Free Dry Bones by Peter May

rate?’
    ‘Oh, I think probably around eighty. The skull from the
catacombes
is one of my notable failures.’ But it was not a failure with which he seemed too concerned. His present preoccupation seemed to be with leaving. ‘Was there anything else?’
    ‘Do you still have it?’
    ‘Do I still have what?’
    ‘Your forensic facial approximation.’
    ‘Well, yes, of course.’
    ‘Could I see it?’
    Bellin sighed his irritation and glanced at his watch. ‘I suppose so.’ He crossed his office and threw open the doors of a tall wall cabinet. The shelves inside were lined with heads, strange lifeless eyes staring out from the darkness of their odd final resting place. Nearly thirty human faces sculpted in plasticine. Likenesses of the dead. Hair, too, was represented by interwoven layers of plasticine, making it easy for Enzo to recognize the skull in question. It was the only one without any. Enzo stared at it curiously. It did not appear to bear much resemblance to Gaillard, except for a similar fleshiness about the lips and a slight droop at the corners of the eyes. The nose was, like Gaillard’s, unremarkable. Enzo was disappointed that the face did not seem more familiar. He had spent hours the previous night staring at photographs of Gaillard. But he knew that facial and head hair can dramatically change the way a person looks.
    Enzo reached up and touched the recreated face, almost as if he were hoping to feel the bristles where the flamboyant Gaillard moustaches had been shaved.
    ‘You recognise him?’ Bellin seemed surprised.
    ‘Only because I’d been told you’d made the face and scalp hairless. Why did you do that?’
    ‘Because there was no hair with the skull.’
    ‘Isn’t that unusual?’
    Bellin shrugged his indifference. Lack of success had bred lack of interest. ‘Sometimes mice take hair away from decomposing heads to build nests.’
    ‘But the head was locked in a trunk. It wasn’t airtight, so no doubt insects got access to accelerate the process of decomposition. But there was no way mice could have got into that trunk.’
    ‘That’s true,’ Bellin conceded.
    ‘So didn’t it strike you as odd that there was no hair at all?’
    ‘It was impossible for me to determine why there was no hair. He might have suffered from alopecia. His head might have been shaved.’
    ‘And if his head and his face had been shaved, might someone not have done that for the same reason they smashed his teeth—to prevent recognition, to stop identification?’
    ‘Of course, anything is possible.’
    Enzo reached into his satchel and searched for a photograph of Gaillard from Raffin’s file. He held it out towards Bellin. ‘Whiskers and a
coiffure
like this might have been somewhat recognisable, don’t you think?’
    Bellin took the photograph. ‘Good God! It’s Jacques Gaillard.’
    ‘Like I said. Somewhat recognisable.’
    Bellin lifted his reconstruction off the shelf and carried it through to a small adjoining room. There were computers here, and facial and cranial charts on the walls, and a table in the centre of the room with a half-completed facial approximation on it, tiny wooden dowels inserted at thirty-four different reference points around the head. The skull had been cast in plaster, and the mandible in cold cure resin, before being rearticulated with the cranium. Both were visible down one half of a face criss-crossed with a complex of plasticine strands representing the musculature. Bellin placed the finished head next to it and switched on a bank of overhead lamps which bathed the table in soft, bright light. He looked at the photograph, examined the head, and then re-examined the photograph. Suddenly he had rediscovered all his lost enthusiasm.
    ‘There are umpteen points of correlation here.’
    ‘Can you put hair on the head? And a moustache?’
    ‘I can do better than that. The danger is, of course, that one is influenced by the original. But I can photograph my