Cast Iron

Chapter five

Château Gandolfo stood on a hilltop in rolling country just east of the small town of Duras, on the very edge of the Bordeaux wine-producing area of western France. The commune had its own appellation, Côtes de Duras, producing wines with which Enzo was unfamiliar. He was better acquainted with the reds of Saint-Emilion, just a few kilometres further west, but had to confess that the gently undulating hills and green forests of this stunning part of the Lot-et-Garonne were much more interesting than the endless fields of vines that shimmered in the distance across the Saint-Emilion valley.

He was in Aquitaine now, that whole slice of western France which had once been a part of England before finally being annexed by the French at the end of the Hundred Years’ War. The influence of the English was still apparent everywhere. In the names and the architecture, the religion and even the culture. As Enzo knew from his Scottish upbringing, it was not an easy thing to erase the pervasive traces of the English.

The single track that turned off the main road wound its way through trees in red, gold and yellow autumn splendour, deep into the hills, before Enzo took a steep chalk track that cut its way up the slope to the château at the top of the hill.

It had been dry for several weeks, and a plume of dust rose up in his wake. Impossible to approach without being seen. The château itself seemed comprised of three separate buildings, with shallow-pitched, red roman-tiled roofs. Two towers stood at one end, and Enzo assumed that they had originally been pigeonniers, providing nourishment for the fields from their guano, and meat for their owner’s table from a plentiful supply of pigeons. Four tons of meat a year, the average pigeonnier was calculated to produce.

The two storeys of the main building stood centrally between the others, its white stonework betraying a history of renovation and extension that probably went back centuries. Shutters were painted a faded blue, and half the building had been taken over by various vines and creepers that burned dazzling red and purple now, as summer transitioned to winter.

Enzo turned into a gravelled parking area near the lowest of the three buildings. A pergola stood on the terrace outside arched and glazed double doors, but Enzo couldn’t see beyond them because of reflections. The building itself had almost vanished beneath red and green creeper with white flowers.

As he stepped out of his carefully restored Citroën 2CV, a voice in perfectly accented English said, ‘That’s my office. Or used to be. It’s my den now — my escape from life.’ A chuckle. ‘And the wife.’

Enzo turned to see an elderly man walking down the tiled path from the main house to greet him. He was of medium height and build, unstooped by age as he extended a confident hand to shake Enzo’s warmly. Piercing blue eyes were set in a face that was tanned and deeply lined, contrasting starkly with the thick silver hair that grew in such abundance above it. He wore moleskin trousers that gathered around sturdy walking boots, and a quilted vest over a chequered shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He might easily have stepped straight out of a country estate anywhere in England.

He smiled at Enzo’s surprise. ‘My ancestors were Italian and English. There’s very little about me that’s French.’ He grinned. ‘Except, of course, for my entire cultural upbringing. And my name.’ He paused. ‘Guillaume Martin. And you’re Enzo Macleod, I presume.’ He looked Enzo up and down. ‘A Scotsman.’ It sounded more like a statement than a question.

‘The last time I looked.’

‘And how is your French?’

‘I’ve lived here for twenty-five years, monsieur,’ Enzo said in French. ‘I have taught science to university students and raised a daughter who is as French as frogs’ legs.’

Martin tipped his head in acknowledgement. ‘Then let us speak French. I am always more at home in my native tongue.’

They walked up to the main house. Martin said, ‘There used to be a Roman road running along here, between the watermill at the foot of the hill and the windmill at the top.’ He waved his hand across half an acre of neatly trimmed lawn towards an infinity pool built into the hill and looking out over the view. ‘That’s where my Italian ancestor, Gandolfo, built a massive greenhouse for the Duke of Duras to house his exotic plants. In return for the duke gifting him the château and the estate.’

‘Why would the duke do that?’

