The golden points continued to emerge, detach and sail, and the colours at the edges of his irises began to rotate from deep blue to violet to indigo. Around her, the kitchen had ceased to exist. All she could see was the light, the dark, the colours and the gold. All she could hear was the thunder of her blood pounding in her ears.
And now, as if the swirling colours were a whirlpool tumbling her inexorably towards a vacuum at the heart of him, she felt pulled, drawn, dragged, into the darkness of those pupils, leaving the wonder of the shifting hues behind, reducing her world to a terrifying void that rushed at her, called to her, clamoured for her.
Hannah shuddered, squirmed, felt her fingers twitch and stutter in Gabriel’s grip. She felt her throat constricting, a scream building. She tried to look away. Couldn’t.
It seemed like an age, a lifetime, and perhaps it was no more than the merest of moments, but finally Gabriel flung away her fingers and lurched up from the table.
Their link broken, Hannah jerked back in her chair. Gasping for breath, raising her hands to her face, she felt the tracks of tears on her cheeks. ‘My God,’ she breathed. ‘I felt . . .’
Gabriel studied her from the far side of the kitchen, shaken. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I thought I was losing myself.’
‘I’m sorry. It’s the first time I’ve ever done that. I forgot that you – that you’re not . . .’
‘Hosszú élet.’
He stared at her, his expression hollow.
Hannah wiped perspiration from her forehead. She stood up. Dizziness assailed her and she gripped the table for support. Breathing heavily, she turned to Sebastien. ‘It’s not him. It’s not Jakab.’
With a last look at Gabriel, she fled to the hall and climbed the stairs to the first-floor landing. A window there was open to the night. She was grateful for the movement of air against her flushed cheeks. As the tingling faded from her skin, as her fear receded, she felt a warmth flooding her, as if someone had opened the top of her head and filled her with heated syrup.
Leah’s bedroom was a boxroom, containing a single bed that stretched the length of the far wall. The shutters above it were closed. The girl lay beneath them, cocooned in an embroidered quilt.
On a side table, in a pile, lay the diaries started by Hans Fischer. The string that usually bound them was balled on the floor.
So Leah had finally read them. Perhaps, she thought, it was time.
Hannah walked into the room, sank down on to the bed and curled around her daughter’s body.
‘I thought you were dying,’ Leah whispered into the darkness. ‘I kept coming to see you but you never wanted to wake up.’
‘I’m here now. And I’m going nowhere. I’m here and you’re safe.’
She turned over. ‘I cooked you some eggs but you didn’t eat them,’ the girl said. ‘I didn’t know what else to do.’
Hannah pulled her close, bowing her head so that she could fill her nose with the scent of Leah’s hair. The warmth that had immersed her still radiated. Now, with her daughter in her arms, she felt a moment of calm for the first time since Nate’s death.
For three days and nights, she had replayed the moment when her father had risen to his feet and shot her husband dead. The image played every time she closed her eyes. For three days and nights, she had asked herself what she could have done to stop Jakab, how she could have prevented him from killing Nate.
Here, in the sanctuary of her daughter’s bedroom, that scene had temporarily lost its power to torment her. The questions faded from her mind. She breathed the fragrance of Leah’s hair, felt the heat of her body, reached out for sleep.
Jakab was coming. She knew that. The only remaining uncertainty was how many people would die when he arrived, and whether Hannah could ensure that he was one of them.
CHAPTER 22
Snowdonia
Now
Dániel Meyer watched as his second, Nikola Pálinkás, shovelled the last spade of earth over the grave and tamped it down. Pálinkás was in his late thirties, six foot five, with a weightlifter’s chest. It seemed the only areas of his body not covered with wild black hair were the two triangles of skin beneath his eyes, currently hidden behind gold-framed Aviators. His beard reminded Dániel of the bristles of a boar’s fur.
This place was so cold.
