Blacklight Blue (19 page)

He looked up, hardly daring to ask. ‘May I take this? Please. I promise I’ll return it.’

She stared at him, eyes stripped suddenly of all emotion, lacking any sense of self-deception. ‘A forensic scientist recovering samples of my son’s DNA.’ She paused, her expression hardening. ‘What has he done, Mister Macleod? What has my son become?’

Enzo drew a deep breath. There was no longer any way to avoid the truth. ‘I think your son is a murderer, Angela.’

Chapter Thirty-Seven

All light had been leeched from the sky by the night, except for the stars that pricked its blackness. The moon had not yet risen, and the back streets of Cadaquès were almost impenetrably dark. Out of season, its restaurants were closed and its holiday lets empty. Those few residents remaining were locked up tight behind closed shutters, watching television until late, when it would be time to eat.

Enzo made his way carefully down the steeply sloping cobbled street, clutching Rickie Bright’s toy panda in a plastic bag, and carrying with him the memory of a mother’s despair. Thirty-six years of hope, both fulfilled and dashed in the same dreadful moment. He could only imagine how Angela Bright would deal with the truth about her son. In his presence she had been brave, polite. Courteous but cold. God only knew what demons awaited her now that she was left alone to face the night.

Somewhere on the street above him, he heard the sound of footsteps descending through the deserted town. Soft, stealthy footfalls in the dark. The temperature had fallen, but although the evening had not yet turned cold, Enzo felt a shiver of disquiet. He stopped to listen, wondering if perhaps he had imagined it. But no, there they were again. Someone was following him, just out of view beyond the curve of the street.

He turned to his left and hurried down the narrowest of alleyways. There was almost no light at all here, and he had to feel his way along the wall, tripping and almost falling over a short flight of steps leading up to a door that was shut firmly against the night. After a short distance, the alley split into three. One leg of it climbed the hill to his left. One carried straight on. The other descended towards the shore. He could see, beyond the roofs, the first glimmer of moonlight reflected on the still water of the bay. Behind him, he heard the footsteps still following. Faster now, determined not to lose him.

He wondered if Rickie Bright had somehow managed to follow him. Or whether he had simply anticipated his next move. Either way, it would be clear to him beyond doubt, that Enzo knew now who he was. Or, at the very least, who he had been. No point, any longer, in trying to short-circuit an investigation. Only one course would remain open to a desperate man.

Enzo took the turn to his right, leading down towards the bay, and started to run. He could hear the following footsteps increasing in pace, trying to match his. Over his shoulder he caught the merest glimpse of a dark shadow emerging from the labyrinth above, and he squeezed left through a narrow alley, running its length, and then turning right again, descending so steeply that his own momentum was quickly robbing him of control over his legs. The street curved away to his right. Through gaps in the houses he could see streetlights along the waterfront. And almost at the same time, he heard music rising up through the night. An accordion and violins, a Spanish guitar. There were whoops and hollers and the sound of laughter. People. Safety.

At the foot of the hill, the street turned sharply right. Beyond the low wall that bounded its curve, splinters of light forked up into the dark through a weave of rush matting stretched tightly over a wooden frame, a flimsy roof to contain the music and merriment in an open square below. Slithering and sliding on the dew-wet cobbles, Enzo realised he wasn’t going to be able to stop. He raised a foot to brace himself against the wall at the bottom of the hill and pitched up on top of it, arms windmilling as he tried to retain his balance.

He spun around to face back the way he had come, and as he tipped backwards into space, he saw the dark figure of his pursuer turn into the street above. For the briefest of moments he had a sensation of floating, before his full weight landed on the rush matting below. It dipped violently beneath him, breaking his fall, and he thought for half a second that it was going to support him. But then he heard it rip, a harsh tearing sound all along one edge, and it tipped him out of its cradle into a confusion of music and light and bodies.

He landed heavily on a makeshift wooden dancefloor, a softer landing than the cobbles beneath it. Still it knocked all the wind from his lungs. The music stopped very suddenly, and his ears were filled with the sounds of women screaming. Through lights that seemed to be shining directly in his eyes, he saw figures retreating around him like displaced water. Musicians on a small stage were frozen in suspended animation, staring at him in disbelief. Enzo raised a hand to shade his eyes from the light and saw men in dark suits, a young woman all in white. He saw tables set out in the square. People with glasses in their hands, cigars in their mouths. Everyone standing now. He had just dropped in unannounced, and uninvited, on some unsuspecting couple’s wedding night.

