“I agree,” said Amélie. “But what does this mean for these other men who were with her at the gîte? Were they trying to sound the same warning as Leah about this testament? Or is something else going on?”
“We know Leah wasn’t alone at Commarque when she fell,” Bruno replied. “But who would want to stop her from painting that graffiti?” He paused. “I’d better forward this to J-J and the brigadier before we go see the historian in Sarlat.”
“Dumesnil?” Her voice was clipped, and Bruno glanced up, surprised.
“Do you know this guy?” he asked.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything.” She turned away and began putting her papers together. “What time should we leave?”
He ignored the question and decided to press her. “Have you come across this Dumesnil before, perhaps in another context?”
“It’s not that. I’m just upset because of that e-mail from Leah, a voice from the grave.” She snapped the catches of her bag shut and then looked at him, a challenge in her eyes.
Bruno was sure there was more to this than Amélie was prepared to admit. That reminded him to make the usual courtesy call to his colleagues in Sarlat to explain that he was coming onto their turf to see a possible witness. Then he forwarded Leah’s e-mail to J-J and the brigadier, adding a brief note about its source.
Chapter 16
Bruno was deeply attached to the old town of Sarlat, thinking of it as one of those magical places, like Notre-Dame de Paris or Mont St. Michel or the battlefield of Verdun, where French history came immediately and thrillingly alive. It was not simply that the heart of the old town was virtually unchanged since the early seventeenth century. The narrow streets and crooked alleys, the ancient stone buildings with their Renaissance windows, all made him think of d’Artagnan and his fellow Musketeers, plumed hats and rapiers. Passing the house of the La Boétie family reminded him that Montaigne himself had strolled on these same ancient stones, cultivating the friendship that had inspired his immortal essays.
A link that went back much further, to the abbey from Charlemagne’s time and the medieval tombs built into the walls of the town, intrigued Bruno even more, along with the strange cone-shaped stone building known as the Lantern of the Dead. It had been built to mark the visit of Bernard de Clairvaux, the Cistercian monk who had written the rules of the Templars and whose preaching had launched the Second Crusade. He recalled a carving on the Lantern’s wall of a horse and two iron crosses, a traditional sign of the Templars. Odd, Bruno thought, how the theme of the Templars kept recurring.
“I’ve seen it,” Amélie said curtly when Bruno offered to show her around in the ten minutes before his appointment. “My cousin lives here. She showed me round.”
Sorry you weren’t more impressed, Bruno thought, looking at her curiously. He’d grown accustomed to Amélie and her usually sunny nature and had developed a sense of respect verging on awe for her research skills with a computer. Something seemed to be upsetting her, and he hoped her testy moment would soon pass.
He took a roundabout path to Auguste Dumesnil’s home on the rue des Consuls in order to pass by the cathedral, hoping that he’d still be rehearsing his choir. As they climbed the steps, the sound of a chant became audible, wholly fitting to the ambience of this ancient place. He and Amélie stood at the back of the church, moved by sacred music that was centuries old yet seemed to embody the very spirit of holiness. Then Amélie craned forward, staring at the choir. A moment later she moved to one side for a clearer view, apparently looking for someone. She bit her lip, took her phone from her bag and slipped outside the church.
Bruno edged back to the slightly open door to hear her say, “Is she there?” Then came a pause as Amélie listened to a reply. And then he heard her say: “You’re watching her play basketball? Is she winning? Give her my love.”
Bruno stepped back as the door opened, and Amélie came back inside the church, her phone disappearing into her handbag. They stood at the back of the church as the music swelled around them. Bruno was surprised to see the choirmaster was a woman. When the chant stopped, she thanked the singers before turning away, leaving the members of the choir to collect their bags and coats. Bruno followed her and asked where he might find Dumesnil. She simply shrugged and said he had failed to turn up.
