Bible of the Dead

by Tom Knox

  He thought of his mother. Dying and smiling. How had she died? He didn’t want to think about it. He thought of the demon heads, the women in the frieze staring down at him as they hid at the dark centre of Preah Kahn. He thought of Sonisoy, screaming. Everyone was dying now, it was day zero year zero, they were clearing the city of his life; people were just falling in the gutter of Sisovath Boulevard. Soon they would blow up the bank.

  A rattle turned his daydreams into lucidity. The tarpaulin was flung back. The driver was standing there.

  ‘Anlong Veng.’

  The driver motioned: climb out.

  Tentatively, Jake rubbed his muscles as he walked away from the pickup. The sun was less hot now. They were in the main square of some tiny impoverished town where boys played volleyball in the middle of the dusty road.

  Chemda was on maneuvers already: paying off the driver, and talking to another younger man in a faded red Klang Beer tee shirt.

  Chemda turned and explained to Jake:

  ‘We can rest here,’ she gestured down a shady lane, that led to a kind of promontory. ‘This man is Rittisak, he will help us.’

  ‘But –’ Jake stared around. Some guys were drinking palm wine at a wooden shack a few metres away, looking curiously at the muddied Khmer princess and the scruffed up sweating white man. ‘Are we safe here?’

  ‘We are safe here. This is Anlong Veng, the Thai border is on top of those hills there, the Dangrek Escarpment, Chong Sa crossing. Ah. This is the last place the Khmer Rouge ruled, until 1998.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘The locals hated the Khmer Rouge so much they still hate everyone, the police, the customs – if we are outlaws that makes us their friends – we are safe here, hnn, for a few hours, but then,’ she looked at Jake’s face, ‘then we move on. As you said. We have to get to Thailand.’

  Their new friend, Rittisak, was beckoning, his hand turned down, flapping, requesting them to follow. The path led through a grove of shady trees, past a burned out Soviet truck, to a large concrete house.

  ‘In here,’ said Chemda, following Rittisak, through a door and up some steps.

  The house was bizarre, it was empty and furnitureless and still hot from the day’s sun, and it was decorated with amateurish murals of Angkor Wat in an idealized jungle setting; Disney-eyed deer were feeding at overly crystalline lakes, elephants bathed in the sapphire waters, watched by monkeys so cheerful they looked like they were drugged.

  But what made the house truly bizarre was the view. On three sides of the wall-less house stretched a plain of water shining red and yellow in the setting sun, with a faint reek of decay breezing off the waters. Sticking out of the water, like burned arms and charred fingers, were thousands of dead tree stumps, sometimes entire dead trees, all black, stricken and ugly. The watery graveyard of trees extended many miles, sullen and tragic, to a sudden rise of hills beyond. It looked like a First World War battlefield, like the Somme or Ypres or Passchendaele – inexplicably flooded, and set beneath a decrepit tropical sun.

  ‘What the hell is that?’

  Rittisak bade them sit down. They sat. Jake asked again: about the view, the peculiar lake.

  Chemda explained, quietly, as the sun folded its cards behind the Dangrek hills.

  ‘This was Ta Mok’s house.’

  ‘The Khmer Rouge leader?’

  Chemda nodded, rubbing the mud from her hands on her skirt.

  ‘Look at me. Filthy. Yes, Ta Mok, The Butcher – Pol Pot’s friend – the only man crueller than Pol Pot.’

  ‘And that . . . fucking graveyard over there, the lake?’

  ‘They call it the Butcher’s Lake. Because Ta Mok made it. In the last years of the Khmer Rouge, when they ruled this final corner of Cambodia, Ta Mok had the peasants dam a river and build this lake, an artificial lake, but it went wrong, it just killed the trees, killed everything.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They say he did it to bury all the corpses. Even to the very end, the Khmer Rouge were slaughtering people, they killed many thousands of peasants around here, and, ah, locals say that the remains are out there, concealed under the waters, poisoning the waters, forever.’

  Chemda sat back. Her hands behind her, she was talking with Rittisak, and frowning. She explained:

  ‘Rittisak says to get across the border we have to move tonight. In the dark.’

