Peter May
Cast Iron
In memory of my friend and mentor,
Dr Richard Ward
Keep your friends close
and your enemies closer
Paraphrased from Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince
Prologue
West of France, 1989
It smells of animal here. Dead animal. Something that has been hung to ripen before cooking. Hundreds of years of fermenting grapes have suffused the earth with odours of yeast and carbonic gas, stale now, sour, a memory retained only in the soil and the sandstone and the rafters. Like all the forgotten lives that have passed through this place, in sunlight and in darkness.
It is dark now and another life has passed.
Dust hangs in the pale light that angles through the open door, raised by the act of pulling her dead body from dark concealment to the wash of cold, colourless moonlight that bathes a face once beautiful and animated by youth. A face made ugly now by the blood that has dried in her golden hair, on her porcelain cheek, a tiny river of it following the contour from her temple to her ear. By the eyes that stare in unnatural stillness into the deep shadow that hangs overhead like a shroud. Blue eyes, lit once by the light of life, turned milky and opaque by death.
His tears fall like the first raindrops of a summer storm to splash heavy and hot on her cold skin. His shadow falls over her as he kneels by her side, and for a moment obliterates the sight of what he has done — a consequence of love and anger, those two most volatile of emotions. To gaze upon her is almost unbearable. But regret is useless, for of all the things in life that cannot be undone, death is the most immutable.
He reaches into his jacket pocket to pull out the blue plastic bag he has brought to hide his shame. Carefully, as if afraid he might damage it, he lifts her head from the dust and pulls the bag down over her face, hiding at last the accusation, recrimination and the sense of betrayal he imagines in the gaze he cannot bear to meet.
He ties it at the base of her neck with the short length of plastic string that came with it, and now tears fall on plastic to punctuate the silence. A moment of madness, a lifetime of lament, and he can never tell her now just how much he loved her.
His hands are trembling as they close around her neck, and he closes his eyes tight shut as his thumbs sink into soft flesh and he feels bone breaking beneath them.
Chapter one
Lot-et-Garonne, France, 2003
The cool air that came with the night was dissipating along with the early morning mist. Already he could feel the heat rising up through the earth, and soon the sky would be a burned-out dusty white. Like yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. He had read in La Dépêche that the death toll was climbing, the elderly worst affected by temperatures now soaring into the mid-forties. Eleven thousand and mounting. This summer heatwave had scorched the earth, killing trees and bushes, burning leaves brittle and brown to tumble like autumn in August.
