Blacklight Blue (9 page)

Chapter Nineteen

Commissaire Taillard viewed the pink-faced hairdresser and the three young people sitting on the opposite side of her desk. The sombre figure of the Scottish lawyer, Simon Gold, stood behind them, leaning his hands on the back of a chair. Whatever his faults, Enzo Macleod certainly inspired loyalty among his family and friends. And she felt a tiny pang of regret with the thought that she, too, might have been one of that inner circle, that
sérail
, had things turned out differently between them.

‘It doesn’t prove that he wasn’t there,’ she said.

Simon straightened himself, and tugged at his beard with long, bony fingers. ‘And the fact that you found his hair at the scene doesn’t prove that he was. He was having a relationship with the woman, for God’s sake. People shed hair. You might expect to find some of his hair on her clothes.’

Kirsty cut in. ‘The point is, why would someone pay a hundred euros for some of my father’s hair if it wasn’t to incriminate him?’

Sophie added, ‘And why would somebody set him up with a phony doctor’s appointment if it wasn’t to blow his alibi out of the water?’

Commissaire Taillard shook her head. ‘This is all just speculation.’

Simon said, ‘In the same way,
commissaire
, that the only evidence you have is circumstantial.’

But the police chief was conceding nothing. ‘We have a computer diary entry that places him at the scene at the time of the murder. We have hair that ties him to the body of the victim. And his alibi is laughable. People have been convicted on less.’

Simon said, ‘Just stop and think for a moment,
commissaire
. If you were going to commit a murder, wouldn’t you come up with a better alibi? You know that Enzo is not a stupid man. Why would he invent such a ridiculous story in the full knowledge that it wouldn’t stand up to a moment’s scrutiny?’

There was a knock at the door, and it was opened by a uniformed officer. But Commissaire Taillard’s thoughts were focused elsewhere. ‘No one is suggesting that the murder was premeditated. It might well have been a crime of passion, a moment of anger. And Enzo Macleod left town almost straight afterwards. He probably never imagined that we might tie him to the scene. He never had time to concoct a credible alibi. And the fact is that the building in the Rue des Trois Baudus had been empty for two years.’

‘No it hadn’t.’

Everyone turned towards the door. Nicole stood clutching a beige folder and looking very pleased with herself. She was breathless and slightly flushed.

‘I’ve been round every
agence immobilière
in Cahors trying to find out who had 24
bis
Rue des Trois Baudus on their books. Turned out to be an estate agent at the foot of the Boulevard Léon Gambetta.’ She waved her beige folder in the air. ‘And guess what? They rented the building to a Paris-based company three weeks ago. A one-year lease.’

Hélène Taillard gave a tiny gallic shrug of dismissal. ‘I don’t see how that helps Monsieur Macleod.’

Nicole said, ‘Well, if you check with the registrar of the Commercial Court in Paris, as I just did, I think you’ll find that the company which took the lease doesn’t exist.’

Everyone took a moment to digest this.

Then Sophie leaned forward on the desk and looked earnestly at the police chief. ‘Madame Taillard, you
know
my dad didn’t do this. You guys were…’ She stopped suddenly, halted by an image of the semi-undressed Hélène Taillard on the
canapé
with her father, a shared memory which brought a flush to the older woman’s cheeks. ‘Well…you were pretty close. You know there’s not a bad bone in his body. He’d be incapable of killing anyone.’

The
commissaire
sat back in her seat and sighed deeply. ‘I wouldn’t disagree with you, Sophie. But it’s not my call to make. I am the chief of police. I am bound by rules and procedures. There is a limit to how much I can intervene. The
juge d’instruction
already thinks I am compromised because I know your father socially.’

Simon took the folder from Nicole. ‘But surely,
commissaire
, the testimony of the hairdresser, and the fact that the building in the Rue des Trois Baudus was leased by a company which doesn’t exist, throws further doubt on an already weak case.’ He smiled. A persuasive smile of reassurance, normally reserved for a jury during summing up. ‘Perhaps, in the light of developments, you might consider discussing with the
juge d’instruction
, the possibility of letting Enzo out on police bail.’

***

Enzo stepped out from the glass-fronted Hôtel de Police and drew his first breath as a free man in nearly forty-eight hours. Brittle leaves from the plane trees in the car park lay in drifts among the cars, and rattled across the tarmac in the icy breeze that blew down from the old city walls.

