Cast Iron

Chapter forty-four

The marzipan house, with its sugary red roof and quizzical eyebrows, looked as if it might dissolve in the rain. Mist rose up from the ground around it like steam. A veil of gauze concealing all its detail and reducing it to a blur of colour and shape, like some impressionist painting.

Tall conifers stood dripping darkly in the rain as Enzo turned their car through the gates and they caught their first sight of it. The time was a little before ten a.m. He followed the sweep of the gravel drive to the parking area in front of the main entrance where there was a single car parked. A green Renault Clio. All the windows and doors were shuttered for the winter, except for a couple high up in the tower, where Enzo knew that Madame Brusque had her private rooms.

He and Dominique stepped out into the rain and climbed steps to try the front door. It was locked. They followed the path, then, around the side of the house, past shuttered bay windows and large shrubs shedding leaves on the gravel, to a porticoed side entrance. Water poured from the sloping roof above its steps where a gutter was broken, a curtain of water that they slipped through quickly to squeeze into a tiny porch. A glazed door looked into a narrow, stone-flagged entrance hall.

Enzo tried the handle and the door opened into the hall. He and Dominique stepped inside, dripping second-hand raindrops all over the flags. It was gloomy here, and the house beyond lay brooding darkly in silence. A narrow staircase led off to their right and Enzo leaned forward to peer up into the stairwell. Somewhere at the top, cold light spilled in from a hidden skylight. This was the tower.

‘Hello!’ His own voice sounded strangely remote as he called up the stairwell. Disconnected from him, somehow. ‘Is there anyone there?’

They waited in silence and exchanged glances before Enzo called again. ‘Hello!’

The sound of a door opening somewhere high up in the tower travelled down the stairs to meet them. Then a ghostly pale face peered over the banister. Its spectral effect was emphasised by the lifeless grey hair that hung in lustreless loops to her shoulders. Hair that had been pulled back into a severe bun when last Enzo had seen her.

‘What do you want?’

They could hear the apprehension in her voice.

‘It’s Enzo Macleod, Madame Brusque. I was here the other week with my daughter, Roger’s fiancée.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Yes.’ And now they heard apprehension morphing to indifference. ‘What do you want?’

‘Can we come up?’

‘I’m not really prepared for visitors.’

‘Won’t take long,’ Enzo called back. ‘I promise.’

She hesitated, and clearly wanted to say no. But this was the father of her employer’s fiancée. How could she refuse? ‘Alright.’

She watched Enzo and Dominique all the way up the stairs, until they drew level with her on the landing. Enzo seemed to tower over her. A quilted pink dressing gown gathered itself around a long, diaphanous nightdress, and she wore grey and pink slippers. She might very well still have been in bed when they came calling.

‘Has anyone been in contact?’ he said.

She frowned. ‘In contact? What do you mean?’

He shook his head. ‘Obviously not. It doesn’t matter.’

The woman looked beyond him at Dominique. ‘Who’s this?’

‘My colleague.’

Again the woman frowned, and Enzo couldn’t help but notice that her once glittering green eyes were faded now, and almost grey like her hair. ‘Colleague?’ She seemed confused. ‘Are you here on business?’

‘I’m afraid we are.’

Now he saw the return of apprehension, perhaps even fear, in her eyes. ‘What sort of business?’

Dominique said, ‘The business of catching killers, Sally.’

And what little colour there was in Sally Linol’s face vanished, leaving it almost transparent. Dominique stepped forward and pulled away the upturned collar of her dressing gown. There, starkly etched on white skin, was her feather tattoo. Sally took a step back, eyes wide with fear. ‘What do you want?’

‘To keep you safe, Sally,’ Enzo said. ‘There are people on their way here to kill you.’

Even her lips were bloodless, eyes darting, panic-stricken, towards the open door of her apartment, and then the stairs, neither offering any real means of escape. And suddenly it was as if her fear, something sick and malign that had possessed her for nearly two decades, had left her. Enzo saw the slump of her shoulders, the resignation that settled on her, cutting deeper lines into a face shaped by angst and uncertainty over all the lost years of her life.

