Cast Iron

Chapter fourteen

The Institut Médico-Légale in Bordeaux — or the morgue, as it might be described in detective novels — was part of the Groupe Hospitalier Pellegrin on the campus of Bordeaux University. Here, soulless concrete buildings in not quite fifty shades of grey congregated around a network of roads and flyovers carved out of the heart of what had once been old Bordeaux. The elegance of the past replaced by the functionality of the present.

Enzo waited a long time in a sterile reception area, breathing in antiseptic and sitting on a hard plastic seat watching the comings and goings. This was a busy place. Death was doing good business. A nurse behind the reception desk kept a watchful eye on him until eventually a young pathologist in a pristine white coat pushed through swing doors and walked towards him, hand outstretched. Enzo stood and the two men exchanged a cursory handshake.

‘I’m told you’re looking for Dr Bonnaric,’ the pathologist said.

‘That’s right. You’re him?’ Enzo frowned. He seemed a little young to have carried out an autopsy in 2003.

‘No. I’m sorry, Dr Bonnaric passed away a number of years ago. Before my time, I’m afraid.’

‘Oh.’ Enzo’s heart sank. This looked like being another dead end. He fished in his shoulder bag to pull out Martin’s photocopied autopsy report, well thumbed and dog-eared now. ‘He carried out this autopsy eight years ago.’

The pathologist took the document reluctantly, but kept his eyes on Enzo. ‘And you are?’

‘Enzo Macleod. I run the forensics department at Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse.’

The young man raised an eyebrow. Enzo knew he didn’t look like someone who ran a forensics department and so fumbled in his pocket to find a business card. He handed it to the pathologist.

‘I’ve been investigating a series of cold cases here in France. I’m currently working on the murder of Lucie Martin, daughter of the retired judge Guillaume Martin. She disappeared in 1989 and her remains were found in a lake in 2003.’ He nodded towards the autopsy report in the young man’s hands. ‘Dr Bonnaric conducted that autopsy on her and retained the skull for the purposes of identifying the victim from dental records.’ He paused. ‘He never returned it.’

The pathologist frowned. ‘Returned what?’

‘The skull.’

‘Oh.’

‘The judge would like it back. Apparently he wrote several times, without response.’

‘Oh,’ the young man said again. And this time seemed a little embarrassed. ‘Well, that’s unfortunate.’ He looked at the front page of the report. ‘At least we have a case number here. I’ll see if I can track it down. Would you like to come back in, say—’ he checked his watch — ‘a couple of hours?’

Enzo rode the tram east through town, standing room only, clutching an upright and watching the city spool past the windows of his carriage. Now that they had left the concrete campus behind them, the old city reasserted itself in all its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century glory. Ahead, he could see the tall spire of the elegant Cathédrale Saint-André, but stepped off the tram on the Cours Maréchal Juin to cross to the architectural curiosity that was the Palais de Justice. The courthouse was an ugly building with grey skeletal uprights supporting curved, overhanging eves above rows of blue slats — imitation shutters shielding the acres of glass from which the Palais seemed almost wholly constructed.

Its frontage abutted on to what looked like the original prison and sat elevated on a stone-clad plinth. Beyond a sign which read Tribunal de Grande Instance, steps led up over a water feature to a glazed public ambulatory, through which seven courtrooms could be seen rising in bizarre tapering towers, a grotesque parody of the medieval spires all around. The concept, Enzo imaged, was that justice was being seen to be done.

He waited on the steps with his back to the building, gazing by preference down a street of honey-gold stone and black-painted wrought iron, and wondered what had happened to man’s sense of the aesthetic. It seemed, these days, that concept was more important than character, and the result less than edifying. Sophie, he knew, would tell him he was just old and locked in the past. And maybe, he thought, she was right. Maybe it was time to pass it all on to the next generation and let them do their worst. After all, Enzo’s lot had already done theirs.

‘Monsieur Macleod?’

