Peter May - Cast Iron

He was waiting for them at a table at the back of the café, and rose to greet Dominique with a warm embrace and a kiss on each cheek. Then he looked at Enzo. ‘Who’s this? Your dad?’

Dominique gave him a dangerous look. ‘This is Enzo Macleod. If you were even remotely in touch with the real world, Franck, I wouldn’t need to make the introduction.’

Franck’s liquid brown eyes opened wide with sudden recognition, and he pumped Enzo’s hand enthusiastically. ‘Monsieur Macleod. What an honour.’ And Enzo wasn’t sure if the younger man was mocking him or not. ‘Sit down. What can I get you to drink?’

They ordered coffee, since they had never got around to drinking the ones that Kirsty had made, and Franck reached across the table to take both of Dominique’s hands in his. To his annoyance, Enzo found a tiny seed of jealousy germinating inside him at such casual and not unfamiliar intimacy. Dominique blushed with embarrassment and avoided his eye.

Franck said, ‘It’s been too long.’

Dominique nodded. ‘It has.’

He gazed into her eyes with unglazed affection. ‘I still miss you.’ He turned a smile of regret in Enzo’s direction and sighed. ‘Life, monsieur, is full of might-have-beens. The moments we missed, or didn’t see until they were gone. Dominique is one of those. The one who got away.’

Dominique took back her hands. ‘Oh, stop it, Franck.’ She risked a glance at Enzo. ‘He was always a fantasist.’

‘A man’s entitled to dream, isn’t he?’ He looked to Enzo for confirmation.

Enzo said, ‘Sometimes the dream is all we’re left with.’ And somehow that stole away all the levity, leaving a moment of awkward silence among them.

Dominique broke it. ‘So? Did you find anything?’

Franck said, ‘I did.’ The smile was gone now, and the twinkle with it. He sat back and looked at them thoughtfully. ‘I don’t know what you two are involved in. And I don’t want to know. In fact, I’m beginning to regret I ever agreed to do this.’

‘You owed me, Franck.’

Franck looked at her. The merest nod of his head and a downward turn of his eyes acknowledged it. ‘I know.’ He examined his hands for a moment, before looking up again. ‘It wasn’t that hard, actually. Money, even the electronic variety, leaves indelible traces wherever it goes. You just have to follow the tracks.’

‘And?’ Dominique could hardly contain her impatience.

Franck sucked in a deep breath, as if stealing himself to reveal some dirty little secret. ‘That little girl’s medical care has been paid for over the last twenty-odd years by money transferring automatically out of a private account in the BNP Paribas.’ Again he paused, before adding reluctantly, ‘A personal account belonging to someone who might conceivably be the next president of France. A certain Jean-Jacques Devez. The Mayor of Paris.’

They walked for some way in silence in the rain after leaving Franck in the Place de la Sorbonne. They were several streets away before Dominique slipped her arm through Enzo’s and posed the question that had gone unasked in the café. A question that all three of them had assiduously avoided. Franck had been compromised enough as it was. ‘Why would the Mayor of Paris be paying for the medical care of Alice Blanc?’

Enzo shook his head grimly. ‘I don’t know.’ His mind was swimming and filled with the recollection of Charlotte telling him that Devez had begun his political career in Bordeaux. ‘But I do know this. He was an adjoint to the Mayor of Bordeaux at the time Blanc was murdering those prostitutes there.’ He thought some more about that conversation he’d had with Charlotte on the drive to Lannemezan. ‘And Raffin and Devez are old friends. Charlotte told me that Raffin and Marie used to socialise with Devez and his wife.’

Dominique tightened her grip on his arm. ‘And now that Devez is on the brink of entering the race for the presidency, he’s offering Raffin a job as his press secretary.’ Her frustration billowed, like smoke, in condensed breath around her head. ‘I don’t understand it, Enzo. The more pieces of the picture we assemble, the more obscure the picture itself becomes.’

Enzo pulled her close. ‘That’s because we’re missing something, Dominique. Something big. Something important. Something that’s going to connect all the pieces and suddenly make the whole picture blindingly clear.’

‘Which is exactly what they’re trying to stop you from doing.’

He nodded, and thought once more with anger and pain about Sophie.

‘So what is it?’ Dominique said. ‘This thing we’re missing?’

‘I haven’t the least idea.’

Light from all the apartments around the interior square fell from countless windows to reflect on black cobbles. Raffin’s apartment on the first floor was no exception. Evidently, someone was home.

The piano player had given up as Enzo and Dominique climbed the stairs to the landing, and so they were accompanied only by the sound of their own feet on the stone steps, and the exhalation of their breath in the chill air of the stairwell. Enzo rang the doorbell and after some moments it was Raffin himself who opened the door. He was in shirtsleeves and stockinged feet, his hair a little dishevelled, and he looked wild-eyed. ‘Come in, come in,’ he said, and headed back into the apartment, leaving them to follow and close the door behind them.

Dominique tugged on Enzo’s sleeve as they crossed the hall and cast him a warning look. The revelation that somehow Jean-Jacques Devez was involved in all this had ratcheted everything up to a new and more potent level of danger. They had decided not to confront Raffin just yet. The razor head had gone off to Cahors, and Sophie’s life might just depend on how things would unravel over the next twenty-four hours. But Enzo was containing himself with difficulty.

In the séjour Raffin had spread his files on the Bordeaux Six all over the table, and he returned to them now in a state of apparent excitement. ‘It’s a real development, Enzo,’ he said. ‘Blanc’s running a prostitution racket in Bordeaux. Then, out of the blue, he ups and murders three of his girls. And, who knows, maybe Lucie Martin, as well. But one of his other girls vanishes just before the killings. Sally Linol. Who then turns up in Paris, where she becomes best friends with Pierre Lambert. Then, when he gets murdered, she vanishes again.’ He picked up his photocopied image of Sally Linol, the tattoo on her neck blurred and darkened by the process of copying it, and he waved it at Enzo. ‘She’s the key. She’s got to be the key.’

And Enzo realised, quite suddenly, that that’s exactly what she was. The one common factor. The ‘something big’ they were missing that he had discussed with Dominique. And here was Raffin waving her under his nose, telling him that she was the missing piece of the puzzle. Almost flaunting her, as if he knew that it really didn’t matter. And the only reason he could have such confidence in that was his knowledge that Enzo would never find her. Because she was dead. Buried long ago in some dark wood somewhere, or lying in the bottom of a lake, a bagful of bones like poor Lucie Martin.

‘Don’t you see?’ Raffin was saying. He dropped the picture back on to the table. ‘There’s a connection we had no idea ever existed.’

Enzo said, ‘Which doesn’t help us much with the Lucie Martin case.’

Raffin’s eyes were still shining, and Enzo couldn’t remember seeing him this animated in a long time. ‘Maybe not. But it throws new light on the killing of Pierre Lambert. We always knew who did the deed, but not who paid him or why.’

‘So,’ Dominique said, ‘all we have to do is find Sally Linol?’