Peter May - Cast Iron

Enzo was happy to sit back in the passenger seat and let Kirsty drive. The rhythm of the car had sent Alexis to sleep in his baby seat, and Enzo had spent half an hour or more lost in replay of his interview with Blanc. It seemed to him now that Michel Bétaille had been right to question Blanc’s motivation for murdering those prostitutes. Blanc himself had scorned the reasons attributed by the psychologists to his sudden killing spree. But had very nearly admitted that it wasn’t just some random notion. It had been a clear and conscious decision.

What was not clear, and what he wasn’t saying, was why.

Neither had he denied Enzo’s suggestion that he had wanted to be caught, attributing it to some Christian notion of paying penance. But Enzo didn’t believe that Blanc was a very Christian man, in spite of what had very probably been a Catholic upbringing. His mother herself would have been the role model providing the lie that undermined the pretence of faith.

‘I won’t ask,’ Kirsty said suddenly. She smiled. ‘I’d love to know, but you can tell me in your own good time. We have a couple of days together.’

Enzo returned her smile. ‘We have. And it’s nice. A long time since I got to spend time like this with you on your own.’

She nodded towards the back seat. ‘Not exactly alone.’

Enzo grinned. ‘Ah, but Alexis is family.’ And he saw the shadow that passed fleetingly over her face. They could pretend all they wanted that nothing had changed between them since the revelation that he was not her blood father. But it had. Not in any substantive way, but in some strangely amorphous sense of loss that neither wanted to acknowledge.

She said, ‘I noticed that Dominique spent the night at the apartment last night.’

‘She did.’

Kirsty flicked him a look. ‘And I noticed that she didn’t sleep on the sofa.’

‘I could hardly ask the girl to doss down on that awful thing.’

She lifted an eyebrow. ‘You’re incorrigible, Papa, you know that?’

He grinned. ‘Encourageable, Kirsty.’

‘Is she...?’ And she left the sentence hanging.

‘She’s very serious.’

‘And you?’

‘I’ve been trying hard not to be.’

‘Why?’

‘Because she’s not much older than you, Kirsty. There’s no future in it for her.’

‘Have you told her that?’

‘I have.’

‘And what did she say?’

‘Oh, I got a great big long speech. Which I won’t bother you with. But I told you, she’s very serious.’

Kirsty took her eye from the road for just a moment to look at him very directly. ‘And if it wasn’t for the age gap?’

‘Keep your eyes on the road,’ he admonished her. And he thought about it for a moment before he spoke. ‘She’s the first woman I’ve met since Pascale died...’ He hesitated. He always felt guilty at the mention of Pascale’s name, and what it meant to Kirsty. If he hadn’t met Pascale he might never have left Kirsty’s mother and, by default, Kirsty herself. Although in his heart he always knew that, while he loved Kirsty with all his being, his marriage to her mother had been a mistake.

‘Yes?’ Kirsty prompted him.

‘She’s the first woman I’ve met that I would be happy to spend the rest of my life with. Even if I do turn into an old fart while she’s still a young thing.’

‘Papa, has no one told you? You’re already an old fart.’

He grinned. ‘Thank you, Kirsty.’

Her smile faded. ‘And what about Charlotte?’

He expelled a slow, sad breath. ‘She might have been the one. Only, I wasn’t the one for her. Obviously.’

‘Nobody seems to like her very much. Apart from you.’

‘You shouldn’t judge her by appearances, pet. Charlotte’s a complex and, yes, difficult woman, and she tends to hide the real her.’

Kirsty shrugged. ‘So who is the real her?’

Enzo smiled. ‘Well, that would be hard to say. She had a pretty disturbed childhood. Discovered in her teens that she was adopted. Got obsessed by it and went looking for her birth parents. Only to discover that she was the love child of the celebrated political adviser and film critic Jacques Gaillard — whose murder, as you know, was the first case in Raffin’s book that I investigated. Apparently her birth mother had been going to have her aborted. But Gaillard paid her a lot of money to have the baby, then farmed Charlotte out to a childless couple in Angoulême, retainers employed by his family. I think Charlotte was quite deeply affected by the sense of being unwanted, no matter how much her adopted parents loved her.’

Kirsty was less than sympathetic. ‘And yet she was prepared to do exactly the same thing to her own child, when she was pregnant with Laurent.’ She glanced at her father. ‘Do you think she really would have had an abortion?’

Enzo thought about it. ‘Yes, I do. Charlotte is a very determined and wilful woman. She’ll do exactly what it is she wants to do, and never does anything without a good reason.’ He paused and corrected himself. ‘Well, a reason that she considers good for her.’

A tree-lined drive of pale castine gravel wound through this lightly forested estate in the very south-west corner of France, before opening up suddenly on to a sweep of neatly cut lawn, and a view of the house where they were to stay, that very nearly took their breath away.

Although they knew it had only been built in the nineteenth century, it looked like a sugarloaf and marzipan château from some extraordinary medieval fairy tale. Cream-painted, with red-chequered stonework around arched and square windows and doors, it was topped off by a tower and a jumble of red-tiled roofs that raised themselves like eyebrows in surprise over dormers and balconies.

The whole was softened by exotic trees and shrubs, which grew all about it, and as the drive looped around to the front entrance, they saw the lawns that stretched away on the far side, to an oblong water feature with a fountain sparkling in the early-afternoon sun

In a long, tiled entrance hall they were greeted by an attractive woman in her thirties, black hair pulled back severely from a sultry face and dark eyes that seemed to owe more to a Spanish than a French heritage. She wore a tight-fitting black business dress that reached the knee, and black shoes with impossibly high heels that emphasised the elegant curve of her calves. Long fingers, with perfectly manicured red-painted nails, and a simple pearl necklace completed the picture of the ideal hostess, always on hand to greet visitors to this exclusive manor house of half a dozen chambre d’hôte apartments.

So this, Enzo thought, was what Raffin had married into, and in the end inherited.

‘I’m Rafaella,’ the young woman said, shaking their hands. ‘Roger told me to expect you.’ And as they followed her along the hall and up the broad spiral staircase at the far end, Enzo found his eye being drawn by the sway of her hips and the way that her dress clung to a slim but curvaceous figure. He felt an elbow in his ribs, and turned to see his daughter glaring at him.

‘Papa!’ she admonished him in a whisper.

He shrugged and whispered back, ‘I wouldn’t be normal if I didn’t look.’

She breathed her exasperation and shook her head.

On the first floor, Rafaella led them along a hushed and carpeted hall. At the end of it, she opened double doors into a sitting room filled with light from two enormous French windows overlooking the lawns at the back of the house. ‘Bedrooms on either side,’ she said, indicating doors to the left and right, ‘each with their own en suite.’ She looked at their overnight bags, and Alexis in his carrycot. ‘If you have more luggage in the car I’ll send someone to fetch it.’