‘Oh, it was all part of an attempt to repopulate the area and reinvigorate the economy. Gandolfo was a renowned wine grower in Italy, and he brought his enormous family with him.’ They stopped outside the main door of the house. ‘Plague and the Hundred Years’ War had laid waste to this whole area, Monsieur Macleod. There wasn’t a living soul for miles around. The Desert Lands, they called it. And, for the next two hundred years, they brought in foreigners and folk from other parts of France to breathe life back into it.’ He turned to look up at the house. ‘Gandolfo put a second floor on this part and a new front on it, making it pretty much as you see it now. And when there was no further use for the greenhouse, they knocked it down and used the materials to build the chais — or wine cellar, I suppose you’d call it — and the barn. Come in and meet Madame.’

Madame was a mouse of a woman, tiny and fragile, and Enzo was afraid to shake her hand too firmly when she offered it, in case he broke bones. Her hair was fine, spun silver, and she had skin as smooth and unlined as a twenty-year-old. Her smile spread across a face still handsome in spite of the years, and soft brown eyes met his with candour and warmth.

‘What peculiar eyes you have,’ she said.

Enzo smiled. ‘One brown, one blue.’ He ran a hand back over the crown of his head. ‘And a white streak in my hair — slowly disappearing, now, as it greys. They used to call me Magpie.’

She frowned. ‘Is there a connection?’

‘Between the eyes and the hair? Yes. Both symptomatic of a genetic condition called Waardenburg syndrome. But don’t worry, I’ve had it all my life and I haven’t died of it yet.’

She laughed. ‘Would you like tea, Monsieur Macleod? I would have offered coffee, but I know you English like your tea.’

‘He’s Scottish, Mireille,’ Martin said. ‘You’ll offend him if you call him English.’

Enzo grinned. ‘Not at all. But coffee would be fine.’

They sat around an enormous wooden table in the centre of a vast kitchen that had clearly been designed to cater for a very large family, and probably servants and farm workers, too. An old Belfast sink stood beneath the window and piles of old tea boxes were stacked up against the far wall, beside one of two cookers. The second, a wood-burning range, was set into the long wall where an arched fireplace must once have stood. Worktops and cupboards ran along either side of it, and the place was filled with warm cooking smells and soft light.

While Madame Martin busied herself with the coffee, her husband lit up a small cheroot. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’

Enzo didn’t see how he could.

‘Damned smoking laws,’ Martin said. ‘They’ll be banning it in the privacy of our own homes next.’ He tilted his head back and breathed blue smoke at the ceiling. ‘So, Monsieur Macleod. You have amassed yourself quite a reputation. Are you going to find who killed our Lucie for us?’

‘I certainly intend to try, Monsieur... I’m not quite sure how to address you. Is it Monsieur le Président, or Monsieur le Juge?’

Martin’s eyes crinkled in amusement. ‘I am long retired, Monsieur Macleod, and was never one to stand on ceremony outside of the courtroom, anyway. “Monsieur” will suffice. And “Guillaume”, if I decide I like you.’

‘Well, I have already decided that I do,’ said Madame Martin as she brought coffee pot and cups to the table on a tray. ‘You have an honest face, Monsieur Macleod.’

Enzo smiled. ‘Thank you, Madame.’

‘Oh, “Mireille” will suffice.’ And she flashed twinkling eyes at her husband. But just as quickly the twinkle faded and a shadow crossed her face. After a moment she looked at Enzo again. ‘Sometimes I forget for ten or fifteen minutes. Even an hour or two on occasion. Once or twice, even for a whole day. And then I feel terribly guilty. Someone killed our lovely Lucie, monsieur. She would have been in her forties now, and with luck might have given us grandchildren. She had a whole life to live and someone took it from her. I have never felt I deserved the right to laugh or take pleasure in simple things since the day she went missing.’ She could no longer meet his eye and occupied herself with pouring the coffee.

Enzo glanced at her husband and saw his glazed expression as he stared, unseeing, at the floor. Some memory filled his thoughts and his eyes, his lips pressed together in a grim line. And, as so often happened, Enzo was reminded that this was not just some mystery to be unravelled, a puzzle to be solved. These were real people, with real lives and real sorrow. ‘Tell me about the day she went missing,’ he said.

