Extraordinary People

by Peter May

  ‘Is there a problem with my student pass rates?’

  ‘No.’ The Président gave a little defensive shrug of each shoulder. ‘But that’s not the point.’

  ‘What is the point, Monsieur le Président?’

  ‘The point is, Macleod, that I want you to lay off this amateur detective nonsense.’

  ‘I’m on holiday, Monsieur le Président.’

  The Président stood up. ‘Yes, you are, Macleod. And I can arrange for it to be permanent if that’s how you’d prefer it.’

  ‘No, Monsieur le Président.’

  ‘Good, then we understand one another.’ He stretched out a hand to indicate that the interview was at an end.

  Enzo shook it. ‘Yes, Monsieur le Président.’

  And as he walked through the outer office he heard the Président shout to his secretary, ‘Amélie! Have you seen my glasses?’

  ‘No, Monsieur le Président.’ Amélie hurried through to help him look for them.

  Enzo took the pieces from his pocket and dropped them in the wastepaper bin. He didn’t feel so bad now about breaking them.

  II.

  It was early afternoon by the time he stepped off the Toulouse train in Cahors. He was depressed and disheartened. Warned off the Gaillard case twice. Once by the government, once by his employer. And he had spent most of the previous night dwelling on what might have been with Charlotte. He had known from their first meeting at Raffin’s apartment that she was special. She was affecting him in a way no woman had since Pascale. Dry mouth, palpitations, loss of self-confidence. It was uncomfortably like being a teenager again. He hardly knew her, and yet he knew that what he felt was more than just attraction. And last night, when they kissed, he had wanted simply to possess her. Entirely. It had been hard for him to accept her rejection, and he had lain awake most of the night thinking about it. There was no knowing when he would next be in Paris. And so he had no idea when he might see her again. The only redeeming thought in which he found comfort was that last night it was she who had come to see him.

  He let himself go with the flow of disembarking passengers, out through the station foyer and into the afternoon sunshine.

  It was a fifteen minute walk back to his apartment, where the final straw awaited him. He saw it as soon as he opened the door. Bertrand’s metal detector. He could not believe it was still there. ‘Sophie!’ he bellowed. But there was no response. The apartment was empty. He had no idea where Nicole might be. He picked up the metal detector and stormed off down the stairs in search of his car.

  ***

  Bertrand’s gym was on the west side of the river, across the Pont Neuf, at the far end of the Quai de la Verrerie. The gym had been converted to its present purpose from a disused miroiterie. Tall windows along the front of the building flooded the interior with light. It was divided in two. There was a salle des appareils, filled with heavy weightlifting and fitness training equipment. A room beyond it with a sprung wooden floor was used for aerobics and dancing. One of its walls was lined entirely with mirrors so that overweight housewives could watch their flesh heaving as they tried to exercise it away.

  Enzo had never visited the gym. He knew that it had an older clientele during the day, and that in the evening it was a popular haunt for the town’s teenagers. There were nearly twenty cars parked outside, and Enzo had trouble getting parked himself. He took the metal detector and pushed open the door. A number of middle-aged men and women looked up from miscellaneous pieces of equipment, and nodded and mumbled bonjour. A television set mounted on the wall was belting out MTV music videos. There was a sour smell of body odour and feet. Through windows along the back wall, he could see thirty or more women, ages ranging from twenty-five to sixty-five, dance-stepping in time to an endlessly repetitive beat. Bertrand was leading them, calling out each change in step. He wore a muscle tee-shirt, and close-fit shorts that cut off just above his calf. Enzo had only ever seen him in jeans and loose-fitting tee-shirts, and was almost shocked by his beautifully sculpted physique. God only knew how many hours of muscle-burning weight training it took to build a body like that.

  Now that he was here, the metal detector in his hands, Enzo was not quite sure what to do with it. He could hardly burst into the aerobics class waving it at Bertrand. He decided to wait until the class was finished. He sat down on an exercise bench and waited through another ten minutes of mind numbing dance beat before the women began streaming out towards the changing rooms, a babble of breathless, excited voices.

