by Jo Mazelis
‘Found a body,’ the woman said with grim satisfaction. ‘Murdered.’ Suzette stared at the woman’s mouth as she said the words: crooked yellow teeth, the lipstick bleeding into a radiating pattern of fine lines around her lips.
‘Oh God,’ said Suzette, ‘that’s awful.’
‘And the Lord saw that they were ashamed and cast them out of paradise,’ the woman intoned, crossing herself as she rolled her eyes heavenward.
That was enough for Suzette, without another word she dodged past the woman and went into the shop.
The Scholar
The body lay on a deep verge above a drainage ditch. At first sight it seemed possible that the young woman had accidently fallen there. She was dressed very prettily in a summer dress whose full skirt had snagged on a tree stump, stopping her progress into the murky stew of the water below.
Her head fell forward so that her blonde hair covered her face. One arm was trapped and hidden under her body, the other dangled limply down from the shoulder as if she were trying to trail her fingers in the fetid water below.
Her legs stuck out at awkward angles. From one foot, with its strap caught around her ankle, dangled one of her shoes. Her other foot, the sole black with dirt, was bare.
Inspector Vivier and a number of other senior detectives were gazing down at the body and trying to figure out the best way of examining it and the surrounding area without contaminating the scene or missing any clues.
From where he stood on the concrete bank above the culvert, Vivier could see the young woman’s naked hip and the pale swell of her left buttock. It looked as if she wasn’t wearing any panties. This raised the alarm for the Inspector and suggested a sexual element in whatever had happened to the young woman. But there again, she might be wearing a thong. It was impossible to tell, besides which, he understood that the latest trend was for some young ladies to wear no undergarments whatsoever. He had been shocked some months back to see the photograph of an American pop star which had been widely distributed in the media – the one of her caught in the act of getting out of a car with her legs slightly parted, her skirt hiked up and that hairless soft-looking slit on show for all the world to see.
Curiously the paparazzo’s snapshot of the pop star had reminded him of one of the background figures in the illuminated manuscript of the Duc de Berry’s fifteenth century Book of Hours. It was a winter scene depicting the month of February which showed a snow-covered hill under a leaden grey-green sky and inside a farm building, warming themselves by the fire, there was a fine lady dressed in celestial blue and a couple of peasants. The peasants, a man and a woman, had both lifted up the skirts of their outer garments in order to warm themselves, and the creator of the manuscript, one of the Limburg brothers, had painstakingly recorded the pink hairless genitals of each.
Paul Vivier, as a child seeking refuge from his father’s uncontrollable rages, often haunted his local public library. It was there in the dusty hush among the towering book shelves that he had first seen this reproduction in the Book of Hours and it had fascinated him ever since.
February. The bitter cold. A harsh life for the peasants of France. The picture almost made him shiver every time he saw it.
But now it was a beautiful day towards the end of July. At last the unseasonable rain had stopped. The heavy rain and flooding had been caused, or so some meteorologists claimed, by global warming. Depending on who you listened to or read there was no going back – the polar ice was melting, the ozone layer had a hole in it three times the size of the United States and floating somewhere in the Pacific there was a ten-million-square-mile logjam of indestructible plastic trash that threatened not only that ocean’s eco-system, but the entire world’s. Thinking about this was enervating. Whatever happened to progress?
It reminded Vivier of the medieval period’s fears and superstitions about the end of the world. The sighting of a meteor gave rise to preachers foretelling imminent doom and disease was seen as punishment for a sinful people. Thunder was God’s voice. Flood, famine and pestilence all signalled the coming of the promised last days. At the zenith of the first millennium in the year 999 a great army of pilgrims travelled to Jerusalem in anticipation that the sky would open to reveal God. Another crowd gathered on the hills of Hampstead on October the 13th, 1736, to see the predicted destruction of London.
Vivier’s father, a uniformed flic of the old school, who was as likely to use his fists on his wife and sons as on the criminals he caught, was responsible for the man his son had become. While it was true that both men had entered the police force, the son made his way up the ranks through his quiet intelligence and austere temperance. The father let his brusque manners, foul mouth and explosive temper keep him on the lowest levels of the force until the day he retired.
When the nine-year-old Paul Vivier sat slowly turning the glossy pages of the books he found in the library he entered a different world, which despite its deprivations was free from the malevolent hand of his father. In that vivid winter scene from centuries ago, he saw how the regularity of the seasons held more meaning then; spring with its promise of fertility, summer with its blessed life-giving warmth and light, autumn with its harvest, then the closing in of winter, its barren chills, stark skies and murderous cold.
Human beings, as individuals, as societies, hadn’t really changed that much. Progress, science, the Renaissance and Enlightenment only served to add to the illusion that the Modern age was an improvement yet fear still filled the world and murderers walked its streets. Vivier had been a policeman long enough to distrust everyone and everything.
And he was, besides being a police inspector, a scholar of history. It was a private passion of his. Few of his colleagues could have guessed at the hundreds of books which lined the walls of his study at home or of his private ruminations and obscure debates. These last often taking place almost anonymously over the internet with faceless others who might have been equally surprised that [email protected] was an inspector of police and not a teacher or postgraduate historian.
