Cast Iron

Chapter thirty-one

For the longest time Dominique just held him. She felt the pain in his silence, and in the tears she wiped from his cheeks. ‘We’ll find her,’ she told him. ‘We will.’ And he nodded, grateful that for almost the first time in his adult life he did not feel completely alone. Even so, he was overwhelmed. By pressure and emotion. By love for his daughter and hatred for those who had taken her.

The drive back to Cahors from Montpellier had taken nearly four hours, and both Enzo and Kirsty were exhausted by the time they got to the apartment. Emotionally, physically and mentally drained.

Now Enzo and Dominique lay fully dressed in each other’s arms on his bed in the dark. He realised that he had to remain focused, that he couldn’t allow his emotions to drive his thinking or his actions. If ever he needed to stay cool and clear and calm, this was the time. But anger and fear, in equal measure, kept bubbling into his consciousness, like carbonated water fizzing and spitting and drowning out cogent thought. The only thing saving him from himself was Dominique.

All of his instincts were telling him that somehow Régis Blanc was the key. Not the killer, at least not of Lucie Martin. And not behind the kidnapping of his daughter. But somehow at the centre of it all. He recalled vividly the picture of him that he had carried away from the prison in Lannemezan only yesterday. Lean and fit, and with a tension inside him so tightly wound that Enzo had felt him capable of unravelling in violence at any moment. And yet he had controlled himself with a steely composure, keeping close those secrets he had hinted that one day he might reveal to the world. But not yet. Not to Enzo. And Enzo knew that somehow he had to get inside the man’s head and find them for himself.

A soft knocking at the door interrupted his thoughts, and he heard Nicole’s voice from the other side of it. ‘Ready now, Monsieur Macleod.’

He and Dominique rose wordlessly from the bed, and she took a moment to wipe his face dry and kiss him softly on the lips.

They found Nicole settling herself in front of her laptop, which sat on the table in the séjour beneath a ring of light from the pull-down lamp. Kirsty sat opposite, a pen resting on the top page of an open notebook. Enzo and Dominique joined them in silence, faces set in grim resolve, floating on the edge of darkness. Any one of them could have reached out and touched the apprehension that sat among them. It was after ten p.m. But a night of inactivity through all the sleepless hours that would surely lie ahead was not an option.

Nicole said, ‘I wasn’t expecting to have to brief you on Blanc quite this soon. But I think I’ve pulled together just about everything about him that’s out there in the public domain. There’ve been a lot of articles written on the man.’ She tapped on her keyboard, and Enzo saw the changing light from the screen reflecting on a face fixed with dark determination. ‘Do you want just the bones, or the detail, too?’

‘Everything,’ Enzo said. And he could barely recognise his own voice. He blinked several times to clear stinging eyes.

‘He was born in 1957. Mother, Paulette Blanc, the daughter of a fishmonger and a seamstress. Father unknown. He had a half-brother, Jean-Paul, born three years later. Again, father unknown, but he died in infancy. Paulette lived in one of the Bordeaux slums that were cleared in the sixties. Prostitute, alcoholic. Used to bring her clients home when Régis was still a child. According to Blanc himself, she used to tell him to “keep an eye out” while she took her clients into a back bedroom. Though, apparently, he never quite knew what he was keeping an eye out for.’

Nicole navigated her way to a new screen.

‘Anyway, when he was about twelve, Paulette got herself a regular man, who moved in with them and effectively took over the role of Régis’s father. But he wasn’t exactly the kind of role model you might hope for in a father. He was a pimp, but insisted that Paulette give up her night job and stay home. Again according to Régis, it was this man, Arnaud, who first introduced him to drugs. Cocaine, and later heroin, though it seems that Régis had more of a taste for alcohol than drugs.

‘Arnaud conducted his business out of a café near the station, and when Régis was a teenager used to take him along, so he got to know all of the girls that Arnaud ran, and all of his associates. Drunks and drug dealers and petty thieves.’ Nicole looked up and shrugged sadly. ‘You could almost say that Régis Blanc was destined for disaster.’ She returned her eyes to the screen. ‘At first he looked up to Arnaud. Respected him. Probably feared him. Certainly saw him as the father he’d never had. Until the man started beating his mother.’

Kirsty said, ‘It hadn’t always been an abusive relationship, then?’

Nicole shook her head. ‘No. It seems not. But Paulette’s addiction to gin went from bad to worse. The house was filthy. There was never any food, and it seems that Arnaud just lost patience with her. But raising his fists to her was the beginning of the end for his relationship with Régis. Blanc was nearly eighteen by then, and a real hard case from all accounts. Told Arnaud that if he didn’t stop beating up on his mother he would have him to answer to. Arnaud didn’t take him too seriously, and according to witnesses there were several confrontations when Arnaud made a fool of him in public, humiliating the boy in front of his mates.’

