Peter May - Cast Iron

‘What if they kill her?’

Enzo turned wild eyes in her direction. ‘They’re going to kill her anyway, Kirsty. If they haven’t already. I can only hope that somehow they believe keeping her alive gives them continued leverage.’

Kirsty looked at him helplessly, bouncing Alexis up and down to try to calm his crying. ‘Doesn’t it?’

‘No. If I wasn’t motivated before to solve the Lucie Martin murder, I damn well am now. Because only by finding her killer, or killers, am I going to find Sophie.’

‘But what if it’s not that murder they want to stop you looking at? What if it’s the murder of Marie Raffin?’

Enzo closed his eyes and shook his head. ‘I can only think in a straight line, Kirsty. If it’s not Lucie, it’s Marie. One or other of them is going to lead me to Sophie’s kidnappers. Then there’ll be another murder. Only, I won’t be investigating it. I’ll be committing it.’

He took several long, slow breaths, trying to calm himself, before looking at his phone.

‘But first things first.’ He tapped a dial icon and lifted the phone to his ear. He heard it ring three times before it was answered. But whoever was on the other end was saying nothing. Enzo said, ‘If you want me to stop coming after you, I need to know that she’s still alive.’

Another long silence. He heard ambient sounds and a scraping noise, then what sounded like footsteps. A door opened, then a hand went over the phone to muffle voices. When it lifted away again, Sophie’s voice nearly broke his heart. ‘Papa?’

‘Baby, are you alright?’

‘Papa, they say they’ll kill me if you don’t stop chasing Roger’s cold cases.’

He heard her voice breaking. A stifled sob.

‘Don’t worry, baby, I’m going to get you out of this.’ Though he had no idea how.

‘Papa—’

He heard the phone being snatched from her before it went dead.

Kirsty watched as his phone hand fell away from his ear, and she thought she had never seen him look so old, or so defeated.

For the longest time Dominique just held him. She felt the pain in his silence, and in the tears she wiped from his cheeks. ‘We’ll find her,’ she told him. ‘We will.’ And he nodded, grateful that for almost the first time in his adult life he did not feel completely alone. Even so, he was overwhelmed. By pressure and emotion. By love for his daughter and hatred for those who had taken her.

The drive back to Cahors from Montpellier had taken nearly four hours, and both Enzo and Kirsty were exhausted by the time they got to the apartment. Emotionally, physically and mentally drained.

Now Enzo and Dominique lay fully dressed in each other’s arms on his bed in the dark. He realised that he had to remain focused, that he couldn’t allow his emotions to drive his thinking or his actions. If ever he needed to stay cool and clear and calm, this was the time. But anger and fear, in equal measure, kept bubbling into his consciousness, like carbonated water fizzing and spitting and drowning out cogent thought. The only thing saving him from himself was Dominique.

All of his instincts were telling him that somehow Régis Blanc was the key. Not the killer, at least not of Lucie Martin. And not behind the kidnapping of his daughter. But somehow at the centre of it all. He recalled vividly the picture of him that he had carried away from the prison in Lannemezan only yesterday. Lean and fit, and with a tension inside him so tightly wound that Enzo had felt him capable of unravelling in violence at any moment. And yet he had controlled himself with a steely composure, keeping close those secrets he had hinted that one day he might reveal to the world. But not yet. Not to Enzo. And Enzo knew that somehow he had to get inside the man’s head and find them for himself.

A soft knocking at the door interrupted his thoughts, and he heard Nicole’s voice from the other side of it. ‘Ready now, Monsieur Macleod.’

He and Dominique rose wordlessly from the bed, and she took a moment to wipe his face dry and kiss him softly on the lips.

They found Nicole settling herself in front of her laptop, which sat on the table in the séjour beneath a ring of light from the pull-down lamp. Kirsty sat opposite, a pen resting on the top page of an open notebook. Enzo and Dominique joined them in silence, faces set in grim resolve, floating on the edge of darkness. Any one of them could have reached out and touched the apprehension that sat among them. It was after ten p.m. But a night of inactivity through all the sleepless hours that would surely lie ahead was not an option.

Nicole said, ‘I wasn’t expecting to have to brief you on Blanc quite this soon. But I think I’ve pulled together just about everything about him that’s out there in the public domain. There’ve been a lot of articles written on the man.’ She tapped on her keyboard, and Enzo saw the changing light from the screen reflecting on a face fixed with dark determination. ‘Do you want just the bones, or the detail, too?’

‘Everything,’ Enzo said. And he could barely recognise his own voice. He blinked several times to clear stinging eyes.

‘He was born in 1957. Mother, Paulette Blanc, the daughter of a fishmonger and a seamstress. Father unknown. He had a half-brother, Jean-Paul, born three years later. Again, father unknown, but he died in infancy. Paulette lived in one of the Bordeaux slums that were cleared in the sixties. Prostitute, alcoholic. Used to bring her clients home when Régis was still a child. According to Blanc himself, she used to tell him to “keep an eye out” while she took her clients into a back bedroom. Though, apparently, he never quite knew what he was keeping an eye out for.’

Nicole navigated her way to a new screen.

‘Anyway, when he was about twelve, Paulette got herself a regular man, who moved in with them and effectively took over the role of Régis’s father. But he wasn’t exactly the kind of role model you might hope for in a father. He was a pimp, but insisted that Paulette give up her night job and stay home. Again according to Régis, it was this man, Arnaud, who first introduced him to drugs. Cocaine, and later heroin, though it seems that Régis had more of a taste for alcohol than drugs.

‘Arnaud conducted his business out of a café near the station, and when Régis was a teenager used to take him along, so he got to know all of the girls that Arnaud ran, and all of his associates. Drunks and drug dealers and petty thieves.’ Nicole looked up and shrugged sadly. ‘You could almost say that Régis Blanc was destined for disaster.’ She returned her eyes to the screen. ‘At first he looked up to Arnaud. Respected him. Probably feared him. Certainly saw him as the father he’d never had. Until the man started beating his mother.’

Kirsty said, ‘It hadn’t always been an abusive relationship, then?’

Nicole shook her head. ‘No. It seems not. But Paulette’s addiction to gin went from bad to worse. The house was filthy. There was never any food, and it seems that Arnaud just lost patience with her. But raising his fists to her was the beginning of the end for his relationship with Régis. Blanc was nearly eighteen by then, and a real hard case from all accounts. Told Arnaud that if he didn’t stop beating up on his mother he would have him to answer to. Arnaud didn’t take him too seriously, and according to witnesses there were several confrontations when Arnaud made a fool of him in public, humiliating the boy in front of his mates.’

Nicole breathed deeply and pressed her lips together with distaste in anticipation of what was to come.

‘One day Régis came home to find Paulette so badly beaten up she had actually lost an eye and was in a coma. He rushed her to hospital, but she remained unconscious for two months before finally passing away. Arnaud was never charged. No witnesses, no proof. Two weeks after Paulette died, Arnaud was found dead on a railway siding on the south side of Bordeaux. Almost every bone in his body was broken and he was missing an eye. Everyone knew Régis had done it, but there was no physical evidence to link him to the murder, and he had a solid alibi.’ She looked up from her computer screen and saw all eyes fixed on her. ‘Arnaud had always groomed Régis to take over the “business” from him sometime in the future. And that’s exactly what he did, only a little earlier than Arnaud had planned. Régis was just eighteen years old.’