The Night Gate

Chapter Twenty-Four

Bauer’s train arrived in Brive-la-Gaillarde from Paris shortly after midday. The conductor had explained to him that he should only exit the train on the left if he was leaving the station. Otherwise he should step out on the right and the connecting local train would be waiting on the next platform.

He found himself a seat in it, a single-carriage bullet-shaped blue train whose final destination was Aurillac, one of the coldest towns in France. But he was not going anywhere near that far.

It pulled out of the bourgeois Corrèzienne town, with its grey slate roofs and tall narrow houses, and gathered speed into the bleak October landscape of the Département du Lot. A landscape characterised by forests of oak and chestnut and lime, and rolling hills cut through by tiny meandering streams.

He was both excited and apprehensive. All of this would have been so much easier if only Narcisse had been prepared to accept his proposition. It never, for one moment, occurred to him that his train might be speeding him towards an encounter with the man himself. And ultimately with death.

He climbed down from the train at Biars-sur-Cère and waited until it pulled out again before crossing the line to exit through the station into a deserted car park. To his relief, a taxi sat outside a café opposite the station and he went in to enquire if someone could take him to Carennac.

His first impression as they turned off the Alvignac road into Carennac village was that they had just driven into a medieval fairy tale. Steeply pitched red roofs, and slated turrets, the bell in the abbey chiming the hour. Streets barely wide enough for his taxi to negotiate. It was here, he was almost certain, that his grandfather’s life had been cut short. Here that a story never previously told had played out among the Carennac stone. A story whose ending, he felt, had yet to be written. Quite possibly by him.

His taxi pulled up outside the Hostellerie Fenelon, and he carried his overnight bag across the paved terrace, through glass doors and into reception. A young man confirmed his reservation, took his details and handed him a key. ‘Upstairs and to the right,’ he said.

Bauer was just about to head for the stairs when he caught a glimpse of a familiar figure sitting at a window table on the far side of the restaurant. And it was as though every joint in his body had suddenly seized. He couldn’t move.

Narcisse’s focus was on his lunch, and so he didn’t see the young German glaring at him across the tables. Beyond his initial shock, Bauer felt anger fizzing inside him, that old familiar feeling. His fists clenched at his sides. After insulting him, and feigning disbelief, Narcisse was flagrantly betraying his confidence. Evidently he did not, as he had claimed, believe Bauer’s story was so far-fetched. What was it he had called the German? A crank and a charlatan? And yet here he was. Bauer was having trouble controlling his breathing now. He moved quickly out of Narcisse’s line of sight and headed for the stairs, determined that the old bastard would not get away with this.

Bauer did not linger long in his room. He dropped his bag on the bed and crossed to the window to look out through a latticework of branches and dead leaves at the slow-moving water of the River Dordogne below. His thoughts were a confused jumble of uncertainty. What to do? Almost on an impulse he decided that the first thing would be to find the house. Then he could take it from there. A way of procrastinating. Avoiding the issue. And most of all, Narcisse. Since he knew that a confrontation at this point could lead him to violence. And that would ruin everything.

He drifted quietly downstairs, hesitating at the doors to the restaurant to establish that Narcisse was still lunching, before slipping unseen out into the street.

It was cold. Only the faintest warmth discernible in a sun that barely rose above the rooftops. Bauer smelled woodsmoke in the air. Medieval buildings crowded narrow streets and cut crystal-sharp outlines against the pale autumn blue above. He realised very quickly that he should have obtained a street plan. The village was far bigger than he had imagined. The village store and the post office were shut. A faded sign above a shuttered property on the edge of the tree-lined palisade read Café Calypso. But it didn’t look like a café. The palisade itself was deserted, apart from a solitary car parked up against the wall. It was a steep drop to a footpath that ran along the bank of the river below, where wooden rowing boats were moored in twos and threes, some half submerged in brackish green water. The walls of the château rose steeply on the other side of the road. At the far end, an archway led up a narrow cobbled street to the precincts of the abbey. Beyond that, a long bridge spanned a cleft in the rock, and a road led away from the village along the riverbank.