Inside him welled a great, burning sense of anger. Greater even than his sense of injustice, or his relief at being released unexpectedly on bail. Someone had murdered an innocent woman, just to set him up as a suspect. In order to create a false alibi, he had been duped into a consultation with a phony doctor, and suffered through two days of believing he was dying from an incurable disease. That same someone had tried to murder his daughter, and burned down Bertrand’s gym.

It had all been one-way traffic. All designed to ruin his life, to distract him from an investigation that someone feared would uncover a murderer. A murderer who, until now, had escaped justice. Of that Enzo was certain.

But he was certain, too, that he had reached a turning point. A moment in this whole sad and sordid tale, when his adversary had done his worst, and in doing so revealed enough of himself to give Enzo a starting point to fight back. He clung to that thought with a grim tenacity.

‘You don’t look very happy to be out.’

Enzo turned to look at Commissaire Taillard. She had walked him up to the front door from the cells. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t mean to be ungrateful. I ought to thank you for everything you’ve done.’

She took his arm and led him through the trees towards the Musée de la Résistance on the corner. ‘Don’t thank me yet, Enzo. This isn’t over. There is still a killer out there. And a few of my officers still think it’s you.’

‘But you don’t?’

Her concession was reluctant. ‘I never really did, Enzo. In fact, I might even have put money on you being innocent.’

His smile was rueful. ‘You bet on me once before and lost.’

‘You got lucky on the Jacques Gaillard case. I don’t hold that against you.’

They stopped and she turned to face him, her breast lightly brushing his arm. There was a moment between them, a tiny frisson suggesting that perhaps the flame hadn’t been entirely extinguished.

He said, ‘The only way I’m going to clear my name here is by catching the killer myself.’

She shook her head. ‘That’s our job.’

He gave her a look, but refrained from comment. ‘There must be something you can tell me Hélène. About the murder or the crime scene. Something that would give me a starting point.’

‘Absolutely not. You’re just out on bail, Enzo. I can’t go divulging information like that to a suspect.’

‘If I really did it, you wouldn’t be telling me anything I didn’t already know. At least tell me how she was murdered.’

Commissaire Taillard held him in a long, hard stare before blowing through pursed lips in exasperation. ‘She was struck on the face. Sufficiently hard probably to render her unconscious. But that’s not what killed her. The pathologist’s preliminary autopsy report says her neck was broken.’

Enzo stiffened. ‘Deliberately? I mean, she didn’t break it accidentally when she fell?’

‘Oh, no. The
médecin légiste
was quite clear. The neck was broken by a clean, twisting movement that severed the spinal cord between the third and fourth disarticulated vertebrae. A real pro job was how he described it.’

Enzo whistled softly. ‘Then I know who did it.’

‘What?’ the Commissaire looked at him in disbelief.

‘At least, I know who else he’s killed. In a Paris apartment, nearly seventeen years ago.’ His eyes shone with the cold, hard steel of revenge. ‘Which also means I know where to start looking for him.’

Chapter Twenty

London, England, July 1986

He had been surprised at how easy it was. The newspaper’s archives were open for anyone to see, transferred now to microfiche, viewable on any one of a number of machines in the reading room.

Richard had found the offices of the Daily Mail easily enough. It was before the Associated Press had moved its headquarters to Kensington, and its suite of newspapers was still to be found in the old Northcliffe House in Whitefriars Street, not far from Fleet Street.

He was not quite sure why he had chosen the Daily Mail, except that it seemed a little classier than the other tabloids, but still certain to carry stories of popular interest. He had no idea what he was looking for. But he had a starting date. One imprinted in his memory, just as it had been burned in red into the bottom corner of the photograph. July 23rd, 1970. Almost exactly sixteen years ago.

Outside, the City of London baked under the hot July sun, bankers and journalists finally abandoning coats and jackets for open-necked shirts and summer frocks. But in here it was dark and cool, and Richard’s focus was on the screen in front of him as he wound the spool through the reader. He found July 23rd quickly enough, but if anything newsworthy had happened, it would surely have come after that date. Nothing up until then, at least, had disturbed the happiness of a family on a Spanish beach. He spooled quickly through that day’s news stories before moving on to the 24th. But it wasn’t until the 25th that he found what he was looking for. And it shook him to the core.

Snatched
, was the headline. And the sub-head read,
Toddler Taken From Spanish Holiday Hotel.
Richard ran hungry eyes over the text of the story:

There were photographs of the whitewashed Mediterranean houses of the old port with an inset picture of the bizarrely moustachioed surrealist, Salvador Dali. A snapshot of the missing boy grinning at the camera. Richard stared for a long time at the picture, a shock of blond curls above a chubby round face. He had seen enough photographs of himself at this young age to be in no doubt that he was the abducted child.

