Extraordinary People ef-4

by Peter May

  In spite of his antipathy towards Bertrand, Enzo could never bring himself to be angry with his daughter for long. ‘What on earth is it?’ he had asked.

  ‘A metal detector. Bertrand got it cheap at a brocante. Lots of the kids have got them now. Ever since they found those old Roman coins along the riverside above the Pont Louis-Philippe. They’re worth a fortune, you know.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be for long, Monsieur Macleod,’ Bertrand had promised. ‘Just until I can clear a space in my mother’s grenier.’

  But as the pain on his shin testified, it was still there. Enzo glanced at his watch. It was well into the afternoon now, but Sophie’s bedroom door was shut tight, and he figured she was probably still asleep. Kids! They thought nothing of sleeping their lives away. It seemed criminal, somehow, when you had lived longer than you had left, to think of wasting a single moment of your youth. It was gone before you knew it. He thought of that most famous of verses from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

  The moving finger writes: and, having writ,

  Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

  Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,

  Nor all your Tears wash out a word of it.

  It seemed, too, particularly appropriate to Jacques Gaillard. Although not a young man, he’d had, from all accounts, an abundance of both piety and wit. And neither tears nor time had washed away his blood, spilled on the steps of the altar of St. Étienne du Mont. It made Enzo all the more determined to find his killer. He pushed open the door into the front room to see if the workmen had finished.

  The séjour was in chaos. The ouvriers had removed the bookshelves along the far wall, and piled the hundreds of displaced books untidily on tables and chairs, and on most of the available floor space. Mounted in their place was a huge whiteboard, three meters by two. Enzo looked at it with satisfaction and began clearing a way to get to it. He would need to make some space on the table to set up his computer.

  There was a knock at the open door from the landing, and a girl’s voice called, ‘Monsieur Macleod?’

  ‘Through here.’

  A young girl, about Sophie’s age, appeared in the doorway. As soon as Enzo saw her he knew why she was there, and cursed inwardly at his forgetfulness. She was not an ugly girl, but physically awkward, big without being tall. She had what in Scotland would have been called good childbearing hips. She wore jeans stretched tightly across them, and a V-necked tee-shirt which strained to contain breasts which one of Enzo’s fellow lecturers had once lasciviously described as being like cantaloupe melons. They had a tendency to draw the eye, and to his shame Enzo had found his eyes drawn to them on more than one occasion. She had a pretty face, and very long, dark, wavy hair which she often tied back in a loose ponytail. Her cheeks burned with the pink bloom of embarrassment.

  ‘I’m sorry, Monsieur Macleod…I hope I’m not disturbing you.’

  ‘Nicole.’ Enzo raised both hands in surrender. ‘I’m sorry, I completely forgot. You know, things have been…well….’ He gave up trying to find excuses. ‘I just forgot, that’s all.’

  ‘I know. I’ve been to the hospital. They didn’t know anything about it.’

  ‘Well, they wouldn’t. Because I never got around to speaking to Docteur du Coq.’

  ‘They said that I was too late and they’d already taken their complement of students for the summer.’

  ‘Shit,’ Enzo muttered under his breath.

  ‘Only, I’d been kind of counting on it. You know, for the money.’ She dropped her eyes to the floor, too self-conscious to meet his. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know what else to do, or where else to go.’

  ‘Oh, God. Nicole, I’m sorry.’ He wanted to give her a hug and tell her everything would be all right. But he wasn’t sure how close those breasts would let him get, and in any case he knew that everything wouldn’t be all right. Student jobs everywhere had been filled by now. He had let her down badly. And then he had an inspiration and said impulsively, ‘Look…why don’t you come and work for me here?’ Almost as soon as the words were out of his mouth he regretted them. How could he pay her? He supposed that if he won the bet — a thousand euros each from the Préfet and the chief of police — then he could afford to pay her handsomely. If not…well, that was something he would face up to later.

  She looked up in astonishment, embarrassment replaced suddenly by a flush of slow-burning pleasure. ‘For you?’

  ‘I have a sort of project I’m working on this summer. I could do with an assistant. Someone smart. Someone good on computers, and the internet.’

  ‘Well, that’s me,’ she said eagerly.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I’ve been online ever since I can remember. You know, “Nicole calling the world.”’

