Into The Fire (9 page)

When she first came here, if she looked at a radiograph at all she saw a haphazard array of white blurs on a black background, repeating patterns that made no sense, however hard her brain tried to fit them to something she knew.

Now, after two years of Éric Masson’s tuition, she can start at the top, with the outline of the cranium, and immediately pick out the irregular spider’s web of fractures above the black space of the left eye socket and the greyed mess of haemorrhage behind it.

‘Big cranial bleed? Was he hit on the crown of the head as well as over his eye?’

‘Good. Go on.’

She runs her gaze on down from there to the mandible. She takes another sip of coffee, rolls it round her mouth. Her tongue curls against the bitterness. Her body craves more.

‘Did you send the dental images?’

‘Patrice is working on them now.’

Picaut eases out a breath. The threat of Prosecutor Ducat takes one pace back.

She checks her watch: 09.27. She places a small bet with herself as to how long Patrice will take to ID their man. And then, because there’s clearly something else she is supposed to be seeing, she scans on down from head to clavicle to sternum, to ribs, spine, arms, hands, pelvic girdle, legs, feet.

And back to the thorax, the cage of white, splayed ribs overlaid on the grey shadows of the heart and lungs. And in that cage, a foreign object, bright-white, with square, manufactured corners.

‘What’s that?’ She taps the screen with a pointer.

‘Good question. I’d say it’s what our American cousins call a thumb drive and the rest of us in the civilized world call a USB drive.’

‘What’s it doing in the middle of his chest? Is it even possible to stab someone with a USB drive? Was there an entry wound? I didn’t see one.’

‘Look again.’ Masson is in teaching mode. Picaut is not in the mood to be a student, but then she rarely is, and he’s taught her anyway.

She reviews her understanding of basic anatomy. In the chest are the heart, the lungs, the trachea … and the route from the mouth to the stomach. ‘Is it in his oesophagus? Has he
swallowed
it?’

A broad smile transforms Éric Masson’s lean face; he is young again, animated. ‘Swallowed shortly before death. It got this far and no further.’ He leans back, the better to watch her. ‘He knew he was going to die. He left you the answers to your questions.’

‘Fuck …’ She whistles. ‘Patrice will think it’s Christmas.’

‘If the fire hasn’t cooked the data to illegibility.’ Masson sees the look on her face. ‘
Courage, mon brave
. Shall we find out?’

He works swiftly, neatly, cleanly. Charred skin peels back from roasted flesh and the brown bone of the cooked sternum. The band saw whines and the smell of burning bone is the same as it was in the night.

Picaut’s phone rings again. She checks her watch. 09.40. Patrice is two minutes inside her estimated time. Grinning, she hits the elbow switch, putting the call on to speaker. ‘You win. Who is he?’

‘Luc,’ he says, and the echo of his voice in the hollow room sounds as if he’s taken a mouthful of dog shit. ‘He’s here. He says he needs to see you. Actually, he says he needs you. On a different note, the dead man is a Dr Iain Holloway from Glasgow. That’s Glasgow, Scotland, not Glasgow, Kentucky.’

‘He’s not American?’

‘Doesn’t look that way. I’ll have more on him by the time you get here. Just don’t let Luc drag you down into whatever hole he’s digging for himself.’

TOMAS RUSTBEARD’S SECOND
chance to kill the Maid comes three days after the first, at night, during the attack on the gatehouse protecting Meung-sur-Loire.

It is the middle of June and the nights are as short as they’re going to get. Dusk bleeds into dawn with scarcely enough dark between to blink, although in that scarcity is enough to do what they must, or so the Maid has said and nobody contradicts her now. Since Jargeau, she is the army’s favourite: men will die for her and think themselves blessed.

From the wave of fury that followed her injury, Tomas has learned that he dare not kill her in the open field. He may, however, assault her in the dark, with few around. Beyond that, he has long recognized that night loosens tongues which the sun holds fast, and, tonight, he is seeking answers as much as action, for on this expedition are some of the men who brought the Maid to Chinon and began this whole misadventure.

Thus does he find himself part of the Maid’s assaulting troop, which at this moment requires him to crawl across a hundred yards of open ground and flop belly down in a ditch, less than a hundred paces from a gatehouse that stands on a bridge which in turn guards the route across the Loire to the town of Meung.

