Sepulchre (62 page)

On the shelf below it were objects he had found during his excavations of the estate. He had been slow to accept that the ruined sepulchre was just that, a few old stones, nothing else. But he had turned up one or two items. An expensive, although damaged, timepiece bearing the initials AV, and a silver locket with two miniatures inside, both taken from graves he'd discovered by the lake.

This was what he cared about, the past. Finding the cards. Not sorting out the problems of the present.

 

Julian went to the tantalus on the sideboard and poured himself a brandy to steady his nerves. He drained it down in one, then glanced at the clock.

 

Ten fifteen.

 

He took his jacket from the back of the door, put a mint in his mouth, grabbed his car keys and headed out.

 

CHAPTER 87

 

Meredith left Hal talking on the phone, trying to fix the meeting at the commissariat in Couiza before going to call for Dr O'Donnell as promised.

She kissed him on the cheek. He raised a hand, mouthed that he'd see her later, then went back to his one-sided conversation. Meredith paused to ask the nice receptionist if she knew where she might borrow a shovel. Eloise made no reaction to this odd request, simply suggested that the gardener should be working in the gardens and might be able to help.

'Thank you. I'll ask him,' Meredith said, then wrapped her scarf around her neck and went through the glass doors on to the terrace. The early morning mist had almost burnt away, although the grass was glistening with a silver dew. Everything was bathed in a copper and gold light, set against a chill sky flecked with pink and white clouds.

There was already a heady smell of Hallowe'en bonfires in the air. Meredith breathed it in, the smell of fall taking her back to her childhood. She and Mary religiously carving faces in pumpkins for lanterns. Getting her trick-or-treat costume ready. She usually went out with her friends dressed as a ghost, a white bedsheet with two holes cut for the eyes and a scary mouth painted on in black marker.

As she ran lightly down the steps to the gravel path, she wondered what Mary was doing right now. Then she pulled herself up. Only a quarter after five back home. Mary would still be asleep. Maybe she'd call her later to wish her happy Hallowe'en.

The gardener was nowhere to be seen, but his barrow was there. Meredith looked around, in case he was coming back, but saw nothing. She hesitated, then took the small trowel lying on the top of the leaves, tucked it in her pocket, and struck out across the lawns towards the lake. She'd bring it back as soon as she could.

It was an odd sensation, but she felt she was following in the footsteps of the figure she'd seen on the lawns earlier.

 

Seen? Imagined?

She found herself glancing back at the façade of the hotel, at one point stopping to figure out which was her window, and whether she could possibly have seen what she thought she had from such a long way off.

As she completed the path around the left-hand side of the lake, the ground began to rise. She climbed up a grassy slope to a small promontory that overlooked the water, straight across to the hotel. It seemed crazy, but she was convinced this was precisely where she had seen the figure standing earlier. Imagined.

There was a curved stone bench, in the shape of a crescent moon. The surface glistened with dew. Meredith wiped it with her gloves, then sat down. As always, by deep water, thoughts of Jeanette rushed into her mind, and the way she had chosen to end her life. Walking into Lake Michigan with her pockets weighted down with stones. Like Virginia Woolf, Meredith had learnt years later at high school, although she doubted her mother had known that.

But as Meredith sat looking out over the lake, she surprised herself by feeling peaceful. She was thinking of her birth mother, but it wasn't accompanied by the usual feelings of guilt. No thumping heart, no rush of shame, no regret. This was a place of reflection, to be calm and private. The rattling of the crows in the trees, the higher-pitched twitterings of thrushes in the thick, high box hedge at her back, isolated from the house by the expanse of water, yet still in plain view.

She lingered a while longer, then decided to carry on walking. Two hours earlier, she had been frustrated not to be able to rush out and start looking for the ruins of the sepulchre. Given how Shelagh O'Donnell had been in the hotel, she figured Hal would have his hands full. She didn't expect him back much before one.

She pulled out her cell and checked she had a signal, then put it away. He could call if he needed to get in touch with her.

