The Chaplin Conspiracy

by Stewart Ferris

  Scabies was the first to reach the newly carved riverbank. He jumped down into the space that had been occupied by dozens of graves only twenty-four hours before and examined the scene.

  ‘It’s just like the last flood twenty years ago,’ he said. ‘They lost a quarter of the churchyard back then. Lots of headstones, clues, evidence, history, all disappeared in the night. And now it’s happened again. I thought they’d put in some flood defences. Don’t think it worked, though. Ugh. Look at that!’

  His reaction caused the others to lose their fear of jumping down to the riverbank. The primaeval instinct to look at something macabre was present in all of them. Their sick curiosities were not disappointed.

  ‘A femur,’ said Ruby. ‘The river is to the east, and that’s the direction the head would have been, so all that’s left of this person is the legs.’

  ‘Look at this one,’ said Scabies. ‘Spinal column sticking out of the mud. Still got some tissue around it. Somewhere downstream there’ll be a half-decayed head bouncing along the rocks. Nice.’

  ‘Could someone help me pick Ratty up?’ called the Patient.

  ‘It’s perfectly OK,’ said Ratty. ‘Just felt the need for a little lie down. Yes, that seems to have done the trick. Think I might tootle off back to, I don’t know. Somewhere. Could really do with those scrambled eggs, actually.’

  ‘Does he do that a lot?’ asked Scabies.

  ‘Fainting?’ checked Ruby.

  Scabies nodded. She nodded back.

  There was no way to climb up the wall of mud where they had jumped down, so Ratty walked along the edge of the graveyard looking for a point that would provide easier access to higher ground. He averted his eyes from the gruesome body parts protruding here and there, trying to focus on the ground in front of him, but he could not ignore the exposed family tomb. The eastern wall was partly destroyed, revealing a hole through which he could see a stone-built, subterranean room about the same size as Charlie’s camper van. A layer of silt filled most of the space, sparing him the view of the tomb’s occupants, but something strange caught his eye. At the far end of the tomb, closest to the church, he could make out another hole in the wall, but this one had not been caused by flood damage. There were chisel marks and it was precisely the size a person would need to be able to climb through it. It was the entrance to a tunnel and it led in the direction of Charlie’s van and the church beyond.

  ‘I say!’ called Ratty to the others, distracting them from their freak show entertainment. ‘Something rather queer is afoot. Does anyone have a torch? Preferably one that is still capable of illumination?’ Heads shook. ‘I think I may have stumbled upon a tunnel thingy.’

  ‘Charlie!’ shouted Rocco. ‘Stop crying and make yourself useful. We need torches.’

  ‘This church was the domain of Father Boudet, a contemporary of Saunière’s,’ said the Patient, attempting to bore everyone while they waited for Charlie.

  ‘I know,’ said Scabies. ‘Boudet was in on the secret. Some think he was more important than Saunière in this whole thing.’

  ‘Precisely,’ agreed the Patient. ‘Having read Boudet’s peculiar writings, especially his work on the true Celtic language, I am convinced that in his own way, just like Saunière, he was attempting to reveal something important to the world, but in a manner that would not attract the attention of the Vatican. One priest created unusual works of literature, the other constructed strangely decorated buildings. Both wanted to convey a message that would only be understood after their deaths, and then only by someone of sufficient education and imagination. The world awaits the arrival of this intellectual giant. This true genius.’

  ‘Charlie!’ shouted Rocco, relieved to see him appear above them with a handful of muddy flashlights. ‘We were just talking about you.’

  ‘I wanna go home,’ sighed Charlie. ‘But I don’t have a home. That van is the only thing I have, and now it’s gone.’

  ‘I know,’ said Ruby. She was almost tempted to put a comforting arm over his shoulders, but she knew he would read too much into the gesture. ‘Let’s forget about the tunnel, everyone. We should find a way out of this town. We don’t know if it’s safe to hang around. The police will be here soon to cordon off the damaged areas. Why don’t we grab some breakfast and make our way to somewhere larger, maybe Esperaza or Limoux?’

