Extraordinary People ef-4

by Peter May

  Enzo forced himself to focus on her. ‘The night Gaillard disappeared, a person or persons unknown broke into the church of St. Étienne du Mont. St. Étienne’s had been Gaillard’s church for nearly thirty years. The intruders slaughtered a pig in front of the altar.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To cover the fact that they had just murdered Jacques Gaillard on the same spot.’

  Charlotte’s eyes opened wide. She had turned quite pale. ‘How can you know that?’

  ‘Because I took a sample of the bloodstains left in the stone. And the laboratory analysis shows that there were two types of blood staining the flagstones in the church. Pig. And human.’

  ‘That doesn’t prove it was Gaillard’s.’

  ‘No. But the DNA does. The DNA extracted from the human blood in the church matches the DNA in a sample of hair that I provided for the lab. I took that hair from a comb in Gaillard’s apartment.’ Enzo paused. ‘Gaillard was butchered — very possibly dismembered — right there in front of the altar where he normally worshipped.’

  For a moment he thought that she was going to faint. She grabbed his arm and half-staggered.

  ‘Are you all right?’ He put an arm around her and felt that she was trembling.

  She pushed him away. ‘I’m fine.’ She seemed embarrassed. ‘It’s just…well, it’s horrible.’ She took a deep breath. ‘In my job, you deal with everything in the abstract. In the mind. It’s a shock to be confronted with the reality.’

  The sun broke through the mist above the city for the first time, sending light coruscating across the broken surface of the river. Somewhere a tug sounded its horn, and they heard laughter coming from the queue for les égouts.

  ‘One more shock, then. If you can take it,’ Enzo said, and she looked up into his face, brows deeply furrowed. He preferred her eyes when they were smiling.

  ‘What?’

  ‘A visit to the morgue.’

  II

  Docteur Bellin was involved in an autopsy when they arrived at the Institut Médico Légal, and so they waited in the tiny park next door. It was named after an architect, Albert Tournaire, and was little more than a central flowerbed ringed by a path and flanked by tiny lawns and a handful of trees. They sat on one of the benches, with their backs to the dead, and looked along the river instead towards the Pont Sully and the twin towers of Notre Dame beyond. A hot July sun had burned off the early morning cloud, and the sky was the clearest summer blue. A dusty white heat was already beginning to settle on the city.

  Charlotte had barely spoken two words on the métro, and now she sat in contemplative silence, before turning to look thoughtfully at Enzo. ‘I saw him on television, you know. Never missed his show. I was a student then, and movies were important.’ A pale smile flickered briefly across her face, reflecting some thought that came and went. ‘I suppose he must have been more than twice my age, but I had quite a crush on him at the time.’

  Enzo was surprised. ‘He was a strange looking guy.’

  ‘He had charm and personality and wit. You don’t find much of any of that in today’s crop of celebs.’ She almost spat the word “celeb” on to the path, a clear enough indication of the contempt with which she regarded contemporary French celebrities. She turned to gaze earnestly at Enzo. ‘Why would anyone want to murder him like that?’

  ‘You’re the psychologist. You tell me.’

  She didn’t seem to like that much and looked away again, and Enzo regretted his bluntness. But she changed the subject before he could try to soften it. ‘You said your daughters had different mothers. What happened?’

  He wasn’t sure if she was genuinely interested, or simply finding an excuse to talk about something else. ‘I got married when I was twenty.’

  ‘Ouch! Too young.’

  ‘It was. We were still students. At our hometown university. We did it to get away from home, really. Get a place of our own.’ He shook his head at the memory. ‘A damp, grotty, one-bedroomed tenement flat in Partick with a shared lavatory on the landing. By the time we graduated, the relationship had probably run its course. But then she got pregnant.’

  Charlotte looked at him. ‘Women don’t just get pregnant, Enzo. Men make them pregnant.’

  Enzo nodded his acknowledgement. ‘Okay, we got pregnant — and spent the next seven years regretting it. Not the kid, not Kirsty. Us. The fact that we’d tied ourselves to one another when it wasn’t really what either of us wanted. And, you know, you do that thing, stay together for the kid. And I’m not sure it’s the right thing.’

  ‘Sounds like you’re building up to a justification for leaving them.’

