A Lady in Shadows Page 3

  The photographer moved the camera into position and ducked under the hood. I could hear the click from the shutter mechanism. After a few moments his upper body and head appeared again.

  “I think that is that,” he said. “I can have the pictures ready tomorrow.”

  “Thank you,” said the Commissioner slightly absently. “Madeleine, could you . . .” He gestured vaguely in the direction of the body, and I nodded. I understood. No one who had known the young woman with the Botticelli face should see her as she was now.

  I ducked under the corrugated roof. Now that we had photographed the body as it had been found, I could do two things. First I measured the body temperature—35.0 degrees—and then I pulled down her skirts quickly so that they covered both the exposed abdomen and the terrible lesions. There were dried bloodstains on her petticoat, but not as many as one might have expected. I smoothed the blue dress as best I could, but otherwise there was not much I could do to soften the impact of her death.

  “Please, mademoiselle.”

  Now that we had agreed to her demand, she hesitated for a few seconds. Then she nodded with pale determination and approached me and the body. Recognition was instant. I could see it in her shoulders, in her entire body. She hid the lower part of her face in her hands while the dark eyes still peeked out above her fingers.

  “Oh, God,” she said. “Oh no. Oh, God.”

  “What was her name?” I asked gently.

  She swallowed and had to clear her throat. “Rosalba. Rosalba Lombardi.”

  “Italian?”

  “Yes. From Parma. Oh no. Do you think . . . ? Is that why? Has someone . . . because of the president . . . ?”

  “It is too soon to tell,” I said. I could not rule it out. Not when I thought about Monsieur Marco’s broken windows and Geraldo, who had had to flee for his life.

  A deep shudder went through her slight shoulders, followed by a violent broken sob that came all the way from her diaphragm. Instinctively, I placed a hand on her shoulder.

  “I’m so sorry, mademoiselle. My deepest condolences.” I did not ask if she was a close friend or perhaps a relative. Her grief was obvious, and the police would soon be pelting her with such questions. There was no call for me to lead the attack.

  “Would you come to the morgue later?” I asked instead.

  “Why?”

  “To sign a formal declaration of identification. And to help me go through her personal belongings to see if anything is missing.”

  She nodded. In one sudden movement, she knelt next to the body and reached out for the dead woman’s hand. When I stopped her, she looked up at me in confusion.

  “Not yet,” I said. “But you will be able to say good-bye later.”

  The Commissioner gallantly assisted me onto the box of the hearse as if he was offering me a ride in an elegant carriage.

  “What are your first impressions, Madeleine?” he asked. Still somewhat formally because the driver was listening.

  I thought about it for a moment.

  “Contradictions,” I said. “There is something inconsistent about it all. The brutality of the incisions, and yet no fear, no signs of struggle, no resistance. The violence is solely directed at her abdomen; there is not so much as a bruise anywhere else. Of course it is possible that we will find something when we undress her, but, as I said, I don’t think she was killed here, so this is not a case of a sudden rage and an attack on the spot. At least not this spot. Rage and planning. Peculiar mixture, don’t you think?”

  He bowed his head lightly. “It has been known to happen. But not often, I admit.”

  The driver clicked his tongue and slapped the reins against the hindquarters of the two powerful Ardennes horses that were pulling the wagon. With a jerk, we began to move. The gate was opened, the mass of people moved to the side so we could pass.

  “Who is she, Commissioner?” someone in the crowd shouted, possibly one of those “gentlemen of the press” whom the Commissioner had been so anxious to avoid. The Commissioner ignored the question with his usual granite impassiveness.

  “The time of death?” he asked me quietly, without taking his eyes off the horses.

  The journalist, however, did not give up that easily. “Mr. Commissioner. Do we now have our own Jack the Ripper in Varbourg?”

