The First Fingerprint (7 page)

De Palma jotted down the scientist's conclusions. The date of death did not ring any bells. He would have to check the missing persons file.

“There's something that bothers me,” Mattei went on.

“What's that?”

“She'd buttoned her anorak up wrongly. She'd put the first button in the second hole, and so on. I'll show you later, in the photographs we took. And she had some pebbles in her right pocket. I put them in the jar over there. Go and have a look.”

Mattei pointed toward a stainless steel table mounted on wheels. It was covered with small jars containing a variety of objects: sea worms, scraps of cloth, hair … In one of them, the Baron could see some small stones which were almost round and about two centimeters in diameter.

“Do you know what she did for a living?”

“No. How should I?”

“She was a lecturer in prehistory, no less.”

De Palma picked up the coastguard's report and went through the pages one by one. Christine Autran had been found in almost the same place as the corpse of Franck Luccioni, a small-time thug. Below Le Torpilleur.

“That's odd,” he said.

“What is?” Mattei asked.

“She was found in the same place as Franck Luccioni. Do you remember that little crook?”

“Perfectly. But his was an accidental death. There were no traces of any violence. Nothing at all. Drowning preceded by a serious decompression accident. I think he must have stayed on the seabed for too long. His cylinders were empty and he had to come back up too fast, without being able to respect the decompression stops. A classic accident that bad divers have. A good diver would never do that. Never.”

“I'm from the police, Madame,” the Baron called out. “It's about your upstairs neighbor. Can I talk to you for a few minutes?”

Yvonne Barbier had just come home from the market when de Palma rang on her doorbell. It took her an excessively long time to answer. He could sense her presence behind the door, peering through the spyhole. Then the door was opened on its nickel chain. De Palma saw the made-up face of an eighty-year-old woman, one of those grannies with real character who spend hours preening their seniority in chic boutiques in the city center. He produced his tricolor card and raised it to her eye-level.

“Come in, come in …”

In the huge, sumptuous flat dating from the late nineteenth century there hung a slight fragrance of ilang-ilang mingled with bergamot, marzipan and vetiver. It was the smell of dated opulence, with an acidic tinge of sweat and vegetable soup. Yvonne had been beautiful once and she still maintained that presence, those graceful gestures and the natural charm of an attractive person. Her faded, turquoise eyes gave her sharp stare an infinite depth, and there was something astonishingly young about them. With a broad smile, she showed the officer into the salon. He sat down on a pink velvet sofa, in front of the piano, a Pleyel mini grand, on which, in a silver frame, stood a photograph of a severe-looking man. The half-closed shutters let in two shafts of golden light which cut their way obliquely through the air. Several canvases by minor masters decorated the walls, which had the sheen of age. One of them, in strong red and black blocks, with no half-tones, depicted a corrida: a signature and a grandiloquent dedication, presumably from the
artist, showed prominently in the bottom right-hand corner of the painting.

Yvonne peered at her guest as discreetly as possible. It must have been the first time in her life that she had received such a person in the comfort of her home. The situation intrigued her just as much as it brought out her congenital nosiness.

De Palma spoke first:

“When did you last see your neighbor?”

“The last Wednesday of November. I can't remember the exact date …”

Yvonne thought it over, puckering her brow and adopting a mysterious air as if she were the possessor of great secrets.

“Usually, on Tuesdays, she goes to teach in Aix, then comes back at about 8:00 in the evening. She hardly ever goes out. I didn't hear her that evening. I thought she must have stayed late with her students or something. Then, when I didn't see her the next morning, I thought that something must be wrong. I went to see your colleagues at the Commissariat on boulevard Chave. They told me to wait. A couple of days later, I went back to tell them that she still hadn't come home. That time they listened to me. They told me that they'd put her in the missing persons file.”

“Where do you think she could be?”

“I have absolutely no idea, Officer. All I know is that she didn't pay me rent for November or December. In my opinion, she must be dead by now, or else kidnapped by some sadist.”

