AL07 - Murder on the Ile Saint-Louis

“This way.”

She followed him and a now friendly Nemo, who smelled her legs and keened to be petted. The officer slid another door open and they crossed a deck to an adjoining peniche.

“Bonjour, Mademoiselle Leduc,” said Capitaine de Police Michel Sezeur. Shorter than Aimee, he had brown hair combed back en brosse. He wore a Manhurin standard- issue revolver in a holster on the belt of his form-fitting blue twill trousers. “I regret that I can only give you five minutes.” He gestured toward a row of blinking red lights on his telephone.

“I appreciate your making the time for me, Capitaine,” she said and sat down on a swivel chair facing his crowded desk.

The peniche rocked in the backwash of a boat speeding past and her stomach lurched. Waves lapped over the steamed-up portholes and gray mist hovered in the distance.

“Commissaire Morbier confirmed your request,” he said, handing her a stapled report several pages in length

Smart and quick. He’d checked with Morbier after her call.

“You’ll find all the details in this report: our recovery of the victim at 02:47 hours, attempts at resuscitation by one of our paramedic qualified divers, the assessment of the inspector who arrived on the scene and decided upon the next course of action, and the victim’s subsequent removal to the Institut medicolegal. Standard procedure as you will see.”

“About the CRS involvement—” she started to say.

He kept a tight smile. “You know the CRS carry no bullets, their guns are sealed, and they can’t attack the public unless provoked or for due cause.”

“A demonstrator’s in the hospital—”

He cut her off. “Due to illegal assembly, failure to disperse, and discovery of weapons. The CRS only react if demonstrators cross the line. Which, I believe, one of them did.” He sat. “But that’s not my area nor the reason you’re here, correct?”

“How do this victim’s circumstances correspond to or differ from those relating to other bodies you’ve recovered?”

“We find fifty to sixty bodies a year in the Seine. More often than not, they’ve been submerged a long time.”

“But this one wasn’t. Mind telling me the river’s depth and temperature?”

“Usually four to five meters*.” He gestured to a wall chart of the river confluences. The peniche rocked and her stomach lurched again. A door swung open, revealing a line of hanging wet suits. “However, the Seine can rise two to three meters more, as it has now. The current’s strongest now. Temperature-wise, it’s three to four degrees in winter, up to twenty** degrees in the summer.”

“You mentioned that the corpses are usually submerged. How does that affect the body?”

“It’s not rocket science, Mademoiselle. In winter, bodies sink, in spring, they bloat. Sometimes they blow up with body gases like a hot-air balloon. When they’re black and swollen it’s difficult to distinguish between a man or a woman. We’ve recovered bodies as far away as the barrage, the sluice gates south of the Tour Eiffel.” He paused. “That one took three weeks to travel eight kilometers.”

Curious, she leaned forward, though it had little to do with Orla.

“Three weeks?”

“The current, the time of the year, and water temperature all have to be taken into account. Plus the silure, the big-river fishes, and the ecrevisses, fresh-water crawfish, had eaten more of the extremities than usual.”

She shuddered, thinking of them feasting on Orla.

“Some fishmongers near Les Halles supplemented their income by selling les ecrevisses.” He smiled. “Until we stopped them.”

Aimee glanced at an array of rusted firearms and a collection of rope knots behind glass on the wall. “Artifacts from the river?”

He grinned. “Treasures. I found the Sten gun used by the Resistance on the river bottom. On another dive I brought up this revolver, from the 1930s. It had been a dumping point for gangsters from rue de Lappe. Amazing to find it, considering the murkiness of the water, Mademoiselle. We must use our hands; we can’t see a thing down there. And twenty minutes in a wet suit is all a diver can take.”

Interesting, but it got her no further. She had to ask him for guesses with respect to what she wanted to know. “Two more questions, Capitaine. How long do you think this woman’s body lay in the water? And, in your opinion, how far could it have traveled from the point at which it entered the water?”

“The Seine’s risen several centimeters since last night and will continue to rise due to runoff and rain. We’re near flood levels.” He exhaled. “Given the body’s temperature and the lack of severe bloating or discoloration, I’d hazard three or four hours. The autopsy report should be more definite.”

A knock and the door slid open. Two uniformed officers stood outside. “Ready when you are, Capitaine.”

He grabbed his raincoat from the rack. “Regarding the body . . . well, I can only conjecture.”

“I understand.”

He flipped the pages of the report to the end. “On this diagram, you’ll see, I’ve marked the place where the body was recovered from the sewer grate.”

It was at a point just below Pont de Sully. “But wouldn’t it be unlikely for her body to remain in the same spot at which she was shoved in, considering the river current, the passing Bateaux-Mouches and other barge traffic?”

“I’ve seen it before; it happens,” he said. “A limb catches on a sewer grate, a body twists and sticks in the iron rungs or the underwater steps descending from the bank. Or it becomes entangled in an underwater pylon or with an old fishing line. Sometimes the currents from a Bateau-Mouche will push a body up to the surface.”

“So what do you conclude, Capitaine?”

“Don’t quote me.” He walked to the door. “And I’ll deny saying this, but I doubt she’d been there long at all. It’s just a feeling, a sense, from my twenty years of experience.”

“Can you explain what you mean a little more clearly?”

“I tried to reconstruct the scene. It struck me, well—a possible scenario would be that she reached for help, was struck, and fell back into the water, her lungs filling up then.”

That’s what Serge had intimated, she recalled.

“There’s no way to be certain,” the commander continued. “But it’s almost as if she was trying to grab her attacker.”

Or to grab something from the attacker? Serge had not mentioned any defensive wounds on her hands.

“Who knows? The attacker might have been frightened by the lights of a passing boat. He might have been interrupted and so he ran away not knowing if she survived.”

He put his raincoat on. “And I never said that.”

INTERRUPTED?

Nelie Landrou had made the frantic telephone call to her.

This made sense if she’d seen Orla attacked at the river, been chased in turn, and so feared for her life and the baby’s. She had not even had time to put a diaper on Stella. Shaken, Aimee rounded the curve of Quai d’Anjou.

The rain continued to pelt down. She walked down the worn steps to the spot Capitaine Sezeur had pointed out. White and rust-colored lichen splashed with clumps of lime covered the stone wall; moss feathered the cracks oozing under her wet boots. A Bateau-Mouche glided past, so close she could hear radio static erupting from the deck, and sweeping gray-green water onto the bank and her shoes. Just as quickly, the water receded, trickling back over the weathered stone.

Here. Hunched over, she reached her hand into the icy water. Flailed around until her fingers touched a metal rung, invisible in the murky depths. A whoosh of colder subterranean water, putrid and scummed with foam, gushed forth and was swept away by the current. The capitaine’s conjecture was right. Caught in and buffeted by the sewer stream, Orla couldn’t have been here long or she would have been bruised all over.

Her hand, dripping by her side, tingled. Then the rain stopped and a warm, almost tropical wind whipped her