The Lying Down Room (Serge Morel 1) (12 page)

Morel looked at the print-out. ‘Nice work, Lila.’

‘And another thing,’ she said, looking pleased. ‘Remember how Dufour’s son was about to head off to Geneva for two nights, when we interviewed him?’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, he left without a bag. You’d think a man would have an overnight bag at least, if he was going to be away from home for two nights.’

‘He could have had it in the car. He might have put it there earlier.’

‘I think we should ask his wife, don’t you?’

‘Yes. I’ll be interested to see what she says.’

The food came and they ate in silence. Ten minutes later Lila had cleaned up her gnocchi while Morel’s fettuccine lay mostly untouched.

‘Coffee?’ Morel asked. Lila shook her head.

‘I’m too full.’

He called for the bill and paid.

‘Thank you,’ Lila said.

‘You did say it was on me.’

‘Well, I knew you’d want to pay, being the perfect gentleman.’

‘And you the perfect lady.’

‘Ha ha.’

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s walk.’

They headed towards the river. A barge heaped with coal was making its way down the Seine. An elderly woman in a suit was walking a poodle along the pathway. They passed a couple of joggers. The
river seemed to mark the divide between past and present. On this side, Neuilly with its elegant architecture; on the other a skyline of office and apartment blocks. Across the water, the Great
Arch of La Défense framed a taciturn sky. The design of the Danish architect Johann Otto von Spreckelsen looked more like a cube than the triumphal arch it was meant to be, Morel thought.
Either way it didn’t add much to the high-rise office district.

‘When we go back to the Dufour house we can ask the daughter-in-law about the cross,’ Morel said.

‘It may be nothing.’

‘Or not. This is a woman who supposedly wasn’t religious.’

They stood there much longer than necessary, observing the river’s turmoil, a deep wedge carved by the passing boat.

‘I’d better get going,’ Morel said.

‘Me too,’ Lila said. ‘See you on Monday?’

‘See you on Monday.’

Morel accompanied her to the Métro station and watched her jog down the stairs. Then he turned around and slowly walked back home.

When Morel arrived at work on Monday morning he found Marie Latour and Irina Volkoff waiting with Jean in the office. Morel was never under-dressed but he was glad he’d
remembered today to wear a tie. It was a dark-red Nino Cerruti which Solange had bought for him two years ago, before they’d become lovers. Jean introduced him to the two women.

Morel noticed them give him the once-over. They both smiled. Visibly, he’d passed the test.

The same was perhaps less true of Jean. Morel saw Marie Latour examine Jean’s snakeskin boots and the stud in his left ear. She was probably wondering what he was doing out of
handcuffs.

‘Thank you for coming in,’ Morel said. ‘We really appreciate it. We can call you a taxi when you’ve finished here. We’ll try not to keep you here any longer than
necessary but we’re keen to get as clear a portrait as possible of the man who came to your house. And the boy, too.’

‘Why?’ said Irina Volkoff. ‘I thought we’d already done that. Why do you need more?’

‘Because we’ve had other complaints since you provided the testimony,’ Morel said, keen not to give away too much. There was no point worrying them when he still had so little
to go on.

He called Marco over.

‘Is Madame Guillou on her way?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Marco said.

‘Well, perhaps we’ll proceed without her. I don’t want to keep these ladies waiting,’ Morel said. He moved closer to Marco, out of earshot. ‘Get her on the phone
now or find her; either way I want to know where she is,’ he said quietly.

He turned back to the two elderly women. They couldn’t have been more different. Marie Latour was short and plump, with a round face. Irina Volkoff was the opposite, angular and tall.
Watchful and silent where Latour was chatty and eager to please.

Morel turned to Marco. ‘Do you want to drive these ladies? I’ll be with you shortly.’

‘The illustrator is expecting you,’ Morel told the two women.

As per custom, the composite sketch would be worked out at the Quai de l’Horloge, where the judicial identity section in charge of all the technical and scientific analyses was located. It
was only a hundred metres or so from the Criminal Brigade headquarters. A short stroll, but given the witnesses’ age, Morel did not consider asking them to walk.

