Blacklight Blue

Chapter Twenty-Six

You wouldn’t normally expect to find customers sitting out at pavement tables on a cold November day in Paris, even under the protective cover of an awning. But since the smoking ban had come into force earlier in the year, die-hard tobacco addicts had taken to sitting out on the sidewalks, nursing their noisettes and puffing on their Gaulloises huddled over tables in coats and hats. France was changing. The stereotypical chain-smoking Frenchman was a dying breed. Literally.

Enzo and Raffin found the retired commissaire, Jean-Marie Martinot, at his habitual pavement seat outside the Café Maury in the Rue La Fayette, not far from the Gare de l’Est. A hand-rolled cigarette smouldered in the corner of his mouth. A glass of red wine stood on the table beside him, and his face was buried in an early edition of France Soir. This stereotypical old Frenchman, at least, was still alive and kicking.

He drew his nose out of the newspaper as they pulled up chairs to join him. ‘Ah, Monsieur Raffin.’ He held out his hand. ‘Comment allez-vous?’

‘I’m well, Monsieur Martinot. This is the gentleman I spoke to you about on the phone. Monsieur Macleod.’

Martinot extended his hand to Enzo. ‘Delighted, monsieur. Your reputation goes before you.’

‘Would that be the good one or the bad one?’

The retired policeman chuckled. Then his smile faded. ‘So you think you’re going to crack the Lambert case?’

‘Only with your help.’

‘I spent ten years sweating it before I finally gave up. Hate to admit defeat, monsieur. But la retraite was beckoning. And it was time for me to call it a day.’ He took a final puff on his cigarette and stubbed it out in the cendrier. ‘Still niggles, though.’ And as the smoke leaked from the corners of his mouth, he drained his glass. ‘You can buy me another, if you like.’

He had a full head of white hair dragged back from a high forehead and unusually blue eyes. He was a big man shrunken by age. A hard man in his day, Enzo guessed. Tough, physical. And yet there was a gentle quality about him, a reflection perhaps of something more cerebral, a sense of humanity that had, against all the odds, survived a lifetime as a cop. He wore a heavy, dark blue overcoat buttoned up almost to the neck, and there was a wide-brimmed felt hat on the seat beside him. Enzo noticed that he wore different patterned socks, and that his shoes had long since lost their shine. There were food stains on the front of his coat, and it occurred to Enzo that Jean-Marie Martinot was either a widower or a confirmed bachelor. Either way, he was certain that the old policeman lived on his own.

Enzo settled in his seat and glanced a little anxiously along the sidewalk. He knew there was no way the killer could know where he was. But he felt exposed here on the streets of Paris. Vulnerable. Raffin ordered three glasses of wine and raised his voice above the roar of the traffic. ‘So do you think you can help?’

‘Of course. What else have I got to do with my time? I’ve got so much of the damned stuff I can’t give it away. People say it passes more quickly when you get older. But since Paulette died, every day feels like a year. And the nights even longer, especially when you can’t sleep. Santé.’ He raised his glass and took a sip of wine. ‘Besides, I’d like to see you get the bastard. He still haunts me, you know. Poor little Pierre Lambert. It’s funny, I spent twenty years working homicide, and I always felt a kind of responsibility for the victims. Like I was the only one who could represent their interests in the world they had just departed. They had no voice in it, no way of seeking justice. That was my job, and if I failed, I felt I’d let them down.’

He took out a plastic tobacco pouch and a pack of Rizla cigarette papers and began rolling a fresh smoke. ‘He’d have been forty this year. Maybe that’s why time drags. I’ve got all his lost years to live out, too. Along with all the others.’ He shook his head, pulling pinches of tobacco from each end of his cigarette. ‘There were a few, sadly.’

Enzo lifted his glass and took a sip. The wine was cold and bitter on the tongue. Cheap red wine. La piquette, as the French called it. ‘So why does Lambert haunt you more than the others?’

‘I suppose it wasn’t him so much as his mother.’ Martinot looked from one to the other. ‘It’s always the hardest bit. Talking to the loved ones. Breaking the news. She was a poor soul. Widowed when she was just a young woman, left to bring up two children with only her sister-in-law to help. Worked her whole life, with nothing to show for it in the end. Her sister-in-law found herself a man finally and left. Her daughter got MS and ended up in a wheelchair. And then I arrive. A messenger from hell to tell her that her son’s been murdered. Her boy. The only one in the whole world who cared. And since she’d had to give up her job to look after her daughter, he was her only means of support.

‘Lambert was keeping them both, his mother and his sister. He’d told them he was going to move them into a nice apartment in town. It’s a pity he didn’t do it before he died. Because the authorities couldn’t have taken it away from them. As it was, his family didn’t get a penny from his offshore account. That was sequestered for the case. Money of dubious origin.’

Enzo said, ‘Did she know where his money came from?’

Martinot smiled sadly and shook his head. ‘Didn’t have a clue. She thought her precious boy had a part share in a successful restaurant. She had no idea that he was gay, never mind a male prostitute. In a way, perhaps, it was better for her that the case never did come to court. She would have learned things about her boy she would never have wanted to hear. And I certainly wasn’t going to tell her.’

‘Did you come to any conclusions at all about who might have murdered him or why?’

The old man shook his head. ‘No. There was precious little evidence, and what there was proved frustratingly contradictory. I’ve thought about it a lot since, though. And I suppose if I was to make a guess, I’d probably say that Lambert had been blackmailing someone and pushed them too far. But whoever he was blackmailing, I don’t think that was who killed him.’

‘Why not?’

‘It was a messy crime scene, monsieur. And for that I have no explanation. But Lambert’s killer came prepared, left no prints, and killed him in a way you or I wouldn’t know how. My best guess would be that he was killed by a professional. Someone paid to do it.’

Enzo and Raffin exchanged glances.

‘But the best laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley, as your countryman once wrote, and something went wrong that afternoon. None of it went quite as planned.’ He looked at Enzo. ‘I checked you out, monsieur, after Raffin called. You know your stuff.’

Enzo inclined his head in acknowledgement. ‘Crime scene analysis used to be my speciality.’

‘Then maybe you can throw some light on what it was that went wrong for our killer. And if you can, then maybe we’ll have a key to unlock the case.’

Enzo said, ‘Obviously the crime scene is long gone. But I take it the police still have the evidence?’

‘Locked up safe and sound in the greffe.’ Martinot looked at his watch and realised he hadn’t lit his cigarette. He leaned over a burning match and smoke rose in wreaths around his head. He looked up. ‘I still have some influence at the Quai des Orfevres. In half an hour, you’ll get to see everything we had.’ He finished his wine. ‘Which gives us just enough time for another glass.’

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The Palais de Justice lay at the west end of the Île de la Cité, between the Quai des Orfèvres and the Quai de l’Horloge. Le greffe, the evidence depository, was situated deep in its bowels. Enzo had been here once before, when he found clues that led him to the missing Jacques Gaillard in a trunkful of apparently unrelated items recovered from the Paris catacombs.

In a vast, high-ceilinged room, row upon row of cardboard boxes were squeezed onto metal shelves that ranged from floor to ceiling. Every box told a story. Of murder, rape, theft, assault. The detritus of decades of crime. Evidence that either cleared or condemned, quashed or convicted. Or sometimes, simply baffled.

Martinot pushed open the door of a small room at the end of the main hall, and Enzo placed the box marked Production No. 73982/M on a plain metal table against the far wall. The retired commissaire looked at the label and recognised his own signature. He chuckled. ‘It’s been a while since I signed one of these.’

He took off his overcoat and hat and hung them on a coatstand by the door. His shirt was buttoned up to the collar, but he wore no tie. His jacket was held closed by a single button. The other two were missing. He opened the box. ‘Et voilà!’

Enzo looked into it and felt a strange, breathless sense of anticipation. This was what the killer had been trying so very hard to stop him from ever doing. People had died and lives been ruined in the process. There was something in here, Enzo knew, that would shine a light into a place which had languished in darkness for nearly seventeen years. It was up to him to find the switch.

One by one he lifted out all the bagged evidence from the crime scene that had been Lambert’s apartment. The antihistamines, now back in their bottle. Shards of glass from the tumbler smashed in the sink. The broken coffee cup and saucers. The shattered sugar bowl and lumps of sugar. The victim’s clothes and underwear, wrapped in brown paper. His shirt, a woollen sweater, jeans, sneakers. From all of which it was apparent that Lambert had been a slight-built man of less than average height.

Enzo examined the cassette from the telephone answering machine in its ziplock bag. ‘Could I have a copy made of this?’

Martinot shrugged. ‘I don’t see why not.’

Enzo turned back to the treasure trove of evidence. There was a box of paperwork. The original police reports. Martinot’s tattered black notebook. The old cop picked it up and flipped through it with nostalgic fingers. A scrawling script written by another man in another time. Observations on life and death.

Pictures of the crime scene taken by the police photographer were slipped into plastic sleeves in a clip folder. Enzo glanced through them. Coarse colour under bright lights. A dead man lying among the debris of the struggle, his head turned at an impossible angle, a look of surprise frozen on his face.

Enzo was shocked by how slight he was. There was something fragile about him. An attractive young man whose life, and death, had been defined by his sexuality. He had a fine-featured face with full, almost sensuous lips. Dark, slightly curly hair fell untidily across his forehead. The bruises and scratching around his neck were plainly visible.

His appearance was dated already. Although less than seventeen years had passed, it seemed as if he had come from a different era. In seventeen years, Enzo had not changed so very much. He’d had his ponytail back then. Wore baggy, loose-fitting shirts, cargo pants. Sneakers. Timeless, unfashionable. But Lambert reflected the fashion of his time. Today, even at the same age, he would have looked quite different.

Enzo examined the chaos around the boy. The shattered coffee table, an upturned chair, an occasional table that had been sent flying, ornaments strewn across a luridly patterned carpet. That there had been quite a struggle was evident. He looked up to find Martinot smiling at him.

‘I know what you’re thinking. If the killer was a professional, like we figure he might have been, how on earth was Lambert able to put up such a fight? Look at him. You could have blown him over.’

Enzo nodded and reached for the autopsy report. He flipped through it until he found the pathologist’s description of the neck injuries, and saw why the légiste had concluded that the attacker was wearing gloves. Seam stitching along the fingertips had left a pattern on the skin. The bruising itself was messy. In a classic case of strangulation, the killer might have left three or four marks on one side of the neck from his fingers, and a single mark on the opposite side from his thumb. A good patterned injury in the shape of a hand was rare, but recently cyanocrylate fumes had been used successfully to bring out the shape of a finger or hand print, sometimes even with enough detail to collect a fingerprint from the skin. Such a technique, even had it been available, would not have helped in this case.

The abrasions on the neck, Enzo figured, had been made by Lambert himself, trying to prise free his attacker’s grasp. He flipped through a few more pages to confirm his suspicions, and found what he was looking for. The pathologist had recovered skin from beneath the victim’s fingernails. His own skin, gouged from his neck in the heat of the struggle.

He had, it seemed, been at least partially successful in preventing his attacker from strangling him. As Martinot had observed, that seemed odd given Lambert’s slight build. In the end, however, he had been no match for a technique that had severed his spinal cord in a single, deft twist of the head.

‘So what do you think?’ Raffin’s impatience was palpable. But Enzo raised a hand to quiet him. He was not going to be rushed. He lifted the plastic bag containing the pills and looked at the label on it. Twenty-one comprimés, terfenadine, brand name Seldane. He turned to Martinot. ‘You’re certain that Lambert did not suffer from allergies?’

‘As certain as I can be. His mother knew nothing about it if he did. He had never been prescribed antihistamines, and there were no others in the house.’

‘But terfenadine was a prescription drug?’

‘Yes. We always figured they belonged to the killer.’

‘Although you found nothing in the apartment that might have triggered an allergic reaction?’

‘Our best advice at the time was that almost anything can trigger a reaction in sufferers. Even someone’s aftershave. But Lambert wasn’t wearing any, and there was nothing else that suggested itself to us.’

‘So why was there a broken glass in the sink and pills spilled all over the kitchen floor?’

Martinot shrugged. ‘We can only guess at that, monsieur.’

Enzo picked up the crime scene photographs again, this time examining as much of the room as he could see beyond the immediate area of struggle. A large settee and two armchairs that looked as if they had seen better days, half-hidden beneath colourful woven throws. The lurid, thick-piled carpet, plush velvet curtains hanging in oriel windows. ‘This was a furnished rental, right?’

‘Right.’

‘He hadn’t been there very long.’

‘A couple of months.’

‘Did you talk to the previous locataires?’

Martinot picked up and riffled through the reports. ‘Yeah, here we are. Two days after the murder. A middle aged couple. They’d moved across town. Fourteenth arrondissement. It was just routine stuff. They couldn’t help.’

‘Would we be able to find them again?’

‘Who knows? Sixteen years. They could have moved again. They might be dead. Why?’

‘We need to know if they kept pets.’

‘Pets?’ Martinot frowned and scratched his head. ‘You know, now that you mention it, I can actually remember going to their place. Sticks in my mind only because they had these two thundering great Irish setters that just about knocked me over. Huge beasts. Made a big apartment seem small.’

Enzo let his eyes wander over the crime scene photographs once more. ‘Then that’s probably what did it.’

‘Did what?’ Raffin said.

‘Sparked the reaction.’

Martinot said, ‘But there hadn’t been dogs in Lambert’s apartment for over two months.’

Enzo shook his head. ‘Doesn’t matter. Both cats and dogs shed something called dander. The word has the same origin as dandruff. It’s a natural phenomenon in hairy animals. The outer layer of skin, the epidermis, is quite thin in dogs. It’s constantly renewing itself as layers of new cells push up to replace the old ones above. The process takes place every twenty-one days or so. The outer cells flake off into the environment as dander. People think it’s the animal’s hair that causes allergy. It’s not. It’s the dander.’

Raffin said, ‘Are you saying the killer had an allergic reaction to dogs that weren’t even there?’

‘Well, consider this. Epidermal turnover is more rapid in breeds that are prone to various forms of dry and oily seborrhea. Breeds like Cocker or Springer spaniels.’ He paused. ‘Or Irish setters. These dogs shed old skin every three or four days. So the previous occupants of Lambert’s apartment had dogs that were producing up to seven times the amount of dander most dogs produce. And there were two of them. That dander would have permeated the entire place, sparking possible allergic reaction in a sufferer even months after the dogs had gone.’

He handed the folder of photographs to Martinot. ‘Look at the place. Soft furniture, plush curtains. Thick-piled carpet, the worst repository of all for dander. It would be my guess, monsieur, that the killer had a severe allergy to dog dander. He maybe knew that his victim didn’t keep pets, so he went unsuspecting to an apartment that was just laden with the stuff. Symptoms would have started within minutes. Judging by the struggle, the ineffectual attempt to strangle his victim, the killer was probably under serious stress. Semi-incapacitated. Severe allergic reaction develops very fast. If it reaches anything like anaphylaxis, whole body reaction, it can be disabling, sometimes even fatal.’

