by Tom Knox
‘Jake. You say those police cars coming after you – one of them hit a bomb or a mine.’
‘Yes.’
‘And possibly some cops were thrown, maybe injured – even killed?’
‘I’m not sure. I saw one of them stumble out. Jesus. Jesus Christ . . . of course –’
The ugly reality dawned on Jake, like he’d woken to a nasty breakfast. The police car that exploded. Now he dwelled on it, conceptually, for a moment – it was obvious. Trouble. Serious trouble. They wouldn’t just let this go. Would they?
Tyrone summed it up:
‘Maybe a cop died, maybe he didn’t, but that’s serious. Add it to the doctor’s death – murder or suicide – and you have a very serious incident. Perhaps the Lao government will forget about the problem, rather than publicize it.’ He squinted at Jake. ‘That is possible. But maybe they won’t just forget it. They could go through the Cambodian authorities, ask them to arrest you. Or someone might just quietly tell someone . . . who hires someone. Maybe you should watch your back, on Monivong Boulevard.’
The scorpion of fear scuttled down Jake’s collar, under his shirt, and down his spine. He shivered at the sensation. Red haired, war-chewed old Tyrone Gallagher was surely right. Watch your back on Monivong.
Jake stood.
He felt ill-at-ease again, very ill-at-ease.
‘I need a leak.’
Turning on a heel he crossed the bar to the toilets. He unzipped and sighed, and gazed anxiously out of the toilet windows at the river. On both riverbanks, the people were out walking. Poor families were frying eggs in braziers on patches of scruffy grass. Bonfires burned. The squid sellers hawked their racks of dried translucent squid. Dried and swaying, like the kun krak.
Jake felt the scorpion move, under his shirt. The fear. This city: it always got to him. He found Phnom Penh addictive in its anarchy and energy and exoticism, but it was also a truly harrowing city. Menacing by day and haunted at all times. A city spooked by an unknown future – and a tragic and appalling past.
Down there on those crowded boulevards, on Monivong and Sisowath and National Highway 5, the Khmer Rouge had marched two million townspeople, out of the city, in two sunburned days in April 1975: they had cleared the whole capital as soon as they had won the civil war. People were tipped from hospital beds and forced to walk. The elderly who stumbled were left to dehydrate in the gutter. Children were lost in the chaos and never found again. The capital city was emptied, society was deconstructed, all was dissolved. Two days.
They even blew up the central bank, destroying all the money in the country; sending banknotes and government bonds flying into the shattered streets. The banknotes hung for weeks from the wilting jacaranda trees, like old confetti. Money was officially useless. And then the Khmer Rouge sent the nation into slavery, and they worked and starved a quarter of the population to death, and bludgeoned half a million more. Killing their own parents their own sons their own brothers their own families. Devouring themselves in an orgy of self harm. The nation that hated itself. The nation that killed itself.
His phone was ringing.
It was Chemda.
Her voice was an urgent whisper.
‘I got a call from Agnes, in Luang.’
‘And?’
‘A maid confessed, Jake. She confessed. She put the things in our rooms.’
‘But why –’
‘She was told to do it. The smoke babies were ordered, by the kra, the Neang Kmav of Skuon.’
‘The who? Who is that?’
The line hissed and deadened for a moment. ‘Sorry Jake. I –’ The voice was gone, then it returned. ‘My mother is crying. The whole family is in chaos – have to go – maybe I can call you back –’
The call blacked. Jake waited for a moment, and another moment, and nothing happened. He put the phone in his pocket and returned to his bar stool. His plate of pad thai was sitting on the table. Tyrone was already assaulting his burger. Jake picked up his knife and fork, but he didn’t feel remotely hungry any more. His stomach was full of fluttering nerves. He had already dined, too much, on fear and angst.
He told Tyrone what Chemda had told him. Tyrone stopped eating.
‘The Neang Kmav of Skoun?’
‘What? What is the Kmav? What is Skuon?’
Tyrone looked atypically rattled. ‘Skuon is a small town near here. They eat spiders there. Tarantulas.’
