He had the vivid sense of hard stares on his back.
The owner started clattering glasses, arranging them noisily on a shelf.
Luc didn’t like the prickly way he was feeling and was about to turn to confront the imagined stares when he heard the squeal of brakes.
A blue and white gendarmerie van jerked to a stop behind his Land Rover and Luc gladly sprang to his feet. ‘I called them about my car,’ he told Hugo. ‘Come out when you’re done.’ He took the opportunity to glower at the men in the corner but they refused to meet his gaze.
The owner stepped around the bar and gruffly slapped down the bill. ‘I’m closing now anyway.’
Luc glanced at it contemptuously, threw some euros on the table and said to Hugo, ‘Don’t be so quick to change your mind about the countryside.’
EIGHT
Luc stared at the phone long and hard before lifting the handset and punching the number he had found on her web page.
It wasn’t easy making the call, in fact it was entirely out of character, but this was, after all, an extraordinary circumstance.
He needed the best people and in her field there was no one better. He simply refused to compromise.
He was in his office on the Bordeaux campus, watching a fast-moving Atlantic storm soak the quadrangle. The familiar, insistent UK dial-tone blared into his ear and then, just like that, he heard the soft roundness of her voice.
‘Hello, Sara?’
‘Luc?’
‘Yes, it’s me.’
There was silence on the line, prompting him to ask if she was still there.
‘I’m here. I’m just trying to decide whether to hang up on you.’
It had been two years since they first met.
She’d spent that summer in Paris working on her book, A Palynological Perspective of the Magdalenian to Mesolithic Transition , which hadn’t been destined for the bestseller lists, but would further cement her growing credentials.
He was at Les Eyzies, doing survey work and opening the first tranche of what would become a multi-year campaign.
They’d been an ‘item’ as she called it, for two years. He’d heard her lecturing in her bad French at a Pleistocene conference at the University of Paris and afterwards he had sidled up to her at the drinks reception. Later, she would tell friends she saw him coming, smoothly manoeuvring through the assembly like an assassin, and hoped the darkly handsome guy was heading her way. He disarmed her with effusive compliments about her work in perfect American English. They had dinner that night. Dinner the next night too.
She’d told her friends, even told her mother back in California, that she’d fallen; she’d drunk the Kool-Aid and gone back for more. That they spoke the same language professionally was nice though hardly the basis for her attraction. She knew his reputation but beyond that, there was something wild and untamable about him which she took as a challenge. He was almost ten years older than her and she wanted to believe he’d sown enough wild oats to be able to settle into something resembling monogamy. She poured energy into the relationship like a boiler- operator on an old coal-fired steamer, shovelling, constantly shovelling. He’d announced so many times in his taunting way that this was the longest affair of his life that she was sick of hearing it. She bridged the geographic gap between her position in Paris and his in Bordeaux by living on the train. She’d been expecting an invitation to join him on his dig that summer but it never materialised and she heard through the rumour-mill about a special friendship with a comely Hungarian geologist on his team.
So, out of mounting concern over the paucity of texts and calls, she hired a car and one Friday afternoon, arrived unannounced at his dig. Judging from the strained expression of pleasure on his face at seeing her, and the sidelong glances from the Hungarian who, regrettably for Sara, was a real stunner, the rumours were true. Her visit only lasted until early the next day. Sometime around three in the morning she angrily broke it off, spent the rest of the night at the furthest edges of his bed and let him sleep when she slipped away at dawn. Within months she had accepted a faculty appointment at the Institute of Archaeology in London and there she completely faded from his life.
‘Please don’t hang up. This is important.’
She sounded concerned. ‘Are you all right?’
‘No, no, I’m fine, but I need to talk to you about something. Are you in front of a computer?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can I send you some material to look at while I hold the line?’
She hesitated then gave him her email address.
He heard her breathing into the mouthpiece as he attached some files and sent them on the way. ‘Got it?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Open photo 93 first.’
He waited, staring at his copy of the picture, still mesmerised by it, and tried to imagine her at the moment of download. Two years wasn’t such a long time. She couldn’t have changed much. He was glad he finally had an excuse to call.
She sounded startled, as if someone had dropped a stack of china behind her back. ‘God! Where’s this from?’
‘The Perigord. What do you think?’
It was a picture of the dense herd of small bison with the bird man in their midst.
‘It’s magnificent. Is it new?’
He enjoyed the excitement in her voice. ‘Very new.’
‘You found it?’
‘Yes, I’m happy to say.’
‘Does anyone know about it yet?’
‘You’re among the first.’
‘Why me?’
‘Open Number 211 and 215 next.’
They were taken in the last of the ten chambers, the Hall of the Plants, as Luc had come to call it.
‘Are these for real?’ she asked. ‘Was this photoshopped?’
‘Unmanipulated, unretouched, au naturel,’ he replied.
She was quiet for a moment then said in a hushed voice, ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’
‘Didn’t think you had. Oh, and one more thing. I found an Aurignacian blade in direct association with the paintings.’
‘Oh, boy…’ she whispered.
‘So, I need a plant expert. Want to come and play?’
NINE
Gatinois sat rigidly at his antique chinoiserie desk keeping his ankles, knees and hips fixed at ninety degree angles. He never slouched, not even at home or at his club. It was the way he was brought up, one of the social artefacts of a merchant family vaguely clinging to its aristocratic heritage. At the office, the sight of his erect posture contributed to his carefully cultivated image of imperiousness.
He had in his hand a dossier entitled: ‘Proposal to Mount a Major Excavation at Ruac Cave, Dordogne, by
