Commissaire Paulin walked in without knocking. He did that with everyone, to see if his squad was working conscientiously. He found de Palma going through the phone book.
“You know that we have the Internet now. You should try using it,” Paulin remarked reproachfully.
“You never find anything on the Internet, Commissaire. It takes hours just to find the right name, but only two minutes with the phone book. And no-one else knows what you’ve been up to.”
Paulin was a shabby fifty-something who wore lousy suits and had a pot belly. A pair of small, twitching eyes were framed by specs placed at an acute angle over a hooked nose too big for his narrow skull. It all made him look as insincere as hell. But essentially de Palma did not like him because of his shoes: dated gray moccasins. He could not stand moccasins.
The big boss did not dare ask him what he was up to, as he generally did with his younger officers. He was treating his best soldier well, because this man would help to push through his own future promotion. He just smiled, showing his horsy teeth in the gap between his puffy lips.
“I’ve got a good customer for you, de Palma. A walker found her body some place—I can’t remember where exactly—in the creeks. A preliminary investigation says it was a murder. The prosecutor has appointed us, and I’m giving you the case. Go along to the morgue. Forensics are slicing her up now.”
“I’m on my way,” de Palma said. He stood up slowly, hoping that this would annoy Commissaire Paulin even more. “But there’s something I have to point out to you.”
“What?” said Paulin, irritated.
“Normally, the presence of two police officers at an autopsy is obligatory.”
“I know that, de Palma. It’s not my fault. There’s been a mix up with the municipality … We’re in Marseille, and that’s the way it goes! Everyone does whatever they want. Anyway, an officer is there to identify her, and the judge has already called by. You know Mattei. He starts work at 8:00 a.m., whether the police are there or not. Take Vidal with you!”
“He’s not available.”
Paulin squinted a little, turned on his heel and left with a shrug.
Whenever he had to pay a visit to forensics at Timone, de Palma always felt decidedly off. He did not like this kind of appointment, especially on a Wednesday after Dédé’s cooking.
At 3:00 p.m., he walked into the vast Timone teaching hospital complex. In the changing room of the forensics department, as he put on his white coat, gloves, mask and over-shoes, he smelled the awful odor that hung all around.
Despite all his years in the force, de Palma had never got used to the smell of dead flesh mixed with a bouquet of chemicals: phenol, ether, formalin, chloral hydrate … To make themselves understood by police officers, the forensic scientists often translated these strangely named fragrances into everyday terms such as pear, orange, rotten egg or caramel. To the specialists, each odor had its meaning.
“You start out by sniffing a stiff, like a vintage wine. You appreciate its bouquet, then you look at its color, finally you test it …” Dr. Mattei had explained gravely.
De Palma pushed open the door between the changing room and the dissection room. The smell of the rotting corpse grabbed him by the throat. He stopped to swallow back his saliva several times, then gave a friendly wave to the two officers charged with identification and stood beside Mattei. The doctor was not wearing a mask, and was flanked by two assistants wearing huge goggles, like skiers’, except for the color. The trio of specialists was bending over the naked body.
When he saw de Palma’s face, Mattei winked at him, and chuckled.
“So, the boys have dropped by. And not just anybody, if you don’t mind. The prestigious Commandant de Palma. Sorry, Monsieur, but this isn’t a pretty picture. Especially not after Le Zanzi. So step forward. You’re going to get your money’s worth.”
“Mattei, once again you’ve started the job before I arrived …”
“No choice, Baron,” he said with a shake of his head. “There are too many corpses in my drawers. Too many scores being settled! I called you three times this morning. No answer. It’s your job to sort the situation out. Here, we start work at 8:00 a.m. sharp.”
The doctor was sewing up the woman’s thoracic cage. Her flesh was puffy and covered with a fatty translucent liquid, like grease. De Palma saw the chrome-plated steel of the curved needle as it entered and then reemerged from the epidermis which had been bleached by the sea. To save face, he picked up his notebook to write down the doctor’s conclusions.
