Peter May - Cast Iron

He shimmied across the bed and slid out to stand up beside her. She seemed so small next to him. ‘Where are we going?’

‘To lay your ghosts to rest. The only way to remove uncertainty is to know the truth.’ She took his hand and led him across the room. He snatched his dressing gown from the door, black silk with embroidered dragons, and pulled it on as she drew him out into the hall. There was not a sound from the other rooms. Streetlight lay in squares across the floor, divided and subdivided by the panes of glass in the double doors leading to the séjour. They stepped through them, avoiding the lines, almost like the games of peever Enzo remembered playing in the school playground.

Nicole had left a bag of Laurent’s things sitting on the table. Dominique rifled through them until she found what she was looking for. A hairbrush with fine soft bristles, wisps of gossamer dark hair trapped between them. With thumb and forefinger, she teased some free and held it up to Enzo. ‘You of all people, my love, should be able to use his DNA to test for paternity.’

Then he saw a shadow cross her face, as if a cloud had passed before the moon.

‘But one thing you should know. I can’t ever give you a son. Or a daughter. We tried, my ex and I, and failed. They tested us. He was declared fertile.’ There was the slightest catch in her voice. ‘And I was told I would never bear a child.’

When consciousness returned it brought only darkness. Bertrand’s eyes flickered open and saw nothing. Neither could he feel anything, except for the constant tattoo of rain on his chest and face. Where the raindrops touched his skin they felt like needles. His clothes were soaked and immeasurably heavy. Almost heavier than the limbs he seemed incapable of moving.

There was no sensation in his broken leg now, as if it had been amputated while he slept. He was unable to feel his feet. His hands seemed huge, swollen and clumsy.

But, even as he gazed into darkness, the world about him slowly began to take form. Shadows delineating shapes. The silhouette of a fallen tree. The bowed and sodden leaves of autumn fern. Hard black rock shot through with seams of marbled limestone. And they were moving. Slowly crossing his field of vision from right to left.

Then the sound of a motor. And, filtering through the fog that filled his head, the realisation that a vehicle was coming, the twin beams of its headlights raking this barren landscape, a place that had somehow trapped him for a day and a night in its dead arms.

With an effort that robbed him of almost all his remaining strength, he rolled on to his side and found his right hand grasping the broken branch of a fallen tree. Strong enough to support his weight as he used it to get himself to his knees, pulling himself up to transfer that same weight on to his one good leg. He stood, trembling on it, swaying in the rain, using the dead branch to keep his balance.

What had begun as the distant sound of a vehicle’s engine had turned into a roar that filled the night. Its headlights, set high in the cab of a tractor trailer dragging a huge container behind it, burned out the landscape like an overexposed photograph. Bertrand levered himself forward, almost blinded by it, transferring weight between his left leg and the broken branch, his other leg dragging uselessly behind him.

By some light in the cab he could see the face of the driver, pale, focused, averted in that moment from the road, concentrating on something that he held in one hand. And it dawned on Bertrand that he was either sending or receiving a text on his mobile phone. He waved his arm uselessly and shouted at the huge, lumbering vehicle as he tried desperately to put himself level with the road. But even as he forced himself on he knew he was too late. The driver hadn’t seen him, and the great sweep of its wheel arch caught him a glancing blow that threw him back into the undergrowth, broken branches and briars tearing at his clothes and his skin, leaving him unconscious and barely breathing.

And still the rain fell.

The gap between carriageways of the motorway was on fire with leaves in full blaze of autumn colour. It had been dark when they left Cahors, and now a low sun was slanting through the rear windscreen as they headed west and south. Toulouse was behind them, and away to their left the Pyrenees cut a purple silhouette against the palest of clear blue skies. Some of the most distant peaks already bore snow.

Enzo glanced in the mirror and saw Kirsty keeping a measured distance behind them, her brown hair almost red, backlit by the sun.

For someone who had been so keen to talk to him the night before, Charlotte had stayed strangely silent for most of the last hour, gazing straight ahead at the lines counting themselves off beneath the car, lost in her own private world. She had handed her car keys to Enzo and insisted he drive.

Suddenly, apropos of nothing, she said, ‘Why have Kirsty and Roger not married?’

Enzo was startled, both by the sudden sound of her voice and the question it had framed. ‘I’ve no idea. I’ve asked her about it myself, but she seems a little evasive. They were due to marry before the baby was born, but it never happened.’

‘Good. Let’s hope it stays that way. For Kirsty’s sake.’

Enzo stole a glance at her, but her eyes were still fixed on the road ahead. ‘Why? Are you jealous?’

Now she laughed, and her amusement seemed genuine enough. ‘Good God, no. It was over with Roger and me a long time ago.’

‘And yet you still maintain regular contact.’

She shrugged. ‘What is it they say? Keep your friends close and your enemies closer?’

Enzo was surprised. ‘You think of Roger as your enemy?’

She half turned her head towards him. ‘Not exactly. But as I’ve told you before, I know him too well. I neither like nor trust him. I’d rather keep him in plain view in front of me than suddenly feel his knife in my back.’

And Enzo remembered the night on the terrace at Gaillac where she had expressed dark thoughts about him. He glanced in the mirror again at Kirsty, and the misgivings he had always had about Raffin came bubbling once more to the surface. Yet again he felt a stab of concern for his daughter, and Charlotte put his thoughts into words. ‘Pity they had the baby. Children have a habit of tying people together more closely than marriage.’

And the irony in that was not lost on him. He glanced at her and their eyes met for a moment in unexpected communion. He returned his gaze to the road. ‘You know he’s been offered a job by the Mayor of Paris?’

He felt her head turn towards him. ‘Devez?’

He nodded.

‘What kind of job?’

‘Press secretary. If Devez gets the nomination for the presidential candidacy.’

He heard a tiny puff of air expel itself from between her lips. ‘That figures, I suppose. With Roger’s left-wing credentials and his association with Libération , it’ll put the socialists on the wrong foot. Give the UMP a little street cred.’ She paused. ‘You know that Roger and Marie were great friends of Devez and his wife back in the nineties?’

‘I do. Though I don’t really know very much about Devez himself. Except that he’s the front-runner for the UMP nomination.’

‘Oh, he’s a smart one, Enzo. A real smooth operator. Cut his political teeth in Bordeaux in the early days. He was deputy mayor for some years, with responsibility for finance, human resources and administration. One of the youngest ever to be entrusted with the job. I guess even then people saw him as a future star. Bright, intelligent, personable. But he had something else. That magic something you need to get to the very top. Charisma. The kind of charisma that marked out Bill Clinton as special. It shines through, even once removed, on television, or in press photographs.’