Peter May - Extraordinary People

Sophie emerged from her room late morning, bleary-faced and puffy-eyed. She barely acknowledged Nicole. ‘I’m off to Bertrand’s,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you later, Papa.’ And she was gone before Enzo could tell her to take the metal detector with her.

‘There’s a Rue Corvisart in Paris,’ Nicole said suddenly, as if her thoughts had been running along the same lines as Enzo’s. She was staring at the screen. ‘And a Hotel Corvisart. And a Lycée Corvisart, all in the same street. Oh, and there’s a métro stop called Corvisart. On the Green Line. Just one stop away from Place d’Italie.’

Enzo sat up. ‘Place d’Italie?’ He jumped out of the recliner and crossed to the whiteboard and wrote up, Street, Hotel, School, Métro , one below the other, and circled them. Then he pointed an arrow to them from Corvisart . ‘We’re getting somewhere, Nicole. If the head was buried in the catacombes beneath Place d’Italie, maybe the rest of him is also somewhere down there. Is there any way we can find out if there are tunnels below the Rue Corvisart?’

‘Let’s see….’ Nicole called up Google and entered Catacombes and then info, bringing up a list of around two and a half thousand links. Top of the list was a site advertising the official catacomb tour at Denfert-Rochereau. But they struck gold with the one below it. The link took them to www.catacombes.info, and eerie music immediately began to fill the room.

‘What the hell’s that?’ Enzo asked.

‘They’ve put a soundtrack on the website for a bit of atmosphere,’ she said.

Enzo came around to have a look at it. The site displayed vivid orange and white lettering on a black background. Nicole moved her cursor over a photograph of a manhole cover with a circle of blue around the letters IDF. She clicked on it, and the manhole cover slid aside, prompting a fresh page to appear with links to a welcome page, a history page, a page of photographs, and several others.

‘Try the photos page,’ Enzo said. Nicole clicked on the link, which took them to a page with a map tracing the peripheral boundaries of Paris and the route of the Seine through the city. It also delineated areas where the largest number of tunnel networks were to be found. Enzo pointed to the thirteenth arrondissement . ‘That’s where the Place d’Italie is.’ Nicole moved her cursor over it, and the area of tunnels on the map was immediately highlighted in green. She clicked, and they were taken to another page with a detailed map of the tunnel network below. Enzo gasped. ‘ Salle des carriers ! I was there.’

Nicole move her cursor over the salle des carriers , clicked on it, and they were taken to another page filled with photographs of tunnels leading to the room, all spookily lit by strategically placed candles.

‘This is extraordinary,’ Enzo said. ‘Someone’s gone to a huge amount of work to put this site together.’

Nicole took them back to the map and located Place d’Italie on it. Almost all of the network was immediately north or east of it. None of the tunnels extended far enough west to take in the Rue Corvisart. ‘It doesn’t look like there are any tunnels under Corvisart,’ she said. ‘At least, not if this map’s to be believed.’

Enzo was disappointed. ‘Maybe I’m going to have to go back to Paris and look at this Rue Corvisart myself.’

‘It’s a pretty long street.’ Nicole looked at the map. ‘And anyway, aren’t you getting a bit ahead of yourself? I mean, we still don’t know the relevance of the scallop shell, or the Ordre de la Libération, or the date on the back of it.’

Enzo nodded. ‘No, you’re right.’ It was good to have someone else there to keep him focused. He felt his stomach growling and checked the time. It was midday. After twenty years in France he had acquired that quintessentially French biological clock which told him when it was time for lunch. ‘I’m going downstairs for some pizza. Are you coming?’

But Nicole’s attention was still riveted on the screen in front of her. ‘Um…no, thanks. I’m on a diet.’

‘Oh. Okay. Well, there’s stuff in the fridge if you get hungry.’

Enzo had a simple Margarita at La Lampara restaurant below the apartment. He washed it down with a quart de vin rouge and a half bottle of Badoit and stared through the trees opposite, past the cars in the square, to the arches of La Halle, closed now for lunch. Tables at all the restaurants and cafés were filled, groups and couples, locals and holidaymakers enjoying the food and the company. Even after all these years, Enzo had never quite got used to eating alone, and he had developed the habit of eating quickly and settling up. There was never any reason to linger. But today he had a more pressing reason for speeding up the process. He had a sense that they were almost within touching distance of Gaillard’s killer.

When he got back to the apartment, he found Nicole in a state of excitement, her breasts heaving hypnotically as she told him that she thought Corvisart had taken them up a blind alley.

‘Why?’ Enzo asked.

‘Because we thought all this medical stuff leading us to Napoléon was supposed to take us to Corvisart, because he was Napoléon’s personal physician.’

‘So?’

‘So Napoléon had another doctor. A much more famous one.’ She scrolled through the history of recently visited websites and recalled a page she had found during lunch. ‘Doctor Dominique Larrey.’

‘What’s so remarkable about Larrey?’

‘He revolutionised medical treatment on the battlefield. He pioneered amputation surgery, introduced ambulances to remove the wounded from the field, and the concept of triage in their treatment. Napoléon appointed him Surgeon-in-Chief to the French army, and he accompanied Napoléon on his expeditions to Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Germany, Poland, and Moscow. He was made a baron in 1810.’

Enzo shrugged. ‘Why do you think he’s more relevant than Corvisart?’

‘Okay, just listen.’ And she started reading. ‘Larrey’s name remains associated with an amputation of the shoulder joint, Mediterranean yellow fever, and ligation of the femoral artery below the inguinal ligament.’ She looked up, her face shining. ‘Femoral artery. That’s what you called the thigh bone, wasn’t it? The femur.’

Enzo inclined his head in doubtful acknowledgement. ‘Well, yes. But that seems a bit thin, Nicole.’

‘Ah, but wait, that’s not all. Here’s the best bit. He was born in the Pyrénées, and studied medicine under an uncle who was a surgeon in Toulouse.’

For the first time, Enzo’s interest was aroused. ‘Toulouse?’

Nicole grinned at him. ‘I thought that might get you. I checked. Toulouse was one of the most important stopping places on the pilgrim’s route to Compostela.’ She left the computer and brushed past Enzo to the whiteboard. She took a different coloured marker, scored out Corvisart under Napoléon’s Doctor . ‘If we make that Larrey instead…’ and she wrote up the name, ‘…we can point arrows to it from the femur, the bee, the stethoscope and the scallop shell.’ She drew in the arrows.

Enzo took the pen from her. ‘And we can add something else.’ He wrote Toulouse up on the board, circled it, and drew arrows to it from Larrey and from the scallop shell. ‘So now we have four arrows pointing through Larrey and a second from the shell, all going to Toulouse .’ Which was much closer to home than Enzo could ever have imagined — just an hour south of Cahors. Was it possible that Gaillard’s remains had been brought all the way to Toulouse? And if so, why?’ He stood back and examined the board afresh. ‘We haven’t looked at the Ordre de la Libération yet.’