Curious, she leaned forward, though it had little to do with Orla.
“Three weeks?”
“The current, the time of the year, and water temperature all have to be taken into account. Plus the silure, the big-river fishes, and the écrevisses, fresh-water crawfish, had eaten more of the extremities than usual.”
She shuddered, thinking of them feasting on Orla.
“Some fishmongers near Les Halles supplemented their income by selling les écrevisses.” He smiled. “Until we stopped them.”
Aimée glanced at an array of rusted firearms and a collection of rope knots behind glass on the wall. “Artifacts from the river?”
He grinned. “Treasures. I found the Sten gun used by the Résistance on the river bottom. On another dive I brought up this revolver, from the 1930s. It had been a dumping point for gangsters from rue de Lappe. Amazing to find it, considering the murkiness of the water, Mademoiselle. We must use our hands; we can’t see a thing down there. And twenty minutes in a wet suit is all a diver can take.”
Interesting, but it got her no further. She had to ask him for guesses with respect to what she wanted to know. “Two more questions, Capitaine. How long do you think this woman’s body lay in the water? And, in your opinion, how far could it have traveled from the point at which it entered the water?”
“The Seine’s risen several centimeters since last night and will continue to rise due to runoff and rain. We’re near flood levels.” He exhaled. “Given the body’s temperature and the lack of severe bloating or discoloration, I’d hazard three or four hours. The autopsy report should be more definite.”
A knock and the door slid open. Two uniformed officers stood outside. “Ready when you are, Capitaine.”
He grabbed his raincoat from the rack. “Regarding the body . . . well, I can only conjecture.”
“I understand.”
He flipped the pages of the report to the end. “On this diagram, you’ll see, I’ve marked the place where the body was recovered from the sewer grate.”
It was at a point just below Pont de Sully. “But wouldn’t it be unlikely for her body to remain in the same spot at which she was shoved in, considering the river current, the passing Bateaux-Mouches and other barge traffic?”
“I’ve seen it before; it happens,” he said. “A limb catches on a sewer grate, a body twists and sticks in the iron rungs or the underwater steps descending from the bank. Or it becomes entangled in an underwater pylon or with an old fishing line. Sometimes the currents from a Bateau-Mouche will push a body up to the surface.”
“So what do you conclude, Capitaine?”
“Don’t quote me.” He walked to the door. “And I’ll deny saying this, but I doubt she’d been there long at all. It’s just a feeling, a sense, from my twenty years of experience.”
“Can you explain what you mean a little more clearly?”
“I tried to reconstruct the scene. It struck me, well—a possible scenario would be that she reached for help, was struck, and fell back into the water, her lungs filling up then.”
That’s what Serge had intimated, she recalled.
“There’s no way to be certain,” the commander continued. “But it’s almost as if she was trying to grab her attacker.”
Or to grab something from the attacker? Serge had not mentioned any defensive wounds on her hands.
“Who knows? The attacker might have been frightened by the lights of a passing boat. He might have been interrupted and so he ran away not knowing if she survived.”
He put his raincoat on. “And I never said that.”
INTERRUPTED?
Nelie Landrou had made the frantic telephone call to her.
This made sense if she’d seen Orla attacked at the river, been chased in turn, and so feared for her life and the baby’s. She had not even had time to put a diaper on Stella. Shaken, Aimée rounded the curve of Quai d’Anjou.
The rain continued to pelt down. She walked down the worn steps to the spot Capitaine Sezeur had pointed out. White and rust-colored lichen splashed with clumps of lime covered the stone wall; moss feathered the cracks oozing under her wet boots. A Bateau-Mouche glided past, so close she could hear radio static erupting from the deck, and sweeping gray-green water onto the bank and her shoes. Just as quickly, the water receded, trickling back over the weathered stone.
Here. Hunched over, she reached her hand into the icy water. Flailed around until her fingers touched a metal rung, invisible in the murky depths. A whoosh of colder subterranean water, putrid and scummed with foam, gushed forth and was swept away by the current. The capitaine’s conjecture was right. Caught in and buffeted by the sewer stream, Orla couldn’t have been here long or she would have been bruised all over.
Her hand, dripping by her side, tingled. Then the rain stopped and a warm, almost tropical wind whipped her face as she walked the few steps to her building. A weak moon struggled behind wisps of pearl gray clouds hovering over Pont Marie.
Orla had died almost outside Aimée’s window. Capitaine Sezeur had confirmed her suspicions.
But her investigation had fallen short. Brigitte had revealed little about MondeFocus or Nelie. Claude’s video held only blurred, unfocused images and would require painstaking processing to decipher. And then the tape might show only two minutes of dark chaos. There had to be more.
What was clear was that she couldn’t juggle work and take care of Stella.
Yet she needed to sniff under the rocks Brigitte had pointed her at and to find Krzysztof. To focus, or—as the old dinosaurs in the force said—squeeze till the water ran dry.
She tried Brigitte at the MondeFocus office. No answer, so she left a message on the machine.She stopped at the boulangerie around the corner and stood in line behind a bent old man. He tipped his cap with a knowing smile. “Bonsoir.”
She returned his greeting, searching her memory. Did she know him? He struggled to put his loaf of pain au paysan inside a plastic bag printed with the green cross of the pharmacy next door. She noticed boxes of bandages and dressings inside the bag.
The boulangerie doors stood open to the street where the few passersby were folding their umbrellas to save them from the wind. Meter maids in blue peaked caps checked car meters along the quai. She emerged, baguette in hand, and paused, sensing someone watching her. Her skin prickled.
Unsure of what to do, she ducked inside a doorway and scanned the street, but she saw only a meter maid writing a ticket in her little book and the bent old man shuffling to the stone stairs leading down to the riverbank. She had to control her nerves.
On impulse, she followed him. She wanted to ask if he’d seen anything unusual the previous night. The algae-scented breeze rustled the budding plane-tree branches. The old man clutched the stone balustrade as he made his way downward with slow, painful steps. Odd. She wondered why he was descending since the Seine’s gray-green water lapped over the bank and rose above the bottom step. No one else was out walking on the quai now.
Pont Louis Philippe arched ahead of her, decorated with carved stone wreaths of intertwined sculpted leaves. Buses trundled overhead, their green sides flashing above the stone wall.
When she looked down again, the old man had disappeared.
“Monsieur?” she called out. Anxious now, she took the steps two at a time, hesitated, then tiptoed through the swirling eddies of water. Useless. Her shoes were soaked. And she couldn’t see the old man on the bank or in the river. Before she waded ankle deep in water to explore, she had better relieve René. She mounted the stairs. Her cell phone vibrated in her pocket.