The Nighthawk

by Sally Spedding

  “No, I haven’t. Besides, we’re all here to bring about a better world through love, harmony and study of the Scriptures. White Light reaches beyond Christianity and its divisions. Beyond other less forgiving beliefs.”

  “White Light?”

  She nodded then frowned again. “Are you the police?”

  I hardly looked it. Undercover maybe. Part of me wanted to answer yes, yes...

  “No.”

  She shivered, bringing her habit closer around her body. “I don’t think I can help you, except for the missing woman you mentioned.”

  “Go on.”

  “I did notice something unusual, because the threat of bad weather means all van deliveries here have to be made before 15:00 hours.”

  My heart seemed to be pole-vaulting inside my chest. “And?”

  The security light went out. Her perfect skin and the whites of her eyes glistened under the starlight. Only the image of my sister’s garden came close, when I’d once seen its first white crocuses burst into life.

  She pointed towards the brick building on her left where thankfully the ground floor and upper windows were unlit. “I was in my room around midday, finishing my essay on the enduring symbolism of the Annunciation, when I looked up as it came up the drive and turned towards the store next to the chapel. Over there.”

  “A van?”

  “Yes. An 8cwt. Peugeot, I’m sure.”

  *

  I was already running towards that same building, while she kept up alongside, holding her cumbersome habit clear of the ground with both hands.

  “What’s this place used for?” I asked, almost there.

  “Storing stuff mainly. Broken gravestones, battered Bibles etcetera...”

  All part of the clever front, I thought, reminded of Les Pins’ second tower, aware of chippings not tarmac under my boots. We were out of the security light’s radius, in a darkness where the slightest sound seemed magnified. Behind us, people were emerging from supper, huddled in small groups on the accommodation block’s steps. Their robes ghostly white in the roving strobe. Someone lit up. A line of smoke wavered in the air then dispersed.

  I’m Mireille, by the way,” she added. “Shortly to be given a saint’s name instead.”

  And I’m John Lyon. On holiday.”

  “Lucky you.”

  I don’t think so...

  *

  Dirt and loose stones replaced the chippings, slowing us up as we reached the repository that loomed up from its nest of half-grown conifers, planted presumably to shield its ugliness. The metal, double doors, like ice against my hands, were unlocked and opened without making a sound. We slipped inside, into a deeper chill and mix of smells that were nothing to do with old Bibles or graveyard memorabilia, despite their muffled shapes lining what most resembled a cave.

  Suddenly, Mireille pulled on my arm. A desperate look in her eyes.

  “Promise me one thing, Monsieur Lyon. Don’t leave me here at the Abbey, please. I’m nineteen, with the rest of my life ahead of me. But never as Sister Elisabeth. Oh no...”

  I stared at her.

  “You didn’t choose this path, then?”

  She shook her head.

  “They came to my school. Last year, just before we sat the Bac. Made it sound so wonderful. So right. Even Papa and my grandpapa approved.”

  No mother...

  “They?”

  “That fat pig, Monsignor Besson, and Father Jérôme.”

  Not an uncommon name, yet my heart slipped had down a gear. If he was the one Martine claimed to have seen conversing with Joel, then…

  “Can you describe him?”

  “Young, dark-haired, tanned like a pin-up, I suppose. The girls here love him. Not me though. His eyes are like a shark’s. Almost black, dead.”

  Jesus...

  Could he have been the parcel tape expert? Driven me all the way to Pamiers? Stole the Walther? No, not nearly heavy enough. But the attack at Les Pins? Far more likely with brother Paul too. And why hadn’t Besson mentioned him when spieling to me about the rest of his charming family? I didn’t need to ask. Things were adding up all too clearly. Even for that mystery Homburg.

  “I need to go home to Toulouse,” she pleaded again. “You’ve got to help me.” Her grip hardened. I’d never felt so torn.

  “I will,” I said, trying to fast-forward the logistics of it. “Don’t worry. But first, while I’m here, I must find my friend.”

