Bible of the Dead

Chapter 22

Julia pressed herself into a corner, a kind of vestibule between the office and the main doors of the archives of the archives of the Musée de l’Homme. Perhaps the killer would walk straight past, not see her, walk on.

Then she could run for it. If the killer walked straight down the lobby into the study room or the main archives she would have a few seconds to flee, without even being spotted.

The door swung open.

The killer stood there, looking left and right. Julia was hidden behind some coats and a stack of boxes, crushing herself backwards against the wall. She could feel her heart beating in her lungs and her spine: that’s how hard she was pressed to the brickwork.

Again, the killer glanced left, and then right. The face of the young murderer was pale to the point of unearthliness. There was something wrong with it, something strange.

Now the killer was staring directly into the gloom of the vestibule. Squinting. Surely she had seen Julia. Surely this was it.

But then the woman walked on into the hallway, and she tapped on the glass. She wanted to speak to the curator. The grouchy old Frenchman.

Julia quelled her despair. This was another vortex of anxiety. Assuredly, the French curator would say, ‘Oh there is someone here looking for you, she is in the building, she was here a minute ago,’ and then – then the killer would turn and narrow those dark eyes and she would see Julia and the knives would come out or worse.

The curator appeared to be asleep, or disappeared. There was no response to the woman’s persistent tapping.

Tap, tock, tap.

‘Bonjour? Hello? Anyone there?’

No reply. The small lithe woman had a soft deep voice. Maybe an American or Canadian accent. Yet the face was not European. Maybe it was Asian. Oriental. Yet bewilderingly pale.

The murderer leaned close to the glass, cupping a hand to her eyes to see better, to see through. Where was the curator?

Tap, tock, tap.

‘Bonjour?’

Julia assessed her chances. She could just run now, run right past, out of the main door; it might take seconds for the murderer to realize what had happened; to turn and see the door swinging, see Julia sprinting away. Would the killer even come running after? Would she take the risk? Attack Julia in bright daylight?

It was the best option. Do it now. Before the curator returned and pointed down the way and the woman turned.

Sweat trickling. Sweaty and immobile. She was sticky and hot and terrified and immobile but she had to do it, she was about to do it, to run, when she heard a voice, the curator, heard him sliding back the glass partition.

‘Ah Mademoiselle, pardon, bonjour.’

‘Vous êtes occupé?’

‘Non. J’étais en train de parachuter un Sénégalais!’

The Asian woman nodded, unsmiling.

‘OK, I am going to continue my research. You understand? Je vais poursuivre mes recherches. OK?’

‘Oui oui!’ The curator was grinning, feebly, submissively, like a supplicant; Julia realized with a shiver: even this big and grumpy man was frightened by this small, menacing woman, this thing, this killer, the presence she carried with her was so mesmerizing, so unsettling.

The killer turned left. This was it. The danger was passing. Julia was going to survive. To make it through. The curator had said nothing. The killer was unaware of Julia’s presence five metres away -

‘Une moment,’ said the curator, leaning out through the glass partition. ‘Il y avait deux personnes qui vous cherchaient!’

There were two people looking for you.

The woman swivelled, lithe and tautened, in trainers and jeans and a dark dark tee shirt under a fashionably scarred leather jacket:

‘When?’

The curator mumbled.

‘Ce matin…?’

The reaction was instant. The rest of the curator’s sentence was truncated by a brash clattering of glass. Then a grunting noise. Then a fearsome groan. Julia could not see what exactly was happening. The killer was in the way, muscling and tugging. The grunting was horrible, it was pursued by a pissing noise, a hissing, and another low groan, then silence.

The killer then turned on a bloodied heel and ran from the building, straight past Julia’s hiding place, not even seeing her, running out into the car lot and the drizzle and the cold and the concrete Algerian slums. The killer was gone.

For five minutes Julia remained crouching. Half sobbing, half panting, in relief and fear. She texted Alex. Go home, go to the apartment now. Please trust me.

He texted back: OK.

Her back aching, her heart protesting, she stood. And stepped. And saw. The killer had punched a hole in the glass partition; then she had evidently pulled the curator’s head through the hole, and slammed his neck down, onto the jagged shark teeth of the glass. The broken glass had severed arteries and veins, it had almost severed the entire head. His head was stuck on the spikes of glass, like a pig’s head on the counter of a butcher’s shop. Grinning.

The man was dead, his blood spooled across the floor, a luxurious shellacking of tacky red varnish. Julia shivered, and grasped at her fears. She used her phone and called Rouvier.

The French policeman picked up the phone at once and listened to her story in brisk silence. Then he told her to go the apartment immediately where he would send men to interview her. He told her to lock herself in the apartment and answer to no one but him or the Paris police. He was sending cars to the archives of the archives of the Musée de l’Homme.

Julia did as she was told. Tensed and trembling, she walked out into the cold and the wind of peripheral Paris, where greasy old shwarma wraps went tumbleweeding across the car lot.

She was almost too numb to be frightened. Quickly but without panic she made for the nearest Metro station, where Arab kids loitered on their mountain bikes, openly selling drugs, le chocolat, la poudre.

The metro journey to their central apartment in the Marais was long. Julia needed to distract herself, to distract her pounding heart, and her obsessing memories. She remembered the paper in her bag. The paper, the essay that had been requested by the killer.

Taking the page from her bag, she read the title; then she sat back, between two silent commuters, opposite a couple of dozing American tourists.

The essay’s title was sonorous and even pompous, pure Ghislaine Quoinelles.

Quelques Spéculations sur les Origines de Culpabilité et de Conscience dans les Grottes Paléolithiques de France et d’Espagne

Some Speculations on the Origins of Guilt and of Conscience in the Paleolithic Caves of France and Spain

Julia thought; she cogitated deeply. The stations whizzed by. Carrefour Pleyel. Marie de Sainte Ouen. La Fourche.

The origins of guilt?

The train stopped and started. She didn’t notice any of this. She didn’t notice the people getting on and off, the couple violently arguing under the advert for Banque Paribas, she didn’t notice any of this – because she was remembering the sensation she had felt by the stones, the Cham des Bondons.

Guilt. She had felt some kind of guilt. Mournful guilt.

There was a link between the skulls and the murders – and maybe the cave paintings too? And if there was a link, it was something deep and serious, it had to be. She could sense the outlines of something, in a tactile way; she was like a blind man touching an abstract bronze sculpture. Art. Bones. Wounded skulls.

The stations whirred by, in a disregarded blur.

Guy Moquet, Place de Clichy, Saint Lazere.