Ghosts from the Past

by Sally Spedding

  “Me what?”

  The last of those red tail lights came into view. My adrenalin rush short-lived. Truth was on her lips ready to maim me some more.

  “Putting you back together again.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  Shit.

  I had to brake hard. That convoy was taking an unsigned turning right and slowing down.

  “Jesus Christ!” Alison’s hands covered her face. You really are bonkers.”

  “Not as bad as some.” Thinking of the Deschamps and the loose-canon aunt. Those black-headed images in Mathieu’s sketchbook all too clear. That young artist now in danger of death…

  “Look!”

  *

  A vast, old windmill loomed up to our left, blacker than the dawn sky, bigger than any I’d ever seen on my escapes from work into Norfolk. Its splintered sails slowly turning, creaking like so many death rattles as they did so, their noise echoing into the car. Of those trucks there was no sign. It was as if that flat, treeless place had swallowed them whole. Unless…

  I pulled up, killed my lights and let down my window to sniff the surroundings for clues.

  “Definitely diesel,” I whispered. So where the hell are they?”

  “Hang on.” Alison’s head cocked in the windmill’s direction. “Did you hear that? Like some animal. There it is again.” She was opening her door, pulling up her anorak hood over her hair. Checking her torch.

  “Stay here.” I tried holding her back. “Let’s just watch. See what happens.”

  “You’re on your own.”

  “Look, only a minute ago you were…”

  But Alison had gone. My words of protest fading after her.

  *

  I ran and fell, not once but twice. My still-buggered left ankle tearing at all my nerves while that giant wooden monstrosity’s appendages almost scraped my bare head. Their din rocking my brain.

  A weathered door designed for midgets stood slightly ajar. The date carved on it was 1878. I ducked too late on my way in. and cursed. The smell inside the windmill reminded me of Karen Fürst’s spare tower, used as a store. Musty the wrong word. The air trapped inside the structure was thick with the dust of ages - human, animal, insect… Grinding stones too. Huge and broken, whle rusted machinery lay half-buried in the soft ground beneath my feet. I looked up expecting to see a meal floor and the rest, but everything except the upright shaft had gone.

  So where was Alison?

  And then, from somewhere close by came the whiff of perfume. Not hers, that was for sure. This was way too strong. Then came the warm addition of another’s breath stroking my neck.

  “Well, Monsieur Lyon,” came a woman’s voice I half-recognised. “We meet at last.”

  27. Odette.

  Sunday `13th March 5.15 a.m.

  My sense of freedom hadn’t lasted long enough. I’d since become a fugitive, aware that somewhere under that barely light, shifting sky, I was being followed.

  Jacques and I had both bred and handled enough livestock to realise that fear delivers many things to the target. Yet here, there was none. Not even my beloved, late husband risen from his grave to hold me and bring me back to our huge hearth where, on winter nights, Christine would sit to the left and Elisabeth to the right, watching its dead, wooden cargo become grey ash. Those honeycombed beams he’d sawn up every autumn when recurring termites had done their worst. When orange dust had coloured his thinning hair and coated his lips…

  But the beams in La Cathédrale had remained solid. Unmolested. Why they’d been chosen for that terrible hanging. By whom?

  Jacques, help me.

  My favourite old bag had grown heavier with every step I’d taken. My coat an extra thick skin and my breath stinging my ribs each time I breathed or called out to my young nephew who’d always been scared of the dark. But only the swaying, ungathered maize now surrounding me, replied.

  *

  A defunct farmstead, I could tell. Another bien that couldn’t be sold and would, month by month and year by year, sink and buckle into the ground from which it had sprung.

  I needed an angel. Some benign presence to lead me to my youngest daughter’s boy and keep him safe from her own sister’s dark, grasping heart.

  I can recall as if it was yesterday when Elisabeth and I had seen him just hours after he’d entered the world. A tiny, red morsel topped by a thatch of dark hair, later to lighten, but still with the look of a stranger.

