Peter May - Cast Iron

The bolt was about three inches long, as thick as her little finger, and frustratingly stubborn. She twisted and turned the spoon, buckling it completely out of shape, until suddenly the bolt head lifted a quarter of an inch. She almost gasped in surprise, and stood back staring at it in disbelief. Before throwing herself at it feverishly once more, grasping the head between thumb and crooked forefinger. Turning and pulling until she drew blood, and her wrist and arm began to ache from the effort of trying to pull it out.

Then suddenly it came. In three short turns. And she stood breathing hard and holding the bolt in her hand. She slathered it in butter and started working it in and out of the hinge until she could slide it in and retrieve it easily again. God only knew how long she’d been working on it, but she understood that if she could achieve the same result with the lower hinge, she could swing the bars in their iron frame away from the window to hang from the padlock at the other side. Which would give her access to the window itself. Breaking the glass would be simple enough, but they would be sure to hear the noise, and she would have only a very short time to squeeze herself through it.

But then what? It was a twenty-foot drop to the lane below. She shook her head. She couldn’t let herself think about that. One step at a time. If she got out of the window, that would be the time to start worrying about how to deal with the drop.

It was only at this point that she noticed a white SUV parked almost immediately below the window, tight in against the wall. She hadn’t heard it arrive, and was certain it hadn’t been there before. But she had no time to think about it. Footsteps in the hall forced her hurriedly to reinsert the bolt and slide her back down the wall to sit on the floor. She tried to control her breathing, but was sure that her cheeks must be burning pink. She dragged a forearm across her face to wipe away the sweat.

The footsteps came to a halt outside her door. And then silence. A silence that seemed to extend itself for a very long time. Before whoever was there turned and headed back the way they had come. Had they been able to see in? The thought set panic beating in Sophie’s breast again.

She held her breath and listened intently. From the offices at the far end of the corridor, where her captors spent their time, she could hear very faintly the sound of men’s voices raised in argument. Then a woman’s voice, sharp and commanding. Sophie strained to hear, but there were no words taking shape. And then silence.

For a long time she heard nothing. Then a car door slamming. And she stood up quickly to press her face to the bars and peer down into the lane below. The SUV started up and drove away, but she could not get even a passing glimpse of the driver.

Now she stood breathing hard, the sense of time running out sending chills of apprehension through her body. And she set to work on the lower hinge with a ferocity driven by fear.

The late-afternoon fever of Parisians dressed in winter black was building towards rush hour on the packed concourse of the Gare d’Austerlitz. People stood gazing upwards in impatient, ever-shifting crowds, at the electronic arrivals and departures display. Others gathered around tables outside cafés and in the stuffy, packed waiting room with its unyielding seats. Trains came and went from an endless line of platforms, engines revving and resounding along the quays, uniformed SNCF staff checking tickets and issuing refund vouchers to passengers spilling off late arrivals.

Enzo found Dominique in the crowd and the two stood locked in embrace, the rest of the world eddying around them, before reluctantly they let go to kiss with a short, desperate intensity. They hurried to grab a recently vacated table outside the café at the north end of the concourse. A harassed waiter swept away the crumbs and lifted empty, stained coffee cups before taking their order. It was cold, and their breath condensed in clouds, rising with the noise into the cavernous glass-roofed station.

Dominique had abandoned the car at Orléans and taken the train the rest of the way. Quicker, she had told Enzo on the phone, than driving into Paris in the rush hour. She listened in silence now, sipping her coffee, as Enzo told her about his visit to Mathilde de Vernal, and the confirmation that Pierre Lambert’s great friend and confidant was, indeed, Sally Linol. The prostitute from Bordeaux with the feather tattoo on her neck.

‘And she never resurfaced?’ Dominique said.

Enzo shook his head grimly. ‘Never.’

‘So what does it mean?’

‘I wish I knew.’ It was the question that had been exercising his mind ever since dropping old Jean-Marie Martinot back at his apartment with the promise of keeping him up to date with any developments. He glanced at Dominique and saw the concern on her face. ‘How did you get on with Anne-Laure Blanc?’

And she told him. All about Alice, and the clinic, and the secret funding of her treatment. Enzo’s consternation grew as she spoke.

‘But who would pay that kind of upkeep for the daughter of a serial killer?’

Dominique glanced at her watch. ‘Hopefully we’ll find that out in an hour or so.’

Enzo frowned. ‘How?’

She smiled. A rare moment of sunshine on a dark afternoon, Enzo thought.

‘An old colleague of mine,’ she said. ‘An ex-gendarme who turned out to be a genius with figures. We always knew he had a special talent. He could make the most extraordinary calculations before you even had time to take in the figures. We used to try and catch him out, throwing him impossible sums, like a curveball at an unsuspecting kid. Additions and subtractions and multiplications that we didn’t even know the answers to. But he never failed. Every one of them rattled off his tongue. And it would take us the next ten minutes to work it out on paper to see if he was right. And he always was.’

‘ Ex -gendarme?’

She nodded. ‘He got headhunted by Tracfin.’

Enzo pursed his lips and shook his head. ‘No idea what that is.’

‘It’s a government organisation set up five years ago to track and prevent money laundering, and to cut off the flow of finance to terrorists. They have absolute power to access financial records and bank accounts.’

Enzo sat back and raised an eyebrow. ‘And you asked your friend to find out who’s been paying for Alice Blanc’s care?’

Dominique’s smile was faintly smug. ‘He owed me a favour.’

‘That’s some favour.’

She leaned forward, her elbows on the table, smile fading. ‘I don’t know why, Enzo. I just get the feeling that it could be the key to everything.’

Enzo noticed the car idling in the street outside Raffin’s apartment. A large, black government car with a uniformed chauffeur behind the wheel. Any other car that stopped here, just two hundred metres from the Senat building at the top of the Rue de Tournon, would have been moved on by traffic cops within minutes. But it looked as if it might have been there for some time, belching fumes into the rain and the gathering gloom, a rectangle of dry tarmac beneath it.

It wasn’t until Enzo and Dominique reached the first-floor landing of Raffin’s apartment block that he realised just whose vehicle it was.

Raffin was emerging from the apartment, pulling on his coat, accompanied by a tall, good-looking man who might have been in his early forties. The man wore a long black coat and a crisp white shirt with a red tie, and he had the unmistakable dyed and manicured coiffure of a typical homme politique . Enzo realised that he knew him, but couldn’t immediately place him.

Raffin was startled to see Enzo. ‘Oh.’ His voice echoed down the narrow stairwell. ‘Are you here to see Kirsty?’