Significance (18 page)

He repeats these to himself several times, but he is restless. He needs movement, needs to shake out his legs, charge his muscles, get his blood racing.

In an act of compromise he carefully copies out the names of the major parts of the larynx onto the palm of his left hand in biro, then after a brief look at the diagram again, he sets off for a morning jog.

The sweat (produced by the eccrine gland) would cause these inky words to dissipate except that in this temperature and at close to sea level, Joseph's morning exercise barely raises his pulse. Like a man on the moon he feels almost weightless and his movements are effortless.

The sun has long risen and the sky is a deep blue and there is a faint breeze in the air. He smells flowers, coffee, baking bread, petrol and diesel fumes. His limbs flex and beat out a rhythm which is without sound, but is felt through his spring
-
loaded feet. Breathing easily, he thinks about the inside of his mouth, about swallowing, breathing, speaking, kissing; about the sounds the mourning women made at funerals in his home town, the ululations carrying far and wide, the wolf's howl, the newborn baby's cry. And singing too. Miraculous, all of it.

Science opened up the path to seeing, to knowledge, but what was found was so mind
-
bogglingly remarkable one almost imagined a God
-
like genius behind it all. Chance, for that was what evolution was really all about, seemed irrational. Preposterous.

Joseph paced himself. Long strides, heels kicking up behind him, hands held high like paddles, head erect; larynx, trachea, hyoid bone, glottis, epiglottis. The opening and closing of a flap to shut off the passage to the lungs, the vocal chords vibrating like the reed in a wind instrument.

So much of this delicate machinery could go wrong, and yet for the most part it didn't.

He slowed his pace when he came to a small café, though he wasn't tiring. He would stop and have something to eat and, as he swallowed, he would pay attention to the workings of his body and, when he spoke, he would picture his phonation, the intricate work of tiny muscles constricting and contracting to make his words.

Inside the café it seems as dark as a cave. He blinks as his eyes adjust to the gloom. Behind the counter there is a middle
-
aged woman. She is very small and very round, with a mole on her chin and another between her eyebrows, which gives the impression that she is frowning. When he was a child he would have been frightened by her – for who but a witch would have such ugly moles?

‘
Bonjour, Madame
,' he says and inclines his head in a respectful nod. She appreciates this and smiles in welcome.

‘
Monsieur?
'

‘A coffee, please, and bread.'

A siren rends the air and Joseph turns towards the door just in time to see the flickering light of the emergency vehicle as it speeds past.

Fallen Angel

The young woman had no identification on her, which was not a surprise to Paul Vivier; he had guessed it as soon as he set eyes on the crime scene.

They had combed the immediate area and there was no convenient discovery of a handbag which contained a passport, ID card, flight or rail tickets. No diary or mobile phone. No purse containing foreign currency or credit cards. No personal items; an inscribed book, a letter, no receipts that usefully showed where she had recently been or what she had purchased.

She might have fallen from heaven. Not that Vivier believed in heaven, but he was not above imagining a paradise where angels dressed, not in long white diaphanous gowns, but in pretty summer dresses such as this girl was wearing.

Demoiselles
were creatures such as she; fairies from the forests, spirits from pagan times who always dressed in purest white. Wild flowers were said to spring into life where they stepped. But then with Christianity they had become visions of the Virgin Mary. The peasant girl Bernadette Soubirous had seen a young woman in an elegant white gown in a grotto near Lourdes no less than eighteen times. But the woman lying in the ditch was dead, her presence there symptomatic of evil rather than heavenly grace.

He found himself gazing up momentarily at the sky. Pure blue, the same achingly luminous blue that is seen in the summer scenes in the calendar commissioned by the Duc de Berry in the fifteenth century. The sort of blue that made you believe there had to be something more than empty air above you.

It would have been so much easier to get away with murder in the fifteenth century – throw a body over a cliff then add a basket and a few broken gulls' eggs. Throw enough girls from the same village into ditches and people will think not of serial killers, but of how the females of that region are particularly accident prone, or bewitched. A legend might spring up about a particular dark lake and how at a certain hour during full moon, young maidens are at risk of meeting their deaths there. A creature, a bog sprite perhaps or some other demonic force might be sometimes glimpsed in the distance, bulky and shadowy amongst the trees at the water's edge.

Maybe it was easier to imagine an otherworldly monster, a spectre of evil that rose out of the swirling yellow
-
green mists which hung over the land at dusk, than to think that somewhere in the community there was a man; a friend, neighbour or brother who, now and again, was filled with the urge to kill.

Science provided other truths, and society, no longer fixed and insular, provided highways and autobahns, railways and airplanes; the movements of people were free and unfettered, and amongst the crowds who wandered the avenues and back streets of this small town there were many strangers. No one stood out as the obvious culprit, and the victim was unidentified.

Most murders are committed by people who know their victims; a husband or wife, a mother or father, a lover or work colleague, and the circumstances of the event are easily spelled out at the scene of crime or in the events of the next few hours. But here, in this foul
-
smelling ditch was an as yet anonymous woman who'd been killed by another anonymous person. Nothing could bring her back, nothing could undo what had already been done, but the murderer must be found. Especially if, as Vivier surmised, this was the same man who had taken the life of Marianne Sigot.

In the northern suburbs of Paris, ten or perhaps twelve years ago, Paul Vivier had been involved in the hunt for the ‘Seine Boat Man' as the press had dubbed that particular killer. Only two of his victims' bodies were found in or near water, but the label had stuck.