The first flakes of snow were beginning to fall from a tombstone sky, and the temperature had plunged below freezing. But it was the wind and the damp that wrapped around Dániel’s limbs and squeezed his bones until they ached. Beneath his feet, the ground was as hard as steel.
Despite the conditions, sweat had beaded on Pálinkás’s brow. Dániel clapped the man on the back. He blew air into his cupped hands and turned. Behind them, in the lap of the mountain, stood the farmhouse of Llyn Gwyr, a sad and silent monolith. Whether it was the building’s empty windows or something else, he did not know, but ever since they had arrived, Dániel had felt watched. It was not a pleasant feeling.
They had discovered Professor Charles Meredith moments after turning on to the track that served the farm. His corpse, frozen and white, reclined against the sign exactly where Sebastien had directed them.
Lifting the cadaver into the back of their rented 4x4 had caused them some difficulty – manoeuvring it into the farmhouse had been even harder. Once inside Llyn Gwyr’s kitchen, they’d had to prop his body on a chair in front of a crackling fire for two hours before he thawed enough to enable them to prise the booklet from his fingers and unbend his limbs until they lay flat.
A series of burns decorated the professor’s chest. Two of his fingers had been snipped off. But however agonising those injuries, they had not been life-threatening. Dániel had not been able to pinpoint the cause of death.
They decided to bury him next to the grave of Nathaniel Wilde, the husband of the girl Sebastien had brought to them. Hannah Wilde. Poor thing, to be caught up in something as awful as this.
‘I’ll be inside.’ Dániel walked towards the building, studying its blank windows. So much loss, he thought. Such a melancholy place.
In the kitchen, he gazed again at the shattered windows, the broken glass on the flagstones. He went down the hall and into the dining room, where he saw the broken line of shotgun cartridges that snaked across the table.
It was going to be a last stand. Yet they managed to escape. Although not without a price.
Dániel shivered, his thermal layers inadequate inside this draughty mausoleum. He heard footsteps in the hall. Pálinkás came into the room.
The big man nodded towards the windows. ‘Chopper approaching.’
Dániel moved to the sill and looked out. He could already hear the distant beat of rotor blades. ‘Is it finished?’
‘It’s not pretty, but it’ll keep the scavengers off him.’
‘We’ve done what we can.’
‘Did you ever meet him?’ Pálinkás asked.
‘Once. A long time ago now. Just after his wife died. He was half mad with grief, suddenly responsible for the safety of a fifteen-year-old girl who half loved him, half hated him for what had happened. I didn’t think they had a chance. It’s a miracle he stayed alive as long as he did.’
The helicopter, a Bell 206 JetRanger, appeared over the trees and arced around the front of the building, a growling beast of black and silver. The bass thrum of its engine and the whup-whup-whup of its blades seemed wrong in the funereal stillness of the valley: obscene. Llyn Gwyr was a cemetery now. Its dead begged for silence.
The helicopter circled the house, hovered and began to descend, stirring the snowflakes into a maelstrom. Seconds after landing, its doors opened and three men jumped out. All of them wore insulated winter clothing. Dániel recognised one of them. He stiffened.
Benjámin Vass, chubby-faced second to the sig
neur, leaned back inside the craft and removed a wheelchair. His two associates helped a fourth man out of the aircraft and into it. This time Dániel blew air from his cheeks.
Károly Gera.
The Eleni signeur looked about as alive as the corpse they had buried earlier. The thick padding of his jacket did little to disguise the frailty of his body. His eyes held a dangerously fanatical shine.
Pálinkás appeared at Dániel’s side. ‘This isn’t good.’
‘No.’
‘You want me to call Lorant?’
‘There’s nothing the Presidente can do from Budapest.’
Pálinkás nodded. They both watched the four men approach the farmhouse.
Benjámin Vass pushed the signeur’s chair into the dining room and parked him in front of the fire. When he turned to face Dániel he was smiling, face shiny with perspiration. He clapped his hands, two hard punctuations, and rubbed them together. ‘Nice place. Remote, admittedly. Basic. But I could grow to appreciate it. Perhaps. What do you think, Dániel?’
