4

 

He woke up with a terrible headache and the desire to die in order to make it stop. A pleasant smell of coffee reached his nostrils, bringing him halfway back to reality. He felt disoriented. The place he was in looked unfamiliar to him. He could discern the sound of running water, but he couldn’t tell whether it was rain or coming from a tap.

A brief flash of people walking in Leicester Square brightened his mind for a moment.

Where the hell was he?

He tried to sit up, but he felt so dizzy that he had to give up right away.

‘Good morning, boss.’

He could barely recognise Adele’s voice. Only now did he realise he was still wearing the same clothes he’d had on last night and that he was lying on a settee, half-covered by a blanket.

He tried to rise into a sitting position again, this time more slowly.

The water sound ceased, and when he finally managed to sit up, he could see that it had been coming from a small kitchen at the end of the room. Standing beside the sink, with a big smile spread across her face, was Adele. She was wearing a white blouse and a pair of blue jeans. The sunlight coming from the window beside her lit her up like a spotlight on a stage.

It was already daytime!

‘But … what time is it?’ Eric stammered. ‘Where am I?’ Even though he’d asked, he guessed he knew the answer. What he was wondering was why he was there, how he’d got there, and most of all, what had happened that he couldn’t remember. The fact that he’d woken up on a settee partly relieved him.

‘Don’t worry, boss.’ Adele walked to him and placed a cup of steaming coffee on the table in front of the settee. ‘It’s Sunday, you’ve got plenty of time to recover from yesterday’s bender.’

He would’ve liked to reply with a witty remark, but he didn’t know what to say and probably wouldn’t have the strength to say it, anyway.

Meanwhile, she had disappeared again. He was so bewildered that he hadn’t even seen where she’d gone.

He reached out to the cup. The smell of coffee was exhilarating, but he wasn’t certain it would be enough to put him right.

As he was having his first sip, Adele reappeared from one of the two doors. She was holding a packet of pills between her fingers, which she put on the little table, without saying a word. Then she went back to the kitchen and filled a glass with water, before walking to him again and putting it beside the packet. ‘Hangover, I suppose.’ The tone of her comment was halfway between amused and reproachful.

He didn’t need to reply. It must have been evident enough, looking at his face, that he felt the pain hammering his head.

He swallowed a pill, even without checking to see what it was. He wasn’t certain he would be able to understand it. And he drank the entire glass of water. He’d just realised that his mouth was dry, and that he was thirsty. ‘Thank you,’ he murmured.

Now Adele was fixing her hair in front of a mirror. ‘I’m sorry I brought you here. I tried to ask you your home address, but you weren’t answering.’ She started rummaging in her handbag.

‘Oh God,’ Eric commented, rubbing his face with one hand. How embarrassing. ‘I hope I didn’t say or do something …’ He stopped, unsure how to continue with the sentence.

‘Inappropriate?’ she suggested, bursting into laughter.

‘Yeah, something like that.’

‘Don’t worry, boss, you were a perfect gentleman.’ Adele appeared to be really enjoying herself. She grabbed a linen jacket and put it on. ‘But I must be going now. My sister-in-law is waiting for me so that she can lend me her car.’ She headed for the door.

Eric was dumbfounded. He didn’t exactly know what she expected from him. Perhaps he had to stand up and go back home. What a shame he wasn’t at all capable of getting to his feet.

He tried to open his mouth to say something, but she turned and shushed him with a wave. ‘No, no, you take it easy, make yourself at home.’ She pointed at one of the doors. ‘I left you a clean towel over there in the bathroom. It’s the white one, folded on the cabinet.’ She took a key out of a drawer and placed it by the telephone, near the front door. ‘When you leave, use this key to lock up.’ She pointed at one of the four locks. ‘You can give it back to me when we meet at the Yard, okay?’

Hit by all those words, he was gawping in the attempt to follow them, so it took a few seconds for him to realise that Adele was waiting for his reply. ‘Oh … okay.’ He must seem like a total idiot. ‘Thanks again.’

‘Not at all, boss. See you.’ She winked at him and left.

As soon as she disappeared from his sight, it was like the enormous bubble in which he’d found himself until now burst with no warning. The morning sounds coming from the half-open window overwhelmed him. Another sip of coffee helped to clear his head further.

