Extraordinary People ef-4

by Peter May

  ‘What are you suggesting?’

  ‘Suppose that someone lured Gaillard here and murdered him in front of the altar.’

  ‘Why?’ Raffin frowned. ‘Why would they?’

  Enzo raised his hands. ‘That’s another question altogether. But make the leap with me. Suppose that’s what happened. Suppose he was murdered right there….’ He turned and looked back down the church towards the cross and the screen and the bloodstained flags. ‘Suppose he was hacked to pieces in front of that altar, some bizarre, ritualistic killing, and then the pieces of a pig and its blood strewn about to disguise the fact that it was a human being who had been murdered. Who would ever think to check that there was human blood with the pig’s? You heard the curé. They were shocked, horrified by the thought of an animal sacrifice being performed in their church. They called the police, yes, but I’ll bet you it was all cleaned up before anyone would even have thought to question it.’

  The notion seemed to shock Raffin. ‘What makes you think he might have been dismembered?’

  ‘Ah, now that’s more difficult to quantify. But in my head I keep coming back to La Traversée de Paris. A dismembered pig in the film, a dismembered pig in the church. Only, they left the pig behind. So what happened to Gaillard? Wouldn’t it be easier to take him away in pieces? And might that not also be like some kind of strange homage to La Traversée? Instead of the pig, it was the dismembered pieces of Gaillard which were smuggled away across the city.’

  Suddenly the organ burst into life again, and the dramatic opening notes of Bach’s Trio Sonata for Organ No. 2 in C minor filled the church.

  * * *

  The world outside, awash with sunshine and filled with tourists, seemed strangely unreal. Only the strains of the organ from within carried with them the reminder of the dark theories that Enzo had conjured out of the bloodstained flags. The two men stood on the steps, blinking in the sunlight, gazing out beyond the Panthéon and the arcaded arches of the Ste. Geneviève Bibliotheque towards the ancient Faculté de Droit and the Mairie of the sixth arrondissement.

  ‘What now?’ Raffin asked.

  ‘First of all, I have to call in a favour from the director of a laboratory here in Paris. Then we need to find out how many unidentified body parts have turned up over the last ten years.’

  Raffin raised a sceptical eyebrow. ‘Well, that should be easy. Where do you propose we start?’

  Enzo pulled the folded newspaper from Raffin’s jacket pocket. ‘I take it you have access to the cuttings library at Libération.’

  ‘Of course.’ Raffin snatched the journal back.

  ‘Then that’s where we’ll begin.’

  Chapter Four

  I

  The offices of Libération were tucked away in the narrow Rue Béranger in the third arrondissement, where the city’s rag-trade conducts its wholesale and retail activities.

  The newspaper archives were reached by a rickety elevator which took them to the fourth floor, glass-walled offices lined with shelf upon shelf of box files and bound copies tracing the history of the newspaper back to its first edition in 1973. Large windows looked out on Le Petit Béranger brasserie in the street below.

  Raffin and Enzo spent nearly twenty minutes flicking through drums of index cards and fetching corresponding boxes from shelves that groaned with numbered files. A row of filing cabinets had drawers labelled with everything from Accidents du Travail to Vietnam, but their contents held nothing of any interest. They had been unable to find a single cutting referring to unexplained or unidentified body parts.

  ‘Isn’t there microfilm we can look at?’ Enzo was frustrated by their lack of progress.

  ‘They started to put everything on to microfiche a few years ago,’ Raffin told him, ‘but somehow it all got scratched and ruined in the reader.’

  ‘Well, aren’t there internet archives?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Everything from 1994 on. But you have to subscribe to get access to it.’

  ‘And don’t you subscribe?’

  ‘Well, no,’ Raffin confessed. ‘Why would I? I’ve got access to this place.’

  ‘Where you can’t find anything!’ Enzo was losing patience. ‘Can’t the newspaper access the internet for you from here?’

  ‘I suppose they could. Only I don’t think they have a computer here in the cuttings library.’