He picked up the plastic bag with the pills. ‘The terfenadine wouldn’t have been particularly effective. He must have tried to get as many into himself as he could. But the best way of dealing with a reaction like that is getting away from the source of the allergen as quickly as possible. Which would explain his panic in getting out of the place, and why he left a trail of evidence in his wake. It’s even possible he might have required hospital treatment.’

‘Jesus!’ Martinot’s oath slipped out in a breath. He had a very vivid picture now of a scene he had been trying to piece together for almost two decades.

Raffin said, ‘So he had an allergic reaction, how does that help us?’

Enzo turned to him. ‘If Monsieur Martinot can get us a Wood’s Lamp, I’ll show you.’

Martinot cocked an eyebrow. ‘With all due respect, monsieur, what the hell’s a Wood’s Lamp?’

‘It’s a lamp that gives off an ultraviolet light. Standard kit for a forensic scientist. But any ultraviolet lamp will do.’

It took Martinot more than an hour to procure an ultraviolet lamp and return to meet up with Enzo and Raffin once more at the greffe.

‘I don’t know if it’s a Wood’s Lamp,’ he said, but it gives off ultraviolet light.’ It was around nine inches long and three inches wide in a black casing, most of which was to contain a battery to power the tubular bulb.

‘It’ll do perfectly.’ Enzo handed it back to Martinot and removed Lambert’s patterned blue and red woollen crewneck sweater from its paper parcel, spreading it carefully on the table top. ‘Ultra violet,’ he said, ‘otherwise known as blacklight. Or blacklight blue, in the trade, to distinguish it from those bug zapping lamps. It was delivered as a light source in a lamp more than a century ago by a man called Robert W. Wood. First used in the diagnosis of infective and pigmentary dermatoses. But more recently as a diagnostic tool for certain skin cancers.’

He took back the lamp from Martinot. ‘Most often employed in forensic science to detect the presence of semen on the skin and clothing of rape victims.’ He turned to Raffin. ‘Would you turn out the light, please, Roger?’

The windowless room was plunged into absolute darkness. Enzo took a deep breath. He was about to shine a light into the past. A blacklight to illuminate a brutal killer. He pressed a switch, and the lamp flickered several times before casting its eerie light around the room. He held it six inches above the fabric of Lambert’s sweater and made a slow pass over it. All three men could see quite clearly the glow of fluorescent silver across the chest and neck, woven into the yarn, it seemed, in random patches and trails.

Enzo said, ‘You can turn on the light now.’

They all blinked in the sudden glare of harsh electric light, and Enzo turned off the ultraviolet.

‘What the hell is that silver stuff?’ Raffin said.

‘Dried mucus. Saliva. Phlegm. Invisible to the naked eye. And the pathologist would never have thought to pass a Wood’s Lamp over the victim’s clothes.’ Enzo turned to Martinot. ‘This man came to Lambert’s apartment to murder him. But as you surmised, his plan went well agley. He succumbed to a severe allergic reaction brought on by dog dander from the apartment’s previous renters. His immune system went haywire, responding to the dander by producing vast quantities of Immunoglobin E, known as IgE. The IgE would have gathered very quickly on the mast cells lining his nose, throat, lungs, and gastrointestinal tract. The union of the IgE and the allergen would have been explosive, releasing a torrent of irritating chemicals, primarily histamine. The man would have been coughing and sneezing and choking as his throat closed up, his body using nose, mouth, and eyes to try to expel the histamine like an aerosol. Even as he fought to see and murder his victim through streaming eyes, he must have been spraying him with mucus and saliva. Clear, wet liquid that would have dried to invisibility in minutes.’

Enzo turned back to the sweater. ‘It couldn’t be seen, but it was there, expelled at great velocity, and almost certainly rich in white blood cells. Particularly the eosinophils involved in allergic reactions. Even better, there may be a stray sloughed nose hair or two, along with respiratory epithelial cells. Which means there’s a better than even chance we’ll be able to recover DNA.’

‘Even after all this time?’ Raffin said.

‘It would have been more certain had the clothes been refrigerated. But it’s relatively cool down here in the greffe. A steady temperature. I think the chances are good.’

Martinot whistled softly in admiration. ‘Man, I wish you’d been around sixteen years ago.’

But Enzo shook his head. ‘Wouldn’t have made any difference, monsieur. Back then, we might have found the cells on his clothing, but we’d never have been able to extract the DNA.’

He turned to Raffin. ‘I think our man knew that. I think he knew that if we revisited this crime we were almost certain to find those cells and recover his DNA. And he could only be afraid of that for one reason. His DNA is in a database somewhere.’

Even as he spoke the words, Enzo felt their effect. He shivered, as if someone had stepped on his grave. He had taken a huge stride towards the possible identification of his nemesis. It could only be a matter of time before the killer would know that, and try to stop him from going any further. Any way he could. The stakes had just been ratcheted up to breaking point, and it seemed there was no way Enzo could avoid going head to head with him.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Outside the church, on the slate-paved terrace, two Mediterranean conifers offered a pool of shade, a momentary escape from the dusty blast of the sun. Below, across the Roman tiled roofs, boats bobbed gently at moorings in a bay like glass. The reflection of sunlight on whitewash was blinding.

Richard hesitated in the shadow of the trees. He felt strangely choked. He had watched her leave the house just minutes earlier. A woman of fifty, whom the years had not treated kindly. Once lustrous blond hair now gone grey, pulled back severely from a thin face, pinched and turned mean by time and disappointment. A woman who passed him on the steps without a second glance.

His mother.

He was not quite sure why he had come. Curiosity, he supposed. A need to connect with his past. A tiny Spanish fishing port from where he had been snatched sixteen years and two months ago. A place which had become a prison for the woman who had loved him then. And if she still did, it wasn’t really him she loved. It was the memory of the child she had lost all those years before.

There was something shocking in seeing her. In knowing that she was going to church to pray for him. He had stood on the steps, caught by surprise. And if she had met his eye he might have said, ‘Hello, mother,’ and released her from her misery. Instead, he had frozen, unable to move, unable to speak, and she had passed, preoccupied, within a few inches of her missing boy.

Now that he was here, he didn’t know quite what to do. But the cool of the Església de Santa Maria drew him, like an inhalation of breath. An escape from the furnace. And he walked in through an opening in the tall, studded door, only to see a reflection of himself in glass behind wrought iron gates. Dark glasses and baseball cap, shorts and a tee-shirt. Not exactly the respectful attire expected of those who came to worship.

He turned into the church and removed his cap and shades, blinking in the dark as his eyes adjusted to the change of light. And then suddenly the apse at the far end of the nave was bathed in soft yellow, as a tourist dropped a coin in a metre, and an altar of extraordinary extravagance, fashioned from pure gold, rose up into the vaulted dome. Angels and cherubs adorning columns and arches rising in tiers to a winged figure in flight almost at the confluence of the dome’s ribs.

For a moment Richard gazed at it in awe. He had never seen anything quite like it. At least, not on this scale. Then his eyes drifted among the rows of pews searching for his mother. But she wasn’t to be seen. He walked carefully through the echoing vastness, almost afraid to breathe, until he saw a red, net curtain hung in the entrance to the transversal chapel. A sign in the doorway read, A Place of Prayer. And through the curtain he could see a more modest altar presided over by a figure of Christ washed in sunlight from windows high up in the walls. A solitary soul knelt before it in silhouette.

Angela Bright was quite still, head bowed, her hands clasped in front of her. Richard stood watching her for some minutes, safe in the knowledge that even if she rose unexpectedly he would not be immediately visible to her. If she was praying for his return, then her prayers had been answered. But he had already decided that she would never know it.

He retreated to the back of the church to sit beneath the huge circle of stained glass and stare at the altar, until the time purchased by the coin expired, and it retreated suddenly into its habitual obscurity. He was backlit through the glass at the door, a silhouette like his mother, cut in sharp contrast against the rectangular halo of sunlight beyond. When she emerged, finally, from her chapel, she walked past him without even looking. She had an odd, shuffling gait, like an old woman.

He rose and followed her out, slipping on his dark glasses and pulling the peak of his cap down to shadow his face. She turned into the narrow, slate-cobbled street below the church that led to her house, a white-washed, three-storey building with rust-red shutters and arched brick lintels. He wondered what she did all day in this rambling old house with its walled garden, bougainvillea climbing the whitewash and weeping its purple tears. Did his brother and sister still live here, too? He looked up and saw patterned ceramic tiles beneath the eaves. Who paid for it all? His father?

His mother pushed open a mahogany red door and was swallowed by darkness. Richard stood staring after her for some minutes. The street descended at an acute angle below him into the old town, narrow and shaded by tall houses and more bougainvillea. A few paces down, on the other side of the street, was a small restaurant, a chalkboard sign outside with the menu of the day. Just a handful of pesetas would get him lunch and a carafe of wine.

He was served by an attractive young waitress who clearly found him interesting. She hovered attentively at his table, happy to talk. She had just left school to work in the family business, and after a busy season things were quieter now, she said. Her French was good. And her English passable. He ordered gaspacho, which came with soft chunks of rough, Spanish bread, and then catch of the day, which was dorado, or sea bream, soft white flesh moist and delicious, reminding him of home. Although now that he knew who he was, it no longer felt like a place he could call home. It was where he had grown up, with a stranger pretending to be his mother.

He asked if there were a lot of foreigners buying property in the town these days, and she told him there were more and more. There was an old English lady living across the street. But she’d been there for years. Señora Bright. And she was no holidaymaker. Hers was a sad story.

‘Oh?’ Richard gave her his most charming smile. ‘Tell me?’

She glanced back towards the kitchen before running an eye over the other tables, and decided she had time. She told him about the abduction of Señora Bright’s child, although she was too young to remember it herself. The old lady had lived opposite ever since she could remember. She’d had two children with her. But she hardly knew them. Her parents had sent her to a convent school, so she didn’t know a lot of the other kids in town. But she’d seen them occasionally in the street. She looked at Richard. ‘The boy looked a little like you.’ She tried to picture him without the baseball cap and sunglasses. ‘But he had much longer hair.’

Richard said, ‘You speak about them as if they weren’t around any more.’

‘They’re not. They went back to England a couple of years ago. To live with their father, my mother said. And good riddance. She doesn’t like the English.’

Richard lingered over his meal, smoking several cigarettes, thinking about what he was going to do with the rest of his life. Who he was going to be. After all, he was free now to be whoever he wanted. But his money wasn’t going to last forever, and that was a problem.

Through the open door of the restaurant, he saw his mother passing. Dressed all in black, like a widow in mourning. He paid up quickly and said a hurried farewell to the disappointed waitress. Emboldened by a half-litre of rough, red Rioja, he set off after the old lady.

She was carrying a woven shopping basket and had a black headscarf tied loosely around her hair. He followed her, recklessly close, all the way down through the town, past the Carretera del Dr. Callis and a tiny art gallery on the corner to the Casa de la Vila at the bottom of the hill. He leaned on the rail and looked down into the clear, green water of the bay below and watched his mother climb stiffly down the steps to the curve of the harbour road.

He wondered again what point there was in this. Perhaps he was simply delaying the moment when he would have to decide what to do next, but still he felt strangely compelled to go after her.

Past the café-bar in the Casino, she turned off the Place Frederic Rahola into the main street opposite the town’s long, shingle beach and climbed steps into a small supermarket. Richard lingered for several minutes out on the sidewalk before following her in. He hovered, pretending to look at the wine, as she chose a selection of fresh vegetables from tiered racks, then felt his heart seize suddenly solid as she turned in his direction. She, too, wore dark glasses, so he couldn’t see her eyes. But she stopped, for all the world as if time had simply decided to stand still. She was looking right at him. Right through him. What were maybe only a few seconds seemed to stretch into eternity, but he felt naked, bathed in the spotlight of her confusion and uncertainty. And he turned and hurried from the shop without looking back. His heart was hammering against his ribs so hard he felt sure that people in the street could hear it above the noise of the traffic. He daren’t stop. He kept on walking until he knew there was no way she could still see him, then he pressed himself against a wall and tried to control his breathing.

He had been foolish, careless, and wondered if she had realised. If there was any way she could have recognised him. And, of course, he knew that there was.

It was time to go. Time to get on with the rest of his life. And it had occurred to him now exactly where to start.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Returning to Miramont, tucked away in its mountain valley high up in the Cantal, was an anticlimax after Paris. Enzo was not quite certain why Raffin had opted to come with him, but suspected that the journalist was being drawn back by an interest in Anna. There was no doubt that she was an attractive woman, and Raffin had so clearly been fascinated by her that first night. Enzo was uncomfortable with the thought but had no evidence with which to back it up. And so he held his peace.

When they got there, it seemed colder than before, although the sky, if anything, was a clearer, deeper blue. The winter sun cut the sharpest of shadows among the folds of the hills that rose up around the house, and the frost stayed white all day in those shaded places that the sunlight never reached.

Enzo had spent a restless few days at Raffin’s apartment in the Rue Tournon, just a stone’s throw away from the Sénat, and the wide-open spaces of the Luxembourg Gardens. The weather had been grey, and misty, and cold, and he had passed the time walking in the park, wading through the drifts of leaves, drinking coffee and reading the papers behind the steamed-up windows of the crowded café-restaurant near the north gate.

It was not until the fourth day that he received word from the laboratory of the police scientifique. Cells had been recovered from the dried mucus on Lambert’s pull, and a DNA profile successfully obtained. Enzo felt a sense of triumph. They had the killer’s code. All they needed now was to find a match. But that was likely to take time and to be a complex and labyrinthine process.

‘Why?’ Nicole demanded to know on his return.

And Enzo explained that it was because they had no idea what databases to search. There were twenty-seven countries in the European Union, each with its own DNA database. And while they had all signed up the previous year to the Prum Agreement, allowing national law enforcement agencies automatic access to the DNA and fingerprint databases of other member states, Enzo did not constitute a national law enforcement agency.

‘So how are you going to get access to them?’ Nicole said.

‘I’m not. Jean-Marie Martinot, the cop who handled the original investigation, has to persuade his former colleagues to re-open the case. Even then, they’ll still have to sell the idea to the Police Nationale. And you know how quickly French bureaucracy moves, Nicole. It could be a while.’

‘Well, if he’s on anyone’s database, it’ll probably be ours.’

Enzo shrugged. ‘Maybe, maybe not. The French database it pretty limited. The British have got the biggest in Europe. In fact, the biggest in the world. But there’s nothing to say he’s on any of the European computers. There are dozens of databases around the world now. And then, of course, there are the Americans, who have the second biggest. Getting access to that will generate a blizzard of paperwork all on its own.’

They were in the computer room at the back of the house. Nicole had several screens up and running. Enzo ran his eyes across them. ‘So how’s the search for the good doctor going?’

