The Tenth Chamber

FOURTEEN

Luc went to breakfast grinning. Hugo’s bunk was undisturbed. The scoundrel had clearly succeeded and undoubtedly would soon be peppering him with tales of conquest.

After Luc dispatched the first shift to the cave he embarked with Sara on an old-fashioned field trip, complete with specimen bags and notebooks. In the damp mist of early morning, they started from behind the abbey walls and hiked through a saturated pasture in the direction of the river.

Jeremy and Pierre were by the Portakabin and saw them taking off. ‘Where do you think they’re going?’ Jeremy asked.

‘Haven’t got a clue,’ Pierre answered with a wink. ‘The boss looks happy though.’

They walked in silence, inhaling the fertility of the countryside. It had rained hard for an hour or more the previous night and their wellington boots were soon shiny from the wet grass. The sun finally managed to eke out an appearance and when it did, the land began to sparkle brightly, sending both of them reaching for sunglasses.

They made their first find only a kilometre from the campsite. Sara noticed the border between the meadow they were traversing and the forest was speckled, a mixture of greens and yellows. She spotted tall yellow shoots towering above green grasses and started running for them. Luc kept pace with easy, long-legged lopes. The two of them left trails of trodden-down grass in their wake.

‘Wild barley,’ she said. ‘ Hordeum spontaneum, tons of it.’

To Luc, it looked like run-of-the-mill cultivated barley but she snapped off a spiky head and showed him two rows of kernels rather than six-rowed cereal grain.

She had pruning shears and he had a pocket knife and the two of them methodically snipped and cut a large bagful of golden heads. ‘This was probably the precursor of the domesticated species,’ she happily explained while they worked. ‘The transition to farmed grain would have happened during the Neolithic, but there’s nothing to suppose that Mesolithic and even upper Paleolithic people wouldn’t have foraged wild barley for food and even beer.’

‘Or other purposes,’ Luc added.

‘Or other purposes,’ she agreed. ‘I think that’s enough.’ She stretched her back. ‘One down, two to go.’

He carried the sack of barley and followed her as she plunged into the forest. The thin sunlight didn’t warm the woodlands much and it became chillier the deeper they wandered.

She wasn’t trying to avoid thickets and brambles; she was searching them out, which made for slow going. Luc trekked along, content to let his mind wander. She’d know what to watch out for; he knew what he wanted to watch – her hips, perfectly tight in khakis. And her shoulders were small and feminine even in that thick leather jacket. He tussled with a growing urge to grab her from behind, spin her and pull her against him. They’d kiss. She wouldn’t resist this time. He’d ask for absolution. She was always the one, he’d say. He hadn’t known it then but he knew it now. He’d pull her down. His sins would be washed away. The cool wetness of the forest floor would wash them away.

‘We’re looking for a creeping, tangled vine, climbing up small-to-medium-sized trees,’ she said, breaking the spell. ‘The leaves look like elongated arrow heads. It’s late in the season so don’t expect pink-and-white flowers but there could be some late-bloomers.’

There was a trickling sound and their boots began to slurp in mud. Luc wondered if the stream fed into one of Barthomieu’s waterfalls. Along the stream bed there was a mixed population of mostly holm oak and beech along with a thick undergrowth of weeds and prickly acacia. His jeans caught on some thorns and when he bent to free himself he heard Latin spilling from her mouth, euphonious, as if she was beginning to sing a hymn, ‘ Convolvulus arvensis! There!’

The flowerless bindweed had attacked saplings and juvenile trees just like she’d predicted. Its vines wound tightly around bark in a choking grip, spiralling high over their heads.

There was an abundance of the weed. The problem wasn’t quantity but collection. The vines were wrapped so snugly it was impossible to pull them away from the trunks. They were obliged to undertake an exercise that was painstaking and made their fingers ache – cutting and unwrapping, cutting and unwrapping – until they had a second bag filled with stems and leaves.

‘Two down, one to go,’ she declared.

She was leading again, he was following. The cliffs and the river were ahead. She doubled back towards the meadows. She had studied the topo maps and knew there was a disused train tracks nearby, a long-abandoned spur. Their last target favoured the kind of land that had once been tamed and was now fallow. They were seeking bushes. She was talking about them but he wasn’t absorbing the botany lesson. He was aching inside and becoming angry with himself for who he’d become.

His father was a petrochemical executive, stereotypical of men of his generation, with his private clubs, his drinking, his narcissistic arrogance and his insistence on keeping young mistresses despite having a perfectly lovely wife. If it weren’t for his fatal coronary, he’d still be at it, drinking and romancing, a pathetic septuagenarian Lothario.