Enzo said, ‘What we need to know, Sally, is why.’

She nodded. ‘You’d better come in.’

They followed her into the tiny apartment at the top of the tower. A single room with a kitchen and breakfast bar. A small round table in the window looking out over the gardens. A couple of armchairs gathered around a TV set. Through an open door they could see an unmade bed, and another door off the bedroom, leading to a shower room. Régis Blanc had spent all the years of his life sentence in Lannemezan. Sally Linol had spent hers here. Both of them prisoners of their own making.

She slumped into a chair by the window and gazed sightlessly out at the view she must have seen every day for the nearly seven thousand of them she had spent in this place. Then she put her elbows on the table in front of her and dropped her head into her hands, shaking it in despair.

‘I always knew that someday, somehow, they would find me.’ And she lifted her head to look at Enzo, an appeal for understanding in her eyes. ‘It’s been no life at all. Just a living hell.’ She ran her tongue over dry lips. ‘It’ll be a relief, at last, to tell somebody the truth.’

Enzo felt Dominique’s tiny tug at the sleeve of his jacket, and he half turned. Dominique tipped her head towards the door. She wanted them to go. Everything in her face and her eyes said they had no time.

But Enzo’s frown and the slightest shake of his head said, Not yet. This was a defining moment. Sally Linol, after years of silence, wanted to tell her story. To tell it to them. The last thing he wanted to do was break the spell. In other circumstances, away from here, when she felt safe, it was perfectly possible that she might decide to keep it to herself after all.

He stepped away from Dominique and sat in the chair opposite the woman who had once sold her services on the streets of Bordeaux and Paris, and shared a bed with the murdered rent boy, Pierre Lambert. He slipped his phone from his pocket, tapping its Record icon and setting it on the table between them. She was oblivious. Enzo said, ‘I’ve met your parents, Sally. They’re both still alive. And still hoping to find you alive, too.’

Those green-grey eyes flickered towards him, and he saw the pain behind them, before tears blurred their sharpness. ‘The last thing I ever wanted to do was hurt them. You know? They were good people. I couldn’t have asked for a happier childhood. Only...’ Time and distance glazed her eyes now, and Enzo knew that she had left him, transported back to another place and time. Memories, regrets, all those fears and fantasies that we shut away in lockfast boxes in the darkest corners of our minds. ‘They didn’t have the money to put me through university in Bordeaux. Tuition fees, books, an apartment, food, transport. My dad was a farm worker. He barely made enough to cover their own living costs.’ Her breath trembled as she drew it in. ‘So I told them I had a job. And I did. But not the job they thought it was.’

The first of her tears splashed on to the shiny surface of the table.

‘In the beginning it was almost fun. Wealthy older men who liked young girls. Sugar daddies with wandering hands and generous wallets. A friend introduced me to it, and you know pretty quickly you get used to the money. You buy things. You move into a better apartment. You meet people. And then the money dries up. You’re a little older and the sugar daddies lose interest. You start to get desperate. You’ll do anything for cash. And that’s when you begin to lose control, when it all starts slipping away from you, and you find yourself mixing with pimps and junkies, getting yourself into hock and standing on street corners to pay your debts.’

‘How did you meet Régis Blanc?’

‘I was at a club with a client one night. He got really drunk, and he wasn’t nice with a drink in him. He started beating up on me, and this guy steps in and kicks the shit out of him. That was Régis. He was like that. Hated to see any of his girls treated badly. Not that I was one of his girls.’ A pale smile flitted across her face. ‘Not then. But it wasn’t long before I was. He was really good to me, especially after what I’d been through the previous six months. But he was good to us all.’ She raised her eyes to Enzo ‘We loved him, you know. Régis was special. All the girls felt really bad for him when his little girl was born with that... whatever it was. Some kind of congenital defect. And I suppose, in a way, it changed him. He adored that baby. Really adored her.’

Dominique said, ‘But he murdered three girls.’