  Enzo looked at her. ‘I forgot. I’m talking to a psychologist.’ And, after a moment, ‘Are you going to bill me for this?’

  ‘So you met someone else?’

  Enzo looked away. None of it had seemed predictable to him then. But no doubt Charlotte had heard the same story a thousand times. ‘At a conference of the International Association of Forensic Scientists at Nice.’

  Charlotte smiled. ‘I suppose they picked Nice because of its importance to forensic science.’

  Enzo laughed. ‘It’s true. Sunshine and seafood are very important to forensic scientists.’

  ‘Was she a forensic scientist?’

  ‘She’d just graduated. She was twenty-three. I was thirty. And I knew she was the one. From the minute she spilled her drink in my lap.’

  Across the Seine a police boat gunned its engine and set off up river at speed, blue light flashing, siren wailing.

  ‘So you left your wife and kid and came to France?’

  ‘It wasn’t just my family I gave up. It was my career. In those days my French wasn’t that great, and I’d never have got a job in the police scientifique. And, of course, by then Pascale was pregnant.’ And before Charlotte could say anything he corrected himself. ‘I’d got her pregnant.’

  ‘Good God,’ Charlotte said, ‘have you never heard of condoms?’ He smiled. ‘So what happened?’

  Enzo’s jaw set and he stared silently towards the ële St. Louis. ‘She died in childbirth. Left me a beautiful daughter to remind me of her every day of the rest of my life.’ He stood up quickly, thrusting his hands in his pockets to hide the emotion he felt welling up inside. ‘But Sophie was also her gift. The best thing that ever happened to me.’

  After a long moment, Charlotte asked, ‘What about your other daughter?’

  Enzo’s lips tightened. ‘Kirsty won’t even speak to me. And do you know what’s ironic?’ He turned to find Charlotte looking up at him. ‘She’s here, in Paris. Living on the ële St. Louis. Not half a mile from here.’ He gazed back down river. ‘And it’s as if I don’t even exist.’

  * * *

  Bellin had the smell of death about him. No doubt he had showered after changing out of his surgical pyjamas, but still he brought the perfume of the autopsy room with him into his office. He was clearly excited, dark eyes shining with anticipation. He took them through to his tiny studio. The head he had taken down from the shelf the day before was still on the table. Charlotte looked at it curiously.

  ‘Is this it?’ she asked. Enzo nodded and watched her closely. She had been a fan of Gaillard. Watched his TV show. Had a crush on him. But she just shrugged and frowned. ‘Doesn’t look like anyone I know,’ she said.

  ‘Wait,’ said Bellin, and he sat down in front of the twenty-inch cinema screen of his Macintosh G5 and shuffled the mouse. His screensaver vanished and a photograph of Gaillard appeared in its place. He turned and looked triumphantly at Enzo.

  Enzo was confused, uncertain of what he was supposed to be seeing. ‘Where’s the head?’

  Bellin smiled. ‘You’re looking at it. Digital photographs of it manipulated by software, hair and whiskers superimposed and morphed on to the image.’ He hit a key, and an extraordinarily lifelike 3D image of the head began slowly revolving on the screen.

  Enzo heard Charlotte gasp and glanced at her across the room. Her eyes
were fixed on the image. ‘It’s him,’ she whispered.

  Enzo looked back to the screen. ‘It certainly looks like him. But it’s not proof.’

  ‘How can you prove it, then?’ she asked.

  ‘DNA,’ Bellin said.

  Enzo asked him, ‘Do you still have the skull?’

  ‘Of course.’ Bellin stooped to open a cupboard door. A row of seven or eight skulls sat side by side on the bottom shelf. He checked the labels, and then lifted one of them out and placed it on the table. The repair work around the lower mandible, where it had been smashed, was evident.

  Enzo gazed at it curiously and felt the hairs lift up on the back of his neck. He had no doubt he was looking at Jacques Gaillard’s skull. He said to Charlotte, ‘When the Americans sent forensic pathologists to Bosnia in the nineties to try to identify bodies found in mass graves, they employed a new technique which allowed them to extract a DNA profile from old bones by, literally, grinding them down. It’s a technique more recently employed in Iraq.’ He looked at Bellin. ‘Your people can do this by grinding down a piece of the skull, can’t they?’