Genes or environment – the eternal question. What accounted for Luc’s emulation of his old man? He’d seen the effect his father’s behaviour had on his mother. Fortunately, she’d been able to regain her dignity with a divorce, move back to the States and reclaim a life suspended for a quarter century as the brittle spouse of an oil company man, desiccating in the desert heat within the walled confines and country clubs of Doha and Abu Dhabi, pining for her only child who was sent away to Swiss schools.

His mother married again, this time to a wealthy dermatologist in Boston, a man with a mild manner and a soft body. Luc tolerated him but had no affection.

Suddenly, the blindingly obvious question flooded his mind. Why had he driven Sara away? Hadn’t it been the most complete relationship of his life? The most satisfying?

And why had he never asked himself why?

The old train tracks ran parallel to the river and were now overgrown. Sara pointed in the direction of a flat linear strip at the edge of a field and made a beeline towards it. Luc quietly trudged along, his thoughts percolating like hot coffee grounds.

The tracks were visible only when they stood directly over them. Sara, with the intensity of a blood hound, sensed that north was a better direction than south. They followed the tracks, adjusting their steps to land on the sleepers. On the river-side of the tracks was a wild hedgerow of hawthorn and Sara told Luc this was as good an environment as any to find what they were looking for.

The clouds blew off and the sun stayed out. Half an hour later they were still walking the rails and Luc began to fret about the excavation. His mobile phone had zero bars and he didn’t like being out of touch. They were about to pack it in and reverse direction when she began jumping like a little girl and spouting Latin again, ‘ Ribes rubrum, Ribes rubrum!’

The cluster of shrubs growing out of the hedgerow had pale-green five-lobed leaves and, as she explained, the persistence of berries so late in the season was the result of the longish summer and the temperatures which had been mild until recently.

The berries glistened in the sunshine like ruby-coloured pearls. She tasted one and closed her eyes in pleasure. ‘Tart, but lovely,’ she exclaimed. Luc playfully opened his mouth and she grudgingly obliged him by popping a berry between his lips.

‘Needs sugar,’ he said, and the two of them began to pick berries until a litre-sized plastic bag was full and their fingertips were stained red.

They kicked the cook out of the kitchen hut and commandeered chopping boards, utensils and his largest stewing pot. Emulating the sketchy description in the manuscript, they chopped the vines and grasses like salad greens, mashed them with a make-shift mortar and pestle – a wooden salad bowl and meat pounder – and set them on a boil with added water and crushed redcurrants. The kitchen took on a unique steamy smell of fruit and botanicals and they both stood over the pot, hands on hip, watching the concoction bubble.

‘How long do you think?’ Luc asked.

‘I don’t think we should overcook it. It should be more like making tea. That’s generally the correct ethno-botanical approach,’ Sara said. Then she laughed and added, ‘Actually, I’ve got no idea. This is so crazy, don’t you think?’

‘Too crazy to talk about it publicly, that’s for sure,’ he said. ‘This is strictly between you and me. How are we going to send it to Cambridge?’

She had a Thermos flask in her caravan, her personal one, a nice stainless steel and glass model used for real tea. After stirring the pot one more time, she turned the gas down a bit and went to retrieve it.

Before she returned, Abbot Menaud came flopping in on his sandals, a little too flushed for a cool day.

‘There you are, Luc. I was looking for you. I even rang your mobile phone.’

Luc fished it from his pocket. There were several missed calls. ‘Sorry, there wasn’t any reception where I was. How can I help you?’

The abbot was momentarily distracted by the peculiar sweet smells in the hut. ‘What is that?’ he asked, pointing at the stove.

Luc hated to be evasive with a man who had shown so much generosity but he ducked the question anyway. ‘Professor Mallory is just cooking something. I’m watching the pot.’

The abbot resisted the urge to sample whatever was simmering as he habitually did in his own kitchen. The reason for seeking out Luc came back to him. There had been a flurry of calls to the abbey, from the young head of the local gendarmerie, Lieutenant Billeter. He had left his number several times and was growing insistent.

Luc thanked him and wondered out loud if there had been some development in the investigation of Zvi’s accident. When Sara almost bumped into the abbot in the doorway they separated like pole-matching magnets. The old monk glanced at her thermos and muttered as he fled that her dish smelled lovely and that he’d like to try it one day. She held her tongue and Luc sealed the moment with a wink.

Luc returned the lieutenant’s call while Sara began straining the hot concoction into a clean bowl.

