Peter May - Extraordinary People

‘What happened?’ Charlotte asked.

Enzo forced himself to focus on her. ‘The night Gaillard disappeared, a person or persons unknown broke into the church of St. Étienne du Mont. St. Étienne’s had been Gaillard’s church for nearly thirty years. The intruders slaughtered a pig in front of the altar.’

‘Why?’

‘To cover the fact that they had just murdered Jacques Gaillard on the same spot.’

Charlotte’s eyes opened wide. She had turned quite pale. ‘How can you know that?’

‘Because I took a sample of the bloodstains left in the stone. And the laboratory analysis shows that there were two types of blood staining the flagstones in the church. Pig. And human.’

‘That doesn’t prove it was Gaillard’s.’

‘No. But the DNA does. The DNA extracted from the human blood in the church matches the DNA in a sample of hair that I provided for the lab. I took that hair from a comb in Gaillard’s apartment.’ Enzo paused. ‘Gaillard was butchered — very possibly dismembered — right there in front of the altar where he normally worshipped.’

For a moment he thought that she was going to faint. She grabbed his arm and half-staggered.

‘Are you all right?’ He put an arm around her and felt that she was trembling.

She pushed him away. ‘I’m fine.’ She seemed embarrassed. ‘It’s just…well, it’s horrible.’ She took a deep breath. ‘In my job, you deal with everything in the abstract. In the mind. It’s a shock to be confronted with the reality.’

The sun broke through the mist above the city for the first time, sending light coruscating across the broken surface of the river. Somewhere a tug sounded its horn, and they heard laughter coming from the queue for les égouts .

‘One more shock, then. If you can take it,’ Enzo said, and she looked up into his face, brows deeply furrowed. He preferred her eyes when they were smiling.

‘What?’

‘A visit to the morgue.’

Docteur Bellin was involved in an autopsy when they arrived at the Institut Médico Légal, and so they waited in the tiny park next door. It was named after an architect, Albert Tournaire, and was little more than a central flowerbed ringed by a path and flanked by tiny lawns and a handful of trees. They sat on one of the benches, with their backs to the dead, and looked along the river instead towards the Pont Sully and the twin towers of Notre Dame beyond. A hot July sun had burned off the early morning cloud, and the sky was the clearest summer blue. A dusty white heat was already beginning to settle on the city.

Charlotte had barely spoken two words on the métro, and now she sat in contemplative silence, before turning to look thoughtfully at Enzo. ‘I saw him on television, you know. Never missed his show. I was a student then, and movies were important.’ A pale smile flickered briefly across her face, reflecting some thought that came and went. ‘I suppose he must have been more than twice my age, but I had quite a crush on him at the time.’

Enzo was surprised. ‘He was a strange looking guy.’

‘He had charm and personality and wit. You don’t find much of any of that in today’s crop of celebs.’ She almost spat the word “celeb” on to the path, a clear enough indication of the contempt with which she regarded contemporary French celebrities. She turned to gaze earnestly at Enzo. ‘Why would anyone want to murder him like that?’

‘You’re the psychologist. You tell me.’

She didn’t seem to like that much and looked away again, and Enzo regretted his bluntness. But she changed the subject before he could try to soften it. ‘You said your daughters had different mothers. What happened?’

He wasn’t sure if she was genuinely interested, or simply finding an excuse to talk about something else. ‘I got married when I was twenty.’

‘Ouch! Too young.’

‘It was. We were still students. At our hometown university. We did it to get away from home, really. Get a place of our own.’ He shook his head at the memory. ‘A damp, grotty, one-bedroomed tenement flat in Partick with a shared lavatory on the landing. By the time we graduated, the relationship had probably run its course. But then she got pregnant.’

Charlotte looked at him. ‘Women don’t just get pregnant, Enzo. Men make them pregnant.’

Enzo nodded his acknowledgement. ‘Okay, we got pregnant — and spent the next seven years regretting it. Not the kid, not Kirsty. Us. The fact that we’d tied ourselves to one another when it wasn’t really what either of us wanted. And, you know, you do that thing, stay together for the kid. And I’m not sure it’s the right thing.’

‘Sounds like you’re building up to a justification for leaving them.’

Enzo looked at her. ‘I forgot. I’m talking to a psychologist.’ And, after a moment, ‘Are you going to bill me for this?’

‘So you met someone else?’

Enzo looked away. None of it had seemed predictable to him then. But no doubt Charlotte had heard the same story a thousand times. ‘At a conference of the International Association of Forensic Scientists at Nice.’

Charlotte smiled. ‘I suppose they picked Nice because of its importance to forensic science.’

Enzo laughed. ‘It’s true. Sunshine and seafood are very important to forensic scientists.’

‘Was she a forensic scientist?’

‘She’d just graduated. She was twenty-three. I was thirty. And I knew she was the one. From the minute she spilled her drink in my lap.’

Across the Seine a police boat gunned its engine and set off up river at speed, blue light flashing, siren wailing.

‘So you left your wife and kid and came to France?’

‘It wasn’t just my family I gave up. It was my career. In those days my French wasn’t that great, and I’d never have got a job in the police scientifique . And, of course, by then Pascale was pregnant.’ And before Charlotte could say anything he corrected himself. ‘I’d got her pregnant.’

‘Good God,’ Charlotte said, ‘have you never heard of condoms?’ He smiled. ‘So what happened?’

Enzo’s jaw set and he stared silently towards the ële St. Louis. ‘She died in childbirth. Left me a beautiful daughter to remind me of her every day of the rest of my life.’ He stood up quickly, thrusting his hands in his pockets to hide the emotion he felt welling up inside. ‘But Sophie was also her gift. The best thing that ever happened to me.’

After a long moment, Charlotte asked, ‘What about your other daughter?’

Enzo’s lips tightened. ‘Kirsty won’t even speak to me. And do you know what’s ironic?’ He turned to find Charlotte looking up at him. ‘She’s here, in Paris. Living on the ële St. Louis. Not half a mile from here.’ He gazed back down river. ‘And it’s as if I don’t even exist.’

Bellin had the smell of death about him. No doubt he had showered after changing out of his surgical pyjamas, but still he brought the perfume of the autopsy room with him into his office. He was clearly excited, dark eyes shining with anticipation. He took them through to his tiny studio. The head he had taken down from the shelf the day before was still on the table. Charlotte looked at it curiously.

‘Is this it?’ she asked. Enzo nodded and watched her closely. She had been a fan of Gaillard. Watched his TV show. Had a crush on him. But she just shrugged and frowned. ‘Doesn’t look like anyone I know,’ she said.

‘Wait,’ said Bellin, and he sat down in front of the twenty-inch cinema screen of his Macintosh G5 and shuffled the mouse. His screensaver vanished and a photograph of Gaillard appeared in its place. He turned and looked triumphantly at Enzo.