Joe recognized a manly challenge when it was thrown at his feet. Intrigued, he raised his brows and smiled his acceptance but didn’t pursue the matter. In any case, he preferred to come at a crime scene with a mind uncluttered by other people’s views.
He nodded goodbye to Guy de Pacy and stood for a moment before the great oak door trying to work out how on earth to operate the unfamiliar foreign latch.
‘Turn the central knob and lift. It’s heavy!’ de Pacy called back over his shoulder.
Strangely, it was exactly the troubadour’s soulful reactions that Joe found himself experiencing as the door clunked shut behind him and he was left alone.
The south-westerly sun angled through the stained glass windows, stencilling the paved floor with a pattern of rich colour. Vert, gules and azure—it was the heraldic names that sprang first into Joe’s mind in this medieval setting. Green, red and blue. The fairy-tale colours illuminated the only thing that moved in this dim and quiet place—dust motes. Disturbed by the opening and closing of the door, they were eddying in the rays and rising to the sculpted roof above.
Joe observed their dance. A police scientist had told him once—and demonstrated with a high-powered Zeiss microscope in the CID laboratory—that ‘dust’ was not a simple substance. Perhaps Joe was even now watching flakes of human skin mingling in the air with minute shards of pounded stone. Perhaps if he made his way in further he would breathe in a blend of aggressor and victim? Good Lord! Joe shook away the fanciful thought. But he could see how a young man like Padraic might get carried away by this atmosphere.
He breathed in uncertainly. He doubted that ‘thick’ was a suitable word to describe a scent but it was the first one that came to mind. Centuries of devotion and incense clotted the air and there was something else. A base note. Joe’s nostrils twitched in distaste. Rotting lilies. He glanced towards the altar but failed to spot the wilting blooms. But of course the flowers would not have been changed following the ban on entering. There were jugs of water and empty flower vases standing ready on a table. No flowers.
He began to make his way towards the object of everyone’s concern. There it stood, built up with one long side abutting the north wall. The table-top tomb of Lord Hugues de Silmont, famous survivor of some crusade or other. Joe resolved to fill in the gaps of his knowledge. And, lying by his side, his even more famous wife, the Lady Aliénore.
Rendered widower in his lifetime by the early death of his young wife, the old boy was once more, after a sleep of six hundred years, bereft of her charming presence. There he lay all alone, calmly oblivious of the raw gap in the matrimonial bed. All vestige of the sweet girl had been hacked and broken away. At least, not quite all. Sir Hugues’ feet rested on the body of a carved lion. A docile beast looking much more like a Pekinese dog, Joe thought. Still, rendering the heraldic beast small enough to slip under a man’s size tens was an impossible task for any sculptor, Joe allowed. His wife’s feet had rested on the shape of a sleek little greyhound. A whippet perhaps? Were they known in those days or had the sculptor scaled it down in size as he had the lion? The dog remained untouched. Its tail curled down cleverly over the tomb top and at the other end its nose was slightly tilted in adoration of its mistress. The poor creature now gazed with sad eyes at the empty extent of white marble on which she had reclined. So realistic was the carving, Joe almost expected to hear a throaty whine of distress. He patted the sleek haunches and murmured: ‘I know—it’s a bugger, old mate!’
He looked around him to spot the remains. And there she was as Padraic had described her. A pile of largish pieces placed in a careful pyramid in the corner between the north and west walls. Joe walked over to take a closer look. Two small slippered feet poked out from the bottom of the heap and from the top there extended vertically one slender white arm, its clenched, beringed hand appearing to offer a pathetic gesture of defiance.
He approached, eyes scanning the thick layer of dust on the floor. He grunted in disappointment to see two or three different shoe patterns, all so scuffed as to be indistinguishable from each other. He paused on the fringe of the disturbed area and scanned the remains.
On a red silk kneeling cushion carefully placed centrally at the bottom of the small cairn was Aliénore’s head. The luxuriant gilded hair shorn by hammer blows, the nose smashed, the famous lips pounded into a gaping hole, none of her features remained intact. For a giddy moment Joe wrestled with a thought that had, he did believe, been seeded deliberately in him by the studied distribution of the remains. Celtic. The symbolism was connecting him with the head-hunting, head-worshipping Celts. But that was to do the Celts an injustice. The lopping off and triumphant display of an enemy’s head, if distasteful to a civilized man, was at least comprehensible. This vaunting, unreasoning destruction was beyond the realms of human understanding.
Joe felt his limbs begin to twitch with disgust and rage. He could contemplate and draw evidence from the bodies of the recently dead and remain stolidly calm, so why this overreaction to a piece of old stone?
He was being manipulated and had felt the pull on his strings, the pressure on his back, the opening of a path from the moment he arrived in this frightful place. The thought that pushed all others aside was that here, amongst a group of people who would all declare themselves dedicated to the creation of beauty, was concealed a soul who could take an obscene pleasure in destroying something more lovely than anything their hands were capable of producing. Surely such a soul would stand out like a block of black iron amongst these tinkling, golden, ephemeral but well-meaning daubers? A hornet amongst the butterflies?
Unsettled, Joe breathed in cautiously and wondered. The stink here was strong. And he wasn’t detecting lilies. Had the steward not been so firmly in control of his stomach as the experienced Joe and vomited in some dark corner? No. The man had survived four years of war. He would have recognized rotting flesh as easily as Joe and not been physically perturbed by it. But perhaps the flesh, wherever it was, had not yet begun to rot at the time de Pacy visited?
Joe followed his nose back to the tomb. His eye ran along the Latin engraving that encircled the three sides of the monument exposed to view. Hic iacet Hugus Silmontis, it read, under a swag of twining ivy, along the short west end facing the door, followed by armiger honoratus Provinciae along the long side. Four words completed the statement and acknowledged his wife: et Alienora, uxor sua was engraved across the short east end.
Dangling from a projecting curl of ivy was the source of the stench.
Chapter Eight
Marseille, Monday lunchtime
Commissaire Francis Jacquemin of the Paris Police Judiciaire, lean, attractive and gallantly moustached, was enjoying a rare moment of unbuttoned ease. Two buttons to be precise. It was as far as decorum would allow. He had released his waistcoat to this extent under cover of the voluminous table napkin that defended his white shirt from the unctuous saffron-coloured sauce of the dish he was just finishing.
He ran a finger round his starched collar to release a surge of body heat created by the spices and sighed. ‘Bliss! Utter bliss, my friend! Damned good idea to take ourselves off the hook and come out and celebrate. This is my first taste of bouillabaisse and—I’m sure you’re right—the best in Marseille. Nothing like this to be had in Paris!’ He took another sip of his chilled champagne.