The Lying Down Room (Serge Morel 1) Read online

  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.

  FOURTEEN

  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.

  He thought about her attacker. He had held her underwater, watching her life ebb away. To what purpose?

  And why hadn’t Guillou fought back? She was a battler. There had been nothing to show that her hands might have been tied. A toxicology report would soon reveal whether she had been drugged. Right now none of it made sense to Morel. And it bothered him that she may have given up without a fight.

  He had let her down, by not taking Dufour’s death seriously enough, but there had been so little to tie the two women together. A bunch of pamphlets. Still, he berated himself for being slow on the uptake. He wouldn’t make the same mistake again.

  The trouble was that he couldn’t see the motive. What was the link between Isabelle Dufour and Elisabeth Guillou? Why had they been killed?

  He studied the photograph before him. Elisabeth Guillou’s body lay under the covers just as Dufour’s had. In her hand she held a plain silver cross. For a minute, standing at her bedside, Morel had felt uneasy, as though she might all of a sudden sit up and berate him for intruding upon an old woman in the privacy of her bedroom. He remembered the way she had examined him in his office, her intense scrutiny. Dead, she seemed smaller than he remembered.

  Morel had searched for a sound system and found a CD player in Guillou’s living room. In the player he’d found a copy of Fauré’s Requiem.

  Morel spread the other photos on his desk. Lila wa
lked over to him and looked at the display.

  ‘We just got back from the morgue. Martin confirmed what we already know – that Guillou died the same way Dufour did. No signs of bruising yet, though.’

  ‘OK. He wasn’t too painful?’

  ‘One of these days I’m going to wipe that smug smile off his face and knock his teeth out.’

  ‘Do you want me to take it up with his office? I will, you know. I can’t do anything about the other complaints against him, it’s outside my jurisdiction, but if he’s harassing you—’

  Lila rolled her eyes. ‘I can handle Richard Martin,’ she said. ‘We’ve got more important things to attend to.’

  Together they looked at the photos of Guillou’s home. Unlike Dufour’s cluttered flat, Guillou’s house was a study in minimalism. There was a lot of empty space. The surfaces were bare. No magazines, nothing that pointed to how she might have occupied herself or the things that interested her. The only family photographs on display were on a side table in the living room. The garden was tidy. There was a trampoline, presumably for the grandchildren to play on when they visited.

  Morel and Lila had delivered the news to Guillou’s son at the accounting firm where he’d worked.

  It was the part Morel disliked most about his job. But it could sometimes reveal a great deal about a victim’s life. Take Guillou’s children. The son’s expression had been one of mild regret, while the daughter had become hysterical. No doubt due to the shock of seeing her mother in that state. Morel wondered what her reaction might have been otherwise.

  It was important to note these things, but at the same time he was careful not to over-analyse them. People did not always express their sadness in obvious ways.

  He thought about Perrin. After calling Morel to tell him that Guillou was dead, he had turned up at her flat minutes after Morel, his face dark with anger.

  ‘How did this happen?’ he’d said. ‘I thought you were going to find those guys. Now we’ve got a fucking double homicide on our hands. Jesus Christ! Do you know how this makes me look?’ He jabbed a finger at Morel. ‘I. Want. Results.’ Then he’d stalked out of the flat before Morel could say anything.

  Numbers. These days it was all about the statistics. The trouble was that there weren’t enough people to get the results they wanted at the top. With thousands of jobs being cut across the police force, everyone was complaining these days of being under-resourced. In some of the outer suburbs, stations were even shutting down at night and over the weekends due to lack of staffing.

  Yet another Sarkozy pledge that had been broken. He’d promised in the lead-up to his 2007 election to tackle crime through increased policing. What had happened to that brilliant idea? Police numbers were steadily dwindling, while crime was ramping up.

  ‘Are you still with me?’ Morel realized he’d stopped listening. Lila moved into one of the chairs across from Morel’s seat and crossed her legs.

  ‘You know, I’ve been thinking. What if there are others?’ she said. ‘Other women who haven’t bothered to complain to us just because two guys knocked on their door. I mean, why would you?’ She looked at Morel. ‘I hate to say this, but maybe Perrin is right. We need to go public and see whether anyone else can tell us anything about these guys.’

  ‘If we do that we’ll have every woman over the age of fifty panicking,’ Morel said. ‘And the press will be on our back. We need to be able to focus on the job.’

  Lila looked doubtful. ‘If you say so.’

  Morel rubbed his eyes and gathered the photos to return them to the folder.

  ‘We need to proceed as tactfully as possible,’ he said, thinking of Perrin.

  Tactfulness was not high on Lila’s list of concerns when she rang the bell at the Dufour home. For a start, she would ask Anne why her husband hadn’t taken a bag on the overseas trip he’d been about to embark on when Lila and Morel had interviewed him. Her guess was that he hadn’t gone quite so far and that, where he’d been, he hadn’t needed too many clothes. There must be a girlfriend Anne knew nothing about. Or maybe she did. Maybe she welcomed a break from her odious husband.

  While Lila waited for someone to appear, she rehearsed her lines mentally. The door opened.

  ‘Do you mind if I come in?’