  He stood up and saw Bertrand laughing and joking with a group of them. Hard as it was to see past the facial piercing and the gelled, blond-tipped spikes, with reluctance Enzo supposed that Bertrand was a good-looking young man. The women couldn’t keep their hands off him, all anxious to kiss him goodbye. And he seemed to be enjoying it, flirting with them, encouraging them. His smile faded when he saw Enzo and the metal detector. He detached himself from the ladies and came across to shake his hand, the diamond stud in his nose glinting in the sunlight that slanted in through the front windows. Enzo grudgingly took the proffered hand. ‘You left something at the apartment.’ He thrust the metal detector into Bertrand’s chest. He was taller than Bertrand, but the boy’s physical presence was almost intimidating. A confrontation between the young buck and the grizzled old stag.

  ‘I can’t leaving it lying around here. It would be dangerous.’

  ‘I can vouch for that. And I don’t want it in my home.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ Bertrand turned and headed out of the door with it. Enzo followed him across the car park to a battered white Citroen van. Bertrand opened the back doors and threw the metal detector inside. He closed the doors and turned to face his girlfriend’s father. ‘You don’t like me much, do you, Monsieur Macleod?’

  ‘So you’re quick as well as fit.’

  Bertrand looked at him with hurt in his soft brown eyes. ‘I don’t know why.’

  ‘Because I don’t want Sophie throwing her life away on a waster like you. I saw you in there with those women. Like some kind of…’ Enzo searched for the right word, ‘…gigolo. Disgusting.’

  ‘Monsieur Macleod,’ Bertrand said patiently, ‘these women pay good money to come to my fitness classes. It does no harm to be nice to them. It’s good for business. And as far as women are concerned, there’s only one in my life. And that’s Sophie.’

  ‘She’s not a woman, she’s just a girl.’

  ‘No, she’s a woman, Monsieur Macleod.’ Bertrand’s patience was wearing thin. ‘She’s not your little girl any more. So maybe it’s time you started letting her grow up.’

  Enzo exploded. ‘Don’t you tell me how to bring up my daughter! I’ve done it for twenty years without any help from anyone. If it wasn’t for you she’d still be at university. She’s thrown away her future. And for what? Some muscle-bound dick-head who spends his days prancing about a gym with a bunch of middle-aged women. What possible future could she have with you?’

  All the colour had drained now from Bertrand’s face. He stared back at Enzo with eyes that blazed anger and humiliation. He pointed at the gymnasium. ‘You see that gym? That’s mine. I created that. It was a derelict old factory until I raised the money to convert it. My father died when I was fourteen, and my mother couldn’t afford to put me through college, so I did it myself. I took two jobs, working nights and weekends.’

  Enzo was already regretting his outburst. ‘Look…’ he said, determined that things should take a more conciliatory turn. But Bertrand wasn’t finished.

  ‘I’ve got a diploma on the wall in there. Top of my year. Do you know how hard it was to get that? Ten gruelling months at CREPS in Toulouse, studying anatomy, physiology, accounting, diet, muscle development. Do you know how many people apply for entry each year?’

  Enzo shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘Hundreds. And do you know how many they take? Twenty. The physical test’s tough. Twenty tractions, twenty push-ups, forty dips, twenty squat-lifts, and as
many laps of the stadium as you can run in twenty minutes. Then there’s the written exam. General knowledge. An oral address to a panel on motivation and ambition, and then a gruelling question and answer session where they can ask you any question they damn well like for half an hour. It would be easier getting into one of the Grande Écoles.’

  He paused for a moment, but only to draw breath. ‘So don’t call me a waster, Monsieur Macleod. I may be many things, but I’m not that. I do what I’m good at, and I’m good at what I do. I’ve worked damned hard to achieve what I have. And as far as Sophie’s concerned, I did everything I could to persuade her to stay on at university. But she’s the one who wanted to drop out. She told me there was no point in even trying to compete with her genius of a father.’

  Enzo was stunned to silence, and felt the colour rising on his face.

  ‘Thanks for bringing the metal detector.’ Bertrand turned and went back into his gym.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I.

