Peter May - Cast Iron

When finally she spoke, the quiet of Dominique’s voice seemed to resonate in the room. ‘You promised you would keep in touch.’

‘I know.’

‘You didn’t.’

‘No.’

More silence. Then, ‘Why?’

Enzo sighed. ‘I think you know, Dominique.’

‘I’ll tell you what I know,’ she said. ‘I know that I want to be with you. It’s all I’ve wanted since you left. I’ve never met anyone like you, Enzo. You’re sensitive, intelligent, and you were mine. Even if only for a few days. I’ve lost count of the number of nights I’ve lain awake thinking I was never going to see you again. Dying a little with every day that you never called or wrote. Scared to contact you for fear that I didn’t mean to you what you meant to me.’

Enzo closed his eyes and felt the pain of regret at hurt given so casually, if only by default.

‘And then I thought, For Christ’s sake, girl, stop feeling sorry for yourself. If you want him, go and get him.’ She paused. ‘So here I am.’ She turned quickly on the couch, placing a finger over his lips to stop him from speaking. ‘And don’t tell me you’re too old for me. I’ve heard it all before.’

He couldn’t resist kissing her finger, then he turned his head towards her and smiled sadly. ‘Trouble is, it’s true.’

She sighed loudly and turned away.

‘Dominique, I’m old enough to be your father. You’re... what? Thirty-five? Thirty-six? Young enough to find someone your own age and still have a full life ahead of you.’

‘I don’t want someone my own age. I want you.’

‘I’m fifty-six today, for God’s sake! In four years I’ll be sixty. You don’t know how it feels, Dominique. To reach a point in your life where the distance still to go is far less than the road already travelled. When you spend more time looking back than looking forward, because there is comfort in memory and only fear of the future. When I’m seventy, you’ll just be turning fifty, and you won’t want to be looking after some old man.’

She swung herself across the settee suddenly to straddle his thighs and sit facing him, taking his face in her hands. Her own face just inches from his. ‘You’re wrong, Enzo,’ she said. ‘I’ve thought so much about this. The past is... Well, that’s your history. It’s a part of you. The memories that make you who you are. Good or bad, you can’t change them. But the future is still yours to make. However long you’ve got. You told me once about Pascale, how she died giving birth to Sophie. She could never have imagined that. She thought she had a whole life ahead of her. You both did. Don’t you see? You can’t look ahead and calculate the rest of your life by the law of diminishing returns. To live in fear, of anything, is not to live at all. You have to live for today, because you might be dead tomorrow. So damn well make the most of it!’ And she kissed him, fierce with passion, and he felt the warmth of her tears on his face in the dark.

He slipped his arms around her and pulled her to him, feeling her body soft against his.

‘I want you,’ she said.

‘I want you, too,’ he whispered. ‘I just—’

She kissed him again to stop him speaking. ‘Just know that I am yours, Enzo, and that I want you more than I have ever wanted anyone. And that I am going to treasure every moment that I have with you, and not count them off as they pass.’ She drew a long, slow breath. ‘You don’t spend a year thinking about someone, and missing them as much on the last day as the first, without realising that you must be in love.’

Her words dropped into his heart like molten metal into water, consolidating themselves into tiny bullets that pierced all the emotional armour he had so carefully built around himself for protection. He slid to the edge of the sofa and stood up with her in his arms, marvelling at how light she seemed. He grinned. ‘Not bad for an old man, eh?’ And he carried her through the darkness of the hall and into his bedroom.

Their lovemaking was not the frantic, lust-driven sex that might be expected of two people who had not slept together in nearly a year. It was slow and tender, and so filled with emotional commitment that it left them both drained, spreadeagled on the bed. Not lying on it, but floating on it, not a ripple breaking the surface of their sea of post-sex tranquillity. And Enzo wondered if, finally, after all these years, he had found the woman who would make him happy for the remainder of his life.

Moonlight lay in angles and shadows across the rooftops, and poured like liquid through the window, splashing across their naked bodies.

For a time they dozed, drifting in and out of sleep, she turning to hold him, then turning again to let him spoon her. At some point she emerged from her sexually sated slumber to an awareness of Enzo lying on his back, staring at the ceiling, hands propped behind his head on the pillow. And she sensed something dark. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Lying to me is not a good way to start our relationship, Enzo.’

He rolled his head to one side to look at her earnest face in the moonlight and smiled. ‘You’re right.’

‘Is it me? Us?’

‘No. You are everything that is not wrong with my life.’ He hesitated. ‘It’s Charlotte.’

He heard the tiny explosion of air that signalled Dominique’s irritation. ‘I don’t know why you still give her the time of day.’

‘Because she’s the mother of my son, Dominique.’ He closed his eyes and ran the next words through his head several times before he spoke them. ‘At least, I thought she was.’

Dominique pulled herself up on one elbow and stared at him in surprise. ‘What do you mean?’

He found it difficult now even to form the sentence. ‘She told me there had been someone else.’

‘When?’

‘She didn’t say. But...’ He was almost afraid to say it, in case speaking the words aloud would give them substance and truth. ‘She hinted there was a chance that Laurent might not be mine.’

He was aware of Dominique going limp. ‘What a bitch she is.’

Enzo said, almost as if apologising for her, ‘She doesn’t always endear herself to everyone.’

A silence lay between them, like the ghost of Charlotte herself. Then Dominique said, ‘Where are you going with her tomorrow?’

‘To the high-security prison at Lannemezan. To interview the serial killer Régis Blanc.’ And he explained about the Lucie Martin case, and Charlotte’s ability to get him access to Blanc.

Dominique listened in silence. She had played an important role in discovering who had killed the celebrity chef, Marc Fraysse. Now she said, ‘Let me help.’

‘How?’

‘I’m a trained police officer, Enzo. I can be useful in the investigation. You know how it can sometimes throw more light on a problem to have two minds working on it from different angles.’

‘I can’t take you with me to see Blanc.’

‘No, but you can brief me when you get back. We can do this together.’

And for some unaccountable reason Enzo felt a huge wave of relief. Almost for the first time since Pascale had died he didn’t feel alone anymore. Carrying the burdens of his life, his family and sometimes, it seemed, the whole world. All on his own. He turned to her again, suffused by a nearly overwhelming sense of affection, cupping the back of her head in his hand and drawing her to him to kiss her. He wanted to tell her he loved her. But he was scared to say the words. Three simple words, said too easily, that carried a weight far greater perhaps than any other three words in human history. He knew she wanted to hear them, but still they wouldn’t come.

Suddenly she turned away and slipped out of bed. She leaned over to dip into her overnight bag and pulled out a sheer satin dressing gown. He heard the smoothness of it on her skin as she drew it around her. Then she held out her hand towards him. ‘Come on.’