The apartment was clean enough, but made smaller somehow by cheap furniture that was much too big for it. An electric fire was switched off and the room was cold. Enzo wondered if it was an attempt to save money. A woman who was at home mid-morning was unlikely to have a job, and he thought she was probably on benefits.
‘I still go and see him sometimes,’ she said. ‘There’s no hard feelings. We had our time. It was short, and it passed. But he’s still a lovely man.’
Enzo and Dominique exchanged fleeting glances. It seemed an odd way to describe a triple murderer. She went off to retrieve a photo album from an ugly 1960s sideboard, and squeezed on to the settee between them to open it up. ‘I should look at these more often. Everything’s digital now, and nobody keeps photo albums any more. Which is a shame, because they are lovely to look back on.’ Everything, it seemed, in Anne-Laure’s life was ‘lovely’.
There were photographs taken in a bar somewhere of Régis and Anne-Laure raising glasses towards the camera. Both of them almost unrecognisable. Impossibly young, brimming with life and laughter, moments trapped in time and captured in the virulent reds and greens and blues of cheap 1980s film stock. Like the painted concrete blocks outside her window.
She flicked through the pages faster than they could take them in. Girls with the superficial glamour of the street-corner hooker, dyed blond hair and unthinkably short skirts. Men with broken-veined faces and glassy eyes leering at the lens. And then she stopped at a photograph taken in a park somewhere, sunlight dappling grass through summer leaves. She and Régis were seated on a travelling rug spread out on the lawn, a picnic hamper between them and a baby held up by Régis above his crossed legs. Both he and Anne-Laure were burned out in places by patches of sunlight, but their happiness shone through, and there was such pride in Régis’s smile that Enzo began to regard him as almost human.
‘Happiest days of my life,’ Anne-Laure said. Enzo glanced at her and saw that she was transported back to that time, a radiance in her eyes and her smile at the recollection of a life long gone. ‘Being pregnant was the best feeling ever. Like it’s what I had been born for.’ Then a darkness crossed her face. ‘Though I only ever had the one.’
Dominique said, ‘Why did you leave him?’
She laughed, as if there were something funny in the question. ‘Oh, Régis was never a one-girl man. I suppose I always knew that. But it wasn’t until he went inside that I realised there was no future for us. If I wanted a life of my own, a real life, it wasn’t going to be with Régis.’ Her smile was rueful and filled with irony. ‘And look where I ended up.’
Enzo said, ‘What did you know about Lucie Martin?’
She frowned. ‘Lucie...?’ Then recollection dawned. ‘Oh, that girl who was murdered over in Duras.’ She shook her head. ‘That wasn’t him. No doubt he had a thing for her. But that was just Régis. He’d never have hurt the girl.’ She turned a look on them that was so honest and open it was almost startling in its innocence, and Enzo wondered if it was the innocence in Anne-Laure that had attracted Régis, just as it was in Lucie. She said, ‘I never stopped loving him, I suppose. There was violence in him, but it was never directed at me. Or any other woman, as far as I knew. He always treated his girls well. They liked him. And that’s rare for a man in his line of work.’
‘Still,’ Dominique said, ‘he murdered three women.’
Anne-Laure’s smile faded and became fixed. ‘They say that, yes.’
‘He’s never denied it.’
‘No, he hasn’t. But it doesn’t make him a bad person.’
She stood up, a little huffily, closing her photo album and returning it to its place in the sideboard where it would reside unopened for who knew how many more years.
‘But don’t take my word for it. Ask any of his girls. They all loved him, you know. Go and see Lulu. She’ll tell you all about Régis. Still on the game, even after all these years. Past her sell-by, you might say. But, then, some men seem to like that kind of thing.’
‘Where would we find Lulu?’ Enzo asked.
‘I don’t know where she lives. But she still plies her trade on the Quai Deschamps,’ Ann-Laure said. ‘Any night after dark. Just ask one of the girls. Can I get you another coffee?’
‘No, no, thanks.’ Enzo stood up. This had been a waste of time. Whatever she might have told them about Régis, she wasn’t going to discuss the murders. Or Lucie Martin.’
But Dominique remained seated. She said, ‘What happened to your daughter?’
Anne-Laure lifted her chin and stared off into some unseen distance. ‘Alice is lucky. She got away from all this.’
‘She must be nearly twenty-five by now,’ Dominique said. Then paused. ‘She’s not in Bordeaux anymore, then?’
‘No. No, she’s not.’
Enzo said, ‘Does she ever visit her father?’
An almost pained look flitted across Anne-Laure’s face. ‘She’s never set eyes on her father in all the years since... well, since they sent him to prison. And never will.’
Prostitution around the Gare Saint-Jean had become a blight, with ladies of the night soliciting customers from the doors of churches and pharmacies, congregating in the underpasses. If you knew where to look there were strip clubs and swingers’ clubs, massage parlours and brothels, and places you could watch live sex shows caught on camera.
The Quai Deschamps was on the other side of the river. Derelict industrial properties and once grand mansions, like bad teeth in a grim smile. After dark, cars cruised the riverbank, girls appearing out of the shadows, catching headlights. Pale, painted faces, sometimes brown, sometimes Asian, long legs barely covered by miniskirts so short they verged on the obscene. Breasts spilling out of low-cut tops or unbuttoned blouses as they leaned in open windows, displaying their wares to potential clients.
Enzo and Dominique got off the tram at Stalingrad and walked south along the quay into darkness, past crumbling brick walls defaced by garishly coloured graffiti. Across the river, the black water reflected the lights of the city, another world away, where people went about lives uncontaminated by crime or a sex trade that bred only misery and disease. Where young women sold their futures for a handful of euros, and men exploited them to indulge their sad fantasies.
On a patch of waste ground they saw three white vans parked among the rubble, suspension tested by men exploiting the world’s oldest profession, and women practising it. Vehicles cruised slowly by, hidden faces staring out in suspicion at the incongruous sight of a man and woman walking here together.
During the long hours of waiting in the hotel room they had taken near the station, Enzo had barely been able to contain his frustration. Time, it seemed to him, was simply ticking away, and with it any hope of getting Sophie back. But he had no idea what else to do. For very nearly the first time in his life he was lost. He did not know which way to turn next. He was like a drowning man, struggling to keep his head above water, but losing the fight. And he felt himself being sucked under.
He had been determined to go to the Quai Deschamps alone. It was too dangerous, he had said, for Dominique. He couldn’t guarantee to protect her. She had sat him down on the edge of the bed and told him that she was young, trained and fit, and the only reason she was going along was to protect him. And he had smiled, in spite of the darkness in his heart.
‘Kinky!’ A skinny young black woman stepped out of deep shadow where she had been standing behind a broken-down portail that opened on to the garden of a derelict gatehouse. Somewhere beyond the darkness, an old house rose in silhouette against a sky backlit by the city itself. ‘Been a long time since I had a couple. First timers?’