Cast Iron

Chapter eleven

It took him no more than two minutes to drive through the narrow arteries of the old town and emerge into the Place Jean Bousquet, which sloped down to where Château Duras stood in a commanding position above the valley below. A couple of cafés spilled light out into the evening, but there was no one sitting at the tables outside. It was getting too cold now, even for the smokers.

He parked his car under some trees and walked the rest of the way to the foot of the square where the château rose into the night and the lights of a tourist shop fell in rectangles across the paving stones.

The entrance to the château, through an arched gateway, was blocked by wooden fencing, and the château itself simmered in darkness beyond it. Access was gained through the tourist shop, which sold tickets for tours. But the note had said at the château, not in the château, and so Enzo shuffled impatiently on the cobbles outside, stamping his feet against the cold and watching warily for anyone approaching on foot or by car.

He was almost rigid with tension, and wondered again who had left the note, and why. He had the most awful sense of it being a trap, and yet he couldn’t see what anyone could do to him in plain view like this. Although, as he looked around, there was not a soul in sight. He began to think that he should not have come at all. And yet, if there was a chance of at least throwing some light on the murder of Lucie Martin...

He decided to go into the shop and ask if someone had left anything for him there.

A bell tinkled as he pushed the door open into the light. Shelves were lined with books and brochures and maps and tourist guides. A till stood on a counter immediately to his left as he went in. But there was no one there.

He called out, ‘Hello?’ And waited. Then called again. But there was no response. He walked around to the far end of the counter and saw another door leading out to the other side of the fencing that sealed off the castle. This was clearly the entrance to the château that tourists took when they had bought their tickets. He stood awkwardly for a moment, hoping that someone would appear, before opening the door and heading out into the tall, arched passageway that led into the castle forecourt. One half of the huge metal gates that guarded the entrance stood open, and he passed through the arch and into a cobbled square flooded with the light of a moon rising in a sky studded now by stars.

‘Hello!’ His voice echoed around the courtyard. Walls on either side of it dropped away twenty feet or more into what might once have been a moat, but was now a bank of freshly mown grass. At the far side a flight of steps led up to a stone terrace with doors opening into the château itself. There were no lights on anywhere that he could see, except for those that twinkled distantly in the vast swathe of countryside that fell away below.

One of the doors leading into the castle stood partially open, and he found himself drawn unaccountably towards it. The soles of his leather boots scraped on the stone of the steps as he climbed to the terrace. Moving more cautiously now, he pushed the half-open door wide and stepped into a grand salon, empty apart from the slabs of moonlight that fell across the tiled mosaic floor from the windows all along the side of it. There were three vast fireplaces, one on the facing wall, and one at either end. Each had a portrait hanging above it, and Enzo imagined a great table running the length of the room, all three fires blazing, and a banquet in progress, peopled by, among others, the faces in the portraits. But in the blink of an eye the image was gone, leaving only scaffolding at the far end, and loops of red silk draped between chrome poles barring the doors that led to the rest of the château. And silence. A quiet so profound that Enzo found himself holding his breath in case he disturbed it.

And then a noise outside filled him with sudden fright and apprehension. How foolish had he been to come in here on his own? He threw the door wide and stepped out boldly on to the terrace, prepared to confront whoever might be there. But the terrace was empty, as was the courtyard below.

Which was when he noticed that the lights in the tourist shop beyond the arch had gone out, and the gate through which he had entered was firmly shut. In sudden panic he ran down the stairs and across the cobbled yard, moonlight casting his shadow off to his right as he ran. He reached the gates, hands grasping the cold metal of iron uprights and shaking them as hard as he could. They barely moved, and he saw that a thick chain wound around the old lock was solidly padlocked. Someone had locked him in, damn it!

Across the road, a car started up. Then headlights raked across the square as it turned and accelerated towards the top end of the Place Jean Bousquet, where a narrow road led away to the south.

‘Shit!’ Enzo cursed under his breath. He reached into his pocket for his mobile phone and felt his heart sink as he pictured it still sitting in its dashboard holder where it had been in use as a GPS. Idiocy compounding idiocy! He rattled the gate again in anger and frustration, and shouted, ‘Help!’ He heard his voice echo away across the square, but there was no one to hear it. Letting his eyes close, and taking a deep breath, he bellowed as loudly as he could. ‘Help! For God’s sake, is there anybody there?’ The lack of any response told him that there almost certainly wasn’t, and he felt himself slump in despair. What was wrong with these people? Where were they all? Why did people in rural France all vanish the moment darkness fell? He felt sure that if he waited long enough, some smoker would eventually step out of one of the cafés for a cigarette, and then they would surely hear him when he shouted. He waited and waited, for what seemed like endless minutes, and no one appeared. What an inconvenient moment, he thought angrily, for everyone in the world suddenly to give up smoking. He threw more imprecations at the night and turned back into the shimmering moonlight of the cobbled courtyard, walking briskly towards the left-hand wall. There, he peered down into darkness, shadow cast by the moon, and knew that it was far too big a drop to risk jumping.

He turned back into the courtyard, trying to stay calm. There had to be an office somewhere, a place for administrative staff. And there would be a telephone, so that he could call for help. Even if he had to kick a door down to get to it.

He headed back towards the steps leading up to the grand salon, and noticed for the first time that there were steps at the side of them descending into the cellars. It was profoundly dark down there, and it took several moments before he decided to risk it. What else was he going to do?