He had a blurry memory about the conversation they’d had while sitting on the low stone wall. He’d asked her some very personal questions. He let out a groan of disappointment with himself. How much had he had to drink? He remembered the first two pints, and then the third, the one ordered by Adele, which appeared to have opened an abyss in his mind, where he’d fallen at the speed of light. It must have been spiked with something stronger. Maybe he should’ve asked what it was as soon as he’d realised it wasn’t just a beer, but something had stopped him. He hadn’t wanted to seem like an old man who was afraid to drink something strong or who didn’t know anything about the latest drink trends.

The point was that he should have eaten more, but he’d been so excited to be with her he’d ended up spending more time talking than chewing.

Ridiculous, that’s what he was. A man like him, in his position, losing his head over a girl, who seemed to really enjoy torturing him. Oh, yes, it was so convenient to blame Adele for his midlife crisis. Pathetic. With so many beautiful forty-something women wandering about, he’d taken a fancy to a twenty-seven-year-old. Okay, she was clever; she seemed mature. She was fresh from a divorce. And, most of all, she was beautiful. But all that couldn’t justify his inability to maintain control.

He slapped his knees in an attempt to repress his disappointment, and he finally managed to stand up.

He placed the cup and the glass in the sink. Perhaps it would be polite to wash and store them away, but he wasn’t certain where to put his hands in that kitchen. Or that doing that would be a good idea. In the meantime, his swollen bladder had woken up, forcing him to look for the bathroom.

Not knowing where it was, he entered the door Adele had pointed at and found himself in a bedroom. The walls were peach coloured, the bedcover a similar shade, but a bit darker. White curtains did little to block the light flooding into the room, lending a comforting optical effect to it. He immediately noticed the absence of any wardrobe. There was more space on the other side of the double bed. A nice desk with a portable computer on it occupied it. The typical noise emitted by the activation of a hard disk revealed that she’d left it turned on.

Curious, he moved closer to it. A video showing a stormy sea was looping on the screen. The waves lashed on the beach, while some surfers tried to ride them.

As if frightened by the prospect of being caught in the act of snooping, Eric glanced around, then reached out to the mouse. The screensaver froze and a little window popped up, requesting a password.

He wasn’t really thinking about nosing into Adele’s computer files, was he?

The fact he couldn’t look any further was a relief. One less temptation.

He resumed looking around the room. There was something strange he couldn’t quite decipher, but he’d already noticed it in the living room. A sense of the impersonal. Everything was beautiful, but it felt more like a hotel room than someone’s home. Perhaps she’d been living there for a short time?

Almost all the walls bore a photograph of Adele. They weren’t traditional amateur photographs; they looked professional. There were close-ups, landscapes, and cityscapes. In one of her portraits you could glimpse the Eiffel Tower in the background, so it had been taken in Paris.

What if she used to work as a model? That wouldn’t surprise him.

Other than those photographs, however, there was nothing else that told him about her. No pictures with other people, friends, not even her former husband or her family. What he could see seemed a celebration of Adele herself. Beyond her, nothing. In a sense, it was compatible with the image of herself she offered to others. Yet last night, for a short while, Eric had thought he was catching a glimpse of a totally different side of that woman. Now he was surprised he couldn’t find any trace of it in her home.

Oh, yes, the bathroom. He’d stopped to fantasise again, but now his bladder gave him no peace.

There was another door in the room, besides the one from which he’d entered. He opened it, but it was dark beyond it. He tried the switch alongside the jamb and a dozen little spotlights spread on the ceiling lit the room up bright as day. The bathroom was embellished with tiles in all different shades of pastel green. It was fitted with a large bathtub, but also a shower. That was quite unusual. Both looked somehow technological. The whole place felt projected into the future.

A large wall of mirrors reproduced Eric’s image as he dared to step closer. Holy smoke! He looked absolutely knackered. A greasy face, dirtied by an emerging beard and dark circles under the eyes. Tousled hair. Who knew what absurd positions he’d been in while asleep?

He reached the toilet bowl. It took a few seconds for him to focus on his next move, but then, finally, he managed to empty his bladder. And the whole world seemed like a better place.

A large white towel lay on the cabinet, carefully folded. Doubtful, he looked at it and then the shower. The cubicle was large enough to fit two people comfortably. It looked inviting.

She’d told him to make himself at home, hadn’t she?

 

 

The pungent odour of chemicals mixed with decomposing flash invaded Eric’s nose and mouth as he walked into the morgue, making him cough.

‘Good morning, Detective.’ Dr Dawson was busy filling out a file and had greeted him without glancing up from his paperwork.

Beside him was the table where Thompson’s corpse was lying. His clothes had been removed, but the autopsy hadn’t started yet. Two red plastic rods were sticking out of the body. One was perpendicular to his groin, the other was on a side of his neck.

