The Night Gate - Enzo MacLeod Investigation Series 07 (2021)

by Peter May

  He reached the park as Bauer got to the other side of it and ran up steps towards the entrance to the gouffre. Enzo stopped and bellowed across the park, ‘Bauer, stop! I know you didn’t kill Narcisse.’

  Bauer stopped at the top of the steps and looked back, hesitating, clearly in a quandary. He could not have helped but hear what Enzo had shouted. And it was only in that moment that Enzo realised he had been calling after him in English. He started jogging across the path on shaking legs, breath tearing raggedly at his throat.

  But as he reached the steps, Bauer appeared to have second thoughts, and turned, sprinting across the road and vanishing among the shadows of the building opposite. By the time Enzo had climbed the steps there was no sign of him. He walked across the road, moonlight casting his shadow in stark silhouette on the tarmac, and glanced towards the Auberge, then up the hill towards the Padirac Hotel. Nothing moved. A dozen steps took him up to the main entrance. Two doors, grilles drawn over glass for the season. Both leading into a darkened entrance hall where the billeterie sold tickets, and a passageway led off to the lift and the stairs.

  He went around the front of the building to where an adjoining café would do brisk business during the summer, and placed his hands on the railing that separated the building from the gouffre itself.

  The full light of the moon picked out a grey-painted metal staircase that doubled back on itself, zigzagging all the way down into deep shadow below. Right next to it, the cage of the elevator that would make return to the surface easier on the way back. Both were affixed to layers of rock that were like great slabs of petrified sediment piled one upon the other and vanishing into the darkness of this vast hole in the ground. It looked almost as if some alien deity had drilled down into the earth with a giant Archimedes screw. Trees and bushes clung stubbornly to its perimeter, metal webbing stretched across the face of the cliff opposite to prevent rock falls.

  Enzo’s attention was drawn by the clatter and rattle of metal rising up through the night, and to his astonishment he saw Bauer employing the webbing to climb down and drop on to the staircase below. The whole structure shook with the weight of his body as he dropped the last three metres. Enzo leaned over the railing and shouted again, ‘Bauer, I’m here to help you.’ He saw Bauer’s upturned face caught ghostly by the moon, before he vanished into shadow.

  Enzo could only think that there must be another way out of the gouffre, an exit that Bauer believed would provide him with a clean getaway. And there was no way that Enzo was going after him. He dug out his phone and found Arnaud’s number at the gendarmerie in Vayrac. As it rang he checked the time. Just after eight o’clock. But the ringing went quickly to an answering service. Enzo cursed under his breath. There was never a gendarme around when you needed one. He started to leave a message.

  ‘Hello, this is Enzo Macleod calling for Capitaine Arnaud. I’ve found Bauer. He’s at the Gouffre de Padirac, and the idiot’s just climbed down into the hole.’

  He was interrupted by a sudden clatter of metal, and a bloodcurdling scream that echoed all around the vastness of the gouffre.

  ‘Shit!’ he said. ‘Something’s happened to him.’ And he hung up. Then shouted into the darkness below, ‘Are you alright?’

  It was a long moment before Bauer’s voice came feebly back from the darkness. His English only very lightly accented. ‘I think I’ve broken my leg. It’s bleeding like hell.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’ Enzo looked around as if somehow help might suddenly emerge from the shadows, but the street simmered in silent indifference, pools of light beneath the street lamps outshone by the moon. He looked at the webbing that Bauer had climbed down and wondered if he could do it, too. There had been a time, certainly, when he wouldn’t have doubted it. But now . . .

  He sighed and climbed over the railing to pick his way through the growth around the edge of the hole. It seemed like a horribly long way down. Seventy-five metres, he recalled from the leaflet. Nearly 250 feet. And he couldn’t even see the bottom of it. He felt giddy just looking over the edge.

  ‘Hold on,’ he shouted. ‘I’m coming down.’ And he began his descent of the metal webbing. Hand- and footholds were easy to find, but the metal quickly cut into his palms. He tried to take most of the weight on his feet and felt his legs trembling as he moved one foot down below the other.

