A Lady in Shadows Read online

  “Of course,” Marot answered automatically.

  I cursed inwardly.

  “Rosalba Lombardi is dead,” I said. “As is her friend, Fleur Petit. If you are behind these killings, no vow of silence can save you, national crisis or not!”

  Marot placed a warning hand on my arm, but it was too late. The words hung in the air. I had said them even though I had promised I would not.

  “Mademoiselle. What is it you imagine I have done?”

  There was no way back now. With a sensation of throwing myself into free fall, I attempted to present my dawning suspicions as if they were a fully consistent explanation for the two deaths.

  “You attempted to remove Rosalba’s fetus and uterus with the aid of Porro’s procedure. You failed, and Rosalba bled to death. Thereafter you attempted to camouflage the procedure by making it look like the murder of Eugénie Colombe, then prominent in the headlines of our newspapers. And when Fleur discovered that you were behind it, you killed her and tried to mislead the police by using the same method a second time.”

  “I see,” he said. “So I am supposed to be a simple murderer now? Is that what you believe?”

  “Rosalba’s death was not a murder, but Fleur’s was!”

  “Well, then you had better arrest me,” he said calmly to Marot.

  Marot cleared his throat. “Do you confess . . . ?”

  “Of course not. But Mademoiselle Karno is not concerned with proof, testimonies, or confessions. She has already found the answer she wants, and nothing can shift her from her conviction. However, before we move on to summary justice and arrests, might I perhaps be permitted to ask when this murder of . . . what did you say her name was? Fleur Petit? . . . when this murder took place?”

  Marot consulted his notes. “According to the autopsy, she died Friday evening, between six and ten. Where were you then, monsieur?”

  An almost jovial smile lit up Althauser’s heavy bulldog features. “Why, Mademoiselle Karno herself can answer that. She was there.”

  It was not until he said it that I realized what should have been obvious to me from the beginning. Althauser could not have killed Fleur. At the time of her murder, he had been in the rostrum of the Brotherhood of Freedom’s Grand Hall, telling several hundred people about the threat against the future of France.

  He was entirely correct. I had been there myself.

  “It is probably best if I return this to its proper place,” Althauser said, and took Rosalba’s file from my numb hands. “I have a suspicion that Mademoiselle Karno did not receive the commission’s permission to take it.”

  How could it happen? How on earth could I have made such an obvious mistake? I might have discovered my error, or not made it at all, had I been the one to perform the calculations and state the time of death. But thanks to my demonstration of feminine sensitivity down by the riverbank, my father had conducted the autopsy alone and had sent me home with Marie instead. Someone else, probably one of the morgue assistants, had been obliged to try to make sense of my father’s notes for the report.

  Marot escorted me out into the waiting hansom cab in silence and told the driver to take me home to Carmelite Street. I was clearly in the doghouse, and with good reason.

  The house was empty. Elise must be out running errands or perhaps at home with her mother. I thought about visiting August’s lodgings, but right now I would have found it difficult to look him in the eye. He considered me an intelligent person. I did not wish to lose that respect.

  I went up to my room and sat in front of the mirror to loosen a couple of hairpins that were hurting my scalp. I had circles under my eyes, I observed. And felt sick.

  Nausea. Still no menses. Gravida.

  No. It was exhaustion. My monthly periods were often irregular. This meant nothing.

  I lay down on the bed, still fully corseted, with the intention of resting for a moment. Instead, I fell into a deep sleep and did not wake until several hours later.

  Someone was knocking on our front door. And the house was still silent—there was no Elise to open it.

  I got up, considerably refreshed but still a bit fuzzy and with the disoriented sensation that often bothers me if I sleep during the daytime. On the steps stood a boy with slicked-back hair, unusually pale, and dressed in a suit that, in a slightly larger size, could have belonged to an undertaker or a bank clerk. It took me a moment to recognize him. It was Bruno, Aristide Gilbert’s little laboratory assistant.

  “Mademoiselle?” he said. “I have a letter for you.”

  He handed it to me. The hand that held it was shaking.

  “Are you ill?” I asked. “Is something wrong?”

