by Peter May
‘Monsieur Raffin tells me you’re going to find my son,’ she said. And suddenly Enzo felt burdened by that responsibility. This was about more than just a bet entered into lightly over dinner. It was about a man’s life, a woman’s son. An almost certain tragedy.
‘I’m going to do my best.’
The old lady left them to wander through the apartment as they wished, while she went and sat by the window in the front room, staring out across the sea of mist that washed over the city below. Beautifully polished parquet flooring, liberally littered with expensive oriental rugs, led them from room to room. Antique furniture stood against cream-painted walls. A Louis Quinze armoire, a nineteenth-century chaise longue, an ancient, carved wooden trunk inlaid with silver and mother of pearl. All the furniture seemed to have been bought for effect. Chairs looked stiff and uncomfortable, the four-poster bed in Gaillard’s bedroom was unyieldingly hard. Heavy curtains were draped around all the windows, tied back by gold silk cord, but still obscuring much of the light. There was an oddly gloomy feel to this top-floor apartment with its large French windows leading to ornate wrought-iron balconies. Enzo had an urge to throw back all the curtains and let the light in. But this was how Gaillard had lived. This was how he liked it.
Rows of dark suits hung in his wardrobe, polished shoes in a line along the rail beneath them. Dresser drawers were filled with neatly pressed shirts, socks, underwear. A silk dressing gown hung on the back of the door, as if Gaillard had left it there just moments earlier. A simple cross, adorned by the figure of Christ, hung on the wall above the bed. Enzo found his reflection looking back at him from a large, gold-framed mirror above the dresser. He saw Raffin behind him, hands thrust deep in his pockets, staring gloomily out of the window. On the dresser, a carved ivory box held tie-clips and cufflinks engraved with the initials JG. There was a clothes brush, a gilt hairbrush with two combs wedged in the bristles. There were traces of Gaillard’s hair still trapped between the roots of the teeth. Enzo glanced back through the open door, across the hall to the sitting room. Madame Gaillard had not moved from her seat by the window. He pulled one of the combs from the brush and carefully teased out a pinch of thick dark hair, two to three inches long. He took a small, clear plastic ziplock bag from his pocket, dropped in the hair sample and resealed it. Then he turned to find Raffin watching him. Neither man said anything.
They crossed the hall to the study, which adjoined the sitting room. Half-glazed double doors stood open between the two rooms, and Enzo could see through to the marble fireplace in the séjour, and the tall mirror set into the wall above. While the rest of the apartment seemed almost for show, Enzo felt he was meeting Gaillard for the first time when he entered the study. Here, the man was everywhere in evidence. A glazed bookcase against the far wall held his collection of literary classics. Something to be prized and kept safe behind glass. No doubt there would be first editions amongst them, but Enzo had the feeling that many of them had probably remained unread. His “living” bookcase faced it on the opposite wall. Open shelves on either side of the door were untidily crammed with well-thumbed tomes. There were books and magazines on French and American cinema, rows of popular fiction with creased spines and dog-eared fly-leafs, whole series of works on politics and finance. An entire shelf was devoted to a collection of comic books—bandes dessinées as the French called them.
Enzo whispered to Raffin, ‘He never married, did he?’ Raffin shook his head. ‘Was he gay?’
Raffin shrugged. ‘Not that I know of.’
‘But no women in his life?’
Again, Raffin shrugged and shook his head, and Enzo wondered if they were to believe that Gaillard had practised an odd kind of celibacy. He looked around the walls at the dozens of framed photographs of Gaillard pictured with well-known faces of the day. Président Jacques Chirac, Prime Minister Alain Juppé. Movie stars and pop icons. Gérard Depardieu, Johnny Halliday, Vanessa Paradis, Jean-Paul Belmondo. And others whom Enzo did not recognise. There were several portraits of Gaillard on his own, posing for the camera with an imperious self-confidence. And a portrait-painting which caught that same expression. And Enzo began to wonder if the reason there were no women, or men, in Gaillard’s life, was because his ego had allowed no space for anyone or anything else.
