by Peter May
‘Well?’
Enzo strode past him towards the police vehicle that had brought them, and Roussel had to hurry to catch him up and fall in step. ‘She’s officially invited me to consult on the case.’
Roussel stopped dead. ‘You’re kidding!’
Enzo turned and looked at him speculatively. ‘Like you didn’t know.’
Roussel shrugged. ‘Well…not for sure.’
‘Like you didn’t suggest it.’
‘Not in so many words.’
Enzo shook his head. ‘“We don’t need your help. We have all the expertise we require within the service.” That’s what you told me, isn’t it?’
‘Saves me getting into trouble with the STIC, or anyone else, when you come nosing around the investigation.’
‘So what do I get? A badge and a gun?’
‘You get a lift back to Gaillac. If you’re civil.’
‘And if I’m not?’
‘You can take the train.’
III.
Enzo hadn’t noticed before the family photographs stuck up on the wall behind Roussel’s desk. A little boy, aged two or three, playing on a tricycle. A young woman laughing at the camera. Plump, with an attractive smile. There was a child’s drawing of a motor car made with coloured crayons. Pinned to the wall above the filing cabinet was a violet and white striped football supporter’s scarf, and a banner for TFC—Toulouse Football Club. So Roussel had interests beyond Lara Croft.
Enzo said, ‘Do you always have the shutters closed?’
‘I think better in the dark. Sunlight’s distracting. It just makes you want to be outside.’ Roussel took his missing person’s file from the filing cabinet and opened it carefully on his desk. He lifted up the sheaf of papers he had produced during Enzo’s first visit and handed it to him. ‘Serge Coste, aged thirty-four. Married. Childless. No longer missing. I guess I should be moving him into the Petty file. I broke the news to his wife just after first light.’
‘How did she take it?’
He shook his head. ‘Hard to say. She didn’t cry or anything, not while I was there. She just nodded and bit her lip. I almost got the sense that she was relieved. He hadn’t run off and left her after all. So, no loss of face. She asked me in and wanted to know the details. When I told her she seemed genuinely shocked. It’s not an easy thing to describe, what we saw last night. Especially to a loved one.’
Enzo cast an eye over the file. Coste had been the manager of a DIY store, one of a national chain, on the outskirts of town. He had no apparent connection with the wine industry. He was born in Gaillac, grew up and went to school in the town. He had failed his baccalauréat, but still managed to get a place in a technical college where he had honed his skills in bricolage and got a job as a sales assistant in the store he would later manage. He had been married for eight years before disappearing without explanation one weekend twelve months ago. ‘Had he ever been to the States?’
Roussel scratched his chin thoughtfully. ‘Not to my knowledge. You know, a lot of people who’re born here and die here, never venture any further than Toulouse. I don’t know where Serge took his vacations, but he wasn’t the type to go abroad.’
Enzo gazed sightlessly at Coste’s file for several minutes, lost in deep contemplation. ‘And you couldn’t find any link between Coste and any of the others in your missing person’s file.’
‘To be honest, I wasn’t looking. There was no reason to. None of them was connected in life, there was no reason to look for connections between their disappearances.’
Enzo held out a hand. ‘Can I have a look?’
Roussel handed him the file, and he started leafing through the cases. Roussel tucked his thumbs in his belt and tilted his chair back against the wall, watching Enzo as he absorbed the details of each. ‘Until now, there wasn’t any reason to look for a connection with Petty either. Not that I can think of anything anyway. Except maybe Robert Rohart. He was a good bit older than the others, an estate worker at one of the wine châteaux. But that’s a pretty thin connection. A lot of people work in the wine industry around here.’
He continued to watch Enzo sift slowly through the papers in the file, as if somehow absolved now from all responsibility. Then he tipped his chair forward again and leaned his elbows on the desk.
