Into The Fire (56 page)

Hanne is cheered; the reminiscence has brought colour to her cheeks. If she is ever going to eat, now is the time.

De Belleville ministers to her. ‘Drink this soup, and tell Tomas the tale of Jean the horse breaker and his mother Marie who set up beside the stables in Sauvigny, and could have made their fortunes breaking difficult colts to saddle.’

Spoonful by spoonful, Hanne drinks. ‘Father lost both his elder sons, and the third was … well, you know what he is. So he turned his attention to my sister. From when she first could walk, she would cry to be allowed on horseback, and so, in time, he taught her everything he knew. He made her ride and ride and ride without stirrups until she could sit any horse in his stable.’

Tomas says, ‘In court, under oath, she said her mother taught her to spin and to weave.’

‘It’s true.’ Hanne finishes the soup, lays down the bowl. ‘For that one year in Burgundy, she wore gowns and pattens and high veils and learned spinning and weaving until her fingers bled. I wish I had seen her in a gown!’

Hanne comes to kneel by the fire, holding her wine. Her gown today is wool, dyed blue. Here in Rouen, she is a merchant’s wife, but not a rich one. Her hair is unbound. It lies about her shoulders as a dark veil, threaded gold where the firelight leans to touch it.

Tomas prompts her gently. ‘So after Burgundy, she became a horse breaker?’

‘Yes. They moved to Sauvigny and began to make a name for themselves. As Jean, she took on the beasts nobody else dared go near, and her mother sewed bridles fit for a king. They liked the life, I think; at least the Maid did. Her mother lived only a year there, so perhaps it did not suit her. Odette died in the autumn of 1424, two years after the king.’

‘The Maid could have stayed a horse breaker …’

‘But she had given her word to Father that she would see to her mother and then see to France. The spring after, she came to me in Domrémy. She sent a boy to find me in the fields with a message to say her mother had died, but he got it wrong and I thought it was my mother – that is, the woman who raised me. I flew to the house! Guerite hid amidst the nut trees, well away from Jacques d’Arc, the man who called me daughter; even then, he hated her.

‘We met twice a month in the old chapel of Saint Margaret, in the woods three miles from the village. I walked there; she rode on whatever horse most needed work. She brought furs and wool and a cloak and cheeses and apples in the autumn and we talked of how life had been and how it would be when she had made France whole again. Even then, Father spoke to her, just as his counsel had spoken to him.’

‘He heard voices?’

‘Yes. I think not as often as he pretended, but sometimes the voices were real. They came always out of sunlight, I remember, and as children we had orders to find la Petite Reine if it happened when we were with him; he would speak to nobody else.’

The wine has worked its magic; Hanne is quiet, sleepy, warm. Huguet and Jean de Belleville excuse themselves and Tomas is left alone with her; they trust him this much. He comes to sit by the fire, keeping the flames for company, each lost in memory. As the darkness draws in, he takes her hand in his, and lifts it, and kisses the knuckles, and she smiles for him, and does not draw her hand away.

In the flame-lit quiet, she says, ‘You love her.’

As it has been all day for her, it is a relief for him to speak the truth. ‘I do.’

‘As do we all. Even Jean and Huguet. Do you understand?’

‘And she loves you?’

A sad smile. ‘After Xenophon, yes.’

He sets down her hand. ‘Claudine told me of the day of Agincourt, when you broke up a mock battle she was having with de Belleville. She said, “Even then, they loved each other, those two.”’ It is not quite what Claudine said, but it sounds as if she might have done. ‘Tell me of that day,’ he says.

He hears it as from the angel, the story of a child who blundered into a game and broke it, on the day their whole world was broken. In her memory stands tall the girl who threw herself into the rescue of the sister who sought only to be in her company. Even then, they were entwined, each with the other; the acknowledged daughter who bore her father’s arms, and the untended daughter who had all of his beauty.

‘You were never bitter that she was the king’s daughter and you were the maid from Lorraine?’

‘No. I was happy. And I could never have been what our father wanted. It was better that I did not have to try.’

He sleeps alone, always. That night, for the first time, in his mind he lies with the angel-princess who is really Hanne, and wakes soiled, and feels treacherous.

