Clive Barker - Books of Blood Vol 2

"Merci, Monsieur Fox. I understand your confusion, oui? But you are wasting your time. A crime is a crime. It is real; not like your paintings."

He saw the surprise on Lewis's face.

"Oh, I am not so uncivilized as not to know your reputation, Monsieur Fox. But I ask you, make your fictions as best you can; that is your genius, oui? Mine; to investigate the truth."

Lewis couldn't bear the weasel's cant any longer.

"Truth?" he snapped back at the Inspector. "You wouldn't know the truth if you tripped over it."

The weasel looked as though he'd been slapped with a wet fish.

It was precious little satisfaction; but it made Lewis feel better for at least five minutes.

The house on the Rue des Martyrs was not in good condition, and Lewis could smell the damp as he climbed to the little room on the third floor. Doors opened as he passed, and inquiring whispers ushered him up the stairs, but nobody tried to stop him. The room where the atrocity had happened was locked. Frustrated, but not knowing how or why it would help Phillipe's case to see the interior of the room, he made his way back down the stairs and into the bitter air.

Catherine was back at the Quai de Bourbon. As soon as Lewis saw her he knew there was something new to hear. Her grey hair was loosed from the bun she favoured wearing, and hung unbraided at her shoulders. Her face was a sickly yellow-grey by the lamplight. She shivered, even in the clogged air of the centrally-heated apartment.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"I went to Phillipe's apartment."

"So did I. It was locked."

"I have the key: Phillipe's spare key. I just wanted to pick up a few clothes for him."

Lewis nodded.

"And?"

"Somebody else was there."

"Police?"

"No."

"Who?"

"I couldn't see. I don't know exactly. He was dressed in a big coat, scarf over his face. Hat. Gloves." She paused. Then, "he had a razor, Lewis."

"A razor?"

"An open razor, like a barber."

Something jangled in the back of Lewis Fox's mind.

An open razor; a man dressed so well he couldn't be recognized.

"I was terrified."

"Did he hurt you?" She shook her head. "I screamed and he ran away."

"Didn't say anything to you?"

"No."

"Maybe a friend of Phillipe's?"

"I know Phillipe's friends."

"Then of the girl. A brother."

"Perhaps. But —"

"What?"

"There was something odd about him. He smelt of perfume, stank of it, and he walked with such mincing little steps, even though he was huge."

Lewis put his arm around her.

"Whoever it was, you scared them off. You just mustn't go back there. If we have to fetch clothes for Phillipe, I'll gladly go."

"Thank you. I feel a fool: he may have just stumbled in. Come to look at the murder-chamber. People do that, don't they? Out of some morbid fascination..."

"Tomorrow I'll speak to the Weasel."

"Weasel?"

"Inspector Marais. Have him search the place."

"Did you see Phillipe?"

"Yes."

"Is he well?"

Lewis said nothing for a long moment.

"He wants to die, Catherine. He's given up fighting already, before he goes to trial."

"But he didn't do anything."

"We can't prove that."

"You're always boasting about your ancestors. Your blessed Dupin. You prove it..."

"Where do I start?"

"Speak to some of his friends, Lewis. Please. Maybe the woman had enemies."

Jacques Solal stared at Lewis through his round-bellied spectacles, his irises huge and distorted through the glass. He was the worse for too much cognac.

"She hadn't got any enemies," he said, "not her. Oh maybe a few women jealous of her beauty..."

Lewis toyed with the wrapped cubes of sugar that had come with his coffee. Solal was as uninformative as he was drunk; but unlikely as it seemed Catherine had described the runt across the table as Phillipe's closest friend.

"Do you think Phillipe murdered her?"

Solal pursed his lips.

"Who knows?"

"What's your instinct?"

"Ah; he was my friend. If I knew who had killed her I would say so."

It seemed to be the truth. Maybe the little man was simply drowning his sorrows in cognac.

"He was a gentlemen," Solal said, his eyes drifting towards the street. Through the steamed glass of the Brasserie window brave Parisians were struggling through the fury of another blizzard, vainly attempting to keep their dignity and their posture in the teeth of a gale.

"A gentleman," he said again.

"And the girl?"

"She was beautiful, and he was in love with her. She had other admirers, of course. A woman like her —"

"Jealous admirers?"

"Who knows?"

Again: who knows? The inquiry hung on the air like a shrug. Who knows? Who knows? Lewis began to understand the Inspector's passion for truth. For the first time in ten years perhaps a goal appeared in his life; an ambition to shoot this indifferent ‘who knows?' out of the air. To discover what had happened in that room on the Rue des Martyrs. Not an approximation, not a fictionalized account, but the truth, the absolute, unquestionable truth.

"Do you remember if there were any particular men who fancied her?" he asked.

Solal grinned. He only had two teeth in his lower jaw.

"Oh yes. There was one."

"Who?"

"I never knew his name. A big man: I saw him outside the house three or four times. Though to smell him you'd have thought —"

He made an unmistakable face that implied he thought the man was homosexual. The arched eyebrows and the pursed lips made him look doubly ridiculous behind the thick spectacles.

"He smelt?"

"Oh yes."

"Of what?"

"Perfume, Lewis. Perfume."

Somewhere in Paris there was a man who had known the girl Phillipe loved. Jealous rage had overcome him. In a fit of uncontrollable anger he had broken into Phillipe's apartment and slaughtered the girl. It was as clear as that.

Somewhere in Paris.

"Another cognac?"

Solal shook his head.

"Already I'm sick," he said.

Lewis called the waiter across, and as he did so his eye alighted on a cluster of newspaper clippings pinned behind the bar.

Solal followed his gaze.

"Phillipe: he liked the pictures," he said.

Lewis stood up.

"He came here, sometimes, to see them."

The cuttings were old, stained and fading. Some were presumably of purely local interest. Accounts of a fireball seen in a nearby street. Another about a boy of two burned to death in his cot. One concerned an escaped puma; one, an unpublished manuscript by Rimbaud; a third (accompanied by a photograph) detailed casualties in a plane crash at Orleans airport. But there were other cuttings too; some far older than others. Atrocities, bizarre murders, ritual rapes, an advertisement for ‘Fantomas', another for Cocteau's ‘La Belle et La Bete'. And almost buried under this embarrassment of bizarreries, was a sepia photograph so absurd it could have come from the hand of Max Ernst. A half-ring of well-dressed gentlemen, many sporting the thick moustaches popular in the eighteen-nineties, were grouped around the vast, bleeding bulk of an ape, which was suspended by its feet from a lamppost. The faces in the picture bore expressions of mute pride; of absolute authority over the dead beast, which Lewis clearly recognized as a gorilla. Its inverted head had an almost noble tilt in death. Its brow was deep and furrowed, its jaw, though shattered by a fearsome wound, was thinly bearded like that of a patrician, and its eyes, rolled back in its head, seemed full of concern for this merciless world. They reminded Lewis, those rolling eyes, of the Weasel in his hole, tapping his chest.

"Le coeur humain."

Pitiful.

"What is that?" he asked the acne-ridden barman, pointing at the picture of the dead gorilla.