by T D Griggs
A fire trail crossed the lane just ahead, and the trees had been cleared for a few metres on either side. I pulled onto the wide, soft verge, stopped the car and turned off the lights. The numerals on the dashboard clock were the last to fade: it was 2.56.
We climbed out and stood in the mild and aromatic night. There was no sound except the ticking of the engine and the faint rush of the wind through the trees. Bars of moonlight fell across the clearing and along the trail but the woods around us were solid ramparts of darkness. I heard Serge move and a second later the tailgate clicked and he appeared beside me with the two backpacks. I swung mine onto my shoulder. The clink of metal sounded loud in the night.
‘Let’s fix this now,’ he said softly. ‘We don’t want a big conference when we’re close.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘You follow me,’ he said. ‘It’ll take us about ten minutes. Stick as close as you can. We’ll come out by the fence near the old house, not far from the beach. It’ll take me a few moments to make friends with the dog again, then I’ll come back and whistle. That’s when you come through.’ He looked at me anxiously in the darkness. ‘I hope you’re right about this, Monsieur Madoc. It’s a big old ruin to go poking around in.’
‘It’ll be light in about two hours and the workmen will be here,’ I said. ‘Then it won’t matter one way or the other.’
He hesitated for a second and then slid away between the trees. He moved fast and I felt clumsy behind him, snapping dry branches and dragging through underbrush. After a minute or two my eyes adjusted to the darkness and I found some kind of rhythm and gradually closed the gap between us. When he reached the edge of the trees and raised a hand to stop me, I almost collided with him. He crouched down and I did the same.
The fence glinted in the moonlight. Beyond it, the rear wall of the Rosens’ old farmhouse was a dark blur against the undergrowth. A hundred metres away, on the far side of the field, cold light lay along the ridgeline of the largest steel barn, but the other buildings and the junkyard itself were in darkness.
Serge unslung his pack and unclipped the straps. He waited for a few seconds and then crept across the strip of bare earth, carrying it under one arm. I heard the snap of wire cutters and a twang from the first strand. He was very quick after that. Half-a-dozen sharp snaps later he folded back a square of fence and slid through it. He didn’t look back.
I lost sight of him almost immediately in the long grass. I hunkered down on the soft pine needles and waited. I took out a bottle of water and drank. I imagined my father and Billington waiting in that old house sixty and more years ago, listening as I was to the waves bursting against the shingle just beyond the bluff.
I heard Serge’s whistle, and scrambled through the hole in the fence. I waded through the long grass towards the old farmhouse and plunged into its shadow. I stumbled on a root and the dog barked quite close by. I heard Serge calming it. He was crouching in the litter of broken tiles at the front of the house, behind the bushes that shielded us from the open paddock. The animal gave a low growl as I rounded the corner, but lost interest in me as Serge conjured up the lamb joint from his backpack. The dog froze for a second, ears pricked, not quite able to believe its luck, then disappeared into the undergrowth with the bone.
‘If we’re going to go in,’ Serge said, ‘it might as well be now.’
I stepped through the litter to the door, felt in my pack for a tyre lever, slipped it through the hasp off the padlock, and snapped it off. The door wouldn’t budge. I put the tyre lever in against the jamb and splintered the wood. The first plank tore away in my hands, and then Serge was beside me and between us we heaved the door outwards. The dog whimpered once, but when the noise stopped it went back to its meal.
The roofless kitchen was still and warm, sheltered from the wind. The ash tree whispered in the moonlight above us, but here at floor level it was quiet and dark. I snapped on the torch and swept its beam across the debris. Serge’s torch sprang on beside me.
The kitchen was larger than I had realised. A dresser, once full of china, had collapsed in the far corner and its contents had slid across the floor. A rack which had held pots and pans on butcher’s hooks above the range had fallen against the far wall. The range itself, an ancient cast iron affair, had collapsed through the floor under its own weight, and lay at an angle in the cellar below, its rusted doors hanging open.
I stepped onto the rubble slope and started to edge down towards it, then half-slid, half-clambered the rest of the way. My torch beam wavered in front of me and dust rose in the light like smoke. I had the map in my shirt pocket but I didn’t need to take it out. I could see it with perfect clarity in my mind.
