Extraordinary People ef-4

by Peter May

  Enzo sat with the blood pulsing at his temples. Diop was dead. The man who had tried to kill him just two days ago. The man whose footballing past had led Enzo to this provincial hotel room in the ancient city of Auxerre. Dead because of Enzo. He was sure of that.

  An urgent knocking at the door startled him. Sophie’s voice called from the hall. ‘Papa? Papa, are you there?’ He slid off the bed, and as he stood the blood rushed to his head. He steadied himself against the door jamb and unlocked the door. Sophie and Bertrand and Nicole stood in the darkness. Sophie seemed shocked by his appearance. ‘Papa, are you feeling all right?’

  ‘I’m fine, Sophie. What’s all the noise about?’

  She grinned then, her eyes gleaming with anticipation. ‘You’ll never guess what we found up in the old town.’

  ‘You’re right, I’ll never guess.’

  ‘A restaurant,’ Nicole said before Sophie could respond.

  Enzo sighed. ‘Is that a hint that you’re hungry?’

  Nicole shook her head triumphantly, but Sophie beat her to the punchline. ‘It’s called The Salamander.’

  II

  La Salamandre restaurant was at number 84 rue de Paris, next door to a wine merchant’s, and opposite a shop supplying flowers for funerals. The three youngsters led Enzo up through the narrow streets of the cité médiéval. A cat sat in an open window, above an old bicycle, and watched them go by. Geraniums poured in carefully pruned cascades from hanging pots on almost every corner. Tourists filled the cafés in Place Charles Surugue, soaking up the burgundy wines and the centuries-old ambience of the ancient, beamed buildings that leaned and tilted at odd angles all around them. Enzo watched the town slide by, like a man seeing the world through a fisheye lens. There was nothing here out of the ordinary, and yet none of it seemed quite real. He felt oddly detached, as if fate had taken away his powers of decision-making, and given over his life to the vagaries of chance and serendipity. The same clues which had led Enzo to Diop were leading him now to a restaurant in a quiet back street in this départemental capital of the Yonne. A chance find by these young people he had unwittingly involved in this foolish venture.

  Painted salamanders climbed the pale green frames around the door of the restaurant. Poissons — Fruits de Mer, it said in both windows. They stood outside on the pavement, looking at a menu offering oysters, large roasted king prawns, half lobster roasted in its shell with pan-fried chanterelle mushrooms.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ Nicole asked.

  Enzo could almost hear her salivating. ‘I suppose we’d better go in and eat.’

  It was still early, and they were seated at a table near the window. The waiter was a young man in his early twenties. Bertrand, at Enzo’s bidding, ordered a 1999 Pouilly Fuissé to wash down their seafood. Sophie asked for a bottle of Badoit, Nicole a diet Coke, and Enzo asked the waiter if he knew of any connection between the restaurant and Auxerre football club.

  The young man gave him an odd look. ‘Why on earth would there be?’

  Enzo shrugged, a little embarrassed. It must have seemed like a very peculiar question. ‘I don’t know. I just wondered, that’s all.’

  The waiter looked puzzled. ‘Not that I know of. I could ask the owner if you like. Monsieur Colas. He’s also the chef. He opened this place more than twenty years ago.’

  ‘No, that’s all right.’ Enzo knew now that this was a waste of time. No more than a bizarre coincidence. And then a thought occurred to him. ‘Are you a supporter?’

  ‘Of Auxerre? Sure. My father started taking me when I was just five years old.’

  ‘You know that the salamander was the emblem of François Premier?’

  The waiter looked at him as if he were a sandwich short of a picnic. This was all getting a little surreal. ‘Was it?’ It was clear that he didn’t.

  Enzo was disappointed. ‘So you wouldn’t know of any connection between Auxerre football club and François Premier.’

  ‘I could tell you more about the English Premiership than François Premier. And apart from where they finished in the league last season, the only unusual thing I know about Auxerre football club is their patron saint. Saint Joseph. And I only know that because it’s the name of the school I went to.’

  Enzo was beginning to feel like one of the Three Princes of Serendip. ‘There’s a school in Auxerre called Saint Joseph’s?’

