Doctor Death (21 page)

“I understand from Christine that Cecile was not quite herself the last few days before she disappeared,” I said instead.

“Her young man had broken off their engagement,” said Mother Filippa. “And I have the sense that the news was not received well at home. Are you suggesting that that is why she ran away with Emile?”

“Maybe,” I said. “But you believe it was her initiative?”

“I assume so. Emile was not like that.”

“Not even if you take his handicap into consideration?”

“What do you mean?”

“I understand he had certain . . . troubles.”

“What has Christine told you? There was nothing wrong with Emile.”

“Inspector Marot seems to have got the impression that he was not quite right in the head.”

“Mademoiselle Karno, I am about to get angry. Emile may need a bit more kindness and understanding than most people are willing to offer. But there is nothing wrong with his mind. And as far as Christine’s gossip goes, let me describe it precisely, so that there is no misunderstanding. When he is strongly moved, Emile gets an involuntary erection. It is an unhappy condition for
him and it makes it difficult for him to be among people, which is one of the reasons he has found a haven here. And if you in your human charity cannot understand and accept that, I can assure you that God does.”

I felt as if she had just pulled down my pants and given me a well-deserved spanking.

“I . . . I just came to say goodbye,” I managed to stammer.

“Of course you did, Mademoiselle Karno. Thank you for your visit. And thank you for bringing my old friend home.”

I just nodded mutely and fled with my tail between my legs.

That night Sister Marie-Claire was awakened a few hours after compline when someone knocked quietly on her door. In the hallway stood Mother Filippa, still in her nightdress, with a knitted shawl thrown hastily over her shoulders and just a scarf covering her short hair.

“The new wolves are restless,” she said. “I heard them howl several times. And I thought I saw a light. I’m just going to check on them.”

“Do you want me to come?” asked Marie-Claire.

“No. Best if I go alone—in case it’s him . . .” It was not necessary to use names. “But I want you to go down to the kitchen and get some food. Bread, cheese, perhaps some smoked meat if we have it. Apples, there must still be some apples. Things that will keep, things that are easy to carry. And plenty of it, please. Just set it outside the wolf stables. Do not go in. It is enough that one of us may have something to hide from the authorities and Father Augustine.” Father Augustine was the sisters’ confessor.

Marie-Claire smiled. “I think we have some smoked duck,” she said, “and ham.”

“Thank you.” The two women exchanged a warm, conspiratorial look. But then a shadow crossed the abbess’s face. “I shall have to explain to him what happened to the old wolves,” she said. “It will be hard for him.”

She disappeared down the corridor, with bare ankles in the frayed brown shoes she usually wore in the stables and the garden. An odd pairing with the nightdress.

Marie-Claire listened but could not hear any wolf howls, only an owl from somewhere over by the apple orchards.

In the cool cellar under the kitchen, she found the duck, kept in a jar covered by fat, and she also cut some generous slices from one of the smoked hams that hung from the ceiling on large iron hooks. Two whole loaves of bread, one white and one dark. Nine apples. But it had to be portable, Mother Filippa had said, so she emptied the last potatoes out of a sack and used that to pack the food in.

When she came back up, the night was completely still. The owl was silent, and the moon shone pale and calm on the convent courtyard, so bright that the tall yews cast long blue shadows. She walked through the colonnade that connected the convent with the oldest stable buildings where the wolves were. And then she suddenly did hear a noise. She spun around but saw nothing out of the ordinary. Only moonlight and columns, yews and long shadows.

She put down the sack by the stable door as she had been ordered to do and returned to the convent. It was not until Mother Filippa failed to appear at the matins prayer that her unease led her to look for her in the wolf stables.

Later she often asked herself just what she would have seen if she had opened that stable door the night before.

III

M
other Filippa lay on her back on the bare earth of the wolf pen with an odd neatness to her dead limbs—her arms along her sides, her legs straight and together, the nightdress smoothed so it almost covered her ankles. Her feet were bare. The morning light touched the white folds of the dress with a soft golden glow and lent the scene an air of false serenity, making me think of gilded icons and portraits of martyred saints.

But there was nothing serene about this death. A bloody gash ran down the abbess’s face and continued along her neck and chest, under the nightdress. It looked almost as if someone had attempted to cleave her in two, like a log.

“I suppose we may put ‘homicide’ on the certificate without further ado,” said the Commissioner.

“Yes,” said my father. He could not kneel by the body, and stood awkwardly leaning on his crutch. “But I will have to get her on a table before I can say with certainty what kind of instrument was used.”

A few paces from the abbess lay another dead body—the new male wolf’s. His fur was matted with blood, and a coil of his intestines hung out through an incision in the abdomen. A grimy trail of blood and feces led from the beast to the abbess, or perhaps the other way around. The Commissioner made a note in his book.

