Cast Iron

Chapter twelve

Enzo sat, dishevelled and dispirited, in the interview room of the gendarmerie. With an elastic band found in his bag he had tied up his hair again, but strands of it still hung loose. He had been here for more than two hours, questioned relentlessly for the first of them by a humourless and po-faced officer demanding to know how he had broken into the château and why. No matter how many times Enzo told him it was all a misunderstanding, and that he had been accidentally locked in, he was regarded with patent disbelief.

Eventually, the officer had given him pencil and paper and asked him to make a list of people who might vouch for him, with phone numbers, if possible. Enzo had been forced to think about that. Locally, there was the retired judge, Lucie’s father. In Paris, there was Roger, although he knew the police invariably disliked and distrusted journalists. And then, of course, there was Commissaire Hélène Taillard in Cahors. Who better to speak for his good character than a senior police officer? He just hoped that she didn’t hold their nearly relationship against him. It had always, he recalled, been he who, in the end, had shied away from going any further than friendship. To her obvious disappointment.

For the second hour he had sat twiddling his thumbs under relentless electric light, his backside growing numb on an unforgiving plastic chair. From somewhere else in the building he had heard the chatter of keyboards, phones ringing, the distant sound of muffled voices, but no one had come through the door for nearly an hour and a quarter. A window high up in the wall was barred. Beyond it, the darkness seemed so profound it was almost tangible.

He was beginning to think they had simply forgotten about him when the door swung open and his interrogator stood, glowering, in the doorway. He stuck out his jaw and jerked his head towards the corridor behind him. ‘You can go.’

Enzo got up, surprised. Previous encounters with gendarmes had usually led to a blizzard of paperwork, forms in triplicate, complaints drawn up, disclaimers to be signed. But perhaps they were as embarrassed by the whole thing as he was and were happy simply to pretend it never happened.

‘Commissaire Taillard has vouched for your good standing, and Monsieur Martin is here to collect you.’

Enzo felt an enormous wave of relief, but the gendarme stopped him in the doorway. ‘Just the small matter of the damage at the château,’ he said.

Enzo said, ‘Tell them to bill me and I’ll send them a cheque by return.’

The officer fixed him with a hard stare, then stood reluctantly aside.

Guillaume Martin was waiting in reception and cast curious eyes over him. Enzo realised he must present a somewhat bizarre figure, with his jacket torn and hair hanging in shreds. But Martin made no comment. The two men shook hands solemnly, and it wasn’t until they were outside that the old man looked at him again and said, ‘What on earth happened?’

Enzo explained about the note, and wandering into the castle only to find himself accidentally locked in. He said, ‘Apparently someone heard me shouting from inside and called the police, who thought I was an intruder.’

Martin frowned. ‘Who left the note?’

Enzo had no desire to go into all the previous attempts on his life, real or imagined, or his belief that someone, somewhere, wanted to stop his investigation in its tracks. So all he said was, ‘I have no idea.’

‘And what’s your next move?’

Enzo sighed. ‘I’ll drive home, I suppose.’

‘Nonsense!’ Martin looked at his watch. ‘Come and stay again at the château and Mireille will fix you something to eat. It’s far too late and far too far to drive home now. Besides, I want to hear what progress you made today.’

The second glass of wine very nearly rendered Enzo unconscious. His long day, followed by his exertions in the château, the interrogation and the interminable wait at the gendarmerie, had left him physically and mentally exhausted. Now, as he started to relax in the warmth of Mireille’s kitchen, washing down her leftover but deliciously tender boeuf bourguignon with some fine Saint-Emilion, fatigue swept over him and he felt his eyes growing heavy.

But Guillaume Martin wasn’t about to let him rest. He wanted to know exactly what Michel Bétaille had said to him, and listened attentively as Enzo related their conversation. It clearly didn’t please him, and he threw his napkin on the table in disgust.

‘Two years, we paid that man,’ he said. ‘And he came up with absolutely nothing.’

At least nothing, Enzo thought, that any of the parents wanted to hear. But he didn’t say so, and decided to change the direction of their conversation. ‘I’m assuming there was an autopsy, Monsieur Martin. On Lucie’s body.’ He immediately corrected himself. ‘Bones.’ And then glanced self-consciously towards Madame Martin, aware that she found talk of Lucie’s murder difficult to deal with, even after all this time. The old lady kept her eyes on the table.

Martin seemed distracted, even annoyed by Enzo’s switch of subject. ‘There was,’ he said.

