The Lying Down Room (Serge Morel 1) (3 page)

Through the open window directly behind him, he could hear the morning traffic in the distance, commuters making their sluggish way along the quays. Drivers slammed their horns to let off
steam.

It was already warm. He wished he’d worn a short-sleeved shirt. He wished he could have a cigarette, but Perrin had caught him once puffing away and blowing the smoke out his window. All
of a sudden Morel was fifteen again, trying to hide his humiliation while his father delivered a lecture on the debilitating effect of nicotine on the brain.

He would rather not give Perrin another opportunity to dress him down. Still, he would have killed for a smoke. The day had not started well. His father had thrown a tantrum at the breakfast
table after finding butter in the strawberry jam. Morel had ended up shouting, then apologizing.
I’m a forty-four-year-old man, fighting with my father about the way I like to do
things,
he thought.

‘Commandant?’

Morel suddenly realized he’d turned away from his visitor and was gazing without seeing at the pattern of leaves against a cobalt sky and the outline of a boat carrying sightseers along
the Seine. Another world to the one he’d walked into this morning. Arriving at the inner courtyard of the Judicial Police Headquarters at eight he’d found a team from narcotics pulling
a car apart following a tip-off from one of their informants about a sizeable heroin stash.

Morel turned to his visitor and managed to look contrite.

‘I’m sorry.’

The woman sitting across from him couldn’t have been much more than five feet tall but she radiated an intensity that Morel found unsettling. She was the third and last of the women whose
testimonies Morel’s team were hearing. Three women who, like Dufour, had called their local police stations to complain of two visitors handing out religious material.

‘Doesn’t that seem strange to you?’ Morel had asked Lila. ‘All four of them, reporting something so innocuous?’

‘Unless our evangelists visited others. For whatever reason, these four found it unsettling enough to call. Others might have had the knock on their door but didn’t think anything of
it.’

She had a point. Still, Morel couldn’t figure out why these women had bothered to complain at all, except for the fact that they were elderly and perhaps easily scared.

His visitor certainly didn’t look like the fearful type. But he remembered Isabelle Dufour’s body lying prone under the sheets. He was not giving this woman the attention she
deserved, he realized.

‘So where were we?’ he said, feeling abashed.

The old lady shifted in her chair. Her eyes darted across the room as though the walls were made of rubber. She was humming the tune again. He was sure he knew it, but it evaded him no matter
how often she did this. How long exactly had the two of them been at it? He didn’t dare look at his watch, not with her sharp eyes observing him.

That tune. What was it exactly? Morel’s father would know. Of course he would. At the thought of his father, Morel’s mind began to wander again. He forced himself to focus. Maybe if
it wasn’t so hot, he told himself. It didn’t help that the windows opened only so far and that there was no ventilation. No air-con unit, no fan.

He tugged at his collar. This Wednesday heralded the first heatwave of the year. Belatedly, considering it was the fourth week of August. Half the city’s indigenous population had long
since left town, heading south for the congested beaches or for holidays in the country. Morel would have liked to be among them. Right now he’d be grateful for a square foot of sand on the
beach in Antibes, to sit among the lobster-coloured people and gaze at the sea.

‘Like this, you see,’ his visitor said, and she started up again. Morel found himself straining forward again, as though the problem were to do with volume rather than her inability
to carry a tune.

‘An English piece, perhaps? I seem to remember—’

The old woman shook her head vigorously. She seemed offended.

‘English! Never trust the English,’ she said. Her voice rang like a rusty old bicycle bell.

He ignored the comment, much as he’d ignored her comments at the start of their encounter. He had been making small talk to put her at ease and telling her how much Paris had changed since
he was a child, to which she’d replied that it was all due to the Arabs. It was they, Morel learned, who had introduced cockroaches to the capital due to their lack of hygiene. Morel could
have told her that French history was riddled with unhygienic practices – all authentically local. For centuries this had been a country awash with lice, bedbugs, fleas. But he held his
tongue.

‘Anyway, it wasn’t just the tune, it was something about his face,’ she continued. Morel leaned closer so that the chair tilted dangerously.

‘What about it?’ he asked.

‘Oh, he had all the airs and graces,’ the woman said. ‘But.’

