The Third Antichrist (12 page)

Unlike the hallway, which had nightlights burning at floor level, the Countess’s bedroom was in total darkness. Abi paused for a moment to allow his eyes to get used to the gloom.

He slowly began to make out a hump in the centre of the bed. The one thing he really needed was for Madame, his mother, to have her face tilted either upwards or to the side. Chances were, at her age, that her mouth would be hanging open like a cargo door. In that case he would take the vial and drip the liquid through her lips. She’d be dead before she knew it.

He would stay around long enough to make sure she had no pulse, and then retrace his steps, locking up behind him. The only problem would be the outside cellar door. But he wasn’t overly concerned about that. Nobody ever used it. It might be years before anyone found that it was unlocked. And by that time he would no doubt be living in the house himself, as eldest son and erstwhile inheritor of Monsieur, his father’s, titles. Not to mention Madame, his mother’s, money.

As Abi approached the bed, the first prickle of disquiet ran through him. The hump at the centre was far larger than he might have assumed from his mother’s size. He stopped and flared his eyes. He was beginning to pick up the glow from the dashboard of a cordless telephone at his mother’s bedside. The telephone cast a luminous haze across the bed.

Abi now saw that there were two heads on the bolster.

He froze. Milouins. That whoreson Milouins. Was he in here? Was Milouins his mother’s lover? That would answer a good few questions he’d been aching to ask over the years.

Abi inched closer. It was crazy, but if he could drip the poison into the Countess’s mouth while Milouins was asleep beside her, things would be even tighter. There’d be no room for discussion then. He could fly back in from Boston in a day or two and make an almighty fuss. Insist that they do an autopsy on her body. Incriminate Milouins. Get rid of the bastard that way.

But then someone was bound to ask him how he had known that Milouins was actually in bed with his mother at the time of her death. It was hardly likely that Milouins would own up off his own bat, was it? No. Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea after all. Just kill her and have done with it. That was the ticket.

Abi took a further pace towards the bed. He could hardly bring himself to breathe. If Milouins woke up he would be for it. His mother would never forgive him for finding out her secret. He’d be lucky to make it out of the house in less than a dozen pieces.

Yes. That was his mother’s head. And beside her...

Abi stopped. His mouth fell open.

Madame Mastigou.

Jesus Christ.

Madame Mastigou was in bed with his mother.

Madame, his mother, was a lesbian.

Abi hugged himself by the upper arms. Shockwaves of adrenalin flooded through his body. For a brief moment he was tempted to burst into a fit of hysterical laughter.

What was he to do now? There they were, side by side in bed, Madame, his mother, and her private secretary, Madame Mastigou. He couldn’t kill both of them, could he? Couldn’t make a clean sweep. That would be a bit of a giveaway.

Abi shook his head like a dog with ear mites. Who would have thought it? He’d never have come up with that idea in a thousand years. But there had been Madame Mastigou, for near enough the past quarter of a century, brash as daylight, and always at his mother’s right hand. And everybody knew that Monsieur, his father, had had his lunch pack blown off during the war. The whole thing was hardly surprising when you looked at it in that light.

No wonder Madame Mastigou and Milouins had frozen the children out at every opportunity. Because Milouins must have known the truth from the start. In a small household such as this one, secrets like that were hard to keep. That must be why he and the other children had been farmed out so early on in their Corpus careers, and only allowed home on special occasions. Within the hidebound – let’s face it, even reactionary – milieu in which the Countess customarily moved, any overt recognition of her Sapphic tendencies would have been tantamount to committing social suicide.

Had Rocha known about it too? He’d been the oldest of them all – already a teenager when he’d been adopted. Maybe that was why he’d changed his name to Achor Bale, abandoned the family, and gone crazy? People rarely joined the Foreign Legion simply for the hell of it.

Abi stood over the two sleeping women and weighed up his options. It was a peaceful scene. The glow from the cordless telephone was so clear now that he could even make out their matching nightdresses in the semidarkness.

