The Last Secret Of The Temple (37 page)

'Bloody fuck it,' he mumbled.

He drummed his fingers on his knees, defeated, then reached into his pocket and pulled out his hipflask, bringing with it, accidentally, a crumpled sheet of paper – a copy of the picture of Piet Jansen Khalifa had faxed over to him the previous afternoon. He had brought it in the hope that Schlegel might be able to tell him something about it, but he now accepted that that was wishful thinking. Leaning forward, he dropped it into the bin beside the old man's chair before sitting back again, unscrewing the cap of his flask and taking a long gulp.

So intent was Ben-Roi on getting as much of the liquid down his throat as he could before Dr Nissim arrived that he didn't notice Schlegel slowly craning forward, picking the paper out of the bin and staring down at the grainy black and white image. Only when he had drained off the flask's entire contents and was starting to rescrew the cap did he register what the old man was doing.

'Ring any bells?' he grunted, slipping the flask back into his pocket, talking more to himself than to Schlegel. 'But then I guess you haven't any bells left to ring, have you?'

If he caught the sarcasm, the old man didn't show it. What he did do, suddenly, shockingly, was to hold out the picture towards Ben-Roi and, levering open his mouth, unleash the most ferocious, ear-piercing scream the detective had ever heard.

He might not have got all the answers he'd wanted, but one thing at least was clear: Isaac Schlegel knew exactly who Piet Jansen was. And he was terrified of him.

The moment he left the tangled labyrinth of the Old City, passing beneath its walls and back into the outside world, the encounter in the synagogue seemed to recede in Khalifa's mind like a dawn mist evaporating in the heat of the rising sun. By the time he got into the Metro station he was already struggling to recall the interior details of the synagogue and the precise appearance of the man he had met there; and by the time he was back in El-Maadi, walking swiftly along its tree-lined avenues towards the Gratzes' apartment block, he had genuinely started to wonder whether the whole thing hadn't simply been some sort of elaborate daydream. Only those piercing, sapphire-blue eyes and the curious seven-branched lamp lingered with any residual clarity, and even those were catapulted away into the furthest recesses of his consciousness when, rounding a corner, he saw a cluster of police cars and ambulances gathered in front of the Gratzes' apartment building. There must have been dozens of other residents in that particular block, but he knew immediately, instinctively, that it was Piet Jansen's friends who were somehow the focus of all this commotion. He broke into a trot.

'What's going on?' he asked, coming up to the police cordon and flashing his force ID at one of the uniforms on guard there.

'Shooting of some sort,' replied the man. 'Two dead.'

'Oh God! When?'

'A couple of hours ago, maybe more. I'm not sure. I only just got here.'

Cursing himself for not anticipating something like this, Khalifa ducked beneath the tape and, his wooden Horus-statue still clutched incongruously in his hand, hurried into the building and up to the third floor.

The Gratzes' flat was full of people – plain-clothes officers, photographers, forensics guys in white suits and rubber gloves – the air echoing with the hushed, staccato chatter that always seemed to accompany these sort of scenes, part excitement, part nervousness. He asked who was in charge and was pointed towards a door about halfway along the hall from which blared the strobe-like pulse of flashing cameras. He pushed his way down to it, and after a second's hesitation – 'This is my fault,' he was thinking, 'I caused this' – turned inside.

He was in a bedroom, a large double bed in its far corner, the wall behind it spattered with a heavy fan of congealed blood. The bed itself was covered with what Khalifa at first took to be some sort of sheet or throw, but after a moment realized was actually a large red flag with a swastika emblazoned at its centre. This too was drenched in blood and what looked like flecks of meat and skin, its surface depressed and crumpled, as though someone had been lying on it. There was still a faint whiff of cordite in the air – sour, corrosive – and another smell that he couldn't quite place, like burnt almonds. A single black body-bag lay on the floor beside the bed, smooth, shiny, like a giant pupa.

'Who are you?'

A fat bearded man, the detective in charge to judge by his manner, was looking at him from across the room. Khalifa came over and, again flashing his ID, explained why he was there.

'What happened?'

The man grunted, removing a Mars bar from his pocket and tearing away the wrapper.

'Some sort of suicide pact, by the looks of it. Guy blew his brains out' – he nudged the body-bag with the toe of his shoe – 'woman drunk half a bottle of prussic acid. Neighbours heard the gunshot, called us. No third party involved, so far as we can tell.'

He took a hefty bite out of the bar, apparently unperturbed by the blood-spattered walls and sheets.

