The Books of the Dead

by Emilia Bernhard

  Rachel’s mind went back to Magda’s hypothesis about the murderer peeing on the string used to murder Laurent. Suddenly it didn’t seem quite as implausible. But, just as in that scenario, what could inspire such scorn that you would mark a corpse by spitting on it? She was making a mental note to ask Boussicault this when Magda held up the pad. LET ME TALK TO HIM, it said. Rachel shook her head.

  Boussicault was still speaking. “The arrival of the coroner’s reports makes me hopeful that the full forensic reports will arrive shortly. I’m also aware that two of our suspects’ teaching periods begin again soon, so the longer we keep them in Paris, the more tense and less cooperative they may become. In light of that, I’d like to begin our next round of interviews quickly. The day after tomorrow.”

  “The day after tomorrow for the interviews.” Rachel looked at Magda, who held up the pad again.

  LET ME TALK TO HIM.

  Rachel shook her head again.

  “Yes,” the capitaine said in Rachel’s ear. “I plan to begin at ten AM.”

  Magda had flipped over her page and was scribbling again.

  “You are available?”

  Magda held up the pad once more. LET ME TALK TO HIM!!! Rachel noted the three exclamation points—Magda was usually restrained when it came to punctuation—but she still shook her head. What in Magda’s previous interactions with the capitaine made her think they could have a useful conversation? Rachel moved the pad-holding hand out of her sight line.

  “Yes,” she said, “I’m available. So, ten AM on Friday?”

  “Let’s say nine forty-five. That will give us some time to get organized before we begin.”

  She knew she should be angry at him for dismissing the two of them from the investigation. She was angry at him for that. But she really did want to be at those interviews. She wanted to find someone besides LouLou who could be the murderer; she wanted to know if any of the witnesses could be possible suspects. And she wanted to know if the superior abilities of the Commissariat Rue de Vaugirard had managed to locate Jean Bernard. At the very least, if she sat in on the interviews, she would learn everything that Boussicault discovered, then bring that to Magda for their own use. And she knew that if a true detective had to choose between her personal feelings and aiding the investigation of a crime, there was no question which was the choice to make. “I’ll be there at nine forty-five.”

  Magda’s pad appeared in front of Rachel’s nose. ASK HIM IF I CAN COME. Rachel pushed it aside again, but it appeared again, and when Rachel tried to push it away, Magda pushed back. When she drew her head back, Magda made the pad follow.

  She sighed. “Magda would like to speak to you.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “I can’t believe he said no!” Magda sat on Rachel’s sofa with her arms crossed.

  “You said that all the way home, but you didn’t tell me why he said it.” Rachel spoke from the kitchen area, where she was making them both gin and tonics. After Boussicault’s call she had been too excited, and Magda too irritated, to be able to focus anymore on looking for Jean Bernard. Instead they had come straight to Rachel apartment. So she did have something to thank the capitaine for after all, she reflected as she whacked an ice cube tray against the countertop.

  “Oh, he said the interview room was too small to fit four people comfortably.” Magda’s tone said she considered this an obvious lie. “You’re going to have to tell me every single thing.” She took the glass from Rachel. “In fact, you can start by telling me exactly what he said to you on the phone. What was this about saliva?”

  Rachel sat in the chair across from her. “The coroner found saliva on Giles’s neck, and on Laurent’s.”

  “Saliva? The murderer licked him?”

  “Or drooled on him, I guess. From the exertion, maybe?”

  “Who drooled on whom from exertion?” Alan had appeared behind Rachel, still wearing his suit. He put his keys down on the counter.

  “Oh, hey. We don’t know; that’s the point. I was just telling Magda that Boussicault told me the coroner found saliva on Giles Morel and Guy Laurent’s necks.”

  “You’re talking to Boussicault again?” Alan had heard all about the second meeting in the capitaine’s office.

  “Well, he called me.”

  “To tell you someone drooled on a corpse’s neck?” He sat down in an available chair.

