Salvador Dali certainly found Perpignan station a turn-on. At 4.21pm on August 27 1965, he declared it the centre of the universe, alerted to its aura by a bright, shining light and a revelation in which "everything become overpoweringly evident". As if to confirm the vision, he later wrote: "My penis sprang to attention with joy and ecstasy."
In recognition of this brave, if indisputably barmy, attempt to propel a small, dozing Catalan town to cosmic fame - Dali, driving up to Paris from his native Spain, would often stop there to send his luggage ahead by train - the local authorities in Perpignan promptly named the square outside the station Place Salvador Dali. The surrealist master himself was to feature the building in future canvases, several of them filled with the bizarre, grotesque and sexually violent imagery that is a hallmark of his work. One painting titled The Railway Station at Perpignan includes a depiction of a man preparing to sodomise a young woman.
All of which would probably be reduced to a mere footnote in the art history books by now were it not for the fact that, in the past five years, three young women have gone missing in Perpignan, and in a very macabre fashion. One, Tatiana Andujar, aged 17, took a train into town and was never seen again. The horribly mutilated bodies of the other two - Mokhtaria Chaib, 19, and Marie-Hélène Gonzalez, 22 - were found near the station.
Short of other clues, police are wondering if they are not dealing with a serial killer inspired by the tortured visions of Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dali i Domenech, born May 11 1904, died January 23 1989. "It's a theory they've tested and are continuing to test," says Mohamed Iaouadan, a lawyer for the Chaib family. "I've seen the files, believe me. They've commissioned analytical reports from art experts on the significance of Dali paintings. They're looking for anything that could tie in with the killings, anything."
Dali's world, on display in an otherworldly museum in his hometown of Figueras, just over the Spanish border a few miles from Perpignan, is a weird one. The artist had a marked preference for masturbation over intercourse. His obsession with vaginas, says one biographer, stems from a profound "loathing of the female genitalia". He was, writes Ian Gibson in The Shameful Life of Salvador Dali, "an impotent outsider", desperate to join in his friends' sexual escapades but incapable of doing so.
Dislocated body parts, notably female breasts, began to appear in his work when the artist was in his early 20s. Later productions feature sprawling, limbless, decapitated bodies; in some, unattached vaginas and anuses fly across the canvas. In the grotesque 1934 The Spectre of Sex Appeal, a small boy stares up at a naked female body without a head and a hand, and with sacks replacing her breasts and womb.
That's the point. The naked body of Gonzalez, who worked in a butcher's shop at the seaside resort of Argelès-sur-Mer, a few miles south of Perpignan, was found on wasteland near the motorway to Barcelona in June 1998. She had been dead for 10 days. Her head and hands had been cut off. Her vagina had been neatly sliced out, and some of her internal organs had been removed and placed carefully in a cardboard box by her side.
Gonzalez was independent and bubbly, says her family's lawyer, Etienne Nicolau. She had come into Perpignan on June 16, on the 8.33pm train from Argelès. She had left the station, crossed in front of the Htel Paris-Barcelone, turned right into the Rue Courteline, lined with apartment blocks. Four hundred yards further on, she had passed the Café Figuère before plunging into a dodgy district of lock-up garages and disused workshops.
She was, Nicolau is sure, planning to hitch a ride to her parents' home in Toulouges, a small village just outside Perpignan. The route she took is one used by a lot of young people who arrive at the station and want a lift out of town. The favoured spot is the Avenue Julien Panchot, 20 minutes' walk from the station. That afternoon, she had told her parents she would be with them by 10pm.
For the Perpignan police, the killing was a grisly echo of another unsolved murder from December 1997. Five days before Christmas, Mokhtaria Chaib had spent the evening with a boyfriend in the Avenue Générale de Gaulle, 200 yards from the railway station. She left his apartment at 11pm, planning to walk back to her campus lodgings at the Cité Universitaire three miles away.
