‘But you do know him! Don’t try to deny it!’ exclaimed Margont. ‘Who is he?’

‘Hermann Teyhern ...’

‘What?’ cried Relmyer.

The man was panic-stricken. He said desperately: ‘I live peacefully at home, I didn’t see anything and I don’t speak French. I’ll give you back the money you paid me to bring the dogs. I don’t understand anything about this business and I swear I will say nothing

*

Margont tried in vain to question him more closely about Teyhern, then had to agree to let him depart. The farmer did not wait to be told twice and fled with his dogs. Margont went back to Relmyer. ‘The assassin knows Teyhern well because he falsified the records for him. He realised that our quest would eventually lead us here, or at least he knew that Teyhern’s tampering had been discovered. So he had to get rid of Teyhern. But he didn’t mutilate his face: he didn’t treat him the way he normally treats his victims. He took the key to the house and he put his own portrait in the salon. Then he carefully concealed the body. We managed to find his accomplice, but our trail ends here.’

Relmyer began to rant at the corpse in German, asking it how it could have acted in that way. Pagin and another hussar stood in his path, because it really seemed as if he might fling himself on the body and beat it.

CHAPTER 28

THAT evening, everyone was back in his respective encampment. The sky was cloudy. The tension was visible on the men’s faces. Soldiers were bivouacking as far as the eye could see: on the plains, in the fields, in the villages, the farms, the barns, the woods, the forest...

Margont paced in a circle, arms crossed, brow furrowed, as he used to do as a child in his monastic cell at Saint-Guilhem-le-Desert.le-Desert. He kept repeating that he refused to admit defeat, but actually, it was worse than that: he couldn’t allow himself to give up.

‘Did you see how badly Relmyer reacted?’

Lefine nodded, not adding that Margont was hardly taking it any better.

‘He’s just lucky that his major closed his eyes to his absence. It has to be said that Batichut adores Relmyer, he reminds him of himself at twenty ... Could you stop pacing up and down?’

‘No.’

‘It’s over,’ decreed Lefine. ‘The assassin beat us. He’s cleverer than us, or luck gave him all the best cards, a very fine hand. Now there’s only one thing we have to concentrate on: the battle to come. Let’s do our work, and try to come out of it alive with all our limbs intact. I’m quite happy to fight to the death as long as it’s not my death.’

‘But we haven’t lost yet!’

‘Apparently we’re lining up a hundred and ninety thousand men and six hundred cannon! And the Austrians, probably about a hundred and forty thousand and four hundred pieces of artillery. My source is reliable; it’s one of my friends who serves on the general staff. But where did they find those three hundred and thirty thousand soldiers? You’d think they bought them at auction. Bids for victory, please! I have a hundred thousand men for the Austrians, a hundred thousand! A hundred and twenty thousand for Napoleon, yes I did say a hundred and twenty thousand! A hundred and forty thousand for the Archduke! Come on, Monsieur

Napoleon, make an effort, damn you! A hundred and ninety thousand for the French? By thunder, he just doesn’t want to lose, the bugger! Have you ever seen two such enormous armies facing each other? How many will we be next time, ten million against ten million?’

‘It was all too perfect and that’s what’s wrong with it!' exclaimed Margont.

‘It’s all very well, numerical superiority, except that each time one of our regiments reaches Austrian soil, all the enemy divisions are going to converge their fire against it. The regiments will arrive one by one, in single file, so we will always find ourselves one against ten. That will mean a succession of little Battles of Essling. The Austrians will methodically crush us as we arrive. If the Emperor does not find a way of parrying their attack, we will all be massacred, even if there were to be a million of us!’

Margont stared at him long and hard.

‘What are you talking about, with your millions? Are you actually going to listen to me? The murderer was just putting us off his

trail with Teyhern. But it was too perfect, too well executed to be totally false. It’s in the word “too” that the solution lies. We have not stopped drawing closer to the assassin: we have discovered that the registers were tampered with, Relmyer forced him to show himself again, we know that he serves in the Viennese Volunteer regiment ... The false trail of Teyhern worked: Relmyer believed in it, so did I ... The man we’re looking for panicked after the setback of the ambush. He had very little time to put together the scheme that made us confuse him with Teyhern. Think about the difficulties he must have overcome to set up that scenario ... Our man had to prepare his crime rapidly because a large part of his time was taken up with the army. How could he have acted so quickly? He must have known Teyhern very well, he knew everything about him. What’s more, for him to leave us such a precious clue as his portrait must mean that he’s starting to lose his grip! We are so close to the real culprit! It’s as if we’re in the right street but we knocked at the wrong door. The assassin and Teyhern knew each other extremely well! We have to find out more about this

Teyhern.’

Lefine seized a stick and shook up the fire, which was cooking the soup rather slowly.

‘We have a hundred and forty thousand Austrians on one side and a murderer on the other, and you choose to worry about the murderer? We’ll see to it after the battle! I know, it’s possible that the man has locked up a young boy somewhere. But that’s only a hypothesis.’

‘I really believe it is a possibility. And that’s not all. We are very close to him, he has murdered his accomplice, the Austrian army is investigating the business of the falsified records ... For him, it’s the end: he has held out a long time, but his world of hypocrisies and of manipulations is beginning to crack at the seams. If we don’t name him, Relmyer will, or Luise, or the Austrian military authorities ... He’s going to flee, Fernand. He knows that someone is going to unmask him, it’s no longer a question of weeks; he knows it will happen in days. The battle is keeping us here, because there are so many patrols on the lookout for deserters. But,

as soon as he has the chance, he will leave the region, possibly Austria. We’re running out of time to catch him.’

Margont finally stopped pacing up and down; he had just taken a decision.

‘I’m going to see Luise. Only she can find out about Teyhern.’ ‘You’re joking! What about our orders? We are not allowed to leave our regiments. The imperial police don’t take it lightly when a battle is imminent.’

‘Jean-Quenin can scrawl me a note. He can pretend that I’ve come down with typhus and they’ll send me away in horror. I’ll leave straight away. I’ll be back before nightfall.’

Margont was too stubborn to allow anyone to change his mind. If the major wondered about his absence, Lefine, Saber and Pique-bois would come up with something. They were used to doing that.

CHAPTER 29

MARGONT made his way amongst the cohorts of regiments, crossing long convoys of artillery that blocked the roads, regiments that were behind schedule, recovered invalids looking for their battalions, impatient couriers ... In Vienna, he skirted round the large avenues, his horse splashing through the mud of the narrow streets, while the large thoroughfares rang to the sound of the hoofs of the squadrons.

Luise was watching the troop movements from her window. She was hoping to see Relmyer or Margont pass by, unlikely as that was, and she despaired at the size of the army that was about to be unleashed against her own side. She was dumbfounded when she saw Margont silhouetted against the garden gate. She hastened to go to open it for him, deaf to her mother’s protestations, and led him into a back room, while Margont apologised profusely.