‘As they say, there’s no time like the present. The keys are in the ignition. As soon as I’m outside, get in the driving seat and then just keep your eyes open. I think we’re ahead of the game, at least at the moment, but if you see anything you don’t like the look of, just start the car and get the hell out of here.’
Angela put her hand on his arm.
‘For God’s sake be careful, Chris,’ she said.
‘I will. I’m just going to try the door. If it’s locked then we’ll have to think of something else.’
Bronson opened the door of the car and stepped out. In seconds, he was invisible, his dark clothes blending seamlessly into the solid black shadow that cloaked the front of the chapel.
The door was set into a fairly ornate arched entrance, flanked by four stone pillars, the whole surmounted by a kind of frieze of carvings that formed a semicircle around the top of the arch. Bronson flicked on his torch and examined the stonework. It was a line of human faces, each different from its neighbour and some apparently in agony, judging by the expressions they were displaying.
He moved the thin beam of the torch around the semicircle, then stopped when he reached the apex to examine another carved image set into the ancient stone directly above the arch. It looked somehow familiar to him. He reached into his pocket, took out his mobile phone, made sure the street was still deserted and then snapped a picture of the carved stone, the explosion of light from the built-in flash bouncing off the old stones.
Then he turned his attention to the door itself. This wasn’t, as he had been expecting, a single door, but rather two separate doors hinged at either side of the archway. A printed notice on the left-hand door advised anybody interested that the key was available from the village Mairie on four days of the week — including Sunday, predictably enough — but only between the hours of three and five in the afternoon.
He tried the handle anyway, and it was of course locked. He bent to examine the lock, but realized immediately that it was the kind of ancient mechanism that would require a heavy and complex key some six or seven inches long. Bronson’s expertise in lock picking was confined to the more modern kinds of devices, and he certainly didn’t have the heavy-duty picks and torsion wrenches he would need to try to open it.
And he wasn’t even sure that opening it would be a good idea. In order to do any meaningful exploration inside the building, they would need to use torches, and although, like most French villages late in the evening, all the houses in Montsaunès appeared to be shuttered and completely silent, the occupants apparently having retired for the night, he had no doubt that somebody would notice intermittent torchlight inside the old chapel.
Before he returned to the car, Bronson checked both sides of the church. Access to the sides and rear of the building was prevented by a substantial steel fence supported by stone pillars and pierced by locked gates. There were, he noted, at least two other doors into the building, one on each side, and at the right-hand rear of the chapel was what appeared to be a later addition, a single-storey stone structure attached to the church and accessed by a narrow doorway. Bronson guessed it might function as a storeroom or even as a robing room for the local priest. Because the main door of the church was locked, he had no doubt that all the other doors would also be secured.
Even the lowest windows were mounted so high in the walls that a ladder would be needed to reach them, and as far as he could tell by the light of his torch they were all closed. For a few moments he toyed with the idea of clambering over the metal fence and examining the back of the building, but knew he’d be unlikely to achieve anything if he did. And, in fact, he also knew he didn’t need to.
By the time he walked back across the street, Angela had already moved over to the front passenger seat of the car.
‘It was locked, I presume?’ she asked.
‘Locked securely,’ Bronson replied, ‘which at least means that if we can’t get in, no one else can either. All we can do now is wait until tomorrow morning.’
‘You took a photograph,’ Angela stated.
‘Oh, yes.’
He fished his mobile out of his pocket, tapped the screen to open the gallery, then handed it to her.
The picture showed two angelic figures — each had a halo — that appeared to be supporting an ornamented stone circle within which was an unusual symbol, at least to Bronson’s eyes. It looked like an enlarged letter X with the elongated shaft of a letter P driven down through the centre point of the X.
‘What is it?’ Bronson asked.
‘It’s a Chi Rho,’ Angela replied. ‘Of a sort, anyway. It’s one of the oldest Christian motifs, a monogram that contains the first two letters of the word “Christ” in Greek, the letters chi and rho.’ She pointed at two other symbols, either side of the central motif. ‘That’s the Greek letter alpha on the left and what’s left of omega on the right, the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. The beginning and the end, if you like.’
‘So it’s a common symbol?’ Bronson asked.
‘Yes. Some Christians still use it, but this particular Chi Rho is a bit different. I’m not sure what this symbol at the top means. It looks like a kind of flattened and elongated letter omega, but it’s not something I’ve seen on a Chi Rho before. But perhaps the oddest feature is the snake.’
‘Snake? What snake?’
‘Here. Entwined around the upright of the letter rho.’
‘I thought that was the letter “S”.’
‘That’s what it looks like, but it’s almost certainly a serpent. There’s evidence that the Chi Rho symbol actually existed perhaps half a millennium before the time of Christ, in the writings of Herodotus and Plato, for example. It was known as the Chrestos, and it was kind of backwards, if you like. The Chi Rho was accepted as a religious symbol that was created by combining two Greek letters, but the Chrestos was a symbol from the first. The “X” on the Chrestos is almost certainly a representation of the solar ecliptic path and the celestial equator, not the letter Chi, which is why the two straight lines don’t cross at right angles.’
Even in the darkness of the hire car Angela could see Bronson’s expression starting to glaze.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said. ‘All it means is that the symbol is a lot older than most people think and originally had nothing to do with Christianity. It probably meant good fortune, and was hijacked by the early Church because the shape of the cross was a visual reminder of the crucifixion.’
‘And the snake?’ Bronson asked.
‘Oh, yes. The snake’s been an important symbol for religions and societies for millennia, and most likely that’s astrological in origin. It’s the sign of serpens, the serpent, and referred to the serpent healers of antiquity. So although most people think of the Chi Rho as a Christian symbol of the crucifixion, it actually isn’t. It’s much older and had a completely different meaning.’
They hadn’t seen a hotel in the village, but even if there had been, Bronson wouldn’t have wanted to stay that close to their objective. Thinking ahead earlier in the evening, on their way to the village of Montsaunès, they’d pulled off the autoroute at Boussens and picked a hotel at random close to the banks of the River Garonne, checked in, locked their bags in their room and then driven on.
Back in the hotel, they sat side by side on the double bed consuming the sandwiches and soft drinks they’d bought earlier at the airport, while Bronson talked through his plan.