  Lila could tell by Anne Dufour’s face that she did mind, but she couldn’t come up with a good reason not to let the policewoman in. She opened the door wider and turned back into the house. Lila followed her, thinking that she must clarify the matter of the wooden cross with the blue stones.

  ‘Can I offer you anything?’ Anne Dufour asked her.

  ‘No thanks.’

  She looked relieved. She seemed a great deal more composed than the last time they’d met. Her make-up was perfect. There were no traces of black eyeliner and mascara running down her cheeks. She was dressed up too, in a two-piece linen suit and black heels.

  ‘A lunch date?’ Lila asked.

  The other woman gave a vague smile but didn’t answer. ‘What can I do for you, then?’ she asked. She sat on the sofa and looked up at Lila, who remained standing.

  Now Lila could take a closer look at her she saw there were dark shadows under her eyes. She looked thinner than the last time Lila and Morel had visited. On the inside of her wrist there was a mark that looked a lot like a burn. Anne Dufour caught Lila’s look and pulled at her sleeve.

  ‘Is your husband home?’ Lila asked.

  Anne Dufour shook her head. ‘He’s away.’

  ‘Another business trip?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Does your husband always travel without luggage when he goes away?’

  Anne Dufour’s expression told Lila all she needed to know. She had a look on her face that said this was something she was used to.

  So Jacques Dufour was a cheat. Well, what a surprise, Lila thought.

  ‘How did your mother-in-law’s funeral go?’ she asked.

  Anne Dufour shrugged. ‘Well, I guess.’ She emitted a strange, mirthless laugh. ‘As well as these things can go.’

  ‘How is your husband coping?’

  ‘With what?’ When Anne Dufour looked up at her, Lila wondered for the first time whether she was on medication or whether she’d been smoking a joint.

  ‘With his mother’s death, Madame Dufour.’

  ‘Oh. That.’

  ‘Have you seen any changes in his behaviour?’

  ‘No.’ Anne Dufour looked at Lila as though she’d suddenly woken up. ‘Why are you here anyway? I thought you got everything you needed from us last time.’

  Lila decided on a direct approach. ‘I wanted to make sure you were all right,’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t know that was part of your duties, as a police officer.’

  ‘It isn’t. I also have a couple of questions I’d like to ask.’

  ‘Ask away.’

  ‘Have you heard of someone called Elisabeth Guillou? She may have been a friend or an acquaintance of your mother-in-law’s.’

  Anne Dufour shook her head. ‘No. But I wouldn’t know if she was. I never met any of her friends.’

  ‘Can you tell me about the cross we found in her hand?’

  Anne Dufour shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. What kind of cross?’

  Lila was running out of patience. ‘The same one you were wearing the last time we came to speak to you and your husband,’ she said. ‘The Orthodox cross.’

  The transformation was astonishing. Lila watched as Anne Dufour went pale and started trembling. Her fingers went shakily to her throat and she dropped her voice to a whisper.

  ‘I can’t talk about that,’ she said.

  ‘What is it you’re afraid of?’ Lila asked, more gently this time.

  ‘I’m a Christian, you know. Before I married Jacques, I used to attend church every week.’ She spoke in a hurried voice, so quietly Lila had to strain to hear. ‘Jacques hates the whole idea of it. Which is why I never – but my mother-in-law was interested in these things. She
and I spoke of God and she wanted to understand. One day we were out together and we bought the crosses. It didn’t even mean much. I mean, neither of us is – was – Orthodox or anything,’ she said, becoming confused about which tense to use.‘We just thought they were beautiful and that it would be nice to wear them together.’

  Her face was so drained of colour Lila worried she might faint.

  ‘I never wear it, I usually keep it hidden from Jacques. But after Isabelle died I put it on, under my clothes so Jacques wouldn’t notice. As a sort of tribute to her, so I could still feel her near. I thought no one would see it, not under my shirt.’

  ‘Where did you buy the crosses, Madame Dufour?’

  ‘Does it matter? It was at an exhibition. In May.’

  ‘Which one?’ Lila asked. She wasn’t sure why she was even asking, she was more preoccupied with how to lessen Anne Dufour’s agitation.

  ‘An exhibition on Holy Russia. At the Louvre.’

  ‘OK.’

  Anne Dufour tugged at the buttons on her jacket. Without thinking, Lila placed a hand on the other woman’s arm.

  ‘I can help you,’ she said in a low voice.

  Anne Dufour looked at her carefully. Then, with visible effort, she pulled herself together. She got up from the sofa. She seemed unsteady on her feet.

  ‘I don’t believe in self-pity. And besides, there are people with far bigger problems than mine.’

  Lila nodded slowly. ‘You’re right. Still, I believe in the power to change things when they make us unhappy.’

  Anne Dufour managed a forced smile.

  ‘That’s very uplifting.’ She looked at her watch. ‘I’m sorry but I have to go now. Was there anything else?’

  Lila hesitated. But it was clear she had done all she could. ‘No.’

  Lila walked to her car. She heard the door close softly behind her. Why did she fancy that it was closed reluctantly, as though the person on the other side secretly yearned to open it wide again?