Nicole breathed deeply and pressed her lips together with distaste in anticipation of what was to come.

‘One day Régis came home to find Paulette so badly beaten up she had actually lost an eye and was in a coma. He rushed her to hospital, but she remained unconscious for two months before finally passing away. Arnaud was never charged. No witnesses, no proof. Two weeks after Paulette died, Arnaud was found dead on a railway siding on the south side of Bordeaux. Almost every bone in his body was broken and he was missing an eye. Everyone knew Régis had done it, but there was no physical evidence to link him to the murder, and he had a solid alibi.’ She looked up from her computer screen and saw all eyes fixed on her. ‘Arnaud had always groomed Régis to take over the “business” from him sometime in the future. And that’s exactly what he did, only a little earlier than Arnaud had planned. Régis was just eighteen years old.’

It was, Enzo thought, a classic example of being moulded by your environment. Whatever good there might have been in Régis Blanc, he had never stood a chance. He became the mirror image of those who had corrupted him. And he wondered what it was that Lucie had seen in him. What it was that could possibly have attracted her, or suggested the possibility of redemption.

Nicole said, ‘In 1985 he married a young woman called Anne-Laure Couderc. She had been one of his girls. But like Arnaud before him, he made her give all that up when she married him. Two years later she gave birth to a baby girl that they called Alice. From all accounts, Blanc was absolutely smitten by the child, but he and Anne-Laure weren’t getting on, and after he was sent to Murat for nine months in late eighty-eight she quit their apartment and got a place of her own.’

Dominique said, ‘What was he sent to Murat for?’

‘Aggravated assault,’ Nicole said. ‘Blanc had got away with murder, only to be sent down for getting into a drunken brawl. Made a bit of a mess of the other guy, apparently. The only time he was ever actually convicted of anything. Before he murdered those girls, of course.’

Her fingers rattled across the keyboard, and Enzo saw her eyes scanning the text that she next brought up on her screen. He saw the earnest concern in them, and the studied concentration as she read.

‘A condition of his early release from Murat was that he attended sessions at Rentrée, the Catholic charity for the resettlement of prisoners. Which, of course, is where he met Lucie. He had come out of prison to find that Anne-Laure had left him, and maybe that was a contributing factor, but it seems he became besotted by Lucie Martin. And, well... the rest we know.’ She glanced at Enzo. ‘Do you want me to go through the murders of the prostitutes?’

But Enzo shook his head. It was all a matter of public record, and he had been over those killings many times. Blanc’s story was not untypical of the lives of the petty criminals who inhabited that dark and dangerous underworld concealed by the wafer-thin veneer of civilisation that society papered over it. A world inhabited by criminals and cops alike, creatures found crawling beneath the stones we never want to lift. But it told him nothing new, providing not even a foothold from which to advance the investigation. He felt the fingers of despair closing around him.

Dominique said, ‘We should go and talk to his wife.’ She looked at Nicole. ‘Or is it ex-wife?’

Nicole shrugged. ‘There’s no mention anywhere of them ever getting a divorce.’

‘Can you get us an address? We’ll go first thing in the morning.’

‘I’ll try.’

Enzo reached down to retrieve a bundle of folders from his shoulder bag. He pushed them across the table towards Nicole. ‘Those are the files on the Bordeaux Six.’ He shook his head. ‘I’ve been through them and through them. But a pair of fresh eyes...’

Nicole pulled them towards her. ‘I’ll go through them myself with a fine-toothed comb, Monsieur Macleod.’

‘I’m going to have to take Alexis back to Paris tomorrow.’ Kirsty’s face said it all. ‘I hate to leave you, Papa. But I’ll brief Roger on everything that’s happened.’

Enzo nodded, then the ringing of his mobile phone startled everyone around the table. He glanced at the screen and saw that the call was from Commissaire Hélène Taillard, and he was almost afraid to answer it.

‘Hélène?’ Everyone watched as he listened and nodded. He glanced at his watch. ‘What are you doing there at this time of night?’ His eyes grew moist at her response, and he blinked furiously to clear them. ‘I’ll be right over.’ He hung up and looked around the expectant faces. There was a break in his voice as he said, ‘She’s been at the caserne all evening. Taken personal charge of coordinating the investigation into Sophie’s abduction. She has the forensics report on the house she was held in.’ He stood up. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

Dominique got quickly to her feet. ‘I’ll come with you.’

