Blacklight Blue

by Peter May

  Kirsty shook her head vigorously. ‘No. Not as long as I kept well clear of you. You’re the one who’s caused all this. You’re the Jonah. You ought to have a fucking health warning stamped on your forehead. Stay away! Anyone who gets too close is in danger of being blown up or shot!’ A look flicked at Bertrand. ‘Or having their world burned to the ground.’

  As she turned away, Enzo grabbed her arm. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Where do you think? I’m going to Paris.’

  ‘No, you’re not.’

  And so now they were in a state of stand-off.

  ‘You can’t tell me what to do.’

  ‘I can stop you being an idiot. Going to Paris will not make a blind bit of difference to whether Roger recovers or not.’

  ‘So what are you going to do? Ground me? Lock me in my room?’

  ‘If I have to.’

  ‘Oh, fuck off. I’m not five any more. There’s nothing you can do to stop me.’

  ‘So how are you going to get there? Walk?’

  ‘Bertrand’ll give me a lift to the station at Aurillac.’

  Bertrand flushed deeply.

  ‘No, he won’t. Because he knows I’m right. And because he’s not going to do anything that would put you at risk.’ Enzo looked at Bertrand. A look that required no words. Bertrand’s nod was almost imperceptible. ‘And neither will Anna.’

  Kirsty stared at him, eyes wide and glazed with tears. ‘You’ve no right …’ She was starting to lose control. ‘You can’t tell me what to do.’

  ‘Yes, I can.’

  ‘No, you can’t!’

  ‘I’m your father.’

  Anna appeared in the doorway, the movement registering in Kirsty’s peripheral vision, and she turned her head quickly to catch Anna’s look, the tiny shake of her head. She turned back to meet her father’s eye. She wanted to shout, no you’re not! You’re not my father, you’ve never been my father! The words were right there in her mouth, balanced precariously on the tip of her tongue. But something stopped her, some instinct that made her swallow them before they could escape. Instead she said, ‘You never liked Roger, did you? You never wanted me to be with him.’

  Kirsty’s dam finally burst, a flood of tears sweeping her out of the room and up the stairs. They could hear her sobbing all the way up to the landing, and then the door of her room slamming shut.

  In the silence she left behind, Enzo could hear the slow tick, tick of the grandfather clock in the hall. Motes of dust hung in suspended animation in the sunlight. Outside, the sound of children in the playground of the village school came to them across a frosted field. A normal, happy world, that seemed to exist in another universe entirely.

  Enzo found Nicole in the computer room. It was half an hour after Kirsty’s outburst. Sophie and Bertrand had gone out. For a walk, they said. Anything, Enzo figured, to escape the awful atmosphere in the house. Anna had returned to the kitchen, and Enzo had found himself alone, reliving his conflict with Kirsty.

  He felt a sudden surge of anger towards Rickie Bright. All of this was his fault. None of them would be here if it wasn’t for Bright. The man had set out to deconstruct Enzo’s life, to stop his investigation, but he could never have known just how successful he would be. In many ways, Enzo no longer cared why Bright had murdered Lambert. He just wanted to get him. To make him pay. To peel away all the layers of his deception, to reveal him to the world for the callous, cold-blooded killer he was. A destroyer of lives. A purveyor of pure, undiluted evil.

  Nicole was embarrassed to meet his eye. She had retired to the safety of the computer room immediately after Sophie and Bertrand went out, seeking solace in the ether where she controlled the world with her fingertips.

  ‘I’ve got some more faces for you to look at,’ she said.

  ‘Faces?’ For a moment he had no idea what she was talking about.

  ‘Your phony doctor.’

  ‘Oh. Yes.’ He wasn’t sure how much that mattered any more.

  ‘I came across a really good website. An annuaire called the Bellefaye Directory. It’s a listing of all the writers, technicians, directors, and actors working in the French film and television industry.’

  She ran nimble fingers over her keyboard and brought the Bellefaye Directory up on screen.

