Bible of the Dead

Chapter 19

Alex Carmichael rolled off Julia, flopped back, and lit a cigarette.

‘That was nice,’ he said.

She slapped him.

‘Nice? You just had sex with me. You aren’t allowed to use the word “nice” for at least fifteen minutes.’

He laughed, puffed twice on the cigarette, then extinguished it in an old wine glass from last night.

‘Coffee babe?’

‘Please.’

She watched him swing his arms into a dressing gown, and disappear towards the kitchen. What did she feel? She felt more than ‘nice’. Perhaps she was falling for him. So far their relationship had been sexual but recreational, an agreement, friends-with-benefits, one of those things that happens in the intimacy and intensity of an archaeological dig, like actors and actresses on location.

Usually these flings flamed out, quite peaceably, when the season was over. But Alex was turning out to be more than expected: the sex was good, he was properly masculine, unruly, impulsive, posh, and frivolously cynical in a way that made her laugh when she really needed to laugh; he was forty-two, English, and married, though he was apparently getting divorced.

Julia sat up. This was the wrong time to be thinking about relationships: in the middle of all this. Ghislaine, now Annika, brutally murdered. But maybe that’s why she was thinking all this: right now it was good to have a boyfriend of any kind, a man around the place, she liked the protection and the companionship and the comfortingly satisfying sex. Why not? In the middle of all this terror? Or maybe that was cowardly in itself.

She showered, and the self criticism came quickly now, rinsing her, scalding her, like the water gushing from the shower-rose. Was she a coward?

Almost everything about her life had been too safe. She had let herself settle into a safe job in a mediocre university in London. Home was an average flat in a quintessentially boring suburb. She led a risk-free life as a permanent singleton, she always made sure the men she dated were unsuitable for real and possibly painful commitment. Like Alex.

Julia stepped from the shower and towelled, and assessed herself in the mirror.

But now things were different. She had, for the first time, discovered something. The skulls. Prunieres. She wasn’t going to let go, not now. Moreover, she was involved with these murders, the chain of mysterious events, whether she liked it or not. And she was increasingly sure the two evolutions in her life converged: the skulls and the murders, there was a link. But what?

The complexities were intense. She wanted to solve everything immediately.

But that wasn’t going to happen: Alex was so laid back, first he wanted coffee and croissants, then he wanted to read Le Monde very slowly, trying to improve his French, and failing. They had done this many mornings through the summer. The ritual was sometimes comforting; right now it was frustratingly sluggish, an unnecessary delay.

The ritual unfolded. Alex read Le Monde. Julia drank her coffee from a handle-less bowl, dispelling thoughts of Annika and the green Chinese tea in the porcelain cup. That last evening, a few days before she was killed. Executed. Now Julia lost a grip on her patience, she pulled down her lover’s newspaper and said:

‘Please, come on, Alex, this is unbearable, all this waiting, let’s go.’

‘Right now?’

‘Right now.’

An hour later they were in a taxi heading north for St Denis, a rougher part of Paris, not the Paris of Haussman and the boulevards, this was the Paris of les banlieus – literally, the places of banishment – the Paris of Algerian and Moroccan kids with no jobs, the Paris of couscous and Muslim rappers and nervy policemen in riot gear standing by vans just down the road from teeming mosques.

It was dull and cold and drizzly: late November. Their destination was the subsidiary archives of the Musée de l’Homme: the most farflung outpost of the empire of Parisian ethnology.

Alex spoke.

‘You know I met him. Just a couple of times.’

‘Who?’

‘Hector Trewin.’ The taxi had stopped at a junction. Alex gazed out at some Arab kids in Inter Milan football shirts, doing nothing.

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Well, it’s true. Sort of. I mean, we weren’t best mates. But I went to a few of his lectures at Balliol, the Ashmolean, when I was a student. And we chatted. He was very very slightly famous.’

‘And?’

Alex shrugged a laconic shrug. Julia insisted, she wanted to talk.

‘Go on, tell me! Trewin, what was he like?’

‘A lot of the students revered him, this great Marxist intellectual. But he creeped me out. Everything was theoretical. The world was theoretical. Breakfast was bloody theoretical. He simply wouldn’t acknowledge that there was a practical problem with communism; as far as he was concerned Marxist theory was fine so it should work, and one day it would. We just had to keep trying. I asked him about Stalin and Mao and he actually said: You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.’

Alex laughed, bitterly.

‘I pointed out to him that sixty million dead people was possibly an oversupply of broken eggs. And the fucking omelette turned out to be the Gulags, and the Lubyanka, and the Purges. He just looked over my head and sighed. He was an arsehole. An idealist and a thinker, but an arsehole.’

