Lost Goddess : A Novel (9781101554340)

by Knox, Tom

  “A wedding?”

  Grandfather Sen patted him paternally on the knee and said, “This is the most bizarre of surprises, I know.”

  “What the hell—a wedding?”

  Jake could barely grasp the idea. He was being offered Chemda: like a casual meal, or a rather trifling gift.

  Sen smiled regretfully.

  “I understand the shock. You probably need to think about it. I shall step inside, to see if these two typhoons have exhausted themselves. Wait here and I shall bring my daughter.”

  The old man quit the garden. Jake stared blankly at the gray rocks, the perfectly positioned tree, the tenderly raked circles of sand, all parched and delicate in the ruthless sun of the remorseless dry season.

  He was stunned, and perspiring, almost feverish. This wasn’t good; this was horrible. These people were so desperate to get Chemda safely out of the country, and get her swiftly married, they were prepared to foist her on some man they hardly knew. Maybe fear was driving this. Maybe even the great Sovirom Sen was scared; maybe everyone was scared.

  Jake was scared.

  A further, darker thought occurred to him. Could Chemda be part of this? Was this some peculiar conspiracy to entangle him? But why had she asked him to come this morning? Had she lied about her grandfather being away on business?

  The confusion was bewildering, even painful. He needed to get out, to think clearly. Get some advice, go home, drink too much coffee, call Tyrone.

  He got up and walked to the door and quickly crossed the hallway. The house was quiet. The maid stared at him from behind a door. The mother-daughter argument had apparently been calmed by Sen, or blown itself out. But he had no desire to linger and enjoy the domestic harmony. Not in this pristine prison of a house.

  Jake paced very quickly to the front door, and then virtually ran down the long, curving drive to the boulevard. Jumping in a tuk-tuk, he sat back, trying to clarify his thoughts in the sweet, warm, polluted Phnom Penh breeze. His mind was churning.

  It was Sunday, so it took just a few minutes to reach his corner. He tapped the driver on the shoulder.

  “Here. No problem. I can walk from here.”

  Handing over two dollars, Jake turned the corner. And saw a boy climbing off a motorbike—and casually walking to the door of Jake’s apartment block, carrying a glass bottle. Something about this was odd. Jake felt an instinctive wariness: who was this? What was going on? He slowed his pace, observing. The boy was fiddling with the bottle in his hand. And a lighter. He was setting fire to a cloth stuck in the bottle; he stepped back and threw the flaming bomb through a first-floor window. The glass crashed.

  The Molotov cocktail exploded inside Jake’s apartment.

  Flames woofed, fire streaked from the windows. Jake stood there, gawking, quite stupefied.

  It was all so casual, so fucking casual.

  The street was still quiet, it was Sunday morning, a young woman was cycling past the end of the road. Couples were strolling along the riverfront. And someone had thrown a Molotov cocktail.

  As Jake watched, the boy climbed back onto his Suzuki and sped away from the scene. The flames were already roaring, hoarse and hungry, licking up the walls. And then, incredibly, it happened again. A second lad drove up, on a moped, and repeated the process, calmly, half smiling—like it was an amiable household chore. The youth climbed off, Zippoed a wick in a glass bottle—and walked toward Jake’s flat. Ready to throw.

  The urge to run and stop the boy was almost irresistible. Jake wanted to sprint and kick and stomp and hurt—but some deeper logic held him back. Some inner, concealed, subconscious sense of self-preservation restrained him, despite his fury.

  Trembling with helpless anger, Jake watched. The boy hurled. The bottle smashed. The flames gained in strength, eating and roaring.

  The fire was big now. Someone, somewhere, screamed. People were running from cafés and pointing, fear on their faces. The fire bombers were long gone.

  Jake sank into the shadow of a frangipani tree. He realized, with a lucid terror, that he had just witnessed an attempt on his own life. No one knew he wasn’t in there, it was still quite early, it was Sunday, they probably presumed he was asleep, inside.

  Someone had just tried to kill him.

