Peter May - Extraordinary People

‘Except, of course, for the skull in the trunk.’

Enzo turned back. ‘A skull in a trunk?’

‘Yes….’ La Mémoire began flipping through file cards, every one meticulously handwritten by himself. ‘Yes, here we are. I filed it under Catacombes .’

Which pricked Raffin’s interest. ‘Why?’

‘Because that’s where it was found.’ He crossed the room and ran his finger along a row of box files until he identified the one he was looking for. He pulled it out and laid it on the desk to open it, and then flipped back the spring to release its cuttings. ‘There was quite a bit of coverage at the time, just because it was so unusual. But it was a one-day wonder, really. Nothing ever came of it as far as I remember.’

Enzo sat down and started spreading the cuttings out in front of him. ‘What do you remember exactly?’

‘Just that it was discovered somewhere in the tunnels below Place d’Italie. About five years ago. A surveyor, I think, working for the Inspection Générale des Carrières . There had been some kind of collapse beneath the Avenue de Choisy, and that’s how the trunk came to light.’

Raffin peered over Enzo’s shoulder at the cuttings. ‘And it had a skull in it?’ There were photographs of a skull with the mouth and teeth smashed.

‘Yes, the skull of a middle-aged male, I believe. Quite recently deceased, they thought. Five, ten years, something like that. But it wasn’t so much the skull which created the interest, as the items found with it.’ Even as La Mémoire spoke, Enzo turned over one of the cuttings to reveal a grainy photograph of an odd collection of apparently unrelated items. ‘Ah, yes,’ said La Mémoire . ‘I remember now. Very strange stuff. A scallop shell. An antique stethoscope. A thigh bone — I think there were tiny holes drilled through either end of it. A gold insect on a chain. A pendant, I think.’ He shuffled through the cuttings. ‘Yes, it was a bee.’

Raffin lifted one of the clippings, squinting at its picture and caption. ‘And a copy of an Ordre de la Libération with May 12, 1943, engraved on the back of it.’

‘What’s an Ordre de la Libération?’ Enzo asked.

‘They were medals given out by de Gaulle to men and women who helped in the liberation of France,’ La Mémoire said.

Enzo let his eyes drift over the cuttings in front of him. ‘How bizarre. And they never figured out what it was all about?’

‘Apparently not.’

Place Dauphine, at the west end of the ële de la Cité, was where officers from the Brigade Criminelle on the Quai des Orfèvres sometimes grabbed a bite of lunch. It was a dusty, tree-filled square lined with apartments and restaurants, once the home of Yves Montand. And because of the proximity of the Palais de Justice, it was also home to the Paris Bar, le Barreau de Paris , from which the city’s advocates practised their black arts from beneath a grinning Cheshire cat painted on a rooftop gable. The pavement tables under the twin awnings of Le Caveau de Palais restaurant had been full just a little earlier. But Inspecteur Georges Thomas was having a late lunch, and so some of the seats around him had already emptied. Enzo and Raffin pulled chairs up at his table and ordered a couple of glasses of chilled white wine and watched as he used fat fingers to tear off chunks of bread and mop up the juices on his plate. His hair was cropped short, shiny steel bristles above a round tanned face with a day’s growth of silvered whiskers. His lips shone with the grease from his meal. He dragged a crumpled napkin across them and then wiped his fingers one by one. He cleansed his palate with a last mouthful of red wine and belched loudly, nodding his satisfaction.

A quick call to Raffin’s contact at the Préfecture de Police had established that Thomas had been in charge of the unsuccessful investigation to identify the skull found below Place d’Italie. He was in his mid-fifties now, treading water until retirement, and was in the habit of treating himself to long lunches in the Place Dauphine. ‘The skull? Yeah. Fucking weird one that,’ he said. ‘The local cops passed it on to us. But, you know, there was fuck all to go on. No fingerprints on the trunk, or on any of that strange shit that was in it.’ He waved the waiter over and said he would have an île flotante and a coffee.

‘What happened to it?’ Enzo asked.

Thomas looked at him as if he had two heads. ‘What kind of fucking accent is that?’

‘He’s Scottish,’ Raffin said.

Thomas made a slight forward thrusting movement of his jaw to indicate his contempt for anyone who wasn’t Parisian. ‘What happened to what?’

‘The trunk and the stuff that was in it.’

‘They’ll still be in the greffe .’

‘ Greffe ?’

‘The evidence depository,’ Raffin explained. He looked towards Thomas for confirmation. ‘In the Palais de Justice?’

Thomas nodded. The waiter arrived with his dessert, and the detective chased frothy lumps of eggwhite around a pale, watery custard which he managed to dribble down his chin. ‘I gotta blizzard of paperwork on my desk gonna make me go blind.’ He wiped his face again with his napkin. ‘But if you guys want to see the stuff, then I guess I could always take time out to show you.’

Le greffe was a large subterranean room in the bowels of the Palais de Justice, rows of metal staging supporting lines of shelves filled with the accumulated evidence of investigations past and present. Each item was bagged and labelled and tracked by a computerised index held by the Gardien du Greffe —the Keeper. It was less than five minutes’ walk from Le Caveau de Palais.

The Keeper was a man who looked as if he rarely saw daylight. His skin was pale, almost grey, and his oiled black hair was scraped back across a shrunken head. He displayed no interest when Thomas asked to see the trunk. He searched through the index on his screen and gave the detective instructions on where to find it — Row 15, Shelf C, Production Number 53974/S.

Row 15 was at the bottom end of the room, and Shelf C was near the ceiling. Thomas required stepladders to reach it. He located the bag, wrapped his arms around the trunk and lifted it down, carrying it to a table at the end of the aisle. He untied the bag and removed it to reveal a battered tin trunk, about the same size as an average suitcase, but deeper. It was a dark, military green, scraped and scored and a little rusted. ‘There were no distinguishing markings on it,’ Thomas said. ‘No manufacturer’s label. And it was probably damaged in the tunnel collapse.’ He released the catches on either side and the lid creaked as it opened. ‘ Et voilà .’

Enzo and Raffin peered inside. There were the items described in the newspaper articles: the scallop shell; the antique stethoscope, looking for all the world like an elongated horn from a vintage car; the thigh bone with its tiny holes drilled at either end; a bee, elaborately fashioned in gold and attached to a fine neck chain; the Ordre de la Libération with its green and black strip of cloth, the medal itself engraved in black with the double cross of Lorraine. ‘Where’s the skull?’ Enzo asked, disappointed.

‘The pathologist’s still got it.’ Thomas snorted. ‘Fucking weirdo. He does these facial reconstructions in clay. It’s a hobby. Like, you know, he enjoys it or something.’

‘He did a facial reconstruction from the skull found in the trunk?’

‘Sure.’

‘And?’

‘And what?’

‘You circulated photographs of it?’

‘Sure we did. It was pretty distinctive. Completely bald. But no one recognised it.’