‘About what?’
‘About your farmhouse, of course. Let me guess. Holiday home? Investment property? Just somewhere you can come to get away from it all? I’m presuming that’s why you’re here.’
‘I’m sure you know that’s not why I’m here.’
Vass went to the sideboard, picked up a china figurine, studied it. ‘Ah. Of course. There’s been some trouble, I understand. Two fresh graves by the lake. Perhaps not such a nice place after all. Oh, well. I’m not intending to stay long. Just long enough, in fact, for you to tell me where I can find Hannah Wilde and that cantankerous old goat, Sebastien.’
Dániel felt his temper rising. ‘You forget yourself, and you forget your position, Benjámin. People have died here. I’ve no wish to listen to your insolence.’
‘Insolence? Oh, Dániel, I can’t express how much that hurts. Every morning I wake up and tell myself how I need to win the respect of my acadeim, win the trust of the loyal, unimpeachable Dániel Meyer. And now you cut me like that.’
Károly gripped the armrests of his wheelchair with clawed fingers. His voice was a rasping whip. ‘God damn you both, stop it!’ The words seemed to exhaust him. He collapsed back in his chair. ‘Dániel, come here. Sit down. Listen to me. We know what happened. The important part, at least. We need to know where they went.’
‘Signeur, I can’t tell you that.’
‘The woman and the girl are in danger.’
‘I know.’ He glanced across at Vass, who was staring out of the window. ‘I’m trying to ensure we don’t add to it.’
‘Your motives are good, Dániel, but you’re not making the right decisions. We can protect them.’
‘Sebastien is already protecting them.’
Vass turned from the window. ‘I know that one of those graves contains the woman’s husband. I’m guessing the other contains her father. Dropping like flies, aren’t they? If that’s the kind of protection Sebastien’s providing, it makes me feel a little sorry for her.’
‘Benjámin, that’s enough!’ the signeur barked. ‘Dániel, you’re not a fool. I admit we have a chance to turn this to our advantage. But the positive side effect is that we can save the lives of this woman and her daughter. I know I speak as only one ülnök. I can dial Földessy right now and give you a majority decision if you wish. But I believe we’re beyond Eleni politics at this point. It’s become a very simple choice. Whose side do you want to be on?’
The signeur studied Dániel’s face. He seemed disappointed with what he saw. Sighing, he inclined his head at his second.
Dániel felt Vass approach him from behind. The man’s breath, spicy and meaty, filled his nostrils.
‘It’s unpleasant being on the other side, Dániel,’ he said. ‘If you’re interested in seeing how unpleasant, I’d be more than happy to demonstrate.’
CHAPTER 23
Aquitaine region, France
Now
Hannah discovered the note while she was preparing Leah’s breakfast.
She had woken when the first pale light of morning slipped between the slats of the shutters in her daughter’s room. The girl was asleep beside her, warm and at peace, and it took all Hannah’s will to force herself up from the bed and down the stairs to the kitchen.
She had, for too long, allowed her grief to consume her. It had been an unforgivable dereliction of the girl. The knowledge of her failure was like a steady drip of poison in her veins, and while she would force herself to bury the agony of Nate’s death for now – stifle it, smother it, drown it – she would not forgive herself for the three days she had abandoned Leah to her loss.
He makes monsters of us all.
No.
Too easy, Hannah. That failure had nothing to do with Jakab. That was your weakness alone.
Nate’s passing, she knew, had destroyed something in her that could never be healed. That life was over, its echoes already faint, and now that she had emerged from her paralysis into this cold new existence, she found she had only one goal. Last night she had extracted a promise from Sebastien to find Leah a loving home should she not survive a final encounter with Jakab. She had asked him because she felt the conclusion of their struggle lay near, and because she planned to kill him at whatever cost to herself.
The prospect of death did not raise in her the slightest fear. Perhaps, she thought, it was the one advantage she had over the creature that stalked them. She no longer placed any value on her life.
