by F. G. Cottam
‘Would you like a beer, Dan? I don’t think it’s too early.’
‘In the circumstances, I could murder a beer,’ Dan said.
They sat on stools at opposite sides of the counter and sipped from the bottles. Albert said, ‘I’m guessing Royal Marines or the Parachute Regiment. Who knows? Maybe SAS.’
‘You’re an astute man.’
‘Did three years in the Legion after graduating from the Sorbonne. My dad’s idea of a post-grad in life. Shared exercises in Belize and other places. There are characteristics you come to recognize.’
‘Shared characteristics.’
‘Quite so.’ The smile again. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘I’ve reason to believe the library here housed a book until sometime in 1944. A very rare and valuable book. I’m trying to locate it.’
Albert nodded. ‘I’ve heard rumours,’ he said. ‘An occult almanac. A spell book from the sixteenth century, no?’
‘Yes.’
‘The library was more or less intact when my grandfather bought the place, except that most of the books were damp. If they hadn’t been, when the place was deserted, villagers from hereabouts would have taken them to fuel their fires. There’s a glass display case. Something was once displayed in it. I can’t confirm it for certain, but it might have been your spell book.’
‘Why do you think that?’
‘There’s a warning on a brass plaque screwed into the wooden table on which the case rests. Translated roughly from Latin it reads, “Open this only at your peril and the peril too of humanity. These pages have the power to unleash the Auguries.”’
‘A legionnaire who can read Latin,’ Dan said. ‘Who knew?’
‘Italian comrades,’ Albert said. ‘It’s a short hop.’
‘Did you ever hear any rumours about the theft?’
Albert shook his head.
‘Do you know anyone who might?’
Albert sipped beer thoughtfully. He said, ‘The last du Lac to live here was Olivier du Lac, who died late in 1944. My only living link with him is one of my cleaning team who told me her grandmother worked for the family as a scullery maid as a twelve- or fourteen-year-old. That means that she’s in her late eighties now. Quite a character in her own right. Still lives in the village, still drinks a ritual cognac every evening at her neighbourhood café.’
‘Near here?’
‘In the village, half a mile away.’
‘Do you know which café? Do you know this woman’s name?’
Albert took an iPhone from his hip pocket. ‘I can find out from my cleaning people.’
‘You’re being enormously helpful.’
Albert narrowed his eyes, awaiting a reply to his call. He said, ‘Which outfit?’
‘SAS.’
‘Ha! I knew it.’ He got a connection, asked his questions, gave his thanks. Then he took a pad and pen from a kitchen drawer and wrote down a name and a location. ‘She’ll be there at seven p.m. That gives you an hour and I’ll give you a lift down there, if you need one.’
‘Thanks.’
‘I expect you’d like to see the library before we leave.’
‘You’re a mind-reader.’
‘I’m a man starting to put two and two together, Dan. The Auguries?’
More corridors. The chateau was vast. Dan wondered whether Albert lived there alone. He’d given plenty away, just not very much about himself.
The repair work to the vaulted ceiling of the library was immaculate. There was a substantial number of books and no hint of a scent of damp. Original oils hung on the wood-panelled walls. One Dan would have bet money was a Manet. A Sisley country scene. A much older painting he thought might be a Delacroix.
Albert guided Dan across the library to the wooden table with its mounted glass case and burnished brass plaque. Dan thought the wood of the table black enough to be ebony. The writing etched into the plaque was italic. The glass of the case was flawed by a single diagonal crack old enough for dust to have seeped into it in microscopic quantities, incrementally, so now it resembled a long grey scar.
Albert slapped Dan lightly on the back and said, ‘I’m going to fetch my car keys. I’ll see you at the library door in five minutes?’
‘Perfect.’
The feeling of despondency arrived subtly, after Albert’s departure from the room. It crept through Dan Carter’s mind like a poisonous fog. He felt his buoyant spirit ebb away from him as though it bled from some existential wound. A mortal wound, he thought, confused, dismayed, almost unable to think.