Behind a large desk with a deep maroon leather-tooled top, more shelves groaned under the weight of literally hundreds of videos. French movies, American movies, Japanese films, South American, European, Chinese. More films than you could conceive of watching in a lifetime. In the far corner of the study there was a wide-screen television set, a mid-nineties state-of-the-art sound system. Opposite was the only comfortable chair in the apartment, a soft leather recliner with a drinks table placed at the right hand. It was not hard to imagine how Gaillard had passed all his solitary hours in this study.
‘The films are all catalogued.’ Enzo was startled by Madame Gaillard’s birdlike voice. She had left her chair and was standing in the doorway. ‘He has notes on every one of them.’
‘Did you watch them with him?’
‘Oh, no. I was very rarely here. He always came to me. After my husband died, he brought me to Paris and bought an apartment just a few streets away. He came every day.’ She wandered across the polished floor, supporting herself on a rubber-tipped stick, and gazed up at the collection of movies. ‘He loves his films.’ A tiny smile creased her face, and she stepped forward to slide one out from its place on a shelf a little above head-height. ‘His favourite. He says he has watched it nearly thirty times. He says it is the absolute true essence of Paris.’
Enzo took the box from her and looked at the black-and-white still on the cover. The title was blazed across it in yellow. La Traversée de Paris. A film by Claude Autant-Lara, starring Bourvil and Jean Gabin. Enzo vaguely remembered having seen it on television. Made in the nineteen-fifties, it was set during wartime Paris. Under the noses of the Nazi occupiers, two unlikely compatriots try to smuggle the dismembered pieces of a pig across the city to sell on the black market. Enzo was not sure why Gaillard had thought it so remarkable. Madame Gaillard took it back from him and returned it to its place on the shelf. ‘It’s the first one he’ll want to watch when he gets back, I’m sure.’
Enzo wondered how she could possibly imagine that he was not dead. Perhaps that belief was all that kept her alive. She gave him a wan smile and shuffled back through to the sitting room.
Enzo turned to Raffin. ‘Where’s the diary?’
‘On the desk.’
It lay open, beside the telephone, at the page which had been treated by the police forensics lab to reveal Gaillard’s final entry. Enzo could see where the page before it had been carefully torn out. By Gaillard? Or by someone else? Only Gaillard’s fingerprints had been found. Enzo flipped back through the diary. There was no evidence of other pages being removed. So it was not something Gaillard was in the habit of doing. From his pocket Enzo took the forensically treated copy of the last entry and spread it out on the desk. Mad à minuit. ‘Obviously you’re familiar with this,’ he said.
Raffin peered at it over his shoulder. ‘I’ve nearly gone blind looking at the damned thing.’
‘But sometimes it’s possible to look and not see.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘All these doodles next to the words, what do they look like to you?’
‘Well, nothing.’ Raffin squinted at them. ‘Just doodles.’
‘Have you ever doodled while talking on the telephone?’
‘Of course.’
‘So you start off with some basic design. You’re not even necessarily conscious of what it is. But the longer the call goes on, the more elaborate it becomes, until that first image gets lost. You might be hard-pushed yourself to remember how it started out.’
‘So?’
‘So, supposing we were able to take this back to that first, unconscious image, maybe it would tell us something about what was in his mind.’
‘Ho
w would we do that?’
Enzo said, ‘The early lines of a doodle tend to be gone over several times before you start expanding on it. So if we look for the heavier lines….’ He went into his pocket and took out the folded greaseproof paper he had used to trace the doodle the night before, and smoothed it over the copy of the diary page.
Raffin peered at it. He could see the lines Enzo had traced, and the ones he had not still showed through, but it wasn’t until Enzo lifted the tracing paper away again, that he saw what it was Enzo had drawn. ‘Good God! It’s a cross.’
‘There’s even the suggestion of the figure of Christ on it.’ Enzo traced his finger around the outline.
Raffin stood upright. He seemed startled. ‘Well, what does it mean?’
‘I don’t know,’ Enzo said. ‘There’s a cross on the wall above his bed. Was he a religious man?’
***
Gaillard’s mother looked up at them from her chair at the window when they came through to ask, and seemed puzzled by the question. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘He went to mass several times a week. He was absolutely devoted.’