A short, stocky man, with black hair oiled back over a balding pate, stooped to help him to his feet. He looked up at the hole in the rush matting above, and a hush descended on the gathering. He dropped his eyes again to look at Enzo and fired off a salvo in Spanish.

Enzo was still trying to catch his breath. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t speak Spanish. English or French.’ He bent to pick up the panda in its bag.

‘Okay, Eenglish,’ the man said. ‘You no invited to thees wedding, señor.’

‘I know. I’m sorry. But someone’s trying to kill me.’ As soon as the words left his mouth he realised how ridiculous they sounded.

The man translated for the assembly, and there were some stifled sniggers. ‘Why someone try keel you in peaceful place like Cadaquès, señor?’

‘He’s a murderer.’ Enzo compounded the madness. ‘He’s been following me. If you’d just call the police…’

‘Señor, in Cadaquès, I am police. Who is thees
asesino
?’

But before Enzo could answer, they all heard the footsteps running down the stone staircase from the street above, and the guests fell silent. Everyone turned, as the figure of Angela Bright’s maid ran into the circle of light, and stopped suddenly, breathing hard, blinking in the glare, startled and perplexed.

Enzo stared at her in astonishment. She was holding his satchel.

‘Is thees your keeler, señor?’ Again he translated for the others, and now they roared with laughter. Enzo flushed with embarrassment, and the maid held up his satchel. She had no idea what the joke was, but smiled anyway.

Enzo said, ‘I must have left my bag at Señora Bright’s house.’ He almost snatched it from her. ‘Why didn’t you just call after me?’

His translator interpreted for the crowd, eliciting another roar, and some applause. ‘Señor. She could not. Maria Cristina Sanchez Pradell ees
muda
. Mute. She has not spoken seengle word her whole life.’ He allowed himself a broad grin. ‘You have very veeveed imagination. Señora Sanchez never harm anyone.’

The bride stepped forward, her veil drawn back from a beautifully slender latin face, large black eyes viewing him with amusement. She spoke rapidly and the small man looked towards her bride-groom for confirmation. The young man nodded, and the Cadaquès policeman turned back to Enzo.

‘She say not often tall, dark stranger fall eento wedding. Maybe lucky. How about you stay for drink and dance?’

Enzo looked around the assembled faces watching for his reaction, and for the first time he saw a funny side to it all, a release of tension after his chase through the dark streets of the town believing that Rickie Bright was right behind him. He said, ‘If you put a glass in my hand, I’ll be delighted to drink a toast to the happy couple.’ He looked at the gorgeous young woman smiling at him on her wedding night, and thought how lucky was the young man at her side. They had the whole of the rest of their lives together. His time with Pascale had been so short. But he forced a smile. ‘As long as I get to dance with the bride.’

Part Four

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Enzo sat nursing a glass of red wine in the window of the Café Bonaparte. He watched the faces streaming past in the Place St. Germain de Prés outside. Pale faces on a grey November afternoon breathing dragonfire into polluted winter air. And he wondered if someone out there was watching him. If Bright had any idea where he was, and if so, what he might be planning to do about it.

Raffin was late, as usual. Just as he had been when they’d met here for the first time more than two years ago. Enzo had flown directly to Paris from Barcelona, and been there for two days, calling in favours, before taking the decision to call Anna. Which was when he’d learned that Raffin had left the Auvergne several days earlier to return to the capital. He immediately called him at his apartment to arrange a rendezvous.

‘Do you want another of these?’

Enzo looked up to find Raffin unravelling a blood-red scarf from around his neck. His long camel coat hung open, its collar turned up. Beneath it he wore a beige crewneck sweater over black jeans. His brown leather boots were polished to a shine. He was pointing at Enzo’s glass.

‘No thanks.’

Raffin shrugged, and as he sat signalled a waiter to order a small, black coffee. ‘So…what news?’

‘How much do you know?’

‘Only what Kirsty told me on the phone.’ Just the mention of her name was enough to evoke the depression that had dogged Enzo since the night at Simon’s apartment. ‘About the Bright twins, and Rickie Bright stalking you through the London underground. How did you get on in Spain?’

Enzo told him about his meeting with Señora Bright, her suspicions about the woman by the pool, the blood-stained toy panda.

‘Can you do anything with the blood?’

‘I’ve got someone working on it right now. We should have a result later this afternoon.’

