‘Hélène?’ Everyone watched as he listened and nodded. He glanced at his watch. ‘What are you doing there at this time of night?’ His eyes grew moist at her response, and he blinked furiously to clear them. ‘I’ll be right over.’ He hung up and looked around the expectant faces. There was a break in his voice as he said, ‘She’s been at the caserne all evening. Taken personal charge of coordinating the investigation into Sophie’s abduction. She has the forensics report on the house she was held in.’ He stood up. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can.’
Dominique got quickly to her feet. ‘I’ll come with you.’
Much of the police headquarters lay in darkness. It stood at the north end of the loop in the River Lot that contained the old town of Cahors, and was manned only by a skeleton night staff. An officer at reception led them back through a half-lit corridor towards a slab of yellow electric light that fell from an open door to lie across the floor and fold itself up the wall. They could hear Hélène’s voice all the way down the hall. Rapid, insistent. One end of a telephone conversation.
Hélène hung up and rose from her desk as the officer showed Enzo and Dominique into her office. She took Enzo in her arms and held him close for several long moments before standing back. Enzo was almost shocked to see the hint of tears gathering themselves in her eyes. ‘We’ll get her back,’ she said.
She was still in uniform, but had dispensed with the hat, her hair piled up and pinned neatly to her head. There was barely a trace of make-up remaining on her face after a long day. She looked tired. She shook Dominique’s hand and turned to lift a folder from her desk.
‘They emailed me a preliminary report.’ She forced a smile. ‘I know we’re all supposed to be on the same side, but you’ve no idea how difficult it is to get cops from one département to share information with cops from another. You can thank the préfet for exerting his influence.’
And Enzo felt himself choked at the realisation that friends from all sides were stepping up to the plate to help him. She handed him the folder and he pulled out the three printed sheets from inside.
‘There’s not much to go on, I’m afraid. The house has been on the market and lying empty for nearly a year. The owners pay someone to check up on it occasionally. Air the house, cut the grass, that sort of thing. He says he was last there about two weeks ago.’
Dominique said, ‘And he was the only key holder?’
Hélène shook her head. ‘No. The house is with several estate agents, and they all hold keys. There have been eight or ten visits to the property by prospective buyers over the last few months. The last one just ten days ago. And apparently the keys from that visit have gone missing.’
Enzo looked up from the folder. ‘Who were the last people to visit?’
‘Don’t raise your hopes, Enzo,’ Hélène said. ‘If it was the people behind the abduction, they wouldn’t have given real names. But we’re chasing it down.’ She nodded towards the folder in his hands. ‘And you’ll see the forensics people haven’t come up with much. The house is full of fingerprints, of course. But probably none of them belonging to the people we’re interested in. The one possibility is DNA.’
Enzo frowned. ‘How so?’
‘Saliva traces on cigarette ends. The ashtrays are all overflowing. Depends whether or not they’re in the database, of course.’ She paused and examined the big Scotsman with concern. ‘How are you holding up?’
He shook his head. ‘Not well.’
‘If we were to take bets again, Enzo, I’d put money on whoever took Sophie being the same people who’ve been trying to kill you for the last three years.’
‘Then we’d be betting on the same side. Pretty short odds, too, I’d say.’ And he told her about the text from Sophie’s phone, and calling it back.
‘Enzo, there are ways of tracking phones down to locations these days.’
But he shook his head. ‘I’ve tried it several times since. It’s dead. Whatever else they are, these people aren’t stupid.’
‘So what will you do?’
He pursed his lips to contain his anger and frustration. ‘Catch them.’
She put a hand on his arm. ‘Leave it, Enzo, please. That’s our job.’
‘Yes, and you’ve been so good at it so far.’ It was out of his mouth before he could stop himself, and he saw Hélène withdraw her hand, as if from an electric shock. Regret immediately rushed in to fill all his empty places. He reached out and took her hand. ‘I’m sorry, Hélène. That was unfair.’ But he had hurt her, and hurt is something that is very hard to take back.
She pulled her hand away and rounded her desk. ‘I should probably be getting home.’
Dominique felt the hurt and tension that lay between them and tried to bridge the gap. ‘Speaking of DNA,’ she said, and delved into her bag to retrieve the small plastic container with the strands of Laurent’s hair that they had taken from his comb.
Enzo glanced at it and turned away. ‘This isn’t the time.’ He reached for the door.
But Hélène’s interest was piqued. ‘The time for what?’ She glanced at the hair sample and back at Enzo.
‘It doesn’t matter.’ He opened the door.
Dominique said, ‘There’s a question mark over the paternity of Enzo’s son, Laurent. We thought, maybe...’
Enzo avoided Hélène’s eye, and tried to ignore the curiosity in the look she gave him. ‘Like I said. This isn’t the time.’
Hélène took the container from Dominique, but kept her eyes on Enzo. ‘Well, since your DNA will still be in our database... I’ll pull a few strings.’ She paused. ‘I’ll keep you up to date with any developments on Sophie.’ Another pause. ‘If you’ll do the same?’ She raised an eyebrow and cocked her head.
Handling both his regret and his embarrassment at the same time was difficult for Enzo, and all he managed was a nod.
Chapter thirty-two
Anne-Laure Blanc lived on the second floor of a seventies apartment block in the Bordeaux banlieue of Pessac, made infamous by La Cité Frugès, a self-contained housing scheme designed and built for workers in the 1920s by the Swiss-born architect Corbusier. Her one-bed apartment overlooked some of the concrete cubes intended by Corbusier’s experiment to solve a twentieth-century housing shortage. All brightly painted now in orange and blue and green and red, and set in serried rows among trees shedding autumn leaves on empty streets.
In the two-and-a-half-hour drive from Cahors to Bordeaux, Enzo had briefed Dominique fully on the events of the past week and every tiny detail of his investigation into the murder of Lucie Martin. His eyes were stinging from lack of sleep, although he supposed he must have drifted off sometime shortly before the alarm brought him crashing back into reality and the sickening recollection of Sophie’s abduction. Coffee had turned to acid in his stomach, and his mouth was dry and suffused with a bad taste that wouldn’t go away.
Anne-Laure was happy enough to invite them into her tiny apartment, and although she had filled it with bright paintings and photographs, and china ornaments of puppies and pixies, she had the demeanour of someone entirely consumed by loneliness. Even had they been the bearers of bad news, Enzo thought, she would still have greeted them with a smile, an offer of coffee and an invitation to sit on her best settee.
She had put on weight, Enzo imagined, since the days when she and Régis had married, and her red-dyed hair seemed sparse, thinning perhaps with an early onset of the menopause. She wore blue jog-pants that fitted where they touched, and a pink hoodie that looked like it might have been purchased before the weight had begun to accumulate.