For Selwyn
‘What? Is man just God’s mistake?
Or is God just man’s mistake?’
Nietzsche: The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo,
Twilight of the Idols. And Other Writings
‘I will incline my ear to a riddle:
and unfold the mystery to the sounds of the harp.’
The Liturgical Psalter
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
THIRTY-SEVEN
THIRTY-EIGHT
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Death in the Rainy Season
ONE
TWO
PROLOGUE
For a long time, he watches the people in the queue. It’s remarkable how patient these tourists are. It’s 38 degrees Celsius and there’s a bedraggled air about the line leading into the Pop Art exhibition here at the Centre Georges Pompidou. Yet they seem happy enough to wait. In the meantime, they’re making friends and swapping tips. Last night we had a steak-frites at the Assiette au Boeuf, have you heard of it? Best steak-frites I’ve ever had and the Béarnaise was heaven. I know a small place off the Place du Marais, you’d never guess it was there, it was just us and the locals. Forget about the Champs-Elysées, no one in their right mind goes there any more except the nouveaux-riches. Everyone likes to think they’ve made a discovery when it’s generally the case they’re the last to find out.
A shuffle of feet and the column lumbers half a step forward. It amazes him that so many will go out of their way to see this, will line up in a heatwave for the opportunity to gaze at a giant tube of toothpaste or a reproduction of a tin of tomato soup. If this is art then he obviously knows nothing about it. Art, he believes, should have an illuminating effect, should permeate the soul.
He has a headache and he’s dizzy from standing in the stifling heat for so long and from the buzz of conversation coming from the queue. It’s a wonder no one’s fainted or had a heart attack, or just walked away. A quick look at his watch tells him he’s been here twenty minutes already. How much longer should he wait? His coffee’s cold but he sips at it till the grainy residue at the bottom of his Styrofoam cup spills onto his tongue. A bead of sweat rolls down his eyelid and he blinks.
He’s never liked the industrial style of the Pompidou Centre with its utility pipes and exposed ducts on the outside of the building. To him it’s like a carcass, the worthless remains of a structure that never quite came to life. It stands there with its innards exposed, stripped of all mystery. Down on the square the jugglers and mime artists and musicians are competing for attention. A woman is singing ‘La Vie en Rose’ and playing the accordion and he thinks about the tourists who will take this moment home as though it’s genuine and says something about this city.
But at least the visitors are courteous. Paris is nearly civilized in August, with the Parisians gone. The tourists are harmless, with their shiny new sneakers and eager faces, taking snapshots of everything. Every other month of the year he has to contend with his hard-nosed, pushy compatriots here. It takes a great deal out of him to ignore them and focus on the exhibitions – this year there have been such treasures, particularly at the Louvre and Orsay.
His headache is under control still, but there’s the dizziness and he thinks he had better eat soon, before nausea sets in. Something light, maybe a salade de chèvre. At the Café des Halles they make the goat-cheese salad just the way he likes it. He should go there now, before it gets too crowded.
He looks at his watch one more time, just to confirm that it’s time to give up and leave, but then he sees the boy out of the corner of his eye, heading towards him with his left foot trailing slightly. If you didn’t know, you’d mistake his lopsided gait for an adolescent’s exaggerated nonchalance. He wears his backpack over one shoulder and his grey cap turned back to front. His clothes hang too loosely on him. He is trying hard to look cool, and at the same time holding back a smile.
To the man, the boy seems breakable, like his skinny, loose-jointed limbs might easily snap.
When he reaches him, his face shiny with sweat, the boy raises both hands in the air, as if to say his lateness is not his fault but due to circumstances beyond his control. As usual, he seems oblivious to the fact that there are other people around and the world contains a great deal more than just the two of them. He tugs at the man’s sleeve and rubs his stomach. I’m starving. Maybe it has something to do with his age: the boy is always famished.
The man nods. ‘Come on. Let’s get some lunch.’ He takes one last look at the queue which has just inched forward again, and turns towards the escalator. He throws his coffee cup into a bin.
He watches the boy step down the escalator, in his oversized clothing. It’s almost as though he is absent, beneath his clothes. It’s almost as if he doesn’t exist.
ONE
Commandant Serge Morel finished his coffee and tossed the cup into a bin before crossing the street and entering the nineteenth-century stone building on Rue de l’Eglise. He looked at his watch: 9.16 a.m. He’d driven straight here after getting the call, without stopping at home.
He looked at the sky. Another muggy and uncomfortable day to look forward to. He could have done with a cold shower and a change of clothes.
In the red-carpeted lobby he debated whether to take the lift but one look at the tiny old-fashioned cage with its iron gate was enough to change his mind. Besides, his doctor would probably tell him that taking the stairs was a smart option. What had the GP said? A man in his forties is at risk of, well, just about everything.