'Never seen anything like it,' he garbled, mouth full of chocolate. 'The two of them lying there on the bed, hand in hand, place like an abattoir, him in some sort of military uniform, her in a wedding dress, for God's sake. Weird.'

He crammed the rest of the bar in his mouth, and, turning away, gesticulated at a photographer, indicating that he wanted more pictures of the blood-stained flag. Khalifa pulled out his cigarettes, received a disapproving look from one of the forensics guys who were crawling around the floor, and pocketed them again.

'It's cursed,' he thought to himself. 'This whole case. Everything I do, everywhere I turn, nothing but dead ends and death and horror. I hate it. Hate the whole thing.'

'Where's the woman's body?' he asked after a moment.

'Hmm?' The detective turned back to him. 'Oh, they've taken her up to As-Salam International. Pumped her stomach, or whatever the hell it is they do in these situations.'

It was a second before the significance of these words struck Khalifa.

'I thought . . .' A sharp jolt speared up his spine. 'I was told they were both dead.'

'What? No, no, the old woman survived, although only just. Another twenty minutes and she'd have ended up like her husband.' He gave the body-bag another nudge with his foot. 'Lucky. Or unlucky, depending on which way you look at it. Wearing a fucking wedding dress, she was. Weirdest thing I ever—'

He didn't get the chance to finish the sentence, because Khalifa had already swung round and hurried from the room.

Layla pulled the hire-car, a bruise-coloured Renault Clio, over into the lay-by and, leaving its engine running, leant forward and looked up through the windscreen at the ramparts of Montségur Castle high above. She remained like this for a moment, taking in the blank grey walls, the rearing, skull-shaped dome of rock on which the castle perched like a ship riding the crest of a tidal wave; then, sitting back again and throwing a glance at the map on the passenger seat beside her, she swung back out onto the road and continued on her way.

It took her another twenty minutes to reach Castelombres. She had bought a couple of guide books back in Toulouse, which was fortunate because without them she would have struggled to find Castelombres village – no more than a scattered string of houses and farm buildings that didn't even show up on the map – and would have had no hope whatsoever of locating its ruined castle, which was three kilometres outside the hamlet and well off the beaten trail. Even with the books the ruins were still by no means easy to find, involving a bumpy ride along a steep track that hairpinned its way high into the hills, and then a walk across two boggy fields and up through a thick coppice of hawthorn and giant boxwood, following a sharply climbing path that must once have been reasonably well kept but was now so overgrown as to be virtually indistinguishable from the surrounding vegetation. So remote was the castle's location, so completely hidden away, that she was actually on the point of retracing her steps, thinking she must have taken a wrong turning somewhere, when the coppice suddenly dropped away to either side of her and she found herself standing on a broad, grassy terrace cut deep into the hillside with spectacular views over the surrounding hills and down into the river valley below. A broken wooden sign to her left announced ÂTEAU DE CASTELOMBRES.

Whoever had razed the castle had done a thorough job, because there was almost nothing of it left, just a few scattered blocks of stone, a couple of collapsed walls – the tallest of them no more than knee height – and a single pock-marked pillar lying on its side in a clump of grass like a rotten log. Only one thing hinted at what must once have been a substantial building, and that was a magnificent arch at the far end of the terrace, very tall, very narrow, its stonework clasped by winding tendrils of black ivy, its apex rising to a sharp point that seemed to scratch at the sky like a pen-nib scrawling across a sheet of grey parchment.

Layla walked over to it, assuming it must be some sort of door or gateway, only realizing as she got up close that it was actually the remains of a window, beautifully constructed, with a delicate tracery of loops and spirals incised into its face, and here and there, just visible beneath the heavy jacket of ivy, tiny flowers carved out of the stone. There was something unbearably melancholy about it, standing there all on its own, a solitary eye gazing out over the hills, and after staring at it for a moment she turned away again, pulled her jacket around her against the chill wind that had suddenly blown up from the south, and wandered off around the remainder of the ruins.

Whatever the Germans had been doing here they seemed to have left no trace of their presence, and after twenty minutes she grew bored of the place and started back towards the path that had led up through the coppice. As she did so there was a swoosh and rustle of branches from below, accompanied by the slow pad of feet, the sounds growing steadily louder until eventually an elderly, red-faced woman emerged through the foliage onto the terrace. She was wearing Wellington boots and a heavy brown coat, and had a large wickerwork basket three-quarters full of mushrooms clutched in her hand.

'Bonjour,'
she said when she saw Layla, her thick Languedoc accent elongating and twisting the word so it came out more as 'bangjooor'.