  Enzo nodded, thinking that this was definitely a mistake. She might be his brightest student, and there was no doubting her academic brilliance. But there was no doubting, also, that she lacked certain social skills. Her upbringing as a single child on a remote hill farm in the Aveyron had not prepared her for sophisticated student life in France’s fourth-largest city. Her first year in Toulouse had been hard, not least because of the cruelty of some of her fellow students.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, suddenly downcast. ‘But where will I stay? It’s too far to travel.’

  Perhaps, Enzo thought, this was a way out. ‘There’s a spare room here,’ he said, hardly believing he’d said it out loud. But, after all, he had let her down.

  Her spirits lifted again. ‘I won’t disappoint you, Monsieur Macleod. I promise.’ And then she said, ‘What’s the project?’

  Enzo sighed. ‘It’s difficult to explain, Nicole. Why don’t you go home and pack a suitcase tonight and come back tomorrow? I’ll explain in the morning.’

  As he was seeing her out, a sleepy Sophie emerged from her bedroom wrapped in a towelling robe. She craned up to kiss Enzo on the cheek. ‘What’s happening?’ she said, looking at Nicole and blinking the sleep out of her eyes.

  Enzo said, ‘Sophie, this is Nicole. She’s a student at Paul Sabatier.’ And to Nicole, ‘Sophie’s my daughter.’

  Nicole put her hand over her mouth to stifle a giggle. ‘Well that’s a relief.’ And then she thrust her hand out to shake Enzo’s. ‘See you tomorrow, Monsieur Macleod.’

  When Nicole had gone, Enzo turned back to the séjour and caught his shin for a second time on Bertrand’s metal detector. ‘Jesus Christ, Sophie! Will you get rid of that damned thing?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Papa, I meant to put it in the spare room. I’ll do it now.’

  ‘No,’ Enzo said quickly. ‘Nicole’s going to be in there.’

  Sophie looked at him as if he had two heads. ‘That girl?’ Enzo nodded uncomfortably. ‘Papa, what’s going on?’ She pursued him into the front room. The French windows were open and hot air wafted in from the square below.

  ‘It’s just for a few weeks.’

  ‘Weeks!’

  ‘I promised to get her a summer job at the hospital, and I forgot. Now she’s too late to get anything else.’

  ‘So she says.’ Sophie was highly sceptical. ‘Papa, I saw the way she was gazing up at you. She’s infatuated.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Sophie. Of course she isn’t.’ Enzo was indignant. ‘She comes from a tiny hill farm in the Aveyron, and her folks have been struggling to put her through university. She needed that job. I owe her. So she’s going to help me with the Jacques Gaillard thing.’

  Sophie relented and took his arm and squeezed it. ‘Papa, you’re too soft for your own good.’ She looked up at him with her mother’s eyes. ‘How are you going to pay her?’

  ‘I’m just going to have to win the bet, that’s all.’

  Almost for the first time Sophie became aware of the chaos in the séjour. She untangled herself from her father and looked around. ‘What’s going on in here?’

  Enzo cast his eyes over the piles of books and glanced across at the whiteboard. ‘This is my war room,’ he said. ‘It’s
where I’m going to do battle with Gaillard’s killer.’

  III

  Sophie had gone to the gym, where Bertrand ran courses in everything from dance to weightlifting, and Enzo had the apartment to himself again. The computer was set up on the table, wires trailing everywhere — to the wall socket, the telephone, the printer. He had downloaded the photographs from his digital camera and printed them out one by one. All five items found in the trunk below the Place d’Italie with Gaillard’s skull. Now he was sticking them up on his newly mounted whiteboard. Bellin’s approximation, cut from the front page of Libération, was taped to the top left-hand corner. Top-centre he placed the thigh bone, top-right the bee. He taped the shell, the antique stethoscope and the Ordre de la Libération along the bottom of the board, cleared a space in his favourite recliner and sat back staring at them. A pack of marker pens sat on top of a pile of books below the board, ready for writing up his initial thoughts. But he didn’t want to rush it. He wanted to clear his mind first. He needed to wash away all preconceptions and let these five puzzling pieces find their own place in his thoughts. This was going to be a long road, and he wanted to make as few wrong turns as possible. He reached for his guitar and began picking out a slow, mournful twelve-bar blues, and closed his eyes to find Gaillard staring back at him from the haunted shadows of his dead skull.