‘What?’
‘And the Neang Kmav is the Black Lady, a notorious fortune teller who lives there.’ Tyrone was shaking his head. ‘It sounds like a stupid cartoon but that . . . that is bad news.’
‘But –’
‘She’s an extremely powerful sorceress, one of those Khmer witch doctors that gets hired by Thai generals, Malay sultans, Chinese billionaires. Jake, this is the Spider Witch of Skoun we’re talking about. The Spider Witch of Skuon.’ He gazed at Jake’s frightened face. ‘Hey. Chillax. At least if she turns you into a frog it will make a good headline.’
Chapter 13
The air was still and cold above the Cham des Bondons. The stars looked down, protectively, on the standing stones. Annika was confronting her open kitchen window, talking on her phone with Julia.
‘So how long are you going to stay in Paris?’
‘Until I can track down the Prunieres collection.’
‘Ah. I see.’
‘But we’re having problems, it’s hard to find . . . But heck we’ll get there.’
Her friendly Canadian voice was distant yet close, a comforting sound in the loneliness of the moors. Annika had been feeling the emptiness more and more these past days. Since Ghislaine.
‘You tried the Louvre, I suppose.’
‘Of course I tried the Louvre. But nothing. Nothing at all. We’re still looking.’
A silence intervened.
Annika yearned to fill this maudlin pause, to fill it with facts, to say something useful. To stop all the lying.
But it was so hard. The years of deceit meant the deceit had become part of her, grown deeply into her being. She was like one of those sad old trees on the Cham: a tree that had grown too close to barbed wire, so that the tree had eventually grown around the wire, and absorbed it, slowly and painfully, until the cruel iron wire was part of the tree itself. And could not be ripped from the trunk.
The lies were deep inside her now, wholly embedded, could she just rip them out?
‘Annika?
‘I’m still here. I just want you to be careful. Julia. This is, you understand, a difficult area of investigation. Ghislaine was obsessed with Prunieres, what Prunieres discovered. And look where he is now.’
‘But why? What does that mean?’
Annika was silent. Julia persisted.
‘Annika, please, can’t you just tell me the whole damn thing? You already knew about Prunieres, you know a lot of this –’
‘I wish, I truly wish it was so simple.’ The Belgian woman stared through the open window, across the Cham. The silhouetted stones looked like Victorian scholars, dressed in black, and posed in thought.
‘Don’t understand. Why can’t you tell me now?’
‘Because I can’t. Not just . . . so simply. It’s like . . . like betraying him, Julia. And he’s barely cold in his grave. After all these decades, now he is dead, suddenly I am to overturn all we did, everything he believed? Give . . . me . . . time. Just a day or two. There are reasons I cannot talk. Let me think.’
‘OK,’ Julia’s voice softened. ‘OK. Sorry.’ Another silence, then. ‘Monsieur – ici . . . le rue Laperouse, n’est ce pas?’
Annika listened to Julia’s muffled dialogue with her cabbie; she could hear Paris traffic in the background, police sirens, noise from cafes and trains and hurrying people: for a moment she yearned to be there and not here. To be drinking cheap vin de table in some cheerful old brasserie in the Left Bank, not alone on the Cham with the stones. The frightening stones, waiting to seal the tomb lid, over Annika.
&nb
sp; The chill autumn wind was making her shudder. Tomb lid? This was silly, fanciful, superstitious. It was time to sort out the secrecy and the lies in her head, and then she just had to decide: was she going to admit the entire and terrible truth? Betray Ghislaine? Annika was very close to doing so.
And for the moment she could be a better friend to Julia. Poor Julia: dragged unwittingly into this vortex of brutality and terror.
‘Julia, Alex is joining you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. A friend, a man. That is good.’
‘Yep. I’m sorry to drag him from the Lozère.’
This apology was unexpected. The Belgian woman stepped forward and closed her kitchen window; the wind was simply too cold. Now she could see herself, frowning at her own reflection in the dark glazing.
