Tapestry by J. Robert Janes Read Free Book Online Page B

looking up. ‘The position of the body isn’t right, is it? Partly up on the knees, the arms and back stiffly bent—why, please, hasn’t he completely collapsed? The muscles should have been flaccid, yet here we have a victim who—oh for sure, rigor is now well advanced—but he’s too tense even for that. Was he rigid before being dragged down several of those steps?’
    Not thrown from the top of them as first thought. ‘Violent exertion?’ asked St-Cyr.
    ‘Any such struggle would speed the onset of rigor, making the body almost immediately rigid.’
    But this was more. ‘The hands,’ said St-Cyr. ‘Were they so tightly clenched, the only way the fingers could be loosened was to stamp on the fists?’
    ‘Precisely!’
    ‘As a result of instantaneous cadaveric spasm?’
    One didn’t see this often, but … ‘He was strong and in good shape,’ acknowledged Tremblay. ‘He resisted his attackers. At one point he got away from them but …’
    ‘Was brought down and hit again, that second time.’
    ‘The bruising of the buttocks and thighs bear this out, also that of the left shoulder. The scrotum was then grabbed and torn, not crushed. He may well have passed out, though; would have been brought round, dragged up, steadied …’
    ‘Held by two men, while a third smashed him across the face with the flat of a long-handled shovel, the neck instantly breaking.’
    ‘A sudden, violent disruption of the nervous system, Jean-Louis, but unlike rigor, the fingers stiffen so much they are far more difficult to open even when compared to the tightly clenched fists of a living person who resists with all their might.’
    Had the victim grasped something during the struggle? Had this been why it had been necessary to open the hands, the fingers then removed not so much to hide the victim’s identity as to hide the reason for their opening? ‘Strands of hair?’ St-Cyr heard himself ask. ‘A wristwatch perhaps? Some item that could lead to the identity of his killers?’
    It wasn’t a happy thought, they both looking down at the grille of the sewer. ‘There might be a catchment at the bottom of the shaft or a weir to hold back the solids,’ mused Jean-Louis who had, it must be admitted, far more experience with such things. ‘We could,’ he added, ‘order up the sewer workers and wait for them to arrive, or go fishing ourselves to save time and further possible loss.’
    ‘Idiot, it’ll be freezing. Is it that you would have us toss a coin to see who strips off to take the first plunge? In any case, he must be turned over and moved, and that will help to verify the spasm.’
    * * *
    Kohler longed for a cigarette. More than ever he felt Louis and he were on quicksand. Too much bad feeling towards them, the two of them being put on the run like that last night.
    Austere in the old Cité barracks, the Préfecture de Police was to his right, overlooking place du Parvis Notre-Dame. To the south and directly ahead of him beyond the quai , the Seine was mud-grey in the rain, to the east, the main portal of the Notre-Dame accepted a hurrying, umbrella-bearing flock of sisters. Wounded, the eye of the rose window had been plucked to safety in the autumn of 1939. Now its canvas and timber-framed bandage bagged and sagged with accumulated moisture, causing the gargoyles to cringe.
    The Trinité victim, Madame Adrienne Guillaumet, age thirty-two, had been a part-time teacher of German for the Deutsche Institut, and hadn’t the French, its Parisians especially, flocked to learn the language, and wasn’t everything being done to encourage them? But here, too, things were never simple. The Institut had taken over the Hôtel Sagan, the former Polish Chancellory on the rue de Talleyrand and not far from her flat at 131 rue Saint-Dominique, which was in the quartier du Gros-Caillou and just to the west of the Invalides, in a very up-market Left Bank neighbourhood.
    The École Militaire was immediately to the south of the