Forcas de Bale – alerted his master to the verses’ potential contents. The Count was already on his way down to Agen when news reached him of Michel de Nostredame’s death. When he arrived, the verses had already been dispersed and the seer buried. It took nearly 450 years for the verses to reappear. We in the Corpus have long memories. An oath is an oath for us. Once bound, always bound.’
‘Once bound, always bound.’ The children whispered in echo of her words.
‘Abiger…’ The Countess turned towards her eldest son. ‘The time has come for you and your brother to travel to America. You will identify the man Sabir. First, you will extract the secrets of the prophecies from him in whatever manner you may deem appropriate. Then you will take revenge for the murder of your brother. Is that clear?’
‘Perfectly, Madame.’
The Countess turned towards her eldest daughter. ‘Lamia, you did not make the reverse cross. Kindly make it now.’
Lamia’s hand crept towards her throat. The rufous complexion marring one side of her face turned, if anything, a deeper red.
‘I am waiting.’
‘I cannot do it, Madame.’ Lamia shook her head.
Her brothers and sisters stared at her like dingoes alerted to a kill.
‘Abiger. Escort your elder sister to her room. She will remain there until she is able to offer a suitable explanation for her behaviour. Apprise Milouins of the situation. The rest of you may take the blood oath. You will be told when you are needed.’
Oni de Bale glanced down at his mother from his great height. ‘Do we others continue with our work, Madame?’
The Countess turned away, motioning to Madame Mastigou, who was cleaning a small ivory receptacle. Then she turned towards her dwarfish daughter, Athame, a sufferer from Ellis-van Creveld Syndrome. A polydactyl, Athame was unconscionably dexterous with all of her twelve fingers. ‘Athame. Live up to your name. You may do the necessary cuts for the blood oath.’
‘Yes, Madame.’
‘Mother?’
‘I heard you, Oni.’ The Countess turned and laid a light hand on her youngest son’s forearm. She glanced up into his eyes, her neck forced back against the collar of her elegantly tailored 1950s Dior suit the better to take in his span. ‘Always continue with your work. That is the way to please me. Stir, stir, stir. Keep the broth moving. Never let the commoners rest at ease. The Devil is a hungry angel – he will come calling if we don’t forestall him. That is your primary job.’
‘Yes, Madame.’
‘And, Oni.’
‘Yes, Madame?’
‘Soon, I may have a more specific use for you. You must hold yourself in readiness for that.’
Oni hunched down and kissed his mother’s hand.
The Countess noticed Lamia hesitate on her way to the door. ‘Have you anything to say to me, my child?’
It looked for a moment as if Lamia would speak. Then she shook her head and followed her brother quietly out into the library.
11
At precisely 9.30 the next morning, Joris Calque watched from his camouflaged hiding place as the battery of chauffeur-driven cars returned to collect their clients. He counted them off, one by one.
‘That leaves three of them still inside the house. Two males and a female, if I am not mistaken.’
In the lonely weeks that Calque had spent ensconced inside his eyrie, he had occasionally drifted into the habit of talking out loud to himself. He was well aware of this new tendency, but didn’t, as yet, feel that he was in imminent danger of turning into one of those ubiquitous males – and they were always males, weren’t they? – who stride up and down the pavements of their home town mouthing off to imagined companions.
If he ever did slide into such a public form of idiocy, Calque hoped that he would have enough wit left to wedge a cell phone speaker in his ear, thereby protecting himself against the very forces of public order to which he had for so long subscribed.
His main problem now wasn’t incipient dementia, however, but rather to retrieve the – hopefully – brimming voice-activated tape recorder from the Countess’s inner sanctum.
He stood up and glanced around his eyrie. So. His time here was over.
He wouldn’t miss the chemical toilet, the smell of stale tobacco, or the curious quality of light that filtered through the gaps in the camouflage netting. But he would miss the birdlife, and the sightings of badgers, rodents, rabbits, deer and foxes with which he had wiled away the more tiresome hours of his vigil. He decided, on the spur of the moment, to bequeath the entirety of his hidey-hole to the poacher who had set it up. That would save him the trouble of carting everything back to his car. It would serve to cover his back-trail rather nicely, too.
Calque’s experience told him that he didn’t stand a cat-in-hell’s chance of getting into the Domaine to retrieve the recorder himself. He was neither young, suicidal, nor particularly eager to see the inside of any of the prisons to which he had consigned so many felons, child-molesters, and murderers in the course of his detecting career.
But there was one possible alternative to professional suicide. And Calque made up his mind to explore it without further delay.
12
Calque watched as Paul Macron’s cousin put the finishing touches to a louvred shutter. The man was aware of him, that much was obvious. But it would have been unrealistic of Calque to expect an ex-Foreign Legionnaire to come running just because a captain – strike that, an ex-captain – of police showed up at his workshop. At least it would give him time to have a cigarette.
Just as Calque was preparing to inhale, he saw Macron gesticulating at him with his sander from across the atelier.
‘Put that fucking thing out. This isn’t a country club. There’s enough dry wood stacked up in here to smoke a whale.’
Calque gave a sickly smile and crushed the as yet unsavoured cigarette and its accompanying match out beneath his foot. He should have expected that, too. Macron’s cousin had no reason to view him with anything other than disdain. Paul Macron had been killed on his watch, and it was only luck, and Adam Sabir’s suicidal bloody- mindedness, that had allowed the police to put a line under Achor Bale’s killing spree.
Aime Macron went over to a sink in the corner of the workshop and started on the laborious rigmarole of washing his hands, his face, and the back of his neck. Calque could see Macron weighing him up in the pin-up plastered mirror above the basin.
Calque didn’t move. He was weighing Macron up, too. Deciding whether to trust him with information that, in the wrong hands, could send him to prison.
‘You’re not a flic any more, are you?’ Macron was moving towards Calque now, scrubbing at his neck with a towel, his eyes hooded.
Calque was fleetingly tempted to brazen the thing out – pretend he was still on the force – flash his purposefully mislaid badge – but he thought better of it. ‘No. I’m not. How did you guess?’
Macron shrugged. ‘I was in the Legion for twenty years. I can tell when a man has power by the way he carries himself. You don’t have power any more. If you were still a flic, you would have breezed in here and