Martin pulled the door shut behind them as they stepped outside. He had avoided discussing Lucie in front of his wife while they drank their coffee, telling Enzo that he would go through it all with him on the walk down to the lake where she was found. He turned to Enzo now. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘She still gets very upset.’

‘Of course.’

He quickly changed the subject himself, waving a hand towards a collection of crumbling outbuildings. ‘Those were originally part of the house,’ he said. ‘An oven for drying prunes and meat, and a bread oven. They date back to the sixth century and still function, although the earliest date we could find for the house itself was on an old quoinstone: 1456. Come and see the chais.’

They walked around the house to the old, stone wine cellar, and Martin pushed open one of the huge, arched double doors. The wood was grey with age, deeply lined and knotted, and protested noisily. Inside, it was dark and fusty, and it took several moments for Enzo’s eyes to adjust. It was a big empty space with rafters high overhead, cobwebs hanging in great loops as if freshly fired from a designer’s web-gun to dress the set of a horror movie. The effect was emphasised by Martin turning and pointing to the wall above the lintel, where there was a pattern of what looked suspiciously like human bones set into the stonework.

‘Back when Lucie was still just a child, we started digging out the floor of the chais with a view to laying concrete and converting the building into guest rooms. We had only gone down about twelve inches when we came across bones. Human remains. An old grave, I thought, and as a kind of memorial I set them into the wall above the door there. But as we kept digging there were just more and more of them, and, in the end, I gave up the idea altogether.’

‘What was it? Some kind of burial ground?’

‘Oh, almost certainly a plague pit. People were dying in their thousands back then. Best left undisturbed, I decided.’

As they set off down the hill behind the château, the old man lifted his head towards the sun sinking in the west. He said, ‘The light goes so early these days. Better be quick, or it’ll be dark by the time we get back.’

The path that cut down the hillside led them into woodland, the last sunlight of the day slanting through branches and backlighting leaves in glorious autumn technicolour, like stained glass. Rising up to their left, jagged white rock pushed through earth and fallen leaves.

‘The old quarry,’ Martin said. ‘Employed hundreds of people for centuries, right up until the 1920s. That’s where they quarried the stone to build the great château in Duras, and almost certainly Château Gandolfo, too.’

By the time they reached the water’s edge, the sun had vanished over the horizon, and a purple dusk, like dust, settled on the land. The water came right up to the limit of the woodland, and several trees around its perimeter were growing out of the lake.

They stood and gazed across still water reflecting the last light in the sky. Enzo was impatient to hear Martin’s story, but reluctant to press him, and so he waited for the old man to tell it in his own good time. For a long time, Martin stood simply staring out over the lake. Until finally he said, ‘She was a beautiful girl. Took after her mother. The love of my life. There wasn’t anything we wouldn’t have done for her.’ He turned to look at Enzo. ‘And I don’t mean we spoiled her. But she was as precious to us at twenty as she had been the day she was born.’

Enzo saw light reflecting in moist eyes, and the old man blinked rapidly several times.

‘She cared deeply about her job.’ He chuckled ironically. ‘After years on the bench I had very little time for the pimps and prostitutes and petty criminals that populate our world, Monsieur Macleod. But Lucie always saw the humanity in them, no matter how deeply buried it was. She saw them all as victims — of society, of their upbringing, or just of fate. And something about her innocence touched them, too. Many of them, anyway. She was cut out for that kind of work.’ He smiled. ‘Whereas her old dad would have locked them all up and thrown away the key.’

He pointed west, where the lake emerged from the trees into open ground.

‘That’s where they found her, and I suppose that’s where her killer must have dumped her body, originally. It’s one of the deepest parts of the lake. Probably weighted down, the police thought. Tied to a boulder or chunk of masonry that would stop her floating back to the surface. No trace of any rope left, of course. No doubt rotted away, or eaten by the same fish that...’ He stopped and swallowed hard, doing his best to compose himself and regain control of his voice before he spoke again. ‘He could never have imagined that fourteen years later there would be such a drought that the level of the lake would fall by as much as four metres and expose his brutal handiwork.’

