by Kate Mosse
Most of all, Sandrine Vidal.
He did not know why he was certain that she was so important in this story, only that she was. Two years ago she had told him of the dreams she sometimes had at night. Of the sensation of slipping out of time, falling from one dimension into another through white space. Of the indistinct figures hunting her down – white and red and black and green – their faces hidden beneath hoods and shadow and flame. The glint of metal where should have been skin. Baillard did not know yet what the Codex contained, but he recognised echoes of the Book of Revelation in her nightmares and wondered at it.
Was she linked in some way to the Codex and its history? Was it chance, or was there a design behind the fact that Sandrine had come upon Antoine Déjean at the river that day and heard the words he spoke? Happenstance or destiny?
Baillard sighed. Once more, he was being called upon to drive the invaders from the green lands of the Languedoc. Once more, to fight to liberate the Midi. To protect the ancient secrets buried in the mountains. He turned to the west, where the labyrinth cave lay hidden within the folds of the Sabarthès mountains. Then returned his eyes to the images on the milk-white scrap of cloth.
Baillard feared the power of the Codex. He feared he would not be equal to the task and would fail to control the forces that might be unleashed. But he was resolved to act. He had no other choice, whatever the consequences might be.
‘Come forth the spirits of the air.’ He spoke the words that had lain in the dusty recesses of his mind through his long captivity. ‘Come forth the armies of the air.’
He paused. He listened. And, carried on the air, he heard the land begin to answer.
‘Benlèu,’ he whispered. Soon.
Chapter 121
CARCASSONNE
Raoul didn’t want to leave, but Sandrine sent him away as soon as the curfew was lifted. She and Lucie needed to get ready and he shouldn’t be out on the streets for any longer than absolutely necessary.
‘And you can’t stay here,’ she said.
Raoul put his arms around her waist and drew her to him. ‘Be careful, ma belle.’
She smiled. ‘You too.’
‘Chez Cazaintre.’
Sandrine nodded. ‘And don’t be late!’ She leant forward and kissed him.
Raoul left the rue du Palais by the garden gate, into the rue du Strasbourg, down to the riverbank and along. He took an even more circuitous route than usual, to make sure he wasn’t being followed. His eyes darted left and right, watching for patrols or Milice informers. Every journey he was obliged to make during daylight hours was undertaken with a knot in his chest, hands balled into fists, his heart bumping one beat into the next.
No one paid him any attention.
He went out of town towards the Aire de la Pépinière, then doubled back to approach the Quai Riquet from the route de Minervois. There was a blind corner underneath the railway bridge by the station. Coming at it from the eastern side of the Bastide, he could see the whole sweep of the road clearly.
There were no police, no military vehicles, no sounds. Nothing to see but the ripple of the Canal du Midi and no noise but the water lapping against the wooden hulls of the barges moored on the riverbank.
Raoul walked quickly along the narrow pavement in the light of the rising sun and into the building. Careful not to hurry, careful not to idle. The street door to the building where his mother lived stood open, as it always had done. The familiar smell in the hallway, polish and the chill of the floor tiles, caught at his heart. Taking him back to a time when he and Bruno had been rough-and-tumble brothers, eager every morning to be allowed out to play. Watching the barges transporting food and grain along the Canal du Midi, the coopers with barrels of beer and wine from Toulouse, the stevedores with their wide-brimmed hats and faces tanned dark by the sun. Sometimes a sou for holding a horse’s harness while the men went to the down-and-out bar to drink after the sun had gone down.
He took a deep breath, banishing the ghosts of the past, then mounted the stairs two by two to the first floor. It seemed strange to do it, but he didn’t want to scare his mother, so he knocked at the door. Nothing happened. He heard no footsteps, no sound from the wireless or voices talking. He hesitated, then fished the latch key out of his pocket. He put it into the lock and turned.
‘Maman, c’est moi,’ he said, stepping into the apartment.
The silence surged around him like a living thing, curious and intrusive. It seemed cold in the flat, though Raoul couldn’t have said why.