  I could not help reacting. How did he know that? How could he have such knowledge of the lesions on the corpse? He had to know, why otherwise the comparison with London’s notorious serial killer? I scanned the crowd to find the man who had yelled. It was the notebook that gave him away. The straw hat, silk vest, and the casual shirtsleeves were, in my eyes, more suitable for a flâneur on his way to a rowing excursion on the Var River.

  The Commissioner placed a hand on my arm.

  “Say nothing,” he admonished me quietly. “Even an unvarnished no can become a confirmation of some spurious theory before they have finished reworking the truth. Madeleine—the time of death? What can you say about that?”

  I knew he was insisting not just because he needed to know—a piece of information of vital importance both for his own report and for the consequent police investigation—but also to get me to ignore the crowd and especially the man with the notebook. It worked. I had to turn my attention inward, recall the details.

  “Her body temperature had dropped to thirty-five degrees,” I said. “And rigor mortis was pronounced.” I hesitated and thought of the heat, the heavy, oppressive heat that had made sleep difficult even before the riots had started. Had it remained that hot all night? That might be the case. The temperature could have been even higher than the 33.1 degrees I had registered for the morning air. In that case, the body’s temperature did not tell us much. Once it reached the same level as the surroundings, it would not drop any further. Ordinarily, it took about twelve hours for the temperature difference between the body and the surroundings to halve. But I also knew that the smaller this difference was to begin with, the slower the body temperature would drop. Other factors played a role as well. I did not know how long she had lain here, only that she had been placed where she was found before rigor mortis set in, that is, within a few hours of her death. If you assumed that the temperature in that airless space between the blackened walls had held constant throughout the night, which in itself was a considerable if . . .

  I calculated as best I could in my head. The Commissioner did not disturb me.

  A difference of two degrees. Was that a halving?

  Rigor mortis was full-blown—the bare pointed feet had been as stiff as the rest of her. Thus it was at least eight hours since she had been killed and possibly as much as twelve. But again, the heat must have affected this process, just in reverse—where the body temperature fell more slowly because of the heat, rigor mortis progressed more quickly.

  “She probably died between eight in the evening and two in the morning,” I said.

  The Commissioner growled. “Could you narrow that down in any way?”

  “Not right now,” I answered. I did not dare to give up the margin of error I had added. “The contents of her stomach might be able to help us if we can discover when she had her last meal.”

  The horses clip-clopped down Rue Colbert, with a few curious observers still bringing up the rear, primarily street urchins who ran alongside and shouted in high, singsong voices: “It’s a dead ’un, it’s a dead ’un, come and look, it’s a dead ’un . . .”

  Annoyed, the driver lashed out with his whip at a few of the more daring ones.

  “Let them be, Jacques,” said the Commissioner. “They will get tired of it soon.”

  He was right. When we turned the next corner and continued down toward the Arsenal Bridge, most of them dropped away. Only one stubborn—and silent—boy followed us for the length of another street before he also gave up.

  “It would be nice to know if the killing happened before or after one o’clock,” said the Commissioner. “Or rather, before or after it was generally known that
an Italian had assassinated our president.”

  “I know,” I said. “Perhaps my father can be more precise.”

  For some reason that simple remark silenced the Commissioner. He glanced at the driver and rubbed the sweat from his neck with a broad and damp hand.

  “Yes,” he said at last, as if he had continued the conversation somewhere inside himself. “How is he?”

  “Papa?” I said, a bit surprised. “Perfectly well. Or I assume so; he has no doubt had a hard and busy night without sleep. Why?”

  “Does one need a reason to ask after the health of a good friend?”

  “Of course not. I merely thought that . . . Well, I assumed you knew about as much about the subject as I do.” Hardly a day passed without the two men seeing each other, professionally or privately. The Commissioner had a habit of dropping by the house in Carmelite Street most days of the week, quite frequently at mealtimes.

  Or . . . That is . . . I realized that it had in fact been a while since he had taken his usual place in the plush armchair. At least a week, perhaps even more than that.