  He shook his head.

  “Read it,” he said.

  It seemed to me that the seal was a bit on the loose side. One might think the envelope had been opened and closed again—to judge from the way the paper was buckling from copious application of fresh saliva.

  Dear Mademoiselle Karno,

  You once showed me exceptional lenience. As I turn to you now, it is not in the hope of forgiveness, for such does not exist for someone like me, but with the plea that you will do what is in your power to see justice fully done. The poor little girl, I see her before me night and day. I thought the water would be kinder than the other thing, I thought she would be fulfilled as my poor Alice was, but it seems not all women are like that. I had no idea. I had no idea she would fight like that. And I am a monster, a coward, a sinner so great that not even God can forgive

  The letter stopped abruptly midsentence. It was not signed, and I did not recognize the handwriting, but because Bruno had brought it, I must assume that Gilbert had written it.

  I stared at the words. The poor little girl . . . I thought the water would be kinder . . . I had no idea she would fight like that.

  I did not know who “poor Alice” was, but “the poor little girl” . . . could it be Fleur?

  “Won’t you come?” said Bruno, who looked as if he wanted to grab my skirts and drag me off there and then. “Please won’t you, mademoiselle?”

  At first glance, there was no one in the atelier. It occurred to me—belatedly—that if the letter meant what I thought it did, I should have brought Marot along, or at least have fetched the policeman who directed traffic on nearby Place Picault. There was a heavy smell of absinthe and vomit, but no visible signs of either bottle or regurgitated alcohol. The stuffed dog was staring into the distance with its squinting glass-bead eyes, and the potted plants looked so mummified that they were probably beyond salvation.

  “Monsieur Gilbert?” I called out, without much hope.

  “The darkroom,” whispered Bruno. “He is . . . maybe he is in the darkroom.”

  The door was ajar, so if he was there, he should have been able to hear us. On the other hand, there was such despair in the brief letter that it made me assume the worst.

  I pushed open the door. The room was surprisingly large but, of course, it had no window. I could not see very much, but there was a bulb hanging from the ceiling, the kind that is usually turned on by pulling a chain. I located the chain and pulled. The bulb did give off light—not white or yellow, however, but red, which gave everything an unreal glow, as if part of some distorted nightmare.

  Along the back wall was a zinc-lined wooden tub. I was not sufficiently familiar with photographic processes to know whether it belonged to the darkroom’s inventory, or whether it was there just because the room was an old bathroom, but I suspected the latter. It was, in any case, large enough to hold a human body, and I would have thought such volume was excessive if all one wanted to do was expose photographic plates the size of a book or a postcard.

  The bathtub was full. A pair of fully dressed male legs were dangling over the rim. When I took a few steps farther into the room, it was no longer any great surprise that the rest of Aristide Gilbert was lying on his back on the bottom, staring up at me with eyes as huge, blank, and dead as those of a cod on a fishmonger’s
slab.

  On the 27th April, 1890, two ova were obtained from an Angora doe rabbit which had been fertilised by an Angora buck thirty-two hours previously; the ova were undergoing segmentation, being divided into four segments.

  These ova were immediately transferred into the upper end of the fallopian tube of a Belgian hare doe rabbit which had been fertilised three hours before by a buck of the same breed as herself.

  It may be well to mention here, I bought this Belgian hare doe some three months before; the man from whom I bought her bred her, and guaranteed her to be a virgin doe of about seven months old. During the time I had her, until the 27th of April, she had never been covered by a buck of any breed, kept always isolated from the various bucks in my rabbitry.

  In due course this Belgian hare doe gave birth to six young—four of these resembled herself and her mate, while two of them were undoubted Angoras. The Angora young were characterised by the possession of the long silky hair peculiar to the breed, and were true albinoes, like their Angora parents. Both presumed Angora offspring were males.

  —WALTER HEAPE ON HIS FIRST SUCCESSFUL EGG TRANSPLANT, 1890

  October 3, 1894

  They lay side by side, the murderer and his victim. The morgue made no distinctions. In death there was no barrier between them, unless one counts the sheets with which the naked bodies were covered. There were married couples who never came closer to each other than these two.