  “Thank you!” She stretched up to plant a cold kiss on my cheek. “In return, I’ll help you. You see, Papa can’t drive, so I’d have to send his rail fare from here.” Besides,” she released my arm, “I’ve heard a rumour that no-one’s allowed to leave until...” Her voice gave out in the cold, clammy air.

  “Until what?”

  “Swearing to sign up to the AEJ. An organisation to help Jewish kids in places where Jews aren’t welcome.”

  Hey ho...

  “Papa looked them up and isn’t happy. Yes, they’re a recognised charity, but he discovered some controversy over their record during the Occupation. When you said WWII, I didn’t make the connection.”

  Join the club, I thought, imagining an 8cwt van - the most common type - easily moving in, with a terrified Karen, inside. But why here, of all places?

  “Did you notice that same Peugeot van leaving?”

  “I did. After about twenty minutes. I’d just had a quick tutorial with Father Jérôme. I hate him even more than Monsignor Besson”

  The evening chill stroked my bones. “You’re joking?”

  “I’m not. He’s weird. So quiet. Just stares at you.”

  “And the van driver? Passengers?

  “Too far away to see, I’m sorry.” She paused then sniffed. “Can you smell diesel?”

  “Now I can.”

  “It’s over here. Do you have a torch?”

  “Damned battery’sused up. I should have bought another, but…”

  “Don’t worry. I always keep one handy because they’re so stingy with lights here. Especially in the corridors. And,” she whispered, “I bet Besson’s been spying on us.”

  Her mini-torch’s narrow beam picked out a glossy, black pool leaking between the floor’s rough stone slabs. I bent down to savour the even more distinct whiff of. diesel.

  “Fresh too,” I said, straightening up. “Maybe another one came in.”

  Mireille then passed me her torch. Almost immediately I noticed something else, small and solitary on a scratched refectory table. A single pearl stud earring.

  Good God.

  “Are you alright?” she asked.

  “Just about.”

  For it was surely one of two that I’d helped Karen set in place only that morning. I scoured the rest of that table’s old wood. No blood. Nothing else. Had she removed it deliberately for someone to find? Had she lain on this hard, cold slab? Been tortured, drugged, then taken way to be killed? Or had someone else left it as a cruel taunt?

  “I think this belongs to my missing friend,” I whispered.

  “Oh, Lord.”

  Without caring, I cupped my hands around my mouth and yelled. “Karen? “Are you here?”

  My appeal echoed in my head and that gloomy dump, as I willed myself to pick out any other sign of her earlier presence.

  Nothing.

  I led Mireille, reluctant White Light novice towards the double doors, wondering if Herman’s head had also been in that van? Anything was possible.

  *

  “Hang on,” I said, suddenly recognising something else stll close to my mind. A metal trunk whose shape and paint damage seemed identical to the one I’d found in the second tower at Les Pins. Closer inspection showed the lettering on top had been scraped away.

  “This is old,” observed Mireille. “My uncle had the same while in the army in Algeria”

  “Let’s take a look,” I said. “Ready? One, two, three…” But when we both lifted the heavy lid, not only were we faced by a gaping void, but
that same, unmistakeable smell of death.

  *

  I closed the store’s doors behind us, convinced that an original plan to capture and hide Karen dead or alive had probably gone awry. That she had, despite severe limitations, put up so much of a fight in Les Pins, her captor or captors had brought her to this Abbaye Saint-Saint Polycarpe to shake off a suspicious follower or pick up more personnel.

  But if so, why here? And could Saint Jérôme be involved?

  I stared upwards. The universe above our heads had rarely seemed so beautiful, so detached. The bejewelled Ice Queen waiting...

  “Did you ever see a youngish, blond Belgian guy around the place, asking questions, being nosy?” I then quizzed my companion as we kept close to the neighbouring chapel’s walls out of the security light’s mobile glare. “Short, sturdily built? He was my friend’s devoted nurse.”

  “Was?”

  Careful.

  “Is, sorry.”

  “Not to my knowledge. Why?”

