He sipped his drink, thinking what if
she
was still here for Christmas? What would she want for Christmas?
‘A way home is what she wants, Rochat, a way home.’
‘Who?’
‘The angel.’
‘What angel?’
‘The angel who’s lost and hiding in the cathedral because … because …’
Rochat stopped talking and looked up. Monsieur Dufaux was at the table with a picnic basket covered with a red chequered cloth in his hands. He smiled at Rochat.
‘Tell you what, Marc. You go right ahead and find that angel a way home. Too many illegal foreigners in Switzerland as it is.’
The phone rang again. Harper ignored it. His desk was now covered with scraps of paper. Each scrap filled with his own scribbled notes. The phone stopped ringing, Harper turned back to the computer screen.
Chapter seven, verse one.
It happened after the sons of men had multiplied in those days, that Daughters were born to them, elegant and beautiful. And when the Angels(3), the sons of heaven, beheld them, they became enamoured of them, saying to each other, Come, let us select for ourselves from the progeny of men, and let us beget children.
Harper scrolled down to the references, number 3: ‘Aramaic text reads Watchers here’. He scrolled down a few more lines.
And the women conceiving brought forth giants, Whose stature was each three hundred cubits. These devoured all which the labour of men produced; until it became impossible to feed them.
‘So what the hell is a bloody cubit?’
He kept reading.
The Angels taught man how to make weapons, armour, jewellery and other things that which were not known before. Moreover Azazel taught men to make swords, knives, shields, breastplates, the fabrication of mirrors, and the workmanship of bracelets and ornaments, the use of paint, the beautifying of the eyebrows, the use of stones of every valuable and select kind, and all sorts of dyes, so that the world became altered … thus has the whole world been filled with blood and inequity.
The screen blipped, a message flashed on the screen.
Mr Harper, Inspector Gobet asks as you are too busy to answer the telephone, could you then be good enough to open the door. Thank you.
‘You can’t be serious.’
Knockknockknock
.
A not-so-gentle rapping at the chamber door that could only be from the knuckles of an iron fist. Harper turned in his chair, stared at the door.
‘Just a second.’
He tossed off the robe, threw on his clothes, opened the door. The cop in the cashmere coat was standing in the hall, the waitress with the gun behind him. Her gun drawn, her finger inside the trigger guard, the barrel pointed at Harper’s head. Harper was careful not to move, remembering from somewhere there’s no dodging a bullet at point-blank range.
‘Good morning, Inspector.’
‘Good afternoon, Mr Harper.’
Harper looked at his watch: two forty.
‘I miss check-out time?’
‘Considerably. But as you are not checking out as yet, let’s not worry about it. May I come in?’
‘Room’s a mess, I’m afraid. Seems I’m the maid and I’m rather bad at it.’
Inspector Gobet turned to the waitress with the gun.
‘Thank you, Officer Jannsen. He appears to be in one piece. Please resume your post, advise the rest of the team of the situation.’
‘Sir.’
The Inspector stepped into the room.
‘I hope you’re comfortable. I’m afraid the Lausanne Palace is one star above our expense guidelines.’
‘Thought it might be because this place is a Swiss copper’s safe house.’
‘That too. Though the management doesn’t advertise it in the brochure.’
‘May not be the Palace, but there’s a free minibar and a nice view of those big rocks across the lake. What else does a man need in a prison?’
The Inspector looked about the room. Harper saw the Inspector’s nose turn up at the general lack of neatness.
‘Any news, Inspector?’
‘One or two things. Firstly, I took lunch with the Doctor. I told him you were involved in a bit of research for me. He was kind enough to pass on a telephone message from the IOC switchboard.’
‘A message?’
‘Received at twelve thirty-five today. A woman called for you regarding a lost cigarette case, asking if you might return it. There was no name or return number. I assume you know her.’
Harper could sense the Inspector’s sees-all, knows-all eyes.
‘Someone I met in a bar, but she’s got the wrong man.’
‘The wrong man?’
‘I don’t have it.’
‘Have what?’
‘Her cigarette case.’