Summer has been kind. The ditch is dry. It smells of good, clean earth and crushed grass. He leans out, watching, waiting for the right man to pass by, and when he does …

‘Hey!’ As if by chance, a hoarse whisper. ‘Here!’

‘Where?’ A bulky figure, good boots, an axe in his belt, slowing.

‘Here, by your feet.’

A slide, a shiver of mail, a crunch, and he has company: Bertrand de Poulangy, man at arms, former equerry to Yolande of Aragon, Queen of Sicily and Naples and the King of France’s redoubtable mother-in-law.

Yolande is a woman of notorious fortitude. When the present king’s two older brothers each died in ‘accidents’ at the hands of their mother, it was Yolande who rescued the young Charles, brought him south to her lands of Aragon and then dared anyone to come and get him. Without her, nobody is in any doubt that Charles VII would be dead and the young Henry VI would be king of a united France.

Tomas, of course, loathes her. Bertrand de Poulangy, by all accounts, worships the very air she breathes. A handful of years into his fifth decade, de Poulangy is an old man to be running round the countryside at night. Old, and acting very much beneath his station. His mistress, it is said, trusts him beyond anyone else. Which is rather the point.

He rolls over now, peers out into the inky night. ‘Where’s the Maid?’

‘Over there, by the oak.’ Tomas points right and forward. ‘Body of Christ, but it’s dark.’

‘Ha!’ De Poulangy’s fist bounces softly off his arm. ‘You shouldn’t swear. She can hear you at a thousand paces.’

‘What’s she going to do? Make me confess again?’

When he was on the English side, Tod Rustbeard confessed once a year at Easter, if he remembered at all. In the weeks since he came to the French side, he has knelt in penitence more often than the sum total of the rest of his life. He has not, of course, confessed the nature of his business here. His father was a bishop. He lost his fear of the church a long time ago.

De Poulangy settles deeper into the ditch. ‘Think yourself lucky you’re not taking Mass with her. She made us stop at dusk and dawn when we brought her up to Chinon in February.’

‘You were one of …’ Tomas feigns awe. ‘
You
brought the Maid to the king at the year’s start?’

He hears a humble, self-denying laugh. It has had a lot of practice these past few months, that laugh.

Careless, Tomas says, ‘I heard it took you thirteen days each way, riding only at night.’

‘Eleven,’ Bertrand says, which, actually, is exactly what the gossip said, but it never hurts to underestimate a man’s accomplishments to his face if you want to oil his tongue. ‘Eleven nights in the first days of February, through enemy lands; me and Jean de Metz and the Maid, riding flat to the ground in the pitch black and filthy rain and mud up to the girth and frost making ice on the tracks when it wasn’t raining. By day we slept under the trees in the forest, and even so, I lost count of the times we had to hide in a ditch while Burgundy’s men went by.’

To think Burgundy could have caught her at the outset. And he’d have killed her, too, no question. The English might bear no love for the French that stand against them, but there’s nothing like a falling out among family to foster a genuinely vicious hatred. The Duke of Burgundy may be the King of France’s cousin, but the Duke of Burgundy prefers to swear his allegiance to England. Burgundy’s loathing of all things French is mutual and mortal.

That’s not the point tonight, though. Here, now, Tomas Rustbeard has other toads to skin. Carefully, carefully, keeping it as a joke between men: ‘So did you teach her to ride on the way?’

Because this is one of the biggest gaps in the whole improbable story: he is supposed to believe that a peasant girl brought up in a land reduced to penury by eighty years of warfare could make the kind of ride that leaves his joints sweating just to think about it.

She rode from Vaucouleurs to Chinon in eleven days? At night? In
February
? Are you insane? When would she even have seen a riding horse, still less learned to ride one well enough to stay on for that distance?

‘Ha! No, no. That one’s been riding from the time she could walk. Her father taught her and he was the best in France. I heard her tell Jean d’Alençon that she spent five years posing as a horse b—’

De Poulangy’s teeth click tight shut. Oiled, but not loose. Incautious, maybe, but not stupid. And infinitely loyal to Yolande, and now to the Maid. He grunts, rolls his shoulders, eases his blade from his belt, peers out over the edge of the ditch. Gruffly: ‘God, but I hate waiting. Come on, you English bastards, come out and get us.’