THERE IS A
drain by the car. As instructed in the phone call from Father Cinq-Mars, Picaut takes out both of her phones. A text has come up in the last few minutes, from Jonita Markos, aka Monique Susong:

DNA
RESULTS:
A=M
ALE
, B=F
EMALE
.

F
AMILIAL RELATIONSHIP STATUS: POSITIVE
.

Which is, when she thinks about it, what Iain Holloway said in his note – and not the result expected by her father in his email. There is no time to work out the implications. Picaut drops both of her phones into the drain, hears the momentary silence and the double splash. Her guts churn at the loss.

Her car is locked. Nevertheless, a new cell phone sits on the passenger seat. It rings as she fires up the engine. Father Cinq-Mars sounds hoarser than he did before, less congenial.

‘Capitaine Picaut. You are to drive to Cléry-Saint-André, to the basilica. Further instruction will be given you when you arrive. Drive directly away from your current location. Do not stop. Drop this phone out of the window as soon as this call ends. You will be seen if you do not and your friend, I fear, will lose a finger, if not his entire right hand. Goodbye.’

The line goes dead before she can speak. Picaut lowers the window, reaches out and drops this new phone into the same drain.

She starts the car and heads out of Blois. Traffic is light. It’s not hard to see the team who are following her: a Suzuki GSX 1300 ridden by a biker in full black leathers and a black helmet with a darkened visor; a grey Audi S8: two occupants, both wearing dark suit jackets and sunglasses; a marine blue Mazda RX8: one occupant, the same. Four against one is not great odds, but neither is it insurmountable.

They change places frequently with the slickness of much practice, but they make no real effort to remain invisible and as soon as she reaches the main road to Meung-sur-Loire, they move up until they bracket her, the bike in front, the Mazda behind, the Audi on the outside at the times when the road allows.

She does what she can to identify them, but the most she can see is that every one of the occupants of the cars is white. If this is Jaish al Islam, it is either composed entirely of Caucasian converts or it’s a sham. Score one to Picaut: she told Ducat it was fake after the first phone call.

Like a sheep and its shepherds, they pass through Meung and on to Cléry-Saint-André. The spire of the basilica calls to Picaut long before they reach it. Her minders usher her into a parking space right in front of the northern entrance. The biker dismounts and jerks his head towards the door. He doesn’t remove his helmet; she still can’t see his face.

Picaut has tucked Patrice’s SIG into the waistband of her jeans, hidden by her jacket. She has exactly the length of time it takes to remove the keys from the ignition and open the door to think about hiding it in the car, but the biker is too close, and in any case, there’s no guarantee that it’ll be possible to come back.

She leaves it in place and does her best to ensure that when she gets out, the flap of her leather jacket doesn’t lift to expose it.

The door to the basilica is unlocked. Inside is cool and quiet and empty, or seems so until she walks towards the altar.

‘Father Cinq-Mars!’

He is lying on his back at the altar’s foot, with his hands crossed on his chest. She falls to her knees beside him, but her fingers seeking the pulse at his throat are a reflex born of blind optimism. There is no chance at all that he is alive; the bullet hole in his forehead has already told her that.

Her hand falls away from his throat. His body is already beginning to cool.

His eyes are still open and they would need coins, now, to weigh them shut. She wants to read peace in their depths, a release from the pain of his affliction, and knows she cannot.

She wants him to have left her a message, but the phone clasped between his dead hands is not his. It rings now, from a withheld number.

A man’s voice says, ‘So you know we are serious.’

‘That was never in any doubt. Now you have me, you can let Patrice go. You have thirty seconds to let me see him alive and well or I use this phone to call Prosecutor Ducat.’

She hangs up. She has been taught never to let the opposition set the agenda, but to offer her own ultimatums; her trainers never imagined a situation in which she would be her own bargaining counter.

She believes the men in dark glasses want her, not anybody else, and she is gambling Patrice’s life on it.

She has had a twenty-minute drive to think it through. If he has seen their faces, if he can identify those holding him hostage, then he’s dead; there is no other possible answer. If he hasn’t, they may choose to let him go. If they shoot him, she will regret it for whatever remains of her life, but she can see no other way to get him out. Without doubt they won’t let him go once she’s dead.