  Charlie nodded. He wasn’t in a tunnelling mood. Everyone was hungry, but he felt the pangs more acutely than most. ‘Breakfast would be cool,’ he said. ‘And maybe get some brunch while we’re there. And lunch, too.’

  ‘Never mind that shit,’ said Scabies, ‘this is more important. We’ve found a tunnel.’

  ‘Ah, actually, without blowing one’s own—’

  ‘Ratty found a tunnel,’ corrected Scabies, taking the hint. ‘Which is why he should go in first.’

  ‘It’s awfully dark in there. Not to mention unseasonably moist. If anyone else would prefer to venture forth ahead of me, I would not take offence.’

  ‘Come on, Ratty,’ said Scabies. ‘It’s just a tunnel. I’ve been down more of these things than you’ve had hot banquets.’

  Ratty stood aside and let the drummer go ahead of him into the tomb. Scabies wiped the dirt from the end of the torch and switched it on. A weak light limped ahead of him, seemingly failing to stick to the walls. He climbed through the chiselled hole into the narrow passage and crawled in the direction of Boudet’s church. The distance to the church appeared to be only about sixty feet, but with blistered palms, sore knees and few visual markers the journey felt uncomfortably long for Scabies, Ruby, the Patient and Rocco.

  ‘So, Charles,’ said Ratty, attempting conversation with the member of the group with whom he had the least in common as they waited outside the tomb, ‘er, my deepest wotsnames about what happened to your Volkswagen thingy.’

  ‘Shit happens,’ said Charlie.

  ‘Quite. That phrase has echoes, if I’m not mistaken, of the teaching of the great philosopher—’

  ‘No,’ interrupted Charlie. ‘It’s just shit and it’s what happens. I’m going back to the van to see what I can save.’

  Ratty stood alone, watching the river and almost forgetting why he was there. Occasionally he would hear a banging noise from the nearby camper van as Charlie broke open a seized-up cupboard and threw out objects that were now worthless. Ratty paid no attention to the next crashing sound from Charlie’s direction, but seconds later a plume of dust blew out from the tunnel. A zig-zagging light danced through the dust until Rocco emerged, blinking and coughing and looking pale despite the filth that covered his face.

  ‘Help!’ he croaked. ‘Something terrible happened! We hit a problem! Help!’

  ***

  In nearby Rennes-le-Château, news of the partial destruction of its sister town at the hand of the previous night’s storm was starting to spread around the forty or so inhabitants. Many drove straight to the disaster zone to offer their services in the clean-up. The investigation into the crime scene at the castle was already complete, and the sole gendarme who had been assigned to the village on a temporary basis for the reassurance of its citizens was called away to assist in the more pressing matter of finding those who had gone missing in the flood.

  When Winnifred and Justina approached the village via the leafy footpath, they felt as if they had the place to themselves. The silence was eerie, yet reassuring. They had a job to do and there would be no better opportunity than this quiet morning.

  ‘Saunière’s bones were moved from the cemetery a few years ago,’ said Justina. ‘They had to lock the cemetery to keep the tourists out after The Da Vinci Code brought thousands more than they were used to. But everyone wanted to see Saunière’s grave so they built a little shrine behind his old house and chucked his bones in it. Just dug him up and moved him, all done in secrecy in the middle of the night.’

  ‘Thanks for the fucking history lesson.’

  ‘They stuck a slab of concrete over the top of it,’ Ju
stina continued, ‘so we can’t go in from the top. But it’s right next to a sheer drop down to the path. We can get in sideways, and there’s usually no one down there. If we tape off access to the path at both ends we won’t be disturbed.’

  ‘No shit.’

  ‘And no one needs to get hurt, you understand?’

  ‘You know something? You’re no fun.’