Enzo knew that it wouldn’t have been much of an autopsy. The collection of bones that they had recovered from the lake would have been very little for the pathologist to go on. But his years spent working as a forensic scientist had taught him that every last detail counted, no matter how small. He said, ‘I wonder where I might be able to get a copy of it?’

Martin placed his hands flat on the table in front of him. ‘Well, that’s easy. I have one.’ He inclined his head a little. ‘One of the perks of being a judge. One has a certain amount of influence. Or used to.’

‘Could you make me a copy?’

‘Of course.’ He stood up, then paused. ‘Who was it you went to see in Duras?’

Enzo was not at all sure he wanted to get into this right now, particularly in the presence of Lucie’s mother, but he didn’t see how he could avoid it. ‘Richard Tavel,’ he said, and both Martin and his wife looked at him in surprise.

‘Why would you bother with that waster?’ Martin said. ‘I rue the day my daughter ever met him. He would never have been good enough for her, monsieur. That’s the trouble with sending your children to state school. They mix with all the wrong people. We could have sent her to the private Catholic collège in Bergerac. But that would have meant her boarding out, and neither of us wanted that.’

‘He was interviewed by the police at the time,’ Enzo said.

‘Yes, but he was in Paris the weekend she disappeared, so he couldn’t have had anything to do with it.’

‘Perhaps. But you told me yourself, experience has taught you that alibis are not to be trusted.’

Which stopped the old judge in his tracks. ‘You mean he wasn’t in Paris?’

‘I didn’t say that. According to the police, his story checked out. But he wasn’t entirely honest with them in other ways.’

Martin sat down again, frowning. ‘What do you mean?’

‘About why Lucie had dumped him.’

The Martins exchanged puzzled glances. ‘I don’t understand,’ Madame Martin said. ‘Dumped him?’

And for the first time it became clear to Enzo that no one, other than Lucie and Tavel, knew that their relationship had ended. He said, ‘Lucie had met someone else. But it wasn’t until Tavel followed her one night that he saw her with him.’

‘Who?’ Colour flushed high on Lucie’s mother’s cheeks.

‘He didn’t know him immediately. Not until after his arrest.’ He paused. ‘It was Régis Blanc.’

Enzo was unprepared for the ferocity with which the old man hammered his clenched fists down on the table, making plates and crockery jump. ‘Rubbish!’ Spittle gathered immediately on his lips, and his face flushed red. He stood up suddenly and his chair fell over behind him, clattering on the tiles. ‘There is not the slightest possibility that my daughter was having a relationship with that man! Not a chance in hell, monsieur!’

‘Guillaume...’ Madame Martin reached a calming hand towards him, but if he saw it he ignored it.

‘That boy, Tavel, is a waster and a liar—’ he stabbed a finger at Enzo — ‘and if you go spreading scurrilous rumours like that to sully the memory of my poor dead daughter I can assure you, monsieur, you will get not one iota of cooperation from me.’

All of Enzo’s fatigue was banished in an instant. He stood up, taken aback by Martin’s outburst. ‘I’m only telling you what Tavel told me.’

‘So why didn’t he tell anyone at the time? It’s just lies. Lies!’

Madame Martin had rounded the table and placed both hands on her husband’s arm, crooking her elbow around his and looking up with great concern into the old man’s face. ‘Calm yourself, Guillaume. Monsieur Macleod’s just doing his job. I’m sure that nothing said between us will go any further than this room.’ She glanced at Enzo for confirmation, and he shrugged noncommittally, hoping that Martin might interpret that as an affirmative. There was no way he could guarantee keeping any of his findings private. ‘Now, you go and make that copy of the autopsy report for Monsieur Macleod, and I’ll pour you a small cognac.’

Martin took a moment to control himself, breathing stertorously through his nose. And then he swivelled and strode out of the kitchen.

His wife took a deep breath and turned towards Enzo. ‘I am so sorry, monsieur. Guillaume has always been inclined to a quick temper, and when it comes to anything to do with Lucie he’ll not hear a word against her.’ She righted Martin’s chair and sat down where he had been sitting, gazing off into space. ‘Personally, I always thought Richard was a rather nice young man.’ She turned worried eyes on Enzo. ‘Did he really say he’d seen Lucie with that man?’

Enzo nodded, and she lowered her eyes to stare at her hands in front of her. ‘Oh dear,’ was all she said.

Enzo sat down and reached for the bottle of Saint-Emilion, pouring another glass with slightly trembling hands. Martin’s reaction, at the end of a long and difficult day, had caught him off balance and a little more alcohol seemed like a good idea.

