Dry Bones (22 page)

They crossed the bridge and turned west, past a couple of
gendarmes
and several unmarked police vehicles, and followed the moat along to the gate.

‘Of course, you know that he had a brilliant career ahead of him in the Conseil d’État.’

Enzo felt guilty that they had kept up the pretence of knowing the young Hugues.

‘But when news reached him of the death of his parents in that dreadful car crash, he simply bought himself out and came back here to mourn. Seven years of solitude.’ The old man shook his head. ‘He was not interested in company, or in travelling. Occasional trips to Paris to deal with legal and financial affairs. But he spent most of his time locked away in the library reading. Endlessly reading. Or walking the estate. He would be gone for hours on cold winter days, striding over the hills. Didn’t even keep a dog. Wouldn’t have one after…well, you know. Said no dog could ever serve him so well as Utopique.’

When they reached the gate, Enzo could see crime scene tape fluttering in the breeze up along the treeline, and a scribble of blue and pink where a group of
gendarmes
stood waiting. That was when they heard the first distant drone of the helicopter, thrumming rotors beating warm air as it dropped altitude over the vineyards at the end of its short flight from Paris.

The old man gazed up into the clear sky, searching for a first sight of it. When, finally, he saw it, he seemed disappointed and turned away. Enzo walked with him, and Raffin and Charlotte followed. He drifted along the edge of the moat, staring gloomily into its stillness. ‘You’ve no idea why he did it?’ Enzo asked.

‘Why he killed himself?’ The old man shook his head. ‘None. If he’d been going to do something like that, I’d have thought it would have been after his parents died.’ He lifted his arms, then let them fall again to his sides, as if signalling the futility of ever trying to understand what moved men to do what they did.

‘Had he been depressed recently?’ Charlotte asked.

‘He was a very melancholy young man. He was only thirty-six. But, of course, you know that. Hardly old enough to be carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. But he always seemed to.’ The old family retainer stopped to remember, and Enzo reflected that he must have known Hugues from cradle to coffin. ‘Not depressed, as such,’ the old man said suddenly. He searched for the right word. ‘Agitated. Yes, I’d say he was agitated these last days. Spent more time in bed than usual. Wasn’t eating properly. Drinking far too much. But, then, that had become something of a habit.’

The distant beat of the helicopter had become a roar, and they turned to look as it swooped down, slowing abruptly and then settling itself gently on the grass. Its near side door swung open and Juge Lelong climbed out, aided by a uniformed officer of the Police Nationale. A third, plainclothes officer, followed. The judge spotted Enzo. He ducked and hurried out from beneath the rotors, before straightening up and running a hand back through ruffled hair. His suit was creased from the flight, and he tried to tug a little style back into its skewed lines. He strode purposefully towards Enzo and the others, his minions trotting in his wake like well-trained dogs. Behind him, the helicopter pilot cut its motors, and the blades slowed with a descending whine. Enzo knew that the judge was not going to be pleased with him.

Juge Lelong stopped in front of Enzo and lit a cigar, blowing smoke into the hot afternoon air. ‘You’re a persistent man.’

‘So I’ve been told.’

‘You were
told
,’ said the judge, ‘to keep your sticky little fingers out of the honey pot. But you just couldn’t resist, could you?’

‘As far as I’m aware, we don’t live in a police state. Yet.’

The judge delivered a long look of withering contempt. ‘You’re an amateur, Macleod. And I think the Garde des Sceaux made it perfectly clear that you were to leave matters to the professionals.’

‘If we were to wait for the professionals to get a result, we’d all be picking up our pensions,’ Raffin said.

Juge Lelong swung his head slowly to encompass Raffin within his glare. ‘And who are you?’

‘Roger Raffin.’ Raffin smiled affably and held out his hand.

If Lelong saw it, he chose to ignore it. ‘Ah, yes. The journalist.’ He spat out the word
journalist
as if it had a bitter taste.

‘That’s right. I’m following Enzo Macleod’s investigation. He’s just uncovered what are certainly more of Jacques Gaillard’s remains. And when the story appears in Libération tomorrow, I think it’s you people who are going to look like the amateurs.’ He pulled a small notebook from his pocket and drew a pen from its spine. ‘Any comment?’

Juge Lelong’s comment was contained within the look he drew the journalist. And if his look had been words, they would have been unprintable.