Enzo turned to find himself looking into a lugubrious face with wild, black, curling eyebrows beneath a shock of wiry white hair. It was a big, fleshy face, with silver fuse-wire growing out of nostrils and ears. It belonged to a large man standing on the step above Enzo and towering over him. He wore the long black gown of the French avocat, with its broad flash of white col hanging down from the neck.

‘Maître Imbert?’

‘Yes.’ He shuffled impatiently. ‘I don’t have much time.’

‘How on earth did you recognise me?’ Enzo said.

‘Monsieur, there can be hardly anyone working in the French justice system who does not know your face by now.’

Enzo smiled. ‘Well, thank you for meeting me.’

There was no smile in return, and no handshake. ‘Like I said, monsieur, I am pressed for time. What can I do for you?’

In the absence of any of Maître Imbert’s precious time to soften the request, Enzo came straight out with it. ‘I’d like you to arrange for me to see Régis Blanc.’

And for the first time the hint of a smile rearranged gross features. ‘Monsieur, just because you have successfully resolved four of Raffin’s cold cases does not mean that you are going to pin the murder of Lucie Martin on my client.’

‘That’s not why I want to see him.’

The eyebrows of the avocat gathered in a tangle above his nose as he frowned. ‘Then why do you want to see him? Is this something to do with the Bordeaux Six?’

‘No. Although I have met with the parents and looked at their files.’

‘Time wasters and fantasists.’

Enzo found a seed of anger stirring inside him. ‘Actually, those parents are just as much victims as their daughters.’

‘Not victims of Blanc.’

‘No, I agree.’

Maître Imbert seemed taken aback. ‘Really?’

‘If Michel Bétaille couldn’t find any connections between Blanc and the disappearance or murder of those girls in two years of investigation, I’m inclined to think there aren’t any.’

‘So what do you want with Blanc?’

‘I found his letter to Lucie oddly touching, Maître. I know he claims to have written it while drunk, but I doubt that. A drunk man, released from his natural inhibitions, would have expressed himself more freely, and perhaps more crudely. Blanc had real difficulty.’

Imbert’s thick pale lips curled in what looked like a sneer. ‘Blanc was not exactly what I would have called literate, Monsieur Macleod.’ He clearly didn’t think much of his client.

‘I don’t mean the words he used. I’m talking about the emotions he expressed.’

Imbert sighed. ‘Is there a point to this anywhere in our future?’

‘New evidence has come to light suggesting that Lucie and Blanc had a romantic liaison.’

Now Imbert laughed out loud. ‘Nonsense!’

‘I have a witness.’

‘Who?’

Enzo just smiled. ‘They were seen together in a café, kissing and holding hands.’

The frown returned in another meeting of eyebrows. ‘And you want to ask Blanc if it’s true?’

Enzo inclined his head.

‘He’ll not tell you.’

‘But you’ll get me in to see him?’

‘No, I will not. I’m far too busy to bother myself with a case that’s more than twenty years old. Blanc killed those girls and now he’s serving life, and that’s an end to it.’ He turned away on the steps, then paused and turned back. ‘Why don’t you ask your friend, Charlotte Roux?’

Now it was Enzo’s turn to frown. ‘Charlotte?’

‘You and Raffin are pretty thick with her, aren’t you? Certainly, if the papers are to be believed.’

‘How could Charlotte get me access to Régis Blanc?’

The smile spreading the thick lips of the avocat was smug now. ‘She’s a regular visitor. I had to clear it with Blanc myself. One of a group of forensic psychologists doing some kind of study on the long-term effect of prison on lifers.’ He paused, his smile widening. ‘Didn’t she tell you?’

Enzo walked back to the Institut Médico-Légale in a daze. He buttoned up his jacket against the cold and pushed his hands deep into his pockets, oblivious of his fellow pedestrians. Twice he crossed the road when the lights were at red, to a cacophony of klaxons.

Why wouldn’t Charlotte have told him that she had visited Blanc in Lannemezan prison? But no matter how many times he asked himself, he could not come up with a satisfactory answer. She must have known that he would find out sooner or later — certainly as soon as he embarked on the Lucie Martin case. In addition to her training as a psychologist, Charlotte had spent two years in the United States studying forensic psychology. Her help was even solicited on occasion by the Paris police, when those particular talents were in demand, and so it was not unnatural that she should be participating in a prisoner study. What was unnatural was that she hadn’t told him.

