Peter May - Extraordinary People

Franck was watching him with mild amusement. ‘You should visit the ossuary sometime.’

‘Ossuary?’

Raffin said, ‘In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Paris authorities started clearing city-centre cemeteries which had become a health hazard. They allocated about eleven thousand square meters of the catacombes out at Denfert as a dumping ground for the bones. There are something like six million people stacked up in those tunnels, floor to ceiling. The bones and skulls are arranged in macabre patterns.’ He chuckled. ‘I suppose the men who transferred them from the cemeteries had reason enough to find ways of amusing themselves.’

It occurred to Enzo that there was irony in the discovery of a single skull in tunnels which concealed six million.

‘Anyway,’ Raffin said, ‘this isn’t what we came to see, is it?’

‘No.’ Franck turned and led them back along the gallery and through a rabbit warren of tunnels. They passed street names beautifully carved into blocks of stone corresponding to the names of the streets above — BOULEVARD VINCENT, RUE ALBERT BAYET — and surrounded by the scratched and spray-painted graffiti of a less elegant generation.

They carried on until they reached a stone marked ROUTE DE PARIS à CHOISY CôTé EST, and they turned left into a narrower transverse tunnel that took them to the other side of the street overhead.

‘We’re under the Avenue Choisy here,’ Franck said. ‘Right below Chinatown.’

On the other side, a marker stone was inscribed ROUTE DE PARIS à CHOISY CôTé OUEST. But here, the way was blocked. The roof and part of the wall had caved in, piles of stone and rubble and earth preventing their further progress.

‘Well, this is it.’ Franck turned around and his lamp nearly blinded them. ‘For what it’s worth.’ Both Enzo and Raffin raised their hands to shade their eyes. ‘The Inspection Général des Carrières send surveyors down regularly to check below the sites of possible new building. No point in throwing up skyscrapers if they’re just going to fall down again. It was a surveyor who came across this tunnel collapse. It seems the tin trunk had somehow been concealed in the wall, bricked into a recess. If the roof hadn’t come down it would still have been there.’

The world above ground was a burned-out white, blinding and hot. Enzo’s eyes adjusted quickly, but he knew that it would take the sun longer to warm through to the chill deep in his bones. The Place d’Italie was jammed with traffic and late afternoon shoppers. White flags emblazoned with red Chinese characters fluttered on either side of lamp posts around the small park which created a roundabout for the traffic, and Enzo noticed for the first time that half the population seemed to be oriental. Ethnic Chinese from French Indochina. He looked down the length of Avenue Choisy and saw the red lanterns and flashing neon characters delineating Chinatown and wondered just where exactly they had been below ground.

Franck had gone to find detective Thomas from the Quai des Orfèvres. Raffin was still brushing the dirt from his trousers. ‘What now?’

‘I want to talk to the pathologist.’

Raffin checked his watch and shook his head. ‘Then you’ll have to go on your own. I still have to earn a living — and I’m going to have to change out of these clothes.’

It was only four stops on the métro from Place d’Italie to the Quai de la Rapée in the neighbouring twelfth arrondissement . Enzo sat gloomily in the crowded carriage, sunlight streaming through windows as the train rattled beneath the girdered arch that spanned the Seine. With all these bodies pressed around him, the heat was stifling. He looked down to his left and saw the square redbrick building that housed the Institut Médico Légal on the west bank of the river. The bodies stored there, in tiered drawers, would be kept at a somewhat cooler temperature.

Enzo was not optimistic. What had seemed like an interesting development, the skull in the trunk, was probably no more than an eccentric diversion. If the pathologist had reconstructed a head from it without facial or scalp hair, then it couldn’t be Gaillard. Even if the flesh and brain of the head had rotted away to nothing, the evidence of hair would still have remained. It took hair much longer than five years to decompose. King Tutankhamun had still had hair.

So what was left? Nothing but a theory constructed from a bloodstained floor, a doodle in a diary, and a fifty-year-old French movie.

He got off at the Quai de la Rapée and walked back along the river bank, traffic roaring past on the expressway below. On the far side of the water, the boats of the River Police were tied up at the Quai St. Bernard. A small park beside the morgue was deserted. Cars and trucks thundered across the Pont d’Austerlitz, and the clatter of the métro trains was only slightly muted by their rubber wheels. It was a noisy corner of the city, but Enzo supposed that the morgue’s present tenants would not be too troubled.

The bodies were kept downstairs, behind the thick stone walls of the basement, and there cut open in tiled rooms devoid of daylight by pathologists in pursuit of death’s dark secrets. There was disabled access to the main entrance one floor up, but it occurred to Enzo that the real disabled access was one floor down, via the back door. He climbed steps to the front door and walked into an airy reception hall lined by the busts of famous physicians and asked for Docteur Henri Bellin.

Bellin’s office was up a narrow staircase on the first floor. The pathologist was a man in his sixties, and gave the impression of being possessed by a nervous energy he found difficult to contain. A tweed suit hung on a tall, angular frame that Enzo was sure carried less flesh than some of the cadavers downstairs. He had a pathologist’s pallor, and strong, bony hands scrubbed so clean they were almost painful to look at. He was in the process of clearing his desk for the day. Like most pathologists, he was meticulously tidy.

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he said. ‘I remember it well. Odd, very odd. All those strange items in the trunk. Still, that wasn’t my brief. My only interest was the skull.’

‘You carried out a forensic examination?’

‘Yes, yes I did. Nothing very remarkable about it as I recall. A middle-aged male, aged somewhere between forty-five and fifty-five.’

‘How could you tell?’

‘Females have more delicate mandibles, and much more gently sloping foreheads.’ He laughed nervously. ‘And I never like to discuss the fact that there is roughly two hundred cubic centimeters less space in a female skull to house the brain. Women don’t like to hear it.’ He slipped some papers into a briefcase. ‘I was able to determine the age because the sutures — that’s the joints between the bones — were completely ossified. There were also some deep furrows on the inside of the skull, something usually caused by blood vessels in an older person.’

‘I believe the teeth had been smashed.’

‘That’s correct. Someone had taken a cylindrical instrument of some sort and done considerable damage. To the mandible as well. I had to do quite a bit of reconstruction work around the mouth.’

‘Presumably the teeth were smashed to prevent identification from dental records.’

‘Yes, of course. There were a number left intact, though. Not enough to facilitate positive identification — assuming that we’d had something to compare them to — but enough for me to recast and recreate a mouthful of teeth for the facial approximation.’

‘The reconstruction?’

‘Forensic facial approximation is what I prefer to call it. I have evolved my own technique. A blend of the Russian and American methods. You know, Gerasimov claims one hundred percent success. Even Gatliff claims seventy percent.’