  Alain had stayed away to see his lawyer about a doping slur, so Christine had been even more pleased to see us, even though her sister’s crysanthemums weren’t the most auspicious flowers to bring as a gift. Twelve-year-old Laure had stuck her tongue out at the peaceful little soul and straightaway called him ‘un maggot.’

  Sssshh….

  There it is again. That soft, repetitive sound. The brush of maize against what?

  “Dear God,” I began. “I know my faith has lapsed but please, please let me live to save him.”

  I found a lime tree and pressed myself against its ragged bark, holding my breath. Un… deux… trois… My pursuer was drawing closer. A sudden snap of light dissolved into a pale beam trained first on my tracks, then up the tree.

  “Madame?”

  My old heart seemed to stop working. I pressed myself even closer to the tree trunk, wishing it was thicker, like that that of my wedding present apple tree by Les Tourels’ front door. A spider began crawling down my nose.

  Don’t sneeze. Don’t move…

  Here was definitely a man, but who? Monsieur Lyon, the former Detective Inspector? Some lost, foreign tourist?

  Non. This one was French, now reciting an Ave to the sound of beads jostling together. My CO during the war had originated from the Mayenne, so I could tell the Normandy accent a mile off.

  Help me, Theo…

  “Please don’t be afraid,” that same voice began. “My name’s François Leboeuf. A part-time priest from Lisieux. I noticed you from the road back there. I’m no Good Samaritan, but I was concerned, especially it being so early in the morning…”

  What morning? The sky’s still barely light…

  I peered round from my flimsy sanctuary, and immediately, a tall figure dressed in a long raincoat filled my vision. A flash of white showed between his lapels and although his face was in darkness, his right hand was still busy on his beads. My heartbeat thudded in my ears as I compared my real home and its familiar rooms snatched by the ‘black cuckoo,’ with my small space at the Home. My bed made up and Aimée wondering where I’d got to. If this was to be the end of my life, here in this hostile night, I’d better confess. How else might I join the angels and guard Laure and Mathieu from further harm?

  Then I wondered if this stranger mightn’t be a gendarme in disguise. But that wouldn’t stop me…

  “I’ve something to tell you,” I began, while he trained his torch beam in a wide arc around us as if to check we were the only ones in the wrong place at the wrong time. “And if you kill me afterwards, then at least you will have known…”

  “Let me assure you, I’m not here to kill you, Madame.” He lowered his torch and clasped my arm. “We need to get you somewhere safe because there’s a Devil still walking abroad. I’ve seen her up close, believe me.”

  “Devil? Her?”

  “Come, my van’s not far, and the next village has a Bar Hotel where you can find food and a bed.”

  Try as I might to brand him a possible murderer, I couldn’t. During the war I’d been trained to detect friend from foe not only by body language, but patterns of speech, tone and pace of voice. All equally important, but despite all that, could I be I staring at a psychopath?

  “Do you have any identification?” I asked, wondering if he might take offence at that request.

  But no. He produced a a card from inside his mac and, once I’d read its details, I looked up to see his features for the first time. Haggard, pale as whey against his thick, black eye
brows, yet his skin was glazed by sweat that had gathered above his top lip. And then I noticed a tremor on his lips. His hands.

  “I have to find a telephone quickly,” he reclaimed his card. “And I don’t think…”

  My mind was looping and wheeling round inside my head like those early summer swallows we’d get over Les Tourels. If I were to run, he’d catch up with me. But why would anyone want to run from a man of God?

  “Don’t think what?” I challenged, playing for precious time.

  “Nothing. Let’s go.”

  “You’re not well, are you?”

  His grip had tightened on my arm. “No, I’m not. And even though I’ve had tests, time is against me. Now, Madame. The choice is yours. Either risk being devoured by wolves which have been imported here from the Vosges, or safety?”

  Safety?

  That word had ceased to exist once Elisabeth had shoe-horned me into the Jacques Cousteau Maison de Repos at Aucentrelle. Not only because of the mild stroke which had followed, but the monstrous lie she’d continued to peddle about her bruise. How I’d stood by while her Papa beat her, destroyed her over the years. Stealing her last shred of self-belief. Even at that moment of possible danger, the wind’s long moan seemed to deliver her accusations anew.