  ‘It’s really great if you’re a producer or director wanting to cast someone with very specific looks.’ A row of different coloured boxes along the top of the screen allowed you to choose from among Actors, Agents, Technicians, Companies, Film Schools. Nicole clicked on Actors. More boxes appeared. Gender, Type, Language, Age, Height, Weight, Eyes, Hair. ‘It’s easy, you just select each of these criteria in turn and define what they should be.’ She clicked on Gender and selected Male. Then Type, and chose European from a selection of nine ranging from African, through Nordic and Asiatic, to Indian. She looked up at Enzo. ‘I just entered your description of him in each category. Hair and eye colour, height, weight. And it came up with a list of fifty-six actors matching those criteria.’

  She slid her mouse across its mat and pulled up a page saved in Bookmarks. It was the list produced by the Bellefaye Directory. She scrolled down it.

  ‘As you can see, they don’t all have photographs. But twenty-one of them did. I pulled them all out and copied them into a single folder for you to look at.’

  She brought up the folder, selected the jpegs and opened them up in a full-screen slideshow. Images of men in early middle-age, with short, dark, greying hair, mixed one into the other, all smiling for the camera. What felt like an endless sequence of unfamiliar faces. Enzo stared at the screen, almost without seeing. He was still replaying the fight with Kirsty. And he was finding it hard to rid his mind of the image of Raffin lying in his bed in intensive care, tubes and wires trailing from his broken body to machines that beeped and flashed, delivering blood and fluid to replace the litres he had lost. His face had been unnaturally pale. Unreal. Like a death mask laid over living features. And Enzo hadn’t needed Kirsty to tell him that he was to blame.

  Suddenly he became aware that a man he knew was looking back at him from the monitor. ‘Stop!’ Nicole paused the slideshow, and Enzo found himself staring at the face of the man who had told him he was dying. How could he ever forget what he had taken for the sympathetic sincerity in those cold blue eyes? Only now they were smiling, full of warmth, hoping to persuade some producer or director to cast him in a starring role. And maybe he deserved to be. The role he had played for Enzo had been brilliantly convincing. ‘Who is he?’

  Nicole toggled back to the Bellefaye list and clicked on the name Philippe Ransou. Up came his CV. She scanned it. ‘French-Canadian. Also speaks English. Seems to get a lot of work. But mostly small roles in action movies and TV dramas. Military types, or thugs. Sometimes does his own stunts. No one seems to have cast him as a doctor, though.’

  ‘Until Bright. I wonder how he chose him.’

  ‘Is it him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She beamed with pleasure. ‘I told you I’d find him. What do you want me to do with the information?’

  ‘Print out a couple of copies of his photograph and CV, his agent. Everything you’ve got. We’ll send them to the chief of police in Cahors, and to Monsieur Martinot in Paris.’ One way or another, Enzo was determined that Philippe Ransou would pay now for the pain he’d caused. ‘But before that, there’s something else I need you to do, Nicole.’ He had to force himself to focus.

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘I want you to try to get hold of a list of all hemophiliacs living in the Roussillon.’

  He saw her surprise. The question forming behind her eyes. But all she said was, ‘That’s the département of the Pyrénées-Orientales, isn’t it?’ Enzo nodded. ‘So Perpignan’ll be the administrative capital.’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Okay. Hemophiliacs.’ She paused. ‘Is there anything in particular I should be looking for?’

  Enzo drew a deep breath. ‘Yes. A wom
an.’

  Chapter Forty-Four

  The afternoons were getting shorter as November wore on. The sun was low in the sky now, shadows lengthening almost as you looked. There wasn’t much warmth left in the air, the heat of the day, such as it was, rising into the big, wide, empty sky above. A sky that paled to yellow in the west, and then orange and finally red, as the earth turned on its axis. The ghost of a full moon was already visible in it.

  Kirsty had not come down for lunch, and the five of them had eaten in uneasy silence. Afterwards, Nicole had retired to the computer room, and Bertrand and Sophie sat down to compose the latest response to an ever increasing traffic of forwarded correspondence with the insurance company over compensation for the gym.

  Enzo and Anna walked through the village wrapped in coats and scarves, their breath condensing in the final, cold light of the day. She had wanted to know how much he had found out, and it helped him clarify his own thoughts to go through it all for her, step by step.