While he still had the mental strength to do so – and he didn’t have long, and he didn’t have much – Dan reeled away from the table and lurched drunkenly in the direction of the door. Recovery was as rapid as contagion. By the time he got to the door he felt OK, relatively. Albert Troyer was already there, a concerned look across his lean, tough, friendly features.
‘Is it always like that?’
‘It’s getting worse,’ Albert said. ‘I think it’s to do with the Auguries. You need to find that book, my friend. The cathedrals? Someone’s using it.’
The café itself was like something from an earlier time. A zinc counter, an enamel Pernod sign, elderly metal chairs and zinc-topped tables, some crooner warbling his way through a French ballad on an ancient, perforated leather-covered transistor radio on a shelf behind the bar, the liquorice tang of French tobacco.
Dan Carter got there at five minutes to seven and ordered a beer. The woman he wanted to speak to walked in at exactly seven o’clock. It had to be her – white-haired, immaculately attired in a summer coat and hat, lipstick neatly applied and precisely punctual.
She looked around. Her eyes alighted on him and she smiled. She had been forewarned, of course, by her granddaughter. She had consented to meeting him and answering his questions, if she could. Though impromptu and hastily arranged, it was an appointment rather than an ambush.
They shook hands, Dan doing so with a slight, courteous bow that earned another smile. Yvonne Dupont had lavender-coloured eyes that even after eighty-odd years retained their intelligent sparkle. Dan bought her a cognac and pulled out her chair and waited until she was properly settled before sitting himself. She cleared her throat without a prompt from him and began to speak. A confidential voice, one that wouldn’t carry to a neighbouring table. Maybe a skill learned in her Resistance years? The French Resistance had used children a lot.
‘After my master died, I made it my task to check every day on the book. It was the master’s belief that if the book fell into the wrong hands, the whole world would suffer great harm. He thought this his secret, but there are no secrets servants do not know. Of course, the war meant that the world was suffering great harm anyway, and many of its people real anguish. But wars are won and lost. The master thought the book could bring the End Times.
‘I hadn’t given back my keys. There was no one left to give them back to. So, every day, I checked on the book. Right up until the afternoon of October twenty-eighth, 1944, when I went to check on it and it simply wasn’t there any more. Someone had taken it.’
Yvonne Dupont raised her glass and emptied it at a single gulp. She put the glass down and said, ‘They call it Dutch courage. I find it works equally well for the French. Forgive me, these reminiscences are difficult.’
‘Nothing to forgive, madame,’ Dan Carter said, getting to his feet and fishing for his wallet to go to the bar and buy her another.
He sat back down with fresh drinks for both of them.
She said, ‘This was only a couple of months after the liberation of Paris. It was a turbulent time. There was much settling of old scores, especially in the countryside. Summary executions. Hangings, shootings. Sometimes there would be a trial, more often not.’
‘Have you any idea who might have taken the book?’
Her lavender eyes looked at him incredulously. ‘I know who took it,’ she said. ‘It was the British. There were twelve of them,’ she laughed,
‘like the Apostles. Only they were here to kill rather than to preach. They drove around in jeeps with machine guns bolted on to their rear. They were long-haired, scruffy, bearded, most of them. Not as you imagine a soldier to be, even in a time of fierce combat. Thinner than men are today. And they laughed a lot.’
‘Did you suspect anyone in particular?’
‘The one I saw twice in the chateau grounds, poking around. He was quite sly, this one, skilled at concealment. But I knew every inch of those grounds. What’s the English word for when a pattern isn’t quite right?’
‘An anomaly.’
‘Just so. I knew every path, plant, tree, bush, flower and patch of gravel. I spotted the anomalies there and then I spotted him, twice.’
‘Did you ever learn his name?’
‘No.’
‘His rank?’
‘I didn’t know anything about insignia on uniforms. I was fourteen.’
‘Could you describe him?’
‘To what end? He was about thirty and will certainly be dead.’