‘Sorry for what?’
‘For leaving you alone Annika. There is still a killer out there . . . Have you heard they got a description?’
A pause; ‘Yes. Yes of course.’
The police had told her this yesterday: that someone had come forward with a description of the possible killer, or, at least, of someone acting suspiciously near Ghislaine’s house, on the night the archaeologist was butchered. A neighbour had been walking his dog, along the semi rural road near Marvejols, and had glimpsed a strange figure over a hedge. Why would anyone be skulking in a field on a very dark and wet evening?
But the description of the killer was bizarre: short, slender, very probably a young woman: long dark hair, chalky white face.
‘Do you believe it, Julia? Could a woman do all that? It sounds a little incredible to me.’
‘Maybe.’ The taxi driver was talking in the background, once again. ‘Look Annika, I have to go, I’m back at the hotel. Can see Alex waving. Please please please, when and if you feel like . . . you know – conf . . .’
‘Confessing?’
‘No – no I don’t mean confessing as such – I mean – I mean –’
‘Yes you do, Julia. You want a confession. Why shy away from this? And you are right to ask this, confession is the correct term. Just let me think . . . just permit me a few more days, maybe just a day or so. I will try to find the strength to defeat the years.’
The Canadian woman thanked Annika profusely, and said goodbye. The older woman shut down the call with an inner tremor of guilt. Why was Julia thanking her? Even now, after Ghislaine’s death, Annika was delaying, decoying, and avoiding, and blatantly lying: but soon, very soon, she had to admit it all. Ghislaine was dead; and because of that, and because of so many things, what they had once aspired to was also dead, philosophically, ideologically, morally. Was there any reason to maintain the deception one moment longer? Apart from the fact that it meant vitiating and eviscerating everything she had once believed?
Setting down the phone, Annika walked into the sitting room, and looked sadly around the softly lit, low-ceilinged room: at the elegantly framed artworks on the wall, the pictures from the ice age caves: of the mute and wounded Hands of Gargas, the great black frieze of Niaux.
It all seemed slightly insulting now. Once, these pictures, these mementoes, they had meant everything – truly everything – but now all this, her life’s work, the ceaseless work and the tireless lies and the childless journey she had shared with Ghislaine, it was an historical dead end: it had literally ended in death.
Ghislaine had been cut open like the bison of Lascaux, his intestines falling to the floor.
She had to talk, she had to tell: very soon. She paused. Then pulled a chair, and sat at her lonely desk; she opened her laptop, then turned around. A shadow. A noise.
What was it?
There was a large agitated shadow on the wall. Cast by a moth in the room. Flittering around a tablelamp. The moth was trapped in the lampshade, its little wings beating desperately. The struggle of the moth made the light flicker on the walls, animating the pictures: the hands of Gargas opened and closed, showing the severed fingers; the dying boys of Addaura struggled in the dust watched by the men with the sinister beaks. Like plague masks.
The moth was still trapped. The metaphor was brazen.
She and Ghislaine were like moths. Once and long ago they had thought they 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. But they had been wrong, they were like moths who sought the moon, by instinct, but flew inside a lampshade, and got trapped by their delusion, dying, burning, singed to death by the false deceiving light. Trapped by a terrible error.
Enough. Her thoughts were unravelling. Write them down.
She began writing an email to Julia. She was going to tell everything. Yes. It was the correct thing to do. And she had to begin with the most important speculation of all. The death of their friend in England. If that was connected then it all began to make sense, all of it.
Her typing was quick and efficient; from years of taking notes for Ghislaine, of helping Ghislaine, of writing a book they could never publish, of taking dictation from the man she loved despite the lies.
Annika’s fingers paused on the keys. But the large brown moth was still trapped in the lampshade, noisily fluttering. It was irritating and distracting, even a little distressing.
Standing up, she walked to the lampstand and reached her hands inside the shade. A subtle shiver run through her as she touched the hysterical flapping wings of the moth; she still nurtured childhood fears of moths trapped in her hair, flying into the mouths of sleepers, choking them on dusty wings.