‘Richard,’ Eric replied as a salutation.

A flash illuminated the body, revealing the presence of a third person in the room, taking pictures. Eric stiffened as he recognised Adele. She, on the other hand, seemed immersed in her work, uninterested in his arrival.

‘Good morning,’ Eric finally murmured. She nodded to him, adding a half smile to her gesture. She always behaved this way; there was nothing wrong with it, save for the fact that the previous morning he’d woken up in Adele’s flat instead of his own, and that made him embarrassed. ‘What can you tell me about the victim?’ He turned back to the medical examiner. Focusing on the case was the best thing to do.

‘First of all, as you can see, the suppositions on the crime scene have proved mostly wrong.’

‘And for wrong you mean …?’ Eric stepped closer to the table to take a close look at the body.

‘We thought the murderer shot him in the neck first, and then in the groin, to leave him to die of blood loss.’ Dawson put the file on a little trolley as he finally turned his gaze to the forensic team chief. ‘But the directions of the bullets tell us a different story.’ He pointed at the rod on the neck. ‘As you can see, it is pointing downwards with respect to the rest of the body.’

‘This means that the murderer was shorter than the victim and had to raise his arm to shoot. Although …’ Eric paused for a moment, noticing the size of the corpse. ‘He can’t be more than one metre and seventy centimetres tall.’

‘The wound has an angle lower than sixty degrees. This suggests that the shot came from below. But things get more complicated with the one in the groin.’

Eric’s attention moved to the red rod sticking straight up out of the corpse’s groin. ‘It’s a ninety-degree angle!’

‘Exactly! Either our murderer is a dwarf or, worse, a child, or he was sitting much lower, when he pulled the trigger.’ The medical examiner was looking at him with the air of someone who loved asking riddles.

Another flash flooded the room.

‘Perhaps there was a fight, the murderer fell on the … settee, and shot from there.’ It was an acceptable theory. Thompson wasn’t very tall, but rather stout. He would’ve had the strength to push away someone bigger than he was.

While he thought about this, out of the corner of his eye, Eric noticed that Adele had put away the camera and picked up a tablet computer, on whose surface she was moving her left forefinger.

‘I don’t know what your team will find on the scene or in the victim’s clothes,’ Dawson said. ‘But what I can tell you is that the body doesn’t show defensive wounds. It doesn’t look like he fought with anyone before dying.’

‘Then what happened, in your opinion?’

‘Oh!’ the doctor exclaimed, raising both arms. ‘I’m just a simple medical examiner.’ Eric smiled at this statement. He’d heard it already many times. ‘You forensic investigators are the wizards of reconstruction. But before coming to this, there’s something I haven’t told you yet.’ He stooped down to reach out for an object on the lower tray of the trolley. A moment later, he had a clear bag in his hand and a pleased smile on his face.

Eric tried to bring into focus the tiny piece of coloured plastic inside it.

‘I’ll save you the question,’ Dawson added, before the detective could even start to formulate any. ‘It’s a piece of packing tape. I found it here.’ He pushed the victim’s head to one side with his gloved hand and pointed at a spot on the back of the cheek. ‘With all the blood, we didn’t notice it the first time. It showed up once I cleaned the body.’

‘He’d been gagged with tape!’ That changed things.

‘Exactly.’ Dawson had a boundless love for that word. ‘So he might not have been shot first in his neck, to silence him, and then in his groin. The opposite may be true. Actually …’ He removed his glasses and raised his head, turning his gaze straight at him. ‘Our talented Ms Pennington has an interesting theory on the dynamics of the murder that fits perfectly with the external examination of the corpse.’

Eric did the same as Dawson, so that they both were now looking at Adele, who seemed to have been waiting for them to involve her in the conversation.

‘I’ve created a simulation,’ she said in a confident tone, showing the tablet she was holding, but not its screen.

Eric hesitated for a moment, unsure whether or not to approach her. That was why it was a bad idea to fraternise with colleagues. You felt embarrassed about gestures that in any other circumstances would’ve felt normal. Only there hadn’t been any real fraternisation, because nothing had happened between them. It was all in his head. As he repeated that concept to himself, he glanced at Dawson.

‘She’s all yours,’ the medical examiner commented. A wrong interpretation of those words made Eric gave a feeble start. ‘I’ve already seen it.’ The further clarification wasn’t really of any help. Then Dawson put his glasses back on and went back to his file.