Careful not to slip on the wet grass, she made her way back down to the level ground close to the side of the lake and took stock of her surroundings. In one direction the path led around the lake and back towards the house. In the other, a more overgrown track went into the beech woods.

Meredith took the left-hand path. Within minutes, she was deep into the trees, winding through the dappled sunlight. The track led to a crisscross of interconnecting paths, all pretty similar. Some led uphill, others seemed to slope down towards the valley. She was intending to track down the ruins of the Visigoth sepulchre, then work out from there, looking for a place where the cards could be hidden. Anything too obvious and they would have been found years ago, but she figured it was as good a place to start as any.

Meredith set off down a path that led to a small clearing. After a few minutes, the hillside dipped away sharply. The ground beneath her feet changed. She braced her legs, taking it slowly on the slippery stones and gravel, jolting down, dislodging pine cones and fallen twigs, until finally she found herself standing on some kind of natural platform, almost like a bridge. And underneath, intersecting it at right angles, was a strip of brown earth leading down through the green woodland all around it.

In the distance through a break in the trees, Meredith could pick out on the far hill a cluster of stone megaliths, grey amongst the wooded green, possibly the same ones Hal had pointed out to her on their way to Rennes-le-Château.

The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end.

She realised that from here, pretty much all the natural landmarks Hal had mentioned - the Fauteuil du Diable, the bénitier, the étang du Diable - were visible. More than that, from this one spot, all the locations used as backdrops to the cards were also evident.

The sepulchre dated back to Visigoth times. So it stood to reason there might be other Visigoth burial sites within the grounds. Meredith looked around. And this, to her inexpert eye at least, looked much like a dry riverbed.

Trying to keep her excitement in check, she looked around for a way down. There wasn't an obvious one. She hesitated, crouched, and manoeuvred herself round, then lowered herself over the edge. For a moment, there was nothing, as she hung suspended in the air on her elbows. Then she let herself go, dropping for a fraction of a heart-stopping second, until her feet found the ground.

She took the impact in her knees, then straightened up and started to make her way down. It looked like the bed of a winterbourne at the end of a dry summer, but slick with light autumn drizzle. Meredith, working hard not to slip on the loose stones and film of wet topsoil, cast her eyes about her for anything out of the ordinary.

At first, there seemed no break in the undergrowth, all tangled and dripping with dew. Then, a little further, just before the track took another sharp dive down like a helter-skelter at a fairground, Meredith noticed a shallow depression. She moved closer until she could make out a flat grey stone, peeking out from beneath the tangled roots of a spreading juniper bush, with its scratchy needle-like leaves and green and purple fruit. The depression wasn't big enough to be a grave itself, but the stone didn't look like it had been put there by chance. Meredith got out her cell and took a couple of photos.

She put her cell away, then reached in and pulled at the knotted undergrowth. The thin branches were strong and wiry, but she succeeded in pulling them far enough apart to peek into the damp green space around the roots.
She felt a spark of adrenalin. There was a ring of stones, eight in all. The pattern set a memory chasing in her mind. She narrowed her eyes, then realised the shape of the stones echoed the crown of stars on the image of La Force. And now that she was standing here, she could see the landscape right here was especially reminiscent in colour and tone of that depicted on the card.

With growing anticipation, Meredith thrust her hands into the foliage, feeling the green slime and mud seeping through the tips of her cheap woollen gloves, and dragged clear the biggest of the stones. She wiped the surface clean, then gave a sigh of satisfaction. Painted in black tar or paint was a five-pointed star set within a circle.

The symbol for the suit of pentacles. The treasure suit. She took a couple more photos, then put the stone to one side. She pulled the stolen trowel from her pocket and started to dig, scraping against stones and shards of unfired clay tiles. She pulled out one of the larger pieces and examined it. It looked like a roof tile, although she wondered how such a thing was buried out here, so far from the house.

Then the metal head of the trowel hit something substantial. Concerned not to damage anything, Meredith put the trowel to one side and finished the job by hand, burrowing at the mud and worms and black beetles, pulling off her gloves and letting her fingers be her eyes.