He drew long, deep breaths as he walked, to control his anger. It was not beyond the bounds of possibility that she was simply being bloody-minded. Where Enzo was concerned, it seemed she took great pleasure these days in baiting him. And he could just imagine her supercilious response to his asking the question. But ask it he was determined to do. Besides which, it looked now like she might be his only way of getting to speak to Blanc himself.

He had walked off most of his anger by the time he reached the Hôpital Pellegrin and the young pathologist came to meet him in reception. He was carrying a square, cream cardboard box, which he set down on the chair next to where Enzo had been sitting. ‘That’s her,’ he said. ‘The box had been incorrectly labelled and misfiled in the greffe. It was pure chance that I found it.’

Enzo sat down beside it. ‘May I take a look?’

‘Of course.’

Enzo removed the lid and reached in to cup his hands carefully around the skull and lift it out. It had been wired together where separated and came out in one piece. Held in his hands like this, it felt incredibly small and delicate. The last trace on this earth of what had once been a vibrant, attractive young girl who, if Tavel was to be believed, had fallen in love with a serial killer. But the more he learned, the less inclined Enzo was to believe that it was Blanc who had killed her.

He looked into the large, dark, empty sockets from which her blue eyes had once viewed a world full of possibility, and gazed with love upon a man who had killed at least three times. Eyes which had seen her killer, filled perhaps with terror in the moments before her murder. He almost hoped that holding her skull like this might communicate something of that to him. But all he felt was cold bone on warm skin, and something faintly sinister in the sense of cupping the head of a dead human being in his hands.

He turned it to examine the fracture on its left side, just above the temple. The bone was broken here, a piece of it missing, and Enzo realised how easy it would be to damage something so fragile.

The pathologist said, ‘I read the autopsy report. Just out of interest. He was wrong, you know.’

Enzo looked at him, startled. ‘Who?’

‘Bonnaric. I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but he was no anthropologist.’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’

The young man smiled. ‘Forensic anthropology. That’s my particular specialty. Bonnaric wrote in his report that the damage to the skull was likely caused during the process of its recovery from the lake. That’s not the case.’

Enzo looked in astonishment at Lucie’s head in his hands and then back at the pathologist. ‘How can you know that?’

He reached out for the skull. ‘May I?’

Enzo handed it to him and stood up.

The pathologist turned the fracture towards them and ran his finger along the broken edge. ‘There, you see?’

And Enzo saw immediately. He said, ‘The edge of the break is stained.’

‘Exactly. The broken edges would have got dirty during recovery, yes, but if Bonnaric had cleaned them properly, he would have seen that they weren’t just superficially dirty. The staining is deeply ingrained in the fabric of the skull.’

‘So the fracture pre-dates the discovery of the body.’

‘Indeed. And was therefore probably inflicted while the victim was still alive. If the damage had been done — by, say, a shovel — when it was being dug out of the mud, the break would have been clean and unstained.’

Enzo stared at it, absorbing the implications.

The young man smiled and said, ‘It’s like an ice-cream bar, really. If you break it and then dip it in chocolate, it’s covered in chocolate even along the break. Compare that to an ice-cream bar dipped in chocolate and broken later. The break will be clean ice cream. Et voilà.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s not rocket science.’

Enzo’s mind was racing with all the new possibilities this development presented. ‘So that means the blow that did this damage could have been the cause of death?’

‘Very easily. Given the nature of it.’ He handed the skull back to Enzo, who gazed at Lucie for several long moments before returning her to the cardboard box. Then he looked at the forensic anthropologist again.

‘I wonder if I could ask you a very big favour?’

‘What?’ The young man inclined his head as if to say, Have I not done enough?

‘One theory about how Lucie died is that she was a victim of the serial killer Régis Blanc, who murdered his victims by strangling them, separating the hyoid bone and breaking part of it in the process.’

