Cast Iron

Chapter twenty-six

Lannemezan lay in the great southern plain that sprawled in the shadow of the Pyrenees. The high-security maison centrale and centre de détention was an ordered, modern prison complex behind a rectangle of concrete walls, built in the eighties and set in agricultural country outside the town itself. It was bounded on two sides by railway lines, and no doubt the 170 prisoners held within its cells could hear the trains that passed in the night, and dreamt of long-lost freedom.

It must, Enzo thought, as they turned off the main road and drove up to the entrance, be quite galling to look out from behind these bars to see the mountain range that was once the escape route for allied soldiers and resistance fighters fleeing the Nazis. The Pyrenees had long been a symbol of freedom, and he wondered if there was some deliberate irony in the choice of Lannemezan as the setting for a place to take it away.

Implacable prison guards watched them from behind glass in circular observation turrets at the top of concrete towers on each corner as the two cars drew into the car park. Kirsty would wait for them here, and she wound down the window and unstrapped Alexis from his baby chair to sit him with her in the front.

Enzo followed Charlotte past a huge steel door set into a harled archway where vehicles came and went over the hump of a yellow and black ramp. Pedestrian access was at the far side of the entrance, leading them into an open reception area where electric lights reflected on shiny floors and hummed in the deep silence.

Enzo had visited prisons many times, and it always depressed him. There was something about stepping inside a place of incarceration that filled him with a sense of apprehension, and then on leaving, with relief and a gratitude for the freedom he had previously taken for granted.

At a long counter, unsmiling staff behind glass took his passport, which they copied and filed and told him they would hold in safekeeping until his departure. They gave him several forms to fill out and sign, before providing him with the black number six, printed on a white card, to pin to his jacket. They took his bag and the contents of his pockets and gave him a receipt to be produced for their safe return.

It was a procedure Charlotte had clearly been through many times, and she stood waiting patiently until Enzo was finished.

Finally, the door to the prison itself was unlocked and they were accompanied through the high-security wing by two guards in black uniforms with white stripes across their chests. The place smelled like a hospital. Of body odour and antiseptic. Floors were polished to a shine, and pale green walls were punctuated at regular intervals by dark green bars that divided hallways into sections, like airlocks, gates behind them secured before gates ahead were opened. Overhead strip lights threw up glare from beneath their feet, and every sound seemed to echo back at them from every hard surface.

Finally they were led down steps, through a gate and into a room with reinforced glass walls on three sides. Régis Blanc sat behind a table facing two empty chairs. A door slammed behind them, a key turned in the lock, and they could see the guards who had brought them there through the glass, leaning back against a wall, arms folded, watching them with studied disinterest.

‘Salut, Régis. Comment ça va?’ Charlotte greeted him as if she had known him all her life and they were old friends meeting for lunch. But she didn’t kiss his cheeks or shake his hand. Instead, she sat down and folded her hands on the table in front of her.

Blanc had been slouched in his chair. He wore a white T-shirt stretched tightly over muscles honed, perhaps, in a prison gym, or by isometric exercises performed in his cell. His jeans, too, were slim fitting to reveal well-developed thighs. He had about him the air of a man tightly wound and ready to spring. Like a cat on alert. Enzo knew that Blanc was two years younger than him, but he was probably fitter than a man half his age. He looked older, though. Much of his hair had gone, and what was left of it was the colour of metal filings. It had been shorn to a stubble across his scalp. His face was lean and lined, a dead pallor pockmarked by teenage acne. But the most remarkable things about him were his eyes. They were the palest blue Enzo had ever seen. So pale they were very nearly translucent. And with pin-sharp pupils, and irises circled in black, they were like the eyes of some wild cat. A snow leopard or a tiger. And they were fixed on Enzo, suspicious and hostile, alert from the moment Enzo entered the interview room. He sat immediately upright, ignoring Charlotte’s greeting.

‘Who’s this?’

Charlotte said, ‘We had to indulge in a little subterfuge, Régis, to get him in. As far as the prison’s concerned Enzo is my assistant.’

‘And who is he really?’

‘Enzo Macleod,’ Enzo said, holding out his hand. Blanc made no attempt to shake it and kept his eyes fixed on Enzo.

‘He’s a former forensic scientist from Scotland,’ Charlotte said. ‘He’s looking into the murder of Lucie Martin.’

Blanc was on his feet so quickly that Enzo was startled into taking a step back. Blanc’s seat overturned and crashed to the floor behind him, and Enzo saw the prison officers beyond the glass pushing themselves off the wall, suddenly tense and ready to move.

