The Night Gate

Chapter Fourteen

Enzo had never enjoyed Paris in autumn or winter. Like London it was cold and damp and grey, and traffic pollution hung over the city in a sulphurous pall. Less so since lockdown. For several months in the spring, Paris had been an abandoned city. People working from home if they could, or simply staying away from their place of work and living on government subsidies. Traffic had reduced to a trickle and levels of pollution plummeted. Although a degree of normality had returned with the lifting of stringent restrictions over the summer, a second wave of the virus had once more curtailed daily life.

Just three-quarters of an hour north-west of the city itself, traffic on the Boulevard de l’Hautil, in the new town of Cergy-Pontoise, was light as Enzo headed past the Commissariat de police de Cergy, before turning into the car park of the IRCGN at number five.

He had driven up from the south-west the day before, and stayed overnight in Paris at a pied-à-terre belonging to friends in the Rue Guénégaud in the sixth arrondissement. It was some years since he had last seen Magali, and he was looking forward to renewing their acquaintance. They had met when he first established the department of forensic science at Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse, and she had visited as a guest lecturer. There had been an instant attraction. But, then, she had been married. And he had broken a home once, causing pain to people he loved. So had no intention of doing it again.

The IRCGN, or Institute de Recherche Criminelle Gendarmerie Nationale, was a state-of-the-art forensic science centre, providing services for gendarmeries throughout France. It comprised laboratories in four departments over 20,000 square metres. The wearing of masks was obligatory within the facility, and Enzo slipped his on before getting his security pass at reception and being directed towards the Human Identification Department, and the office of Magali Blanc on the first floor.

It was a tiny office with a view of a staff car park at the rear, and a leaden sky above. Even masked by her face-covering, Enzo could tell that she remained a good-looking woman, and that warm penetrating look in her eyes still gave him butterflies. Frustratingly, they were constrained from a more intimate greeting by the two-metre rule, and stood looking at each other across her desk.

‘How have you been?’ she asked.

Enzo grinned. ‘Retired.’

‘Yes, I heard.’

‘Careless of you to lose my contact details.’

He saw her mask stretched by a smile. ‘Just putting temptation out of my way. I hear you finally settled down. Got yourself married.’

‘Only because you weren’t available, Magali.’

She laughed. ‘You haven’t changed, anyway.’

He shrugged. ‘Just got older.’ He retrieved a pair of latex gloves from his pocket and pulled them on before fishing a large buff envelope from his shoulder bag. He held it out for her. ‘Untouched by human hand in more than twenty-four hours. Quite safe for you to handle.’

She opened it and pulled out half a dozen colour prints. The photographs Enzo had taken at the site of the fallen tree in Carennac. She looked up, surprised. ‘I got the jpegs. You didn’t come all the way to Paris just to give me these, did you?’

He made a moue with his lips that she couldn’t see. ‘I’ve got a date for you as well.’

She frowned. ‘A date?’

‘It was clear to me that whoever killed your unfortunate gentleman took advantage of a trench already dug in the park for a drainage pipe. A freshly dug grave would otherwise surely have excited interest.’

‘So they buried him in the trench before the pipe got laid.’

‘And records at the mairie show that work on laying drainage pipes in the park took place between June 5th and June 9th, 1944.’

‘Right around D-Day.’

Enzo nodded. ‘If we assume that work was completed on June 9th, that’s probably when they laid the pipe and filled in the trench. If work began on June 5th, that’ll be when they started digging it. By hand. So it’ll have taken a day or two, presupposing the cantonnier was working on his own.’

‘Which means that our man was probably buried on the 7th or the 8th.’ She shook her head in admiration. ‘That’s quite a piece of detective work, Enzo. Would you like to see the remains?’

‘Very much.’

She led him through to her adjoining laboratory where two long tables were covered with large sheets of newsprint. The remains found under the dead tree in Carennac were carefully laid out on both, beneath the glare of bright overhead lamps.

What was left of the skeleton was roughly assembled on the table that stood in the centre of the room. Various other artefacts recovered from the site were set out on the second table which was pushed against the window-facing wall. Many of the bones were broken. Others were simply missing. They were reddish-brown in hue, having absorbed the pigment of the soil.

Magali walked around the table. ‘It’s a little like trying to do a jigsaw puzzle without all the pieces. Over time the roots of the tree must have insinuated their way through the skeletal remains, breaking many of the bones.’ She looked at him. ‘I’m assuming that there was no tree there at the time of the burial.’

‘As far as I could tell, the remains pre-date the tree. But the tree was just as dead as our cadaver. Although it had probably enjoyed many years of growth, inflicting damage on the bones before it died.’

‘What killed the tree?’

‘Some kind of fungal disease, by the look of it. It was a tilia. Better known to you and me as a lime tree. And it had been dead for some time.’

‘A bit like our man from the Luftwaffe.’

Enzo tipped his head in curiosity. ‘Yes... about that. Enlighten me. How can you tell?’

She crossed to the other table, and Enzo looked in detail for the first time at the odd collection of bits and pieces that the gendarmes had recovered from the grave. A rusted cigarette tin. The remains of a brass Zippo lighter. A corroded Iron Cross in poor condition. The remnants of a black leather jacket, and boots. Shrunken, faded and cracked. Cotton thread holding seams had disintegrated, and so they had mostly come apart. Magali snapped on latex gloves and very carefully turned over what was left of the jacket. ‘The fabric of his clothes — cotton and wool — will have biodegraded years ago. Leather lasts much longer. And we were lucky that a fold in the jacket preserved this almost intact.’

