weevils had got in? Four hundred and fifty years was a long time for anything to survive, much less parchment.
He sat down on the sofa. After a moment he straightened up the French dictionary which he had brought with him until its edges accorded with the border of the table. Then he lined up his pen and paper beside the dictionary. Bouboul had loaned him a large-faced, gaudy watch and Sabir now laid this on to the table next to the other accoutrements. The familiar movements provided him with some measure of comfort.
He glanced back over his shoulder towards the corridor. The fire was burning well by this time and he began to feel a little more secure in his isolation. Yola would find the prophecies if anyone could. When she arrived at the Maset, he would take the prophecies, from her and send her straight back to Les Saintes-Maries with Reszo. He was fine alone here. He would have the rest of the night in which to translate and copy the prophecies. From that moment on he would not let them out of his sight.
Come morning, he would send the originals by courier to his publisher in New York. Then he would work on the copies until he had milked out their full meaning. With the prophecies skilfully interleaved with the story of their discovery, he would have a sure-fire bestseller on his hands. It would easily bring in enough to make them all rich. Alexi could marry Yola and end up Bulibasha and Sabir could write his own ticket.
Twenty more minutes. It couldn’t take longer than that. Then he would have one of the great untold secrets of the world within his grasp.
There was a crash from upstairs. Then silence.
Sabir sprang to his feet. The hairs on the back of his neck stood erect, like the spine fur of a dog. Holy heck, what had that been? He stood listening but there was only silence. Then, in the distance, he heard the approaching drone of a car.
With a final, furtive glance over his shoulder, Sabir hurried outside. It had probably only been a cupboard door falling open. Or maybe the police had moved something – a mosquito screen, perhaps? – and the wretched thing had stood there, teetering, until a gust of wind had finally finished off the job and blown it over. Perhaps the noise had even come from outside? From the roof, maybe?
He glanced up at the house as he stood waiting for the Audi to make its way up the track towards him. Hell. And now here was another thing – he’d have to come to a reckoning sooner or later with his friend John Tone about the theft of his car.
Sabir squinted into the headlights. Yes, there was Yola’s outline in the passenger seat. And that of Bouboul’s nephew in the driving seat beside her. Alexi was safely tucked up in his bed back in Les Saintes-Maries, with Sabir next door, in the guest bunk. Or at least that was what Sergeant Spola had been persuaded to think.
Sabir walked towards the car. He could feel the night wind pick at his hair. He motioned downwards with his hands, indicating that Reszo should douse the lights. As far as he knew, there were still policemen dotted all around the marshes and he didn’t want to draw anyone’s attention back to the Maset.
‘Do you have them?’
Yola felt inside her coat. Her face looked small and vulnerable in the light of Sabir’s torch. She handed Sabir the bamboo tube. Then she glanced towards the house and shivered.
‘Did you have any trouble?’
‘Two policemen. They were using the cabane for shelter. They nearly found me. But they were called away at the last moment.’
‘Called away?’
‘I overheard one of them talking on his cellphone. Captain Calque knows where the eye-man has escaped to. It is somewhere over towards St-Tropez. All the police are going there now. They aren’t interested in here any longer.’
‘Thank God for that.’
‘Do you want me to come in with you?’
‘No. I have the fire going. And some candles. I’ll be all right.’
‘Bouboul will collect you just before dawn. Are you sure you don’t want to come back with us now?’
‘Too dangerous. Sergeant Spola might smell a rat. He’s not as stupid as he looks.’
‘Yes he is.’
Sabir laughed.
Yola glanced once more towards the house. Then she climbed back inside the car. ‘I don’t like this place. It was wrong of me to suggest it as a rendezvous.’
‘Where else could we have used? This is by far the most convenient.’
‘I suppose so.’ She raised her hand uncertainly. ‘Are you sure you won’t change your mind?’
Sabir shook his head.
Reszo eased the car back down the track. When he was near the road he switched the lights back on.
Sabir watched their glow as it disappeared over the horizon. Then he turned back towards the house.
76
Captain Calque leaned back in his chair. The document laid out before him made no earthly sense. It purported to have been written on the express instructions of King Louis IX of France – and it was, indeed, dated 1228, two years after Louis had ascended to the throne, aged eleven. Which made him just thirteen or fourteen years old at the time he was credited with its conception. The seals, however, were definitely those of Saint Louis himself and of his mother, Blanche of Castile; in those days, trying to fake such a thing as a royal seal would have seen you hung, drawn and quartered, with your ashes used for soap.
Three other signatures were appended beneath those of the King and his mother: Jean de Joinville, the King’s counsellor (and, alongside Villehardouin and Froissart, one of France’s greatest early historians); Geoffrey of Beaulieu, the King’s confessor; and William of Chartres, the King’s chaplain. Calque shook his head. He had studied de Joinville’s Histoire de Saint Louis at university and he knew for a fact that de Joinville would have been no more than four years old in 1228 – the others, well, it wouldn’t take him long to find out their ages. But it suggested that the document – which appeared to grant a charter and cognisance to an association called the Corpus Maleficus – had been, in some sense at least, post-dated.
It was at that point that Calque remembered the chalice locked inside the tantalus, with its initials of CM. The coincidence, particularly in this hidden room, with its revocations of secrets, plots and cabals, struck him as an unlikely one. He glanced again at the document in front of him.
Grunting with concentration, he turned the document over and scrutinised its reverse side through the magnifying glass. Yes. Just as he’d suspected. There was the faint imprint of writing on the back. Backwards writing. The sort a left-hander might engineer if called upon to write in the manner of an Arab – that is to say from right to left. Calque knew that in medieval times the left side was considered the side of the Devil. Sinister in connotation as well as in Latin nomenclature, the concept had been carried across from the early Greek augurs, who believed that signs seen over the left shoulder foretold evil to come.
Calque drew the document nearer to the light. Finally, frustrated, he held it up in front of him. No dice. The writing was indecipherable – it would take an electron microscope to make any sense of it.
He cast his mind back to the Countess’s words during their first meeting. Calque had asked her what the thirteenth Pair de France would have carried during the Coronation and she had answered: ‘He wouldn’t have carried anything, Captain. He would have protected.’
‘Protected? Protected from whom?’
The Countess had given him an elliptical smile. ‘From the Devil, of course.’
But how could a mere mortal be expected to protect the French Crown from the Devil?
Calque could feel the gradual dawning of some sort of understanding. The Corpus Maleficus. What did it mean? He summoned up his schoolboy Latin. Corpus meant body. It could also mean an association of people dedicated to achieving one end. And Maleficus? Mischief. Evildoing.
A body devoted to mischief and evildoing, then? Impossible, surely. And certainly not under the aegis of the saintly Louis, a man so pious that he felt that he had wasted his day if he hadn’t attended two full Masses (plus all the offices) and who would then drag himself out of bed once again at midnight to dress for matins.
Then it must mean a body devoted to the eradication of such things. A body devoted to undermining the
