Blood-Red Rivers aka The Crimson Rivers Read online

  The officer watched the tall man in the blue coat as he started to leave.

  "Really, superintendent, you could have got a student on this job, someone more qualified than me to…"

  "I wanted a professional opinion. An interpretation which would fit into our frame of reference."

  The officer pursed his lips once more.

  "And you really think that all this crap has something to do with the murders?"

  Niémans put his hand on the glass partition and leant over.

  "In this sort of business, every element is important. Coincidences don't exist. And neither do irrelevancies. It all works like an atomic structure, do you see that? So, keep reading."

  Niémans left the officer, who was looking decidedly dubious. Outside, on the campus, he noticed distant flashes coming from the projectors of television crews. He screwed up his eyes and distinguished the far-away figure of Vincent Luyse, the vice-chancellor, who was stammering out some reassuring declaration on the steps of the main building. He also made out the distinctive logos of the local, national and even Swiss television channels…A seething crowd of journalists, questions from all directions. The process had started. The lenses of the media were now focused on Guernon. News of the murders was about to spread across France, and panic had gripped the little town.

  And it was just the beginning.

  CHAPTER 37

  As he walked on, Niémans phoned Antoine Rheims.

  "Any news of our Englishman?"

  "I'm at Hôtel-Dieu now. He still hasn't regained consciousness and the medics are sounding pessimistic. The British Ambassador has just let loose a pack of lawyers. They've come straight over from London. The journalists are here, too. Imagine the worst, then double it."

  The satellite connection was perfect; Rheims's voice crystal clear.

  Niémans pictured his boss on the Ile de la Cité, then saw himself once more in those hospitals, questioning prostitutes who had been beaten up by their pimps – their faces swollen, flesh torn by signet rings. He could also see the bloodied features of suspects he himself had shaken up a bit. Their hands cuffed to the bed, with a whole array of flashing lights and other gadgets, in the ghostly pallor of the room.

  He saw the square outside Notre Dame, when he used to leave Hôtel-Dieu at three o'clock in the morning, weary, his mind in a whirl, in the bright silence of the night. Pierre Niémans was a warrior. And his memories had a metallic gleam, of ammunition belts, of the fires of combat. He felt a strong pang of regret for that strange existence, which few people would have wanted, but which was his sole reason for carrying on.

  "How are your enquiries going?" Rheims asked.

  His voice sounded less aggressive than it had during the last phone call. Solidarity between colleagues, their shared experiences and old intimacy were beginning to take control once again.

  "We now have two murders. And not the slightest lead. But I'm keeping at it. And I know that I'm on the right track."

  Rheims added nothing, but Niémans sensed that his silence indicated trust. He asked:

  "And what about me?"

  "What about you?"

  "I mean, in the service. Is anyone looking into this hooligan business?"

  Rheims laughed sardonically.

  "You mean the disciplinary board? They've been waiting for this moment for ages. And they can wait a while longer."

  "For what?"

  "For the Brit to die. So they can do you for murder."

  Niémans reached Annecy at about eleven o'clock. He drove down the town's large clear avenues, under the boughs of the trees. The leaves, lit up by the streetlamps, gleamed like pieces of gold. At the end of each street, Niémans encountered some small constructions that seemed to rise up from a well of light: newsstands, fountains and statues. At a distance of several hundred yards, these tiny objects looked like figurines in music boxes, or Christmas cribs. As though the town were hiding its treasures in cases of stone, marble or wood, along its squares and crossroads.

  He went alongside the canals of Annecy, with their fake Amsterdam look, opening out in the distance onto the lake. The policeman could hardly believe that he was only a few miles away from Guernon, from his corpses, from his savage killer. He reached the town's residential area. Avenue des Ormes. Boulevard Vauvert. Impasse des Hautes-Brises. Names which, to the inhabitants of Annecy, were presumably impregnated with dreams of white stone, with symbols of power.

