by Peter May
The abrasions on the neck, Enzo figured, had been made by Lambert himself, trying to prise free his attacker’s grasp. He flipped through a few more pages to confirm his suspicions, and found what he was looking for. The pathologist had recovered skin from beneath the victim’s fingernails. His own skin, gouged from his neck in the heat of the struggle.
He had, it seemed, been at least partially successful in preventing his attacker from strangling him. As Martinot had observed, that seemed odd given Lambert’s slight build. In the end, however, he had been no match for a technique that had severed his spinal cord in a single, deft twist of the head.
‘So what do you think?’ Raffin’s impatience was palpable. But Enzo raised a hand to quiet him. He was not going to be rushed. He lifted the plastic bag containing the pills and looked at the label on it. Twenty-one comprimés, terfenadine, brand name Seldane. He turned to Martinot. ‘You’re certain that Lambert did not suffer from allergies?’
‘As certain as I can be. His mother knew nothing about it if he did. He had never been prescribed antihistamines, and there were no others in the house.’
‘But terfenadine was a prescription drug?’
‘Yes. We always figured they belonged to the killer.’
‘Although you found nothing in the apartment that might have triggered an allergic reaction?’
‘Our best advice at the time was that almost anything can trigger a reaction in sufferers. Even someone’s aftershave. But Lambert wasn’t wearing any, and there was nothing else that suggested itself to us.’
‘So why was there a broken glass in the sink and pills spilled all over the kitchen floor?’
Martinot shrugged. ‘We can only guess at that, monsieur.’
Enzo picked up the crime scene photographs again, this time examining as much of the room as he could see beyond the immediate area of struggle. A large settee and two armchairs that looked as if they had seen better days, half-hidden beneath colourful woven throws. The lurid, thick-piled carpet, plush velvet curtains hanging in oriel windows. ‘This was a furnished rental, right?’
‘Right.’
‘He hadn’t been there very long.’
‘A couple of months.’
‘Did you talk to the previous locataires?’
Martinot picked up and riffled through the reports. ‘Yeah, here we are. Two days after the murder. A middle aged couple. They’d moved across town. Fourteenth arrondissement. It was just routine stuff. They couldn’t help.’
‘Would we be able to find them again?’
‘Who knows? Sixteen years. They could have moved again. They might be dead. Why?’
‘We need to know if they kept pets.’
‘Pets?’ Martinot frowned and scratched his head. ‘You know, now that you mention it, I can actually remember going to their place. Sticks in my mind only because they had these two thundering great Irish setters that just about knocked me over. Huge beasts. Made a big apartment seem small.’
Enzo let his eyes wander over the crime scene photographs once more. ‘Then that’s probably what did it.’
‘Did what?’ Raffin said.
‘Sparked the reaction.’
Martinot said, ‘But there hadn’t been dogs in Lambert’s apartment for over two months.’
Enzo shook his head. ‘Doesn’t matter. Both cats and dogs shed something called dander. The word has the same origin as dandruff. It’s a natural phenomenon in hairy animals. The outer layer of skin, the epidermis, is quite thin in dogs. It’s constantly renewing itself as layers of new cells push up to replace the old ones above. The process takes place every twenty-one days or so. The outer cells flake off into the environment as dander. People think it’s the animal’s hair that causes allergy. It’s not. It’s the dander.’
Raffin said, ‘Are you saying the killer had an allergic reaction to dogs that weren’t even there?’
‘Well, consider this. Epidermal turnover is more rapid in breeds that are prone to various forms of dry and oily seborrhea. Breeds like Cocker or Springer spaniels.’ He paused. ‘Or Irish setters. These dogs shed old skin every three or four days. So the previous occupants of Lambert’s apartment had dogs that were producing up to seven times the amount of dander most dogs produce. And there were two of them. That dander would have permeated the entire place, sparking possible allergic reaction in a sufferer even months after the dogs had gone.’