Chapter Fifteen

I.

The Rue des Tanneries, in the thirteenth
arrondissement
, was in the heart of what had once been the poorest
quartier
of Paris. The tanneries, which crowded the narrow streets and filled the air with noxious odours, washed their leather in the river Bièvre, polluting the water that powered the mills along its banks. And when Jean Gobelin opened his tapestry factory in the fifteenth century, his new techniques with scarlet dyes turned the river blood red. It was here, in the offices and warehouse of a former coal merchant, that Charlotte had chosen to establish her home and consulting rooms.

‘I’m told,’ she said, ‘that in the old days, on a moonlit midsummer’s night, the streets looked as if they were covered in snow. Everything was layered with a fine, white dust from the treatment of the leather. I guess people must have breathed that stuff in every day. No wonder life expectancy was low.’

Enzo looked from the open kitchen window down into the street below. Most of the buildings were commercial, occupied by offices and wholesale suppliers. The ground-floor windows of Charlotte’s place were barred, the door grilled and padlocked. A heavy, retracting metal door guarded the entrance to the ground-floor storage area of the old warehouse.

Enzo turned to watch her preparing food on the worktop. It was a bright, modern kitchen with a large, blue-painted table at the window. ‘What on earth made you set up base here?’

She smiled. ‘So I wouldn’t bump into any of my clients in the street when I go out shopping.’ She returned to the chopping of vegetables. ‘I’ve made a few changes to the place. Why don’t you take a look around?’

They had come in through a waiting room downstairs, and climbed up a narrow staircase to the first-floor living area. Another three steps led up from the kitchen to a huge, sprawling
séjour
beyond a sliding Japanese screen door. Venetian blinds diffused the light from windows which ran along the front wall from floor to ceiling. A superstructure of metal cross-supports held up a steeply pitched roof. Brick walls were painted white. A bank of computer screens and monitors flickered on a long table pushed up against the windows. Beyond them, two low settees defined a living space subdivided by shelves lined with files and books.

Raffin sat at one of the computers, searching the internet for background information on Hugues d’Hautvillers. They had driven back to Paris in the early evening, and Raffin had directed Enzo to his parking place in an underground car park in the basement of an apartment building in the Rue St. Jacques, near the Luxembourg Gardens. His own car was in for repair. They had taken the métro, then, to Glacière—one stop from Corvisart, and two from Place d’Italie, names that seemed to be haunting Enzo—and walked to the Rue des Tanneries.

Enzo went down another three steps leading to a metal gallery overlooking the old warehouse storage area. Large interior windows opening into a bedroom immediately opposite made Enzo feel like a voyeur. He could see pale lilac sheets thrown back from a large bed, discarded clothes draped over a chair. He assumed it was Charlotte’s bedroom.

Late evening sunshine streamed in through a pitched glass roof above a second gallery, and when Enzo looked down into the well of the space below, he saw that it had been transformed into an indoor garden, filled with potted plants and gravelled walkways. The constant tumbling of a small fountain filled the whole space with its gentle cadence. Upholstered garden furniture sat around a low, teak table at the centre of the garden. It was an extraordinary oasis in the heart of the city.

‘It’s where I interview my clients.’ Charlotte’s voice startled him, and he turned to find her at his side. She leaned on the rail. ‘Good
feng shui
. It relaxes them. It relaxes me. It’s almost a therapy in itself.’ She pointed out video cameras mounted on metal struts that criss-crossed the space overhead. ‘I quite often record my sessions so that I can replay them later.’ She nodded towards monitors next to where Raffin was still working at the computer. ‘It means I never have to take notes.’ She paused. ‘Where are you staying tonight? At the studio?’

‘Probably.’

She lowered her voice a little. ‘I have a spare room here.’ And Enzo thought that no matter how much he was attracted to Charlotte, he hated this subterfuge.

‘You’d better come and have a look at this,’ Raffin called over his shoulder, almost as if he had heard her, and they went back up to the
séjour
. Enzo drew a chair in beside him. ‘Most of the stuff about d’Hautvillers is pretty well buried. Unlike Utopique. But I’m beginning to get a picture of him.’ He rubbed his hands enthusiastically, and started pulling up sites he had already visited. ‘We knew from the old servant at the
château
that he went to the Pritanée Militaire de la Flèche here in Paris. Apparently this was to prepare him for the competitive exam you have to sit to gain entry to the École Polytechnique.’ He glanced at Enzo, and must have realised that an explanation was required for the dumb foreigner. ‘That’s the
grande école
that trains the top engineers required for public administration. Seems he came out top of his year at the
lycée
and won the
Concours Général
for maths.’