‘I’ll pour us all a cognac,’ Madame Martin said, and she stood and went off to get glasses and a bottle. When she returned, she poured generous measures into the glasses, and she and Enzo sat in awkward silence, waiting for her husband to return.

It was nearly fifteen minutes before Martin came back into the kitchen clutching a photocopy of his daughter’s autopsy — a meagre document, which led Enzo to wonder what had taken him so long to copy it. All trace of his temper tantrum had vanished, and he handed Enzo the document as if nothing had happened. ‘It’s not very long,’ he said. ‘The médecin légiste had, in truth, very little to work on. And I’m not sure you’ll find much illumination from it. I have read it many times. I keep imagining I’ll see something I’ve missed. But I never do.’

‘I’ve poured us a brandy,’ Madame Martin said, holding out a glass towards him.

But he waved it aside. ‘I’ve had enough tonight, Mireille. It’s time for bed, I think. Don’t you agree, Monsieur Macleod?’ And no matter how much Enzo might have enjoyed a glass or two of cognac, his host was making it clear that their evening was over.

For the second night running Enzo sat up in his bed at Château Gandolfo, unable to sleep. An hour ago he would have drifted away the moment his eyes closed, but Martin’s outburst had brought the events of the day back into sharp focus, and he couldn’t stop it all going round and round in his mind. Bétaille’s cool assertion that none of the Bordeaux Six, including Lucie, could be linked to Régis Blanc’s short, lethal and completely inexplicable killing spree. Richard Tavel’s revelation that Lucie had dropped him for a relationship with Blanc — something that chimed very much with Enzo’s reading of intimacy in Blanc’s letter. His adventure, or misadventure, at Château Duras. Who had left him that note, and why had they wanted to meet him? And then Martin’s extraordinary display of temper at the merest suggestion of a romantic link between Lucie and Blanc. What concerned Enzo most was that everything he had learned in the course of today had brought no greater clarity. If anything, he had simply stirred up more mud in the water.

He turned, finally, to the autopsy report lying on the quilt beside him. It weighed almost nothing as he lifted it. A life summed up in a few pages of observation gleaned from a handful of bones. And it didn’t take long to read. Identity had been confirmed by comparing teeth with dental records. DNA had not been required. The three hyoid bones had been recovered individually, and it was impossible to tell whether or not they had been separated by force in the act of strangulation, or whether they had subsequently separated as the soft tissue decayed or was eaten by fish. But there was no doubt that the left, greater horn, or cornu, had been fractured, as in one of Blanc’s victims. Cause of death, however, was impossible to determine.

Enzo knew that a baby was born with 270 bones, some of which would gradually fuse together, leaving it with 206 as a mature adult. Lucie would not have reached full skeletal maturity at the age of twenty, and so she would have had more than 206 bones. Only 178 were actually recovered.

But what most interested Enzo was a fracture to the left side of the skull, which the pathologist had attributed to damage done when it was being retrieved from the mud. According to his report it had been necessary to dig the bones out of the dried silt in the exposed bed of the lake, and whoever had been sent to do it had been less than careful with the blade of his shovel.

Unfortunately, the photocopied photographs that accompanied the report were not clear enough to allow Enzo to examine the fracture. It seemed to him extraordinarily careless to have damaged the skull in that way, when the bones would almost certainly have been considered those of a murder victim. And yet in all likelihood it would have been a low-ranking gendarme without crime-scene training who had been dispatched to do the job. So was it really that surprising? Still, Enzo was troubled, and knew that he was going to have to pursue it further.

Finally, he slipped the report on to the bedside table and switched off the light. He turned over on to his right side, pulling his left leg up into a semi-foetal position, his right leg stretched out towards the foot of the bed, and closed his eyes. Several minutes later he opened them again. Sleep was a long way off, and he knew it. And so he sat up, turned on the light again and pulled a book from his bag. There was nothing like a good book to fill those endless hours of a sleepless night, and a murder mystery by Scots author Val McDermid seemed like a good distraction.

He wasn’t sure when sleep had finally crept up on him, but he woke at four a.m. with his book lying open on the floor and his neck stiff from sleeping at an impossible angle. The bedside light was still burning, and he thought he couldn’t have been asleep for long. He turned it out and curled up again, as he had done several hours earlier. And again, within minutes, knew that he was not going to re-enter the land of nod.