Layla reciprocated the greeting, adding, for the sake of politeness, a couple of complimentary remarks about the size of the woman's mushroom harvest.

'Oh, it's not a bad haul,' she said, smiling. 'It's not really the season, but you can still find them if you know where to look. You're Spanish?'

'Palestinian.'

The woman raised her eyebrows, a mildly surprised look on her face.

'You are on holiday?'

'I'm a journalist.'

'Ah.'

She crossed to the nearest stone block, set the basket down on top of it and began working her way through its contents, sifting the mushrooms, examining them.

'I suppose you're here to do an article on the Germans,' she said after a brief silence.

Layla shrugged, driving her hands into the pockets of her jacket.

'You remember them?' she asked.

The woman shook her head. 'Not really. I was only five at the time. I remember them all staying in a house at the end of the village, and my father telling us that we weren't to talk to them, weren't to go anywhere near the castle, but apart from that . . .'

She shrugged, held up a large yellow mushroom and sniffed its crumpled cap, giving a satisfied nod and holding it out towards Layla.

'Girolle,' she explained.

Layla leant forward and breathed in the mushroom's scent, her nostrils filling with a rich, earthy odour.

'Beautiful,' she said. And then, just for the hell of it, 'What do you think they found up here?'

The woman grunted, dropping the mushroom back into the basket.

'I don't think they found anything. It makes a good story, but the truth is people have been digging holes up here for centuries looking for buried treasure. If there was anything to find it would have been discovered long before the Germans arrived. Or at least that's what I think. There are others who would disagree.'

From somewhere far off there was a distant rumble of thunder.

'You didn't hear about the crate they took away with them?' asked Layla.

The woman waved a hand dismissively. 'Oh I heard about it. But I never saw it. And even if they did take a crate away, that doesn't mean there was anything in it. It could have been full of rocks for all we know. Or empty. No, I think the whole thing's an old wives' tale. Complete rubbish.'

She held up another mushroom, examined it, then, with a tut, threw it aside into the undergrowth.

'If you want to do a story about Castelombres, you should write about the children.'

Layla frowned. 'The children?'

'The Jewish children. The twins. I sometimes think it's the reason everyone in the village spends so much time going on about treasure and crates and what-not. To try and forget what happened to them. Divert attention.'

Again Layla frowned, not understanding. 'What twins?'

The woman paused for a moment, then, laying aside the basket, sat herself down on the stone. There was another faint rumble of thunder, the trees whispering and hissing as their branches shuddered in the wind.

'Their parents sent them down here from Paris,' she said, gazing out over the wooded hills. 'After the Germans invaded. Paid a local farmer to take them in. Thought they'd be safer here, in the south, out of the occupied zone, being Jews and all that. Like I said, I was only five at the time, but I remember them very clearly, especially the girl. We used to play together, although she was older. Ten or eleven. Hannah, that was her name. And her brother Isaac' She sighed and shook her head. 'A terrible thing, it was. A terrible thing.' She looked up at Layla. 'The Germans found them, you see. Up here, at the castle. Playing. They didn't mean any harm, they were only children, but it didn't make any difference. No-one was supposed to go near the ruins. The man in charge – horrible man, wicked – he brought them down to the village and stood them in the street: I'll never forget it, as long as I live, the two of them standing there side by side, terrified, so small, and the man screaming that if anyone disobeyed his orders again he would do to them what he was going to do to these Jew vermin. That's what he called them. Jew vermin. And then he beat them, right there in front of us, with his own hands. Little children. Beat them unconscious. And no-one in the village, not a single person, did anything to help them. Not a single voice was raised, not even when they threw them in a truck and drove them away.'

She shook her head sadly.

'Isaac and Hannah, that's what they were called. I sometimes wonder what happened to them. Died in the gas chambers, I expect. It's them you should be writing about, the real secret of Castelombres, not all this rubbish about buried treasure. But then, being a Palestinian, maybe that sort of thing doesn't interest you.'

She swung her eyes out over the hills again, then, with a sigh, got to her feet, picked up her basket and, with a glance up at the sky, which had turned a forbidding slate grey, said that she ought to be on her way.

'It was nice meeting you,' she said. 'I hope you enjoy the rest of your stay.'

She smiled, raised a hand in farewell and, turning, set off across the terrace, disappearing into a clump of fir trees on the slope above, her basket of mushrooms swinging in her hand. There was a third groan of thunder, nearer this time, and it started to rain, heavy drops spilling down from above as though the sky was weeping.