  He parked his saloon at the end of the cul-de-sac, which sloped downwards. The tall houses were crammed in, one against the other, at once affected and overpowering, divided by gardens concealed behind verdigris walls. The number he was looking for corresponded to a large town house in cut stone, with an oblong glass porch. The policeman pressed twice on the diamond-shaped doorbell, the button of which was made to look like an eye. Beneath it, the plaque of black marble indicated: "Dr Edmond Chernecé. Ophthalmology. Eye Surgery".

  No answer. Niémans looked down. The lock presented no difficulties and one more break-in would not now make any difference. He skillfully forced open the latch, and found himself in a marble-tiled corridor. Arrows indicated the direction of the waiting-room, down the corridor on the left, but the policeman was more interested in a leather-covered door to the right. The surgery itself. He turned the handle and discovered a long room, which was in fact a large veranda, its roof and two of its walls being entirely made of panes of glass. In the darkness, water could be heard trickling. It took Niémans a few seconds to distinguish a human form at the end of the room, standing in front of a sink.

  "Doctor Chernecé?"

  The man stared round at him. Niémans approached. The first detail he noticed with any precision were the doctor's hands, tanned and shining in the flowing water. Old roots, mottled with brown stains, the veins reaching up in a tangle toward the powerful wrists.

  "Who are you?"

  The voice was deep, and calm. The man was short, but extremely stocky, and he looked over sixty. White hair flowed out in luxuriant waves from his high sunburned forehead, which was mottled with liver spots, too. A profile like a rock face, the build of a dolmen. The man looked like a monolith. A mysterious block of stone, made all the stranger because the doctor was wearing only a white tee-shirt and boxer shorts.

  "Superintendent Pierre Niémans. I rang the bell, but nobody answered."

  "How did you get in?"

  Niémans flicked his fingers, like a circus conjurer.

  "I improvised."

  Without seeming at all put out by the policeman's lack of decorum, the doctor smiled elegantly. With his elbow, he turned off the long arm of the tap and walked across the transparent room, his forearms raised, in search of a towel. Oculist's instruments, microscopes, anatomical plates illustrating eyeballs, entire and cut open, appeared in the half-light. In a neutral tone of voice, Chernecé declared:

  "I've already had one visit from a police officer this afternoon. What do you want?"

  Niémans was now only a few feet away from him. And he realised that he had not yet noticed the man's main distinguishing mark, the one that set him apart from thousands of other people: his eyes. Chernecé's stare was colorless. Gray irises which gave him a look of snake-like vigilance. Pupils which resembled miniature aquariums, containing killer fish, protected by scales of steel. Niémans said:

  "I'm here to ask you a few questions about him."

  The man smiled indulgently.

  "How original. Are the police now investigating one another?"

  "What time did he come here?"

  "About six this evening, I should think."

  "That late? Do you remember what he asked you?"

  "Of course I do. He questioned me about the inmates of a home near Guernon. A home for children suffering from eye problems, whom I regularly treat."

  "What did he want to know?"

  Chernecé opened a cupboard with mahogany doors. He picked out a light-colored shirt, with baggy sleeves, and rapidly slipped it on.
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  "He wanted to know the reasons for the children's conditions. I told him that they were hereditary diseases. He also asked if there might be another explanation for such problems, such as poisoning, or a wrongly administered drug."

  "And what was your answer?"

  "That the idea was preposterous. These genetic conditions arise from the town's isolation, and from interbreeding. Marriages between closely related people mean that the diseases are passed on, in the blood. This sort of phenomenon is well attested in communities that are cut off from the outside world. The region around the Lac Saint-Jean in Quebec, for instance, or the groups of Amish in the USA. And it also applies to Guernon. People from that valley do not mix with outsiders…Why look for another explanation to the phenomenon?"

  Without the slightest sign of embarrassment at Niémans's presence, the doctor was now pulling on some navy blue trousers, made of a slightly moiré material. Chernecé was clearly quite a snappy dresser. The policeman went on:

  "Did he ask you anything else?"

