Peter May - Extraordinary People

Enzo felt a wave of disappointment. “Bald” was not a word he would have used to describe Gaillard. ‘Was the face clean-shaven?’

‘Completely hairless.’

‘Would it be possible to see it?’

‘You’ll need to ask him that.’

Enzo looked at the items in the trunk again. He put a hand inside. ‘May I?’

‘ Allez-y .’

Enzo lifted them out one by one and laid them on the table. They were an odd collection of articles to find together at any time. But buried in a trunk with an unidentified skull, made them notably peculiar. ‘What about the thigh bone? Was it related to the skull?’

Thomas shook his head. ‘The experts said it was much older. They figured it was probably part of an anatomical skeleton. You know, the kind of thing a bone specialist would have in his office.’ He lifted up the femur. ‘And these tiny holes…They figured that’s where the bones were wired together.’

Raffin said, ‘And you never worked out what these things were doing in there with the skull?’

The detective shook his head. ‘A complete fucking mystery. Take a better man than me to work it out.’ Enzo and Raffin made fleeting eye contact.

‘What about the date on the back of the medal? May 12th, 1943. Does it have any significance?’

‘Not that we could figure.’

Enzo reached into his satchel and produced a small, square digital camera. He held it up between thumb and forefinger. ‘Would it be okay if I took some photographs?’

Thomas thought about it for a moment, running a chubby hand over his bristled jaw. ‘Yeah, I guess….’ And as Enzo lined up the items one by one to snap them, the detective said, ‘So when’s this piece going to be in the papers?’

Enzo felt his face colouring, and concentrated on the photographs. They had required a cover story. But Raffin was not in the least uncomfortable with their subterfuge. ‘Depends what progress we make,’ he said.

‘As long as you don’t quote me,’ Thomas growled. ‘I’m retiring at Christmas. I don’t need the hassle.’

‘Any quotes will be strictly unattributable,’ Raffin reassured him.

Enzo finished taking his photographs. ‘And the trunk was found in the…the catacombes ?’

The detective nodded. ‘That’s right.’

‘I didn’t know there were catacombes in Paris.’

Thomas spluttered and laughed. ‘You’re kidding me! Jesus, there’s nearly three hundred kilometers of tunnels under the city.’

‘You mean the sewers?’

‘No, no, no. The catacombes are way below that. Way below the métro, too.’

Raffin said, ‘The catacombes are twenty to thirty meters down. Hacked out of solid rock by quarriers over centuries.’

Enzo was astonished. ‘What for?’

‘For the stone. The whole of Paris was built with rock dug out from beneath it. There’s a few kilometers of catacombe that you can visit officially, but the rest of it’s dangerous, and strictly off-limits.’

Thomas snorted. ‘Which makes it a magnet for every freak and weirdo in the city. There’s all sorts of shit goes on down there. Drug dealing, illicit sex, you name it.’

Raffin said, ‘They recently discovered an underground cinema, and a night-club. All powered from lines tapped illegally into the power grid. There’s a whole subculture that exists down there. Tunnel rats, they call them. People who just love to explore the dark and the unknown. And there are extreme tourists who pay illicit guides to take them down for a good time. I wrote a piece about it a few years ago. I went down officially….’ He glanced at Thomas. ‘And unofficially. My unofficial guide had better maps. He’d spent years exploring the tunnels and charted them meticulously.’

Thomas sighed and looked ostentatiously at his watch.

Raffin took what he thought was his cue. ‘Well, thank you, Inspecteur. We’d better not keep you.’

Thomas scratched his jaw again. ‘No, I’m just thinking. Maybe you guys would like to see where the trunk was found. My paperwork can wait. And, anyway, this case has never been officially closed. So any publicity’s good publicity.’

Raffin looked to Enzo for a response. Enzo nodded. ‘That would be very helpful, Inspecteur.’

Enzo felt the temperature falling as they went down rung by rung, hand below hand, foot below foot. Until they reached a small, stone-clad chamber. The manhole cover thirty feet above them had slipped back into place with a deep thud, shutting out the daylight. All that lit the thick, velvet blackness that wrapped itself around them now, were the battery-powered lamps mounted on the helmets that the tunnel cop had insisted they wear. Their beams raked back and forth in the damp air as they turned their heads, and Enzo saw a stone staircase arcing down into deeper darkness. The distant rumble of traffic from the Place d’Italie overhead was still audible. Just.

The tunnel cop had met them in front of the soaring glass frontage of the Gaumont Grand Écran opposite the nineteenth century splendour of the thirteenth arrondissement’ s town hall, and led them down a side street to where a temporary canvas awning had been raised around a circular manhole cover in the pavement. The metal-framed letters IDC were embedded in the cover, above a slot into which the cop inserted a sturdy iron key to lift the lid. Thomas had introduced him simply as Franck, and then announced that he would wait for them in the café on the corner of the Rue Bobillot.

‘Be careful, these steps are uneven.’ Franck led them down in what felt like an unending spiral, dizzying and disorientating. They heard a far-off growling, the air around them vibrated and the ground shook. ‘It’s just the métro,’ Franck shouted back to them. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

And still they went down. Enzo felt his ears popping with the pressure, and he shivered. The temperature had dropped by more than fifteen degrees. Finally, they seemed to reach the foot of the staircase, and bowed their heads to pass through an arched entryway into a narrow tunnel. The walls and ceiling were constructed entirely from masonry and led them into a section of tunnel hacked from pure limestone. It ran off to left and right. Franck turned right, taking them past columns and arches to a junction where a long gallery led to another arched doorway opening into a square room lined by stone benches. There were niches set into the walls, charred by candles, and layered with the solid coloured pools of once molten wax. There was a stone table set in the centre of the room. There was, too, evidence of recent habitations: food wrappers and empty beer cans and cigarette ends. It smelled of grease and stale smoke.

‘I thought since we were down here anyway you might be interested in seeing this place,’ Franck said. ‘The quarriers built it for their own recreation. It was originally called the salle des carriers , but it’s more popularly known these days as the salle de repos . It’s a favourite meeting place for tunnel rats. We raid it from time to time, but they usually have a pretty good early warning system.’

Enzo wandered around this perfectly constructed stone room more than thirty meters below an unsuspecting world above and ran his fingers lightly over the cool, smooth stone. Beneath an arched niche in the back wall, the date 1904 had been carved into the stone. It was just over a hundred years since men had created this room as a place of rest. He could not imagine what life must have been like down here for the generations of quarriers who had hacked tens of thousands of tons of stone from limestone bedrock to build their city. What kind of existence had they eked out in this dark, choking, subterranean world?