  “I was thinking they spat on it. On them.”

  “Maybe the murderer has a thing for bodily fluids,” Magda said. “That could explain why they killed in a bathroom.”

  “But not why they killed in the library stacks,” Rachel pointed out. “Although … I remember reading somewhere that dust is sixty percent dead skin. So if they had a thing for bodily waste—”

  “They’d also have to have a thing for librarians.” Alan broke in. “Bodily waste, necks, and librarians. That’s one picky killer.”

  Despite herself, Rachel laughed. Magda, however, kept a straight face. “How would you explain the saliva?”

  “I wouldn’t. And neither would you, I thought. I thought Boussicault told you you weren’t needed anymore.”

  “He did.” Rachel nodded. “But he also told me I could sit in on the second round of witness interviews, remember? He just called to tell me when they are.”

  “Which is?”

  “Day after tomorrow. Which means we get a day off from trying to track down Jean Bernard.”

  “Who’s Jean Bernard?”

  Too late, Rachel remembered that she hadn’t told Alan about their search. She took a breath to prepare herself, but Magda got there first.

  “Jean Bernard is the name of a man who was in the reading room on Tuesday and on Wednesday morning,” Magda said. She didn’t look at Rachel. “The Bibliothèque found his request slips, but he’d left by the time the police arrived, and Boussicault said they haven’t been able to find him yet, so Rachel and I thought we’d fill up some time by giving it a try ourselves.”

  Rachel let her breath out like a balloon expelling air. An explanation that both was true and made the truth sound innocuous. She gave Magda a grateful glance.

  Alan looked confused. “Why don’t the police just use his address?” He turned to Rachel. “You told me everyone had to register their address when they first use the Bibliothèque, right?”

  “They don’t have it. In fact, the Bibliothèque can’t find his registration at all.” She shrugged. “It happens, apparently.”

  “Jean Bernard?” Alan said the name again, slowly this time. “Some man named Jean Bernard has filled out request slips at the Bibliothèque, but there isn’t any record of his registration and the police can’t find him?” He frowned, then pulled his cell phone out of his breast pocket and typed into it. After a moment he stopped. He started to laugh.

  “What?” Now it was Rachel’s turn to be confused.

  “Jean Bernard,” he said, as if this were an explanation.

  “Yes, Jean Bernard. I don’t see what’s funny. It’s a perfectly ordinary French name.”

  “That’s what’s so funny.” He sobered and explained. “Because my division is International Major Finance, the bank has to be careful that all our transactions are on the up-and-up. One thing they do to ensure that’s so is give us a list of the most common French names, the ones people are likely to use if they want an alias that won’t be noticed. You know, like Pierre Durand or Jean-Luc Richard. Those totally ordinary names.”

  He turned his screen to face her, and she squinted enough to read COMMON FRENCH NAMES as a website headline.

  “Jean Bernard is the second most common name in France. Someone who didn’t want to be found filled out those slips to throw the police off. It’s a fake name! I can’t believe the police didn’t make the connection.” He nodded at Rachel. “Now, Jeanne Bernard would be a much better alias for you than Susan Vande-whatever.”

  That’s why it sounded so familiar, Rachel realized. It had the same rhythm and half the same sound
as Jeanne Martin, that silly fake name Alan had suggested to her. She kicked herself for being so slow on the uptake, then took refuge in the fact that the police hadn’t figured it out, either.

  “It isn’t necessarily a fake name,” Magda pointed out. “It could just be that the murderer has a very common name.”

  “That is true.” Alan nodded. “But how likely is it that someone named Jean Bernard would show up at the Bibliothèque only on the day before he killed someone and the day that he killed someone, and that he would pass the time before the murder by filling out some request slips in his own name when he could’ve just sat in the room and left no indication of being there?”

  Well, Rachel thought, put like that …

  But Magda said, “It’s not impossible.”

