Cast Iron

Chapter thirty-two

Anne-Laure Blanc lived on the second floor of a seventies apartment block in the Bordeaux banlieue of Pessac, made infamous by La Cité Frugès, a self-contained housing scheme designed and built for workers in the 1920s by the Swiss-born architect Corbusier. Her one-bed apartment overlooked some of the concrete cubes intended by Corbusier’s experiment to solve a twentieth-century housing shortage. All brightly painted now in orange and blue and green and red, and set in serried rows among trees shedding autumn leaves on empty streets.

In the two-and-a-half-hour drive from Cahors to Bordeaux, Enzo had briefed Dominique fully on the events of the past week and every tiny detail of his investigation into the murder of Lucie Martin. His eyes were stinging from lack of sleep, although he supposed he must have drifted off sometime shortly before the alarm brought him crashing back into reality and the sickening recollection of Sophie’s abduction. Coffee had turned to acid in his stomach, and his mouth was dry and suffused with a bad taste that wouldn’t go away.

Anne-Laure was happy enough to invite them into her tiny apartment, and although she had filled it with bright paintings and photographs, and china ornaments of puppies and pixies, she had the demeanour of someone entirely consumed by loneliness. Even had they been the bearers of bad news, Enzo thought, she would still have greeted them with a smile, an offer of coffee and an invitation to sit on her best settee.

She had put on weight, Enzo imagined, since the days when she and Régis had married, and her red-dyed hair seemed sparse, thinning perhaps with an early onset of the menopause. She wore blue jog-pants that fitted where they touched, and a pink hoodie that looked like it might have been purchased before the weight had begun to accumulate.

The apartment was clean enough, but made smaller somehow by cheap furniture that was much too big for it. An electric fire was switched off and the room was cold. Enzo wondered if it was an attempt to save money. A woman who was at home mid-morning was unlikely to have a job, and he thought she was probably on benefits.

‘I still go and see him sometimes,’ she said. ‘There’s no hard feelings. We had our time. It was short, and it passed. But he’s still a lovely man.’

Enzo and Dominique exchanged fleeting glances. It seemed an odd way to describe a triple murderer. She went off to retrieve a photo album from an ugly 1960s sideboard, and squeezed on to the settee between them to open it up. ‘I should look at these more often. Everything’s digital now, and nobody keeps photo albums any more. Which is a shame, because they are lovely to look back on.’ Everything, it seemed, in Anne-Laure’s life was ‘lovely’.

There were photographs taken in a bar somewhere of Régis and Anne-Laure raising glasses towards the camera. Both of them almost unrecognisable. Impossibly young, brimming with life and laughter, moments trapped in time and captured in the virulent reds and greens and blues of cheap 1980s film stock. Like the painted concrete blocks outside her window.

She flicked through the pages faster than they could take them in. Girls with the superficial glamour of the street-corner hooker, dyed blond hair and unthinkably short skirts. Men with broken-veined faces and glassy eyes leering at the lens. And then she stopped at a photograph taken in a park somewhere, sunlight dappling grass through summer leaves. She and Régis were seated on a travelling rug spread out on the lawn, a picnic hamper between them and a baby held up by Régis above his crossed legs. Both he and Anne-Laure were burned out in places by patches of sunlight, but their happiness shone through, and there was such pride in Régis’s smile that Enzo began to regard him as almost human.

‘Happiest days of my life,’ Anne-Laure said. Enzo glanced at her and saw that she was transported back to that time, a radiance in her eyes and her smile at the recollection of a life long gone. ‘Being pregnant was the best feeling ever. Like it’s what I had been born for.’ Then a darkness crossed her face. ‘Though I only ever had the one.’

Dominique said, ‘Why did you leave him?’

She laughed, as if there were something funny in the question. ‘Oh, Régis was never a one-girl man. I suppose I always knew that. But it wasn’t until he went inside that I realised there was no future for us. If I wanted a life of my own, a real life, it wasn’t going to be with Régis.’ Her smile was rueful and filled with irony. ‘And look where I ended up.’

Enzo said, ‘What did you know about Lucie Martin?’

She frowned. ‘Lucie...?’ Then recollection dawned. ‘Oh, that girl who was murdered over in Duras.’ She shook her head. ‘That wasn’t him. No doubt he had a thing for her. But that was just Régis. He’d never have hurt the girl.’ She turned a look on them that was so honest and open it was almost startling in its innocence, and Enzo wondered if it was the innocence in Anne-Laure that had attracted Régis, just as it was in Lucie. She said, ‘I never stopped loving him, I suppose. There was violence in him, but it was never directed at me. Or any other woman, as far as I knew. He always treated his girls well. They liked him. And that’s rare for a man in his line of work.’

‘Still,’ Dominique said, ‘he murdered three women.’

Anne-Laure’s smile faded and became fixed. ‘They say that, yes.’

‘He’s never denied it.’

‘No, he hasn’t. But it doesn’t make him a bad person.’

She stood up, a little huffily, closing her photo album and returning it to its place in the sideboard where it would reside unopened for who knew how many more years.