  Enzo retreated to the apartment like the wounded stag that he was. The young buck had given him quite a mauling. There was still no one there when he got back. He picked his way into the séjour which seemed, if anything, even more cluttered. There were empty cola cans lying around, and pizza crusts in carryout boxes. The air was stale, and the heat stifling. He opened the French windows, only to be hit by a wall of even hotter air. Which was when he noticed that his whiteboard had been cleared of its first set of clues, and a new set of images fixed around its edges. A crude drawing of two skeletal arms; a bottle of Dom Perignon champagne; a photograph of a crucifix with the date April 1st written beside it; a picture of a dog tag with Utopique handwritten across it; a diagram of a dog’s skeleton with one of its front legs circled in red; a photograph of a lapel pin, complete with two men on a single horse and the inscription, sigilum militum xpisti. And someone had already begun trying to decipher them. There were words written up and circled, with arrows criss-crossing the board.

  ‘Oh, you’re back.’ Enzo turned to find Nicole standing in the doorway grinning at him. He hadn’t heard her come in. Her long hair tumbled over her shoulders and down her back, and her breasts seemed more prominent than usual in a tight-fitting tee-shirt. Its V-neck exposed a substantial amount of cleavage. Enzo tried not to let his eyes be drawn by it. ‘I didn’t know when you’d be, so I started without you,’ she said.

  ‘So I see.’ She brushed past him and sat herself at the computer, hitting the spacebar to wake it up. ‘Where did you get the images?’

  ‘On the internet.’

  Enzo looked at the board and frowned. ‘Why the skeleton of a dog?’

  ‘Ah.’ Nicole beamed with pleasure. ‘Remember the bone that was in the trunk? The one that didn’t seem to go with the arms? It’s a shinbone from a dog’s foreleg.’

  Enzo was astonished. ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘A boy I was at school with is studying zoology at Limoges. It was his professor who was called in by the Toulouse police to try to identify the bone.’ She grinned again, pleased with herself. ‘Word gets around.’

  But Enzo was distracted from her self-congratulation by an odd, acrid smell that he noticed wafting into the room for the first time. He screwed up his face. ‘What the hell’s that?’

  ‘What’s what?’

  ‘That smell.’

  ‘Ah…’ Nicole said. ‘That’ll be the ducklings.’

  ‘Ducklings?’

  ‘I put them in the bath. I didn’t know where else they should go.’

  Enzo looked at her in disbelief. He turned and stalked out into the hall and threw open the bathroom door. The stink hit him like a blow from a baseball bat. Half a dozen tiny ducklings had settled themselves in the bottom of the bath, which was covered with a mixture of grain and shit. ‘Dear God! Is this some kind of a joke?’

  Nicole had followed him out, and stretched on tiptoe to look at them over his shoulder. ‘They’re a gift from my father. By way of an apology for the other night.’ She sniffed several times. ‘You get used to the smell.’

  Enzo looked at her over his shoulder. ‘I can’t keep ducks in my apartment. They can’t stay here.’

  Nicole shrugged. ‘You must know someone with a garden. My papa says he’ll slaughter them for you when they’re big enough.’ She turned away into the hall, irritated by the interruption to her flow of explanation. ‘Do you want to know how far I’ve got with these clues or not?’

  Enzo raised his eyes to the heavens and closed the door on the problem. He’d worry about the ducklings later.

  He followed her back into the séjour.

  Nicole settled herself in front of the computer again and said, ‘You’ll see I’ve written dog up there, and circled it and drawn arrows to it from the dog’s skeleton and the dog tag.’

  Enzo looked at the board, still distracted by the smell, and nodded. ‘You’d better tell me why.’

  ‘Well, it was the guy from the police scientifique who said it—about the disk with Utopique engraved on it. A name tag for a dog, he said it looked like. And it did. Just the sort of thing you would attach to your dog’s collar. And if it is a name tag, then it’s reasonable to assume that Utopique is the name of a dog. We know that the extraneous bone was a dog’s shinbone, so it just seemed kind of obvious that both these clues were pointing towards a dog.’

  ‘Called Utopique.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘It’s possible,’ Enzo conceded. He couldn’t argue with the logic. ‘Go on.’

  Nicole beamed with pleasure. ‘Okay. The champagne. Moët et Chandon, Dom Perignon 1990. You have to figure that they didn’t choose a 1990 vintage by accident. I’ve no idea why, but the date’s got to be important.’

