Peter May - Cast Iron

‘They ran both Raffin’s DNA and Laurent’s against the database. The good news is that you are definitely Laurent’s father.’ Enzo barely had time to absorb this before she added, ‘But they also found a familial match for Laurent’s DNA.’

He frowned. ‘A match with what?’

‘The blood on the jacket pocket.’

Enzo’s confusion morphed now from incredible to surreal. How could that possibly be? ‘I don’t understand,’ he said again. Three words wholly inadequate to communicate his complete stupefaction.

Hélène’s voice took on a hard edge as she spelled it out for him. ‘It’s his mother’s blood that’s on the pocket, Enzo. It was Charlotte Roux who tried to kill you in the château that night.’

Now Enzo’s entire universe had come to a stop, as if somehow God had pushed the pause button, and all known things had fallen into a state of suspended animation.

‘Enzo...?’ Hélène’s voice came to him as if from some distant planet. He saw the look in Dominique’s eyes. He saw the dust suspended in the light that fell through the half-raised roller blind. He knew that he had died and woken up in the place they called Hell.

And then the sound of a car door slamming crashed through consciousness, and everything wound up to speed again with the revving of a motor and tyres spinning on gravel.

Dominique was at the door before him, and he followed her, running in a daze of bewilderment through the darkness of the main hall and into the corridor that led to the side entrance. The door stood open.

They ran out into the rain and the mist in time to see Sally’s green Renault Clio skidding on the gravel at the end of the drive and slamming, side on, into a white SUV which had just turned in from the gate through the trees.

Steam rose up from a fractured radiator. Dominique sprinted up the drive towards the cars and Enzo chased after her, still dazed and numb, and praying that sometime very soon he would wake up from this nightmare.

The door on the driver’s side of the Clio swung open, and Sally, in jeans and trainers and a camel coat hanging open, fell out into the drive, blood streaming from a gash on her face. She crawled for half a metre before managing to stagger to her feet. The driver’s door of the SUV opened and Charlotte stepped out into the rain. Her dark coat fell to below the knees, her face chalk white by contrast. Within moments her black curls were glistening with raindrops. She took three swift paces towards the dazed Sally Linol and ripped away the collar of her coat and her blouse to reveal the feather tattoo on the side of her neck. In one single movement, she drew a pistol from her coat pocket and shot the one-time prostitute in the head at close range. Even before Enzo could summon the breath to scream NO!

He saw the blowback from the shot spray fine blood in her face, red-speckling the white. Black saucer eyes swivelled then towards the approaching figure of Dominique. She turned her gun to aim it at the chest of the former gendarme, and Dominique stopped abruptly. Enzo drew up by her side seconds later.

Charlotte’s arm was fully extended towards them, the gun trembling in her hand at the end of it. Her eyes were wild in a way that Enzo had never seen them before. This woman, the mother of his child, who had just shot Sally Linol dead in cold blood. Who had tried to kill him high up in the dark of a château in Gaillac. Whose bed he had shared on countless occasions. A whole kaleidoscope of memories spun through his head. A million fragments of light and colour. Laughter and love. Moments in time, shared over years. And he was almost blinded by it all. He felt tears burn hot on his cheeks. He couldn’t even find his voice to ask why.

But he heard the quivering in hers. ‘Roger called me last night. To tell me about your little discovery.’ She inclined her head slightly towards the prone form of Sally Linol, lying on the drive, her blood soaking with the rain into the gravel. ‘He thought I would be interested. He had no idea just how much.’

Finally, words forced their way beyond Enzo’s lips as his brain wound back up to speed and a million pieces of an impossible puzzle started dropping into place. ‘You killed Marie Raffin!’

She gave the most imperceptible of shrugs. And although she was trying hard to project cool, Enzo could see that she was shaken to the core.

‘Why?’

‘Many years ago, in science class at school, I learned that for every action there is a reaction. Consequences. All the things that have happened in the twenty-two years since my brother took the first steps on his road of no return have left me picking up the pieces in his wake. Everything I have done has been to protect him.’

‘Your brother ?’ Enzo was incredulous.

But she ignored him, and almost as if she were trying to persuade herself, she said, ‘He had a weakness, and he made a mistake.’

Dominique said, ‘Murdering three women is hardly a mistake.’

Charlotte could not even meet her eye. Her gaze flickered in Enzo’s direction. ‘He was young, immature. Married with a young family. And, yes, he had certain... predilections.’ Enzo saw her mouth curl in distaste as she found a euphemism for his perversion. ‘But he is also a genius. He has intelligence, vision, charisma. Everything that is lacking in the generation of politicians who run this country today. I couldn’t allow the errors of youth to deny France the special gifts that he has to offer. And, God knows, we are in dire need of them now.’

Enzo had difficulty both breathing and thinking. He said again, ‘Your brother ?’ And he saw some of her arrogance return as she focused her scorn on him.

‘The great Enzo Macleod.’ She shook her head. ‘You had no idea, did you? That when I went looking for my birth parents, not only did I discover who my real father was, but that I also had a brother. A twin brother. Not identical. But born thirty minutes before me. And while I was given for adoption to the Gaillard family retainers in Angoulême, Jean-Jacques went to my adoptive mother’s cousin, also afflicted by the family curse of infertility. All my years growing up, I only knew him as my second cousin, meeting at family get-togethers. Christmas, Easter, summer holidays.’

Enzo saw fond recollection cloud her dark eyes, like cataracts.

‘During all those long summers spent at the family cottage in the Corrèze we were inseparable. Understood things in a way that others did not. Sharing thoughts and secrets. Writing to each other when we were apart. I admired him, adored him, maybe even fell in love with him a little. And then I found out why. We weren’t cousins at all. But brother and sister. Flesh and blood. One and the same. Each of us a piece of the other.’ Her eyes cleared in a moment of anger. ‘They had no right to separate us. To break us up like that. They should have known. Blood is thicker than water.’

Her hair was hanging in wet ropes now around her face.

Enzo said, ‘And it was you who tried to kill me in the château at Gaillac.’

Something almost like a smile flitted across her lips. ‘That was a mistake. Reckless. And nearly cost us everything. I had one of Roger’s suits in my apartment. I had picked it up for him from the dry cleaner’s some months earlier and forgotten to return it. It was still hanging in my wardrobe. There seemed to me to be a certain irony in it, you see. To kill you in the guise of Roger. Stupid. I know that now. When I finally returned it to him, I suggested that perhaps it had been damaged at the cleaner’s. If it was ever traced back, it would point the finger at him, not me.’

She looked down again at the body lying on the drive. ‘She was the one loose end that’s been hanging over us all these years. I knew you would find her in the end, Enzo. You’re so bloody relentless.’ She turned angry eyes back on him and he saw them soften. ‘But fortunately, you also led me to her. And now that she’s been taken care of, that leaves only you. And your little piece of... stuff.’ She cast a disparaging glance at Dominique. ‘You always did like them young, didn’t you, Enzo?’