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attended a performance of the Grand
Guignol.”
    Undeterred, the Countess rang
the bell for Mahmoud. What they needed was more coffee and some
patisseries. Men were always more agreeable when their stomachs
were full. They had reached a stalemate early and needed to go back
to the beginning. Inspector de Guise was looking pale and tired; no
doubt the murders were keeping him up at night. What little sleep
he was snatching was probably being circumvented by the next murder
and the one after that. Dark circles underscoring the nut-brown
eyes were making the hazelnuts look like something even the
squirrels would reject. His unhealthy skin tone had all the warmth
of bowl of yesterday’s kasha. She wondered if he’d been skipping
meals and if he’d had any breakfast.
    She subpoena’ed him with a
winning smile. “If you wouldn’t mind indulging me, Inspector,” she
said when the coffee had been dispensed and he had consumed three
freshly baked croissants and two brioches, “I would like you to
describe all four murders in detail starting with the first.”
    Carefully, he replaced his
delicate demitasse cup on the tray table, wiped the corners of his
mouth with a linen napkin and made himself comfortable for the
first time since being ushered into the salon that overlooked busy
rue Bonaparte.
    It was not a grand room, stiff
with French formality; more like a Byzantine closet full of exotic
little treasures. The step-aunt had clearly possessed eclectic
taste and had created an orientalist trompe l’oeil from her many
travels to far-flung destinations. There was a collection of
jewelled scarabs from Egypt on a round table by the window, a bust
of Herodotus in the corner, another of Caligula with his face to
the wall like a naughty boy in disgrace, a row of phallic ornaments
on the carved mantelpiece surmounted by an octagonal Venetian
mirror, and myriad Eastern Orthodox ikons depicting various saints
and several versions of the Virgin Mary – oddly, the saints all
looked alike and the Virgins all looked different; the many looked
like one and the One looked like many.
    They covered the wall behind
him and he had the uneasy feeling they were looking over his
shoulder. He could see them reflected in the Venetian glass and was
tempted to throw some salt over his shoulder. But should he throw
it over his left or his right? Was it a wall of evil eyes or an
army of guardian angels?

Chapter 3 - Kisses in the
Night
     
    “The first murder occurred
almost a month ago – the third day of November. A body was found
hanging from a lamp-post in the rue des Abbesses. Not hanging by
the neck, but strung up as if it was a marionette, the underarms
bound with string, the sort of string used for binding large
packages that one wishes to send through the post, quite common,
able to be purchased almost everywhere. The corpse looked bizarre
because the lips had been smeared with red lipstick and there were
red dots on the cheeks, the sort that clowns paint on their faces,
achieved using the same red lipstick. It was doubly bizarre because
the victim was an elderly man.”
    “That comical contrivance
appears to be related to a circus rather than a theatre of horror,”
commented Dr Watson.
    “Yes,” agreed the inspector,
“except the victim’s hands had been cut off.”
    “Oh,” muttered the doctor.
“Nothing comedic about that, then.”
    “No,” agreed the inspector
blandly, affecting an immobile expression to counter the
melodramatic fact. “The hands had been chopped off most likely
using a small hatchet after the victim had been stabbed through the
heart with a round spike of some sort. There was a pool of blood in
a nearby alleyway but hardly any under the lamp-post. The missing
hands were never found though we searched high and low. The dead
body did not immediately strike us as looking like a marionette –
merely a bizarre method of displaying a corpse.”
    “The missing hands hint at some
sort of medieval retribution,”