She made a face. ‘It’s not. There are loads of agencies and directories. It’s hard to believe, but a lot of them don’t even have photographs. Then there are all these sites with so-called actors advertising their services.’ She blushed. ‘Mostly it’s about sex. You know, exotic dancers, escorts. That sort of thing. But I think you might find it easier to identify your doctor with his clothes on.’

Enzo smiled. ‘I think I’d know the face, no matter what.’

‘Well, I’ve got a few for you to look at. I’m not too confident, though.’

In fact, she had fifteen jpegs collected in a folder. Enzo leaned over the desk as she opened them one by one. These were photographs taken by professionals, always against a neutral backdrop, faces lit to show them off to best advantage. Those with few advantages had their deficiencies masked by soft focus. A catalogue of men in their forties showing teeth that were too white, pulling in paunches, smiling eyes trying hard to hide an optimism long lost to failure. None of them was his doctor.

Nicole grimaced an apology. ‘I’ll keep looking.’

Enzo had been disappointed by the coolness with which he had been greeted by Anna. He had hoped for the same warmth with which she had sent him off. The taste and scent of her remained vivid in his recollection. But she was still being discreet in front of his daughters.

Now, as he left the study, she was waiting for him at the foot of the spiral staircase and gave him a quick kiss and squeezed his hand. ‘I missed you,’ she whispered.

He ran his hand up through her hair to cup the back of her head in his hand and draw her to him to kiss her back. A much longer kiss, filled with the passion aroused by her very proximity. She drew away, smiling, and wagged a finger at him.

‘Not in front of the children.’

He grinned.

She took his hand. ‘I’ve got a surprise for you.’ And she led him into the séjour, where she had removed all the paintings from one wall to mount a large whiteboard at eye-level. He had told her at some point how he liked to think visually. How at home he always worked on a whiteboard, jotting down thoughts and observations, trying to find links between them and connecting them with arrows.

He looked at it in astonishment. ‘Where on earth did you manage to find that?’

She shrugged dismissively. ‘A few phone calls, and a monsieur from the village to install it.’

‘But won’t your friends object to you defacing their house like this?’

‘Oh, they won’t mind.’

Enzo thought, if it was his house, he would have minded. But all he said was, ‘Thank you.’ And kissed her again to demonstrate his gratitude. ‘How have things been?’

She tilted her head a little to one side. ‘Okay.’ But she didn’t sound convincing. ‘Sophie’s pretty restless. And Bertrand, too. I think he wants to get back and sort out his gym.’

Enzo sighed. ‘I feel bad about that. But it’s not safe yet. It really isn’t.’

‘Anyway, they go for long walks, and they lunch sometimes in the village. They’re out right now.’

‘What about Kirsty?’

Anna made a face. ‘I think she’s still in shock, Enzo. Someone tried to murder her, after all. And her best friend was killed. Roger didn’t call once, and she’s spent most of her time in her room. He’s up there with her now.’

Enzo didn’t even want to think about what they might be doing. He said, ‘I’ve got something I want everyone to listen to. But I’ll leave it until after we’ve eaten tonight.’ He took her face in his hands. ‘Is anyone helping you with the cooking?’

She let him kiss her and laughed and said, ‘I’m enjoying it, Enzo. It’s such a long time since I had anyone to cook for but myself.’

He slipped the cassette into the stereo system and hit the play button.

All through the meal he had watched Raffin monopolising the conversation with Anna, flirting with her, exuding charm like oil. And he had seen Kirsty become more and more subdued. At one moment, he had caught Anna’s eye, and felt her embarrassment, her silent plea for rescue. And he had broken up the tête à tête by calling her into the kitchen on some pretext. He was itching to break his silence on the subject, but didn’t want to create a scene in front of Kirsty and the others. And so all his attention was focused on the tape.

Intent faces around the room strained to listen. Two voices distorted by time and telephone. A murderer speaking to his victim the day before he killed him:

The conversation ended abruptly. Enzo had listened to it over and over again. He had his own thoughts, but he wanted fresh input. ‘What do you think?’

‘I think they didn’t like one another very much,’ Sophie said.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Well, because the killer’s being very polite, and the other guy can hardly conceal his irritation.’

Bertrand said, ‘I’m not sure he’s irritated so much as just tense. Wary.’

Nicole asked if they could listen to it again, and Enzo rewound the tape to replay it. When they finished listening for a second time Nicole said, ‘They don’t know one another very well, do they? I think maybe they’ve met only a handful of times before.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Because he had to ask if the other guy knew his address.’

Kirsty said, ‘They’d obviously met often enough for Lambert to have established that he only wanted them to meet in public.’

‘So why did he agree to let him come to his home?’ It was Raffin this time.

Enzo said, ‘Because the killer was threatening him. Very subtly, but unmistakeably. He was in complete command of the conversation. He was using the familiar tu, while Lambert was using the formal vous. Lambert was being spoken to like a child. His caller had failed to make some pre-arranged call the day before, but his apology was perfunctory. When Lambert expressed his preference for meeting in public, he was slapped right back down. Ecoute-moi. Listen, we need to talk. There’s more than a hint of a threat in that. We hear Lambert sigh. He doesn’t want the caller to come to his house. But he gives in straight away, because he’s lacking in confidence. He’s scared, intimidated.’ Enzo looked around at all the faces focused in his direction. ‘But there’s something else. A single word in that whole conversation that sticks out like a sore thumb.’

When the faces looking back at him remained blank, he turned to his elder daughter. ‘Come on, Kirsty. English is your native tongue. You must have heard it, surely?’

Kirsty stiffened, feeling the weight of her father’s expectation. She had never been quite sure that it was something she could live up to. She desperately wanted to please him, but she couldn’t think of anything.

‘He said he’d been out of the country. In England. The town of Portsmouth.’ He swung his attention towards Bertrand. ‘Say Portsmouth, Bertrand.’ Bertrand looked at him blankly. ‘Just as you would normally.’

‘Portsmouth,’ he said.

Enzo swivelled back towards Kirsty. ‘See? Hear how he said it? The way the French always say it.’ And he pronounced it phonetically, just the way that Bertrand had said it. ‘Porsmoose. The French just cannot get their brains around the concept of four consecutive consonants. RTSM. How do you pronounce that? They can’t. They say, Porsmoose. But his caller pronounced it just the way an Englishman would. Portsmouth.’

Kirsty nodded, understanding now what her father had meant. ‘Are you saying he was English?’

‘That’s just it. I don’t know. He doesn’t sound English to me.’ He turned to Anna. ‘Did he sound like a foreigner to you?’

She shook her head. ‘He sounded like a Frenchman to me.’

‘He had a southern accent,’ Sophie said. ‘He’s French. I’d put money on it.’

Enzo smiled and shook his head. He reached for a book he had placed on the shelf beside the stereo. He opened it at a page marked by a Post-it. ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ he said. ‘By Edgar Allen Poe. Let me read you this paragraph.’

He slipped a pair of half-moon reading glasses on to the end of his nose and perched himself on the arm of Sophie’s fauteuil:

He looked up at the array of rueful smiles around him. ‘Not easy, is it? We all have our own perceptions, very often based on preconceptions which are false.’ He paused. ‘You know what a shibboleth is?’

Raffin said, ‘It’s a password.’

‘We use it in that sense, yes. But it’s the origin of the word that’s interesting in this context. It’s an old Hebrew word. And its present usage derives from a story told in the old Hebrew bible. A story of civil war between two Hebrew tribes, the Ephraimites who have settled on one side of the River Jordan, and the Gileadites who have settled on the other. If an Ephraimite who crossed the river tried to pass himself off as a friend, the Gileadites would make him pronounce the word shibboleth. It actually meant flooding stream. But in the Ephraimite dialect, initial sh sounds were always pronounced s. So the Ephraimite would say, sibboleth, and give himself away.’

Kirsty said, ‘So Porsmoose is like a shibboleth.’

‘Exactly. It tells us something very important about our killer. The trouble is, I don’t know what.’ He closed his book and took the cassette from the stereo. He held it up between thumb and forefinger. ‘But I know a man who might. I need to get this in the post first thing tomorrow.’

Chapter Thirty

When Kirsty awoke, there were long slivers of gold slanting through half-open shutters, and she heard the church bell strike nine. She had lain awake for much of the night, and was surprised now to find that she had slept at all. The bed beside her was empty.

She got up, brushing tangled hair from her face, and slipped on her dressing gown, padding then in bare feet across polished boards to open the French windows and throw the shutters wide. The sun, still low in the sky, blinded her, and the rush of ice-cold air shocked her from her drowse. Frost lay thick across the field, sparkling in the sunlight. Long shadows cut sharp lines across the white-roofed houses of the village.

In normal circumstances, a morning like this would have raised her spirits, keening her anticipation of the day ahead. But nothing, it seemed, could lift her out of her depression. The tumultuous events of the last few days, and the death of Sylvie, had settled on her like a fog, laden with guilt and regret. Compounded now by the mercurial behaviour of her lover.

In the days that he had been away, Roger had neither called nor e-mailed once. And then on his return, he had been caring and attentive, making love to her in the afternoon, easing her depression with a balm of soothing words. Only to ignore her all through dinner, turning his attentions exclusively towards their hostess. Kirsty knew that everyone else around the table had been aware of it. Nicole had prattled away to Sophie and Bertrand, and they had prattled back, a way of covering their embarrassment. And Kirsty had been conscious of her father’s smouldering anger at the far end of the table. But his expected explosion had never come.

Kirsty was intimidated by Anna. She felt dowdy and naïve by comparison. And she was sure that for the erudite and experienced Roger, Anna’s more worldly sophistication cast Kirsty in the shade.

She had tried to speak to him about it last night when they went to bed. But he had said that he was tired. It had been a long day. She was just depressed and not seeing things clearly. They would talk about it in the morning.

But now that morning was here, he had risen before her, and she wondered if that was a harbinger for a day that would be spent avoiding the issue.

She showered and dressed and slipped out into the hallway, filled with trepidation. Light from the windows in the stairwell reflected off dark, polished floorboards, and the spiral wooden staircase curled up and down from the landing, supported by nothing that Kirsty could see. It was attached to the wall on one side, and its bannister spiralled around fresh air on the other. A fairytale staircase in Kirsty’s personal nightmare. It creaked ominously at each step, as she made her way down to the hall below.

Even as she reached the foot of the stairs, she could hear raised voices in the kitchen. Roger and her father. Curtains half-drawn across the hall obscured the kitchen doorway, and she stood listening, transfixed.

‘Oh, piss off, Enzo. You’re just jealous.’

Enzo’s voice was steady, controlled, but Kirsty could hear the tension in it, and was shocked by his words. ‘Even if I didn’t know that Anna thought you were a prick, Raffin, I’d have no cause to be jealous.’

‘True enough. Why would you go getting jealous over some whore you picked up in a bar.’

There was a very long, dangerous silence, in which the imminent threat of violence had time to recede. Enzo’s voice was stretched to breaking point. ‘Anna and I owe each other nothing. Neither loyalty, nor fidelity. We’re enjoying each other in the moment. No history, no future. And none of that has any relevance here.’

‘Oh, and what has?’

‘Kirsty.’

‘I think she’s made it more than abundantly clear to you that she and I are none of your business. Alright?’

‘Yes, she has. And that’s her choice. Her right. Like it or not, I’ve got to respect that. But I’ll not stand by and see her hurt.’

Raffin said, ‘You’re full of shit, you know that?’

‘Just stay away from Anna.’

There was the sound of something banging onto a worktop, and then a heavy footfall. Kirsty quickly ran down the first few steps of the stairway leading to the cellar, the curve of it hiding her from view as Raffin emerged from the kitchen, pale-faced with anger. He headed upstairs two at a time. Kirsty remained hidden, listening for her father, in case he might follow. But after a long silence she heard him moving through to the dining room, and the sound of the French windows opening on to the terrasse.

She took several tentative steps back up to the hall and stood in the semigloom nursing mixed feelings. Not so long ago she would have been furious with Enzo. She would have stormed into the kitchen and told him he had no business and no right interfering in her life. But somehow in these last days, her perception of him had changed.

‘You’re up late this morning.’

The voice startled her, and she turned to find Anna standing in the half-open door of the computer room. ‘Oh, hi. I guess I slept in.’

Anna tilted her head, giving her a curious look, a tiny empathetic smile curling the corners of her mouth. ‘Have you had breakfast?’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘Why don’t we go for a walk, then? It’s a beautiful morning. Who knows, you might work up an appetite.’

‘I don’t think so.’

But Anna wasn’t taking no for an answer. ‘What else are you going to do?’ And when Kirsty couldn’t think of a quick reply Anna took her arm and led her towards the door, stopping only to lift their jackets from the coat stand.

The frost was beginning to melt now on roofs and across the fields where the sunlight lay. The garden was spread out before them, sparkling and wet, a tiny fountain set in a circular flowerbed gurgling through the ice. They walked across the grass, leaving trails through the frost, past the swimming pool and down on to the path that led to the road.

‘Where is everyone?’ Kirsty said.

‘Sophie and Bertrand have driven down to Aurillac for the day. Nicole’s got her face stuck in a computer screen, as usual.’ She glanced back towards the house and saw Raffin watching them from the balcony outside his bedroom. On the terrasse at the side of the house, Enzo was leaning on the rail following their progress. Neither man could see the other. Anna slipped her arm through Kirsty’s. ‘You don’t like me very much, do you?’

Kirsty drew away. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Some woman your father picked up in a bar. A one-night stand. What sort of woman could that be? Certainly not good enough for him.’

Kirsty said, ‘It takes two to make a one-night stand. And from all accounts, it wouldn’t be atypical of my father.’ No sooner were the words out of her mouth, than she immediately regretted them. That was the old Kirsty talking. Her father had believed he was dying. She had no right to judge him.

But Anna just grinned. ‘The young are such prudes. One set of values for themselves, another for their parents. But actually, it was me that did the picking up. If I hadn’t, I doubt your father would even have noticed me. He was pretty preoccupied. I was in Strasbourg for the funeral of a friend and feeling a bit low. It was more about comfort than sex. For both of us.’

‘And now?’

Anna twinkled. ‘Oh, now, it’s definitely the sex.’

Which made Kirsty laugh for the first time in days.

They walked on in silence, until they reached the road that ran through the village. A monument in front of the church listed the dead of the Great War. Even in a tiny village like this, the death toll had reached nearly forty, wiping out a whole generation of its young men. Brousse, Chanut, Claviere. Taurand, Vaurs, Verdier.

‘So what’s the story, Kirsty?’

‘What story?’

‘Between you and your father.’

‘He hasn’t told you?’

‘We’re still strangers in the night, Kirsty. We make love, not conversation.’

And Kirsty felt overshadowed again by the older woman’s easy wit and sophistication. It made her behaviour through all the years of rejecting her father seem childish and inconsequential, and she glossed over it. ‘Oh, he left my mother for another woman when I was just a kid. He set up home here in France with his French lover. And then she went and died in childbirth, leaving him to bring up Sophie on his own.’

