been married for eight years before disappearing without explanation one weekend twelve months ago. ‘Had he ever been to the States?’
Roussel scratched his chin thoughtfully. ‘Not to my knowledge. You know, a lot of people who’re born here and die here, never venture any further than Toulouse. I don’t know where Serge took his vacations, but he wasn’t the type to go abroad.’
Enzo gazed sightlessly at Coste’s file for several minutes, lost in deep contemplation. ‘And you couldn’t find any link between Coste and any of the others in your missing person’s file.’
‘To be honest, I wasn’t looking. There was no reason to. None of them was connected in life, there was no reason to look for connections between their disappearances.’
Enzo held out a hand. ‘Can I have a look?’
Roussel handed him the file, and he started leafing through the cases. Roussel tucked his thumbs in his belt and tilted his chair back against the wall, watching Enzo as he absorbed the details of each. ‘Until now, there wasn’t any reason to look for a connection with Petty either. Not that I can think of anything anyway. Except maybe Robert Rohart. He was a good bit older than the others, an estate worker at one of the wine chateaux. But that’s a pretty thin connection. A lot of people work in the wine industry around here.’
He continued to watch Enzo sift slowly through the papers in the file, as if somehow absolved now from all responsibility. Then he tipped his chair forward again and leaned his elbows on the desk.
‘You know, I have this way of working. It’s kind of conceptual. I see each case as being like a long corridor.’ He held the palms of his hands six inches apart and moved them in parallel away from himself. ‘There are doors off it to the left and right. So I stop at each door I come to. I go into the room, and I take account of everything that’s in it. Then I shut that door and move on to the next. That way I miss nothing, and there’s never any reason to go back. When I reach the end of the corridor, I have all the information I need to solve the case.’
Enzo looked up and found it impossible to mask his skepticism. ‘What if there’s a power cut?’
‘What?’
‘If it’s dark in those rooms, there’s stuff you won’t see. Or in the corridor. You might miss a door. You might find a light bulb in the next room and go back to throw light on one you’ve already visited.’ Enzo tapped the papers on his knee with his knuckle. ‘In my experience, Gendarme Roussel, criminal investigations are never linear. You’re constantly going back and forth and sideways, reassessing what you knew before in the light of what you’ve learned since. Looking again at what you’ve already examined because for sure there’s something you’ve missed.’
Roussel’s face reddened, and he pushed himself back from the desk, folding his arms defensively. ‘We all have our own ways of working.’ He nodded huffily towards the missing persons file. ‘So what have I missed in there?’
‘A connection.’
Roussel seemed startled. ‘Really?’
‘But like you said, you weren’t looking for one before. This is a classic example of going back to reopen a door you’ve already closed.’
‘Tell me.’
‘You’ve got four cases in here. All of them have disappeared over the last three years. Three of them share two things in common. The fourth shares neither of them, so let’s take that one out for the moment.’ He passed it to Roussel.
‘Jeanne Champion.’
‘She was sixteen. All her friends said she was pregnant, but her parents didn’t seem to know. Classic hallmark of the teenage runaway. Disappeared April, 2004.’
‘So what doesn’t she have in common with the others?’
‘Most obviously, she was a female. All the others were male.’
‘And?’
‘She went missing in the Spring. The others all disappeared on dates ranging between mid-September and mid-October from 2004 to 2006.’ He waited for Roussel to realise the significance of the dates, but the gendarme simply looked perplexed. ‘They all went missing when the grapes were being harvested. During the vendanges.’
The red of Roussel’s cheeks darkened. ‘Jesus.’
‘And if Petty was still just a missing person, he would share those things in common with them. As it was, he was the first one to disappear. Serge Coste was the last. If you ask me, monsieur, I would say that the other two are probably curled up in barrels of wine somewhere awaiting disposal.’
‘Or display.’
Enzo nodded his agreement. ‘Or display.’ He dropped the file back on Roussel’s desk. ‘But here’s the scary thing. For all intents and purposes, there’s been one a year for the last four years.’ He paused for effect.
This time Roussel took his point. ‘But there’s been no one reported missing this year.’
‘Yet.’
Chapter Ten
The hospital backed onto the railway line that ran between Albi and Toulouse, where it crossed the Avenue Rene Cassin on the road north out of town towards Montauban. The street which bordered its southern edge was appropriately named the Rue de la Maladrerie. Those who were unfortunate enough to be wheeled in or out of the hospital’s mortuary were, however, more than malade. They were dead.
Enzo had attended many autopsies during his time with Strathclyde police in Scotland. Autopsy rooms all tended to be the same. White tiled walls, tiled floors, stainless steel autopsy tables, stainless steel counter tops. Clinical and soulless. The autopsy room in the morgue at Gaillac was no different. And, as always, Enzo found the accompanying perfume of death, of formic acid and formaldehyde, profoundly depressing.
The pathologist made them wear green aprons and surgeon’s face masks. ‘You never know what you might breath in when we’re cutting through bone,’ he said comfortingly. Doctor Garapin was a small man, but thickset, almost square. He was bald beneath his plastic shower cap, and the three inches of bare arm visible between the short sleeves of his gown and the plastic sleeve covers above his gloved hands were dense with wiry, black hair. He was the antithesis of the stereotypical tall, intellectual physician. He had a thick, local accent and would not have been out of place, Enzo thought, pruning vines at a chateau vineyard.
‘The body is that of a Caucasian adult male. Age is estimated around midthirties. The body is identified as Serge Coste by a tag tied about the right ankle. The body weighs seventy-three kilograms, measures one hundred and sixty-three centimetres in length, and has been refrigerated and is cool to the touch.’
Garapin reached up to turn off the overhead mike. ‘He’s some colour. How the hell do I describe that? He’s like…like rasperries soaked in eau de vie.’
Enzo thought it a very accurate description. Under the harsh lights of the autopsy room, the body did not seem as vividly coloured as it had in the woods the previous night. ‘You didn’t do the autopsy on Petty, then?’
The pathologist shook his head. ‘No, monsieur. But I’ve read the report.’ He turned his mike on again.
‘The skin is a pale, grey-pink all over. The palms and soles, while still pink-stained, are paler and wrinkled.’
He switched off the mike once more. ‘Just as if he’d remained in the bath too long. Only, in this case, a bath of red wine. What a way to go!’ He grinned.
Enzo noticed that Gendarme Roussel had gradually moved away from the table, and was about a metre back from it. He was a bad colour. Worse than the corpse in front of them.
Garapin moved meticulously over the surface of the body, noting contusions on the left shin, right knee, right forearm and an area of subgaleal hemorrhage on the left temple. With the help of an assistant, he manhandled the dead weight onto its front and examined the backs of the legs, the buttocks, the back, neck and head. He found more contusions on the left shoulder and another subgaleal hemorrhage on the head behind the right ear.
‘Are these post or antemortem injuries?’ Enzo said.
Garapin shook his head thoughtfully. ‘Almost impossible to tell. They appear to be postmortem. Bodies drowned in an ocean or a lake, for example, tend to have injuries, or damage, from rubbing on the bottom, or
