‘The house,’ says Everbout.
The house. Naturally. Where else would she be? He nods to Everbout, issues a perfectly unnecessary order for the men to remain where they are, then sets off towards the house. He has only gone four or five strides when he is suddenly falling, arms flailing, onto the black grass. He gets up, looks to see what has tripped him, reaches to feel it with his hand. A lime sack some fool has left carelessly in the grass? Then he touches hair, the rough parchment of skin. He snatches back his hand. A corpse! Though not, thank God, a fresh one. One of the preserved girls? Guillotin’s Charlotte? Why here?
Another ten strides and he is in the sexton’s house. There is a lamp in the kitchen and around it a little of the mist is glittering in a blue nimbus. Jeanne — though it is not at first obvious that it is Jeanne — is lying on the kitchen table. She has a blanket over her. Her eyes are shut. Her grandfather is beside her, stroking her brow. He is making a low but terrible noise, a keening such as one might hear in the throat of some beast whose progeny the farmer has just led away towards a reeking shed. At the sound of movement behind him, he blinks his muddied eyes, bares the stumps of his teeth.
‘It’s me,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘The engineer.’
The sexton gesticulates. A mime, a dumb-show. He is far beyond words. Jean-Baptiste approaches the table. A quarter of the girl’s face is disappearing into the swelling above her left eye. Her mouth. . her mouth must have been struck repeatedly. Fist? Boot? Some implement? What other wounds she has — and he is certain they exist — are hidden under the blanket. He is glad of it.
He leans over her, whispers her name. The eye by the wound will not open, but the other does. It opens and stares at him, without expression. He touches her shoulder; her whole body flinches. He takes back his hand.
‘Lecoeur?’ he asks.
The eye tells him it was so.
‘He has. . attacked you?’
And the eye tells him it was so.
‘I will bring the doctor to you,’ he says. ‘I will bring some women to you. I will send for Lisa.’
The eye shuts. He walks outside. It seems noticeably lighter, but the mist is lingering, thick skeins of it tangled in the bars of the charnel arches. By the door of the house, a spade with a heart-shaped blade is leaning against the wall. He takes it — the haft worn smooth — and walks towards the men. The first he meets is the tall one, the one with the missing half-finger. He asks him if Monsieur Lecoeur is in the charnel.
‘He is,’ says the miner, quietly. Then, as Jean-Baptiste is stepping away from him, the miner touches his arm, stops him. ‘He has a pistol,’ he says.
‘I remember it,’ says Jean-Baptiste. For an instant he is tempted to ask the miner to come with him, is desirous of having the other’s calmness and strength beside him. Then he goes on his own, down past the doctors’ workshop to the charnel’s first open archway. He steps inside, into the frigid stillness of its air, stops, turns his head to listen. Outside, the men have ceased their noise. They too are listening.
He moves forward: impossible, with no light but what is offered by the thinning darkness, to move soundlessly over such a surface. Too much debris. Pieces of stone, pieces of bone. Who knows what else besides. There is no hope of surprising Lecoeur, of stealing up on him. He decides to announce himself.
‘Lecoeur!’
An echo but no reply.
‘Lecoeur! It is Baratte!’
Nothing.
He goes on, trusting as much to his memory of the place as to his eyes. To his right, the archways stand out a faintly luminous blue against the speckled blackness of the gallery. One way or another it is light that will bring this thing to an end. Light will make a target of him. Light will leave Lecoeur nowhere to hide. And then? When Lecoeur is able to see him? The only reason he can imagine Lecoeur will not shoot him is that he would not then have time to reload his pistol before the miners reached him.
He looks back, counts off the archways. He will soon be up by the door onto the rue de la Ferronnerie, the door through which they load the carts. Is that why Lecoeur came in here? To make his way more secretly to the door? There would have been a key in the sexton’s house. He might have pocketed it before attacking Jeanne, the escape planned before the crime was committed.
Gripping the spade in one hand, he feels for the wall with the other, his fingers trailing over lettering, then rough stone, then, unmistakably, the shaped edge of a hinge. He fumbles for the iron ring of the doorhandle, turns it, pulls, pulls again more sharply. The door is locked. Either Lecoeur had the coolness, the presence of mind, to lock it after him, or he is still here, in the cemetery, in the charnel.
He is poised to call out again — his nerves have had quite enough of this game of hide and seek — when he is aware of movement in the gallery behind him. Someone, something, is coming towards him, coming fast, sure-footed, recklessly fast. His first thought is not of Lecoeur at all but of the thing the minister spoke of, the dog-wolf. Would this not be its moment? A man alone at night, deep in its secret lair? Whatever it is, he has no hope of avoiding it. The thing’s energy, its intention, is already upon him. He swings the spade, arcs it blindly through the black air while in the same instant a voice roars at him, ‘Violator!’
The force of the contact comes near to throwing him off his feet. He skitters backwards until his shoulders collide with the wall; then, bracing himself against the stones, he jabs three or four times, furiously, at the dark, but there is no second assault. He waits, heart thundering behind his ribs, then creeps forwards, spade held out like a pike. Beneath his left shoe the snap of breaking glass. He stretches down, touches a curl of wire, a shard of smooth glass. Spectacles! He takes another step, sees beside one of the pillars of the nearest archway, the shape of a man’s head. He goes closer, lowers the edge of the spade against the man’s chest, feels it swell and fall.
‘Who was it?’
The engineer spins about, spade at the ready.
‘Who have you struck?’
‘Lecoeur? Where are you? I cannot see you.’
‘Do not worry about that. I can see you well enough. My eyes have grown quite used to the dark.’
‘It was the priest.’
‘Colbert?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is he killed?’
‘No.’
‘And what did you strike him with? What is that you have in your hands?’
‘A spade.’
‘Ha! He mistook you for me, perhaps? Or there again, perhaps not.’
From his voice it is evident that Lecoeur is no more than four or five metres away, yet somehow he seems to be speaking from within the wall.
‘You have hurt Jeanne, Lecoeur.’
‘I have?’
‘You know it.’
‘And you?’
‘What of me?’
‘Have you not also hurt her? Abused her willing nature? Made her your creature. Forced her to assist in the destruction of her little paradise?’
He has it now. Lecoeur must be sitting or crouching on one of the flights of steps leading up to the bone attics. A good place to choose. Easy to defend. Dark even in the middle of the day. ‘I have not raped her,’ he says.
‘So I am a little worse than you. Bravo. It is all a matter of degree, Baratte. And I can assure you she was no saint. I lived in the house with her. I knew her.’
‘If the men catch hold of you. .’