Peter May - Extraordinary People

The concierge went to ring the doorbell and stopped suddenly, recoiling as if from an electric shock. ‘It’s open,’ she said. And Enzo moved forward to see that the door stood very slightly ajar, as if someone had left in too much of a hurry to close it properly. He pushed it wide. The apartment beyond lay in darkness.

‘Hello?’ he called into the void. It seemed to swallow up his voice, and gave nothing back in return. ‘Hello!’ he called again, only louder. Still nothing. But now he caught a scent that seemed vaguely familiar. A perfume, or an aftershave. For some reason it spooked him, and he began to feel decidedly uneasy.

‘There must be a light,’ Raffin said, and Enzo leaned in to feel for a light switch on the wall. He found it and flicked it down. Nothing happened.

‘The disjoncteur must have blown,’ the concierge said. ‘I’ll go and get my flashlight. Wait here.’ And she seemed relieved to have found an excuse to leave.

They stood on the landing listening to the whine of the elevator as it descended to the ground floor. And then an unnerving silence. Enzo and Raffin exchanged uneasy glances. Finally, Enzo said, ‘I’m going in.’

Raffin nodded bravely. ‘I’m right behind you.’

The hall was long and narrow, and went beyond the reach of the light from the landing. There were doors off to left and right. Enzo stepped forward cautiously, pushing open a door on his right-hand side. A glimmer of light sloped in through a window and lay across the cool tiles of a bathroom floor. Further on, a door to the left opened into a bedroom. There was more light here, from the streetlamps in the boulevard. The bed was unmade, and there were clothes strewn across the floor. A stale smell of socks and bodies. Enzo could hear the murmur of distant traffic.

Raffin followed behind him like a ghost as he moved down the hall to the next door. On the right this time. Another bedroom. Less light. The bed was made, pillows leaning decoratively against the headboard. There was an odd, unlived-in feel about the room. A guest bedroom, perhaps.

At the end of the corridor, the hall divided into passageways leading off at right angles, and they found themselves facing tall double doors to what Enzo assumed must be the séjour . One of the doors was off the latch, and a faint crack of light drew an angled line across the floor of the hall and up the wall opposite. As Enzo gently pushed it open, the crack widened. Through it, he could see windows overlooking the street whose lamps were the source of the light. Otherwise, the room seemed mired in deep shadow. The scent which Enzo had first noticed on the landing was stronger here. And, oddly, even more familiar.

Behind them they heard the drone and clatter of the elevator as the concierge returned with her flashlight. Emboldened, Enzo opened the door wide. Now the scent of perfume gave way to something else. Again, strangely familiar. But unpleasant, like singed flesh and hot metal. The warm air was thick with it. Enzo scanned the room, eyes adjusting to the dark, and stepped in as he heard the concierge at the far end of the hall.

But suddenly the floor beneath his feet turned soft, and he felt his ankle turn, and he tipped forward losing all spacial awareness as the window flew up through his line of vision towards the ceiling, canted at a peculiar angle, and he hit the floor with a force that took his breath away. Almost at the same moment, the world flooded with a light that burned and dazzled, and he found himself looking into half a face. A single, staring eye. A mouth that gaped in a grotesque smile, revealing bloodied teeth and jawbone, and disappearing into deep, black red. Enzo opened his own mouth to scream, but all he could hear was the screaming of the concierge .

He spun on to his back, feeling the blood sticky on his hands and soaking into his shirt, and as he heaved himself on to one elbow, he saw a young man sitting in a chair, arms hanging at his sides. His head was tipped backwards at an impossible angle, and most of the back of it was splashed across the wall behind him. Bits of brain and bone and hair. A gun lay on the floor beside the chair, immediately below one hanging hand.

The concierge was still screaming, standing in the doorway, both hands clutching at her face. Raffin stood a little way in front of her, and his face was as white as Champagne chalk.

Enzo heard the high-pitched whine of a flash recharging after each photograph, and then the splat sound it made with the next shot. There was a low murmur of voices, and footsteps moving around. Something fell to the floor, and a voice raised itself above the others with a curse.

Raffin was pacing by the window, speaking rapidly into his cell phone. He had made several calls in the space of a few minutes, but Enzo was paying him very little attention. He was still in shock. The blood had dried, turning rust brown and crusting on his hands. Like Lady Macbeth, all he wanted to do was wash them. His shirt was stiff where the blood had dried on it, and despite the warmth of the Paris night, Enzo found himself shivering. He wanted out of these clothes, he wanted to stand under a hot shower and wash away the blood and the memory at the same time.

Both men in the next room were dead. That much was certain. And one of them was Roques.

Enzo and Raffin had been made to wait in the guest bedroom when the first officers of the Brigade Criminelle arrived. No one had talked to them. No one had asked them anything. But they had heard the shrill, near-hysterical voice of the concierge in another room describing everything that had happened from the moment they had shown up at the gate.

The door opened, and the plainclothes officer who had arrived at Château Hautvillers in the helicopter with Juge Lelong stood looking at them thoughtfully.

‘Who gave you permission to make phone calls?’ he said sharply to Raffin.

Raffin hung up and slipped the phone into his pocket. ‘I don’t need your permission.’

‘Wrong.’ The officer closed the door behind him. ‘From now on you don’t breathe without my permission.’

Raffin stood his ground. ‘I don’t think you have the right to withhold my air. Are we under arrest?’

‘That could be arranged. For the moment you’re helping us with our enquiries into two suspicious deaths.’

‘Murders,’ Raffin corrected him.

‘That might be one interpretation.’

‘And what’s the other?’ Enzo asked.

‘A lover’s tiff. Luc Vidal had been living here with Roques for nearly nine months. They had a furious row. Vidal shot Roques in the face and then in a fit of remorse sat down, put the gun in his mouth, and blew the back of his head off.’

‘Obviously, that’s what you’re supposed to think,’ Raffin said.

‘I don’t think anything.’ The detective slipped his hands into his pockets and leaned against the wall. ‘I’ll wait for the autopsy reports, and the results from the police scientifique before I come to any conclusions. Meantime, I would like you to tell me what you were doing here.’ He waited for a response, and when none was forthcoming, he said, ‘Monsieur Roques was a well-known homosexual. Apparently he and his boyfriend had frequent gentlemen callers.’

Enzo had no appetite for playing games. ‘I think you know perfectly well why we were here. The names of Philippe Roques and Hugues d’Hautvillers both arose from the clues found with Jacques Gaillard’s body parts.’

‘Only, we seem to have figured that out ahead of you,’ Raffin said. ‘As usual.’

‘Okay.’ The detective pushed himself off the wall and held out a hand towards Raffin. ‘I’ll take your cell phone now.’