De Palma did not tell her that Christine Autran had been hanged and thrown into the sea like a piece of dead meat. He wanted to get as much information as possible from this witness, so for the moment he had to avoid any psychological shocks.

“What did she like doing? Did she have any hobbies or anything?”

“Her job. She loved her job. Apart from that, I don't know of anything …”

The elderly woman thought it over. She stared at her shiny shoes, tapping them on the thick Chinese rug.

“Oh yes!” she suddenly exclaimed, as though re-emerging from a long meditation. “She liked walking in the creeks. I used to tell her that
it was no place for a woman, but she wouldn't listen to me. She went there all the time. Alone. She was always alone, the poor thing. She was a beautiful woman, she could have got married. But she preferred her freedom. You know what young people are like these days … I got married in 1940 to the gentleman you see there, on the piano. He was a conductor. I was twenty and he was thirty. It was a different era … Christine's mother died about twenty years ago. She had no other family, and as far as I know she had no friends.”

“I suppose you have spare keys to her flat?”

Yvonne Barbier suddenly lit up. She got to her feet and vanished into what was presumably her lumber room.

“Of course I have a spare. Do you want us to go up and have a look?” she said, heading toward the front door.

“We'll see about that later.”

“From what I can understand, you think that she really has disappeared, or that she's dead, is that right?”

“It is a possibility we are bearing in mind,” de Palma replied vaguely. “But as you know, we police officers see so many strange things …”

“She's dead. I'm sure of it. Just like two and two makes four. She's been living her for twenty years, coming home every evening. Sometimes she doesn't go out all day. I can hear her walking from one room to another.”

“And you haven't noticed anything unusual of late?” de Palma asked. “No-one has been here to ask after her, no sales reps or workmen, nothing?”

“No, nobody. There's just the old folk like me who live here. You can question them, if you want. But they'll only tell you the same thing.”

He was not going to learn much that day. It was 12:30. De Palma asked Yvonne Barbier to show him Autran's flat.

“Shouldn't you have a search warrant?”

“No, Madame Barbier. That's just in American cop shows … Under French law there's no such thing as a search warrant. All I need is one or two witnesses, such as you. Normally the person living at the address should be present, but I have to admit that I lied to you earlier. Christine Autran was in fact found yesterday.”

“She's dead, isn't she?”

De Palma lowered his head.

“I just knew it. My God. The poor little thing.”

Professor Autran's flat was identical to Yvonne Barbier's. It measured about 150 square meters and was laid out around a large, central corridor, which led into vast rooms with high ceilings decorated with fine plaster moldings. The prehistorian had painted the walls white and, here and there, placed a few bits of cheap, chipboard furniture.

All the shutters were closed. The sun filtered in, weak and discreet between the slats and through the net curtains. The policeman looked for the nearest light switch. Pulling on a pair of gloves, he told Yvonne not to touch anything and to stay in the hall. He was hoping to find the beginnings of an explanation for this affair.

Two of the rooms were crowded with books and files stacked up on red, metal shelves. It was almost impossible to cross the floor. In the salon, a plain showcase contained some pieces of cut flint. Christine Autran had hung a few black-and-white photographs on the walls. In one picture, taken in one of the creeks, she was smiling at the photographer, her hair disheveled by the wind. In another she was grimacing as she kissed the mouth of a human skull with no lower jaw, presumably a find from a dig. Above the black marble mantelpiece was a photograph of her posing in front of a cave painting of a gentle-eyed bison.

The salon, like the rest of the flat, was furnished without taste. In the kitchen, a pile of dirty washing-up had dried out in the sink; tomato sauce had crystallized on a plate.

The dark blue bathroom did not tell the Baron much either, except that Christine Autran was not some flirt who spent hours making herself up before going to work. A few hardened lipsticks lay in a pile above the basin beside a three-quarters-full bottle of Chanel Number 19, a shabby make-up bag and a hard brush full of brown hairs. The lecturer had not left on a long journey.

In her study, the answering machine showed that there were no messages. He picked up the receiver to listen to the dialing tone. The
phone still worked. He jotted down all these details in large letters in his exercise book.