As pastimes went it was certainly preferable to watching TV, or reading, as Assistant Detective Sabine Pelat always did, in particular novels, about serial killers and other evils.
Montaldo huffed noisily to express his frustration and shake the inspector from his reverie. ‘Well, this is going to be a bastard, eh?’
‘It does look like a bit of a logistical nightmare. I think what we need is ladders.’
‘Ladders, Inspector? We have rope and…’
‘No, it’s not as simple as clambering down there, the verge is unstable and it would be easy to dislodge evidence into the drain where it would be carried away. With a few long ladders over the culvert we can get access without disturbing the scene too much.’
‘You think it’s foul play, then, sir?’
‘We’ll proceed as if it is.’
‘Of course.’
‘I can’t think why a young girl like this would be here. I can’t imagine she was taking a stroll and lost her footing.’
‘Perhaps she was working,’ Montaldo said.
‘Perhaps,’ Vivier allowed, ‘and yet there is something not right about the dress…’
‘No knickers,’ Montaldo stated grimly.
‘Well, that tells us nothing.’
Montaldo nodded slowly as if absorbing great wisdom from his superior, though privately he thought that the absence of underwear told them plenty.
‘So let’s get this started, contact the fire department, see if they’re in a frame of mind to lend us a few ladders.’
As the ladders were organised and paper suits and evidence bags were distributed by the forensic team, Vivier found himself thinking about the Middle Ages again; paintings from Northern Europe which depicted both everyday life in all its banality and conversely, examples of astonishing cruelty and torture. Pictures by Bosch and Breughel.
There was one in particular that showed Christ’s journey to Calvary. Except that the lan
dscape was not that of the Holy Land with its deserts and flat-roofed buildings, but was very clearly the Low Countries. In the picture’s centre, almost lost amongst the teeming crowds of peasants and soldiers, Christ bore the cross on his back. To the right of the picture and in the distance there were strange precarious structures; a spindly pole topped by a wheel with what look like rags hanging from it and perched atop the wheel a large black bird; a crow or raven. In the distance a similar structure could be seen, as well as what looked like a scaffold built for the purpose of hanging several men, or indeed women, at the same time. What had always struck Vivier about these constructions was that they were the only man-made objects to stand out against the sky in the stark landscape. That just as a cityscape of the same period or later would have shown church steeples reaching towards heaven, so here in the uncultivated countryside the instruments of torture and cruelty were thrust at the sky.
Man’s inventiveness was as appalling as it was wondrous. If the wheel was one of the most important developments in the long climb to progress, why misuse it as an instrument of torture? And what perverted genius was inspired to break and thread a human being through its spokes?
He looked down at the body of the young woman; she looked like a discarded doll. Whatever had happened to her, he hoped she didn’t suffer too much. But even as he thought this he suspected that his prayer was futile.
Three weeks ago Paul Vivier had found himself gazing down at the body of another woman. She had been older, a prostitute and drug addict well known to the police – Marianne Sigot. Her death had been no surprise, which is not to say it wasn’t tragic. She had been hurtling headlong towards it her whole life. Fighting and fucking her way to damnation, clothed in tight lycra pants, high heels and barely decent skimpy tops, all of them brightly coloured and glossy, making herself look like some cheap plastic toy, exposing her grubby, scarred and often bruised flesh.
He’d interviewed Marianne’s mother, Madame Sigot, a tiny woman with a halo of grey fuzz around her head, a perm gone wrong no doubt, whose quiet gentility was oblivious. She had made him tea and served it with buttery homemade madeleines, then proceeded to tell him of how she had called her only child Marianne because she thought of her as a wonder, a saviour, a miracle. She had insisted on bringing out tattered old cigar boxes filled with snapshots of the young Marianne. Christ, it had been heart wrenching to sit there and see the beautiful child the dead prostitute had been; rosy-cheeked in her bassinette, flying high on a swing, grinning with both front teeth absent in a school photo, then demure in her white confirmation dress and veil, a small pale book in her slim hands while her big dark eyes seemed about to brim over with tears.
How did this child become that woman?
Most people knew her not as Marianne Sigot, but as Mazzy.
But Mazzy was no more.
Two women dead within the space of a month? It could easily be a coincidence. One, the victim of a pimp, dealer or client. The other, perhaps the victim of an accident, possibly domestic violence. The answers were all around them, on the women’s skin, in their hair and clothes, under the fingernails, on the earth, amongst the weeds, on the path that led here and in the murky silt at the bottom of the ditch.
And there might be witnesses too. Even without the benefit of seeing her face (which was turned away and concealed by a curtain of hair) there was something about her slim frame, the dress with its nipped-in waist and wide skirt, her (almost certainly) bleached blonde hair which would make her stand out from other women, whether natives or tourists. And whatever had happened to her, however she had died, identification was going to be vital; the sooner they knew who she was, the sooner each part of the puzzle would fall into place.