Much of the police headquarters lay in darkness. It stood at the north end of the loop in the River Lot that contained the old town of Cahors, and was manned only by a skeleton night staff. An officer at reception led them back through a half-lit corridor towards a slab of yellow electric light that fell from an open door to lie across the floor and fold itself up the wall. They could hear Hélène’s voice all the way down the hall. Rapid, insistent. One end of a telephone conversation.

Hélène hung up and rose from her desk as the officer showed Enzo and Dominique into her office. She took Enzo in her arms and held him close for several long moments before standing back. Enzo was almost shocked to see the hint of tears gathering themselves in her eyes. ‘We’ll get her back,’ she said.

She was still in uniform, but had dispensed with the hat, her hair piled up and pinned neatly to her head. There was barely a trace of make-up remaining on her face after a long day. She looked tired. She shook Dominique’s hand and turned to lift a folder from her desk.

‘They emailed me a preliminary report.’ She forced a smile. ‘I know we’re all supposed to be on the same side, but you’ve no idea how difficult it is to get cops from one département to share information with cops from another. You can thank the préfet for exerting his influence.’

And Enzo felt himself choked at the realisation that friends from all sides were stepping up to the plate to help him. She handed him the folder and he pulled out the three printed sheets from inside.

‘There’s not much to go on, I’m afraid. The house has been on the market and lying empty for nearly a year. The owners pay someone to check up on it occasionally. Air the house, cut the grass, that sort of thing. He says he was last there about two weeks ago.’

Dominique said, ‘And he was the only key holder?’

Hélène shook her head. ‘No. The house is with several estate agents, and they all hold keys. There have been eight or ten visits to the property by prospective buyers over the last few months. The last one just ten days ago. And apparently the keys from that visit have gone missing.’

Enzo looked up from the folder. ‘Who were the last people to visit?’

‘Don’t raise your hopes, Enzo,’ Hélène said. ‘If it was the people behind the abduction, they wouldn’t have given real names. But we’re chasing it down.’ She nodded towards the folder in his hands. ‘And you’ll see the forensics people haven’t come up with much. The house is full of fingerprints, of course. But probably none of them belonging to the people we’re interested in. The one possibility is DNA.’

Enzo frowned. ‘How so?’

‘Saliva traces on cigarette ends. The ashtrays are all overflowing. Depends whether or not they’re in the database, of course.’ She paused and examined the big Scotsman with concern. ‘How are you holding up?’

He shook his head. ‘Not well.’

‘If we were to take bets again, Enzo, I’d put money on whoever took Sophie being the same people who’ve been trying to kill you for the last three years.’

‘Then we’d be betting on the same side. Pretty short odds, too, I’d say.’ And he told her about the text from Sophie’s phone, and calling it back.

‘Enzo, there are ways of tracking phones down to locations these days.’

But he shook his head. ‘I’ve tried it several times since. It’s dead. Whatever else they are, these people aren’t stupid.’

‘So what will you do?’

He pursed his lips to contain his anger and frustration. ‘Catch them.’

She put a hand on his arm. ‘Leave it, Enzo, please. That’s our job.’

‘Yes, and you’ve been so good at it so far.’ It was out of his mouth before he could stop himself, and he saw Hélène withdraw her hand, as if from an electric shock. Regret immediately rushed in to fill all his empty places. He reached out and took her hand. ‘I’m sorry, Hélène. That was unfair.’ But he had hurt her, and hurt is something that is very hard to take back.

She pulled her hand away and rounded her desk. ‘I should probably be getting home.’

Dominique felt the hurt and tension that lay between them and tried to bridge the gap. ‘Speaking of DNA,’ she said, and delved into her bag to retrieve the small plastic container with the strands of Laurent’s hair that they had taken from his comb.

Enzo glanced at it and turned away. ‘This isn’t the time.’ He reached for the door.

But Hélène’s interest was piqued. ‘The time for what?’ She glanced at the hair sample and back at Enzo.

‘It doesn’t matter.’ He opened the door.

Dominique said, ‘There’s a question mark over the paternity of Enzo’s son, Laurent. We thought, maybe...’

Enzo avoided Hélène’s eye, and tried to ignore the curiosity in the look she gave him. ‘Like I said. This isn’t the time.’

Hélène took the container from Dominique, but kept her eyes on Enzo. ‘Well, since your DNA will still be in our database... I’ll pull a few strings.’ She paused. ‘I’ll keep you up to date with any developments on Sophie.’ Another pause. ‘If you’ll do the same?’ She raised an eyebrow and cocked her head.

Handling both his regret and his embarrassment at the same time was difficult for Enzo, and all he managed was a nod.