The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge
Page 28
‘Pas vraiment.’ Schweigen hesitated. His English failed him. ‘No, she’s not his wife. She’s his Judge.’
‘Righto, sir. I’ll send someone over to talk to you.’
The officer then stood beside the car, utterly confused.
Schweigen rocked her in his arms. He was an honest man. A piece of truth smouldered in his pocket.
‘Dominique, listen. I don’t understand this any more than you do. But he wasn’t planning to die tonight. He can’t have known that the last of the Faith were bent on organising another departure. You heard what Hamid said – the Guide cannot outlive his people. The Composer didn’t choose to die as they did. But he had to follow them. That’s what he believed he had to do. Look. I found these in the hotel. Two tickets for Lübeck on the morning plane. One of them’s in your name. He was going home and he counted on taking you with him.’
The Judge sat up straight, her face garish and macabre in the swivelling blaze from the squad cars.
‘Taking me? I can’t go. What do you mean? I won’t go.’ She raged into his face. She gave no sign that she had understood him.
Schweigen abandoned explanations. The lights contradicted the eerie silence of the great white dish; he heard the birds stirring uneasily in the long, bulbous line of trees. Even the voices surrounding the barrier tapes came to them muffled and hushed. Schweigen tried again and spoke for the Composer, who had left them, discarded and stranded, beneath the great white dish, amidst the gathering dew and the flat English fields.
‘He loved you. He wanted you. He loved you as much as I do.’
* * *
On the 12th of June 2001 the Assemblée Générale ratified the draft legislation that defined a sect in precise philosophical and legal terms. The sects could no longer operate on any French territory, neither within the hexagone, nor overseas. Dominique Carpentier watched over the passage of this law into the architecture of the French state with quiet satisfaction. Under the terms of the Composer’s will she became Marie-T’s legal guardian and spent a good deal of her time at the Domaine Laval, revising philosophy and literature. The final exams loomed over them both. The Judge rediscovered her passion for Racine. They read Andromaque together, startled at the emotional excess which emerged from satin corsets and rhyming couplets. The Judge occupied Marie-Cécile Laval’s bedroom whenever she stayed at the Domaine, but she changed nothing in the room. She displaced no objects, altered no wallpaper, bedspreads, ornaments or photographs.
Every two months the Judge flew to London to visit Professor Hamid, who had been released on bail, pending his hearing. The British courts decided that he presented no danger to the general public; the Judge harassed his defence team with documents and suggestions. No one could decide where the preliminary hearings should be held. His extremely detailed declaration described two murders, prior to the mass suicides, one in France and one in Switzerland. But nobody initiated any extradition proceedings. The Judge decided to delay the paperwork, thus giving him time to finish his monograph on the recent discoveries uncovered at the ancient astrological monuments in Nineveh. The Book of the Faith remained under lock and key in the bowels of her office. She never allowed the Book to leave the reinforced steel safe, and in that sense she became its Keeper, and its Guardian.
Afterword
Explanations and acknowledgements are not usually added to a work of fiction, but a few words are necessary here. My French-speaking readers will have noticed that I have anglicised the shortened spelling of Marie-Thérèse. Her name would usually be written in French as Marité, or Marithé. To an English eye, unused to French, this would appear to be an entirely different character in the fiction. I have therefore spelt her name Marie-T throughout, in the interests of clarity.
Thank you to the team that produced this book: my agent Andrew Gordon at David Higham, my editor and publisher, Alexandra Pringle, and her colleagues at Bloomsbury, especially Erica Jarnes and Alexa von Hirschberg. I would like to thank Mary Tomlinson in particular, for her astute attention to the detail of the text.
