The Night Gate

Chapter Eight

Sophie’s pallor seemed all the more marked in contrast with the darkness of the hair that fell about her face. Her eyes seemed darker, too, and sunk in shadow. She’d had a sleepless night.

Their breath, diffused by masks, misted about their heads in the cold air as they stood on the step outside the maternity unit on this chill October morning. Enzo pulled the door open. Sophie hurried inside. Dominique was about to follow when the younger woman turned and raised a hand. ‘It’s okay. I’d rather be on my own.’

Dominique exchanged a quick look with Enzo. ‘Are you sure?’

‘If it’s bad news I’d rather hear it by myself.’

‘Darling, it won’t be bad news,’ Enzo said.

The palest of smiles didn’t even reach beyond Sophie’s mask. ‘Bertrand will be back as soon as he’s parked the car. Just be here for us when we come out. Shouldn’t be any more than about thirty minutes.’ And she vanished inside.

Enzo and Dominique stood in silence for nearly a minute before Enzo looked at his watch. ‘We won’t have long to see the pathologist, then. Better hurry.’

They turned down the Rue Wilson towards the Valentré and turned left along the bottom end of the hospital. Neither of them wanted to talk about the cramps which had kept Sophie awake the previous night, or Bertrand’s panicked call for help at 6 a.m. His face had been even more bloodless than Sophie’s when he drew up outside the Lamparo, where Enzo and Dominique were waiting for them on the pavement. Almost forty now, Bertrand’s visage still bore the scars of the long-discarded studs and rings which had adorned it when he first started dating Sophie — to Enzo’s horror. But after a prickly start, the old stag and the young buck had won each other’s respect and were now more like father and son. Enzo would have done anything for him. But he was powerless to prevent the possibility of his losing another baby, and he shied away from the very thought of it.

Dominique said, ‘You’re sure the pathologist won’t mind me sitting in?’

Enzo shrugged distractedly. ‘She’s an old friend.’ It was hard to concentrate on the Carennac case when his daughter was facing the prospect of a third miscarriage. But it would, at the very least, provide another focus to prevent him obsessing about it. Thirty minutes standing on the steps outside the maternity unit would have felt like a lifetime.

‘This is highly irregular, Enzo.’ Dr Laurence Vidal was not tall. She sat on a desk swinging her legs in this tiny office on the first floor of the main hospital block. She was already kitted up with shower cap, gown and mask for the post-mortem she would conduct in the autopsy suite in just a few minutes’ time. She kept her mask in place. A handsome woman, somewhere in her forties, green eyes smiled in a strong, quizzical face. She laid aside her briefing notes and submitted Enzo to careful scrutiny. ‘It’s not fair,’ she said. ‘You just keep improving with age. Unless you’re hiding something beneath that mask, you’re looking even better than you did in the days when you used to chase me round the lab.’

In spite of himself, Enzo blushed and glanced self-consciously at Dominique. ‘She’s joking,’ he said.

Dr Vidal swung an enquiring gaze towards Dominique. ‘And who’s this?’

‘Dominique. My wife.’

The pathologist’s eyebrows flew up on her forehead. ‘You’re kidding? You got married? When?’

Dominique said, ‘As soon as I could persuade him to stop running around solving cold cases and putting himself in harm’s way.’

The doctor smiled. ‘Then you succeeded where the rest of us failed.’ There was a twinkle in her eye.

Enzo shuffled awkwardly. ‘Laurence, we don’t have much time.’

‘Neither do I,’ she said, jumping down from the desk to lift another file from the cabinet opposite. ‘I did the autopsy on Narcisse yesterday afternoon, and I’m not at all sure I should be sharing my findings with you, Enzo.’

‘I am officially consulting on the case, Laurence. If you want to call Capitaine Arnaud...’

She waved a hand to cut him off. ‘Yes, yes, yes, I believe you.’ Though there was the merest flicker of her eyes towards Dominique.