Dumesnil lived on the second floor of an old building whose doorway was open, leading to a wide spiral staircase of stone. Bruno found a light switch and began climbing the steps. The door to Dumesnil’s apartment was closed, and Bruno’s knock brought no response. There was no sign of a bell. Amélie leaned across him and tried the door handle. It opened, and the now-familiar sound of a Gregorian chant seeped out from within. He called out Dumesnil’s name, but there was no reply. Looking through the doorway he could see tumbled books and an overturned chair in the corridor.
“Police,” he called out and went inside, telling Amélie to remain where she was. He located a light switch inside the apartment, but it wasn’t working. He was instantly struck by the bitter scent of burned cooking along with something else, perhaps hair or cloth.
He opened each door he came to, but every room was dark except for one whose double doors were partly open, a faint light leaking out through them. Inside, a sputtering candelabra revealed more books scattered on the floor and furniture overturned. Bruno had a sudden sense of having stepped into another century. Walls that were not covered in bookshelves were draped in old tapestries, hanging in folds. The floor was bare wood, great planks almost a meter wide but smooth underfoot as if trodden by generations of feet.
Before one of the tapestries was a life-size wooden statue of a Madonna standing on a plinth, gazing down with one hand raised in blessing upon a prie-dieu which had an unlit candle at each corner. Bruno took the two long candles, lit them from the dying candelabra, left one in place and took the other to help him look around the room. The sound of chanting was coming from a stone archway whose ironbound wooden door was just ajar. Now the smell of burning was stronger, though there was no flickering light that a fire might give. He pushed the door open farther, calling out once more, “Police.”
There he stepped into a room that captured the fire and torments of hell. A gagged and naked figure, head sunk down on his chest and his arms bound behind him, was slumped awkwardly and bent almost double on a wooden chair. The man’s knees seemed almost as high as his head, his buttocks having fallen through what had been the woven cane seat of the chair. Bruno saw the stub of burned-out candle overturned beneath the chair and realized what had caused the smell of burning and how terribly Dumesnil must have suffered.
He could detect no pulse in the neck but used his pocketknife to cut through the strip of cloth that gagged the man. His mouth was stuffed with something. Bruno pulled out a sodden sock. Then he put his wristwatch under the man’s nostrils and saw the faintest misting. The poor devil was still breathing.
“Call an ambulance now,” he shouted to Amélie, turning to see that she had followed him and was standing in the doorway, her hand to her mouth and her eyes wide in horror. She seemed frozen in place.
He strode forward and pushed her out of the room. Then he used his own phone to call for the urgences, giving his name, rank and location and said the victim had very severe burns but was still alive. Once they had confirmed the address, he hung up and called Fabiola’s cell phone to ask what he should do until the ambulance arrived.
“Third degree, flesh and some muscle looks as if it has been burned away,” he said when she asked how it looked.
“Remove any constrictions like tight clothing, elevate the heart above the site of the burn and cover the burn with a cool, moist cloth,” she replied. “If the victim’s breathing is very faint, try mouth-to-mouth. Where’s the burn?”
“Buttocks and genitals, mainly the backs of his thighs. I think he was tortured.”
“Mon Dieu. You have to keep him breathing. I’ll call a colleague at the hospital in Sarlat to warn them what’s c
oming. There’s a man there who is good with burns, and I’ll get them to call him in.”
Bruno returned to the room, slammed his boot into the crossbars of the chair and then pulled away the chair legs. It was the only way he could see to free the man. Only when the buttocks came free did the legs extend, and Bruno could see the horrific extent of the burns.
“Find the kitchen or bathroom and bring me a clean, cool, moist cloth,” he shouted at Amélie. This time she complied. By the time Bruno had the victim draped facedown on a couch, his legs on the floor so the heart was elevated, she returned with the cloth and draped it over the burned area.
“Thanks, you’re doing well,” Bruno said. “Now can you help turn his head?”