He pulled up another site. ‘Of course, he had no difficulty getting into the Polytechnique. He went on to become one of the top students of his year, and was selected on graduation for the Corps des Mines, which is pretty much the
crème de la crème
of the engineering
cadre
.’

He ran his finger down the screen until he found what he was looking for. ‘But he turned that down to follow in the footsteps of a pretty famous predecessor, Valery Giscard d’Estaing. Apparently if you’re smart enough to be offered a place in the Corps des Mines, you’re smart enough to gain direct access to ENA. Which is what he did.’ He turned eyes filled with light towards Enzo and Charlotte.

‘Now, here’s the thing. Each period of study at ENA is called a
promotion
. Each
promotion
is given a name by its students, who choose it during a two-week bonding holiday in the Vosges. In d’Hautviller’s case, his
promotion
was named after Victor Schoelcher, who was a nineteenth century campaigner against slavery and colonial injustice. The Schoelcher Promotion ran from 1994 to 1996—the same period that Gaillard was teaching at ENA.’ He beamed triumphantly. ‘So Hugues d’Hautvillers must have been one of his pupils.’

Enzo drew a long, steady breath. A direct connection between Hugues d’Hautvillers and Gaillard. Did that mean that d’Hautvillers was one of his killers? Enzo was reluctant to make that leap. But it was, at least, a starting point in the search for a motive.

‘Wait a minute.’ Charlotte sat down on the edge of the table and looked at Enzo. ‘The name of Hugues d’Hautvillers came out of the process of decoding the clues you found in Toulouse, didn’t it?’

‘That’s right.’

‘So wasn’t there a name associated with the first set of clues? The ones found at Place d’Italie?’

‘Philippe Roques,’ Enzo said. ‘But that was just a clue to lead us to the Hospital St. Jacques.’

‘Are you sure about that? The Hugues d’Hautvillers that you originally unearthed was one of the founders of the Knights Templar, wasn’t he? Not the Hugues d’Hautvillers who went to ENA.’

The implications of what she was saying started to dawn on Enzo.

‘She’s right,’ Raffin said. ‘Maybe the clues don’t just lead us to the next body part, but also to one of the killers.’ He typed
Philippe Roques
into his search engine and hit the return key. ‘Let’s see what comes up.’

There were nearly five hundred links to sites with references to the name of Philippe Roques.

‘
Merde
!’ Raffin began scrolling through them. There was a financial expert, a professor of film studies in New York, an expert on downloading music from the internet. There was the Philippe Roques they already knew about, recipient of the Ordre de la Libération, and a Philippe Roques who was head of the Inspection Générale de l’Administration at the Ministry of the Interior. Raffin’s cursor hovered momentarily over the last name, and he tilted his head slightly, staring off into the middle distance. Then he clicked on the name, and up came a biography. Raffin scanned it quickly, and then slapped the palm of his hand down on the table. ‘I knew it!’ And he read, ‘Philippe Roques, fifty-two, rose through the ranks of the IGA before taking advantage, in 1994, of one of several internal promotion opportunities offered each year by the École National d’Administration.’ He turned shining eyes on his ex-lover. ‘Spot on, Charlotte. Roques was at ENA at the same time as d’Hautvillers. Part of the Schoelcher Promotion. Another one of Gaillard’s pupils.’

***

They ate in silence in the kitchen, each nurturing his or her own private thoughts. Charlotte had prepared a smoked salmon salad, and they washed it down with a cool, crisp Chablis. A beige, short-haired cat with a huge head and enormous green eyes watched them enviously from the window sill. It looked like an alien, or something recovered by archaeologists from a Pharaoh’s tomb. Charlotte called it Zeke, and when she let it, it would leap on to her shoulders and drape itself around her neck. It was Charlotte who finally broke the silence. ‘So how many killers do you think there are?’

‘Probably as many as there are body parts,’ Enzo said.

‘And how many body parts?’

‘Well, we’ve already found the head, the arms, and the legs. You have to figure there’s not a whole lot more of him left.’

