Behind him on the canal, Lapointe could see a faint mist rising from the water and he heard a dozen radios and Vs, all tuned to the morning news programmes. So far, at least, the press had not yet got hold of this story. He stubbed out his cigar against a masonry-clad wall and put it back in his case, following the uniformed man into the house. He told Le Bec to remain outside for a minute and question the angry residents as to their whereabouts and so on before following him upstairs. There were no elevators in this particular building and Lapointe was forced to climb several storeys until at last he came to a landing where a pale-faced young man, still in his pyjamas covered by a blue check dressing gown, stood with his back to the green and cream wall smoking a long, thin Nat Sherman cigarette, one of the white Virginia variety. He transferred the cigarette from right to left and shook hands with Lapointe as he introduced himself.
“Bonjour, M’sieu. I am Sebastien Gris.”
“Commissaire Lapointe of the Surete. What’s all this about a fancy dress party and a dead girl?”
Gris opened his mouth, but there was no air in his lungs. His thin features trembled and his pale blue eyes filled with helpless fury. He could not speak. He drew a deep breath. “Monsieur, I telephoned the moment I found her. I have touched nothing, I promise.”
Lapointe grunted. He looked down at a pretty blonde girl, her fair skin faintly pockmarked, who lay sprawled in the man’s hallway, a meter or so from the entrance to his tiny kitchen filling with steam from a forgotten kettle. Lapointe stepped over the body and went to turn off the gas. Slowly, the steam dissipated. He took a large paisley handkerchief from his pocket and mopped at his head and neck. He sighed. “No name? No identity? No papers of any kind?”
The uniformed man confirmed this. “Just what you see, Monsieur le Commissaire.”
Lapointe leaned and touched her face. He took something on his finger and inspected it carefully. “Arsenic powder,” he said. “And almost certainly cochineal for rouge.” He was growing depressed. “I’ve only seen this once before.” He recognised the work on her dress. It was authentic.
Though unusually beautiful for the period and with an unblemished skin, she was as certainly an inhabitant of the early 19th century as he was of the 21st and, as sure as he was alive, she was dead, murdered by a neat cut across her throat. “A true beauty and no doubt famous in her age. Murdered and disposed of by an expert.”
“You have my absolute assurances, Monsieur, that her body was here when I got up this morning. Someone has done this, surely, to implicate me. It cannot be a joke.”
Lapointe nodded gravely. “I fear, Monsieur Gris, that your presence in this building had little or nothing to do with the appearance of a corpse outside your kitchen.” The young man became instantly relieved and began to babble a sequence of theories, forcing Lapointe to raise his hand as he dropped to one knee to inspect something clutched in the corpse’s right fist. He frowned and checked the fingernails of the left fingers in which some coarse brown fibres had caught. The young man continued to talk and Lapointe became thoughtful and impatient at the same time, rising to his feet. “If you please, Monsieur. It is our job to determine how she came to die here and, if possible, identify her murderer. You, I regret, will have to remain nearby while I question the others. Have you the means to telephone your place of work?”
The young man nodded and crossed over to a wall bearing a fashionably modelled telephone. He gave the operator a number. As he was speaking, LeBec came in to join his chief. He shuddered when he saw the corpse. He knew at once why their department had been called in.
“1820 or perhaps ‘25,” he murmured. “What’s that in her hand? A rosary?
An expensive gold crucifix, too? Poor child. Was she killed here or there?”
“By the look of the blood it was there,” responded his chief. “But whoever brought her body here is still amongst us, I am almost certain. He turned the crucifix over to look at the back. All he read there were the initials j.c. “Perhaps also her murderer.” With an inclination of his massive head, he indicated where the bloodstains told a story of the girl being dragged and searched. “Did they assume her to be a witch of some sort? A familiar story. Her clothes suggest wealth. Yet she wears too much make-up for a girl of her age from a good family. Was she an adept or the daughter of an adept, maybe? What if she made her murderers a gateway into wherever they thought they were going and they killed her, either to be certain she told no others or as some sort of bizarre sacrifice? Yet why would she be clutching such an expensive rosary. And what about those fibres? Were they disguised? You know how they think, LeBec, as well as I do.” He watched as his assistant took an instrument from an inside pocket and ran it over the girl’s head and neck. Straightening himself, Le Bec studied his readings, nodding occasionally as his instincts were confirmed.
The commissioner was giving close attention to the series of bloody marks leading away from the corpse to the front door of the apartment.
Again he noted those initials on the back of the crucifix. “My God!” he murmured. “But why…?”
II
“I suspect our murderer had good reason to dispose of the corpse in this way,” declared Lapointe. “My guess is that her face and body were both too well known for her to be simply dropped in the Seine, while the murderer did not wish to be observed moving her through the streets of Paris, either because he himself was also highly recognisable or because he had no easy way of doing what he needed to do. And no alibi. So, if not one himself, he called in an expert, no doubt a person already known to him.”
“An expert? You mean such people understood about metatemporal transcience in the 1820s?”
“Generally speaking, of course, very few of our ancestors understood such things. Even fewer than today. We are not talking of time-travel, which as we all know is impossible, but movement from one universe to another where one era has developed at a slower rate in relation to ours. Needless to say, we are not discussing our own past, but a period approximating our own present. That’s why most of our cases take us to periods equivalent to our own 20th or early 21st century. So we are dealing here with a remote scale, far removed from our own. Another reason for our murderer to put as many alternative planes’ scales between our own and theirs.”
Lapointe was discussing the worlds of the multiverse, separated one from another by mass rather than time. Each world was of enormously larger or smaller scale to the next, enabling all the alternate universes which made up the great multiverse to coexist, one invisible to the other for reasons of size. Not until the great French scientist Benoit Mandelbrot had developed these theories had it become possible for certain adepts to increase or decrease their own mass and cross from one of these worlds to the other. Mandelbrot had effectively provided us with maps of our own brains, plans of the multiverse. This in turn had led to the setting up of secret government agencies designed to create policies and departments whose function was to deal with the new realities.
Now almost every major nation had some equivalent to the STP in some version of its own 21st century, apart from the United States, which had largely succeeded in refusing to enter that century in any significant sense and was forced to rely on foreign agents to cope with the problems arising from situations with their roots in the 21st century.