Blacklight Blue (13 page)

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The Palais de Justice lay at the west end of the Île de la Cité, between the Quai des Orfèvres and the Quai de l’Horloge.
Le greffe,
the evidence depository, was situated deep in its bowels. Enzo had been here once before, when he found clues that led him to the missing Jacques Gaillard in a trunkful of apparently unrelated items recovered from the Paris catacombs.

In a vast, high-ceilinged room, row upon row of cardboard boxes were squeezed onto metal shelves that ranged from floor to ceiling. Every box told a story. Of murder, rape, theft, assault. The detritus of decades of crime. Evidence that either cleared or condemned, quashed or convicted. Or sometimes, simply baffled.

Martinot pushed open the door of a small room at the end of the main hall, and Enzo placed the box marked
Production No. 73982/M
on a plain metal table against the far wall. The retired
commissaire
looked at the label and recognised his own signature. He chuckled. ‘It’s been a while since I signed one of these.’

He took off his overcoat and hat and hung them on a coatstand by the door. His shirt was buttoned up to the collar, but he wore no tie. His jacket was held closed by a single button. The other two were missing. He opened the box. ‘
Et voilà
!’

Enzo looked into it and felt a strange, breathless sense of anticipation. This was what the killer had been trying so very hard to stop him from ever doing. People had died and lives been ruined in the process. There was something in here, Enzo knew, that would shine a light into a place which had languished in darkness for nearly seventeen years. It was up to him to find the switch.

One by one he lifted out all the bagged evidence from the crime scene that had been Lambert’s apartment. The antihistamines, now back in their bottle. Shards of glass from the tumbler smashed in the sink. The broken coffee cup and saucers. The shattered sugar bowl and lumps of sugar. The victim’s clothes and underwear, wrapped in brown paper. His shirt, a woollen sweater, jeans, sneakers. From all of which it was apparent that Lambert had been a slight-built man of less than average height.

Enzo examined the cassette from the telephone answering machine in its ziplock bag. ‘Could I have a copy made of this?’

Martinot shrugged. ‘I don’t see why not.’

Enzo turned back to the treasure trove of evidence. There was a box of paperwork. The original police reports. Martinot’s tattered black notebook. The old cop picked it up and flipped through it with nostalgic fingers. A scrawling script written by another man in another time. Observations on life and death.

Pictures of the crime scene taken by the police photographer were slipped into plastic sleeves in a clip folder. Enzo glanced through them. Coarse colour under bright lights. A dead man lying among the debris of the struggle, his head turned at an impossible angle, a look of surprise frozen on his face.

Enzo was shocked by how slight he was. There was something fragile about him. An attractive young man whose life, and death, had been defined by his sexuality. He had a fine-featured face with full, almost sensuous lips. Dark, slightly curly hair fell untidily across his forehead. The bruises and scratching around his neck were plainly visible.

His appearance was dated already. Although less than seventeen years had passed, it seemed as if he had come from a different era. In seventeen years, Enzo had not changed so very much. He’d had his ponytail back then. Wore baggy, loose-fitting shirts, cargo pants. Sneakers. Timeless, unfashionable. But Lambert reflected the fashion of his time. Today, even at the same age, he would have looked quite different.

Enzo examined the chaos around the boy. The shattered coffee table, an upturned chair, an occasional table that had been sent flying, ornaments strewn across a luridly patterned carpet. That there had been quite a struggle was evident. He looked up to find Martinot smiling at him.

‘I know what you’re thinking. If the killer was a professional, like we figure he might have been, how on earth was Lambert able to put up such a fight? Look at him. You could have blown him over.’

Enzo nodded and reached for the autopsy report. He flipped through it until he found the pathologist’s description of the neck injuries, and saw why the
légiste
had concluded that the attacker was wearing gloves. Seam stitching along the fingertips had left a pattern on the skin. The bruising itself was messy. In a classic case of strangulation, the killer might have left three or four marks on one side of the neck from his fingers, and a single mark on the opposite side from his thumb. A good patterned injury in the shape of a hand was rare, but recently cyanocrylate fumes had been used successfully to bring out the shape of a finger or hand print, sometimes even with enough detail to collect a fingerprint from the skin. Such a technique, even had it been available, would not have helped in this case.