  Enough.

  *

  I emerged into the open and Father Leboeuf released my arm as somewhere, an owl screeched towards its prey.

  “I’ll come,” I said, remembering the small pocket knife still in my handbag. Time was when I’d stored a small pistol under my chignon…

  “On one condition. You do me no harm.”

  “I swear to my God. Allons.” He glanced upwards. “See, the dawn’s here already. I wouldn’t want her to see us.”

  “You mean the dawn?”

  A short, strained laugh followed.

  “I’ll tell you as I drive. By the way,” he added as we left my hiding place and he led the way into a dense plantation of swaying saplings. Somewhere I’d not come across before. “If anything should happen to me - and it will, soon - can you take over and drive to the next gendarmerie you find, and repeat what I’m about to tell you?”

  *

  By the time he’d re-lived that fateful ferry crossing, how his early suspicions about Danny Lennox and Elisabeth on board together had been proved right, every part of me had turned numb. And here I was, perched in a van next to a total stranger who’d spotted my elder daughter while she’d slept in the isolated Aire des Arbriers. Who’d doggedly followed her there from Cherbourg unable to make contact with any police and get justice done

  “I’ve never believed in coincidences,” he said as house lights came weakly into view. “But I do believe in miracles. And Madame, you are a miracle.”

  The last words he spoke, before pulling up the handbrake outside the large gendarmerie at Villedieu on the outskirts of Bussac, which seemed at first glance, to be all in darkness. Before I could keep him upright to give him some basic First Aid, he’d slumped forwards against the dashboard, letting a thick, yellow liquid drip from his open mouth. His pulse had gone. Not even the merest flicker. And all I ask myself was, could this poor man be my daughter’s second victim?

  *

  I was back in St Junien, aged twenty-three. The leader of our small Resistance cell where quick decisions could mean the difference between freedom and capture.

  There’d be no trace of me in or out of this stranger’s van. Not a hair nor mark of any kind. I’d repeatedly wiped the soles of my shoes clean before getting into the passenger seat and now I was leaving it, praying no security camera was recording my movements. This wasn’t to spare my eldest child due punishment in law, but to punish her myself. When the time was right. To involve the police any more now, could jeopardise that goal.

  Was I going mad? Probably. But I needed something meaningful to show for my seventy-two years on this planet. And Mathieu? Notre petit étranger? Was he even still alive? I asked myself for the hundredth time while sneaking towards the open double gates and turning off past the small parade of closed shops and businesses, where the dead man’s powerful torch was proving very useful.

  A quick check told me to follow a recently made-up road signed for a chambres d’hôtes some eight kilometres away. It wasn’t worth finding somewhere to sleep for the night’s few remaining hours, but I’d been used to that. And foraging for wild food, also drinking water from streams.

  I thought of Father Leboeuf. Poor man. How during our one-sided conversation in the van, he’d neither mentioned friends nor family. However, this could help take the law a little more time to connect his death with the forty-three-year-old killer he’d met on that wretched ferry. Time too, in which I could step in.

  *

  The wind had dropped to a murmur as if those strips of pale muslin lightening the sky had also calmed it. I could smell the new day, the damp earth under my aching feet, but instead of feeling the hours ahead to be filled with promise, I sensed the kind of dread from all those years ago when, because of my skills, I’d been selected to place the first bomb on the Poitiers to Limoges railway line. Listening like a hare. No, like a vixen, waiting for the bullet in the head as I worked. The same fate suffered by my dear friend Marie Chrétien, And too many innocent inhabitants of Oradour sur Glȃne…

  And was my agenda now so very different? No. And it might at least save Mathieu.

  *

  6.50 a.m.

