The Tenth Chamber (28 page)

‘I hope it is. But anyway that would be up to the abbey to decide. It’s their property.’

Isaak nodded and promised Luc he’d contact him as soon as the next email arrived from the decoder. But they’d see each other again over dinner. They would eat and drink to Hugo that night. Both of them wanted that closure.

He tried Sara by phone one more time in what had become an obsessive and futile routine. The midday traffic was fairly light. The Place de Concorde was wide open and magnificent as always. He glanced absently at his knuckles. They were less red; the new pills were definitely working. He’d almost felt guilty taking them. People were dead. Sara was missing and he was attending to a mundane hand infection. He got angry with himself and in the flick of a physiological switch, the anger turned to melancholy. He put his hands to his face and literally shook his head, trying to shake out the demons. But he couldn’t permit himself to wallow. He had work to do.

Maurice Barbier had agreed to see him on short notice. Here was a man who had grown into his affectations. While Einstein hair and a cravat had marked him throughout middle age as somewhat of a dandy, it suited him as an older man. His office too, in the ministry, was an exercise in unselfconscious ornateness, an overstuffed assortment of archaic artefacts and pre-classical art on loan from the storage cabinets of the Louvre, an extravagant spectacle that seemed less ridiculous the older he became.

Barbier was sedate and serious. He guided Luc by the shoulder over to his gilded drinks cabinet.

Luc relaxed when he saw they were going to be alone.

‘You thought I’d ask Marc Abenheim to sit in?’ Barbier asked.

‘I thought you might.’

‘I have too much respect for you to play the tricks of a politician. He doesn’t even know you’re here.’

‘I need your help,’ Luc said.

‘Anything I can do, I will do.’

‘Give me my cave back.’

Barbier took a delicate sip of sherry and looked at an oversized Etruscan urn in the corner as if seeking strength from its spear-clad warriors. ‘That, unfortunately, I cannot do.’

Then and there, Luc knew he’d lost. Though saddened, Barbier seemed resolute. But he couldn’t just give up, finish his drink and walk away. He had to fight. ‘Surely, Maurice, you don’t buy into the nonsense that the things which have happened during the excavation represented a dereliction of duty or a failure of leadership!’

‘I want you to know that I don’t believe that.’

‘Then why?’

‘Because we have here the problem of perception versus reality. The image of Ruac has been sullied before we can even define it. There won’t be a magazine or newspaper article written about it which will not mention the deaths. There will be idiotic Internet postings about the Curse of Ruac. The mishaps are over-shadowing the importance of the archaeology and this is hard for me to bear. The Minister herself has ordered a health and safety assessment of the conditions of the dig and by the way, you will be questioned by more lawyers and functionaries than you can imagine. What I’m saying is that perception has
become
reality. You’re in an untenable position.’

‘I’m sure Abenheim shaped the discussion within these halls,’ Luc said with disgust.

‘Of course he did. I won’t lie to you about that, and I tell you, whether or not you trust my word, that I fought for you – until the pendulum of opinion had swung too far. So yes, I voted, in the end, for your removal. I’m worried about future funding. The cave is more important than one man, even its discoverer.’

‘Let’s not confound one tragedy with another. My heart’s already been broken. Losing Ruac will tear it out.’

More sherry, then the glass came down hard on the table. ‘I’m sorry.’

Luc rose and picked up his case. ‘Is there nothing I can do to change your mind?’

‘It would take a miracle.’

Luc was back in his hotel room with more time to kill before dinner than he would have liked. He sprawled on the bed and pulled out the notes he’d jotted down during Isaak’s translation.

The mentions of the red tea.

Gooseberries, barley grass and possession weed.

Over and over.

Like an amnesic coming out of the fog, he remembered the last conversation on Monday morning before his life came completely unglued. In the corridors of Nuffield Hospital, by the Radiology Department. Fred Prentice. They’d been talking about barley grass and some kind of fungus. Then the call from Abbot Menaud. Then hell.

What else had Prentice learned about their plants?

The general number of Nuffield Hospital was on his prescription bottles of antibiotics. He rang through and asked to be connected to Dr Prentice’s room. Judging from the extent of his injuries, Luc reasoned that he had to be hospitalised still.

