The Tenth Chamber (25 page)

One day, early in his tutelage, the boy made a mistake. He was spitting a red ochre against his outstretched hand, using the angle between his thumb and wrist to make the gentle curve of a deer’s back leg. He was momentarily distracted by the unsteadiness and shifting of his wooden platform and instead of delivering the paint to the wall, most of it landed squarely on the back of his hand, coating it orange-red. When he took his hand away from the wall, there was a perfect stencil of his palm and parted fingers. The boy winced, waiting for the opprobrium of his father but instead, Tal was delighted. He thought the handprint was a wonderful thing and he promptly tried the technique himself.

One handprint became two and in time, the cave would be filled with them, joyful marks of humanity and a father’s pride in his son.

And many years later, after Tal had discovered the malachite crystals that he learned how to grind into green pigment, Mem and his other son joined their father in the last chamber. They crawled through a narrow natural tunnel, into the special part of the cave Tal had long reserved for his sanctuary, the most sacrosanct of places, where they would paint the images of the plants that let him soar and connect with the spirit world.

And among the plants, Tal himself painted the life-size bird man, his soaring spirit, his other self.

Luc called Sara once, twice, three times then repeated the effort every hour or so. He hammered her mobile with messages. He got her home number in London from directory assistance and tried that. He called her office. When leaving messages got old, he hung up at the beep.

He was back at his flat in Bordeaux, a tidy bachelor pad in a high-rise, minutes from the campus. He was battling a rough sea of roiling emotions, barely keeping his head above the water.

Anger. Frustration. Grief. Longing.

Luc wasn’t the type to dwell on feelings, but he couldn’t avoid them. They were bashing him in the head, ramming him in the gut, making him punch the furniture, scream into a pillow, choke back the urge to cry.

He ducked calls. If he didn’t recognise the number he let them ring through. Reporters, including Gérard Girot from
Le Monde
, called him incessantly but he was under a gag order from the Ministry; press contacts were in the hands of Marc Abenheim.

Who could he talk to – other than Sara?

He would have called Hugo, but he was dead.

He would have met up with Jeremy and Pierre for a beer, but they were dead.

There were no women to turn to. All his relationships were dead.

His bastard of a father was dead.

His mother was in another world geographically and neurologically, in the first grip of Alzheimer’s, and what would be the point of distressing her? And he might have the bad luck of getting the dermatologist on the line.

That left Sara. Why wasn’t she picking up the phone or responding to texts and emails? He’d left her in hell at Nuffield Hospital, blazing off in a blind panic, oblivious to
her
needs. ‘There’s been an emergency,’ and he was gone. He alluded to the crisis in his messages. It was in all the papers. Other team members would have surely reached out to her. She
had
to know.

He wasn’t one to drink on his own, but he drained a bottle of Haitian rum left over from an old party over the course of the afternoon. In a boozy mist he came to this conclusion: Sara was done with him. This was more than a brush off, it was terminal. The bridge was burned to its pilings. Bad things happened to her when he was around. He’d hurt her once. He’d probably just hurt her again by ditching her in Cambridge. He was toxic. Cars veered at him on the pavement. People died around him. The next time he heard from her would be an email with an attached report on her pollen findings at Ruac, signed, With Best Regards, Sara. Or maybe not even that. Abenheim might have already contacted her and told her to communicate exclusively with him from now on. Maybe he forbade her to speak with Luc altogether.

Abenheim could go to hell. Ruac was
his
cave.

He ran a bath and while he was soaking he tried not to close his eyes because each time he did, he saw the covered bodies on the floor of the Portakabin, or Hugo, crushed in his car, or Zvi, broken at the river’s edge. He balled his hands into fists and realised his right hand was getting better, less red and less painful. He didn’t much care but he’d keep taking the Asian doctor’s pills. The phone chimed a few times. He let it ring.

Wrapped in a towel, he listened to his new voice messages. One was from Gérard Girot again, urgently requesting a comment. The next was from Pierre’s father, calling from Paris.

Luc had only one suit and fortunately it was dark, appropriate for funerals.