Vivier, like others in his position in the USA, UK, Italy, Germany – wherever – found the press' involvement in the early days of detection, and more especially their deeper involvement in ongoing cases, to be deeply troubling if not actually harmful.

Imagination, thought Vivier, is both man's curse and his blessing.

He looked down at the young woman's form again as she hung there over the soupy
-
looking grey water, illuminated momentarily by the searing white light of the police cameraman's flash.

Imagination was equally woman's curse and blessing. Some thought, some belief, an idea of trust or love may have brought this young woman to this, and physical evidence aside, Vivier knew that part of his role in the detection of this crime would demand that he begin to imagine a series of dramas which led to the moment of her demise.

The first and simplest of these dramas was that she had simply fallen. Not from heaven, but from the bank just a few feet above the ditch. Such a fall however would be unlikely to kill anyone. He pictured her running at speed along the bank, imagined her laughing, a little drunk perhaps, with the recklessly giddy movements of someone stoked with alcohol. Then he struck the laugh from the scene and added a pursuer.

The path that ran alongside the ditch covered a stretch of flat, open scrubland between one industrial unit and another and although it was approximately the length of a football pitch, there was only one light halfway along.

As he trained his gaze and his imagination to the furthest end of the ditch, he turned to find Sabine Pelat was suddenly at his side, proffering a paper cup of coffee.

‘Sir?'

He took the cup, aware of his fingers' overzealous grasp as the paper container gave a little under the pressure.

‘Not very hot, I'm afraid,' she said, lifting an identical cup to her lips.

‘That's fine.'

They stood companionably side by side sipping the lukewarm coffee and watching the busy scene before them.

‘I have a bad feeling about this one,' Vivier said, conscious that his words probably made him sound like a detective from one of Sabine Pelat's murder mysteries.

‘Me, too,' Sabine said, ‘but then…'

‘But then?'

‘I always do. With women, I mean, as a woman myself.'

Vivier turned to look at Pelat, curious to see the expression on her face.

Sabine Pelat, who always claimed absolute equality with men, who would not be patronised, or talked down to. Whom one dare not even compliment or speak affectionately to. And now here she was quietly saying this; reminding him that she was a woman?

‘Because?' he said.

She frowned. Her dark hair was pulled back from her face in two glossy wings that joined in a chignon at the base of her skull; her olive
-
coloured skin was scrubbed clean and gleamed in places where the light caught it. Her eyebrows were finely shaped, her eyelashes heavy and dark. Such a woman, Vivier thought, can easily scorn the artificiality of make
-
up and still look a thousand times more beautiful than her less principled and over
-
painted sisters.

‘Because,' she said, and now she turned to meet his gaze, ‘because this is what happens to us.'

He knew it was better to absorb her words in silence rather than challenge them. It was not the time to raise polemical issues about gender, about masculinity and how men die in street fights and construction accidents and wars. So instead he blinked slowly and nodded his head. And then, as if to challenge the limitless potential of human imagination, he pictured himself, without really meaning to, kissing her. And Sabine, suddenly abandoning her steely professional reserve, kissing him back.

He hoped his thoughts were not betrayed by his expression. He looked away from Sabine Pelat and stared at the dead girl instead.

A Thousand Cuts

Aaron, when they found him, had attracted a small audience of onlookers, and no wonder, as his hands and once pristine white t
-
shirt were smeared with blood. But he was standing quietly enough, as was his way. With his thin shoulders hunched, head tilted to one side he was gazing into space – into that floating other world that existed only for Aaron. His hands were busy, and what they held, what he passed from one hand to another and twirled between his fingers was a razor blade. The old
-
fashioned kind, very thin and flexible and extremely sharp, and it had efficiently scored and rescored his flesh as it was passed between his hands. The cuts were perhaps superficial, but there were so many and so much blood.

The postman stood nearby, daring to take up a position closer to Aaron than any of the other onlookers, and somehow, because of his uniform, reminiscent at that moment of the circus ringmaster, or the lion tamer, the only one with the courage to approach the wild beast.

Scott nodded gravely at the postman who responded in kind. Marilyn felt there was more to this man's interest and subsequent actions than just kindness. He seemed to have a personal knowledge of what it meant to deal with someone like Aaron. Perhaps he too had a brother or sister or cousin who suffered from something like that which afflicted Aaron. Or worse, and certainly sadder, he might be the father of a child with disabilities.

Scott stepped forward, clearly aware of the audience Aaron had attracted, and although seemingly calm, he must have been raging beneath the surface. Not raging with anger alone, but with the torments of the public gaze, of being exposed as a man incapable of watching over his brother and keeping him from harm.

And then there was fear too. Fear about how badly Aaron might have hurt himself, fear of involvement with the French police and social services, fear of a legal battle which might drag on for weeks and delay their escape and lastly, but by no means least, fear of his parents' reactions when they heard about the incident. His mother would weep. His father, though less demonstrative, would express his disappointment by failing to look Scott in the eye.

All of this ran like a torrential river through Scott's mind, but when he spoke his voice was both authoritative and gentle, firm yet kind.

‘Aaron. Aaron!'

Aaron did not look up, but his hands stopped moving and grew limp so that the blade at last fell and landed soundlessly on the blood
-
splashed pavement.

Scott put a guiding arm around Aaron and began to lead him away from the crowd and towards home.

The postman, again taking up a quasi
-
official role, addressed the people in rapid French. Marilyn understood only a smattering of his words. Words, which in hindsight, adequately told a story – lost boy, family, medicine, American, no ambulance needed, no, it's over now.