‘You know, I have this way of working. It’s kind of conceptual. I see each case as being like a long corridor.’ He held the palms of his hands six inches apart and moved them in parallel away from himself. ‘There are doors off it to the left and right. So I stop at each door I come to. I go into the room, and I take account of everything that’s in it. Then I shut that door and move on to the next. That way I miss nothing, and there’s never any reason to go back. When I reach the end of the corridor, I have all the information I need to solve the case.’
Enzo looked up and found it impossible to mask his skepticism. ‘What if there’s a power cut?’
‘What?’
‘If it’s dark in those rooms, there’s stuff you won’t see. Or in the corridor. You might miss a door. You might find a light bulb in the next room and go back to throw light on one you’ve already visited.’ Enzo tapped the papers on his knee with his knuckle. ‘In my experience, Gendarme Roussel, criminal investigations are never linear. You’re constantly going back and forth and sideways, reassessing what you knew before in the light of what you’ve learned since. Looking again at what you’ve already examined because for sure there’s something you’ve missed.’
Roussel’s face reddened, and he pushed himself back from the desk, folding his arms defensively. ‘We all have our own ways of working.’ He nodded huffily towards the missing persons file. ‘So what have I missed in there?’
‘A connection.’
Roussel seemed startled. ‘Really?’
‘But like you said, you weren’t looking for one before. This is a classic example of going back to reopen a door you’ve already closed.’
‘Tell me.’
‘You’ve got four cases in here. All of them have disappeared over the last three years. Three of them share two things in common. The fourth shares neither of them, so let’s take that one out for the moment.’ He passed it to Roussel.
‘Jeanne Champion.’
‘She was sixteen. All her friends said she was pregnant, but her parents didn’t seem to know. Classic hallmark of the teenage runaway. Disappeared April, 2004.’
‘So what doesn’t she have in common with the others?’
‘Most obviously, she was a female. All the others were male.’
‘And?’
‘She went missing in the Spring. The others all disappeared on dates ranging between mid-September and mid-October from 2004 to 2006.’ He waited for Roussel to realise the significance of the dates, but the gendarme simply looked perplexed. ‘They all went missing when the grapes were being harvested. During the vendanges.’
The red of Roussel’s cheeks darkened. ‘Jesus.’
‘And if Petty was still just a missing person, he would share those things in common with them. As it was, he was the first one to disappear. Serge Coste was the last. If you ask me, monsieur, I would say that the other two are probably curled up in barrels of wine somewhere awaiting disposal.’
‘Or display.’
Enzo nodded his agreement. ‘Or display.’ He dropped the file back on Roussel’s desk. ‘But here’s the scary thing. For all intents and purposes, there’s been one a year for the last four years.’ He paused for effect.
This time Roussel took his point. ‘But there’s been no one reported missing this year.’
‘Yet.’
Chapter Ten
The hospital backed onto the railway line that ran between Albi and Toulouse, where it crossed the Avenue René Cassin on the road north out of town towards Montauban. The street which bordered its southern edge was appropriately named the Rue de la Maladrerie. Those who were unfortunate enough to be wheeled in
or out of the hospital’s mortuary were, however, more than malade. They were dead.
Enzo had attended many autopsies during his time with Strathclyde police in Scotland. Autopsy rooms all tended to be the same. White tiled walls, tiled floors, stainless steel autopsy tables, stainless steel counter tops. Clinical and soulless. The autopsy room in the morgue at Gaillac was no different. And, as always, Enzo found the accompanying perfume of death, of formic acid and formaldehyde, profoundly depressing.
The pathologist made them wear green aprons and surgeon’s face masks. ‘You never know what you might breath in when we’re cutting through bone,’ he said comfortingly. Doctor Garapin was a small man, but thickset, almost square. He was bald beneath his plastic shower cap, and the three inches of bare arm visible between the short sleeves of his gown and the plastic sleeve covers above his gloved hands were dense with wiry, black hair. He was the antithesis of the stereotypical tall, intellectual physician. He had a thick, local accent and would not have been out of place, Enzo thought, pruning vines at a château vineyard.
