‘Reines Claudes. Yes.’
Sabir glanced back-up the road behind them. A Citroen breasted the corner and thundered guilelessly past. ‘I’m taking us to where we can’t be seen. Just in case a police car comes by.’
‘No one will recognise us, Adam. They’re looking for one man, not two men and a woman. And in a car with different plates.’
‘Still.’
Yola hammered the seat-back in front of her. ‘Look. I can see some more. Over there by the river.’ She rustled about in her rucksack and came up with two knotted plastic bags. ‘You two go and collect the asparagus by the road. I’ll collect the other stuff. I can see dandelions, nettles and marguerites too. You boys are lucky. We’re going to have a feast tonight.’
37
Achor Bale had bought himself forty minutes’ grace. Forty minutes in which to extract all the information he needed. Forty minutes for the police to deal with the scene he had left behind him, liaise with the ambulance service and placate the local back-up.
He slammed his foot on to the accelerator and watched the tracking markers converge. Then he sucked in his breath and slowed down.
Something had changed. Sabir wasn’t moving forward any more. As Bale watched, the marker began slowly retracing its steps towards him. He hesitated, one hand poised over the steering wheel. Now the marker was stationary. It was flashing less than five hundred metres ahead of him.
Bale pulled off the road twenty metres before the apex of the corner. He hesitated before abandoning his car, but then decided that he had neither the time, nor a suitable location, in which to hide it. He’d just have to risk the police driving by and making the somewhat unlikely connection between him and a stationary vehicle.
He hurried over the breast of the hill and down through a small wood. Why had they stopped so soon after the last halt? A picnic? An accident? It could be anything.
The best thing would be if he could get them all together. Then he could concentrate on one whilst the others were forced to watch. That way nearly always worked. Guilt, thought Bale, was the major weakness of the Western world. When people didn’t feel guilt, they built empires. When they began to feel guilt, they lost them. Look at the British.
He saw the girl first, squatting alone near the riverbank. Was she taking a leak? Was that what this was all about? He searched for the men but they were out of sight. Then he saw that she was dissecting clumps of vegetation and stuffing the residue into a series of plastic bags. Jesus Christ. These people weren’t to be believed.
He checked around for the men one final time and then cut down towards the girl. This was simply too good to be true. They must have known he was coming.
Laid it all on in some way.
He hesitated for a moment, when he was about fifteen feet from the girl. She made a pretty picture, squatting there in her long gypsy dress by the river. A perfect picture of innocence. Bale was reminded of something from the long-distant past but he couldn’t quite identify the scene. The sudden lapse disturbed him, like an unexpected current of cold air travelling through a tear in a pair of trousers.
He ran the last few yards, confident that the girl hadn’t heard his approach. At the last possible moment she began to turn around but he was already on top of her, pinning her arms to the ground with his knees. He had expected her to scream and had taken the precaution of pinching shut her nose – it was a method which nearly always worked with women and was far better than risking one’s hand over a panic-stricken person’s mouth – but the girl was strangely silent. It was almost as if she had been expecting him.
‘If you cry out, I shall sever your spinal cord. Just like I did to your brother. Do you understand me?’
She nodded.
He couldn’t see her face properly, as he had her pinioned down from the back, with her body underneath him and her arms stretched out in a cruciform position. He rectified this by angling her head to one side.
‘I’m going to say this once and once only. In ten seconds time I am going to knock you out with my fist. While you are unconscious I am going to raise your skirt, take off your underpants and conduct an exploration inside you with my knife. When I encounter your fallopian tubes I am going to cut them. You will bleed badly but it won’t kill you. The men will probably find you before that happens. But you will never be a mother. Do you understand me? That will be gone. Forever.’
He heard rather than saw her evacuating her bladder. Her eyes turned up in themselves and started fl uttering.
‘Stop that. Wake up.’ He pinched her cheek as hard as he could. Her eyes began to refocus. ‘Now listen. What did you find? Where are you going? Tell me these things and I will leave you alone. Your ten seconds have started.’
Yola began to moan.
‘Eight. Seven. Six.’
‘We’re going to Rocamadour.’
‘Why?’
‘To the Black Virgin. Something is hidden at her feet.’
‘What?’
‘We don’t know. All it said on the bottom of the coffer was that the secret of the verses is at her feet.’
‘The bottom of what coffer?’
‘My mother’s coffer. The one my mother gave me. The one that belonged to the daughter of Nostradamus.’
‘Is that it?’
‘That’s everything. I swear to you.’
Bale took some of the weight off her arms. He glanced back-up the valley. No sign of the men. Kill her? No point really. She was as good as dead already.
He dragged her to the edge of the riverbank and tumbled her in.
38
‘I hope to Hell this is worth all the trouble we’re going to.’
‘What? What are you talking about? The verses?’
‘No. The wild asparagus.’
Alexi circled his fingers. ‘You can bet it will be. Yola cooks good. All we need now is a rabbit.’
‘And how do you propose to catch that?’
‘You can run it over. I’ll tell you if I see one by the roadside. But don’t squash it – you’ve got to time it just right so that you hit its head with the outside of the wheel. The flesh won’t taste as good as one that God Himself kills, but it’ll be the next best thing.’
Sabir nodded wearily. What the Hell had he expected Alexi to say? That they’d go into the next town and buy a shotgun? ‘Can you see Yola? We’d better be going.’
Alexi straightened up. ‘No. She went down by the river. I’ll go and call her.’
Sabir trudged back towards the car, shaking his head. It was an odd thing to admit but he was slowly beginning to enjoy himself. He wasn’t a great deal older than Alexi but there had been times in the past few years when he’d realised that he was starting to lose his zest for life – his sense of the absurd. Now, with the loose artillery of Alexi and Yola acting in counterpoint to the still lurking threat of the police, he suddenly felt all the excitement of the unknown bubbling up again in his stomach.
‘Adam!’ The shout came from just beyond a small stand of trees down near the river.
