Cast Iron

Chapter ten

Retired commissaire Michel Bétaille lived in a modest two-bed apartment in a modern block in Bordeaux Bastide, near the botanical gardens just off the Quai des Queyries. From a front room with sliding glass doors on to a narrow balcony, he had a view across the slow-moving pewtery waters of the River Garonne to the Quai Louis XVIII, where négociants had built grand offices along quays from which barrels of Bordeaux wine were once loaded on to the boats that took it all around the world.

Bétaille was younger than Enzo had been expecting. A man in his mid-sixties, and yet he had retired more than twenty years ago. He smiled when Enzo asked him about it. ‘Retired from the police,’ he said. ‘Not from life, or work. As a commissaire I saw too much of the worst of folk. Bad bastards, death and blood. Ruined and wasted lives. Lies and deception. You either get inured to it, or it breaks down your humanity and marks you for life. I was somewhere between the two, and knew that I had to get out before it destroyed me.’

He waved Enzo into a seat by the window.

‘Can I get you a coffee?’

‘Thank you.’

The kitchen, dining and living areas were open-plan. Comfortable living for one. A squeeze for two. Bétaille disappeared behind his kitchen island and primed an espresso maker.

‘You live here on your own?’ Enzo asked above the noise of beans being ground.

Bétaille smiled. ‘Yes. Saw too many marriages fail among my fellow officers, so I was never tempted. Police and families don’t mix. Besides which, I probably just never met the right woman.’ He chuckled. ‘And then you get to a certain age and, you know how it is. You don’t want someone else filling your private space, moving your things around, interfering with your routine.’ Pause. ‘How about you?’

‘Divorced once, widowed once.’

Bétaille glanced towards him. ‘I’m sorry.’

Enzo shrugged. ‘It was all a long time ago.’

Bétaille nodded, and when his machine had forced water at pressure through the freshly ground beans, he brought small black cups of it to place on a coffee table between them, with sugar lumps and spoons. He said, ‘Help yourself.’ Then, ‘I’ve been half expecting you for some time.’

‘Have you?’

He shrugged and sipped his coffee. ‘I’ve been following your progress in the press, Monsieur Macleod. You’ve done an exceptional job on Raffin’s unsolved murders. I knew you would get to Lucie eventually, and that she would probably lead you to me.’

Enzo smiled. ‘Nothing if not predictable, then.’

Bétaille cocked an eyebrow. ‘There must be a couple of killers out there getting pretty nervous by now. If I were you, I’d be watching my back.’

‘Oh, I do. There have already been three attempts on my life.’ And he remembered that dark night in the gallery of the château in Gaillac where someone had tried to stab him to death. The serendipitous quirk of fate which had led to Raffin taking the bullet meant for him in the Rue du Tournon. And, most painful of all, the woman called Anna who had been sent to kill him — a woman he had slept with and who had stirred long-dead emotions. Someone out there was very anxious to see him dead. He laughed it off. ‘So far I’ve led a charmed existence.’ He stirred a single cube of sugar into his coffee. ‘Tell me why you took on the parents’ group.’

He made a moue with his lips. ‘The Bordeaux Six, as the press called them. Referring to the number of girls, of course, not parents.’ He paused and looked like he might be wondering how to frame his next statement. ‘I wasn’t satisfied with the original investigation into the Blanc murders.’

Enzo watched him carefully. ‘Why? Blanc was guilty, wasn’t he? He killed those three girls?’

‘Yes, he was, and he did. But I was never satisfied that I knew why.’

Enzo sipped his coffee. ‘The Chinese would say the why is not important if the accumulated evidence leads conclusively to the killer. And it would seem that it did in this case.’

But Bétaille shook his head. ‘You have to understand your man. I’m sure you know that from your own experience, Monsieur Macleod. There was nothing in Blanc’s background, past or present, that would have led you to believe him capable of murdering those women.’

‘And yet he did.’

‘Yes. But here’s the thing... Although I was satisfied that we had got our man alright, like I said, I was never happy that I knew his motive. So I started digging around in his history, his connections, his friends, searching for some kind of understanding.’

‘And?’

‘I wasn’t just discouraged by the folk upstairs, I was told to stop it. In no uncertain terms.’

‘Did they say why?’