‘The body is that of a Caucasian adult male. Age is estimated around midthirties. The body is identified as Serge Coste by a tag tied about the right ankle. The body weighs seventy-three kilograms, measures one hundred and sixty-three centimetres in length, and has been refrigerated and is cool to the touch.’
Garapin reached up to turn off the overhead mike. ‘He’s some colour. How the hell do I describe that? He’s like…like rasperries soaked in eau de vie.’
Enzo thought it a very accurate description. Under the harsh lights of the autopsy room, the body did not seem as vividly coloured as it had in the woods the previous night. ‘You didn’t do the autopsy on Petty, then?’
The pathologist shook his head. ‘No, monsieur. But I’ve read the report.’ He turned his mike on again.
‘The skin is a pale, grey-pink all over. The palms and soles, while still pink-stained, are paler and wrinkled.’
He switched off the mike once more. ‘Just as if he’d remained in the bath too long. Only, in this case, a bath of red wine. What a way to go!’ He grinned.
Enzo noticed that Gendarme Roussel had gradually moved away from the table, and was about a metre back from it. He was a bad colour. Worse than the corpse in front of them.
Garapin moved meticulously over the surface of the body, noting contusions on the left shin, right knee, right forearm and an area of subgaleal hemorrhage on the left temple. With the help of an assistant, he manhandled the dead weight onto its front and examined the backs of the legs, the buttocks, the back, neck and head. He found more contusions on the left shoulder and another subgaleal hemorrhage on the head behind the right ear.
‘Are these post or antemortem injuries?’ Enzo said.
Garapin shook his head thoughtfully. ‘Almost impossible to tell. They appear to be postmortem. Bodies drowned in an ocean or a lake, for example, tend to have injuries, or damage, from rubbing on the bottom, or bashing against rocks after death.’
‘The same kind of injuries you might sustain falling or being pushed into a fermentation cuve in a chai?’
The pathologist looked doubtful. ‘There are a lot of contusions here. I’m not at all sure they would be consistent with falling into a cuve. And in any case, you would expect such injuries to be antemortem.’
‘You said you couldn’t tell whether they occurred before or after death.’
‘That’s right. See…’ He moved to the shoulder injury. ‘There’s no blood around here, which would lead you to think it happened postmortem. But the victim went missing, what, twelve months ago? If he’s been in wine all this time, which from the state of him seems likely, and these injuries were inflicted before death, then the liquid would have leeched the blood from around the skin wound, and it would have ended up looking pale and bloodless, like this, just as if it were postmortem.’ He turned away to the countertop behind him and leafed through a folder of photocopied pages. ‘Yes, you see what’s interesting is that Petty suffered very similar injuries, and the pathologist who carried out that autopsy wasn’t able to decide whether they were post or antemortem either.’ He turned back to the table and from his tool trolley lifted what looked to Enzo very much like a French chef’s knife. ‘Let’s cut him open, shall we?’
With Coste laid on his back, head propped by a half-moon block placed below the neck, Garapin made incisions from either shoulder to the chest, and then down towards the pubis.
‘The body is opened with a Y-shaped thoracoabdominal incision through the skin, and subcutaneous fat measuring 3.7 centimetres thick at the level of the umbilicus. The pleural, pericardial, and peritoneal cavities are smooth and glistening, with no abnormal accumulations of fluid or gas, and there are no adhesions. All organs are present and in their appropriate positions.’
The first autopsy Enzo attended had been carried out by students, under supervision, on a preserved corpse at the University of Glasgow’s faculty of medicine. The internal organs were subdued in colour, grey and pale, the blood dark and surprisingly unred. It had come as a shock to him, then, during his first post mortem on a fresh body, to discover how vividly coloured it was inside. The fat was a bright yellow-orange, the blood dark red, muscle the colour of steak, and the guts very nearly white.
Coste’s insides, however, bore a striking resemblance to that first, preserved corpse he’d seen in Glasgow. Except that the muted grey of the organs had a pink blush to them. And the overwhelming smell that rose from the open cadaver was that of stale alcohol, like a pub the morning after a drunken party.