“Inspector Marot will not be able to get here for a few hours, and I would like to have her examined before rigor mortis sets in,” he said. “Dear Madeleine. Could you draw a sketch for the inspector?”

It was the first time I had been at the scene of a murder. And once again it was a person I had met when she was alive. I could feel my saliva dry up, and the muscles in my abdomen contract in involuntary spasms. But I just nodded with my mouth closed, in order not to release the vomit I was fighting off.

Oddly enough, it helped to draw it. To notice angles and lines, shadow and light, instead of looking at the terrible totality. I was even able to make a closer study of the abbess’s cloven face.

Then a stretcher arrived from the hospital, and with the help of the Commissioner, two sisters carefully lifted the abbess’s body onto it.

“Where may I perform my examination?” asked Papa.

That simple question caused some uncertainty. The sisters clearly believed that their dead abbess belonged in the chapel of the convent church, but that was one of the places to which they could not allow my father access. They settled on a compromise. The examination could take place in the hospital wing, and only when it was over would Mother Filippa come to rest where she belonged.

“What about the wolf?” I said. “Does he need to be examined as well?”

“Later,” said my father with a glance at the sisters. “Humans first, then the animals.”

Predictably enough there were more protests when my father and I wanted to undress the body. In consideration of the nuns’ sense of propriety, both my father and the Commissioner had to leave the room while I and Sister Agnes took off the abbess’s nightdress and underwear and covered the dead body with a sheet.

At that point I was already conscious that something was not right.

There were several things to note about the naked body. In addition to the bloody incision that continued down between the abbess’s small, pointed breasts, most noticeable were the bite marks that covered breast, stomach, and thighs, eleven in all. On one breast, the bite was so deep that there was actual tissue missing.

But that was not all. On the stomach, lower body, and the inside of the thighs were smeared splotches of blood and some uneven brownish tracks that, judging by smell and appearance, were feces. It looked as if someone had attempted to wipe it off, but in the daylight the smears were clear. I had to look a little more closely to discover the long dark animal hairs that stuck to the blood.

Sister Agnes cried quietly during our work, and her usual, “Oh dear. Oh dear,” had been replaced by a despairing little, “Oh no. Oh no. Oh no.”

Together we spread the clean white sheet and let it fall around the abused body. At this point I hardly knew if it was for the sake of the dead woman or for ours. It was a mercy in any case.

This morning I was glad that my father would come in and take over. His even voice noted the facts with a calming objectivity, and all I had to do was write them down:

“Height: one hundred sixty-two centimeters. Build: normal. Hair color: dark chestnut brown. Eyes—”

“They were olive green,” I said.

The sheet was lifted from one body part at a time, which not only removed the general impression of exposure and nakedness but also isolated the relevant area and made it an object of inquiry rather than an arm, a leg, a breast. My father had me place a piece of silk paper over each of the eleven bite marks and carefully draw them on a 1:1 scale. As I had, he noted and described the animal hair, the bloody tracks, “which do not seem to originate from the victim’s own wounds,” and the smears of intestinal contents.

“The bite wounds are generally shallow and possibly made after death. The lesions in the head, throat, and chest . . .”

“Knife?” asked the Commissioner.

“I do not think so. The edges of the wound are too jagged, too torn. A knife would have made a cleaner incision. I think we should be looking for a saw.”

“But she would not have just stood there while the killer started sawing through her head,” objected the Commissioner.

“No. That is why I also looked carefully for other lesions, a blow that might have knocked her unconscious, for example. But I could find nothing like that. Perhaps some kind of anesthesia?”

“And the bite marks. Did the wolf bite her?”

“Probably not. They are almost certainly from a human being.”

“As with Cecile Montaine.”

“Yes. But Cecile was not murdered.”

“So you think these are the murderer’s teeth?”

“That was one of the reasons why I got Maddie to trace the marks. As I said, the victim was most likely bitten postmortem, so it is at the very least strong circumstantial evidence.”

“Anything else?”

“The abbess was naked when the damage was done. She was dressed later.”

“Do you mean that the murderer dressed her?”

“It is possible. But . . . it could also have been someone else.”

Sister Marie-Claire sat with her hands folded, but there was no serenity in the gesture, one hand was gripping the other so tightly that the knuckles whitened, and occasionally they performed a spasmodic leap in her lap, like a wounded rabbit. Her voice was oddly monotonous; it was as if her attempts to control her emotions squeezed all other expression out of it as well.

“Mother Filippa woke me up shortly after midnight to say that she was going to check on the new wolves. She thought they were restless.”

“But you did not go with her?”

“No. I . . . went back to bed. It was not until she did not show up for matins . . .” The hands jumped, and Sister Marie-Claire did not finish her sentence.