  "Yes. About grafts."

  "What about grafts?"

  He was buttoning up his shirt.

  "Eye grafts. I had no idea what he was on about."

  "He didn't tell you the reason for his enquiries?"

  "No. But I answered as best I could. He wanted to know if there was any point removing people's eyes, with a view to performing a graft of the cornea, for example."

  So, Joisneau had thought of the surgery angle.

  "And?"

  Chernecé went stock still, and wiped the back of his hand over his chin, as though testing the harshness of his stubble. The shadows of trees were dancing outside the panes of glass.

  "I told him that such practices were now unnecessary. It is very easy to find substitute corneas these days. And much progress has been made in the production of artificial ones. As for the retinas, we still do not know how to preserve them, so grafts are out of the question…" The doctor gave a slight chuckle. "You know, all those stories about the smuggling of organs are just urban myths."

  "Did he ask you anything else?"

  "No. And he looked disappointed."

  "Did you advise him to go anywhere? Did you give him another address?"

  Chernecé laughed affably.

  "Goodness me. It rather sounds as though you have lost your fellow officer."

  "Answer my question. Do you have any idea where he went after leaving here? Did he mention anything?"

  "No. Absolutely not." His face hardened. "Now, would you mind telling me what all this is about?"'

  Niémans took the Polaroids of Caillois's corpse out of his coat pocket and laid them down on the desk.

  "That's what it's about."

  Chernecé put on his glasses, lit a small desk lamp and examined the photographs. The gaping eyelids. The empty sockets. "Good Lord…" he murmured.

  He seemed horrified and at the same time fascinated by the images. Niémans spotted a collection of chrome-plated probes in a Chinese pencil-case at the end of the desk. He decided to adopt a different line of approach. He had a specialist in front of him, so why not ask specialist questions?

  "I now have two victims in this state. Do you think that it was a professional who mutilated them in this way?"

  Chernecé looked up. His face was beaded with drops of sweat. He remained silent for some time, then asked:

  "My God, what the hell do you mean?"

  "I'm talking about the excision of the eyes. I've got some close-ups." Niémans handed him the photographs of the sockets. "Does it at all look like the work of a professional surgeon? Are there any specific signs? The killer carefully avoided cutting the eyelids. Is that easily done? Or does it require any special anatomical knowledge?"

  Chernecé stared again at the images.

  "Who could have done such a thing? What sort of…monster? Where did this happen?"

  "Near Guernon. Doctor, would you answer my question? Do you think that this operation was carried out by a professional?" The oculist stood up.

  "I'm sorry. I…I don't know."

  "What technique do you suppose he used?"

  The doctor took another look.

  "I think he slid a blade under the eyeballs…that he managed to slice through the optical nerves and oculomotor muscles thanks to the suppleness of the eyelid. I think that he then rotated the eye, using the flat of the blade as leverage. Rather as if with a coin, do you follow me?"

  Niémans pocketed his Polaroids. The sunburned medic watched his every move, as if he could still see the images through the material of the coat. On the bulwark of his chest, his shirt was stained with sweat.'

  "I'd like to ask you a general question," Niémans said. "Think carefully before answering it."

  The doctor pulled back. The veranda seemed haunted by the dancing reflections of the trees. He gestured to the policeman to go on.

  "What do you think eyes and hands have in common? What connection could there be between those two parts of the body?"

  The oculist paced up and down for a moment. He had recovered his calm, the coolness of the man of science.

  "The connection is obvious," he said at last. "Our eyes and our hands are the only two unique parts of our anatomy."

  Niémans shivered. Since hearing the news from Costes, he had sensed this, but had been incapable of putting his finger on the reason. Now it was his turn to sweat.

  "What do you mean?"