An absurd phobia. Clutching her hands carefully, Annika caught the struggling moth between her fingers, caging it, not killing it. Slowly she moved to the nearest window, a small cottage window; it was unlatched; she just had to nudge the handle with her elbow and she could release the moth into the night. Just like this . . .
A white face passed in the darkness outside.
The shock was subzero. Liquidly chilling. What was that? What had she seen? Had she seen anything? Surely she had: it was metres away, a chalky white face, staring, barely visible in the gloom, like a ghost. And now it was gone.
Had it even been there? Yes, perhaps, no. Perhaps yes. Maybe she had imagined it. Her thoughts were turbulent. She calmed herself as best she could. It was probably her deeper anxiety making her foolish – she had surely imagined it, and now it was gone. So she could return to her computer.
A noise rattled across the garden.
Annika spoke, timidly.
‘Hello?’
It was so black out there, almost moonless. And the deserted village had no streetlights. The dark was so dark it could play tricks. But there – there! – that noise again. Was it just the wind, rattling an ancient door – or something lurking among the crumbling walls, maybe in the neigh-bouring ruined cottage.
Julia leaned further out of the tiny window.
‘Bonsoir? Hello? Is there someone there?’ She felt absurd as she did this.
Silence. Then more silence. Julia pulled back a fraction.
The face loomed again. The white face was rushing towards the window at incredible speed.
Annika choked with shock.
A dark hand was reaching in. Gripping her.
Who was this?
What was this? An angry face, showing animal anger, growling, murderous. Bestial. And now the body of this white-faced thing was pouring through the open window, pushing her back, hands enormously strong, muffling her mouth, all over her. Annika was grabbed by the throat and her arms and her legs: she was grappled by something unexpectedly and luridly powerful.
A jab of sharp pain pierced her neck, just under her chin. She had been injected. At once she felt the cold of paralysis slam into every limb, yet her brain was quite functional, she could sense and think and fear and feel her heart straining at the terror.
Annika tried to scream – but the paralysis was too strong. Yet she could feel pain, too, searing pain, she was being dragged by the killer, this woman,
was it a woman? So strong? Long dark hair? She was being dragged out of her sitting room by her own hair, yanking at the roots in her scalp.
Her hipbone banged against a table, now she was in the kitchen; her elbows knocked against the fridge, the oven, the door. The kitchen door. Lights dazzled her eyes and then more lights, and then she felt coldness and darkness: they were outside, she was being dragged over the front door step and along. By her hair.
The attacker was effortlessly potent. Annika was tugged and yanked all the way down her path, past her bins, past her little flower bed, out onto the track that led to the Cham des Bondons. Sharp cold skies sang above her, Capricorn span above her.
Where were they going? The stones? It had to be. She, it, this white-faced thing, she was dragging Annika to the stones. Again the Belgian woman tried to scream, again she heard nothing. Had she gone deaf?
No. She wasn’t deaf. She could hear the coarse and rasping breaths of the killer, the animal-like panting. She could hear the sounds of her own body slishing over the dewy turf, as she was hauled along by the hair.
The stones awaited.
The nearest stone to her cottage was one of the tallest, The Soldier, three brutal metres of impervious granite, a pillar of black in the black of the night: she saw it coming towards her. The stone was standing like an executioner, medieval, in a horrible black hood, waiting to do a silent duty.
Annika struggled.
The paralysis was dwindling. She could sense some movement return to her limbs, but she was trussed by the ankles. At some point she – this thing – this monster – must have duct-taped her ankles and wrists.
And now she was being lifted.
Lifted by the hair onto her knees. The horrible truth leered in her face. The killer was going to sit Annika on her knees, for an execution. She was being lifted to her knees so the killer could chop off her head, or smash her in the neck; but she had one last chance. One last chance. Grasping her final energy Annika lunged forward and rolled away, writhing across the grass, rolling away downhill – screaming, screaming loudly now, so loud they could surely hear her in the Ardeche.