A sociology student of Algerian origin, Chaib had fought long and hard with her father and stepmother to lead a life free from the constraints of Islam. She had run away from home at 16, spent a year in a teenage hostel, but completed her baccalauréat exam successfully and enrolled at the university in September. She had worked that summer in a beach restaurant at Collioure, just down the coast, to fund her studies. She was a laugh, her friends say: the plaque they paid for on her tomb reads: "A funny lady."
Like Gonzalez, Chaib's route took her past the station, down the Rue Courteline, across the Avenue Julien Panchot, and on past a cemetery to the campus. Someone out walking their dog found her nude body the next morning. She had died from three stab wounds to the heart. Her breasts had been cut off and her uterus removed. Her anus, too, had been expertly sliced out. According to the police doctors, the whole operation could only have been done with a scalpel, and must have taken close to an hour.
After Chaib's murder, investigators made the link to Tatiana Andujar, a secondary school student who disappeared on the evening of September 24 1995. Another rebellious teen, Andujar had left home for two months that summer, sharing an apartment with friends and working as a waitress in the beach resort of Port Leucate. Back with her Spanish parents in the nearby village of Llupia for her last year at school, she was heading home after a weekend in Toulouse. She called her father to ask him to pick her up at Perpignan station when she arrived, at about 7.30pm. He couldn't leave home.
"So she says no problem, I'll hitch," says Nicolau, who also represents the Andujars. "And she leaves the station - she was seen there by two schoolfriends - and walks down Avenue Générale de Gaulle and turns into the Rue Courteline. And disappears, completely."
For a while, the police had a suspect who was almost too good to be true. Picked up in the wake of the Chaib murder, Andres Palomino-Barrios was an unemployed Peruvian-born doctor. A homosexual drifter and down-and-out eccentric, he had been kicked out of - or let go from - half a dozen hospitals in south-east France, and was banned from practising further. He had a police record, for illegal residence, trafficking in stolen passports and stealing hospital equipment: stethoscopes and surgical instruments. He lived 300 yards from where Chaib's body was found, little more than half a mile from the station. And, almost unbelievably, he was in training to become a butcher.
Palomino-Barrios was arrested, and placed under formal investigation for "murder and acts of barbarity". But there was not a shred of forensic evidence against him. Minute searches of his sordid apartment and minivan - which one witness saw him washing vigorously the morning after Chaib was killed - revealed nothing. No blood, no fingerprints, no semen, no hair, no DNA.
Police did turn up traces of blood on his clothes, but they proved to be from an animal - which was put down to his butcher's apprenticeship. And while the chief suspect was nearing the end of the six months he spent in Perpignan prison, Gonzalez was murdered, dismembered and partially disembowelled. The doctor was released.
Plenty of policemen in Perpignan, however, believe he is guilty of at least one murder. Plenty - there are 15 on the case, full-time, and they have so far interviewed 2,000 people - also believe that, if he is guilty, this pretty, pastel-coloured town with its terrace cafes, Catalan restaurants and winding medieval streets has not one but two sickos on the loose.
"Barrios is definitely the man for me," says one senior policeman, who asked not to be named. "But there could well be two or even three killers here. There's absolutely nothing to say that the last murder, the Gonzalez girl, wasn't done to throw us off the scent - by some guy who owed Barrios something."
The same investigator is, perhaps understandably, less forthcoming about the Dali angle. "Yes," he sighs, "we've looked at it. It's improbable, but this whole thing is so murky you have to look everywhere. At present we have nothing, sweet nothing. And some of those paintings show women with their heads off, their bowels removed, no genitals to be seen. They do . . . well, they do remind you."
Stare long enough at a particular strain of Dali painting and you can see almost anything you're looking for: so many twisted, butchered bodies; so many grotesque imaginings. The artist himself once said, famously, that the only difference between himself and a madman was that he was not mad.
"I'm not sure what I think," says Iaouadan, the Chaibs' lawyer. "Maybe it's madness, this Dali stuff. But killers are inspired by films, aren't they? Why not by decapitations, eviscerations and dismemberments in the painting of the man who made this town famous?
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