‘Are you certain this is Colonel Berle?’ asked Margont.
Mejun’s face lit up and Margont was annoyed with himself for having accidentally given the man false hope. He could see the servant’s excitement at the thought that it was a plot: the colonel had been kidnapped and this unrecognisable body had been left here to cover up the kidnapping. Yet the old man did not really believe that. He freed a shirt-tail from the victim’s trousers, his fingers moving slowly as if numbed by frost, and revealed a scar across the victim’s left thigh. His answer stuck in his throat and he merely nodded.
‘Have any documents been taken?’ pursued Margont.
‘Yes. The study was always cluttered with papers.’
Not a sheet of paper remained, although on the bookshelves piles of ill-assorted works were stacked on top of the lined-up books. Drawers had been pulled out, emptied and left open. Alas, the colonel had been a taciturn man and Mejun was not able to say what had disappeared.
The emblem of the Swords of the King had been pinned to the dead man’s shirt. Caught in a ray of sunshine, the white material gleamed, like the glittering snowy summit of a mountain seen in the distance. Margont knelt down to remove the emblem and give it to Mejun, who accepted it, since those were his orders. But like Margont and Lefine, he did not think it right that an important clue
was being hidden from the police. It appeared that the investigation was setting off in a devious manner. Margont tried not to mind about that. His two strongest qualities were also his worst faults. He was philanthropic and idealistic, as befitted a child of the Revolution — possibly, in its origins, one of the most utopian and naive periods in the history of humanity. Margont tended to see everything as black or white, and here he was, plunged by Joseph and Talleyrand into a world of infinite shades of grey.
He sent the servant to watch for the arrival of the medical officer, then looked around the room. The bookshelves contained travel writing, military memoirs, works by Vauban, plays by Molière. Each of these books reflected part of the personality of their owner. Berle must have sat laughing at the adventures of poor Don Quixote, wondering if perhaps he didn’t share some of his characteristics himself; he must have thought about those wild boars with human heads supposedly observed in this or that exotic country and depicted in Ambroise Paré’s Des monstres et prodiges; perhaps he had dreamt of having an amorous encounter as he read Marivaux. Suddenly the body became the person, Berle, and that made it harder to bear the idea that he had been murdered.
‘I wonder if he talked ...’ said Lefine.
‘No,’ replied Margont.
‘How can you be sure?’
‘Because he was already dead when he was burnt.’ He indicated Berle’s wrists. ‘Look at where his wrists were tied. The skin is intact. If that man had still been alive while his face was being burnt, he would have tried to free himself, he would have struggled. His wrists would have been bruised and bloody.’
Lefine recoiled instinctively. Insanity frightened him more than barbarity.
‘We must be dealing with a madman ...’
‘Possibly.’
Jean-Quenin Brémond arrived at that moment, in a hurry as usual. He removed his greatcoat, revealing his medical officer’s uniform, which was of a lighter blue than the standard dark blue of the French army. His movements were hurried and nervous in
everyday life but correspondingly slow and precise when he was practising medicine or teaching. So his life seemed to pass either too quickly or too slowly. Only a few days ago a colleague from the Army Medical Service had reprimanded him for spending too long tending to the Russian prisoners. Since then, as a protest, Jean-Quenin had worn a Russian medal given to him by a hussar from Elisabethgrad whose life he had saved. He was regularly at logger-heads with the military authorities, much like Margont and Lefine. And as his rages were famous, his aides, sentries and patients pretended not to notice the little blue ribbon with the strange silver medal.
Mejun appeared a little after Jean-Quenin. Margont asked him to leave them on their own, then explained to his friend what he wanted from him without telling him his first conclusions. The medical officer crouched down beside the victim. With his seventeen years’ service in an army constantly at war, he was not shocked by what he saw. Recently, whatever he was confronted with, he had already seen worse. Always.
This person was killed by a single knife blow straight to the heart. The attack was very precise and the murderer was certain that it was going to be fatal because he only struck once.’
He stood up to study the desk, then crouched down again and searched in his case for tweezers, which he plunged into the wound.
The victim was sitting at the desk. His assailant came up behind him and must have put his hand over his mouth whilst stabbing him with his right hand. Yes, the direction of the wound means that the blow was delivered from behind by someone right-handed. I conclude therefore that the assassin is very familiar with the human body and its pressure points. Probably a doctor, a butcher or a battle-hardened soldier. I realise that doesn’t narrow the field down much. The blood spattered the desk, then a little dripped onto the victim’s clothes and the floor when the body was moved. But the heart stopped beating almost immediately, which explains why there is relatively little blood.’
He manipulated the corpse delicately with precise movements,
undid the buttons, and struggled against rigor mortis to prise open the teeth.
‘Astonishing. The man was killed first, then burnt! Look carefully at his face - no blistering! Had the man been alive when he was burnt you would have seen blisters filled with serum, a liquid containing albumin, surrounded by red areas. You would also have seen damage to the oral cavity. He would have been obliged to breathe and so would have inhaled burning-hot air and flames. His tongue and pharynx would have been necrosed and would have suffered desquamation, that is, the superficial layers of mucous membrane would have come off in little strips, in squamas. And there would have been little ulcerations on the back of the throat. The mucous membrane on the epiglottis would have been red and engorged. You would have seen soot marks and a pinkish froth in the trachea and the gag would not have prevented that. A living victim would have breathed through his nose and that would have had the same effect as breathing through the mouth. As for the gag itself, of course it should have shown bite-marks.
I’ve seen plenty of burns on the battlefield and in hospitals, and I can say with certainty: these burns were inflicted after death.’ ‘That’s necromancy!’ exclaimed Lefine.
‘Hmm ... Necromancy is consulting the dead to get them to give up their secrets. Yes, I suppose you could call it that! I’m a necromancing doctor. But that’s thanks to my friend Quentin and his investigations.’
‘I’m sorry, Jean-Quenin,’ replied Margont.
‘Not at all! Without you life would be monotonous ...’
It was always hard to tell if he was being serious or sarcastic.
‘Have you ever come across a crime where the murderer burns his victim after killing him?’ Margont asked him.
‘Never.’
‘Neither have I. We’ll have to find out whether the murderer was acting out of vengeance, or whether he was covering his tracks, or whether the fire had some special significance for him. Look around the room. There is a trail of blood from the fireplace to the desk, near where the body was found. At first sight it looks as if
the murderer overcame the victim, bound and gagged him, dragged him over to the fire to burn him, and then, for some reason, took him back to the desk. The blood would have dripped in a trail as the body was dragged from the fireplace to the desk. But, in fact, according to what you’ve just told us, the blood flowed as the murderer dragged the colonel’s body to the fireplace. Therefore, the murderer went to the trouble of taking the remains over to the desk to mask the fact that he had already killed the victim before burning him.’