Peter May - Extraordinary People

‘Well, I don’t know about oil and walls, but these days it’s perfectly possible to get blood out of a stone.’

Raffin frowned. ‘Even blood that’s ten years old?’

Enzo nodded. ‘And even from the floor of a fifteenth century church.’ He smiled. ‘The wonders of modern forensic science. It will be a fairly straightforward matter to extract DNA from the sample scrapings I’ve taken and subject it to some basic precipitin tests.’

‘Precipitin?’

‘You mix the DNA on a glass slide with some anti-pig globulin. If there’s a positive reaction, there will be a visible clot, or clump — or “precipitate” form — and we’ll know whether or not it was pig’s blood.’

‘But we already know that it’s pig’s blood. You heard the curé . They left the butchered beast behind.’

‘That’s right. And I confidently predict that we will indeed confirm the presence of pig’s blood. But we’ll also mix the DNA with some anti-human globulin, which will tell us if there is any human blood amongst it.’

Raffin’s face darkened, and he glanced around self-consciously. A sign on a stand next to them urged them to SILENCE. He lowered his voice. ‘Gaillard’s blood?’

‘Well, we’ll be able to tell that, too, from the DNA.’

‘You think Gaillard was murdered here?’’

‘I don’t know.’ Enzo paused. ‘Yet. But this was his church. Even although it was another ten days before he was actually reported missing, he made a rendezvous to meet someone the same night that intruders broke in here and slaughtered a pig. He drew a cross next to the rendezvous in his diary. A lot of coincidences there.’

‘It’s a bit of a leap, though.’

‘Perhaps. But sometimes you have to make those kinds of leaps.’ Enzo paused for reflection. ‘And think back to earlier this morning. His mother told us that his favourite film was La Traversée de Paris . Two men smuggling the pieces of a dismembered pig across Paris. Another coincidence?’

‘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.’

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.