Finally she felt a piece of heavy material, a waxed cloth. She pushed her head under the leaves to look and peeled the corners back to reveal the beautiful lacquered lid of a small chest, with a crisscross of mother-of-pearl inlay. It looked like a jewellery case or a lady's workbox, pretty and clearly expensive. On the top were two initials in dull corroded brass.

LV.

 

Meredith smiled. Léonie Vernier. It had to be.

 

She went to open the lid, then hesitated. What if the cards were inside? What would it mean? Did she even want to see them?

In a rush, she felt the solitude press down upon her. The sounds of the wood that had been so gentle, so reassuring, now seemed oppressive, threatening. She pulled her phone from her pocket, checked the time. Maybe she should give Hal a call? The desire to hear another human voice - his voice - stabbed at her. She thought better of it. He wouldn't want to be disturbed in the middle of his meeting with the police. She hesitated, then sent an sms, and straight away regretted it. Displacement activity. And the last thing she wanted was to come over all needy.
Meredith looked back down at the box in front of her. The story is in the cards.

She wiped her palms, greasy with exertion and anticipation, once more on her blue jeans. Then finally, slowly, she opened the lid. The box was full of spools of thread, ribbons and thimbles. The inside of the padded lid was studded with needles and pins. With grimy fingers, raw from the cold and the digging, Meredith removed some of the cotton reels, burrowing through felt and cloth, as she had previously dug through the earth and dirt. Then there they were. She saw the top card with the same green back, the delicate patterns of tree branches threaded through in gold and silver, although the colour was chalkier, clearly painted by hand with a brush rather than made by a machine. She ran her fingers over the surface. A different texture, rough not smooth. More like parchment than the modern plastic-coated reproduction deck.

Meredith made herself count to three, summoning the courage to turn the top card over.

Her own face stared up at her. Card XI. La Justice. As she gazed at the hand-painted image, once more she was aware of whispering inside her head. Not like the voices that had hounded her mother, but gentle and soft, the voice she had heard in her dream, carried on the air slipping between the branches and trunks of the autumn trees. Here, in this place, time moves away towards eternity. Meredith stood up. The most logical move now would be to take the cards and go back to the house. Study them properly in the comfort of her own room, with all her notes, access to the internet, the reproduction deck to hand to compare them with.

Except now she could hear Léonie's voice again. In the turning of a moment, the whole world seemed to have shrunk to this one place. The smell of the earth in her nostrils, the grit and soil under her nails, the dampness that seeped from the earth and into her bones. Except this is not the place.

Except something was calling her on deeper into the woods. The wind was getting louder, more forceful, carrying something more than just the noises of the forest. Music heard but not heard. She could pick out a faint melody in the rustling of the fallen leaves, the tapping of the bare branches of the beech trees a little further off.

Single notes, a mournful melody in a minor key, and always the words in her head leading her on to the ruined sepulchre. Aïci lo terns s'en, va res l'Eternitat.

Julian left the car unlocked in the parking area on the outskirts of Rennes-les-Bains, then walked quickly down to the Place des Deux Rennes, diagonally across the square, and into the small side street where Dr O'Donnell lived.

He loosened the tie at his neck. There were patches of sweat under his arms. The more he'd thought about the situation, the more his concerns had grown. He just wanted to find the cards. Anything that prevented that or delayed it was intolerable. No loose ends.

He hadn't thought about what he was going to say. He just knew that he could not allow her to go with Hal to the commissariat.

Then he turned the corner and saw her, sitting cross-legged on the low wall that separated the terrace of her property from the deserted public footpath that led along the river. She was smoking and pushing her hands through her hair, talking on a mobile phone. What was she saying?

Julian stopped, suddenly dizzy. Now he could hear her voice, a grating accent, all flat vowels, the one-sided conversation muffled by the pounding of the blood in his head.

He took a step closer, listening. Dr O'Donnell leaned forward and with sharp stabbing movements extinguished a cigarette in a silver ashtray. Certain words leapt out at him. 'I've got to see about the car.'