You could tell she liked to choose how she told a story. She wouldn’t be rushed.

‘But,’ she continued, pausing for effect – ‘what sort of well-mannered man comes knocking on a stranger’s door at eight o’clock on a Sunday morning, handing
out business cards? Calling me sister and telling me Jesus is coming. Sister!’ she repeated, with a disgusted air. ‘I told him, I’m not your sister. I’m old enough to be
your mother, though, and if the poor woman is still alive I hope to God she doesn’t know how her son is disgracing himself, intruding on people in their homes.’

Now Elisabeth Guillou was waving a pamphlet at him. It was the same one Morel had found in Isabelle Dufour’s bedroom.

‘Can you describe them to me? The ones who knocked on your door and gave you that pamphlet?’ he asked.

His visitor sighed, as though it pained her to have to explain herself.

‘The man was quite ordinary. Pleasant enough, though he didn’t fool me for a second. He was dragging a boy around with him, no doubt to prevent doors being slammed in his face. The
boy was mute. Literally. A shameful character,’ she said.

She glared at Morel, but there was a hint of pleasure in the old prune’s eyes. Something merry and unkind. She leaned forward.

‘You know, I was raised as a Christian. We used to recite the Lord’s Prayer twice a day, before breakfast and after dinner. My father would watch me and my sister to make sure we
were saying the words, not just pretending. I always knew, well before I could read and write, that it was a load of rubbish.’

She laughed as though something excessively droll had just occurred to her.

‘You know, it delights me to think of all those people living their lives with the conviction they’ll be going somewhere special for eternity once they die. And where are they now?
Decomposing, gone, buried underground, reduced to ashes. Just think! How wonderful, how utterly priceless!’

Morel laughed with her. It could do no harm, and might in fact jog her memory further. ‘Is there anything else, Madame Guillou?’

She began whistling again, loudly, startling him. Her thin lips clenched into a tune, a better rendition this time, which Morel found overwhelmingly familiar once he got over his initial
surprise. He rolled his chair forward. Thankfully, it didn’t collapse.

‘That’s it?’

‘Yes, that’s the tune.’

‘The one the man was humming? Who came to your house?’

‘Yes, it is. Do you recognize it?’

‘Indeed, Madame, indeed I do.’

They looked at each other, beaming.

‘Well, you’ve been an immense help, Madame Guillou. I thank you, once again, for taking the trouble to come in.’

‘Are you a believer, Commandant?’ she asked. She was standing up, adjusting the strap of her handbag on her shoulder and holding on tight, as though she expected someone to snatch it
from her.

‘Of sorts, Madame, of sorts. But not the peddling kind, if you know what I mean.’

Not so certain now, she hesitated. ‘Yes, yes. Will that be all?’

‘Yes indeed. And I thank you for taking the time to come in. You’ve been a great help.’

‘My pleasure.’ All briskness and efficiency now. ‘Nice to meet you too.’ She looked him up and down, as though she might say something more. But then thought better of
it.

He walked her to the top of the stairs, thinking to accompany her to the ground floor, but she waved him away as though guessing his intention.

‘I’m perfectly capable of seeing myself out,’ she said.

They shook hands as though they’d just conducted a successful business transaction.

‘Goodbye, then.’

Morel returned to his desk, triumphant. Who would have thought he would recognize the tune? That it would in fact turn out to be one he had grown up with? One his father listened to so often
that to Morel it became synonymous with long Sunday afternoons, when, as a child, he waited for something, anything, to happen to relieve the tedium? As he sat down and swivelled the chair to face
his computer, he hummed the melody. ‘In Paradisum’, from Fauré’s
Requiem.
In the end, the old lady had rendered it perfectly.

The morning wore on, sticky and warm. Nothing was resolved. The heat seemed to get on people’s nerves, in and outside the building. Phones were ringing off the hook. In
the sixteenth, a man clobbered his wife with a 300-euro lamp she’d just brought home from a boutique on Avenue Molière. Thirty-five years of marriage, and now this lamp he hated, which
he took as a personal affront. A homeless man had thrown himself in the Seine naked, to cool down, he said. No one cared to pull him out of the water and so he floated on his back for half an hour,
singing, until the police arrived.

