He and Dominique rose wordlessly from the bed, and she took a moment to wipe his face dry and kiss him softly on the lips.
They found Nicole settling herself in front of her laptop, which sat on the table in the séjour beneath a ring of light from the pull-down lamp. Kirsty sat opposite, a pen resting on the top page of an open notebook. Enzo and Dominique joined them in silence, faces set in grim resolve, floating on the edge of darkness. Any one of them could have reached out and touched the apprehension that sat among them. It was after ten p.m. But a night of inactivity through all the sleepless hours that would surely lie ahead was not an option.
Nicole said, ‘I wasn’t expecting to have to brief you on Blanc quite this soon. But I think I’ve pulled together just about everything about him that’s out there in the public domain. There’ve been a lot of articles written on the man.’ She tapped on her keyboard, and Enzo saw the changing light from the screen reflecting on a face fixed with dark determination. ‘Do you want just the bones, or the detail, too?’
‘Everything,’ Enzo said. And he could barely recognise his own voice. He blinked several times to clear stinging eyes.
‘He was born in 1957. Mother, Paulette Blanc, the daughter of a fishmonger and a seamstress. Father unknown. He had a half-brother, Jean-Paul, born three years later. Again, father unknown, but he died in infancy. Paulette lived in one of the Bordeaux slums that were cleared in the sixties. Prostitute, alcoholic. Used to bring her clients home when Régis was still a child. According to Blanc himself, she used to tell him to “keep an eye out” while she took her clients into a back bedroom. Though, apparently, he never quite knew what he was keeping an eye out for.’
Nicole navigated her way to a new screen.
‘Anyway, when he was about twelve, Paulette got herself a regular man, who moved in with them and effectively took over the role of Régis’s father. But he wasn’t exactly the kind of role model you might hope for in a father. He was a pimp, but insisted that Paulette give up her night job and stay home. Again according to Régis, it was this man, Arnaud, who first introduced him to drugs. Cocaine, and later heroin, though it seems that Régis had more of a taste for alcohol than drugs.
‘Arnaud conducted his business out of a café near the station, and when Régis was a teenager used to take him along, so he got to know all of the girls that Arnaud ran, and all of his associates. Drunks and drug dealers and petty thieves.’ Nicole looked up and shrugged sadly. ‘You could almost say that Régis Blanc was destined for disaster.’ She returned her eyes to the screen. ‘At first he looked up to Arnaud. Respected him. Probably feared him. Certainly saw him as the father he’d never had. Until the man started beating his mother.’
Kirsty said, ‘It hadn’t always been an abusive relationship, then?’
Nicole shook her head. ‘No. It seems not. But Paulette’s addiction to gin went from bad to worse. The house was filthy. There was never any food, and it seems that Arnaud just lost patience with her. But raising his fists to her was the beginning of the end for his relationship with Régis. Blanc was nearly eighteen by then, and a real hard case from all accounts. Told Arnaud that if he didn’t stop beating up on his mother he would have him to answer to. Arnaud didn’t take him too seriously, and according to witnesses there were several confrontations when Arnaud made a fool of him in public, humiliating the boy in front of his mates.’
Nicole breathed deeply and pressed her lips together with distaste in anticipation of what was to come.
‘One day Régis came home to find Paulette so badly beaten up she had actually lost an eye and was in a coma. He rushed her to hospital, but she remained unconscious for two months before finally passing away. Arnaud was never charged. No witnesses, no proof. Two weeks after Paulette died, Arnaud was found dead on a railway siding on the south side of Bordeaux. Almost every bone in his body was broken and he was missing an eye. Everyone knew Régis had done it, but there was no physical evidence to link him to the murder, and he had a solid alibi.’ She looked up from her computer screen and saw all eyes fixed on her. ‘Arnaud had always groomed Régis to take over the “business” from him sometime in the future. And that’s exactly what he did, only a little earlier than Arnaud had planned. Régis was just eighteen years old.’
It was, Enzo thought, a classic example of being moulded by your environment. Whatever good there might have been in Régis Blanc, he had never stood a chance. He became the mirror image of those who had corrupted him. And he wondered what it was that Lucie had seen in him. What it was that could possibly have attracted her, or suggested the possibility of redemption.
Nicole said, ‘In 1985 he married a young woman called Anne-Laure Couderc. She had been one of his girls. But like Arnaud before him, he made her give all that up when she married him. Two years later she gave birth to a baby girl that they called Alice. From all accounts, Blanc was absolutely smitten by the child, but he and Anne-Laure weren’t getting on, and after he was sent to Murat for nine months in late eighty-eight she quit their apartment and got a place of her own.’
Dominique said, ‘What was he sent to Murat for?’
‘Aggravated assault,’ Nicole said. ‘Blanc had got away with murder, only to be sent down for getting into a drunken brawl. Made a bit of a mess of the other guy, apparently. The only time he was ever actually convicted of anything. Before he murdered those girls, of course.’
Her fingers rattled across the keyboard, and Enzo saw her eyes scanning the text that she next brought up on her screen. He saw the earnest concern in them, and the studied concentration as she read.
‘A condition of his early release from Murat was that he attended sessions at Rentrée, the Catholic charity for the resettlement of prisoners. Which, of course, is where he met Lucie. He had come out of prison to find that Anne-Laure had left him, and maybe that was a contributing factor, but it seems he became besotted by Lucie Martin. And, well... the rest we know.’ She glanced at Enzo. ‘Do you want me to go through the murders of the prostitutes?’
But Enzo shook his head. It was all a matter of public record, and he had been over those killings many times. Blanc’s story was not untypical of the lives of the petty criminals who inhabited that dark and dangerous underworld concealed by the wafer-thin veneer of civilisation that society papered over it. A world inhabited by criminals and cops alike, creatures found crawling beneath the stones we never want to lift. But it told him nothing new, providing not even a foothold from which to advance the investigation. He felt the fingers of despair closing around him.
Dominique said, ‘We should go and talk to his wife.’ She looked at Nicole. ‘Or is it ex-wife?’
Nicole shrugged. ‘There’s no mention anywhere of them ever getting a divorce.’
‘Can you get us an address? We’ll go first thing in the morning.’
‘I’ll try.’
Enzo reached down to retrieve a bundle of folders from his shoulder bag. He pushed them across the table towards Nicole. ‘Those are the files on the Bordeaux Six.’ He shook his head. ‘I’ve been through them and through them. But a pair of fresh eyes...’
Nicole pulled them towards her. ‘I’ll go through them myself with a fine-toothed comb, Monsieur Macleod.’
‘I’m going to have to take Alexis back to Paris tomorrow.’ Kirsty’s face said it all. ‘I hate to leave you, Papa. But I’ll brief Roger on everything that’s happened.’
Enzo nodded, then the ringing of his mobile phone startled everyone around the table. He glanced at the screen and saw that the call was from Commissaire Hélène Taillard, and he was almost afraid to answer it.