cushion. ‘Why should I be a mere vicomte when you’re a fucking comte? Why should you be the one to snaffle Rocha’s title?’
‘Because I was the last one to emerge from our mother. That’s the Napoleonic Code for you. Last out, first conceived. Enlightened primogeniture, mon pote. Christ. Just think. If it wasn’t for King Clovis, our fallen angel of a sister would have inherited instead of me. She’s two years older. Maltho ti afrio lito.’
‘What the hell does that mean?’
‘Salic Law, dummy. Male primogeniture. It’s what saved our bacon.’
‘No. The other bit.’
‘It’s the only full sentence left in Old Frankish. “I tell you. I free you. Half free.” Complete gobbledegook, of course. Be thankful you’ve got a title at all. If Rocha hadn’t let that pig of a policeman loose off a shot at him, you’d have remained a commoner all your life. Now you’re a real vicomte you can flash your chevaliere ring at all the girls and their pants will automatically fall down. Just like I’ve been doing for years.’
Vaulderie launched another kick at the seat cushion, but harder this time. ‘It’s not fair. If we’d been born in England, I would have been the senior of us two. First out is considered the eldest there.’
‘Lucky for me we weren’t born in England, then. We’d have had an idiot as head of the family.’
The brothers, despite the fact that they were all of twenty-five years old, began to wrestle. Watching them, the off-duty railway security inspector – who was availing himself of his free first-class travel privileges – thought yet again how lucky France was to have a Republic. It was always these young blue bloods, off for the weekend, who caused the most trouble on his trains. He could see their signet rings flashing as they fought for control of each other’s throats.
‘That’s enough. I’ll have no rough-housing here.’ He eased his way up the central aisle and flashed his badge at the boys.
Both young men straightened up and smoothed back their hair. ‘Sorry, Colonel. It won’t happen again. We were only mud-larking.’
The inspector was rather taken aback. He had expected trouble. These two had all the earmarks of their class. Absurdly well-cut hair. Double-breasted grey flannel suits that fitted them like a second skin. Not an ounce of excess fat on the pair of them – fencing, probably, or some exclusive tennis club with a five-year waiting list. When he looked at them more closely, he was astonished to realize that they were identical twins.
He shrugged, not a little disarmed by their unanticipated courtesy. ‘I won’t take your names this time, as we’re nearly at my destination. You’re lucky – you’ve both got off more lightly than you deserve. But remember.’ He pointed above his head. ‘There are security cameras on this train.’
‘Yes. We noticed those.’ The boys grinned at each other, as if in echo of some telepathic joke.
The inspector hesitated, tempted to say more – to make his mark on these gilded hooligans. Then he shrugged a second time and moved back down the aisle. He was due off at the next station anyway. In twenty minutes’ time he would be home with his wife. Why complicate matters?
‘Shall we?’ Abiger gave his brother a playful nudge with the toe of his shoe.
‘Are you crazy? We’d be forced to change trains. We’d be late for Madame, our mother. She might even ask us what we were doing that was so important we missed the beginning of her gathering.’
‘Oh come on, Vau. Live dangerously for once. We’re too old to be thrashed with a wooden clothes hanger anymore. Anyhow, I’m head of the family now.’
‘Madame, our mother, is head of the family. You’re merely its technical figurehead. And a plug-ugly one at that. That much I’ll acknowledge.’
Abiger de Bale lurched forwards as if he intended to trigger a rematch of their wrestling competition – but then, with the movement only half-completed, he changed his mind. Grinning, he allowed his gaze to slide away from his brother and follow the line of the inspector’s retreating back. ‘That worm insulted the CM, Vau. I say we do it.’
For twenty-five years Vaulderie had followed his brother’s lead in everything. Gone everywhere he had gone. Even taken his punishments for him. It was far too late to turn back now. With the death of Rocha de Bale, their adopted brother – the man now known to the outside world as the murderer, Achor Bale – everything had changed. What had been hidden was now open. What had been obscured was now set to be revealed. The Corpus Maleficus would finally be taking its rightful place as the driving force behind a new order.
Vaulderie gave a defeated sigh. ‘I say we do it too.’
3
At first, after leaving the train, the boys worked in a zigzag formation behind the inspector’s back. That way, if the man had a car, one of them could break away from the stalk and procure a vehicle, whilst the other could mark the direction taken and keep in touch via his cell phone.
But the inspector didn’t have a car. It soon became obvious that he lived within walking distance of the station – a railwayman through and through. Instinctively, intuitively, the boys decided not to take him en route. Far more sensible to deal with him at home, well out of the eye of the storm. Far more fun to wait.
At one point the man stopped. He cocked his head downwards and to one side, as though he were listening to something passing underneath him. The boys froze in their respective positions, visible, but not visible, maybe fifty metres behind him. In their experience, marks never turned around. People simply didn’t expect to be followed – not on a suburban street, mid-afternoon, in la France profonde, with mothers collecting their children from school, and yellow postal vans busy on their last collection of the day.
The boys converged again when they saw the inspector hesitating at the communal door to his apartment block – feeling for his keys – tapping his pockets for cigarettes. Would he turn at the very last moment and head for the Bar / Tabac on the corner? Have himself a quick snifter before facing his wife? In that case both twins knew that they would be forced to abandon the hunt and head back towards the station.
For despite all their bravado, each, in his own way, feared Madame, their mother, as they feared nothing else on earth. She was like Agaberte, daughter of the Norse god Vagnoste, who could transform herself from a wrinkled old crone into a woman so tall she could reach up and touch the sky – a woman who could overturn mountains, rip up great trees, and dry up the swollen beds of rivers. Abi and Vau’s childhood had been spent entirely in her thrall, and no power on earth could entirely break her dominance of them.
The inspector reached forward and unlocked the door. Now the boys were hurrying, not wishing to be faced with an unknown, untested lock. Vau caught the door just before it clicked to, and Abi slid through the crack his brother made for him, one eye fastened on the stairs above him.
Shoes in their hands, they padded up the concrete stairwell behind the inspector. How could people bear to live like this? Money and power were there to be taken. All you needed was the nerve.
The inspector was stepping into his apartment – calling out to his wife.
Abi reached out and touched him on the arm. ‘Colonel. A word.’
4
Some years before, the brothers had had a series of telescopic, lead-weighted, fighting batons designed and made for them. Eight inches long, the batons fitted comfortably inside the forearm sleeve of a jacket, where they were secured in place by the simple expedient of a loop and a double button.
Although principally made of rubber, the batons were not able to pass through a metal detector by dint of their lead content, and therefore had to be transported separately on an aeroplane as part of hold baggage – or secreted, for instance, inside a travelling fishing-rod case, where they could be passed off as fisherman’s priests. By train and by car, however, they were perfection itself. Once liberated from their housings, the batons extended with a simple flick of the wrist to a total of two feet in length, retaining more than enough rigidity to guarantee a quite remarkable hand-to-target action.
They would kill, of course, if used aggressively, but their principal function was defensive – they were