‘To the end of finding and retrieving the book, Madame Dupont.’
She sipped cognac and appraised him and said, ‘And so preventing the onset of the End Times?’
THIRTY-NINE
Juliet Harrington and Paul Beck breakfasted on Friday morning listening to the radio. It seemed a bit surreal to Juliet that the device still functioned, just as it seemed a bit surreal that the gas cooker functioned as she scrambled their breakfast eggs. They listened to Radio 4, to a variety of experts and officials and pundits discussing the cathedral blazes of the previous day, all of them tactful, diplomatic, skirting around the evidential implausibility of what had occurred. They brought to Juliet’s mind skaters on ice they well knew was very thin. The more of them who took to it, the greater the weight, and the more alarming the consequent risk they all ignored.
The BBC was no longer broadcasting from central London. Everything was in Manchester now, so the guests still on the spot in the old capital were being patched through to the new in any way audio trickery made possible. The flooding and the quake had combined to write off most of the city’s landlines. A lot of mobile masts had also become casualties. Communication with London, directly or indirectly, was becoming more and more difficult. And the disruption seemed to be spreading outward, like a contagion, Juliet thought.
Only one of the radio experts was really prepared in Juliet’s view to call a spade a spade. He was a veteran fire-fighter who’d retired to make a lucrative living assessing fire risk in listed buildings. He said that the water saturation from the recent flooding made the fires that had consumed the cathedrals physically impossible. He said that even with accelerants, it was implausible that the waterlogged pews and still soggy carpeting would have burned with the ferocity they had.
‘But it still happened,’ the presenter kept saying, sounding to Juliet’s ears like a truculent child.
‘I know it bloody happened,’ his exasperated expert eventually said. ‘It happened, yet it was impossible. I’m just having a bit of a struggle mentally with that obvious contradiction.’
Juliet switched the radio off, thinking that the insane world she now inhabited didn’t really suit the medium. It didn’t work in print, either. It worked best in televised pictures with the sound turned down, when you didn’t have to struggle with a commentator’s inane efforts to describe calmly the fundamentally indescribable.
Seated at the table, Paul swallowed a piece of egg-smeared toast and said, ‘At least last night was fun. The horizontal part of it, I mean. Before we fell asleep.’
‘And dinner wasn’t bad. And you can read my mind.’
‘Only some of the time. But opacity can be an attractive quality in a woman.’
‘Can be? When isn’t it?’
‘When she’s trying to hide something.’
‘Come on, Paul. I’m as transparent as a pane of glass.’
He mused on this. Then he smiled. ‘Frosted glass, maybe,’ he said. He looked around her kitchen. He said, ‘This is a nice place. Your flat, I mean.’
‘Easy to keep things pristine when you live alone.’
‘You make that sound like a sort of rebuke.’
‘In another life I’d have liked a family, is all. A faithful partner, a couple of little ones. Instead, I’ve got an orderly home and letters after my name. I ought to be satisfied.’
‘But you’re not.’
‘No. I’m not.’
‘It isn’t too late, Juliet. You’re still young enough. Assuming the madness ends.’
She didn’t comment directly on that. Instead she said, ‘What do you intend to do about what Desperate Dan Carter told you last night?’
Which made Paul laugh. He said, ‘You wouldn’t call him that if you’d met him. He’s a very cool customer, is our Daniel. Enigmatic. I suspect as hard as nails.’
‘And on to something,’ Juliet said.
‘Divide and conquer,’ Paul said.
‘What does that mean?’
‘I think you should follow the du Lac chateau trail. I’ll stay here and read the rest of Edmund Fleury’s story. There might be something significant there.’
‘Where does the du Lac chateau trail lead to?’
‘I hope to the Almanac, eventually. But in the first instance to the Imperial War Museum. It’s going to be closed, I expect. All the ground-floor exhibits are going to be flood-damaged. But the Home Secretary will get you in and their papers are filed above the ground floor. If there’s anything on that SAS unit running riot in northern France in October of 1944, that’s where you’ll find it.’
