Cast Iron

Chapter thirty-six

Paris was wet and grey, and several degrees cooler than Bordeaux. Winter here, it seemed, had already got the city in the grip of its dead hand.

Jean-Marie Martinot lived beyond a gated arch in an apartment block called Villa Adrienne overlooking sumptuous gardens hidden from view off the Avenue du Général Leclerc in the fourteenth arrondissement.

Two of the three rooms he had once shared with his wife on the second floor were largely unused, gathering dust along with his memories, and he spent much of his life in one room with large windows that looked out over the gardens. It was a shambles. Settee and armchairs strewn with discarded clothes, half-eaten meals on plates gathering themselves on bookshelves and tables. Newspapers and wrappings accumulated in drifts on the floor.

‘Excuse the mess,’ he said as he showed Enzo in, but he seemed not in the least embarrassed by it. As if he had long stopped seeing it as the symptom of his loneliness that it was. The air was so thick with cigarette smoke that Enzo immediately wanted to open a window, but Martinot was oblivious. He had a hand-rolled cigarette, stained brown by nicotine, burning between his lips, and ashtrays everywhere were overflowing. He lifted an old coat from the back of an armchair by the window where rain ran like tears down the glass, and he waved Enzo into the seat. He threw the coat on the settee and sat himself down opposite, across a cluttered coffee table.

He wore baggy dark trousers held by a belt at the waist, and a stained grey cardigan open over a white shirt frayed at the collar. A day’s growth of silver bristles covered fleshy cheeks beneath a high forehead and a sweep of thick white hair. A big man once, age had diminished him in more ways than one. But there was still a twinkle in his clear blue eyes, even though Enzo noticed that he was wearing different-coloured socks.

‘So,’ he said, ‘you’re still on the Lambert case. I thought you’d got his killer?’

‘Well, yes. The one who actually broke his neck. But not whoever paid him to do it.’

The old policeman shook his head. ‘There are some cases that just never go away. The Lambert killing haunted me for damn near twenty years, even into retirement.’ He gave Enzo a look of grudging admiration. ‘But I could never have tracked down that killer the way you did. I’m just not up on all this new technology. In my day it was all about knocking on doors, tramping the streets and following your instincts.’

‘There’s still a lot to be said for that,’ Enzo said. It was what he was doing himself. All the science and new technology in the world was unlikely to save Sophie now. It was all boiling itself down to her father’s instinct and intuition.

‘How’s that journalist doing? What was his name...? Raffin?’

‘He’s pretty much recovered,’ Enzo said, and he remembered very clearly stooping to pick up the note left by Raffin’s cleaner in the journalist’s apartment, only for Raffin to take the bullet meant for Enzo.

‘A messy business.’

‘It was.’

‘Anyway, I’m glad to be of help again. Retirement is a much overrated thing, monsieur. Leads to atrophy of the brain as well as the body. I’d much rather be back at my old office on the Quai des Orfèvres than wasting away here waiting for my time to come. There’s nothing quite like feeling there’s a point to your life.’

He leaned forward to stub out his cigarette, and ash overflowed from the ashtray on to the table.

‘Your phone call gave me a good excuse to revisit some old colleagues and retrieve my case notebooks from the greffe.’ He laughed. ‘Hah! Notebooks. Do cops these days even carry such things?’ He opened a tin of tobacco and began carefully rolling another cigarette. ‘Funny looking at your old handwriting, and remembering things that used to be important to you. I was amazed how much of it I did actually recall, though. Lambert didn’t have that many friends. Nobody liked him very much. Apart, of course, from the girl called Sally.’

‘But you had names for the others?’ Enzo knew that the odds of this leading anywhere were extremely long.

The old man lifted an eyebrow. ‘Of course. But there’s only one, I think, that you’ll be interested in. When we first went looking for Sally we learned that she had a friend. A girl called Mathilde Salgues. Another hooker. Her only real friend, apparently, aside from Lambert himself.’ He shook his head. ‘Strange relationship that.’

‘Do you know where we can find her? Mathilde, I mean.’

‘Well, she’s not at the address she was back then.’ Martinot lit his cigarette, and smoke seeped out of the corners of his mouth as he grinned. ‘But there’s still a little life in this old dog yet. I did a bit of checking. She’s no longer Salgues. Seems she married into money, and up a class.’ He fumbled in the pocket of his cardigan and pulled out a folded page torn from a notebook. He handed it across the table to Enzo. ‘Lives in the Paris suburb of Orsay, and calls herself Mathilde de Vernal these days.’

Enzo unfolded the sheet of paper and looked at the address written in the old man’s tight, neat hand.

‘If it’s not too much to ask, Monsieur Macleod, I’d very much like to come with you when you go to see her. Just a wee reminder of how it used to be. When I still had a life.’

With a name like de Vernal, Enzo had imaged Mathilde to be living in some grand nineteenth-century townhouse set behind trees in its own extensive grounds. Instead, the taxi from the station dropped them off in the car park of a block of modern upscale apartments looking out over a sprawling area of parkland and lakes on the edge of la ville d’Orsay. Ash and sycamore, and lime and oak cast their shadows and their leaves on wet roads. A row of fir trees stood very nearly as tall as the apartments themselves.