‘And you resented him for it?’

‘I didn’t understand why he’d gone. It was like it wasn’t my mother he was leaving, it was me. At first I thought it was my fault. Me and mum used to row all the time. I thought I’d driven him away. Then my mum made me see it wasn’t my fault, or hers. It was just my dad. That’s how he was. He didn’t care about anything or anyone but himself.’

There were tables and chairs on the terrasse outside Chez Milou, and they sat down to soak up what little warmth there was in the sun. An old man came out and took their order for coffee.

Kirsty examined the backs of her hands, avoiding Anna’s eye. ‘It took me nearly twenty years to understand that it wasn’t that simple. That dads suffer, too. And that you can’t choose who you love and who you don’t.’ Which made her wonder about Roger, the feelings she had for him, and why, in spite of everything, she still had. She lifted her eyes to meet Anna’s. ‘Anyway, we’ve had a kind of father-daughter rapprochement of late. I think I understand him better now. Which makes it easier to forgive. And I suppose I never really realised how much I loved him until I first met Sophie and saw how she doted on him.’ She smiled. ‘He’s difficult, and cranky, and brilliant, and after all the years I had to do without him, I don’t know how I’d survive without him now.’

Anna gazed off towards some distant, unseen horizon, then snapped back to the moment as their coffees arrived. ‘We never can imagine how we’ll survive without the ones we love,’ she said. ‘Until we have to.’ She turned her gaze directly on the younger woman. ‘And then we just do.’ And there was something cold in her tone, like the touch of icy fingers.

When they finished their coffees, they walked on to the far end of the village before turning back. It took nearly fifteen minutes to get back to the house. They heard the phone as they were passing the swimming pool, and when the ringing stopped, they heard Nicole calling for Enzo. They had reached the foot of the steps by the time they heard him return her call. He was coming down the stairs when they came through the front door. Nicole was waiting for him in the hall, and handed him the phone. ‘It’s Monsieur Martinot.’

Enzo took the phone as Raffin appeared on the curve of the staircase above him.

‘Allo? Oui, bonjour, monsieur. I didn’t expect to hear from you so soon.’ He listened intently for a few moments, and Kirsty saw his expression change. ‘Well, that’s wonderful. When do you think we can expect some kind of feedback?’ His expression changed again, and she saw his skin flush dark. ‘The British? Well, who is he?’ As he listened his expression altered once more, this time to one of incredulity. ‘Monsieur, that is simply not possible….Well, do we have a name and address…?’ He waved his hand at Nicole who grabbed a pen and notepad from the hall table. He cradled the phone between neck and shoulder and scribbled on the top leaf. ‘There has to be some mistake. Will you check it out?’ His face lapsed into resignation. ‘Okay, well thank you, Monsieur Martinot. I’ll see what I can find out myself.’

He pressed the End Call button but still held on to the phone, lost in thought. Raffin came down the rest of the stairs. ‘Well?’

Enzo came out of his trance. ‘It seems that the system put in place by the Prum Convention works better that I had hoped. Once it was cleared by the brass at the Quai des Orfèvres, they were able to run our man’s DNA through all twenty-seven European databases.’

‘And?’ Nicole could barely contain her excitement.

‘They found a match. In the NDNAD. That’s the UK national database.’

Raffin looked at him. ‘But?’

‘The man whose DNA profile matches our killer’s was serving a prison sentence in England at the time of Lambert’s murder.’

Nicole said, ‘That’s not possible,’ echoing Enzo’s own words of just a few moments earlier. ‘There must have been a mistake.’

‘Apparently not. They were an exact match. And here’s the thing. A DNA profile consists of twenty numbers and a gender indicator. The probability of the DNA profiles of two unrelated individuals matching is, on average, less than one in one billion.’

Chapter Thirty-One

The apartment building was at the south end of Clapham High Street, not far from the green open spaces of the common. It was a six-storey block, with a pebbledash facing, built in the nineteen-thirties. During a recent renovation, rusted art deco windows had been replaced by double-glazed units that kept the heat in and the noise out. Unwelcome visitors were kept out, too, by a door-entry system that required a six-digit code. The nearest station was Clapham Common, and you could be in central London within thirty minutes.

Richard sat in a café across the street wondering what it must feel like to live in a place like that. To have a flat you could call your own, money in your pocket, parents you could telephone when you were in trouble.

He wondered what Christmases must have been like in his family. Very different, he imagined, from those he had spent alone with his mother in the house on the cliffs. She had done her best, with decorations and a Christmas stocking. She had showered him with presents he didn’t want, a vain attempt to win his affections. But it was always just them, and he got bored. If she had friends or relatives, they never came, never called. She never watched TV, preferring to sit and read, driving him to his bedroom where he spent solitary hours nursing his resentment of the good time he knew his friends from school would be having.

He couldn’t finish his coffee. It was weak and milky, and no amount of sugar would give it flavour. He liked his coffee strong and black. Real coffee. He couldn’t get used to the way the English served it, powder from a jar drowned in milk.

In the street outside, he was assaulted by the roar of the traffic and waited at the lights until he could cross. There was a red pillar box on the corner where people posted letters, and he lit a cigarette and leaned against it, pretending to read the copy of the Evening Standard that he had bought in the newsagent’s. From here, he had a clear view of the entrance to the apartments, and could make it in thirty seconds if he chose.

He watched a middle-aged couple emerge and head north along the High Street, and then a young man in a great hurry who took the steps to the door two at a time before Richard had time to intercept him.

It was nearly an hour before the perfect opportunity presented itself. A young woman, who could have been no more than twenty-five or twenty-six, hesitated at the foot of the steps, juggling several bags of shopping. She retrieved a slip of paper from her purse, and by the time she reached the door, Richard was right behind her. He could see the code written in a neat hand, as she fumbled to try to punch it in. She must have been new, the number not yet committed to memory. She dropped a bag, and onions spilled down the steps. Richard stooped quickly to retrieve them and pop them back in the bag. She flushed with embarrassment.

‘Thanks.’

He handed her the bag. ‘Hi, how are you doing?’ he said, as if he knew her. ‘Why don’t you let me do that?’ And he punched in the number he had just read over her shoulder.

‘I’m so clumsy,’ she said, and pushed the door open with her foot as the buzzer sounded. He held it open for her, so that she could go through into the lobby. There were post boxes all along one wall, and an elevator at the far end of the hall. ‘You’re on the fourth floor, aren’t you? I’ve seen you before, in the lift.’

‘That’s right,’ Richard said. ‘And I never forget a pretty face.’

She blushed, this time with pleasure, as they squeezed together into the intimate space of the elevator.

‘You haven’t been here long,’ he said.

‘No. Just a couple of weeks.’

‘You’re really going to have to work at remembering that number.’

‘Oh, I know. I’ve just never made the effort. Stupid, isn’t it? I can never remember it when friends are coming round and they ask for the code.’

The elevator jerked to a halt on the fourth floor and Richard stepped out into the hallway. ‘See you around, I hope.’

‘Yeh, I hope so, too.’

The doors slid shut and Richard looked along the length of the corridor. He had no idea which door it was, and walked quickly along, checking each nameplate.

Bright was second from the end. He stopped outside the door and listened for a moment, although he was certain the apartment was empty. He drew out a long, stout screwdriver from inside his jacket, inserting it between the door and the architrave and levering it several times until the wood splintered and the lock gave way. He stood perfectly still, holding his breath, listening for any sign that he had been heard, before opening the door and slipping quickly inside.

He closed it behind him and leaned against it, taking deep, steady breaths to calm himself. He was standing in a short hallway. Two doors opened to the left. One to a bedroom, the other to a kitchen. There was a toilet at the far end. To the right, a door opened into a living-dining room with windows overlooking the High Street.

Richard had the oddest sense of familiarity. He had never been here, and yet felt strangely at home. A calm descended on him, and he went into the bedroom. The bed had not been made. The shape of a head was still pressed into the pillow. The stale smell of sleep, of spent air and sweat, made him think of the bedroom in which he had slept and dreamed and masturbated his whole life. He opened the wardrobe. Men’s shirts and jackets, overcoats and trousers, hung untidily from the rail. There were tee-shirts and sweats and hoodies folded on the shelves, shoes on the rack along the bottom. Leather shoes, and sports shoes, a pair of Doc Martens.

He dropped his bag on the bed and stripped to his underwear and tried on several shirts. They fit, as if he had bought them himself. A pair of jeans were slightly loose on him, but he found belts in a drawer, and tried on a couple of suits. Perfect.

There was a suitcase on top of the wardrobe. He took it down and opened it on the bed, then turned to the wardrobe and began systematically lifting out clothes to pack. He wouldn’t need to buy any for quite some time.

In the kitchen he found cans of beer in the refrigerator, and opened one, taking large mouthfuls as he wandered through to the living room. The remains of a carry-out pizza were still in its box on the table, along with two empty cans of beer. The tabletop was stained with the countless rings left by cans and glasses and mugs. There was a huge TV set in one corner, a futon drawn up in front of it. There were more empty beer cans lined along the windowsills and on top of the television. The shag-pile carpet was littered with the debris of life, crumbs and clothes, and cigarette ash, and Richard wondered, fastidiously, if anyone had ever passed a vacuum cleaner over it.

A brand new Amstrad computer with green phosphor screen stood on a cluttered desk pushed against the far wall. Richard slid open the top drawer and smiled as his eyes fell on the gold-crested blue cover of a British passport. He hesitated, almost savouring the moment. It was who he would be from now on. He picked it up and felt its texture between his fingers, before opening it to look at himself smiling up from a photograph stamped with the official seal of the United Kingdom Passport Agency.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Clapham High Street hadn’t changed much in the twenty-two years since Richard Bright had been there, although Enzo remembered it from earlier than that. He had stayed in a bedsit off Clapham Common for four months in 1978 during his four-month training attachment to the Metropolitan Police Forensic Science Lab.

It felt strange being back, revisiting what had been little more than a fleeting moment in his life. He had been someone else then, and he found it hard to remember the gauche young Enzo, fresh from his one-year Masters in Forensic Science, a Scottish fish out of water in the great big London pond.

The café hadn’t changed much either, since the half hour Bright had spent in it in 1986, sipping at a milky coffee he would never finish. But Enzo wasn’t to know that. If the café had been there in Enzo’s day, he had no recollection of it. What remained true was that it still provided a perfect view of the apartment block across the street.

He sat at a table in the window, a bitter, black, watery coffee in front of him. He had known to ask for his coffee black, but had forgotten how bad it would be and wished he had ordered tea instead. Kirsty sat opposite, sipping a diet Coke. She was more freshly acquainted with British bad taste.

He still heard Sophie whining in his ear, begging him to take her with him. That she was becoming more jealous of her half-sister was clear, and she didn’t want to hear it when Enzo explained that the only reason he would risk taking Kirsty was because she could identify the man from Strasbourg. If, indeed, the man whose London address Martinot had given him was the same one. Which was a long way from certain.

They had lunched in the café and spent much of the afternoon there, watching the comings and goings across the street. There had been quite a few. But no one remotely resembling the man who had picked Kirsty off the floor in the Palais des Congrès. Enzo was finding it hard to contain his impatience. He had checked the nameplates when they first got there. And now he wanted simply to cross the road and press the buzzer marked Bright. But if this really was their man, then he would be putting Kirsty, as well as himself, at risk.

He looked up to find Kirsty watching him. ‘Whatever happened with you and Charlotte?’ she said out of the blue.

He had met Charlotte when he first began his investigations into the murders in Raffin’s book. She had been in the throes of breaking up with Raffin at the time, and Raffin had never forgiven him for getting into a relationship with her. ‘Charlotte’s a free spirit, Kirsty. She’s happy to sleep with me, but doesn’t want a relationship. I was happy to sleep with her. But I wanted more.’

‘It’s over then?’

‘With Charlotte, I never know.’

‘Roger says she’s real bitch.’

‘She speaks well of Roger, too.’ In fact she’d told Enzo that there was something dark about Raffin. Something beyond touching. Something you wouldn’t want to touch, even if you could. He wanted to tell her that, but didn’t, and Kirsty didn’t pursue it.

Instead, she said, ‘And Anna?’

‘I like her a lot, Kirsty. I know you don’t approve…’ He raised a hand to pre-empt her objections. ‘But that night, in Strasbourg, we were both, you know, pretty low. It was good for each of us.’

‘She told me. You thought you were dying. She’d just come from a funeral.’

Enzo shook his head. ‘No, she’d been visiting her parents, and they’d given her a hard time.’

Kirsty looked at him. ‘That’s not what she told me. She said she’d just been at the funeral of a friend.’

Enzo shrugged and contemplated another sip of coffee, but decided against it. ‘Maybe she’d been at a funeral, too. Doesn’t really matter. The fact is that our paths crossed, and I’m not sorry that they did.’ He looked up to see Kirsty staring out of the window, her face pale, fear frozen in her eyes. ‘What is it?’

He turned to see a man standing on the other side of the glass, cupping his hands around a cigarette to light it. He had close-cropped fair hair, and wore a dark, Crombie overcoat. ‘It’s him.’ Her voice was barely a whisper. ‘He just got off the bus.’ If there had not been a window between them she could have reached out and touched him.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Absolutely certain. I’d know him anywhere.’ The bus moved away, and he turned towards them, blowing smoke at the window. He was looking straight at them. Enzo heard the panic in Kirsty’s voice. ‘Dad, he’s seen us!’

But a hand went up to smooth back his ruffled hairline, and he inclined his head slightly to one side, lifting his jaw. And Enzo realised that he didn’t see them at all. He was looking at his own reflection in the glass. And then, as he turned away, Enzo heard Kirsty gasp.

‘Oh, my God!

He looked at her concerned. ‘What?’ The man was starting to cross the road.

‘I don’t think it is him. I mean, it can’t be.’

‘How’s that possible, you were absolutely certain just a moment ago?’

‘The man in Strasbourg was missing his right earlobe. I told you that. The same as the man in the hairdresser’s in Cahors. But that man’s ear is intact. Just as he turned away from the window I could see it quite clearly. Earlobe and all.’

‘Jesus!’ Enzo said suddenly. ‘That explains everything. Come on.’ And he grabbed her hand and they ran from the café. They could see the man in the Crombie overcoat climbing the steps to the door of the apartment block, but the traffic lights were at green and they couldn’t get across. Then there was a break, and Enzo dragged Kirsty between the cars, to a chorus of horns, and they reached the far sidewalk just as the man was punching numbers into the door-entry system. By the time they were running up the steps, the door was swinging shut and nearly closed. Enzo caught it before the lock engaged, and pushed it wide. The man was entering the elevator at the far end of the hall. ‘William Bright!’

The man put his hand between the doors to stop them closing and took a half-step out as Enzo and Kirsty ran up the hall. ‘Who the hell are you?’ Kirsty felt a chill of fear run through her. But he looked at them both without recognition.