  There had been an odd sense of old-fashioned informality about the whole place. The lack of security, the worn carpet in the lobby, the unfinished renovation work which greeted them when they stepped out of the lift, the tables of apparently randomly stacked boxes of cuttings lining the hallway. It was a sense which only increased with the arrival of a middle-aged man with dark, thinning hair and a close-cropped beard. He wore black, corduroy trousers and a grey tee-shirt, and Raffin introduced him to Enzo as La Mémoire du Journal. The memory of the newspaper. ‘He’s been with Libé since the first edition hit the streets more than thirty years ago.’ It seemed that the most reliable archive the paper possessed was filed in the head of La Mémoire du Journal.

  ‘What exactly is it you’re looking for?’ he asked. When Enzo told him he frowned. ‘I don’t think we have a separate category for that. We would only file what was reported, and we would only report something particularly unusual. There’s nothing that immediately springs to mind.’

  Enzo sighed. This had been a complete waste of time. ‘Thank you anyway.’ He and Raffin turned towards the elevator.

  ‘Except, of course, for the skull in the trunk.’

  Enzo turned back. ‘A skull in a trunk?’

  ‘Yes….’ La Mémoire began flipping through file cards, every one meticulously handwritten by himself. ‘Yes, here we are. I filed it under Catacombes.’

  Which pricked Raffin’s interest. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because that’s where it was found.’ He crossed the room and ran his finger along a row of box files until he identified the one he was looking for. He pulled it out and laid it on the desk to open it, and then flipped back the spring to release its cuttings. ‘There was quite a bit of coverage at the time, just because it was so unusual. But it was a one-day wonder, really. Nothing ever came of it as far as I remember.’

  Enzo sat down and started spreading the cuttings out in front of him. ‘What do you remember exactly?’

  ‘Just that it was discovered somewhere in the tunnels below Place d’Italie. About five years ago. A surveyor, I think, working for the Inspection Générale des Carrières. There had been some kind of collapse beneath the Avenue de Choisy, and that’s how the trunk came to light.’

  Raffin peered over Enzo’s shoulder at the cuttings. ‘And it had a skull in it?’ There were photographs of a skull with the mouth and teeth smashed.

  ‘Yes, the skull of a middle-aged male, I believe. Quite recently deceased, they thought. Five, ten years, something like that. But it wasn’t so much the skull which created the interest, as the items found with it.’ Even as La Mémoire spoke, Enzo turned over one of the cuttings to reveal a grainy photograph of an odd collection of apparently unrelated items. ‘Ah, yes,’ said La Mémoire. ‘I remember now. Very strange stuff. A scallop shell. An antique stethoscope. A thigh bone — I think there were tiny holes drilled through either end of it. A gold insect on a chain. A pendant, I think.’ He shuffled through the cuttings. ‘Yes, it was a bee.’

  Raffin lifted one of the clippings, squinting at its picture and caption. ‘And a copy of an Ordre de la Libération with May 12, 1943, engraved on the back of it.’

  ‘What’s an Ordre de la Libération?’ Enzo asked.

  ‘They were medals given out by de Gaulle to men and women who helped in the liberation of France,’ La Mémoire said.

  Enzo let his eyes drift over the cuttings in front of him. ‘How bizarre. And they never figured out what it was all about?’

  ‘Apparently not.’

  II

  Place Dauphine, at the west end of the ële de la Cité, was where officers from the Brigade
Criminelle on the Quai des Orfèvres sometimes grabbed a bite of lunch. It was a dusty, tree-filled square lined with apartments and restaurants, once the home of Yves Montand. And because of the proximity of the Palais de Justice, it was also home to the Paris Bar, le Barreau de Paris, from which the city’s advocates practised their black arts from beneath a grinning Cheshire cat painted on a rooftop gable. The pavement tables under the twin awnings of Le Caveau de Palais restaurant had been full just a little earlier. But Inspecteur Georges Thomas was having a late lunch, and so some of the seats around him had already emptied. Enzo and Raffin pulled chairs up at his table and ordered a couple of glasses of chilled white wine and watched as he used fat fingers to tear off chunks of bread and mop up the juices on his plate. His hair was cropped short, shiny steel bristles above a round tanned face with a day’s growth of silvered whiskers. His lips shone with the grease from his meal. He dragged a crumpled napkin across them and then wiped his fingers one by one. He cleansed his palate with a last mouthful of red wine and belched loudly, nodding his satisfaction.