He walked up to the fourth floor and waved his badge at the police officer standing outside the door of the dead woman’s apartment. The man stepped aside and Morel found himself in a living room so cluttered it looked like a furniture auction house before the bidding starts. As he entered the room he felt the tension crackle in the air like high-voltage power lines in damp weather. A buzzing of anxiety beneath the calm and measured movements of the experienced people gathered in the apartment, most of whom he knew. The tension was always there. The first stage of the investigation was its most crucial: no one wanted to make a mistake or miss anything.
Considering the lack of space it was a wonder so many people were able to move around at all without climbing over each other. Morel counted eight in this room alone. One of them was his boss, Commissaire Olivier Perrin. The minute he spotted Morel he hurried up to him on short, bandy legs.
‘What took you so long? Don’t you live just down the road?’
Morel looked at Perrin and marvelled for the hundredth time at how closely his boss resembled a bulldog. The same muscular build and permanent scowl. The same hanging jowls.
‘I came as soon as I got the call,’ he said. No point going into details.
Still, he
wished he’d arrived sooner. He felt like the latecomer at a party. Two of Morel’s team members, Jean Char and Marco Lancel, wearing protective gear on their heads, hands and feet, were talking to one of the technicians. There were only two men Morel didn’t recognize. Probably the local, Neuilly boys who had initially been called in. In the hallway two women waited on chairs to be interviewed. One of them was sobbing, wiping at her eyes with her sleeve.
‘Where have you been? Are you ready to take a look at the body?’ Lila Markov, the youngest member of Morel’s team, was standing next to him with her hands on her hips.
‘In a minute.’ He took a quick look at Lila. Dressed in jeans, a V-necked white T-shirt and black Doc Martens, she had that look of intense concentration on her face which he knew well. Her hair was tied into a ponytail and she looked strong and fit. There was nothing soft and yielding about Lila Markov.
The police photographer emerged from what Morel guessed was the victim’s bedroom.
‘Morel,’ he said by way of greeting. ‘I’ve got all the shots I need for now. But when you’re ready I’d like to get the rest of her body. Didn’t want to pull the sheet back till you’d seen her.’
‘I’ll be right there,’ Morel said.
As he surveyed the living room one last time, Lila waited patiently. She was used to the way he did things.
Every available surface was covered in ornaments. One was a bronze owl. Morel gazed at it, momentarily distracted by its glistening feathers. The bronzework was delicate, the feathers detailed with great precision.
His eyes shifted across all the other knick-knacks on display. So much clutter spoke of an empty life. The room looked out on to a street lined with chestnut trees that looked careworn from the relentless heat of these past weeks. In the apartment too it was beginning to feel uncomfortably warm. Morel crossed over to the window and slid the balcony door open. He took several deep breaths before sliding it shut again. In the background the woman’s sobs went on, quiet and insistent.
‘That’s the cleaning lady,’ Lila said. ‘She found the body. The victim’s name is Isabelle Dufour.’
Morel nodded. ‘Anything else you want to tell me before I take a look?’ he asked.
‘I’d rather not spoil the surprise.’
It took Morel several seconds to understand what he was looking at.
The old woman’s face was grotesque. The closed lids caked in blue eye shadow. Her lipstick overlapped the shape of her lips, making them look like they’d been surgically enhanced. Her cheeks wore bright circles of pink and the foundation across her face was thickly applied, spread unevenly across the wrinkly, parchment-like skin.
To top it all off, she wore a wig. The hair down to her shoulders, curly and bright red.
Morel was reminded of a couple of the regular ‘girls’ on Place Blanche who had long since passed the age of retirement but seemed to think that with extra layers of make-up they might still score. And it was true there were men who would make do with such ghoulishness.
The make-up was in stark contrast to everything else. The dead woman wore a virginal cream-coloured nightgown tied at the neck with a bow. She lay on a plumped-up pillow with perfectly white sheets stretched tightly over her thin body.
Leaving aside the face painting, if it had been a wake Isabelle Dufour couldn’t have been better prepared.
Morel looked at her and felt the familiar sense of unease that always accompanied this initial violation of a victim’s private world. The first thing the dead gave up was their intimacy.
‘Not what you’d call a typical crime scene, is it?’ Lila said.
One of the two police officers who’d called in the murder came into the room. Morel turned to him. He guessed that the man was in his early thirties. His black hair was cropped military-style and his eyes were the molten colour of maple syrup.
‘Akil Abdelkader,’ the man said and Morel nodded. There seemed little point in shaking hands when they were both wearing gloves.
‘What alerted you?’ Morel asked.
‘It didn’t feel right. First the make-up on her face – that lady who cleans for her, the one who found her like this, said she never wore any make-up – and then the sheets,’ Abdelkader said, pointing to the bed. ‘They are too tight. No one can go to sleep like that, right? Even to tuck yourself in that tightly isn’t possible. Especially with your arms underneath the covers. So I started thinking, someone put her here like this, someone not quite right in the head maybe. Was I wrong to call it in?’