  Not a country I knew. Bells. Woodsmoke. Sounds and smells of a settlement somewhere, but no further signs for the Chambres d’Hôtes. And was that the Vienne river lying like a white snake below the pastures? To my left, a mist hovered over a small lake. To my right, a plantation of spindly larches that would offer me no protection, and then something which made my dry throat close. My hand to tighten around my bag. I looked up, blinking. This was an invasion of sorts. Not Panza tanks or the throb of a thousand infantry boots, but airborne. An army helicopter circling and descending against the cream and charcoal sky.

  I was Odette Cremorne all over again, running to meet the vital money drop from our Paris HQ before the enemy or some greedy farmer got there first. My head felt dizzy with fear and joy. With the kind of expectation withheld too long at the Home.

  Power at last.

  Short of breath, and none too steady on the uneven ground, I reached the field’s low brow and spotted a small clutch of houses from whose centre rose a church spire. Beyond it lay various scattered outbuildings within well-fenced paddocks. In one, a herd of Limousin cattle charged to its far corner, bellowing and bucking as that same helicopter made its landing. Two men in camouflage uniforms, rifles poised, sprinted towards the farmhouse from where, I could just about see other figures emerging. A man and woman holding the hand of a small, fair-haired boy. Could this be…? Could it?

  I prayed, then screamed like I’d never screamed before. Not even before Daniel Lennox cut down my daughter from her killing beam. Not even when her sister’s large head had engaged in my birth canal and begun to move south.

  Everyone stopped, looked my way. Then came that small boy’s wave. A face I recognised. A cry

  “Mamie!”

  Merci Dieu. Merci Dieu…

  But when I blinked and looked again, he was gone.

  28. Elisabeth.

  Sunday 13th March 7.00 a.m.

  So, this was the cripple and his poule I’d heard so much about from Capitaine Didier Rousson and Lieutenant Raoul Paranza, from the Hervieux gendarmerie. Well, those two Anglais certainly knew how to stare in that ignorant way some foreigners have. Ex-flic or no ex-flic. Her the same. Nor did I like the way Rousson had eyed her up and down from the minute he’d seen her.

  Black mark number three.

  And for their dire dress sense. His old boots and flannel trousers, her adolescent pink cagoule…

  For all her attitude, she’d not put up the fight I’d expected. Too surprised, that was it. As for him, despite his stick, he’d landed a couple of punches bu
t that hadn’t lasted long. Not once my helpers got stuck in. Serve him right.

  While Paranza kept watch, Rousson and Eduard Gallas, wearing provocatively tight combat pants, had looped both prisoners together, back to back and standing up, with a length of stout rope attached to the windmill’s upright shaft. This rose up through four broken floors to the wallower and windshaft, still moving after almost two hundred years. Strong enough to keep the meddlers in their place.

  I liked this old Moulin de Berthigny, despite opposition, because in many countries, windmills take the feminine form of the noun. She could be the kind of friend I’d never managed to keep. Loyal and useful…

  “No wonder you didn’t want us interfering,” said the has-been to Rousson. “Bent bastard. And as for you,” he muttered to Eduard, “I’ve heard some interesting rumours. Seems like a lot goes on in your abattoir. Is that where Vervain’s headed?”

  A smack on the mouth soon calmed him down, and the other one who’d begun to join in, yelped. Caught a gob of blood in her hand. Was wetting herself, I could tell.

  Good. If Eduard was to be believed, they weren’t going to be around for much longer. He knew of a lake just a short hop away. A deep one, connecting to a Neolithic cave system where no-one in their right mind would ever go.

  “Your phones,” he said, frisking both sans success. “Where are they?”

  “Kaput. We got rid a while ago.”

  Eduard sighed, and we heard it, despite the racket made by the windmill’s churning sails. “You fancy a swim?” he then said. “A long, deep one, where you’ll vanish for ever?” His English had improved month on month. However, some of his words during sex, still made me smile.

  “Ask all you like,” said the one called Alison, still wiping her mouth. “The phones are in our hotel’s dustbin.”

  “Which hotel?”

  “Aha.”

  “Town? City? Cut playing games.”

  The pair glanced at each other.

  “Orléans,” he said, rather too quickly.

  Another hit where it hurt. More blood and the sound of a bone cracking.