Raffin rubbed his hands cheerfully. ‘It’s turning into quite a story, Enzo.’ Whatever enmity there was between the two men, whatever words might have passed between them, Raffin seemed to have banished to some other compartment of his life. The journalist in him smelled a scoop. Enzo had already solved two of the seven murders he had written about in his book. Both of them had generated copy and controversy. Now it looked like they were on the verge of cracking a third.

‘Why did you come back to Paris, Roger?’

Roger flicked him a glance, and Enzo detected a note of caution in it. ‘I was going insane cooped up in that bloody house. Besides, I have a living to earn. I don’t have some university paying my wages while I go around playing Sherlock Holmes.’

‘Weren’t you worried?’

‘About what?’

‘That Bright might come after you?’

Raffin laughed. ‘No. It’s you he’s after, Enzo, not me. I’m probably in more danger when I’m with you than when I’m not.’ He took a sip of his coffee. ‘You said you had a meeting set up for this afternoon. Is that about the blood work?’

‘No, it’s about the cassette I sent to my voice expert here in Paris. The recording of the conversation between Bright and Lambert the day before the murder.’

Raffin cocked an eyebrow. ‘What about it?’

‘I don’t know yet. That’s what we’re going to find out.’

***

Pierre Gazaigne was project leader of a study in the analysis of spoken French sponsored by the Université Paris-Sud 11, and the Université Pierre et Marie Curie. The project was based in a small suite of offices and sound labs on the top floor of a converted nineteenth century apartment block in the Rue de Lyon in the twelfth
arrondissement
.

Enzo and Raffin walked south from the
métro
stop at the Place de la Bastille. They found the building three hundred metres down, on the west side of the street, and squeezed into a tiny elevator that took them to the sixth floor. They stepped out into a gloomy hallway filled with cigarette smoke and the grey faces of half a dozen nicotine addicts puffing morosely on their cigarettes.

One of them coughed, phlegm rattling in his throat. ‘Are you looking for someone?’

‘Professor Gazaigne.’

The smoker flicked his head towards the glass door. ‘Go on in. You’ll find him in the lab on the right at the far end of the corridor.’

Gazaigne was sitting at an enormous console with a bewildering array of sliders and faders beneath a bank of computer screens. Sound graphs flickered in various colours, and a loud screeching noise issued from huge speakers on either side. He turned as the door opened and flicked a switch. The graphs flatlined, and the screeching stopped. He was an elderly shambles of a man in a grubby white labcoat, white hair scraped back over a flat head. He had a pencil stuck behind one ear, half-moon glasses perched on the end of his nose, and a twinkle in dark, brown eyes.

‘
Ah, c’est l’Ecossais
!’ He jumped to his feet and thrust a large hand at Enzo. ‘You look older every time I see you.’

‘That’s because you only see me about once every ten years.’

‘That would explain it.’

‘This is my colleague, Roger Raffin, a journalist.’

Gazaigne crushed Raffin’s hand ‘
Enchanté, monsieur
. Pull up a chair.’ He waved a hand towards the console. ‘A few years ago there would have been banks of reel-to-reel machines in here. Nagra, Sony, Revox, Teac. Now it’s all digital. State of the art electronics. Random access. But, you know, it takes a lot to beat good old-fashioned tape running at 76.2 centimetres per second. The treble response you got off those old recorders was unbeatable. Sadly, the people with the purse strings believe the PR of the manufacturers, so now we’ve gone digital. Like it or not. And we’ve lost a lot in the process. Progress at any cost, I say, even if it’s backwards.’

He looked at the two faces looking back at him and burst out laughing. ‘But you don’t want to hear some old fart going on about things not being what they were in the good old days. You want to know what I found on your crappy little cassette.’

‘What did you find, Pierre?’ Enzo said.

‘Some shit quality sound, I’ll tell you that.’

‘And what else?’

‘Well, you were right about the
shibboleth
, Enzo.
Portsmoose
. Dead giveaway. You see, I can’t even say it. But this guy pronounced it like a native. Very interesting. Because he isn’t. He comes from the south of France. More specifically, and almost certainly, the Roussillon.’

‘How can you tell?’

‘Number of factors. I thought it was interesting the way he used
tu
and the other
vous
. As you suggested, a very pointed way of establishing a pecking order. The
tu,
however, tells us more. Not that it’s much in evidence. But if you listen carefully, the pronunciation is telling. He says the
tu
almost like
ti
. Listen…’ He swivelled away to tap at a keyboard and pull up a menu on one of his screens. He ran a cursor down a list of files, and selected one. He double clicked and a graph immediately began spiking on an adjoining monitor as Bright’s voice boomed out from the speakers.
J’ai pensé que tu te démanderais pourquoi je n’avais pas appelé
. ‘Do you hear?
I thought you would wonder why I hadn’t called
. The
tu
next to the
te
seems to emphasise it. He definitely leans towards pronouncing it as
ti
.’