‘Which is how Dr Bonnaric thought Lucie might have died.’

‘Exactly. But Blanc also sedated his victims with the date-rape drug, Rohypnol — Flunitrazepam — which is one of a class of benzodiazepines. I’ve read that it is possible to detect these drugs in bone, and not just the marrow.’

The doctor nodded. ‘Yes. Easier in the marrow of fresh bone. But it is also possible to detect some drugs in cortical bone.’ He glanced at Lucie’s skull in the box. ‘You would take a little bone and grind it into powder. If there were traces of Rohypnol in it, they would be detectable.’ He looked at Enzo. ‘You would like me to do that.’ It was a statement, not a question.

Enzo nodded.

He sighed. ‘I can’t guarantee that I would be able to find the time or the resources.’

‘No, I understand that. But if you could...’ Enzo let his sentence hang. Then he said, ‘You’ve got my card.’ He paused. ‘So, I’ll leave Lucie with you.’

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Enzo left Bordeaux just after midday, arriving in Paris shortly before seven. He had stopped only once, and was stiff and tired when finally he left his 2CV in the car park at Rue Soufflot and walked to Raffin’s apartment in the Rue de Tournon.

For once there was no piano playing as he crossed the shining wet cobbles of the interior courtyard and climbed wearily to the first floor. Somehow it always seemed to be raining in Paris in autumn. To his disappointment Kirsty and his grandson were not there.

‘They’ve been away all afternoon visiting a friend of Kirsty’s in the eighth,’ Raffin said. He stood for a moment in the doorway before reluctantly opening it wide to let Enzo in. If there had ever once been warmth between them, it had long since dissipated.

In the séjour Enzo saw an almost empty bottle of Pouilly Fumé on the table, and a single glass with half an inch of honey-coloured white wine remaining in the bottom of it. There was a glassy quality, he noticed then, to Raffin’s usually clear green eyes, and he spoke slowly, with the studied concentration of a man trying to convince you that he had not drunk too much. Drinking too much had pretty well characterised Raffin since his shooting, here in this very apartment, and Enzo, though still nurturing a sense of guilt, worried for the future of his daughter and grandson. ‘I’ve just driven from Bordeaux,’ he said.

Raffin raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s quite a drive. I’m flattered you’d come all this way just to see me.’

Enzo gave him a look. ‘Actually, I’ve come to see Charlotte,’ he said, and saw Raffin stiffen. The journalist was still, inexplicably, jealous of Enzo’s relationship with her, even although it had long since turned sour. Enzo dipped into his bag to pull out the folders given him by the Bordeaux Six, and his copy of Lucie’s autopsy report. ‘And I wanted to give you these. Or, at least, let you take copies for your files.’

Raffin glanced at them. ‘Oh, yes. The Bordeaux Six.’

‘I’m surprised you weren’t tempted to include more of them in the book.’

Raffin shrugged. ‘Lucie’s was the only one of real interest. And four of them were just missing, still alive for all we know. Although, probably not.’

‘And the girl stabbed to death in that hotel room?’

Raffin pulled a face. ‘Again. Not very interesting. A prostitute murdered in a sexual frenzy by some lowlife client. Not the sort of mystery to engage my readers.’ He flicked through them. ‘But I’ll take copies. You never know when you might find something interesting.’

Enzo followed Raffin through to his study, where the journalist ran off duplicates of the six files on his high-speed copier. He looked at Lucie’s autopsy report.

‘I haven’t seen this before. Can’t imagine there’s anything very interesting in it.’

‘Then you’d be wrong,’ Enzo said, and for the first time he saw that Raffin’s interest was piqued.

The two men went back through to the sitting room, and as Raffin spread out the contents of the six copied files on the dining table to examine in more detail, Enzo told him about the fractured skull, written off by the original pathologist as collateral damage and now reassessed as the possible cause of death.

Raffin looked at him, his eyes suddenly clear and shining. ‘Well that changes everything, doesn’t it? If a blow to the head was the cause of death, it means that her killer strangled her post-mortem to make it look like it was Blanc.’