She stands up and is about to head for the door when a glimmer of white at eye level makes her turn back. She steps over the priest and up to the lectern. The vast gilt-edged bible stands shut, but on it rests a note scrawled in a fast and shaking hand.
Marguerite de Valois: I did not burn her bones. Keep her safe. Please.

He lied. This does not surprise her.

She does not care about bones. Patrice matters very much more.

Twenty seconds have passed since she hung up. She loses two more in sliding the paper underneath the bible.

At the twenty-eighth second, the Mazda driver appears in the doorway. A silk scarf reaches up to the lower edge of his wrap-around shades. He does not speak, but gestures with his Glock, a sideways flick of the barrel, motioning her towards the side door.

She is afraid she might have to go out ahead of him, and that he’ll see the gun in her waistband, but he backs out first, keeping the gun trained on her torso.

She keeps her eyes down; they are doorways to her imaginings and at the moment the image of Patrice, lying across the path, pumping blood from his severed carotids, is too fresh to let anyone see; and the plans, the steps by steps, of what she might do if he is not. So don’t look up. Not yet. Don’t look up.

She feels the sunlight at the threshold before it hits her eyes, a knife edge of heat and brightness, and now she must look up, and see—

A flash of electric blue … Her heart leaps.

‘Patrice!’ At her voice, he wrenches round. He is whole, unhurt, unbound. ‘The bike!’

Even as she says it, she hits the floor, rolling, pulling out the SIG. How often has she practised this particular manoeuvre? A thousand times. How often has she used it? Never. Not in anger. Not when a life depended on it. Not with an empty chamber that is a threat and nothing more.

She loops into a forward roll, head tucked in, right arm across her chest with the pistol sheltered by her body.

Her momentum takes her into the shins of the Mazda driver, bending them back in ways their anatomy was not designed to sustain. She hears a shout of pain. Several shouts. A body falls away from her.

She rises to her feet, gun out, arms straight, hands locked, head spinning. She wheels round, dry-mouthed.
Patrice?

He is down on the ground, propped on one arm, his body sweeping parallel to the floor in a great two-legged roundhouse kick that strikes the legs from the Audi driver and his passenger, bowls them over like skittles.

Picaut swings the barrel left, threatening the biker, until he spreads his hands the way anyone does when confronted by the muzzle of a gun. She wants to tell him to take off his helmet but there isn’t time. Patrice has hurled himself on to the bike, kicked it off the stand, is revving the engine so the noise blasts through the quiet village.

He turns. ‘Come on!’

‘Go!’

‘Not without you.’

‘Fucking go!’ They are four to her one and they are recovering; the biker is to her right. Picaut clicks the safety off the gun, as loudly as she can, weaves right, left, right: biker, driver, biker. They are hesitant, but not stopped. ‘Patrice!
Go!
’

But still he waits.

The Audi driver is armed, fast, recovering his balance. His weapon swings up and round. If her SIG were loaded, a double tap and he’d be dead. He must know this, but he’s brave, or dedicated, or thinks she can’t shoot. He is swinging round, pointing his muzzle at Patrice.

He’s half a dozen paces away.

If she runs, if she throws herself bodily at him …

… she can cannon into his shoulder, play havoc with his aim. Over the kick of the recoil and thunder of the report, she can scream, ‘Go! For fuck’s sake, just
go
!’

She falls less elegantly this time, lands in a sprawled heap, and it is possible that her collarbone has broken and then not, because she can move her arm. She hears the rapid crack of single shots from several weapons, but over them the howl of an engine and the burn of rubber on the tarmac.

Her whole body cringes in anticipation of a crash, of the impact and the rending of metal she has heard so often.

When none of this happens she dares to hope and rolls over, pushes herself to her feet, looks around for shelter, for somewhere to run to—

And finds herself looking down the barrel of a Beretta.

While the other three have been firing at Patrice’s receding back, the biker, who is perhaps the thinker where the rest are the muscle, has focused on her, and is standing now in the classic stance, feet shoulder width apart, pistol held out in both hands, but loosely; a practised manoeuvre; effortless.