  "Our irises are unique. They are made of thousands of fibrillae, which form a pattern which is distinct to each of us. A biological marker, created by our genes. The iris is as good a distinguishing mark as our fingerprints. So that is what our eyes and hands have in common. They are the only parts of our bodies to have a biological, or biometric signature, as the specialists put it. Deprive a body of its eyes and hands, and you take away its external markers. Now, what is a man who dies without such markers? Nobody. An anonymous corpse, which has lost its personal identity. Even its soul, perhaps. Who knows? In some ways, it is the worst possible end. An unmarked, common grave of dead flesh."

  The panes of glass were setting off reflected glints in Chernecé's colorless eyes, making them look even more translucent. The entire room now resembled a glass iris. The anatomical plates, the figure in the shadows, the claws of the trees – everything was dancing as though in the deepest reaches of a mirror.

  An idea flashed into the superintendent's mind. Caillois's hands, which had lost their fingerprints, and which the killer had not removed. The murderer had clearly let them alone because they were already anonymous.

  The killer was stealing his victims' biological signatures.

  "In fact," the doctor went on, "I would say that the irises are a more certain means of identification than the fingerprints. Your specialists ought to look into the matter."

  "Why do you say that?"

  In the half-light, Chernecé smiled. He had recovered his professorial poise.

  "Some scientists believe that it is possible to read in the irises not only a person's state of health, but also his entire history. Those little circles which glimmer around our pupils carry our very genesis…Have you never heard of iridology?"

  For some inexplicable reason, Niémans felt sure that this information was casting a new, transversal beam of light across the case. He did not yet know where it might lead, but he sensed that the killer shared the oculist's point of view. Chernecé went on:

  "It is a study which was first started at the end of the nineteenth century. A German eagle-trainer noticed a curious phenomenon. One of his birds broke its foot. The man then observed that a new mark, like a golden scratch, had appeared in its iris. As though the accident had had an effect on the bird's eye. Such physical echoes exist, superintendent. I am sure about that. So, who knows? Maybe your killer removed his victims' eyes so as to wipe out the trace of some past event, which could be read in their irises."

  Niémans backed off, letting the doctor's shadow fill up the space he left. He as
ked one final question:

  "Why didn't you answer the phone this afternoon?"

  "Because I unplugged it," he smiled. "I don't consult on Mondays. I wanted to spend my afternoon and evening tidying up my surgery."

  Chernecé went back to the wardrobe and removed a jacket. He put it on with a broad, exact gesture. It was dark blue, airy and square-cut. As though finally grasping the reason for Niémans's visit, he said:

  "So you tried to contact me this afternoon? I am sorry. I could have told you all this by telephone. Please forgive me for having you waste your precious time."

  The words rang false. The man oozed egoism and indifference from every pore of his sun-tanned forehead. He had probably even forgotten about Rémy Caillois's stolen eyes by then.

  Niémans gazed at the engravings of sliced-up eyeballs, the blood vessels dancing across the whites, as though mimicking the shadows of the trees through the thick panes of the ceiling and walls.

  "I haven't wasted my time," he murmured.

  Outside, Superintendent Niémans was in for another surprise. A man was apparently waiting for him, with his back to the light from the streetlamp, leaning on his saloon. He was as tall as Niémans, looked North African, with long dreadlocks, a colored woolly hat and a devil's beard. An experienced policeman can always spot a dangerous man when he sees one. And, despite his nonchalant pose, this bean-pole was certainly in that category. He reminded him of the drug pushers he had so often hunted down through the shadows of the Parisian nights. Niémans also reckoned that he probably had a gun hidden somewhere on his person. His hand clutching his MR73, he approached him and could not believe his eyes. The Arab was smiling at him.

  "Superintendent Niémans?" he asked, when the policeman was just a few yards away from him.

  The North African slid one hand into his jacket. Niémans immediately drew and aimed his gun.

  "Don't move!"

  The man with the sphinx face grinned, with a mixture of self-assurance and irony that was blown up to a degree that Niémans had rarely encountered before, even on the faces of the hardest suspects.

  The Arab said, calmly:

  "Easy does it, superintendent. My name's Karim Abdouf. I'm a police lieutenant. Captain Barnes told me that I would find you here."