Peter May - Extraordinary People

‘And what is your success rate?’

‘Oh, I think probably around eighty. The skull from the catacombes is one of my notable failures.’ But it was not a failure with which he seemed too concerned. His present preoccupation seemed to be with leaving. ‘Was there anything else?’

‘Do you still have it?’

‘Do I still have what?’

‘Your forensic facial approximation.’

‘Well, yes, of course.’

‘Could I see it?’

Bellin sighed his irritation and glanced at his watch. ‘I suppose so.’ He crossed his office and threw open the doors of a tall wall cabinet. The shelves inside were lined with heads, strange lifeless eyes staring out from the darkness of their odd final resting place. Nearly thirty human faces sculpted in plasticine. Likenesses of the dead. Hair, too, was represented by interwoven layers of plasticine, making it easy for Enzo to recognize the skull in question. It was the only one without any. Enzo stared at it curiously. It did not appear to bear much resemblance to Gaillard, except for a similar fleshiness about the lips and a slight droop at the corners of the eyes. The nose was, like Gaillard’s, unremarkable. Enzo was disappointed that the face did not seem more familiar. He had spent hours the previous night staring at photographs of Gaillard. But he knew that facial and head hair can dramatically change the way a person looks.

Enzo reached up and touched the recreated face, almost as if he were hoping to feel the bristles where the flamboyant Gaillard moustaches had been shaved.

‘You recognise him?’ Bellin seemed surprised.

‘Only because I’d been told you’d made the face and scalp hairless. Why did you do that?’

‘Because there was no hair with the skull.’

‘Isn’t that unusual?’

Bellin shrugged his indifference. Lack of success had bred lack of interest. ‘Sometimes mice take hair away from decomposing heads to build nests.’

‘But the head was locked in a trunk. It wasn’t airtight, so no doubt insects got access to accelerate the process of decomposition. But there was no way mice could have got into that trunk.’

‘That’s true,’ Bellin conceded.

‘So didn’t it strike you as odd that there was no hair at all?’

‘It was impossible for me to determine why there was no hair. He might have suffered from alopecia. His head might have been shaved.’

‘And if his head and his face had been shaved, might someone not have done that for the same reason they smashed his teeth — to prevent recognition, to stop identification?’

‘Of course, anything is possible.’

Enzo reached into his satchel and searched for a photograph of Gaillard from Raffin’s file. He held it out towards Bellin. ‘Whiskers and a coiffure like this might have been somewhat recognisable, don’t you think?’

Bellin took the photograph. ‘Good God! It’s Jacques Gaillard.’

‘Like I said. Somewhat recognisable.’

Bellin lifted his reconstruction off the shelf and carried it through to a small adjoining room. There were computers here, and facial and cranial charts on the walls, and a table in the centre of the room with a half-completed facial approximation on it, tiny wooden dowels inserted at thirty-four different reference points around the head. The skull had been cast in plaster, and the mandible in cold cure resin, before being rearticulated with the cranium. Both were visible down one half of a face criss-crossed with a complex of plasticine strands representing the musculature. Bellin placed the finished head next to it and switched on a bank of overhead lamps which bathed the table in soft, bright light. He looked at the photograph, examined the head, and then re-examined the photograph. Suddenly he had rediscovered all his lost enthusiasm.

‘There are umpteen points of correlation here.’

‘Can you put hair on the head? And a moustache?’

‘I can do better than that. The danger is, of course, that one is influenced by the original. But I can photograph my approximation, front, side and back, and digitise the images into the computer. And with the help of an interesting piece of software called Face, as well as Adobe Photoshop, I can recreate Monsieur Gaillard’s unusual whiskers and coiffure and superimpose them on to a 3D image of the head.’ He removed his jacket, draping it over the back of a tall stool at the table, and lifted a white overall from the back of the door. His earlier impatience to leave for the day was quite forgotten.

‘How long will it take?’ Enzo asked.

‘Hmmm?’ Bellin seemed almost unaware that Enzo was still there. He had already begun setting up his camera.

‘How long?’

‘Come back tomorrow morning, Monsieur.’

Enzo sat in the window of Le Balto, below his studio, dipping his croissant in a large, milky coffee, and absently watching the regulars lining up along the bar drinking small, black coffees which they washed down with cold water. The morning was sticky and overcast. Across the street, people were breakfasting under the green awnings of the Bistro Mazarin, and the street cleaners had opened sluice gates to let water wash down the gutters of the Rue Jacques Callot before draining back into the sewers below.

‘ Salut .’ Her voice startled him out of his reverie, and he turned to find Charlotte standing by his table. She wore jeans, and a knee-length, black cotton waistcoat open over a white tee-shirt. ‘May I join you?’

He stood up. ‘Of course.’ They shook hands formally.

She turned towards the small, ginger-haired woman behind the bar. ‘ Un petit café .’ They sat facing each other. ‘Do you want another?’ she asked as an afterthought.

He shook his head. ‘What are you doing here?’ And, then, before she had time to answer, ‘Looking for me, I hope.’

A smile split her face and crinkled around her eyes. ‘Naturally.’ When her coffee arrived Enzo waited while she stirred in the sugar. She took a sip and looked up. ‘Roger tells me you have come up with a theory about what might have happened to Jacques Gaillard.’

Enzo shrugged. ‘It’s just a theory.’ He tipped his head quizzically. ‘Why would that interest you?’

She shrugged. ‘I’m always interested in the psychology of murder.’ Then paused. ‘And, as you know, I was around when Roger was doing his research.’ She took another sip of her coffee. ‘And… maybe it seemed like a good excuse for seeing you.’ She examined the table for a moment, as if reluctant to meet his eye. Then she looked up boldly. ‘So?’

‘So what?’ It made him feel good that he might have been the real reason she was here.

‘So what’s your theory?’

‘Didn’t Roger tell you?’

‘No, he didn’t, actually.’

Enzo regarded her thoughtfully. ‘Tell you what. I’ve had analysis done on some hard evidence I collected. The lab should have the results for me in…’ He looked at his watch. ‘…about half-an-hour. Why don’t you come with me? And then we’ll know whether or not it’s more than just a theory.’

She held him in the gaze of her dark eyes for several moments, and he felt his stomach flip over. She was having a disproportionately disconcerting effect on him. ‘Okay.’

As he made his way down towards the Seine from the Rue de l’Université Enzo saw her rise in expectation from the bench where she had waited for him. Barges ploughed their way up river. A private motor boat passed in the other direction. The long, glass-topped boats of the bateaux mouches below the Pont de l’Alma opposite rose and fell gently on the wash. A little further east, along the left bank, tourists queued for tickets for a tour of les égouts —the Paris sewers. They were not yet open. Enzo was holding the large manilla envelope they had given him at the lab, and seemed a million miles away.