Peter May - Cast Iron

‘So the fracture pre-dates the discovery of the body.’

‘Indeed. And was therefore probably inflicted while the victim was still alive. If the damage had been done — by, say, a shovel — when it was being dug out of the mud, the break would have been clean and unstained.’

Enzo stared at it, absorbing the implications.

The young man smiled and said, ‘It’s like an ice-cream bar, really. If you break it and then dip it in chocolate, it’s covered in chocolate even along the break. Compare that to an ice-cream bar dipped in chocolate and broken later. The break will be clean ice cream. Et voilà .’ He shrugged. ‘It’s not rocket science.’

Enzo’s mind was racing with all the new possibilities this development presented. ‘So that means the blow that did this damage could have been the cause of death?’

‘Very easily. Given the nature of it.’ He handed the skull back to Enzo, who gazed at Lucie for several long moments before returning her to the cardboard box. Then he looked at the forensic anthropologist again.

‘I wonder if I could ask you a very big favour?’

‘What?’ The young man inclined his head as if to say, Have I not done enough?

‘One theory about how Lucie died is that she was a victim of the serial killer Régis Blanc, who murdered his victims by strangling them, separating the hyoid bone and breaking part of it in the process.’

‘Which is how Dr Bonnaric thought Lucie might have died.’

‘Exactly. But Blanc also sedated his victims with the date-rape drug, Rohypnol — Flunitrazepam — which is one of a class of benzodiazepines. I’ve read that it is possible to detect these drugs in bone, and not just the marrow.’

The doctor nodded. ‘Yes. Easier in the marrow of fresh bone. But it is also possible to detect some drugs in cortical bone.’ He glanced at Lucie’s skull in the box. ‘You would take a little bone and grind it into powder. If there were traces of Rohypnol in it, they would be detectable.’ He looked at Enzo. ‘You would like me to do that.’ It was a statement, not a question.

Enzo nodded.

He sighed. ‘I can’t guarantee that I would be able to find the time or the resources.’

‘No, I understand that. But if you could...’ Enzo let his sentence hang. Then he said, ‘You’ve got my card.’ He paused. ‘So, I’ll leave Lucie with you.’

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Enzo left Bordeaux just after midday, arriving in Paris shortly before seven. He had stopped only once, and was stiff and tired when finally he left his 2CV in the car park at Rue Soufflot and walked to Raffin’s apartment in the Rue de Tournon.

For once there was no piano playing as he crossed the shining wet cobbles of the interior courtyard and climbed wearily to the first floor. Somehow it always seemed to be raining in Paris in autumn. To his disappointment Kirsty and his grandson were not there.

‘They’ve been away all afternoon visiting a friend of Kirsty’s in the eighth,’ Raffin said. He stood for a moment in the doorway before reluctantly opening it wide to let Enzo in. If there had ever once been warmth between them, it had long since dissipated.

In the séjour Enzo saw an almost empty bottle of Pouilly Fumé on the table, and a single glass with half an inch of honey-coloured white wine remaining in the bottom of it. There was a glassy quality, he noticed then, to Raffin’s usually clear green eyes, and he spoke slowly, with the studied concentration of a man trying to convince you that he had not drunk too much. Drinking too much had pretty well characterised Raffin since his shooting, here in this very apartment, and Enzo, though still nurturing a sense of guilt, worried for the future of his daughter and grandson. ‘I’ve just driven from Bordeaux,’ he said.

Raffin raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s quite a drive. I’m flattered you’d come all this way just to see me.’

Enzo gave him a look. ‘Actually, I’ve come to see Charlotte,’ he said, and saw Raffin stiffen. The journalist was still, inexplicably, jealous of Enzo’s relationship with her, even although it had long since turned sour. Enzo dipped into his bag to pull out the folders given him by the Bordeaux Six, and his copy of Lucie’s autopsy report. ‘And I wanted to give you these. Or, at least, let you take copies for your files.’

Raffin glanced at them. ‘Oh, yes. The Bordeaux Six.’

‘I’m surprised you weren’t tempted to include more of them in the book.’

Raffin shrugged. ‘Lucie’s was the only one of real interest. And four of them were just missing, still alive for all we know. Although, probably not.’

‘And the girl stabbed to death in that hotel room?’

Raffin pulled a face. ‘Again. Not very interesting. A prostitute murdered in a sexual frenzy by some lowlife client. Not the sort of mystery to engage my readers.’ He flicked through them. ‘But I’ll take copies. You never know when you might find something interesting.’

Enzo followed Raffin through to his study, where the journalist ran off duplicates of the six files on his high-speed copier. He looked at Lucie’s autopsy report.

‘I haven’t seen this before. Can’t imagine there’s anything very interesting in it.’

‘Then you’d be wrong,’ Enzo said, and for the first time he saw that Raffin’s interest was piqued.

The two men went back through to the sitting room, and as Raffin spread out the contents of the six copied files on the dining table to examine in more detail, Enzo told him about the fractured skull, written off by the original pathologist as collateral damage and now reassessed as the possible cause of death.

Raffin looked at him, his eyes suddenly clear and shining. ‘Well that changes everything, doesn’t it? If a blow to the head was the cause of death, it means that her killer strangled her post-mortem to make it look like it was Blanc.’

But Enzo shook his head. ‘She disappeared the day before Blanc was arrested.’

‘Yes, but it was well publicised that those prostitutes had been strangled, that the hyoid bones had separated and fractured.’

‘True — but until Blanc’s arrest nobody knew it was him.’

‘So the killer was simply trying to make it look like the work of whoever had murdered the prostitutes, without knowing it was Blanc.’ Raffin was clearly irritated by Enzo’s constant contradictions.

‘Which would be an extraordinary coincidence,’ Enzo said. ‘Given that Blanc had written to Lucie, and that, according to her ex-boyfriend, he had been having a relationship with her.’

This set Raffin back on his heels. ‘What? When did you learn that?’

‘A couple of days ago.’

‘He told you?’

Enzo nodded. ‘Under a little duress.’

Raffin drew him a curious look, but his excitement at the revelation was patent. ‘This is new. It’s going to make a great story.’ He paused. ‘So you think that Blanc might have killed her after all?’

Enzo stroked his jaw thoughtfully and felt the bristles on his chin, realising he hadn’t shaved for two days. He said, ‘There’s no way to know if that blow to the head killed Lucie or not. It might just have rendered her unconscious, and then she was strangled. After all, Blanc drugged his prostitutes with Rohypnol before strangling them. If you strangle someone, I guess you have to look them in the eye as you do it. And they look back at you. Maybe Blanc didn’t like that.’

‘So you do think it was Blanc?’

Enzo released a long, slow breath and ran his eyes sightlessly around the room, as if searching for inspiration in facts to back up his instinct. When he couldn’t find any, he looked at Raffin and said, ‘Actually, I don’t.’

He was saved from having to provide a rationale for his instinct by the sound of the door opening out in the hall. Cold air rushed in as Kirsty, with Alexis in her arms, manhandled a pushchair through from the landing.