  “Or has a Joel Dutroux ever been mentioned?”

  Her frown didn’t last long.

  “Joel Dutroux? Yes. It was awful. He tried to kill himself by jumping off the Chapel roof. When that didn’t work, he almost gassed himself in his room. Didn’t Monsignor Besson say?”

  He wouldn’t…

  “No. When was all this?”

  “Let me see. In 1985, The last year he was here, so I heard.”

  My pulse was rioting. I stopped walking. Nothing to do with an empty stomach because that senior cleric who’d seemed so liberal with certain information, had held back twice as much. So what influence might Joel’s priestly brother have exerted on him? I wished now I’d given him more to think about at the Café des Étoiles...

  “Joel was my friend’s brilliant cook,” I said. “Actually, lots of things...”

  “Is he dead? Mireille stared up at me.

  “Sadly, yes.”

  She crossed herself. “God rest his soul.”

  “I’m sure He will. Now then, what about your belongings?”

  “Please just give me two minutes.”

  “My car’s outside, to the left of the gates. A grey Volvo. Hurry.”

  She sprinted away, and just ten minutes later, was sitting next to me dressed in jeans and a shiny, red mac. One of three full carrier bags perched on her lap.

  *

  I took the mountain road up and away from Roche-Les-Bains, following the thinnest thread of logic that might decide whether Karen lived or died.

  “Please take a look at this,” my passenger began to rummage in the carrier bag. “I found it behind a few old books left behind in Besson’s study. The rest was pretty much cleared out...”

  I bet it was.

  I glanced sideways at the plain cassette tape as she read out its title.

  “Pierre Laval, Vichy’s Prime Minister, rousing his homeland against Jews in the spring of 1942.” She looked up at me. “Proof if you need it.”

  I should have smiled at her resourcefulness but couldn’t. I was still too choked up thinking of Karen.

  “Thanks, pet. I’m really grateful for what you’ve done. I just hope that from today, you begin to live the life you want.”

  She squeezed my arm. “I will, Monsieur Lyon, and it’ll all be because of you.”

  Chapter 49. Karen.

  For my sixth birthday, Vader rigged me up a kaleidoscope in which, depending upon how I held it, tiny enamelled fragments would form endless, colour-filled images. Here a forest, there a river, and now, as if I was inside the same long box, being turned and turned this way and that. Just another particle in a crazy, random world.

  Then Christian had broken it in two because he’d wanted the same. How sad and mean was that, considering he’d had a go-kart, fishing gear and God knows what else? Never mind the big, new Renault when it arrived at Mas Camps. He’d said sorry, of course, and brought me a bag of lollipops to compensate, but I never forgot that sudden crack of plywood under his hammer. Colours scattering on our black-tiled kitchen floor.

  *

  My hands and bare feet were completely numb. My navy-blue suit way too thin. I was also barely breathing to keep my lungs as free as possible from that killing night. But my open eyes still focussed on Venus in the small hope I could connect with her bright, burning energy.

  Someone with half a brain cell would hopefully have found my pearl earring and then what? Taken it to a gendarmerie or commissariat? I’d not thought of that scenario, only of John. Might he have found it in that dark, strange-smelling place and set off for here? And was Herman looking down on me, with forgiveness in his heart, willing me to live? Tell me, Venus, tell me. Also, about Christian who stole our Moeder’s bracelet for that Blumenthal parasite. Was I supposed to pity her? To hide her? I didn’t think so. And what of Joop, hunting me down the years. Was he my only brother alive, or had Christian’s heart kept beating too? Even Vader’s at eighty-seven wasn’t impossible. As for poor Edwige, horse meat had then been cheap and very popular...

  So, who’d be trekking up this bloody mountain to see whether I’d still got a pulse or not? The younger, thorough one, always checking things twice, three times? Or the elder sibling, quiet and contemplative until regularly driven to explosive rages and other more secretive crimes? Either, although at that very moment, the silence around me was as impenetrable as our dear, dead Moeder’s eyes.

