The Martyr’s Curse

Chapter Nineteen

Ben drove aimlessly for fifteen minutes, approximately south-east, just to put distance between himself and the monastery. The unfamiliar road curved and looped around the mountainside, then dropped steeply in altitude and took him down into thick deciduous and coniferous forest, the trees arching over the road in places to make a tunnel. Just one car passed in the opposite direction and his mirrors were empty. The sun was shining. It should have been another beautiful day in paradise.

He slowed as a narrow forest track appeared on his right, pulled in and drove the Belphégor fifty yards, rocking and lurching over the uneven ground until he came to a clearing, about thirty yards wide and roughly circular. The ground was hard-packed earth, littered with bark chippings and moss and last autumn’s leaves. At the centre stood a wooden picnic table, and at its edge was a block-built toilet facility. If the place had been developed as a travellers’ rest for road-weary tourists, it was too well-hidden to have ever had much use. Today, at any rate, it was completely deserted, and that suited Ben fine.

He stopped and killed the engine, but he didn’t get out of the truck. The deafened whine in his ears was beginning to wear off. He could hear the birds chirping overhead, the whisper of the breeze in the leaves and the soft hum of forest insects. Sunlight filtered through the foliage and dappled the windscreen. He sat motionless for a long time, staring dead ahead into space over the top of the wheel. Slowly, he was beginning to unwind. His jaw had unclenched, his fists loosened on the wheel and his heart had returned to its normal resting rate of forty-five beats per minute. Before, he’d been upset and angry. Now he was upset, and angry, and focused. Calm. Clear. Cold. And very dangerous.

‘All right,’ he said at last.

He took out the dead man’s phone. It was a cheap pay-as-you-go item, shiny and new with the standard bells and whistles, including a built-in camera. He scrolled over to the screen icon labelled Call Records, and opened up the menu. It was blank. No calls either made or received, unless the dead guy had deleted them all. Ben backtracked to the main menu. Picture files: blank. Calendar: blank. He backtracked again and selected contacts.

This time, he found something. There were ten numbers in the list, but no names. Over the next few minutes he dialled each one in turn, and each one in turn came back with a generic answerphone recording.

‘Fine,’ he said, and slipped the phone back in his pocket. He climbed down from the cab, stretched his sore muscles and walked over to the toilet block. The washroom facilities were basic and neglected, with a grubby sink and a cracked mirror, no soap, no towel, cold water only. He peered into the glass and saw a wild man looking back at him. Hair almost white with dust, red-rimmed eyes staring out of a face that was gaunt and unshaven and streaked with soot and dirt, like a soldier slathered in facial camo cream before going into battle. He spent the next few minutes cleaning himself up as best he could, splashing cold water over his face and brushing the worst of the dust out of his hair. The result wasn’t perfect, but marginally decent enough to frequent human society again.

He walked back to the Belphégor, restarted the engine and jammed it in gear, and spun the wheel round and round to full lock to U-turn back out of the clearing and down the narrow lane to the road. He pulled out and continued in the same direction, the road twisting and bending through the trees, now and then a break in the overhead canopy offering a glimpse of the mountains against the clear blue sky.

After another fifteen minutes he saw a sign for a filling station coming up on the right. Fifty yards later, he toed the brake and leaned across the transmission tunnel and the massive gear lever to wind down the far-side window and get a good look at the place as he drove past. The filling station shop was a low, weathered wooden building about forty yards back from the road, attached to an old open-fronted tin-sheet barn that would have had some agricultural use back in its day but now served as a storage shed. Firewood was stacked high in one corner, rows of butane cylinders stood in another. A pair of old-style pumps stood out on the patched concrete in front of the shop, one for gasoline and the other for diesel. A sign over the doorway read GAZ — TABAC–LOTERIE. Parked at the side of the building was a hard-used Peugeot 505 pickup truck with rusty skirts and a taped-up headlamp, the only other vehicle in sight. A bent old guy in a Breton cap, whom Ben took to be the proprietor of both the business and the pickup truck, was pottering slowly about the storage shed, seeming to be doing not much of anything.

