Enzo sat down beside it. ‘May I take a look?’
‘Of course.’
Enzo removed the lid and reached in to cup his hands carefully around the skull and lift it out. It had been wired together where separated and came out in one piece. Held in his hands like this, it felt incredibly small and delicate. The last trace on this earth of what had once been a vibrant, attractive young girl who, if Tavel was to be believed, had fallen in love with a serial killer. But the more he learned, the less inclined Enzo was to believe that it was Blanc who had killed her.
He looked into the large, dark, empty sockets from which her blue eyes had once viewed a world full of possibility, and gazed with love upon a man who had killed at least three times. Eyes which had seen her killer, filled perhaps with terror in the moments before her murder. He almost hoped that holding her skull like this might communicate something of that to him. But all he felt was cold bone on warm skin, and something faintly sinister in the sense of cupping the head of a dead human being in his hands.
He turned it to examine the fracture on its left side, just above the temple. The bone was broken here, a piece of it missing, and Enzo realised how easy it would be to damage something so fragile.
The pathologist said, ‘I read the autopsy report. Just out of interest. He was wrong, you know.’
Enzo looked at him, startled. ‘Who?’
‘Bonnaric. I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but he was no anthropologist.’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’
The young man smiled. ‘Forensic anthropology. That’s my particular specialty. Bonnaric wrote in his report that the damage to the skull was likely caused during the process of its recovery from the lake. That’s not the case.’
Enzo looked in astonishment at Lucie’s head in his hands and then back at the pathologist. ‘How can you know that?’
He reached out for the skull. ‘May I?’
Enzo handed it to him and stood up.
The pathologist turned the fracture towards them and ran his finger along the broken edge. ‘There, you see?’
And Enzo saw immediately. He said, ‘The edge of the break is stained.’
‘Exactly. The broken edges would have got dirty during recovery, yes, but if Bonnaric had cleaned them properly, he would have seen that they weren’t just superficially dirty. The staining is deeply ingrained in the fabric of the skull.’
‘So the fracture pre-dates the discovery of the body.’
‘Indeed. And was therefore probably inflicted while the victim was still alive. If the damage had been done — by, say, a shovel — when it was being dug out of the mud, the break would have been clean and unstained.’
Enzo stared at it, absorbing the implications.
The young man smiled and said, ‘It’s like an ice-cream bar, really. If you break it and then dip it in chocolate, it’s covered in chocolate even along the break. Compare that to an ice-cream bar dipped in chocolate and broken later. The break will be clean ice cream. Et voilà.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s not rocket science.’
Enzo’s mind was racing with all the new possibilities this development presented. ‘So that means the blow that did this damage could have been the cause of death?’
‘Very easily. Given the nature of it.’ He handed the skull back to Enzo, who gazed at Lucie for several long moments before returning her to the cardboard box. Then he looked at the forensic anthropologist again.
‘I wonder if I could ask you a very big favour?’
‘What?’ The young man inclined his head as if to say, Have I not done enough?
‘One theory about how Lucie died is that she was a victim of the serial killer Régis Blanc, who murdered his victims by strangling them, separating the hyoid bone and breaking part of it in the process.’
‘Which is how Dr Bonnaric thought Lucie might have died.’
‘Exactly. But Blanc also sedated his victims with the date-rape drug, Rohypnol — Flunitrazepam — which is one of a class of benzodiazepines. I’ve read that it is possible to detect these drugs in bone, and not just the marrow.’
The doctor nodded. ‘Yes. Easier in the marrow of fresh bone. But it is also possible to detect some drugs in cortical bone.’ He glanced at Lucie’s skull in the box. ‘You would take a little bone and grind it into powder. If there were traces of Rohypnol in it, they would be detectable.’ He looked at Enzo. ‘You would like me to do that.’ It was a statement, not a question.
Enzo nodded.
He sighed. ‘I can’t guarantee that I would be able to find the time or the resources.’
‘No, I understand that. But if you could...’ Enzo let his sentence hang. Then he said, ‘You’ve got my card.’ He paused. ‘So, I’ll leave Lucie with you.’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Enzo left Bordeaux just after midday, arriving in Paris shortly before seven. He had stopped only once, and was stiff and tired when finally he left his 2CV in the car park at Rue Soufflot and walked to Raffin’s apartment in the Rue de Tournon.
For once there was no piano playing as he crossed the shining wet cobbles of the interior courtyard and climbed wearily to the first floor. Somehow it always seemed to be raining in Paris in autumn. To his disappointment Kirsty and his grandson were not there.
‘They’ve been away all afternoon visiting a friend of Kirsty’s in the eighth,’ Raffin said. He stood for a moment in the doorway before reluctantly opening it wide to let Enzo in. If there had ever once been warmth between them, it had long since dissipated.
In the séjour Enzo saw an almost empty bottle of Pouilly Fumé on the table, and a single glass with half an inch of honey-coloured white wine remaining in the bottom of it. There was a glassy quality, he noticed then, to Raffin’s usually clear green eyes, and he spoke slowly, with the studied concentration of a man trying to convince you that he had not drunk too much. Drinking too much had pretty well characterised Raffin since his shooting, here in this very apartment, and Enzo, though still nurturing a sense of guilt, worried for the future of his daughter and grandson. ‘I’ve just driven from Bordeaux,’ he said.
Raffin raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s quite a drive. I’m flattered you’d come all this way just to see me.’
Enzo gave him a look. ‘Actually, I’ve come to see Charlotte,’ he said, and saw Raffin stiffen. The journalist was still, inexplicably, jealous of Enzo’s relationship with her, even although it had long since turned sour. Enzo dipped into his bag to pull out the folders given him by the Bordeaux Six, and his copy of Lucie’s autopsy report. ‘And I wanted to give you these. Or, at least, let you take copies for your files.’
Raffin glanced at them. ‘Oh, yes. The Bordeaux Six.’
‘I’m surprised you weren’t tempted to include more of them in the book.’
Raffin shrugged. ‘Lucie’s was the only one of real interest. And four of them were just missing, still alive for all we know. Although, probably not.’
‘And the girl stabbed to death in that hotel room?’
Raffin pulled a face. ‘Again. Not very interesting. A prostitute murdered in a sexual frenzy by some lowlife client. Not the sort of mystery to engage my readers.’ He flicked through them. ‘But I’ll take copies. You never know when you might find something interesting.’
Enzo followed Raffin through to his study, where the journalist ran off duplicates of the six files on his high-speed copier. He looked at Lucie’s autopsy report.