The rain was streaking the cab windows. Alex snapped the words.

‘Arsehole. Like all of them, all of those soixante-huitards and those 70s radicals and those CND Marxists, all of those euro-communists. I hate them. Wankers. How could you be a communist after Mao, after the Terror? It’s like being a Nazi AFTER the Holocaust. How could you be a communist at the same time as the Khmer Rouge were killing babies?’

Julia had rarely seen Alex this sincere and vehement. Normally he was sarcastic and languid to the point of nihilism.

They sat in silence. Then Alex patted her on the knee.

‘Anyway, darling – I think we have arrived.’

He was right. They’d arrived at the archives of the archives of the Musée de l’Homme. It was a huge grey warehouse on an industrial estate. A post-industrial estate.

Tipping the cabbie, they crossed the rain-stained empty concrete carlots. Alex said it reminded him of IKEA in far north London. Julia had a childish urge to cross her fingers. This was their last best hope, it was definitely their last hope. They had tried literally everywhere else: the Louvre and the Pasteur, private museums, the Broca archives, and now they were down to a bleak steel warehouse in a dismal burb of Paris beyond La Peripherique. One last shot.

The only official presence, the only human presence, was a large grouchy Frenchman in a small depressing office with a sliding glass window. The archivist of the archives of the archives.

‘Eh, bonjour,’ he said, giving them a curt nod through the open window. ‘Et vous êtes?’

They explained in bad French. He clocked their credentials, yawned, and did a magnificently Gallic shrug. ‘Pas de problem.’ He returned to his sports newspaper, L’Equipe.

With an air of tourists approaching the Parthenon, they stepped into the vastness of the secondary archives of the Musée de l’Homme. It really was like IKEA – but a frighteningly disorganized IKEA. It swiftly became apparent that the archives had not been indexed in any way. It was just stuff: vast acres of steel shelves with boxes and artefacts and plastic bags, it was academic debris, the forgotten old dreck in the curatorial attic.

For an hour they wandered disconsolately around the vast building, peeking in boxes of tiny amber beads from Mauritania, staring in perplexity at half a broken bird-god from Malagasy. In this hour they realized they had scrutinized maybe 0.5% of the collection.

In despair the couple retreated to the office, to ask the archivist for help.

He shrugged, like they had asked him if he could spit further than a llama. Like their question was quite surreally redundant.

Pressed once again, the official relented: grudgingly he told them that this cathedral of stuff, this huge warehouse of rubbish, was what remained following the recent trans-location of the museum from the Palais Chaillot to its new site at the Quai Branly. Everything the Parisian authorities thought too worthless or irrelevant to be stored in the official archives had been thrown in here. The Frenchman specifically used the word ‘thrown’: jetes.

Julia stared down the gigantic aisles of steel shelving in the great cold warehouse. It was pointless. They were defeated. Her determination of the morning had already reached a dead-end.

They retreated to the study room. It was a bleak space like a classroom in a fairly poor school: a scattering of tables, a drinks machine. There were two other people there. Two more willing scholars sent to les banlieues of anthropology. They had boxes open, or files to study – obviously they had made their finds.

Julia approached one of the scholars, a young thin man in black jeans hunched over a dirty and apparently African tribal mask.

She asked him, in her best French, how he had made his find: how he had located the tribal mask amongst the millions of boxes.

The man answered in cheerful English. He was American.

‘It’s a total nightmare. That’s why no one comes here. They say they will have properly archived everything by the end of the decade. I would give it two decades. I was lucky, I was told by someone else exactly where to find this. What do you think? A death mask of the Cameroonian Fang, eighteenth century, real human hair!’

The death mask with human hair was thrust in Julia’s face. She smiled, and backed away slightly.

Returning to his work, the man said:

‘If you haven’t got a location, a shelfmark, you’re kinda screwed. Sorry. Your only hope is chance. You might luck out.’

They weren’t going to get lucky. Julia knew it. She gazed at Alex and shrugged and they both walked, defeated, to the door. As she reached the door she realized she was passing another vast pile of boxes. She paused.

‘What? Julia? What is it?’

She said nothing. She was staring at the large piles of boxes, dozens of them, stacked roughly, unordered. Alex said again:

‘What?’

Julia had been in enough libraries and archives to recognize what this pile implied.

‘These are boxes waiting to be reshelved. Stuff that’s been examined or added to, very recently.’

‘Rrright…’ Alex drawled. ‘And?’

