Cast Iron

Chapter seven

They had all arrived within fifteen minutes of each other, in five cars parked out front, alongside Enzo’s, engines ticking as they cooled in the night. And now they sat around the big table in the Martins’ kitchen, all eyes turned expectantly towards the Scotsman.

Martin had introduced them in turn. Monsieur and Madame Linol; Monsieur Klarczyk and his daughter, Karolina; Madame Robert; Monsieur and Madame Bru; Monsieur Edward Veyssière. All were guests for dinner, and Enzo was the centre of attention. He was embarrassed and confused as Madame Martin served up a cold starter of foie gras and salad, with strips of smoked duck breast, while Martin poured chilled sweet Bergerac wine into all their glasses.

‘You must be wondering what all this is about, Monsieur Macleod,’ he said.

Enzo nodded. ‘Yes, I am.’ He was feeling ambushed, and just a little resentful.

Martin took his seat. ‘We are a group of parents... relatives... of girls who either disappeared or were murdered in the weeks and months leading up to the arrest of Régis Blanc. Each and every one of us is of the firm belief that Blanc was responsible. But, in most cases, the police never even examined the links between Blanc and our girls. They’d got their man for killing those prostitutes. Why bother going over old ground to convict him for more murders when he had already been sent down for three?’

Enzo ran his eyes around the array of faces turned in his direction. ‘Are you saying that your girls were also prostitutes?’

Martin seemed uncomfortable. ‘Not at all. Lucie certainly was not.’ But he glanced awkwardly towards the others.

Monsieur Klarczyk looked to be a man in his sixties. He spoke with just the hint of an accent. ‘Karolina’s sister had been working as a waitress in Bordeaux for several months before she disappeared.’

Karolina, whom Enzo gauged to be in her forties, had no trace of an accent whatsoever. She said, ‘We’re pretty sure she’d been working for an escort agency.’ She avoided her father’s eye, and Enzo saw that he was blushing. ‘Well, I know she was, because she told me. She usually came home once a month. Then, one month, she didn’t. We never saw or heard anything of her again. She was well behind in paying for the apartment she’d been renting, but all her things were still there, and nobody had seen her in weeks.’

Enzo found his interest engaged. ‘What was her connection with Blanc?’

‘None that we know of,’ her father said.

And Karolina cut in. ‘He was a well-known souteneur. A pimp, Monsieur Macleod. Veronika was a prostitute, and she vanished at almost exactly the same time that Blanc killed those other girls.’

Her father lowered his head and couldn’t lift his eyes from the table.

Their stories were all remarkably similar. Girls who had been working in Bordeaux, away from home, telling parents and loved ones that they had jobs in restaurants or bars, one claiming to be an actress. Only one of them, other than Lucie, had turned up dead. She was Monica, the daughter of Madame Robert.

Madame Robert carried her sadness about her like something she might wear; a veil, a cape, a black shawl of mourning. It was almost visible, and only too apparent in her eyes and the tragic set of her face. She had been a single mother, doing her best to bring up her daughter on her own in the provincial town of Poitiers. But Monica had been a headstrong and argumentative teenager and run off at the age of seventeen.

‘I searched in vain for her, Monsieur Macleod. Some friends and I raised a little money for a poster campaign. We had no idea, of course, that she’d gone to Bordeaux. And the press weren’t interested. They ran her photograph a couple of times in the local paper, and once on regional television, and then other things caught their interest.’ She examined her hands on the table in front of her. ‘I was always waiting for the knock on the door, but it still didn’t make it any easier when it came. Four years later. They’d found her stabbed to death in some seedy hotel bedroom in the red-light district of Bordeaux. Naked.’ She bit her lip. ‘Her killer had done terrible things to her.’

There was absolute silence around the table. Enzo felt her pain. He said, ‘I take it there were no arrests?’

She shook her head. ‘They said they thought it had probably been a client. Maybe drug-related.’ She took a moment to compose herself. ‘She was a heroin addict, apparently. And infected with HIV.’

‘And the connection with Blanc?’

‘She was one of his girls, or had been. He claimed he’d let her go months before because he didn’t like his girls taking drugs. And, of course, he had half a dozen people who vouched for where he was the night she was murdered.’

‘Sally was one of his girls, too.’ It was Monsieur Linol who cut into Madame Robert’s story. Enzo swung his gaze across the table to take in the small, bald man who sat with his wife at the far end of it. He was dressed in a grey suit, worn shiny in places, and tightly buttoned over a white shirt with curled-up collar. His wife seemed even smaller. You could see that she had been a pretty woman once, but her face had collapsed with the years and her skin was the colour and texture of parchment.