Bétaille breathed his frustration. ‘A waste of police resources on a case already resolved.’ He shook his head. ‘And who could argue with that? Blanc had admitted the murders in court and been sent down for life. No one was going to fund one man’s feeling that something wasn’t quite right.’ He drained his cup. ‘And I suppose that precipitated my decision to take early retirement. It was time to get out.’ He smiled. ‘But then, of course, along came the Bordeaux Six, and I couldn’t resist the chance they presented me to have another look at the whole thing.’

‘You spent two years on it?’

‘Off and on, yes.’

‘And did it bring any greater clarity?’

Bétaille gazed into his empty cup. ‘No, it did not.’

‘What about the six? The parents tell me you found no connections there, either.’

‘No, I didn’t. And I don’t believe there are any. I mean, apart from the obvious. But I don’t think Blanc killed any of those girls.’

‘Why not?’

‘As far as three of the missing were concerned, I couldn’t find a single connection at any level with Blanc or any of his known associates.’ He shrugged. ‘People disappear all the time, Monsieur Macleod. Usually because they want to, for whatever reason.’ He stood up. ‘Would you like another coffee?’

Enzo declined.

‘You don’t mind if I do?’ But he didn’t wait for an answer and busied himself preparing a second espresso. ‘It didn’t help, of course, that I was getting the cold shoulder from my former colleagues. I had anticipated at least some access to inside info. But they shut me out, Monsieur Macleod. People I’d worked with for years, done favours for, helped up the ladder—’ a bitterness crept into his voice — ‘wouldn’t give me anything. Not a goddamn thing!’ He clattered his cup into his saucer. ‘I suppose they’d been warned not to. But I thought, you know, that I’d get at least a nod and a wink. I almost had the sense that they were scared to talk to me.’ He flashed a look towards Enzo. ‘Why would police officers be afraid of talking to a former colleague?’

Enzo just shrugged and shook his head, and wondered if perhaps Bétaille had read more into it all than there really was. Frustrated by his lack of progress in the investigation he had taken on for the Bordeaux Six, it would have been only too easy for him to blame his failure on lack of police cooperation, informal or otherwise. Enzo wanted to keep him on track. ‘What about the other three?’

Thick, black coffee gurgled into Bétaille’s cup. ‘It was well established that Blanc had met Lucie at the offices of Rentrée. But you know, of course, that Rentrée was a Catholic charity for helping newly released prisoners back into society, so she would have met all sorts of criminals in the course of her work. The difference was that Blanc was the only one who wrote her a love letter.’

‘Quite a letter it was, too,’ Enzo said. ‘And, if you asked me to guess, I’d say there had been others before it.’

Bétaille cast him a curious glance as he resumed his seat and sipped his coffee. ‘Why?’

Enzo shrugged. ‘Instinct. Something to do with its intimacy. You don’t achieve that in a single exchange.’

But Bétaille did not seem impressed. ‘Well, there was no other letter found, monsieur. The two would have met just a handful of times at the offices of the charity. Blanc himself admits to having developed an infatuation for her, and claims to have written the letter while he was drunk in a bar.’

‘And the girl with the feather tattoo?’

‘Sally Linol?’ Bétaille shook his head. ‘Yes, she was one of Blanc’s girls. Well in with him, apparently. Known to all the others. But I don’t think he killed her. She cleared out her apartment and left. And that was before any of the murders. She just moved on. A fresh start somewhere else.’

‘What about Monica Robert? The one who was murdered.’

‘Oh, she had been one of Blanc’s alright. But ties had been severed several months before. She was working for some horrible, drug-dealing little pimp that operated out of a backroom in a café in the red-light district. She was found mutilated in a hotel room. A frenzied, sexual murder. Just not Blanc’s style. He had no history of violence towards women.’

‘And yet he strangled three of his girls.’

‘Which brings me back to my original point, monsieur. Why? It was totally out of character. He was a man’s man. He got drunk and into fights. He was a pimp, yes, but everybody said he was good to his girls. There was a soft, maybe even romantic side to him. Well, you’ve read his letter to Lucie. He liked women. Treated his prostitutes with a respect that none of them had been used to from other pimps. So why would he suddenly murder three of them? And here’s the oddest thing of all. Never made public. Even at the trial, because the man pled guilty.’ He paused. ‘All three of those girls had been sedated. Rohypnol, or “roofies”, as they called them on the street: the old date-rape drug. But he never interfered with them sexually, and the chances are all three were unconscious when he strangled them. So they wouldn’t have known anything about it. He didn’t want to hurt them.’