  Bellin inclined his head in acknowledgement. ‘We can have a result in twenty-four hours.’

  Chapter Six

  I

  A large white swan left a gentle V-shaped ripple in its wake as it glided effortlessly up to their window and peered in jealously at the food on the table. Beyond, the shimmering red-tiled roofs of the old town rose up from Port Bullier to the imposing stone tower of the mediaeval prison and the painfully blue Lotois sky behind it.

  Enzo was pleased to be back in Cahors, an escape from the noise and pollution of Paris, oppressive high buildings crowding narrow streets. Here, he could breathe again. He had missed the tree-covered hills rising all around from the banks of the river, the purity of the air, the simple sound of a church bell pealing out across ancient rooftops, calling the faithful to prayer. Life seemed so much less complicated here.

  He was pleased, too, by the discomfort of Préfet Verne and his chief of police, Madame Taillard, who were sitting opposite. A copy of Libération lay on the table between them. The headline the sub-editors had given Raffin’s story was, GAILLARD ASSASSINÉ. A subheading read, La Verité Après Dix Ans. There was a large reproduction of Bellin’s digitally treated forensic facial approximation of Gaillard’s head, full-face and profile.

  The police chief was fixing Enzo with a hard stare, colour high on her cheeks. Enzo reminded himself that Hélène Taillard had once been attracted to him. There was a time when he might have felt something reciprocal, but that had long since passed. He suspected that she sensed this, and that it was fuelling her hostility now — a woman scorned. ‘It proves nothing,’ she said dismissively.

  ‘It proves that he was murdered,’ Enzo said.

  ‘Which is no more than everyone suspected,’ said the Préfet. He tore off a piece of bread and mopped some Roquefort sauce from his plate. He was handling the situation with more dignity than his chief of police.

  Enzo liked Jean-Luc Verne. He was one of more than a hundred regional administrators, state-appointed and hugely powerful. A man several years Enzo’s senior, he had been running the Département du Lot for the past two years. They had met at a party and found they shared the same ironic sense of humour.

  ‘Suspected perhaps,’ Enzo said. ‘But in ten years the Paris police failed to find a single piece of evidence to prove it.’

  Madame Taillard said, ‘Policing techniques have changed radically in ten years.’

  ‘Which, I think, was Monsieur Macleod’s point in the first place,’ the Préfet said. ‘And he is to be congratulated on his achievement. The political repercussions of Gaillard’s murder are, as we speak, reverberating around the corridors of power in Paris.’ He sipped appreciatively on a Château Lagrézette, which he had selected himself from the Carte des Vins, and turned back towards Enzo. ‘However, proving that he was murdered is one thing. To win our little wager you’ll need to determine who murdered him, and why. And that is quite another.’

  There had been four of them at the dinner table the night they made the bet. Enzo, Simon on one of his unannounced visits from London, Préfet Verne, and police chief Taillard.

  ‘Which, I think, was my point,’ she said now, clearly piqued. ‘The trail is ten years old, as cold as the stone upon which Monsieur Gaillard was apparently murdered.’

  ‘But not as cold as it was,’ Enzo pointed out.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Préfet Verne. ‘The items in the trunk.’

  They were all startled by a sharp rap at the window, and turned to see the swan glaring at them. It was not pleased at being ignored.

  The Préfet said, ‘I think perhaps diners on the top deck are in the habit of throwing it titbits. It’s probably wondering why we’re not doing the same.’ Which would have been impossible, since the air-conditioned lower salon of the Bateau au Fil Douceurs restaurant was almost at river level, its windows sealed against the summer heat. And the water. The boat was berthed on the east side of the river, beyond the Pont de Cabessut, a chunky, white-painted vessel which looked as if it might topple over if ever it were to set sail. It had been Préfet Verne’s suggestion that they lunch there. He had expensive tastes. He turned his attention away again from the swan. ‘Where were we? Ah, yes, the items in the trunk. What on earth do they mean?’

  ‘Well, that’s just it,’ Enzo said. ‘They must mean something.’

  ‘Why?’ asked chief Taillard.

  ‘Because you wouldn’t cut off a man’s head and bury it in a trunk with five seemingly unrelated items unless you had a reason. And if there’s a reason, then there must be a way of working out what it was.’