‘Prentice, you say?’ the hospital operator asked.

‘Yes, Dr Fred Prentice.’

‘May I ask if you’re family?’

He lied. ‘Yes, his brother-in-law.’

After a long wait, the phone was ringing again. A woman identified herself as the ward sister in Orthopaedics and asked if he was inquiring about Dr Prentice.

The protective tone of her voice alarmed him. She asked him again if he was a relative.

‘Brother-in-law.’

‘I see. It’s your French accent. We can’t talk to just anyone.’

‘Of course. His sister married a Frenchman. It happens in the best of families.’

She didn’t chuckle at that. ‘I must have met you on Monday night when he was admitted.’

‘No. I only saw him in Casualty.’

‘It’s just that there was a French gentleman who came to see him Monday night, that’s all.’

‘Not me. There’s more than one of us. So, may I speak with him?’

‘Has your wife not been in touch?’

‘No. She’s in Asia. She asked me to call.’

‘Well, I’m very sorry to have to inform you but Dr Prentice passed away in the early hours of Tuesday.’

His mind garbled most of the rest of what she had to say. A suspected pulmonary embolus. Not uncommon in patients with leg injuries and immobilisation. Seemed like a nice man.

He managed to ask if the nurse had seen an American woman named Sara Mallory on the ward, but no, she couldn’t recall an American.

He hung up and tried all of Sara’s numbers again, punching numbers by memory, he’d called so many times. He felt panic in his throat.

Prentice.

Another death.

Another unrelated, disconnected death?

Who was this ‘Frenchman?’

Where the hell was Sara?

He hadn’t checked his emails since the morning. Maybe there’d be one from her, explaining everything innocently. She needed to get away. She went to visit her family in America. Anything.

His inbox was bursting with unopened messages, none of them from Sara or her friend from Ossulston Road. Then he saw one from her boss, Michael Moffitt, the Director of the Institute of Archaeology. He opened it excitedly.

Moffitt had received Luc’s message. He hadn’t a clue where Sara was but had been relieved, no end, that her name hadn’t surfaced on the Ruac victims’ list reported in the press. He was as concerned as Luc and would make inquiries amongst the Institute staff.

So, nothing.

Luc scanned the rest of his messages. One was from Margot. The subject read H
UGO
’
S
PHOTOS
. He couldn’t bear to click on it.

Or any of them. Except just when he was going to log off, one message line caught his attention in an irresistible way. A
BIT OF GOOD NEWS TO BREAK THE GLOOM.
It was from Karin Weltzer.

It was about the tiny human bone they had found in the Chamber of Plants. An infant’s distal phalanges. They had sent it to a palaeontologist at Ulm, one of her colleagues. She apologised for even writing when the sense of loss was so fresh and great among the surviving members of Team Ruac but she couldn’t keep the news to herself, even though she admitted she’d been instructed by Marc Abenheim to communicate official matters directly to him. Professor Schneider had completed his examination and had a most unexpected finding. He was certain, as she put it, absolutely, one-hundred-and-ten-per-cent-certain, that this was not a Cro-Magnon infant.

It was
Neanderthal
.

The rest of the email was Schneider’s point-by-point differential between the morphology of phalanges from
Homo neanderthalensis
and
Homo sapiens
. All the check marks from their bone were in the
neanderthalensis
column.

Neanderthal?

Luc was momentarily swept back to the world he loved – the Paleolithic. This was an Aurignacian cave. A Cro-Magnon cave. This was the art of Homo sapiens. What was a Neanderthal infant doing in the tenth chamber?

The two species certainly co-existed in the forests and savannas of the Upper Paleolithic Périgord but there was not one single example of a mixing of their artifacts or human remains in the archaeological record. Could it have been scavenged elsewhere, carried into the cave by a predator, like a bear? All the way into the furthest chamber? Perhaps, but unlikely.

Ruac was unique in many ways. This was another example of its singularity.

A phone call interrupted his musings.

It was Colonel Toucas with his smooth, cultured voice.