‘Just to kill them.’

‘Yes.’ He drained his second cup. ‘Without rhyme or reason, monsieur. I understand his motivation no better now than I did twenty-two years ago. And it still troubles me.’ He stood up and thrust his hands deep in his pockets, gazing out at sudden sunlight playing on the river. ‘Of course, he’s been visited in prison by a procession of psychologists and psychiatrists over the years, and he spins them all the same bullshit. His mother was a whore, you see. And, one time, the story goes, when he was in the back of the car, he saw her giving a client a blow job.’ He turned withering sarcasm towards Enzo. ‘So naturally, he was killing his mother each time he murdered one of those girls.’

Enzo smiled. ‘Psychology for dummies.’

Bétaille nodded. ‘You said it.’

‘But he killed those three girls for a reason, and you think that the Bordeaux Six are completely unconnected?’

‘That’s exactly right.’

‘So who killed Lucie?’

‘I haven’t the faintest idea, monsieur.’

Enzo felt this thread of his investigation starting to slip away from him. ‘Were there ever any other suspects in the frame for her murder?’

‘Well, I don’t know about suspect, but her boyfriend was interviewed at the time of her disappearance.’

‘And?’

‘There was nothing to connect him to it in any way. He was in Paris the weekend she went missing.’

Enzo had left his 2CV in the station car park at Libourne and taken the train into Bordeaux. It was a half-hourly service and easier than driving into the city. The journey time back was less than thirty minutes. He picked up his car again and nosed the old Citroën through the narrow streets of Libourne and out on to the D670. Using the GPS in his phone he set a course south-west to Lucie’s medieval hometown of Duras, where she had gone to school with the boy who would become her lover.

Richard Tavel lived with his wife and two young children in a house he had inherited from his parents. It was a solid, square, nineteenth-century house on three floors, on the outskirts of Duras, just off the Route de Savignac, and no more than five kilometres from where Lucie had lived with her parents at Château Gandolfo. It was late afternoon when Enzo got there. The day was beginning to fade, and electric lights already burned in windows on the ground floor of the house.

Enzo parked in the street and climbed half a dozen steps to the front door. He heard the sound of ringing somewhere distantly inside the house when he pressed the bell push. After a few moments a shadow appeared beyond the glass, and a woman in her mid-to-late thirties opened the door. She was a plain-looking woman, not unattractive, with thick brown hair drawn back in a severe ponytail. She wore jeans and a T-shirt and not a trace of make-up. She looked at Enzo with enquiring brown eyes. ‘Oui? Can I help you?’

‘I’m looking for Richard Tavel. Do I have the right house?’

At the far end of the hall behind her, a dishevelled-looking man appeared out of the shadows. ‘Who wants to know?’

‘My name’s Enzo Macleod.’ Enzo pronounced his name as the French do — Mac-lee-odd.

The man had stepped into the light by now, and Enzo saw his face pale immediately. He was tall and rangy, a woollen jumper hanging loosely on his angular frame. He didn’t fill his cargo pants either, and they concertinaed around bare feet.

‘Oh, yes...’ he said uncertainly. As if he should have known. ‘You’d better come in.’

His wife looked at him, surprised, and from somewhere at the back of the house Enzo heard the burble of a TV and the voices of children. But Tavel made no attempt to explain to her, and Enzo saw his reluctance even to meet her eye. He also saw her reluctance to let this stranger in. So he forced the issue and squeezed past her into the hall.

‘What’s all this about?’ she said.

Tavel forced a smile. ‘I’ll tell you later, Magalie.’ And to Enzo, ‘We can talk in my study, monsieur.’

Enzo followed him up the stairs, aware of Magalie’s eyes on them, until a child’s cry of pain sent her running through to the back of the house. The first-floor landing was dark, and Tavel pushed open the door into a large, square room and turned on the light. His study was sparsely furnished. An antique desk and captain’s chair, and a couple of worn leather armchairs stood around on polished floorboards. A large mirror hung above the fireplace, the walls festooned with framed family photos. He closed the door and said, in a voice tight with tension, ‘I just knew you were going to turn up on my doorstep one of these days.’

