“Yes?”
“Many of the careers, of these men and women, subsided after this Asian adventure. They were very bright young people, of course Marxists”—he said the word with a definite moue of repugnance—“but nonetheless clever. Future stars of science, if the English phrase is suitable? Yet so many of them appear to have deliberately returned to obscurity after 1976. Strange.”
Alex interjected. “You said they shared two things? What was the other?”
Rouvier’s sigh was abrupt, yet emotive.
“It took us several days to follow up their careers and life stories, because of that obscurity, and because they had dispersed so globally. But, the truth is, we are too late.”
“Sorry?”
“They are nearly all dead. Already.”
Julia asked: “You mean… they were murdered? Like Trewin and Annika?”
Rouvier’s gray eyes met hers.
“Most of them. Possibly. Yes. The older ones died naturally. Many of them appeared to have committed suicide, but now we think — we estimate — that if we look again at these suicides they might turn out to be murders. And some have just been clearly and plainly butchered. Over the last three years. Therefore, after much investigation, our foremost guess is that the killer has been slowly slaughtering the rest, working her way through a list, probably a list she extracted from Trewin, by torture. She has been taking revenge, gradually, over the last three years.” Another short sigh. “Of course, no one noticed a pattern before, partly because this mission to Cambodia was so secretive that no one knew of the historic links between the victims, and because the murders were subtle, often disguised as self-murder. And anyway, who would associate the suicide of an elderly psychologist in Los Angeles with the tragic death of, say, a sixty-five-year-old archaeologist in Geneva eighteen months later? But now, now we do see the pattern. A vivid pattern.”
“Is anyone left alive?”
“We have failed to trace two people. We know, naturally, about Marcel Barnier, the expert in hybridization. He is also apparently in the Far East, or at least he was until recently — we have reports of him in Cambodia itself a few months ago.”
Rouvier pointed a manicured fingernail at a second figure in the photo. Julia leaned to see a tall, smiling blond face in the back row of the photo, with a ponytail. A Hawaiian shirt. Arrogantly smiling. “This man, Colin Fishwick, may also still be alive. A neurosurgeon from Princeton, he moved to Hong Kong in the 1980s. We don’t know where he is now, but we have no record of his dying.”
Rouvier sat back. “So there it is. Just two men left. The killer will evidently seek them out. And kill them, too, if she can find them; then her task will assuredly be complete.”
Alex said, “Why did she kill the archivist? And attack Julia?”
“A most sensible question. Probably just a reaction, the fear that she had been recognized, a sudden desire to silence a witness. This is a violent killer, very violent: there are elements of extreme cruelty in some of the later killings alongside clever forethought. It is as if the killer is getting angrier as time passes, or maybe she is allowing herself to take more brutal revenge, to use more animal savagery, as she nears the completion of her task.”
Julia noticed the deliberate phrasing.
“Animal?”
Rouvier nodded and smiled, this time rather bleakly. “Ah yes, Miss Kerrigan. Perhaps you have elucidated this for yourself?”
She shrugged. She knew where this was going, but she didn’t want to articulate it. The idea was too insane.
Rouvier was less bashful.
“This may all sound incredible, I know. But given all the other information we now possess, it seems very possible that we are dealing with some experimental form of… hybridization. Or maybe some experiments at a higher anatomical level, maybe even neurological? Hence the simultaneous interest in cranial surgery? How else do we comprehend the links with Ghislaine’s grandfather, the crossbreeding experiments? It all seems too rich to be coincidence.” The suavity returned. “Perhaps I am reading too much science fiction, perhaps my theories are becoming as florid as the novels they sell in Carrefour. Who knows?”
Rouvier swept up the photo and slid it back into his briefcase. The traffic noise from the street was more noticeable now: rush hour had arrived.
“La circulation! I must go. Before I depart I can relieve you of some minor burdens.” He glanced at Alex, then at Julia. The room was dark now: a late November twilight was falling swiftly outside. “We have no more need of you, at least for the moment. You are surely not on the killer’s list. You do not need protection. I can also understand if you wish to leave France, after the horrors”—he looked at Julia, piercingly—“all the horrors that you have experienced. If so, the Gendarmerie de France will not resist, though I would like it if you let me know where you go, if you go. We will need you as witnesses at some point. But for now—au revoir.”
They shook hands. The room was very dark. When the officer was gone Julia turned on a lamp and poured herself and Alex some glasses of dark scotch whiskey, and they sat alone and silent on the sofa for several hours, drinking slowly, occasionally cuddling or kissing, saying nothing.
But when they went to bed, Julia could not sleep. Instead she lay there, watching the filtered shadows cast by the moving car lights outside, watching them slide quietly across the ceiling. Like the shadows on the wall of a cave, cast by a timid firelight. Fearful shadows, images of animals, frightening shades.
The next morning was wet and dreary, the sky a true Parisian grisaille. Julia didn’t feel like doing anything or going anywhere. The puzzle wasn’t even half solved. And she felt desolate. Emptied. Unsatisfied. She sat down on the sofa and stared at nothing and didn’t even eat breakfast. Finally, she retreated to her laptop. Research. She had nothing else to do. She was a scientist. She could research.
But there was almost nothing to go on, just her own hunches and guesswork and wildly ambitious intuitions, and she was frankly bored with them. How about hard facts?
The one fact she had was this essay title, and the name of the obscure magazine. The Journal of French Anthropogenesis. The magazine was long defunct, and many of its editions had disappeared from this earth — but maybe she could find out more about the magazine itself.
An hour of furious key-tapping gave her an answer. One of the editors of the journal was mentioned in another obscure journal in the footnotes of a French government website. The trail of connections was flimsy, attenuated, and Julia had the peculiar notion she was grasping at a cobweb, a network of ephemerality that could disappear with a single, too-eager touch. But a network of connections, nonetheless.
The name of this editor was intriguing. He was called Sergei Yakulovich; and he was apparently a senior editor of the Journal of French Anthropogenesis when Ghislaine submitted his essay.
And who was Sergei Yakulovich? The name was Russian.
The same website gave her a brief but piercingly relevant biography.
Sergei Yakulovich: a Soviet primatologist who for many years studied at Lomonosov State University, specializing in the relationship of human brains to primate brains.
Julia’s eyes were alive with excitement.
There was more: Since 1979 Sergei Yakulovich has been director of the Center for Primate Research in Abkhazia, Georgia; controversially, the center is best known for its experiments into crossbreeding between primates and Homo sapiens.