There was a moment when it seemed that almost anything was possible, and Enzo calculated that Blanc could quite easily kill him before the guards had even unlocked the door.

Blanc snarled, ‘You think I’m going to sit here and let you pin Lucie Martin’s murder on me?’

‘Cool it, Régis.’ Charlotte’s tone was calm, but there was an underlying sense of menace in it that drew his eyes towards her for the most fleeting of moments before they returned to Enzo.

With a surface calm that in no way reflected the way he felt inside, Enzo said, ‘I’m not even going to try to do that, Régis. Because I don’t believe you did. I think you were in love with Lucie. And that, very probably, she was in love with you. Or, at least, thought she was.’ He saw consternation gather in the creases around Blanc’s eyes.

Charlotte stood up and walked around the table to right Blanc’s chair. ‘Sit down, Régis,’ she said. And like some schoolboy admonished by his teacher, he pulled his chair towards him and perched, sullen-faced, on the edge of it, still without taking his eyes from Enzo.

‘What makes you think that?’ His whole tone and demeanour was defensive.

‘Your letter.’ Enzo sat down so that they were all facing each other on the same level, and he was aware in his peripheral vision of the guards outside relaxing again.

‘What about it?’

‘I’ve written love letters in my time, Régis. The first one, all full of declaration. Love and intent. And the last one... Well...’ And he smiled. ‘That would depend on which of us was breaking it off.’ He placed his forearms on the desk in front of him and leaned forward. ‘But here’s the thing. Yours doesn’t fit either category. I don’t believe that was the first, or only letter. And it certainly wasn’t intended to be your last. So I can only assume there had been others. Before, maybe after.’

Blanc sat back and folded his arms, and Enzo noticed for the first time the crude tattoos on his left forearm.

‘That’s quite an assumption, Monsieur... whatever your name is.’

‘Macleod. But I know some people have trouble pronouncing that, so you can call me Enzo.’ Enzo knew that he couldn’t let his gaze wander left or right. He had to meet Blanc’s eye with the same unwavering stare with which Blanc was fixing him. ‘Anyway, maybe I’m cheating a little. Because I also know that you and Lucie were seeing each other.’

Blanc’s whole expression changed. Incomprehension clouded the clarity of his eyes. ‘How can you know that? Nobody knew that.’

‘It’s true, then?’ Charlotte’s voice broke like an intruder into their conversation, but neither of them paid it the least attention.

Enzo said, ‘She’d been going out with a boy all through school.’

‘Tavel!’ Blanc spat out his name, and Enzo was amazed that Blanc both knew it and remembered it.

He nodded. ‘When she threw him over he got jealous. Figured there was someone else. So he followed her one night. And guess who she met?’

This was clearly news to Blanc, and he took some moments to process it. Enzo could almost see the thought machinery working behind eyes that were gazing into the past, making calculations and reaching conclusions. For once Enzo was not their focus. And then it was as if he had returned from some other place, and he looked at Enzo again. His eyes wild now.

‘He killed her. It must have been him.’ And he looked around the room as if searching for a way out. ‘I’ll fucking kill him. Even if I have to break out of here to do it.’ He slammed the palms of his hands down flat on the table in front of him.

Enzo said calmly, ‘There’s no proof whatsoever that Tavel was involved. He was in Paris the weekend she went missing.’ He paused. ‘But, then again, what’s an alibi, except someone else lying to protect you? You should know all about that, Régis. You always seemed to have an alibi when the police came looking for you.’ Another pause. ‘Except when it came to murdering those three girls.’ And he thought about what he had written up on his whiteboard. Did he want to be caught?

For the first time, Blanc’s unwavering gaze flickered away from Enzo, and when his eyes returned to him it was almost as if he accepted that Enzo knew the truth, whatever that might be.

‘Tell me about your relationship with Lucie, Régis.’

Blanc sat back in his chair, folding his arms over his chest, and deliberately avoided a meeting of eyes. He glanced self-consciously towards Charlotte, and Enzo would have sworn that he blushed. Blood rose high on his cheeks to bring colour to his prison-pale complexion. He let his eyes fall, fixing his gaze on his own feet, stretched out under the table in front of him. ‘Hard to explain,’ he said, ‘what it was about her.’ Even the tone of his voice had changed now, hushed, as if he were speaking in a church. ‘When I first met her at the offices of Rentrée...’ He laughed. ‘I suppose I’d gone along to scoff. To be difficult. Rude and crude. Fucking Christian do-gooders! And then she came in the room and sat down opposite me, and I suddenly felt like a little boy. Tongue-tied and awkward. Didn’t know where to look. But wherever I turned my eyes I couldn’t seem to avoid meeting hers in the end. I’d never been in the presence of—’ he fought for a way to describe it — ‘such innocence. Ever in my life. It was so pure, and real. Like the first time you shoot up heroin. It feels so fucking amazing, you never want to be in any other state.’ He shook his head. ‘I never got addicted to heroin, but I got addicted to Lucie. Couldn’t get enough of her.’

