Dry Bones by Peter May Read Free Book Online Page B

might have been dismembered?’
    ‘Ah, now that’s more difficult to quantify. But in my head I keep coming back to
La Traversée de Paris.
A dismembered pig in the film, a dismembered pig in the church. Only, they left the pig behind. So what happened to Gaillard? Wouldn’t it be easier to take him away in pieces? And might that not also be like some kind of strange homage to
La Traversée?
Instead of the pig, it was the dismembered pieces of Gaillard which were smuggled away across the city.’
    Suddenly the organ burst into life again, and the dramatic opening notes of Bach’s Trio Sonata for Organ No. 2 in C minor filled the church.
    ***
    The world outside, awash with sunshine and filled with tourists, seemed strangely unreal. Only the strains of the organ from within carried with them the reminder of the dark theories that Enzo had conjured out of the bloodstained flags. The two men stood on the steps, blinking in the sunlight, gazing out beyond the Panthéon and the arcaded arches of the Ste. Geneviève Bibliotheque towards the ancient Faculté de Droit and the
Mairie
of the sixth
arrondissement
.
    ‘What now?’ Raffin asked.
    ‘First of all, I have to call in a favour from the director of a laboratory here in Paris. Then we need to find out how many unidentified body parts have turned up over the last ten years.’
    Raffin raised a sceptical eyebrow. ‘Well, that should be easy. Where do you propose we start?’
    Enzo pulled the folded newspaper from Raffin’s jacket pocket. ‘I take it you have access to the cuttings library at Libération.’
    ‘Of course.’ Raffin snatched the journal back.
    ‘Then that’s where we’ll begin.’

Chapter Four
    I
    The offices of
Libération
were tucked away in the narrow Rue Béranger in the third
arrondissement
, where the city’s rag-trade conducts its wholesale and retail activities.
    The newspaper archives were reached by a rickety elevator which took them to the fourth floor, glass-walled offices lined with shelf upon shelf of box files and bound copies tracing the history of the newspaper back to its first edition in 1973. Large windows looked out on Le Petit Béranger brasserie in the street below.
    Raffin and Enzo spent nearly twenty minutes flicking through drums of index cards and fetching corresponding boxes from shelves that groaned with numbered files. A row of filing cabinets had drawers labelled with everything from
Accidents du Travail
to
Vietnam
, but their contents held nothing of any interest. They had been unable to find a single cutting referring to unexplained or unidentified body parts.
    ‘Isn’t there microfilm we can look at?’ Enzo was frustrated by their lack of progress.
    ‘They started to put everything on to microfiche a few years ago,’ Raffin told him, ‘but somehow it all got scratched and ruined in the reader.’
    ‘Well, aren’t there internet archives?’
    ‘Oh, yes. Everything from 1994 on. But you have to subscribe to get access to it.’
    ‘And don’t you subscribe?’
    ‘Well, no,’ Raffin confessed. ‘Why would I? I’ve got access to this place.’
    ‘Where you can’t
find
anything!’ Enzo was losing patience. ‘Can’t the newspaper access the internet for you from here?’
    ‘I suppose they could. Only I don’t think they have a computer here in the cuttings library.’
    There had been an odd sense of old-fashioned informality about the whole place. The lack of security, the worn carpet in the lobby, the unfinished renovation work which greeted them when they stepped out of the lift, the tables of apparently randomly stacked boxes of cuttings lining the hallway. It was a sense which only increased with the arrival of a middle-aged man with dark, thinning hair and a close-cropped beard. He wore black, corduroy trousers and a grey tee-shirt, and Raffin introduced him to Enzo as
La Mémoire du Journal
. The memory of the newspaper. ‘He’s been with Libé since the first edition hit the streets more than