He glanced at Enzo once more.

‘Do you remember the year of the canicule, Monsieur Macleod?’

Enzo nodded. Two thousand and three. It had been a heatwave like no other he had ever known. It had begun in early March. Day after day after day of sunshine, and no rain. The heat building through the spring until, by early summer, temperatures were in the forties. Classes at university had to be cancelled. Students were fainting. Back home in Cahors he had been forced to keep all the windows shut. The air outside was hotter than in. He had set up fans on tables and chairs in every room, but even then the temperature had been unbearable. Sleep was elusive — some nights impossible. More than 13,000 people around France had died that summer, just from the heat. He said, ‘The Saturday that she disappeared...’ It was his cue to Martin to tell him about that day.

The old man nodded. ‘She’d been unusually subdued when she came home from Bordeaux the previous night. Normally, she would sit at the dinner table and chatter away, telling us all about everything that had happened during the week. Always so bright, never with anything negative to say.’ He drew a long, slow breath. ‘That night she ate in silence. Lost in some world that she wasn’t inclined to share with us. I don’t mean she was deliberately shutting us out. I think she was just deeply disturbed by something. Distracted. Mireille and I exchanged frequent looks, but we didn’t dare say anything. And eventually she brightened a little, making an effort for us. But it didn’t last long. She said she was tired and wanted an early night. It wasn’t even nine o’clock when she went to bed.’

‘Did you and Mireille speculate on what it was that might have been troubling her?’

‘No, monsieur. We had no idea what it might be. It was so uncharacteristic. There was nothing for us to speculate about. But it left us both troubled ourselves. Not sure what to say, even to each other. I suppose we arrived at an unspoken agreement between us, simply not to mention it. As if, by not talking about it, we might make it just go away.’

‘And the next morning?’

‘She was late down to breakfast. But cheerier. Or so it seemed. Then she went back to her room. Mireille called up to her when she was leaving, late morning. Her sister lives in Duras, and she quite often has lunch with her and stays the afternoon. The woman’s widowed, so I never go with her. One man, two women — just doesn’t work. Lucie called down, telling her mother to say bonjour to her aunt. And that was the last exchange Mireille ever had with her.’ He shook his head. ‘She’s never forgiven herself for not at least having kissed her goodbye. Silly. But there you go. You can’t help but feel what you feel.’

Somewhere out on the lake a fish jumped. They heard it rather than saw it, but the rings from its point of re-entry reached out in ever-widening circles towards them, catching the last light of the day.

‘And you?’ Enzo said. ‘What was your last interaction with Lucie?’

Martin kept his eyes on the rings that broke the surface of the water. ‘She didn’t come down for lunch. Said she wasn’t hungry. I ate on my own in the kitchen, then retired to my study. I have a television down there. I was having a cigar and watching the rugby when she rapped on the door. I looked up and saw her through the glass, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. She wouldn’t come in, and I had to get up and open the door. I’d swear she’d been crying, Monsieur Macleod. Those clear blue eyes, red-rimmed and blurred by the spilling of tears. I’m sure she hadn’t wanted me to see her like that. All she said was, “I’m going for a walk, Papa.” And she turned and headed off down the hill.’ He took a moment. ‘I never saw her again.’

‘Was she in the habit of going walking?’

‘On her own? Never. Not that I can recall.’

‘Do you think she might have been going to meet someone?’

Martin shrugged. ‘Who can know? Usually she was so bright and transparent. But that day she was—’ he searched for the right word — ‘closed. Like a pebble held in your fist.’

Enzo raised his eyes towards the far shore. ‘What is there beyond the lake?’

Martin nodded towards the east end of it. ‘There’s an artificial dam. You can cross the lake there. It leads up to a farm track on the other side. There’s a vineyard, and beyond that you rejoin the single-track road that comes up from the D708.’

‘So, if she’d had a rendezvous she didn’t want you to know about, she could have met someone there who had driven up from the main road by car?’

