Dry Bones (7 page)

‘Of course, anything is possible.’

Enzo reached into his satchel and searched for a photograph of Gaillard from Raffin’s file. He held it out towards Bellin. ‘Whiskers and a
coiffure
like this might have been somewhat recognisable, don’t you think?’

Bellin took the photograph. ‘Good God! It’s Jacques Gaillard.’

‘Like I said. Somewhat recognisable.’

Bellin lifted his reconstruction off the shelf and carried it through to a small adjoining room. There were computers here, and facial and cranial charts on the walls, and a table in the centre of the room with a half-completed facial approximation on it, tiny wooden dowels inserted at thirty-four different reference points around the head. The skull had been cast in plaster, and the mandible in cold cure resin, before being rearticulated with the cranium. Both were visible down one half of a face criss-crossed with a complex of plasticine strands representing the musculature. Bellin placed the finished head next to it and switched on a bank of overhead lamps which bathed the table in soft, bright light. He looked at the photograph, examined the head, and then re-examined the photograph. Suddenly he had rediscovered all his lost enthusiasm.

‘There are umpteen points of correlation here.’

‘Can you put hair on the head? And a moustache?’

‘I can do better than that. The danger is, of course, that one is influenced by the original. But I can photograph my approximation, front, side and back, and digitise the images into the computer. And with the help of an interesting piece of software called Face, as well as Adobe Photoshop, I can recreate Monsieur Gaillard’s unusual whiskers and coiffure and superimpose them on to a 3D image of the head.’ He removed his jacket, draping it over the back of a tall stool at the table, and lifted a white overall from the back of the door. His earlier impatience to leave for the day was quite forgotten.

‘How long will it take?’ Enzo asked.

‘Hmmm?’ Bellin seemed almost unaware that Enzo was still there. He had already begun setting up his camera.

‘How long?’

‘Come back tomorrow morning, Monsieur.’

Chapter Five

I.

Enzo sat in the window of Le Balto, below his studio, dipping his croissant in a large, milky coffee, and absently watching the regulars lining up along the bar drinking small, black coffees which they washed down with cold water. The morning was sticky and overcast. Across the street, people were breakfasting under the green awnings of the Bistro Mazarin, and the street cleaners had opened sluice gates to let water wash down the gutters of the Rue Jacques Callot before draining back into the sewers below.

‘
Salut
.’ Her voice startled him out of his reverie, and he turned to find Charlotte standing by his table. She wore jeans, and a knee-length, black cotton waistcoat open over a white tee-shirt. ‘May I join you?’

He stood up. ‘Of course.’ They shook hands formally.

She turned towards the small, ginger-haired woman behind the bar. ‘
Un petit café
.’ They sat facing each other. ‘Do you want another?’ she asked as an afterthought.

He shook his head. ‘What are you doing here?’ And, then, before she had time to answer, ‘Looking for me, I hope.’

A smile split her face and crinkled around her eyes. ‘Naturally.’ When her coffee arrived Enzo waited while she stirred in the sugar. She took a sip and looked up. ‘Roger tells me you have come up with a theory about what might have happened to Jacques Gaillard.’

Enzo shrugged. ‘It’s just a theory.’ He tipped his head quizzically. ‘Why would that interest you?’

She shrugged. ‘I’m always interested in the psychology of murder.’ Then paused. ‘And, as you know, I was around when Roger was doing his research.’ She took another sip of her coffee. ‘And… maybe it seemed like a good excuse for seeing you.’ She examined the table for a moment, as if reluctant to meet his eye. Then she looked up boldly. ‘So?’

‘So what?’ It made him feel good that he might have been the real reason she was here.

‘So what’s your theory?’

‘Didn’t Roger tell you?’

‘No, he didn’t, actually.’

Enzo regarded her thoughtfully. ‘Tell you what. I’ve had analysis done on some hard evidence I collected. The lab should have the results for me in…’ He looked at his watch. ‘…about half-an-hour. Why don’t you come with me? And then we’ll know whether or not it’s more than just a theory.’

She held him in the gaze of her dark eyes for several moments, and he felt his stomach flip over. She was having a disproportionately disconcerting effect on him. ‘Okay.’

***

As he made his way down towards the Seine from the Rue de l’Université Enzo saw her rise in expectation from the bench where she had waited for him. Barges ploughed their way up river. A private motor boat passed in the other direction. The long, glass-topped boats of the bateaux mouches below the Pont de l’Alma opposite rose and fell gently on the wash. A little further east, along the left bank, tourists queued for tickets for a tour of
les
égouts
—the Paris sewers. They were not yet open. Enzo was holding the large manilla envelope they had given him at the lab, and seemed a million miles away.

‘What happened?’ Charlotte asked.

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.’