The abrasions on the neck, Enzo figured, had been made by Lambert himself, trying to prise free his attacker’s grasp. He flipped through a few more pages to confirm his suspicions, and found what he was looking for. The pathologist had recovered skin from beneath the victim’s fingernails. His own skin, gouged from his neck in the heat of the struggle.

He had, it seemed, been at least partially successful in preventing his attacker from strangling him. As Martinot had observed, that seemed odd given Lambert’s slight build. In the end, however, he had been no match for a technique that had severed his spinal cord in a single, deft twist of the head.

‘So what do you think?’ Raffin’s impatience was palpable. But Enzo raised a hand to quiet him. He was not going to be rushed. He lifted the plastic bag containing the pills and looked at the label on it.
Twenty-one
comprimés,
terfenadine, brand name Seldane
. He turned to Martinot. ‘You’re certain that Lambert did not suffer from allergies?’

‘As certain as I can be. His mother knew nothing about it if he did. He had never been prescribed antihistamines, and there were no others in the house.’

‘But terfenadine was a prescription drug?’

‘Yes. We always figured they belonged to the killer.’

‘Although you found nothing in the apartment that might have triggered an allergic reaction?’

‘Our best advice at the time was that almost anything can trigger a reaction in sufferers. Even someone’s aftershave. But Lambert wasn’t wearing any, and there was nothing else that suggested itself to us.’

‘So why was there a broken glass in the sink and pills spilled all over the kitchen floor?’

Martinot shrugged. ‘We can only guess at that, monsieur.’

Enzo picked up the crime scene photographs again, this time examining as much of the room as he could see beyond the immediate area of struggle. A large settee and two armchairs that looked as if they had seen better days, half-hidden beneath colourful woven throws. The lurid, thick-piled carpet, plush velvet curtains hanging in oriel windows. ‘This was a furnished rental, right?’

‘Right.’

‘He hadn’t been there very long.’

‘A couple of months.’

‘Did you talk to the previous
locataires
?’

Martinot picked up and riffled through the reports. ‘Yeah, here we are. Two days after the murder. A middle aged couple. They’d moved across town. Fourteenth
arrondissement
. It was just routine stuff. They couldn’t help.’

‘Would we be able to find them again?’

‘Who knows? Sixteen years. They could have moved again. They might be dead. Why?’

‘We need to know if they kept pets.’

‘Pets?’ Martinot frowned and scratched his head. ‘You know, now that you mention it, I can actually remember going to their place. Sticks in my mind only because they had these two thundering great Irish setters that just about knocked me over. Huge beasts. Made a big apartment seem small.’

Enzo let his eyes wander over the crime scene photographs once more. ‘Then that’s probably what did it.’

‘Did what?’ Raffin said.

‘Sparked the reaction.’

Martinot said, ‘But there hadn’t been dogs in Lambert’s apartment for over two months.’

Enzo shook his head. ‘Doesn’t matter. Both cats and dogs shed something called dander. The word has the same origin as dandruff. It’s a natural phenomenon in hairy animals. The outer layer of skin, the epidermis, is quite thin in dogs. It’s constantly renewing itself as layers of new cells push up to replace the old ones above. The process takes place every twenty-one days or so. The outer cells flake off into the environment as dander. People think it’s the animal’s hair that causes allergy. It’s not. It’s the dander.’

Raffin said, ‘Are you saying the killer had an allergic reaction to dogs that weren’t even there?’

‘Well, consider this. Epidermal turnover is more rapid in breeds that are prone to various forms of dry and oily seborrhea. Breeds like Cocker or Springer spaniels.’ He paused. ‘Or Irish setters. These dogs shed old skin every three or four days. So the previous occupants of Lambert’s apartment had dogs that were producing up to seven times the amount of dander most dogs produce. And there were two of them. That dander would have permeated the entire place, sparking possible allergic reaction in a sufferer even months after the dogs had gone.’

He handed the folder of photographs to Martinot. ‘Look at the place. Soft furniture, plush curtains. Thick-piled carpet, the worst repository of all for dander. It would be my guess, monsieur, that the killer had a severe allergy to dog dander. He maybe knew that his victim didn’t keep pets, so he went unsuspecting to an apartment that was just laden with the stuff. Symptoms would have started within minutes. Judging by the struggle, the ineffectual attempt to strangle his victim, the killer was probably under serious stress. Semi-incapacitated. Severe allergic reaction develops very fast. If it reaches anything like anaphylaxis, whole body reaction, it can be disabling, sometimes even fatal.’