  ‘And you intend to use forensic science to find out?’ said the Préfet.

  ‘No, I intend to use my brain.’

  II

  Madame Taillard drove back on her own to the Caserne Bessières at the north end of town. Enzo walked across the Pont de Cabessut with Préfet Verne, who was puffing gently on his post prandial cigar. Bright southern sunlight spilled across the rooftops to the old city wall and the Tour des Pendus, where lawbreakers were once hanged in full public view. They turned south towards the Place Champollion. ‘I know we all believed that something awful had happened to him,’ the Préfet said, ‘but one is never really prepared for the truth. Somehow it’s always worse than you could possibly have imagined. Poor Jacques.’

  ‘You knew him?’

  ‘Yes, but not well. We were at ENA together. There were nearly a hundred and thirty of us in our promotion, but everyone knew Jacques Gaillard. He was a character. Not necessarily a likeable one — he was somewhat full of himself. But he certainly brought a little colour into our dull academic lives. Ironic that he should have spent his last year back there teaching.’

  ‘It must have been something of a comedown for him. From Prime Ministerial advisor to teacher.’

  ‘No, not really. He wasn’t a teacher, exactly. There are no full-time professors at ENA — except for sport. The brightest pupils are taught only by the best brains. Top fonctionnaires, captains of industry, former cabinet ministers, all invited to take time out of busy lives to pass on their experience to the next generation. It was George Bernard Shaw, wasn’t it, who said that those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach? Well, it was de Gaulle’s vision that those who do exceptionally well should teach their successors how to do likewise. Which is why he created ENA.’ They turned west and began the climb up the narrow Rue Maréchal Foch at the back of the cathedral towards the Hôtel du Département, and the offices of the Préfet. ‘So it wasn’t really a demotion, as such,’ he added. ‘More a sideways shuffle to move his celebrity spotlight away from the Prime Minister.’

  They stopped at the gate of the Conseil Général and shook hands, and Préfet Verne pushed through wrought-iron into the cobbled courtyard beyond, to vanish into his own administrative empire. Enzo crossed the square opposite the cathedral with a lightness in his ste
p. The Saturday market was over, and a truck with large rotating brushes was cleaning away the débris. He reached the brick arches of La Halle at the foot of the Place Jean-Jacques Chapou and strolled in through the back entrance of the covered market with his hands in his pockets. Past the poissonerie, with all its fresh fish laid out on crushed ice; Le Chai the wine seller, where you could fill your own container from huge stainless steel vats; Monsieur Chevaline, the butcher; the charcuterie where Enzo sometimes bought pre-cooked plats Asiatique to carry out. The wine seller waved and shouted salut. The butcher called that he had some very tender filet mignon just in. But Enzo wasn’t buying. He was just revelling in being back. Where everything was a known quantity and everyone was familiar. Such a contrast with the hostile anonymity of Paris.

  His good mood lasted for as long as it took him to open the door of his apartment and trip over something lurking in the shadows of the hall. It was hard and unyielding and caught him squarely on the shin. He cursed, and saw that it was Bertrand’s metal detector.

  It had been there since before his trip to Paris, arriving unexpectedly one night as Enzo was heading down for a nightcap at the Café Le Forum. He had been confronted by Bertrand out on the landing, cradling the long-necked creature with its disc-like head in strong, muscular arms.

  Enzo had never made any attempt to disguise his disapproval of this young man with his spiky, blond-tipped brown hair, and pointless pieces of metal piercing eyebrow, nose and lip. ‘What the hell…!’

  ‘Hi, Papa.’ Sophie’s bright, smiling face, appearing at Bertrand’s shoulder, had made Enzo momentarily forget his irritation. It happened almost every time. Whenever he wasn’t expecting to see her, and she caught him unawares, he always saw her mother in her. Those bright, dark eyes, her elfin face, long blue-black hair fanning out across her shoulders. And the memory of Pascale would wash over him, powerful and melancholic. The only part of Sophie which was identifiably him was the pale streak in her hair which ran back through it from her left temple, not as pronounced as his own, although there was no mistaking the stubborn streak they both shared with equal vigour. ‘You don’t mind if we leave it here for a couple of days?’ she’d said. ‘There’s no room at Bertrand’s mum’s, and the health and safety people would object if he left it lying around the gym.’