Novelists need help with their inventions. Thank you to the following friends and colleagues: Monsieur and Madame Agneau, Myriam Buades, Lucie Barthès, Ghyslène Chantre, Simone Chiffre, David Evans, Richard Holmes, Anne Jacobs, Peter Lambert, Jenny Newman, Michèle Roberts, Sandrine Sire, Rose Tremain, and all my neighbours, past and present, in the village of St Martial. Jacqueline Martel created the garden at the Domaine Laval. Françoise Brutzkus-Gélinet, Avocat à la Cour d’Appel de Paris, advised me on French law and I am very grateful to her and her colleagues. Dr Tim O’Brien at Jodrell Bank has been very generous with his time and astronomical expertise, and for sharing his knowledge of Hebrew, I am grateful to Professor Philip Alexander from the department of Religions and Theology at the University of Manchester. My first readers are Janet Thomas and Sheila Duncker, and I thank them for all their critical help, suggestions and encouragement. Janet Thomas is one of the other writers who keep me going when the going gets tough. Claude Chatelard painstakingly corrected my French, and Lisbeth Lambert checked the German, for which I am exceedingly grateful. Needless to say, all the remaining errors are mine alone.
I have taken the usual geographical liberties every writer takes with physical space, so that it will be impossible for anyone to find the Judge’s offices in Montpellier, the Domaine Laval, the house in Lübeck, or the Hôtel Belvédère on the slopes of Sète. So far as I am concerned all the characters and sects I have described are entirely fictitious, but the Dark Host is real, and, by the time you are reading this book, the eclipse will already have begun.
Patricia Duncker
Aberystwyth, 2009
A Note on the Author
Patricia Duncker is the author of four previous novels: Hallucinating Foucault (winner of the Dillons First Fiction Award and the McKitterick Prize in 1996), The Deadly Space Between, James Miranda Barry and Miss Webster and Chérif (shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 2007). She has written two books of short fiction, Monsieur Shoushana’s Lemon Trees (shortlisted for the Macmillan Silver Pen Award in 1997) and Seven Tales of Sex and Death, and a collection of essays on writing and contemporary literature, Writing on the Wall. She is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Manchester.
By the Same Author
Fiction
Hallucinating Foucault
Monsieur Shoushana’s Lemon Trees
James Miranda Barry
The Deadly Space Between
Seven Tales of Sex and Death
Miss Webster and Chérif
Criticism
Sisters and Strangers
Writing on the Wall: Selected Essays
Edited
In and Out of Time
Cancer through the Eyes of Ten Women (with Vicky Wilson)
The Woman who Loved Cucumbers (with Janet Thomas)
Mirror, Mirror (with Janet Thomas)
Safe World Gone (with Janet Thomas)
Copyright © 2010 by Patricia Duncker
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations
embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address
Bloomsbury USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York
library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Duncker, Patricia, 1951–
The strange case of the composer and his judge : a novel / Patricia Duncker.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-1-60819-203-8 (pbk.)
ISBN-10: 1-60819-203-2 (pbk.)
1. Police—France—Fiction. 2. Murder—Investigation—Fiction.
3. Sects—Fiction. 4. Composers—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6054.U477S77 2010
823’.914—dc22
2009049557
First published by Bl
oomsbury USA in 2010
This e-book edition published in 2010
E-book ISBN: 978-1-60819-287-8
www.bloomsburyusa.com
Table of Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
1 HUNTERS IN THE SNOW
2 THE FIRST DEPARTURE
3 THE BOOK OF THE FAITH
4 NOT DEATH, BUT JUDGEMENT
5 THE PRINTER OF LÜBECK
6 ENDLESS NIGHT
7 SERVANTS OF ISIS
8 PERSEPHONE’S DOUBLE
9 GREEN THOUGHT
10 CONSEQUENCES
11 FLAMME BIN ICH SICHERLICH
12 AGAPE: HEALING THROUGH LOVE
13 THE FÊTE
14 PRAYER FOR THE DEAD
15 THE CHTEAU IN SWITZERLAND
16 FOLLOW ME INTO THE KINGDOM
17 JODRELL BANK
Afterword
A Note on the Author
By the Same Author
Copyright Page
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