  ‘Agreed,’ Enzo said. ‘Which is probably why it was in a box, wrapped and protected by the wood wool, so the label would be kept safe from the damp.’

  Nicole nodded and moved on. ‘You’ll see I’ve written Poisson d’Avril below the date April 1st, beside the crucifix.’

  ‘April Fool’s Day, we called it in Scotland,’ Enzo said.

  Nicole chided him. ‘Don’t you remember when Sophie was little, kids sticking paper fish on each other’s backs?’

  Enzo shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘Well, it probably happened at school. It’s what you do on April 1st in France. You try and stick a paper fish on other kids’ backs without them knowing. Which is why we call it Poisson d’Avril.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ Enzo confessed. He smiled. ‘Maybe it’s a red herring.’

  Nicole frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘A red herring. Something that misdirects you from the truth. Isn’t there a French equivalent?’

  Nicole looked at him as if he were mad. ‘I don’t think so, Monsieur Macleod.’ She shook her head. ‘Anyway, I searched the internet for things that might have happened on April 1st. And guess what? Another Napoléonic connection. Napoléon Bonaparte married Marie Louise of Austria on April 1st, 1810.’

  Enzo looked at the board where Nicole had written and circled Napoléon and drawn an arrow to it from the crucifix. He chewed his lip thoughtfully. ‘But what’s the connection with the crucifix? It seems to me that the date and the crucifix are inseparable, and that whatever they point to should have a relevance to both.’ He took a cloth and wiped off the circle and the arrow. ‘Let’s just keep that in mind, and maybe we’ll come back to it.’

  ‘Oh, okay.’ Nicole was momentarily crestfallen. And then she brightened up. ‘But here’s the real breakthrough. The lapel pin. Sigilum militum xpisti. Do you know what that means?’

  ‘The seal of the army of Christ,’ Enzo said without hesitation.

  It was as if he had stuck a pin in her. She was instantly deflated. ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I studied Latin at school.’

  ‘I suppose you also know what it is, then?’

  ‘I haven’t a clue.’

  She brightened up again. ‘Two men on a single
horse bearing shields, encircled by the words sigilum militum xpisti, is the chosen seal of the Knights Templar.’ Her fingers spidered across the keyboard and she read from the screen. ‘The seal was introduced to the Order in 1168 by its Grand Master in France, Bertrand de Blanchfort.’

  Enzo breathed a small jet of air through clenched teeth. Bertrand! It seemed there was no escaping him.

  Nicole continued, ‘It is said that fifty years earlier, when the founding Christian knights took a vow of poverty, chastity, and obedience at Jerusalem, they could only afford one horse between two of them. And the depiction of two knights astride a single mount also recalls the passage in the book of Matthew, where Christ says, Wherever two or more of you are gathered in My name, there am I, in the midst of you.’

  ‘Well that seems pretty conclusive,’ Enzo said. ‘Well found.’ And he picked up a marker pen and wrote up Knights Templar, and circled it and drew an arrow to it from the lapel pin. ‘I wonder if we can connect April 1st in some way with the Knights Templar. Maybe it’s an important date in the history of the Order.’

  ‘That’s a thought.’ Nicole called up Google and began a search. But after nearly fifteen minutes, she had found nothing that linked the date with the Order. She grinned to cover her disappointment. ‘Another “red herring.”’

  ‘What about trying to link the date with the crucifix?’ Enzo felt that he was clutching at straws now. But anything was worth a try.

  Nicole tapped in crucifix and April 1st, and initiated a search. After a moment she let out a tiny yelp of excitement. Enzo crossed the room to take a look. There were three hundred and seventy-eight results. But halfway down the first page of ten was a link headed, THE FIRST MIRACLE OF FATIMA—1385, and below it an extract from the page it would take them to—He died in his cell clutching a crucifix on April 1st, 1431. Nicole clicked on the link and brought up a lengthy document detailing the canonisation of the Blessed Nuno, whom it described as the last great mediaeval knight. But their initial interest was short lived as they read through a dull account of the man’s life and death. A Portuguese knight, widowed in 1422, he had given away all his worldly wealth and joined a Carmelite monastery in Lisbon. There did not appear to be any connection with the Knights Templar, or with France.