It had taken only twenty minutes on the train to get here, and another ten in the taxi to the Rue de Valois. Old Martinot was in his element. He had listened intently on the train as Enzo explained why he wanted to talk to Mathilde, and fallen silent when he heard about Sophie’s abduction. Now, as they left the elevator on the third floor and walked to the door of the de Vernal apartment at the end of the hall, he said to Enzo, ‘I know it’s a dreadful cliché, monsieur. But there never is smoke without fire. If we can confirm your link between Lambert and those murders in Bordeaux, no matter how tenuous, there’s a reason for it. And it’ll lead us somewhere. Mark my words.’

Enzo noticed Martinot’s use of the word we, and took comfort from the sense of support gathering around him.

Martinot rapped on the door and said, ‘You leave this to me.’

A shadow darkened the other side of the spy hole at eye level. And a woman’s voice called from inside the apartment, ‘Who is it?’

‘Police, madame. Open up.’ The old man turned and half-winked at Enzo. He had shaved and put on his best and shiniest shoes, and a long, dark winter coat. Enzo had persuaded him that he should take a moment before they left to clean the food stain off the lapel.

Mathilde was a handsome woman, close to fifty Enzo thought. Recently coiffed hair shone almost blue-black, immaculately cut and cascading from a centre parting to very nearly touch her collar. The years had treated her kindly, and she had worn well, a strong jawline defining a well-structured face above an elegant neck that was only now beginning to show signs of age. She wore a cream blouse with a frilled lapel, and a pale blue pencil skirt that fell just below the knee. It would have been impossible to guess that she had once sold her body on street corners.

She looked out at them with concern, casting an appraising glance first towards Enzo, before turning it without apparent recognition in the direction of Martinot.

‘Commissaire Jean-Marie Martinot,’ the old man said, ignoring the fact that he had been retired for more than ten years. He half turned, but without looking at Enzo. ‘My colleague, Monsieur Macleod.’

She glanced again at Enzo and frowned. Whatever else he looked like, it wasn’t a policeman. But Martinot didn’t give her time to dwell on it.

‘We met in February 1992, you may recall, when I was investigating the murder of one Pierre Lambert, a rent boy working out of an apartment in the thirteenth.’

Colour immediately rose high on her cheeks, and she glanced quickly along the hall. ‘Please, come in,’ she said, and held the door wide, clearly in a hurry for them to step out of public view, and the possible earshot of prying neighbours.

She led them into a sumptuous living room, expensive leather furniture set around a deep, white, shagpile carpet. French windows looked out beyond a balcony and the trees below, to the still waters of distant lakes reflecting the pewter of a wintery sky. There were no lights on, and the room seemed gloomy and faded somehow. She turned towards them, clearly agitated. ‘I have two teenage children due home from school in ten minutes. I would appreciate it if you were gone before then.’

‘That’ll depend on how cooperative you are, madame,’ Martinot said. He looked pointedly around the room. ‘Seems like you married well. What is it your husband does?’

‘Look...’ She was almost ringing her hands. ‘My husband knows nothing about... about my life back then. And I’d very much like it to stay that way.’ She paused. ‘What can you possibly want to talk to me about after all this time?’

‘Your friend Sally,’ Enzo said.

Mathilde frowned. ‘Sally?’ Then it dawned on her. ‘Oh, you mean Sal?’

And Enzo remembered that ‘Sal’ was what Lulu had called Sally Linol.

‘She disappeared,’ Martinot prompted her. ‘Immediately after Lambert was murdered.’

‘Yes...’ She seemed lost for a moment in recollection. ‘They were a weird pair, those two.’

‘And yet you and Sal were friends,’ Enzo said.

‘We used to work the same patch. Shared a pimp.’ Somehow the memory of it was distasteful to her now. ‘Even shared a studio for a time. Then she got herself some money and moved out. A place of her own. Though she still spent most of her time at Pierre’s.’

‘Where’d the money come from?’ Martinot asked.

She shrugged and folded her arms defensively below her breasts. ‘Who knows? She certainly never told me. Some of the girls said she’d caught herself a nice wealthy client who treated her well, but, if she did, I didn’t know anything about it. It was just gossip.’ She couldn’t resist a glance at her watch, and she sighed theatrically. ‘Look, what is this all about? Has she turned up, or what?’ And then she was struck by a sudden thought. ‘She’s not dead, is she?’

‘I hope not,’ Enzo said. ‘Did she ever tell you where she was from?’

She gave him a withering look. ‘The girls don’t talk about stuff like that. You don’t tell, you don’t ask.’ But she paused then, realising this was not the answer they wanted. She thought for a moment. ‘I don’t know why, maybe it slipped out sometime. Bordeaux?’ Then she shrugged. ‘Could be wrong.’ She glanced from one to the other. ‘Listen, I’d really like you to go.’

Martinot said, ‘She never got in touch again after Lambert’s murder?’

A vigorous shake of the head. ‘Never. And good riddance. Didn’t even say goodbye.’

Enzo retrieved his laptop from his shoulder bag and kneeled down to open it up on a low coffee table by the window. He woke it from sleep and brought up, full screen, the jpeg image of Sally Linol that Nicole had sent him. The feather tattoo was clearly visible on the side of her neck.

Mathilde’s hand flew to her mouth. ‘Oh, my God! Where did you get that?’

‘Is it her?’ Enzo said.

Mathilde leaned over to trace the line of the feather with the tips of her fingers. ‘God, yes. Even without that tattoo, I’d have known her anywhere.’