‘Maman?’
A sense of foreboding swept through him.
‘It’s me, Raoul.’
There was a strange noise he couldn’t identify. High-pitched, angry, like a thousand flies trapped in a boy’s jar. The buzzing and humming, and the smell. A putrefying stench that seemed to seep from under the door, sticking to his skin and his hair and his clothes. He looked down and saw that he was standing in water.
‘Maman,’ he said, fear catching in his throat. Or was it grief?
Raoul put out his hand and pushed open the door into the kitchen. Time stopped. He seemed to be looking down on the scene from outside. His hand on the wooden panel of the door – eyes open, heart thudding, the pulse of blood in his head – and seeing, but being unable to take in what he saw. And the sound. The drone of the buzzing and the humming of the black cloud around his mother’s face.
She was sitting in a chair facing the kitchen window. Her body was swollen, purple turning to black, plump in death as she had not been in life. Raoul swallowed hard, snatching his handkerchief from his pocket and clamping it over his nose and mouth. Struggling to keep his emotions in check, he forced himself to think.
Think, not feel.
He had seen men die. Seen their bodies decay when they couldn’t be reached to bring them back to base, in France’s six weeks of fighting in May 1940. So he knew that the death chill that set in immediately was followed, within two to six hours, by rigor mortis. From cold to warm again, it was only days later that the body started to putrefy. Bloating, swelling, turning in upon itself.
The arrangement had been that their neighbour came in every other day. But what if she had forgotten? What if she’d been arrested? What if she stopped bothering, knowing no one else would come?
Was this his fault?
Raoul stood still, his emotions suspended, aware of the lap of water around his shoes, but yet unable to process the information. When had his mother died? Two days ago? Three? Where had he been when she’d taken her last breath? In Limoux, in Carcassonne?
Feeling as if everything was happening to someone else – a man who looked like him, stood like him, grieved like him – Raoul looked around the room. He realised the tap was running into the overflowing sink. He crossed the room in a couple of strides and turned it off, then took the plug out. A gurgle and a gulp and the sink began to drain. He leaned forward and opened the window as high as it would go, then rushed through the flat opening every other window to let the foul smell seep out. He couldn’t bring himself to go closer to the chair where his mother sat.
There were no obvious signs that anyone had been here, but he had to be sure. People didn’t just die. They didn’t just sit in a chair and stop breathing. Did they?
What had happened?
Raoul shook his head, numb with disbelief. He should do something. Call the undertaker, ensure that the dignity that had been taken from her in the hour of her passing was restored to her. Be a good son in this, at least. But he couldn’t, not yet.
He searched the flat. In each room, the same story. His distress grew, his sense of failure at having let her become so ill. Having left her alone. Everywhere were the scribbled notes, the same words written over and over again. On scraps of newspaper, on the cover of a paperback book, on the brown paper packaging of a loaf of bread delivered and not eaten.
‘Les fantômes,’ he muttered. Ghosts.
He screwed up the scrap of newspaper and threw it to the f
loor. The cheap paper swelled in the centimetre of water, then opened up like a flower.
A shiver went down his spine. He remembered how she stood at the kitchen window, looking out. Waiting for Bruno to come. How much it had frustrated him and upset him and made him angry, because he could do nothing to assuage her grief. All the time talking about how the ghosts would come, that the spirits were waking.
Ghosts?
He had dismissed all of it as delusion. The result of grief and heartbreak too much to bear and the loss of her favourite son. But that was then. Before he met Sandrine, before he sat in Coustaussa and listened to Monsieur Baillard tell stories of the Codex and a ghost army that might save the Midi.
Raoul ran back into his mother’s bedroom, throwing everything to one side, searching for something he’d seen on her nightstand. He took a deep breath and looked down at the desperate message. An empty pill bottle, was that it? But everywhere, words printed in block capitals in pencil on a sheet of cheap blue writing paper: FANTÔMES, ARMÉE, MONTAGNES. Then, on the lines beneath, single words written over and over again like an embroidered pattern: VERRE VERRE VERRE, FEU FEU FEU.