‘But don’t take my word for it. Ask any of his girls. They all loved him, you know. Go and see Lulu. She’ll tell you all about Régis. Still on the game, even after all these years. Past her sell-by, you might say. But, then, some men seem to like that kind of thing.’

‘Where would we find Lulu?’ Enzo asked.

‘I don’t know where she lives. But she still plies her trade on the Quai Deschamps,’ Ann-Laure said. ‘Any night after dark. Just ask one of the girls. Can I get you another coffee?’

‘No, no, thanks.’ Enzo stood up. This had been a waste of time. Whatever she might have told them about Régis, she wasn’t going to discuss the murders. Or Lucie Martin.’

But Dominique remained seated. She said, ‘What happened to your daughter?’

Anne-Laure lifted her chin and stared off into some unseen distance. ‘Alice is lucky. She got away from all this.’

‘She must be nearly twenty-five by now,’ Dominique said. Then paused. ‘She’s not in Bordeaux anymore, then?’

‘No. No, she’s not.’

Enzo said, ‘Does she ever visit her father?’

An almost pained look flitted across Anne-Laure’s face. ‘She’s never set eyes on her father in all the years since... well, since they sent him to prison. And never will.’

Prostitution around the Gare Saint-Jean had become a blight, with ladies of the night soliciting customers from the doors of churches and pharmacies, congregating in the underpasses. If you knew where to look there were strip clubs and swingers’ clubs, massage parlours and brothels, and places you could watch live sex shows caught on camera.

The Quai Deschamps was on the other side of the river. Derelict industrial properties and once grand mansions, like bad teeth in a grim smile. After dark, cars cruised the riverbank, girls appearing out of the shadows, catching headlights. Pale, painted faces, sometimes brown, sometimes Asian, long legs barely covered by miniskirts so short they verged on the obscene. Breasts spilling out of low-cut tops or unbuttoned blouses as they leaned in open windows, displaying their wares to potential clients.

Enzo and Dominique got off the tram at Stalingrad and walked south along the quay into darkness, past crumbling brick walls defaced by garishly coloured graffiti. Across the river, the black water reflected the lights of the city, another world away, where people went about lives uncontaminated by crime or a sex trade that bred only misery and disease. Where young women sold their futures for a handful of euros, and men exploited them to indulge their sad fantasies.

On a patch of waste ground they saw three white vans parked among the rubble, suspension tested by men exploiting the world’s oldest profession, and women practising it. Vehicles cruised slowly by, hidden faces staring out in suspicion at the incongruous sight of a man and woman walking here together.

During the long hours of waiting in the hotel room they had taken near the station, Enzo had barely been able to contain his frustration. Time, it seemed to him, was simply ticking away, and with it any hope of getting Sophie back. But he had no idea what else to do. For very nearly the first time in his life he was lost. He did not know which way to turn next. He was like a drowning man, struggling to keep his head above water, but losing the fight. And he felt himself being sucked under.

He had been determined to go to the Quai Deschamps alone. It was too dangerous, he had said, for Dominique. He couldn’t guarantee to protect her. She had sat him down on the edge of the bed and told him that she was young, trained and fit, and the only reason she was going along was to protect him. And he had smiled, in spite of the darkness in his heart.

‘Kinky!’ A skinny young black woman stepped out of deep shadow where she had been standing behind a broken-down portail that opened on to the garden of a derelict gatehouse. Somewhere beyond the darkness, an old house rose in silhouette against a sky backlit by the city itself. ‘Been a long time since I had a couple. First timers?’

Enzo said, ‘We’re looking for Lulu.’

Derision exploded from her lips. ‘Oh, are you? What’s she got that I haven’t got, then?’ She cackled. ‘Apart from another fifty kilos of flesh.’

‘Do you know where we can find her?’ Dominique said.

The girl looked her up and down lasciviously. ‘Not bad,’ she said. ‘Sure I can’t change your mind? Just you and me. We don’t need the old guy, do we?’

Dominique reached into an inside pocket and pulled out an ID wallet that she opened up and thrust in the girl’s face. ‘You can tell us where we can find Lulu, or you can spend the night in a cell.’ She snapped the wallet shut and thrust it back in her pocket.

‘Oh, shit,’ the girl said, all her levity displaced by disappointment. ‘Fucking cops.’

‘Well?’ Dominique was insistent.

The girl nodded towards the south end of the quay. ‘About a hundred metres down. Gates of an old tyre factory. She parks up on the concrete behind it.’ She puckered up her lips. ‘Give her a kiss from me, darling, would you?’

Enzo waited until they were twenty metres or so away before he said in a low voice, ‘What the hell did you show her?’

‘My old gendarme’s ID. I was supposed to hand it in, but no one ever asked, so...’ She shrugged. ‘Thought it might come in handy.’

‘Isn’t it illegal to impersonate a police officer?’

Dominique smiled. ‘But I’m so well practised, who could tell the difference?’

It was somewhere along here, Enzo knew, that one of Blanc’s victims had been found. As they approached Lulu’s van across a cracked concrete apron strewn with the detritus of discarded lives, a client was slipping out of the back of it. The man was short and middle-aged, and Enzo saw the panic in his rabbit eyes as he noticed them coming towards him, and he went skulking quickly off into the darkness like some resentful rodent.