With fingers tracing his progress along the wall, he took one step at a time down into darkness. When he reached the foot of the stairs he saw light spilling out into a narrow corridor from an open door. On the wall outside the door a plaque read, Salle ‘Emmanuel Félicité’. Beware of the stairs. There was a yellow square, and the numbers “1... 9”. With a sinking heart Enzo realised this was some kind of numbered and colour-coded tourist trail through the château. The light came from a window inside the room of Emmanuel Félicité, moonlight divided into squares by panelled glass. In the centre of the room, raised on a plinth and protected by glass, was a model of the château itself. Beyond it a door opened on to a railed corridor. There was an arrow on the wall, a yellow square, and the numbers 2... 9. The next point of interest on the tour. No office, no phone, no way out.

Enzo’s sense of despondency increased, and he turned out into the corridor again to retrace his steps and climb back up to the courtyard.

Moonlight shadows and whispers came tumbling down the steps to meet him. Two men moving with great caution towards the stairs. Although he could not yet see them because of the arch that led to the steps, their shadows almost reached his feet, and behind their whispers he could hear the scrape of their shoes on the cobbles. Then he saw the shadow of an outstretched arm, a gun in its hand, and sheer panic gripped him. He turned and ran back into the Salle Emmanuel Félicité. All he could think to do was follow the yellow squares on a circuit that would surely take him away from these men, who could be intent on doing him nothing but harm.

Black railings led him down stairs to a dog-leg that took him to a further flight, descending even deeper into darkness. A sign told him that he was heading for La Boulangerie. And, in an absurd moment of fleeting incongruity, he realised that they must have made their own bread in the castle, back in the day.

Behind him, he heard footsteps clattering on stone. The men, who had so cautiously approached the stairs above him, had now given up any attempt at subtlety. They knew he knew they were there, and were openly hunting him down.

Enzo ran into the boulangerie, moonlight flooding in through the window, and nearly died of fright as he saw a figure standing by a long wooden table, wielding the paddle with which bakers of old would have slid uncooked bread into the wood-burning oven. A short, sharp involuntary cry broke from his lips before he realised that the figure was a mannequin. A dummy surrounded by fake props, recreating the bakery as it must once have been. And this was a dead end.

He turned back into the corridor and out through an arched door into a long gallery lined by photographs. A sign pointed him towards La cuisine ‘aux Cent fagots’ and he sprinted down the length of the gallery, aware of the breathing and footsteps and voices of the men on his tail, just moments behind him. In desperation he turned into the old kitchen and collided with yet more mannequins. A plastic whole roast pig rotating on a spit in a cold fireplace. Yet another dead end. Fleeing back into the gallery, he caught sight of his pursuers running into the boulangerie, and he turned and sprinted in the opposite direction. Past the Room of Secrets, up stairs, turning left and right in blind panic, crashing into women in long aprons populating the Second Kitchen. A glass case of crockery toppled and smashed on the floor, splinters of porcelain exploding across the stone flags.

He had lost all sense of where he was now, the tourist itinerary long since abandoned. He found stairs leading up and took them, two at a time. Reaching a landing, and then a room, then following the spiral ever higher until he emerged into a rectangular inner courtyard, open to the sky far above, and surrounded by stone galleries that looked down on him from all sides.

The heavy breathing and footfalls of the chasing men followed him up the stairwell, and he ran across the courtyard to yet more steps on the far side. Here, he entered a hallway mired in darkness, and felt his way along a wood-panelled wall, knocking over a standing sign before stumbling through a doorway into even deeper gloom. He was completely disorientated and felt once more for the wall, fingers connecting with a rocker switch that triggered a sudden explosion of light from the far side of the room, glass walls rising up into a void high overhead. Behind the glass, ghostly figures in white wailed and screeched into the night. All the hairs stood up on Enzo’s neck and he fled in panic, tripping over the fallen sign and sprawling full length on the floor. As he scrambled to his feet he saw, by the reflected light of the room he had just left, an arrow beneath the legend Salle aux Fantômes — the Ghost Room.

He ran. Blindly. Back out into another gallery of some kind, and up steps to where an open door led on to a balustraded walkway high up on the side of the castle. At the far end of it, he found an opening on to yet another spiral stairway. The opening was narrow and, as he turned into it, he felt something snag the band that held his ponytail in place, pulling it free, and his hair cascaded down over his shoulders.

He forced his way on to the stairs, which twisted endlessly upwards, narrowing at every turn. On a tiny landing, he swung into an even tinier room with a low ceiling and arched windows set into each corner, overlooking the red-tiled roofs of castle buildings below. No way out. So he turned back, squeezing himself into an impossibly narrow spiral, climbing ever more steeply upwards, steps almost too short, even at their widest, to accommodate his feet. And he thought, People running away always go up. Something an old policeman had told him once. How stupid! Because there would always come a point when you could climb no higher.

His jacket tearing on ragged stonework, he finally pushed himself out from the top of the stairwell into the open air of a large, stone-flagged, balustraded circle. And this was it. The point at which he could go no higher. He realised with an inner sense of despair that he had just emerged on to the top of the tower. The only way down was over the edge, and certain death. Or back the way he had come, to meet his pursuers on the stairs.

The moon-washed landscape that fell away all around him shimmered into the distance, the lights of the town twinkling to the south, occasional clusters of light in villages and farms punctuating the plain that stretched off to the north and west. He saw a couple of rugby pitches, green and inviting under floodlights, not that far away. The tiny figures of rugby players in training, running and throwing the ball and shouting to each other.

And from the stairwell behind him, the sound of leather on stone and breath rasping in lungs. In a moment of sudden calm, Enzo turned to face them, determined not to go down without a fight. ‘Come on, you bastards!’ he shouted at the night, as two overweight and perspiring gendarmes tumbled, one over the other, from the stairwell, clutching their pistols and gasping for breath. They stared in amazement at the big, mad-eyed man with hair tangling wildly over his shoulders, and it would have been hard to say who was the more astonished — the gendarmes, or Enzo.