I set my backpack on a mound of fallen bricks and got down on my knees in the damp earth and thrust aside some of the rubbish – old dark wine bottles, tiles, a rusted saucepan, bits of worm-eaten timber, pebbles, roots. An orange centipede stumbled over the dirt. A very large spider scuttled into a crack in the brick foundations of the chimney. The light of my torch blazed briefly on its battery of ruby eyes as it sidled into the darkness.
‘Monsieur Madoc –’
‘Get down here, Serge.’
He did so at once, bringing a small landslide with him. He was breathing hard. ‘It’ll be light in just over an hour…’
‘If it’s here at all, it’s somewhere in this corner, up near the chimney breast.’ I pulled out the map. ‘See these measurements? If I copied them down right, it should be a couple of feet in from this wall and maybe four or five feet from that one, which means between here –’ I scuffed the soil with my heel ‘ – and there...’
‘That’s under the old cooker,’ he said.
‘Sod’s Law.’ I crawled over to my pack and threw him one of the trowels. ‘Shift some of that junk and dig around the edges of the thing. I’d guess we’re looking for a box. A biscuit tin, or maybe an ammunition box. Possibly a leather or oilskin packet. Something like that. If we don’t have it in a few minutes we’re out of luck, and we’re out of here. OK?’
I took the other trowel, and shaved off a layer of soil and then another and another. I could hear Serge dragging aside the debris a few feet behind me.
In the next twenty minutes I carved a hole nearly half-a-metre deep in the sandy soil. I spent a few more minutes widening it, throwing the spoil behind me. The earth was clean and undisturbed. I worked until my muscles ached and I had to stop. Sweat was running down the sides of my neck and I threw my head back and let the night air cool my face.
Above me, the leaves of the ash tree glittered in the moonlight. I don’t know what it was about that sight, the tree shivering against the stars. Something changeless and huge. Whatever it was, the full absurdity of what I was doing suddenly overwhelmed me. We would not find anything here. No cashbox, no leather packet, no diaries. Perhaps they never had existed after all. I tossed aside the trowel, and wiped my forehead with my sleeve.
I turned to see that Serge too had stopped working too. He was on all fours, and his torch, lodged in the oven door of the rusted cooker, shone on his face as he peered down at the floor between his hands
‘Monsieur Madoc?’
I crawled over to him, shoving aside a mound of wood and bricks and old bottles. One of them rolled and broke and the air was filled with the tarry bouquet of sixty year-old claret. I aimed my torch into the pit he had scraped. A cracked grey paving stone lay half-exposed at the bottom of it. A corner of the slab had broken away and I saw a patch of rusted metal underneath.
I took Serge’s trowel and tapped the metal with the base of the handle. It gave a hollow thud. My mouth went dry. I levered up the rest of the slab and heaved it aside. Underneath it was a recessed circular handle, which the paving stone – flush with the original floor of the cellar – would have concealed. I prised up the handle and got two fingers through the ring and lifted. It groaned a little but did not give.
Serge craned over my shoulder. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s not a tin box, that’s for sure.’ I dug away at the dirt and found an edge, then a corner. ‘A hatch, maybe?’
Serge and I dragged aside a jumble of old boards and joists and between us we revealed a small trap, less than a metre square. I could lift it only an inch or two before it clanged against the side of the range. I did this a couple of times, experimentally, and let the door fall back, then got up and put my shoulder against the stove and pushed. It moved only a fraction.
Serge shuffled up beside me and as the dead weight of the stove lifted a few centimetres he kicked a loose brick under it. We heaved again and this time I managed to shove the broken corner of the paving slab into the gap and won us another small space. We were making a lot of noise by now, but the excitement of the discovery deafened us to it, and it was only when the dog barked that we both froze. We waited perhaps thirty seconds, leaning against the old range, filthy and sweating and out of breath, listening for any sound over the hissing of the trees, but there was nothing more.
‘He’s finished his dinner.’ Serge smiled wanly in the torchlight. ‘I hope he won’t want us for breakfast.’