“Christine Autran. Caucasian, female—as you can see for yourself. I’ll skip her personal details, you’ll find them in the file. We’ve put her papers in a bag, just as it says in the rulebook.”
De Palma was about to remind this doctor of the dead that it was the job of the police to take care of all that, but he held himself back. This forensic surgeon was as stubborn as a mule, but also the best in the region.
The corpse’s face was covered with a blue cloth.
“We hid her face because we were beginning to get fed up with her watching us work. But for you, Michel, we’ll make a little effort. Take a look.”
Mattei lifted the cloth. Two empty eye sockets stared dumbly at some point on the gray ceiling. The face had been devoured. All that remained were scraps of flesh, entirely bloodless now. The dead woman had no lips, her mouth was slightly open and her teeth jutted from greenish gums which were disintegrating. Her half-eaten cheeks revealed the depths of her throat. De Palma noticed that her tongue and a large part of her scalp had disappeared, gobbled up by some carnivorous sea creature. The surgeon showed the police officer the signs of strangulation, two distinct black marks around her neck like a tattooed necklace.
“Apart from the bruising on the body, I don’t have much else to tell you. She was strangled, then thrown into the sea. Her abdomen was full of gas, which is why she was floating on the surface … The salt then absorbed the water in her blood, which has a high chlorine content. There’s a very weak presence of diatomeae. This tells us that she was thrown in postmortem. The nape of her neck was snapped; cervical vertebrae four and five are broken. She must have been hanged, or something similar. But one thing’s certain: someone broke her neck.”
With a well-practiced movement, Mattei turned Christine Autran’s head to one side and pointed to the position of the fracture. A brown blotch indicated the fatal wound. The kind of trace the murder squad sees all the time.
The doctor pressed down on the flabby flesh with his index finger, protected by a double layer of surgical gloves, and moved it in small circles. The movement made the half-empty skull emit a slight glugging sound, like a siphon being opened.
“The marine fauna has done its work. I even found some tiny worms from the mediolittoral zone in her thoracic cage. Look at her hands—they were eaten by congers, morays or some other creatures, without big jaws … I can’t date the death accurately. But it was at least a month ago, and more likely a good forty days ago! In other words, around the end of November or the beginning of December. Not before.”
De Palma jotted down the scientist’s conclusions. The date of death did not ring any bells. He would have to check the missing persons file.
“There’s something that bothers me,” Mattei went on.
“What’s that?”
“She’d buttoned her anorak up wrongly. She’d put the first button in the second hole, and so on. I’ll show you later, in the photographs we took. And she had some pebbles in her right pocket. I put them in the jar over there. Go and have a look.”
Mattei pointed toward a stainless steel table mounted on wheels. It was covered with small jars containing a variety of objects: sea worms, scraps of cloth, hair … In one of them, the Baron could see some small stones which were almost round and about two centimeters in diameter.
“Do you know what she did for a living?”
“No. How should I?”
“She was a lecturer in prehistory, no
less.”
De Palma picked up the coastguard’s report and went through the pages one by one. Christine Autran had been found in almost the same place as the corpse of Franck Luccioni, a small-time thug. Below Le Torpilleur.
“That’s odd,” he said.
“What is?” Mattei asked.
“She was found in the same place as Franck Luccioni. Do you remember that little crook?”
“Perfectly. But his was an accidental death. There were no traces of any violence. Nothing at all. Drowning preceded by a serious decompression accident. I think he must have stayed on the seabed for too long. His cylinders were empty and he had to come back up too fast, without being able to respect the decompression stops. A classic accident that bad divers have. A good diver would never do that. Never.”
5.
“I’m from the police, Madame,” the Baron called out. “It’s about your upstairs neighbor. Can I talk to you for a few minutes?”
