Peter May - Cast Iron

A girl on a switchboard answered her call. ‘Tracfin. How may I help you?’

‘Could I speak to Franck Bouthet?’ Dominique said.

‘One moment.’

But it was several long moments before the phone ringing on his extension prompted Franck to answer it. ‘Hello?’

Dominique felt the remnants of the butterflies he always used to give her resurrect themselves in her tummy. ‘Franck, it’s Dominique.’

There was a moment’s silence, laden with a whole history. Then that familiar voice. ‘My God! Dominique. You certainly know how to waken a man from his slumbers.’

‘You’re at work, Franck. You’re not supposed to be sleeping.’

‘My whole life has been in hibernation since we went our separate ways.’

She laughed. ‘Hedgehogs and bears hibernate, Franck. Not policemen.’

‘Emotionally, I meant. I’m just an automaton at work.’

‘You’re a damn genius. Which is why they pulled you out of the gendarmerie.’

She could hear him smile. ‘Flattery will get you everywhere.’

‘Good,’ she said. ‘Because I have a favour to ask.’

Paris was wet and grey, and several degrees cooler than Bordeaux. Winter here, it seemed, had already got the city in the grip of its dead hand.

Jean-Marie Martinot lived beyond a gated arch in an apartment block called Villa Adrienne overlooking sumptuous gardens hidden from view off the Avenue du Général Leclerc in the fourteenth arrondissement.

Two of the three rooms he had once shared with his wife on the second floor were largely unused, gathering dust along with his memories, and he spent much of his life in one room with large windows that looked out over the gardens. It was a shambles. Settee and armchairs strewn with discarded clothes, half-eaten meals on plates gathering themselves on bookshelves and tables. Newspapers and wrappings accumulated in drifts on the floor.

‘Excuse the mess,’ he said as he showed Enzo in, but he seemed not in the least embarrassed by it. As if he had long stopped seeing it as the symptom of his loneliness that it was. The air was so thick with cigarette smoke that Enzo immediately wanted to open a window, but Martinot was oblivious. He had a hand-rolled cigarette, stained brown by nicotine, burning between his lips, and ashtrays everywhere were overflowing. He lifted an old coat from the back of an armchair by the window where rain ran like tears down the glass, and he waved Enzo into the seat. He threw the coat on the settee and sat himself down opposite, across a cluttered coffee table.

He wore baggy dark trousers held by a belt at the waist, and a stained grey cardigan open over a white shirt frayed at the collar. A day’s growth of silver bristles covered fleshy cheeks beneath a high forehead and a sweep of thick white hair. A big man once, age had diminished him in more ways than one. But there was still a twinkle in his clear blue eyes, even though Enzo noticed that he was wearing different-coloured socks.

‘So,’ he said, ‘you’re still on the Lambert case. I thought you’d got his killer?’

‘Well, yes. The one who actually broke his neck. But not whoever paid him to do it.’

The old policeman shook his head. ‘There are some cases that just never go away. The Lambert killing haunted me for damn near twenty years, even into retirement.’ He gave Enzo a look of grudging admiration. ‘But I could never have tracked down that killer the way you did. I’m just not up on all this new technology. In my day it was all about knocking on doors, tramping the streets and following your instincts.’

‘There’s still a lot to be said for that,’ Enzo said. It was what he was doing himself. All the science and new technology in the world was unlikely to save Sophie now. It was all boiling itself down to her father’s instinct and intuition.

‘How’s that journalist doing? What was his name...? Raffin?’

‘He’s pretty much recovered,’ Enzo said, and he remembered very clearly stooping to pick up the note left by Raffin’s cleaner in the journalist’s apartment, only for Raffin to take the bullet meant for Enzo.

‘A messy business.’

‘It was.’

‘Anyway, I’m glad to be of help again. Retirement is a much overrated thing, monsieur. Leads to atrophy of the brain as well as the body. I’d much rather be back at my old office on the Quai des Orfèvres than wasting away here waiting for my time to come. There’s nothing quite like feeling there’s a point to your life.’

He leaned forward to stub out his cigarette, and ash overflowed from the ashtray on to the table.

‘Your phone call gave me a good excuse to revisit some old colleagues and retrieve my case notebooks from the greffe .’ He laughed. ‘Hah! Notebooks. Do cops these days even carry such things?’ He opened a tin of tobacco and began carefully rolling another cigarette. ‘Funny looking at your old handwriting, and remembering things that used to be important to you. I was amazed how much of it I did actually recall, though. Lambert didn’t have that many friends. Nobody liked him very much. Apart, of course, from the girl called Sally.’

‘But you had names for the others?’ Enzo knew that the odds of this leading anywhere were extremely long.

The old man lifted an eyebrow. ‘Of course. But there’s only one, I think, that you’ll be interested in. When we first went looking for Sally we learned that she had a friend. A girl called Mathilde Salgues. Another hooker. Her only real friend, apparently, aside from Lambert himself.’ He shook his head. ‘Strange relationship that.’

‘Do you know where we can find her? Mathilde, I mean.’

‘Well, she’s not at the address she was back then.’ Martinot lit his cigarette, and smoke seeped out of the corners of his mouth as he grinned. ‘But there’s still a little life in this old dog yet. I did a bit of checking. She’s no longer Salgues. Seems she married into money, and up a class.’ He fumbled in the pocket of his cardigan and pulled out a folded page torn from a notebook. He handed it across the table to Enzo. ‘Lives in the Paris suburb of Orsay, and calls herself Mathilde de Vernal these days.’

Enzo unfolded the sheet of paper and looked at the address written in the old man’s tight, neat hand.

‘If it’s not too much to ask, Monsieur Macleod, I’d very much like to come with you when you go to see her. Just a wee reminder of how it used to be. When I still had a life.’

With a name like de Vernal, Enzo had imaged Mathilde to be living in some grand nineteenth-century townhouse set behind trees in its own extensive grounds. Instead, the taxi from the station dropped them off in the car park of a block of modern upscale apartments looking out over a sprawling area of parkland and lakes on the edge of la ville d’Orsay . Ash and sycamore, and lime and oak cast their shadows and their leaves on wet roads. A row of fir trees stood very nearly as tall as the apartments themselves.

It had taken only twenty minutes on the train to get here, and another ten in the taxi to the Rue de Valois. Old Martinot was in his element. He had listened intently on the train as Enzo explained why he wanted to talk to Mathilde, and fallen silent when he heard about Sophie’s abduction. Now, as they left the elevator on the third floor and walked to the door of the de Vernal apartment at the end of the hall, he said to Enzo, ‘I know it’s a dreadful cliché, monsieur. But there never is smoke without fire. If we can confirm your link between Lambert and those murders in Bordeaux, no matter how tenuous, there’s a reason for it. And it’ll lead us somewhere. Mark my words.’

Enzo noticed Martinot’s use of the word we , and took comfort from the sense of support gathering around him.