There were two in rapid succession, Jeremy’s in Manchester and Pierre’s in Paris.

There was an interesting bond between a graduate student and a thesis adviser. Part parental, part filial, part comradeship. It didn’t always work out that way. Some professors were stand-offish. Some students were immature. But Jeremy and Pierre were good students and close friends and he thought he would never fully recover from their murders.

That morning, with a thick head, dry mouth and pangs in his chest, he caught one of the few direct flights from Bordeaux to Manchester.

Jeremy’s funeral was a rather bloodless Church of England affair. The family and parishioners were stoical. It wasn’t clear that the minister, a high-pitched Irish fellow, had ever met Jeremy judging from his generalities and platitudes about a man being plucked from the flock at such a young age.

Outside the church, in a gritty central Manchester neighbourhood, a cold rain was falling and no one wanted to hang about too long. Luc waited for his turn and introduced himself to Jeremy’s family, an older couple who had clearly conceived their boy at the edge of female fertility. They seemed confused by it all, almost post-concussive, and Luc didn’t put any demands on them. They had heard of him through Jeremy and acknowledged that and his father thanked him for coming all the way from France. Then his mother asked, ‘Were you there, Professor Simard?’

‘No ma’am. I was in England.’

‘What on God’s earth happened?’ she said. It wasn’t clear from the glassy look on her face, she really wanted to know.

‘The police think it was a robbery. That’s all I was told. They don’t think he suffered.’

‘He was a good boy. I’m glad of that. He’s at peace.’

‘Yes, I’m sure he is.’

‘He was keen on this archaeology,’ his father said, snapping out of his daze, long enough to start crying.

Rather than fly directly back to Paris, he took a commuter jet to Heathrow and jumped in a cab. Sara was still
in communicado
, but he couldn’t let it stand. He was in England. He’d exert the effort and try to make amends.

She lived in St Pancras, a stone’s throw from the British Library and a short enough walk to her job at the Institute of Archaeology.

At Ossulston Street, he got out of the cab into the driving rain of a muddy-skied evening. He had no umbrella and his suit jacket soaked through in the time it took to figure out which entrance to the block of flats was hers. From the directory, Flat 21 was on the third floor. Its entrance was in a well of sorts, protected from the rain, which was fortunate because there was no answer to his persistent buzzing.

He was about to call it quits when a woman came to the door. It wasn’t Sara. The woman, about Sara’s age, was stringy-haired and wore no make-up. A long baggy sweater hid her figure.

‘I’m sorry, were you ringing Sara Mallory’s bell?’

Luc nodded.

‘I’m her neighbour, Victoria. The walls are frightfully thin. Actually, I’ve been worried about her. Do you know where she is?’

‘No, that’s why I’m here.’

‘You’re French, aren’t you?’ she asked.

‘Yes, I am.’

She looked at him like a robin about to pluck a worm from its hole. ‘Are you Luc?’

She took him up to Flat 22, gave him a towel and made tea. She was a freelance writer who worked from home. As she told it, Sara and she had become friends from the day Sara moved in. When Sara was in town, they had dinner at each other’s flats or the local curry house once or twice a week. They’d been emailing and texting sporadically during the dig. She was clearly clued into Sara’s life and she looked Luc over with knowing eyes that seemed to proclaim:
So that’s the famous Luc! That’s what all the fuss is about!

She poured the tea and said, ‘She texted me Saturday night from France. She said she was coming back to London Monday night. Now it’s Wednesday. I saw what happened at Ruac on the news. I’ve been frantic but no one’s been able to tell me anything. Please tell me she wasn’t caught up in that.’

‘No, no, she wasn’t there when it happened, thank God. She was with me in Cambridge Monday morning,’ Luc explained. ‘We were visiting a man in hospital when I was called away to deal with the tragedy. I went back to France and left her in Cambridge. I haven’t heard from her since.’

‘Oh my,’ she said, with a look of fright.

‘Are you positive she couldn’t have come back to London without your knowledge?’

She confessed she couldn’t be sure and volunteered that she had a key to Sara’s flat. Perhaps they might check together.

