Peter May - Cast Iron

There was almost nobody in the cafeteria, and a wan-faced girl with sleep in her eyes served them short, sweet, black coffees.

For a long time during the night, the death of Régis Blanc had exercised their thoughts.

Sometimes obligations don’t last a lifetime. Maybe, one day soon, I’ll have my say , he had told Enzo. Had someone had Blanc killed to stop him having that say? Or was it just Fate laughing at them all. Cruel and deceptive, determined to hide the truth until the last? Or maybe forever.

Impossible to know, and Enzo had realised very quickly that it was pointless to fret about it. The man was dead. A man who had killed people and sold women’s bodies for money. The world was a better place without him. And, whatever the truth, he had surely carried it with him to the grave. Which led Enzo full circle to the thought that just maybe he had been murdered for that very reason.

They finished their coffees and walked twice around the car park, gulping down the fresh, cold night air, then back at the car Enzo slid into the driver’s seat. He looked at Dominique. ‘Ten minutes,’ he said. ‘No more.’

When he next opened his eyes there was the faintest light dawning in a leaden sky.

‘Shit!’ He sat up, startled, and Dominique stirred in the seat beside him, blinking blearily into the first grey light of the day. He checked his watch. ‘Two hours!’ he said. ‘We’ve been asleep for two fucking hours!’ He leaned forward and started the car, reversing fast out of the parking bay.

The first trucks were already leaving the lorry park, and Enzo weaved his way through them to accelerate on to the feeder lane and back on to the motorway.

‘I’m sorry,’ Dominique said.

‘Not your fault.’ Enzo’s denial of blame was grudging. It was someone’s fault. Maybe Dominique’s, but most probably his, and he was cursing himself for ever closing his eyes in the first place. ‘We’ve still got three hours to go. If we had a head start we’ve lost it now.’

Even as he spoke, the heavens opened, and rain like stair rods beat its tattoo on the roof and splashed up from the road in a white mist.

The marzipan house, with its sugary red roof and quizzical eyebrows, looked as if it might dissolve in the rain. Mist rose up from the ground around it like steam. A veil of gauze concealing all its detail and reducing it to a blur of colour and shape, like some impressionist painting.

Tall conifers stood dripping darkly in the rain as Enzo turned their car through the gates and they caught their first sight of it. The time was a little before ten a.m. He followed the sweep of the gravel drive to the parking area in front of the main entrance where there was a single car parked. A green Renault Clio. All the windows and doors were shuttered for the winter, except for a couple high up in the tower, where Enzo knew that Madame Brusque had her private rooms.

He and Dominique stepped out into the rain and climbed steps to try the front door. It was locked. They followed the path, then, around the side of the house, past shuttered bay windows and large shrubs shedding leaves on the gravel, to a porticoed side entrance. Water poured from the sloping roof above its steps where a gutter was broken, a curtain of water that they slipped through quickly to squeeze into a tiny porch. A glazed door looked into a narrow, stone-flagged entrance hall.

Enzo tried the handle and the door opened into the hall. He and Dominique stepped inside, dripping second-hand raindrops all over the flags. It was gloomy here, and the house beyond lay brooding darkly in silence. A narrow staircase led off to their right and Enzo leaned forward to peer up into the stairwell. Somewhere at the top, cold light spilled in from a hidden skylight. This was the tower.

‘Hello!’ His own voice sounded strangely remote as he called up the stairwell. Disconnected from him, somehow. ‘Is there anyone there?’

They waited in silence and exchanged glances before Enzo called again. ‘Hello!’

The sound of a door opening somewhere high up in the tower travelled down the stairs to meet them. Then a ghostly pale face peered over the banister. Its spectral effect was emphasised by the lifeless grey hair that hung in lustreless loops to her shoulders. Hair that had been pulled back into a severe bun when last Enzo had seen her.

‘What do you want?’

They could hear the apprehension in her voice.

‘It’s Enzo Macleod, Madame Brusque. I was here the other week with my daughter, Roger’s fiancée.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Yes.’ And now they heard apprehension morphing to indifference. ‘What do you want?’

‘Can we come up?’

‘I’m not really prepared for visitors.’

‘Won’t take long,’ Enzo called back. ‘I promise.’

She hesitated, and clearly wanted to say no. But this was the father of her employer’s fiancée. How could she refuse? ‘Alright.’

She watched Enzo and Dominique all the way up the stairs, until they drew level with her on the landing. Enzo seemed to tower over her. A quilted pink dressing gown gathered itself around a long, diaphanous nightdress, and she wore grey and pink slippers. She might very well still have been in bed when they came calling.

‘Has anyone been in contact?’ he said.

She frowned. ‘In contact? What do you mean?’

He shook his head. ‘Obviously not. It doesn’t matter.’

The woman looked beyond him at Dominique. ‘Who’s this?’

‘My colleague.’

Again the woman frowned, and Enzo couldn’t help but notice that her once glittering green eyes were faded now, and almost grey like her hair. ‘Colleague?’ She seemed confused. ‘Are you here on business?’

‘I’m afraid we are.’

Now he saw the return of apprehension, perhaps even fear, in her eyes. ‘What sort of business?’

Dominique said, ‘The business of catching killers, Sally.’

And what little colour there was in Sally Linol’s face vanished, leaving it almost transparent. Dominique stepped forward and pulled away the upturned collar of her dressing gown. There, starkly etched on white skin, was her feather tattoo. Sally took a step back, eyes wide with fear. ‘What do you want?’

‘To keep you safe, Sally,’ Enzo said. ‘There are people on their way here to kill you.’

Even her lips were bloodless, eyes darting, panic-stricken, towards the open door of her apartment, and then the stairs, neither offering any real means of escape. And suddenly it was as if her fear, something sick and malign that had possessed her for nearly two decades, had left her. Enzo saw the slump of her shoulders, the resignation that settled on her, cutting deeper lines into a face shaped by angst and uncertainty over all the lost years of her life.

Enzo said, ‘What we need to know, Sally, is why.’

She nodded. ‘You’d better come in.’

They followed her into the tiny apartment at the top of the tower. A single room with a kitchen and breakfast bar. A small round table in the window looking out over the gardens. A couple of armchairs gathered around a TV set. Through an open door they could see an unmade bed, and another door off the bedroom, leading to a shower room. Régis Blanc had spent all the years of his life sentence in Lannemezan. Sally Linol had spent hers here. Both of them prisoners of their own making.

She slumped into a chair by the window and gazed sightlessly out at the view she must have seen every day for the nearly seven thousand of them she had spent in this place. Then she put her elbows on the table in front of her and dropped her head into her hands, shaking it in despair.

‘I always knew that someday, somehow, they would find me.’ And she lifted her head to look at Enzo, an appeal for understanding in her eyes. ‘It’s been no life at all. Just a living hell.’ She ran her tongue over dry lips. ‘It’ll be a relief, at last, to tell somebody the truth.’