Luc started for the door. ‘Send an email to your friend and get him to hurry up with the rest of the manuscript. I’m going to talk to Sara about the plants.’
‘If I were you, I’d do more than talk.’
‘Oh for God’s sake, Hugo. Grow up.’
Sara’s caravan was dark but Luc still rapped on the door. There was a muffled ‘Who is it?’
‘It’s Luc. I’ve got some important news.’
After a few moments, the Spaniard Ferrer opened the door, shirtless, and cheerfully said, ‘She’ll be right with you, Luc. Want a drink?’
Sara lit a mantle lamp and appeared at the doorway, flushed with embarrassment like a caught-out teenager. Her blouse was one buttonhole off and when she noticed it, all she could do was roll her eyes at herself.
Ferrer gave her a peck on the cheek and took off, remarking without a touch of bitterness that business came first.
Luc asked if she’d be more comfortable if they talked outside but she invited him in and lit the lamp in the sitting area. Its hissing sound broke the silence. ‘Seems like a nice fellow,’ he finally said.
‘Carlos? Very nice.’
‘Did you know him before Ruac?’
She frowned. ‘Luc, why is it I’m feeling like I’m being interrogated by my father? This is a little awkward, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Not for me. I’m sorry it’s awkward for you. That wasn’t my intention.’
‘I’m sure.’ She sipped from a bottle of water. ‘What did you want to talk about?’
‘Our plants. I think they were put to specific use.’
She leaned forward, unwittingly exposing glistening cleavage. ‘Go on,’ she said, and as he repeated the story gleaned from Barthomieu’s manuscript she obsessively twirled strands of hair over and over, tightly enough to make her finger blanch. It was a nervous habit he’d forgotten until just now. During their final night together she’d done it a lot.
He wasn’t sure if it was his presence that was causing her stress or Barthomieu’s story. Either way, when he was done and they had both made eager comments about the work that lay ahead, he told her to take it easy and get a good night’s rest.
From her quizzical expression, he suspected his tone carried more admonishment than advice.
The second day of the excavation quickly unspooled and knotted up like a tangled fishing line.
Zvi Alon was a no-show for breakfast. His car was found parked above the cliffs. The cave gate was locked and undisturbed. Jeremy anxiously came forward to tell Luc about Alon’s request for the key the night before, to which Luc angrily denied he’d granted the man permission.
In a panic, the team began searching the undercliffs and found nothing at all. Then Luc made a command decision and ordered the morning shift to begin work inside the cave while he contacted the authorities.
Given the profile of the Ruac excavation a lieutenant, named Billeter from the local gendarmerie, personally responded to the call. When he ascertained the matter to be complex, he summoned his superior officer from the Group Gendarmerie of the Dordogne in Perigueux, Colonel Toucas, and mobilised a police boat from Les Eyzies to motor up the Vezere.
By mid-morning, Luc was radioed in the cave and informed that Toucas had arrived. The colonel was a rather loutish-looking man, slightly overweight, bald, with big facial features and dangling, creased ear lobes. His moustache was clipped too short for the wide expanse between his nose and upper lip, leaving a naked line of skin, and like many men with a paltry head of hair, he compensated with a goatee. But he had an incongruously smooth, elegant voice and a rather cultured Parisian accent. Luc would have had more confidence in him if they’d been speaking over the telephone.
They met at Alon’s rental car. The two had only begun to talk when the young Lieutenant trotted over and excitedly informed them that a body had been found near the river bank.
Luc would not make it back to the cave that day.
His first duty was to take a boat to identify the corpse. The task left him queasy and shaken. Alon was bloodied and broken. A sheared-off tree branch had gruesomely impaled his lower abdomen. The stuttering fall had bashed his face and twisted his arms and legs into bizarre angles like the limbs of the old juniper tree high on the ledge. Even though it was cool and dry, insects had already staked their claim.
There were statements to be taken. Luc had to surrender his office to Toucas and his men to conduct their interviews. Late in the afternoon it was Jeremy who was the last to be questioned and he emerged from the Portakabin as drained of blood as Alon’s remains. Pierre was waiting for him. He goodheartedly swung his long arm around Jeremy’s shoulder and took him away for a drink.
The mood around the camp was grim. After dinner Luc felt compelled to address the group. Toucas had informed him that pending an autopsy, it seemed probable that Alon had slipped while attempting to climb down in the dark; there was no reason to suspect otherwise. There was a straight line from the ladder to the body’s resting place. The trauma he suffered was consistent with a great fall. Luc passed the assessment along to the sombre group.
After reflecting on Professor Alon’s contributions to their field he led a minute of silence and concluded by beseeching everyone to accept that access to the cave beyond protocol-defined hours was strictly prohibited and that he alone would control the keys. One would remain on his keychain, the duplicate would be locked in his desk.
Luc hardly ate. Hugo took him back to his caravan, fed him a liquid diet of bourbon and played New Orleans jazz on his battery-operated MP3 player until Luc eventually fell asleep in his clothes. At that, Hugo switched off the music and listened to a hooting owl until he too drifted off to sleep.
Despite the tragedy, work at Ruac continued. Alon would have to be replaced but that hole in the team would not be filled until the next season.
They forged ahead with the plan for the first campaign. The focus of the initial excavations would be two chambers: the cave floor at the entrance chamber, or Chamber 1, its official designation, and the Chamber of Plants, Chamber 10.
Space was tight within Chamber 10 and Luc restricted access to only a few people at a time. That core group included Sara, Pierre, Craig Morrison, the lithics expert from Glasgow and Carlos Ferrer, their authority on microfauna, the diminutive bones of small mammals, reptiles and amphibians. Luc felt he was making a devil-may- care statement by teaming Sara with the Spaniard, but his gut fluttered every time he saw them working next to one another, their bodies almost touching. Fortunately Desnoyers had been correct. The bat population started thinning almost immediately. There were a few stubborn hold-outs flapping around the rear chambers but the team was greatly relieved the ceiling had ceased moving.
Sara was concentrating on a one-by-one-metre square of earth bordering the south-west wall of Chamber 10 where Luc had discovered the flint blade. The upper layers were encrusted with modern guano, complicating her work since bat droppings were rich in the pollen she was seeking. Her goal for the first season was to find a guano- free layer and make a preliminary assessment of the types and frequency of pollen and spores. In an ordinary dig her remit as paleobotanist would have been to assess the flora and climate during the period of study. The paintings in the tenth chamber were a constant reminder that Ruac was far from ordinary.
About ten centimetres from the surface the earth turned from black to tan and the guano petered out. The transition zone was at the level where the bottom of Luc’s upright blade had rested before its removal.
The Chamber 10 group stood and watched as Pierre cheerfully scraped away the last of the black earth from the square metre. After a series of photos, they decided to go deeper.
Before proceeding, they changed into fresh suits, boots and masks and swapped out all their trowels, brushes and spatulas to avoid contaminating older levels with younger pollen. Sara climbed into the square to do the honours and began trowelling a section for sample collection. She had barely begun when she said ‘Oh wow!’ and stopped working.
Ferrer was bending over her back and started yammering in his hyper way, ‘Look, look, look!’
‘Is that flint?’ Pierre asked.
Morrison asked to step in and switch places with Sara. The six-and-a-half foot white-haired Scot folded himself into a crouch and whipped out his specimen brush. The object was smooth and yellowish but it was not stone. ‘Not my shop, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘Looks like bone. All yours, Carlos.’