  I could not make it fit, and yet it fit as a key fits its keyhole. Under her shredded, broken nails were the remains of his skin. On his arms and neck were scratches she had made in her mortal struggle. I had to believe it was Aristide Gilbert that Fleur had seen with her wide-open eyes.

  But why?

  I had known Aristide Gilbert for years. He was a quiet, melancholy man, and if I had been called to comment on his ability to murder another human being, I would have said that he could not hurt a fly. Now he was lying here, and Police Inspector Marot had already completed a report that said he had killed and disfigured at least three women. The proof included a scalpel still marked with traces of blood, as well as two thick leather-bound portfolios found in the search of his studio. Here he had hidden, so it seemed, every single photograph he had taken of a dead woman during the past five years. I had seen those portfolios, and it was like paging through a catalog of the dead of Varbourg, or at least those dead who were female. I knew a number of them because I had taken part in their autopsies.

  Only a small portion of them were police photographs. As Gilbert had remarked himself, there were not enough crimes committed in Varbourg to supply his needs. Instead he had made use of his access to the morgue and the Commissioner’s archive, it turned out, and had sought out the survivors with a handsome offer. For a very modest price he would take one last picture of their deceased relative. I had read some of the witness reports as well.

  “He was very polite and kind,” said a mother whose daughter had died in an accident at the textile factory. “He asked us what she was like, what sort of things she liked . . . and the picture . . . the picture turned out to be so beautiful. You can’t even tell that she is dead.”

  It was almost true. Perhaps Aristide Gilbert had never been very good at portraying the living, but it was only because they did not interest him. He had reserved all his compassion, insight, and imagination for his preservation of the dead. He had dressed them in the clothes they liked best; they were surrounded by people and things they had cared about; for their sake he worked with light and shadow until the tender portrait took on the life the subject no longer possessed.

  There were more than a hundred of them. Even for someone like me who was used to death in all its forms, it was strange to see so many lifeless faces all at once. The oddest pictures, however, were the first three. They were close-ups. A young woman lying with closed eyes, slightly parted lips, and her head at an angle. Normally with the dead that would mean that the features collapsed, that flesh and skin fell away from the bones because there was no longer any elasticity in tissue and muscle. Some undertakers place small amounts of wax in the nostrils and mouth to remedy this phenomenon and make the deceased look more like their living countenance, and perhaps Gilbert had done the same thing, but in addition this woman was half immersed in dark, shimmering water, which returned to her some of the buoyancy she had had in life. Her blond hair was loose and billowed around her head so that she looked like a sleeping mermaid. It was poetic and bizarre, living and dead at the same time, and in all ways a portrait I would have a hard time forgetting.

  The picture of Rosalba was equally unforgettable. It was not one of the raw, unvarnished police photographs—Gilbert had not saved any of those, at least not in these portfolios. She too was lying down, with her head turned slightly to the left, in much the same position as the mermaid. Her hair was arranged decoratively around her head, and beneath her one could make out the gleaming thick folds of some silky fabric that, with their wavelike contours, created a further similarity with the mermaid pictures.

  Yes, I realized. Of course he had used wax, like the undertakers. I had found traces of it in Rosalba’s mouth and had wondered about its source. Not cheese rinds, as I had once speculated. It was simply what remained of Gilbert’s attempt to make her look alive.

  This picture was proof; I had to acknowledge that. There was no possible way he could have taken it unless he had been present between the moment of death and the moment of discovery. He had not had access to the corpse afterward.

  There were no pictures of Fleur. Not even the pictures I had seen him take that morning on the riverbank.

  Aristide Gilbert had drowned as well—of that there was little doubt. We found foam in his mouth and water in his lungs. When he went underwater in the bathtub, he had still been able to breathe. In his stomach sloshed most of the bottle of absinthe I had found on the floor of the darkroom. This, with the letter, made it easy to imagine he had climbed into the tub and drunk himself unconscious, well aware that there was a high risk, perhaps almost a certainty in this helpless condition, that he would drown.