She did so, saying, “There’s a pool of fresh vomit on the kitchen floor.” Bruno ignored her and began giving Dumesnil mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, rewarded after what seemed to be a long, long time with a faint groan and then a cough from the victim, followed at once by the thunder of booted feet climbing the stairs and a call of “Urgences.”
“Keep his head up,” Bruno said to Amélie as he went to the door to guide the ambulance men, explaining what he’d found and what he’d done.
“You did right,” one of them said. He took one look at the victim and pulled a portable oxygen mask from his kit bag as well as a large lamp that lit up the room. A second man unrolled the stretcher he had brought with him. They applied the oxygen mask before checking the victim’s blood pressure. Then they rolled him onto the stretcher, strapped him facedown and took him out and down the stairs. Bruno followed with the lamp and helped them to load the stretcher into the ambulance. He gave the driver his cell-phone number and asked to be kept informed of Dumesnil’s condition.
He climbed back up the stairs and looked around the entrance hall of the apartment for the fuse box, opened it and shined his own flashlight onto the fuses. The orange master fuse had been turned off. So what was the source of the Gregorian chant he could hear? He turned on the fuse and a light came on in one of the side rooms. He tried the hall light switch, and it worked.
“Amélie?” he called. “Can you locate the source of the music?”
“In here,” she replied, and he followed her voice into a room that might have been a monk’s cell. The outer wall was stone, the others whitewashed. A single iron bed stood in a corner, topped by the thinnest mattress Bruno had ever seen. Above it hung an icon of a stylized female head surrounded by a golden halo. It looked antique. At first Bruno thought there was some kind of white carpet until he realized that sheafs of paper had been scattered over the floor, apparently from the single, waist-high bookcase, which must have held manuscripts rather than books. Perched atop the bookcase was a small tape recorder of the kind Philippe Delaron carried for his interviews. That was the source of the music.
“Battery driven,” said Amélie, following his gaze. She was standing at a small table that seemed to be Dumesnil’s desk. A fountain pen lay beside a thin pile of writing paper which looked handmade, the old-fashioned kind that was produced by one of the restored paper mills at Couze, Bruno thought.
“He was writing a letter to some professor at the Sorbonne about this Testament of Iftikhar,” she said, gesturing to a page that was half filled with neat handwriting. “I haven’t touched anything.”
Bruno nodded, looked into the kitchen and placed a chair over the vomit to preserve it from careless feet, thinking that the forensics team might be able to identify its owner’s DNA. He pulled out his phone to tell J-J of Dumesnil’s fate. He was told to remain in the apartment until J-J arrived.
“We’re going to be stuck here for some time,” he told Amélie. “Do you want to call for a sandwich or a pizza to be delivered? We have to stay here until J-J gets here, half an hour or more, and then I may have to wait until the forensics team arrives.”
“I couldn’t eat, not after seeing that. What a terrible thing to do to someone, to anyone. I’d just like to stay here with you.”
He nodded, thinking she didn’t have much choice. He pulled out his phone again and called the commissariat of police in Sarlat to explain what had happened, thankful that he’d made the courtesy call to them earlier. The duty officer took down the details and promised to send a town cop to guard the entrance to Dumesnil’s building.
“Any chance of starting some door-to-door inquiries?” Bruno asked. He was told that would need authorization by the town’s police chief, a morose man named Messager who was a year or two from retirement. Bruno had Messager’s mobile-phone number and found him at some mayoral reception where the background noise made it hard for Messager to hear what Bruno was saying. He waited until Messager had found somewhere quieter and then explained what had happened and that J-J would be taking over the case.
“Torture? Dumesnil? Merde, my wife’s in his choir. She’ll be distraught. It happened at his home, you say? We’ll start the door-to-door inquiries right away. I’ll be right there.”
Bruno closed his phone and looked at Amélie. “Why not tell me what it was that was upsetting you about Dumesnil when you realized he wasn’t at the church with the choir. I saw the expression on your face when you went out to use your phone.”
“Why do you want to know?” Her voice was irritated rather than hostile.
