Significance (15 page)

The cardigan was still there, a scrap of white against the green and red pattern of the plants. It would have been bad luck to keep it. She hoped whoever it belonged to found it again, and almost wished that its owner could know where it had been and how very good she had been to give it back.

For the next few days, she thought, she would keep her eyes open in search of some tourist wearing it, some pretty rich girl who, while she might own expensive clothes, might never have what Suzette now possessed, namely a good man like Florian.

She walked past the entrance to her apartment, going further along the street to the small supermarket ten minutes walk away. She planned to buy more of that coffee Florian liked, and fresh bread and cheese and fruit and a small bottle of cognac. All of it really for Florian, all of it to make him stay.

When she drew near to the shop's entrance, her eye was drawn to the place where the road widened at the edge of the old town and the small shops and houses petered out and the industrial units and factories began. There was an unfamiliar contusion of vehicles; marked police vans, an ambulance, a number of other cars; sleek BMWs and a Land Rover or two, and many people, milling about or standing together in groups, dressed variously in police uniforms, white overalls or sharp black suits.

She stopped and gazed up the road, straining to see whatever it was that was going on. Remembered all the sirens they'd heard earlier. A car crash, she thought, or perhaps some industrial accident.

A middle
-
aged woman came out of the shop, a woven basket filled with groceries over her arm, red lipstick too bright for her sagging tired skin, making her look older than she perhaps was. The woman stopped beside Suzette companionably and gazed in the same direction.

‘Oh, it's awful isn't it? Oh, I heard the sirens earlier and I said to my Regis, I said someone is suffering now, and sure enough, that's what it was.'

Although Suzette had disliked this woman at first sight and could hear behind the concerned words a sort of thrilled gloating, she could not help asking ‘What happened, do you know?'

‘Found a body,' the woman said with grim satisfaction. ‘Murdered.' Suzette stared at the woman's mouth as she said the words: crooked yellow teeth, the lipstick bleeding into a radiating pattern of fine lines around her lips.

‘Oh God,' said Suzette, ‘that's awful.'

‘And the Lord saw that they were ashamed and cast them out of paradise,' the woman intoned, crossing herself as she rolled her eyes heavenward.

That was enough for Suzette, without another word she dodged past the woman and went into the shop.

The Scholar

The body lay on a deep verge above a drainage ditch. At first sight it seemed possible that the young woman had accidently fallen there. She was dressed very prettily in a summer dress whose full skirt had snagged on a tree stump, stopping her progress into the murky stew of the water below.

Her head fell forward so that her blonde hair covered her face. One arm was trapped and hidden under her body, the other dangled limply down from the shoulder as if she were trying to trail her fingers in the fetid water below.

Her legs stuck out at awkward angles. From one foot, with its strap caught around her ankle, dangled one of her shoes. Her other foot, the sole black with dirt, was bare.

Inspector Vivier and a number of other senior detectives were gazing down at the body and trying to figure out the best way of examining it and the surrounding area without contaminating the scene or missing any clues.

From where he stood on the concrete bank above the culvert, Vivier could see the young woman's naked hip and the pale swell of her left buttock. It looked as if she wasn't wearing any panties. This raised the alarm for the Inspector and suggested a sexual element in whatever had happened to the young woman. But there again, she might be wearing a thong. It was impossible to tell, besides which, he understood that the latest trend was for some young ladies to wear no undergarments whatsoever. He had been shocked some months back to see the photograph of an American pop star which had been widely distributed in the media – the one of her caught in the act of getting out of a car with her legs slightly parted, her skirt hiked up and that hairless soft
-
looking slit on show for all the world to see.

Curiously the paparazzo's snapshot of the pop star had reminded him of one of the background figures in the illuminated manuscript of the Duc de Berry's fifteenth century
Book of Hours
. It was a winter scene depicting the month of February which showed a snow
-
covered hill under a leaden grey
-
green sky and inside a farm building, warming themselves by the fire, there was a fine lady dressed in celestial blue and a couple of peasants. The peasants, a man and a woman, had both lifted up the skirts of their outer garments in order to warm themselves, and the creator of the manuscript, one of the Limburg brothers, had painstakingly recorded the pink hairless genitals of each.

Paul Vivier, as a child seeking refuge from his father's uncontrollable rages, often haunted his local public library. It was there in the dusty hush among the towering book shelves that he had first seen this reproduction in the
Book of Hours
and it had fascinated him ever since.

February. The bitter cold. A harsh life for the peasants of France. The picture almost made him shiver every time he saw it.

But now it was a beautiful day towards the end of July. At last the unseasonable rain had stopped. The heavy rain and flooding had been caused, or so some meteorologists claimed, by global warming. Depending on who you listened to or read there was no going back – the polar ice was melting, the ozone layer had a hole in it three times the size of the United States and floating somewhere in the Pacific there was a ten
-
million
-
square
-
mile logjam of indestructible plastic trash that threatened not only that ocean's eco
-
system, but the entire world's. Thinking about this was enervating. Whatever happened to progress?

It reminded Vivier of the medieval period's fears and superstitions about the end of the world. The sighting of a meteor gave rise to preachers foretelling imminent doom and disease was seen as punishment for a sinful people. Thunder was God's voice. Flood, famine and pestilence all signalled the coming of the promised last days. At the zenith of the first millennium in the year 999 a great army of pilgrims travelled to Jerusalem in anticipation that the sky would open to reveal God. Another crowd gathered on the hills of Hampstead on October the 13th, 1736, to see the predicted destruction of London.