Wielding a pair of what looked very much like garden shears, Garapin flexed thick muscles in his forearms to cut easily through the ribs, one a time. Each one gave with a sickening crack. He took a knife to separate the breast plate from the diaphragm, and the fatty tissue sac that held the heart, before lifting the cage aside to get full access to the organs.
Holding the heart in one hand, he snipped open the pericardial sac looking for blood or excess fluid, but found none. Then he lifted the heart out for examination.
‘The endocardial surface has a usual appearance and there are no mural thrombi. The valves are thin and pliable and are neither stenotic nor dilated. The coronary arteries have a usual distribution and show minimal atherosclerotic disease. There are no thrombi. The aorta is patent, without injury, and shows minimal atherosclerosis.’
‘Meaning what?’ Enzo said.
‘That he didn’t die of a heart attack.’
The pathologist moved on to the respiratory system, removing and weighing one lung at a time. They were grey-pink and spongy. He shook his head. ‘Heavy. Waterlogged. Or should I say, winelogged. He wasn’t getting any oxygen through these.’
‘You’re saying he drowned?’
‘I’m not saying anything, except that there was wine in his lungs. Whether he breathed it in, or it seeped in over time, is impossible to tell.’
He sectioned them in turn, looking for giveaway particles, pieces of grape skin, fragments of seed, but found none, then turned to the gastrointestinal system and the stomach.
‘The rugal pattern of the stomach is normal and there are no ulcers. It contains 300 millilitres of dark red fluid. An ethanol odour is noted.’
The pathologist flicked off his mike. ‘No partially digested food material in there, just wine. So it had been some time before he’d eaten.’ He chuckled. ‘Should have known better than to drink on an empty stomach.’
Enzo was aware of Roussel’s breathing becoming shallower behind him. He said, ‘Gendarme Roussel was at school with the victim, Doctor Garapin.’
The pathologist glanced at the policeman. ‘Sorry.’ And he turned back to the job at hand, head down to examine the intestines. He cut the endless, looping tube from the fat which bound it, and slit it open from end to end releasing a thick, pungent odour that almost made Enzo gag.
Next, he removed the pancreas, liver, kidneys, spleen, and thyroid
, and weighed and sectioned them on the countertop, describing each in turn, finding nothing unusual.
While he was breadloafing the organs, his assistant incised the scalp from ear to ear behind the head, and rolled the scalp down over the face, like peeling off a mask. He warned Enzo and Roussel to stand back as he took a circular saw around the top of the skull, the noise of it filling the room, along with the smoky, sweet smell of burning bone.
When he finished, and pulled the skull cap away, it was with a sucking noise and a loud ‘pop’ as it disengaged from the brain. Then he pulled the brain itself gently back towards him, beginning at the forehead, transecting it from the cranial nerves and spinal cord, so that finally it plopped out into his cupped hands.
Garapin examined the damage to its frontal and temporal lobes. ‘Small areas of subarachnoid hemorrhage,’ he said. ‘But not enough to kill him. Otherwise the brain is substantially normal.’ He turned to Enzo and Roussel. ‘Messieurs, there’s really nothing more for you to see here. If you’d like to adjourn to my office, I’ll see you in about ten minutes, after I’ve showered.’ Enzo noticed the sweat running in rivulets down Garapin’s forehead and gathering in his thick, black eyebrows.
***
As they walked along the green-painted corridor to Garapin’s office, Enzo said, ‘Are you okay?’
Roussel was the colour of the walls. His hands were trembling. ‘You know, as a cop, you see stuff. Stabbings, drownings, suicides. Horribly mutilated people in car wrecks. When I first started on the job, there were nights I came home and just lay on the floor shaking. You’d think you’d get used to it.’
‘It’s never quite the same when it’s someone you know.’
‘I kept thinking about Serge when we were kids. He was a character. Always getting in trouble at school. He wasn’t much good academically, but he was clever, you know. Always had a comeback when some smartass teacher got sarcastic. The profs hated him for it.’ He took a deep breath. ‘What a shitty way to end up.’