  ‘It’s the strangest tale. A kid, just twenty months old, abducted from a holiday hotel on the Costa Brava nearly forty years ago. A kid who grew up to be a killer. Stolen by an Englishwoman and brought up, probably somewhere in the Roussillon, just a couple of hours away from where he was snatched. All the time unaware that just a short drive to the south his mother had refused to leave the scene of his abduction. Determined to stay there in case he should ever return.’

  He looked at Anna and saw the warmth in her dark eyes, transported by his words to another time, another place.

  ‘At some point, sometime in his teens, he must have discovered the truth. Found out who he really was. By the time he was eighteen, he’d tracked down his real family, and found that he had an identical twin brother living in London. He stole his money, his clothes, and his identity, and embarked on a new life as his own twin.’

  ‘You think he’s still masquerading as his brother?’

  ‘I doubt it. He probably only used that as a stepping stone to another persona. But at least we know now what he looks like, and it’s a good starting point for our search.’

  ‘So how likely do you think it is that you’ll catch him?’

  ‘Oh, I’ll get him.’ There was steel in Enzo’s voice. ‘If he doesn’t kill me first. I also know where to look for the woman who abducted him. It may be that I’ll find something there, some clue that’ll take me another step closer.’ He drifted off into speculative thought before coming abruptly back to the present. ‘And we found the actor he employed to masquerade as my doctor in Cahors. Another loose end. Another thread that could to lead us to him. I’m closing in on him, Anna. Almost got him on the end of my line. And when I have, one way or another, I’m going to reel him right in.’

  She slipped her arm through his and gave it a small squeeze. ‘You told me last time you were here that you thought he was some kind of professional.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘So … what did you say his real name was … ?’

  ‘Bright. Rickie, or Richard Bright.’

  ‘So Bright didn’t kill Lambert for personal reasons.’

  ‘I don’t think so. I think he was probably hired to do it.’

  ‘And are you any nearer to figuring out who it was who hired him, or why?’

  Enzo shook his head. ‘Not at all. I figure the only way we’re ever going to know that is by getting Bright into custody and persuading him to tell us.’

  They walked past the row of trees in front of the church, brittle, frosted leaves crunching underfoot. The granite stone of the village houses sparkled in the dying sunlight all along one side of the street, and the streetlights flickered and shed ineffectual electric light into the gathering gloom on the other.

  Anna said, ‘You mustn’t take what Kirsty says too seriously.’

  Which brought Enzo’s mind back from that other place it had wandered to again. ‘She always seems to want to hurt me,’ he said. ‘To lash out and do damage.’

  ‘Sometimes when we’re hurting, the only people we can take it out on are the ones we love.’

  ‘She spent her whole life blaming me for all the hurt in it. I thought she’d got over that.’ He wanted to tell her about the night at Simon’s. To share it with someone, to offload the burden. But he was afraid that to give it voice would make it somehow more real. And he still didn’t want to believe it. He had no way of knowing that Anna already knew, that his own daughter had told her. And so they were two people divided by a common knowledge they couldn’t share.

  ‘You can’t underestimate how vulnerable she is right now, Enzo. She barely escaped with her life in Strasbourg. Her best friend was killed. She thought her father was dying, and then he was arrested for murder. And now her lover’s been shot, and she doesn’t know if he’s going to survive.’ There was more, but like Enzo she wasn’t going to go there. ‘You’re at the centre of it all. So who else is she going to blame?’

  Enzo stopped and took her face in his hands. He gazed into the dark eyes she turned on him, and kissed her softly on the lips. ‘I don’t know what I’d have done without you, Anna. I really don’t.’

  She kissed him back. ‘You and me both.’

  ‘Just promise me … If I have to leave again, you won’t let her go to Paris.’

  She smiled. ‘I won’t let her do that, Enzo. I promise.’ And then her face darkened, as if a cloud had passed over it. ‘You know why he left?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Roger. Why he really left?’

  Enzo tensed. ‘He said he needed to get back to work.’

  ‘He made a pass at me. Damned near raped me. If I hadn’t been as fit as I am he might have succeeded.’

  ‘Jesus! Does Kirsty … ?’

