Peter May - Cast Iron

Sophie turned her head to look at Bertrand lying on the mattress beside her. Her face was pale, almost grey, deep shadows etched in half-moons beneath her eyes, and she seemed to retreat even further into the blankets. The look of abject misery in her eyes filled Bertrand with love and anger in equal measure. They had no right to treat his beautiful, innocent little Sophie like this. He tightened his arms around her and drew her closer, wishing that he did not feel so utterly impotent.

‘Against the wall!’ The now familiar voice bellowed at them from the other side of the door.

Bertrand and Sophie scrambled stiffly to their feet, bones and muscles aching and joints frozen, and stood against the back wall below the window. Obedience meant food, and they were both weak with hunger.

They heard the key turning in the lock, and then the door was kicked violently open, slamming back against the wall. There was only one of them this time. Usually a second man would lean watchfully against the door jamb as the first laid the tray on the floor. But there was no second man, and the corridor beyond was dark and empty.

The man with the tray crouched to set it on the floor and Bertrand sprang at him, uncertain on what reserves of energy and strength he was drawing, but fuelled by the anger that had been simmering deep inside him. He caught the man full in the midriff with his shoulder as he stood up, and, behind him, heard Sophie scream as the two men crashed out of the room and slammed into the far wall of the corridor. A burst of rotten breath exploded in Bertrand’s face, and he heard the man’s involuntary grunt discharge itself through his mask. Bertrand balled his fist and went for the soft midriff again, only to feel pain fill his head. The power of a solid blow to the side of his face knocked him over. He sprawled heavily on the concrete floor, before hands grabbed him, swinging him around to bang up hard against the wall. A forehead as hard as brick smashed into his face, and through his blood and tears he saw angry green eyes behind slits in a mask, and a voice hissed, ‘Little fucker!’

Bertrand had no idea where the second man had come from, and guessed he must simply have been lingering a little further along the corridor. Attacking the man with the tray without a plan had been a bad idea, and he was paying for it now. The first man picked himself off the floor, cursing violently, and sank his fist into Bertrand’s stomach. Once. Twice. Until Bertrand fell to his knees, retching. The second man kicked him over on to his side, and the two of them grabbed him and threw him back into the room.

Sophie was kneeling beside him in an instant, weeping almost uncontrollably, shocked by the blood oozing from his nose and mouth. The man who had brought the tray swung a foot at it, turning it over and spilling coffee and yoghurt across the floor. He spat into the dust and said, ‘That’s your breakfast. You want to eat, you can eat it off the floor.’ And he pulled the door shut, the sound of it slamming closed echoing violently around the room.

The Institut Médico-Légale in Bordeaux — or the morgue, as it might be described in detective novels — was part of the Groupe Hospitalier Pellegrin on the campus of Bordeaux University. Here, soulless concrete buildings in not quite fifty shades of grey congregated around a network of roads and flyovers carved out of the heart of what had once been old Bordeaux. The elegance of the past replaced by the functionality of the present.

Enzo waited a long time in a sterile reception area, breathing in antiseptic and sitting on a hard plastic seat watching the comings and goings. This was a busy place. Death was doing good business. A nurse behind the reception desk kept a watchful eye on him until eventually a young pathologist in a pristine white coat pushed through swing doors and walked towards him, hand outstretched. Enzo stood and the two men exchanged a cursory handshake.

‘I’m told you’re looking for Dr Bonnaric,’ the pathologist said.

‘That’s right. You’re him?’ Enzo frowned. He seemed a little young to have carried out an autopsy in 2003.

‘No. I’m sorry, Dr Bonnaric passed away a number of years ago. Before my time, I’m afraid.’

‘Oh.’ Enzo’s heart sank. This looked like being another dead end. He fished in his shoulder bag to pull out Martin’s photocopied autopsy report, well thumbed and dog-eared now. ‘He carried out this autopsy eight years ago.’

The pathologist took the document reluctantly, but kept his eyes on Enzo. ‘And you are?’

‘Enzo Macleod. I run the forensics department at Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse.’

The young man raised an eyebrow. Enzo knew he didn’t look like someone who ran a forensics department and so fumbled in his pocket to find a business card. He handed it to the pathologist.

‘I’ve been investigating a series of cold cases here in France. I’m currently working on the murder of Lucie Martin, daughter of the retired judge Guillaume Martin. She disappeared in 1989 and her remains were found in a lake in 2003.’ He nodded towards the autopsy report in the young man’s hands. ‘Dr Bonnaric conducted that autopsy on her and retained the skull for the purposes of identifying the victim from dental records.’ He paused. ‘He never returned it.’

The pathologist frowned. ‘Returned what?’

‘The skull.’

‘Oh.’

‘The judge would like it back. Apparently he wrote several times, without response.’

‘Oh,’ the young man said again. And this time seemed a little embarrassed. ‘Well, that’s unfortunate.’ He looked at the front page of the report. ‘At least we have a case number here. I’ll see if I can track it down. Would you like to come back in, say—’ he checked his watch — ‘a couple of hours?’

Enzo rode the tram east through town, standing room only, clutching an upright and watching the city spool past the windows of his carriage. Now that they had left the concrete campus behind them, the old city reasserted itself in all its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century glory. Ahead, he could see the tall spire of the elegant Cathédrale Saint-André, but stepped off the tram on the Cours Maréchal Juin to cross to the architectural curiosity that was the Palais de Justice. The courthouse was an ugly building with grey skeletal uprights supporting curved, overhanging eves above rows of blue slats — imitation shutters shielding the acres of glass from which the Palais seemed almost wholly constructed.

Its frontage abutted on to what looked like the original prison and sat elevated on a stone-clad plinth. Beyond a sign which read Tribunal de Grande Instance , steps led up over a water feature to a glazed public ambulatory, through which seven courtrooms could be seen rising in bizarre tapering towers, a grotesque parody of the medieval spires all around. The concept, Enzo imaged, was that justice was being seen to be done.

He waited on the steps with his back to the building, gazing by preference down a street of honey-gold stone and black-painted wrought iron, and wondered what had happened to man’s sense of the aesthetic. It seemed, these days, that concept was more important than character, and the result less than edifying. Sophie, he knew, would tell him he was just old and locked in the past. And maybe, he thought, she was right. Maybe it was time to pass it all on to the next generation and let them do their worst. After all, Enzo’s lot had already done theirs.

‘Monsieur Macleod?’

Enzo turned to find himself looking into a lugubrious face with wild, black, curling eyebrows beneath a shock of wiry white hair. It was a big, fleshy face, with silver fuse-wire growing out of nostrils and ears. It belonged to a large man standing on the step above Enzo and towering over him. He wore the long black gown of the French avocat , with its broad flash of white col hanging down from the neck.