‘Then, you should be well prepared,’ Enzo said.

Tavel drew a deep breath. ‘My wife knows nothing about this, and I’d like to keep it that way.’

Enzo frowned. ‘Exactly what is it she knows nothing about?’

‘My connection to the disappearance of Lucie Martin.’

Enzo raised an eyebrow. ‘Oh? And what is your connection to her disappearance?’

‘None! Absolutely none. And if you understood anything about what happened, you’d know that.’ He wandered off towards the window, wringing his hands. He was in a state of some considerable agitation when he turned back to face Enzo. ‘I am a happily married man now, Monsieur Macleod. I have a young family. Magalie’s from the Aubrac and knows nothing about Lucie’s murder, or my relationship with her. I’d like it to stay that way.’

‘Well, I won’t tell her if you don’t.’ Enzo smiled. ‘Always assuming, of course, that you are prepared to answer my questions.’

‘What questions? She’s been dead more than twenty years, and everyone knows I had nothing to do with it.’

‘Do they?’

‘The police interviewed me only once, for less than an hour. They let me go as soon as they were able to confirm that I really was in Paris the weekend she went missing.’

Enzo nodded. ‘It’s amazing how mud sticks, though. I remember a cinema manager being questioned by police about the murder of a young girl in Glasgow. They grilled him for forty-eight hours before letting him go. Everyone assumed he’d done it, and that the police just couldn’t prove it. Didn’t matter that they caught the real killer three months later. By then that cinema manager had lost his job, his wife had left him, and he ended up committing suicide.’

Tavel sighed heavily. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘Tell me about you and Lucie.’

Tavel perched, then, on the edge of one of the armchairs, leaning forward, feet crossed one over the other, still wringing his hands in his lap. He stared into an abyss of time and tragedy. ‘I’d known her from primary school. Then in our first year at the lycée I took her to the end-of-term dance. I’d always, you know, had a kind of soft spot for her. She was so pretty, with those blue eyes and soft golden curls. Goodness knows where she got them from, because her dad was always going on about their Italian heritage.’ He glanced up at Enzo, but his eyes flickered quickly away again. ‘We started going out regularly. All through our teen years. Childhood sweethearts, I suppose you could say we were.’

‘And when you finished school?’

‘I got a place at Bordeaux University, and Lucie didn’t. Not that she wasn’t bright enough.’ He seemed to feel the need to apologise for her. ‘She just wasn’t interested in continuing her education.’

‘But she still ended up in Bordeaux.’

‘Yes. A job with the prisoners charity, Rentrée. Took it to be close to me. Or so she said. My folks weren’t that well off...’ He flicked his head towards the house. ‘They inherited this place from my mum’s parents. So I was in digs with half a dozen other students in a pretty seedy apartment block near the university. Lucie’s dad bought her a studio.’ This said with what Enzo perceived to be the green monster of envy sitting on his shoulder. ‘There was money in the Martin family, and her father was happy to indulge her in whatever took her fancy.’ Again he darted a look at Enzo. ‘In anything and everything except me. He never really liked me very much. Not good enough for his daughter. Didn’t say it in so many words, but made sure I knew in other ways.’

‘And you never stayed at her studio?’

‘Oh yes, I did. All the time. Except when I had a lecture first thing in the morning. Her place wasn’t exactly close to the uni. It was amazing, those first few months. Free from parental constraints. Free to do exactly as we wanted, when we wanted.’

Enzo watched him closely. ‘I sense a “but” somewhere in the not-too-distant future.’

Tavel shrugged, and the tiny laugh that slipped from his lips was entirely without humour. ‘She dumped me.’ His fingers seemed locked together and his hands made a single fist, as if he was indulging in some desperate kind of prayer. ‘Not immediately. I mean, there was no “It’s finished” speech. It just became “inconvenient” for me to stay over. We saw less and less of each other, and I could feel her slipping away.’

‘Did you have any sense of why?’

Tavel simply shrugged. ‘She’d found someone else.’

‘She told you that?’

‘No.’

‘So how did you know?’

Tavel was avoiding eye contact with Enzo again. ‘Educated guess.’

A tiny gasp of exasperation escaped Enzo’s lips. ‘Because, God knows, it couldn’t possibly have been that she’d simply lost interest in you.’