  They walked up to the stable yard of the chateau. Even after forensic searches of each tumbledown outbuilding, the place was still crammed with rusting farm tools and other implements as if nothing had happened there. Winnifred selected a wheelbarrow, filled it with tools, and set off towards the section of path below the grave of Saunière while Justina picked up lengths of police crime scene tape that were lying around and used them to block both ends of the footpath. The tunnelling began immediately. Part of the cliffside above them was solid rock, but a seam of soft soil and grit provided the perfect starting point for their excavations. Winnifred progressed through the hill an inch at a time, steady and calm, her curving biceps exposed to the morning sun. She paused when she was about four feet into the cliff face. The bones were now just above her, and the soil would be loose after its relatively recent disturbance during the re-interment.

  Justina handed her labourer a protein shake. Not a single person had troubled them since they’d begun. They could sense victory. Winnifred downed her drink in seconds and returned to the task. She hacked at the soil above her head, higher and higher, all the way to the anticipated depth of the grave. Finally, the shovel made contact with something solid. She cleared the dirt from the underside. It was wood. They had located the new coffin into which Saunière’s bones had been transferred.

  She put down the shovel and replaced it with an axe. Justina waited with a bag in which to place the bones she expected would cascade down upon them at any moment. Winnifred swung the axe and smashed through the wood. She repeated the move in different places until a large piece of the underside of the coffin fell down.

  ‘Any bones?’ asked Justina.

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Let me reach inside.’

  Winnifred stood aside and let Justina put her hand into the coffin. Her hand moved in a circle and made contact with nothing. ‘I can’t find anything. Maybe they all slid up one end when it was moved? Smash the rest of it open.’

  More soil had to be cleared before the whole underside of the coffin could be revealed. Winnifred then destroyed the remainder of the coffin’s base and inspected the fallen detritus.

  ‘No bones at all?’ asked Justina. ‘What the hell is going on?’

  ‘Makes sense to me. You said they moved him in secret?’

  ‘Yes. I read all about it. The villagers were kept in the dark until after it was done. There was even some controversy because his new grave didn’t point east to west like a proper Christian grave.’

  ‘So it’s obvious,’ said Winnifred. ‘If there was no one around to see the bones, why go to the bother of digging them up in the first place? The lazy assholes never moved him. They just pretended to. I’d have done the same.’

  ‘So we need to get all our stuff into the locked cemetery? Shit.’

  ‘Locked? When has that ever been a problem?’ Winnifred asked, lifting a hefty pair of bolt cutters from a tool bag. ‘Get some more police tape and seal off the entrance as soon as we’re inside. Do you know where his original grave was?’

  ‘Of course I do. It’s next to his housekeeper, Marie, up against the wall that divides the cemetery from his garden.’

  ‘This is going to be easy. Just soil, straight down. Piece of cake.’

  Only five minutes later they were secured behind the tall iron gates of the cemetery, protected from public curiosity by the fake police cordon. They turned left behind the church and approached the wall where Saunière had first been laid to rest.

  ‘There was a stone engraving above the spot,’ said Justina. ‘It was supposed to be Saunière’s face but they actually did the carving based on a photo of his brother.’ She walked up to the wall. ‘There it is.’ Beneath the relief was a thin concrete slab, marking the outline of the grave. ‘The sledge hammer will sort that in no time, huh?’

  ‘Are you trying to tell me my job? Stand back. This is going to make some noise.’

  The cement shattered under the first blow. Winnifred cleared the rubble and started the downward journey while Justina kept a lookout for anyone who might be tempted to question the validity of the police tape across the gates. Winnifred revelled in the physical workout, throwing weighty shovel-loads of earth over her shoulders and gleefully stabbing the next layer of soil with the pickaxe. With almost superhuman strength she progressed through the soil until she appeared to have been swallowed whole by the grave.

  ‘Anything?’ asked Justina, peering down into the space.

  ‘Jack shit. Not even traces of a coffin.’

  ‘Could it be any deeper?’

  ‘I’ll go another couple of feet,’ Winnifred replied. ‘The bones have to be just beneath me.’

  But there was nothing. Only stones, soil, grit and Winnifred’s sweat.