Sally’s eyes darted towards her, then quickly away again, as if embarrassed. ‘Régis had some kind of a deal going with this rich guy. Well, I don’t know that he was rich, but he liked to have working girls in his bed, and certainly had the means to pay for it. He had this little apartment in west Bordeaux. His little love nest, he called it. There were four of us that Régis used to send there on a regular basis. Sometimes two at a time. The guy wasn’t violent or anything. But he was pretty weird. Young, too. Liked us to do some pretty strange things.’

She went silent for a moment, and the knuckles of her interlocked hands turned white with tension on the table in front of her. Enzo guessed that she was recalling some of those strange things.

‘Anyway, one of the girls found out that our weirdo was married, with a very young family, and was some kind of politico at the mairie. I mean, none of us ever read the papers, or watched TV, but apparently he was all over the news. Youngest ever adjoint to the mayor.’

Enzo sat back. ‘Jean-Jacques Devez.’

Rabbit eyes darted a frightened look in his direction and Sally nodded.

‘So you blackmailed him.’

Resentment flared briefly in the one-time prostitute. ‘I didn’t, no! But the other three figured he would probably be willing to pay to keep our sordid little sessions permanently under wraps.’ She shook her head. ‘I didn’t want anything to do with it. He was a weirdo, yes, but he paid good money. Why risk that?’

‘So what happened?’

‘They went to see him, all three together, and he went berserk. Smashed up the furniture, threatened to kill them if they breathed a word to anyone. They were pretty shaken up, and I thought, Shit! Time to get out of here. Packed up my stuff and left. Didn’t tell a soul. Just got the hell out of there as fast as I could. Seemed to me you don’t go messing with people like that. We’re little people, know what I mean? We don’t control much of anything in our lives. And people like him... Well, they have power and money. They control everything, and they’re dangerous. Get away with anything, too.’

‘Like murder,’ Dominique said.

Sally nodded and stared at her hands.

‘Only Devez didn’t kill anyone,’ Enzo said. ‘Régis did it.’

Sally swung her head slowly from side to side, and it was clear that she still found it difficult to believe. ‘When I heard the news, in Paris...’ Her face was a mask of consternation as she lifted it towards Enzo. ‘It just didn’t seem possible. Régis? He would never have laid a finger on his girls.’

Dominique said, ‘But he strangled your three friends.’

‘I can only think that Devez forced him to do it somehow. Had some kind of, I don’t know, power over him, or hold on him.’

Everything was falling into place for Enzo now. ‘Or made him an offer that he couldn’t refuse. An inducement.’

All the lines around Sally’s eyes gathered themselves in a frown. ‘What possible inducement could he have offered Régis to make him do a thing like that?’ But it wasn’t a question Enzo needed to ask. He knew the answer.

He said, ‘So you went to Paris.’

She shrugged. ‘Where else would I go?’

‘And resumed your—’ he searched for the right word — ‘career.’

She glowered at him. ‘It was never my intention to go back on the game. I wanted to make a clean start.’ Her indignation faded almost as quickly as it had fired itself up, and she sighed with sad despair at the memory. ‘Only it’s not that easy. In the end you do what you know, you do what you can do.’

‘And that’s when you met Pierre?’ Enzo saw in her eyes, then, a kind of acceptance that somehow they knew everything about her.

She nodded. ‘Best friend I ever had. I loved that man. You know? I mean, really loved him. Not in a sexual way. Cos, well, that wasn’t ever going to happen. Though I’d have slept with him in a heartbeat if he hadn’t been gay.’ She looked away self-consciously, staring into the empty void of recollection beyond the window. ‘We were, you know, total confidants. Told each other everything.’

‘Including the story of Devez and the three dead prostitutes?’ Dominique said.

Sally dragged her eyes away from the window and looked from one to the other. ‘I never in my wildest imagination thought he’d go blackmailing Devez. I mean, Jesus, the man was a fucking superstar by then. Followed me to Paris. Well, he didn’t, but that’s what it felt like. Rising star in the town hall. Tipped to be the next mayor. You just don’t fuck with people like that. Christ, he’d already had three girls killed. Why wouldn’t he do it again?’

‘So you didn’t know anything about it?’ Enzo said.