  ‘Good idea.’

  ‘But there’s only one route, only one way to avoid checkpoints.’ She stared outwards, at the watery desolation, and she nodded. ‘Yes. We have to go that way. It’s the only way. It’s dangerous.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes. We have to get across the lake.’

  Chapter 25

  Officer Rouvier nodded. Light, softly filtered by the half closed blinds of the Carmichaels’ Marais apartment, was making subtle stripes across his kindly face. Like a man behind horizontal bars.

  Maybe they were all behind metaphorical bars, Julia thought: they’d been hiding in here for forty-eight hours, barely daring to visit the boulangerie.

  Policemen had come and gone, interviews had been taken and recorded, but Julia and Alex had been stuck here, in a darkened apartment, together and isolated.

  Alex came in to the room from the kitchen, clutching a mug of tea; he sat on the sofa, saying nothing. Rouvier gestured at the sheet of paper, with the essay title carefully written thereupon. The essay that had, for some unknown reason, disappeared.

  ‘Can you explain it to me, briefly? Recall that I am a humble detective from the furthest provinces. A pequenaud.’ He smiled, charmingly. ‘I may not understand complicated science. How does your new theory connect with this missing article by Quoinelles.’ The smile faded. ‘And all the murders?’

  Julia offered a pinched smile of her own. ‘I don’t have a theory. Just ideas. First you have to know a little bit about the evolution of the human mind.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Behavioural Modernity is a term used by some scientists to express the idea that humans made –’ Julia glanced at Alex, then back at Rouvier ‘– a kind of Great Leap Forward in their cognition and cultural development around 40,000 years ago.’

  Rouvier asked: ‘Evidenced how?’

  ‘Well, firstly, the birth of art – the cave paintings. But there are other signs at this time of humans suddenly changing their behaviour, signs of advanced and abstract cognition. Hunting becomes much more elaborate and efficient – animals are corralled and herded over cliffs, showing significant fore-thought. Music and game-playing emerge, refined bone tools are manufactured, barter is seen between tribes; and religious rituals become complex, including proper burials. All these behaviourisms sharply differentiate homo sapiens from other previous hominid forms, such as homo erectus, or homo neanderthalis. Basically, the idea is that we quite suddenly became fully human around 40,000 years ago.’

  ‘Why did this change happen?’

  ‘Two main perspectives. One is a sudden genetic mutation in human DNA, another is an actual change to neural structures of the brain, evolution of the brain itself. Maybe in the frontal cortex! No one is sure.’

  The sounds of the Paris traffic filtered into the quiet apartment.

  ‘And you believe Professeur Ghislaine was investigating this?’

  ‘Perhaps yes. Surely yes. Just look at his essay title. Conscience and guilt in the paleolithic caves of France and Spain. We also know he was interested in the trepanned skulls, his very first work, as a student, was done in the Lozère, where he probably encountered the theories of Prunieres and – and we know his old friend Annika was an expert on the cave art of Lascaux and Gargas –’

  Rouvier raised a hand. ‘You are referring to the skulls you found in your caverns, and the same skulls, and damaged bones, found by Pierre Barthelemy Prunieres a hundred years ago, in the same region?’

  ‘Sure, but –’

  ‘And because this Prunieres mentions Cochinchina, you believe that, somehow, this ties it all in to
the murders . . . by a Cambodian, a possibly Asian killer. Yes?’

  ‘Yes.’ Julia felt herself blushing. She was slightly angry at herself, she should be advocating her ideas better than this.

  Rouvier sighed. ‘But. I am still a little unclear. How are they tied together?’

  ‘I don’t know – but I know they are! They must be! I just haven’t worked it out yet.’ She stopped, with a stammer. Why was she almost shouting? Why was she so histrionic?

  The apartment was quiet. Alex was looking at the slatted windows, a faint trace of embarrassment on his English face.

  Julia felt, absurdly, like she had failed Rouvier, the way she had once disappointed her father: but she also felt an injustice. She couldn’t piece together the lost essay just like that, she needed time, and clues, and maybe luck. And given enough time, she might prove she was right. Because she was right.

