One or two other customers left the shop, and he held up a hand to placate me.
‘Monsieur?’ he said, and indicated a curtain that led to the darkroom behind the shop, I assumed. ‘S’il vous plait . . . ?’
And still I did not understand what was going on. I thought he wanted to take the argument out of his shop, though in fact it was now empty. And so, like a fool, I ducked under his arm and into a back room.
He opened a door that I saw led outside, and nodded at me, showing that I should go out into the alley behind the shop.
I hesitated, and as I turned, he shoved me in the back and I stumbled outside. The door slammed behind me. Two rough men faced me. One of them was Jean.
I opened my mouth but the first fist hit me before I could speak.
I fell immediately and it was all I could do to cover my head as the kicks began to fly into me. I don’t know how long it lasted, but it seemed to go on for ever, until suddenly I heard shouts, and the sound of footsteps running away, and more approaching.
I rolled over, in great pain, and saw two policemen staring down at me.
‘Monsieur? Monsieur? Mon Dieu!’
Of course, by the time I was able to explain what had happened and take the police around to the front of the shop, it had shut. No sign of anyone in the shop, or the flat above.
They spoke no English, and I was having great trouble communicating anything, let alone French, but I got them to understand I wanted to go to the police station, where I demanded an immediate audience with whoever was in charge.
The captain, a polite, middle-aged man called Leclerc, had a paunch and good English.
‘But monsieur,’ he repeated again and again, ‘you should go to a hospital.’
I agreed with him. My nose was bleeding still, I could barely move my neck, there was a cut behind my ear, I hurt everywhere. But I refused to go anywhere until I had told my story.
And what a story it was.
Of a murderer from Paris, of a blasphemous cult in the city, drinking blood in a church whose name, I now realised, I didn’t even know. I could take them there, I assured them, only I couldn’t show them photographic evidence because they had destroyed it and beaten me up, and in fact, if his two men hadn’t happened past, I would probably be dead, or something very like it.
I stopped.
The captain smiled at me.
‘You don’t believe me,’ I said, stupidly.
‘No, monsieur, I am of course very happy to hear what you have to say. But I think right now you are a little excited, perhaps. Maybe you could go to the hospital, get cleaned up, and come back tomorrow. And we can sort all of this out.’
He smiled at me again, and glanced at the blood I was dripping on his carpet.
‘But you can’t just ignore a crime!’ I protested. ‘I can show you the shop, I can—’
‘Monsieur? No one is ignoring you. But you are not well. Come back tomorrow, and we can talk.’
I felt idiotic. I felt like apologising for ruining his carpet, and I felt my anger subside, and as it did, I realised that I hurt. So I did what he said. I let them take me to the hospital, wondering whether it was standard police procedure. Shouldn’t they have at least taken a statement?
I hurt too much to care about it for long. So I got cleaned up. I went back to Villeneuve and checked out, and moved all my stuff to the hotel in town.
I ate early, drank a lot, and went to bed, where I passed out in my clothes.
And in the middle of the night, they came for me.
Chapter 13
What is it we are most afraid of?
Is it that harm will come to us, or that harm will come to those we love? Of the latter, I had had my share; of the former, my share was about to come.
What can we say of pain? Why do we fear it so? Why is it that we are unable to remember it when we are well and happy, just as we are unable to remember joy when we are sad?
When I woke, it must have been as my hotel-room door was kicked open. I felt fear then. Even as I struggled to wake and understand what was going on, I felt some kind of primitive fear, something that must have been planted in us aeons ago, and I rolled out of bed before they got to me. But it was no good. Strong arms held me and someone struck me on the head from behind, not enough to knock me out, but enough to make me retch and stagger.
I was dragged on my tiptoes out of the room before I could make another sound, and down a flight of stairs at the back where the night porter held a door open, nodding at the men who dragged me out and into a car right outside the hotel.
We didn’t drive far, to just outside the city walls, where the car stopped. The three men pushed me out, and tumbled after me, giving me another crack on the head to keep me in line. I tried to stand and my legs gave out. I watched the car speed off into the night, and I wondered what was going to happen to me.
