The First Fingerprint

by Xavier-Marie Bonnot

  THE FIRST FINGERPRINT

  THE FIRST FINGERPRINT

  Xavier-Marie Bonnot

  Translated from the French by Ian Monk

  An imprint of Quercus

  New York • London

  © 2002 by Xavier-Marie Bonnot

  Translation © 2008 by Ian Monk

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of the same without the permission of the publisher is prohibited.

  Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use or anthology should send inquiries to Permissions c/o Quercus Publishing Inc., 31 West 57th Street, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10019, or to permissions@quercus.com.

  ISBN 978-1-62365-285-2

  Distributed in the United States and Canada by Random House Publisher Services

  c/o Random House, 1745 Broadway

  New York, NY 10019

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  www.quercus.com

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Acknowledgments

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The characters and situations

  in this novel are part of my imagination,

  and are not based on reality.

  Some sections will probably bring a smile to the lips of specialists in prehistory or members of the Marseille murder squad. I have intentionally altered places, transformed research laboratories, shifted around hospitals, upturned hierarchies and metamorphosed the murder squad’s offices. I have also taken liberties with a number of official procedures.

  Without asking a single word of permission …

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  In the original French, a large amount of Marseille slang is used.

  No attempt has been made to imitate its

  probably inimitable presence.

  To Patrick and Maurice…

  Two eternal friends.

  1.

  For some time, there had been only a diffuse glow in the sky, a faint light whose source was presumably somewhere behind the jagged row of black rocks, high up there, far above the tiny form now hurrying along, guided by the narrow beam of a torch pointing at the ground.

  The will-o’-the-wisp was dancing, a yellow and white elf skimming over the sloping surface in a jerky motion. A lonely and malicious light providing just enough visibility so as not to trip over any of the hundred and one stumbling blocks along its winding way. Just enough not to be seen.

  But who could possibly have been watching a sleepwalker out in such a place?

  No-one could have known she was there. No-one.

  Now, the moon had risen over the huge cliff-face which plunged straight down into the sea, and a milky light slipped its way into the sea creek of Sugiton, making its enormous blocks of white limestone look like mighty diamonds standing out against the dark ink of the Mediterranean. Only the outlines of a few scrubby pine trees added life to this mineral chaos.

  It was brighter, the walker turned off her torch, her shadow now could be clearly seen to her right: a strange, long, complex shape of sharp angles, a walking petroglyph which had nothing human about it, inching along the contours of the cliff and losing itself sometimes in a hole before surging back at once on to the pointed spine of a rock. The monstrous apparition of a mythical being risen from the depths of creation, an evil god, forgotten by mankind, come to commit some black deed against humanity in this half-night.

  This moving shadow belonged to Christine Autran, leaping lightly from rock to rock, following a precise path, without making a single slip. If an imaginary onlooker had been there to observe the scene, he would have recognized that she knew this place like the back of her hand.

  But no-one knew that Christine Autran was there. No-one.

  The east wind had just got up and waves were beginning to slap hard against the jagged rocks. At each blow, the sea compressed the air trapped in the gaps of the coastline with its slow motion, before tumbling backward into a furious swirl. The surges of water were rhythmic, the creek was being filled with a dull rumble like the gigantic resonance of a titan’s drum.

  The tide was coming in, foul weather was brewing out at sea; before long it would bite even further into the coastline.

  Christine Autran stopped for a moment and breathed in the mood of the sea spray. She looked up at the moon, then turned toward the sea: that cold eye was making beautiful silvery glitters on the surface of the waves. She sat on a flat stone and took off her rucksack. The sea breeze bit into her sweat-soaked clothes and an icy chill gripped the small of her back. She got out a fleece pullover, slipped it on and then from one of the rucksack pockets took a cereal bar which she chewed while thinking over the events of the day. Far off, a bird was whistling.

  No-one could know she was there. No-one.

  She looked at her watch: 8:00 p.m. It was now exactly one hour since she had left the terminus of the number 21 bus in front of the university at Luminy. First, she had gone one kilometer along the broad pathway which leads toward Sugiton pass, while sticking to the signposting of the hiking path GR 98. Night was falling, a few finches were giving their final bursts of song. Christine had then passed through a scrub of Aleppo pines and stunted holm oaks before reaching the Sugiton pass. She had sat there for a moment to make the most of the last moments of daylight.

  It had been warm for late November, so warm that a fine blue mist had risen from the sea to mingle with the last glimmers of the day. Slowly, the emerald and sapphire of the water had melted into a still-hot pewter brown amid the whiteness of the limestone, while the matte green of the bushes of mastic, sarsaparilla and sabline de Provence had become black blotches in the scars of the contours.

