Peter May - Extraordinary People

Raffin stood upright. He seemed startled. ‘Well, what does it mean?’

‘I don’t know,’ Enzo said. ‘There’s a cross on the wall above his bed. Was he a religious man?’

Gaillard’s mother looked up at them from her chair at the window when they came through to ask, and seemed puzzled by the question. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘He went to mass several times a week. He was absolutely devoted.’

‘What church did he go to?’

‘St. Étienne du Mont,’ she replied without hesitation. ‘It is the parish church of the Sorbonne. He began going there when he was still a student.’

St. Étienne du Mont, not unnaturally, stood at the top of a hill at the end of the Rue de la Montagne de Ste. Geneviève. It dominated the skyline as Enzo and Raffin walked up the steep incline from the métro station at Maubert Mutualité. The mist had lifted, and the sun was burning its way through a hazy sky. It was a warm climb.

The clock beneath the lantern on the oddly turreted bell tower of the church showed nearly ten-thirty. Below, in the Place de l’Abbé Basset, young artists sat sketching on semicircular steps leading up to an arched doorway. Raffin led them around to the Place Ste. Geneviève, past the rear of the Panthéon, and along the Rue Clovis to a side entrance leading to the curé’ s house beyond.

The curé was an elderly man, bald, with a wispy fringe of thin silver hair. He walked them through the cloisters, his gowns flowing impressively in his wake. Sunlight streamed through the stained-glass windows. There were twelve of them, vividly coloured images of the Prophet triumphing over the priests of Baal, the miracle of the Manna in the Wilderness, the Last Supper.

‘I remember him well,’ the curé was saying, his voice reverberating through the Apsidal Chapel. ‘He came to mass several times a week. He was a regular at confession.’ They passed along a short corridor, by-passing the sacristy, and through a door into the church itself. Enzo gazed up into its towering vaulted roof in awe. Light flooded in through stained glass in the apse and in the chapels all along each ambulatory, on to the organ pipes rising up at the far end in tiers of shining elegance. Somewhere unseen, the organist was practising, and the sonorous resonance of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor cascaded down from the roof in a waterfall of sound. The curé had to raise his voice to be heard above it. ‘Of course, like everyone else, we had no idea he’d gone missing until after La Rentrée. It was August, after all, and most of Paris had left on holiday.’

‘I know that you cannot breach the confidentiality of the confessional, father,’ Enzo said, ‘but had Monsieur Gaillard given you any reason to think that he might have been depressed, or under stress in any way?’

‘To be honest, I really don’t recall. I’m sure the police must have asked me at the time. But there’s nothing that sticks in my mind. I do remember I was far more distracted that month by the defiling of the church. We’re just coming up to the tenth anniversary of it. I do hope the culprits don’t feel the need to deliver any reminders. I’ve asked for a police guard just in case.’

‘Defiling of the church?’ Enzo was intrigued. ‘What happened?’

‘I remember something about that,’ Raffin said suddenly. ‘It was in all the papers at the time. Someone broke in and sacrificed an animal in front of the altar.’

The curé said, ‘It was a pig. They butchered it. Dismembered the poor creature. Blood and bits were everywhere.’

‘Why would anyone do something like that?’ Enzo asked.

‘God only knows.’ The curé raised his eyes to Heaven as if searching for belated enlightenment. ‘Some Pagan rite perhaps. Some Black ceremony, a sacrifice to the Antichrist. Who knows? No one ever owned up to it. But no matter how much we rubbed and scrubbed, we never could get the blood out of the stone. Here, see for yourselves….’ He walked briskly along the north ambulatory, past several of the chapels, to an altar beneath a delicately woven stone screen dominated by the figure of Christ on a large cross overhead. The area immediately in front of the altar was roped off at each side to keep tourists away. Rows of wicker chairs ranged off towards the back of the church. ‘There, you see.’ The curé pointed to the ancient stone flags and two steps leading up to the raised altar. ‘It’s faded over the years, but still quite visible.’ A large area covering the flags and the steps was discoloured. It would have been impossible to guess that it was blood. It was just darker where the blood had pooled and splashed and lain undisturbed long enough to be absorbed into the stone.

‘This happened during the night, then?’ Enzo said.

‘I discovered it myself the following morning. It made me physically sick.’

‘Can you remember what date that was?’

‘Monsieur,’ the curé puffed himself up indignantly, ‘it is a date burned into my memory for eternity. It was the night of the twenty-third to the twenty-fourth of August, 1996.’

Enzo glanced at Raffin. The significance of the day was not lost on either of them.

The shrill warble of a phone was just audible above the reverberating roar of the organ, and the curé reached beneath his cassock to retrieve the latest Samsung flip-open model. God’s work, it seemed, could now be done by cell phone. ‘Excuse me.’ The curé hurried away.

Enzo gazed thoughtfully at the dark-stained flagstones. A group of tourists stood opposite, beyond the rope on the south ambulatory, staring up at the stone screen beneath the cross. They became distracted when suddenly Enzo stepped over the rope on the north side, walked to the centre of the church, and crouched down in front of the altar as if praying. But if he said a prayer at all, it was to the God of Science. He searched in his satchel and produced a sturdy, bone-handled knife, folding out its well-sharpened steel blade. He began scraping along the edge of one of the flagstones, breaking off splinters and flakes of crumbling stone, and digging out the dirt of centuries from the cracks between them. He very quickly accumulated a small pile of stone flakes and dirt, which he gathered together with his knife and dragged on to a sheet of clean paper torn from a notebook. He carefully folded the paper to seal in the scrapings, and slipped it into a plastic ziplock bag.

Raffin was embarrassed. ‘What are you doing?’ he hissed, his voice almost drowned by the organ.

Enzo looked round. ‘What?’

‘What the hell are you doing?’ he shouted, just as the organist finished his piece. Raffin’s voice reverberated around the church, chasing the dying echoes of the fugue. Tourists all along each ambulatory turned to look.

Enzo returned the plastic bag to his satchel and walked back to the north ambulatory, stepping over the rope to rejoin Raffin. ‘No need to shout.’

Raffin lowered his voice self-consciously. ‘What are you playing at, Macleod? You can’t just go digging up the floor of a fifteenth century church.’

Enzo steered the journalist towards the back of St. Étienne du Mont and the small door to the left of the main entrance. ‘I don’t know if you’re familiar with idiomatic English. But we have an expression in which we describe the process of trying to get information out of someone who refuses to talk, or even money out of a Scotsman, as like trying to get blood out of a stone. It’s another way of saying that it’s impossible.’

Raffin shrugged. ‘We have a similar expression, except that it’s oil from a wall— on ne saurait tirer de l’huile d’un mur . I’m surprised you haven’t heard it.’