  A quick call to Raffin’s contact at the Préfecture de Police had established that Thomas had been in charge of the unsuccessful investigation to identify the skull found below Place d’Italie. He was in his mid-fifties now, treading water until retirement, and was in the habit of treating himself to long lunches in the Place Dauphine. ‘The skull? Yeah. Fucking weird one that,’ he said. ‘The local cops passed it on to us. But, you know, there was fuck all to go on. No fingerprints on the trunk, or on any of that strange shit that was in it.’ He waved the waiter over and said he would have an île flotante and a coffee.

  ‘What happened to it?’ Enzo asked.

  Thomas looked at him as if he had two heads. ‘What kind of fucking accent is that?’

  ‘He’s Scottish,’ Raffin said.

  Thomas made a slight forward thrusting movement of his jaw to indicate his contempt for anyone who wasn’t Parisian. ‘What happened to what?’

  ‘The trunk and the stuff that was in it.’

  ‘They’ll still be in the greffe.’

  ‘Greffe?’

  ‘The evidence depository,’ Raffin explained. He looked towards Thomas for confirmation. ‘In the Palais de Justice?’

  Thomas nodded. The waiter arrived with his dessert, and the detective chased frothy lumps of eggwhite around a pale, watery custard which he managed to dribble down his chin. ‘I gotta blizzard of paperwork on my desk gonna make me go blind.’ He wiped his face again with his napkin. ‘But if you guys want to see the stuff, then I guess I could always take time out to show you.’

  * * *

  Le greffe was a large subterranean room in the bowels of the Palais de Justice, rows of metal staging supporting lines of shelves filled with the accumulated evidence of investigations past and present. Each item was bagged and labelled and tracked by a computerised index held by the Gardien du Greffe—the Keeper. It was less than five minutes’ walk from Le Caveau de Palais.

  The Keeper was a man who looked as if he rarely saw daylight. His skin was pale, almost grey, and his oiled black hair was scraped back across a shrunken head. He displayed no interest when Thomas asked to see the trunk. He searched through the index on his screen and gave the detective instructions on where to find it — Row 15, Shelf C, Production Number 53974/S.

  Row 15 was at the bottom end of the room, and Shelf C was near the ceiling. Thomas required stepladders to reach it. He located the bag, wrapped his arms around the trunk and lifted it down, carrying it to a table at the end of the aisle. He untied the bag and removed it to reveal a battered tin trunk, about the same size as an average suitcase, but deeper. It was a dark, military green, scraped and scored and a little rusted. ‘There were no distinguishing markings on it,’ Thomas said. ‘No manufacturer’s label. And it was probably damaged in the tunnel collapse.’ He released the catches on either side and the lid creaked as it opened. ‘Et voilà.’

  Enzo and Raffin peered inside. There were the items described in the newspaper articles: the scallop shell; the antique stethoscope, looking for all the world like an elongated horn from a vintage car; the thigh bone with its tiny holes drilled at either end; a bee, elaborately fashioned in gold and attached to a fine neck chain; the Ordre de la Libération with its green and black strip of cloth, the medal itself engraved in black with the double cross of Lorraine. ‘Where’s the skull?’ Enzo asked, disappointed.

  ‘The pathologist’s still got it.’ Thomas snorted. ‘Fucking weirdo. He does these facial reconstructions in clay. It’s a hobby. Like, you know, he enjoys it or something.’

  ‘He did a facial reconstruction from the skull found in the trunk?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘You circulated photographs of it?’

  ‘Sure we did. It was pretty distinctive. Completely bald. But no one recognised it.’

  Enzo felt a wave of disappointment. “Bald” was not a word he would have used to describe Gaillard. ‘Was the face clean-shaven?’

  ‘Completely hairless.’

  ‘Would it be possible to see it?’

  ‘You’ll need to ask him that.’

  Enzo looked at the items in the trunk again. He put a hand inside. ‘May I?’

  ‘Allez-y.’

  Enzo lifted them out one by one and laid them on the table. They were an odd collection of articles to find together at any time. But buried in a trunk with an unidentified skull, made them notably peculiar. ‘What about the thigh bone? Was it related to the skull?’

  Thomas shook his head. ‘The experts said it was much older. They figured it was probably part of an anatomical skeleton. You know, the kind of thing a bone specialist would have in his office.’ He lifted up the femur. ‘And these tiny holes…They figured that’s where the bones were wired together.’