Well. Killing his mother would soon make things right again. He’d happily give a million of his yet-to-be inherited euros to see Madame Mastigou’s face first thing in the morning when she woke up beside her late girlfriend’s rigid corpse. If you could call a seventy-something-year-old woman a girlfriend.

He reached up to his collar for the
Antiaris toxicaria
.

The door crashed open behind him and the lights came on.

Abi swung round, his mouth hanging open like a startled cat’s.

Milouins was standing at the door. He didn’t even have a gun. He just stood there, supremely confident that nothing, and no one, could reasonably get past him.

Behind his left shoulder Abi could hear Madame, his mother, and her partner, Madame Mastigou, stirring in their bed.

Abi felt sick to the depths of his heart. Like a man who has mislaid a winning lottery ticket. His recent run of bad luck was turning into an epidemic.

He dropped his hands to his sides to demonstrate that he held no weapon. Maybe Milouins hadn’t seen the movement towards his collar? Maybe he could still talk himself out of the noose?

‘I’m here to see my mother. In private. I don’t trust telephones anymore. I need to speak to her alone. It’s an emergency.’ The explanation sounded lame in the extreme. But it was all that Abi had, for the time being, in his armoury.

Madame Mastigou helped Madame, his mother, out of bed. They both reached for their dressing gowns. Watching them, Abi felt a pall of despair descend upon him. The Countess did not forgive lightly. If Milouins searched him and found the poison, he would be for it. There’d be no forgiveness. He’d be lucky not to end up as pigswill.

‘How did you know I was here?’ Abi tried to make his voice sound as unconcerned as possible. As if it were a common occurrence for him to be discovered lurking in someone else’s bedroom, at 3.30 in the morning, clutching a vial of poison.

Milouins grinned. ‘Pressure pad. Beneath the carpet at the top of the stairs. You’d have to stretch a yard or more to miss it. It’s specially designed for idiots like you.’

Abi gritted his teeth and threw back his head. ‘Stupid. So stupid.’

He straightened up, hoping that this would galvanize his mother into suggesting they move to another location. He felt awkward in her bedroom. As though being there further reinforced his guilt in the eyes of the others. As a child he and his siblings had never, ever, invaded the holy sanctum of his mother’s private apartments. They had been inviolable. Like the House of the Vestals.

Some Vestal.

‘Milouins. Search him.’

Abi raised his arms. He’d been expecting this. He kept his left arm as tight to his shirt top as possible, hoping that this would hamper Milouins from checking out his collar. But he soon came to realize, thanks to the relaxed postures of all those in the room, that no one – not even Milouins – was figuring him for a potential assassin. For the time being at least he was a familial intruder who had been caught doing something terminally dumb. I mean who, apart from Orestes, went around murdering his own mother? It simply wasn’t done.

Abi wound down a notch. His position might be salvageable after all. Especially if he pretended that Madame Mastigou was not standing there beside the Countess, like the Sugar Plum Fairy, still in her dressing gown and nightie.

‘I’m desperately sorry I woke you up, Madame. But I needed to speak to you privately. Without any witnesses. And I didn’t want to incriminate you in any way. As far as the authorities are concerned I am not here. Technically speaking, I am over in Boston. So I didn’t want anybody to see me who might later be able to testify that I was ever here.’

Awkward. Too awkward. He needed to be more fluent. Abi’s eyes flicked towards Milouins and Madame Mastigou. He wasn’t on firm ground with them, and he knew it. And particularly given what he had just seen.

Milouins stepped back from his work. ‘He is clean, Madame. No weapons.’

Abi could feel his throat deconstricting. Milouins hadn’t found the poison. He felt a sudden, irrational surge of confidence in his bargaining abilities, and in his capacity for survival. He’d managed to climb out of the cenote, hadn’t he? And finagle himself back to France against all the odds? So how difficult could this be?

‘And why are you over in Boston, Abiger? Technically speaking?’