‘Think about it! We’re presuming the Prunieres collection must be here, somewhere in these archives, because we’ve searched everywhere else. If the collection exists, it must be dumped in this warehouse.’

Her lover sighed. With a hint of impatience.

‘Fine. Yes. So?’

‘Remember what Ghislaine said about the skulls I found. “They will be put in the Prunieres collection”. If Ghislaine meant that, and we have no reason to doubt him, the skulls would have been brought here recently. And added to the collection!’

Alex’s frown turned into a bright and flashing smile.

‘Get it! Clever girl! So our boxes could be…’

‘Just in this pile! In fact they should be here. Waiting to be reshelved -’

Julia was already wading into the stacks and columns of boxes.

The boxes were arranged in piles of ten and fifteen; it took them twenty minutes to sift through a quarter of the columns. Then forty minutes. Then fifty. It seemed they would have no luck; until Alex said, very slowly and rather portentously:

‘Julia, look. There.’ He was pointing, ‘Third box down. By the door.’

Looking across, she counted down the column of boxes. Her eyes rested on a box with a large and discernible label, handwritten and florid and visible from a distance.

Prunieres de Marvejols, 1872

There were, in fact, three boxes, all labelled the same way, sitting one on top of the other. Stifling her intense and scholastic excitement, Julia fought through the mess to the column of boxes, then they briskly carried the boxes from the stack to a table. Alex was smiling at Julia’s glee. She didn’t care; she ripped opened the first carton – like it was a take-out Indian meal and she was very hungry.

They peered inside.

The boxes contained several human skulls, obviously Neolithic. All had been trepanned. They were not the skulls that she had found. Why not?

Yet they were trepanned skulls. Besides the skulls, the boxes also yielded several flint arrowheads, in a soft cotton bag, and a file of slender documents, written in exquisitely mannered old handwriting, tiny, but entirely legible.

The notebooks of a layman Victorian scientist. They were but a few pages long. Ten minutes later she sat back. Her friend-with-benefits looked up from the wounded skulls he was examining and gave her a sly smile. He said:

‘C’mon, don’t tease. What did he say? Prunieres?’

‘He found exactly what I found, on the Cham. Skeletons with wounds, lots of them; and skulls with trepanations. Little rondelles cut from the cranium. He was hunting in the caves of Lozère, to the west, near the Tarn.’

‘I see. And?’

‘He made notes for a lecture, summing it up. Here, I’ll read it out.’ She picked up one notebook, and stolidly translated, ‘“In the Baumes-Chaudes caves, situated in that part of the valley of the Tarn which belongs to the department of Lozère, I picked up numerous bones bearing scars, characteristic of wounds produced by stone weapons. Some fifteen of these bones, such as the right and left hip bones, tibiæ, and verte-brae, still contain flint points flung with sufficient force to penetrate deeply the bony tissue. I have also presented to the Congress at Clermont many bones bearing traces of…”’ she paused, ‘I’m not sure of this word… no hold on. Ah, it’s cicatrized. “many bones bearing cicatrized wounds, from the cave of the l’Homme Mort, and beneath the Aumède dolmen…”’ She turned the page, and looked at Alex. ‘There’s lots more like this, he found thousands of wounded bones, and dozens of trepanations, across Lozère.’

Alex whistled, low, appreciatively.

‘Something else. And the upshot, does he speculate a link?’

She said:

‘Yes! It’s vague, and he admits it is kinda theoretical. But he wonders if…’ she quoted again. ‘“If we may posit the existence of a relatively advanced society, in upper Languedoc, many thousands of years before the birth of Christ, prone to severe violence. In this regard, perhaps the trepanations can be seen as a reaction to the violence. We know from the estimable Doctor Mantegazza, of Peru, who did such prodigious research in the Sanja Huara cave, in the Anta province of that distant land -”’

‘He’s a bit wordy.’

Her smile was excited. ‘He is. But he gets there! Listen. “We know from Mantegazza blah blah… that certain civilizations in pre-Colombian antiquity, practised the same cranial surgeries, probably as a way of exorcizing evil spirits, allowing demons to escape. It is surely”…’ she leaned closer to the page, squinting at a word, ‘… “plausible, that our ancestors on the wild Causses of the Lozère attempted similar interventions: they tried to excise the violence in their culture by freeing the demons in their brains. By drilling holes in their skulls.”’

Alex said:

‘Intriguing. Very intriguing. He thinks they were all killing each other, so they tried to save their culture with some primitive brain surgery – to get rid of violent urges. Not entirely impossible. It helps to explain Stone Age trepanation.’

She lifted a hand.

‘This last paragraph is even more curious.’