She shook her head. ‘All I knew was that suddenly Pierre had money. Lots of it. And he was generous, you know. Splashed it around. Spent a lot of it on me.’

Dominique folded her arms across her chest. ‘And you never thought to ask him where it came from?’

‘He said it was a wealthy client who’d fallen for him big time, liked to indulge him.’

‘And you believed that?’

‘Well, maybe not. But, you know, some things you don’t ask.’ She sucked in a long, slow breath then expelled it quickly, as if summoning her courage for the final revelation. ‘Then, one night, he told me. He was drunk. And scared. Something had spooked him. I was... incandescent. I can’t begin to tell you. I’d have killed him myself if I could. But, you know, he’d a way of wrapping me around his little finger. Calmed me down. Told me he was setting up one last payment, and then that would be it. He and I would get out of Paris. Set ourselves up somewhere else, enjoy the fruits of the payouts Devez had already made.’ She stopped, eyes staring into the abyss. ‘And then he was dead. Murdered in his apartment. And I knew they’d be coming for me.’ She looked up, reliving the horror of it. ‘I had no idea what to do, where to go. I was sure they would find me. No loose ends. These people never leave loose ends.’

Dominique drew up a chair and joined them at the table, curiosity written large all over her face. ‘So what did you do?’

A sad smile flickered across her face. ‘I was rescued by an angel.’

Enzo said, ‘Marie Raffin.’

Sally looked up, surprised. ‘How did you know?’

‘Educated guess.’ He paused. ‘What was Marie’s involvement in all this?’

‘She was a journalist, you know? I’d never met her before, had no idea who she was. Only she turns up at my door within twenty-four hours of Pierre getting murdered and says that if I’m prepared to help her, she can keep me safe.’ She gasped. ‘Jesus, I nearly bit her hand off. Seems she was working on some kind of story about Devez. An exposé. Something she’d been at for months, something linking him to the murders in Bordeaux. I don’t know what her source was, or how she knew, and I didn’t ask. She was just there, offering me an escape. And I jumped at the chance. She brought me down here, set me up as housekeeper under an assumed name. Showed me how to use make-up to cover my tattoo. She said it would only be for a short time and that as soon as the story had broken I would give a statement to the police, and they would put me in protective custody. Devez would go to jail and I’d be safe.’

She breathed her exasperation, irony turning her mouth down at both corners. ‘But, then, as you know, Marie herself was murdered. I can’t tell you how scared I was then. Absolutely certain they would come for me. But they never did. And here I am, twenty years on, a middle-aged spinster living on her own in the tower of an upmarket chambres d’hôtes, changing the sheets of wealthy fucking guests and cleaning their shit out the pan when they’re gone. My whole fucking life wasted.’

A life, Enzo thought, configured by fear and mired in regret.

She looked at him almost defiantly. ‘So what now? A statement to the police and protective custody? Just like Marie Raffin promised all those years ago?’

Enzo nodded. ‘Something like that.’

Sally snorted. ‘And what makes you think you’ll be any more able to deliver it than she was?’

Enzo slipped his phone back in his pocket. ‘We get you away from this place, I can pretty much guarantee it.’

Dominique stood up. ‘You need to get dressed fast, Sally. And put whatever you need in an overnight bag.’ She glanced at Enzo, then back at the older woman. ‘We’ll wait for you downstairs.’

There was a chill pervading the darkness of the house, and a smell of damp that Enzo had not been aware of on his previous visit. They wandered through into the main hall, where the double doors to the large sitting room stood open. Light leaked in around the edges of all the shutters, casting deep shadows in the gloom. Enzo found the rocker switch for an electric roller blind on the French windows and half raised it to bring some real light in from the outside. But it was a grey light, suffused with rain and pessimism. In the distance, yet more rain pitted the surface of the rectangular water feature set into the lawn, but the fountains had been switched off. There was enough water falling from the sky.

Enzo’s thoughts were full of Sophie. There had been no news of her for days. But as soon as they had got Sally Linol safely away from this place he could begin to open negotiations. He glanced at his watch, anxious now to be gone.

Dominique said, ‘So Raffin must have killed his own wife to protect Devez.’