With a certain reluctance, Eric walked around the table and stood next to her. She moved her head a little, then waved one hand in front of her face as if to shoo away an insect. He couldn’t see any, but the gesture freed a fragrance from her hair, which for a few seconds prevailed over the stench of the corpse.

‘This is a reconstruction of the crime scene. It’s pretty rudimentary.’ Adele had seemed as if she was apologising whilst pronouncing those words.

On the screen was a three-dimensional image of a room, the one where they’d found the body. About one metre away from the table on the floor were two large bloodstains, one of which was roughly three times the other. Their shapes weren’t round, but irregular, as if something had prevented the liquid from spreading out freely. The reconstruction was very realistic. Eric recognised the scene. Only the corpse was missing.

‘At first, we supposed the victim was here, more or less, when he was shot,’ Adele continued. A human figure materialised over the largest stain.

‘No, wait,’ Eric cut it. ‘Were it so, we would have high-velocity spatters all around the body and some gravitational drops where it fell afterwards.’

‘In fact, there weren’t any. When we lifted it, most of the floor underneath was clean. That made me think Thompson wasn’t standing at all when he was shot.’

‘Wait a moment.’ Eric knew where she was going with this. ‘You think he was already on the floor.’

‘That would explain the shape of the bloodstains and also why the one related to the neck was a bit farther from the body,’ Adele said, nodding.

But now Eric was a little lost. They’d thought that the abnormal position of the stain was due to the victim writhing as he was dying.

‘I’ll show you.’ She tapped an icon on the side of the screen and the body’s position changed. Now the human figure was no longer standing, but lying down supine. ‘If they’d shot him while he was already on the floor, we could explain the direction of the bullets for a start.’

A new figure, this time equipped with a gun, was standing beside the victim, its feet by his groin.

‘The murderer threatens him with a handgun, forces him to gag himself.’ Adele’s account was flowing. It was evident that she’d worked on it for a long while. Considering that it was nine o’clock on Monday morning, she must have devoted the day before to it. ‘Then they make the victim lie down, and bang.’ She’d imitated the shot by raising her voice. ‘They shoot him in the groin.’

Without meaning to, Eric winced. He instinctively moved a hand to cover his private parts, but as he realised it, he stopped halfway. However, the manoeuvre didn’t escape Adele, who shot him a mischievous glance. He wondered whether she’d done it on purpose, to see his reaction.

‘Thompson would like to scream.’ She resumed describing the events. ‘But being gagged, he can’t produce anything more than a soft noise, which his neighbours can’t hear.’

‘But nobody heard the shot.’ He was still her boss and had every right to test her now and again.

‘They used a silencer,’ was her laconic reply.

Okay, that had been a silly remark. They’d already arrived at that supposition at the crime scene.

‘So … they shot him in the groin.’ Eric tried to mimic the shot, holding his right arm down and aiming towards the floor. ‘The victim instinctively places his hands on the wound, and in doing so he curls up on one side.’

Adele smiled, satisfied, and tapped the table to move on to the next sequence. The body was now in a foetal position, curled up on one side. The murderer’s arm was stretching out, aiming towards the victim’s neck. ‘Bang.’ A line united the pistol and the penetration wound on one side of the neck.

The detective examined the corpse on the table again. The angle of the line corresponded to the one of the rod. But there was still something not quite right. ‘But the body wasn’t like that when we found it.’

The young forensic investigator wasn’t perturbed. ‘Because it was moved.’

‘How can you tell?’

‘The murderer waits for their victim’s death.’ She kept talking, apparently ignoring Eric’s question. ‘They struck the carotid artery in full, so they don’t have to wait long. Thompson bleeds to death quickly, he loses consciousness almost immediately.’ She shifted her attention from the tablet to the corpse. ‘Pushing the body with one foot, they shift the man onto his back again.’ The sequence was played on the screen, but Adele was pointing at the side of the body, whose skin showed a bluish stain. ‘It wasn’t visible at first, but a day in the fridge revealed this peri-mortem bruise.’

‘The shoe caused it.’ This kind of revelation, when the clues began to take shape, allowing him to pull the threads together, made Eric remember why he loved his job so much. He put on a latex glove and touched the skin around the bruise. ‘It seems a lot more marked towards the centre.’

‘As if he were hit by a rigid, pointed shoe,’ Adele suggested. They had both come to the same conclusion. ‘Like a woman’s shoe.’

‘Ah, women!’ was the medical examiner’s comment from the other side of the room.

‘And once the body is supine …’ Eric said. ‘The killer rips off the tape.’