Enzo tried to catch his breath. ‘My name’s Enzo Macleod. I need to talk to you, Mister Bright. About your family. Just a few minutes of your time.’

Bright’s apartment, on the fourth floor, was small. A typical bachelor pad, cluttered and untidy. ‘Scuse the mess. Cleaner doesn’t come till tomorrow.’ He held the door open for them. ‘Go on through to the living room. I’ll be with you in a minute.’

The living room floor was piled high with books. A small gate-leg dining table was stacked with cardboard boxes. There was a huge plasma TV mounted on the wall and a couple of recliners positioned for watching it. They heard the toilet flush, and the faucet running, then Bright came into the room and looked around it with sad resignation. He seemed to feel the need to explain. ‘Half this stuff isn’t mine. Been letting it for years. Had to give the last tenant notice when my bloody wife kicked me out. I’ve only just moved back in.’ He found Kirsty staring at him with an odd intensity and turned to Enzo. ‘So what can I do for you people?’

‘You spent nine months in prison in 1992 after a brawl in a night-club.’

‘Jesus Christ! What are you, cops?’

‘I’m a forensic scientist, Mister Bright, investigating a murder.’

Bright shook his head. ‘I never killed the guy.’

‘I know that. Just beat him unconscious.’

‘It was self-defence. A bloody miscarriage of justice!’

‘Then you were re-arrested twelve years later on suspicion of dealing drugs.’

‘And never charged. What the fuck is it you want, mister?’

‘Maybe you weren’t charged. But they held you for questioning for twelve hours, during which time they took a DNA swab from the inside of your mouth. I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but from that time on, your DNA has been held in the UK national DNA database.’

‘So what?’

‘That’s how we found you. A sample of DNA recovered from a crime scene in France was a perfect match with the sample you provided the British police. ’

Bright frowned. ‘That’s not possible. I’ve never even been to France.’ Then he paused. ‘What crime scene?’

‘The murder I’m investigating.’

Bright laughed in their faces. ‘Got fuck all to do with me! I never murdered anyone.’

‘I know that, Mister Bright. You were in prison here in the UK when the murder was committed.’

‘Then you couldn’t have found my DNA.’

‘But we did.’

Bright was shaking his head. ‘Not possible.’

Enzo drew a deep breath. ‘Do you have a twin, Mister Bright?’

‘No.’

Enzo was momentarily discomposed. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Of course I’m fucking sure. I’d know if I had a twin, wouldn’t I?’ Then he paused, and pulled a face, and waved a dismissive hand towards no one in particular. ‘Well, okay, technically maybe I did. Once. I mean, I did have a twin brother. But he’s dead. Has been for nearly forty years.’

Enzo stared at him wondering how that was possible. ‘Explain.’

Bright pushed his hands in his pockets and wandered away towards the window. ‘Jesus, I don’t even know that I want to talk to you people about it.’ He pressed his forehead against the glass and looked down into the street below. ‘It’s something I never think about. Christ, I can’t even remember him.’ His breath exploded in little patches of condensation.

He closed his eyes, and it seemed as if he had been somehow transported to another place. That his spirit had left the room, and only the body remained. Then his eyes snapped open and he turned to face them. ‘We were on holiday in Spain. July, 1972. A place called Cadaquès, on the Costa Brava. My parents, my sister, my twin brother and me. They used to put us to bed in our hotel room before they went down to eat every night. The hotel had a babysitting service that was supposed to keep an eye on us.’ A small explosion of air escaped his lips. ‘Fat lot of fucking good they were. My folks came back up one night to find blood all over the place, and Rickie was gone.’

‘Your brother?’

‘Yeh. We were about twenty months old at the time. Me and Lucy, that’s my older sister, never heard a thing. Turned out the blood wasn’t Rickie’s. But he was never found. No one ever knew who took him, or why.’

‘So what made you think he was dead?’

‘The cops. After about three months, they gave up. Told my folks he was almost certainly a goner. ‘Course, my mother never believed it.’ He looked at them and shook his head. ‘She’s still there, you know. Couldn’t bring herself to leave, as long as there was a chance Rickie was still alive and might come back. Kept us there, too, Luce and me. It’s where I grew up. Speak Spanish like a native. For all the fucking good it does me.’

Enzo stared at the strangely sad face of the twin who’d been deprived of his brother, and felt all the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. ‘I don’t know whether this is good news, or bad, Mister Bright. But your brother’s not dead.’

William Bright said nothing. Simply stared back at Enzo, as if he had just seen a ghost.

Enzo said, ‘Only identical twins share identical DNA. Which means that when you were in prison here in England in 1992, your twin brother was murdering a male prostitute in a Paris apartment. And he’s still very much alive today.’

All colour had drained from Bright’s face. He opened a pack of cigarettes with trembling fingers and lit one. ‘I need a drink,’ he said, and he went through to the kitchen to get a can of beer from the refrigerator. They heard the fizz of the can opening, and Bright came back clutching it in an unsteady hand. He took a long pull at the beer, then dragged on his cigarette. His mouth curled into an expression of something like anger. ‘So it was fucking Rickie that nicked my passport.’

Enzo frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘It was years ago. Sometime in the mid eighties. Not that long after I came back from Spain. It was a real fucking mystery. Never forgotten it.’

‘What happened?’

‘I stayed with my old man for a while when we first got back. Then he set me up with this place. Couldn’t believe my luck. Eighteen years old, and I had my own private knocking shop. He said it was a good investment. Bloody right. It’s worth a fortune now.’ He blew cigarette smoke at the ceiling. ‘So I came in one night to find the place had been broken into. Bastard nicked half my clothes, credit cards, passport. But this is the weird bit. When the cops talked to the other residents, this girl two floors up said I came in with her that day, and that we’d shared the lift on the way up.’ He looked at Enzo. ‘But that was impossible. I was in Ilford. A party at my dad’s place. I think the cops thought I was trying to pull some kind of insurance scam. But it wasn’t me. I had a dozen witnesses to place me on the other side of town.’ He paused. ‘Must have been Rickie.’ He shrugged his consternation. ‘What the hell would he want with my passport?’

Enzo said, ‘Your identity.’ And he knew that if he was to solve Lambert’s murder, he was going to have to go back another twenty-two years, to find out who abducted a little boy from a coastal resort in northern Spain.

Chapter Thirty-Three

The light was fading fast when they emerged from the apartment block on to the steps. There was a fine, cold mist in the air, making haloes around the streetlights. The traffic, like cholesterol, was clogging the artery that was Clapham High Street, belching carbon monoxide into air fibrillating with the sound of petrol and diesel engines.

Kirsty said, ‘So now you know who he is.’

But Enzo shook his head. ‘We know who he was, thirty-eight years ago. A little boy abducted from a holiday hotel in Spain. We’ve no idea who he became, or who he is now.’

‘You said he’d stolen his brother’s identity.’

‘Sometime in the eighties, yes. For however long it suited him then. But it would be no long term solution to take on the identity of another living person. Too risky.’

‘So we’re not really any further on at all?’

‘Yes, we know what he looks like, Kirsty. We know that the man you encountered at the Palais des Congrès in Strasbourg is the man who killed Lambert, the man who tried to kill you and who murdered Audeline Pommereau in Cahors. From the tape in Lambert’s answering machine we know that he speaks French with a southern accent. Speaks it like a native. Which means he probably grew up there. What we don’t know is who, or exactly where he was all those years.’

‘So how do we find out?’

‘By going back thirty-eight years to a hotel room in Spain. To find out who took him. And where they went.’

Enzo felt Kirsty’s fingers tighten around his arm. ‘Dad…’ He barely heard her above the roar of the traffic.

He turned. ‘What?’

But her gaze was transfixed. She was staring straight ahead of her, almost as if trapped in some demonic trance. Enzo followed her eyeline, and as a truck cleared his line of sight he saw, standing on the sidewalk on the far side of the street, the man they had just left in the apartment four floors up. But it couldn’t be him. Enzo felt a chill run down his back, like a trail of cold fingers. He shivered. He was looking straight at Lambert’s killer. The man who had murdered Audeline Pommereau and tried to kill his daughter. And the man was looking straight back at him.

For a moment Enzo lost all reason, an irresistible surge of anger robbing him of both fear and rationale. He tore his arm free of Kirsty’s grasp and leapt down the steps to the sidewalk. He heard her calling after him. A taxi driver leaned on his horn as it seemed that he would plunge out into the flow of traffic. And he was forced to stop on the curb as a bus thundered past, the air it displaced nearly knocking him from his feet.

When it cleared his vision, Rickie Bright, or whatever he might call himself now, was gone. People in coats and scarves stood in a line at the bus stop. Others, with collars turned up, huddled against the cold and moved in rush hour streams in either direction, silhouettes against the brightly lit shopfronts opposite. Now Kirsty was at his side, clutching his arm again, her voice insistent. ‘For God’s sake, Dad, what are you doing?’

And as his first flush of anger subsided, fear rushed in to fill the void. ‘Jesus, Kirsty, I don’t know. I must be off my head.’ He turned to look at her. ‘He knows we know. We’re in more danger now than ever.’

The platform of the underground station at Clapham Common was jammed with rush hour commuters. They were heading back into the city on the Northern Line. Their train, preceded by a blast of warm air, screeched to a halt with a penetrating squeal of brakes. Doors slid open spewing people on to the already overcrowded strip of concrete. War broke out as passengers fought to get on and claim their place. Enzo and Kirsty were carried along by the flow, squeezing into an impossibly small space between the doors and those who had got in ahead of them. A buzzer sounded, and the doors slid shut. The train jerked, throwing everyone off-balance, before accelerating into the dark of the tunnel.

On the way to the station, Enzo had looked for another glimpse of Bright, turning constantly to check behind them, eyes flickering among the myriad faces that flowed past them like a river in spate. Now he craned to check up and down the carriage. Those who had already claimed seats had faces buried in newspapers and books. Those forced to stand, studiously avoided eye contact. Above the roar and rattle of the train, he could hear people sneezing and coughing germs into the fetid air of this winter incubator of flus and colds.

And then he saw him. In the next carriage, face pressed against the window of the separating door, making no attempt to conceal himself. He wanted them to know he was there. He wanted them to be afraid. Enzo tugged at Kirsty’s arm and nodded towards the following carriage. Her eyes tracked his to meet Bright’s, and she turned ghostly white. ‘What are we going to do?’

‘We need to lose him.’

‘How?’

‘I don’t know. As long as we’re in a crowd we should be safe.’ But he was thinking of the dark, quiet backstreets of Shad Thames behind Butler’s Wharf, where they were going to spend the night at Simon’s apartment. Simon was still tied up by his court case in Oxford but had e-mailed them to say they could pick up the keys from a neighbour and use the place in his absence. Enzo knew they would have to try to lose Bright before they changed at Cannon Street to board the train for Tower Bridge.

He watched the names of the stations glide past as they pulled up, one by one, breathing out passengers, sucking in others, and then moving on to the next. Kennington, Elephant and Castle, Borough. London Bridge was the last stop before Cannon Street, where they would have to negotiate a labyrinth of foot tunnels to get to the Monument tube station on the Circle and District line. He checked to see that Bright was still there, then whispered to Kirsty. ‘We’ll get off here. Wait till we see him on the platform, and then jump back on just before the doors close.’

‘That won’t work.’

‘Of course it will. I saw it in a film once. And it worked in Cahors.’

‘There probably wasn’t anyone following you in Cahors. And anyway, there are far too many people. There won’t be any room to get back on before the doors close.’

The train jerked and rumbled and swayed into the brightly lit London Bridge station, its platform choked with yet more commuters pressed up against the hoardings, girding themselves for the battle to get aboard. The doors slid apart.

Kirsty pushed the hesitating Enzo. ‘Come on, get off.’ And they tumbled out with dozens of others to fight against the oncoming torrent. Enzo strained for a glimpse of Bright above a sea of heads. And there he was, elbowing his way down on to the plaform. Enzo turned to grab his daughter, but she was gone. For a moment he panicked, then saw her pushing through the crowds to where two uniformed police officers on terrorist alert stood cradling short, black, Heckler and Koch MP5 machine guns. They listened intently as she stopped in front of them, talking fast, before turning and pointing back towards Bright. Enzo saw their expressions harden, and they immediately started towards him. One of them shouted, “Hey, you!’ The buzzer sounded, warning that the doors were about to close. Bright turned, shouldering his way back into the carriage as the doors shut. Enzo could see the fear in his face. If just one door along the length of the train had been impeded, they would all open again, and he would be caught.

But the train juddered and strained, picking up speed out of the station, and Bright allowed himself a tiny, frustrated smile through the glass as it carried him off into the night.

The policemen were talking to Kirsty again, and Enzo heard one of them say, ‘Sorry miss. All you can do is report it, but I don’t suppose it’ll do much good.’

She thanked them, and turned away towards the exit. Enzo caught up with her on the escalator. ‘What did you say to them?’

She looked at her father and grinned. ‘I told them he’d had his willie out on the train, flashing it at me all the way from Elephant and Castle.’

They came down the steps from the south end of Tower Bridge, and passed beneath a brick archway into the narrow Shad Thames. Streetlights barely punctured the dark of this ancient walkway between towering warehouses, where once the spoils of empire had been unloaded from the boats docked at Butler’s Wharf. Girdered metal bridges ran at peculiar angles overhead. A huge gateway gave on to the Thames itself. In the nineteenth century, workers had queued here each day in the hope of a few hours’ work. Now these vast brick edifices had been converted into luxury apartments, homes for the wealthy, serviced by wine bars and gourmet restaurants whose windows lit up the cobbled lanes.

The lights of Pizza Express blazed out in the dark, and they turned past Java Wharf, a freezing fog rolling up from the river, turning people into wraiths, and buildings into shadows. It seemed impenetrably dark. A barge sounded its foghorn somewhere out on the water, and the noise of the pubs and restaurants they had left behind receded into the night. Only their own footsteps, echoing back from unseen walls, accompanied them.

Enzo put his arm around Kirsty’s shoulder, and drew her to him for comfort and warmth. She yielded gratefully, letting her head rest on his shoulder. They were both weary and cold, exhausted by fear and apprehension. At the gated entrance to Butler’s and Colonial, Enzo tapped in the entry code that Simon had e-mailed, and they crossed the cobblestones to the entrance of what had once served as a warehouse for storing spices. He remembered Simon telling him that he had toured the building in a hardhat before work began, and that the whole place smelled of cloves. But if the scent of the past still lingered there, then neither Enzo nor Kirsty had been aware of it when they had collected the keys to drop off their bags that morning.

Enzo stopped at the gate and made Kirsty turn to face him. She looked wan and tired. He said, ‘You probably don’t remember, but when you were very young, I used to carry you up to bed every night. There was a Crosby and Nash album I was listening to then and a song on it called Carry Me. I used to sing it to you when I carried you up the stairs.’