He handed the folder of photographs to Martinot. ‘Look at the place. Soft furniture, plush curtains. Thick-piled carpet, the worst repository of all for dander. It would be my guess, monsieur, that the killer had a severe allergy to dog dander. He maybe knew that his victim didn’t keep pets, so he went unsuspecting to an apartment that was just laden with the stuff. Symptoms would have started within minutes. Judging by the struggle, the ineffectual attempt to strangle his victim, the killer was probably under serious stress. Semi-incapacitated. Severe allergic reaction develops very fast. If it reaches anything like anaphylaxis, whole body reaction, it can be disabling, sometimes even fatal.’
He picked up the plastic bag with the pills. ‘The terfenadine wouldn’t have been particularly effective. He must have tried to get as many into himself as he could. But the best way of dealing with a reaction like that is getting away from the source of the allergen as quickly as possible. Which would explain his panic in getting out of the place, and why he left a trail of evidence in his wake. It’s even possible he might have required hospital treatment.’
‘Jesus!’ Martinot’s oath slipped out in a breath. He had a very vivid picture now of a scene he had been trying to piece together for almost two decades.
Raffin said, ‘So he had an allergic reaction, how does that help us?’
Enzo turned to him. ‘If Monsieur Martinot can get us a Wood’s Lamp, I’ll show you.’
Martinot cocked an eyebrow. ‘With all due respect, monsieur, what the hell’s a Wood’s Lamp?’
‘It’s a lamp that gives off an ultraviolet light. Standard kit for a forensic scientist. But any ultraviolet lamp will do.’
* * *
It took Martinot more than an hour to procure an ultraviolet lamp and return to meet up with Enzo and Raffin once more at the greffe.
‘I don’t know if it’s a Wood’s Lamp,’ he said, but it gives off ultraviolet light.’ It was around nine inches long and three inches wide in a black casing, most of which was to contain a battery to power the tubular bulb.
‘It’ll do perfectly.’ Enzo handed it back to Martinot and removed Lambert’s patterned blue and red woollen crewneck sweater from its paper parcel, spreading it carefully on the table top. ‘Ultra violet,’ he said, ‘otherwise known as blacklight. Or blacklight blue, in the trade, to distinguish it from those bug zapping lamps. It was delivered as a light source in a lamp more than a century ago by a man called Robert W. Wood. First used in the diagnosis of infective and pigmentary dermatoses. But more recently as a diagnostic tool for certain skin cancers.’
He took back the lamp from Martinot. ‘Most often employed in forensic science to detect the presence of semen on the skin and clothing of rape victims.’ He turned to Raffin. ‘Would you turn out the light, please, Roger?’
The windowless room was plunged into absolute darkness. Enzo took a deep breath. He was about to shine a light into the past. A blacklight to illuminate a brutal killer. He pressed a switch, and the lamp flickered several times before casting its eerie light around the room. He held it six inches above the fabric of Lambert’s sweater and made a slow pass over it. All three men could see quite clearly the glow of fluorescent silver across the chest and neck, woven into the yarn, it seemed, in random patches and trails.
Enzo said, ‘You can turn on the light now.’
They all blinked in the sudden glare of harsh electric light, and Enzo turned off the ultraviolet.
‘What the hell is that silver stuff?’ Raffin said.
‘Dried mucus. Saliva. Phlegm. Invisible to the naked eye. And the pathologist
would never have thought to pass a Wood’s Lamp over the victim’s clothes.’ Enzo turned to Martinot. ‘This man came to Lambert’s apartment to murder him. But as you surmised, his plan went well agley. He succumbed to a severe allergic reaction brought on by dog dander from the apartment’s previous renters. His immune system went haywire, responding to the dander by producing vast quantities of Immunoglobin E, known as IgE. The IgE would have gathered very quickly on the mast cells lining his nose, throat, lungs, and gastrointestinal tract. The union of the IgE and the allergen would have been explosive, releasing a torrent of irritating chemicals, primarily histamine. The man would have been coughing and sneezing and choking as his throat closed up, his body using nose, mouth, and eyes to try to expel the histamine like an aerosol. Even as he fought to see and murder his victim through streaming eyes, he must have been spraying him with mucus and saliva. Clear, wet liquid that would have dried to invisibility in minutes.’
