The Mayan Codex

11

At precisely 9.30 the next morning, Joris Calque watched from his camouflaged hiding place as the battery of chauffeur-driven cars returned to collect their clients. He counted them off, one by one.

‘That leaves three of them still inside the house. Two males and a female, if I am not mistaken.’

In the lonely weeks that Calque had spent ensconced inside his eyrie, he had occasionally drifted into the habit of talking out loud to himself. He was well aware of this new tendency, but didn’t, as yet, feel that he was in imminent danger of turning into one of those ubiquitous males – and they were always males, weren’t they? – who stride up and down the pavements of their home town mouthing off to imagined companions.

If he ever did slide into such a public form of idiocy, Calque hoped that he would have enough wit left to wedge a cell phone speaker in his ear, thereby protecting himself against the very forces of public order to which he had for so long subscribed.

His main problem now wasn’t incipient dementia, however, but rather to retrieve the – hopefully – brimming voice-activated tape recorder from the Countess’s inner sanctum.

He stood up and glanced around his eyrie. So. His time here was over.

He wouldn’t miss the chemical toilet, the smell of stale tobacco, or the curious quality of light that filtered through the gaps in the camouflage netting. But he would miss the birdlife, and the sightings of badgers, rodents, rabbits, deer and foxes with which he had wiled away the more tiresome hours of his vigil. He decided, on the spur of the moment, to bequeath the entirety of his hidey-hole to the poacher who had set it up. That would save him the trouble of carting everything back to his car. It would serve to cover his back-trail rather nicely, too.

Calque’s experience told him that he didn’t stand a cat-in-hell’s chance of getting into the Domaine to retrieve the recorder himself. He was neither young, suicidal, nor particularly eager to see the inside of any of the prisons to which he had consigned so many felons, child-molesters, and murderers in the course of his detecting career.

But there was one possible alternative to professional suicide. And Calque made up his mind to explore it without further delay.