  Raffin said, ‘And you never worked out what these things were doing in there with the skull?’

  The detective shook his head. ‘A complete fucking mystery. Take a better man than me to work it out.’ Enzo and Raffin made fleeting eye contact.

  ‘What about the date on the back of the medal? May 12th, 1943. Does it have any significance?’

  ‘Not that we could figure.’

  Enzo reached into his satchel and produced a small, square digital camera. He held it up between thumb and forefinger. ‘Would it be okay if I took some photographs?’

  Thomas thought about it for a moment, running a chubby hand over his bristled jaw. ‘Yeah, I guess….’ And as Enzo lined up the items one by one to snap them, the detective said, ‘So when’s this piece going to be in the papers?’

  Enzo felt his face colouring, and concentrated on the photographs. They had required a cover story. But Raffin was not in the least uncomfortable with their subterfuge. ‘Depends what progress we make,’ he said.

  ‘As long as you don’t quote me,’ Thomas growled. ‘I’m retiring at Christmas. I don’t need the hassle.’

  ‘Any quotes will be strictly unattributable,’ Raffin reassured him.

  Enzo finished taking his photographs. ‘And the trunk was found in the…the catacombes?’

  The detective nodded. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I didn’t know there were catacombes in Paris.’

  Thomas spluttered and laughed. ‘You’re kidding me! Jesus, there’s nearly three hundred kilometers of tunnels under the city.’

  ‘You mean the sewers?’

  ‘No, no, no. The catacombes are way below that. Way below the métro, too.’

  Raffin said, ‘The catacombes are twenty to thirty meters down. Hacked out of solid rock by quarriers over centuries.’

  Enzo was astonished. ‘What for?’

  ‘For the stone. The whole of Paris was built with rock dug out from beneath it. There’s a few kilometers of catacombe that you can visit officially, but the rest of it’s dangerous, and strictly off-limits.’

  Thomas snorted. ‘Which makes it a magne
t for every freak and weirdo in the city. There’s all sorts of shit goes on down there. Drug dealing, illicit sex, you name it.’

  Raffin said, ‘They recently discovered an underground cinema, and a night-club. All powered from lines tapped illegally into the power grid. There’s a whole subculture that exists down there. Tunnel rats, they call them. People who just love to explore the dark and the unknown. And there are extreme tourists who pay illicit guides to take them down for a good time. I wrote a piece about it a few years ago. I went down officially….’ He glanced at Thomas. ‘And unofficially. My unofficial guide had better maps. He’d spent years exploring the tunnels and charted them meticulously.’

  Thomas sighed and looked ostentatiously at his watch.

  Raffin took what he thought was his cue. ‘Well, thank you, Inspecteur. We’d better not keep you.’

  Thomas scratched his jaw again. ‘No, I’m just thinking. Maybe you guys would like to see where the trunk was found. My paperwork can wait. And, anyway, this case has never been officially closed. So any publicity’s good publicity.’

  Raffin looked to Enzo for a response. Enzo nodded. ‘That would be very helpful, Inspecteur.’

  III

  Enzo felt the temperature falling as they went down rung by rung, hand below hand, foot below foot. Until they reached a small, stone-clad chamber. The manhole cover thirty feet above them had slipped back into place with a deep thud, shutting out the daylight. All that lit the thick, velvet blackness that wrapped itself around them now, were the battery-powered lamps mounted on the helmets that the tunnel cop had insisted they wear. Their beams raked back and forth in the damp air as they turned their heads, and Enzo saw a stone staircase arcing down into deeper darkness. The distant rumble of traffic from the Place d’Italie overhead was still audible. Just.

  The tunnel cop had met them in front of the soaring glass frontage of the Gaumont Grand Écran opposite the nineteenth century splendour of the thirteenth arrondissement’s town hall, and led them down a side street to where a temporary canvas awning had been raised around a circular manhole cover in the pavement. The metal-framed letters IDC were embedded in the cover, above a slot into which the cop inserted a sturdy iron key to lift the lid. Thomas had introduced him simply as Franck, and then announced that he would wait for them in the café on the corner of the Rue Bobillot.