‘Are you in Bordeaux?’ he asked, and seemed disappointed when he heard otherwise. ‘I’m in Bordeaux on business and was hoping to drop by to discuss something.’

‘I’ll be back midday tomorrow,’ Luc said. ‘I have a dinner in Paris. Can’t you tell me what it is?’

‘Well, yes, okay, but I’m telling you this in confidence. It’s not for others, definitely not for the press.’

‘Of course.’

‘You know that stick of material we found under Pierre Berewa’s body? We had it analysed. It’s a material called picratol. It’s a military high-explosive. But no one’s seen it for years. It’s almost a footnote to history. Both sides used it quite a bit during the Second World War.’

Luc felt light-headed. ‘An explosive?’

‘There’s more, I’m afraid. I followed up with the police in England, as you requested. In fact, I’ve been in touch with Scotland Yard. Your explosion in Cambridge? What would you say if I told you that explosive residue was also found at the bombed building?’

‘My God.’

‘Not picratol, mind you. Modern material, some variant of military-grade C-4. A very curious development. I think we need to have a more extensive discussion, Professor Simard, about you, about Pierre Berewa, about everyone who has had anything to do with your cave.’

‘I’ll cancel my dinner and come back to Bordeaux this afternoon.’

‘No, no, that’s not good for me. I’ve got to get back to Perigeux for an engagement tonight. Can you come to my office, say noon, tomorrow?’

‘I’ll be there. But Colonel, please, one of the professors on my team, Sara Mallory, an American who works in London, is missing. She was in Cambridge with me on Monday morning heading for the building that blew up. We were visiting a victim in the hospital. That’s where I left her. No one’s seen her or heard from her since. The man we were visiting was connected with Ruac. He died unexpectedly on Tuesday morning after being visited by a man with a French accent. It’s all connected, I don’t know how but all of this is connected! The Cambridge police know about Sara’s disappearance but have done nothing. Please get Scotland Yard involved. Please!’

‘I’ll make a call,’ he said, then added sternly, ‘Noon, professor. My office.’

Luc closed the phone and stared.

Someone wanted to blow up my cave
.

Tal awoke, covered from head to feet in sweat, the taste of Soaring Water still on his tongue. He tried to remember what had just happened but he was unable.

He felt between his legs and stroked his erect member. Uboas was a few feet away, lying on a beautifully lush bison skin, the last beast killed in their bi-annual hunt. She was asleep, wrapped in a reindeer skin blanket, and had not been well. He could have woken her and satisfied himself but he chose to let her sleep till the morning light entered the mouth of the cave.

He stroked himself until he was satisfied then rolled himself in skins to warm himself against the night chill. He ran his hand over his own bison skin which was starting to get thin and patchy. It was from a kill he had made as a young man. Not his first – that trophy had gone to his father, but his second. That was his to keep. He remembered the spear throw that had taken the animal. He could still see the shaft flying fast and straight, the flint tip, slipping perfectly between the ribs and sinking deeply. He remembered it vividly, even though it had occurred a very long time ago.

As he felt the animal’s fur bristling between his fingers, suddenly, in a flash of blinding light as if he had looked into the sun, the remembrance of the soaring came back to him. He began to shiver.

He was flying over a herd of bison, close enough to reach out and touch a powerful, muscular shoulder of one of the beasts. He felt, as he always did, the exultation of effortless flight, the honour of moving with the herd, of being one with them. In pleasure, he stretched his arms to their fullest and spread his fingers to the wind.

Then, he was aware of something strange, an alien presence closing in on him. He always soared alone but he sensed there was someone or something else intruding on his realm. He turned his head and saw it.

A long, sleek figure, swooping down on him, like a hawk after prey.

It had the head of a lion but the body of a man. Its arms were tucked against its body, allowing it to cut through the air like a spear. And it was aiming for him.

He flapped his arms to pick up speed but could go no faster. The herd of bison parted, half going right, half going left. He wanted to turn to follow along but he was unable to change directions. He was flying on his own, low, the tall grasses of the plain tickling his bare body. The lion man was getting closer and closer. He could see it open its mouth and snarl, and had a notion how its hot saliva would feel against his flesh the instant before its fangs clamped down on his leg.