‘What church did he go to?’
‘St. Étienne du Mont,’ she replied without hesitation. ‘It is the parish church of the Sorbonne. He began going there when he was still a student.’
II.
St. Étienne du Mont, not unnaturally, stood at the top of a hill at the end of the Rue de la Montagne de Ste. Geneviève. It dominated the skyline as Enzo and Raffin walked up the steep incline from the métro station at Maubert Mutualité. The mist had lifted, and the sun was burning its way through a hazy sky. It was a warm climb.
The clock beneath the lantern on the oddly turreted bell tower of the church showed nearly ten-thirty. Below, in the Place de l’Abbé Basset, young artists sat sketching on semicircular steps leading up to an arched doorway. Raffin led them around to the Place Ste. Geneviève, past the rear of the Panthéon, and along the Rue Clovis to a side entrance leading to the curé’s house beyond.
The curé was an elderly man, bald, with a wispy fringe of thin silver hair. He walked them through the cloisters, his gowns flowing impressively in his wake. Sunlight streamed through the stained-glass windows. There were twelve of them, vividly coloured images of the Prophet triumphing over the priests of Baal, the miracle of the Manna in the Wilderness, the Last Supper.
‘I remember him well,’ the curé was saying, his voice reverberating through the Apsidal Chapel. ‘He came to mass several times a week. He was a regular at confession.’ They passed along a short corridor, by-passing the sacristy, and through a door into the church itself. Enzo gazed up into its towering vaulted roof in awe. Light flooded in through stained glass in the apse and in the chapels all along each ambulatory, on to the organ pipes rising up at the far end in tiers of shining elegance. Somewhere unseen, the organist was practising, and the sonorous resonance of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor cascaded down from the roof in a waterfall of sound. The curé had to raise his voice to be heard above it. ‘Of course, like everyone else, we had no idea he’d gone missing until after La Rentrée. It was August, after all, and most of Paris had left on holiday.’
‘I know that you cannot breach the confidentiality of the confessional, father,’ Enzo said, ‘but had Monsieur Gaillard given you any reason to think that he might have been depressed, or under stress in any way?’
‘To be honest, I really don’t recall. I’m sure the police must have asked me at the time. But there’s nothing that sticks in my mind. I do remember I was far more distracted that month by the defiling of the church. We’re just coming up to the tenth anniversary of it. I do hope the culprits don’t feel the need to deliver any reminders. I’ve asked for a police guard just in case.’
‘Defiling of the church?’ Enzo was intrigued. ‘What happened?’
‘I remember something about that,’ Raffin said suddenly. ‘It was in all the papers at the time. Someone broke in and sacrificed an animal in front of the altar.’
The curé said, ‘It was a pig. They butchered it. Dismembered the poor creature. Blood and bits were everywhere.’
‘Why would anyone do something like that?’ Enzo asked.
‘God only knows.’ The curé raised his eyes to Heaven as if searching for belated enlightenment. ‘Some Pagan rite perhaps. Some Black ceremony, a sacrifice to the Antichrist. Who knows? No one ever owned up to it. But no matter how much we rubbed and scrubbed, we never could get the blood out of the stone. Here, see for yourselves….’ He walked briskly along the north ambulatory, past several of the chapels, to an altar beneath a delicately woven stone screen dominated by the figure of Christ on a large cross overhead. The area immediately in front of the altar was roped off at each side to keep tourists away. Rows of wicker chairs ranged off towards the back of the church. ‘There, you see.’ The curé pointed to the ancient stone flags and two steps leading up to the raised altar. ‘It’s faded over the years, but still quite visible.’ A large area covering the flags and the steps was discoloured. It would have been impossible to guess that it was blood. It was just darker where the blood had pooled and splashed and lain undisturbed long enough to be absorbed into the stone.
‘This happened during the night, then?’ Enzo said.
‘I discovered it myself the following morning. It made me physically sick.’
‘Can you remember what date that was?’
‘Monsieur,’ the curé puffed himself up indignantly, ‘it is a date burned into my memory for eternity. It was the night of the twenty-third to the twenty-fourth of August, 1996.’