Enzo turned back to the sweater. ‘It couldn’t be seen, but it was there, expelled at great velocity, and almost certainly rich in white blood cells. Particularly the eosinophils involved in allergic reactions. Even better, there may be a stray sloughed nose hair or two, along with respiratory epithelial cells. Which means there’s a better than even chance we’ll be able to recover DNA.’
‘Even after all this time?’ Raffin said.
‘It would have been more certain had the clothes been refrigerated. But it’s relatively cool down here in the greffe. A steady temperature. I think the chances are good.’
Martinot whistled softly in admiration. ‘Man, I wish you’d been around sixteen years ago.’
But Enzo shook his head. ‘Wouldn’t have made any difference, monsieur. Back then, we might have found the cells on his clothing, but we’d never have been able to extract the DNA.’
He turned to Raffin. ‘I think our man knew that. I think he knew that if we revisited this crime we were almost certain to find those cells and recover his DNA. And he could only be afraid of that for one reason. His DNA is in a database somewhere.’
Even as he spoke the words, Enzo felt their effect. He shivered, as if someone had stepped on his grave. He had taken a huge stride towards the possible identification of his nemesis. It could only be a matter of time before the killer would know that, and try to stop him from going any further. Any way he could. The stakes had just been ratcheted up to breaking point, and it seemed there was no way Enzo could avoid going head to head with him.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Cadaquès, Spain, September 1986
Outside the church, on the slate-paved terrace, two Mediterranean conifers offered a pool of shade, a momentary escape from the dusty blast of the sun. Below, across the Roman tiled roofs, boats bobbed gently at moorings in a bay like glass. The reflection of sunlight on whitewash was blinding.
Richard hesitated in the shadow of the trees. He felt strangely choked. He had watched her leave the house just minutes earlier. A woman of fifty, whom the years had not treated kindly. Once lustrous blond hair now gone grey, pulled back severely from a thin face, pinched and turned mean by time and disappointment. A woman who passed him on the steps without a second glance.
His mother.
He was not quite sure why he had come. Curiosity, he supposed. A need to connect with his past. A tiny Spanish fishing port from where he had been snatched sixteen years and two months ago. A place which had become a prison for the woman who had loved him then. And if she still did, it wasn’t really him she loved. It was the memory of the child she had lost all those years before.
There was something shocking in seeing her. In knowing that she was going to church to pray for him. He had stood on the steps, caught by surprise. And if she had met his eye he might have said, ‘Hello, mother,’ and released her from her misery. Instead, he had frozen, unable to move, unable to speak, and she had passed, preoccupied, within a few inches of her missing boy.
Now that he was here, he didn’t know quite what to do. But the cool of the Església de Santa Maria drew him, like an inhalation of breath. An escape from the furnace. And he walked in through an opening in the tall, studded door, only to see a reflection of himself in glass behind wrought iron gates. Dark glasses and baseball cap, shorts and a tee-shirt. Not exactly the respectful attire expected of those who came to worship.
He turned into the church and removed his cap and shades, blinking in the dark as his eyes adjusted to the change of light. And then suddenly the apse at the far end of the nave was bathed in soft yellow, as a tourist dropped a coin in a metre, and an altar of extraordinary extravagance, fashioned from pure gold, rose up into the vaulted dome. Angels and cherubs adorning columns and arches rising in tiers to a winged figure in flight almost at the confluence of the dome’s ribs.
For a moment Richard gazed at it in awe. He had never seen anything quite like it. At least, not on this scale. Then his eyes drifted among the rows of pews searching for his mother. But she wasn’t to be seen. He walked carefully through the echoing vastness, almost afraid to breathe, until he saw a red, net curtain hung in the entrance to the transversal chapel. A sign in the doorway read, A Place of Prayer. And through the curtain he could see a more modest altar presided over by a figure of Christ washed in sunlight from windows high up in the walls. A solitary soul knelt before it in silhouette.