Martin shrugged. ‘Possible, I suppose.’ But he didn’t seem engaged by the idea. Perhaps, Enzo thought, he had been through every possibility so many times over the years that anything and everything seemed likely, or unlikely. When you are not in possession of the facts, speculation is both endless and pointless. Martin said, ‘We should go before it gets dark.’

Enzo followed him along a dry animal-track made treacherous by knotted roots. It wound up through the trees before emerging on to a wide, open slope that climbed back up the hill to the château. This, Enzo imagined, was the way that Lucie must have come, if she had gone straight down the hill from her father’s study. He would have been able to see her all the way to the treeline, had he stood and watched. But Enzo didn’t ask.

A nearly full moon had risen over the far horizon, washing the hillside in its bright, colourless light and throwing long shadows of the two men towards the west. Despite his age, Guillaume Martin was fit and took long strides up the hill, which Enzo found hard work to match.

A little breathlessly he said, ‘When did you first become concerned about her?’

Martin stopped. ‘It was March, monsieur. Just before the clocks went forward. So it was still dark quite early. I suppose it must have been about seven when I realised that she hadn’t come back. I was in the kitchen preparing dinner, as I always do when Mireille has been at her sister’s. I hadn’t been aware of Lucie returning, so I called up to her room, but there was no response. Couldn’t find her anywhere and started to get worried.’

‘Did you go looking for her?’

‘Yes, I did. Pulled on my wellington boots and set off down the hill. But it was pretty hopeless — almost completely dark by the time I got down to the lake. I called out her name. Several times. And I could hear it echoing away across the open water. In the end I gave up and went back to the house — and checked again, just to be sure she hadn’t returned while I was gone. Mireille got home about half an hour after that. By then I was pretty much beside myself with worry. I had the most dreadful sense that something awful had happened.’

‘But you didn’t call the police?’

He shook his head vigorously. ‘Mireille wanted me to. But I knew they wouldn’t do anything. Lucie had only been gone a few hours, and we had no reason to suppose anything had happened to her. It wasn’t until we went to search her room, later that night, and found the letter from Blanc that I thought we should report it to the police.’

‘What was it about the letter that convinced you, finally, to do that?’

‘Because it was obviously from one of the criminals she’d been dealing with at the charity, and from the tone of his letter he was clearly obsessed by her.’ He ran both hands back through his hair and sighed in exasperation. ‘Little did we know then exactly what kind of a man he was.’

‘You think he killed her, then?’

The old man swivelled to face Enzo, eyes blazing. ‘I know he did, monsieur.’

‘How can you know it?’

‘You’ve read the letter. The man was deranged. Somehow he persuaded Lucie to meet him. She was such a damned innocent. And he strangled her, just as he had already killed those three prostitutes before her. And then he dumped her body in the lake.’

‘But he had what police described as a cast-iron alibi for that afternoon.’

Martin’s mouth tightened. ‘I didn’t spend all those years sitting on the bench, monsieur, without coming to the realisation that alibis can be fabricated. People vouch for family and friends all the time, for any number of reasons. Love, fear, money. Régis Blanc killed my Lucie, Monsieur Macleod, and I would very much like you to prove it.’

Lights around the outside of the château came on with a timer, sending warm yellow light cascading down the slope towards them, and they walked the rest of the way up the hill in silence. When they reached his 2CV, Enzo took out his keys. ‘Please thank your wife for the coffee, Monsieur Martin. I’ll need to do some thinking about all of this. Go and speak to some of Blanc’s associates.’

Martin shook his head in consternation. ‘Well, where are you going?’

‘I have a hotel room booked in Duras.’

‘I won’t hear of it. You’ll stay here, of course. I’ll phone and cancel.’

‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly—’

‘Nonsense, man,’ Martin cut him off. ‘Mireille has prepared dinner. And besides, there are some folk I want you to meet.’ He glanced down the hill to see the beams of headlights raking the dark as they climbed towards the château. ‘In fact, that looks like the first of them arriving now.’