Enzo glanced at Raffin. The significance of the day was not lost on either of them.
The shrill warble of a phone was just audible above the reverberating roar of the organ, and the curé reached beneath his cassock to retrieve the latest Samsung flip-open model. God’s work, it seemed, could now be done by cell phone. ‘Excuse me.’ The curé hurried away.
Enzo gazed thoughtfully at the dark-stained flagstones. A group of tourists stood opposite, beyond the rope on the south ambulatory, staring up at the stone screen beneath the cross. They became distracted when suddenly Enzo stepped over the rope on the north side, walked to the centre of the church, and crouched down in front of the altar as if praying. But if he said a prayer at all, it was to the God of Science. He searched in his satchel and produced a sturdy, bone-handled knife, folding out its well-sharpened steel blade. He began scraping along the edge of one of the flagstones, breaking off splinters and flakes of crumbling stone, and digging out the dirt of centuries from the cracks between them. He very quickly accumulated a small pile of stone flakes and dirt, which he gathered together with his knife and dragged on to a sheet of clean paper torn from a notebook. He carefully folded the paper to seal in the scrapings, and slipped it into a plastic ziplock bag.
Raffin was embarrassed. ‘What are you doing?’ he hissed, his voice almost drowned by the organ.
Enzo looked round. ‘What?’
‘What the hell are you doing?’ he shouted, just as the organist finished his piece. Raffin’s voice reverberated around the church, chasing the dying echoes of the fugue. Tourists all along each ambulatory turned to look.
Enzo returned the plastic bag to his satchel and walked back to the north ambulatory, stepping over the rope to rejoin Raffin. ‘No need to shout.’
Raffin lowered his voice self-consciously. ‘What are you playing at, Macleod? You can’t just go digging up the floor of a fifteenth century church.’
Enzo steered the journalist towards the back of St. Étienne du Mont and the small door to the left of the main entrance. ‘I don’t know if you’re familiar with idiomatic English. But we have an expression in which we describe the process of trying to get information out of someone who refuses to talk, or even money out of a Scotsman, as like trying to get blood out of a stone. It’s another way of saying that it’s impossible.’
Raffin shrugged. ‘We have a similar expression, except that it�
��s oil from a wall—on ne saurait tirer de l’huile d’un mur. I’m surprised you haven’t heard it.’
‘Well, I don’t know about oil and walls, but these days it’s perfectly possible to get blood out of a stone.’
Raffin frowned. ‘Even blood that’s ten years old?’
Enzo nodded. ‘And even from the floor of a fifteenth century church.’ He smiled. ‘The wonders of modern forensic science. It will be a fairly straightforward matter to extract DNA from the sample scrapings I’ve taken and subject it to some basic precipitin tests.’
‘Precipitin?’
‘You mix the DNA on a glass slide with some anti-pig globulin. If there’s a positive reaction, there will be a visible clot, or clump—or “precipitate” form—and we’ll know whether or not it was pig’s blood.’
‘But we already know that it’s pig’s blood. You heard the curé. They left the butchered beast behind.’
‘That’s right. And I confidently predict that we will indeed confirm the presence of pig’s blood. But we’ll also mix the DNA with some anti-human globulin, which will tell us if there is any human blood amongst it.’
Raffin’s face darkened, and he glanced around self-consciously. A sign on a stand next to them urged them to SILENCE. He lowered his voice. ‘Gaillard’s blood?’
‘Well, we’ll be able to tell that, too, from the DNA.’
‘You think Gaillard was murdered here?’’
‘I don’t know.’ Enzo paused. ‘Yet. But this was his church. Even although it was another ten days before he was actually reported missing, he made a rendezvous to meet someone the same night that intruders broke in here and slaughtered a pig. He drew a cross next to the rendezvous in his diary. A lot of coincidences there.’
‘It’s a bit of a leap, though.’
‘Perhaps. But sometimes you have to make those kinds of leaps.’ Enzo paused for reflection. ‘And think back to earlier this morning. His mother told us that his favourite film was La Traversée de Paris. Two men smuggling the pieces of a dismembered pig across Paris. Another coincidence?’