  Chapter Seven

  I

  Nicole was waiting among the deserted Sunday morning tables of the pizzeria when he returned from breakfast at the Café Le Forum. She was pleased to see him. ‘Hi, Monsieur Macleod.’ She ignored his outstretched hand and leaned up to kiss him three times, alternating cheeks. He was taken aback. It was a customary French greeting between men and women familiar with each other, but not usual between lecturer and student. He wondered, if perhaps, Sophie was right about Nicole.

  Her suitcase was huge, and very heavy, and she allowed Enzo to carry it up to the second floor. Circumventing the metal detector, he put the case in her room. She looked from the window over the jumble of rooftops behind the apartment. ‘This is lovely. Better than any job at the hospital.’

  While she unpacked, Enzo explained the background to the Gaillard case. For her further enlightenment he had left, on the bedside table, a copy of Raffin’s book, as well as his front-page piece in Libération about the identification of the skull. Nicole’s eyes opened wide. ‘So we’re going to be kind of, like, detectives?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Oh, wow. That’s amazing.’

  ‘It’s serious work, Nicole. We’re talking about a man’s murder here. And a killer, or killers, who are still at large.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said, eager to be started. ‘Let’s get them, then.’

  He ensconced her at the computer in the séjour and she said, ‘Are we broadband?’ Enzo nodded. ‘Good. I don’t know how anyone can work with dial-up any more. It’s so-oo slow. What search engine do you use?’

  ‘Google.’

  ‘Good, so do I.’

  Enzo picked his way through the books littering the floor to the whiteboard. ‘This is how I’m going to work it,’ he said. ‘Around the board I’ve taped up photographs of the items found with the skull. As you can see, I’ve already started making notes under each of them. Each time we come up with a valid line of thinking on any of them, we’ll note that somewhere in the centre of the board, circle it, and draw a line to it from the item which has sparked the thought. Then we’ll be looking for connections, either between the thoughts or between the items, and we’ll draw more arrows and more circles. The theory is, that the thought which ends up with most arrows pointing to it is the key to the puzzle.’

  Nicole stared at the board thoughtfully, and her intelligence kicked in over her immaturity. ‘What makes you think it’s a puzzle?’

  ‘Because there has to be a reason for these things being there. Some kind of message. It must be. Each item kind of like a cryptic clue.’

  ‘Why would the killer want to leave a message?’

  ‘I haven’t the least idea. But I’m not concerned with that for the moment. The first thing is to decipher the message. You can see I’ve started making notes on my first thoughts.’

  ‘You’d better take me through them, then.’

  ‘Okay, let’s start with the femur, the thigh bone.’ Underneath it he had written Anatomical Skeleton. ‘The police had already figured out that this was probably taken from the kind of anatomical skeleton used for demonstration purposes in medical schools. The small holes drilled at either end would have been for wiring the bones together. So now I’m thinking, why? What’s the point of this bone? Sometimes, in primitive societies, bones like this were used as weapons. Which is why I’ve written up Club with Murder weapon? in brackets.’ He held up his hand. ‘But don’t pay too much attention to that. There was no sign of cranial damage to the skull. It was just an initial thought. And there’s no particular reason I started with the bone.’ He moved along the board. ‘But it was after that I had my first revelation.’

  ‘Good,’ Nicole said. ‘I like revelations.’

  Enzo pointed first at the scallop shell, and then to the bee. ‘Do either of these things mean anything to you?’

  Nicole thought for a moment. ‘Didn’t Napoléon use the bee as his emblem? I can see golden bees embroidered on blue velvet. Something like that.’

  ‘Good girl. And what about the shell?’

  ‘A Coquille St. Jacques….’ Nicole said thoughtfully.

  ‘Okay, I’ll stop you right there. Why’s it called a Coquille St. Jacques?’

