Peter May - Cast Iron

‘Maître Imbert?’

‘Yes.’ He shuffled impatiently. ‘I don’t have much time.’

‘How on earth did you recognise me?’ Enzo said.

‘Monsieur, there can be hardly anyone working in the French justice system who does not know your face by now.’

Enzo smiled. ‘Well, thank you for meeting me.’

There was no smile in return, and no handshake. ‘Like I said, monsieur, I am pressed for time. What can I do for you?’

In the absence of any of Maître Imbert’s precious time to soften the request, Enzo came straight out with it. ‘I’d like you to arrange for me to see Régis Blanc.’

And for the first time the hint of a smile rearranged gross features. ‘Monsieur, just because you have successfully resolved four of Raffin’s cold cases does not mean that you are going to pin the murder of Lucie Martin on my client.’

‘That’s not why I want to see him.’

The eyebrows of the avocat gathered in a tangle above his nose as he frowned. ‘Then why do you want to see him? Is this something to do with the Bordeaux Six?’

‘No. Although I have met with the parents and looked at their files.’

‘Time wasters and fantasists.’

Enzo found a seed of anger stirring inside him. ‘Actually, those parents are just as much victims as their daughters.’

‘Not victims of Blanc.’

‘No, I agree.’

Maître Imbert seemed taken aback. ‘Really?’

‘If Michel Bétaille couldn’t find any connections between Blanc and the disappearance or murder of those girls in two years of investigation, I’m inclined to think there aren’t any.’

‘So what do you want with Blanc?’

‘I found his letter to Lucie oddly touching, Maître. I know he claims to have written it while drunk, but I doubt that. A drunk man, released from his natural inhibitions, would have expressed himself more freely, and perhaps more crudely. Blanc had real difficulty.’

Imbert’s thick pale lips curled in what looked like a sneer. ‘Blanc was not exactly what I would have called literate, Monsieur Macleod.’ He clearly didn’t think much of his client.

‘I don’t mean the words he used. I’m talking about the emotions he expressed.’

Imbert sighed. ‘Is there a point to this anywhere in our future?’

‘New evidence has come to light suggesting that Lucie and Blanc had a romantic liaison.’

Now Imbert laughed out loud. ‘Nonsense!’

‘I have a witness.’

‘Who?’

Enzo just smiled. ‘They were seen together in a café, kissing and holding hands.’

The frown returned in another meeting of eyebrows. ‘And you want to ask Blanc if it’s true?’

Enzo inclined his head.

‘He’ll not tell you.’

‘But you’ll get me in to see him?’

‘No, I will not. I’m far too busy to bother myself with a case that’s more than twenty years old. Blanc killed those girls and now he’s serving life, and that’s an end to it.’ He turned away on the steps, then paused and turned back. ‘Why don’t you ask your friend, Charlotte Roux?’

Now it was Enzo’s turn to frown. ‘Charlotte?’

‘You and Raffin are pretty thick with her, aren’t you? Certainly, if the papers are to be believed.’

‘How could Charlotte get me access to Régis Blanc?’

The smile spreading the thick lips of the avocat was smug now. ‘She’s a regular visitor. I had to clear it with Blanc myself. One of a group of forensic psychologists doing some kind of study on the long-term effect of prison on lifers.’ He paused, his smile widening. ‘Didn’t she tell you?’

Enzo walked back to the Institut Médico-Légale in a daze. He buttoned up his jacket against the cold and pushed his hands deep into his pockets, oblivious of his fellow pedestrians. Twice he crossed the road when the lights were at red, to a cacophony of klaxons.

Why wouldn’t Charlotte have told him that she had visited Blanc in Lannemezan prison? But no matter how many times he asked himself, he could not come up with a satisfactory answer. She must have known that he would find out sooner or later — certainly as soon as he embarked on the Lucie Martin case. In addition to her training as a psychologist, Charlotte had spent two years in the United States studying forensic psychology. Her help was even solicited on occasion by the Paris police, when those particular talents were in demand, and so it was not unnatural that she should be participating in a prisoner study. What was unnatural was that she hadn’t told him.

He drew long, deep breaths as he walked, to control his anger. It was not beyond the bounds of possibility that she was simply being bloody-minded. Where Enzo was concerned, it seemed she took great pleasure these days in baiting him. And he could just imagine her supercilious response to his asking the question. But ask it he was determined to do. Besides which, it looked now like she might be his only way of getting to speak to Blanc himself.

He had walked off most of his anger by the time he reached the Hôpital Pellegrin and the young pathologist came to meet him in reception. He was carrying a square, cream cardboard box, which he set down on the chair next to where Enzo had been sitting. ‘That’s her,’ he said. ‘The box had been incorrectly labelled and misfiled in the greffe . It was pure chance that I found it.’

Enzo sat down beside it. ‘May I take a look?’

‘Of course.’

Enzo removed the lid and reached in to cup his hands carefully around the skull and lift it out. It had been wired together where separated and came out in one piece. Held in his hands like this, it felt incredibly small and delicate. The last trace on this earth of what had once been a vibrant, attractive young girl who, if Tavel was to be believed, had fallen in love with a serial killer. But the more he learned, the less inclined Enzo was to believe that it was Blanc who had killed her.

He looked into the large, dark, empty sockets from which her blue eyes had once viewed a world full of possibility, and gazed with love upon a man who had killed at least three times. Eyes which had seen her killer, filled perhaps with terror in the moments before her murder. He almost hoped that holding her skull like this might communicate something of that to him. But all he felt was cold bone on warm skin, and something faintly sinister in the sense of cupping the head of a dead human being in his hands.

He turned it to examine the fracture on its left side, just above the temple. The bone was broken here, a piece of it missing, and Enzo realised how easy it would be to damage something so fragile.

The pathologist said, ‘I read the autopsy report. Just out of interest. He was wrong, you know.’

Enzo looked at him, startled. ‘Who?’

‘Bonnaric. I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but he was no anthropologist.’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’

The young man smiled. ‘Forensic anthropology. That’s my particular specialty. Bonnaric wrote in his report that the damage to the skull was likely caused during the process of its recovery from the lake. That’s not the case.’

Enzo looked in astonishment at Lucie’s head in his hands and then back at the pathologist. ‘How can you know that?’

He reached out for the skull. ‘May I?’

Enzo handed it to him and stood up.

The pathologist turned the fracture towards them and ran his finger along the broken edge. ‘There, you see?’

And Enzo saw immediately. He said, ‘The edge of the break is stained.’

‘Exactly. The broken edges would have got dirty during recovery, yes, but if Bonnaric had cleaned them properly, he would have seen that they weren’t just superficially dirty. The staining is deeply ingrained in the fabric of the skull.’