  Not only was she right, she was surely just repeating someone else’s excellent analysis. Ghislaine’s. Indeed, she even felt a slight resentment that Ghislaine had got there so long before her: she had thought herself so insightful, that day on the Cham, sensing the guilt in the past, the stones, the bones, yet Ghislaine, it seemed, had been there already – The Origin of Guilt and Conscience? – and he had maybe achieved a much smarter, deeper, older explanation. Something that circuitously led to his death?

  Maybe. But how could she explain this series of hunches and guesses to a sober and practical policeman?

  She couldn’t.

  Rouvier was standing. He walked to the long windows of the eighteenth century apartment, pulled down a few slats of the modern grey blinds, looking out at the softly rumbling traffic. He spoke to the window:

  ‘I do not know. I am not a Tarot reader of ancient times. It is a fascinating idea but I am not sure how it helps us.’

  Julia subdued the last of her enthusiasm. She felt mortified, almost scorned; Rouvier was just being his normal self: polite, charming, sensitive. Yet it was as if her parents were in the room pouring sceptical cold water over her teenage dreams of a serious archaeological career. Inside her was the old rage at being patronized, and infantilized.

  ‘However,’ Rouvier added, ‘there is one aspect . . . Hmmm . . . I wonder . . .’

  ‘Wonder what?’

  ‘The fact this essay disappeared. This is interesting, and maybe relevant.’ He turned and faced her directly. ‘You say that the article is mentioned in, if I have the word, bibliographies – it is referenced and indexed? Correct?’

  Quickly, she answered:

  ‘Yep. The essay was only ever published in one magazine, an extremely obscure academic journal. There might only have been a couple hundred copies ever printed. But all these copies have gone! Not in the libraries. Taken and not returned, maybe destroyed. Weird . . . is that weird?’ She was unsure of herself now.

  Rouvier was sitting down again. ‘No. It is unusual. And as I say it possibly relates to something else we have discovered.’

  Alex spoke, for the first time:

  ‘What?’

  Rouvier smiled:

  ‘Exactly how old was Ghislaine Quoinelles when he wrote this?’

  ‘Twenty-two.’

  ‘Oui. And already he was being published in academic journals, no matter how obscure. We know he was building quite a reputation, a famous radical. And yet, soon after this, his career dwindled. He went to Cambodia, he returned to France, and he promptly disappeared into obscurity, back to where he came from, where he did his student work, the caves of the Lozère – and there he stayed. Despite the dazzling promise of his early career, it all dwindled away.’

  ‘Yah.’ Alex interrupted. ‘And he never told me – or Julia – about any of this. The essay I mean. And Annika never mentioned it. It’s like he suppressed it, denied its existence. Denied his past. Rather odd.’

  Rouvier hunched forward, his flecks of grey hair almost silver in the fading light. ‘But maybe not that odd? Or at least not unique.’ The Frenchman reached in his briefcase, and lifted out a piece of paper with a photo. Julia recognized it immediately. The same poignant photo of the mission to China and Kampuchea in 1976. That gallery of young smiling faces, in the hot Phnom Penh sun, with the ominously empty boulevards in the background.

  The French detective waved an eloquent hand across the photo.

  ‘We have now completed our investigations into these people. They were scattered across the world. Yet they share two things, apart from their membership of this mission.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Many of the careers, of these men and women, subsided after this Asian adventure. They were very bright young people, of course Marxists,’ he said the word with a definite moue of repugnance, ‘but nonetheless clever. Future stars of science, if the English phrase is suitable? Yet so many of them appear to have deliberately returned to obscurity after 1976. Strange.’

  Alex interjected. ‘You said they shared two things? What else?’

  Rouvier’s sigh was abrupt, yet emotive.

  ‘It took us several days to follow up their careers and lifestories, because of that obscurity, and because they had dispersed so globally. But, the truth is, we are too late.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘They are nearly all dead. Already.’

  Julia asked:

  ‘You mean . . . they were murdered? Like Trewin and Annika?’

  Rouvier’s grey eyes met hers.