‘I see.’
‘But thanks for being concerned about my social life. Or were you just profiling the manner of my thinking again?’
‘Bit of both, in truth.’ The Inspector turned, regarded the view from the windows. ‘Yes, an excellent view of Le Massif.’
‘The what?’
‘Le Massif des Mémises, Mr Harper, those big rocks across the lake.’
The Inspector took the chair at the desk, his eyes scanning the almost finished sandwich plate with the LP’s logo, the empty bottles of beer and the ashtray overflowing with butts. All set amid scattered notes and Yuriev’s casino photos.
‘You’ve been busy, I see.’
‘A little.’ Harper nodded towards the computer. ‘By the way, nice trick with the laptop, Inspector.’
‘I hope it wasn’t too much of an intrusion.’
‘I take it your lads in the kitchen have been monitoring what I’m doing?’
‘Of course. But as I’m here, why don’t you tell me what it is you have been up to with our computer. Save me reading the report on your excellent detective work.’
‘Ever heard of the Book of Enoch, Inspector?’
‘Should I have heard about it?’
Harper walked to the desk and picked up his smokes and lit one up.
‘It was a book that ended up getting chucked from the Bible, part of what’s called the Apocrypha. I downloaded it from the net, read through it twice. Load of mystical gibberish about angels and men. Seems, in the beginning, angels were called Watchers. Sent here by God to protect the creation, guide mankind. First wave of Watchers went stir crazy and fell for the women of Earth in a big way. They took the form of men and set out to create their own race of half-breeds to rule the Earth.’
‘Half-breeds, you say?’
‘Not me, Enoch.’
The Inspector didn’t appreciate the jibe. Harper dug through the scraps of paper on the desk.
‘Bottom line, all evil in the world comes from a pack of bad guy angels and their half-breeds.’
‘And what, may I ask, does any of this have to do with the late Alexander Yuriev, or the hapless Albanian night clerk for that matter?’
Harper looked the Inspector in the eyes, feeling they had a way of beating lesser beings into their place.
‘The note Yuriev left in the cathedral, the line about evil spirits walking the earth, it’s from the Book of Enoch. A local biblical scholar confirmed it. Bit of a loon who talks in morphine riddles, but he did get me thinking.’
‘About?’
‘Evil spirits.’ Harper picked up the last shots of Yuriev leaving the casino. ‘You told me to keep these pictures, look at them again.’
‘Standard procedure in police work, Mr Harper. New eyes see new things.’
‘Or things that aren’t there, maybe.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Look at the carpet in front of Yuriev. There’s more than one shadow on the carpet, I count three. The man isn’t stumbling, he’s being dragged.’
The Inspector didn’t bother to look.
‘Are you suggesting Yuriev was forcibly removed from Le Casino Barrière by two “bad-guy angels” from the Book of Enoch, as it were?’
‘I’m suggesting someone did a lousy job of doctoring these photos. The rest was – what’d you call it on the drive from Montreux?’
‘Whimsy, shooting the breeze.’
‘That’s it.’
Harper dropped the photos in the Inspector’s lap. The Inspector tapped the photos into even corners, laid them atop Harper’s notes.
‘For the moment, Mr Harper, let’s put aside pictures of things that aren’t there and consider all the things that are.’
Harper walked back to the bed, sat down.
‘Somehow, I knew this wasn’t a social call.’
‘Indeed not.’
The Inspector slid his hand into his cashmere coat, pulled out a DVD case and removed a disc from it. He tossed the empty case across the room. It landed perfectly in Harper’s lap. Black scribble on the cover, ‘
Confidentiel pour Inspecteur Gobet
’. Harper picked it up.
‘I’ll bite, what is it?’
The Inspector looked at the sandwich plate on the desk. He took the last of the chips, popped it in his mouth.
‘Let’s just say, it’s a good thing we’ve both had our lunch.’
twenty-four
The Inspector slid the disc in the laptop. The machine whirred, grainy video appeared on the screen.