Tears sprung instantly to her eyes. Carry me, carry me ’cross the world. Of course she remembered. She just hadn’t thought that he would. But all she did was nod.

‘If I could I still would. Carry you up the stairs, I mean. But you’re too big, and I’m too old.’

She laughed, and laid her head on his chest and put her arms around him. ‘Oh, shut up, Dad.’

He grinned and she took his hand, and they hurried through the gate to the door. Enzo unlocked it, and they stepped gratefully into the warmth of the tiny hall at the foot of a flight of steep, narrow stairs. The ground floor was for parking, accessible from the street. Simon’s apartment was one up. Kirsty laughed and said, ‘You’d have had trouble carrying me up these stairs, even twenty years ago.’

But Enzo stood stock still and raised a quick finger to his lips.

Her smile vanished. ‘What is it?’

‘I turned all the lights off when we went out this morning.’ His voice was low and brittle with anxiety.

She looked up to see the cold light issuing from the naked yellow bulb hanging in the stairwell, and her eyes drifted upwards to the top landing. ‘The door’s open.’

Enzo saw that the door to the apartment at the top of the stairs was fractionally ajar. There was a seam of light around two of its edges. He looked about him for a weapon of some kind. A golf umbrella in a coat stand at the foot of the stairs was the only thing to suggest itself. Not much protection against a professional killer. He reached for it, all the same, and held it in both hands. ‘Stay here.’

‘No.’ Her voice was insistent. ‘This is crazy. We can still get out of here and call the police.’

He shook his head. ‘I’m not going to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder. There comes a time when you have to confront your fears. If I get into trouble, go for help.’

‘Da-ad…!’ But he wasn’t listening. He pulled himself free of her grasp and started slowly up the stairs, trying to make as little noise as possible. By the time he reached the landing, he could hear someone moving around inside the apartment. But only just. The sound of blood pulsing through his head was drowning out almost everything else. Very gingerly, he pushed the door open. The long hallway that led to the vast, open-plan space at the far end, was in darkness. The light came from an open door leading to one of the bedrooms. A shadow crossed the oblong of light that fell out into the hall, then loomed large as a figure emerged from the doorway. Enzo grasped the umbrella so that he could use its stout wooden handle as a club, and raised it level with his head.

The figure turned towards him, startled by the movement caught in his peripheral vision. A switch was flicked, and the hall flooded with light. Simon stood staring in astonishment at Enzo clutching his golf umbrella. He said, ‘Is it raining out?’

Chapter Thirty-Four

It was apparent very quickly that Simon had been drinking. There was a slight glaze about his eyes, and he enunciated all his words too carefully to avoid slurring them.

There was a lack of warmth in his greeting for Enzo, a cursory handshake, before giving Kirsty an extravagant hug, almost lifting her from her feet. She was both pleased and relieved to see him.

‘What are you doing here? I thought you had a court case in Oxford.’

‘Prosecution dropped the charges. Right out of the blue. Seems they had misplaced a piece of vital evidence and were unable to produce it in court. So my client walked free, and I was able to come home to see my favourite girl.’

One side of the huge open floor of the warehouse had been closed off to build bedrooms and a bathroom. The rest of the space was divided only by furniture, creating defined areas for eating, relaxing, cooking. It was punctuated by enormous potted plants with fleshy leaves and fronds and flowers that breathed out oxygen to the keep the air sweet. Concealed lighting picked out the redbrick walls and steel beams. Tall windows on one side looked out onto the street below, with patio doors leading on to a wrought iron balcony at the back. Simon had lived here on his own for most of the fifteen years since his divorce, entertaining a succession of younger women, none of the relationships lasting beyond the initial flush of sex and enthusiasm.

There was a twelve-string acoustic guitar hanging on the wall. Enzo nodded towards it. ‘Do you still play?’

‘Only to entertain my lady friends.’

‘Ah. That explains why you go through so many of them.’

Usually Simon would have laughed. It was the kind of friendly insult jousting they had indulged in all their lives. But he turned away to conceal his irritation. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to feed you.’

‘We could go out somewhere,’ Kirsty said.

But Simon was quick to spike the idea. ‘No, I’ve got cheese in the fridge and wine in the rack. That should be French enough to keep your father happy.’

He opened a bottle of Wolf Blass Australian cabernet sauvignon. ‘Sorry, got none of the French stuff. I prefer Australian or Californian. Even Chilean. You’ve got to pay through the nose for a decent French wine these days.’

They sat around the table in the kitchen area, a lamp drawn down from the girders above to contain them within its bright circle of light, and Simon put out several different cheeses on a board, and some bread reheated in tinfoil in the oven. He filled their glasses and took a long pull at his, before sitting back to look at them both. ‘So you never told me what brings you to London.’

Kirsty said, ‘Dad recovered DNA from an old crime scene and tracked the killer to an address in Clapham.’

Simon flashed Enzo a dark look. ‘And you brought Kirsty with you why?’

But Kirsty answered for him. ‘I was the only one who’d really seen him. He was the same guy who tried to kill me in Strasbourg. Only it turned out not to be him at all. He has a twin brother who thought he was dead. The brother was pretty shaken up to find out he wasn’t. And then we saw the real killer outside his twin’s apartment.’

‘What?’ Simon turned his concern towards her.

‘He was waiting for us in the street, and followed us into the underground. But we lost him at London Bridge.’ She laughed and reached for Enzo’s hand, giving it a squeeze. ‘Dad was so funny. He wanted us to jump back on the train. But I told these cops with machine guns that the guy had been flashing at me, and it was him who had to jump back on the train. You should have seen his face as the train left the station with him in it, and us still on the platform.’

But Simon didn’t share her amusement. He leaned across the table towards Enzo. ‘You fucking idiot! I thought I told you to give up all this shit. You’re putting people’s lives at risk, you know that?’

Kirsty was shocked by Simon’s sudden outburst. Enzo met his old friend’s eye. ‘This guy’s trying to destroy me, Sy. And everyone close to me. You know that. The only way I can stop him is by tracking him down and exposing him for the killer that he is.’

Simon stared at him hard for several long seconds, before sitting back in his seat and draining his glass. He refilled it.

‘It’s not Dad’s fault, Uncle Sy. He’s got all of us in a safe house in the Auvergne. And he didn’t make me come to London. I wanted to. That guy tried to kill me. I want to see him caught.’

Simon took a mouthful of wine and pursed his lips. Thoughts that flashed through his mind behind sullen eyes remained unspoken. He seemed to relax a little. ‘Yeh, well, it might be an idea if you went back to that safe house and stayed there until all of this is over.’

‘That’s exactly what she’s going to do,’ Enzo said.

‘Am I?’ Kirsty seemed surprised.

‘I’m putting you on the first flight to Clermont Ferrand in the morning. I’ll call Roger to pick you up at the airport.’

‘And where are you going?’

‘Spain.’

Simon looked from one to the other. ‘I’m not even going to ask.’

An intangible tension hung over the rest of the meal. Kirsty tried her best to ignore it, to be bright and chatty, as if nothing had been said. But Simon remained sullen, drinking more wine than was good for him, and opening another bottle when the first one was empty. Both Kirsty and Enzo refused refills, and Simon made a start on it by himself. Enzo asked if he could log on to Simon’s wi-fi, and Simon flicked his head towards his own laptop and told him to use that. It took Enzo less than ten minutes to track down a flight for Kirsty, leaving from Stansted the following morning. And a cheap Czech Airlines flight to Barcelona from the same airport. He bought e-tickets and printed them off, and when he returned to the table said, ‘We were lucky to get you one for tomorrow. There are only three flights a week to Clermont Ferrand.’

Kirsty stood up. ‘I’d better go to bed then. Try and get some sleep.’ Both men rose and she gave Simon a perfunctory kiss, and her father a big hug. ‘See you in the morning.’

Enzo and Simon sat for a long time in silence. They heard Kirsty getting ready for bed, and then it all went quiet. Finally, Enzo said, ‘What’s wrong, Sy? What’s all this about?’

Simon just stared into his wine glass. ‘You seem to be getting on pretty well these days, you and Kirsty.’

‘Yeh, we are.’

Simon grunted. ‘Funny how fast she just dropped her surrogate dad for the one who deserted her.’ He sucked in more wine. ‘You know, before all this shit in Strasbourg, I hadn’t heard from her in months. And then someone tries to kill her and it’s you she calls, not me.’ He looked up, and Enzo was shocked to see tears in his eyes. ‘All those years, I was the one she turned to. Always. And you were off fucking some woman in France. But the minute she’s in trouble it’s you she turns to. You.’

‘Well, why wouldn’t she? I’m her father, after all.’

‘Yeh?’ Simon fixed him with shining green eyes that simmered with resentment. Alcohol was releasing a flood of pent up emotion he’d kept to himself for years. ‘Well, that’s what you think.’

Enzo stared at him. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Nothing.’ Simon avoided his eye now, refocusing on his glass.

‘That wasn’t nothing, Sy. If you’ve got something to say, you’d better say it.’ All the same, he wasn’t sure that he wanted to hear it.

Simon’s breathing had become erratic. He looked up again, holding on to his glass to stop his hands from trembling. ‘She’s not your kid,’ he said through clenched teeth.

Enzo’s world stood still. His whole body tingled with shock. ‘What do you mean?’

‘She’s mine.’

‘That’s a lie!’

‘No, it’s not.’

Hurt and anger and disbelief welled up through Enzo’s confusion. ‘You’re a liar!’

‘You remember how it used to be, when we were in the band? It was always you, me, and Linda. I always had a thing for her. You know that. But it was you she wanted. It’s always you they want. That’s why I left, went to study law in London. You guys were going to get married as soon as you graduated, then I don’t know what happened. You suddenly split up. I never knew why. It only lasted three weeks, but I wasn’t to know that. I came back up from London like a shot. Linda was in a state. I got her on the rebound. And I thought, this is it. Then suddenly you guys are an item again, and the wedding’s back on.’ The secret he’d held on to for all these years was out, like pus, and Simon’s release in finally lancing the boil was patent. ‘I never knew I’d made her pregnant. Not till you left, ran off to France and left the two of them to their fate. And there’s me back in Glasgow again trying to pick up the pieces.’ He drew a deep breath. ‘That’s when she got drunk and it all came out.’

Enzo was numb. ‘You bastard!’

‘Hey!’ Simon raised his hands in self-defence. ‘I didn’t do anything wrong. Neither did Linda. When I slept with her, you guys had split up. Then, when she realised she was pregnant, and I was the father, you were getting married. So she kept it to herself. None of it came out until after you’d gone.’ He poured more wine into his glass. ‘Think how hard it’s been for me all this time. Knowing I was Kirsty’s dad and couldn’t tell her. And now, seeing you two together, like I don’t even exist any more.’

He took a mouthful of wine and leaned across the table. ‘But you can’t tell her, Magpie. You can’t ever tell her.’

Enzo sat in stunned silence. He remembered carrying her up the stairs when she was only five, singing to her as he went. He remembered standing outside Simon’s apartment less than two hours before, her head resting on his chest. He remembered threatening to do Raffin harm if he ever hurt her.

None of that had changed. She was still his little girl. He still loved her. He looked at Simon, and felt angry and betrayed, and knew that he could never think of his friend the same way again. If anything had been destroyed by the revelation, it was the friendship of a lifetime. He pushed his glass towards him. ‘You’d better fill that up.’

She had only settled in her bed for a minute, when she remembered that she hadn’t taken her pill. With a curse under her breath, she had got up to go to the bathroom, and only just opened the door when she heard her father say, Well, why wouldn’t she? I’m her father, after all. And Simon’s response. Yeh? Well, that’s what you think.

Now she stood with her back pressed against the bedroom door, their whole confrontation echoing in her head. Ending with Simon’s insistence, You can’t tell her, Magpie. You can’t ever tell her.

Too late, she thought. And she felt nothing beneath her feet. No floor, no earth, no world, as she dropped soundlessly into the abyss.

Chapter Thirty-Five

The Essex plains were thick with early morning mist, and the flight was delayed by more than half-an-hour. Enzo and Kirsty sat in the concourse looking out through tall windows at the grey expanse of dull, wet, southeast England fading off into an uncertain distance.

They had hardly spoken on the train ride out from London, each lost in thoughts that couldn’t be voiced. There was an awkwardness between them that neither knew quite how to dispel. Enzo bought a newspaper, and buried his face in it while they waited. But he wasn’t reading. And when finally Kirsty’s flight was announced, he folded it up and left it on the seat beside him.

They walked together to the gate, and stopped short of it, not knowing how to say goodbye. How to be natural with each other. He put down his overnight bag and wrapped his arms around her. At first she was reluctant to respond, and when she did he tightened his hold on her.

In the end it was Kirsty who drew away, and they stood looking at each other. ‘Are you alright?’ he asked. She was so pale.

She nodded. ‘Just tired. Didn’t really sleep well.’ She glanced towards the departures board. ‘They still haven’t announced your flight.’

He shrugged. ‘The fog’s put everything back.’

‘How will you get there from Barcelona?’

‘I’ll rent a car. It’s probably only about an hour-and-a-half by road.’

‘I’d better go.’ She reached up and brushed his cheek with her lips. ‘See you when you get back.’

‘Yeh.’ And he watched her go through the gate with a breaking heart.

The flight passed in a haze of uncertainty. If she had slept at all during the night she hadn’t been aware of it. Her head ached, as did her throat, and her eyes felt raw from the tears that had soaked into her pillow. It occurred to her, thinking about the little boy who had been abducted all those years ago in Spain, that there must have been a moment when he discovered that he was someone else. A stranger who had lived a lie all of his life.

Just as she wondered, now, who she was, who she had been.

And yet on the surface, nothing had changed. Not a single moment of her life had passed any differently. A childhood filled with the love and certainty of a father whom she had thought would always be there. And then all the years without him, resenting him, even hating him. The constant presence of Uncle Sy. Someone she’d been fond of, but who could never have replaced her dad. Her real dad. And now it turned out that he was her real dad. So what difference did it make? It was all just genetics, blood, and family. How did that change her relationship with Enzo? But somehow it did.

The thought brought fresh tears to her eyes, and she turned her head towards the window to avoid the stares of a man across the aisle who’d been eyeing her lasciviously since they boarded the plane. She let her head rest against the cool glass and couldn’t wait until she saw Roger at Clermont Ferrand. Someone to confide in. A shoulder to cry on. Strong arms to hold her. Her only grasp left on a world disintegrating around her.

She was disappointed when it was Anna who met her in the arrivals hall. The older woman kissed her on both cheeks.

‘Where’s Roger?’

Anna hesitated. ‘He had to go back to Paris.’ She peered at Kirsty. ‘You look terrible.’

‘Thank you. You look pretty good yourself.’

Anna smiled. ‘I’m sorry. You just looked like maybe you’d been crying.’

‘I didn’t sleep very well, that’s all.’

