Extraordinary People

I

The offices of Libération were tucked away in the narrow Rue Béranger in the third arrondissement, where the city’s rag-trade conducts its wholesale and retail activities.

The newspaper archives were reached by a rickety elevator which took them to the fourth floor, glass-walled offices lined with shelf upon shelf of box files and bound copies tracing the history of the newspaper back to its first edition in 1973. Large windows looked out on Le Petit Béranger brasserie in the street below.

Raffin and Enzo spent nearly twenty minutes flicking through drums of index cards and fetching corresponding boxes from shelves that groaned with numbered files. A row of filing cabinets had drawers labelled with everything from Accidents du Travail to Vietnam, but their contents held nothing of any interest. They had been unable to find a single cutting referring to unexplained or unidentified body parts.

‘Isn’t there microfilm we can look at?’ Enzo was frustrated by their lack of progress.

‘They started to put everything on to microfiche a few years ago,’ Raffin told him, ‘but somehow it all got scratched and ruined in the reader.’

‘Well, aren’t there internet archives?’

‘Oh, yes. Everything from 1994 on. But you have to subscribe to get access to it.’

‘And don’t you subscribe?’

‘Well, no,’ Raffin confessed. ‘Why would I? I’ve got access to this place.’

‘Where you can’t find anything!’ Enzo was losing patience. ‘Can’t the newspaper access the internet for you from here?’

‘I suppose they could. Only I don’t think they have a computer here in the cuttings library.’

There had been an odd sense of old-fashioned informality about the whole place. The lack of security, the worn carpet in the lobby, the unfinished renovation work which greeted them when they stepped out of the lift, the tables of apparently randomly stacked boxes of cuttings lining the hallway. It was a sense which only increased with the arrival of a middle-aged man with dark, thinning hair and a close-cropped beard. He wore black, corduroy trousers and a grey tee-shirt, and Raffin introduced him to Enzo as La Mémoire du Journal. The memory of the newspaper. ‘He’s been with Libé since the first edition hit the streets more than thirty years ago.’ It seemed that the most reliable archive the paper possessed was filed in the head of La Mémoire du Journal.

‘What exactly is it you’re looking for?’ he asked. When Enzo told him he frowned. ‘I don’t think we have a separate category for that. We would only file what was reported, and we would only report something particularly unusual. There’s nothing that immediately springs to mind.’

Enzo sighed. This had been a complete waste of time. ‘Thank you anyway.’ He and Raffin turned towards the elevator.

‘Except, of course, for the skull in the trunk.’

Enzo turned back. ‘A skull in a trunk?’

‘Yes….’ La Mémoire began flipping through file cards, every one meticulously handwritten by himself. ‘Yes, here we are. I filed it under Catacombes.’

Which pricked Raffin’s interest. ‘Why?’

‘Because that’s where it was found.’ He crossed the room and ran his finger along a row of box files until he identified the one he was looking for. He pulled it out and laid it on the desk to open it, and then flipped back the spring to release its cuttings. ‘There was quite a bit of coverage at the time, just because it was so unusual. But it was a one-day wonder, really. Nothing ever came of it as far as I remember.’

Enzo sat down and started spreading the cuttings out in front of him. ‘What do you remember exactly?’

‘Just that it was discovered somewhere in the tunnels below Place d’Italie. About five years ago. A surveyor, I think, working for the Inspection Générale des Carrières. There had been some kind of collapse beneath the Avenue de Choisy, and that’s how the trunk came to light.’

Raffin peered over Enzo’s shoulder at the cuttings. ‘And it had a skull in it?’ There were photographs of a skull with the mouth and teeth smashed.

