Read Online The First Fingerprint by Xavier-Marie Bonnot - Free Book Online

just in American cop shows … Under French law there’s no such thing as a search warrant. All I need is one or two witnesses, such as you. Normally the person living at the address should be present, but I have to admit that I lied to you earlier. Christine Autran was in fact found yesterday.”
    â€œShe’s dead, isn’t she?”
    De Palma lowered his head.
    â€œI just knew it. My God. The poor little thing.”
    Professor Autran’s flat was identical to Yvonne Barbier’s. It measured about 150 square meters and was laid out around a large, central corridor, which led into vast rooms with high ceilings decorated with fine plaster moldings. The prehistorian had painted the walls white and, here and there, placed a few bits of cheap, chipboard furniture.
    All the shutters were closed. The sun filtered in, weak and discreet between the slats and through the net curtains. The policeman looked for the nearest light switch. Pulling on a pair of gloves, he told Yvonne not to touch anything and to stay in the hall. He was hoping to find the beginnings of an explanation for this affair.
    Two of the rooms were crowded with books and files stacked up on red, metal shelves. It was almost impossible to cross the floor. In the salon, a plain showcase contained some pieces of cut flint. Christine Autran had hung a few black-and-white photographs on the walls. In one picture, taken in one of the creeks, she was smiling at the photographer, her hair disheveled by the wind. In another she was grimacing as she kissed the mouth of a human skull with no lower jaw, presumably a find from a dig. Above the black marble mantelpiece was a photograph of her posing in front of a cave painting of a gentle-eyed bison.
    The salon, like the rest of the flat, was furnished without taste. In the kitchen, a pile of dirty washing-up had dried out in the sink; tomato sauce had crystallized on a plate.
    The dark blue bathroom did not tell the Baron much either, except that Christine Autran was not some flirt who spent hours making herself up before going to work. A few hardened lipsticks lay in a pile above the basin beside a three-quarters-full bottle of Chanel Number 19, a shabby make-up bag and a hard brush full of brown hairs. The lecturer had not left on a long journey.
    In her study, the answering machine showed that there were no messages. He picked up the receiver to listen to the dialing tone. Thephone still worked. He jotted down all these details in large letters in his exercise book.
    He opened the desk drawers slowly, one by one: there was little of interest in them either, apart from piles of notes which meant nothing to him for the moment. He would have to go through all this mess over the next week. It would take quite some time. He looked through the rest of the study without any apparent results. A few files had been placed on the floor. One of them had been labeled with a large, red felt-pen: “Le Guen, various photos.” He opened it and discovered a stack of snapshots; positive and negative hands, paintings of animals and carvings. One of the hands looked like the picture the gendarmes had found beside Hélène Weill’s body. De Palma had been sent a series of photographs of it.
    He picked up a second file entitled ‘Le Guen, topology,’ containing a series of topological studies which were totally incomprehensible to him. Blue blotches, some light, others darker, were spread out over a brown background which also showed darker zones. Some captions had been added in a fine, energetic hand. He glanced quickly at a few of them: ‘horse section,’ ‘boulevard of sea spiders’, ‘the three penguins’, ‘mural of black hands’ …
    A third file was marked ‘Le Guen, September 2000.’ Inside it were two almost identical photographs, of poor quality compared with those in the other files, showing a painting of an animal which looked rather like a