They walked outside to the car park, and bright winter sunlight angled down from the mountains to the sprawling, flat basin of land that cradled the city of Clermont Ferrand high up on the Massif Central. It was colder here than in London, but a welcome change from the grey misery of a damp southern English November.

They took the A75 autoroute south before leaving it at Massiac and heading west on the N122, up into the mountains of the Cantal. Kirsty sat staring from the window, but barely registered the changing landscape, the dramatic swoop of fir-lined hills crowned by jagged peaks of snow-covered rock. The road turned and twisted through mountain valleys that never saw the winter sunshine, before emerging suddenly into patches of dazzling sunlight squinting down between the peaks.

Anna contained her curiosity until they were nearly home, climbing steadily through the trees towards the ski resort of Le Lioran. Another few kilometres and they would begin their descent into the tiny valley that cradled the village of Miramont. Finally she glanced across the car at her silent passenger. ‘What’s wrong, Kirsty?’

Kirsty awoke as if from a dream. ‘What?’

‘You haven’t said a word all the way from Clermont.’

‘Sorry. I was just thinking about what happened in London.’

‘What did happen?’

‘It wasn’t the killer’s DNA in the database. It was his twin brother’s, a brother who was abducted in Spain when he was just a child. Everyone thought he was dead.’

‘Is that why Enzo didn’t come back with you?’

Kirsty nodded. ‘He’s gone to Spain.’

She turned to look at Anna. ‘We saw him, you know. The killer. He was stalking us in London. But we managed to lose him.’ She was lost in thought for a moment. ‘It was really scary.’

‘That’s not why you’ve been crying, though.’

Kirsty’s head snapped round. ‘Who says I’ve been crying?’

‘Kirsty, I’ve seen enough red-rimmed eyes looking back at me from the mirror to know when someone’s been shedding tears.’

Kirsty held her gaze for a moment, before turning away, and Anna flicked her indicator and braked suddenly, pulling them round into an unexpected left-hand turn. Kirsty saw the welcome sign to Le Lioran, and the road dipped down into a sprawling car park. Pine covered slopes rose all around the nearly deserted ski resort. Alpine cabins, an ugly apartment block, a hotel, a tiny shopping mall, stores filled with ski equipment and souvenirs. Chair lifts were threaded up between the trees, but the chairs hung silent and empty, swinging in the cold wind that sheered off the mountains. There were hardly any cars in the parking.

‘The season hasn’t started yet,’ Anna said. ‘And the summer tourists are long gone. Looks like we’ve got the place pretty much to ourselves.’ She pulled up her car and switched off the engine. She turned towards Kirsty. ‘So are you going to tell me, or are you going to bottle it up forever?’

Kirsty shook her head. ‘There’s nothing to tell.’ But she wasn’t sure she could keep it to herself for very much longer.

‘Trust me, Kirsty. I have an instinct for these things.’

Kirsty was fighting now to contain her tears, staring straight ahead of her at nothing. ‘How would you feel if you suddenly found out that your dad wasn’t really your dad?’

Whatever Anna might have been expecting, it wasn’t this. She sat silently for a few moments absorbing the revelation. ‘Does he know that?’

‘He found out at the same time as I did. We were staying with his oldest friend. My sort of surrogate dad. The one who was always around when Enzo wasn’t. He was drunk. Jealous, I think. And there was some kind of tension between them. Then it all came out. I’d gone to bed. I wasn’t supposed to hear, but I did.’

‘So he doesn’t know that you know.’ Kirsty shook her head. ‘Are you going to tell him?’

Kirsty stared at her hands. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. I don’t know what to do.’

‘And how do you feel about it?’

‘How do you think I feel about it?’

‘No, I mean, how do you feel about Enzo? Does it change anything?’

Kirsty flashed her a tear-stained look. ‘It changes everything.’

‘How?’

Kirsty became shrill. ‘I don’t know. I can’t explain it. It just does.’

Anna put a hand over hers. ‘I’m sorry. I guess you’re pretty confused right now. I didn’t read the warning signs very well: Private. Keep Out. Right?’ Kirsty took her hand and squeezed it tightly. Anna waited until the grip on her hand relaxed, before reclaiming it to open the car door. ‘Come on, there’s something here you should see.’

As she slammed the door shut and rounded the car, her breath billowed around her head, caught in the sunlight that streamed across the frozen car park. Kirsty sat for a moment, before getting out of the passenger side. ‘What is there to see in a place like this?’

Anna took her hand. ‘I’ll show you.’

There was no snow here in the resort, or on any of the lower slopes. But the peaks above them glistened white against a diamond blue sky. The bar-brasserie was empty. In the covered shopping strip, only a handful of desultory figures wandered amongst the stands of cards and mugs and ski jackets. Shop signs swayed in the wind. École de Ski Les Yétis, Spar Alimentation, Salon de Thé. A bored-looking receptionist doodled behind the counter in the empty lobby of the drum-shaped hotel above the mall.

They climbed steps into the large terminal building of the Téléphérique, and in the deserted ticket hall Anna bought them a couple of return tickets on the cablecar that would take them to the peak of the Plomb du Cantal, the highest mountain in the range. Summer and winter there would have been long queues standing patiently on the concrete concourse upstairs. But in this dead time between seasons there wasn’t another soul, and a frozen-looking employee punched their tickets and waved them through to the landing stage.

From here they had a view of the twin cables stretched between stanchions, rising steeply through the grassy gap between the trees towards the snowline. Their cablecar stood in its dock. The other had just left the landing stage at the peak, a distant speck descending through a blaze of white.

They crossed the docking area, with its red-painted barriers, and walked through open doors into the empty cablecar. It had sliding doors at each corner, and panoramic windows at either end. A notice warned that the car was limited to eighty passengers maximum. But it seemed that today there would only be two. Anna leaned back against the blue rail and folded her arms. She said, ‘I grew up here in the Cantal. This is where I learned to ski.’

Kirsty said, ‘I’ve never skied.’

Anna looked at her in disbelief. ‘And you come from Scotland?’

‘I grew up in Glasgow. There weren’t many ski slopes in Byres Road.’

‘You have to try it. It’s wonderful.’ Her face glowed from some kind of inner passion. ‘Exhilarating. Once you lose your fear, there’s nothing quite like it.’

‘I’m not sure I’d ever lose the fear. I’m not good at balance. I can’t even put on roller skates without falling down.’

The man who had taken their tickets emerged from the terminal, stamping his feet and clapping his hands. He entered the cablecar through the far door, opened a wall panel to access the controls and pressed a button to shut the doors. He nodded towards Anna and Kirsty. ‘Mesdames.’

He pressed another button and the cablecar jerked, the whine of an electric motor engaging the wheels on the cable above, and they bumped their way out of the dock to begin rising away from the terminal. Rows of empty wooden picnic tables set on the apron around the hotel rapidly became tiny, like furniture in a doll’s house, and green pasture opened up all around the resort, reaching up to the treeline and the snowy peaks beyond.

There was a sense of floating, almost flying, dipping suddenly at the first support pylon, then rising ever more steeply. The world began to spread itself out below them, the horizon dropping away on all sides to a ragged, snowy fringe on the skyline, patchwork sunlight on green and white. The other cablecar, making its descent, passed them on their right, hanging from the upward curve of the arm that hooked around the cable, only a few hardy souls aboard it.

And then they passed the snowline, black rock breaking in ragged patches through the still scant covering. Anna and Kirsty moved from the back of the car to the front as they approached the terminal building on the peak, a square structure of wood and steel and concrete built out on struts to allow the cablecars to dock. They stepped out on to a grilled platform, the mountain falling away disconcertingly beneath their feet. Then up steps onto solid concrete, huge yellow wheels set in the roof overhead to haul the cables.

The cablecar operator lit a cigarette and watched as they passed through open doors into a concrete hall, water lying in icy patches on an uneven floor. A sign advertised Stella Artois, but the cafeteria was shut. They passed through a short corridor, then out through swing doors into the icy blast. The snow lay thick, beneath a towering radio mast, and a well trodden trail led up the final three hundred metres to the summit. There were just a few other hardy souls up here on the roof of the world, in fleeces and boots, examining a representational mountain map with its trails and ski slopes, before heading on up to the peak itself.

Kirsty drew her coat more tightly around herself and felt the icy edge of the wind burn her cheeks. ‘Why did you bring me up here?’

‘You’ll see. Come on.’ Anna held her hand and led her past a line of fenceposts sunk in the snow, over a rise that took them above the cablecar terminal. The world sheered away beneath them. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘Just look at it, Kirsty.’ And Kirsty looked, turning slowly through nearly three hundred and sixty degrees. France shimmered away in every direction to a horizon lost in unfocused distance. ‘You can see for, literally, hundreds of kilometres. It’s glorious. Can’t you feel it? That sense of…’ she searched for the right word. ‘…insignificance. You, or I, just one tiny little speck on the edge of infinity. I used to come up here any time life was getting on top of me. Every time I started to obsess about myself and my problems. And I always found a kind of equilibrium. That sense of balance that comes with perspective. With remembering that whatever troubles you have, they are nothing in the grand scheme of things. Nothing compared to this.’

Whether it was the lack of oxygen six thousand feet up, or the pure, bracing quality of the wind in her face, Kirsty found herself almost intoxicated by the sense of insignificance that Anna spoke of, like staring drunkenly at a star-crusted sky on a summer’s night and realising that it had no beginning and no end. She breathed deeply, and felt some of the burden of uncertainty slip away. But she could find no words to describe her feelings, and her only response was to turn to Anna, a reluctant smile breaking across her face, and silently nod her understanding.

Anna said, ‘If it were me, I wouldn’t want any secrets from the people I loved. Secrets are poison, Kirsty. You need to let them out.’

‘I’m scared.’

‘Of what?’

‘That it’ll change things.’

‘It already has. You said it had changed everything.’

But Kirsty was still confused by a surfeit of conflicting emotions. ‘I don’t know what to think, or what to say.’

‘If you loved him before, then you love him still. He hasn’t changed, and neither have you. You can’t alter the past, but you can make the future.’ She turned away, then, staring out across the vast central plateau of her native land, and Kirsty saw the hint of a tear in the corner of her eye.

‘What is it?’ She took her arm.

But Anna blinked away the tear, and smiled to cover it. ‘I never knew my own father that well. I was always too busy. Always thought there would be a tomorrow. Some time when we would sit down and talk and get to know each other, finally. Then he upped and died on me, and there were no tomorrows, no going back.’

Kirsty looked at her. ‘When was that?’

‘Ten years ago.’

And a strange stab of apprehension spiked through Kirsty’s pain.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Although the sun was low in its winter sky, there was a good deal of warmth left in it. The display in Enzo’s hire car had shown twenty degrees celsius. Parking in the Plaça Frederic Rahola was no problem at this time of year. La Plaja Grana, beyond the statue of Salvador Dali, was deserted. Only a couple of tables on the seafront café were occupied. He walked around past the Casino and the Entina tapas bar and into a tiny cobbled square where leaves clung stubbornly to the trees that would shade it in summer. He checked the map he had acquired in the tourist office then looked up to see a narrow slated street climbing steeply up through an archway into the old town.

He shrugged aside the ghost of last night’s revelation about Kirsty and Simon. It had haunted him all through the flight and the drive north from Barcelona. But now he sensed that he was only a touch away from Rickie Bright. Bright would know that, and like an animal cornered, become even more dangerous. Enzo needed all his concentration.

Many of the street names and shop fronts here owed their origins to a strange Catalonian language that hovered somewhere between Spanish and French. The streets were paved with slabs of slate, laid end on, an uneven surface cambered for drainage, and so narrow that they never saw the sun, except in high summer.

A gaggle of schoolkids passed him on the steep climb, satchels slung across shoulders, spirits high at the end of the school day. A man on a ladder was painting a wrought-iron balcony. Ahead of him, an old lady wearing a headscarf, fresh from her siesta, sat on the doorstep of her house, hands folded on a pink apron. She watched him pass with a dull curiosity.

Through a maze of tiny, intersecting passageways, Enzo found himself, finally, on the street that ran straight up to the church. The house he was looking for, he knew, was immediately below it at No. 9. On his right, below a gnarled bougainvillea vine, he passed a small restaurant called El Gato Azul. There was a painting of a blue cat on the panel beside the door. On the wall opposite was a menu spattered with paw prints. A little further up, on the other side of the street, was a double door the colour of dried blood. Next to it, the number 9.

Enzo looked up at the white washed three-storey house. All its shutters were tightly closed, and his heart sank with the thought that he might have come all this way only to find that she wasn’t at home. There was a bell-push above the letter box at the side of the door. He pressed it, and heard a bell ringing distantly, somewhere in the depths of the house. After a moment, he heard slow footsteps beyond the door, the rattle of a lock, and one half of the doors swung open to reveal a small, dark-haired woman of indeterminate age. She was dressed all in black, except for a white pinafore. Her skin was olive dark, and her face deeply lined. This was not, he knew, the woman he sought. She looked at Enzo half-obscured by the dark interior of the hall, and he felt the house breathe its cold, damp air in his face.

‘I’m looking for Señora Bright.’

The dark-haired woman shook her head. Enzo tried again in French, but still she didn’t seem to understand, and his grasp of Spanish was limited.

‘Donde esta Señora Bright?’

She raised a single finger, bidding him to wait, and she turned away to be swallowed by the dark. He waited for what seemed like forever, until she returned to hand him a scrap of paper. On it she had scrawled the word, iglesia. It was close enough to église, the French word for church, for him to understand. He pointed up the street.

‘Up there?’

She nodded and closed the door abruptly in his face. He shifted his satchel from one shoulder to the other, the weight of his laptop computer starting to make the muscle ache, and climbed the last few metres into the tiny square in front of the church. A panel on the wall read, Església de Santa Maria. A cat sitting on the step watched him with wary eyes. Església, Enzo figured, must be the Catalan for church. He had read in the archive, downloaded from the internet, that Señora Bright prayed for her lost son here every morning. Perhaps she was also in the habit of saying an evening prayer for Rickie.

Inside it was cool and dark, and he wandered the length of the nave looking for a face amongst the handful at prayer that he would recognise from the newspaper photographs. It wasn’t until he had discounted them all, that he noticed the small side chapel behind net drapes. A solitary figure knelt at its altar, candles burning on either side. He brushed the drapes apart and walked down the aisle between the pews. The squeak of his rubber shoes on the polished tiles echoed high up into the roof. He stopped beside the lady in black. ‘Señora Bright?’

And when she turned to look up at him, he saw that it was her. He saw, too, a strange look in her eyes. Of both fear and hope. And he suddenly felt like a harbinger of doom, bearing news from the Gods. Good news and bad. ‘Yes,’ she said, and got stiffly to her feet.

‘I think I might have news of your son.’ The words she had waited thirty-six years to hear.