  It was with huge relief that he finally reached the tin roof of a shelter above the stairs, and stood there, still shaking, and gasping to recover his breath and his courage. He glanced up, amazed at just how far down he had climbed. Then, without looking at the drop beyond the staircase, knelt down and lowered himself over the edge, finally letting go to fall the final few metres, as Bauer had done, clattering heavily on the grille of the nearest landing. The whole structure shuddered, and he crouched down to steady himself.

  Looking up he saw the lip of the hole above cast a huge circular shadow around the opposite arc of the wall. He shouted, ‘Bauer?’

  ‘Down here,’ Bauer’s voice rose faintly out of the dark. And Enzo started off down the stairs, reaching the next landing, to double back and head down to the next. Now he moved into the shadow cast by the rim of the gouffre, profoundly dark after the blinding dazzle of the moon. And just as he had back at the house, Bauer emerged from the gloom to smash a fist into Enzo’s face.

  This time as he went down, Enzo tasted blood in his mouth and thought he might have lost a tooth.

  ‘You fuck!’ Bauer bellowed at him, and Enzo could feel hot breath in his face. ‘Leave me the fuck alone. We’re both down here now, so you can’t tell anyone where I am. And you’ll never get out on your own.’ Then he was off, leaping two at a time down the stairs and into the depths of the gouffre.

  Enzo lay on the metal grille spitting blood and cursing his stupidity. But Bauer was right. Because of his own idiotic gullibility, here he was, down in the hole, and knew there was no way he could climb back out.

  Slowly he sat up and ran the back of his hand over his lips, feeling blood smear wet on his skin. He fumbled for his phone, turned on his torch app, and directed its beam down into the hole below. Vaguely, in the semi-darkness, he could see stairways leading to a criss-cross of paths and covered walkways at the very bottom of the chasm. And he saw the tiny figure of Bauer sprinting away towards an opening at the far side of the hole, where more stairs vanished into obscurity.

  He tried to call Arnaud again, but this far down there was no longer any signal, and he sat for several minutes feeling sorry for himself, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, wondering if he was going to die in this damned hole. He shook his head. A stupid thought. There must be another way out.

  Slowly he pulled himself upright, spat blood into the gouffre and started off down the stairs once more. The clatter of his feet on rattling metal reverberated all around him. He turned off the light on his phone to preserve its battery, and let his eyes accustom themselves to the gloom as he descended into the deepest part of the hole.

  When finally he got to the bottom of it, he looked back up, and saw the rim of the gouffre sharply delineated against the starlit sky. An almost perfect circle. But there was no point in looking back. He had to go on. Turning, he stumbled along a path that ran past a strange white glowing statue, like a phantom sent to haunt him. Then down concrete steps set into the rock, to the entrance of a cave that cut deep down into the sedimentary layers. All light beyond it was extinguished by the night.

  Now he needed the light of his phone again, and started off down steep flights of steps that dog-legged into darkness and took him deeper and deeper underground.

  Tunnels hewn out of sandstone over millions of years by the flow of underground rivers dripped condensation like rain on to his head, until eventually the stairs came to an end, and a narrow passage led off through a fissure in the rock face. After nearly sub-zero temperatures above ground it felt warm down here, but the darkness was pro
found, and his phone light barely penetrated it.

  The walls closed in around him, this great crack in the rock vanishing into tenebrosity overhead as he walked steadily forward, playing the light from his phone on the well-worn path in front of him. He could hear the sound of running water, though he could not see it. And then suddenly the cave opened up around him, and light reflected back at him from black water.

  Shiny metal rails, designed to divide tourists into lines, led through a turnstile to where half a dozen long, narrow punts bobbed in concrete docks. One of the slots was empty. Bauer must have taken a boat. Enzo baulked at the thought of setting off after him in a flimsy punt, in the dark. Who knew how deep the water was or what kind of current might rob him of control. He shone his phone around the walls of the cave in the docking area, and saw a stout cable descending from high above to a metal box fixed to the rock at the far side of the dock. He walked gingerly across slick concrete to pull open the box and shine his light on a large power switch. Of course! The caves would have to be lit for the tourists. He threw the switch, and coloured lights concealed overhead transformed the space around him, lighting the passage of the underground river ahead. Waterfalls of rock seemed to pour down from the heavens, stalactites like liquid spears frozen in time. Weird and wonderful formations, coloured green and red and blue by the lights.

