Peter May - Cast Iron

She had lost count now of how many days and nights they had kept her here. Hours were endless. Light and dark came and went, but only on the outside. In this room, her cell as she had come to think of it, there was only electric light. The one constant in her life.

No sunshine reached into the room. For across a narrow lane a brick building rose high enough above her to block any view of the sky. The window stood at head height, but was barred on the inside. An iron frame hinged at one side, padlocked at the other. Beyond filthy glass, most of what might be visible on the other side of it was obscured. By standing on tiptoe she had been able to look down into the narrow, potholed asphalt lane that ran between the buildings twenty feet below. Reflections in the puddles of the sky above were her only view of freedom.

Initially she had been anxious to learn as much as she could about where she was. She drank in every available glimpse of the place they were holding her when they took her downstairs to the toilet. A filthy hole in the floor with raised footings, cracked porcelain and the smell of broken sewers rising up from below. But at least here there was paper and soap.

Her impression of the place when she first arrived, blinded by her hood, had proved amazingly accurate. A pitched glass and asbestos roof, supported on a rusted iron superstructure, was broken in a dozen places and let in the rain to lie in pools and puddles across a vast, empty expanse of concrete floor. Huge sliding metal doors closed off the outside world, and she was being held in what had once been offices, reached by a metal stairway leading to a grilled landing.

The men seemed to come in shifts. Two at a time. And spent their days and nights in an office with a window that looked out over the empty factory beneath them. They played cards and smoked, and drank beer, and watched television. Sometimes, from her cell, she could hear them laughing. They were always hooded when they brought her food and led her to the toilet. And she took encouragement from that. If the intention was to kill her, why would they care if she saw their faces?

Her cell itself must once have been some kind of lockfast room for storing valuable goods. The door was a heavy reinforced steel, with dead bolts that went into the floor and ceiling.

They had brought in a camp bed and sleeping bag on her first night, and when she wasn’t lying in it, she sat on the floor with her back to the window wall, or paced the cell, back and forth, conscious that it was important to exercise, and to keep oxygen flowing to her brain.

Now, as the door opened, she got to her feet. The hunger gnawing in her belly told her it was time to eat. The tallest of her captors, for she had got to know them by their height and their voices, pushed open the door and slid her tray into the room with the tip of his boot. This was the one who had threatened her when she first arrived. The one she most feared. Not just for the hurt he might inflict, but for other things, perhaps worse, that he had hinted might await her if she didn’t behave.

She stood looking at him, waiting for him to go. But he remained, returning her stare, and although all that she could see were his eyes, she could have sworn he was smiling. The tray sat on the floor between them, but she wouldn’t eat until he had gone. And still they stood, facing each other across the room, until an old, familiar emotion came bubbling back to the surface. Fear. For this was new. This was a departure. This was not good.

‘What?’ she said eventually. Almost shouting it at him.

Still he remained silent. Enjoying, she was sure, watching her panic. Before finally he said, ‘Your father doesn’t take a telling, does he?’ And now she could hear the latent violence in his voice. Anger, and something else that she feared even more. ‘Doesn’t seem to believe that we’ll kill you if he doesn’t give it up.’

‘Or maybe he just knows that if you kill me you lose any power over him.’ Defiance came from that same panic.

‘Yeah, but how would he ever know?’ And now she heard the smile in his voice and watched in horror as he peeled his mask back over his head to reveal the face of a man in his early thirties, unshaven, a smile dimpling his cheeks. Dark eyes twinkling. In any other circumstance she might have thought him good-looking. But here, and now, all she could see was her executioner. Why else would he have revealed himself? And he knew that she knew it. He said, ‘Enjoy your meal. Because this one, the next... today, tomorrow, who knows? One of them is going to be your last.’ He grinned. ‘And I’ll take real pleasure in seeing to that.’

He stepped out into the hall and slammed the door shut behind him. She heard all the dead bolts slot into place, and sank to the floor on trembling legs. She needed her fear now, to motivate her, to kick-start her brain. She could no longer accept her incarceration like some passive prisoner awaiting her fate. They were going to kill her. And she would not go gentle into that good night.

She looked around, panic still rising in her throat. She had to get out. She had to. But how? She looked at her tray. Yoghurt, an apple, a piece of cheese. Some bread. A mug of coffee with the spoon still standing in it, two paper-wrapped cubes of sugar. And an idea born of desperation began to clot among the panicked thoughts free-falling through her mind. She lifted the spoon from the mug, ignoring how it burned her hand as she closed it around the hot metal, and she held it to her breast. Everything would depend on them not noticing it was gone.

Anne-Laure was not so welcoming this time. She held the door to her apartment half open and peered suspiciously out into the hall at Dominique. ‘I’ve told you everything I know,’ she said. And tried to shut the door.

Dominique stopped it with her foot and pushed the door wide, forcing Anne-Laure back into her apartment. ‘No, you haven’t.’

‘You can’t come in here like this!’

Dominique reached for her old gendarme’s ID and thrust it quickly in Anne-Laure’s face. ‘I can do anything I damn well like. So either we do this the easy way or the hard way.’ Which caused Anne-Laure to step back, and her pale face lost what little colour it had.

‘You never said you were cops!’

‘You never asked.’ And Dominique noticed for the first time that Anne-Laure wore a little make-up this morning. Gone were the jog pants and the pink hoodie, to be replaced by a black skirt and white blouse. A coat lay draped over the back of the settee.

‘Going somewhere, were you?’

‘None of your business!’

‘To see Alice, maybe?’

Which brought the older woman’s defiance to an abrupt end. She wilted, almost visibly.

‘Where is she?’

Anne-Laure avoided her eye, averting her gaze like a truculent child to look at the floor.

‘Where is she, Anne-Laure? You know you’re going to have to tell me sooner or later. One way or another. Sooner would be better, and this way would be easier.’

The woman turned resentful eyes on Dominique. ‘You fucking people,’ she said. ‘You just never let us alone.’ She looked at the wall, the floor again, then out of the window towards the ugly, painted concrete blocks that were her view of the world. Then finally back at Dominique, and the former gendarme saw resentment turn to resignation. ‘She’s in a special residential clinic. In the commune of Gradignan, just south of the city. Been there most of her life.’ She controlled her breathing. ‘They take care of her. She’d have been dead a long time ago without them.’

Dominique stared at her. ‘That’s twenty-four-hour care. How can you afford that?’

‘I can’t.’