‘Glass and fire,’ he murmured.
He rushed back into the sitting room, thinking he must tell Sandrine. See what she thought. Then he remembered. She and Lucie were on their way to the Cité.
Finally, the horror hit him.
He turned round and saw his mother, for the first time saw her as she was. He doubled over, sorrow and pity ripping his insides open, and emptied his guts. Raoul realised, now, of course. His mother had been dead for two days. The anniversary of Bruno’s birthday. How had she done it? Those pills? Or had her heart simply stopped beating? She had kept going, but where was the sense in it? The loss did not get easier to bear and the war did not end. Bruno was dead and he – the son she did not miss – never came.
Raoul gathered his mother’s last testament – the ghosts that only she had been able to see – and left the apartment where he had spent the first eighteen years of his life. He slipped a note under the door of their neighbour on the ground floor, hoping no harm had come to her, then stepped out into the street.
The peaceful sunlight on the canal mocked the horror of the scene in the room he had left. Raoul hesitated for a moment, then turned and walked to the underground bar. He didn’t know if it would be open or if they would let him in without a password, but he couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.
Was it his fault?
The hatch slid back. He sensed a pair of eyes looking at him, then the grating sound of the bolt being shot, and the door opened a fraction.
‘I need a drink.’
A hand pulled him inside. Raoul heard the door shut behind him. He turned to thank the man and found, for some reason, he couldn’t see him properly. He raised his hand to his eyes and realised that his cheeks were wet.
‘Sandrine,’ he whispered, wanting only for her to be with him. For her to be safe.
‘Come on,’ the man said. His voice was gruff, but kind. ‘There’s one or two others in already.’
Chapter 122
The milicien stood to attention when Laval came into the room. Laval took no notice of him, merely strode to the side window and looked out, then moved to the front window which gave on to the rue du Palais itself. The street was empty in both directions.
‘No one’s approached the house?’
‘No, sir.’
‘So as far as we know, the subjects are still inside?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Anyone else?’
‘Not that I’ve seen.’
The police officer was too scared to admit he had fallen asleep at his post. He’d come on duty at six, after a late shift at the railway yard – every night there were attempts on the rolling stock, thefts of metal and wood – his second in a row. The combination of the stuffiness of the house and the shot of brandy Madame Fournier had given him to perk him up had sent him off for ten minutes, possibly more. He thought he might have heard something, voices perhaps, but he wasn’t sure if they’d come from the house next door or the street. He decided to say nothing.
Madame Fournier, her hands clasped in front of her, appeared in the doorway.
‘Is there anything I can get you, monsieur lieutenant?’ she asked. ‘Anything you need? Or your men need?’
‘No,’ Laval said abruptly.
He found her presence irritating – he always hated undertaking surveillance in civilian houses – and her need to be useful repelled him. Madame Fournier’s face hardened for a moment, then settled back into its habitual obsequious expression.
‘Well, if you do, let me know,’ she said, and went away.
The milicien glanced at her disapproving back. Laval ignored her. In his opinion, she had been of limited help. In addition to Marianne and Sandrine Vidal, and Suzanne Peyre, she’d said there was another woman with a little boy who visited occasionally. When pressed, she said that ‘foreign-looking’ men did sometimes call. Laval knew her type. Trying to make herself important.
Laval glanced at the clock, then back to the road. In the absence of hard evidence, he did not share Authié’s conviction it was Sandrine Vidal – with or without Raoul Pelletier’s assistance – who’d set the device in the Tour de la Justice. Apart from the sentry confirming something was there, they had not gone into the tower on Authié’s orders. He didn’t want the insurgents to know that it had been spotted.
Laval still thought Authié had made a mistake in not raiding the Vidal house the previous night, even though it suited his purposes to be able to be in the rue du Palais at this point.
