“You must be able to hear it!”
Apparently he could not. But I tore the lamp out of his hands and rushed back to the bedroom. I thought the sound was stronger there, even though August still looked baffled. I squatted and tried to push the carpet to the side. I did not succeed—it was stuck somehow. When I examined it more closely, I saw that it had been nailed to a floor hatch similar to the other one, so that it would automatically rise when the hatch rose and fall back into place when it closed.
August put his hand on my shoulder.
“Leave it,” he said. “Let us call the gendarmes.”
But I could not stop. Not with that cry in my ears. I opened the hatch.
There was a room down there, smaller than the cellar room and with a lower ceiling. I got a shadowy sense of shelves and cupboards, books, boxes, a worktable, a row of glass cabinets full of jars and instruments—all in all an odd mixture of laboratory and storage room.
There was someone down there. Madame Arnaud stood directly under the hatch, looking up at me with a hand shielding her eyes against the light.
“I thought you would come,” she said. “You cannot be stopped.”
She seemed quite calm, despite the slumped figure at her feet.
It was Adrian Althauser, and he was clearly stone-dead. Few people survive having a scalpel driven so deeply into their left eye that only a few centimeters of the handle are visible.
“He said we needed to clear the room,” Madame Arnaud continued in her oddly calm voice. “He said we would have to terminate the experiment, that it was too risky now, and we had to remove the evidence. That is what he called her: ‘the experiment.’ He wanted to discard her. But I have taken care of her for almost three months now. She is no ‘experiment.’ ”
Between the two glass cabinets stood one of Althauser’s specially developed incubators. The crying was louder now, and there was no longer any doubt where it came from. It tore at me, that cry, dragging me down through the hatch, past Madame Arnaud, past Althauser’s stiffening corpse.
In the incubator lay a wrinkled little girl with gigantic eyes and the tiniest nose I had ever seen. She looked straight up at me and stopped crying. She wanted me to pick her up.
It was the first time Catherine made me do precisely what she wanted. It would not be the last.
“That young girl in the coal cellar? He forced the photographer to do it. To get rid of her, I mean. Made him do it.”
“How?” Police Inspector Marot asked patiently. He could be surprisingly gentle when he questioned witnesses.
“How?” Madame Arnaud looked confused. “M’sieur, he could make anyone do anything. Sooner or later, once he knew how they functioned inside, they could wriggle as much as they liked, it did no good. I wriggled too. But not for very long. It was easier just to do what he said.” She looked over at me and Catherine.
“You’ll take care of her, won’t you?” she said. “Mademoiselle, you know that she is a child, a human being and not an experiment, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “I will take care of her.”
The police inspector looked ill at ease. He was having a hard time looking at Catherine, I noticed.
“How did Monsieur Althauser and Monsieur Gilbert know each other?” he asked.
“He needed someone to take pictures of all those mothers and children,” said Madame Arnaud. “For his research. And of other things. Things that . . . he did not want . . . that many photographers would not take pictures of.”
The police inspector had at that point already seen some of the photographs Althauser had collected in the room’s many filing drawers. Some of them were the raw material for the posters he had used in his lecture. Others were less suitable for public presentation. He had let Gilbert photograph his operations and dissections step-by-step. Later the police found a series of pictures of his attempt to carry out Porro’s procedure on Rosalba Lombardi.
Marot cleared his throat. “And the . . . uh, child. How did it happen that . . . ?”
“She was desperate,” said Madame Arnaud. “The mother. The Italian girl. She could not take care of it, she said, but she could not kill it either. It was a sin. And they had refused her at the institute because she was . . . you know, not a decent woman. But then he promised her that he would take it out alive. That it would live, and be cared for. And she believed him. Or perhaps . . . perhaps she had to believe it because she had no other options. He did it here. And he had that ready.” She pointed at the incubator. “But the mother started bleeding, and then she died. And that was when we put her in the yard . . . There were so many people everywhere, we had to just leave her there even though it was much too close.”
They could have left her in the cellar, I thought, with no one any the wiser, at least until the uproar after the president’s murder had died down. If a living Fleur could be hidden there, why not a dead Rosalba? But perhaps an unforeseen death could create panic even in a man as calculating as Althauser. It might even be because he was normally so calculating—he was not used to having to act without a preexisting plan.
Fleur’s murder, on the other hand, had been meticulously planned. Aristide Gilbert had received exact instructions about when he was to collect her from the cellar, what he must do to her, where he should leave her, and how he was to mark her body so as to provide the most plausible substance for the Ripper theory. While Althauser had stood at the rostrum in the lavish halls of the Brotherhood of Freedom giving his speech about the nation’s future—while the audience applauded and his fellow patriots drank to his toast—he had known that Aristide Gilbert was murdering Fleur on his orders.
“He told him to cut her throat,” Madame Arnaud explained. “So that it would look like that girl from Bruc. But then he read in the paper that she had drowned. That made him quite angry.”
That had been the only mercy that Aristide Gilbert had dared to show, I thought. I thought the water would be kinder than the other thing, he had written. But since Fleur was in no way similar to his “poor Alice,” it had been a dubious mercy. Her death would probably have been quicker if he had done as Althauser commanded.
Fleur’s endless hours in the cold cellar, the smashed hands, the suffering her thirst had caused her—it was all so that she could die at precisely the moment that Althauser had ordained.
It was just as well that Madame Arnaud had killed him, or I would have been tempted to do so myself.