Well, thought Abi, in the final analysis you might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. ‘To protect you, Madame. And the Corpus.’

‘And the others? I suppose you are going to tell me that they are in Boston too? Technically speaking, that is.’

‘No, Madame. They are dead. It is a tragedy. I am the only one still alive. I am sorry to be the one to bring you this news.’

‘Dead, you say? How did they die?’

Abi was getting a very bad feeling indeed. Madame, his mother, was taking all this far too calmly. He had expected his last statement to demonstrably shock her – to confirm all her worst fears. But she appeared to be taking it in her stride. As if receiving news of the death of eight of her adopted children was an everyday occurrence.

Fortunately, during his flight back to France, Abi had concocted a detailed fall-back story for just such an eventuality. In it, the
narcotraficantes
had machine-gunned everybody in cold blood from the lip of the cenote, and he alone had managed to hide out amongst the floating bodies and survive the massacre. For reasons that now eluded him, however, Abi decided to jettison that version of events and construct a new one. On the hoof, as it were.

‘I mean I presume they are dead, Madame. In fact I am sure they are dead. At least Oni, Asson, Vau, Berith, and Alastor are. For I saw their corpses.’

‘Explain yourself.’

Abi made a last-ditch attempt to extract himself from the hole he had just dug. ‘I called you from near the cenote, Madame, as you may recall, to bring you up to date on our situation. A few minutes after I did this the
narcotraficantes
attacked us, and we were forced backwards into the cenote itself. That’s when we lost the use of our cell phones.’

‘Why did you behave so foolishly? Why didn’t you face up to your attackers like a man?’

Abi could feel himself bridling. He forced back his outrage. This was what his mother always did. She tested him. Just as she tested everybody. It was her party trick. ‘We were massively outnumbered, Madame. And they were using tear gas and stun grenades, whereas we only had the weapons we escaped the warehouse with – pump-action shotguns, pistols, and the like. Useless against larger ordnance. We made the assumption that there might be some other way of escaping through the cenote. Maybe via an underground channel. Something like that.’

‘That’s absurd. You must have been panicking.’

‘No, Madame. We were not panicking. But we had no alternative. It was either that or certain death. We knew that Vau, Alastor, Asson and Berith must have been killed in the initial battle. Their bodies were later dumped down in the cenote so I know this to be true.’

‘They killed Oni in the initial battle too?’

‘No, Madame. They only got him later. He came to save us. He killed all the
narcotraficantes
. Just mowed them down in swathes. But one survived. The
cacique
. He was riddled with bullets. But still, somehow, he survived. When Oni went to throw down the hosepipe so we could climb back up, the
cacique
emerged from amongst the other dead bodies and killed him. Then the
cacique
shot himself. We were alone after that.’

‘I knew my Oni wouldn’t let me down.’ For a moment it looked as if the Countess might even be feeling a little pain – might even be about to reach behind herself for Madame Mastigou’s hand. But she pulled herself together and the moment soon passed. Her expression hardened. ‘What happened next?’

‘Rudra, Nawal, Dakini and I spent what was left of the daylight hours retrieving any useful objects from a car we had previously ditched in the cenote. The next day, at dawn, I made my bid to climb to the summit of the cenote. Against all the odds I made it. I went immediately to get the
cacique’s
car. I intended to attach a tow line to it and pull Rudra, Dakini, and Nawal out of the pit. But just as I reached the car, fresh elements of the
cacique’s
gang arrived at the plantation.’ Abi allowed his eyes to grow misty. ‘This is hard for me to say.’

‘Please make the effort. I wish to hear exactly what happened.’

Abi was clearly fighting a losing battle with his emotions – at least so far as the onlookers were concerned. He drew the line, however, at pretending to brush back an actual tear. Apart from with his twin brother, Vau, Abi had never pretended to have a particularly close relationship to any of his other siblings. If he started shedding crocodile tears at this stage of the proceedings, nobody would believe him. He would be as good as signing his own death warrant.