Now he sat forward, leaning on his thighs, clasping and unclasping his hands in front of him and staring at the floor. But he wasn’t looking at it. Sightless eyes were transporting him back to another place and time. A place where the radiance of a young woman, real or imagined, had changed his life.

‘My whole life I was surrounded by filth and evil. Lies and deceit. But something about Lucie shone a light into that life and made me realise things didn’t have to be that way. That I didn’t have to be that way.’ He glanced up for a moment, as if searching for their understanding. ‘And she saw it, too. She told me she did. That there was a better person inside me. Someone I didn’t know was there. Someone I wouldn’t recognise, even if I did. She said she could help release him. The real me. The person trapped inside. That’s what she said.’

Then he was overcome by self-consciousness and looked down at the floor again.

‘I’ve thought about it often. That’s the thing about prison, there’s not much else to do but think. I wondered, looking back, if maybe she just saw me as some kind of a challenge. The triumph of good over evil. But that’s not what she said in her letters.’

Enzo felt a tiny jolt run through him, like an electric shock. ‘Lucie wrote to you?’

‘We exchanged half a dozen letters or more over as many weeks. I could feel her in every word. Beautiful words. Words that made me realise how stupid and illiterate I was. Words that made me want to change. To be that other person she saw in me. She said...’ He broke off, and Enzo was shocked to see the hint of tears in his eyes, tears that he lowered his head to conceal from them. But you could hear them in the tremble of his voice. ‘She said that she had seen beyond the outer shell, to the soft, sensitive person within. And that she loved that person, and wanted to release him.’

Words, Enzo was sure, that Blanc had memorised from countless readings of her letters. And he found himself empathising with this serial killer sitting before him. A man robbed by death of something that might have transformed his life, but left him, instead, with only memories and regrets and the sense of a life unfulfilled.

‘You know, I look back, and it’s hard to believe it now. Knowing who I am, what I became. But I really believed Lucie could save me. Like Jesus fucking Christ. I’d have done anything for her. Anything.’ He paused. ‘Only...’ And then he sat upright, folding his arms again, and Enzo could see him biting the inside of his lower lip.

‘Only what?’

‘There were things I had to do. You know. First.’ This said with defiance, as if making excuses for not living up to Lucie’s vision of him.

‘What things?’

The colour was gone from his face again, and a shadow crossed it. ‘Things. Obligations. Debts.’

‘What obligations? What debts?’

But Blanc remained tight-lipped, staring at the floor, and Enzo saw an almost imperceptible shake of his head. It was clear that he wasn’t going to say. So Enzo said it for him.

‘Killing those girls, you mean?’

Blanc flashed him a look that was both dangerous and full of pain. His eyes flickered towards Charlotte, then back. ‘These fucking psychiatrists,’ he said, the contempt clear in his voice. ‘They’ll tell you that I killed them because my mother was a prostitute. That every time I killed one, I was killing my mother.’ He snorted his derision. ‘What bollocks! What they don’t understand, any of them, is that it didn’t matter what my mother was. She was my mother. I loved her unconditionally. And she loved me.’

‘So why did you kill them?’

A sad, sick smile curled his lips and he shook his head. ‘If I told you, they’d kill me.’

Enzo frowned. ‘What do you mean? Who’s “they”?’

Blanc’s smile was smug now. A man who knew he kept a secret he wasn’t going to tell, but was taking pleasure in dropping hints that would tease and tantalise without fulfilment. ‘Trust me, there are worse things than death,’ he said.

The silence that followed seemed to stretch from seconds to minutes, without Blanc being in the least aware of it. He was watching his hands in front of him, lacing and unlacing his fingers as if praying, then changing his mind. Enzo sensed that there was more to come and didn’t want to break the moment. He willed Charlotte not to speak. Although she had said nothing throughout the entire interview, listening rapt to a killer’s ramblings in mute fascination.