Yvonne Barbier had just come home from the market when de Palma rang on her doorbell. It took her an excessively long time to answer. He could sense her presence behind the door, peering through the spyhole. Then the door was opened on its nickel chain. De Palma saw the made-up face of an eighty-year-old woman, one of those grannies with real character who spend hours preening their seniority in chic boutiques in the city center. He produced his tricolor card and raised it to her eye-level.
“Come in, come in …”
In the huge, sumptuous flat dating from the late nineteenth century there hung a slight fragrance of ilang-ilang mingled with bergamot, marzipan and vetiver. It was the smell of dated opulence, with an acidic tinge of sweat and vegetable soup. Yvonne had been beautiful once and she still maintained that presence, those graceful gestures and the natural charm of an attractive person. Her faded, turquoise eyes gave her sharp stare an infinite depth, and there was something astonishingly young about them. With a broad smile, she showed the officer into the salon. He sat down on a pink velvet sofa, in front of the piano, a Pleyel mini grand, on which, in a silver frame, stood a photograph of a severe-looking man. The half-closed shutters let in two shafts of golden light which cut their way obliquely through the air. Several canvases by minor masters decorated the walls, which had the sheen of age. One of them, in strong red and black blocks, with no half-tones, depicted a corrida: a signature and a grandiloquent dedication, presumably from the artist, showed prominently in the bottom right-hand corner of the painting.
Yvonne peered at her guest as discreetly as possible. It must have been the first time in her life that she had received such a person in the comfort of her home. The situation intrigued her just as much as it brought out her congenital nosiness.
De Palma spoke first:
“When did you last see your neighbor?”
“The last Wednesday of November. I can’t remember the exact date …”
Yvonne thought it over, puckering her brow and adopting a mysterious air as if she were the possessor of great secrets.
“Usually, on Tuesdays, she goes to teach in Aix, then comes back at about 8:00 in the evening. She hardly ever goes out. I didn’t hear her that evening. I thought she must have stayed late with her students or something. Then, when I didn’t see her the next morning, I thought that something must be wrong. I went to see your colleagues at the Commissariat on boulevard Chave. They told me to wait. A couple of days later, I went back to tell them that she still hadn’t come home. That time they listened to me. They told me that they’d put her in the missing persons file.”
“Where do you think she could be?”
“I have absolutely no idea, Officer. All I know is that she didn’t pay me rent for November or December. In my opinion, she must be dead by now, or else kidnapped by some sadist.”
De Palma did not tell her that Christine Autran had been hanged and thrown into the sea like a piece of dead meat. He wanted to get as much information as possible from this witness, so for the moment he had to avoid any psychological shocks.
“What did she like doing? Did she have any hobbies or anything?”
“Her job. She loved her job. Apart from that, I don’t know of anything …”
The elderly woman thought it over. She stared at her shiny shoes, tapping them on the thick Chinese rug.
“Oh yes!” she suddenly exclaimed, as though re-emerging from a long meditation. “She liked walking in the creeks. I used to tell her that it was no place for a woman, but she wouldn’t listen to me. She went there all the time. Alone. She was always alone, the poor thing. She was a beautiful woman, she could have got married. But she preferred her freedom. You know what young people are like these days … I got married in 1940 to the gentleman you see there, on the piano. He was a conductor. I was twenty and he was thirty. It was a different era … Christine’s mother died about twenty years ago. She had no other family, and as far as I know she had no friends.”
“I suppose you have spare keys to her flat?”
Yvonne Barbier suddenly lit up. She got to her feet and vanished into what was presumably her lumber room.
“Of course I have a spare. Do you want us to go up and have a look?” she said, heading toward the front door.
“We’ll see about that later.”
“From what I can understand, you think that she really has disappeared, or that she’s dead, is that right?”
“It is a possibility we are bearing in mind,” de Palma replied vaguely. “But as you know, we police officers see so many strange things …”
“She’s dead. I’m sure of it. Just like two and two makes four. She’s been living her for twenty years, coming home every evening. Sometimes she doesn’t go out all day. I can hear her walking from one room to another.”
