Wolfnight, p.29
Wolfnight, page 29
“We’ll be drowned in rubbish anyhow.”
“Correct, the computer can’t digest stuff like that and every cross-eyed loony in Paris will be sending us their version of Swedish blondes. We put up a large-screen transparency thing, I’ll get the cranial X-rays from Pathology, I’m going round there anyhow, and I want Liliane to set up a team for comparing every single one we get. Looking ahead, I want a national television flash for the midday news and the evening one too. Those buggers will change the wording but let’s get it as fool proof as makes no matter. Let’s see. The national police make the following appeal to the public. A girl has been assassinated in conditions of such brutality as to make her face unrecognisable. She was twenty, tall, well built, and had long fair hair and noticeably fine white teeth. Her nationality and origins are unknown. Will anybody who has been in the company of such a person or who thinks he may have seen her please lose no time in reporting the facts to the nearest police station. And that of course on our computer for every gendarmerie post: air-sea-land frontier control for what use that is—but blanket. She may have been hitch-hiking.”
“They’re not going to like it.”
“Neither will Richard like it and he’s got to approve it and I’m going to see he does.”
Monsieur Richard, however, only said “As long as I don’t have to go on television. Has Interpol no tall blondes?—astonish me.”
“Don’t be ridiculous—trillions of them in every imaginable guise from photomat miniatures to soft porn in blurred focus and Exquisite Pastel Tints. Liliane is snowed under.”
“Then why not eliminate them first? Who knows, you might even get a positive.”
“Waste time and the fish goes stale. What’s the chance on an Interpol signal—hundred to one against? How many girls are floating about the country in August and haven’t written home for six weeks—if they’ve got a home? If we get a corpse, floater or whatever, decayed beyond recognition, how old is it? Six months or so? Whereas this isn’t more than forty-eight hours old right now. Friends or acquaintances may be still in the district.” Richard nodded, accepting this reasoning.
Professor Deutz had just finished dictating to his secretary (who instead of being the expected elderly female of forbidding aspect was a highly pleasant-looking young girl) all about the egg-laying cycle of the bluebottle fly.
“Here’s another,” he said without animosity, when Castang entered: the girl got the giggles but gathered up her pad and went off to the typewriter.
“I got the impression you’d something more interesting than maggots for me,” said Castang.
“I have indeed. You aren’t interrogating anyone yet though?”
“Good god, we haven’t even an identity for her yet—you didn’t see the midday news?”
“I never look at television, except of course when it’s Commander Cousteau.”
“Politicians being pathological specimens and you’ve enough of those. Sport of course the same.”
“Stop fooling about then. So now we’re quite well equipped. We’ve got beyond the sink in the corner and the chipped enamel basin. We’ve good lighting, and we’ve an expensive Japanese camera with several lenses. So have you, you’ll say. I’ve nothing against your IJ photographer—we aren’t looking for the same things. Annie, where are those photos; you didn’t put them away? Here we are. This is her buttock.”
“Recognisable, if barely.”
“Yes, it’s supermarket butchery. Now since all the soft tissues of the flesh areas were extensively nibbled, your photographer quite naturally assumed all the mutilations were due to the same cause. Whereas the analogy of a roast being made ready for the oven—a leg of missionary, say—caught my eye.”
Castang was used to the old boy’s robust view of pathology. Live surrounded by cancers, and you learn to see their comic side. Criminal-brigade cops, and especially the anti-gang brigade, themselves bandits to a man, had a violent sense of humour. Why else are so many medical students rugby-players?
“There’s something hairy about missionary,” he objected,—“smells of old goats. Roast haunch of blonde looks better on the menu.”
“Now you’re getting somewhere,” turning the photo around and clicking the magnifier up to ten-power, “and give me your opinion now on this.” At first it looked like the Gobi desert after a sandstorm. Large parallel ridges in sharp angular planes.
“A knife,” he said triumphantly.
“Right,” said Deutz. “Watch a really skilled butcher slicing ham and it looks perfectly even. But when an amateur like you or I goes to carve a leg of lamb—your knife is shorter and less sharp. Your pressure on the downstroke is heavier, and each upstroke alters the angle and direction a wee bit. Bitemarks, no matter what the animal, never look like this. Whether you seize or tear, or whether you have the large sharp incisors that scythe away—here, look at these under the high power. You’ve a cannibal, my boy; you’re in psychopathology.”
“He ate her?” asked Castang. Disbelievingly wasn’t quite the word: what other possibilities are there?
“He didn’t want her skin for a lampshade. Whether he had a nice sizzly barbecue is outside my province, but when you get him look for his knife, and I’ll fit it for you to these grooves.”
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About the Author
Nicolas Freeling (1927–2003) was a British crime novelist best known for the Van Der Valk detective series. After serving in the military and working as a hotel and restaurant cook throughout Europe, he began writing his first novel, Love in Amsterdam, while serving a three-week sentence for stealing food from the restaurant where he worked. Freeling’s novel King of the Rainy Country received the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Among his other literary awards are the Gold Dagger from the British Crime Writers Association and France’s Grand Prix de Roman Policier.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1982 by Nicolas Freeling
Cover design by Ian Koviak
ISBN: 978-1-5040-9031-5
This edition published in 2023 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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