s some months earlier and forgotten to return it. It was still hanging in my wardrobe. There seemed to me to be a certain irony in it, you see. To kill you in the guise of Roger. Stupid. I know that now. When I finally returned it to him, I suggested that perhaps it had been damaged at the cleaner’s. If it was ever traced back, it would point the finger at him, not me.’
She looked down again at the body lying on the drive. ‘She was the one loose end that’s been hanging over us all these years. I knew you would find her in the end, Enzo. You’re so bloody relentless.’ She turned angry eyes back on him and he saw them soften. ‘But fortunately, you also led me to her. And now that she’s been taken care of, that leaves only you. And your little piece of... stuff.’ She cast a disparaging glance at Dominique. ‘You always did like them young, didn’t you, Enzo?’
He felt a constriction of all the muscles across his chest, like a great weight bearing down on him. ‘What did you do to Sophie?’
Charlotte shrugged. ‘She’s dead, of course. You never did learn to do what you were told.’
And almost everything that Enzo was or had ever been died in that moment. He closed his eyes, remembering the white stag he had encountered in the woods at Château Gandolfo, and willed Charlotte just to pull the trigger. There was no way, he knew, that he even wanted to go on living. When he opened them again, he saw Charlotte smiling, and he knew, finally, that she was quite insane.
She said, ‘And now it seems like such a shame to deprive an old man of his little piece of skirt, when I have already taken away everything else.’
The roar of her gun in the still of the morning was deafening as she fired a single shot into Dominique’s chest. Enzo heard the bullet strike her. A soft, sickening thud that sent her spinning away and falling to the ground. His cry of anguish pierced the damp air as he dropped to his knees beside her, to turn her over in the wet. Blood oozed from her mouth, and spread quickly into the fabric of the T-shirt beneath her jacket. The pain and hurt and anger that filled him was unbearable, and he cried again, like some wild animal howling for the dead. He half turned in time to see Charlotte lowering her gun to level it at him.
‘Seems wrong, somehow, to kill the father of my child. I told you once about keeping my enemies close.’ She sighed. ‘Sometimes it’s the only way to stay in control. I got involved with Roger when we discovered that Marie Raffin was sniffing around Jean-Jacques’ affairs, asking questions in the wrong places, trying to access his accounts. And you...?’ And now he saw affection in her smile. ‘I kept you too close, Enzo. Much too close.’ Then affection gave way to something much colder. ‘But Laurent... Well, that really was a mistake. Though I suppose I’ll just have to live with it. At least he’ll always be a reminder of you.’
He could see her finger tightening on the trigger and he braced himself for death. But the slightest scrape of a shoe on wet gravel made her turn as a dark figure rose up behind her in the rain, and struck her down.
Charlotte’s gun went clattering away across the drive as her legs folded beneath her and she fell to the ground, blood streaming from a gash on her forehead. And Sophie stood over her, dripping wet in the pouring rain, a wheel brace dangling from her hand.
‘Fucking bitch!’ she said, looking down at the prone form of her father’s would-be killer, her lower lip trembling with raw emotion. And Enzo was struck by the strength of her Scottish accent as she said, ‘Never actually did get round to killing me, did you?’ Despairing eyes found Enzo’s. ‘You’d have thought by now she’d have learned that you don’t fuck with a Macleod.’ And her face crumpled to dissolve in a mess of tears.
Chapter forty-five
He had been waiting for hours, and it seemed like a lifetime. Overhead lights dazzled off polished hospital floors. The sound of voices, always hushed, permeated the corridors. Porters passed with patients on trolleys, on their way to or from theatre. Nurses gave him sympathetic smiles as they walked by, plimsolls squeaking on shiny linoleum.