Enzo said, ‘We’re looking for Lulu.’
Derision exploded from her lips. ‘Oh, are you? What’s she got that I haven’t got, then?’ She cackled. ‘Apart from another fifty kilos of flesh.’
‘Do you know where we can find her?’ Dominique said.
The girl looked her up and down lasciviously. ‘Not bad,’ she said. ‘Sure I can’t change your mind? Just you and me. We don’t need the old guy, do we?’
Dominique reached into an inside pocket and pulled out an ID wallet that she opened up and thrust in the girl’s face. ‘You can tell us where we can find Lulu, or you can spend the night in a cell.’ She snapped the wallet shut and thrust it back in her pocket.
‘Oh, shit,’ the girl said, all her levity displaced by disappointment. ‘Fucking cops.’
‘Well?’ Dominique was insistent.
The girl nodded towards the south end of the quay. ‘About a hundred metres down. Gates of an old tyre factory. She parks up on the concrete behind it.’ She puckered up her lips. ‘Give her a kiss from me, darling, would you?’
Enzo waited until they were twenty metres or so away before he said in a low voice, ‘What the hell did you show her?’
‘My old gendarme’s ID. I was supposed to hand it in, but no one ever asked, so...’ She shrugged. ‘Thought it might come in handy.’
‘Isn’t it illegal to impersonate a police officer?’
Dominique smiled. ‘But I’m so well practised, who could tell the difference?’
It was somewhere along here, Enzo knew, that one of Blanc’s victims had been found. As they approached Lulu’s van across a cracked concrete apron strewn with the detritus of discarded lives, a client was slipping out of the back of it. The man was short and middle-aged, and Enzo saw the panic in his rabbit eyes as he noticed them coming towards him, and he went skulking quickly off into the darkness like some resentful rodent.
Then Lulu swung into view from behind the van and cast cautious eyes in their direction. The placing of her hands on her hips, Enzo decided, was pure bravado. Telling them she was neither frightened nor intimidated. But no matter how long she had been at this game, it never became any less dangerous, and Enzo knew she would be feeling both.
‘I don’t do couples,’ she said.
‘Neither do we,’ Enzo said. ‘We just want to talk.’
Lulu looked at him as if he were some kind of pervert. ‘Talk? I don’t do talk.’
She was at least a hundred kilos in weight, but most of it still hung in the right places, and what wasn’t on show was contained in a brightly coloured print dress with a crossed front that lifted and held her breasts unnaturally high. She had calves like a rugby player and shoulders to match, and teetered on strapless high-heeled sandals that looked both too small and too tight. Back-combed brassy blond hair was piled up high above a face so poorly painted it would not have been out of place in a circus. She was, Enzo thought, at least fifty. A raddled wreck of what might once have been an attractive woman.
‘Anne-Laure Blanc suggested we talk to you,’ he said.
And her face changed immediately. ‘Anne-Laure? Is she in some kind of trouble?’
‘She’s in no trouble,’ Enzo said. He took out his wallet and counted out fifty euros. ‘We just want a few minutes of your time to talk about Régis. Will this cover it?’
Lulu snatched it so quickly from his hand that he almost didn’t feel it leave his fingers. She tucked it into her cleavage.
Enzo said, ‘Are you not a bit old for this, Lulu?’
She looked him up and down. ‘Not as old as you, pappy. What do you want to know?’
They turned as a car cruised by out in the street. The driver’s eyes, catching the light beyond the window, quickly averted themselves before the vehicle accelerated suddenly away.
Lulu said, ‘You just lost me a customer.’
Enzo drew out another twenty note and it vanished to join the others in the generous depths of her cleavage. ‘Anything at all you can tell us about him.’
She eyed them suspiciously, clearly wondering why they would come asking her about Régis Blanc after all these years. But she knew better than to ask. ‘With Régis what you saw was what you got. You played it straight with him, he played it straight with you. No side to him. Never touched the girls, never laid a finger on us. And let me tell you, that’s pretty unique in my world.’
Enzo reckoned she had probably been on the business end of a few fists in her time.
‘Truth is, we all liked him. You couldn’t help but like Régis. He was a good laugh. Always wisecracking, and never sold you short. Took what he was owed and nothing else. And see if anyone messed with you. A client, or another pimp, Régis would pay him a visit. And you never had no more trouble.’ She shook her head, and her smile was one of fond recollection. ‘Word gets round, you know. You don’t fuck with Régis’s girls.’ She grinned. ‘Unless you’re paying. We felt safe. You know?’ She spat on the concrete. ‘Not like now.’
Dominique said, ‘Those three girls he murdered must have felt safe, too. Until he strangled them.’
Lulu folded her arms beneath her breasts and shook her head vigorously. ‘I still don’t understand it. None of us did. At first we thought he’d been set up. Régis would never have done something like that. Then, when he didn’t deny it...’ She turned dark eyes of consternation on them. ‘I’m still not quite sure I believe it.’
‘Did you know them?’ Enzo said. ‘The dead girls.’
She shrugged. ‘Everyone knew everyone back then. But I didn’t know them. I mean, they weren’t friends or anything.’
‘You’ve heard of the Bordeaux Six?’
‘Who hasn’t?’
‘You knew them, too, then?’
‘Same way as I knew the girls he strangled. Except for Sal. We used to hang out. Do the occasional double act.’
‘Sally Linol?’
‘Never knew her second name. She had a tattoo of a feather on the side of her neck. Bitch just up and disappeared on me. Not a damned word. One day she’s here. The next she’s gone. I remember Régis asking about her. Seemed very keen to find her. Someone said she’d gone to Paris, but no one knew for sure.’ She looked at Enzo and then at Dominique. ‘I can’t imagine what use to you any of my ramblings might be. But you’re running out of time. Unless you want to put more money in the machine.’
Enzo shook his head hopelessly. It was another dead end. Just confirmation of the enigma that was Régis Blanc. A man of impossible contradictions, who had murdered three prostitutes and fallen for an angel from Duras. But he hadn’t killed her, Enzo was pretty sure, and he was starting to doubt that Blanc was anything more than a time-consuming red herring. Despair was beginning to seep into his soul. ‘Thanks anyway,’ he said.
‘It’s poor Anne-Laure I feel the most sorry for,’ Lulu said suddenly. ‘Left on her own without any financial support to look after that little girl. I drop in sometimes for a coffee and a chat. She’s a poor soul. Must have been a terrible burden.’
‘What?’ Dominique frowned.
‘Looking after that kid. What was it they called it? Pump, or Pompe’s disease. Something like that. They said she wouldn’t live for more than a couple of years. I remember Régis was devastated. I mean, really devastated. He thought the world of that little girl. Then, when he got sent down for the murders, poor Anne-Laure got left to cope with it all on her own.’
Chapter thirty-three
Their hotel-room window looked out over a clutch of skeleton trees in a patch of scrubby grassland at a road junction. Opposite was a café, and further down the street, a Chinese restaurant. On the far side of the tram tracks, the Gare Saint-Jean stood in all its floodlit glory against a black sky, and the surrounding restaurants and bars were filled with people whose lives were untouched by Enzo’s pain. Their laughter and pleasure in life and living seemed to mock him as he stood looking down at them, cocooned in his own internal misery.