On the kitchen worktop she found two baguettes from the day before, still soft beneath their crusts. The fridge yielded a box of soft cheese, a paper bag of sausages, a ham, six eggs, apples, a jar of plum jam, orange juice and milk. In one of the cupboards, she found tea bags and coffee. She discovered the note, written on a single sheet of watermarked paper, propped on the windowsill between pots of basil and tarragon. The handwriting was a graceful looping of ink.
Hannah, I’ll be down at the river. My people are coming. Gabriel.
She turned the note over in her hands. The experience they had shared the previous evening had filled her with wonder at first, although it had quickly been overtaken by fear. Perhaps she shouldn’t have been surprised by that: despite her inclination to trust Gabriel, he was still hosszú élet, inextricably linked to the nightmare that had claimed her for so much of her life. Oddly, though, the experience seemed to have shaken him too. For whatever reason, the sadness she had glimpsed in him during their ride up Cadair Idris had surfaced once more; she had caught an aching loneliness in his eyes.
My people are coming.
Hearing the creak of floorboards from Leah’s room and the soft thump as her daughter descended the stairs, Hannah poured juice, filled a kettle and began to lay the table.
Leah slouched into the room, bare feet scuffing along the floor, and pulled up a chair. The girl’s face was puffy and flushed. She yawned and squinted up at her mother.
‘Want some breakfast, kiddo?’ Hannah asked, forcing a brightness into her voice.
Leah blinked, nodded.
‘That’s my girl.’
After they had breakfasted on bread, cheese and ham, washing it down with tall glasses of orange juice, she rinsed the dishes, dressed them both and took Leah outside. Hannah had not left the house since they had arrived. She wanted to see how the place had changed since her last visit – wanted to assess its privacy, its security.
‘Is this going to be our new home?’ Leah asked.
‘Yes, it is. Do you like it?’
‘Does it have a name?’
‘Le Moulin Bellerose.’
‘French.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Can you speak French?’
Hannah smiled, slinging her arm around her daughter. ‘Yes, I can. And so will you
.’ She had owned Le Moulin Bellerose for nearly nine years. No one but Nate knew of her connection to it. After her mother’s death, Charles had liquidated his investments. He used the funds to purchase a couple of inexpensive properties in remote locations – he liked to call them his safe-houses – which they could use as a temporary refuge should Jakab ever find them. When Leah was born, and Charles became even more fearful for their safety, he gifted Hannah a sum of money.
Buy a place, somewhere far from here. Somewhere you can all go, in anonymity, should the worst happen. Don’t tell me where it is. I don’t want to know. Less chance of me betraying you that way.
Hannah had found the farm during a family trip through France when Leah was six months old. She only needed half the money her father had given her to buy it, and with good reason. The roof of the honeyed-limestone farmhouse had collapsed. It had no heating, no electricity, no water. A tree grew in one of the rooms.
The following summer, Nate spent a fortnight sawing timber and hammering joists, re-laying all the old roof tiles that had survived, and replacing those that hadn’t. The summer after that, he connected a water supply and added an oil tank and furnace. Between them they made Le Moulin Bellerose their secret retreat. Not just their bolt-hole, but their idyll.
At the front of the property stood two wheat fields, separated by a tree-lined track that stretched away to the main road. Their land was encircled by a forest of oak, sweet chestnut and walnut. Among the trees they saw roe deer, red squirrel, bright yellow Cleopatra butterflies. During the day they listened to the song of mistle thrush and goldfinch, and in the evening to the reedy call of tawny owls and the looping music of nightingales.
The farmhouse kitchen faced south. It opened on to a small plum orchard, neglected and overgrown when they bought the farm, but flourishing since. Below the orchard, a track led through woodland to the north bank of the Vézère River, one of the tributaries of the Dordogne to the southwest. The farm, and its land, was cupped in a horseshoe bend of the river. Early in the last century a mill race had been cut to syphon water from the river to a watermill that still stood on the property’s western border.
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