‘What do you think happened to those other letters that you sent to Lucie? You know they only ever found one.’
He nodded. ‘I’ve no idea.’
‘But you denied any relationship with her at the time. Said you’d only written that one, and only because you were drunk.’
Blanc became almost agitated. ‘Lucie was dead. No one would have believed what it was we had between us. And I wasn’t about to drag her name through the mud along with mine.’
‘And what about her letters to you?’
Blanc eyed Enzo warily now. ‘What about them?’
‘What happened to them?’
‘Oh, don’t you worry. I’ve got them safely hidden away. Somewhere no one will ever find them.’
Enzo said, ‘You realise, if you could produce those letters, they are probably just about the only thing that could erase any suspicion that it was you who killed her?’
‘I don’t care,’ Blanc said, verging on the hostile now. ‘People can think what they want. I know I didn’t kill her. And wherever she might be now, Lucie knows that, too.’ He dropped his eyes to the number six pinned to Enzo’s jacket, and a small smile of irony crossed his lips. ‘Je ne suis pas un numéro, je suis un homme libre,’ he said.
Enzo frowned, then did the mental translation. I am not a prisoner, I am a free man. And he realised that he and Blanc were of the same generation, each sitting on either side of the English Channel, watching Patrick McGoohan in the cult sixties TV show, The Prisoner.
Enzo drew a deep breath as the prison gate shut behind them. It felt good to be out, breathing God’s own pure, sweet air, chilled by the proximity of the Pyrenees, uncontaminated by big-city pollution or tainted by life behind bars.
It felt like emerging from some dreadful human laboratory where, for the hour they had spent locked in a room with a killer, they had found themselves looking deep into Nietzsche’s abyss.
They stood in silence for several long moments, gazing out across a pastoral landscape that shimmered off into a hazy blue distance that then took dark and brooding form in the ominous shape of the mountains.
Charlotte spoke first. ‘I have never heard him speak like that before. No amount of prompting would ever induce him to talk to me about the murders. Or Lucie.’
Enzo glanced at her to see her face quite pale in the misted midday light. ‘What did you talk about, then?’
‘His childhood, mostly. His mother. God. Religion. I think he was always just glad to have someone to talk to. Today was different, though.’ She looked at Enzo. ‘He was a different man.’ She hesitated. ‘What do you think he meant when he said they would kill him?’
Enzo shook his head, equally mystified. ‘I have no idea. He was... well, pretty enigmatic.’
‘Except when it came to talking about Lucie.’
He nodded.
‘You think he didn’t kill her, then?’
‘I’d put money on it.’
She smiled wryly. ‘Enzo, do you not think gambling has got you into enough trouble as it is?’
His smile of resignation and the gentle inclination of his head signalled agreement. ‘Very probably.’ But he couldn’t shake off the depression which had descended on him during his interview with Blanc, and he couldn’t help feeling that there was something inestimably sad about the man. He kissed Charlotte on both cheeks and handed back her car keys. ‘Thank you for getting me in to see him. I’ll let you know if there are any developments.’
‘Please do,’ she called after him, and before returning to her vehicle stood watching as Enzo got into the car with Kirsty to drive down the spur that would take them to the main road and back, ultimately, on to the motorway, heading west.
Chapter twenty-seven
Enzo was happy to sit back in the passenger seat and let Kirsty drive. The rhythm of the car had sent Alexis to sleep in his baby seat, and Enzo had spent half an hour or more lost in replay of his interview with Blanc. It seemed to him now that Michel Bétaille had been right to question Blanc’s motivation for murdering those prostitutes. Blanc himself had scorned the reasons attributed by the psychologists to his sudden killing spree. But had very nearly admitted that it wasn’t just some random notion. It had been a clear and conscious decision.
What was not clear, and what he wasn’t saying, was why.