  In the background, to the left of Sugiton creek, the familiar outline of Le Torpilleur had vanished into the grubby shadows, its limestone prow stuck into the shallows some thirty meters from the coast; this mineral vessel, as big as a frigate, had beached itself in the middle of the creek like a navy ship which, in the hollows of the cliffs, had lost its battle against an invisible submarine.

  Christine had decided to pass to the right of the signpost indicating the hiking track and instead took the winding path that led straight into the valle
y of Sugiton. She let herself be drawn down by the slope, taking care not to trip over the roots of the pines which stuck up from the dusty ground like huge snakes. Twenty minutes later, she had reached a panoramic viewpoint which she knew well. It was there that the night had enveloped her.

  No-one could have known she was there. No-one.

  She had left her comfortable flat, at 125 boulevard Chave, at about eight that morning. Tuesday was the day she taught at the Aix-en-Provence faculty of Literature and Human Sciences: three hours in the morning from 9:00 to 12:00 with bachelor degree students, then one and a half hours starting at 2:00 p.m. with history research students. She preferred the morning lessons—une unité de valeur in the university jargon—which allowed her to dwell on her favorite subject, the Magdalenian era in Provence. She had devoted her entire academic career to its study, starting with a bulky thesis on the sharpened flints found in Upper Paleolithic sites in south-east France and Liguria.

  Once lessons were over, she had had to talk for some time with Sylvie Maurel, a researcher from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique who wanted some details about the site she was studying. Christine did not like Sylvie because of her self-assurance, her daredevil poise, her bourgeois manner and the way she hovered around Professor Palestro, Head of the Department of Prehistory. Christine had to admit to her herself that she was jealous, and that this jealousy was a point of weakness, which was probably what she disliked most of all. She hated hearing the Professor talking to her rival in a familiar way and using her first name. She had the impression that the only man she had ever respected was doing it on purpose, to mortify her. Sylvie was the reflection of what she might have been, had she not sunk her life into the depths of academic literature.

  Sylvie Maurel was radiant, with refined gestures, a body that was both firm and supple, a head of heavy, black hair, amber skin, ebony eyes that darted about, and fine features with slight traces of make-up as the one and only sign of any concession to age awareness. She was always discreetly dressed, generally in jeans and plain tops as though to disguise her bourgeois origins. There was only one nod toward the wealth of her class: a large diamond on her left hand.

  Christine had always had a problem meeting Sylvie’s classiness eye to eye. She shuddered when her hand brushed against her enemy’s hand, or when she was taken in by her delicate voice and felt a luxurious sweetness dissolve into her stomach, like the essence of a rare opiate; her scalp tingled, she crossed her legs quickly, in a game of attraction and repulsion around this sensual beauty that dominated her.

  So Christine Autran had been late and had had to speed along the northern motorway so as to reach Marseille before the evening rush hour.

  In the stairwell of her building, she made as little noise as possible, so as not to let the old lady on the first floor know that her second-floor tenant had come home at the usual time. This old woman owned the building and was forever on the lookout, like an eel in its lair, watching the comings and goings of her tenants through her spyhole. On her way out Christine took the precaution of going downstairs in her stockinged feet. She had then leaped on to the first tram and traveled as far as Vieux-Port métro station. One anonymous person among all the other anonymous people on the move at the close of the afternoon.

  In the town center, beside the Bourse shopping mall, she took the number 21 bus and nobody had so much as glanced at her. Not even the driver, a fat, bald lump with an enormous mustache who, at each stop, started clicking his gold signet ring against the black plastic steering wheel in time to a Johnny Hallyday song, which played on a loop throughout the entire journey. At the back of the bus, some architecture students on their way back to their halls of residence in Luminy were chatting noisily about their final degree projects without paying any attention to this eccentric woman in a dusty, sweat-stained rain-hat.

  And taking an excursion to the creeks at the end of November at 5:00 in the afternoon was indeed eccentric.

  She had gone back thus far over her day, when the east wind got up. From where she stood, she could just make out the presence of the islands of Riou, Plane and Jarre; to her right, but out of sight, lay Maire island and, in front of Marseille, Frioul archipelago; to her left were the wildlife sanctuaries of Port Crau and Porquerolles. She pictured this fantastic landscape during the Magdalenian era, 20,000 B.C.E., when the sea level was twenty meters lower and a vast valley ran down to these islands.

  She often told her students that the coastline at the time looked rather like Norway’s does now. A fossil beach had been discovered there, at a depth of forty meters, with shellfish otherwise found only in northern Scandinavia. The universe of the Provençal Cro-Magnons was a steppe covered with vegetation and colonized by angel’s hair, grasses and juniper bushes. A few Austrian pines, Scots pines and alders scraped an existence in the shelter of the limestone rock-faces, beside streams and little lakes where men and beasts came to drink. The sea temperature barely exceeded six or seven degrees. Pack ice probably covered a large part of the mare nostrum.