Sara’s flat was identical in size and shape to her neighbour’s but it was a world apart in atmosphere. Unlike Victoria’s drab décor of lumpy furniture in greys and whites, Sara’s vibrated with colour and energy and he recognised it straight away as a re-creation of sorts of her old Paris apartment he knew so well. They’d made love on that red sofa. They’d slept under that peacock-blue bedspread.

Victoria buzzed around, checking the flat, and announced, ‘She’s not been back. I’m sure of it.’

Luc had another card in his wallet from the investigating officers in Cambridge.

‘I’m going to call the police.’

Paris looked pristine in the flat cold light of the autumn morning. As Luc’s taxi drove from his hotel in the centre of the city, east towards the Périphérique, the neighbourhoods became dingier until they were in the suburbs, in Montreuil, where if you strained your eyes you could just spot the Eiffel Tower glimmering hopefully on the western horizon.

Off the Boulevard Rouget de Lisle, they drove through a section where there were as many black faces as white, and outside an old Catholic church in the middle of a crowded block, black people were streaming up the steps.

Luc had never met Pierre’s father but Philippe Berewa obviously had his eye out for him, because the man rushed down the steps as soon as Luc sent the taxi off.

They embraced. As tall as Luc was, Philippe was a head taller and had the same type of athletic physique as his son. His face was creased with age. He was wearing a three-piece suit with a gold watch chain, an elegant throw-back to another time and place. Luc knew he’d been a doctor in Sierra Leone, and that he’d never been able to get his certification in France and had been relegated to more lowly work as a hospital technician. Luc nevertheless, called him Doctor.

The church was already packed. Luc was led to the front pew where a seat of honour had been reserved for him, next to Pierre’s mother, a heavyset woman in a sombre dress and small black hat, who was weeping openly.

As the Requiem Mass progressed, the contrasts to Jeremy’s funeral were manifest. The mourners here were under none of the emotional constraints of Jeremy’s kith and kin. There was open sobbing and wailing and the moment Pierre’s casket was met by the priest, who sprinkled it with Holy Water and began intoning the
De Profundis
, a tsunami of grief ran through the church.

Afterwards, there were no questions about what had happened, as if God’s will was a universal explanation, a completely soothing balm. What his parents and siblings wanted Luc to know was that Pierre had died doing something he loved more than anything on earth and that it had been an honour for him to be the student of the illustrious Professor Simard.

All Luc could do was hold on to them, say a few choice words about how special he was and tell them a plaque with Pierre’s name would be driven into the cliffs at the mouth of Ruac Cave.

Luc was in a taxi again, heading back into town, limp from mourning. He checked his voicemail; there was nothing, so he called up the detective inspector in Cambridge he’d spoken to the previous evening about Sara. The detective had promised to check accident and other police reports and local hospital admissions for any mention of a Sara Mallory.

He reached DI Chambers on his mobile. The man seemed rushed and distracted, in the middle of something else. He said there had been no police, ambulance or hospital records involving Professor Mallory but he’d be sure to let Luc know if that were to change. Luc couldn’t even be sure if he’d done anything. Maybe he was lying through his teeth. And when Luc asked if there’d been any developments in the Science Park explosion, the officer frostily referred him to the Cambridge Police website for information. That was that.

Luc had seen Hugo’s people at his memorial service, so when he returned to the office of H. Pineau Restorations on Rue Beaujon there was no need to replay words of grief and loss. The sentiment was on everyone’s face – it wasn’t necessary to put it on their lips.

Even the effervescent Margot was incapable of more than a wan smile. He followed her past Hugo’s office, sealed like a mausoleum, to Isaak Mansion’s office down the hall. Isaak was on the way, she told him, and offered a coffee.

When she came back with a tray, he asked how things were going.

‘Not well. Isaak can tell you.’ She had something in her hand and opened her palm to show it, as if it was a jewel or a relic. Hugo’s mobile. Small, thin and modern, just like him. ‘The police sent it back. Maybe I shouldn’t have but I looked through it. There were some lovely photos of you and Luc with some women.’