  ‘Most of them. Possibly. Yes. The older ones died naturally. Many of them appeared to have committed suicide – but now we think – we estimate – that if we look again at these suicides they might turn out to be murders. And some have just been clearly and plainly butchered. Over the last three years. Therefore, after much investigation, our foremost guess is that the killer has been slowly slaughtering the rest, working her way through a list, probably a list she extracted from Trewin, by torture. She has been gradually taking revenge, over the last three years.’ Another short sigh. ‘Of course no one noticed a pattern before, partly because this mission to Cambodia was so secretive, so no one knew of the historic links between the victims, and because the murders were subtle, often disguised as self murder. And anyway, who would associate the suicide of an elderly psychologist in Los Angeles with the tragic death of, say, a sixty-five-year-old archaeologist in Geneva eighteen months later? But now, now we do see the pattern. A vivid pattern.’

  ‘Is anyone left alive?’

  ‘We have failed to trace two people. We know, naturally, about Marcel Barnier, the expert in hybridization. He is also apparently in the Far East, or at least he was until recently, we have reports of him in Cambodia itself a few months ago.’

  Rouvier leaned, and pointed a manicured fingernail at a second figure in the photo. Julia leaned to see: a tall smiling blond face in the back row of the photo, with a ponytail. A Hawaiian shirt. Arrogantly smiling. ‘This man, Colin Fishwick, may also still be alive. A neurosurgeon from Princeton, he moved to Hong Kong in the 1980s. We don’t know where he is now, but we have no record of his dying.’

  Rouvier sat back. ‘So there it is. Just two men left. The killer will evidently seek them out. And kill them too, if she can find them; then her task will assuredly be complete.’

  Alex said:

  ‘Why did she kill the archivist?’

  ‘A most sensible question. Probably just a reaction, the fear that she had been recognized, a sudden desire to silence a witness. This is a violent killer, very violent, there are elements of extreme cruelty in some of the later killings alongside clever forethought. It is as if the killer is getting angrier as time passes, or maybe she is allowing herself to take more brutal revenge, to use more animal savagery, as she nears the completion of her task.’

  Julia noticed the deliberate phrasing.

  ‘Animal?’

  ‘Yes.’ Rouvier smiled, this time rather bleakly. ‘Ah yes, Miss Kerrigan. Perhaps you have elucidated this for yourself?’

  She shrugged. She shook her head. The officer
sighed, politely, and explained:

  ‘Bear with me. This may sound incredible. But given all the other information we now possess, it seems very possible that we are dealing with some experimental form of . . . hybridization. Or maybe some experiments at a higher, anatomical level, maybe even neurological? Hence the simultaneous interest in cranial surgery? How else do we comprehend the links with Ghislaine’s grandfather, the cross breeding experiments? It all seems too rich to be coincidence.’ The suavity returned. ‘Perhaps I am reading too much science fiction, perhaps my theories are becoming as florid as the novels they sell in Carrefour. Who knows?’

  Rouvier swept up the photo and slid it back into his briefcase. The traffic noise from the street was noisier: rush hour had arrived.

  ‘La circulation! I must go. Before I depart I can relieve you of some minor burdens.’ He glanced at Alex, then at Julia. The room was dark now, a late November twilight was falling swiftly outside. ‘We have no more need of you, at least for the moment. You are surely not on the killer’s list. You do not need protection. I can also understand if you wish to leave France, after the horrors . . .’ He looked at Julia, piercingly. ‘All the horrors that you have experienced. If so, the Gendarmerie de France will not resist, though I would like it if you let me know where you go, if you go. We will need you as witnesses at some point. But for now – au revoir.’

  They shook hands. The room was very dark. When the officer was gone Julia turned on a lamp and she poured herself and Alex some glasses of dark scotch whisky and they sat alone and silent on the sofa for several hours, drinking, cuddling, kissing, and saying nothing.

  But when they went to bed Julia could not sleep, instead she lay there, watching the filtered shadows cast by the moving carlights outside, watching them slide quietly across the ceiling. Like the shadows on the wall of a cave, cast by a timid firelight. Fearful shadows, images of animals, frightening shades.