  “Have you two had a disagreement?” The imprudent remark shot out of my mouth, though I knew that so direct a question was unlikely to receive an honest answer.

  “Not at all,” declared the Commissioner.

  No more was said about the matter before we reached the morgue and he helped me down from the hearse. While Jacques unhitched the horses, the corpse was carried from the wagon by two gendarmes into the cool cellar where most official autopsies took place. I turned automatically to follow, but the Commissioner stopped me.

  “Madeleine . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “There is something I want to ask you.”

  I smiled encouragingly. “Please do.”

  He stood there and seemed almost . . . well, if it had been anyone else, I would have said embarrassed. He was a large, solid man, broad in all directions, with round legs and big hands, a ruddy, roughly carved face, and thick graying hair. I did not know exactly how old he was but assumed he had to be over fifty. To see him standing there, blushing like a schoolboy, was an odd experience.

  “I . . . have become engaged to be married,” he said.

  “Utter shock” probably expressed my feelings best, but I tried not to let it show.

  “Congratulations,” I said. “What a surprise! Is it someone I know?”

  As long as I had known him, the Commissioner had lived in the same guesthouse, a nice and clean but not especially exciting establishment in the Arsenal district. I had thought that Papa and I were the closest he would ever come to a family.

  “In a way,” he growled. “In a way. It is Marie Mercier. Louis’s mother.”

  He looked at me with a mixture of pride and uneasiness, and I completely understood why. In the spring, my father and the Commissioner had been sought out by Marie Mercier, who was in a state because her nine-year-old son had disappeared. That part of the story ended fairly happily. We found Louis alive, and Madame Mercier had literally kissed the Commissioner’s hands out of sheer gratitude. I had noted even then that this made an impression, but Marie was also an uncommonly beautiful woman, though it required more and more effort to maintain her wasp waist, the carefully dyed hair, and the youthful glow. “Prostitute” was really too coarse a word to use about her refined person, and she was hardly a simple streetwalker. But that her warmth and her beauty were for sale, and had been for some years, there was no doubt.

  “Congratulations,” I repeated because I did not know what else to say. Perhaps it was a form of salvation for both of them, a chance to experience security and companionship and love in a way that neither had dared to dream of. Perhaps. But that was probably not the way the world would see it. “When is the wedding?”

  “The seventh,” he said. “We saw no reason to delay any longer. Just a simple ceremony at the mairie, but it would make us both extremely happy if you and your father would attend.”

  “Does Papa know?”

  “No.” He blushed once more, this rock of a man who never revealed his emotions. “I hoped . . . Would you tell him, sweet Madeleine?”

  “Would it not be better if you yourself . . . ,” I began.

  “Marie has written an invitation,” he said before I could finish my hesitant sentence, and pulled an envelope from his inner pocket. It had been there for a while, I judged, based on the slightly concave shape, the dog-eared corners, and certain other signs of wear and tear. The handwriting was neat and feminine, and care seemed to radiate from every pen stroke. To Dr. Albert Karno and Mademoiselle Madeleine Karno.

  “Please make him come,” the Commissioner asked. “It would mean so much to Marie and me.”

  “I will do my best,” I said. But I had absolutely no idea how Papa would react to this news.

  They had placed Rosalba Lombardi on the autopsy table. Due to rigor mortis, her legs were still parted, and her back still arched in the awkward curve formed by its contact with the coal sack, but the stretcher bearers had felt obliged to smooth her skirts so that they covered the horrors below.

  Two kinds of corpses ended up in the public morgue: those whose identity could not immediately be determined and those who had clearly lost their lives under unnatural circumstances. Here death was not softened by the comfort of rituals—here were no candles, flowers, or priests, just a brightly lit basement, which even now in the sweltering summer heat was cool bordering on the chilly. The floor was covered in glazed white tiles, and under the paint of the bare white walls one could just make out the contours of the raw bricks. But there was running water and several well-functioning drains and, high on my list of priorities, electric light.