He wondered if the strange fragmented images that now flooded his thoughts were real memories or imagined ones provoked by the shock of reading about his own abduction. He thought he could remember a darkened room, a woman bending over his cot, lifting him into safe arms, his fingernail catching her cheek, sticky blood on his fingers. His panda falling to the floor. And, then, out of the darkness, being carried from a car. The sound of the sea somewhere far below, exhaling into the night, filling cool air with its salted perfume.

So his mother was not really his mother. And all that suffocating love, her soft warm bosom and rose-scented cologne crowding his senses, throttling his childhood, had in the end driven a wedge between them. He realised now it had really been some desperate attempt to win him over. As if, somehow, he had known the truth.

Was it possible that he really did remember something? That it was those memories that in some way prevented the two of them from ever having a normal relationship? How disappointed by him she must have been.

He spooled through the ensuing days. The story was never off the front pages, with background pieces and feature articles inside. Experts speculated on the reasons for the abduction. Everything from the white slave trade and sexual abuse to a secret sale on the underground adoption market. Kidnapping for financial reasons had been ruled out when no ransom demand was made. And in any case, Rod Bright, while a successful businessman in Ilford, could hardly have been described as wealthy.

There was an in-depth article about the Bright family themselves, Rod and Angela and their three children, but Richard couldn’t bring himself to read it. Not yet, anyway. Days and weeks passed before his eyes as gradually the story slipped from the front pages, a tale of frustrating police failure confining itself to smaller and smaller paragraphs on the inside, until finally it simply disappeared. Upheavals in Northern Ireland were now grabbing the headlines. The Social Democratic and Labour Party had been formed to fight for Catholic civil rights in the troubled province
.

And then suddenly, six weeks later, a young female journalist from the newspaper’s features staff had flown out to Spain to interview Angela Bright. She was still in Cadaquès and refusing to leave until either her child was returned to her, or he was proven to be dead. The blood, it had turned out, was not his. To leave, she told the journalist, would be a betrayal of her son. It would be to abandon him, to admit that he was gone forever. And she simply couldn’t do it. And so this picturesque resort, where discerning people took their holidays, had become a prison, a gilded cage that would hold her until either she found her Richard, or she died. She had already rented a house and was discussing with the local authority the possibility of putting her children into the state school.

Her husband, meantime, had returned to England, where his business interests demanded his presence.

There was a photograph of her sitting in a wicker chair staring forlornly at the camera. Richard stared back at her for a very long time. He had evidently inherited his colouring from his mother. Fair hair, and even from the black and white photograph, he could see that she had the palest of eyes, almost certainly blue like his. But she looked substantially older than her thirty-three years. Drawn, haunted.

He looked away, unable to maintain eye-contact with this ghost from his past, blinking hard to disperse the tears that filled his eyes.

He stood up and went in search of the index. Now that he knew what story he was following, he would be able to find all future references and go straight to them. As it turned out, there were very few. How quickly the world forgot the suffering it shared over breakfast for a few brief days or weeks.

The last reference he could find was in September, 1976, on the occasion of his eighth birthday. Some news editor had figured it was an anniversary on which to hang a story. Perhaps it had been a poor month for news. And so a reporter had been dispatched to do a follow-up interview with Angela Bright, who was still in Cadaquès. A free holiday for a journalist from the features desk.

Señora Bright, as she was now known locally, had purchased a large house just below the church which sat up at the top of the town overlooking the bay. The elder of her remaining children, Lucy, had just started secondary school. Richard’s brother, William, was still in primary school. Angela and Rod had separated eighteen months previously. A good Catholic, Angela was refusing to give him a divorce. But their marriage was over. He had wanted to move on. And she was unable to do so. Still locked up in her gilded cage, resigned to spending the rest of her days there, believing that her son might be dead, but never quite able to release her grip on that last shred of hope that he might somehow, somewhere, still be alive.

She prayed for him each morning in the church, just a few paces from her door, and spent her days in quiet solitude behind shuttered windows or in the cool shade of her tiny, walled garden. In the photograph she seemed to have aged twenty years.

There were photographs, too, of his brother and sister, and short interviews with each. And Richard realised for the first time what he had missed by skimming through all those previous pieces, what would certainly have become clear to him had he read the article on his family background.

He stared at the screen with an extraordinary sense of déjà vu and felt himself freefalling once more into the unknown.