Finally Blanc looked up. His eyes moved from Enzo to Charlotte, then back again. The smile was gone. ‘The thing is... sometimes obligations don’t last a lifetime. Maybe one day soon I’ll have my say.’

‘About what?’

But he just shook his head. ‘Why would I tell you?’

Enzo decided to chance his arm. ‘You wanted to be caught, Régis, didn’t you?’

Blanc shrugged. ‘We all pay for the things we do. In this life or the next. But whatever awful things I’ve done, I know that Lucie would have forgiven me.’

‘For killing those girls?’ Enzo was genuinely surprised.

‘Yes.’ But he quickly changed his mind. ‘Well, no. Not for killing them. I’m glad she never knew about that. I mean why I did it. She’d have understood that. She would.’ He saw the question forming itself in Enzo’s eyes, and he pre-empted the asking of it. ‘But, like I said, I’m not telling you.’

Enzo nodded, sensing the finality in Blanc’s words. ‘And what about the Bordeaux Six?’

‘Pah!’ Derision exploded from Blanc’s lips. ‘That’s just fucking incompetent cops trying to pin their failures on me. A convenient bloody scapegoat, already doing life. I don’t know anything about what happened to those girls. That’s just how it is, you know. People die, people get murdered, people run away. Who knows who or why or when? They come into your life and they go out of it again. Doesn’t make you responsible for them.’

‘What do you think happened to those other letters that you sent to Lucie? You know they only ever found one.’

He nodded. ‘I’ve no idea.’

‘But you denied any relationship with her at the time. Said you’d only written that one, and only because you were drunk.’

Blanc became almost agitated. ‘Lucie was dead. No one would have believed what it was we had between us. And I wasn’t about to drag her name through the mud along with mine.’

‘And what about her letters to you?’

Blanc eyed Enzo warily now. ‘What about them?’

‘What happened to them?’

‘Oh, don’t you worry. I’ve got them safely hidden away. Somewhere no one will ever find them.’

Enzo said, ‘You realise, if you could produce those letters, they are probably just about the only thing that could erase any suspicion that it was you who killed her?’

‘I don’t care,’ Blanc said, verging on the hostile now. ‘People can think what they want. I know I didn’t kill her. And wherever she might be now, Lucie knows that, too.’ He dropped his eyes to the number six pinned to Enzo’s jacket, and a small smile of irony crossed his lips. ‘Je ne suis pas un numéro, je suis un homme libre,’ he said.

Enzo frowned, then did the mental translation. I am not a prisoner, I am a free man. And he realised that he and Blanc were of the same generation, each sitting on either side of the English Channel, watching Patrick McGoohan in the cult sixties TV show, The Prisoner.

Enzo drew a deep breath as the prison gate shut behind them. It felt good to be out, breathing God’s own pure, sweet air, chilled by the proximity of the Pyrenees, uncontaminated by big-city pollution or tainted by life behind bars.

It felt like emerging from some dreadful human laboratory where, for the hour they had spent locked in a room with a killer, they had found themselves looking deep into Nietzsche’s abyss.

They stood in silence for several long moments, gazing out across a pastoral landscape that shimmered off into a hazy blue distance that then took dark and brooding form in the ominous shape of the mountains.

Charlotte spoke first. ‘I have never heard him speak like that before. No amount of prompting would ever induce him to talk to me about the murders. Or Lucie.’

Enzo glanced at her to see her face quite pale in the misted midday light. ‘What did you talk about, then?’

‘His childhood, mostly. His mother. God. Religion. I think he was always just glad to have someone to talk to. Today was different, though.’ She looked at Enzo. ‘He was a different man.’ She hesitated. ‘What do you think he meant when he said they would kill him?’

Enzo shook his head, equally mystified. ‘I have no idea. He was... well, pretty enigmatic.’

‘Except when it came to talking about Lucie.’

He nodded.

‘You think he didn’t kill her, then?’

‘I’d put money on it.’

She smiled wryly. ‘Enzo, do you not think gambling has got you into enough trouble as it is?’

His smile of resignation and the gentle inclination of his head signalled agreement. ‘Very probably.’ But he couldn’t shake off the depression which had descended on him during his interview with Blanc, and he couldn’t help feeling that there was something inestimably sad about the man. He kissed Charlotte on both cheeks and handed back her car keys. ‘Thank you for getting me in to see him. I’ll let you know if there are any developments.’

‘Please do,’ she called after him, and before returning to her vehicle stood watching as Enzo got into the car with Kirsty to drive down the spur that would take them to the main road and back, ultimately, on to the motorway, heading west.