  Nicole frowned. ‘Something to do with pilgrims, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Exactly. Since the early middle ages, pilgrims from all over Europe have been following trails through southwest France to Galicia on the northern Spanish coast, to a place called Compostela. It’s where the saint we call James in English, and you call Jacques in French, was supposed to have landed not long after the death of Christ. Saint-Jacques de Compostelle.’

  Nicole was tapping away furiously at the keyboard. ‘Yeah, here we are.’ She had come up with a page on a website about routes to Compostela. ‘Compostela’s from campo stella, field of stars. Apparently the decapitated body of Saint-Jacques the Elder was landed there in 44 AD.’ She looked up, eyes shining. “Decapitated! Is that another clue?’

  Enzo tipped his head thoughtfully. They were certainly looking for a body without a head. ‘Perhaps.’

  She turned back to the screen. ‘Wow, this guy’s shown close to Christ in most of the paintings of the Last Supper. It says the body got floated ashore from a stone boat to a beach covered with scallop shells, and that’s how the shell became symbolic of the pilgrimage.’

  Enzo said, ‘There are arguments about that. Some people say that the pilgrims brought shells back with them to show that they had reached the sea. You must have seen scallop shells carved in the stone lintels of houses in villages all over this area.’

  Nicole nodded. ‘Yeah, we’ve got one above our door. I never knew why.’

  ‘They say that the pilgrims begged for water as they passed, and that it was given to them in the shells they brought back with them. If you had a shell carved above your door, it meant that you were willing to provide pilgrims with food and drink, even a bed for the night.’

  She had been tapping away again as he spoke and abruptly changed the subject. ‘Okay…Here’s some stuff about Napoléon and the bees.’ She grinned. ‘I was right.’ And she read, ‘At his coronation as Emperor in 1804, Napoléon adorned his imperial robe with the gold bee figurines which had been discovered in the tomb of Childeric the First. And his throne room at Fontainebleau is filled with silks and brocades enriched with precious gold bee decorations.’ She looked up from the screen and screwed up her nose. ‘Why did he have a thing about bees?’

  ‘There is a legend that Bonaparte was advised to marry Josephine and adopt her two children, because they were supposed to be of Merovingean lineage — descendants of Christ. He
was told it would make him part of that lineage. Childeric was the son of King Merovee of the Franks, the first of the lineage, and supposedly a direct descendent of Mary Magdalene. When Childeric’s tomb was opened in the middle ages, more than eleven hundred years after his death, it contained three hundred solid gold replicas of honeybees.’ He shrugged. ‘That’s one story, but who knows. The bee also has certain royal connotations. The Queen served by drones. Royal jelly. Maybe that’s what appealed to him.’ He turned back to the board. ‘Anyway, hold on to those thoughts.’ He lifted his marker and wrote Napoléon below the bee, and Saint-Jacques and Pilgrims below the scallop shell. Then he turned to Nicole again. ‘So the shell and the bee are both what?’

  ‘Symbols,’ she said simply.

  ‘Exactly. So, if those two are symbols, it would be reasonable to assume that the other items are also symbols, or at least symbolic of something, rather than being important in their own right.’

  ‘I see what you mean.’ She stared at the board where he had written Old Medicine next to the antique stethoscope. ‘So the stethoscope doesn’t have any meaning in itself. It’s symbolic of something like early medicine.’ She frowned. ‘When was the stethoscope invented?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Well, let’s see if we can find out.’

  Enzo picked his way back across the room to stand behind her as she put Google to work. She entered Antique Stethoscopes into the search window and hit the return key. The search brought up one hundred and four results, the first one of which was a site called ANTIQUE MEDICAL INSTRUMENTS. Nicole selected it and brought up a website headed, ALEX PECK — MEDICAL ANTIQUES. She scrolled quickly down the page to find the first mention of antique stethoscopes, but it was just a list of early types and manufacturers. She scrolled further down to the second mention, and here found a link to two specific types of stethoscope. She clicked on the first, and up came a page on the Laennec stethoscope. She read out the entry. ‘Ac. 1820s Laennec monaural stethoscope turned in three parts from cedar. Blah, blah….’ She skimmed through the rest, then, ‘René Theophile Hyacinthe Laennec—1781 to 1826—invented the stethoscope around 1816.’ She paused. ‘Just what I’ve always wanted to know. It doesn’t really tell us much, though.’