‘What happened to Sally?’ Enzo said.

‘Vanished,’ Madame Linol said. ‘Two days before the first of those girls that Blanc killed was murdered. She knew them. Everybody said so. But there was no trace of her, Monsieur Macleod. Nothing. Her apartment had been cleared out, but no one saw or heard anything of her ever again.’ She drew a deep breath. ‘We’re convinced that man killed her, too. They just never found the body.’

Enzo looked around the assembled faces. ‘I don’t understand. How did you all get together like this?’

Madame Bru said, ‘We all became familiar with each other’s cases while we were trying to get the police to do something about our own.’

Monsieur Veyssière, whom Martin had introduced as a widower, said, ‘It seemed natural that we should get together, pool resources, since we were all so obviously interconnected.’ He glanced towards Guillaume Martin.

Martin said, ‘I suggested that we form a group to bring pressure to bear on the police. We managed to get quite a bit of publicity at the time. But the media never sustains interest for long, and the police resented our intervention. So, in the end, we resorted to hiring an investigator of our own.’

Enzo raised an eyebrow. ‘Who?’

‘The man who arrested Régis Blanc for the murder of the three prostitutes.’ He nodded acknowledgement of Enzo’s surprise. ‘Commissaire Michel Bétaille. It was his final case before retirement, and I knew from having spoken to him that he was never entirely satisfied with the circumstances surrounding the murders and Blanc’s arrest.’

‘In what way?’

‘Well, perhaps, Monsieur Macleod, if you were to pay him a visit, he could tell you that for himself. Suffice it to say that he jumped at the chance of re-examining the whole case, and following up on the connections to our missing and murdered girls.’

‘And what did he find?’

Silence fell around the table once more, and nobody was keen to meet anyone else’s eye. At length, Martin said, ‘He didn’t find anything. He worked for nearly two years on the case, and charged us a considerable amount for his time. The trouble was that none of his former colleagues seemed anxious to help him. They denied him access to evidence and statements. In the end, he simply gave up, and we were no further forward than we had been two years before.’

‘You’re our last chance to find out the truth, Monsieur Macleod.’ This from Madame Bru, and Enzo’s heart sank. He hated being anybody’s last chance. She reached down to retrieve a folder from her bag, which seemed like a cue for all the other families around the table, including the Martins, to do the same. Six folders in shades of blue and red and yellow and green, tied with black ribbon and held with elastic, were pushed towards Enzo.

He raised his hands defensively. ‘Woah! I can’t take on all these cases,’ he said. ‘I’m here to look into the murder of Lucie Martin. I don’t know that any of these are even connected to it.’ He looked around the table for their understanding, but saw only their sadness. The silence stretched from seconds to a minute, or more, before someone began picking desultorily at their starter. Someone else took a sip of wine, then more eyes turned without relish towards the food on the plates in front of them. Before lifting again to look at Enzo. He sighed. ‘Listen, I’ll take a look at them, alright?’ And he could barely believe he was hearing himself say it. ‘I can’t promise anything. But if something jumps out at me... well, I’ll look into it further.’ He felt absolutely trapped. ‘It’s the best I can offer.’

But it was an offer met by more silence.

Madame Martin began ostentatiously to clear away their starters, most of which had barely been touched. ‘I’ll just serve the beef now,’ she said, colour high on her cheeks. She avoided Enzo’s eye.

Enzo reached for his glass and took several gulps of the Bergerac, fervently wishing that he were somewhere else. He gathered the folders towards him and made them into a neat pile at the side of his place. The Lucie Martin case was on the top, and he opened it to see photographs and documents. Newspaper cuttings, a photocopy of Blanc’s letter to the murdered girl. He looked at the old judge and said, ‘Would you, by any chance, have the original of the letter that Blanc sent to Lucie?’

Martin looked puzzled. ‘You’ve got the photocopy there. And surely you’ve read the text of it already, in Raffin’s book?’

‘Yes, I have. But I’d like to see the original, if it’s available.’

He shrugged. ‘I’ll get it for you.’ And he stood up.

But before he left the table, Enzo said, ‘How do you know that it really was from Blanc?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘How do you know it was Blanc who wrote it?’

Martin appeared slightly embarrassed, as if he had been caught in the act of something illicit. He shrugged. ‘Michel Bétaille obtained samples of Blanc’s handwriting. Don’t ask how.’ He paused. ‘I paid for a graphologist to compare them with the letter.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘There was no doubt, Monsieur Macleod. They came from the same hand. It was Régis Blanc who sent that letter to my Lucie.’