‘Yes, the skull of a middle-aged male, I believe. Quite recently deceased, they thought. Five, ten years, something like that. But it wasn’t so much the skull which created the interest, as the items found with it.’ Even as La Mémoire spoke, Enzo turned over one of the cuttings to reveal a grainy photograph of an odd collection of apparently unrelated items. ‘Ah, yes,’ said La Mémoire. ‘I remember now. Very strange stuff. A scallop shell. An antique stethoscope. A thigh bone — I think there were tiny holes drilled through either end of it. A gold insect on a chain. A pendant, I think.’ He shuffled through the cuttings. ‘Yes, it was a bee.’

Raffin lifted one of the clippings, squinting at its picture and caption. ‘And a copy of an Ordre de la Libération with May 12, 1943, engraved on the back of it.’

‘What’s an Ordre de la Libération?’ Enzo asked.

‘They were medals given out by de Gaulle to men and women who helped in the liberation of France,’ La Mémoire said.

Enzo let his eyes drift over the cuttings in front of him. ‘How bizarre. And they never figured out what it was all about?’

‘Apparently not.’

II

Place Dauphine, at the west end of the ële de la Cité, was where officers from the Brigade Criminelle on the Quai des Orfèvres sometimes grabbed a bite of lunch. It was a dusty, tree-filled square lined with apartments and restaurants, once the home of Yves Montand. And because of the proximity of the Palais de Justice, it was also home to the Paris Bar, le Barreau de Paris, from which the city’s advocates practised their black arts from beneath a grinning Cheshire cat painted on a rooftop gable. The pavement tables under the twin awnings of Le Caveau de Palais restaurant had been full just a little earlier. But Inspecteur Georges Thomas was having a late lunch, and so some of the seats around him had already emptied. Enzo and Raffin pulled chairs up at his table and ordered a couple of glasses of chilled white wine and watched as he used fat fingers to tear off chunks of bread and mop up the juices on his plate. His hair was cropped short, shiny steel bristles above a round tanned face with a day’s growth of silvered whiskers. His lips shone with the grease from his meal. He dragged a crumpled napkin across them and then wiped his fingers one by one. He cleansed his palate with a last mouthful of red wine and belched loudly, nodding his satisfaction.

A quick call to Raffin’s contact at the Préfecture de Police had established that Thomas had been in charge of the unsuccessful investigation to identify the skull found below Place d’Italie. He was in his mid-fifties now, treading water until retirement, and was in the habit of treating himself to long lunches in the Place Dauphine. ‘The skull? Yeah. Fucking weird one that,’ he said. ‘The local cops passed it on to us. But, you know, there was fuck all to go on. No fingerprints on the trunk, or on any of that strange shit that was in it.’ He waved the waiter over and said he would have an île flotante and a coffee.

‘What happened to it?’ Enzo asked.

Thomas looked at him as if he had two heads. ‘What kind of fucking accent is that?’

‘He’s Scottish,’ Raffin said.

Thomas made a slight forward thrusting movement of his jaw to indicate his contempt for anyone who wasn’t Parisian. ‘What happened to what?’

‘The trunk and the stuff that was in it.’

‘They’ll still be in the greffe.’

‘Greffe?’

‘The evidence depository,’ Raffin explained. He looked towards Thomas for confirmation. ‘In the Palais de Justice?’

Thomas nodded. The waiter arrived with his dessert, and the detective chased frothy lumps of eggwhite around a pale, watery custard which he managed to dribble down his chin. ‘I gotta blizzard of paperwork on my desk gonna make me go blind.’ He wiped his face again with his napkin. ‘But if you guys want to see the stuff, then I guess I could always take time out to show you.’

Le greffe was a large subterranean room in the bowels of the Palais de Justice, rows of metal staging supporting lines of shelves filled with the accumulated evidence of investigations past and present. Each item was bagged and labelled and tracked by a computerised index held by the Gardien du Greffe—the Keeper. It was less than five minutes’ walk from Le Caveau de Palais.

The Keeper was a man who looked as if he rarely saw daylight. His skin was pale, almost grey, and his oiled black hair was scraped back across a shrunken head. He displayed no interest when Thomas asked to see the trunk. He searched through the index on his screen and gave the detective instructions on where to find it — Row 15, Shelf C, Production Number 53974/S.