  *

  Awake again but shutting down. Not in a spectacular way, but organ by organ, muscle by muscle. Cell by cell. Sure, I could recite by rote the subtle, degenerative process of death, but Venus was up there, willing me with all my might, to focus on living.

  Yet why had there been the faintest trace of incense in that freezing place where we’d stopped? And in the van quite a different smell growing stronger and stronger? Rotting meat, that was it. During last summer’s heat, Martine and I came across a dead doe amongst my pines. Eviscerated by some predator, coated in black flies, she must have lain there for days. Poor, innocent creature...

  Just like me.

  I managed to stretch out my right arm, to strain my numb fingers to their limits, but instead of snow, they met something hard. A rock of some kind, maybe. But a closer look showed a rock with eyebrows, a nose, and beneath it, an open cavity with no tongue.

  Jésu Christ...

  Had Herman been here with me all along?

  My scream must have drowned the sound of oncoming feet crunching through the snow. The followers were behind me, knowing bloody well I couldn’t turn my head.

  “Shut your face,” said whoever.

  “Give it another half hour,” the other one chipped in, with that same, deeper voice. “That’ll do the trick. Oh, and I think our little Belge here, might appreciate some even closer company. Here we go.”

  Before I could decide who was tormenting me, that figure all in black grabbed that dead, blond hair and dropped the weight on my chest. “There.” He brushed snow from his gloves. “How cosy.”

  Bile seeped up into my mouth. I had to let it out and my question.

  “Who murdered him, and where’s this head of his been?” I burbled, realising these were the same two men as earlier. Slight differences. Same evil.

  “Questions, questions, you cunning fraud...”

  Fraud?

  Only one person in my whole life has called me that. Martine Mannion...

  “We relieved you of it, Liesbet, so you’d bend a little in our enquiries. Someone kindly gave us your alarm codes at Les Pins.”

  Liesbet again. Hell is here...

  “Who?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  “Where’s John Lyon?” All I could say.

  “Forget about him. He’s forgotten about you.”

  “Never.”

  “If he realised what you’d done...”

  “One more chance to come clean, Ryjkel, or do we speak to Philippe Dressier, the examining magistrate and the Public Prosecutor who appointed him.” />
  Ever the bully…

  “Come clean about what?”

  “Where’s the four million? Our four million. Is any of it left now?”

  My tongue felt like an icicle. My breath almost gone. I could only stare to the right, and these two just out of my range of vision, blocked out a patch of stars. Hot pee trickled between my legs and froze.

  “Kill me and you’ll never find out.”

  “Let’s sort it now, hein?” the older one said. “She’s been a waste of skin too long.”

  Waste of skin…

  Another of Joop’s expressions blighting my life.

  “Not yet. I want justice for my family,” said the other. “The drop was for them. For our grandparents’ noble cause.”

  Grandparents? Think…

  “Did Sophie the Stalker put you up to this?” I mumbled, then felt a kick to

  my head. Savage and sudden. The crack of bone. Pain…

  Help me. Help me…

  Herman’s head rolled off my chest and stayed face down in the snow. The reason I’d not been blindfolded. I was meant to see him in awful death, because mine was next.

  “Make her squeal some more,” said the deeper voice. This is good...”

  My breasts, my nipples...

  “Ouch! No! No...”

  All at once, a roaring din overhead grew louder and louder, while a blinding light replaced the night. A yellow helicopter was whipping the snow around me into a mad dance; its engine the sweetest tune I’d ever heard.

  “Move!” Barked the older torturer. “We’ll see the bitch at La Chasse anyway.”

  La Chasse?

  I’d forgotten all about that.

  *

  Moments later, I glimpsed those two black-coated figures slip-sliding away from me out of sight. One clinging to the other. Herman’s head dangling to one side. That same pair who’d disabled the alarm at Les Pins, stung my basilic vein with a needle, pulled me into the lift and carried me like that doe’s decomposing carcass over their shoulders until I must have passed out.

  Oh Moeder, Vader. Don’t let me die.