  ‘Sure. Saint Jo’s. It’s a lycée and collège and commercial school all rolled into one. Just up the hill there in the Quartier Saint Simeon.’ He paused. ‘Is there anything else I can get you?’

  Enzo shook is head. ‘No. Thank you.’

  Nicole looked at him. ‘Is that significant?’

  ‘One of the items we found along with the clues that led us here was a referee’s whistle with numbers scratched into the plating. A nineteen and a three, separated by an oblique.’

  ‘Nineteen, three,’ Bertrand said. ‘March 19th.’

  Enzo was taken aback. It had taken Charlotte to point that out to him. ‘It’s Saint Joseph’s day,’ he said.

  Bertrand thought for a moment. ‘So you think the clues only led to Auxerre football club, in order to take you on to the school, via the club’s patron saint?’

  Enzo shrugged his eyebrows. ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘But what could there be at the school?’ Sophie asked.

  ‘Playing fields, perhaps.’ Enzo shook his head. ‘There has to be some reason for the inclusion of a referee’s whistle.’ The waiter brought an ice bucket to their table, Pouilly Fuissé chilling in iced water. ‘We’d better go and see.’ He caught Nicole’s look of alarm and added, ‘after we’ve eaten.’

  III

  Saint Jo’s Collège and Lycée was at the top of the Boulevard de la Marne on the northern edge of town. It was flanked on its west side by suburban villas and bungalows. At the foot of the hill there was a development of residential apartments, and a franchise for Mitsubishi Motors. The school itself stood, in the gathering gloom, behind white walls and blue fencing, in several acres of forested parkland. The sky was a pewtery blue-black, low clouds scraping the surrounding hills. Streetlamps fought to make any impression in the growing twilight. Bertrand drew his van up to electronic gates that were closed and padlocked. There were no lights beyond them, and no sign of life. Immediately opposite, the offices of the Crédit Agricole bank were shuttered and dark. The only light was a moth-infested pool of yellow at a roadside cash dispenser.

  There was little or no traffic on the boulevard as Enzo stepped out of the van to feel the first spots of rain, warm and heavy on his face. Somewhere beyond the far hills, the sky flashed and crackled, and several seconds later they heard the distant rumble of thunder. The air was filled with the smell of ozone. A sudden courant d’air moved among the trees beyond the fence like a sigh. The first turbulent breath of the coming storm.

  Enzo scaled the gate with the minimum of effort and dropped down on the other side.

  ‘Papa, you can’t just go breaking into the place,’ Sophie hissed at him from the van.

  ‘I’m not breaking anything. I’m just having a look.’

  ‘I’m coming with you,’ Bertrand said suddenly. And before any of the others could object, he was out of the van, and vaulting easily over the gate. He grinned at the scowling Enzo. ‘Safety in numbers.’ He snapped on his flashlight. ‘And it helps to be able to see.’

  Nicole climbed out of the back. ‘Be careful, Monsieur Macleod.’

  ‘And for goodness’ sake be quick!’ Sophie called after them as they moved off into the grounds and were consumed by the dark.

  They followed the beam of Bertrand’s flashlight along a metalled drive, an empty car park brooding silently away to the right. To their left, a roadway ran off through trees to a cluster of single and two-storey flat-roofed buildings. Up ahead, floodlights mounted on the roof of the school gymnasium were trained on an area of playing fields behind a high wire fence. In the distance, Enzo could just make out a patchw
ork of baseball and volleyball courts. Immediately to their right was the football pitch. A dusty, chalky, burned-up stretch of what might once have been grass. Bertrand swung his beam across the pitch to pick out the white of the goal posts. The nets had been removed. Big fat raindrops were leaving craters in the dust.

  ‘We’re going to get wet,’ Bertrand said.

  Enzo nodded absently. He was staring off thoughtfully across the football pitch in the final glimmer of the day’s light. ‘You know a bit about football, don’t you?’

  ‘I used to play for an amateur side.’

  ‘Where does the referee usually stand when he blows for kick-off?’

  He heard the young man expel air through his teeth. ‘Well, I don’t think there’s any set place.’ Bertrand thought for a moment. ‘I guess he usually stands somewhere around the centre circle.’

