Peter May - Cast Iron

‘Just to kill them.’

‘Yes.’ He drained his second cup. ‘Without rhyme or reason, monsieur. I understand his motivation no better now than I did twenty-two years ago. And it still troubles me.’ He stood up and thrust his hands deep in his pockets, gazing out at sudden sunlight playing on the river. ‘Of course, he’s been visited in prison by a procession of psychologists and psychiatrists over the years, and he spins them all the same bullshit. His mother was a whore, you see. And, one time, the story goes, when he was in the back of the car, he saw her giving a client a blow job.’ He turned withering sarcasm towards Enzo. ‘So naturally, he was killing his mother each time he murdered one of those girls.’

Enzo smiled. ‘Psychology for dummies.’

Bétaille nodded. ‘You said it.’

‘But he killed those three girls for a reason, and you think that the Bordeaux Six are completely unconnected?’

‘That’s exactly right.’

‘So who killed Lucie?’

‘I haven’t the faintest idea, monsieur.’

Enzo felt this thread of his investigation starting to slip away from him. ‘Were there ever any other suspects in the frame for her murder?’

‘Well, I don’t know about suspect, but her boyfriend was interviewed at the time of her disappearance.’

‘And?’

‘There was nothing to connect him to it in any way. He was in Paris the weekend she went missing.’

Enzo had left his 2CV in the station car park at Libourne and taken the train into Bordeaux. It was a half-hourly service and easier than driving into the city. The journey time back was less than thirty minutes. He picked up his car again and nosed the old Citroën through the narrow streets of Libourne and out on to the D670. Using the GPS in his phone he set a course south-west to Lucie’s medieval hometown of Duras, where she had gone to school with the boy who would become her lover.

Richard Tavel lived with his wife and two young children in a house he had inherited from his parents. It was a solid, square, nineteenth-century house on three floors, on the outskirts of Duras, just off the Route de Savignac, and no more than five kilometres from where Lucie had lived with her parents at Château Gandolfo. It was late afternoon when Enzo got there. The day was beginning to fade, and electric lights already burned in windows on the ground floor of the house.

Enzo parked in the street and climbed half a dozen steps to the front door. He heard the sound of ringing somewhere distantly inside the house when he pressed the bell push. After a few moments a shadow appeared beyond the glass, and a woman in her mid-to-late thirties opened the door. She was a plain-looking woman, not unattractive, with thick brown hair drawn back in a severe ponytail. She wore jeans and a T-shirt and not a trace of make-up. She looked at Enzo with enquiring brown eyes. ‘ Oui? Can I help you?’

‘I’m looking for Richard Tavel. Do I have the right house?’

At the far end of the hall behind her, a dishevelled-looking man appeared out of the shadows. ‘Who wants to know?’

‘My name’s Enzo Macleod.’ Enzo pronounced his name as the French do — Mac-lee-odd .

The man had stepped into the light by now, and Enzo saw his face pale immediately. He was tall and rangy, a woollen jumper hanging loosely on his angular frame. He didn’t fill his cargo pants either, and they concertinaed around bare feet.

‘Oh, yes...’ he said uncertainly. As if he should have known. ‘You’d better come in.’

His wife looked at him, surprised, and from somewhere at the back of the house Enzo heard the burble of a TV and the voices of children. But Tavel made no attempt to explain to her, and Enzo saw his reluctance even to meet her eye. He also saw her reluctance to let this stranger in. So he forced the issue and squeezed past her into the hall.

‘What’s all this about?’ she said.

Tavel forced a smile. ‘I’ll tell you later, Magalie.’ And to Enzo, ‘We can talk in my study, monsieur.’

Enzo followed him up the stairs, aware of Magalie’s eyes on them, until a child’s cry of pain sent her running through to the back of the house. The first-floor landing was dark, and Tavel pushed open the door into a large, square room and turned on the light. His study was sparsely furnished. An antique desk and captain’s chair, and a couple of worn leather armchairs stood around on polished floorboards. A large mirror hung above the fireplace, the walls festooned with framed family photos. He closed the door and said, in a voice tight with tension, ‘I just knew you were going to turn up on my doorstep one of these days.’

‘Then, you should be well prepared,’ Enzo said.

Tavel drew a deep breath. ‘My wife knows nothing about this, and I’d like to keep it that way.’

Enzo frowned. ‘Exactly what is it she knows nothing about?’

‘My connection to the disappearance of Lucie Martin.’

Enzo raised an eyebrow. ‘Oh? And what is your connection to her disappearance?’

‘None! Absolutely none. And if you understood anything about what happened, you’d know that.’ He wandered off towards the window, wringing his hands. He was in a state of some considerable agitation when he turned back to face Enzo. ‘I am a happily married man now, Monsieur Macleod. I have a young family. Magalie’s from the Aubrac and knows nothing about Lucie’s murder, or my relationship with her. I’d like it to stay that way.’

‘Well, I won’t tell her if you don’t.’ Enzo smiled. ‘Always assuming, of course, that you are prepared to answer my questions.’

‘What questions? She’s been dead more than twenty years, and everyone knows I had nothing to do with it.’

‘Do they?’

‘The police interviewed me only once, for less than an hour. They let me go as soon as they were able to confirm that I really was in Paris the weekend she went missing.’

Enzo nodded. ‘It’s amazing how mud sticks, though. I remember a cinema manager being questioned by police about the murder of a young girl in Glasgow. They grilled him for forty-eight hours before letting him go. Everyone assumed he’d done it, and that the police just couldn’t prove it. Didn’t matter that they caught the real killer three months later. By then that cinema manager had lost his job, his wife had left him, and he ended up committing suicide.’

Tavel sighed heavily. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘Tell me about you and Lucie.’

Tavel perched, then, on the edge of one of the armchairs, leaning forward, feet crossed one over the other, still wringing his hands in his lap. He stared into an abyss of time and tragedy. ‘I’d known her from primary school. Then in our first year at the lycée I took her to the end-of-term dance. I’d always, you know, had a kind of soft spot for her. She was so pretty, with those blue eyes and soft golden curls. Goodness knows where she got them from, because her dad was always going on about their Italian heritage.’ He glanced up at Enzo, but his eyes flickered quickly away again. ‘We started going out regularly. All through our teen years. Childhood sweethearts, I suppose you could say we were.’

‘And when you finished school?’

‘I got a place at Bordeaux University, and Lucie didn’t. Not that she wasn’t bright enough.’ He seemed to feel the need to apologise for her. ‘She just wasn’t interested in continuing her education.’

‘But she still ended up in Bordeaux.’

‘Yes. A job with the prisoners charity, Rentrée. Took it to be close to me. Or so she said. My folks weren’t that well off...’ He flicked his head towards the house. ‘They inherited this place from my mum’s parents. So I was in digs with half a dozen other students in a pretty seedy apartment block near the university. Lucie’s dad bought her a studio.’ This said with what Enzo perceived to be the green monster of envy sitting on his shoulder. ‘There was money in the Martin family, and her father was happy to indulge her in whatever took her fancy.’ Again he darted a look at Enzo. ‘In anything and everything except me. He never really liked me very much. Not good enough for his daughter. Didn’t say it in so many words, but made sure I knew in other ways.’