  17

  Chere Julia

  I don’t know how to begin this letter—this e-mail. It is perhaps the hardest thing I have been summoned to write. But I also feel I have no choice. You are owed an explanation; more than this, I want to give you an explanation, you above all people. My friend.

  Firstly, you need some essential facts. We are scientists, we are nourished by facts, n’est ce pas? Though I am a melancholy sort of scientist, these days. And perhaps this is a deformation professionelle, the inevitable destiny of the archaeologist. All the bones, Julia, all the many many bones. And the skulls. The wounded skulls and bones. They sadden me. They sadden me so much, now I know what I know.

  But I am hurrying away with my story. Here is your first fact, the first of many I must tell you.

  Three years ago, an old academic colleague of Ghislaine’s and mine, an academic named Hector Trewin, was killed in his Oxford college. You may have heard of him, or at least of the case. The murder, I believe, attracted a brief but intense flurry of interest, because Hector had been tortured before he was killed. Electric shocks had been applied to his hands, and his scalp, and, I believe, elsewhere. The homicide was apparently motiveless. No suspects were named or located, Julia. No one was arrested. The unsavory murder soon disappeared from the news.

  But, you see, not everyone was quite so mystified.

  From the start, Ghislaine and I were suspicious that the killing could have been linked to our trip to Cambodia—Democratic Kampuchea—in 1976.

  I have never told you of this. But it is crucial to my sad story.

  Decades ago, Hector Trewin, Ghislaine Quoinelles, and me, we were all part of a mission, a kind of mission, a team, an invited party. Most of us were French, there were also some Americans and Britons, myself from Belgium, as well, perhaps a German. I forget precisely, Julia, it was so long ago.

  But I remember the basic facts. We were all invited by the Chinese and Cambodian governments to visit Beijing, and Phnom Penh, in Spring 1976. The party comprised biologists, anthropologists, archaeologists—thinkers and scientists. And all of us were committed Marxists, supporters, or at least fellow-travelers, of the Pol Pot regime and the Maoists in China.

  What we did there I can barely bring myself to admit. Let me come to that later. What I can tell you now is that the murder of Trewin is, or was, I believe, related to this mission. Because, I mean, of the brutalities, the murder, they were so distinctive. So echoing.

  Therefore when Ghislaine and I read of Hector’s death, we thought, as a consequence, that perhaps someone was taking revenge: for our own terrible actions in the 1970s.

  Therefore we too began to fear, to indulge our horror of this chilling idea: that the killer was going to come for us, too. And take their revenge. This conviction grew over the following months. Earlier this summer Ghislaine openly speculated that we should flee, leave the country. I rejected his suggestions, and made him stay; perhaps, deep inside, I felt this looming fate was condign? Deserved? Maybe I deserved to be punished. My unadmitted guilt held me back.

  But again I am confusing you. Please forgive me. What I am struggling to enunciate is that all this, Julia, explains Ghislaine’s bizarre behavior in the cave, the day you discovered the skulls. He was genuinely concerned for my safety. He thought I was going to be attacked, like Trewin. …All the time he was looking out for me, for us. For himself too of course. He was very afraid he was going to die the same way, someday soon. We were all afraid we were going to die. One by one by one.

  Because all those legends were coming back to haunt us. Man reduced to animal to werewolf to beast.

  You may think I am going mad? I am not. Not now. Non. The madness was indeed ours: but it happened lo
ng ago. In ’76. And this is the truth of the matter, and this is why I need to tell you this. At last. Someone needs to know, and I sense that you, of all people, will understand. My friend. My female friend in the brutal male world of the caves of the skulls.

  Please forgive my previous opacity. J’espère I hope that this e-mail will shed the light you need. There is a moth in the lamp. It is trapped.

  I wonder if me and Ghislaine we were like the moths. Once and long ago we thought we were pursuing the truth, the great truth, the secret of the Ice Age caves, the secret of the blazing paintings in the darkness of the caverns, Julia, but we were so wrong, we were like moths who sought the moon, by instinct, but flew inside a lampshade and … and we got trapped by our delusion, dying burn singed to death by the deceiving light trapped by a terrible mistake.