Neither had he denied Enzo’s suggestion that he had wanted to be caught, attributing it to some Christian notion of paying penance. But Enzo didn’t believe that Blanc was a very Christian man, in spite of what had very probably been a Catholic upbringing. His mother herself would have been the role model providing the lie that undermined the pretence of faith.
‘I won’t ask,’ Kirsty said suddenly. She smiled. ‘I’d love to know, but you can tell me in your own good time. We have a couple of days together.’
Enzo returned her smile. ‘We have. And it’s nice. A long time since I got to spend time like this with you on your own.’
She nodded towards the back seat. ‘Not exactly alone.’
Enzo grinned. ‘Ah, but Alexis is family.’ And he saw the shadow that passed fleetingly over her face. They could pretend all they wanted that nothing had changed between them since the revelation that he was not her blood father. But it had. Not in any substantive way, but in some strangely amorphous sense of loss that neither wanted to acknowledge.
She said, ‘I noticed that Dominique spent the night at the apartment last night.’
‘She did.’
Kirsty flicked him a look. ‘And I noticed that she didn’t sleep on the sofa.’
‘I could hardly ask the girl to doss down on that awful thing.’
She lifted an eyebrow. ‘You’re incorrigible, Papa, you know that?’
He grinned. ‘Encourageable, Kirsty.’
‘Is she...?’ And she left the sentence hanging.
‘She’s very serious.’
‘And you?’
‘I’ve been trying hard not to be.’
‘Why?’
‘Because she’s not much older than you, Kirsty. There’s no future in it for her.’
‘Have you told her that?’
‘I have.’
‘And what did she say?’
‘Oh, I got a great big long speech. Which I won’t bother you with. But I told you, she’s very serious.’
Kirsty took her eye from the road for just a moment to look at him very directly. ‘And if it wasn’t for the age gap?’
‘Keep your eyes on the road,’ he admonished her. And he thought about it for a moment before he spoke. ‘She’s the first woman I’ve met since Pascale died...’ He hesitated. He always felt guilty at the mention of Pascale’s name, and what it meant to Kirsty. If he hadn’t met Pascale he might never have left Kirsty’s mother and, by default, Kirsty herself. Although in his heart he always knew that, while he loved Kirsty with all his being, his marriage to her mother had been a mistake.
‘Yes?’ Kirsty prompted him.
‘She’s the first woman I’ve met that I would be happy to spend the rest of my life with. Even if I do turn into an old fart while she’s still a young thing.’
‘Papa, has no one told you? You’re already an old fart.’
He grinned. ‘Thank you, Kirsty.’
Her smile faded. ‘And what about Charlotte?’
He expelled a slow, sad breath. ‘She might have been the one. Only, I wasn’t the one for her. Obviously.’
‘Nobody seems to like her very much. Apart from you.’
‘You shouldn’t judge her by appearances, pet. Charlotte’s a complex and, yes, difficult woman, and she tends to hide the real her.’
Kirsty shrugged. ‘So who is the real her?’
Enzo smiled. ‘Well, that would be hard to say. She had a pretty disturbed childhood. Discovered in her teens that she was adopted. Got obsessed by it and went looking for her birth parents. Only to discover that she was the love child of the celebrated political adviser and film critic Jacques Gaillard — whose murder, as you know, was the first case in Raffin’s book that I investigated. Apparently her birth mother had been going to have her aborted. But Gaillard paid her a lot of money to have the baby, then farmed Charlotte out to a childless couple in Angoulême, retainers employed by his family. I think Charlotte was quite deeply affected by the sense of being unwanted, no matter how much her adopted parents loved her.’
Kirsty was less than sympathetic. ‘And yet she was prepared to do exactly the same thing to her own child, when she was pregnant with Laurent.’ She glanced at her father. ‘Do you think she really would have had an abortion?’
Enzo thought about it. ‘Yes, I do. Charlotte is a very determined and wilful woman. She’ll do exactly what it is she wants to do, and never does anything without a good reason.’ He paused and corrected himself. ‘Well, a reason that she considers good for her.’