Ben drove on a hundred yards, then flicked his indicator and pulled into the roadside. Leaving the truck running and the driver’s door open, he got out and walked back along the road to check out the filling station more closely. His first impression had been right. It was a useful place for his purposes, selling everything he needed. Best of all, it was a suitably old-fashioned kind of establishment. The kind he favoured most at times like these, which was to say the kind with no security camera keeping tabs on the vehicles that rolled in and out. He walked back to the truck, then reversed the hundred yards back down the road and pulled up on the patched concrete.

It wasn’t that the Belphégor needed diesel. Ben had another errand on his mind. The bent old man in the cap emerged from the workshop and greeted him with the customary and more formal ‘Bonjour, Monsieur’ that older folks in quiet parts of France still observed. Ben purchased four plastic five-litre petrol cans, a Michelin map of the local area, a roll of absorbent paper towel, and the first pack of Gauloises he’d bought in over seven months. He waited patiently while the old man pumped twenty litres of Eurosuper 98 Sans Plomb into his four cans, then paid cash and smiled a polite goodbye, carried his purchases to the truck and was on his way.

He pulled the Belphégor around in the road and headed back the way he’d come earlier. Fifteen minutes later, he’d returned to the clearing. The place was just as deserted as before. He parked the truck as close to its centre as he could, next to the picnic table, then shut off the engine for the very last time and climbed down from the cab with his bag, weighed down by the gold bars inside. He carried it to the edge of the clearing and dumped it at the foot of a tree. Returning to the truck, he undid the tonneau cover fastenings once more, then clambered up on to the flatbed and opened the tool locker. Reaching inside with both hands, he grabbed its occupant by the collar and sleeve and yanked him upright.

It took a few moments to drag the dead man out and lay him on his back on the pitted slats of the flatbed, his broken legs splayed out at odd angles. The guy’s skin had turned a sickly grey-green and rigor mortis was beginning to stiffen him up. Ben took the phone out of his pocket and used its built-in camera to take a mugshot of the corpse.

He quickly examined the picture on-screen. It wasn’t the most flattering of portraits, but it would serve its purpose perfectly well. Satisfied, he put the phone away and stepped back over the body to the open tool locker. He lifted out the pair of bolt croppers, the only component of the truck’s useless toolkit that he hadn’t discarded earlier.

‘This won’t hurt a bit,’ he said to the dead man.

When the unpleasant part was over, Ben left the bolt croppers lying across the corpse’s chest. Then he unscrewed the top of each of the four plastic fuel cans in turn. Taking care not to get any on himself, he sloshed their contents all over the flatbed, over the corpse, inside the cab, everywhere. The volatile petrol fumes filled the air with their sharp tang and shimmered up like heat ripples in the dappled sunlight as they quickly began to evaporate. Ben left the upturned cans where they lay, then walked away from the truck. He reached in his pocket for the cigarettes he’d bought. Tore open the pack, drew out a Gauloise, put it lightly between his lips. It felt as if it belonged there. He lit it with his old Zippo and took a deep draw of the smoke, letting the acrid taste of it fill his lungs. His first cigarette all year. Unlikely to be his last.

He sucked it hungrily down to its last inch, then plucked it out of his mouth and walked a few steps back towards the truck and flicked the burning stub on to the flatbed.

Twenty litres of spilled Eurosuper 98 caught light almost instantly with a big, gushy WHUMPF and a hot expanding breath that Ben felt on his face as he retreated to a safe distance. The fire spread everywhere at once, licking and rolling and consuming all it could find, until the Belphégor and the picnic table next to it could hardly be seen behind a curtain of flames that danced and leaped up high in the centre of the clearing. A tower of black smoke caught the breeze and drifted and dissipated over the forest.

Ben gazed at the blaze for a few moments, then turned, picked up his bag from the foot of the tree, slung it over his shoulder and started walking back towards the road.