  And that is why I cannot bear the lies anymore, Julia. I cannot live with myself, and these corruption Les lilas et les roses. Therefore t k t

  Julia dropped the printed sheet on the café table.

  “That’s where it ends?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she was about to send this e-mail? To me?”

  “Of course. Yes.”

  “But how…”

  Rouvier set down his absurdly large cup of latte and explained:

  “The murderer reached her before she could finish, or even get halfway through, perhaps. However, she was using webmail. The draft message was, therefore, automatically saved. We retrieved it yesterday.”

  Julia stared at the table, at her coffee, at nothing. Trying not to reveal her deepening disquiet. But it was impossible. This new revelation destabilized everything.

  Ghislaine’s death had been ghastly enough—but she had not been emotionally close to her boss. She was, moreover, able to rationalize that crime: she had pretty much convinced herself his death was a unique, if horrible, atrocity. An ex lover taking mad revenge, maybe. Or just a robbery gone wrong.

  But Annika? Julia had cared for the woman; they had been real friends. This murder therefore grieved Julia, very badly; it also forced her into fiercer, more horrifying speculations.

  The murders.

  The brutal murder of Annika following the brutal murder of Ghislaine, that really did mean a chain, a link, a series of crimes—perhaps interwoven with all these mysterious secrets. And a series of crimes implied there would be more crimes. There would be further killings. She shuddered, inwardly.

  Rouvier carefully stirred his coffee.

  They were in a suitably discreet corner of the bland and busy coffee shop. Julia had suggested Starbucks, by the Gare du Nord, because Rouvier had said he was en route to London by train. She’d also chosen Starbucks quite deliberately, because it was so ordinary and non-French and it reminded her of Michigan.

  This is what she wanted right now. Michigan, college football, meat loaf, Tim Horton’s. And this place was the closest she could get: the sofas, the menus, the vast and oversweet cinnamon buns: they were comforting, so very North American. Insipidly safe. Nursery food for the soul.

  Rouvier gazed at her, knowingly, as if he could see her fear.

  “Miss Kerrigan, I do not think the killer is after you.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Why not read the e-mail again.”

  She snatched up the sheet of paper.

  Chère Julia…

  Engaging with the puzzle—shunting emotion aside as best she could—Julia deconstructed the information, more slowly this time: trying to grasp the hidden and curtailed meanings; trying not to imagine Annika’s obvious fear and distress. The e-mail spoke of a very troubled mind, struggling to confess. Bewildered, frightened, and almost waiting to die, almost yearning to die. And also confessing. But confessing what? What had happened in Cambodia?

  She set down the piece of paper on the table, next to her undrunk cappuccino. For a moment she visualized, helplessly, the ensuing scene in the little cottage on the Cham des Bondons. The killing of her friend, her head smashed against a pillar of rock. Smashed to death. She fought back a surge of near-tears, and said, slowly, “I do know the name. Hector Trewin. He is, or he was, quite old, a Marxist anthropologist at Balliol. Respected. Famous in his time, in the 1960s and ’70s.”

  Rouvier nodded. “Yes. I am meeting the English police today to go over such matters. But yes, you are quite right about Trewin. Furthermore, Annika Neuman speaks correctly of their shared connection. Our researches prove this.”

  “It does?”

  “Here. We have a photo.” Rouvier was reaching for his briefcase once more. He extracted a large scan of a color photo and laid it on the table, facing Julia. “We found it among Miss Neuman’s files.”

  It was like a school photo, a group photo: a party of people, with some sitting, some standing behind, all smiling at the camera.

  The photo was so obviously taken in the 1970s: it ached with nostalgia for itself. Lots of flared trousers, wide neckties, short, vivid dresses on the women. The faces were mostly young; all of them were keen, hopeful, idealistic, squinting a little in the sun. So many years ago.

  Julia touched the photo. There: she could see Annika Neuman. Beautiful, blond, Dutch-Belgian, in a summer dress and sandals. Ghislaine was next to her, his arm around her, slightly awkward, slightly proud. His hair did not look absurd. Leaning closer to the photo, Julia tried to assess where it had been taken: the sun was harsh, tropical. Behind them was a strangely empty city street, distant shadows of palm trees. It was Cambodia, for sure: one of the empty, desolate boulevards of Phnom Penh. How could they be smiling?