  For thousands of years, the first men had lived there, hunting, fishing and gathering as described in children’s books. It was a primitive life spent tracking bison, aurochs, Irish elk and Mediterranean monk seals. Everything they needed was there, at arm’s reach: the sea, big and small game, as well as dozens of caves for shelter when night fell.

  Christine liked to imagine Cro-Magnons in the evening, dressed in their clumsily stitched furs, with their long, filthy hair, going back to the dark caves which the sea had now submerged. Sheltered by the depths of the earth, around a fire which had been cunningly kept burning for days on end, they would grant themselves a moment’s rest, away from the women who had gathered life’s essentials during the day: fruit, roots and fungi. The men would think about the next day’s hunt, one of them sharpening flints in staccato blows, turning the hard stone into pedunculate tips, scrapers, saw-edges and rudimentary knives—the equipment of the great hunters and fishers of the Paleolithic era.

  Like Professor Autran that evening, the first men must have looked up at the self-same monochromatic, pale light coming down from the sky. They must have questioned the moon, invented answers to the grand mysteries of existence and peered into the future. Beliefs were born in the world of spirits, which had then been painted, sculpted or engraved in the gloomy living spaces of their prehistoric caves. An art of shadows and rock was born: the first men had wanted it to be different from their crude daily existences and had conceived the fantastic bestiary of their wall paintings.

  For a long time it had been known that Provençal prehistory had sunk beneath the waters. This hypothesis had been verified by a large number of finds, such as the underwater caves of Le Figuier and La Triperie near Morgiou creek. Then, in 1991, a diver from Marseille discovered a decorated cave, like a Provençal Lascaux sleeping beneath a roof of stone. Its entry lay at a depth of thirty-seven meters, at the foot of the colossal slopes of Sugiton creek. It had a narrow entrance that led to a tunnel measuring a hundred and fifty meters, at the end of which lay the now famous frescoes of silence: negative and positive hands, horses, bison, penguins … The cave had been named after its discoverer, Charles Le Guen, and its entrance had been sealed by a heavy iron gate and blocks of stone. Beside the opening, there was a notice which looked strange at such a depth:

  MINISTRY OF CULTURE. KEEP OUT.

  A whistling noise woke Christine Autran from her meditations. She stood up, ran her fingers through her hair and looked at her watch: 9:00 p.m. She set off once more, going from rock to rock, silently reproaching herself for giving in to such reflections. It was something she rarely did, and never in these circumstances. She had no time to lose.

  She reached the last rock, and from there she could just make out the tiny beach of smooth pebbles she was looking for. She leaped from her perch and at once found herself surrounded by the massive limestone rocks she had just crossed, with the threatening sea to her right and in front of her the huge
cliff-face that rose up toward the infinity of the sky. Only a skilled climber could have gone any further than the mousetrap in which Professor Autran now stood.

  She could scarcely see. The moonlight was feeble in this little creek. She advanced a few more paces, as far as the cliff, her feet sinking slightly into the damp stones. Blindly, she felt around for a dry place on which to put her bag.

  The noise of the sea was ever more present, like the breathing of a savage beast on the move only a few meters from her. Further out, Christine could see the lights of a cargo ship which must have left Marseille at nightfall and was now going full steam ahead for Corsica or North Africa.

  Without wasting any more time, she removed her torch and a notebook from the right-hand pocket of her bag. She laid them beside her, then plunged her hand into the main section of the rucksack to take out a small, folding spade. She picked up the torch and aimed its beam at the foot of the cliff, where the limestone met the pebble beach. She examined the rock inch by inch, then stopped when she located a barely perceptible bulge. The whistling noise could be heard once more. Christine shivered. It came from somewhere close by. Just a few meters away. Her whole body trembled. She played her torch across the rocks.

  Nothing.

  She tried to reassure herself by telling herself that her imagination must be working even faster than her concentrated senses. It was an illusion.

  Several times, she swallowed back the saliva which was sticking in her throat, then she let the adrenaline dissolve into the most distant extremities of her body and started to dig. Methodically.

  Her spade made a sharp, rhythmic sound. She scarcely heard the heavy footsteps on the gravel just behind her.

  2.

  “Già nella notte densa

  s’estingue ogni clamor…”

  Commandant Michel de Palma was humming out of sheer boredom: Verdi’s “Otello”—mezza voce—the Moor’s shades mingled with the discreet symphony of police headquarters.