  Enzo stood gazing at it in wonder before his eyes fell on

  the long poles stacked in one corner, and he supposed that the

  water couldn’t be too deep if these could be used to propel

  the punts along the river. He snatched one, and sent the nearest punt rocking crazily beneath him as he stepped on to the nearer end of it. He held the pole horizontally to regain his balance, and when the punt finally stopped dipping he moved forward to better distribute his weight before pushing off.

  The vessel cut a silent swathe through the black water, walls encroaching as he steered it from one side to the other, avoiding rock that jutted into the river, bumping from time to time against it and pushing himself free with the pole. Calcium salts deposited by dripping water hung in cascading columns and the smooth swish of water against the punt now filled the air, along with the sound of myriad drips like rainfall.

  He lost track of how long it took before the narrow underground river opened out into another cave, and a docking area containing just one boat. The one that Bauer had taken. When Enzo docked he stopped and listened intently. But he could hear nothing, and supposed that Bauer by this time must be long gone.

  The passage leading away from the dock lay in darkness, until Enzo found another junction box on the wall and threw a switch to illuminate the way ahead. Bauer had done this entire trip in the dark, probably by the light of a phone, and somewhere up ahead, perhaps, he was now spooked by this sudden explosion of light.

  For Enzo there was no alternative but to press on, and hope that there might be a way out somewhere in his future. The taste of blood was still strong in his mouth, but it had dried on his lips and crusted on the back of his hand. The pain had reduced itself to a dull ache, but his whole body hurt, and he found it increasingly difficult to put one leg in front of the other.

  He stumbled on for several minutes, until this narrow passageway opened out into a vast underground cave, a lake lit turquoise from beneath its still waters and reflecting light from soaring walls that vanished into a mist of obscurity.

  It was a dead end. From the far side of the lake, water flowed into another river that completely filled the path it had carved for itself through the rock. Off to the right, a metal staircase set into the stone climbed away into the crevice above, rising steeply and curving away out of sight. It had to be the way out.

  Enzo trekked across a rock floor worn smooth by a million tourist feet, climbing past a series of illuminated billboards, up and up into the roof of the cave. It seemed endless. His legs were shaking, muscles burning. Then, to his dismay, he saw that the walkway ahead looped around a rock formation like giant cauliflowers, before descending again into darkness. He glanced back the way he had come and was astonished at how high he had climbed. Beyond the rail of the walkway, smooth rock fell away in a torrent, like a frozen waterfall, to the floor of the cave thirty or forty metres below. He became uncomfortably aware of just how flimsy this walkway felt. Ahead he could see other walkways spanning clefts in the rock. Like some kind of impossible Escherian staircase from which there was no escape. Calcium salts shaped by hundreds of thousands of years of erosion tumbled from the walls around him like clusters of giant coloured jellyfish.

  A sound from above made him look up. In time to see the dark shadow of Bauer dropping on to him from a ledge overhead. The two men crashed against the railing, and their combined weight tipped them over to tumble on to a narrow shelf of wet rock and begin to slide towards the drop. Enzo grasped at the rail with desperate fingers and clung on. Bauer slithered past him, before coming to an abrupt halt against an outcrop of rock like a growth of malignant mushrooms overhanging the lip of the chasm.

  Both men lay gasping on the edge of the precipice glaring at each other.

  ‘What the hell do you want from me!’ Bauer’s voice echoed off into the darkness above them.

  Enzo risked a glance down, and felt his stomach turn. It would be a long fall that could only end in death, and it seemed to him that he was only holding on by a thread. ‘I’m trying to help you, for God’s sake, man!’

  But Bauer was unmoved. He swung himself up to grab the rail of the walkway, and pulled himself back along the ledge to where Enzo lay helpless beneath him. He crouched down and grabbed the Scotsman by the collar. ‘What’s to stop me from just throwing you over the edge? No one will ever know that you didn’t just fall.’

