Peter May - Cast Iron

‘No, no, thanks.’ Enzo stood up. This had been a waste of time. Whatever she might have told them about Régis, she wasn’t going to discuss the murders. Or Lucie Martin.’

But Dominique remained seated. She said, ‘What happened to your daughter?’

Anne-Laure lifted her chin and stared off into some unseen distance. ‘Alice is lucky. She got away from all this.’

‘She must be nearly twenty-five by now,’ Dominique said. Then paused. ‘She’s not in Bordeaux anymore, then?’

‘No. No, she’s not.’

Enzo said, ‘Does she ever visit her father?’

An almost pained look flitted across Anne-Laure’s face. ‘She’s never set eyes on her father in all the years since... well, since they sent him to prison. And never will.’

Prostitution around the Gare Saint-Jean had become a blight, with ladies of the night soliciting customers from the doors of churches and pharmacies, congregating in the underpasses. If you knew where to look there were strip clubs and swingers’ clubs, massage parlours and brothels, and places you could watch live sex shows caught on camera.

The Quai Deschamps was on the other side of the river. Derelict industrial properties and once grand mansions, like bad teeth in a grim smile. After dark, cars cruised the riverbank, girls appearing out of the shadows, catching headlights. Pale, painted faces, sometimes brown, sometimes Asian, long legs barely covered by miniskirts so short they verged on the obscene. Breasts spilling out of low-cut tops or unbuttoned blouses as they leaned in open windows, displaying their wares to potential clients.

Enzo and Dominique got off the tram at Stalingrad and walked south along the quay into darkness, past crumbling brick walls defaced by garishly coloured graffiti. Across the river, the black water reflected the lights of the city, another world away, where people went about lives uncontaminated by crime or a sex trade that bred only misery and disease. Where young women sold their futures for a handful of euros, and men exploited them to indulge their sad fantasies.

On a patch of waste ground they saw three white vans parked among the rubble, suspension tested by men exploiting the world’s oldest profession, and women practising it. Vehicles cruised slowly by, hidden faces staring out in suspicion at the incongruous sight of a man and woman walking here together.

During the long hours of waiting in the hotel room they had taken near the station, Enzo had barely been able to contain his frustration. Time, it seemed to him, was simply ticking away, and with it any hope of getting Sophie back. But he had no idea what else to do. For very nearly the first time in his life he was lost. He did not know which way to turn next. He was like a drowning man, struggling to keep his head above water, but losing the fight. And he felt himself being sucked under.

He had been determined to go to the Quai Deschamps alone. It was too dangerous, he had said, for Dominique. He couldn’t guarantee to protect her. She had sat him down on the edge of the bed and told him that she was young, trained and fit, and the only reason she was going along was to protect him. And he had smiled, in spite of the darkness in his heart.

‘Kinky!’ A skinny young black woman stepped out of deep shadow where she had been standing behind a broken-down portail that opened on to the garden of a derelict gatehouse. Somewhere beyond the darkness, an old house rose in silhouette against a sky backlit by the city itself. ‘Been a long time since I had a couple. First timers?’

Enzo said, ‘We’re looking for Lulu.’

Derision exploded from her lips. ‘Oh, are you? What’s she got that I haven’t got, then?’ She cackled. ‘Apart from another fifty kilos of flesh.’

‘Do you know where we can find her?’ Dominique said.

The girl looked her up and down lasciviously. ‘Not bad,’ she said. ‘Sure I can’t change your mind? Just you and me. We don’t need the old guy, do we?’

Dominique reached into an inside pocket and pulled out an ID wallet that she opened up and thrust in the girl’s face. ‘You can tell us where we can find Lulu, or you can spend the night in a cell.’ She snapped the wallet shut and thrust it back in her pocket.

‘Oh, shit,’ the girl said, all her levity displaced by disappointment. ‘Fucking cops.’

‘Well?’ Dominique was insistent.

The girl nodded towards the south end of the quay. ‘About a hundred metres down. Gates of an old tyre factory. She parks up on the concrete behind it.’ She puckered up her lips. ‘Give her a kiss from me, darling, would you?’

Enzo waited until they were twenty metres or so away before he said in a low voice, ‘What the hell did you show her?’

‘My old gendarme’s ID. I was supposed to hand it in, but no one ever asked, so...’ She shrugged. ‘Thought it might come in handy.’

‘Isn’t it illegal to impersonate a police officer?’

Dominique smiled. ‘But I’m so well practised, who could tell the difference?’

It was somewhere along here, Enzo knew, that one of Blanc’s victims had been found. As they approached Lulu’s van across a cracked concrete apron strewn with the detritus of discarded lives, a client was slipping out of the back of it. The man was short and middle-aged, and Enzo saw the panic in his rabbit eyes as he noticed them coming towards him, and he went skulking quickly off into the darkness like some resentful rodent.

Then Lulu swung into view from behind the van and cast cautious eyes in their direction. The placing of her hands on her hips, Enzo decided, was pure bravado. Telling them she was neither frightened nor intimidated. But no matter how long she had been at this game, it never became any less dangerous, and Enzo knew she would be feeling both.

‘I don’t do couples,’ she said.

‘Neither do we,’ Enzo said. ‘We just want to talk.’

Lulu looked at him as if he were some kind of pervert. ‘Talk? I don’t do talk.’

She was at least a hundred kilos in weight, but most of it still hung in the right places, and what wasn’t on show was contained in a brightly coloured print dress with a crossed front that lifted and held her breasts unnaturally high. She had calves like a rugby player and shoulders to match, and teetered on strapless high-heeled sandals that looked both too small and too tight. Back-combed brassy blond hair was piled up high above a face so poorly painted it would not have been out of place in a circus. She was, Enzo thought, at least fifty. A raddled wreck of what might once have been an attractive woman.

‘Anne-Laure Blanc suggested we talk to you,’ he said.

And her face changed immediately. ‘Anne-Laure? Is she in some kind of trouble?’

‘She’s in no trouble,’ Enzo said. He took out his wallet and counted out fifty euros. ‘We just want a few minutes of your time to talk about Régis. Will this cover it?’

Lulu snatched it so quickly from his hand that he almost didn’t feel it leave his fingers. She tucked it into her cleavage.

Enzo said, ‘Are you not a bit old for this, Lulu?’

She looked him up and down. ‘Not as old as you, pappy. What do you want to know?’

They turned as a car cruised by out in the street. The driver’s eyes, catching the light beyond the window, quickly averted themselves before the vehicle accelerated suddenly away.

Lulu said, ‘You just lost me a customer.’

Enzo drew out another twenty note and it vanished to join the others in the generous depths of her cleavage. ‘Anything at all you can tell us about him.’

She eyed them suspiciously, clearly wondering why they would come asking her about Régis Blanc after all these years. But she knew better than to ask. ‘With Régis what you saw was what you got. You played it straight with him, he played it straight with you. No side to him. Never touched the girls, never laid a finger on us. And let me tell you, that’s pretty unique in my world.’