Two hours later Morel had a sketch in hand that the two women had agreed on. He passed copies on to Lila, Marco and Jean.

‘Marco, I want you to go back to the women’s neighbourhoods again with this, talk to everyone you and Jean spoke to last time. In case it helps jog someone’s memory. Lila, you
run the composite by all the organizations we’ve listed, including the Orthodox ones.’

‘I’ll go with her,’ Jean said. ‘I can spare a couple of hours.’

‘Thanks. And wherever we can send a scan by email, let’s do it. Save some time,’ Morel said.

He looked at Marco. ‘Did you make contact with Guillou?’

‘No. She’s not at home.’

‘Let’s try again in an hour’s time. If we don’t hear from her I’d like to get someone down there.’

Marco nodded. Morel watched him gather his things and head out, while Jean and Lila drew their chairs together and began looking at a very long list of religious institutions.

Things were picking up slowly. It wasn’t what you’d call real progress but at least they now had a clear picture of the person Morel wanted to talk to.

He intended to go over the evidence once more, starting with the photos of the Dufour crime scene, the testimonies by the three widows and the interview with the Dufours.

He looked at his watch. Maybe he’d grab some lunch first.

Instead of getting his sandwich at the usual place he found himself driving across the bridge to a narrow street off the Boulevard Saint-Michel. Just a quick drive, he told
himself, knowing he should be back at his desk, focusing on the case.

He slowed down and looked out of his window, scanning the street numbers. He’d known for a long time now that Mathilde lived here and he’d made a point of staying well away from this
part of town. He didn’t want her to know he had tracked her down. Mathilde, he suspected, would not find this endearing.

He was dreaming of her on a regular basis. He had come to expect it when he went to sleep. He took it as a sign, of what he wasn’t sure.

He parked across the street from her building. While he waited, he opened the Dufour folder and started looking at the photos of her apartment. He looked up often to see whether Mathilde had
appeared.

After a few minutes he rolled the window down to get some air. He felt bruised from the relentless heat. Maybe after this case was closed he would take a holiday. Away from the crowds, a place
where he could wake up to the chirping of birds.

He thought of his father. Should he try to talk to him about what had happened with the Scrabble game? Maybe he had simply been confused. Morel promised himself to raise it if it happened
again.

Thinking of his father reminded him that he still hadn’t spoken to his sister Maly. He would try calling again and maybe drop by if he couldn’t get through. He knew she was home most
evenings.

He thought about Isabelle Dufour and about what Paul had told him. Could there possibly be a link between the dead woman and Paul’s little lecture on religious revivalism in Russia?

He was so caught up in his thoughts that when Mathilde appeared he wasn’t ready. She walked right past his car, without looking his way. He could have reached over and touched her arm.
With a galloping heart, he sank further into his seat, cursing his own stupidity. What the hell was he thinking? He pictured what he might look like to her if she happened to see him. A middle-aged
creep, stalking a woman he’d dated over twenty years back.

Mathilde crossed the road towards her building. She was holding a Leclerc shopping bag. A child walked by her side, a boy, maybe ten years old. He was nearly as tall as her. Her hair seemed
shorter, though it was hard to say because she wore it tied up. She was still the small, slight woman he’d had no trouble lifting in his arms yet couldn’t keep up with in a race. She
wore a loose white cotton shirt over a light grey skirt that stopped just below the knees, and silver sandals. She had always preferred silver to gold. On her birthday that first year they’d
had together he’d given her a Celtic ring. Her arms and legs were still pale. When he’d known her, she’d taken pains to avoid the sun. That hadn’t changed, then. She stopped
outside the front door and searched her bag.

Mathilde.

In a matter of seconds she was gone, long before he was able to translate the shock of seeing her into feeling. How long had it been since he’d last seen her? Ten, eleven years? They had
run into each other at the house of a common friend, both surprised and uncomfortable at finding themselves in the same room. He’d left soon after her arrival.

He waited in the car for some time, for something to happen. When it became apparent that nothing momentous was on the horizon, he started the car and backed out of his spot.

His phone started ringing, halfway out of his parking space, and he answered it. It was Perrin.