So close. So very close. This is better, even, than getting near to Claudine. The effort it takes to match the other man’s tone is as great as any Tomas can remember. He says, ‘They won’t. Nobody leaves a fortified emplacement at night.’

‘So we’ll have to go to them.’

‘That’s the plan.’ Take the gatehouse and block the bridge and lock three thousand English men at arms across the river in Meung where they can’t do any harm to the French cause. It’s a decent plan, more humane than the assault on Jargeau, and it’ll work as long as the English don’t realize what is happening.

They haven’t done yet, and when the call of an owl sounds three times, Bertrand de Poulangy, queen’s man and now Maid’s man, looks left and right and slips over the edge. Tomas’s hammer weighs in his hand. It’s tempting to take de Poulangy down with a swift tap to the back of the head, but this is not the time to give way to passing fancies. Follow, then, and swiftly.

From right and left, men crouch-crawl-slither over meadow grass, past scrubby thorns, sliding in from their ditches and hedges, gathering on the Maid, where she waits behind a fallen oak.

What were you? A horse boy? A horse breaker? Horse buyer? Did you take to doublet and hose before you ever set out for Chinon? Half a sentence more from de Poulangy and he’d know.

Even without that, she’s barely a hammer’s throw away. He might just try his luck and be done with it, but d’Alençon is crowding close and with him are Jean d’Aulon, her squire, and Étienne de Vignolles, called La Hire for his hedgehog hair, or his ire, nobody seems to know which.

If there are any men left in France who can fight, it’s these three. Any one of them could crush Tomas without a thought and he’s not ready for that. He wants to witness the chaos when she’s gone. He has an axe now, to go with his hammer. He hefts one in each hand and slides in closer to the oak tree and the gathering men.

The Maid sits on her heels and counts them all in: fifty men at arms, all with their harness bound up with rags for the quiet, all eager as hound whelps, kneeling in the summer grass, filled with love and holy ardour.

She rises, a shining beacon in her unmarked armour. She wears it as Henry did, the late king, as a second skin. She sleeps in it, which is as good a defence against nocturnal assassination as any; only her face shows, heart-shaped in the bassinet, strong black brows, curved mouth, sharp, black eyes.

She says, ‘Fifty English men at arms hold the gatehouse. We need to take it before anyone comes across the bridge from the town.’

She points a mailed fist. ‘La Hire, take a dozen to the left. D’Alençon, a dozen to the right. You know what to do. Those who remain are with me for a frontal assault.’

Jesu, but she speaks like a general. Glasdale himself didn’t give orders less precise than this. And men snap to her bidding: La Hire is a knight; Jean d’Alençon is a cousin of the king. He’s married to the Duke of Orléans’s daughter, for God’s sake. Has he no shame? It isn’t
right.

Men edge close to her, not wanting to leave. La Hire and d’Alençon have to prise their groups away. Tomas has not been sent off; he knows how to make himself small and readily missed. With La Hire and d’Alençon gone, he manoeuvres himself to the front of the main body as they stride up the last fifty paces to the gatehouse.

No hiding now. If the watch isn’t asleep … no, they’re not.

‘French! Goddamned French! Sound the—’

‘Ricard.’ The Maid’s voice is a bell in the chaos.

She doesn’t have longbowmen, but she has Ricard de Saran, who is handy with a crossbow and has three men loading spares for him. His second bolt takes the watch in the throat, which is what you get for standing in plain sight while you yell your warnings.

And then everyone is in plain sight. Fifty English men at arms, who have slept with their harness on their backs and their blades in their hands since Jargeau was lost, are up and at the walls and a bailey is calling orders and a horn sounds, and if they’re not fast now the enemy garrison in the main defences a quarter of a mile across the river will sweep down and slaughter them and … damnation, but it’s hard to remember which side he’s on.

Tomas is running with the French, but the English will kill him if he doesn’t kill them first. He’s wearing mail and his beard is hidden; nobody will know him. So just for now, he’s French.
French
. Scream at the English. Hit them if you have to. Run.

The Maid has brought a ram: an oak trunk with lead set behind an iron tip. Eight big Orléanais carry it at a swift trot. Eight others hold shields above their heads to ward off arrows. Or oil. If they have any sense, the defenders will have had oil on the fire. Or sand. Or water.