“Do you know something about Dumesnil that I don’t?”
She shook her head. “I was worried about something, but I think I was wrong. Let’s leave it there.”
“Sorry, this is a crime scene. I don’t want to have to tell J-J that I think you’re hiding something that could be relevant.”
“Merde, Bruno. It’s something personal, about my cousin’s kid. She’s fifteen and we’re worried about her. She’s had a sudden mood swing. Once she was always cheerful and bouncy, now she’s silent and morose. Her mother is worried that she’s a victim of something, maybe a pedophile. And since she’s in Dumesnil’s choir and he’s such a weird guy…” She broke off and raised her hands in the air, an exaggerated shrug.
“Do you or her mother have any reason to suspect him, other than that he’s fixated on the Middle Ages and seems to live like some fourteenth-century monk?” Bruno kept his voice calm and matter-of-fact.
She shook her head. “Not really.”
“Don’t you think your cousin’s daughter is going through what sounds like a fairly typical adolescence?”
“It’s not typical,” she snapped. “I wasn’t like that, nor was her mother, nor are other kids. It’s as though Jojo suddenly fell into this deep depression. That’s her name, Joséphine.”
“Has your cousin asked Joséphine’s teachers if her behavior has changed at school? Have her marks suddenly gotten worse?”
“Look, I don’t know. And I accept that her mother and I have probably been making two and two add up to five, and after seeing what’s just happened to Dumesnil I feel terrible about it. I’m sorry, all right?”
“The town’s chief of police is on his way here. Do you want me to ask him, very discreetly, if there’s any gossip about Dumesnil? I doubt it, since I’ve just learned that his wife is in Dumesnil’s choir, which wouldn’t happen if there was any whiff of suspicion about him.”
“No, let’s drop it, okay?”
Amélie turned to leave, but Bruno said sharply, “You can’t leave until the place is secure and you have given your statement. You work for the justice ministry, remember? We have to do this by the book.”
She stopped, keeping her back turned to him, and let out a long, noisy sigh, as if her patience were being tried too far.
“Think about what just happened here,” Bruno said. “You’re missing the most important piece of evidence that might just support your suspicions. A man was tortured, but he was gagged so he couldn’t speak. Why was that? Were his torturers not interested in what he might be able to tell them? So was the torture just a punishment, and an obviously sexual punishment, at that? Has some other relative of a young person jumped to conclusions and taken the l
aw into his own hands?”
“The thought had crossed my mind.” She turned to face him again.
“Well, it could also be that they were the same guys who met Leah in Paris. Perhaps they’d already questioned him, learned what they needed and then gagged him before leaving him to burn. Maybe they left the tape deck on to silence his screams, although I’d have thought he’d have been loud enough to bring a lot of attention. Why did they turn off the main fuse and do everything by candlelight? It looks to me as if they were making some kind of search, and I’d have thought that would be easier with the lights on. There are all sorts of odd things about this, as there often are at crime scenes. So we have a procedure. We try to build various scenarios that might explain what we’ve found, and then we look for further evidence to test those scenarios to see if they hold up. One scenario is that you could be right, that Dumesnil was a pervert and someone was determined to make him pay for it.”
“The other scenario is that Leah was with some Middle Eastern terrorists who were desperate to learn something from him,” she said.
“Exactly,” said Bruno as voices from the hallway below and footsteps on the stairs signaled the arrival of Messager and others.
“A waiter in the restaurant on the corner was opening up just before six when he saw four strangers leaving this building,” Messager began, slightly breathless from running up the stairs. “Three were wearing hoodies, and the bareheaded one looked like an Arab. Does that make any sense to you?”
“They could be the men we’re looking for, connected to that woman who fell to her death at Commarque,” Bruno said. He explained that the interior ministry had already launched an antiterrorism inquiry. Messager’s office must have received photos that should be shown to the waiter downstairs as soon as possible.
“I thought this was about an attack on Dumesnil? What’s he got to do with terrorism?”
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