Which dragged Enzo back from gloomy thoughts. ‘I suppose he must have. Although I can’t figure out why. We know by now what it was that Devez offered Régis by way of inducement to murder those girls. Blanc sacrificed them, and himself, for his daughter. But what kind of hold must Devez have had over Raffin to make him do something like that?’

Dominique shrugged. ‘Who knows? But maybe the offer to take him on as his press secretary is some kind of sop, now, to keep him sweet.’

Enzo kicked a footstool and sent it clattering away across the floor, the sound of it resounding around the house. ‘To think I trusted that bastard. That my own daughter gave him a child!’

Dominique crossed to the door and listened for Sally on the stairs. ‘He won’t come himself, will he? Raffin, I mean. He must know by now that we’ve figured out his part in all this.’

‘Whoever comes,’ Enzo said ominously, ‘it’s not just Sally Linol they’ll be wanting to silence.’

Dominique flashed him a look of apprehension. And she, too, glanced at her watch, as if it might tell her when Raffin’s unwelcome emissaries would arrive. Under her breath she muttered, ‘Come on, Sally. Hurry up!’

The ringing of Enzo’s mobile phone in the deep silence of the house made them both jump. Enzo fished it out of his pocket and looked at the display. ‘Hélène Taillard,’ he said and set it to speaker. Dominique crossed the room to listen in.

Hélène’s voice was tinny, and seemed inordinately loud in the hush of this grand salon. ‘Enzo, I got the sample you sent first thing this morning. Raffin’s razor. I had it couriered immediately by motorbike to the lab in Toulouse with instructions to give it priority over everything else. They just faxed me the results.’

Enzo was aware that he had actually stopped breathing. ‘And?’

‘There’s no match, Enzo. The blood on the torn jacket pocket is not Raffin’s.’

For a moment it felt as if not only his breathing, but his heart, too, had stopped, along with a world which had ceased to turn. He was drowning in a sea of confusion. ‘But... it must be. If it’s not Raffin’s blood, whose is it?’

There was a laden silence at the other end of the line that lasted perhaps a second, maybe two. To Enzo it seemed like an eternity. Then Hélène said, ‘Let me put it this way, Enzo, there’s good news and bad.’ Another pause. ‘There was some kind of mix-up at the lab. A misunderstanding about what samples were to be run against the database. I’d already sent them that sample of Laurent’s hair that you gave me to check for paternity.’

Enzo frowned. His confusion was deepening with every word of Commissaire Taillard’s that his mobile brought to him across the ether. He glanced up to find Dominique’s brown eyes open wide and watching him closely. She shrugged.

‘I don’t understand,’ he said, and he heard Hélène sighing softly.

‘They ran both Raffin’s DNA and Laurent’s against the database. The good news is that you are definitely Laurent’s father.’ Enzo barely had time to absorb this before she added, ‘But they also found a familial match for Laurent’s DNA.’

He frowned. ‘A match with what?’

‘The blood on the jacket pocket.’

Enzo’s confusion morphed now from incredible to surreal. How could that possibly be? ‘I don’t understand,’ he said again. Three words wholly inadequate to communicate his complete stupefaction.

Hélène’s voice took on a hard edge as she spelled it out for him. ‘It’s his mother’s blood that’s on the pocket, Enzo. It was Charlotte Roux who tried to kill you in the château that night.’

Now Enzo’s entire universe had come to a stop, as if somehow God had pushed the pause button, and all known things had fallen into a state of suspended animation.

‘Enzo...?’ Hélène’s voice came to him as if from some distant planet. He saw the look in Dominique’s eyes. He saw the dust suspended in the light that fell through the half-raised roller blind. He knew that he had died and woken up in the place they called Hell.

And then the sound of a car door slamming crashed through consciousness, and everything wound up to speed again with the revving of a motor and tyres spinning on gravel.

Dominique was at the door before him, and he followed her, running in a daze of bewilderment through the darkness of the main hall and into the corridor that led to the side entrance. The door stood open.