But Enzo shook his head. ‘She disappeared the day before Blanc was arrested.’

‘Yes, but it was well publicised that those prostitutes had been strangled, that the hyoid bones had separated and fractured.’

‘True — but until Blanc’s arrest nobody knew it was him.’

‘So the killer was simply trying to make it look like the work of whoever had murdered the prostitutes, without knowing it was Blanc.’ Raffin was clearly irritated by Enzo’s constant contradictions.

‘Which would be an extraordinary coincidence,’ Enzo said. ‘Given that Blanc had written to Lucie, and that, according to her ex-boyfriend, he had been having a relationship with her.’

This set Raffin back on his heels. ‘What? When did you learn that?’

‘A couple of days ago.’

‘He told you?’

Enzo nodded. ‘Under a little duress.’

Raffin drew him a curious look, but his excitement at the revelation was patent. ‘This is new. It’s going to make a great story.’ He paused. ‘So you think that Blanc might have killed her after all?’

Enzo stroked his jaw thoughtfully and felt the bristles on his chin, realising he hadn’t shaved for two days. He said, ‘There’s no way to know if that blow to the head killed Lucie or not. It might just have rendered her unconscious, and then she was strangled. After all, Blanc drugged his prostitutes with Rohypnol before strangling them. If you strangle someone, I guess you have to look them in the eye as you do it. And they look back at you. Maybe Blanc didn’t like that.’

‘So you do think it was Blanc?’

Enzo released a long, slow breath and ran his eyes sightlessly around the room, as if searching for inspiration in facts to back up his instinct. When he couldn’t find any, he looked at Raffin and said, ‘Actually, I don’t.’

He was saved from having to provide a rationale for his instinct by the sound of the door opening out in the hall. Cold air rushed in as Kirsty, with Alexis in her arms, manhandled a pushchair through from the landing.

‘Oh hi, Papa,’ she said, handing Alexis to Raffin before throwing her arms around her father. Enzo noticed that, although Alexis was six months old now, Raffin still seemed uncomfortable holding him. But Kirsty was looking over her father’s shoulder at the mess of papers on the table. She stood back and, with a twinkle in her dark brown, liquid eyes, said, ‘I see, once again, that Alexis and I were the reason for your visit.’

Enzo grinned. ‘Always.’ And he reached across to relieve Raffin from the burden of holding his grandson. Alexis chuckled and chortled as Enzo held him with the expertise of an experienced father and bounced him lightly up and down. Grandfather and grandson rubbed noses, and Enzo felt how cold the baby’s face was.

Kirsty crossed to the table, divesting herself of coat and scarf, to look at the photocopied documents and photographs that covered it. ‘Oh, by the way,’ she said. ‘We’ve got a date and time for the appointment with the hearing specialist in Biarritz.’ She looked over her shoulder at Enzo. ‘Two days after your birthday. Will you still be able to make it?’

Enzo said, ‘Whatever else is happening, I’ll make the time.’ And he glanced at Raffin, who shuffled awkwardly in the knowledge that, unlike Enzo, he had made other things a priority.

Enzo turned back at the sound of Kirsty’s voice. ‘Who are these girls?’ She was lining up their photographs, one beside the other.

‘Mostly prostitutes, either missing or dead,’ Enzo said. He joined her at the table. ‘Their parents think that Régis Blanc was responsible.’

‘And was he?’

‘Probably not.’

‘Such sad faces,’ Kirsty said, running her fingertips lightly over grainy facsimiles of once-living human beings. ‘They’ll be middle-aged by now.’

‘If any of them are still alive,’ Raffin said.

‘And we know that two of them are dead,’ Enzo told her.

Kirsty shook her head, almost unable to drag her eyes away from them. ‘What a waste of lives.’

‘Speaking of which...’ Enzo turned back to Raffin. ‘Did you know that Charlotte has been visiting Régis Blanc in Lannemezan prison?’

Raffin seemed startled. ‘No, I did not. Why? I mean, why was she visiting him?’

‘Some kind of study of long-term prisoners.’

