Peter May - Cast Iron

Now he parked in the square below the cathedral and walked past the covered market. He saw familiar faces on the terrace outside the Café Le Forum. He waved but didn’t stop. Everything surrounding him was familiar, and yet he felt like a displaced person in a foreign land. He knew, of course, that while the world around him remained the same, the only thing that had really changed was him. Everything about him. Everything he had known and understood. Everything he had been. Everything he was and might be in the future. The very bedrock on which he had built his life had fallen away beneath his feet. And the only thing that kept him from sliding down into the abyss was Dominique. The way she felt about him. The way he felt about her. She would need him to be there and be strong. How could he fail her after what she had suffered for him?

He climbed the stairs wearily to his apartment. It seemed painfully empty, haunted by the ghost memories of a happier past. Sophie had gone to bring Bertrand back from Montpellier.

He remembered holding her in the rain that morning at the house in Biarritz, as the ambulance rushed Dominique to the hospital and the police led Charlotte away in handcuffs. Traumatised and barely able to stand, she had been trembling in his arms, the deepest of sobs shaking her whole body. The little girl that Pascale had bequeathed him, the child he had raised and loved all those years on his own, the daughter he had thought was dead, and who, in the end, had saved his life. How could there ever be any life for him without her?

And then there was Laurent. The son Charlotte had given him so reluctantly, and who now had only him. A father who was old enough to be his grandfather. While his mother was someone about whom he would only ever feel ashamed. Arrangements would have to be made to go to Paris to take custody of him. Kirsty had retrieved him from the care of the nanny Charlotte employed, and he was staying temporarily with her and Raffin at the Rue de Tournon.

The hall simmered in semi-darkness, light spilling from half-open bedroom doors. The door to the spare room stood wide. Nicole had changed the sheets and made the bed. Everything was in its place, dust-free and shining in the sunlight that fell in across the roofs. She would make Fabien a good wife, but Enzo mourned for the career she might have had, the person she might have been. And yet, if it was Fabien who made her happy, who was he to pass judgment?

He moved stiffly through to the séjour , throwing open the double doors and breathing in the familiar scents of a life he had once known. Again, he had the sense of being a stranger haunting his own past. Beyond the French windows, in the square below, life went on as it always did, flowing past him as if he were no more than a rock in the river. Tiny, insignificant, the most minor of impediments to its swift onward passage.

Nicole had left the mail piled neatly on the table, and he began sifting through it absently. Bills mostly, and bank statements, and junk mail, the detritus of a life that seemed somehow less important. He paused over a white envelope embossed with the official stamp of the Institut Médico-Légale in Bordeaux. The address was handwritten and he opened it with a powerful sense of knowing exactly what was inside. And he was right. The letter was from the young forensic anthropologist at the Bordeaux morgue. He had found no traces of Rohypnol in Lucie’s cortical bone. The final affirmation, if it were needed, that nothing about Lucie’s death fitted with Régis Blanc’s modus operandi.

He let the letter fall to the table and saw a white padded envelope addressed to him in a large, childish hand. He tore it open and inside found two further envelopes. Both were sealed. His name was written on one in a scrawling, oddly familiar handwriting. The other, fatter envelope was blank. He opened the one with his name on it and took out a single folded sheet. Unfolding it, his eye fell to the sign-off at the foot of the page. It was from Régis Blanc.

Monsieur Macleod,

I knew as soon as I learned some weeks ago that little Alice did not have long left in this world that I would not be safe. Chances are I might even be dead by the time you get this. There are things, monsieur, that I will take with me to the grave. But I wanted you to have these. Anne-Laure will have fetched them for me from a secret place where we both kept things safe. She doesn’t know what’s in the envelope, and I’d be pleased if you never told her. I hope, in some way, they might help you to catch the bastard that killed poor Lucie.

Enzo felt a shift in the stream of life rushing by on either side. A tiny shift, but enough to cause the water to foam and eddy a little, albeit briefly.

His hands shook as he carefully opened the second envelope. Inside were half a dozen letters, folded over and held together in a perished elastic band that broke the moment it was stretched. The letters themselves were written on pale blue stationery in a darker blue ink that had faded just a little with the years. Somehow the handwriting felt feminine. Each began, My Dearest Régis , and they were signed simply, Lucie .

Whatever might have become of his letters to her, these were hers to him, and Enzo stood reading them, transfixed. Earnest entreaties of love from a twenty-year-old innocent to a man fifteen years her senior who traded in women for sex. Letters from one dead person to another, memories from the grave returning to haunt an ill-informed present. But more, much more than that, they told Enzo who had killed her. Confirmation, for him at least, of a long-held suspicion.

The light was fading by the time Enzo’s 2CV toiled up the hill to the Château Gandolfo. The ground was still sodden from the recent rain, and so there was no plume of chalk dust rising in his wake this time. But the sky had cleared, and only a few dark clouds bubbled up on the distant horizon as stars appeared faintly in the darkest blue, presaging the coming night.

Lights burned in windows below the red-tiled roman roof, and the twin pigeonniers stood in stark silhouette against the sky.

Enzo parked in front of the wing that housed old Guillaume Martin’s study. He peered in the window and saw a light burning at the former judge’s desk, but there was no one there. He turned and walked instead around the back of the house, past the old bread and prune ovens, to where squares of light fell from the kitchen door and windows. He knocked on the door and through the glass could see Madame Martin busy at the stove. She turned at the sound of his knocking, and wiping her hands on her apron hurried to see who was at the door.

Her face lit up in pleasant surprise when she saw Enzo. ‘Monsieur Macleod. Come in, come in,’ she said. And he stepped into the warmth of the kitchen. Until now, he had not been aware of just how cold it was outside.

‘I’m looking for your husband,’ he said. ‘Is he at home?’

‘Oh, yes, Guillaume’s out in the chais , the old wine shed. He spends a lot of time out there. I think perhaps he’s still hankering after the idea of converting it into guest rooms.’ She laughed. ‘As if we needed any more.’

One of the old wooden double doors stood ajar, a dull flickering yellow light from inside stretching long across the path as Enzo went around the side of the house to the chais . The door creaked loudly as he pulled it open to step inside, and Guillaume Martin turned, startled, at the sound of it.

‘Monsieur Macleod?’ His face was half lit by an old oil lamp hanging on a wire from one of the rafters. The surprise that initially registered on his features changed as sharp eyes searched Enzo’s face. And something like resignation settled on him.