They ran out into the rain and the mist in time to see Sally’s green Renault Clio skidding on the gravel at the end of the drive and slamming, side on, into a white SUV which had just turned in from the gate through the trees.

Steam rose up from a fractured radiator. Dominique sprinted up the drive towards the cars and Enzo chased after her, still dazed and numb, and praying that sometime very soon he would wake up from this nightmare.

The door on the driver’s side of the Clio swung open, and Sally, in jeans and trainers and a camel coat hanging open, fell out into the drive, blood streaming from a gash on her face. She crawled for half a metre before managing to stagger to her feet. The driver’s door of the SUV opened and Charlotte stepped out into the rain. Her dark coat fell to below the knees, her face chalk white by contrast. Within moments her black curls were glistening with raindrops. She took three swift paces towards the dazed Sally Linol and ripped away the collar of her coat and her blouse to reveal the feather tattoo on the side of her neck. In one single movement, she drew a pistol from her coat pocket and shot the one-time prostitute in the head at close range. Even before Enzo could summon the breath to scream NO!

He saw the blowback from the shot spray fine blood in her face, red-speckling the white. Black saucer eyes swivelled then towards the approaching figure of Dominique. She turned her gun to aim it at the chest of the former gendarme, and Dominique stopped abruptly. Enzo drew up by her side seconds later.

Charlotte’s arm was fully extended towards them, the gun trembling in her hand at the end of it. Her eyes were wild in a way that Enzo had never seen them before. This woman, the mother of his child, who had just shot Sally Linol dead in cold blood. Who had tried to kill him high up in the dark of a château in Gaillac. Whose bed he had shared on countless occasions. A whole kaleidoscope of memories spun through his head. A million fragments of light and colour. Laughter and love. Moments in time, shared over years. And he was almost blinded by it all. He felt tears burn hot on his cheeks. He couldn’t even find his voice to ask why.

But he heard the quivering in hers. ‘Roger called me last night. To tell me about your little discovery.’ She inclined her head slightly towards the prone form of Sally Linol, lying on the drive, her blood soaking with the rain into the gravel. ‘He thought I would be interested. He had no idea just how much.’

Finally, words forced their way beyond Enzo’s lips as his brain wound back up to speed and a million pieces of an impossible puzzle started dropping into place. ‘You killed Marie Raffin!’

She gave the most imperceptible of shrugs. And although she was trying hard to project cool, Enzo could see that she was shaken to the core.

‘Why?’

‘Many years ago, in science class at school, I learned that for every action there is a reaction. Consequences. All the things that have happened in the twenty-two years since my brother took the first steps on his road of no return have left me picking up the pieces in his wake. Everything I have done has been to protect him.’

‘Your brother?’ Enzo was incredulous.

But she ignored him, and almost as if she were trying to persuade herself, she said, ‘He had a weakness, and he made a mistake.’

Dominique said, ‘Murdering three women is hardly a mistake.’

Charlotte could not even meet her eye. Her gaze flickered in Enzo’s direction. ‘He was young, immature. Married with a young family. And, yes, he had certain... predilections.’ Enzo saw her mouth curl in distaste as she found a euphemism for his perversion. ‘But he is also a genius. He has intelligence, vision, charisma. Everything that is lacking in the generation of politicians who run this country today. I couldn’t allow the errors of youth to deny France the special gifts that he has to offer. And, God knows, we are in dire need of them now.’

Enzo had difficulty both breathing and thinking. He said again, ‘Your brother?’ And he saw some of her arrogance return as she focused her scorn on him.

‘The great Enzo Macleod.’ She shook her head. ‘You had no idea, did you? That when I went looking for my birth parents, not only did I discover who my real father was, but that I also had a brother. A twin brother. Not identical. But born thirty minutes before me. And while I was given for adoption to the Gaillard family retainers in Angoulême, Jean-Jacques went to my adoptive mother’s cousin, also afflicted by the family curse of infertility. All my years growing up, I only knew him as my second cousin, meeting at family get-togethers. Christmas, Easter, summer holidays.’

Enzo saw fond recollection cloud her dark eyes, like cataracts.

