The pathologist frowned. ‘Returned what?’
‘The skull.’
‘Oh.’
‘The judge would like it back. Apparently he wrote several times, without response.’
‘Oh,’ the young man said again. And this time seemed a little embarrassed. ‘Well, that’s unfortunate.’ He looked at the front page of the report. ‘At least we have a case number here. I’ll see if I can track it down. Would you like to come back in, say—’ he checked his watch — ‘a couple of hours?’
Enzo rode the tram east through town, standing room only, clutching an upright and watching the city spool past the windows of his carriage. Now that they had left the concrete campus behind them, the old city reasserted itself in all its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century glory. Ahead, he could see the tall spire of the elegant Cathédrale Saint-André, but stepped off the tram on the Cours Maréchal Juin to cross to the architectural curiosity that was the Palais de Justice. The courthouse was an ugly building with grey skeletal uprights supporting curved, overhanging eves above rows of blue slats — imitation shutters shielding the acres of glass from which the Palais seemed almost wholly constructed.
Its frontage abutted on to what looked like the original prison and sat elevated on a stone-clad plinth. Beyond a sign which read Tribunal de Grande Instance, steps led up over a water feature to a glazed public ambulatory, through which seven courtrooms could be seen rising in bizarre tapering towers, a grotesque parody of the medieval spires all around. The concept, Enzo imaged, was that justice was being seen to be done.
He waited on the steps with his back to the building, gazing by preference down a street of honey-gold stone and black-painted wrought iron, and wondered what had happened to man’s sense of the aesthetic. It seemed, these days, that concept was more important than character, and the result less than edifying. Sophie, he knew, would tell him he was just old and locked in the past. And maybe, he thought, she was right. Maybe it was time to pass it all on to the next generation and let them do their worst. After all, Enzo’s lot had already done theirs.
‘Monsieur Macleod?’
Enzo turned to find himself looking into a lugubrious face with wild, black, curling eyebrows beneath a shock of wiry white hair. It was a big, fleshy face, with silver fuse-wire growing out of nostrils and ears. It belonged to a large man standing on the step above Enzo and towering over him. He wore the long black gown of the French avocat, with its broad flash of white col hanging down from the neck.
‘Maître Imbert?’
‘Yes.’ He shuffled impatiently. ‘I don’t have much time.’
‘How on earth did you recognise me?’ Enzo said.
‘Monsieur, there can be hardly anyone working in the French justice system who does not know your face by now.’
Enzo smiled. ‘Well, thank you for meeting me.’
There was no smile in return, and no handshake. ‘Like I said, monsieur, I am pressed for time. What can I do for you?’
In the absence of any of Maître Imbert’s precious time to soften the request, Enzo came straight out with it. ‘I’d like you to arrange for me to see Régis Blanc.’
And for the first time the hint of a smile rearranged gross features. ‘Monsieur, just because you have successfully resolved four of Raffin’s cold cases does not mean that you are going to pin the murder of Lucie Martin on my client.’
‘That’s not why I want to see him.’
The eyebrows of the avocat gathered in a tangle above his nose as he frowned. ‘Then why do you want to see him? Is this something to do with the Bordeaux Six?’
‘No. Although I have met with the parents and looked at their files.’
‘Time wasters and fantasists.’
Enzo found a seed of anger stirring inside him. ‘Actually, those parents are just as much victims as their daughters.’
‘Not victims of Blanc.’
‘No, I agree.’
Maître Imbert seemed taken aback. ‘Really?’
‘If Michel Bétaille couldn’t find any connections between Blanc and the disappearance or murder of those girls in two years of investigation, I’m inclined to think there aren’t any.’
‘So what do you want with Blanc?’
‘I found his letter to Lucie oddly touching, Maître. I know he claims to have written it while drunk, but I doubt that. A drunk man, released from his natural inhibitions, would have expressed himself more freely, and perhaps more crudely. Blanc had real difficulty.’
Imbert’s thick pale lips curled in what looked like a sneer. ‘Blanc was not exactly what I would have called literate, Monsieur Macleod.’ He clearly didn’t think much of his client.
‘I don’t mean the words he used. I’m talking about the emotions he expressed.’
Imbert sighed. ‘Is there a point to this anywhere in our future?’
‘New evidence has come to light suggesting that Lucie and Blanc had a romantic liaison.’
Now Imbert laughed out loud. ‘Nonsense!’
‘I have a witness.’
‘Who?’
Enzo just smiled. ‘They were seen together in a café, kissing and holding hands.’
The frown returned in another meeting of eyebrows. ‘And you want to ask Blanc if it’s true?’
Enzo inclined his head.
‘He’ll not tell you.’
‘But you’ll get me in to see him?’
‘No, I will not. I’m far too busy to bother myself with a case that’s more than twenty years old. Blanc killed those girls and now he’s serving life, and that’s an end to it.’ He turned away on the steps, then paused and turned back. ‘Why don’t you ask your friend, Charlotte Roux?’
Now it was Enzo’s turn to frown. ‘Charlotte?’
‘You and Raffin are pretty thick with her, aren’t you? Certainly, if the papers are to be believed.’
‘How could Charlotte get me access to Régis Blanc?’
The smile spreading the thick lips of the avocat was smug now. ‘She’s a regular visitor. I had to clear it with Blanc myself. One of a group of forensic psychologists doing some kind of study on the long-term effect of prison on lifers.’ He paused, his smile widening. ‘Didn’t she tell you?’
Enzo walked back to the Institut Médico-Légale in a daze. He buttoned up his jacket against the cold and pushed his hands deep into his pockets, oblivious of his fellow pedestrians. Twice he crossed the road when the lights were at red, to a cacophony of klaxons.
Why wouldn’t Charlotte have told him that she had visited Blanc in Lannemezan prison? But no matter how many times he asked himself, he could not come up with a satisfactory answer. She must have known that he would find out sooner or later — certainly as soon as he embarked on the Lucie Martin case. In addition to her training as a psychologist, Charlotte had spent two years in the United States studying forensic psychology. Her help was even solicited on occasion by the Paris police, when those particular talents were in demand, and so it was not unnatural that she should be participating in a prisoner study. What was unnatural was that she hadn’t told him.
He drew long, deep breaths as he walked, to control his anger. It was not beyond the bounds of possibility that she was simply being bloody-minded. Where Enzo was concerned, it seemed she took great pleasure these days in baiting him. And he could just imagine her supercilious response to his asking the question. But ask it he was determined to do. Besides which, it looked now like she might be his only way of getting to speak to Blanc himself.
He had walked off most of his anger by the time he reached the Hôpital Pellegrin and the young pathologist came to meet him in reception. He was carrying a square, cream cardboard box, which he set down on the chair next to where Enzo had been sitting. ‘That’s her,’ he said. ‘The box had been incorrectly labelled and misfiled in the greffe. It was pure chance that I found it.’