Then Lulu swung into view from behind the van and cast cautious eyes in their direction. The placing of her hands on her hips, Enzo decided, was pure bravado. Telling them she was neither frightened nor intimidated. But no matter how long she had been at this game, it never became any less dangerous, and Enzo knew she would be feeling both.

‘I don’t do couples,’ she said.

‘Neither do we,’ Enzo said. ‘We just want to talk.’

Lulu looked at him as if he were some kind of pervert. ‘Talk? I don’t do talk.’

She was at least a hundred kilos in weight, but most of it still hung in the right places, and what wasn’t on show was contained in a brightly coloured print dress with a crossed front that lifted and held her breasts unnaturally high. She had calves like a rugby player and shoulders to match, and teetered on strapless high-heeled sandals that looked both too small and too tight. Back-combed brassy blond hair was piled up high above a face so poorly painted it would not have been out of place in a circus. She was, Enzo thought, at least fifty. A raddled wreck of what might once have been an attractive woman.

‘Anne-Laure Blanc suggested we talk to you,’ he said.

And her face changed immediately. ‘Anne-Laure? Is she in some kind of trouble?’

‘She’s in no trouble,’ Enzo said. He took out his wallet and counted out fifty euros. ‘We just want a few minutes of your time to talk about Régis. Will this cover it?’

Lulu snatched it so quickly from his hand that he almost didn’t feel it leave his fingers. She tucked it into her cleavage.

Enzo said, ‘Are you not a bit old for this, Lulu?’

She looked him up and down. ‘Not as old as you, pappy. What do you want to know?’

They turned as a car cruised by out in the street. The driver’s eyes, catching the light beyond the window, quickly averted themselves before the vehicle accelerated suddenly away.

Lulu said, ‘You just lost me a customer.’

Enzo drew out another twenty note and it vanished to join the others in the generous depths of her cleavage. ‘Anything at all you can tell us about him.’

She eyed them suspiciously, clearly wondering why they would come asking her about Régis Blanc after all these years. But she knew better than to ask. ‘With Régis what you saw was what you got. You played it straight with him, he played it straight with you. No side to him. Never touched the girls, never laid a finger on us. And let me tell you, that’s pretty unique in my world.’

Enzo reckoned she had probably been on the business end of a few fists in her time.

‘Truth is, we all liked him. You couldn’t help but like Régis. He was a good laugh. Always wisecracking, and never sold you short. Took what he was owed and nothing else. And see if anyone messed with you. A client, or another pimp, Régis would pay him a visit. And you never had no more trouble.’ She shook her head, and her smile was one of fond recollection. ‘Word gets round, you know. You don’t fuck with Régis’s girls.’ She grinned. ‘Unless you’re paying. We felt safe. You know?’ She spat on the concrete. ‘Not like now.’

Dominique said, ‘Those three girls he murdered must have felt safe, too. Until he strangled them.’

Lulu folded her arms beneath her breasts and shook her head vigorously. ‘I still don’t understand it. None of us did. At first we thought he’d been set up. Régis would never have done something like that. Then, when he didn’t deny it...’ She turned dark eyes of consternation on them. ‘I’m still not quite sure I believe it.’

‘Did you know them?’ Enzo said. ‘The dead girls.’

She shrugged. ‘Everyone knew everyone back then. But I didn’t know them. I mean, they weren’t friends or anything.’

‘You’ve heard of the Bordeaux Six?’

‘Who hasn’t?’

‘You knew them, too, then?’

‘Same way as I knew the girls he strangled. Except for Sal. We used to hang out. Do the occasional double act.’

‘Sally Linol?’

‘Never knew her second name. She had a tattoo of a feather on the side of her neck. Bitch just up and disappeared on me. Not a damned word. One day she’s here. The next she’s gone. I remember Régis asking about her. Seemed very keen to find her. Someone said she’d gone to Paris, but no one knew for sure.’ She looked at Enzo and then at Dominique. ‘I can’t imagine what use to you any of my ramblings might be. But you’re running out of time. Unless you want to put more money in the machine.’

Enzo shook his head hopelessly. It was another dead end. Just confirmation of the enigma that was Régis Blanc. A man of impossible contradictions, who had murdered three prostitutes and fallen for an angel from Duras. But he hadn’t killed her, Enzo was pretty sure, and he was starting to doubt that Blanc was anything more than a time-consuming red herring. Despair was beginning to seep into his soul. ‘Thanks anyway,’ he said.

‘It’s poor Anne-Laure I feel the most sorry for,’ Lulu said suddenly. ‘Left on her own without any financial support to look after that little girl. I drop in sometimes for a coffee and a chat. She’s a poor soul. Must have been a terrible burden.’

‘What?’ Dominique frowned.

‘Looking after that kid. What was it they called it? Pump, or Pompe’s disease. Something like that. They said she wouldn’t live for more than a couple of years. I remember Régis was devastated. I mean, really devastated. He thought the world of that little girl. Then, when he got sent down for the murders, poor Anne-Laure got left to cope with it all on her own.’