It was too subtle for Enzo, but Raffin nodded. ‘I hear it,’ he said. ‘Now that you’ve pointed it out, but I can’t say I’d have noticed.’

‘
Ti as
or
ti es
for
tu as
or
tu es
, is originally derived from a working-class Marseilles accent, but has gained a certain
caché
among the young over the last couple of decades. Particularly in the South where the accent is broadly similar anyway.’

‘But you said this guy was from the Roussillon?’

‘That’s right.’

‘How can you be so sure of that?’

‘Vocabulary.’ The old man grinned. ‘You live in the Midi-Pyrénées, Enzo. If you went into a
boulangerie
you’d probably ask for a
chocolatine
, while the rest of France would ask for a
pain au chocolat
—and they’d know where you came from. But the Midi-Pyrénées is a big area with lots of different dialects, so they wouldn’t know exactly where. The Roussillon, on the other hand, is a smaller area, formerly known as Northern Catalonia, and corresponding almost exactly to the present-day
département
of the Pyrénées-Orientales. And that’s where it gets interesting.’

He turned back to the computer and selected another file and hit the return key. Bright’s voice boomed out again.
Ecoute-moi. Il faut que nous parlions
. And Gazaigne turned to Enzo. ‘Tell me what you think he said.’

‘He said,
listen, we need to talk
.’

‘Specifically
listen to me? Ecoute-moi?’

‘Yes.’

But the old professor shook his head. ‘Sounds like it, doesn’t it? I wasn’t sure at first. But I’ve listened to it a dozen times, slowed it down, run it backwards, you name it. There’s a lot of noise on the tape, and I had to try and filter that out. So listen again.’

This time he selected another file, and Bright’s voice sounded sharper, clearer, and slowed down perhaps fifteen to twenty percent.

‘What do you think now?

Raffin said, ‘It sounds like
écoute-noi
. But that doesn’t make sense.’

‘It does if you come from the Roussillon. There’s a lot of Catalan still spoken down there. After all, historically, it’s not that long since it was still a part of Catalonia. A lot of Catalan words have come into common French usage there, particularly slang words.’ Gazaigne turned to Enzo. ‘Just like in Scotland. You use a lot of Gaelic words without realising what they are. Even French words, absorbed into the language when the French and Scots were allies against the English. You talk about a
bonny lassie
. But actually,
bonny
derives directly from the French word
bonne,
meaning good. Except that you’ve made it mean pretty.’

He hit the return key and played the line again.
Écoute-noi
. Enzo heard it this time, quite distinctly.

‘
Noi
is the Catalan word for
friend
, or
pal
. Equivalent of the French word
mec
or
gars
. So your killer was actually saying,
listen friend
, or
listen pal,
which was a lot more threatening, even if his victim didn’t understand it.’ He grinned again. ‘Not a huge amount to go on, and I’m not a gambling man. But if you asked me to put money on it, I’d say your man comes from the Roussillon.’

Enzo gazed thoughtfully off into some middle distance. The Roussillon was at the western end of the French Mediterranean, forming the border with Spain at the southeast extreme of the Pyrenean mountain range. Not much more than an hour’s drive from Cadaquès. Whoever had taken little Rickie Bright hadn’t taken him very far.

***

‘What do you think?’ Raffin turned up his collar and swept the trailing end of his scarf back over his shoulder as they stepped out into the Rue de Lyon.

The roar of rush hour traffic was almost deafening. Enzo had to raise his voice. ‘I think that there are an awful lot of people in the Roussillon.’

‘So where do we begin?’

‘With an Englishwoman who arrived in the Pyrénées-Oriental with a twenty-month-old son in July 1972. There may have been a father, but more likely than not, she’d have been on her own.’

‘How can you be sure it was an Englishwoman?’

‘I can’t. But the woman Angela Bright met poolside at the hotel was English. Posh, with a Home Counties accent, she said. And I can’t escape the fact that Rickie Bright pronounced Portsmouth like a native. If he grew up in the Roussillon, then that’s how he’d speak his French. But if his mother was English, and spoke only English to him in the house, then he’d speak it as an Englishman would. Just as Sophie speaks English with my Scottish accent, even although she’s never been to Scotland.’ He looked at Raffin. ‘So Rickie Bright would be able to pass himself off as French or English.’