The carriage stopped and Bourdeau got out to speak to some labourers who had approached them, intrigued by their arrival. On a nearby hill a lone horseman watched them from near a great oak tree, whose branches were heavy with a multitude of crows. Nicolas noted the fact without dwelling on it and helped the old woman down. Her hand was clammy and feverish; she could hardly stand and seemed terror-stricken.
‘My God, I can’t …’
‘Come, be brave, Madame. We are with you. You have nothing to fear. Show us the place where you hid.’
‘I recognise nothing with all this snow, good Monsieur.’
The sky was clear but the cold here was keener than in Paris. The snow crackled underfoot. They edged their way forward and eventually came upon some shapeless heaps, from which emerged hooves covered in frost. Bourdeau questioned one of the knackers.
‘How long have these carcasses been here?’
‘Four days, at least. With Carnival we haven’t worked Saturday or Sunday. In any case the frost has set in in the meantime. Now we’ll have to wait for the thaw to be able to handle the dead meat.’
Old Émilie held out her hand and pointed to one of the piles. Bourdeau swept away the snow covering it and revealed the body of a horse. One of its thighs had been cut into.
‘Is it that one? Incidentally, what did you do with your trencher?’
‘I can’t remember.’
Bourdeau continued to work away, kneeling on the ground. A glint of blue flashed in the snow. He lifted up a butcher’s cleaver.
‘Would that be your implement by any chance?’
She grabbed it and held it tight against her as if it were something precious.
‘Yes, yes, that’s my knife sure enough.’
Bourdeau had to wrest it from her.
‘I can’t return it to you quite yet.’
Nicolas intervened.
‘Don’t fret. You’ll get it back. Just tell me where you were watching from.’
This calm voice reassured her. Automatically, she bent to the ground and huddled up to the carcass, peering towards the corner of a brick building situated a few yards away.
‘It’s over there,’ Nicolas said in a hushed voice, helping her to her feet and dusting the snow off her. ‘Don’t be afraid. The inspector and I will go on our own. Stay here and wait for us.’
They soon came upon several heaps covered with snow. Nicolas stopped, thought for a moment and then asked Bourdeau to go and find an implement to clear away the snow. It was quite obvious that these were not animal carcasses. While he was waiting he poked around in one of the piles. His fingers touched something hard, broken into several pieces, like the teeth of a giant rake. He forced himself to grip it with both hands and pulled hard. A heavy object came away from the frozen ground, and to his horror he saw rising up before him a lump of flesh that he immediately recognised as the remains of a human thorax. By the time Bourdeau returned with a broom, Nicolas, pale as a ghost, was vigorously rubbing his hands with snow.
A glance was enough for the inspector to grasp what the young man was feeling. Without exchanging a word they carefully cleared the ground all around, revealing a quantity of human remains mixed in with straw, and bones that were almost totally bare except for a few frozen and blackened scraps of clothing.
They placed the remains alongside each other and little by little reconstructed what had been a body. The state of the skeleton with its coating of snow showed well enough how savagely the scavenging rats and beasts of prey had attacked it. One didn’t have to be a great anatomist to notice that many bones were missing, but the head was there, its jaw fractured. Near the spot where Nicolas had made his first discovery they found some clothes, a leather doublet and a blackish, torn shirt which appeared to be blood-soaked.
Their last find confirmed Nicolas’s fears. Lardin’s cudgel was revealed, with its strange sculpted designs on the silver pommel and the snake-like creature curled around the stick. The inspector nodded; he, too, had understood. Other clues followed: a pair of grey calamanco breeches, some stockings, sticky with a black substance, and two shoes whose buckles had disappeared. Nicolas decided to add these items to everything else they had found, and to examine them in more detail later. He gave Bourdeau the task of finding something suitable in which they could carry away their macabre harvest. The inspector soon came back with an old wicker trunk bought from a knacker who had kept his apron and tools in it. They quickly filled it up, carefully wrapping the bones in the clothes.
Meanwhile Nicolas seemed to be searching for something else and was ferreting around, crouching, with his nose to the ground. Suddenly he asked Bourdeau to give him a piece of paper and he began to trace some small craters that pockmarked the ground. They had left their impression in the clayey soil before it had been covered up by snow and hardened by frost. Nicolas made no particular comment. He did not wish to pass on the fruits of his reflections, even to Bourdeau. It was not that Nicolas mistrusted him but he was quite happy to lend a certain air of mystery to a turn of events that put the inspector at a disadvantage. He did not enjoy having to be so cautious but he felt it advisable so long as he himself was unclear about things and had not found a satisfactory explanation for some of his own observations.
He responded to his companion’s quizzical expression with a toss of the head and a sceptical look. They carried the trunk away. They had forgotten about old Émilie who was watching them with a dazed expression and recoiled as they walked by. Nicolas grabbed her by the arm as they went past and took her back to the carriage. She was crying quietly and her tears made her make-up run, disfiguring her face so much that Nicolas took out his handkerchief and with infinite gentleness wiped away the black and red streaks that were streaming down her cheeks.
The return journey was gloomy. Nicolas remained silent, deep in thought. Night was falling by the time they went through the toll-gate. Nicolas suddenly ordered the coachman to drive into an adjacent street and to extinguish the lantern. As he jumped down he had just enough time to glimpse a horseman galloping along the main street; it was the same man who had been watching them in the knacker’s yard.
At the Châtelet Nicolas had the trunk containing the presumed remains of the Commissioner put away for safe keeping in the Basse-Geôle. He also decided to keep old Émilie in his care so that he could question her again and he paid for her to be put in a cell with special privileges, and served a hot meal. He then withdrew to the duty room to write up a brief report for Monsieur de Sartine recounting his visit to Descart and the journey to Montfaucon, but omitting the conversation with Semacgus. His conclusion, subject to further checks that he planned to carry out, stated that the remains discovered could well be those of Guillaume Lardin.
Notes – CHAPTER IV
1. The Jansenists represented Christ with arms unopened on the Cross.
2. The medical service for the French navy was founded in 1689 and was largely made up of surgeons. Doctors, holders of degrees in medicine, were trained in the universities whereas navy surgeons were trained in schools of surgery in Rochefort, Toulon and Brest. Throughout the eighteenth century doctors attempted to prevent surgeons from practising medicine or even tending the sick.
3.