Peter May - Extraordinary People

Enzo stared sullenly at the ancient brickwork of the Église des Minimes opposite. The waiter arrived with their drinks, and left the bill under Enzo’s glass. He glanced at it and grunted. ‘Huh! Alcohol would have been cheaper.’

Nicole poured sparkling water into both of their glasses. ‘So what are you going to do?’

He took a drink of his Perrier citron , felt the bubbles tickling his nostrils and had a sudden inspiration. ‘I’m going to call on the old school tie.’

‘What do you mean?’

He took a long draft from his glass and stood up, dropping several coins on the table. ‘Come on, drink up. We’re going back to Cahors.’

Enzo pushed open the heavy wrought iron gate and walked across the cobbled courtyard. The administrative buildings of the Hotel du Département rose up around him on three sides to steeply pitched, grey slate roofs. He went through an archway and followed the accueil sign to the reception desk.

‘I’d like to see the Préfet,’ he told the young woman behind the counter.

‘Do you have an appointment, Monsieur?’

‘Just tell him that Monsieur Enzo Macleod needs to see him as a matter of urgency.’

Préfet Verne’s office was on the first floor, a large room with three tall windows overlooking the courtyard. The wall behind his desk was draped with crossed Tricolours. There were photographs of him with the President, the Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister, the Garde des Sceaux. His desk was enormous, and the Préfet himself seemed almost small behind it. Sunlight slanted golden across a floor of polished parquet, and draped itself over two Louis Quatorze armchairs and a chaise longue set around a low antique table.

The Préfet rose to shake Enzo’s hand. ‘My staff is not used to my receiving visits from such disreputable characters.’ He smiled. ‘What can possibly be so urgent?’ He waved a hand towards one of the Louis Quatorze fauteuil and sat in the other one himself, folding his hands in his lap. Enzo remained standing.

‘I know where the rest of Gaillard’s body is buried.’

Préfet Verne tilted his head and raised an eyebrow. ‘Really?

‘But I need your help to prove it.’

‘Curiouser and curiouser.’

‘I need the police in Toulouse to excavate beneath a fountain at the old Hospital St. Jacques. But I can’t get them to take me seriously.’

‘I’m not surprised.’

‘But if the Préfet at Toulouse ordered them to, they’d have to, wouldn’t they?’

‘And why would he do that?’

‘Because you’d asked him to.’

The Préfet regarded him thoughtfully. ‘And why would he listen to me?’

‘Because he’s almost certainly another énarque , and you ENA old boys stick together, don’t you? A favour here reciprocated there. I take it you do know your counterpart in the Garonne?’

‘Naturally.’ His hands were still folded in his lap, and he began tapping his thumbs together. ‘I’m just wondering why I would ask him to do that?’

‘Because I’m asking you.’

‘And that would make me ask him, because?’

‘Because we have a bet,’ Enzo said, ‘that I can’t find out what happened to Jacques Gaillard and why. I imagine that’s probably pretty common knowledge by now.’

Préfet Verne gave a tiny shrug. ‘These things have a habit of getting around.’

‘So if you were to refuse to help me, that could be construed by some people, not to mention the press, as…well, not to put too fine a point on it, welching on a bet.’

The smile faded just a little from the Préfet’s eyes and he pursed his lips in quiet contemplation. ‘There’s Italian blood in your family, Macleod, isn’t there?’

‘My mother was Italian.’

‘Hmmm. Any relation to the Machiavellis?’

Arc lamps flooded the garden with light, and the pink of the ancient hospital building stood bold against the black of the midnight sky. A crowd gathered on the bridge in the warm night air, idly exercising their curiosity. They had no idea why there were police cars filling the tiny car park below, or that the white vans they saw belonged to the police scientifique . And they could not see what was happening behind the canvas barrier erected around the fountain. But they knew that something was going on.

The caterpillar tracks of the crane had chewed up the once pristine lawn, and it swung high above the Toulouse skyline as its cable strained and pulled, lifting the great concrete coquille St. Jacques clear of the barrier. A municipal plumber had disconnected the pipes and turned off the water.

Men in white Tyvek suits drifted around the site like ghosts, directing a digger in its painfully slow process of excavation, ready to take over at the first hint of discovery, prepared if necessary to remove the dry, crumbling earth one grain at a time.

Behind the barrier, Raffin stood next to Enzo, the collar of his jacket turned up as if the evening were cold. His hands were thrust deep in his pockets, and he was watching the proceedings with an odd sense of professional detachment. He had caught the first flight from Paris after Enzo’s phone call. All he had said was, ‘Are you certain?’ And when Enzo replied, ‘Ninety-nine percent,’ he’d said, ‘I’m on my way.’ He had cast a curious eye over Nicole when Enzo introduced them, but refrained from comment.

Enzo looked up at the concrete shell hanging overhead. It seemed almost surreal, caught in the arc lights, as if it were floating. He was tense with anticipation, and misgivings. What if he was wrong? What if there was nothing there? His disquiet was heightened by the approach of the city’s chief of police, a squat, tough-looking man, uniform stretched tightly across broad shoulders. He had long sideburns and was chewing a match in the corner of his mouth. His peaked hat cast a shadow across his eyes. He pulled Enzo to one side and lowered his voice. He moved close to his ear to be heard above the roar of the engines. ‘If this turns out to be a wild goose chase, Monsieur, I’ll have your fucking hide. Friends in high places or not.’ Evidently he had not taken kindly to receiving his orders from on high.

Enzo watched him saunter away again towards a group of officers who were standing watching. His mouth was dry, and he wished he had brought a bottle of water.

Then a shout cut across the revving of the digger. One of the ghosts raised an arm and the articulated claw stopped scooping. It jerked and twisted away from the hole, spilling sandy soil as it went. The other ghosts moved in, climbing carefully into a pit which was now more than two meters deep. Enzo, Raffin and Nicole moved closer as the forensic scientists began scraping away the earth, one trowel at a time, from the corner of a metal object lying at an angle in the ground. Lights were moved in so that they could better see what they were doing. The digger cut its motor, and a strange silence fell across the site. Only the sound of men breathing, and the scraping of trowels, could be heard in the night air.

It took nearly fifteen minutes to uncover the tin trunk. It was the same military green as the one Enzo and Raffin had seen at the greffe in Paris. Battered and scored, and more rusted than its twin. There was a sense of everyone around the hole holding their breath as one of the police scientifique carefully released the clips and opened the lid. He swung a light to shine inside the trunk to reveal the skeletal remains of two arms lying side by side. But there were other items, too, loose in the bottom of the trunk.

A forensic photographer was lowered carefully into the hole to make a photographic record of the trunk and its contents, before the head ghost crouched down to examine them more closely with delicate, latexed fingers. ‘Definitely looks like two arms,’ he called up. ‘The radius and the ulna of both forearms seem damaged. Scarred or scored in someway. Each of the arms appears to have been cleanly jointed from the shoulder at the head of the humerous, although there is also damage to the bone here, too.’ He turned his attention, then, to what looked like a rectangular wooden box. ‘It’s a Moët et Chandon presentation box.’ A quality in his voice reflected the bizarre nature of his words. He slid off the front cover to reveal that it was filled with wood wool, finely curled wood shavings packed around a Champagne bottle. ‘Dom Perignon, 1990. It’s never been opened.’ Now his voice carried a hint of disbelief.