The room Morel shared with his team was dingy, but large enough to accommodate three desks. Morel’s desk was separated from the other two by a Song-era Chinese folding screen, a wedding
gift from his paternal grandfather ten years ago. Morel’s marriage to Eva had lasted less than two years but he still treasured the screen. He’d moved it to the Quai des Orfèvres
the day he was promoted to the position of team leader. His father had thrown a fit.

‘Have you gone mad? Do you know what this thing is worth?’

‘Well, no one’s likely to steal it at headquarters, are they?’

This priceless object had the advantage of providing Morel with some much-needed privacy. People thought twice before disturbing him when he was in his lair out of sight.

‘Real coffee. I hope you’re grateful.’ Jean was standing before him, holding a takeaway cup.

‘Thanks,’ Morel said. ‘How’s it going?’

To Morel’s regret, the older detective was tied up with a warehouse burglary and homicide that had occurred over the weekend. He wouldn’t have much spare time, though Jean was trying
his best to be two people at once.

‘It looks pretty straightforward. We’ve got footage showing the guys coming in and leaving shortly after our victim arrived for work. They look like they’re in a real rush. We
shouldn’t have too much trouble with this one,’ Jean said.

‘Good. Hopefully we can close it fast. I’d like you on this new case,’ Morel said.

Jean nodded. ‘Did the Guillou woman come in?’

‘Yes.’

‘And?’

‘She told the same story as Marie Latour and Irina Volkoff, the two you spoke to,’ Morel said.

‘Have you heard back from Martin? About the body, I mean,’ Jean said.

Morel took a sip of his coffee. ‘Not yet. Lila and Marco are at the morgue, they should have some news when they get back.’

Jean sat down and glanced at the line of origami figures on the desk before him. A paper crow was at the head of a marching avian column that included a pelican and a flamingo. Morel had been
busy.

‘Where’s Vincent?’ Jean asked.

‘I haven’t heard from him yet,’ Morel said.

The two men exchanged a look. With Vincent’s wife dying of breast cancer, no one wanted to comment on his frequent absences from work.

‘You’re going to have to talk to him,’ Jean said eventually. ‘I know he has to spend a lot of time at home and in the hospital right now but we need that extra pair of
hands. So if he’s not going to be fully active anytime soon then we need to get someone in. At least temporarily.’

Morel nodded. ‘I’ll have that conversation eventually,’ he said. ‘But I don’t want to worry him with it right now. I don’t want him thinking he’s being
pushed aside. He’s got enough—’

Before he could finish his sentence, he heard Marco and Lila come in.

Morel stood up. ‘Let’s hear whether there’s any news,’ he said.

‘So what has the great Richard Martin got to say?’ Morel asked. He sat on the edge of Lila’s desk, looking at the two younger officers in his team.

Lila frowned. Morel knew she would be foul-tempered for at least the next hour. Richard Martin had that effect on women.

‘Did Martin behave himself?’

‘What do you think?’ Lila said while Marco pulled a face at Morel, a warning not to pursue the subject further.

Morel had known the forensic pathologist for seven years now. The two had stepped into their current roles around the same time. He knew that Martin was as driven as he was and that, like him,
he’d worked hard to get to where he was now. But the resemblance ended there. While Morel kept his private life under wraps, Martin had become notorious for his ability to make women squirm.
Two of his female colleagues had tried and failed to make sexual harassment cases against him. Another had simply resigned. The fact that Martin was considered by many to be the best in his field
had kept him in his position, so far at least.

‘According to our eminently sleazy pathologist,’ Lila began, ‘Isabelle Dufour died sometime between five and six in the morning. She was drowned. Martin couldn’t find any
signs of a struggle. She was a frail old woman so perhaps she didn’t get an opportunity to fight her opponent. He could easily have held her underwater till she ran out of breath.’

The room was silent, while everyone considered this.

‘How does he know she drowned?’

‘The size and shape of the lungs,’ Lila said. ‘And crepitus.’

Morel had seen it before. The lungs inflated like water wings; crepitus, evidenced by the crackling sound the lungs made when you squeezed them. It wasn’t conclusive but along with the
circumstantial evidence it painted a pretty convincing picture. Dufour’s hair, as well as the bath surface, hadn’t been completely dry.