  Enzo was fighting for the breath to speak. ‘You’ll know. And then you’ll regret it. Just like you always do. But I won’t be around to forgive you, like Lise. And you’ll have to live with your conscience for the rest of your life.’

  Bauer frowned in confusion. ‘How do you know about my Lise?’

  ‘I know a lot about you, Hans. I know that you have a temper, and you do things when you’re angry that you regret later. And I know that you’re not a bad person, not really. You don’t have that evil gene you’ve been so obsessed by. You resort quickly to violence, yes, but it’s hardly your fault if you inherited that from Wolff.’

  Bauer’s face reflected an image of himself that he had not expected to be confronted by here, by this man, in this place. Enzo felt the German’s grip on his collar relax.

  ‘I came down here because I thought you were hurt. Is this really how you’re going to reward me?’ Enzo pushed his luck. ‘I don’t believe you have it in you to kill me. Whatever you inherited from your grandfather, it wasn’t the capacity to kill. And I know you didn’t kill Narcisse. Someone just wanted to make it look that way.’

  Bauer slumped down to sit cross-legged on the ledge of rock. All his anger and fear seemed to leave him. Enzo saw him go limp. ‘How do you know I didn’t kill him.’

  ‘Because I used to be one of the best in the business at reading a crime scene, Hans.’ And Enzo told him about the dry blood spatter, and how it would have made no sense for him to exit in panic several minutes after the event. ‘If you’d had it in you to kill someone in cold blood, you wouldn’t have panicked at all, and you’d have gone back out the way you came in. Through the side door.’

  ‘How can you possibly know all this? About me, about what happened that night?’

  ‘Because I went to Germany, Hans. I spoke to Lise. I obtained DNA from the remains found in the park in Carennac and linked them to you through familial matching. Karlheinz Wolff was your grandfather, just as you thought. Lise told me you have his diaries. Is that where you learned about the copy they’d made of the Mona Lisa?’

  He nodded, staring vacantly down at his hands. ‘I knew it would be worth a fortune, if only I could ge
t my hands on it. But I also knew that I needed help. Which is why I went to see Narcisse in Paris.’ His face reflected his remembered anger. ‘He laughed at the whole idea. More or less threw me out. Then the bastard came down here to try to get it for himself.’

  ‘So what happened that night, Hans? The night of the murder.’

  Bauer looked up, fire in his eyes again. ‘When I arrived at the hotel in Carennac, I realised that Narcisse had already checked in. I made sure he didn’t know I was there, and I was in the park next to the house that afternoon when I saw him go to Madame Lavigne’s door.’

  It took Enzo a moment to realise he meant Anny.

  ‘I watched him go in, then come out again about fifteen minutes later. I waited until he had gone and then went and banged on her door myself. I was angry, and I suppose I must have shouted at her. I told her I was Wolff’s grandson, and that I knew about the Mona Lisa forgery because he had written about it in his diaries. And I demanded to know what Narcisse had wanted with her.’ He frowned, remembering the moment. ‘She was so . . . how can I describe it? Calm. There was this strange little smile on her face. She said that Narcisse had come with the same ridiculous story, and that she had sent him packing.’

  ‘Did you believe her?’

  ‘No. I said I wasn’t leaving until she told me what had happened to the painting. She wouldn’t let me in. She said she wasn’t admitting to anything, but that if I came back to the house at eight o’clock that night she would reveal the truth to me then.’

  ‘And you accepted that?’

  ‘I didn’t know what else I could do.’ He drew a long breath. ‘I was sitting in the bar at the Fenelon shortly before seven-thirty that night, hardly able to contain myself until eight, when I saw Narcisse heading out. And I was sure, then, that she had done some kind of a deal with him. So when he’d gone I slipped across the road and into the garden of the house opposite. There’s a path that climbs the hill through the garden to another gate that opens on to a little alleyway behind Madame Lavigne’s house. It was pitch-dark there, and from the shadows I could see along to the street at the end of the house where the steps go up to her front door. I got there just before Narcisse, and saw him pass through the light. Heard his footsteps on the stairs.’