Row 15 was at the bottom end of the room, and Shelf C was near the ceiling. Thomas required stepladders to reach it. He located the bag, wrapped his arms around the trunk and lifted it down, carrying it to a table at the end of the aisle. He untied the bag and removed it to reveal a battered tin trunk, about the same size as an average suitcase, but deeper. It was a dark, military green, scraped and scored and a little rusted. ‘There were no distinguishing markings on it,’ Thomas said. ‘No manufacturer’s label. And it was probably damaged in the tunnel collapse.’ He released the catches on either side and the lid creaked as it opened. ‘Et voilà.’

Enzo and Raffin peered inside. There were the items described in the newspaper articles: the scallop shell; the antique stethoscope, looking for all the world like an elongated horn from a vintage car; the thigh bone with its tiny holes drilled at either end; a bee, elaborately fashioned in gold and attached to a fine neck chain; the Ordre de la Libération with its green and black strip of cloth, the medal itself engraved in black with the double cross of Lorraine. ‘Where’s the skull?’ Enzo asked, disappointed.

‘The pathologist’s still got it.’ Thomas snorted. ‘Fucking weirdo. He does these facial reconstructions in clay. It’s a hobby. Like, you know, he enjoys it or something.’

‘He did a facial reconstruction from the skull found in the trunk?’

‘Sure.’

‘And?’

‘And what?’

‘You circulated photographs of it?’

‘Sure we did. It was pretty distinctive. Completely bald. But no one recognised it.’

Enzo felt a wave of disappointment. “Bald” was not a word he would have used to describe Gaillard. ‘Was the face clean-shaven?’

‘Completely hairless.’

‘Would it be possible to see it?’

‘You’ll need to ask him that.’

Enzo looked at the items in the trunk again. He put a hand inside. ‘May I?’

‘Allez-y.’

Enzo lifted them out one by one and laid them on the table. They were an odd collection of articles to find together at any time. But buried in a trunk with an unidentified skull, made them notably peculiar. ‘What about the thigh bone? Was it related to the skull?’

Thomas shook his head. ‘The experts said it was much older. They figured it was probably part of an anatomical skeleton. You know, the kind of thing a bone specialist would have in his office.’ He lifted up the femur. ‘And these tiny holes…They figured that’s where the bones were wired together.’

Raffin said, ‘And you never worked out what these things were doing in there with the skull?’

The detective shook his head. ‘A complete fucking mystery. Take a better man than me to work it out.’ Enzo and Raffin made fleeting eye contact.

‘What about the date on the back of the medal? May 12th, 1943. Does it have any significance?’

‘Not that we could figure.’

Enzo reached into his satchel and produced a small, square digital camera. He held it up between thumb and forefinger. ‘Would it be okay if I took some photographs?’

Thomas thought about it for a moment, running a chubby hand over his bristled jaw. ‘Yeah, I guess….’ And as Enzo lined up the items one by one to snap them, the detective said, ‘So when’s this piece going to be in the papers?’

Enzo felt his face colouring, and concentrated on the photographs. They had required a cover story. But Raffin was not in the least uncomfortable with their subterfuge. ‘Depends what progress we make,’ he said.

‘As long as you don’t quote me,’ Thomas growled. ‘I’m retiring at Christmas. I don’t need the hassle.’

‘Any quotes will be strictly unattributable,’ Raffin reassured him.

Enzo finished taking his photographs. ‘And the trunk was found in the…the catacombes?’

The detective nodded. ‘That’s right.’

‘I didn’t know there were catacombes in Paris.’

Thomas spluttered and laughed. ‘You’re kidding me! Jesus, there’s nearly three hundred kilometers of tunnels under the city.’

‘You mean the sewers?’

‘No, no, no. The catacombes are way below that. Way below the métro, too.’

