The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [7]
“Troublemakers are not welcome in France. Physicians are no exception. Deportation is a simple matter,” Barras said flatly.
Deportation! God no! Osborn thought. Please, not now! Not after so many years! Not after finally seeing him! Knowing he’s alive and where! “I’m sorry,” he said, covering his horror. “Very sorry. . . . I was upset, that’s all. Please believe that because it’s true.”
Barras studied him. “How much longer had you planned to stay in France?”
“Five days,” Osborn said. “To see Paris. . . .“
Barras hesitated, then reached into his coat pocket and took out Osborn’s passport. “Your passport, Doctor. When you are ready to leave, see me and I’ll return it.”
Osborn looked from Barras to Maitrot. That was their way of taking care of it. No deportation, no arrest, but keeping tabs on him just the same and making sure he knew it.
“It’s late,” Maitrot said, standing. “Au revoir, Doctor Osborn.”
It was eleven twenty-five when Osborn left the police station. The rain had stopped and a bright moon hung over the city. He started to wave at a cab, then decided to walk back to his hotel. Walk and think about what to do next about the man who was no longer a childhood memory but a living creature, here, somewhere within the sweep of Paris. With patience, he was a man who could be found. And questioned. And then destroyed.
4
* * *
London.
THE SAME bright moon illuminated an alley just off Charging Cross Road in the theater district. The passageway was L-shaped and narrow and sealed off at both ends by crime scene tape. Passersby peered in from either end trying to see past the uniformed police, to get some idea of what was going on, of what had happened.
The faces in the leering crowd were not what had McVey’s attention. It was another face, that of a white male in his early to mid-twenties with the eyeballs bulging grotesquely from their sockets. It had been discovered in a trash bin by a theater custodian emptying cartons after the closing of a show. Ordinarily Metropolitan homicide detectives would have worked it, but this was different. Superintendent Jamison called Commander Ian Noble of Special Branch at home, and Noble, in turn, had phoned McVey’s hotel to wake him from a restless sleep.
It wasn’t just the face, it was the head to which it was attached that had been the primary source of the Metropolitan detectives’ interest. First, because there was no body to go with it. And second, because the head appeared to have been surgically removed from the rest. Where the “rest” was anybody’s guess, but the burden of what was left now belonged to McVey.
What was all too clear, as he watched scenes-of-crime officers carefully lift the head from the trash bin and set it into a clear plastic bag and then place it into a box for transportation, was that Superintendent Jamison’s detectives had been right: the removal had been done by a professional. If not by a surgeon, at least by someone with a surgically sharp instrument and a sound knowledge of Gray’s Anatomy.
To wit: at the base of the neck where it meets the clavicle or collar bone is the juncture of the trachea/esophagus leading to the lungs and stomach and the inferior constrictor muscle (which) arises from the sides of the cricoid and thyroid cartilages. . . .
Which was precisely where the head had been severed from the rest of the body and neither McVey nor Commander Noble needed an authority to confirm it. What they did need, however, was someone to tell them if the head had been removed before or after death. And if the latter, to ascertain the cause of death.
To perform a postmortem on a head is the same as autopsying an entire body except there is less of it.
Laboratory tests would take from twenty-four hours to three or four days. But McVey, Commander Noble and Dr. Evan Michaels, the young, baby-faced Home Office pathologist called from home by beeper to do the job, were of the same opinion. The head had been separated from the body subsequent to death and the cause of death was most probably the result of a lethal dose