POV shot moving down a hall and into a sitting room of Louis XIV furniture, fine paintings and tapestries on the walls. Bay windows looking out to a lakeside harbour. A fountain shooting up from the lake, 150 metres into the sky.
‘These pictures were taken in a flat in Geneva’s Cologny district, famous for its view of the Jet d’Eau you see just there.’
The camera steadied before a gilded mirror. Something reflected in the glass. Out of focus, red, marble-streaked. The camera panned and zoomed in … a headless body hanging by the ankles in the centre of the sitting room, flesh peeled away. Harper felt sick to his stomach, as if last night’s hangover was coming back for more.
‘Oh, Christ.’
The Inspector pointed to the horrid image on screen.
‘The victim is a female, fifty-eight years of age. The attending coroner happens to be a lecturer on medieval torture at the University in Geneva. He believes the killers to be well practised in the art of flaying a victim alive. Note the tiny patches of flesh left at major pulse points, where arteries and veins run closest to the skin. As long as they’re not ruptured, a master of the craft can keep his victim alive through the entire process. According to the coroner, this is the object of the art.’
‘The art?’
‘The art of inflicting pain for as long as possible.’
‘Seems they got their pound of flesh’s worth.’
‘Eight to ten actually.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Human skin is the largest organ of the human body, covering an area of some seven metres squared. Thus, the weight of the woman’s flesh is estimated at eight to ten pounds.’
‘Your attending coroner knows his art, does he?’
‘And more. Indications are the victim engaged in repeated sexual activity during the procedure.’
‘They raped her?’
‘Subcutaneous tissue at the wrists and ankles shows no sign of forced restraint, bodily orifices show no sign of violent entry. The coroner has reason to think she was stimulated to orgasm several times before death occurred, and most probably beheaded at such a moment.’
‘She must’ve been drugged.’
‘Tox-screen turned up negative, but we suspect the use of an un-registered drug with severe psychotropic effects.’
Harper looked at the Inspector.
Severe psychotropic effects
… ‘Those words are from the IOC report on Yuriev’s formula.’
The Inspector ignored Harper’s comment.
‘As in previous cases, we’ve not found any evidentiary DNA, other than that of the victim. She was discovered early this morning by her maid. Body temperature suggests she died in the early hours of this morning.’
‘Who was she?’
‘Simone Badeaux, a French national living in Switzerland.’
‘I need a drink, Inspector. You?’
‘Sparkling water, please.’
Harper went to the minibar, grabbed a bottle of water and the last beer.
‘So who was Madame Badeaux?’
‘One of Europe’s legendary courtesans. She ran an exclusive escort agency out of Paris called the Two Hundred Club, with prostitutes priced at thousands of euros per night. She was connected to and protected by certain personages.’
‘Certain personages?’
‘Powerful and rich men from around the world with strong ties to the European economy. Politicians, businessmen, one or two Arab princes. All very discreet. Joke around Interpol was if Madame Badeaux’s client list was revealed, half of Europe’s governments would collapse and l’École Nationale d’Administration in Paris would be shut down. She took up residency in Switzerland seven years ago for tax reasons. And while maintaining her office in Paris, she became a model citizen of le canton de Genève.’
Harper glanced at the screen.
‘Obviously. So what’s her connection to the killers?’
The Inspector opened his cigarette case, offered one of his flash fags. Harper handed the Inspector a bottle of water in return. Harper lit up, cracked open his beer, waited for an answer, while the Inspector lit his own smoke.
‘I asked my counterpart in Paris to pop round to the offices of the Two Hundred Club for a look, see what he could find.’
‘And?’
‘An empty tenement off Rue Saint-Denis. Nothing but a few dead rats and a telephone on the floor. Not in the sort of place suggesting Madame Badeaux was a woman in possession of several numbered accounts holding in excess of forty million euros. Cash deposits made over the last ten years, to a private bank in Geneva.’
‘The woman was thrifty.’
‘And shrewd. There’s no paper trail of a Two Hundred Club in any French Government office. It appears Madame Badeaux conducted business exclusively by way of telephone and computer.’
‘Easy enough kit to crack.’