‘At that point, there’s no longer any risk of him screaming,’ Adele concluded, triumphant.

 

 

Five minutes later, they were waiting in the lift hallway. Adele was playing with her tablet. Eric was watching her. At a certain point, she seemed to be about to raise her gaze and the detective promptly turned his own on his wristwatch. Only thirty seconds had passed since the last time he’d checked it.

He puffed at his own stupidity, whilst he almost heard Adele stifling a laugh. But he couldn’t be sure and he didn’t dare look in her direction.

Then he remembered about the key. He patted his trouser pockets and finally pulled out a long key for a reinforced door. He lifted it to hand it to her and prepared himself to thank her again, when she interrupted him.

‘Did you enjoy nosing around my flat, boss?’

Eric was taken aback. ‘What?’ For a split second, he feared Adele had watched him with a video surveillance camera. His hand stopped halfway between them. Then he realised he’d done nothing wrong. Except perhaps touching the mouse. But her mocking expression erased any doubts.

She was kidding.

She grabbed the key, brushing his hand. At that very moment, the doors to the lift opened, revealing Miriam and Jane inside it.

Eric and Adele were both holding the key between them. Miriam’s expression hardened, while Jane’s lips stretched out in a smile. He hastened to drop the key and started adjusting his cuff.

‘Just the man we were looking for,’ Jane exclaimed, stepping out of the lift. She opened her eyes wide in derision.

Meanwhile, Adele had resumed fiddling with her tablet and had stepped into the lift. Miriam looked askance at her for a moment, then exited. The other woman pushed a button, and the doors closed.

Miriam was now staring at Eric insistently. ‘They told us you were in the morgue. Discover anything interesting?’

He had the distinct impression that she wasn’t at all interested in the investigation right now.

‘Did you see Adele’s reconstruction?’ Jane asked. ‘Brilliant, isn’t it?’

Miriam glared at her, but she did nothing but ignore the young detective.

‘Yes, but …’ Eric paused for a second. As soon as he’d arrived at the department, he hadn’t seen Jane, and then he’d gone straight to the morgue. How did she know about the reconstruction?

Then his deputy raised a hand holding her smartphone. ‘She sent it to me five minutes ago.’

‘Sooner or later I’m going to have to buy one of those infernal contraptions too.’ Yes, talking was a good idea. ‘Lately I have the impression that I’m always one step behind the rest of you.’

Jane laughed heartily, while Miriam seemed to relax, but she didn’t look as if she was in much of a good mood.

‘Don’t be silly, Eric.’ His deputy patted him on his shoulder. ‘You’re always two steps ahead of the rest of us put together. Don’t you agree?’ She’d asked the question to Miriam.

‘So, what’s the news?’ the latter said.

‘It seems that you must look for a woman.’ Eric gave Miriam an authoritative stare. It seemed just the other day when he was giving her dolls for her birthday. He was a kind of uncle to her, a member of the family, but this didn’t authorise her to behave like this in the workplace.

‘A woman?’ Miriam’s curiosity was apparently getting the better of her anger.

‘The victim was probably kicked with a woman’s shoe,’ he started explaining. ‘Of course, we can’t rule out that it was a man wearing pointed shoes, but this element, along with the shot in the groin, gives us something to think about.’

‘Are you thinking about an abused victim? Rape?’ Her hand shifted to her gun grip. She moved her head a little in a sort of nervous tic, then she straightened out her arm.

‘You tell me.’

‘We haven’t found anything like that in Thompson’s past yet.’ Miriam was now massaging her right wrist. ‘But perhaps we should dig a little deeper.’

‘An extremely meticulous woman who loves tea,’ exclaimed Jane, who had listened to them until then. The other two turned as one to look at her. The forensic investigator showed them a photograph on her mobile phone. You could see a table with an empty cup on it. Then she swiped to the next picture: two teabags in the rubbish. ‘Two bags means two people drank tea that day.’ She paused briefly for effect. ‘But we only found one cup.’

‘Maybe he loved really strong tea.’ Eric liked to play devil’s advocate.

But Jane raised a finger to silence him. ‘We checked the plate rack and found four more cups and little plates just like this one. Add the one on the table, and you’ve got five. It looks like the set’s missing one pair.’

Now he understood her point. ‘She took everything she used so as not to leave any fingermarks behind.’

‘And DNA,’ his deputy concluded.

‘She’s not careless,’ was Miriam’s comment.

Eric folded his arms. ‘She’s not. Not at all.’