As he walked with her down the steep incline to the house, the sun was setting beyond the red-tile roofs, the sky a blaze of red beyond the hills. The bay below, as still as glass, was the colour of copper.

She opened a door at the side of the house, almost obscured by ivy and bougainvillea, and he followed her into a small, walled garden shaded by tall trees. Grass and flowers grew between the paving stones, and water tumbled across a tiny rock garden into a pool half-hidden beneath fleshy lily leaves. She flicked a switch beside French windows leading to the house, and hidden lamps cast soft light around the garden. They sat in chairs around a white-painted, wrought-iron table, and Señora Bright lifted a small bell and shook it vigorously.

‘Tea, Mister Macleod?’

‘Thank you.’

‘I only have Earl Grey.’

‘That’s fine.’

The maid who had opened the door to Enzo just fifteen minutes earlier emerged from the dark of the house and Señora Bright spoke to her rapidly in Spanish. The maid gave a tiny bow and disappeared again inside.

The old lady sat and looked at Enzo thoughtfully, almost as if she were putting off the moment. She folded her hands on the table in front of her and examined them for several seconds. Then she looked up again, courage summoned, ready to hear the worst. ‘So, tell me.’

‘I’d like to hear your story first, Señora.’

‘Angela,’ she said. ‘Only the Spanish call me Señora.’ She sighed. ‘Are you determined to torture me, Mister Macleod? I’m sure you must have read all about it in the newspaper archives.’

‘I’d prefer to hear it from you.’

She breathed her exasperation into the night, worn down by the years, and endless disappointments. ‘We were a little later than usual that night. We’d met another couple from Essex and Rod had ordered a second bottle of wine. Oh, how we laughed together. When all the time someone was upstairs stealing our son.’ She looked very directly at Enzo. ‘Have you any idea how destructive guilt can be? It eats away at you, Mister Macleod, from the inside out, until there’s nothing left but the most hollow of shells. Just what you see before you.’

‘You had employed the hotel babysitting service.’

‘Oh, yes. Promised to check in every fifteen minutes. Some young girl distracted by the kitchen apprentice. Our son lost to teenage hormones. They were both sacked, of course, but that didn’t bring Rickie back. When we got up to the room Billy and Lucy were fast asleep, like nothing had happened. But my baby was gone.’

‘Did you have any thoughts, then or now, who might have taken him?’

‘At the time I was almost sure I knew who’d done it. I told the police, but I think they thought I was imagining it.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s funny how certainty diminishes with time. Now, I can barely even recall the moment. Just my telling of it.’

‘What moment?’

‘The previous day, I’d taken Rickie down to the pool. It was hot, about midday, and most people had gone for something to eat, or found patches of shade to lie and sleep in. But Rickie had been fractious all morning. Hot, almost feverish, and I thought I would take him into the pool to cool him down. When we came out of the water I took him into the shade of the umbrella to dry him off, and there was a woman sitting at the next table. Rickie was still in a bad mood, trying to push away from the towel, whining and fighting me at every turn. And she was just watching, with this sort of smile on her face, looking adoringly at Rickie. I told her he was hungry. You know, just an excuse for the way he was behaving. And she got all defensive on his behalf. Everyone gets grumpy when they’re hungry, she said. God, I can still hear her!’

‘What nationality?’

‘Oh, she was English. No doubt about that. Bit posh. Sort of Home Counties.’

‘Age?’

‘Thirty, early thirties. I don’t know. Difficult to tell. She had a good figure, but wasn’t showing it off. She had a kind of old-fashioned one-piece swimsuit. Her hair was sort of frizzy, pulled back in an untidy knot. She wasn’t very pretty.’

‘And what made you think it might have been her?’

Angela Bright shook her head. ‘I have no idea. Just something about her. Something in her eyes. Something like hunger. Or jealousy. I don’t know. The way she looked at Rickie. She never once met my eye.’

‘You hadn’t seen her around before?’

‘No. Not that I was aware of. And then when the police began their investigation, there wasn’t anyone staying at the hotel who even looked like her. They definitely thought she was some figment of my imagination. But women have an instinct, Mister Macleod. That woman coveted my child. I didn’t realise it at the time, but when I thought about it later…’ She broke off, almost choking on her words. ‘Too late. Too damned late!’

The maid returned with a silver tray laden with cups, a teapot, hot water, and white sugar. She laid it on the table, then retired once more to the house. Angela Bright poured. She had recovered her composure.

‘Sugar, Mister Macleod?’

‘No, thank you.’ Enzo poured in a little milk and took a sip. He hadn’t tasted Earl Grey for years, and for a moment it took him back to another place, another life. Perhaps that’s why Angela Bright persisted with the habit. A reminder of who she had once been, in her previous life as wife and mother of three, happier days when her family was still intact. He looked at her thoughtfully. ‘The newspaper reports said there was blood all over the hotel room.’

‘They exaggerated. There was a little blood. Smears on the floor, some spots on Rickie’s panda. It seemed so vivid then. Spatters of red on white fur. All gone brown now, like faded rust.’

‘You still have it?’ Enzo felt his pulse quicken.

‘Of course. In the end I persuaded the police to let me have it back. It’s the only thing of Rickie’s I still have. The only part of him that still belongs to me.’

‘May I see it?’

For the first time she seemed reluctant to co-operate. ‘Why? Who are you, Mister Macleod?’

‘I used to be a forensic scientist, Angela. Thirty-six years ago, the only thing anyone could have told from the blood they found in Rickie’s hotel room was the blood type. Now, we can tell a whole lot more about a person. Their genetic code, for example. Their DNA. It’s unlikely that whoever took your son will be found in any DNA database. It all happened too long ago for that. But we can at least tell the sex of Rickie’s abductor.’

‘From thirty-six-year-old spots of blood on a cuddly toy?’ She seemed incredulous.

‘With luck, yes. Then we’d know for certain whether it was a man, or maybe your woman at the pool, who took him.’

Angela Bright rang again for the maid, and issued a curt instruction. Then turned back to Enzo. ‘You told me you had news of my son.’

Enzo hesitated, uncertain of how much to tell her. ‘I’ve been trying to track down a missing person,’ he said. He chose his words carefully. ‘In the course of my investigation, I discovered two identical samples of DNA, each of which came from a different person. Which is impossible.’ Again he hesitated. From here there would be no going back. ‘Except in the case of identical twins.’

Even in the gathering darkness, Enzo could see that her face had drained of colour. She was not a stupid woman. ‘And one of them was Billy’s?’

‘Your son, William, yes.’

‘Which means that Rickie is still alive.’

‘It meant he was still alive in 1992. It was from then that we recovered his DNA. I also believe that six years earlier he broke into William’s flat in London and stole his passport, and his identity.’

Enzo watched closely for her reaction. But it almost seemed as if she were no longer there. Her eyes were glazed and distant. Then, in a tiny voice that whispered into the night, she said, ‘I knew it.’ And she dragged herself back to the present, finding focus again on Enzo. ‘It was twelve, fourteen years after he’d been taken, sometime in the mideighties. I was sure it was him. As sure as I’ve been of anything in my life.’

‘You saw him?’

‘In a minimarket in town. He was wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses. For a moment I thought it was Billy. But Billy had gone back to England. He was just standing there, staring at me. And when I saw him, he turned and ran out of the store. I went after him, but by the time I got into the street he was gone.’ Her eyes lifted slowly towards a darkening sky studded with stars. ‘I’ve replayed that moment so many times. You’ve no idea. So often that in the end I began to doubt it had ever happened.’ She looked back at Enzo. ‘Until now.’

The door from the house opened, and the maid emerged, clutching a toy panda, the same size as a child’s teddy bear. It was tousled, and dirty, and threadbare in places. She gave it to the lady of the house, and Angela Bright pressed it to her chest as if it might have been her lost boy. Enzo held out his hand. ‘Can I see?’

Reluctantly she handed it to him, and he very quickly found the spots of dried blood, still caked amongst the clumps of wool. Some of it had flaked off and it’s colour was faded, but there was enough left to obtain a decent sample. Enough to run any number of tests.

He looked up, hardly daring to ask. ‘May I take this? Please. I promise I’ll return it.’

She stared at him, eyes stripped suddenly of all emotion, lacking any sense of self-deception. ‘A forensic scientist recovering samples of my son’s DNA.’ She paused, her expression hardening. ‘What has he done, Mister Macleod? What has my son become?’

Enzo drew a deep breath. There was no longer any way to avoid the truth. ‘I think your son is a murderer, Angela.’

Chapter Thirty-Seven

All light had been leeched from the sky by the night, except for the stars that pricked its blackness. The moon had not yet risen, and the back streets of Cadaquès were almost impenetrably dark. Out of season, its restaurants were closed and its holiday lets empty. Those few residents remaining were locked up tight behind closed shutters, watching television until late, when it would be time to eat.

Enzo made his way carefully down the steeply sloping cobbled street, clutching Rickie Bright’s toy panda in a plastic bag, and carrying with him the memory of a mother’s despair. Thirty-six years of hope, both fulfilled and dashed in the same dreadful moment. He could only imagine how Angela Bright would deal with the truth about her son. In his presence she had been brave, polite. Courteous but cold. God only knew what demons awaited her now that she was left alone to face the night.

Somewhere on the street above him, he heard the sound of footsteps descending through the deserted town. Soft, stealthy footfalls in the dark. The temperature had fallen, but although the evening had not yet turned cold, Enzo felt a shiver of disquiet. He stopped to listen, wondering if perhaps he had imagined it. But no, there they were again. Someone was following him, just out of view beyond the curve of the street.

He turned to his left and hurried down the narrowest of alleyways. There was almost no light at all here, and he had to feel his way along the wall, tripping and almost falling over a short flight of steps leading up to a door that was shut firmly against the night. After a short distance, the alley split into three. One leg of it climbed the hill to his left. One carried straight on. The other descended towards the shore. He could see, beyond the roofs, the first glimmer of moonlight reflected on the still water of the bay. Behind him, he heard the footsteps still following. Faster now, determined not to lose him.

He wondered if Rickie Bright had somehow managed to follow him. Or whether he had simply anticipated his next move. Either way, it would be clear to him beyond doubt, that Enzo knew now who he was. Or, at the very least, who he had been. No point, any longer, in trying to short-circuit an investigation. Only one course would remain open to a desperate man.

Enzo took the turn to his right, leading down towards the bay, and started to run. He could hear the following footsteps increasing in pace, trying to match his. Over his shoulder he caught the merest glimpse of a dark shadow emerging from the labyrinth above, and he squeezed left through a narrow alley, running its length, and then turning right again, descending so steeply that his own momentum was quickly robbing him of control over his legs. The street curved away to his right. Through gaps in the houses he could see streetlights along the waterfront. And almost at the same time, he heard music rising up through the night. An accordion and violins, a Spanish guitar. There were whoops and hollers and the sound of laughter. People. Safety.

At the foot of the hill, the street turned sharply right. Beyond the low wall that bounded its curve, splinters of light forked up into the dark through a weave of rush matting stretched tightly over a wooden frame, a flimsy roof to contain the music and merriment in an open square below. Slithering and sliding on the dew-wet cobbles, Enzo realised he wasn’t going to be able to stop. He raised a foot to brace himself against the wall at the bottom of the hill and pitched up on top of it, arms windmilling as he tried to retain his balance.

He spun around to face back the way he had come, and as he tipped backwards into space, he saw the dark figure of his pursuer turn into the street above. For the briefest of moments he had a sensation of floating, before his full weight landed on the rush matting below. It dipped violently beneath him, breaking his fall, and he thought for half a second that it was going to support him. But then he heard it rip, a harsh tearing sound all along one edge, and it tipped him out of its cradle into a confusion of music and light and bodies.

He landed heavily on a makeshift wooden dancefloor, a softer landing than the cobbles beneath it. Still it knocked all the wind from his lungs. The music stopped very suddenly, and his ears were filled with the sounds of women screaming. Through lights that seemed to be shining directly in his eyes, he saw figures retreating around him like displaced water. Musicians on a small stage were frozen in suspended animation, staring at him in disbelief. Enzo raised a hand to shade his eyes from the light and saw men in dark suits, a young woman all in white. He saw tables set out in the square. People with glasses in their hands, cigars in their mouths. Everyone standing now. He had just dropped in unannounced, and uninvited, on some unsuspecting couple’s wedding night.

A short, stocky man, with black hair oiled back over a balding pate, stooped to help him to his feet. He looked up at the hole in the rush matting above, and a hush descended on the gathering. He dropped his eyes again to look at Enzo and fired off a salvo in Spanish.

Enzo was still trying to catch his breath. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t speak Spanish. English or French.’ He bent to pick up the panda in its bag.

‘Okay, Eenglish,’ the man said. ‘You no invited to thees wedding, señor.’

‘I know. I’m sorry. But someone’s trying to kill me.’ As soon as the words left his mouth he realised how ridiculous they sounded.

The man translated for the assembly, and there were some stifled sniggers. ‘Why someone try keel you in peaceful place like Cadaquès, señor?’

‘He’s a murderer.’ Enzo compounded the madness. ‘He’s been following me. If you’d just call the police…’

‘Señor, in Cadaquès, I am police. Who is thees asesino?’

But before Enzo could answer, they all heard the footsteps running down the stone staircase from the street above, and the guests fell silent. Everyone turned, as the figure of Angela Bright’s maid ran into the circle of light, and stopped suddenly, breathing hard, blinking in the glare, startled and perplexed.

Enzo stared at her in astonishment. She was holding his satchel.

‘Is thees your keeler, señor?’ Again he translated for the others, and now they roared with laughter. Enzo flushed with embarrassment, and the maid held up his satchel. She had no idea what the joke was, but smiled anyway.

Enzo said, ‘I must have left my bag at Señora Bright’s house.’ He almost snatched it from her. ‘Why didn’t you just call after me?’

His translator interpreted for the crowd, eliciting another roar, and some applause. ‘Señor. She could not. Maria Cristina Sanchez Pradell ees muda. Mute. She has not spoken seengle word her whole life.’ He allowed himself a broad grin. ‘You have very veeveed imagination. Señora Sanchez never harm anyone.’

The bride stepped forward, her veil drawn back from a beautifully slender latin face, large black eyes viewing him with amusement. She spoke rapidly and the small man looked towards her bride-groom for confirmation. The young man nodded, and the Cadaquès policeman turned back to Enzo.

‘She say not often tall, dark stranger fall eento wedding. Maybe lucky. How about you stay for drink and dance?’

Enzo looked around the assembled faces watching for his reaction, and for the first time he saw a funny side to it all, a release of tension after his chase through the dark streets of the town believing that Rickie Bright was right behind him. He said, ‘If you put a glass in my hand, I’ll be delighted to drink a toast to the happy couple.’ He looked at the gorgeous young woman smiling at him on her wedding night, and thought how lucky was the young man at her side. They had the whole of the rest of their lives together. His time with Pascale had been so short. But he forced a smile. ‘As long as I get to dance with the bride.’