After more than two years at Authié’s side, he had learnt to read his commanding officer well. He was aware that Authié had evidence to implicate him in the murder of Bauer and his men in August 1942. He also knew Authié had been shocked when de l’Oradore, a devout Catholic, had not destroyed the Codex. The words had been condemned by the Church in the fourth century. Authié assumed that instruction still held good in the twentieth.
Now it appeared the document was a forgery. This time Laval knew Authié would not hand the Codex over. He would deal with the matter himself, believing he’d been given a second chance. He had told Laval as much.
Which was why Laval had to make sure he found the Codex before Authié did. And he agreed that the surest way was to find Sandrine Vidal. He, too, had a second chance.
Laval glanced again at the clock. His visitor should be here at any moment. A middle-ranking officer and senior archaeologist working for the Ahnenerbe, he reported directly to Reichsführer Himmler. In return for handing over the Codex, Laval would be given a guarantee of safe passage to Berlin if – when – the Wehrmacht pulled out of the Aude.
Laval heard footsteps on the stairs, then another milicien came into the room.
‘A man approaching the house, sir.’
Immediately the atmosphere changed. Laval turned to face him.
‘Front or back?’
‘Front.’ He paused. ‘German, sir. Not one of ours.’
Laval moved to the window and saw a tall man, black cap, black tunic and breeches, black dress boots, on his arm the distinctive insignia – the double sig rune – of the Ahnenerbe.
‘You,’ he ordered, pointing at the first milicien, ‘keep Madame Fournier out of the way.’ He turned to his colleague. ‘You, let our visitor in. No one is to do anything – anything at all – except on my orders. Is that clear?’
Raoul was sitting with Robert Bonnet. The bar was tawdry and down at heel in the harsh light of day. It smelt of yesterday’s sweat and spilt beer and stale tobacco. The owner didn’t want trouble. Having let Raoul in, he’d taken one look at him, at the state he was in, and sent someone to fetch Bonnet.
‘You did what you could, Pelletier,’ Robert said again.
Raoul ran his finger round the top of his glass. He felt crushed by guilt, by the horror of what he’d witnessed. Bonnet had taken charge and sent Yvette to
the undertaker with an unsigned note asking him to call at the Quai Riquet – none of them could risk giving their names. The undertaker would publish details in the newspaper of the funeral arrangements.
‘I didn’t do enough. I handed over my responsibility to someone else. I should have made sure she—’
‘Pelletier,’ Bonnet said sharply, putting his hand on Raoul’s arm, ‘she’d had enough. You told me that almost the first time we met. When was that? Three years ago, give or take? You said then she had never got over your brother’s death. If anything, you should be pleased with yourself that you kept her alive for so long.’
‘Why wasn’t the neighbour there?’ Raoul put his head in his hands. ‘When did she leave? My mother . . .’ He paused, then began again. ‘She must have felt abandoned, no one coming to see if she was all right. What if she wanted help?’
‘You found the bottle empty,’ Robert said quietly.
Raoul felt numb, dead through shock.
‘If she wanted to go,’ Bonnet continued, ‘there’s not a thing you – or anyone else – could have done to stop her. If it’s any consolation, she won’t have suffered. Pills, all very peaceful. Just gone to sleep and not woken up. It’s what she chose.’
‘But the state of the place, Bonnet,’ Raoul said, picturing the scraps of paper, the words written on every surface, over and again. ‘She wasn’t in her right mind. She can’t have been.’
‘The doctor will record it as a heart attack,’ Bonnet said. ‘You needn’t worry about that.’
Raoul looked up at him. He hadn’t even been thinking about what would happen if her death was registered as a suicide.
‘It was no one’s fault,’ Bonnet continued. ‘One of those things you couldn’t do anything about.’
Raoul knew Bonnet was doing his best to help. ‘If you’d known her before, before Bruno died, before she got ill. A wonderful woman. One of those rare people, popular with everyone. Our friends, neighbours. No one had a bad word to say about her.’
Robert nodded, letting him talk.