  “Yes,” said Rouvier. “It is Phnom Penh, 1976, a few months after Year Zero, after the genocides had already begun. Rather disturbing, no?”

  The policeman laid a finger on the photo. “This is Hector Trewin.”

  Julia frowned. She vaguely recognized the face: it provoked distant memories of textbooks, maybe an ancient, pompously serious BBC TV program. Trewin was older than most of the others in the photos; but he was also smiling. His smile was even more ardent.

  “So,” said Julia. “They all went to Cambodia. As she said. But…” Julia glanced back at the e-mail. “What does this bit mean. This word revenge?”

  “Miss Neuman’s intention is, to me at least, quite clear.” Rouvier placed his fingertips on the photo, gently pinning it down. “Lewin was electrocuted, in various parts of the body, while he was alive. He was finally dispatched with a terrible blow to the back of the head, with a metal bar. Victims of the Khmer Rouge were tormented and then killed in precisely this way.”

  The puzzle cohered; the logic emerged.

  “You mean … the murderer is… a Cambodian? A survivor of the Khmer Rouge?”

  “Very possibly.”

  “I get it. The killer is taking revenge on these old academics, old Communists, who went to Phnom Penh in 1976. And supported the regime. It’s vengeance! Of course!”

  “It seems something of that nature. Yes. I think so.”

  Julia was somewhat gratified by this solution. It finally made sense, after so much disorientating, seemingly arbitrary violence. The murders were just basic human revenge, exacted on old Western Communists, by a victim of the most evil of Communist regimes. She could almost understand it; she could almost empathize. If the murderer hadn’t brutally killed her friends and colleagues.

  She also liked this solution for the most grisly and selfish of reasons: because she was cut out of the picture. She wasn’t a target. It had nothing to do with her job, her discoveries, the skulls and the bones.

  And yet, a still and persistent voice inside her told her the skulls and the bones were connected. Annika specifically mentioned them. There must be a link, then? But a link meant a link to Julia herself.

  She was still confused, and she was definitely frightened; she sipped her milky coffee.

  Rouvier sat forward. “There is more, naturally. There are many aspects to these murders that still puzzle me.”

  The coffee was goin
g cold already.

  Julia stammered, “A aspects like what?”

  “For a start, there is the sheer skill of the intrusion, the enormous strength, the necessary athleticism—we believe the killer gained entry through a small cottage window at Miss Neuman’s house.”

  Julia remembered the window. It was small. How did the killer get through that? A slender young woman could do it, or a boy, maybe; a small Asian man.

  “Are you guys sure it is a woman?”

  Rouvier smiled approvingly, as if Julia were an elder daughter who had asked a clever question.

  “A most important point. Our sole reliable description is of a pale woman with long dark hair. But the kind of expertise we see here must surely come from training, the army, maybe special forces. And a man is much more likely to have this kind of strength and background, this capability. So a man, or a woman. Or what? Who is this?”

  Rouvier was frowning through the window at the grand stone façade of the Gare du Nord. It was a bright autumn day in Paris, the streets busy with taxis and tourists.

  He turned.

  “Miss Kerrigan, this is where you come in, once more. When I considered all this yesterday, I recalled our conversation outside the hospital that night. Your questions.”

  “Our conversation?”

  “Cast your mind back. You asked me about the research of Ghislaine’s grandfather, the great professor. I told you it was about crossbreeding, between men and animals.”

  Julia took another quick sip of her enormous cappuccino. It was completely cold now. She put the coffee down, and protested.

  “But I was feeling kinda disturbed, that evening. Just asking questions for the sake of it.”

  Rouvier smiled, very soberly. “Exactly so, Miss Kerrigan, but it is a notion that has some folkloric resonance in Lozère. The werewolves of the Margeride, no? Therefore, two days ago, as I thought of the animal savagery of the attacks and so forth, I recalled your question. This is why I asked my assistant to investigate the backgrounds of these academics, these Communists who went to Cambodia.”