Peter May - Extraordinary People

Rows of dark suits hung in his wardrobe, polished shoes in a line along the rail beneath them. Dresser drawers were filled with neatly pressed shirts, socks, underwear. A silk dressing gown hung on the back of the door, as if Gaillard had left it there just moments earlier. A simple cross, adorned by the figure of Christ, hung on the wall above the bed. Enzo found his reflection looking back at him from a large, gold-framed mirror above the dresser. He saw Raffin behind him, hands thrust deep in his pockets, staring gloomily out of the window. On the dresser, a carved ivory box held tie-clips and cufflinks engraved with the initials JG. There was a clothes brush, a gilt hairbrush with two combs wedged in the bristles. There were traces of Gaillard’s hair still trapped between the roots of the teeth. Enzo glanced back through the open door, across the hall to the sitting room. Madame Gaillard had not moved from her seat by the window. He pulled one of the combs from the brush and carefully teased out a pinch of thick dark hair, two to three inches long. He took a small, clear plastic ziplock bag from his pocket, dropped in the hair sample and resealed it. Then he turned to find Raffin watching him. Neither man said anything.

They crossed the hall to the study, which adjoined the sitting room. Half-glazed double doors stood open between the two rooms, and Enzo could see through to the marble fireplace in the séjour , and the tall mirror set into the wall above. While the rest of the apartment seemed almost for show, Enzo felt he was meeting Gaillard for the first time when he entered the study. Here, the man was everywhere in evidence. A glazed bookcase against the far wall held his collection of literary classics. Something to be prized and kept safe behind glass. No doubt there would be first editions amongst them, but Enzo had the feeling that many of them had probably remained unread. His “living” bookcase faced it on the opposite wall. Open shelves on either side of the door were untidily crammed with well-thumbed tomes. There were books and magazines on French and American cinema, rows of popular fiction with creased spines and dog-eared fly-leafs, whole series of works on politics and finance. An entire shelf was devoted to a collection of comic books— bandes dessinées as the French called them.

Enzo whispered to Raffin, ‘He never married, did he?’ Raffin shook his head. ‘Was he gay?’

Raffin shrugged. ‘Not that I know of.’

‘But no women in his life?’

Again, Raffin shrugged and shook his head, and Enzo wondered if they were to believe that Gaillard had practised an odd kind of celibacy. He looked around the walls at the dozens of framed photographs of Gaillard pictured with well-known faces of the day. Président Jacques Chirac, Prime Minister Alain Juppé. Movie stars and pop icons. Gérard Depardieu, Johnny Halliday, Vanessa Paradis, Jean-Paul Belmondo. And others whom Enzo did not recognise. There were several portraits of Gaillard on his own, posing for the camera with an imperious self-confidence. And a portrait-painting which caught that same expression. And Enzo began to wonder if the reason there were no women, or men, in Gaillard’s life, was because his ego had allowed no space for anyone or anything else.

Behind a large desk with a deep maroon leather-tooled top, more shelves groaned under the weight of literally hundreds of videos. French movies, American movies, Japanese films, South American, European, Chinese. More films than you could conceive of watching in a lifetime. In the far corner of the study there was a wide-screen television set, a mid-nineties state-of-the-art sound system. Opposite was the only comfortable chair in the apartment, a soft leather recliner with a drinks table placed at the right hand. It was not hard to imagine how Gaillard had passed all his solitary hours in this study.

‘The films are all catalogued.’ Enzo was startled by Madame Gaillard’s birdlike voice. She had left her chair and was standing in the doorway. ‘He has notes on every one of them.’

‘Did you watch them with him?’

‘Oh, no. I was very rarely here. He always came to me. After my husband died, he brought me to Paris and bought an apartment just a few streets away. He came every day.’ She wandered across the polished floor, supporting herself on a rubber-tipped stick, and gazed up at the collection of movies. ‘He loves his films.’ A tiny smile creased her face, and she stepped forward to slide one out from its place on a shelf a little above head-height. ‘His favourite. He says he has watched it nearly thirty times. He says it is the absolute true essence of Paris.’

Enzo took the box from her and looked at the black-and-white still on the cover. The title was blazed across it in yellow. La Traversée de Paris . A film by Claude Autant-Lara, starring Bourvil and Jean Gabin. Enzo vaguely remembered having seen it on television. Made in the nineteen-fifties, it was set during wartime Paris. Under the noses of the Nazi occupiers, two unlikely compatriots try to smuggle the dismembered pieces of a pig across the city to sell on the black market. Enzo was not sure why Gaillard had thought it so remarkable. Madame Gaillard took it back from him and returned it to its place on the shelf. ‘It’s the first one he’ll want to watch when he gets back, I’m sure.’

Enzo wondered how she could possibly imagine that he was not dead. Perhaps that belief was all that kept her alive. She gave him a wan smile and shuffled back through to the sitting room.

Enzo turned to Raffin. ‘Where’s the diary?’

‘On the desk.’

It lay open, beside the telephone, at the page which had been treated by the police forensics lab to reveal Gaillard’s final entry. Enzo could see where the page before it had been carefully torn out. By Gaillard? Or by someone else? Only Gaillard’s fingerprints had been found. Enzo flipped back through the diary. There was no evidence of other pages being removed. So it was not something Gaillard was in the habit of doing. From his pocket Enzo took the forensically treated copy of the last entry and spread it out on the desk. Mad à minuit . ‘Obviously you’re familiar with this,’ he said.

Raffin peered at it over his shoulder. ‘I’ve nearly gone blind looking at the damned thing.’

‘But sometimes it’s possible to look and not see.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘All these doodles next to the words, what do they look like to you?’

‘Well, nothing.’ Raffin squinted at them. ‘Just doodles.’

‘Have you ever doodled while talking on the telephone?’

‘Of course.’

‘So you start off with some basic design. You’re not even necessarily conscious of what it is. But the longer the call goes on, the more elaborate it becomes, until that first image gets lost. You might be hard-pushed yourself to remember how it started out.’

‘So?’

‘So, supposing we were able to take this back to that first, unconscious image, maybe it would tell us something about what was in his mind.’

‘How would we do that?’

Enzo said, ‘The early lines of a doodle tend to be gone over several times before you start expanding on it. So if we look for the heavier lines….’ He went into his pocket and took out the folded greaseproof paper he had used to trace the doodle the night before, and smoothed it over the copy of the diary page.

Raffin peered at it. He could see the lines Enzo had traced, and the ones he had not still showed through, but it wasn’t until Enzo lifted the tracing paper away again, that he saw what it was Enzo had drawn. ‘Good God! It’s a cross.’

‘There’s even the suggestion of the figure of Christ on it.’ Enzo traced his finger around the outline.