Enzo said, ‘Dominique was a gendarme for over fifteen years. She’s co-consulting with me.’

Dr Vidal nodded, but looked less than convinced. Still, she opened the file in her hands. ‘The victim was killed by a single, fatal cut across his neck. Whoever did it meant business, Enzo. Not just to threaten, or fight him, but to kill him. Unequivocally. My guess is that the killer was standing right in front of him. There were no cuts on the victim’s hands or arms, or anywhere else. No contusions, or anything to suggest that he was in a fight or had tried to defend himself.’

‘So he wasn’t expecting the attack,’ Enzo said.

She shook her head. ‘It would appear not.’ She turned a page. ‘There was just one wound. And it was huge. A cut that ran across the left and front of his neck, completely transecting the left common carotid artery. That was bad enough, but the blade also got the left external and internal jugulars, and cut the left sternocleidomastoid muscle.’

Enzo turned to Dominique. ‘That’s the big muscle that you see running diagonally across your neck when you turn your chin to the side.’ And he turned his head to demonstrate.

‘Thank you for the anatomy lesson, Dr Macleod.’ Wry amusement turned up the corners of the pathologist’s eyes. She returned to her notes. ‘Several strap muscles were also severed, and the blade cut halfway through the bottom of the Adam’s apple and the top of the windpipe. Narcisse didn’t have a chance. He would have lost blood pressure to the brain very quickly and gone down. I haven’t seen photographs of the crime scene, but it must have been a bloody mess.’

Enzo nodded. ‘It was.’

‘He wouldn’t have lasted very long. Not least because of a large air embolism from the jugular injuries.’ She looked up from her notes. ‘Air got drawn into the veins, went straight to the heart and filled the right side of it.’ She shook her head. ‘It wouldn’t have pumped too well after that.’ Now she closed the file and dropped it on to the desktop. ‘It was a devastating cut, Enzo, made with a good sharp blade, by a strong killer, or both.’

Enzo was thoughtful. ‘So apart from the fact that the killer was a powerful individual, is there anything else you might be able to tell us about him?’

But Dr Vidal immediately retracted. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. I wasn’t really thinking. I can’t tell you anything about the killer, actually, not even that he was a powerful person. I make deep cuts on people every day when I open them up for autopsy, and it doesn’t take much force at all. I just guide the knife. As long as it is razor-sharp, the blade itself does ninety per cent of the work.’

Enzo remembered the self-sharpening knife block on the worktop in the kitchen and the missing chef’s knife.

Dominique said, ‘Can you say if he was right- or left-handed?’

Enzo smiled apologetically from behind his mask. ‘Dominique was an excellent investigator, Laurence, but not hugely experienced in murder.’

Dominique flushed with confusion and embarrassment.

Dr Vidal waved a hand dismissively. ‘Of course I can say that he was right- or left-handed. Isn’t everyone?’ She smiled at Dominique. ‘I just can’t say which.’ She started pulling on latex gloves, and Enzo reached into his shoulder bag to pull out a large buff envelope.

‘I’ve printed off some photographs I took at the crime scene, Laurence. I’d really appreciate your thoughts on the blood spatter.’

‘Very quickly, then. Though I imagine your expertise on blood spatter patterns is far greater than mine.’

‘Perhaps,’ Enzo said. ‘But you’ve probably seen a great deal more blood than me.’

He spread his printouts across the desktop and the pathologist leaned over to cast an eye across a bloody scene made more lurid by the colours of the inkjet.

Enzo said, ‘You can see the spatter patterns on the floor left by the blood gouting under pressure from the initial cut.’ He pointed to another of the prints. ‘And here, where it pooled. The police think those skid marks were made by the killer slipping and falling in his panic to get out of the house.’

‘That was careless of him,’ the doctor said.

‘Very.’ Enzo shuffled through the printouts until he found the ones he was looking for. ‘I’ve blown these up.’ He stood back. ‘What do you think?’

