Pryor, Mark - Hugo Marston 07 - The Sorbonne Affair by Pryor Mark

Author:Pryor, Mark [Pryor, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781633882621
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2017-07-20T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINETEEN

At any crime scene, Hugo liked to get a wide-angled look first, if at all possible. In houses that wasn’t always an option, but outside, like at this crime scene, it was easier and gave him a broad picture of what the killer saw, and where he might have gone to. For that reason, Hugo walked down from the busy road beside the Seine to the wide walkway that carried foot and bicycle traffic. He stopped short of the three policemen blocking access to the crime scene and spent a minute looking at it from afar, gazing around him.

Silva’s body sat in the shade of Pont de Sully, on the walkway but tucked underneath the cast-iron arch that stretched directly ahead of him, out across the River Seine. The bridge connected the Left Bank with the Right, running across the southeastern tip of Île Saint-Louis, offering tourists a view of Notre Dame and giving Silva a canopy from the elements. His back was to the stone wall, his head slumped forward and his legs stretching toward the river twenty feet away. Up above him, orange nets sprang out sideways from the side of the bridge, on top of which workers had temporarily halted renovations, their curious faces peering down at the collection of police below.

Hugo looked up at the bridge and made his way back up the stairs toward it. He stood with the workers and gave himself another wide-angled look, a different perspective of the same scene. After a minute he saw the medical examiner, Doctor David Sprengelmeyer, trot down from the street to the walkway beside the river, and then head toward the crime scene that lay beneath them, out of view. Hugo took one more look from above and then made his way back down to the walkway himself, waiting with the policemen until Lerens waved him through.

“This area was cordoned off to pedestrians,” she said, pointing to the “DO NOT CROSS” construction tape stretching across the sidewalk under the bridge.

“So no tourists coming and going, like they usually are.”

“Exactement.”

“Who found him?”

“One of the workers. They’re not supposed to smoke on the job, so he came down here to be out of sight.”

“Needed a cigarette after seeing that, I’d bet,” Hugo said. “How did the poor guy die?”

“Shot. Once in the chest.”

“While he was sitting there, or did he fall into that position?”

“Not sure yet, I’m hoping Sprengelmeyer can enlighten us.”

“How about the gun?”

“No sign of it, so definitely not suicide.”

The setting of the bridge, the river, the missing gun, and even the aspiring writer himself . . . it all called to mind a story crafted by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Hugo smiled grimly. “Remember our conversation earlier, about jumping to conclusions?”

“I think it was about making assumptions, but perhaps it’s the same thing. What are you thinking?”

Hugo remembered the conversation he had with Silva the first time they met, remembered, too, the death of Claudia’s father and the way he’d emulated a trick pulled by a character in a Sherlock Holmes story.

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