  ‘That’s a big area to dig up.’

  ‘What, you mean you think that what you’re looking for is buried somewhere in the centre circle?’

  ‘I don’t know. I really don’t. I’m clutching at straws here. If we’re in the right place — and I’ve got to believe that we are, since all the clues have led us here — then there has to be a reason for the referee’s whistle.’ Enzo sighed, frustrated, trying to articulate his reasoning. ‘The clues have always been symbolic or representative of something else, Bertrand. So maybe it’s not the whistle itself that’s important, so much as the person who blows it.’

  He began walking out across the pitch towards the centre circle. The lines delineating the field of play were faded almost to the point of obscurity. The rain would very soon obliterate any remaining traces. Bertrand followed him to the centre circle, his flashlight trained on the halfway line that led them there.

  ‘My God,’ Enzo said surveying a diameter of something close to twenty meters. ‘It’s huge. We couldn’t possibly dig up an area this size.’

  ‘We don’t have to,’ Bertrand said. ‘Wait here.’ And he took off, running back towards the gate before Enzo had the chance to ask him what he was talking about. He stood, then, a solitary figure, in the centre of the football pitch, where generations of breathless kids had chased elusive aspirations in the shape of a leather ball, and when genius had eluded them, gone on to become doctors, lawyers, waiters. For a moment, he felt surrounded by the ghosts of failed ambition, until lightning tore open the sky and he saw that he was completely alone.

  All daylight had bled, now, from the evening. The darkness was absolute. Thunder cracked so loudly overhead that it felt like a physical blow. Enzo ducked involuntarily, and as lightning flashed again beneath dangerously low clouds, he saw the lean, fit figure of Bertrand loping back across the pitch, his flashlight in one hand, his metal detector dangling from the other. Bertrand was grinning when he reached him. ‘I knew this would come in useful for something.’

  Enzo looked at him for a long moment. Words escaped him. Then finally he said, ‘Well, I hope the damned thing works!’

  Bertrand began a first circuit of the centre circle, the metal detector hovering just centimeters above the parched ground as he swept it methodically from side to side. And then the rain began in earnest, almost tropical in its intensity. Within seconds both men were soaked to the skin. Enzo held the flashlight and followed Bertrand’s progress. The hard-baked earth was slow to soak up the rain, and it began lying in ever widening puddles on the surface of the playing field. The metal detector emitted a steady, high-pitched whine, only just audible above the drumming of the rain.

  ‘Papa…’ Enzo turned as Sophie and Nicole ran into the circle of light, a shared raincoat held over their heads and shoulders.

  ‘You can’t stay out in this,’ Nicole said.

  ‘It’s crazy, Papa.’

  ‘You should have stayed in the van,’ was all he said.

  And suddenly the wail of the metal detector rose half an octave. In that moment lightning filled the sky, infusing every single drop of rain with its light so that the world was lost in a brief, blinding mist. But even above the crash of thunder that followed, Enzo could still hear the shriek of the metal detector.

  ‘There’s something here,’ Bertrand bellowed above the noise of the rain. ‘Right below here!’ He had completed about two thirds of his circuit and stood at ten o’clock on the circle. Gelled spikes had dissolved into streaks of black hair striping vertically on his forehead. Water dripped from his eyebrow piercings and nose and lip studs, and he was grinning like an idiot. ‘We’d better start digging.’

  ‘We can’t dig in this rain,’ Enzo shouted back. ‘The hole will just fill with water.’

  ‘I’ve got an old two-man tent in the back of the van. If we put up the outer skin we can cover the hole.’

  ‘Did you bring the shovels?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You’re mad!’ Sophie shouted at them.

  But Enzo just turned to the two girls and said, ‘Go and get the tent and the spades.’

  Within ten minutes they had erected the arched cross-frames of a small igloo tent, stretching its plastic outer skin tightly across it and pegging it into increasingly soft earth. Bertrand began digging first, until he had made enough of a hole to allow Enzo in beside him, and the two men dug furiously by the light of the flashlight, expelling shovel after shovel of mud through the open flap on to the pitch beyond. The rain hammered an unrelenting tattoo on the taut plastic. Sophie and Nicole stood outside, beneath their raincoat, watching the silhouettes of the two men in the tent rise and fall like some distorted shadow theatre playing out on its curving walls.

