Peter May - Cast Iron

He had lost all sense of where he was now, the tourist itinerary long since abandoned. He found stairs leading up and took them, two at a time. Reaching a landing, and then a room, then following the spiral ever higher until he emerged into a rectangular inner courtyard, open to the sky far above, and surrounded by stone galleries that looked down on him from all sides.

The heavy breathing and footfalls of the chasing men followed him up the stairwell, and he ran across the courtyard to yet more steps on the far side. Here, he entered a hallway mired in darkness, and felt his way along a wood-panelled wall, knocking over a standing sign before stumbling through a doorway into even deeper gloom. He was completely disorientated and felt once more for the wall, fingers connecting with a rocker switch that triggered a sudden explosion of light from the far side of the room, glass walls rising up into a void high overhead. Behind the glass, ghostly figures in white wailed and screeched into the night. All the hairs stood up on Enzo’s neck and he fled in panic, tripping over the fallen sign and sprawling full length on the floor. As he scrambled to his feet he saw, by the reflected light of the room he had just left, an arrow beneath the legend Salle aux Fantômes — the Ghost Room.

He ran. Blindly. Back out into another gallery of some kind, and up steps to where an open door led on to a balustraded walkway high up on the side of the castle. At the far end of it, he found an opening on to yet another spiral stairway. The opening was narrow and, as he turned into it, he felt something snag the band that held his ponytail in place, pulling it free, and his hair cascaded down over his shoulders.

He forced his way on to the stairs, which twisted endlessly upwards, narrowing at every turn. On a tiny landing, he swung into an even tinier room with a low ceiling and arched windows set into each corner, overlooking the red-tiled roofs of castle buildings below. No way out. So he turned back, squeezing himself into an impossibly narrow spiral, climbing ever more steeply upwards, steps almost too short, even at their widest, to accommodate his feet. And he thought, People running away always go up. Something an old policeman had told him once. How stupid! Because there would always come a point when you could climb no higher.

His jacket tearing on ragged stonework, he finally pushed himself out from the top of the stairwell into the open air of a large, stone-flagged, balustraded circle. And this was it. The point at which he could go no higher. He realised with an inner sense of despair that he had just emerged on to the top of the tower. The only way down was over the edge, and certain death. Or back the way he had come, to meet his pursuers on the stairs.

The moon-washed landscape that fell away all around him shimmered into the distance, the lights of the town twinkling to the south, occasional clusters of light in villages and farms punctuating the plain that stretched off to the north and west. He saw a couple of rugby pitches, green and inviting under floodlights, not that far away. The tiny figures of rugby players in training, running and throwing the ball and shouting to each other.

And from the stairwell behind him, the sound of leather on stone and breath rasping in lungs. In a moment of sudden calm, Enzo turned to face them, determined not to go down without a fight. ‘Come on, you bastards!’ he shouted at the night, as two overweight and perspiring gendarmes tumbled, one over the other, from the stairwell, clutching their pistols and gasping for breath. They stared in amazement at the big, mad-eyed man with hair tangling wildly over his shoulders, and it would have been hard to say who was the more astonished — the gendarmes, or Enzo.

Enzo sat, dishevelled and dispirited, in the interview room of the gendarmerie. With an elastic band found in his bag he had tied up his hair again, but strands of it still hung loose. He had been here for more than two hours, questioned relentlessly for the first of them by a humourless and po-faced officer demanding to know how he had broken into the château and why. No matter how many times Enzo told him it was all a misunderstanding, and that he had been accidentally locked in, he was regarded with patent disbelief.

Eventually, the officer had given him pencil and paper and asked him to make a list of people who might vouch for him, with phone numbers, if possible. Enzo had been forced to think about that. Locally, there was the retired judge, Lucie’s father. In Paris, there was Roger, although he knew the police invariably disliked and distrusted journalists. And then, of course, there was Commissaire Hélène Taillard in Cahors. Who better to speak for his good character than a senior police officer? He just hoped that she didn’t hold their nearly relationship against him. It had always, he recalled, been he who, in the end, had shied away from going any further than friendship. To her obvious disappointment.

For the second hour he had sat twiddling his thumbs under relentless electric light, his backside growing numb on an unforgiving plastic chair. From somewhere else in the building he had heard the chatter of keyboards, phones ringing, the distant sound of muffled voices, but no one had come through the door for nearly an hour and a quarter. A window high up in the wall was barred. Beyond it, the darkness seemed so profound it was almost tangible.

He was beginning to think they had simply forgotten about him when the door swung open and his interrogator stood, glowering, in the doorway. He stuck out his jaw and jerked his head towards the corridor behind him. ‘You can go.’

Enzo got up, surprised. Previous encounters with gendarmes had usually led to a blizzard of paperwork, forms in triplicate, complaints drawn up, disclaimers to be signed. But perhaps they were as embarrassed by the whole thing as he was and were happy simply to pretend it never happened.

‘Commissaire Taillard has vouched for your good standing, and Monsieur Martin is here to collect you.’

Enzo felt an enormous wave of relief, but the gendarme stopped him in the doorway. ‘Just the small matter of the damage at the château,’ he said.

Enzo said, ‘Tell them to bill me and I’ll send them a cheque by return.’

The officer fixed him with a hard stare, then stood reluctantly aside.

Guillaume Martin was waiting in reception and cast curious eyes over him. Enzo realised he must present a somewhat bizarre figure, with his jacket torn and hair hanging in shreds. But Martin made no comment. The two men shook hands solemnly, and it wasn’t until they were outside that the old man looked at him again and said, ‘What on earth happened?’

Enzo explained about the note, and wandering into the castle only to find himself accidentally locked in. He said, ‘Apparently someone heard me shouting from inside and called the police, who thought I was an intruder.’

Martin frowned. ‘Who left the note?’

Enzo had no desire to go into all the previous attempts on his life, real or imagined, or his belief that someone, somewhere, wanted to stop his investigation in its tracks. So all he said was, ‘I have no idea.’

‘And what’s your next move?’

Enzo sighed. ‘I’ll drive home, I suppose.’

‘Nonsense!’ Martin looked at his watch. ‘Come and stay again at the château and Mireille will fix you something to eat. It’s far too late and far too far to drive home now. Besides, I want to hear what progress you made today.’

The second glass of wine very nearly rendered Enzo unconscious. His long day, followed by his exertions in the château, the interrogation and the interminable wait at the gendarmerie, had left him physically and mentally exhausted. Now, as he started to relax in the warmth of Mireille’s kitchen, washing down her leftover but deliciously tender boeuf bourguignon with some fine Saint-Emilion, fatigue swept over him and he felt his eyes growing heavy.