an officer, then?’
‘My son was a fool, Captain. At the age at which he enlisted he would have been capable of any folly. He speaks six languages. It is not beyond the realms of possibility that he passed himself off as a foreigner.’
‘As you say, Madame. As you say.’ Calque nodded his appreciation to the footman. ‘We certainly seem to have struck a dead end in our investigation.’
The Countess appeared not to have heard him. ‘I can assure you that my son knows nothing of his father’s pistol. He was born thirty years after the events you describe. We adopted him as a twelve-year-old. On account of my husband’s advanced age.’
Calque was never slow in seizing an opportunity. He pressed his luck. ‘Could you not transfer the title to your second son? Safeguard the heritage like that?’
‘That possibility died with my husband. The entailment is inalienable.’
Calque and Macron found themselves smoothly transferred into the hands of the capable Madame Mastigou. In a bare thirty fluidly managed seconds, they were back in their car and heading down the drive towards Ramatuelle.
Macron fl icked his chin at the retreating house. ‘What the heck was that all about?’
‘What the heck was what all about?’
‘That charade back there. For twenty minutes I even forgot the pain in my feet. You were so convincing, I almost fell for your act myself. I nearly volunteered to help you down the stairs.’
‘Charade?’ said Calque. ‘What charade? I don’t know what you are talking about, Macron.’
Macron flashed him a look.
Calque was grinning.
Before Macron could press him further, the phone buzzed. Macron pulled over into a lay-by and answered.
‘Yes. Yes. I’ve got that. Yes.’
Calque raised an eyebrow.
‘They’ve cracked the eye-man’s tracker code, Sir. Sabir’s car is in a long-term car park in Arles.’
‘That’s of very little use to us.’
‘There’s more.’
‘I’m listening.’
‘A knifing. In Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. In front of the church.’
‘So what?’
‘A check I did. Following our investigations in Gourdon. I flagged up all the names of the people we interviewed. Told our office to inform me of any incidents whatsoever involving gypsies. To cross-correlate the names, in other words.’
‘Yes, Macron? You’ve already impressed me. Now give me the pay-off.’
Macron restarted the engine. Best not to smile, he told himself. Best not to show any emotion whatsoever. ‘The police are searching for a certain Gavril La Roupie in relation to the crime.’
33
Gavril had forgotten about Badu and Stefan. In his single-minded excitement at working out the plot to kidnap Sainte Sara, he had quite overlooked the fact that Bazena boasted two of the most vicious male relatives this side of the Montagne Saint-Victoire. Stories about them were legion. Father and son always acted together, one drawing attention away from the other. Their bar fights were legendary. It was rumoured that they had seen off more victims between them than the first atomic bomb.
It had been the drive down to Les Saintes-Maries that had done the damage. Both men had been in an unnaturally avuncular frame of mind. The festival was their highlight of the year – ample opportunities abounded for the settling of old scores and the creating of new ones. Gavril was so close to them and so obvious, that he didn’t count. They were used to him. And it wouldn’t have occurred to them that he could ever be so stupid as to force Bazena on to the streets. So they had drawn him into their vicious little world and made him, ever so briefly, an accomplice before the fact.
Now Stefan was coming at him and all he had to defend himself was a bloody Opinel penknife. When Badu finally succeeded in disentangling himself from his daughter, Gavril knew that he was for it. They would carve out his lights.
Gavril threw the penknife with all his might at Stefan and then legged it through the crowd. There was a roar behind him but he paid it no mind. He had to get away. He could decide how best to conduct damage limitation exercises later. This was a matter of life and death.
He zigzagged through the assembled gypsies like a madman – like an American footballer running interference through an enemy team’s defences. Instinctively, Gavril used the five bells in the open see-through tower of the church as his visual guide, meaning to sprint down towards the docks and steal himself a boat. With only three possible roads out of town and both incoming and outgoing motor traffic moving at a snail’s pace in the run-up to the festival, it was the only sensible way to go.
Then, on the junction of the Rue Espelly and the Avenue Van Gogh and just in front of the Bull Arena, he saw Alexi. And behind him, Bale.
34
Alexi had been just about to return the statue of Sainte Sara to its plinth in disgust. This had all been a grotesque waste of time. How did Sabir expect things that had happened hundreds of years before to carry over into the modern-day era? It was madness.
For his part, Alexi found it almost impossible to imagine himself twenty years back in time, let alone five hundred. The jottings that Sabir had so confidently decoded seemed to him nothing but the ramblings of a madman. It served people right if they insisted on writing everything down and communicating that way. Why didn’t they simply talk to each other? If everyone just talked, the world would make considerably more sense. Things would be immediate. Just as they were in Alexi’s world. He woke up every morning and thought about the way he felt now. Not about the past. Or the future. But now.
He nearly missed the cork of resin. Over the centuries it had weathered to a similar walnut sheen to the rest of Sainte Sara’s painted plinth. But its consistency was different. When he gouged at it with his penknife, it came up in spirals, like wood-shavings, rather than as powder. He levered away at it until it popped out. He felt inside the hole with his finger. Yes. There was something else there.
He stuck his penknife inside the hole and twisted. A gob of fabric came out. Alexi spread it across his hand and looked at it. Nothing. Just a motheaten bit of linen with worm holes in it.
He peered down the hole, but couldn’t see anything.
Intrigued, he tapped the statue sharply on the ground. Then again. A bamboo tube fell out. Bamboo? Inside a statue?
Alexi was about to snap the bamboo in two when he heard the sound of footsteps coming down the broad stone stairway to the crypt.
Swiftly, he tidied away the marks of his passage and returned the statue to its place. Then he prostrated himself on the ground before it.
He could hear the footsteps approaching him. Malos mengues! What if it was the eye-man? He’d be a sitting duck.
‘What are you doing here?’
Alexi levered himself up and blinked. It was the watchman. ‘What do you think I’m doing? I’m praying. This place is a church, isn’t it?’
‘No need to get shirty about it.’ It was obvious that the watchman had had run-ins with gypsies before and