He expected to hear Zvi’s name mentioned in the first sentence, but instead the officer startled him by asking him something unexpected. ‘Do you know a man named Hugo Pineau?’

There was one steep downhill curve on the road leading from the abbey into the village of Ruac. It wasn’t considered a particularly dangerous stretch but sprinkle together a dark night, a downpour, excessive speed and perhaps some wine and one could imagine the result.

The point of impact was a good ten metres off the road, hidden to passing vehicles. It was as if the forest had parted to receive the car then closed itself up after the crash. Just after nine in the morning, a sharp-eyed motorcyclist had spotted some broken branches and found it.

Car and tree were fused into a knot of wood and metal, a broken, caved-in, twisted mass. The force of the impact was enough to lodge the tree trunk well into the passenger compartment, displacing the engine from its mounts. The front tyres were somewhere else entirely. The windshield glass was gone as if vaporised. Although there was a strong smell of petrol, there hadn’t been a fire, not that it would have mattered to the driver.

An SPV pumper was hosing the road down to wash away an oil run-off which was trickling downhill. Two gendarmes were keeping the road open to an alternating trickle of north and south-bound traffic.

Lieutenant Billeter and Luc spent a time sombrely talking inside the lieutenant’s car. Luc followed the officer to the scene with the shuffling steps of a man going to the gallows. Before he got there, Pierre pulled up in his car and Sara jumped out. After the phone call she had finished in the kitchen, frantically completing the job. Until she arrived, all she had heard was that Hugo had been in an accident.

She saw his eyes and they told the full story. ‘Luc, I’m so sorry.’

The sight of his tears set her off and both of them were sobbing when they stepped from the pavement onto the wet verge.

As an archaeologist, Luc routinely handled human remains. There was something clean, almost antiseptic about skeletons; without the unpleasantness of tissue and blood, one could be ultra-scientific and dispassionate. It took a seeker’s effort to find emotion in skeletal remains.

Yet, in the compressed span of days, Luc confronted fresh death not once but twice and he was ill prepared to deal with it, especially this time.

Hugo was badly mangled. How badly, Luc wouldn’t know for sure, because he turned his head after a second. That was long enough for him to peer into the driver’s side window and identify Hugo’s stylish olive jacket and his wiry hair, neatly trimmed and sculpted around a bloody left ear.

From the other side of the wreck, Luc suddenly saw a man looking into the passenger-side window. It was an older face with dark penetrating eyes, the neatly dressed man he had encountered weeks before in the Ruac café.

Luc and the man raised themselves simultaneously and stared at each other over the dented top of the car.

‘Ah, it’s Dr Pelay,’ Billeter said. ‘Do you know him, professor? He’s the doctor in Ruac. He was kind enough to come out and pronounce the victim.’

‘Death was instantaneous,’ Pelay told Luc, curtly. ‘A clean break of the neck, C1/C2. Not survivable.’

Pelay’s face and voice set Luc off. They were hard as rocks without a touch of compassion. Luc wanted Hugo to be attended by someone with a good bedside manner, even in death.

When he straightened fully and attempted to walk away, gravity overtook him. The officer and Sara simultaneously gave support and leaned him up against a gendarmerie van for balance.

‘We reached his secretary. She told us he was staying with you,’ Billeter said, searching for something neutral to say.

‘He was supposed to go home tomorrow,’ Luc said, wiping his nose on his sleeve.

‘When did you see him last?’

‘About eleven-thirty last night, at the camp site.’

‘He left the abbey then?’

Luc nodded.

‘Why?’

‘To visit a woman at Ruac.’

‘Who?’

‘Odile Bonnet. We had dinner last night, the four of us,’ he said, pointing to Sara. ‘He insisted on seeing her.’

‘Did she know he was coming?’

‘He didn’t have her number. I don’t think he even had her address. But Hugo was, you know, motivated.’

‘He didn’t make it to the village. If he left your camp at eleven-thirty, the accident must have happened no later than eleven-forty,’ the officer said flatly. ‘By the looks of it he was going pretty fast. He didn’t brake. There aren’t any skid marks. He flew into the trees until he was stopped by a large one. So tell me, Professor Simard, was he drinking last night?’

Luc looked pitiful. He didn’t care about absolving himself from the guilt he felt. But before he answered, Sara jumped in protectively. ‘All of us except Luc had some wine with dinner. Luc drove back from Domme. By the time we got back I think all of us were sober.’

‘Look,’ Billeter said, ‘the coroner already took samples from the body. We’ll know how much he had soon enough.’

