Free Dry Bones by Peter May Page B

unknown broke into the church of St. Étienne du Mont. St. Étienne’s had been Gaillard’s church for nearly thirty years. The intruders slaughtered a pig in front of the altar.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘To cover the fact that they had just murdered Jacques Gaillard on the same spot.’
    Charlotte’s eyes opened wide. She had turned quite pale. ‘How can you know that?’
    ‘Because I took a sample of the bloodstains left in the stone. And the laboratory analysis shows that there were two types of blood staining the flagstones in the church. Pig. And human.’
    ‘That doesn’t prove it was Gaillard’s.’
    ‘No. But the DNA does. The DNA extracted from the human blood in the church matches the DNA in a sample of hair that I provided for the lab. I took that hair from a comb in Gaillard’s apartment.’ Enzo paused. ‘Gaillard was butchered—very possibly dismembered—right there in front of the altar where he normally worshipped.’
    For a moment he thought that she was going to faint. She grabbed his arm and half-staggered.
    ‘Are you all right?’ He put an arm around her and felt that she was trembling.
    She pushed him away. ‘I’m fine.’ She seemed embarrassed. ‘It’s just…well, it’s horrible.’ She took a deep breath. ‘In my job, you deal with everything in the abstract. In the mind. It’s a shock to be confronted with the reality.’
    The sun broke through the mist above the city for the first time, sending light coruscating across the broken surface of the river. Somewhere a tug sounded its horn, and they heard laughter coming from the queue for
les égouts
.
    ‘One more shock, then. If you can take it,’ Enzo said, and she looked up into his face, brows deeply furrowed. He preferred her eyes when they were smiling.
    ‘What?’
    ‘A visit to the morgue.’
    II.
    Docteur Bellin was involved in an autopsy when they arrived at the Institut Médico Légal, and so they waited in the tiny park next door. It was named after an architect, Albert Tournaire, and was little more than a central flowerbed ringed by a path and flanked by tiny lawns and a handful of trees. They sat on one of the benches, with their backs to the dead, and looked along the river instead towards the Pont Sully and the twin towers of Notre Dame beyond. A hot July sun had burned off the early morning cloud, and the sky was the clearest summer blue. A dusty white heat was already beginning to settle on the city.
    Charlotte had barely spoken two words on the métro, and now she sat in contemplative silence, before turning to look thoughtfully at Enzo. ‘I saw him on television, you know. Never missed his show. I was a student then, and movies were important.’ A pale smile flickered briefly across her face, reflecting some thought that came and went. ‘I suppose he must have been more than twice my age, but I had quite a crush on him at the time.’
    Enzo was surprised. ‘He was a strange looking guy.’
    ‘He had charm and personality and wit. You don’t find much of any of that in today’s crop of celebs.’ She almost spat the word “celeb” on to the path, a clear enough indication of the contempt with which she regarded contemporary French celebrities. She turned to gaze earnestly at Enzo. ‘Why would anyone want to murder him like that?’
    ‘You’re the psychologist. You tell me.’
    She didn’t seem to like that much and looked away again, and Enzo regretted his bluntness. But she changed the subject before he could try to soften it. ‘You said your daughters had different mothers. What happened?’
    He wasn’t sure if she was genuinely interested, or simply finding an excuse to talk about something else. ‘I got married when I was twenty.’
    ‘Ouch! Too young.’
    ‘It was. We were still students. At our hometown university. We did it to get away from home, really. Get a place of our own.’ He shook his head at the memory. ‘A damp, grotty, one-bedroomed tenement flat in Partick with a shared lavatory