‘Where the hell are you, Morel?’

‘On my way back to the office.’

‘Don’t bother.’

Even before Perrin said it, Morel knew. ‘He’s done it again.’

Morel listened to his boss and because he didn’t have a pen, he memorized the address Perrin gave him. It would take him a while to get there but this was the middle of the day in August
and the protests were over. The traffic would be light.

He thought of the woman who had commanded his attention with her caustic presence, whose fears and prejudices he had understood on some instinctive level though he did not share them, and whose
life had just been snuffed away. A wave of sorrow washed over him. He should have known something was wrong when Elisabeth Guillou hadn’t shown up in the morning. He should have driven to her
house straight away and checked on her. While he’d been busy looking for a stronger link between Dufour’s death and the evangelists, the killer had struck again.

‘I’m on my way,’ he said.

Lila’s nausea had more to do with Richard Martin’s smile than with the carved-up body lying on a slab between them. The pathologist looked like a hungry lion that
has just spotted a lone gazelle across an empty plain. It was a good thing she’d brought Marco along. She had a sudden vision of Martin chasing her around the autopsy table and had to stop
herself from smiling, lest he think he was making a winning impression on her.

‘Well, I think it’s safe to say Elisabeth Guillou was killed in the same way as Isabelle Dufour,’ Martin said. He licked his lips. Lila looked away. She wished she’d
picked something other to wear than the clinging red T-shirt she had on. A paper bag, for example.

‘Water in the lungs?’ said Marco, who seemed oblivious to what was going on.

Martin gave him an impatient look, the one he reserved for most people except for the more attractive members of the opposite sex.

‘If you took the time to read something other than bad crime novels, you’d know that forensic pathology is the art of interpretation, not an exact science.’

He paused, and turned to the body. ‘What we’ve got here is a case of lung expansion, the water-wing phenomenon I’ve described before, and lung crepitus – just as with
Dufour. Also,’ Martin said, looking straight at Lila’s cleavage, ‘her hair was still wet underneath the wig when you brought her in. The skin on her hands still tender. It
doesn’t take a genius to figure out she was in the water not long before she died, which would have been somewhere between five and six this morning. That much I can tell you.’

Lila turned to the woman lying on the slab before her. Naked and exposed. The first wide cut from ear to ear across the top of the skull, the skin tugged back to remove the brain. The Y-shaped
incision along her thorax, skin and tissue peeled back to allow for the removal of the ribcage and organs.

Still, as far as Lila was concerned, this clinical display of Guillou’s open carcass was an improvement on the dolled-up version they’d found when they’d entered the
woman’s home. The victim’s daughter had been the one to find her after letting herself in to the house. She hadn’t seen her mother in four months. The shock of seeing her like
that had sent her over the edge. They’d had to sedate her.

The corpse had been dressed in a bright red wig, too much make-up and a nightie that looked like it could have come straight out of one of those wholesome American shows that were aired on
French television, with dreadfully dubbed soundtracks.

There was little doubt that the two murders were connected.

Marco turned to Lila. ‘Anything else we want to ask?’

‘There doesn’t appear to be any bruising on the arms like the one you described on Isabelle Dufour,’ she said, looking Martin straight in the eye.

‘You’re right. I didn’t see anything. I’ll let you know if that shows up later today or tomorrow morning.’

‘Thanks.’

As they left, Martin managed to move in and say a few words in Lila’s ear.

‘What did he say?’ Marco asked her in the corridor. He watched her move quickly ahead of him and felt a familiar thrill. She could never know how he felt about her. Lila was
definitely not in his league.

Without answering, Lila strode ahead and swung the exit doors so hard Marco had to put his hand up to avoid getting hit when they swung back. He hurried after Lila, who was already halfway
across the car park.

‘Well?’ he called out.

‘He said he thinks you’re cute,’ she said without turning around.

The way she said it, Marco thought it best to shut up.

Morel sat at his desk, looking over the photographs taken by the technician at Guillou’s place. Her death had affected him in ways that surprised him. Whoever had killed
her had robbed her of her life, but also stripped her of all dignity.