A faint wash of dove grey light was stealing into the eastern sky above the walls. I knelt down again and cleared the last of the dirt from the trapdoor. I got my fingers through the ring again and this time it lifted, groaning against rusted hinges, and released a gust of stale air which enveloped us both.
I flicked the torch into the darkness: three stone steps down, a narrow space with a concrete floor, litter, an old shoe. There was very little headroom, certainly not enough for a man to stand up comfortably. Some sort of an emergency bunker, an air-raid shelter, maybe, dug beneath the floor of the wine cellar. A box within a box. I swung my legs in and rested my feet on the top step. And I thought: a shoe?
I dropped down onto the floor below, pulling my arms in after me, and reached up for the torch. It was a second or two before I could bring the beam to bear. After that I didn’t move for quite a long time.
The man lay face down, shreds of what must once have been a black suit still clinging to the bones of his legs. The shoes, perfectly preserved, looked comically big, clown-big, on the thin branches of his ankle bones. I could see the jagged hole in the back of his skull, and the glint of a gold watch chain between his ribs.
His out-flung arm rested across the lap of the woman who sat slumped against the far wall, a bundle of sticks half-wrapped in dark rags. Her eye sockets had been knocked together into one long hole and her bottom jaw lay detached on the floor beside her. The girl lay in her arms, partially mummified and her hair still horribly abundant, faded to blond, cascading over her shrivelled face. The claw of her right hand was hooked through the chain of a pendant or locket of some kind.
I heard Serge drop down beside me and catch his breath.
‘Jesus Christ!’ He crossed himself, and did it again, backing off until he sat down on the steps. ‘Jesus Christ, Monsieur Madoc!’
I stepped around Gustave’s sprawled body and noticed for the first time that the floor was littered with tarnished silverware – candlesticks, a wine cooler, a scatter of cutlery. Mouldered documents, leather satchels and deposit boxes were piled on steel shelves along the wall. I took another step. My foot rolled across a brass shell-case. There were more of them, a lot more. I saw now the pock marks in the cement wall behind Rachael Rosen’s back, and the dark stains in the render.
Serge said fearfully: ‘Shouldn’t we leave them alone?’
I knelt beside Madeleine, forced myself to look into her ruined face. ‘She was the same age as Kate.’
The boy stood behind me, breathing hard.
‘Go back, Serge,’ I said. ‘I’ll be up in a second.’
I heard him scramble gratefully back up the steps. I stretched out my hand and touched Madeleine’s locket. I couldn’t make out details in the torchlight but I could see that it was damaged, the edge of the metal smeared over by one of the bullets which had ended her young life. I wondered what talisman had been so precious she had clutched it to her in this last moment. I reached out and let the weight of it rest in my hand.
Up above, the dog suddenly set up a frantic barking and Serge anxiously called my name. I half-turned, and the movement tugged on the chain of the locket and Madeleine’s dry face and hair fell against my wrist. She felt as light as a moth’s wing. I laid her gently back in her mother’s arms, stood up and backed away to the steps. I had reached the top before I realised that Madeleine’s locket was still in my hand. Serge called again, more urgently this time, and I stuffed the locket into my pocket.
When I pulled myself up through the trap Serge was already out of the cellar, crouching just inside the front door. He waved me to silence as I came up behind him, but he didn’t need to. Headlights raked across the paddock and I could clearly hear the vehicle’s engine.
‘They mustn’t find you here, Serge.’
He looked wildly at me. ‘Shall I go back to the house?’
‘No. They’ll look there. Hide out in the woods for a few hours, and this evening, when no one’s about, go to the launch.’ I gripped his shoulder. ‘She’s at the inlet near the point, near that old blockhouse. When it’s safe, get inside, close her up, and wait for me to come. This is the key to the lock on the main hatch. I’ll be there after eight o’clock tonight.’
He tossed aside his torch and slipped through the gap in the door. The dog, seeing his new benefactor running for the fence and freedom, bounded gleefully after him for a short way and sat down, confused. I sat down too, in the doorway. Below me I could see the black square of the trapdoor in the gathering light. I dragged my backpack towards me and took out the water bottle and drank, sluicing some over my face.