  ‘Impossible!’ screamed Justina. ‘What the fuck is going on here? Saunière can’t just be invisible!’

  ‘When does it say he died?’ asked Winnifred, climbing out of the pit, panting.

  ‘1917,’ said Justina. ‘January 22nd.’

  ‘And did you hear what those English guys were saying about him?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘They think he didn’t die until years later – 1917 was when he faked his death. They said they had evidence of it. And I think we’ve found our own proof. It explains why there’s no bones in here or in his new tomb.’

  ‘And you didn’t think this was worth mentioning before we started?’ asked Justina, incredulous.

  ‘Maybe. It’s not as if you’ve done any of the manual work, anyway. And we don’t have any other clues as to his resting place, so don’t you think we would have checked out these graves anyway?’

  ‘But this is a disaster. If he didn’t die here, he could be anywhere.’

  ‘Yep,’ Winnifred agreed. ‘Anywhere but here. It’s a big world out there.’

  Justina sat on a nearby gravestone and put her head in her hands. She’d thought she was at the end of her quest, and now it stretched ahead of her into infinity.

  ‘I’ve been through too much shit already to give up now,’ she said, talking to herself. ‘Start from the beginning, right? So what do we know?’ she continued, ignoring Winnifred’s shrugging shoulders. ‘We know if we can somehow find Saunière’s bones and get a DNA sample, and if that sample matches mine, then the Templars will authorise me to inherit whatever it is they are guarding. Right?’ Winnifred stared across the wall at the fabulous view: hills and valleys, twisting roads, distant mountains and patchwork fields. ‘So that means that they’ve got whatever Saunière had. And that means it isn’t buried under the village any more. Right? So if we can’t find the remains of Saunière, there’s no point looking for his gold here. We need to infiltrate the Templars. They must have it close to them so they can keep an eye on it. And we know the location of one of their bases, in Rennes-les-Bains. Right?’

  ‘Whatever. What do you wanna do, Justina?’

  ‘We take the fight to them. If the Templars won’t give me my inheritance, we’re going to find it and we’re going to take it.’

  ***

  The last battery died. Charlie’s torches had been feeble and unreliable to begin with, and now they were all useless. Ruby and Scabies felt their eyes straining to amplify light that wasn’t there. The Patient had long since given up trying to see in the dark. His energy was better served in trying not to lose consciousness. The pain in his legs was at times all-embracing and at times numbing. When facing blood loss and possible internal bleeding, he knew that pain meant life, and he didn’t want it to fade.

  The Patient was frustrated. None of his medical knowledge could be put
to use without access to his legs. The tightness of the tunnel permitted no one to get close to any part of him other than his head. There was no space for Ruby and Scabies to dig him out from their end. If the collapse extended further than his toes, it might have crushed Rocco. And if that had happened, there was no one to raise the alarm on their behalves. All their phones had been damaged beyond repair during the flooding. Without Rocco, their only hope was to find another way out. And so far neither Ruby nor Scabies had declared success in that endeavour.

  ‘Hey, Mr Victim. You still with us?’

  ‘It seems that today I am living up to my name for the first time,’ the Patient replied, ‘whichever version you prefer to use.’

  ‘Sorry, you’re Mr Patient. I keep forgetting. We made it to the crypt at the other end before the torches died,’ Scabies explained. ‘It’s under the church, and there’s a sarcophagus in the middle and some coffins all around. No gold or anything else of interest. And no way out that we can use. There are some steps, but they’re sealed at the top by a slab of stone and we don’t have any tools to break through.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Ruby, sounding very worried, ‘even if Rocco didn’t make it back, I know Ratty will come to our rescue when he realises we’ve been gone too long.’

  ‘So long as he hasn’t fainted again,’ said Scabies.

  ‘There might be many tons of rock for him to remove before he can reach me,’ said the Patient, ‘and we’re in a space that’s too tight to allow more than a few chippings to be passed back at a time. I fear the situation may be beyond him.’