  In the course of the past few months, the staff had grown accustomed to my presence, so Jean-Baptiste, the place’s porter and handyman, merely nodded at me and asked if I would like coffee or tea. His wife, Marianne, a curt but not unkind woman in her fifties, helped with the cleaning and was also the one who brought the hot drinks that kept the chill of the basement at bay.

  “Oh, that would be nice. Tea, thank you, Jean-Baptiste.”

  “Of course, mademoiselle.”

  He disappeared up the stairs—he and Marianne lived in a room behind the porter’s lodge. In the meantime, in spite of the cold, I removed not just hat and gloves but also the chiffon blouse and the gray serge skirt I was wearing and hung both in the changing room. The smell had a tendency to cling rather tenaciously to my clothing and my hair. I had thus made a smock for myself, not unlike the Bernardine Sisters’ habit, from coarse cotton twill and supplemented it with a white scarf and apron that, like the smock, could be boiled. The outfit made me look like a cross between a convent novitiate and a charwoman, but I consoled myself with the thought that the dead cared little for such niceties.

  When I emerged from the changing room, Jean-Baptiste had returned with the tea.

  “When can we expect the doctor?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, Jean-Baptiste. Probably not until sometime this afternoon.”

  He smiled.

  “It is almost one, mademoiselle.”

  Was it? The time had passed more quickly than I had realized. Had three hours really gone by since I walked into the coal merchant’s courtyard in Rue Colbert?

  That reminded me of something.

  “A young lady will be coming by in a little while, a Mademoiselle Fleur. Would you and Marianne take good care of her until I am ready down here? She was very close to the deceased.”

  “Of course, mademoiselle.” He hesitated a moment. “Terrible about the president,” he then added, as if two people could not meet on this day without at least mentioning what had happened.

  “Yes. A tragedy.”

  He looked as if he might have said something more, but he just placed the tea tray on the little desk by the door before he disappeared upstairs to Marianne and warmer climes.

  I sipped the tea, but it was still too hot to drink. Then I turned to Rosalba Lomb
ardi.

  Even when a definite identification is believed to have been made, Lacassagne’s excellent procedure, presented in Vade-mecum du médecin-expert, prescribes an initial physical description of the body. Take nothing for granted, he admonishes. You must learn to doubt.

  Thus I measured the length of the thigh (46.3 centimeters) and established by way of Lacassagne’s tables that she must have been just about 163 centimeters tall—the height of a prone and dead person will always diverge significantly from the standing height the person had while alive, and it is therefore better to base one’s calculation on the length of the femur, tibia, fibula, radius, humerus, or ulna. I opened both her eyes to see the color—brown. Noted her nutritional health—good—and the outer signs of her age. I then proceeded to list the details of her garments—a crêpe de chine dress in a fashionable midnight blue that complemented her titian hair admirably. An expensive dress, I thought, though possibly bought secondhand—there were signs that it had been let out at the waist. If she, like Fleur, made a living satisfying men’s desires, then she had lived quite well.

  The most noteworthy thing was that she was not wearing a corset. Under the dress there was just a thin white camisole and a petticoat, but since the dress had been made to fit her corset measurements, it had not been possible to hook it up completely at the back.

  I had difficulty imagining that a woman with Mademoiselle Lombardi’s sense of style would appear in public in a dress that was open at the back. Likewise, it was hard to believe that she would go anywhere without a corset. Add to that the missing stockings and shoes, and—upon looking more closely—the cuff on one of the tight-fitting sleeves of her dress that was buttoned crookedly.

  It was an obvious assumption that she had not put on the dress herself, that someone—possibly her killer—had dressed her after she died. This would also explain why there was blood on the underskirt but not on the dress. I imagined her dressed only in her petticoat and camisole, in a bed—it had to be a bed, didn’t it? And most likely not her own. A lover, a client? Would there be any trace of semen?