Enzo sipped his wine reflectively. ‘She was still living at home, wasn’t she?’
‘Only at the weekends. During the week, she stayed at a studio apartment in Bordeaux. She had a job in town working for a charity called Rentrée that helped newly released prisoners reintegrate into society.’ Raffin raised a sceptical eyebrow, and an element of sarcasm crept into his voice. ‘Some kind of religious organisation.’
‘And that’s where she met Régis Blanc?’
‘Briefly, yes.’ He was irritated again by the interruption, and Enzo wondered — not for the first time — what it was his daughter saw in him. He was a good-looking young man. Though not quite so young anymore. More than forty now, perhaps. Like Enzo himself, he had aged during their six-year collaboration, and never been the same man again after taking, full in his chest, the bullet that had been meant for Enzo. Vanity was apparent in the careful arrangement of his hair and the cut of his designer clothes. Enzo had never taken to him.
‘Anyway,’ Raffin continued, ‘she had arrived home for the weekend on the Friday night. Her mother went off to visit relatives on the Saturday, and that afternoon she told her father she was going for a walk.’
‘The Martins have quite an estate, don’t they?’
‘About a thousand acres, most of it overlooked by the château at the top of the hill. Well, they call it a château, but really it’s just a very large house, extended to a number of outbuildings. Been in his family for generations. He spent a lot of money restoring it all in the seventies and eighties.’
‘So she went for a walk on the estate.’
‘That’s what she told her father. Only she never returned. When her mother got back that evening, Guillaume Martin was in a state.’
‘But they didn’t call the police immediately?’
‘No. Not until some hours later. Martin knew the police wouldn’t respond until she’d been missing for a certain period of time. She was, after all, an adult. But it was going through her room that night that her parents found the letter from Blanc.’
Enzo reached for the photocopy of the letter lying among the papers on the table. He had read it many times, and he cast his eye again over the scrawling, illiterate hand that had striven to convey emotions the man so clearly found difficult to express. He had signed it, simply, Love, R. And something about that suggested to Enzo an unlikely intimacy. It had always troubled him. ‘Of course, they could have had no idea then that Blanc was just about to be revealed as one of France’s most notorious serial killers.’
‘Quite,’ Raffin said. ‘He was arrested on the Monday for the murder of those three prostitutes and within two months had been sentenced to life at the high-security maison centrale at Lannemezan. Lucie had met him first at Rentrée when he was released from Murat some months earlier, just after he’d completed a nine-month stretch for serious assault. The man was a pimp, and well known for his violent temper. Lucie’s father was convinced that he had also killed Lucie. But there was nothing to link him to Lucie in any way, apart from the love letter. And he has always claimed he wrote that when he was drunk and giving vent to an ephemeral infatuation.’
‘But there was no doubt about him having murdered the prostitutes?’
‘None at all. In fact, the defence didn’t even deny it. Just argued that he’d been depressed after the break-up of his marriage and that he’d been under the influence of drugs and alcohol at the time.’ Raffin ran a hand back through light brown hair that was greying at the temples, and perhaps thinning just a little on the crown. ‘Hardly a mitigating factor. And, anyway, no one believed that the calculated way in which he had strangled each of those women, and then dumped their bodies, was anything other than the action of a cold-blooded, entirely sober serial murderer.’
Raffin’s mobile phone rang and vibrated on the table. He turned it towards him to see who was calling.
‘I have to take this,’ he said. And he lifted the phone and raised it to his ear as he wandered across the séjour, through double doors and into his study. Enzo heard him say, ‘No, no, it’s alright. Nothing important.’ And then the door closed and his voice became muffled.
At the same moment, Enzo heard the door of the apartment open, and he stood up, turning expectantly toward the hall. He heard the chortle of a child, the creak of a pram, and then Kirsty came in holding baby Alexis in her arms. She was wearing a long black coat, her chestnut hair and a red scarf draped over her shoulders, face pink with exertion and the chill autumn air. She was momentarily surprised to see Enzo, then her face lit up.
‘Papa! What are you doing here?’ Although born and raised in Scotland, she had started adopting the French informal address for her father.
He took three strides towards them. ‘Am I not allowed to drop by and visit my daughter and grandson?’ And he kissed them both, eyes filled with love and affection for the six-month-old baby. The child gazed back at him, and his little round face broke into the broadest of smiles.
‘God!’ Kirsty gasped. ‘Women and babies! They all fall for you, don’t they?’ She caught sight of the mess of papers and photographs scattered across the table, and gave her father a look. ‘And, if I didn’t know better, I might be tempted to think that the real reason for your visit is a briefing session with Roger on the Martin case.’
Enzo grinned. ‘Oh, that... just a pretext.’
She smiled her scepticism. ‘Here. Hold Alexis while I get out of this coat.’ When she had hung it up in the hall, she took Alexis from his grandfather and laid him in a carrycot by the table, then sat down to pour herself a glass from the remains of the bottle Enzo and Raffin had been sharing. ‘Mmmh,’ she said. ‘This is good.’
‘It ought to be. It cost an arm and a leg.’
‘You brought it?’ Kirsty seemed surprised.
‘Have to keep Roger happy.’ And something in his tone took a little of the shine off her pleasure at seeing him. She knew her father didn’t care much for her fiancé. ‘Set a date yet? he said.
She avoided his eye. ‘No, not yet.’ They had been going to marry before the baby was born, but hadn’t, and never explained why. She followed his adoring gaze towards his grandson. ‘Does it ever bother you?’
He looked at her, surprised. ‘What?’
And perhaps she regretted having started down that road. ‘Well, you know... that he’s not your blood.’
His smile was fond, and he reached out to touch her face with the tips of his fingers. ‘He’s your son, Kirsty. How could I ever think of him as anything other than my flesh and blood?’
She raised her hand to catch his and held it for a moment.
He said, ‘Do you ever see Simon?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
Her eyes blazed briefly. ‘After the way he broke it to you, deliberately to hurt you... well, as far as I’m concerned, he lost all his rights as my real father. I only have one papa, and that’s you.’
Almost embarrassed, Enzo looked back toward the cot and made some silly baby noises to attract his grandson’s attention. But the boy didn’t respond.
Kirsty said, ‘We think he has a hearing problem.’
Enzo turned concerned eyes towards her.