3

PERSILLE OCCUPIED MOST OF THE top floor, apart from a wide corridor running the length of the roof space with four windows overlooking a cobbled courtyard and fountain below. A gendarme stood at the room’s fabric-covered double doors. Jacquot stepped past him with a nod, Brunet followed and the owner, Valbois, came up behind, not sure whether to follow them in or wait outside with the képi.

Inside the room, Jacquot paused and looked around. Like the rest of the house, the walls were bare mortared stone and the floorboards a worn oak strip, a dozen or more beams branching from walls and floors to support a gently pitching tiled roof. The summer before, this would have been a dark old attic filled with a generation’s worth of tat. Now it smelled of perfumed candles or possibly bath oils – warm and close up here in the head of the house – the lighting delivered not through dusty, broken panes and low-watt bulbs but by means of concealed up-lighters hidden among the tied beams above their heads, beams softly coloured with what looked like a green limewash. These same soft shades of green were repeated in overstuffed upholstery, a scatter of rugs, pleated blinds on three mansard windows and, at the end of the room, raised on a low dais, the drapes hanging around a four-poster bed and its quilted cover, half-spilled across the edge of the mattress and dais step. It wasn’t to Jacquot’s taste – too staged and deliberate – but he could see that it would look good in a brochure, or to illustrate a magazine article.

Quietly, slowly, looking from side to side – two new suitcases open on a pair of stools, clothes dropped on the floor and draped over the back of an armchair, an empty bottle of champagne, its label floating in the melted ice water – Jacquot made his way towards the dais and bed at the end of the room.

The girl was lying on her back, head on the pillow, haloed by dark curls, lips parted and kiss-smeared with lipstick, one mascara-ed eye open – a cold disinterested blue – the other a scorched blackened pit between eyebrow and cheekbone. Not a spot of blood on her face. That was all on the pillow behind her head, just the one side of it where the blood had spilled from a hole that Jacquot knew would be the size of a saucer, shards of bone and wads of tissue blasted into the goose down.

He tried to remember her name – Inès? No. Ilena? No. Irèna? No. Isabella . . . Isabelle. Yes, that was it. Isabelle Blanchard. Izzy. Someone had called her Izzy.

Jacquot’s eyes dropped from her face to her body, oddly flat-chested now, the weight of her breasts sliding to her sides, nipples drawn out of shape as though the torso had been stretched or deflated. The quilt had been tossed aside but a crumpled top sheet still covered her legs and belly. One arm lay across it, noticeably hairy, the other thrown back over the pillow. It was how she had fallen asleep, possibly in the glow of their lovemaking, sprawled and satisfied. And that’s how she’d stayed, after the gun had been fired and blown her brains out. A splinter of light from the bedside light glanced off her finger. She was still wearing her wedding ring.

Jacquot followed the spread of blood from the pillow into the centre of the bed where it had soaked down into the mattress where Gilbert had been lying. The impression of his body was still there, curved and hollowed, and there was a sudden and sure certainty in Jacquot’s mind that Noël Gilbert had not killed his wife. Hadn’t touched her. Just woken to a warm stickiness on his skin, reached for the bedside light. Then looked down between them. With waking, light-squinting eyes. Taking it in. Trying to shake off sleep and make sense of it.

The blood, the stillness, that dark, mascara-ed hole . . .

A cold dread, a mounting disbelief.

Trying to blink the image away, rub it from his eyes.

But the picture didn’t change, didn’t go away.

Jacquot breathed deeply through his nose, stayed still, trying to get a sense and measure of what had happened here.

Who would want to kill her? A country girl.

And why in the eye?

Why not between the eyes? In the head? In the heart? All of them deadly shots.

Was there significance there in that single killing shot to the eye?

Something the eye had seen?

And why not the husband too?

Why had he been spared?

And why hadn’t he woken up?

Little wonder that Brunet was doubtful.

Jacquot knew how his assistant would read it: Gilbert, a young city boy forced into a marriage he didn’t want; suddenly, for some as yet unknown reason, driven to despair on his wedding night; a fit of madness, un moment de folie, un crime passionel . . . But it was worth remembering that Brunet was a single man, older than Gilbert, with a formidable reputation for bedding, and moving on from, a significant number of women. Brunet was a tomcat . . . but maybe Gilbert wasn’t.

Jacquot took another long breath in through his nose, let it out, then frowned and sniffed again – shorter, double sniffs. Something hung in the air, beneath the scented candles. Not the warm, crumpled scent of lovers’ sheets, nor the cold ashy note of cordite. Something sharp and astringent . . . something that shouldn’t have been there.

He went to Gilbert’s side of the bed and, reaching out a hand to the stone wall, he bent down to the pillow, sniffed again. Something cold. Metallic. Chemical. A hospital smell.

He turned away from the bed. Brunet was sitting in one of the chairs, waiting for him to complete his preliminary search, knowing his boss wouldn’t appreciate any interruption. Behind him Monsieur Valbois had strayed past the door, hands clutched in front of him, almost stooping, like a room service waiter asking if there was anything more he could do . . .

‘Murder weapon?’ asked Jacquot.

Brunet shook his head.

Jacquot looked past him, at Valbois.

‘Did any of your guests hear a shot?’

‘No . . . nothing. Just the scream,’ replied Valbois.

‘The bathroom?’

‘Through there, Monsieur,’ he replied, pointing to a door in the corner of the room, half hidden behind a fine Coromandel screen. Jacquot stepped past it and leant into the bathroom. White marble tiling, double vanity, a pair of mirrors framed with tiny lightbulbs, like an actor’s dressing-room mirror. Towels on the floor, a puddle of water by the shower, toiletries on the vanity. And beneath the vanity more tiling to conceal the plumbing, just a small hatch for access.

Could they have showered before making love? wondered Jacquot. It seemed unlikely – the opened bottle of champagne, the clothes cast off on the floor. Or had Gilbert gone there afterwards, as his new wife slept?

Pushing himself off the door frame Jacquot turned and crossed the room, Brunet getting to his feet, Valbois standing aside. Outside the room, Jacquot pointed down the corridor.

‘What’s down there?’

‘Just a linen room, Chief Inspector. Each floor has one.’

Jacquot strolled down to it, glancing out of the corridor windows as he passed. A small sign read ‘Privé’. He tried the handle, the door opened and a warm smell of freshly laundered linen coiled snugly out of the darkness.

‘There’s a light on the left,’ said Valbois. ‘On a string. Just pull it.’

Jacquot did as instructed and the room lit up, revealing floor-to-ceiling duckboard shelving laden with towels and sheets and pillowcases and quilt covers, and all the paraphernalia of housekeeping: boxes of soap, shampoos, tissue paper, loo roll. He stepped in, made his way between the shelves until he reached a small open space with an ironing board leaning against a wall. The Gilberts’ bathroom wall. And there, beside the legs of the ironing board, was another small hatch. He moved the ironing board aside, squatted down, ran a finger across the rough wooden architraving fitted around the access panel. He looked closer. A tiny snag of blue, caught on its splintery edge.

Jacquot got to his feet, gave a last look round the room, came out into the corridor, pulled the light switch and closed the door behind him.

‘So,’ he said, smiling at Valbois and Brunet. ‘Let’s have a word with Monsieur Gilbert.’