With delicate fingers she unfolded a flap of leather to reveal the remains of a Luftwaffe eagle patch with swastika.

‘Insignia of the German air force. These things were embroidered with aluminium thread, and this one would have lasted for many more decades. Like all the other metal bits and pieces recovered.’ She fingered them as she spoke, almost lovingly. ‘A zip fastening for the jacket, and a couple of pocket zips. Two longer zips that probably belong with the boots. We also have the remnants of a leather belt and holster. No gun, of course. Whoever killed him would have taken that.’

Using a pair of tweezers, she lifted one of a number of small, deformed metal shapes that seemed as if they might once have been round.

‘Aluminium again. Epaulette buttons, and what look like they might have been four pips denoting rank. In this case, Hauptmann. Or captain, as we would say. Assuming we got them all.’

Enzo shook his head in admiration. ‘It’s amazing what survives us.’ He looked at Magali. ‘And what you can tell from what remains. That’s an amazing piece of work.’

She flushed with pleasure at his compliment, but brushed it aside. ‘It’s my job, Enzo. It’s what I do.’

‘What about the guy himself? What do you know about him?’

She turned back to the table with the skeletal remains and lifted what was left of the skull. ‘What appears to have been a single bullet has shattered much of the cranium. A wound like that would have killed him instantly.’ With gentle reverence, she laid the Hauptmann’s skull back on the newsprint and lifted the left femur. ‘Fortunately this was still intact. The right femur was broken in several places and missing pieces. But from the length of this one I used an established regression formula to calculate height. He would have been around one metre eighty-two.’ She smiled at Enzo from behind her mask. ‘Or, as you would probably understand it better, about six feet. Tall for the time, but shorter than you.’

She moved then up to the hips and the pelvic area.

‘The pubic bones present a narrow sub-pubic angle with a narrow sciatic notch, and from what we can see of the remains of the cranium he had well-developed brow ridges. Take all that into account, throw in the external occipital protuberance and the mastoids, and I would stake my reputation on this being a male. Even without the external artefacts.’

Enzo laughed. ‘Not a female drag artist, then, disguising herself as the enemy?’

Magali canted her head in mock disapproval. ‘I think you can take that as a given, Enzo.’

‘Ethnicity?’

She removed a pen from the breast pocket of her white lab coat and poked it gently around the skull. ‘High and narrow nasal root, narrow nasal aperture, nasal spine, laterally-placed cheekbones and a well-developed jaw. Almost certainly white European.’

‘Age?’

‘Judging by the pubic bones and the cranial suture closure, I would say somewhere around his mid-forties.’

‘Sheer genius.’ Enzo expressed his admiration. ‘It almost makes me wish I was back in the business.’ He waved his hand towards the window. ‘This whole complex... there was nothing like it when I was working in forensics back in Scotland.’

She nodded. ‘It’s an amazing place to work. You know, they now have a mobile DNA analysis laboratory. They call it LabADN, and they can come up with someone’s DNA profile in under four hours — at the crime scene.’

Enzo scratched his head thoughtfully then nodded towards the table. ‘What about this fella’s DNA?’

Magali laughed. ‘I haven’t looked at it.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I’m not going to find it on any database, Enzo. As you very well know, it was nearly five decades after the Hauptmann’s death before DNA fingerprinting was even developed.’

‘DNA transcends time, Magali. I’ve lost count of the number of cases I’ve been able to resolve with familial matching.’

‘Now, that’s what I call a long shot. That the DNA of some descendant is languishing in a European database somewhere?’

Enzo shrugged. ‘My whole life has been based on long shots.’ He tipped his head towards the table. ‘You can get a sample from ground bone?’

‘I could.’

‘Might be worth a try, Magali. Wouldn’t it be nice to put a name to him?’

‘It would be a bloody miracle.’ Her smile faded as she gazed at him. ‘You miss this, don’t you?’

Enzo was reluctant to admit it, but in the end relented. ‘I suppose I do.’

‘And what do you do? All day every day?’

‘I get older, Magali. A day at a time. When you’re working you never stop to think about it. Time passes, and one day you look at yourself in the mirror and realise that ten years have gone by. And then twenty, and then thirty. And you only begin to notice it when everything starts hurting as you climb out of bed in the morning.’ He ran a hand back through greying hair. ‘When you’re retired, you look at yourself in the mirror every morning and start counting off the days.’ He averted his gaze from what looked like sympathy in her eyes.

‘That doesn’t sound like much fun.’

He laughed it off. ‘I have other distractions. Like trying to keep up with the needs of a woman twenty years my junior.’

‘Now that does sound like fun.’

They both laughed.

He said, ‘And I have the joy of watching my son as he grows up.’ He paused. ‘And then an unexpected little murder that I have you to thank for.’

Her eyes opened wide in surprise. ‘Not our Hauptmann, surely?’

‘No. But going to Carennac to take your photographs, I managed to get myself embroiled in a murder committed in the house right next door.’

‘Embroiled?’

‘They asked me to consult on it.’

Laughter lines creased around her eyes. ‘Well, maybe that’ll stop you looking in the mirror every morning.’ She peeled off her gloves. ‘But what a coincidence!’

Enzo scratched his head. ‘Maybe.’

She looked at him blankly. ‘You don’t think there’s some connection, do you?’

‘Probably not,’ he conceded. ‘But I do hate coincidences.’