  They were almost a meter down before Enzo’s spade hit metal. It jarred up through his arms and shoulders, but the dull clang of metal on metal was sweet music to accompany the drumming of the rain. In spite of the tent, water was seeping back into the hole. Enzo knew they would have to get the chest out completely, to be sure of keeping its contents dry and free from contamination. It took another fifteen minutes to prise it from the mud suction of its ten-year resting place and lift it carefully up on to the rim of the crater they had made.

  The flashlight’s batteries were failing fast, and they both stood panting, and staring at the trunk in the fading yellow light. It was the same military green as all the others. Enzo glanced at Bertrand, and saw that his face was sweat-streaked and covered in mud. They were like clay men, standing ankle deep in liquid earth, breathing hard and filled with anticipation and trepidation.

  The girls crouched down at the opening and peered in. ‘Is that it?’ Sophie said.

  Enzo nodded. ‘Take a pair of latex gloves from my bag and give me something to dry my hands with.’

  Nicole held out a handkerchief for him to wipe the mud from his hands and face, and Sophie handed him a pair of surgeon’s gloves from his bag. He tore them out of their plastic wrapping and snapped them on. Very carefully he unclasped the lid of the trunk and lifted it open. It was stiff, complaining loudly as he forced it back, against the will of rusted hinges. Bertrand shone his flashlight inside.

  ‘Jesus!’ Enzo heard him whisper.

  The skeletal remains of Jacques Gaillard’s torso almost filled the interior. Bleached white bones. Shoulders, ribs, pelvis, spine. Enzo had to reach carefully through a rib cage chipped and scarred by the blades which had killed Gaillard, to remove one, by one, what he knew now to be the final set of clues. A short meat cleaver. A baking tray with twelve cookie moulds in the shape of seashells. A bunch of chopsticks tied together with a piece of string. Even before he counted them, Enzo had guessed how many there might be. Thirteen. Unlucky for some. There was a green glass model of the leaning tower of Pisa, and a key ring replica of the Eiffel Tower. Enzo looked at it closely and saw that it was made in China. Just one more confirmation. The final item was a small rock hammer with a rubberised handle grip.

  He laid them out side by side on the inside of the lid. The only thing he had not yet worked out was the name of the last surviving killer.

  ‘Give me my c
amera,’ he said to Sophie, just as Bertrand’s flashlight delivered its final flicker and plunged them into blackness.

  Almost at the same instant, they were dazzled by a blinding white light, and the sound of revving motors soared above the storm. As Sophie and Nicole spun around to see what was happening, Enzo saw lightning flash through the tent flap, and the silhouettes of half a dozen vehicles behind a phalanx of lights were thrown into momentary sharp relief as they came hurtling towards them across the football pitch. Then blackness swallowed the sky, and their eyes were filled again only with the light. The vehicles pulled up abruptly, engines still revving, and a dozen or more figures streamed out into the rain-filled glare, automatic rifles clutched across their chests. A voice crackled through a megaphone.

  ‘Step out into the light. Keep your hands above your heads.’

  Enzo and Bertrand pulled themselves from the hole and crawled out of the tent into the rain and the light. The girls had abandoned their shared raincoat and stood with their hands high above their heads. The rain streamed down Sophie’s frightened face. Before either man could get to his feet, boots came splashing through the wet, and strong hands forced all four of them face first into the mud. Enzo felt the cold bite of handcuffs around his wrists as they snapped shut.

  IV

  Sophie was furious. She paced restlessly around the cell. ‘It’s ridiculous. A complete overreaction. We were digging a hole in a football field, for God’s sake. And they send men with guns?’ She waved her arms in the air. ‘And look at me. Look!’

  They all looked. The mud was drying on her now, cracking and flaking. It was stuck in her hair like glue, smeared across her face, and caked on her tee-shirt and jeans. But she was just a mirror image of the rest of them.