Tavel looked sharply at Enzo, the implication of vanity had not escaped him, and Enzo saw a little spike of angry pride pierce his agitation. ‘I saw her with him.’ Tension levelled his voice.

‘Where?’

And Enzo saw embarrassment, and maybe shame, cloud his anger. ‘I waited outside the offices of Rentrée one night and followed her. She met this man, an older man, in a café. I can’t tell you how shocked I was as I saw her reach up and kiss him when they met. Just a brushing of the lips. But it was so casual and intimate, you could tell immediately that this wasn’t some new relationship.’

Enzo watched him replay the scene in his mind’s eye.

‘They slipped into a stall at the back of the café. It was dark and I couldn’t see too well. And I couldn’t go in without being seen myself. But I saw them holding hands across the table.’

‘And how did that make you feel?’

Tavel’s knuckles whitened. ‘Hurt. Angry.’

‘Did you recognise the man?’

There was an almost imperceptible pause, but Enzo didn’t miss it. ‘No.’

‘So you had no idea who he was?’

‘No, I didn’t.’

Enzo stood watching him in a silence that went on for so long that Tavel was finally compelled to lift his eyes and look at him. Almost immediately, they heard his wife calling up from downstairs. ‘Richard! The boys are waiting for you to help them with their homework.’

Enzo said, ‘You know, this is material evidence in a murder case. Evidence that you withheld from the police.’

Fear widened Tavel’s eyes. ‘I didn’t think it was important.’

‘I’m sure you’ll be able to explain that to them when they take you in for questioning again.’

‘Richard!’ His wife called once more, and Enzo could hear the irritation in her voice.

There was almost panic in Tavel’s. ‘Be down in a minute.’

‘So,’ Enzo said, ‘you had absolutely no idea who this man was?’

Tavel sucked in his lower lip and bit down on it, getting to his feet and turning away towards the window. ‘No, I didn’t,’ he said, and Enzo could see his anguished reflection in the window in front of him. ‘Not at the time.’

Enzo frowned. ‘But you did later?’

Tavel nodded. And after a long pause, ‘When Blanc was arrested for the murder of those prostitutes his picture was all over the papers.’

And Enzo knew he was just a breath away from a breakthrough in the Lucie Martin case. ‘It was Blanc she met at the café?’

Tavel turned, then, an appeal for understanding in his eyes. ‘I didn’t want to get involved. There was no point in telling the police I’d seen her with Blanc.’

‘Because that would mean admitting you’d been following her. And the press would have had a field day with the whole story, wouldn’t they? Childhood sweetheart jilted for serial killer.’

‘If it was Blanc who killed her, he got locked up for those other killings anyway, so what difference would it have made?’

‘The difference is, Monsieur Tavel,’ Enzo said slowly, ‘it would have given you a clear motive for murder.’

‘Except it couldn’t have been me. I was in Paris!’ There was an almost hysterical edge to Tavel’s voice now.

And Enzo recalled what old Guillaume Martin had told him: I didn’t spend all those years sitting on the bench, monsieur, without coming to the realisation that alibis can be fabricated. He said, ‘You might have had an alibi for the weekend she vanished. But who knows when she was murdered, or where you were at the time?’

And every last drop of blood drained out of Tavel’s face.

When the door closed, Enzo knew he had left behind him a house fibrillating with tension. He stood for a moment on the top step, wondering how Tavel would explain him to his wife. What new lies he would fabricate to conceal a past filled with self-perceived shame. And — who knew? — maybe even guilt.

The moon was already rising in a clear sky, although it was not yet fully dark. The day was hanging on, reluctant to give way to the night. Enzo reached his car, pulling his keys from the pocket of his cargoes, and saw the note pinned to his windscreen beneath the wiper. A single white sheet, folded once. He lifted the wiper to retrieve it and opened it up. Four words. Meet me at the château.

For a moment he wondered which château. Did the writer of the note mean Château Gandolfo? Or the château right here in town? He lifted his head and saw the dark shape of Château Duras, with its circular tower pricking the sky, silhouetted against the western horizon, and realised it was there that he was meant to meet with the author of this message. What he couldn’t divine was why, or who that author might be. And he remembered Michel Bétaille’s words in Bordeaux: There must be a couple of killers out there getting pretty nervous by now. If I was you, I’d be watching my back.