Angela Bright was quite still, head bowed, her hands clasped in front of her. Richard stood watching her for some minutes, safe in the knowledge that even if she rose unexpectedly he would not be immediately visible to her. If she was praying for his return, then her prayers had been answered. But he had already decided that she would never know it.
He retreated to the back of the church to sit beneath the huge circle of stained glass and stare at the altar, until the time purchased by the coin expired, and it retreated suddenly into its habitual obscurity. He was backlit through the glass at the door, a silhouette like his mother, cut in sharp contrast against the rectangular halo of sunlight beyond. When she emerged, finally, from her chapel, she walked past him without even looking. She had an odd, shuffling gait, like an old woman.
He rose and followed her out, slipping on his dark glasses and pulling the peak of his cap down to shadow his face. She turned into the narrow, slate-cobbled street below the church that led to her house, a white-washed, three-storey building with rust-red shutters and arched brick lintels. He wondered what she did all day in this rambling old house with its walled garden, bougainvillea climbing the whitewash and weeping its purple tears. Did his brother and sister still live here, too? He looked up and saw patterned ceramic tiles beneath the eaves. Who paid for it all? His father?
His mother pushed open a mahogany red door and was swallowed by darkness. Richard stood staring after her for some minutes. The street descended at an acute angle below him into the old town, narrow and shaded by tall houses and more bougainvillea. A few paces down, on the other side of the street, was a small restaurant, a chalkboard sign outside with the menu of the day. Just a handful of pesetas would get him lunch and a carafe of wine.
He was served by an attractive young waitress who clearly found him interesting. She hovered attentively at his table, happy to talk. She had just left school to work in the family business, and after a busy season things were quieter now, she said. Her French was good. And her English passable. He ordered gaspacho, which came with soft chunks of rough, Spanish bread, and then catch of the day, which was dorado, or sea bream, soft white flesh moist and delicious, reminding him of home. Although now that he knew who he was, it no longer felt like a place he could call home. It was where he had grown up, with a stranger pretending to be his mother.
He asked if there were a lot of foreigners buying property in the town these days, and she told him there were more and more. There was an old English lady living across the street. But she’d been there for years. Señora Bright. And she was no holidaymaker. Hers was a sad story.
‘Oh?’ Richard gave her his
most charming smile. ‘Tell me?’
She glanced back towards the kitchen before running an eye over the other tables, and decided she had time. She told him about the abduction of Señora Bright’s child, although she was too young to remember it herself. The old lady had lived opposite ever since she could remember. She’d had two children with her. But she hardly knew them. Her parents had sent her to a convent school, so she didn’t know a lot of the other kids in town. But she’d seen them occasionally in the street. She looked at Richard. ‘The boy looked a little like you.’ She tried to picture him without the baseball cap and sunglasses. ‘But he had much longer hair.’
Richard said, ‘You speak about them as if they weren’t around any more.’
‘They’re not. They went back to England a couple of years ago. To live with their father, my mother said. And good riddance. She doesn’t like the English.’
Richard lingered over his meal, smoking several cigarettes, thinking about what he was going to do with the rest of his life. Who he was going to be. After all, he was free now to be whoever he wanted. But his money wasn’t going to last forever, and that was a problem.
Through the open door of the restaurant, he saw his mother passing. Dressed all in black, like a widow in mourning. He paid up quickly and said a hurried farewell to the disappointed waitress. Emboldened by a half-litre of rough, red Rioja, he set off after the old lady.
She was carrying a woven shopping basket and had a black headscarf tied loosely around her hair. He followed her, recklessly close, all the way down through the town, past the Carretera del Dr. Callis and a tiny art gallery on the corner to the Casa de la Vila at the bottom of the hill. He leaned on the rail and looked down into the clear, green water of the bay below and watched his mother climb stiffly down the steps to the curve of the harbour road.