Raffin shook his head. ‘Then why didn’t she tell us? She knew you would be working on the Martin case.’

Enzo’s mouth set in a grim line. ‘That’s exactly what I’m on my way to ask her myself.’

‘Because my life is my own and my work is confidential, and you have no rights of access to either.’ Charlotte’s words were hostile, but her tone was indifferent, as if she didn’t really care.

They were in the small kitchen, three steps down from the living area, in her sprawling home in the thirteenth. Charlotte sat back with a glass of wine, the remains of a light meal on the table in front of her.

‘Don’t you want to see Laurent? I’ve just put him down.’

‘Stop trying to change the subject.’

‘Ahhh,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘You see? Only when it suits you.’

But Enzo refused to be deflected. ‘You knew I had started working on the Lucie Martin case, and yet you never thought to tell me that you had been visiting the man suspected of killing her. That you knew him personally. And given the number of times you’ve visited, probably know him better than anyone else in this world.’

She sat forward, angry now. ‘In all the years I have known you, Enzo Macleod, you have never taken the least interest in my work. Except, of course, when it could be of some use to you. You’re selfish and thoughtless and, frankly, with you there’s always an ulterior motive.’ She swallowed a mouthful of wine. ‘Why would I even think of volunteering to provide you with information about my work? After all, if it was of any use to you, sooner or later you’d come looking for it.’

Enzo stood, face reddening, stung by her words. He was not so self-obsessed that he didn’t realise there was some truth in them. ‘I have never been anything but honest and totally open with you, Charlotte,’ he said. ‘You’re the one with the secrets. You’re the one who guards your thoughts and emotions, the one who keeps things from me.’

She regarded him thoughtfully. ‘And what is it you’re keeping from me? The real reason for your visit, Enzo? The ulterior motive? I mean, you didn’t drive all the way from Bordeaux to Paris just to accuse me of withholding information. Did you?’

Enzo reddened further. Charlotte always seemed to read him, like a large Métro map behind glass. Was his veneer really so transparent?

She smiled. ‘I thought so. What is it you want this time?’

He took a moment to try to salvage, at least in his own mind, what was left of his pride. ‘I want to talk to Blanc.’

A knowing smile spread across her face and she leaned back in her chair again. ‘Of course you do. I should have seen that one coming.’ She swirled the remains of her wine around in her glass, looking into it as if searching for enlightenment. ‘To what end? To try and establish some kind of connection between him and Lucie Martin?’

‘I don’t have to establish anything. The links already exist.’

‘Oh, do they? The famous letter that purports to be from Blanc to Lucie?’

‘Oh, he wrote it alright. His handwriting. Confirmed by a graphologist.’

Which was clearly news to Charlotte. Her eyes lifted quickly from her glass to meet Enzo’s. ‘Really?’ She thought about it for a moment. ‘You said “links”. Plural.’

‘Lucie dumped her childhood sweetheart. He suspected a third party and followed her one night to see who.’

‘Blanc?’ Charlotte’s eyes opened wide with amazement. And he could tell that, for the first time, he had really caught her interest. He could see her thinking rapidly behind guarded eyes. And she reached, it seemed, an equally fast decision. She drained her glass. ‘Alright. I’ll bring Laurent to your birthday party in Cahors. And if you can get someone to look after him, we’ll drive down to Lannemezan the next day.’

‘You can get me in to see him?’

‘No guarantees, but I’ll try.’ She stood up. ‘Will you stay over?’

Enzo was startled. ‘What? Here?’

She shrugged. ‘Of course.’ Then paused. ‘In the spare room, naturally.’

Enzo was stung, just as much as if she had slapped him, and he remembered the John Lennon song ‘Girl’, and just how easily Charlotte could manipulate him. He said determinedly, ‘I’m staying over at the studio.’

She smiled with weary resignation. ‘And he would pass up the chance to be with his boy, just so that he could snub Charlotte.’

He gave her a look. ‘Snub Charlotte how?’

She raised both eyebrows. ‘Did you really think I could bear to have you under my roof for a whole night and not also have you in my bed?’