Raffin said, ‘The catacombes are twenty to thirty meters down. Hacked out of solid rock by quarriers over centuries.’

Enzo was astonished. ‘What for?’

‘For the stone. The whole of Paris was built with rock dug out from beneath it. There’s a few kilometers of catacombe that you can visit officially, but the rest of it’s dangerous, and strictly off-limits.’

Thomas snorted. ‘Which makes it a magnet for every freak and weirdo in the city. There’s all sorts of shit goes on down there. Drug dealing, illicit sex, you name it.’

Raffin said, ‘They recently discovered an underground cinema, and a night-club. All powered from lines tapped illegally into the power grid. There’s a whole subculture that exists down there. Tunnel rats, they call them. People who just love to explore the dark and the unknown. And there are extreme tourists who pay illicit guides to take them down for a good time. I wrote a piece about it a few years ago. I went down officially….’ He glanced at Thomas. ‘And unofficially. My unofficial guide had better maps. He’d spent years exploring the tunnels and charted them meticulously.’

Thomas sighed and looked ostentatiously at his watch.

Raffin took what he thought was his cue. ‘Well, thank you, Inspecteur. We’d better not keep you.’

Thomas scratched his jaw again. ‘No, I’m just thinking. Maybe you guys would like to see where the trunk was found. My paperwork can wait. And, anyway, this case has never been officially closed. So any publicity’s good publicity.’

Raffin looked to Enzo for a response. Enzo nodded. ‘That would be very helpful, Inspecteur.’

III

Enzo felt the temperature falling as they went down rung by rung, hand below hand, foot below foot. Until they reached a small, stone-clad chamber. The manhole cover thirty feet above them had slipped back into place with a deep thud, shutting out the daylight. All that lit the thick, velvet blackness that wrapped itself around them now, were the battery-powered lamps mounted on the helmets that the tunnel cop had insisted they wear. Their beams raked back and forth in the damp air as they turned their heads, and Enzo saw a stone staircase arcing down into deeper darkness. The distant rumble of traffic from the Place d’Italie overhead was still audible. Just.

The tunnel cop had met them in front of the soaring glass frontage of the Gaumont Grand Écran opposite the nineteenth century splendour of the thirteenth arrondissement’s town hall, and led them down a side street to where a temporary canvas awning had been raised around a circular manhole cover in the pavement. The metal-framed letters IDC were embedded in the cover, above a slot into which the cop inserted a sturdy iron key to lift the lid. Thomas had introduced him simply as Franck, and then announced that he would wait for them in the café on the corner of the Rue Bobillot.

‘Be careful, these steps are uneven.’ Franck led them down in what felt like an unending spiral, dizzying and disorientating. They heard a far-off growling, the air around them vibrated and the ground shook. ‘It’s just the métro,’ Franck shouted back to them. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

And still they went down. Enzo felt his ears popping with the pressure, and he shivered. The temperature had dropped by more than fifteen degrees. Finally, they seemed to reach the foot of the staircase, and bowed their heads to pass through an arched entryway into a narrow tunnel. The walls and ceiling were constructed entirely from masonry and led them into a section of tunnel hacked from pure limestone. It ran off to left and right. Franck turned right, taking them past columns and arches to a junction where a long gallery led to another arched doorway opening into a square room lined by stone benches. There were niches set into the walls, charred by candles, and layered with the solid coloured pools of once molten wax. There was a stone table set in the centre of the room. There was, too, evidence of recent habitations: food wrappers and empty beer cans and cigarette ends. It smelled of grease and stale smoke.

‘I thought since we were down here anyway you might be interested in seeing this place,’ Franck said. ‘The quarriers built it for their own recreation. It was originally called the salle des carriers, but it’s more popularly known these days as the salle de repos. It’s a favourite meeting place for tunnel rats. We raid it from time to time, but they usually have a pretty good early warning system.’

