Oni de Bale glanced down at his mother from his great height. ‘Do we others continue with our work, Madame?’
The Countess turned away, motioning to Madame Mastigou, who was cleaning a small ivory receptacle. Then she turned towards her dwarfish daughter, Athame, a sufferer from Ellis-van Creveld Syndrome. A polydactyl, Athame was unconscionably dexterous with all of her twelve fingers. ‘Athame. Live up to your name. You may do the necessary cuts for the blood oath.’
‘Yes, Madame.’
‘Mother?’
‘I heard you, Oni.’ The Countess turned and laid a light hand on her youngest son’s forearm. She glanced up into his eyes, her neck forced back against the collar of her elegantly tailored 1950s Dior suit the better to take in his span. ‘Always continue with your work. That is the way to please me. Stir, stir, stir. Keep the broth moving. Never let the commoners rest at ease. The Devil is a hungry angel – he will come calling if we don’t forestall him. That is your primary job.’
‘Yes, Madame.’
‘And, Oni.’
‘Yes, Madame?’
‘Soon, I may have a more specific use for you. You must hold yourself in readiness for that.’
Oni hunched down and kissed his mother’s hand.
The Countess noticed Lamia hesitate on her way to the door. ‘Have you anything to say to me, my child?’
It looked for a moment as if Lamia would speak. Then she shook her head and followed her brother quietly out into the library.
11
At precisely 9.30 the next morning, Joris Calque watched from his camouflaged hiding place as the battery of chauffeur-driven cars returned to collect their clients. He counted them off, one by one.
‘That leaves three of them still inside the house. Two males and a female, if I am not mistaken.’
In the lonely weeks that Calque had spent ensconced inside his eyrie, he had occasionally drifted into the habit of talking out loud to himself. He was well aware of this new tendency, but didn’t, as yet, feel that he was in imminent danger of turning into one of those ubiquitous males – and they were always males, weren’t they? – who stride up and down the pavements of their home town mouthing off to imagined companions.
If he ever did slide into such a public form of idiocy, Calque hoped that he would have enough wit left to wedge a cell phone speaker in his ear, thereby protecting himself against the very forces of public order to which he had for so long subscribed.
His main problem now wasn’t incipient dementia, however, but rather to retrieve the – hopefully – brimming voice-activated tape recorder from the Countess’s inner sanctum.
He stood up and glanced around his eyrie. So. His time here was over.
He wouldn’t miss the chemical toilet, the smell of stale tobacco, or the curious quality of light that filtered through the gaps in the camouflage netting. But he would miss the birdlife, and the sightings of badgers, rodents, rabbits, deer and foxes with which he had wiled away the more tiresome hours of his vigil. He decided, on the spur of the moment, to bequeath the entirety of his hidey-hole to the poacher who had set it up. That would save him the trouble of carting everything back to his car. It would serve to cover his back-trail rather nicely, too.
Calque’s experience told him that he didn’t stand a cat-in-hell’s chance of getting into the Domaine to retrieve the recorder himself. He was neither young, suicidal, nor particularly eager to see the inside of any of the prisons to which he had consigned so many felons, child-molesters, and murderers in the course of his detecting career.
But there was one possible alternative to professional suicide. And Calque made up his mind to explore it without further delay.
12
Calque watched as Paul Macron’s cousin put the finishing touches to a louvred shutter. The man was aware of him, that much was obvious. But it would have been unrealistic of Calque to expect an ex-Foreign Legionnaire to come running just because a captain – strike that, an ex-captain – of police showed up at his workshop. At least it would give him time to have a cigarette.
Just as Calque was preparing to inhale, he saw Macron gesticulating at him with his sander from across the atelier.
‘Put that fucking thing out. This isn’t a country club. There’s enough dry wood stacked up in here to smoke a whale.’
Calque gave a sickly smile and crushed the as yet unsavoured cigarette and its accompanying match out beneath his foot. He should have expected that, too. Macron’s cousin had no reason to view him with anything other than disdain. Paul Macron had been killed on his watch, and it was only luck, and Adam Sabir’s suicidal bloody-mindedness, that had allowed the police to put a line under Achor Bale’s killing spree.
Aime Macron went over to a sink in the corner of the workshop and started on the laborious rigmarole of washing his hands, his face, and the back of his neck. Calque could see Macron weighing him up in the pin-up plastered mirror above the basin.
Calque didn’t move. He was weighing Macron up, too. Deciding whether to trust him with information that, in the wrong hands, could send him to prison.
‘You’re not a flic any more, are you?’ Macron was moving towards Calque now, scrubbing at his neck with a towel, his eyes hooded.
Calque was fleetingly tempted to brazen the thing out – pretend he was still on the force – flash his purposefully mislaid badge – but he thought better of it. ‘No. I’m not. How did you guess?’
Macron shrugged. ‘I was in the Legion for twenty years. I can tell when a man has power by the way he carries himself. You don’t have power any more. If you were still a flic, you would have breezed in here and interrupted my work, knowing it was your fucking right. But you waited for me to finish instead. Cops aren’t usually that fastidious.’
‘ Touche.’ Calque was impressed despite himself. He instantly changed tack, and approached Macron from a different direction to the one that he had initially intended. ‘You remember me, don’t you?’
‘How could I forget? You brought us the news of Paul’s death.’
Calque squirmed inside, each word like a touchpaper to his policeman’s soul. ‘You helped me that time. You gave me valuable information about Achor Bale. About his time in the Legion.’
Macron squinted, as if something he had not understood had just been made blindingly clear to him. He lit a cigarette.
Calque made a face.
Macron grinned. ‘Yeah. I was just bullshitting you back there about the fire hazard and the cigs. Have one of mine.’
Calque cocked his head questioningly. ‘Why the change of attitude all of a sudden?’
‘Do you really want to know?’
‘I really do. Yes.’
Macron snorted smoke through both nostrils. ‘Because you’re not a flic any more. I like you better this way. They kick you out because of Paul’s death?’
‘Indirectly.’
‘Fuckers. It wasn’t your fault. If it had been, you wouldn’t have made it past the front gate.’
‘I suspected that.’ Calque lit the proffered cigarette.
The two men stood staring at each other, smoking.
‘So what do you want, Monsieur l’ex-Capitaine?’
‘Want?’
Macron scrubbed his fingernails across his razor-stropped head. ‘Don’t fuck with me, Inspector. You haven’t come around here to see how I’m getting on. Or to chew the fat about all those happy times you shared with Paul. Neither of you could stand each other.’
Calque could sense himself about to go on the defensive – he wrestled the instinct down. ‘You’re right, Macron. I need more than information this time. I need your help.’
Macron allowed himself the ghost of a smile. ‘Paul’s killer is dead. What do you need me for?’ His face changed expression. ‘You need someone nobbled, don’t you? That’s it, isn’t it? And you remembered that good old Aime Macron was on the prison register for GBH, and maybe he hadn’t forgotten some of his old tricks in the years since they let him out?’