‘A needle in a haystack,’ Juliet said.
‘But you’re experienced at finding those. And not necessarily, if the material has been catalogued. You might get there and find something straight away with a preliminary computer search.’
‘You think Yvonne Dupont a reliable source?’
Paul was quiet, still chewing his breakfast egg on toast, still sipping his English breakfast tea. Then he said, ‘I think Madame Dupont got virtually everything spot on.’
Paul was about to add the detail that Dan Carter suspected Yvonne Dupont had played a role in the wartime French Resistance, something he thought added weight to the woman’s credibility as a witness to events. But he didn’t get the opportunity because, at that moment, their doorbell rang.
‘I’ll get it,’ Paul said.
Their visitor was a tall, rather gaunt man in a black gabardine suit and a black fedora hat and a white clerical collar. He took off the hat, revealing a full head of white hair. There were white whiskers on his cheeks and his eyes were slightly bloodshot. He said, ‘I’m looking for Professor Harrington. That’s plainly not you. I hope I haven’t got the wrong address.’
‘How did you get this address at all?’
‘Martin Doyle gave it to me. Dr Martin Doyle. He’s the professor’s head of department at the university.’
‘Indiscreet of him.’
‘These are not normal times, sir. My name is Thomas Gould. Father Thomas Gould.’ He peered around Paul, examining the hallway. ‘Would you kindly tell the professor I’m here, if she’s in?’
He’d driven all night to get there. He’d begged a jerrycan of petrol apiece from two of his more faithful parishioners to fuel the journey at the wheel of his twenty-year-old Rover. There’d been the roadblocks to navigate, and the fields of rubble and quake debris which formed makeshift roadblocks of their own. He’d had to skirt the gangs of looters and divert around the roads that had subsided after the flood. He’d driven for ten hours straight to cover a distance of just over sixty miles.
Now, he said, ‘Forgive the imposition, but I could murder a cup of tea.’
‘I must apologize, Father,’ Juliet said somewhat later, after they’d got through their introductions and preliminaries. ‘I promised to call you yesterday afternoon but got distracted.’
‘These are not normal times, professor,’ Father Go
uld said, making that observation for the second time in only twenty minutes. ‘I’m just glad finally to be able to get to see you face to face.’
Juliet frowned. She said, ‘I still don’t know what you hope to achieve by speaking to me.’
‘Clarification,’ Father Gould said.
‘Please explain.’
They were seated by now, all three of them, around Juliet Harrington’s kitchen table. It was just after eight a.m. Father Gould described the funeral of the unfortunate flat fire victim, starting with the requiem mass at which the atmosphere had seemed unnerving and the incense in its ceremonial burner had smelled somehow rank.
Then, without naming Andrew Baxter or describing the circumstances in which he came by the story, he told them about what Andy believed he had heard coming from inside the coffin at the graveside.
‘The man we were interring was emphatically dead. The fire which killed him had deprived him of three of his limbs. But the boy was adamant about what he heard. He was shaken by the experience and remained understandably troubled recalling it.
‘Subsequent to his telling me the tale, the phrase “the unrestful dead” recurred to me. I couldn’t remember where I’d heard it, but my bishop did, reminding me of a seminar we attended as novitiates over forty years ago; the speaker had speculated on the existence of the Almanac of Forbidden Wisdom. I believe the name of Gunter Keller came up, and there was some further discussion on the book’s author. And then I read your monograph, professor. And now I’m here.’
‘How honest is this boy?’ The question came from Paul Beck.
‘Totally. Almost painfully. He’s not the most imaginative soul. And though he’s only fourteen, he’s very experienced at participating in those sorts of services. He’d have seen it as routine right up to the moment when, for him, it became anything but.’
Juliet was thinking. She said, ‘If this really was the phenomenon of the unrestful dead, it means someone at that service had come into recent contact with the Almanac. I’m guessing close and prolonged contact. And it certainly wasn’t you.’