Star Gazer
Michelle Brandieu lived in the top-floor apartment above the Café de Trois. The apartment had at some time in the last seventy or so years been the residence of an artist and either they, or the house’s owner, had made alterations by taking out the small gabled windows and putting in floor-to-ceiling glass. However this was not the gigantic single pane of sleek modernist design; it bore less of a resemblance to a Frank Lloyd Wright picture window than to a dilapidated greenhouse, with a rusted lattice of ironwork holding in place a multitude of smaller panes of glass, some of which were cracked, all of which were smeared and mildewed.
But despite this Michelle Brandieu loved her small apartment as it afforded her a wonderful view of the sky and, on clear nights, the multitude of stars, which she viewed with the affection of a proud mother. She had a mild interest in astronomy with a passing knowledge of black holes, nebulae, comets and asteroids, but her real passion was for astrology, the movements of the constellations and their effect on every human being on earth. No science or religion could compete with the power of the stars.
Michelle spent many nights staring out at the sky. Because of the canopies over the cafés beneath her the view of the pavement tables was obstructed. On warm nights when she had the windows open, she heard laughter, music and the odd strand of conversation, but could not see who created it.
She could see the traffic, both pedestrian and automotive, that streamed to and fro on the wide pavement and the narrow road beyond. Such a busy pointless commotion. While up above, sometimes visible, sometimes not, hung the great canopy of stars.
‘Stars do not go away, they are always there, still affect us, even when we can’t see them.’
Michelle had typed out these words on a small index card twenty, no, nearly thirty years ago. She had blue-tacked the card to her fridge, though the card showed signs of having been displayed by other means – in each of its top two corners were the tiny puncture wounds made by drawing pins, and all four corners had yellow diagonal bands which revealed that it was once taped to another surface. And the card itself was grubby with age, the black typewritten words now grey and pale. Perhaps it was actually more than thirty years since Michelle typed it out. Time has become a little vague for Michelle, but the stars and her passion for them endures.
And because of this Michelle happened to be standing at her window the night before the body of the young woman was found, and as she stood there, dreaming of fate and eternity, something caught her eye down below where the row of potted geraniums marked the café’s boundaries. There was an airy movement of something white. Her eyesight was failing and it took her a little time to adjust from the long-distance gaze that took in the night sky with its pinpricks of light. At first the white object seemed to have a life of its own, but then she saw that someone was holding it.
Yes, very clearly she saw a young man standing facing the café. He wore a track suit that she thought might have been red, not bright red, but a greyish red bleached of light, which absorbed the blackness of the night. And his skin was black.
The sight of him had frightened Michelle. A few years ago the café’s owner had moved out of the apartment below hers, going instead to live in a house ten minutes’ drive away with his wife and three almost grown-up children. He’d had a plan to rent the old flat to holiday-makers, but had somehow never got around to refurbishing it, and so once the café closed for the night, Michelle was the only person in residence.
At first she had relished the quiet, as her landlord’s family had been very noisy, always shouting at one another or playing music too loud (the son had an electric guitar) and the daughter was given to histrionics, and the volume on their TV was set too high. She quickly realised that their noise had at least been a comforting sign that she was not alone. These days, while she never suffered from loneliness, she did at times feel terribly vulnerable.
So she had stared at this young black man, certain that he must be about to break into the café. That the white object which, for a few seconds he seemed to deliberately flap through the air, must be some sort of flag, a signal to the rest of his gang that the coast was clear, and very soon they would be picking the locks on the café door and creeping onto the premises, then irrevocably up the stairs to her sma
ll flat, her frail defenceless body.
She watched horrified as he fluttered the white cloth, and then, in a way that she would later describe as ‘ritualistic’, he draped it over the low-growing plants. Once it had been placed there she saw that it was not a simple rectangle of fabric, but had a sort of human shape, a wide central part with two narrower arms beside it. She could not see the far edge of this shape as it fell on the other side of the hedge, but she imagined the continuation of this human form, with the central part being finished by two spectral legs.
Voodoo. The ancient religion of primitive evil. Worse even than burglary.
When the young man had finished his act of ritual he stepped away from the hedge and Michelle was sure that he smiled. Yes, she saw the flash of his white teeth.
Wicked. Terrifying to see the pleasure his evil act had given him. Then he set off again, walking briskly for a few minutes as he scanned the street as if looking for someone, until he eventually broke into a run.
Michelle stood by the window rigid with fear and uncertain what to do. She was certain that he or his comrades would return. She was equally afraid of the evil magic he had performed.
And remembering a charm to ward off evil a pagan friend had once recommended to her, she fetched salt from the kitchen and sprinkled a line of it along the bottom of her window and another at the door to her flat.
Then she went to bed and lay in the darkness willing herself to sleep and imagining terrible things. After hours of tossing and turning and being petrified by every sound; the old building’s creaks, the noise of a motorbike, the scratching of mice beneath the floorboards, she made the rational decision that if something was coming to get her, it would get her no matter what, she was entirely helpless. So she sat up, switched on the small lamp next to her, opened the drawer of her bedside cabinet, pulled out two balls of cotton wool and stuffed them into her ears. Then at last she fell into fitful nightmare-filled sleep.