Morel pulled the sheet back. Both the victim’s arms lay straight down her sides. In her right hand, she held a wooden cross, with four blue stones embedded one at the end of each arm. There were no visible signs of injury. But the scene was all wrong. The woman’s ramrod posture, the make-up, the fact that someone – who? – had tucked her in that way. Abdelkader had made a good call.
‘You did the right thing,’ Morel told him, and he saw the other man visibly relax.
The photographer had returned to the room and moved in to take more shots. While he clicked away, Morel looked at Madame Dufour’s hands and face for anything that might reveal something about how she’d died.
Next he checked the bedside table. It held a lamp, a novel and a stack of religious pamphlets. At first glance they looked like the sort of thing you found in your mail box or people handed out to you on the street. There were three of them, all identical. Nothing in the drawer except a pair of reading glasses and a packet of tissues.
Morel pulled the sheet back over the victim. Even someone with more experience than Abdelkader might have been forgiven for thinking she had died of natural causes. Wearing too much make-up, admittedly. But still. Morel made a mental note to remember the officer’s name.
‘So? Any ideas? I’m hoping the answer is yes. The last thing we need is to give the press another excuse to bang on about soaring crime rates. They’re supposed to be going down, remember? If this government is telling the public that we’re getting tougher on crime, then we’d damned well better be getting tougher. And getting results.’
Morel waited. There was no point in responding, he’d heard it all from Perrin before. The pressure he was under because of the results culture brought in by Sarkozy.
‘Numbers. That’s all that matters to them,’ he said now, for the hundredth time.
He sighed meaningfully and looked at Morel. ‘So what have we got here?’
‘We’ll need to wait for the results of the autopsy before we jump to conclusions,’ Morel said mildly. Perrin eyed him with suspicion.
‘I need to know today,’ he said, articulating the last word as though Morel might have trouble understanding it. ‘I need to know what happened to her and what leads we’ve got. I’ll expect to hear from you before I head home tonight, and I’m leaving early to get changed for dinner.’
‘I understand,’ Morel said.
Perrin stared at Morel as if he didn’t know what to make of him. He started to say something else but just then he caught sight of the deputy public prosecutor entering the room and, without another word or even a look in Morel’s direction, he sidled up to the woman with his arms outstretched, all smiles.
Morel had been dozing happily in Solange’s arms when the call had come through at 8.34. Knowing he was running late but telling himself he deserved a break. Over the past six months Morel’s team had closed more cases than any other team at the Criminal Brigade. Even Perrin had been forced to acknowledge their performance.
‘The cleaning lady has been working for our victim for sixteen years,’ Lila explained. ‘She let herself in with her own set of keys. Looked for her employer and thought that maybe she was sleeping in, though she was an early riser. Then realized something was wrong. She ran out and alerted the concierge.’
Morel listened and looked over at the two women sitting in the hallway. The thin-lipped concierge and the cleaning lady made an unlikely pair. He had a feeling, looking at the former with her beady blue eyes and t
ight curls, that she would not typically show such warmth to the stout woman who sat by her side wearing a headscarf and clutching a shopping bag. But clearly this was an event that superseded any perceived issues of class and sophistication.
The two Neuilly flics had done a good job sending nosy neighbours away, Morel thought. Aside from a change of menu at their local bistro, this was probably the biggest thing that had happened to most of the tenants in years.
‘That Abdelkader was the one who decided to escalate this,’ Lila said.
‘Yes, smart guy,’ Morel said.
‘Speaking of which . . .’
Abdelkader was making his way over to them.
‘There is something you need to know,’ he said.
‘What’s that?’ Morel said.
‘The victim. It turns out one of my colleagues took a call from her a week ago. She wanted to make a complaint.’
‘About what?’
‘About two guys who had knocked on her door. Evangelists. Jehovah’s Witnesses or something, I can’t remember.’
Morel thought of the pamphlets on Dufour’s side table. ‘What was the big deal?’
‘She was freaking out because they had come into the building and all the way to her front door. Normally the concierge keeps a close eye on who comes and goes.’
‘What happened to the complaint?’
‘We got her to come in and took her testimony. That was about it. We never followed up on it.’
He looked unhappy.
‘Well, that sounds right,’ Morel said. ‘There wasn’t anything else you could have done. What’s bugging you?’
‘Nothing. Just that one minute two guys turn up at her door and she seems really freaked out. And the next she’s been killed in this weird way.’ He shook his head. ‘I’ve seen a few dead people since I took this job but nothing like this.’
‘It’s certainly an unusual crime scene. I’ll give you that,’ Morel said. ‘We’ll have to see what the forensic pathologist has to say.’
‘Let me know if I can help.’
Morel noted the restraint in the other policeman’s tone. Abdelkader looked like a man who kept his emotions to himself but Morel guessed how much he wanted to be a part of the investigation. His hunger was evident.
The Lying Down Room (Serge Morel 1) Page 1