They dragged me off the side of the road and down a bank, underneath the arch of the modern bridge by which I’d crossed the river every day.
And there they began to beat all hell out of me. Their fists flew at me until I could no longer stand, and then they started to kick again, and I was too weak to do anything to stop them.
But they did stop, because a voice called out.
I rolled on to my back, groaning as I did, and a torch shone in my face.
The torch flashed away and I saw him above me.
‘Who are you?’ he said, and I noticed that he used English. He already knew something about me, then.
He turned to the leader of the three, who I now saw was Jean, and whispered something.
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. My lips were bleeding and already swollen, blood was in my mouth.
There was some discussion and then someone reached down and began ferreting in my pockets, pulling out my wallet, some other small things. There was more discussion and I dimly saw my bag. They must have brought it from the hotel. They began rummaging through that too, throwing everything on the ground, and then they found my passport.
He, Verovkin, took it and studied it.
‘Charles Jackson . . .’
He spoke with hardly any accent, and what little there was, I couldn’t place.
I moaned, holding my hands above my head. It was a truly pathetic gesture, a gesture of supplication, and it meant that I begged not to be hurt any more.
‘Who are you?’
Again I said nothing, just squinted up into the face above me, desperately trying to think what I could do.
‘Do I know you?’ he asked.
I was too terrified, in too much pain, to even speak, but his question told me something. That unless he was playing games, it meant that he, like Jean, hadn’t connected me to Marian, and that gave me a little hope that they would leave me alone, once they’d done enough damage, once they’d scared me enough. But I was wrong.
‘I don’t know you,’ he said. ‘You’re no one.’
He turned to Jean. For some reason, presumably to scare me, he spoke in English.
‘Kill him and put the body in the river.’
He began to walk away, and Jean pulled out a knife from inside his jacket.
I began to squirm backwards in the dust under the bridge, and then there were more voices, and lights.
From underneath the bridge, I could even see the flash of a blue light winking on the stonework.
There were voices and I rolled over, Jean hovering above me, knife in hand.
A voice called out and Jean stepped away, slipping the knife back inside his pocket.
Verovkin had stopped, and was talking to a man by the entrance to this little tunnel under the bridge. A policeman stood next to this man, but as I watched, the man waved him away and the light caught his face and my vision cleared, and I saw it was Captain Leclerc, though he was not in uniform.
Thank God, I thought, feeling like I would just sink into the dust. They believed me. They’ve come for me.
I watched, waiting for Verovkin to run, or
to be arrested, but neither of those things happened. Nor did Jean and his two accomplices back away.
Verovkin was waving his hand in Leclerc’s face, pointing at him. In return, Leclerc held his ground at first, though even hurt as I was, I could see him take a small step backwards as Verovkin pressed in on him. Then Leclerc stabbed a forefinger on to Verovkin’s chest, speaking quickly but all too quietly for me to hear.
Verovkin was still as he listened to the captain. He became a statue, then turned away rapidly.
Leclerc came and stood over me, and Verovkin kept his distance.
‘So,’ said Leclerc, ‘I think it’s time you left Avignon, yes?’
I rolled on to my side, and managed to prop myself up on my right arm a little.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Time for you to go, monsieur. You are not wanted here. You should count yourself lucky that I was informed. And that I got here before anything could happen.’
‘Happen?’ I spluttered. ‘Something has already happened! Aren’t you going to do anything about it?’
Every word hurt and I had to drag breath into my lungs even to say those few.
‘Yes, monsieur. I am going give you a hundred francs, and drive you to catch the night train to Paris, and you will never come here again.’
With that, Leclerc nodded at Jean and the other two, and I was hoisted up and taken from the bridge. Verovkin glared at me as I was carried away, but I just stared back, wondering what on earth was going on between these people.
A short, agonising car ride and I was dumped at the station. Leclerc stood over me while we waited for the train, where I was put on-board in second class, in a deserted carriage. The others left the train, and Leclerc threw some money and my passport at me.
I had recovered enough to catch his arm.
