Enzo said calmly, ‘There’s no proof whatsoever that Tavel was involved. He was in Paris the weekend she went missing.’ He paused. ‘But, then again, what’s an alibi, except someone else lying to protect you? You should know all about that, Régis. You always seemed to have an alibi when the police came looking for you.’ Another pause. ‘Except when it came to murdering those three girls.’ And he thought about what he had written up on his whiteboard. Did he want to be caught?
For the first time, Blanc’s unwavering gaze flickered away from Enzo, and when his eyes returned to him it was almost as if he accepted that Enzo knew the truth, whatever that might be.
‘Tell me about your relationship with Lucie, Régis.’
Blanc sat back in his chair, folding his arms over his chest, and deliberately avoided a meeting of eyes. He glanced self-consciously towards Charlotte, and Enzo would have sworn that he blushed. Blood rose high on his cheeks to bring colour to his prison-pale complexion. He let his eyes fall, fixing his gaze on his own feet, stretched out under the table in front of him. ‘Hard to explain,’ he said, ‘what it was about her.’ Even the tone of his voice had changed now, hushed, as if he were speaking in a church. ‘When I first met her at the offices of Rentrée...’ He laughed. ‘I suppose I’d gone along to scoff. To be difficult. Rude and crude. Fucking Christian do-gooders! And then she came in the room and sat down opposite me, and I suddenly felt like a little boy. Tongue-tied and awkward. Didn’t know where to look. But wherever I turned my eyes I couldn’t seem to avoid meeting hers in the end. I’d never been in the presence of—’ he fought for a way to describe it — ‘such innocence. Ever in my life. It was so pure, and real. Like the first time you shoot up heroin. It feels so fucking amazing, you never want to be in any other state.’ He shook his head. ‘I never got addicted to heroin, but I got addicted to Lucie. Couldn’t get enough of her.’
Now he sat forward, leaning on his thighs, clasping and unclasping his hands in front of him and staring at the floor. But he wasn’t looking at it. Sightless eyes were transporting him back to another place and time. A place where the radiance of a young woman, real or imagined, had changed his life.
‘My whole life I was surrounded by filth and evil. Lies and deceit. But something about Lucie shone a light into that life and made me realise things didn’t have to be that way. That I didn’t have to be that way.’ He glanced up for a moment, as if searching for their understanding. ‘And she saw it, too. She told me she did. That there was a better person inside me. Someone I didn’t know was there. Someone I wouldn’t recognise, even if I did. She said she could help release him. The real me. The person trapped inside. That’s what she said.’
Then he was overcome by self-consciousness and looked down at the floor again.
‘I’ve thought about it often. That’s the thing about prison, there’s not much else to do but think. I wondered, looking back, if maybe she just saw me as some kind of a challenge. The triumph of good over evil. But that’s not what she said in her letters.’
Enzo felt a tiny jolt run through him, like an electric shock. ‘Lucie wrote to you?’
‘We exchanged half a dozen letters or more over as many weeks. I could feel her in every word. Beautiful words. Words that made me realise how stupid and illiterate I was. Words that made me want to change. To be that other person she saw in me. She said...’ He broke off, and Enzo was shocked to see the hint of tears in his eyes, tears that he lowered his head to conceal from them. But you could hear them in the tremble of his voice. ‘She said that she had seen beyond the outer shell, to the soft, sensitive person within. And that she loved that person, and wanted to release him.’
Words, Enzo was sure, that Blanc had memorised from countless readings of her letters. And he found himself empathising with this serial killer sitting before him. A man robbed by death of something that might have transformed his life, but left him, instead, with only memories and regrets and the sense of a life unfulfilled.
‘You know, I look back, and it’s hard to believe it now. Knowing who I am, what I became. But I really believed Lucie could save me. Like Jesus fucking Christ. I’d have done anything for her. Anything.’ He paused. ‘Only...’ And then he sat upright, folding his arms again, and Enzo could see him biting the inside of his lower lip.
‘Only what?’
‘There were things I had to do. You know. First.’ This said with defiance, as if making excuses for not living up to Lucie’s vision of him.
‘What things?’
The colour was gone from his face again, and a shadow crossed it. ‘Things. Obligations. Debts.’
‘What obligations? What debts?’
But Blanc remained tight-lipped, staring at the floor, and Enzo saw an almost imperceptible shake of his head. It was clear that he wasn’t going to say. So Enzo said it for him.
‘Killing those girls, you mean?’
Blanc flashed him a look that was both dangerous and full of pain. His eyes flickered towards Charlotte, then back. ‘These fucking psychiatrists,’ he said, the contempt clear in his voice. ‘They’ll tell you that I killed them because my mother was a prostitute. That every time I killed one, I was killing my mother.’ He snorted his derision. ‘What bollocks! What they don’t understand, any of them, is that it didn’t matter what my mother was. She was my mother. I loved her unconditionally. And she loved me.’
‘So why did you kill them?’
A sad, sick smile curled his lips and he shook his head. ‘If I told you, they’d kill me.’
Enzo frowned. ‘What do you mean? Who’s “they”?’
Blanc’s smile was smug now. A man who knew he kept a secret he wasn’t going to tell, but was taking pleasure in dropping hints that would tease and tantalise without fulfilment. ‘Trust me, there are worse things than death,’ he said.
The silence that followed seemed to stretch from seconds to minutes, without Blanc being in the least aware of it. He was watching his hands in front of him, lacing and unlacing his fingers as if praying, then changing his mind. Enzo sensed that there was more to come and didn’t want to break the moment. He willed Charlotte not to speak. Although she had said nothing throughout the entire interview, listening rapt to a killer’s ramblings in mute fascination.
Finally Blanc looked up. His eyes moved from Enzo to Charlotte, then back again. The smile was gone. ‘The thing is... sometimes obligations don’t last a lifetime. Maybe one day soon I’ll have my say.’
‘About what?’
But he just shook his head. ‘Why would I tell you?’
Enzo decided to chance his arm. ‘You wanted to be caught, Régis, didn’t you?’
Blanc shrugged. ‘We all pay for the things we do. In this life or the next. But whatever awful things I’ve done, I know that Lucie would have forgiven me.’
‘For killing those girls?’ Enzo was genuinely surprised.
‘Yes.’ But he quickly changed his mind. ‘Well, no. Not for killing them. I’m glad she never knew about that. I mean why I did it. She’d have understood that. She would.’ He saw the question forming itself in Enzo’s eyes, and he pre-empted the asking of it. ‘But, like I said, I’m not telling you.’
Enzo nodded, sensing the finality in Blanc’s words. ‘And what about the Bordeaux Six?’
‘Pah!’ Derision exploded from Blanc’s lips. ‘That’s just fucking incompetent cops trying to pin their failures on me. A convenient bloody scapegoat, already doing life. I don’t know anything about what happened to those girls. That’s just how it is, you know. People die, people get murdered, people run away. Who knows who or why or when? They come into your life and they go out of it again. Doesn’t make you responsible for them.’