He opened the desk drawers slowly, one by one: there was little of interest in them either, apart from piles of notes which meant nothing to him for the moment. He would have to go through all this mess over the next week. It would take quite some time. He looked through the rest of the study without any apparent results. A few files had been placed on the floor. One of them had been labeled with a large, red felt-pen: “Le Guen, various photos.” He opened it and discovered a stack of snapshots; positive and negative hands, paintings of animals and carvings. One of the hands looked like the picture the gendarmes had found beside Hélène Weill's body. De Palma had been sent a series of photographs of it.

He picked up a second file entitled ‘Le Guen, topology,' containing a series of topological studies which were totally incomprehensible to him. Blue blotches, some light, others darker, were spread out over a brown background which also showed darker zones. Some captions had been added in a fine, energetic hand. He glanced quickly at a few of them: ‘horse section,' ‘boulevard of sea spiders', ‘the three penguins', ‘mural of black hands' …

A third file was marked ‘Le Guen, September 2000.' Inside it were two almost identical photographs, of poor quality compared with those in the other files, showing a painting of an animal which looked rather like a bird. He held them under the desk lamp. There were several fingerprints on them. He slipped them into a plastic folder and put them in his pocket.

He went back into the salon, sat down for a moment on the sofa-bed, and tried to imagine Christine Autran's last day. Had she come home before going to the creeks?

“Madame Barbier,” he said. “Could you tell me where Christine Autran parks her car?”

“In a hired garage at the beginning of rue du Progrès. It's not far, just on the corner by the bank across the road.”

“Thank you, Madame.”

De Palma wrote down his name, work and mobile numbers on his notepad. He delicately tore off the page and handed it to her.

“Madame, if you notice anything strange, please contact me at once. It's very important, do you understand? Do you know Christine Autran's phone number?”

The old lady looked at the ceiling, pretending to search her memory.

“Of course. It's 04 91 47 02 13.”

Then she repeated each number as clearly as possible, her eyes fixed on the policeman's notepad to check that he was noting down what she was telling him correctly.

De Palma took out his mobile and dialed Christine's number. After three rings, the answering machine cut in, and the voice of the woman discovered in Sugiton creek filled the empty flat. It was a soft, somewhat hoarse voice. A sensual voice.

“Hello, I'm not at home right now, but you can leave me a message …”

Yvonne Barbier burst into tears.

In the Garage de l'Alliance on rue du Progrès, a fine layer of dust covered Christine Autran's flame-red Peugeot 306. Jean-Marc Menu, a nervy little character who owned the garage, walked several times round the car, waving his arms.

“She hasn't used it for over a month. The lady owes me two months' rent. Soon it'll be three.”

“The lady's dead,” de Palma told him.

“She can't be!”

“Oh yes, she can!”

Menu wiped his oily hands on his overalls. He did not know what to do with himself. Only one thing really interested him: how to get rid of the car as quickly as possible.

“Do you have a spare set of keys, Monsieur Menu?”

“No, never! We never have spares. I never ask for them, it's not done …”

De Palma glanced inside, using his hand as a shade against the glare of the striplights in the garage.

“Could you open this car?”

Menu looked embarrassed.

“That's always possible. But I don't like doing it.”

“Monsieur Menu, I am a police officer! The sooner we search the car, the sooner you'll be rid of it.”

The owner vanished into his workshop and returned a few moments later with a metal rod.

“We use it when we put cars in the pen,” he said, to explain why he had such an implement.

Menu slid the rod between the window and the rubber of the left door of the 306, pulled hard and opened it.

De Palma inspected the interior carefully, but found nothing except for a maintenance handbook and an unopened box of tissues. The counter read 26,584 km, hardly anything for a car which must have been about four years old. De Palma also noticed a few traces of sand and dried mud on the mat below the driver's seat, around the wheels and in the boot. It had rained hard in December. Christine must have driven down a track saturated with water. The mud was ochre, with some red pigments.