For the longest time possible he had focused on simply not thinking. About anything. For every time he did he was unable to stop the tears. Tears for the woman he had once loved, a woman who had given him a son and who would spend the rest of her life in prison. Tears for the horrors poor Sophie had suffered because of him. And Bertrand, with his broken leg and battered face, still lying in a hospital bed in Montpellier. And, most of all, tears for the young woman who had taken a bullet in her chest for the singular crime of being his lover.
The only glimmer of light in the whole foul business was that Kirsty had not, after all, borne a murderer’s son. Raffin, whatever else he might be, was neither corrupt nor a killer. He was as much a victim as the rest of them. And Enzo felt guilt for the hatred he had harboured for him in his heart.
‘Monsieur Macleod?’
Enzo jumped to his feet as the young surgeon approached. He wore a long white coat over jeans and white tennis shoes, his hands and nails scrubbed almost painfully clean. Skin scarified by the scouring demanded before entry to the operating theatre. But it was nearly twenty-four hours since he had operated on Dominique. Enzo searched his face for light or hope.
‘She’s awake, finally,’ he said. ‘To put it crudely, we sewed up the lung and put in a tube to drain the blood. There is a broken rib, but fortunately no tracheobronchial damage. The bullet missed the heart and, by some miracle, all of the arteries. If it hadn’t lodged in the rib it might well have entered her spine. Best prognosis... She’s a strong young woman. She should be on her feet in four to six weeks. Full recovery, four to six months.’
Enzo’s legs nearly folded under him. The young doctor put a hand on his arm to steady him as he staggered slightly.
He said, ‘She’s still heavily sedated. But you can have a few minutes with her. It’ll be good for her morale.’
Sunlight bled in around the blinds that darkened her room, and the sense of something shining bright out there in the world beyond them offered hope and optimism for the future.
There was a hush in here, broken only by the beeping of the equipment that monitored all her vital signs. The air was sickly warm and smelled powerfully of disinfectant. She turned her head a little as he came in, and the tiniest smile stretched dry, cracked lips. She was deathly pale, eyes red-rimmed and distant. Her right hand reached tentatively for his as he pulled up a chair at the bedside. He took it, feeling how small it was, and squeezed it gently.
Her voice was pared thin and clotted by the mucus in her throat. ‘When I was lying there,’ she said, ‘with the blood bubbling into my mouth, I thought I was going to die... and my only regret was that I would never see you again.’
‘Well,’ Enzo said, and he grinned in spite of the hurt he felt inside, ‘twenty years from now, when you’re wiping my arse and heaving me into a bath chair, maybe you’ll regret that you did.’
‘Oh, stop it!’ She laughed and winced from the pain. Slowly the smile faded, and she put all her effort into concentrating on his face. ‘I love you, Enzo Macleod.’
It was all he could do to stop the tears from coming again. ‘I love you, too, Dominique Chazal,’ he said. He blinked furiously and reached for his back pocket, pulling out the copy of today’s Libération that he had folded into it. He opened it up to show her the front page. ‘Look.’ There were photographs of both Charlotte and Jean-Jacques Devez, and smaller inset pictures of the three murdered prostitutes from Bordeaux. The story, beneath the headline, DEATH OF A DREAM, told of the arrest of the secret twins. An explosive story threatening a political earthquake that would shake the country to its foundations. Raffin had been busy since Enzo’s call to him yesterday morning.
She forced another smile. ‘You’ll win your bet now, then.’
But he shook his head. ‘Not quite.’ He paused. ‘There’s still the question of who murdered Lucie Martin.’
She blinked clarity into her eyes and frowned a little as she focused them on him. ‘And do you know who that was?’
He sighed. ‘I have an idea. But no proof.’ Then he thought about it. ‘Yet.’
Chapter forty-six
Enzo had driven behind the ambulance all the way from Biarritz to the Centre Hospitalier de Cahors, to see Dominique safely installed in her own room where he could visit her every day to help her through the long and difficult process of recovery. Or re-education as the French called it.
Now he parked in the square below the cathedral and walked past the covered market. He saw familiar faces on the terrace outside the Café Le Forum. He waved but didn’t stop. Everything surrounding him was familiar, and yet he felt like a displaced person in a foreign land. He knew, of course, that while the world around him remained the same, the only thing that had really changed was him. Everything about him. Everything he had known and understood. Everything he had been. Everything he was and might be in the future. The very bedrock on which he had built his life had fallen away beneath his feet. And the only thing that kept him from sliding down into the abyss was Dominique. The way she felt about him. The way he felt about her. She would need him to be there and be strong. How could he fail her after what she had suffered for him?
He climbed the stairs wearily to his apartment. It seemed painfully empty, haunted by the ghost memories of a happier past. Sophie had gone to bring Bertrand back from Montpellier.
He remembered holding her in the rain that morning at the house in Biarritz, as the ambulance rushed Dominique to the hospital and the police led Charlotte away in handcuffs. Traumatised and barely able to stand, she had been trembling in his arms, the deepest of sobs shaking her whole body. The little girl that Pascale had bequeathed him, the child he had raised and loved all those years on his own, the daughter he had thought was dead, and who, in the end, had saved his life. How could there ever be any life for him without her?
And then there was Laurent. The son Charlotte had given him so reluctantly, and who now had only him. A father who was old enough to be his grandfather. While his mother was someone about whom he would only ever feel ashamed. Arrangements would have to be made to go to Paris to take custody of him. Kirsty had retrieved him from the care of the nanny Charlotte employed, and he was staying temporarily with her and Raffin at the Rue de Tournon.
The hall simmered in semi-darkness, light spilling from half-open bedroom doors. The door to the spare room stood wide. Nicole had changed the sheets and made the bed. Everything was in its place, dust-free and shining in the sunlight that fell in across the roofs. She would make Fabien a good wife, but Enzo mourned for the career she might have had, the person she might have been. And yet, if it was Fabien who made her happy, who was he to pass judgment?
He moved stiffly through to the séjour, throwing open the double doors and breathing in the familiar scents of a life he had once known. Again, he had the sense of being a stranger haunting his own past. Beyond the French windows, in the square below, life went on as it always did, flowing past him as if he were no more than a rock in the river. Tiny, insignificant, the most minor of impediments to its swift onward passage.
Nicole had left the mail piled neatly on the table, and he began sifting through it absently. Bills mostly, and bank statements, and junk mail, the detritus of a life that seemed somehow less important. He paused over a white envelope embossed with the official stamp of the Institut Médico-Légale in Bordeaux. The address was handwritten and he opened it with a powerful sense of knowing exactly what was inside. And he was right. The letter was from the young forensic anthropologist at the Bordeaux morgue. He had found no traces of Rohypnol in Lucie’s cortical bone. The final affirmation, if it were needed, that nothing about Lucie’s death fitted with Régis Blanc’s modus operandi.