‘Hello!’ His own voice sounded strangely remote as he called up the stairwell. Disconnected from him, somehow. ‘Is there anyone there?’
They waited in silence and exchanged glances before Enzo called again. ‘Hello!’
The sound of a door opening somewhere high up in the tower travelled down the stairs to meet them. Then a ghostly pale face peered over the banister. Its spectral effect was emphasised by the lifeless grey hair that hung in lustreless loops to her shoulders. Hair that had been pulled back into a severe bun when last Enzo had seen her.
‘What do you want?’
They could hear the apprehension in her voice.
‘It’s Enzo Macleod, Madame Brusque. I was here the other week with my daughter, Roger’s fiancée.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Yes.’ And now they heard apprehension morphing to indifference. ‘What do you want?’
‘Can we come up?’
‘I’m not really prepared for visitors.’
‘Won’t take long,’ Enzo called back. ‘I promise.’
She hesitated, and clearly wanted to say no. But this was the father of her employer’s fiancée. How could she refuse? ‘Alright.’
She watched Enzo and Dominique all the way up the stairs, until they drew level with her on the landing. Enzo seemed to tower over her. A quilted pink dressing gown gathered itself around a long, diaphanous nightdress, and she wore grey and pink slippers. She might very well still have been in bed when they came calling.
‘Has anyone been in contact?’ he said.
She frowned. ‘In contact? What do you mean?’
He shook his head. ‘Obviously not. It doesn’t matter.’
The woman looked beyond him at Dominique. ‘Who’s this?’
‘My colleague.’
Again the woman frowned, and Enzo couldn’t help but notice that her once glittering green eyes were faded now, and almost grey like her hair. ‘Colleague?’ She seemed confused. ‘Are you here on business?’
‘I’m afraid we are.’
Now he saw the return of apprehension, perhaps even fear, in her eyes. ‘What sort of business?’
Dominique said, ‘The business of catching killers, Sally.’
And what little colour there was in Sally Linol’s face vanished, leaving it almost transparent. Dominique stepped forward and pulled away the upturned collar of her dressing gown. There, starkly etched on white skin, was her feather tattoo. Sally took a step back, eyes wide with fear. ‘What do you want?’
‘To keep you safe, Sally,’ Enzo said. ‘There are people on their way here to kill you.’
Even her lips were bloodless, eyes darting, panic-stricken, towards the open door of her apartment, and then the stairs, neither offering any real means of escape. And suddenly it was as if her fear, something sick and malign that had possessed her for nearly two decades, had left her. Enzo saw the slump of her shoulders, the resignation that settled on her, cutting deeper lines into a face shaped by angst and uncertainty over all the lost years of her life.
Enzo said, ‘What we need to know, Sally, is why.’
She nodded. ‘You’d better come in.’
They followed her into the tiny apartment at the top of the tower. A single room with a kitchen and breakfast bar. A small round table in the window looking out over the gardens. A couple of armchairs gathered around a TV set. Through an open door they could see an unmade bed, and another door off the bedroom, leading to a shower room. Régis Blanc had spent all the years of his life sentence in Lannemezan. Sally Linol had spent hers here. Both of them prisoners of their own making.
She slumped into a chair by the window and gazed sightlessly out at the view she must have seen every day for the nearly seven thousand of them she had spent in this place. Then she put her elbows on the table in front of her and dropped her head into her hands, shaking it in despair.
‘I always knew that someday, somehow, they would find me.’ And she lifted her head to look at Enzo, an appeal for understanding in her eyes. ‘It’s been no life at all. Just a living hell.’ She ran her tongue over dry lips. ‘It’ll be a relief, at last, to tell somebody the truth.’
Enzo felt Dominique’s tiny tug at the sleeve of his jacket, and he half turned. Dominique tipped her head towards the door. She wanted them to go. Everything in her face and her eyes said they had no time.
But Enzo’s frown and the slightest shake of his head said, Not yet. This was a defining moment. Sally Linol, after years of silence, wanted to tell her story. To tell it to them. The last thing he wanted to do was break the spell. In other circumstances, away from here, when she felt safe, it was perfectly possible that she might decide to keep it to herself after all.
He stepped away from Dominique and sat in the chair opposite the woman who had once sold her services on the streets of Bordeaux and Paris, and shared a bed with the murdered rent boy, Pierre Lambert. He slipped his phone from his pocket, tapping its Record icon and setting it on the table between them. She was oblivious. Enzo said, ‘I’ve met your parents, Sally. They’re both still alive. And still hoping to find you alive, too.’
Those green-grey eyes flickered towards him, and he saw the pain behind them, before tears blurred their sharpness. ‘The last thing I ever wanted to do was hurt them. You know? They were good people. I couldn’t have asked for a happier childhood. Only...’ Time and distance glazed her eyes now, and Enzo knew that she had left him, transported back to another place and time. Memories, regrets, all those fears and fantasies that we shut away in lockfast boxes in the darkest corners of our minds. ‘They didn’t have the money to put me through university in Bordeaux. Tuition fees, books, an apartment, food, transport. My dad was a farm worker. He barely made enough to cover their own living costs.’ Her breath trembled as she drew it in. ‘So I told them I had a job. And I did. But not the job they thought it was.’
The first of her tears splashed on to the shiny surface of the table.
‘In the beginning it was almost fun. Wealthy older men who liked young girls. Sugar daddies with wandering hands and generous wallets. A friend introduced me to it, and you know pretty quickly you get used to the money. You buy things. You move into a better apartment. You meet people. And then the money dries up. You’re a little older and the sugar daddies lose interest. You start to get desperate. You’ll do anything for cash. And that’s when you begin to lose control, when it all starts slipping away from you, and you find yourself mixing with pimps and junkies, getting yourself into hock and standing on street corners to pay your debts.’
‘How did you meet Régis Blanc?’
‘I was at a club with a client one night. He got really drunk, and he wasn’t nice with a drink in him. He started beating up on me, and this guy steps in and kicks the shit out of him. That was Régis. He was like that. Hated to see any of his girls treated badly. Not that I was one of his girls.’ A pale smile flitted across her face. ‘Not then. But it wasn’t long before I was. He was really good to me, especially after what I’d been through the previous six months. But he was good to us all.’ She raised her eyes to Enzo ‘We loved him, you know. Régis was special. All the girls felt really bad for him when his little girl was born with that... whatever it was. Some kind of congenital defect. And I suppose, in a way, it changed him. He adored that baby. Really adored her.’
Dominique said, ‘But he murdered three girls.’
Sally’s eyes darted towards her, then quickly away again, as if embarrassed. ‘Régis had some kind of a deal going with this rich guy. Well, I don’t know that he was rich, but he liked to have working girls in his bed, and certainly had the means to pay for it. He had this little apartment in west Bordeaux. His little love nest, he called it. There were four of us that Régis used to send there on a regular basis. Sometimes two at a time. The guy wasn’t violent or anything. But he was pretty weird. Young, too. Liked us to do some pretty strange things.’