The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET. Scott Mariani
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the face, taking most of it away before exiting through the top of the head. Just one eye remained, sitting in its socket like a hard-boiled egg with a pupil that seemed to stare right at them.
‘What’ve you got for me?’ Simon asked Rudel.
The pathologist pointed at the mess of Michel’s face. ‘Damage here is all consistent with the bullet found in the ceiling,’ he said, speaking mechanically as though dictating a report. ‘Entry wound here. Weapon was held against the upper chest with the muzzle in loose contact with the lower jaw. Edges of the entry wound are burned from combustion gases and blacked with soot. The weapon was a Smith and Wesson revolver, three inch barrel, .44 Remington Magnum. The powerful calibre accounts for the amount of bone and tissue damage.’
Simon tapped his foot impatiently. He hoped that this was leading somewhere.
‘Typically that calibre uses much slower-burning powder than you get with semi-auto rounds like the nine millimetre,’ Rudel went on matter-of-factly ‘That means you get a lot of unburnt residue, especially with a short barrel. Doesn’t burn so clean.’ He pointed. ‘You can see it all here, embedded in the skin. Also here down the neck.’
Simon nodded. ‘OK, so what are you telling me?’
Rudel turned to look at him with bleary eyes. ‘The victim’s prints are on the stocks and the trigger of the weapon. So we know he fired the shot without gloves.’
‘He was found still clutching the gun. No gloves. We know that. Are you going to cut to the chase before one of us dies?’
Rudel ignored the sarcasm. ‘Well, this is what I find perplexing. With all this mess of unburnt powder I’d expect to find a lot of it on the gun hand, as well as the normal chemical discharge that blows back when the weapon is fired. But this man’s hands are clean.’
‘You’re sure about this?’
‘Quite sure–it’s a simple swab test for residue.’ Rudel reached down and lifted a pale lifeless arm out from under the sheet. ‘See for yourself.’
‘You’re saying he didn’t fire the shot.’
Rudel shrugged, and let the dead hand flop back down by the corpse’s side. ‘Only thing on this man’s hands, apart from the usual sweat and grease, are some traces of oily fish. Pilchard, to be precise.’
It struck Simon as absurd, and he laughed. ‘You ran a test for pilchard?’
Rudel looked at him coldly. ‘No, there was a half-opened tin of it on his kitchen table, next to a cat’s feeding dish. Now, all I’m saying is, who would blow their brains out in the middle of feeding their cat?’
The boy was jerked semi-conscious as they dragged him off the hard bunk. He heard voices around him, the clang of metal doors and the jangling of keys. Sounds echoed in the empty space. A swirl of lights blinded him through his confusion. A sudden lancing pain in his arm made him wince.
It might have been minutes later, or it might have been hours–everything was hazy, unreal. He was vaguely aware of not being able to move, arms pinned behind him. The white light was burning into his head, making him blink and twist his head away as he sat tied in the chair.
He wasn’t alone. Two men were in the cellar with him, watching him.
‘Shall I dispose of him?’ said one voice.
‘No, keep him alive for the moment. He may be useful to us.’
The warm water trickled over her head and tinkled against the side of the bath where she was bent over. The foam running into the plughole was tinged with red as he carefully washed the blood out of her hair.
‘Ouch.’
‘Sorry. You’ve got dried bits stuck in here.’
‘I don’t want to know, Ben.’
He hung the shower head up on its wall hook and squeezed more shampoo into his hand, lathering it into her hair.
Her nerves were steadier now–the nausea had left her and her hands weren’t shaking any more. She relaxed against his touch, thinking how tender and gentle it was. She could feel the warmth of his body pressing up behind her as he rinsed the foam away from her hair and neck.
‘I think it’s all gone now.’
‘Thanks,’ she murmured, wrapping a towel around her head.
He gave her a spare shirt to wear, and then left her alone to clean the rest of herself up. While she showered, he quickly field-stripped, cleaned and reassembled his Browning. As he went through these fluid, automatic motions, as deeply instilled in him as tying a shoelace or brushing his teeth, his mind was far away.
She emerged from the bathroom, wearing his oversize shirt knotted at the waist, her long dark red hair still damp and gleaming. He poured her a glass of wine. ‘You OK?’
‘Yeah, I’m OK.’
‘Roberta…I haven’t been totally straight with you. There are some things you should know.’
‘This is about the gun?’
He nodded. ‘And other things.’
She sat looking down at the floor and sipped her wine as he told her everything. He told her about Fairfax, about his quest, about the dying little girl. ‘And that’s basically all there is. Now you know everything.’ He watched her for a reaction.
She was quiet for a while, her face still and thoughtful. ‘So, is that what you do, Ben? Save kids?’ she asked softly.
He looked at his watch. ‘It’s late. You need to get some sleep.’
That night he let her use the bed while he slept on the floor in the other room. She was woken at dawn by the sound of him moving about. She came sleepily out of the bedroom to see him packing up his green canvas bag. ‘What’s happening?’ ‘I’m leaving Paris.’
‘You’re leaving? What about me?’
‘After last night, do you still want to come along with me?’
‘Yes, I do. Where are we going?’
‘South,’ he said, slipping Fulcanelli’s Journal carefully into the bag and wishing he had more time to read it. Then he opened a drawer of his desk and took out the passport he kept in there. He’d had it made for him in London, and it was indistinguishable from the real thing. The picture on it was his, but the name was Paul Harris. He slid it in the inside pocket of his jacket.
‘But Ben, there’s just one thing,’ she remembered. ‘I have to go back to my place first.’
He shook his head. ‘Sorry No chance.’
‘I have to.’
‘What for? If you need clothes and things, that’s all right–we’ll go and buy you whatever you want.’
‘No, it’s something else. These people who are after us–if they get into my apartment again they could find my address book. Everything’s in that book, all my friends and family in the States. What if they did something to my family to try to get to me?’
When Luc Simon returned to his office, he found the whole police station in an uproar as news came in about the quayside shooting. Violent crime was a normal thing in Paris, part of life. But when there was a bloodbath like this, with two cops gunned down and five more bodies littering the banks of the Seine, guns and spent cartridges everywhere, the police force was coming out en masse.
Simon found a brown envelope on his desk. The report inside was from handwriting analysis. The writing on the Zardi suicide note was a mismatch with other samples of his handwriting found in his apartment, shopping lists, memos and a half-written letter to his mother. It was