‘During all those long summers spent at the family cottage in the Corrèze we were inseparable. Understood things in a way that others did not. Sharing thoughts and secrets. Writing to each other when we were apart. I admired him, adored him, maybe even fell in love with him a little. And then I found out why. We weren’t cousins at all. But brother and sister. Flesh and blood. One and the same. Each of us a piece of the other.’ Her eyes cleared in a moment of anger. ‘They had no right to separate us. To break us up like that. They should have known. Blood is thicker than water.’

Her hair was hanging in wet ropes now around her face.

Enzo said, ‘And it was you who tried to kill me in the château at Gaillac.’

Something almost like a smile flitted across her lips. ‘That was a mistake. Reckless. And nearly cost us everything. I had one of Roger’s suits in my apartment. I had picked it up for him from the dry cleaner’s some months earlier and forgotten to return it. It was still hanging in my wardrobe. There seemed to me to be a certain irony in it, you see. To kill you in the guise of Roger. Stupid. I know that now. When I finally returned it to him, I suggested that perhaps it had been damaged at the cleaner’s. If it was ever traced back, it would point the finger at him, not me.’

She looked down again at the body lying on the drive. ‘She was the one loose end that’s been hanging over us all these years. I knew you would find her in the end, Enzo. You’re so bloody relentless.’ She turned angry eyes back on him and he saw them soften. ‘But fortunately, you also led me to her. And now that she’s been taken care of, that leaves only you. And your little piece of... stuff.’ She cast a disparaging glance at Dominique. ‘You always did like them young, didn’t you, Enzo?’

He felt a constriction of all the muscles across his chest, like a great weight bearing down on him. ‘What did you do to Sophie?’

Charlotte shrugged. ‘She’s dead, of course. You never did learn to do what you were told.’

And almost everything that Enzo was or had ever been died in that moment. He closed his eyes, remembering the white stag he had encountered in the woods at Château Gandolfo, and willed Charlotte just to pull the trigger. There was no way, he knew, that he even wanted to go on living. When he opened them again, he saw Charlotte smiling, and he knew, finally, that she was quite insane.

She said, ‘And now it seems like such a shame to deprive an old man of his little piece of skirt, when I have already taken away everything else.’

The roar of her gun in the still of the morning was deafening as she fired a single shot into Dominique’s chest. Enzo heard the bullet strike her. A soft, sickening thud that sent her spinning away and falling to the ground. His cry of anguish pierced the damp air as he dropped to his knees beside her, to turn her over in the wet. Blood oozed from her mouth, and spread quickly into the fabric of the T-shirt beneath her jacket. The pain and hurt and anger that filled him was unbearable, and he cried again, like some wild animal howling for the dead. He half turned in time to see Charlotte lowering her gun to level it at him.

‘Seems wrong, somehow, to kill the father of my child. I told you once about keeping my enemies close.’ She sighed. ‘Sometimes it’s the only way to stay in control. I got involved with Roger when we discovered that Marie Raffin was sniffing around Jean-Jacques’ affairs, asking questions in the wrong places, trying to access his accounts. And you...?’ And now he saw affection in her smile. ‘I kept you too close, Enzo. Much too close.’ Then affection gave way to something much colder. ‘But Laurent... Well, that really was a mistake. Though I suppose I’ll just have to live with it. At least he’ll always be a reminder of you.’

He could see her finger tightening on the trigger and he braced himself for death. But the slightest scrape of a shoe on wet gravel made her turn as a dark figure rose up behind her in the rain, and struck her down.

Charlotte’s gun went clattering away across the drive as her legs folded beneath her and she fell to the ground, blood streaming from a gash on her forehead. And Sophie stood over her, dripping wet in the pouring rain, a wheel brace dangling from her hand.

‘Fucking bitch!’ she said, looking down at the prone form of her father’s would-be killer, her lower lip trembling with raw emotion. And Enzo was struck by the strength of her Scottish accent as she said, ‘Never actually did get round to killing me, did you?’ Despairing eyes found Enzo’s. ‘You’d have thought by now she’d have learned that you don’t fuck with a Macleod.’ And her face crumpled to dissolve in a mess of tears.