Enzo wandered around this perfectly constructed stone room more than thirty meters below an unsuspecting world above and ran his fingers lightly over the cool, smooth stone. Beneath an arched niche in the back wall, the date 1904 had been carved into the stone. It was just over a hundred years since men had created this room as a place of rest. He could not imagine what life must have been like down here for the generations of quarriers who had hacked tens of thousands of tons of stone from limestone bedrock to build their city. What kind of existence had they eked out in this dark, choking, subterranean world?

Franck was watching him with mild amusement. ‘You should visit the ossuary sometime.’

‘Ossuary?’

Raffin said, ‘In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Paris authorities started clearing city-centre cemeteries which had become a health hazard. They allocated about eleven thousand square meters of the catacombes out at Denfert as a dumping ground for the bones. There are something like six million people stacked up in those tunnels, floor to ceiling. The bones and skulls are arranged in macabre patterns.’ He chuckled. ‘I suppose the men who transferred them from the cemeteries had reason enough to find ways of amusing themselves.’

It occurred to Enzo that there was irony in the discovery of a single skull in tunnels which concealed six million.

‘Anyway,’ Raffin said, ‘this isn’t what we came to see, is it?’

‘No.’ Franck turned and led them back along the gallery and through a rabbit warren of tunnels. They passed street names beautifully carved into blocks of stone corresponding to the names of the streets above — BOULEVARD VINCENT, RUE ALBERT BAYET — and surrounded by the scratched and spray-painted graffiti of a less elegant generation.

They carried on until they reached a stone marked ROUTE DE PARIS à CHOISY CôTé EST, and they turned left into a narrower transverse tunnel that took them to the other side of the street overhead.

‘We’re under the Avenue Choisy here,’ Franck said. ‘Right below Chinatown.’

On the other side, a marker stone was inscribed ROUTE DE PARIS à CHOISY CôTé OUEST. But here, the way was blocked. The roof and part of the wall had caved in, piles of stone and rubble and earth preventing their further progress.

‘Well, this is it.’ Franck turned around and his lamp nearly blinded them. ‘For what it’s worth.’ Both Enzo and Raffin raised their hands to shade their eyes. ‘The Inspection Général des Carrières send surveyors down regularly to check below the sites of possible new building. No point in throwing up skyscrapers if they’re just going to fall down again. It was a surveyor who came across this tunnel collapse. It seems the tin trunk had somehow been concealed in the wall, bricked into a recess. If the roof hadn’t come down it would still have been there.’

The world above ground was a burned-out white, blinding and hot. Enzo’s eyes adjusted quickly, but he knew that it would take the sun longer to warm through to the chill deep in his bones. The Place d’Italie was jammed with traffic and late afternoon shoppers. White flags emblazoned with red Chinese characters fluttered on either side of lamp posts around the small park which created a roundabout for the traffic, and Enzo noticed for the first time that half the population seemed to be oriental. Ethnic Chinese from French Indochina. He looked down the length of Avenue Choisy and saw the red lanterns and flashing neon characters delineating Chinatown and wondered just where exactly they had been below ground.

Franck had gone to find detective Thomas from the Quai des Orfèvres. Raffin was still brushing the dirt from his trousers. ‘What now?’

‘I want to talk to the pathologist.’

Raffin checked his watch and shook his head. ‘Then you’ll have to go on your own. I still have to earn a living — and I’m going to have to change out of these clothes.’

IV

It was only four stops on the métro from Place d’Italie to the Quai de la Rapée in the neighbouring twelfth arrondissement. Enzo sat gloomily in the crowded carriage, sunlight streaming through windows as the train rattled beneath the girdered arch that spanned the Seine. With all these bodies pressed around him, the heat was stifling. He looked down to his left and saw the square redbrick building that housed the Institut Médico Légal on the west bank of the river. The bodies stored there, in tiered drawers, would be kept at a somewhat cooler temperature.