He picked up the plastic bag with the pills. ‘The terfenadine wouldn’t have been particularly effective. He must have tried to get as many into himself as he could. But the best way of dealing with a reaction like that is getting away from the source of the allergen as quickly as possible. Which would explain his panic in getting out of the place, and why he left a trail of evidence in his wake. It’s even possible he might have required hospital treatment.’

‘Jesus!’ Martinot’s oath slipped out in a breath. He had a very vivid picture now of a scene he had been trying to piece together for almost two decades.

Raffin said, ‘So he had an allergic reaction, how does that help us?’

Enzo turned to him. ‘If Monsieur Martinot can get us a Wood’s Lamp, I’ll show you.’

Martinot cocked an eyebrow. ‘With all due respect, monsieur, what the hell’s a Wood’s Lamp?’

‘It’s a lamp that gives off an ultraviolet light. Standard kit for a forensic scientist. But any ultraviolet lamp will do.’

***

It took Martinot more than an hour to procure an ultraviolet lamp and return to meet up with Enzo and Raffin once more at the
greffe
.

‘I don’t know if it’s a Wood’s Lamp,’ he said, but it gives off ultraviolet light.’ It was around nine inches long and three inches wide in a black casing, most of which was to contain a battery to power the tubular bulb.

‘It’ll do perfectly.’ Enzo handed it back to Martinot and removed Lambert’s patterned blue and red woollen crewneck sweater from its paper parcel, spreading it carefully on the table top. ‘Ultra violet,’ he said, ‘otherwise known as blacklight. Or blacklight blue, in the trade, to distinguish it from those bug zapping lamps. It was delivered as a light source in a lamp more than a century ago by a man called Robert W. Wood. First used in the diagnosis of infective and pigmentary dermatoses. But more recently as a diagnostic tool for certain skin cancers.’

He took back the lamp from Martinot. ‘Most often employed in forensic science to detect the presence of semen on the skin and clothing of rape victims.’ He turned to Raffin. ‘Would you turn out the light, please, Roger?’

The windowless room was plunged into absolute darkness. Enzo took a deep breath. He was about to shine a light into the past. A blacklight to illuminate a brutal killer. He pressed a switch, and the lamp flickered several times before casting its eerie light around the room. He held it six inches above the fabric of Lambert’s sweater and made a slow pass over it. All three men could see quite clearly the glow of fluorescent silver across the chest and neck, woven into the yarn, it seemed, in random patches and trails.

Enzo said, ‘You can turn on the light now.’

They all blinked in the sudden glare of harsh electric light, and Enzo turned off the ultraviolet.

‘What the hell is that silver stuff?’ Raffin said.

‘Dried mucus. Saliva. Phlegm. Invisible to the naked eye. And the pathologist would never have thought to pass a Wood’s Lamp over the victim’s clothes.’ Enzo turned to Martinot. ‘This man came to Lambert’s apartment to murder him. But as you surmised, his plan went well agley. He succumbed to a severe allergic reaction brought on by dog dander from the apartment’s previous renters. His immune system went haywire, responding to the dander by producing vast quantities of Immunoglobin E, known as IgE. The IgE would have gathered very quickly on the mast cells lining his nose, throat, lungs, and gastrointestinal tract. The union of the IgE and the allergen would have been explosive, releasing a torrent of irritating chemicals, primarily histamine. The man would have been coughing and sneezing and choking as his throat closed up, his body using nose, mouth, and eyes to try to expel the histamine like an aerosol. Even as he fought to see and murder his victim through streaming eyes, he must have been spraying him with mucus and saliva. Clear, wet liquid that would have dried to invisibility in minutes.’

Enzo turned back to the sweater. ‘It couldn’t be seen, but it was there, expelled at great velocity, and almost certainly rich in white blood cells. Particularly the eosinophils involved in allergic reactions. Even better, there may be a stray sloughed nose hair or two, along with respiratory epithelial cells. Which means there’s a better than even chance we’ll be able to recover DNA.’