“And you haven’t noticed anything unusual of late?” de Palma asked. “No-one has been here to ask after her, no sales reps or workmen, nothing?”
“No, nobody. There’s just the old folk like me who live here. You can question them, if you want. But they’ll only tell you the same thing.”
He was not going to learn much that day. It was 12:30. De Palma asked Yvonne Barbier to show him Autran’s flat.
“Shouldn’t you have a search warrant?”
“No, Madame Barbier. That’s just in American cop shows … Under French law there’s no such thing as a search warrant. All I need is one or two witnesses, such as you. Normally the person living at the address should be present, but I have to admit that I lied to you earlier. Christine Autran was in fact found yesterday.”
“She’s dead, isn’t she?”
De Palma lowered his head.
“I just knew it. My God. The poor little thing.”
Professor Autran’s flat was identical to Yvonne Barbier’s. It measured about 150 square meters and was laid out around a large, central corridor, which led into vast rooms with high ceilings decorated with fine plaster moldings. The prehistorian had painted the walls white and, here and there, placed a few bits of cheap, chipboard furniture.
All the shutters were closed. The sun filtered in, weak and discreet between the slats and through the net curtains. The policeman looked for the nearest light switch. Pulling on a pair of gloves, he told Yvonne not to touch anything and to stay in the hall. He was hoping to find the beginnings of an explanation for this affair.
Two of the rooms were crowded with books and files stacked up on red, metal shelves. It was almost impossible to cross the floor. In the salon, a plain showcase contained some pieces of cut flint. Christine Autran had hung a few black-and-white photographs on the walls. In one picture, taken in one of the creeks, she was smiling at the photographer, her hair disheveled by the wind. In another she was grimacing as she kissed the mouth of a human skull with no lower jaw, presumably a find from a dig. Above the black marble mantelpiece was a photograph of her posing in front of a cave painting of a gentle-eyed bison.
The salon, like the rest of the flat, was furnished without taste. In the kitchen, a pile of dirty washin
g-up had dried out in the sink; tomato sauce had crystallized on a plate.
The dark blue bathroom did not tell the Baron much either, except that Christine Autran was not some flirt who spent hours making herself up before going to work. A few hardened lipsticks lay in a pile above the basin beside a three-quarters-full bottle of Chanel Number 19, a shabby make-up bag and a hard brush full of brown hairs. The lecturer had not left on a long journey.
In her study, the answering machine showed that there were no messages. He picked up the receiver to listen to the dialing tone. The phone still worked. He jotted down all these details in large letters in his exercise book.
He opened the desk drawers slowly, one by one: there was little of interest in them either, apart from piles of notes which meant nothing to him for the moment. He would have to go through all this mess over the next week. It would take quite some time. He looked through the rest of the study without any apparent results. A few files had been placed on the floor. One of them had been labeled with a large, red felt-pen: “Le Guen, various photos.” He opened it and discovered a stack of snapshots; positive and negative hands, paintings of animals and carvings. One of the hands looked like the picture the gendarmes had found beside Hélène Weill’s body. De Palma had been sent a series of photographs of it.
He picked up a second file entitled ‘Le Guen, topology,’ containing a series of topological studies which were totally incomprehensible to him. Blue blotches, some light, others darker, were spread out over a brown background which also showed darker zones. Some captions had been added in a fine, energetic hand. He glanced quickly at a few of them: ‘horse section,’ ‘boulevard of sea spiders’, ‘the three penguins’, ‘mural of black hands’ …
A third file was marked ‘Le Guen, September 2000.’ Inside it were two almost identical photographs, of poor quality compared with those in the other files, showing a painting of an animal which looked rather like a bird. He held them under the desk lamp. There were several fingerprints on them. He slipped them into a plastic folder and put them in his pocket.
The First Fingerprint Page 5