She quoted the conclusion: ‘“If I am permitted the lib erties of a veteran, in our war on scientific ignorance, I might add one more thought. Could there be a connection between my modest discoveries with the strange objects recently reported by Garnier, in his gallant explorations of the River Mekong in upper Cochinchina?”’

Alex sat forward.

‘Cochinchina. That’s the old name for French Indochina?’

Her nod was vigorous. ‘“The valiant French imperialist, so recently returned from the terrors of the Khone Falls and the delights of Louanghprabangh, tells us that he unearthed several large jars, on a plateau near Ponsabanh, which contained very similar remains as to those discovered in our very own Lozère: many dozens of skulls, trepanned, and evidence of disturbing and coeval social violence. The connection is piquant and intriguing, and of course quite fantastical. It is for younger and better scholars to discover if there is any truth in my fantasies.”’

The notebook was closed. Alex was uncharacteristically silent. Then he spoke:

‘A link with Indochina. Laos, Cambodia. Wow.’

‘It’s time we told Rouvier some of this, there are too many links. Too many. We need to go.’

Alex agreed; he stood and stretched, and said he was impatient for a coffee, a proper grand crème. A nice bar where they could talk all this over. Quick and efficient they put lids on the cartons, replaced them on the shelf; then made swiftly for the exit and the rain.

But something nagged Julia as they went towards the big swing doors with the big grimy windows. Something had been nagging her for a while. She turned to Alex.

‘Meet me at that brasserie on the corner?’

‘Sure. But why?’

‘There’s something I want to ask that asshole at the office. You go and have your coffee. Three minutes.’ She stood on tiptoe and kissed him; slung her arms around his neck; she liked the fact he was taller.

He smiled.

‘You’re getting gay on me, Julia.’ But he was still smiling, as he turned and quit the building. Julia watched him for a moment, happy amidst the terrors that she had sweet masculine Alex. But now she had a more difficult duty than kissing Alex Carmichael.

Walking to the office of the dour Frenchman she tapped on the glass partition. Sighing, tetchily, the curator put down his sports paper and slid back the glass.

Julia asked him about the pile of boxes in the study room. Obviously whoever had used the boxes had not used them to archive the discoveries that Julia had made: the new skulls had not been added. So who had been in to look at this specific collection? What had been their exact purpose in using the Prunieres boxes?

She phrased the question directly: Did the archivist remember anyone who had come in searching for the archives of Prunieres de Marvejols?

The Frenchman nodded, and wearily explained that a scholar had been in for the last three days, frantically hunting down the very same boxes, finally locating them yesterday afternoon. This frantic scholar had been quite annoying in several ways – the archivist yawned theatrically to underline the point – because the scholar had also demanded an obscure back issue of an obscure magazine of French anthropology: so that a specific article could be photocopied.

Julia asked if the archivist remembered the name of the writer of the article.

A petulant sigh.

‘Non mais je me souviens bien du titre. Nous n’arrivons pas à trouver l’article. Il a disparu. Voulez-vous connaître le titre?’

No, but I remember the title. We could not find the article. It is missing. Do you want to know the title?

‘Oui!’

The archivist sighed and turned, and sorted through a pile of documents on his desk; then he handed a piece of paper through the window. The paper had one line written in capitals: it was the title and the author of this missing article.

The author’s name might have been underlined in blood, it was so conspicuous and alarming.

Ghislaine Quoinelles.

Her anxiety and her speculations were cut short, the archivist spoke.

Is that it? We are finished?

‘Non… une autre question.’

Julia asked her final question. She wanted a description of the scholar. Picking up his copy of L’Equipe, the archivist yawned, and answered without looking up:

The woman is about thirty. She is a little strange. She has long dark hair, and a very white face. Perhaps she is Oriental.

Julia swallowed a surge of true and wild anxiety, she felt like she was about to throw up. The link was proved. They hadn’t just got ‘lucky’ with the box. Their find was no co incidence. Someone had been in to use this box just a day before them. But it wasn’t some friend or colleague of Ghislaine’s.

It was the murderer.

Her doomy speculations were once more interrupted. The official had slid back the glass once more: he was pointing through the glass windows of the main door:

Look! The same woman is coming again, you can ask her yourself.

Iced along her spine by the terror, Julia turned, and squinted, and saw.

Approaching the building was a strange, menacing figure, a short, lithe young woman, with the palest face, and long dark hair. The face was somehow odd, inexpressive; yet the eyes were demonic. Slant and brightly dark, and luxuriously intense.

Julia shrank back in reflex. The murderer would reach the door and discover Julia in a few moments. Three seconds. Two. One.