Camera Obscura (2 page)

  The hansom cab had some difficulty navigating the narrow street. The woman inside the cab tapped her long, sharp nails on the windowsill. They were painted a deep shade of black.

  There were gendarmes stationed outside the house, doing a bad job of keeping the spectators away.

  That was soon going to change.

  The cab stopped. The horse on the left raised its head, neighed once, then added its own contribution to the street's refuse. A couple of urchins turned and giggled, pointing at the fresh, steaming pile.

  The door of the cab opened. The woman stepped out.

  What did she look like?

  Six foot two and ebony-black, a halo of dark hair around her head. Strong cheekbones, pronounced. Her arms were naked and muscled, and there was a thick gold bracelet encircling her left arm. She wore trousers, some sort of black leather, and that might have been shocking, but the first, and then only, thing you noticed about her was the gun.

  She wore it in a shoulder holster. A Colt Peacemaker, though there was little that was peaceful about the woman. When the people of the Rue Morgue discussed it, later, they decided it was a coin toss, whether she would shoot you or merely batter you to death with that gun, using it as a bludgeon. They decided it would have depended on her mood.

  The crowd moved back a pace, without being asked.

  The woman smiled.

  You could not see her eyes. They were hidden behind dark shades. She stepped toward the gate of the house. The two gendarmes snapped to attention.

  "Milady."

  She barely acknowledged them. She turned, facing the crowd. "Go home," she said.

  She watched the crowd. The crowd, collectively, took another step back. She said, "I'll count to three," then smiled. She had very white teeth. "One."

  Her hand was stroking the butt of the gun. She looked momentarily disappointed when the crowd, in something of a hurry, dispersed. Soon the street was quiet, though she could feel the eyes staring from every window.

  Well, let them stare.

  She turned back and, ignoring the two gendarmes, went through the gate into the house.

  The apartment was on the fourth floor. She climbed up the stairs. When she arrived the door was open. A photographer was taking pictures inside, the flash going off like miniature explosions. She went inside. The corpse was on the floor.

  "Milady!"

  She smiled, without affection.

  The Gascon was lithe and scarred, and he still carried a sword on his hip as if a sword was any use at all. He said, "We are perfectly capable of solving this murder without interference."

  She arched an eyebrow. It seemed to sum up her opinion of the gendarmes and their investigative abilities. The Gascon said, "Why are you here, Milady?"

  She smiled. He took a step back and, perhaps unconsciously, his hand went to the hilt of his sword. She said, "I have no interest in who – or what – killed him."

  "Oh?" Was it relief in his voice – or suspicion?

  "The why, though," she said. "That's a different matter."

  
Flash.

  The light was blinding. She said, "Give me the camera."

  The Gascon nodded at the man. The photographer began to protest, then looked at the woman and decided that, perhaps, he should do as he was told after all. She took the camera from him and smashed it against the wall. The photographer cried out. "Get out," the woman said. The photographer looked at her, helpless, then at his boss. The Gascon was not looking at him. The photographer opened his mouth to voice a protest, caught sight of the woman's gun, and made a wise decision.

  He left. There were just the two of them in the apartment now. "Who owns the place?" she said, though she already knew.

  "A Madame L'Espanaye," the Gascon said. "And her daughter."

  "Where are they now?"

  "My men are trying to find them as we speak."

  She said, "Your men." There was no intonation in her voice, but somehow it made his face turn red. Again he said, "You have no need to be here."

  She said, "Oh?" She still hadn't looked at the corpse. She moved to the window now, stared out at the night. The window was open, and the ground was four stories below.

  "I understand the door was locked from the inside?" she said.

  The Gascon said, "Yes. The gendarmes had to break it open."

  "And yet no one could have climbed in through the window," she said.

  He said, "Perhaps…" and there was the faint hint of a smile on his face.

  "You have a theory," she said. It was not a question. And now she turned to him and he wished he could see her eyes. "The man was the lover of the young Mademoiselle L'Espanaye. He was living here with the two women. Perhaps he became affectionate with the older L'Espanaye. Perhaps the younger one didn't like it. Or it is possible they got together and since blood is thicker, as they say, than water, they decided to get rid of the man who came between them. Either way, once you locate the missing women they will confess – murder solved, case closed. Correct?"

  The Gascon had lost the smile. And now the lady nodded with apparent satisfaction. "And you could devise some clever scheme to explain how the murder was committed – perhaps a trained ape had climbed four stories into the locked room, the window left open especially for that purpose? Or, much simpler –" and she was almost done now, close to dismissing him, and he both knew and resented it – "the door was never locked from the inside. What do you think?"

  He was standing by the door. She turned her back on him. When she turned again he was standing away from the door. Had there been a key in the lock before? If so it was no longer there. She nodded. "Or perhaps the man committed suicide. Regrettable, when a man takes his own life, but not unheard of." She tapped her nails against the wall. The Gascon stared at them. She said, "Yes, I like that one best. Leave the women out of it. A suicide, nothing more. Not worth attention – from anyone. I hope you agree?"

  "Milady," he said. The pronounced lines around his eyes were the only outward signs of his displeasure. The woman smiled. "Good," she said. "Write your report and close the case. Another speedy result for our dedicated police force. Well done."

  He nodded. For just a moment his head turned and he looked at the corpse on the floor, and a small shudder seemed to run down his spine. For just a moment. Then he turned his back on the woman and the corpse and the case and walked away.

 
 

 
 

Now that she was alone at last she stood still for one long moment. The air in the room was hot and filled with unpleasant scents. She still did not look at the corpse. She glanced around the apartment – cheap furniture, a print on the wall, incongruously, of Queen Victoria – blood. On the walls, on the rickety old sofa, on the floor – the stench of it strong in her nostrils. A drop of blood had hit the lizard queen's portrait and ran down it like a tear. She went to the window.