Two gendarmes came to lead Madame Arnaud up to the prison transport that waited—colloquially christened a panier à salade because the vehicle’s cages were reminiscent of the baskets in which one slings lettuce to dry it. On the threshold, she turned and stopped for a moment.
“You will take care of her, won’t you?” she asked again. “She is not an experiment . . .”
“I know,” I said, and pulled the woolly blanket higher around the hairless little head. I could feel her heartbeat against my uncorseted chest. “I thought we would name her Catherine . . .”
Madame Arnaud nodded. The gendarmes hustled her toward the waiting wagon, and she did not resist.
Dowager Constance Heering-Dreyfuss was angry. That much was evident from the sharpness of her gestures and the way her lilac eyes had narrowed.
“If you think, mademoiselle, that you can fob off the random offspring of some prostitute on me, then you are very wrong. I did not think it was possible to misunderstand our arrangement. I want an heir, not some freak of nature. I’m given to understand she is even bred in an entirely unnatural way on some deceased whore.”
“Grandmama,” said August, “that is enough.”
My future husband’s grandmother stopped in the midst of a furious turn.
“Enough? I haven’t even started.”
“I mean it,” he said. “If you wish to be invited to our wedding, then these insults must stop. I do not require you to understand our choice, but if you wish to continue to be a part of my life, you will have to accept that I have a daugh
ter and a wife, and that they deserve some respect.”
I rose. “Constance,” I said, “don’t you want to hold her for a little while?”
“No, I most certainly do not!”
Despite her protests, I extended Catherine’s tiny, well-swathed form toward her, with a clear sense that what I was handing her was not so much an infant as a secret weapon.
Five minutes later, Catherine was asleep in her great-grandmother’s arms, and there was no more talk of freaks and whores.
How can I explain it? She is not the child of my own body. I have not carried her for nine months—no woman has. I believe that had she not willed herself to live, had she not been such an armful of concentrated survival power, then her miracle would not have occurred. She should have been dead. She just refused to be. And that will to survive is so strong that it drags the rest of us in. We do what it takes. We comply. We care for her needs, we give her what her survival demands. In return, she occasionally rewards us with a look. And most of the time this seems to be an entirely reasonable bargain.
With August, I can make agreements, demand equality, claim my independence. With Catherine, I cannot.
Perhaps it is because she is so tiny. Perhaps it is because I never saw her mother alive. For whatever reason, it is a fact that when I look at Catherine, it is not Rosalba’s features I occasionally believe I can recognize. It is Fleur’s.
Most of the time she is merely herself. By rights, she should not be alive.
But she is.
Author’s Note
“Eugénie Colombe” is in fact Eugénie Delhomme, the first victim of France’s own “Jack the Ripper,” Joseph Vacher. She was found abused, murdered, and disfigured on May 20, 1894, near the town of Beaurepaire. Joseph Vacher was able to murder at least twenty people, primarily women, girls, and young boys between the ages of thirteen and twenty-one, before he was executed on December 31, 1898, in Bourg-en-Bresse, just twenty-nine years old himself.
A huge thank-you to the people without whose help this book would have had far more mistakes and deficiencies:
Eva Kaaberbøl
Michael Thorberg
Rudi Urban Rasmussen
Lotte Krarup
Bent Lund
Berit Wheler
Esthi Kunz
Lars Ringhof
Bibs Carlsen
Agnete Friis
And finally, my thanks to the Danish Centre for Writers and Translators at Hald Hovedgaard, and to Peter and Gitte Rannes, for five weeks of unrivaled peace, hospitality, inspiration, and occasional laughter.
About the Author
LENE KAABERBØL, the New York Times bestselling author of Doctor Death, has sold more than two million books worldwide. She has won several awards for her fiction, including a nomination for the Hans Christian Andersen Award. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. Kaaberbøl is the coauthor of the New York Times bestseller The Boy in the Suitcase. Kaaberbøl, born in Copenhagen, now lives on the Channel Island of Sark.
MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT
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Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Lene-Kaaberbøl
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ALSO BY LENE KAABERBØL
Doctor Death
COWRITTEN WITH AGNETE FRIIS
The Boy in the Suitcase
Invisible Murder
Death of a Nightingale
The Considerate Killer
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 by Lene Kaaberbøl
Originally published in Danish in 2013 as Det levende kød by Modtryk
English translation copyright © 2017 by Elisabeth Dyssegaard
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kaaberbøl, Lene, author. | Dyssegaard, Elisabeth Kallick, translator.
Title: A lady in shadows : a Madeleine Karno mystery / Lene Kaaberbøl ;
translated by Elisabeth Dyssegaard.
Other titles: Det levende kød. English.
Description: New York : Atria Books, 2017. | Series: A Madeleine Karno
mystery | Translated from the Danish.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017027810 (print) | LCCN 2017031070 (ebook) | ISBN
9781476731445 (eBook) | ISBN 9781476731421 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Women forensic pathologists—Fiction. | Homicide
investigation—Fiction. | France—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Historical.
| FICTION / Suspense. | FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Historical. |
LCGFT: Detective and mystery fiction
Classification: LCC PT8177.21.A24 (ebook) | LCC PT8177.21.A24 L49 2017
(print) | DDC 839.813/8—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017027810
ISBN 978-1-4767-3142-1
ISBN 978-1-4767-3144-5 (ebook)
A Lady in Shadows Page 28