  “I’ve seen it before,” said the Commissioner. “In a judicial and religious sense it isn’t suicide but rather death by misadventure, which at least provides the bereaved relatives with a more palatable conclusion to the case, whether it is an insurance settlement or simply a Catholic burial that is at stake.”

  Aristide Gilbert seemed to me to be a man with a startling lack of loved ones.

  “Did he have a life insurance policy?” I asked.

  “I have no idea,” said the Commissioner. “It was meant as an example.”

  “But why . . . with all his clothes on?”

  “To maintain a bit of dignity in death? Many suicides dress themselves in their best, after all.”

  This was true; I had seen more examples than I cared to think about.

  The proof was there. The key fit the lock. I just did not understand why.

  “Maddie?” said my father. “Let us leave. There is nothing more we can do.”

  “You go ahead,” I said. “I’ll just clean up.”

  The Commissioner and my father exchanged a brief look.

  “Jean-Baptiste can do that,” said the Commissioner.

  “I would prefer to do it myself. Then I know where everything is. I might as well enter the notes in the records at once.”

  “Is there such a rush?”

  “Papa. I would like to be alone a little.”

  He raised his hand in a halfhearted farewell gesture.

  “You are a grown woman now. Engaged, even. You can come and go as you wish.”

  “Thank you,” I said, though it struck me that it was neither my work here nor my acceptance at the university that had made him consider me a “grown woman.” It was my upcoming marriage.

  They left and let me be alone without further objections. In the doorway, the Commissioner turned one last time.

  “Dear Madeleine,” he said quietly. “Everyo
ne makes mistakes.”

  I lit candles for Fleur just as I had for Rosalba. I recalled how she had thanked me for that. Then I sat next to the bier in the glow of the candles and read the autopsy report that I had not had any part in. For each point, I examined as far as was possible whether the reality matched the words. I looked at all the tests and at the organs that had been removed. I even cut the stitches with which the abdominal incisions had been closed, so that I could make sure that nothing had been overlooked. Some might think this an insult to her memory. For me, it was the opposite—a memorial service, an almost holy duty, and one last attempt to keep the promise I had made to her.

  In this way, I collected a list of points that seemed to me anomalies not sufficiently explained. It is often like that—we do not always know why the deceased has a bruise on her hip or has been in the proximity of something that left a tar-like stain on his left palm. Life marks our bodies constantly, small accidental occurrences that become interesting only because death chose to stop the process on a particular day so that the bruise never healed, and the traces of tar on the palm were not worn off in time. Even in the case of a homicide, not all marks and traces are connected to the murder.

  As far as Fleur’s corpse was concerned, I noted the following:

  She was considerably undernourished and dehydrated. Both the stomach and intestines were empty, and there were many indications that she had not had sufficient fluids. Her lips were cracked, and lividity spots were not as prominent as they would normally be—in a dehydrated body the blood does not pool quite the way it normally does in the lower tissues. The kidneys were yellowish, the bladder affected; nor did the liver have the weight and water content one would expect. She had clearly been drowned, and yet she had at the same time been dying of thirst. The irony was painful.

  She had a large number of scratches and bruises both on her hands and knees. The tissue along the edge of her hand and little finger was damaged to such an extent that it might best be described as crushed, the knuckles on both hands were skinned and in some cases fractured. Back on the riverbank where we found her, I had already noted that she had fought for her life, but some of these bruises had occurred earlier and had had time to begin to heal. The oldest she had received several days before her death, and probably not from hitting Aristide Gilbert. He had some scratches and the odd bruise, but no lesions that matched the power of desperation Fleur must have had to hammer her hand so hard against someone or something that it fractured. Further, at the time of her death, she must have been considerably weakened from the dehydration and no longer capable of inflicting such great damage on herself. In any case, I did not think the object of her blows had been anything as soft and yielding as a human body. One might certainly break a knuckle if one struck something hard like the jawbone or the skull with sufficient force, but the pulping along the edge of her hand had required something more solid—a wall, a door, a floor, something that did not yield at all and thus transferred the full power of the blow to the tissue instead.