Peter May - Cast Iron

He turned, finally, to the autopsy report lying on the quilt beside him. It weighed almost nothing as he lifted it. A life summed up in a few pages of observation gleaned from a handful of bones. And it didn’t take long to read. Identity had been confirmed by comparing teeth with dental records. DNA had not been required. The three hyoid bones had been recovered individually, and it was impossible to tell whether or not they had been separated by force in the act of strangulation, or whether they had subsequently separated as the soft tissue decayed or was eaten by fish. But there was no doubt that the left, greater horn, or cornu, had been fractured, as in one of Blanc’s victims. Cause of death, however, was impossible to determine.

Enzo knew that a baby was born with 270 bones, some of which would gradually fuse together, leaving it with 206 as a mature adult. Lucie would not have reached full skeletal maturity at the age of twenty, and so she would have had more than 206 bones. Only 178 were actually recovered.

But what most interested Enzo was a fracture to the left side of the skull, which the pathologist had attributed to damage done when it was being retrieved from the mud. According to his report it had been necessary to dig the bones out of the dried silt in the exposed bed of the lake, and whoever had been sent to do it had been less than careful with the blade of his shovel.

Unfortunately, the photocopied photographs that accompanied the report were not clear enough to allow Enzo to examine the fracture. It seemed to him extraordinarily careless to have damaged the skull in that way, when the bones would almost certainly have been considered those of a murder victim. And yet in all likelihood it would have been a low-ranking gendarme without crime-scene training who had been dispatched to do the job. So was it really that surprising? Still, Enzo was troubled, and knew that he was going to have to pursue it further.

Finally, he slipped the report on to the bedside table and switched off the light. He turned over on to his right side, pulling his left leg up into a semi-foetal position, his right leg stretched out towards the foot of the bed, and closed his eyes. Several minutes later he opened them again. Sleep was a long way off, and he knew it. And so he sat up, turned on the light again and pulled a book from his bag. There was nothing like a good book to fill those endless hours of a sleepless night, and a murder mystery by Scots author Val McDermid seemed like a good distraction.

He wasn’t sure when sleep had finally crept up on him, but he woke at four a.m. with his book lying open on the floor and his neck stiff from sleeping at an impossible angle. The bedside light was still burning, and he thought he couldn’t have been asleep for long. He turned it out and curled up again, as he had done several hours earlier. And again, within minutes, knew that he was not going to re-enter the land of nod.

With a sigh of frustration he sat up once more, swinging his legs out of bed and crossing to the window, moonlight flooding in across bare floorboards. It was a painfully clear night. With no light pollution for miles around, the sky was the deepest inky black, crusted by many more stars than he ever knew existed. The Milky Way was like a cloud brush-stroked into the fabric and texture of it. And suddenly he felt the need of air. He wanted to be out there, under that sky, free of the confines of this room, this château, these people. Free to think with clarity.

He dressed quickly and made his way tentatively down the stairs, careful not to make a noise. The Martins, he knew, slept in another part of the house, but he did not want to waken them.

The door in the hallway at the foot of the stairs was locked, but the key was still in it, and he turned it to let himself out. He felt the cold on his face immediately, and buttoned his jacket and turned up his collar.

He took the path that followed the original Roman road along the front of the house, and stepped on to grass that was silver with dew. If the temperature dropped any lower it would freeze, and the day would dawn in a few short hours to a landscape blanketed white with frost.

Retracing the route that he and Martin had taken the other day on their return from the lake, he descended the hill into the darkness of the woods. Fractured moonlight fell between myriad branches casting deep shadows in the undergrowth. But it was easy enough to follow the animal track that led down towards the water.

A sudden noise brought him to a standstill, and he listened intently. Nothing. And for a moment he began to doubt that he had heard anything at all. Then, there it was again. Something or someone moving through the trees, not twenty metres away. Slow, cautious steps. And Enzo felt his heart rate rising, perspiration beading his forehead in spite of the cold. Suddenly, those careful steps turned into a run and came crashing towards him, and he very nearly cried out. A white stag materialised suddenly in the moonlight, stopping unexpectedly on the path, almost within touching distance.

Enzo gazed at it with a mixture of astonishment, and relief, and then pure awe. It seemed huge, breath bursting in condensing clouds from its nostrils, its coat washed almost silver in the moonlight. Enzo had never seen a white stag before, but he knew the legend. An old Scottish folk tale. That if you saw a white stag, someone close to you was going to die. And he stood transfixed, staring at the creature, which stared back at him with large, round, black eyes. Its antlers moved through broken light as it tilted its head, unblinking in its gaze, and Enzo could not imagine what it was thinking. Was it scared? Bemused? Angry at this night intruder invading its territory? It coughed into the night and scraped the path with its hoof, and Enzo could not bring himself to move. Then it turned, without another sound, and went crashing off through the woods, vanishing somewhere down near the lake, where Enzo could see flashes of broken black water reflecting the moonlight.

He stood, breathing heavily for some minutes, watching his own breath billowing in front of him. He was not a superstitious man, and he did not believe in the supernatural, but there was something about this encounter with the white stag in the dark of the woods, miles from anywhere, that left him feeling deeply unsettled. And a shiver ran through him that was not attributable to the cold.

Finally, he shook himself free of the spell that the stag had somehow cast, and he carried on down towards the water’s edge. When he reached the point where the trees opened out to reveal the expanse of still lake that filled the valley, he saw mist rising gently from its surface, like smoke, filtering moonlight through spectral gauze.

This was Lucie’s final resting place. Her killer had dumped her body in the deepest part of the lake, never imagining that one day the water would dry up in the summer heat to reveal his handiwork. But how, Enzo wondered, did he know where the deepest part of the lake was? Was it just chance, or did it suggest local knowledge?

The relationships in this penultimate case from Raffin’s book were endlessly complex. There were the Bordeaux Six, of which Lucie was one. Their links to the serial killer, Blanc, who might or might not have been responsible for their deaths or disappearances. Tavel, the jilted lover who was unusually anxious that his wife knew nothing about his involvement with Lucie, even though it was more than twenty years ago. The love letter from Blanc himself, which seemed so totally out of character with anything anyone knew about him. And then Tavel’s assertions that Blanc and Lucie were involved in a secret affair that no one else appeared to know about. And, of course, Lucie’s father, determined to defend her honour by denying the remotest possibility that Blanc and his daughter had been having an affair, despite it lending credence to his belief that it was Blanc who had killed her.