  ‘No, of course not. I made it clear to him that if he didn’t pack his bags and get out, then I would tell her. And that the only reason I wouldn’t was to protect her, not him.’

  Enzo felt a wave of fatigue wash over him. He wasn’t sure how much more of this he could take. It just seemed to be one thing after another. ‘She mustn’t know, Anna. You mustn’t ever tell her. If Raffin survives, then I’ll deal with him myself.’

  It was dark by the time they got back to the house. Light from the kitchen spilled out into the unlit hall. Sophie and Bertrand were watching television in the séjour. Some girl singing badly, and a voice-over which Enzo recognised as belonging to the host of Star Academy. There was still no sign of Kirsty. The door to the computer room stood ajar, and a crack of light zig-zagged its way up the first few steps of the spiral staircase. Nicole’s voice called out of the darkness. ‘Is that you, Monsieur Macleod?’

  ‘Yes, Nicole.’

  ‘I’ve got some information for you.’

  When he went into the computer room she turned and beamed at him, clearly pleased with herself. Anna leaned against the door jamb and listened.

  ‘What did you find?’

  ‘Well, it’s not easy getting access to confidential medical information online, Monsieur Macleod. So I telephoned the Hôpital St. Jean, the centre hospitalier in Perpignan, and told them I was a researcher at the Ministry of Health in Paris. I said I needed access to the register of hemophiliacs living in their département.’

  ‘And they believed you?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t they? I mean, why would anyone else want that kind of information?’ She grinned. ‘Anyway, I did a little research before I made the call. You know, there are only about three-and-a-half thousand hemophiliacs in the whole of France. Which means that, statistically, in an area like the Pyrénées-Orientales, with a population base of less than half a million, there are only likely to be around twenty-three.’

  ‘It’s a rare disease, Nicole. Where’s this leading us?’ Enzo was struggling to contain his impatience.

  ‘Well, statistically again, they’re all likely to be men.’ She paused dramatically. ‘So guess what?’ But she didn’t wait for them to guess. ‘There were actually twenty-two on their list.’ She lifted a sh
eet of paper from the printer and handed it to Enzo. ‘And contrary to statistical expectation, one of them is a woman.’

  Enzo looked at the printout held in trembling fingers. He remembered Raffin’s words in Paris. He’s just a breath away. I can feel it. And for the first time he felt it, too. That Rickie Bright was just around the corner. Very possibly biding his time, simply waiting for Enzo to appear.

  He barely heard Nicole’s triumphant coup de grace. ‘Her name is Elizabeth Archangel. She lives in an old fishing port on the Mediterranean, not far from the Spanish border. It’s called Collioure.’ The tiniest pause for emphasis. ‘And she’s English.’

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Enzo parked in the Place du 8 Mai 1945, in the shadow of the Château Royal. In the tourist season, he knew, it would be virtually impossible to find parking here, but hors saison the town was almost deserted, a creeping air of neglect in the cool haze of misty morning air that dropped down from the foothills of the Pyrénées. Shops and galleries and restaurants had closed up for the winter. Pavements, stripped bare of colourful summer displays of goods and art, seemed sad and empty. The plane trees all along the Avenue Camille Pelletan had shed their leaves along the quayside, where only a month before people would have sat dining at tables in the soft, Mediterranean autumn. Now these same tables and chairs were stacked up and covered over until next Spring.

  There were a few vehicles parked in the gully below. A dangerous place to leave your car during summer storms, when heavy rainfall would bring run-off from the hills coursing through its dry stone bed to sweep out into the bay. But today there was no hint of rain in the chill-edged breeze that blew off the sea.

  Enzo made a mental note of the sign in the window of the Café Sola on the far side of the Rue de la République – Accès Wifi, wireless internet access – and walked along the Quai de l’Amirauté, past the boulodrome, to the little bridge that spanned the gully. He stopped on the bridge and watched as soldiers under the command of the Centre National d’Entraînement Commando, were put through their paces by barking officers. Young men burdened by full kit, with close-cropped hair and lean, determined faces, pushed rubber dinghies out into the bay. The same routine, though he wasn’t to know it, that the young Rickie Bright had watched daily on his walk home from school thirty years earlier.