With a sigh of frustration he sat up once more, swinging his legs out of bed and crossing to the window, moonlight flooding in across bare floorboards. It was a painfully clear night. With no light pollution for miles around, the sky was the deepest inky black, crusted by many more stars than he ever knew existed. The Milky Way was like a cloud brush-stroked into the fabric and texture of it. And suddenly he felt the need of air. He wanted to be out there, under that sky, free of the confines of this room, this château, these people. Free to think with clarity.

He dressed quickly and made his way tentatively down the stairs, careful not to make a noise. The Martins, he knew, slept in another part of the house, but he did not want to waken them.

The door in the hallway at the foot of the stairs was locked, but the key was still in it, and he turned it to let himself out. He felt the cold on his face immediately, and buttoned his jacket and turned up his collar.

He took the path that followed the original Roman road along the front of the house, and stepped on to grass that was silver with dew. If the temperature dropped any lower it would freeze, and the day would dawn in a few short hours to a landscape blanketed white with frost.

Retracing the route that he and Martin had taken the other day on their return from the lake, he descended the hill into the darkness of the woods. Fractured moonlight fell between myriad branches casting deep shadows in the undergrowth. But it was easy enough to follow the animal track that led down towards the water.

A sudden noise brought him to a standstill, and he listened intently. Nothing. And for a moment he began to doubt that he had heard anything at all. Then, there it was again. Something or someone moving through the trees, not twenty metres away. Slow, cautious steps. And Enzo felt his heart rate rising, perspiration beading his forehead in spite of the cold. Suddenly, those careful steps turned into a run and came crashing towards him, and he very nearly cried out. A white stag materialised suddenly in the moonlight, stopping unexpectedly on the path, almost within touching distance.

Enzo gazed at it with a mixture of astonishment, and relief, and then pure awe. It seemed huge, breath bursting in condensing clouds from its nostrils, its coat washed almost silver in the moonlight. Enzo had never seen a white stag before, but he knew the legend. An old Scottish folk tale. That if you saw a white stag, someone close to you was going to die. And he stood transfixed, staring at the creature, which stared back at him with large, round, black eyes. Its antlers moved through broken light as it tilted its head, unblinking in its gaze, and Enzo could not imagine what it was thinking. Was it scared? Bemused? Angry at this night intruder invading its territory? It coughed into the night and scraped the path with its hoof, and Enzo could not bring himself to move. Then it turned, without another sound, and went crashing off through the woods, vanishing somewhere down near the lake, where Enzo could see flashes of broken black water reflecting the moonlight.

He stood, breathing heavily for some minutes, watching his own breath billowing in front of him. He was not a superstitious man, and he did not believe in the supernatural, but there was something about this encounter with the white stag in the dark of the woods, miles from anywhere, that left him feeling deeply unsettled. And a shiver ran through him that was not attributable to the cold.

Finally, he shook himself free of the spell that the stag had somehow cast, and he carried on down towards the water’s edge. When he reached the point where the trees opened out to reveal the expanse of still lake that filled the valley, he saw mist rising gently from its surface, like smoke, filtering moonlight through spectral gauze.

This was Lucie’s final resting place. Her killer had dumped her body in the deepest part of the lake, never imagining that one day the water would dry up in the summer heat to reveal his handiwork. But how, Enzo wondered, did he know where the deepest part of the lake was? Was it just chance, or did it suggest local knowledge?

The relationships in this penultimate case from Raffin’s book were endlessly complex. There were the Bordeaux Six, of which Lucie was one. Their links to the serial killer, Blanc, who might or might not have been responsible for their deaths or disappearances. Tavel, the jilted lover who was unusually anxious that his wife knew nothing about his involvement with Lucie, even though it was more than twenty years ago. The love letter from Blanc himself, which seemed so totally out of character with anything anyone knew about him. And then Tavel’s assertions that Blanc and Lucie were involved in a secret affair that no one else appeared to know about. And, of course, Lucie’s father, determined to defend her honour by denying the remotest possibility that Blanc and his daughter had been having an affair, despite it lending credence to his belief that it was Blanc who had killed her.

Enzo pushed his hands deep in his pockets and trudged around the edge of the lake to the man-made barrier at the west end of it, where he crossed to the other side. From there he climbed up a chalk track to a farm road that ran around the perimeter of a vineyard, its remaining leaves flaming red, discernible even in the colourless light of the moon.

Following the farm road, he came across the metalled single-track that climbed the hill from the main route into Duras, and he could see the lights of the town twinkling in the distance.