Talk of body parts was not putting Raffin off his salad. ‘This is very good.’ He pushed a final forkful of smoked salmon and Roquefort into his mouth. Then he mopped up the remaining dressing with his bread, cleansed his palate with the last of his Chablis, and wiped his lips with his napkin. ‘I’ve got to make a few phone calls.’ He pointed up the stairs towards the work station. ‘Is it okay?’

‘Sure,’ Charlotte said.

Enzo was still lost in thought. ‘I don’t understand it. Why? I mean, who did they leave these clues for? And why are they giving themselves away, one by one? What kind of game were they playing?’

‘Well, maybe that’s exactly what it was,’ Charlotte said. ‘Some kind of a game. But maybe they thought they would be the only ones ever to play it.’

Enzo looked at her. ‘You’ve studied the psychology of crime. What is it that makes people kill?’

Charlotte shook her head. ‘Like this? I have no idea. There are various theories about what makes people commit crime. There are the so-called social causes—environment, peer pressure. There are situational causes. A set of stressful circumstances perhaps. People crack under stress. Then there are those who commit crime impulsively, usually sexual crimes. Or compulsively, as part of a character disorder or fantasy obsession.’ She sipped at her wine. ‘They are all fairly predictable. My favourite, though, is Fredric Wertham’s theory of catathymic behaviour.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Wertham describes catathymia as the urge to carry an idea through to a violent act. The person imbues the violence with symbolic meaning, and his thinking acquires a delusional quality, which is often marked by rigidity and incoherence. Some situation then arises, creating extreme emotional tension, and leads to the crisis of violence. When it’s over, the person returns to a superficial normality, and the tension appears to have been expunged.’

‘Do you think that catathymia could have played some part in Gaillard’s murder?’

Charlotte smiled. ‘Well, we all get stressed when we’re sitting exams. But we don’t usually kill our teachers. And it would be hard to imagine a group of people all becoming catathymic at the same time.’

Raffin appeared in the doorway at the top of the steps and waved a piece of paper at them. ‘I’ve got an address for Philippe Roques. Why don’t we go and ask him?’

II.

It was nearly ten-thirty by the time their taxi dropped them outside Roques’ apartment. The last light of the day was almost washed from the sky, and even through the light pollution of the city it was possible to see the first faint stars putting in their nightly appearance. The apartment was on the third floor of an upmarket block on the Boulevard Suchet, on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, not far from the Hippodrome. Charlotte had decided not to come with them.

At a tall gate, Raffin rang the bell for the
concierge
, and after a few minutes an elderly lady peered at them suspiciously through the wrought iron.

‘Sorry to trouble you, madame,’ Raffin said, turning on the charm. He held up his Press pass. ‘My name’s Raffin. I’m with the Press corps at Matignon. We’re here for a briefing with Monsieur Roques. He
is
expecting me, but I’m afraid I’ve mislaid my entry code.’

She raised a sceptical eyebrow and it was clear that she did not believe him. But, still, she sighed and opened the gate. ‘Always the same,’ she said. ‘Young men, old men….’ She glanced at Enzo. ‘All with their stories. You people must think I came up the Seine in a bubble.’

Enzo and Raffin exchanged puzzled glances. What on earth was she talking about?

‘Follow me,’ she said, and they did as they were told. She took them through a brightly lit passageway to a wide, paved courtyard ringed by extravagant gardens. Her apartment was on the ground floor adjoining a marble lobby with an elevator and a carpeted staircase. ‘Wait here. I’ll call him.’ She went into her apartment and left the door open.

‘What are we going to tell her when Roques says he doesn’t know us?’ Enzo whispered.

But Raffin was unfazed. ‘I’ll think of something.’

They waited a long time before the
concierge
returned, scepticism replaced by consternation. ‘I don’t understand it. I saw him coming in. And I know he hasn’t gone out.’

‘There’s no reply?’ Raffin asked. She shook her head. ‘Then he must have slipped out when you weren’t looking.’

‘No.’ She waggled a finger emphatically. ‘If he had gone out again, I’d have seen him.’ She nodded towards a barred window giving on to a small sitting room. A television screen flickered blue in the dark. ‘I always hear the elevator. Besides, young Luc hasn’t been out all day.’ She was clearly at a loss for what to do, and more than a little apprehensive. ‘Will you come up with me?’