  This was Magda’s go-to answer when she was backed into a corner, Rachel knew. Next she would start quoting Sherlock Holmes about how if it wasn’t impossible it was likely, or whatever it was. Now it was her turn to play rescuer.

  “But it’s more likely that the actual murderer filled out some slips with a very common French name in an effort to distract the police and hopefully keep himself safe.” She made her voice soft. “Occam’s razor.”

  For a few long seconds, the séjour was silent.

  “Okay, maybe we should concentrate our efforts elsewhere.” Magda held up a clarifying finger. “Not give up on Jean Bernard, but just delay the search. Until we see what your interviews turn up.”

  “Very good idea.” Rachel slapped her hands on her thighs and stood up swiftly. “Now who wants a drink?”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The interview room at the Vaugirard commissariat did not have one-piece aluminum chairs and tables specifically designed so that enraged suspects couldn’t break them and use the pieces as weapons. Nor was it an anonymous carpeted square with a frosted window or poorly disguised two-way mirror set into one wall and a camera on the ceiling to capture all the action. Instead, it looked remarkably like the room in the Bibliothèque Nationale in which Boussicault had conducted the first round of interviews: the walls were white and the furniture consisted of a table with two chairs on one side and one on the other. The only addition to the commissariat’s decor was an inoffensive painting of two tall poppies in a glass on the wall behind the two chairs. This was hardly what television had led Rachel to expect, and she felt vaguely disappointed. What was the point of being involved with something in real life if it didn’t live up to the expectations raised by make-believe?

  Capitaine Boussicault came in, shutting the door behind him. Some of Rachel’s disappointment must have shown on her face, because he said, “This room is designed to be both comfortable and neutral. No clocks, no windows, nothing to show the interviewee how much time has passed or what time of day it is. At the same time, a reasonable amount of comfort and even some inoffensive decoration. The idea is that this relaxes them, so they might let their guard down.” He smiled. “Let’s hope it works.”

  He sat down next to her and put a bloc-notes on the table, flipping it open and flicking through the first few pages until he reached a list. “Bien, okay. First I will talk to Professeure Dale, then Professeur Stibb, and finally Docteur Cavill. The mysterious Jean Bernard we are still trying to track down.”

  Rachel’s said nothing. She would tell him the truth about Jean Bernard, she knew, but she wasn’t quite ready to do it yet. After the interviews. She just wanted a little more time to feel they were ahead of the police in one small area.

  For a moment there was a slightly awkward silence. Then Boussicault stood up and turned to look at the painting. “Inoffensive, isn’t it?” He reached behind the lower portion of the frame; suddenly there was a brief, high-pitched whine. He grinned at Rachel’s surprise. “In here”—he flicked one of the poppies and the canvas rippled—“are a camera and a microphone, recording everything. That’s why we want people to be relaxed. “High-tech, hein? We are not the police of Arsène Lupin these days.” He grinned again and sat down.

  “Now”—he looked at his watch—“are you ready?” Rachel nodded, and he said to the empty room, “Send in Professeure Dale.”

  * * *

  When Boussicault’s brigadier led her in, Aurora Dale looked much the same as she had in the first interview, only a little more worried. This time she didn’t smile at them. She just sat down and settled her bag on the floor next to her. The capitaine nodded at the silent Didier, who settled into a chair by the door; Rachel took this as a signal that these interviews were no longer preliminary.

  Boussicault tried to set Dale at her ease. How had she been finding Paris since their last interview?

  “Hot,” Professor Dale said tightly. “But fortunately the reading room is air-conditioned. And where I’m staying is near several cinemas, so I take refuge there in the evenings. Last night I saw a revival of Rififi.” She looked across the table. “Would you like to see my ticket stub? I saved it because I know the police like that sort of thing.”

  “That won’t be necessary, thank you,” Boussicault said. “But I would like to ask you a few questions about events further in the past, if I may.”

  Dale nodded. She settled more comfortably into her seat.