Richard Tavel and Lucie had been going out together for years. This would all be familiar territory to him. Local knowledge. If he had been up here before, perhaps many times, wouldn’t he know which was the deepest part of the lake? And how easy would it have been to drive here, unseen from the main road below, just a handful of kilometres from where he lived in Duras? Except that he had been in Paris the Saturday Lucie went missing. Or so the story went. Impossible to disprove now, after all these years.

By the time he had made his way back down to the lake, the first light was dawning in the sky, and the mist rising from the water that filled the valley. As he crossed the lake, trees grew, wraithlike, out of the hillside, and Enzo imagined that this was how it all must have looked at the very dawn of time.

Climbing up through the trees, he kept a wary eye open for the stag which had so startled him in the dark, and the sense of foreboding it had provoked returned to him now. But there was no sign of it.

When he emerged on to the open hillside he saw that it was frosted white, as he had imagined earlier, and he was struck by a sudden clarity which seemed forged out of the cold and his lack of sleep.

There was only one person alive who knew the truth about the relationship, alleged by Tavel, between Lucie and Blanc. Régis Blanc himself. And there was only one way to find out what he knew, which was to ask him. But since Blanc was still incarcerated in the high-security maison centrale prison at Lannemezan, Enzo also knew that getting access to him would be next to impossible.

When he got back to the house he saw lights on in the kitchen, and as he stepped inside breathed in the smell of warm bread and pâtisseries.

Martin looked up, surprised, when Enzo pushed open the door into the kitchen. He was brewing coffee on a worktop by the fridge. ‘You’re up early. Sleep well?’

‘No,’ Enzo said. ‘Hardly at all. I’ve been out walking.’

Martin cocked an eyebrow. ‘Cold out there. You could probably do with a coffee. And I’m heating some croissants in the oven.’

‘That would be fantastic,’ Enzo said, and he sat down at the end of the table, rubbing his hands to try to get the blood circulating in them again.

Martin delivered a basket of croissants to the table and placed a mug of steaming hot coffee in front of Enzo, who gulped down a burning mouthful of it before dipping in the end of a croissant and filling his mouth with soft, buttery pastry. Martin watched him and smiled. ‘You’ve been in France too long, monsieur!’

He pulled up a seat and dunked a croissant of his own. ‘Mireille won’t be up for a while yet. She’s not an early riser.’ A trail of drips fell on the table as he transferred the soggy pastry to his mouth.

Enzo eyed him a little warily, anxious not to arouse the ire of the previous night, but knew there were questions he still had to ask. He took another mouthful of croissant. ‘What happened to Lucie’s bones?’

Martin just shrugged. ‘They’re buried in the garden.’ He took in Enzo’s surprise, and explained, ‘We have a family graveyard out there. Goes back about three hundred years. Most of my ancestors are buried in it.’ He stood up. ‘Come on, I’ll show you.’

Enzo stood reluctantly. He would rather Martin just told him about it, so he could stay in here, in the warmth, with his coffee and croissant. But the old man crossed to the back door and opened it to let in a rush of cold air, and Enzo was obliged to follow him outside.

Beyond a stone terrace and a thick grove of tall bamboo in full leaf, a small graveyard nestled in the shadow of high hedges on three sides, and the ivy-covered wall of the old chai on the fourth. Fallen leaves, frosted and brittle, crunched underfoot, and Enzo saw a shambles of moss-green gravestones set randomly into the ground.

Martin knelt down to scrape away the moss and lichen that covered the stone plaques on the gravestones, and took Enzo through the litany of ancestors who lay here, going all the way back to some of Gandolfo’s earliest successors.

Some of the stones had circular holes set into them. As he stood up again, Martin explained, ‘On the anniversary of each death, the descendants of the dead would come to the grave with a bottle of wine which they would share in a toast to the deceased. Then they would leave the remaining wine in the hole, here, so that the departed could have a drink with their also departed friends.’ He grinned. ‘They always had a good excuse for a drink.’

Then his smile faded as he turned to the most recent of the stones. It had been kept free of growth and discolouration, and the inscription on the plaque was clearly legible: Lucie Martin, beloved daughter of Guillaume and Mireille (1969–1989).

‘Just a handful of bones,’ he said. ‘That’s all we had to bury.’ And, with some rancour, ‘They took away her whole skull for the dental comparison and we never got it back. I wrote several times and didn’t even get a reply.’ He turned towards Enzo, who could see him containing his anger with difficulty. ‘I rather suspect they mislaid it. But we went ahead and buried her anyway. The skull is lost, and I wouldn’t open up the grave again to bury it with the other bones, even if we had it. That would seem like sacrilege now. Let her rest in peace, I say.’