Bauer turned left and found himself walking unwittingly in the footsteps that Enzo and Dominique would leave in the same street less than twenty-four hours later. By which time Narcisse would be dead, and Bauer missing.

He followed the street along the basin of the village, aware that it climbed higher to both left and right, tiny alleyways branching off in either direction. At a crooked, cantilevered house at the end of the street, he turned left again, climbing a steep hill past a converted barn to the fenced playground of the village primary school. It too was deserted. A turn to the right led on to the main road to Alvignac and a bus shelter where an elderly lady sat leaning forward, both hands crooked over the top of her walking stick. Arthritic knuckles on age-spattered hands.

In his schoolboy French he asked if she could direct him to the home of Anny Lavigne, and she pointed him back along the road he had come, down past the school and a handful of houses. Where the road branched, she said, there were steps leading up to a tiny park and a war monument. Anny Lavigne lived in the big house that overlooked it from the far side.

He thanked her, hoping that he had understood, and followed the road back over the hill and down to where the road divided in two. Just as she had described, steps led up past a stone cross and into a small park where four stout tilia trees flanked a monument to the dead of both world wars. Beyond them, a dead tree had fallen over, pulling its root system free of the earth that had nourished it for who knew how many decades. A slight breeze stirred in the still of the afternoon, and red and white striped tape fluttered listlessly all around the area of disturbed ground.

He stopped and realised that this, almost certainly, was the place his grandfather had lain undiscovered for more than seventy years. Shot in the head by persons unknown and buried in haste. It was chilling to feel this close to the man who, all these years later, had brought him here. But Bauer knew that he was no longer at peace in the ground which had held him for so long. Every last trace of him had been removed and taken to Paris, and to Bauer it felt like desecration. He stood staring at the disinterred grave with an inexplicable mix of sorrow and anger.

He turned and found himself looking past an old chapel turned exhibition space, shuttered and closed for the season, towards the house that overlooked the park. Anny Lavigne’s house. The house described by Wolff in his diaries.

Steps climbed back down to the street beside it, a stone staircase doubling back and leading up to a small covered terrace at the front door.

He heard the scrape of footsteps echoing off cold stone in the chill of the afternoon. The first and only sign of life he had seen in this deserted place, except for the old lady at the bus stop. The shadows of trees that lined the railings were already long as the sun dipped away to the west, and Bauer moved into the cover they provided as the stooped figure of Emile Narcisse came into view, slowly climbing up from the main street below.

He stopped at the foot of the stairs to Anny Lavigne’s door and hesitated a moment, consulting a piece of paper before pushing it back into a pocket of his long winter coat. He wore leather gloves, and Bauer could see a white shirt and blue tie where the coat was open at his neck.

There was still not a soul in sight, not even the chatter of birdsong to breach the silence of the village, as Narcisse climbed the dozen or more steps to the door of the house. The sharp rap of metal on wood echoed all around the tiny square as he employed the wrought-iron knocker to announce his presence.

Bauer watched as Narcisse shuffled impatiently before knocking again. And then the door opened. But from where he stood, Bauer could not see who had opened it. Just the animated discussion that followed. Their voices were hushed, and at the same time raised, like loud whispers that filled the air. Bauer was unable to make out a word of it, but discerned at least that the other voice was that of a woman.

Then silence, and a long period of what appeared to be a stand-off, before the door opened wider and Narcisse disappeared inside. The door closed softly behind him and Bauer stepped out into the sunlight. He was shaking with anger, and it was all he could do to stop himself from running up those steps to hammer on the door and beat the life out of the treacherous bastard. He took long deep breaths, condensing now as the temperature of the air around him dropped, and he glanced behind him to see the sun slip away beyond the roof of the nearest house, throwing the whole park into shadow.