  “Thank you. Could you begin by reminding me how long you’ve been working in the reading room?”

  “I was there for two weeks before that young man’s death.”

  “And had you visited the Bibliothèque before?”

  “No.” Which put her out of the running for the earlier theft, Rachel thought—before remembering that she could be lying.

  “And in the two weeks before Monsieur Morel’s death,” the capitaine continued, “which books did you consult?”

  “What, all of them?” Professor Dale looked incredulous. “There were about a hundred. I don’t know if I can remember them all.”

  “Well, just the ones you can remember, then.”

  At first with some speed and then with an increasing number of pauses, she listed an array of titles. The capitaine scribbled on his pad as if he wanted nothing more than to acquire a reading list on early modern French midwifery.

  “I see. And during your time there, did you notice Guy Laurent?”

  “I’m sorry, who?”

  “Guy Laurent. He was working in the reading room during the early portion of your time there.”

  “Oh, is he the other librarian? The one who died?”

  Rachel noted the form of this description, which suggested Dale imagined a natural death—then remembered that that, too, could be a ruse.

  Professor Dale, meanwhile, said, “I didn’t care for him.”

  “Why not?”

  “There wasn’t a particular reason. I just—I found him disquieting. He delivered some of my books, and whenever I saw him coming—” She acted out a shiver. “And he had greasy hair. There’s no need for that sort of thing.”

  Boussicault hid a smile as he noted down this lapse in hygiene, then looked up. “But you never had a conversation? Never ran into each other outside the Bibliothèque?”

  “Absolutely not. First, I would have gone out of my way to avoid him. And second, staying in the sixth I never run into anyone from the Bibliothèque.”

  “You don’t remain in the second arrondissement when you finish your day’s work?”

  “No.”

  “You and Professeur Stibb and Docteur Cavill never have a drink together after the library closes?”

  “No. Just a chat before we go sometimes. One sees the same faces over and over; it would be churlish not to say hello and good-bye.”

  Boussicault nodded, made another note. “And Monsieur Morel? Did you notice him in your time at the reading room?”

  “Only as someone to hand slips to and receive books from. Why?” Professor Dale straightened. “Are the two deaths connected?”

  The capitaine ignored these questions and sailed smoothly onward. “You never talked about books with Morel?”

  “Not beyond say
ing, ‘Thank you for this psalter.’ ”

  Rachel’s ears pricked up at the final word; she also noticed that Professor Dale sounded irritated.

  Perhaps Boussicault noticed the same, because he changed the subject. “Now I wonder if you could answer a few questions for me about your life in England?”

  Dale looked puzzled but said, “Certainly. I’ll try.”

  “When you are in Cambridge, you bank with National Westminster Bank?”

  “Yes. They’ve been my bank for thirty years.”

  “You have a current account with them, and until five years ago you had a savings account as well?”

  “Yes.”

  “May I ask, what became of the savings account, Professeure?”

  “May I ask why you’ve been prying into my finances?” Dale shot back.

  The capitaine raised his eyebrows. “I checked into the finances of all the witnesses, madame. I like to be thorough in my investigations.”

  For the first time, she looked worried. “Then you know I closed it.”

  “Well, yes.” He gave a little laugh, as if she had made a mildly funny joke. “I’d like to know why you closed it.”

  “I had transferred its balance into my current account, and there didn’t seem much point in keeping an empty account open.”

  “And why did you transfer the balance? It was a sizable amount.”

  The capitaine’s tone remained calm as he asked this question, but Professor Dale had become increasingly tense. Now she snapped, “You can see that I did it over time, in increments. I did it first to pay the death duties on my husband’s estate, and then to help with my grandchildren’s school fees. It was all aboveboard, I assure you.”

  “Death duties?” Boussicault looked puzzled. Droits de succession, Rachel said silently, reflecting that if he’d kept up the pretense of wanting her help with translation, she could have helped him with the term. But since she was present just as a courtesy to her, she said nothing.