The four-by-four came bouncing across the paddock and pulled up outside the farmhouse. Yannick wrenched the door open and a moment later he stood over me, a torch in one hand and a hunting rifle in the other. His brother pushed past into the old farmhouse.
‘You’re a very persistent type, Monsieur Madoc, aren’t you?’ Yannick said. ‘But trespass? In France? We can do pretty well anything we like to you.’
‘He’s not alone.’ Stephan called up from the cellar. ‘Two torches.’
‘No. I’m not alone.’ I tilted my head towards the trapdoor.
The brothers exchanged glances. Stephan slid down over the rubble to the trap, and flashed his torch into the darkness as I had done. He waited for a moment and then swung himself down.
‘What’s there?’ Yannick called.
But Stephan was already scrabbling out of the darkness, whimpering, his arms and legs pumping to carry him away as fast as possible from what he had seen.
‘What the fuck have you been up to?’ Yannick knelt down and knocked me hard on the side of the head with the barrel of the rifle. ‘I said – ’
But he stopped then, because I was sliding the pickhandle out of my pack and the smooth haft was in my grip, and he knew what was coming and that he would not be quick enough to stop it. I swung the stave hard against his kneecap. I didn’t hear him scream, although he certainly did. I didn’t even notice when his gun exploded quite close beside my head, because I was too busy lifting the pickhandle high and bringing it down again, this time very hard indeed.
55
Inspector Sharif and I sat in folding chairs, sipping coffee from paper cups while police specialists in white coveralls moved around the ruins of La Division. There seemed to be a lot of them, carrying bags in through the front door, rigging tarpaulins, taking photographs.
I was giddy with exhaustion. The caffeine had not yet kicked in, and I badly needed it to. I drank some more. It was a little past eight in the morning and I was glad of the light and the fresh air.
‘Storm coming in, do you think?’ Sharif squinted at mountainous clouds building up over the Channel. ‘Just my luck. I left my umbrella at Madame Didier’s. I’m staying there, you know. You’re acquainted with her, I think?’
‘Oh, y
es. I’m acquainted with her.’
‘Extraordinary woman. When I got the call this morning she was already up. Or perhaps she hadn’t been to bed. She offered me Amontillado for breakfast.’
‘Jean-Paul Sartre used to insist upon it.’
‘She speaks very highly of you, Iain.’ It was the first time he had used my first name. ‘Which is encouraging, because it’s getting a little difficult to find people around here who speak highly of you. I don’t think the Garniers would fall over themselves to sing your praises, for instance. Particularly not Yannick. I doubt he’ll be dancing the tango any time soon.’
‘Such a loss.’
‘He’s legally entitled to use force if he finds you on his land, so I expect there’ll be some boring questions asked about what you did to him. But then I understand that his firearm isn’t licensed, so it will probably all come out amicably in the end.’
Sharif put down his coffee, inspected his nails and buffed his expensive sunglasses.
‘I must say I take my hat off to you, Iain. Your conspiracy theory had some truth in it. Something certainly did happen in St Cyriac. And it did involve the Rosens, poor people. You were right about that. That’s an apology, in case you didn’t recognise it.’ He leaned forward in his canvas chair. ‘I am puzzled, though. How did you know where to look?’
I took out my sketch, grimy now, and gave it to him. ‘This is a copy of my father’s map. They must have brought him and his crewman here night the priest was killed.’
‘Brought them here? But I thought –’
‘They can only have sailed from here. And he marked where the Rosens lay. Three lines in a box…’
Sharif frowned at the paper. ‘But your father escaped in 1944.’
‘Yes. And the Rosens were supposed to have been taken to Auschwitz in 1942...’
‘Well, well. A little conundrum. How do you explain it?’
‘You’re the detective.’
‘So I am.’ He gave me back the map. ‘Well, perhaps the SS decided to save themselves some paperwork. Didn’t trouble with an arrest. Shot the Rosens on the spot, and left them in the strongroom where Gustave kept his valuables, hoping they’d never be found.’