Enzo was not optimistic. What had seemed like an interesting development, the skull in the trunk, was probably no more than an eccentric diversion. If the pathologist had reconstructed a head from it without facial or scalp hair, then it couldn’t be Gaillard. Even if the flesh and brain of the head had rotted away to nothing, the evidence of hair would still have remained. It took hair much longer than five years to decompose. King Tutankhamun had still had hair.

So what was left? Nothing but a theory constructed from a bloodstained floor, a doodle in a diary, and a fifty-year-old French movie.

He got off at the Quai de la Rapée and walked back along the river bank, traffic roaring past on the expressway below. On the far side of the water, the boats of the River Police were tied up at the Quai St. Bernard. A small park beside the morgue was deserted. Cars and trucks thundered across the Pont d’Austerlitz, and the clatter of the métro trains was only slightly muted by their rubber wheels. It was a noisy corner of the city, but Enzo supposed that the morgue’s present tenants would not be too troubled.

The bodies were kept downstairs, behind the thick stone walls of the basement, and there cut open in tiled rooms devoid of daylight by pathologists in pursuit of death’s dark secrets. There was disabled access to the main entrance one floor up, but it occurred to Enzo that the real disabled access was one floor down, via the back door. He climbed steps to the front door and walked into an airy reception hall lined by the busts of famous physicians and asked for Docteur Henri Bellin.

Bellin’s office was up a narrow staircase on the first floor. The pathologist was a man in his sixties, and gave the impression of being possessed by a nervous energy he found difficult to contain. A tweed suit hung on a tall, angular frame that Enzo was sure carried less flesh than some of the cadavers downstairs. He had a pathologist’s pallor, and strong, bony hands scrubbed so clean they were almost painful to look at. He was in the process of clearing his desk for the day. Like most pathologists, he was meticulously tidy.

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he said. ‘I remember it well. Odd, very odd. All those strange items in the trunk. Still, that wasn’t my brief. My only interest was the skull.’

‘You carried out a forensic examination?’

‘Yes, yes I did. Nothing very remarkable about it as I recall. A middle-aged male, aged somewhere between forty-five and fifty-five.’

‘How could you tell?’

‘Females have more delicate mandibles, and much more gently sloping foreheads.’ He laughed nervously. ‘And I never like to discuss the fact that there is roughly two hundred cubic centimeters less space in a female skull to house the brain. Women don’t like to hear it.’ He slipped some papers into a briefcase. ‘I was able to determine the age because the sutures — that’s the joints between the bones — were completely ossified. There were also some deep furrows on the inside of the skull, something usually caused by blood vessels in an older person.’

‘I believe the teeth had been smashed.’

‘That’s correct. Someone had taken a cylindrical instrument of some sort and done considerable damage. To the mandible as well. I had to do quite a bit of reconstruction work around the mouth.’

‘Presumably the teeth were smashed to prevent identification from dental records.’

‘Yes, of course. There were a number left intact, though. Not enough to facilitate positive identification — assuming that we’d had something to compare them to — but enough for me to recast and recreate a mouthful of teeth for the facial approximation.’

‘The reconstruction?’

‘Forensic facial approximation is what I prefer to call it. I have evolved my own technique. A blend of the Russian and American methods. You know, Gerasimov claims one hundred percent success. Even Gatliff claims seventy percent.’

‘And what is your success 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 approximation, front, side and back, and digitise the images into the computer. And with the help of an interesting piece of software called Face, as well as Adobe Photoshop, I can recreate Monsieur Gaillard’s unusual whiskers and coiffure and superimpose them on to a 3D image of the head.’ He removed his jacket, draping it over the back of a tall stool at the table, and lifted a white overall from the back of the door. His earlier impatience to leave for the day was quite forgotten.

‘How long will it take?’ Enzo asked.

‘Hmmm?’ Bellin seemed almost unaware that Enzo was still there. He had already begun setting up his camera.

‘How long?’

‘Come back tomorrow morning, Monsieur.’