Peter May - Extraordinary People

‘Oh,’ she said, suddenly downcast. ‘But where will I stay? It’s too far to travel.’

Perhaps, Enzo thought, this was a way out. ‘There’s a spare room here,’ he said, hardly believing he’d said it out loud. But, after all, he had let her down.

Her spirits lifted again. ‘I won’t disappoint you, Monsieur Macleod. I promise.’ And then she said, ‘What’s the project?’

Enzo sighed. ‘It’s difficult to explain, Nicole. Why don’t you go home and pack a suitcase tonight and come back tomorrow? I’ll explain in the morning.’

As he was seeing her out, a sleepy Sophie emerged from her bedroom wrapped in a towelling robe. She craned up to kiss Enzo on the cheek. ‘What’s happening?’ she said, looking at Nicole and blinking the sleep out of her eyes.

Enzo said, ‘Sophie, this is Nicole. She’s a student at Paul Sabatier.’ And to Nicole, ‘Sophie’s my daughter.’

Nicole put her hand over her mouth to stifle a giggle. ‘Well that’s a relief.’ And then she thrust her hand out to shake Enzo’s. ‘See you tomorrow, Monsieur Macleod.’

When Nicole had gone, Enzo turned back to the séjour and caught his shin for a second time on Bertrand’s metal detector. ‘Jesus Christ, Sophie! Will you get rid of that damned thing?’

‘I’m sorry, Papa, I meant to put it in the spare room. I’ll do it now.’

‘No,’ Enzo said quickly. ‘Nicole’s going to be in there.’

Sophie looked at him as if he had two heads. ‘That girl?’ Enzo nodded uncomfortably. ‘Papa, what’s going on?’ She pursued him into the front room. The French windows were open and hot air wafted in from the square below.

‘It’s just for a few weeks.’

‘Weeks!’

‘I promised to get her a summer job at the hospital, and I forgot. Now she’s too late to get anything else.’

‘So she says.’ Sophie was highly sceptical. ‘Papa, I saw the way she was gazing up at you. She’s infatuated.’

‘Don’t be silly, Sophie. Of course she isn’t.’ Enzo was indignant. ‘She comes from a tiny hill farm in the Aveyron, and her folks have been struggling to put her through university. She needed that job. I owe her. So she’s going to help me with the Jacques Gaillard thing.’

Sophie relented and took his arm and squeezed it. ‘Papa, you’re too soft for your own good.’ She looked up at him with her mother’s eyes. ‘How are you going to pay her?’

‘I’m just going to have to win the bet, that’s all.’

Almost for the first time Sophie became aware of the chaos in the séjour . She untangled herself from her father and looked around. ‘What’s going on in here?’

Enzo cast his eyes over the piles of books and glanced across at the whiteboard. ‘This is my war room,’ he said. ‘It’s where I’m going to do battle with Gaillard’s killer.’

Sophie had gone to the gym, where Bertrand ran courses in everything from dance to weightlifting, and Enzo had the apartment to himself again. The computer was set up on the table, wires trailing everywhere — to the wall socket, the telephone, the printer. He had downloaded the photographs from his digital camera and printed them out one by one. All five items found in the trunk below the Place d’Italie with Gaillard’s skull. Now he was sticking them up on his newly mounted whiteboard. Bellin’s approximation, cut from the front page of Libération , was taped to the top left-hand corner. Top-centre he placed the thigh bone, top-right the bee. He taped the shell, the antique stethoscope and the Ordre de la Libération along the bottom of the board, cleared a space in his favourite recliner and sat back staring at them. A pack of marker pens sat on top of a pile of books below the board, ready for writing up his initial thoughts. But he didn’t want to rush it. He wanted to clear his mind first. He needed to wash away all preconceptions and let these five puzzling pieces find their own place in his thoughts. This was going to be a long road, and he wanted to make as few wrong turns as possible. He reached for his guitar and began picking out a slow, mournful twelve-bar blues, and closed his eyes to find Gaillard staring back at him from the haunted shadows of his dead skull.

Nicole was waiting among the deserted Sunday morning tables of the pizzeria when he returned from breakfast at the Café Le Forum. She was pleased to see him. ‘Hi, Monsieur Macleod.’ She ignored his outstretched hand and leaned up to kiss him three times, alternating cheeks. He was taken aback. It was a customary French greeting between men and women familiar with each other, but not usual between lecturer and student. He wondered, if perhaps, Sophie was right about Nicole.

Her suitcase was huge, and very heavy, and she allowed Enzo to carry it up to the second floor. Circumventing the metal detector, he put the case in her room. She looked from the window over the jumble of rooftops behind the apartment. ‘This is lovely. Better than any job at the hospital.’

While she unpacked, Enzo explained the background to the Gaillard case. For her further enlightenment he had left, on the bedside table, a copy of Raffin’s book, as well as his front-page piece in Libération about the identification of the skull. Nicole’s eyes opened wide. ‘So we’re going to be kind of, like, detectives?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Oh, wow. That’s amazing.’

‘It’s serious work, Nicole. We’re talking about a man’s murder here. And a killer, or killers, who are still at large.’

‘Okay,’ she said, eager to be started. ‘Let’s get them, then.’

He ensconced her at the computer in the séjour and she said, ‘Are we broadband?’ Enzo nodded. ‘Good. I don’t know how anyone can work with dial-up any more. It’s so-oo slow. What search engine do you use?’

‘Google.’

‘Good, so do I.’

Enzo picked his way through the books littering the floor to the whiteboard. ‘This is how I’m going to work it,’ he said. ‘Around the board I’ve taped up photographs of the items found with the skull. As you can see, I’ve already started making notes under each of them. Each time we come up with a valid line of thinking on any of them, we’ll note that somewhere in the centre of the board, circle it, and draw a line to it from the item which has sparked the thought. Then we’ll be looking for connections, either between the thoughts or between the items, and we’ll draw more arrows and more circles. The theory is, that the thought which ends up with most arrows pointing to it is the key to the puzzle.’

Nicole stared at the board thoughtfully, and her intelligence kicked in over her immaturity. ‘What makes you think it’s a puzzle?’

‘Because there has to be a reason for these things being there. Some kind of message. It must be. Each item kind of like a cryptic clue.’

‘Why would the killer want to leave a message?’

‘I haven’t the least idea. But I’m not concerned with that for the moment. The first thing is to decipher the message. You can see I’ve started making notes on my first thoughts.’

‘You’d better take me through them, then.’

‘Okay, let’s start with the femur, the thigh bone.’ Underneath it he had written Anatomical Skeleton . ‘The police had already figured out that this was probably taken from the kind of anatomical skeleton used for demonstration purposes in medical schools. The small holes drilled at either end would have been for wiring the bones together. So now I’m thinking, why? What’s the point of this bone? Sometimes, in primitive societies, bones like this were used as weapons. Which is why I’ve written up Club with Murder weapon? in brackets.’ He held up his hand. ‘But don’t pay too much attention to that. There was no sign of cranial damage to the skull. It was just an initial thought. And there’s no particular reason I started with the bone.’ He moved along the board. ‘But it was after that I had my first revelation.’