Peter May - Cast Iron

Enzo half smiled. ‘Sounds like you’ve fallen for him.’

She laughed. ‘Oh, he’s an attractive man. There’s probably not a woman in France who wouldn’t be tempted to slip into his bed. Though he’s happily married from all accounts. With a young adult family.’

Enzo said, ‘It’s a big leap from provincial deputy mayor to Mayor of Paris.’

‘It is. But there was never any doubt when he made the move to the capital that that’s where he was headed. Even though he was still just a baby, in political terms.’

‘And now he has the presidency in his sights. Will he win?’

‘If the party picks him, I think he will.’ She turned to look at Enzo. ‘Which will make Roger a very powerful man.’

Enzo nodded. ‘Do you know him? Devez, I mean.’

He heard a tiny snorting laugh burst from her nostrils, her lips pressed tightly closed. Then, ‘I’ve met him, yes. But know him?’ She shook her head. ‘Does anyone really know a man like that? Charisma is a wonderful and attractive quality, Enzo, but who knows what it conceals?’

Mist lay all across the plain, filling the contours of the land in swirls and eddies, and, from the slight elevation of the road, it looked like a lake.

The distant motorway was lost in it, but the man could see the faintest trace of fog lamps delineating its route along the horizon, and the sound of early-morning traffic reached him with an odd clarity, the way that sound travels across water.

The sky above was clear, and the southern sun was already spilling its warmth across the treetops to disperse the chill that had settled overnight with the mist.

The road was still wet from last night’s rain, and his dog, a lively Scots border collie, took great pleasure in splashing her way from puddle to puddle. Turning back at frequent intervals to check that her master was still following, and to seek his approval.

As the road curved gently towards the west, she left the pitted tarmac and went bounding off through the tangle of creeper and briar that washed up on the very edge of the mist, like detritus on the beach after a storm. She snagged her fur as she went, barking with excitement. The man imagined she had picked up the scent of a rabbit, or some rodent, or maybe even a fox. Suddenly she stopped and began pawing at the ground. He called after her. ‘Fanny!’ Unusually, she ignored him, snuffling and barking, and circling whatever it was she had found. ‘Fanny!’ He injected a tone into his voice that brought her head up to look at him. But only for a moment, before she returned to her new-found obsession.

He sighed. She was still young. This time he shouted, and still it had no effect on her. Leaving the road, he strode off through the tangle of dead undergrowth left behind in some distant past by the felling of trees. He reached her in a few short strides, and then stopped in his tracks as he saw what it was that had so focused her attention.

The body of a young man lay face down in the bracken, his right leg twisted at an unnatural angle. He wasn’t moving or responding in any way to Fanny’s barking. The man crouched down, with the dread sense that he was in the presence of death, and saw blood dried on the young man’s forehead. Removing his gloves, he lightly brushed his fingers on the skin of the face. It was cold to the touch, and its pallor suggested that life might have departed some time ago.

Now he reached around to the neck, searching with his fingers for what he knew to be the jugular venous pulse. At first he could not find the vein, and when he did, no pulse. Fanny’s constant barking produced a bellow from him that caused the dog to retreat, startled, standing off to stare at him in bemused silence. And it was almost as if the silence itself found the life in Bertrand’s prone body, and the man suddenly felt the faintest of pulses.

He stood up quickly, and with trembling fingers reached for his mobile phone.

Lannemezan lay in the great southern plain that sprawled in the shadow of the Pyrenees. The high-security maison centrale and centre de détention was an ordered, modern prison complex behind a rectangle of concrete walls, built in the eighties and set in agricultural country outside the town itself. It was bounded on two sides by railway lines, and no doubt the 170 prisoners held within its cells could hear the trains that passed in the night, and dreamt of long-lost freedom.

It must, Enzo thought, as they turned off the main road and drove up to the entrance, be quite galling to look out from behind these bars to see the mountain range that was once the escape route for allied soldiers and resistance fighters fleeing the Nazis. The Pyrenees had long been a symbol of freedom, and he wondered if there was some deliberate irony in the choice of Lannemezan as the setting for a place to take it away.

Implacable prison guards watched them from behind glass in circular observation turrets at the top of concrete towers on each corner as the two cars drew into the car park. Kirsty would wait for them here, and she wound down the window and unstrapped Alexis from his baby chair to sit him with her in the front.

Enzo followed Charlotte past a huge steel door set into a harled archway where vehicles came and went over the hump of a yellow and black ramp. Pedestrian access was at the far side of the entrance, leading them into an open reception area where electric lights reflected on shiny floors and hummed in the deep silence.

Enzo had visited prisons many times, and it always depressed him. There was something about stepping inside a place of incarceration that filled him with a sense of apprehension, and then on leaving, with relief and a gratitude for the freedom he had previously taken for granted.

At a long counter, unsmiling staff behind glass took his passport, which they copied and filed and told him they would hold in safekeeping until his departure. They gave him several forms to fill out and sign, before providing him with the black number six, printed on a white card, to pin to his jacket. They took his bag and the contents of his pockets and gave him a receipt to be produced for their safe return.

It was a procedure Charlotte had clearly been through many times, and she stood waiting patiently until Enzo was finished.

Finally, the door to the prison itself was unlocked and they were accompanied through the high-security wing by two guards in black uniforms with white stripes across their chests. The place smelled like a hospital. Of body odour and antiseptic. Floors were polished to a shine, and pale green walls were punctuated at regular intervals by dark green bars that divided hallways into sections, like airlocks, gates behind them secured before gates ahead were opened. Overhead strip lights threw up glare from beneath their feet, and every sound seemed to echo back at them from every hard surface.

Finally they were led down steps, through a gate and into a room with reinforced glass walls on three sides. Régis Blanc sat behind a table facing two empty chairs. A door slammed behind them, a key turned in the lock, and they could see the guards who had brought them there through the glass, leaning back against a wall, arms folded, watching them with studied disinterest.

‘ Salut, Régis. Comment ça va? ’ Charlotte greeted him as if she had known him all her life and they were old friends meeting for lunch. But she didn’t kiss his cheeks or shake his hand. Instead, she sat down and folded her hands on the table in front of her.

Blanc had been slouched in his chair. He wore a white T-shirt stretched tightly over muscles honed, perhaps, in a prison gym, or by isometric exercises performed in his cell. His jeans, too, were slim fitting to reveal well-developed thighs. He had about him the air of a man tightly wound and ready to spring. Like a cat on alert. Enzo knew that Blanc was two years younger than him, but he was probably fitter than a man half his age. He looked older, though. Much of his hair had gone, and what was left of it was the colour of metal filings. It had been shorn to a stubble across his scalp. His face was lean and lined, a dead pallor pockmarked by teenage acne. But the most remarkable things about him were his eyes. They were the palest blue Enzo had ever seen. So pale they were very nearly translucent. And with pin-sharp pupils, and irises circled in black, they were like the eyes of some wild cat. A snow leopard or a tiger. And they were fixed on Enzo, suspicious and hostile, alert from the moment Enzo entered the interview room. He sat immediately upright, ignoring Charlotte’s greeting.