Vivier's father, a uniformed
flic
of the old school, who was as likely to use his fists on his wife and sons as on the criminals he caught, was responsible for the man his son had become. While it was true that both men had entered the police force, the son made his way up the ranks through his quiet intelligence and austere temperance. The father let his brusque manners, foul mouth and explosive temper keep him on the lowest levels of the force until the day he retired.

When the nine
-
year
-
old Paul Vivier sat slowly turning the glossy pages of the books he found in the library he entered a different world, which despite its deprivations was free from the malevolent hand of his father. In that vivid winter scene from centuries ago, he saw how the regularity of the seasons held more meaning then; spring with its promise of fertility, summer with its blessed life
-
giving warmth and light, autumn with its harvest, then the closing in of winter, its barren chills, stark skies and murderous cold.

Human beings, as individuals, as societies, hadn't really changed that much. Progress, science, the Renaissance and Enlightenment only served to add to the illusion that the Modern age was an improvement yet fear still filled the world and murderers walked its streets. Vivier had been a policeman long enough to distrust everyone and everything.

And he was, besides being a police inspector, a scholar of history. It was a private passion of his. Few of his colleagues could have guessed at the hundreds of books which lined the walls of his study at home or of his private ruminations and obscure debates. These last often taking place almost anonymously over the internet with faceless others who might have been equally surprised that [email protected] was an inspector of police and not a teacher or postgraduate historian.

As pastimes went it was certainly preferable to watching TV, or reading, as Assistant Detective Sabine Pelat always did, in particular novels, about serial killers and other evils.

Montaldo huffed noisily to express his frustration and shake the inspector from his reverie. ‘Well, this is going to be a bastard, eh?'

‘It does look like a bit of a logistical nightmare. I think what we need is ladders.'

‘Ladders, Inspector? We have rope and…'

‘No, it's not as simple as clambering down there, the verge is unstable and it would be easy to dislodge evidence into the drain where it would be carried away. With a few long ladders over the culvert we can get access without disturbing the scene too much.'

‘You think it's foul play, then, sir?'

‘We'll proceed as if it is.'

‘Of course.'

‘I can't think why a young girl like this would be here. I can't imagine she was taking a stroll and lost her footing.'

‘Perhaps she was working,' Montaldo said.

‘Perhaps,' Vivier allowed, ‘and yet there is something not right about the dress…'

‘No knickers,' Montaldo stated grimly.

‘Well, that tells us nothing.'

Montaldo nodded slowly as if absorbing great wisdom from his superior, though privately he thought that the absence of underwear told them plenty.

‘So let's get this started, contact the fire department, see if they're in a frame of mind to lend us a few ladders.'

As the ladders were organised and paper suits and evidence bags were distributed by the forensic team, Vivier found himself thinking about the Middle Ages again; paintings from Northern Europe which depicted both everyday life in all its banality and conversely, examples of astonishing cruelty and torture. Pictures by Bosch and Breughel.

There was one in particular that showed Christ's journey to Calvary. Except that the landscape was not that of the Holy Land with its deserts and flat
-
roofed buildings, but was very clearly the Low Countries. In the picture's centre, almost lost amongst the teeming crowds of peasants and soldiers, Christ bore the cross on his back. To the right of the picture and in the distance there were strange precarious structures; a spindly pole topped by a wheel with what look like rags hanging from it and perched atop the wheel a large black bird; a crow or raven. In the distance a similar structure could be seen, as well as what looked like a scaffold built for the purpose of hanging several men, or indeed women, at the same time. What had always struck Vivier about these constructions was that they were the only man
-
made objects to stand out against the sky in the stark landscape. That just as a cityscape of the same period or later would have shown church steeples reaching towards heaven, so here in the uncultivated countryside the instruments of torture and cruelty were thrust at the sky.

Man's inventiveness was as appalling as it was wondrous. If the wheel was one of the most important developments in the long climb to progress, why misuse it as an instrument of torture? And what perverted genius was inspired to break and thread a human being through its spokes?

He looked down at the body of the young woman; she looked like a discarded doll. Whatever had happened to her, he hoped she didn't suffer too much. But even as he thought this he suspected that his prayer was futile.

Three weeks ago Paul Vivier had found himself gazing down at the body of another woman. She had been older, a prostitute and drug addict well known to the police – Marianne Sigot. Her death had been no surprise, which is not to say it wasn't tragic. She had been hurtling headlong towards it her whole life. Fighting and fucking her way to damnation, clothed in tight lycra pants, high heels and barely decent skimpy tops, all of them brightly coloured and glossy, making herself look like some cheap plastic toy, exposing her grubby, scarred and often bruised flesh.

He'd interviewed Marianne's mother, Madame Sigot, a tiny woman with a halo of grey fuzz around her head, a perm gone wrong no doubt, whose quiet gentility was oblivious. She had made him tea and served it with buttery homemade madeleines, then proceeded to tell him of how she had called her only child Marianne because she thought of her as a wonder, a saviour, a miracle. She had insisted on bringing out tattered old cigar boxes filled with snapshots of the young Marianne. Christ, it had been heart wrenching to sit there and see the beautiful child the dead prostitute had been; rosy
-
cheeked in her bassinette, flying high on a swing, grinning with both front teeth absent in a school photo, then demure in her white confirmation dress and veil, a small pale book in her slim hands while her big dark eyes seemed about to brim over with tears.