‘I shouldn’t have let him go on his own,’ Luc choked. ‘I should have driven him.’

The officer had his answer and left them alone.

Sara didn’t seem to know what to do or what to say. Tentatively, she put the palm of her hand against Luc’s shoulder and he let her keep it there.

Another car arrived, this one from the direction of the village. A couple leaped out, Odile and her brother. She looked at Luc and Sara and started to run towards the crash but one of Billeter’s men stopped her and had a word.

She began to scream.

Sara told Luc she should go to her but before she could, one of the firemen strode from behind the pumper and grabbed Odile by the arm. It was her father, the mayor, decked out in his SPV uniform.

Bonnet pulled his daughter away and Sara did the same with Luc, tugging him in the direction of his car. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘You don’t need to be here.’

The afternoon light streamed thin through Luc’s caravan windows. Stretched on his bunk, he was more in darkness than light. Sara sat next to him on a pulled-up chair, sharing Hugo’s last bottle of bourbon.

Luc’s tongue was thick and lazy with booze. He pulled his hands from behind his neck and cracked his knuckles. ‘Do you have many friends?’ he asked.

‘What kind of friends?’

‘Same-sex friends. In your case, girlfriends.’

She laughed at his overexplanation. ‘Yes, quite a few.’

‘I don’t have same-sex friends,’ he said sadly. ‘I think Hugo was it for me on that score. Why do you think that is? I mean, you know me.’

‘I used to know you.’ She had been drinking a bit, enough to be convivial.

‘No, no, you still know me,’ he stubbornly insisted.

‘I think you spend too much time on female friends and your work to have male friends. That’s what I think.’

He turned on his side to face her with a revelatory expression. ‘I think you’re right! Women and work, work and women. It’s not healthy. A stool needs three legs, no?’ He began to flounder. ‘I think Hugo was going to be my third leg. We were reconnecting, really getting on, and now, he’s gone. The bastard drove into a tree.’ He reached for her with two arms.

‘No, Luc,’ she said, collecting herself and getting up. ‘Your instincts have gone haywire. You need emotional support right now, not physical love.’

‘No, I-’

She was already halfway out the door. ‘I’m going to get the chef to bring you something to eat and then I’m going to pack up the thermos to make the afternoon express parcel run. I want it to get to Cambridge by tomorrow afternoon. They’re expecting it at PlantaGenetics.’

‘Are you coming back?’ He was pathetic now, like a child.

‘When you’re asleep!’ she said soothingly. ‘Shut your eyes and drift off. And yes, I’ll come back to check on you. Just to check on you.’

When she was gone he stood up on shaky legs to splash some water on his face from the sink.

He stood over Hugo’s empty bunk and began to shake with the helpless rage he’d been suppressing all day. He closed his eyes and saw orange. Violence was needed, some sort of violence. That’s what his brain was telling him, so he punched the partition between his sleeping area and sitting area hard enough to seriously crater the particle board. He winced from the pain he’d inflicted on himself and saw blood on the wall. His fourth knuckle had a good deep cut. He wrapped it in a bandanna and sat back on his bed bleeding into the cloth and drinking more bourbon.

Sara protected him that night with a fierce, almost maternal instinct. She discovered his wound, saw the fist-shaped depression in the wall, clucked at him and dressed it. He was not to be disturbed. People could sort out their excavation issues on their own for one day, she insisted, and she posted a note on his caravan door to make sure he’d be left alone.

She stopped back later in the afternoon and wished she’d thought to take the bourbon bottle with her. It was empty, his tray of food was uneaten and he was snoring. She wiggled his boots off and threw the cover over his clothed body.

Later, when it was dark, she came back again. He had hardly moved. She decided to do her evening’s work at his desk to keep an eye on him. She kept vigil until quite late, reading her notes and typing on her laptop as the camp ground grew quiet and still.

A beam of light stretched across the darkness of the Portakabin. Luc’s desk was in the corner, furthest from the door. The light moved up and down over the desk drawers and settled on the lowest one.

The side drawers couldn’t be opened until the centre drawer was unlocked. There was a coffee mug on the desk crammed with pencils and pens. They were removed and the mug was tipped upside down. A small key dropped out.

The key unlocked the centre drawer and when it was opened, the side drawer slid open too. Inside were hanging files, in alphabetical order, covering a myriad of administrative issues.

A hand went straight for the Ds and a hand parted the file labelled D IVERS, for miscellaneous items. Among papers was an unmarked envelope, closed, not sealed.

Inside the envelope was the duplicate key to the titanium gate which sealed and protected Ruac Cave.