  Looking down at the Rue Morgue, shadows moved far below, spectators robbed of their moment of excitement. How easy would it be to keep a lid on what had happened here? To the smell of blood, add machine oil, foliage, rot – the smell of a jungle somewhere far away and hot. This last did not belong in this, her city.

  
Her
city. She remembered days running in the alleyways, hunting for scraps, hiding from the urban predators. Had it ever been her city? She was not born there and, later, had not lived there, yet here she was. She glared at the lizard queen's ruined portrait, deciding the blood added, not detracted, from the painting. She remembered the lizards' court. Her second, unfortunate husband had often taken her there. His death…

  She wouldn't dwell on it. The barest hint of wind coming through the window, and she realised her face was wet, that the atmosphere in the room had made her sweat. Looking down – was that a shadow moving up the wall, climbing cautiously, some animal well used to shade making its slow and careful way up to this place of death? She watched but could not be sure. She turned away from the window, taking a last deep breath of air fresher, at least, than that inside, and looked at last at the corpse.

  That first glance only took a moment, and she turned her head, breathing hard through her nose. She closed her eyes, but the image of the corpse was waiting for her in the darkness behind her eyelids, and she felt the room begin to spin. She opened her eyes and looked again, and this time she did not look away.

  A man lay on the floor at her feet.

  One side of his head had been caved in. What remained of the face seemed to belong to a man hailing from Asia, though it was hard to tell with certainty. His skin had taken on a waxy aspect. He was lying in a pool of blood, the fingers of one hand – his left – curled into a fist, the other loose, one finger stretched out as if pointing. She half-expected to see a message scrawled in blood, on the floor or the wall, some cryptic riddle to lead her to the man's killer, but there was none, and it would have made no difference either way since she was not overly concerned with who killed him, but only of what they had taken from the man after his death.

  The head wound was ordinary enough. She let her gaze wander further down, past the neck, towards the chest and stomach… yes. She knelt beside him, feeling sick. And now her hands were on him, studying the gash in his corpulent belly. The skin was hairless and the belly-button pronounced, and the man looked pregnant, even in death, as if his stomach had contained a womb and a foetus inside it – though there were none there now.

  He had been gutted open, with a long, sharp knife. The flaps of his stomach looked like the torn pages of a book. She took a deep breath and plunged her hand into the corpse, searching, knowing even as she did it that she would find nothing but intestines and blood.

  And now there was a sound coming from the open window, a small rustle as of a creature of some sort trying to enter without being noticed, and she turned.

  A shadow was perched on the windowsill. She stared at it, her bloodied hand going to the knife strapped to her leg. The shadow on the windowsill moved and gained definition, an impossible apparition that would have frightened the residents of the Rue Morgue to death.

  She said, "It's about time you showed up." She brought up her knife and suspended it above the corpse, then plunged it in. Perhaps something still remained inside the man. She had to make sure.

  When she looked away again the shadow had moved from the window and came crawling towards her. For a moment they were a tableau – corpse, woman above him with bloodied knife, a crawling, enormous cockroach symbolising death approaching or fleeing, she couldn't decide which. The mechanical cockroach whistled plaintively. The woman said, "That's hardly an excuse."

  The thing whistled again, and the woman said, "Well, you're here now, at least. See if you can find anything."

  The cockroach approached, feelers shaking. As it came closer the faint whirring sound of gears could be heard. It was about the size of a small dog. Its feelers moved and another whistling sound came out of its matt-black body, and the woman said, "You're the forensic automaton, Grimm, so why don't you tell me?"

  The automaton she had called Grimm crawled closer to the body. The woman stood up, cleaning and sheathing her knife, and looked down. Probable cause of death – strike to the head with a blunt instrument. Mutilation inflicted post-mortem – the killer or killers knew what they were looking for and had come away with it.

  She watched the little automaton crawl over the corpse. It buried its head in the man's glistening belly, its legs pushing it deeper into the corpse until it almost disappeared inside, making little whirring noises all the while. She walked back to the window and breathed in the air from the outside: air that carried nothing worse with it than the smell of smoke and dung and rotting rubbish.

 
 

 
 

After a while she went through the deceased's effects. They were few enough. Grimm was still studying the body. Right now its pincers were busy digging deep inside the man's head, and bits of brain dulled their colour when they emerged. The lady had examined the man's clothes but had come to no conclusions. The clothes were not new nor were they foreign.

  The man's pockets were almost entirely empty. She found a handful of coins, a packet of loose tobacco, almost empty, and a matchbox to go along with it – no identity card, nothing to suggest who the dead man may have been or where he came from. She looked at the matchbox – the cheap print on the cover advertised a tobacconist in Montmartre. She put it in her pocket.

  Grimm was still working on the corpse, emitting little whistles and clicks which she ignored. There was an Edison player on a table by one wall. She approached it but could find no perforated discs. She searched the apartment thoroughly then.

  Madame L'Espanaye's room first – distinguished by more Victoria prints, aerial shots of the Royal Gardens, commemorative china plates, a chipped coronation mug – the woman was obsessed with the royal lizards from across the Channel. Les Lézards. Her mouth made a moue of distaste.

  Madame L'Espanaye's interest in lizards evidently did not extend to her wardrobe, which was full of frilly, lacy, pinkishdirty, oversized gowns and negligees. That interested the lady a lot more. In the back of the wardrobe she found a box and inside the box a bottle of Scotch whisky, Old Bushmills, expensive and, if she recalled correctly, a lizardine favourite. It was three-quarters empty. Beside it was a roll of bank notes. They looked new. She ran her thumb through them, then put them in her pocket. Curiouser and curiouser.