The pathologist leaned over to examine several close-ups of tiny peripheral blood drops around the edges of the main event. Some were intact, others smeared by what must have been the killer’s feet. She glanced round at Enzo. ‘What am I looking for?’

He ran a finger across several of the smeared droplets. ‘If you look carefully, you can see that the outer rings of these droplets are more or less intact, while their centres have been smudged, or dragged, or smeared by the feet of the killer.’

Dr Vidal gasped realisation through her mask. ‘Jeez,’ she said. ‘Nothing gets by you, Enzo, does it?’

Dominique peered at the droplets and frowned. ‘What are you guys seeing that I’m not?’

Enzo said, ‘Blood dries relatively quickly. The outer edges of droplets like these would probably dry within two to three minutes. The centres would take longer.’

Dr Vidal said, ‘Sometimes, during autopsy, a drop or two of blood will get spilled on the floor. If I crouch down to wipe them up a few minutes later, the first swipe will smear most of the drop away. But the dry edge remains, and will take another wipe, or even a scrub to remove it.’

Understanding dawned on Dominique. ‘So the killer didn’t try to make his getaway immediately.’

‘Correct,’ Enzo said. ‘The outer droplets were already partially dried. It must have been several minutes, or more, before he tried to make his escape. So the whole notion that Bauer panicked and slipped in the blood in his hurry to get out of the house immediately after the murder makes no sense.’

‘What does it mean, then?’

Enzo started gathering up his prints. ‘I have no idea.’

Dr Vidal opened the door. ‘I’m sure you’ll keep me informed, Enzo. But right now I have a date with a corpse.’

Enzo and Dominique were hurrying back up the Rue Wilson when Sophie and Bertrand emerged from the maternity unit. They could tell immediately from the smiles of relief on the young couple’s faces that their worst fears were unfounded. Sophie threw her arms around her father and buried her face in his chest.

‘Papa, I was so scared.’

‘What did they say?’ Dominique said.

It was Bertrand who responded. ‘That it was a particularly severe case of what they called Braxton-Hicks contractions. A tightening of the uterus. They weren’t too worried, as long as there were no signs of blood or the waters breaking.’

Sophie said, ‘They did another scan, and the baby’s fine.’

Enzo didn’t want to let her go. ‘Thank God,’ he breathed into her hair. She clung to him just as tightly as he held on to her, and he remembered all those times when she was just a little girl, and she’d had a fall, or something had upset her, and she would attach herself to him like a limpet and not want to release him. Ever.

Bertrand said, ‘The car’s miles away. Will you wait with Sophie while I go and get it?’

Sophie finally liberated her father. ‘I can go with you.’

‘You sure?’ Bertrand’s concern was obvious.

‘I’m not an invalid,’ she protested. ‘Take my arm and we’ll go slow.’

Enzo said, ‘Dominique and I will just walk back to the apartment, then.’

He watched Bertrand and Sophie as they ambled arm in arm together to the foot of the street and turned out of sight. He sighed audibly and Dominique squeezed his arm. ‘She’ll be fine,’ she said.

Enzo stared down the Rue Wilson towards the river and the bridge, and saw mist rising into the trees on the far side of it. ‘I don’t know what I’d do if anything happened to her.’

Dominique said, ‘So maybe it’s a good thing that you’ve got this Carennac case to distract you.’

He nodded absently. ‘Maybe.’ He sighed again and turned towards Dominique to take her in his arms. ‘And I don’t know what I’d do without you.’

She smiled. ‘Chase young pathologists round the lab, probably.’

Which brought a sheepish grin to his face. Then the smile slowly faded. ‘I’m going to head back up to Carennac this afternoon. I want to take another look at that crime scene. And I’d like to talk to the old lady. Anny Lavigne.’

‘Want me to come with you? We could take Laurent with us, and I could walk him round the village.’

He shook his head. ‘I want you here in case anything happens with Sophie. No matter how much she loves her dad, it’s a mother she needs at a time like this.’