Peter May - Cast Iron

Words, Enzo was sure, that Blanc had memorised from countless readings of her letters. And he found himself empathising with this serial killer sitting before him. A man robbed by death of something that might have transformed his life, but left him, instead, with only memories and regrets and the sense of a life unfulfilled.

‘You know, I look back, and it’s hard to believe it now. Knowing who I am, what I became. But I really believed Lucie could save me. Like Jesus fucking Christ. I’d have done anything for her. Anything.’ He paused. ‘Only...’ And then he sat upright, folding his arms again, and Enzo could see him biting the inside of his lower lip.

‘Only what?’

‘There were things I had to do. You know. First.’ This said with defiance, as if making excuses for not living up to Lucie’s vision of him.

‘What things?’

The colour was gone from his face again, and a shadow crossed it. ‘Things. Obligations. Debts.’

‘What obligations? What debts?’

But Blanc remained tight-lipped, staring at the floor, and Enzo saw an almost imperceptible shake of his head. It was clear that he wasn’t going to say. So Enzo said it for him.

‘Killing those girls, you mean?’

Blanc flashed him a look that was both dangerous and full of pain. His eyes flickered towards Charlotte, then back. ‘These fucking psychiatrists,’ he said, the contempt clear in his voice. ‘They’ll tell you that I killed them because my mother was a prostitute. That every time I killed one, I was killing my mother.’ He snorted his derision. ‘What bollocks! What they don’t understand, any of them, is that it didn’t matter what my mother was. She was my mother. I loved her unconditionally. And she loved me.’

‘So why did you kill them?’

A sad, sick smile curled his lips and he shook his head. ‘If I told you, they’d kill me.’

Enzo frowned. ‘What do you mean? Who’s “they”?’

Blanc’s smile was smug now. A man who knew he kept a secret he wasn’t going to tell, but was taking pleasure in dropping hints that would tease and tantalise without fulfilment. ‘Trust me, there are worse things than death,’ he said.

The silence that followed seemed to stretch from seconds to minutes, without Blanc being in the least aware of it. He was watching his hands in front of him, lacing and unlacing his fingers as if praying, then changing his mind. Enzo sensed that there was more to come and didn’t want to break the moment. He willed Charlotte not to speak. Although she had said nothing throughout the entire interview, listening rapt to a killer’s ramblings in mute fascination.

Finally Blanc looked up. His eyes moved from Enzo to Charlotte, then back again. The smile was gone. ‘The thing is... sometimes obligations don’t last a lifetime. Maybe one day soon I’ll have my say.’

‘About what?’

But he just shook his head. ‘Why would I tell you?’

Enzo decided to chance his arm. ‘You wanted to be caught, Régis, didn’t you?’

Blanc shrugged. ‘We all pay for the things we do. In this life or the next. But whatever awful things I’ve done, I know that Lucie would have forgiven me.’

‘For killing those girls?’ Enzo was genuinely surprised.

‘Yes.’ But he quickly changed his mind. ‘Well, no. Not for killing them. I’m glad she never knew about that. I mean why I did it. She’d have understood that. She would.’ He saw the question forming itself in Enzo’s eyes, and he pre-empted the asking of it. ‘But, like I said, I’m not telling you.’

Enzo nodded, sensing the finality in Blanc’s words. ‘And what about the Bordeaux Six?’

‘Pah!’ Derision exploded from Blanc’s lips. ‘That’s just fucking incompetent cops trying to pin their failures on me. A convenient bloody scapegoat, already doing life. I don’t know anything about what happened to those girls. That’s just how it is, you know. People die, people get murdered, people run away. Who knows who or why or when? They come into your life and they go out of it again. Doesn’t make you responsible for them.’

‘What do you think happened to those other letters that you sent to Lucie? You know they only ever found one.’

He nodded. ‘I’ve no idea.’

‘But you denied any relationship with her at the time. Said you’d only written that one, and only because you were drunk.’

Blanc became almost agitated. ‘Lucie was dead. No one would have believed what it was we had between us. And I wasn’t about to drag her name through the mud along with mine.’

‘And what about her letters to you?’

Blanc eyed Enzo warily now. ‘What about them?’

‘What happened to them?’

‘Oh, don’t you worry. I’ve got them safely hidden away. Somewhere no one will ever find them.’

Enzo said, ‘You realise, if you could produce those letters, they are probably just about the only thing that could erase any suspicion that it was you who killed her?’

‘I don’t care,’ Blanc said, verging on the hostile now. ‘People can think what they want. I know I didn’t kill her. And wherever she might be now, Lucie knows that, too.’ He dropped his eyes to the number six pinned to Enzo’s jacket, and a small smile of irony crossed his lips. ‘ Je ne suis pas un numéro, je suis un homme libre ,’ he said.

Enzo frowned, then did the mental translation. I am not a prisoner, I am a free man . And he realised that he and Blanc were of the same generation, each sitting on either side of the English Channel, watching Patrick McGoohan in the cult sixties TV show, The Prisoner .

Enzo drew a deep breath as the prison gate shut behind them. It felt good to be out, breathing God’s own pure, sweet air, chilled by the proximity of the Pyrenees, uncontaminated by big-city pollution or tainted by life behind bars.

It felt like emerging from some dreadful human laboratory where, for the hour they had spent locked in a room with a killer, they had found themselves looking deep into Nietzsche’s abyss.

They stood in silence for several long moments, gazing out across a pastoral landscape that shimmered off into a hazy blue distance that then took dark and brooding form in the ominous shape of the mountains.

Charlotte spoke first. ‘I have never heard him speak like that before. No amount of prompting would ever induce him to talk to me about the murders. Or Lucie.’

Enzo glanced at her to see her face quite pale in the misted midday light. ‘What did you talk about, then?’

‘His childhood, mostly. His mother. God. Religion. I think he was always just glad to have someone to talk to. Today was different, though.’ She looked at Enzo. ‘He was a different man.’ She hesitated. ‘What do you think he meant when he said they would kill him?’

Enzo shook his head, equally mystified. ‘I have no idea. He was... well, pretty enigmatic.’

‘Except when it came to talking about Lucie.’

He nodded.

‘You think he didn’t kill her, then?’

‘I’d put money on it.’

She smiled wryly. ‘Enzo, do you not think gambling has got you into enough trouble as it is?’

His smile of resignation and the gentle inclination of his head signalled agreement. ‘Very probably.’ But he couldn’t shake off the depression which had descended on him during his interview with Blanc, and he couldn’t help feeling that there was something inestimably sad about the man. He kissed Charlotte on both cheeks and handed back her car keys. ‘Thank you for getting me in to see him. I’ll let you know if there are any developments.’

‘Please do,’ she called after him, and before returning to her vehicle stood watching as Enzo got into the car with Kirsty to drive down the spur that would take them to the main road and back, ultimately, on to the motorway, heading west.