‘But aren’t you going to do something? That man—’
‘No crime has been committed here. I strongly suggest you do as I have told you. Goodbye.’
The train began to pull away as he jumped to the platform, and I stared at the walls of the carriage as the train rattled me hundreds of miles north, in appalling agony all the way.
Chapter 14
I arrived in Cambridge three days later, having made a spectacle of myself on the way.
A hundred francs had been enough to get me to Paris and on to the coast, but I had had to buy some cheap clothes as mine were ruined and covered in dried blood. With that taken care of it was enough to explain I’d been in a car accident and was making my way home, poring over everything that had happened in Avignon. Who was Verovkin, and what power did he hold that he seemed to be able to act with impunity there? Leclerc had saved me, but how had he known what was happening? Maybe the hotel’s night porter had made a phone call. Clearly there was a powerful group of people in the town, and Verovkin was at their head. Leclerc had merely talked him into not committing murder on their patch, it seemed, and but for that, I would have been a body in the river.
I was two days late reporting back for work, and I think only the extent of the cuts and bruises on my face was enough to keep me out of trouble.
Of course, I told Hunter, and only Hunter, the truth, and asked him what I should do.
‘Drop it,’ he said, flatly.
‘What?’
‘Drop it. No good can come of it. If you want my advice, just drop it.’
I told him I couldn’t and I explained why. It was Marian, I said, I couldn’t just give up on her, just let it be. I went further and asked him for help, because, being Hunter, I knew he would know someone who could help, and he did.
He knew a magistrate.
‘You can’t just walk into a police station in Cambridge or London and report a crime in Avignon, and a possible murder in Paris. You won’t be taken seriously.’
He was right, and so began my first, and last, attempt to solve the matter using what Hunter described as ‘the proper channels’.
He had his magistrate friend write to a chief inspector with the Met, who managed to get someone in Interpol to ‘make enquiries’ to the prefecture of Vaucluse.
Eight weeks later, through this circuitous and painfully slow route, I got a reply.
In long-winded terms, it boiled down to this:
No such person as Verovkin has ever been heard of in or around the Avignon area. Furthermore, Captain Leclerc is an officer of the highest standing, and a decorated veteran to boot. The other individual we believe you are referring to (no name was given) is a member of local society and a noted philanthropist. The accusations you have made are wild and fanciful, but (it was pointed out to me) even if true, neither blasphemy nor the willing imbibition of one’s own blood are a crime, and no further enquiries are to be made.
The matter was closed, though there was one strange thing.
I had reported, also via Hunter’s magistrate, that I suspected that Verovkin was the murderer known as ‘the Beast of Saint-Germain’. Though the reply from the prefecture addressed everything else I’d accused Verovkin of, there was no mention at all of the incidents in Paris. Not a single line.
I had learned a little: that Verovkin was using a new name, and that most likely he had some of the police department in his pocket, if not actually in his control. Maybe some of them were part of that group I’d seen in the church, drinking their own blood. Maybe Leclerc was one of them too, one of those who were cutting themselves for him.
And how should I describe them? His followers? His acolytes, his disciples? His church?
For it was clearly a cult or sect of some kind, which had usurped a church in the backstreets of Avignon for its more sinister actions. Whether anyone outside the cult knew what was happening in the small hours of the night, I had no idea. Perhaps the priest there was involved, perhaps the warden had been scared into silence. Perhaps people had gone missing, and too late I wondered whether it would have been useful to check if there had been any murders in Avignon along the lines of the activities of the Beast in Saint-Germain. Somehow I doubted it; Avignon being a much smaller place than Paris, a series of brutal deaths would draw too much attention, arouse too much outrage, something that would require Verovkin to move on again. Perhaps there were deaths of unknown travellers, of vagrants, but maybe not. Maybe instead, I decided, he had created a different kind of route to blood.
I had witnessed it myself, their ceremony; a sacrament of their own blood, provided freely and presumably frequently. How many of them were involved? I wondered. The thirteen of them I had seen that night? Or others too? I thought about how much blood a man or woman could give, regularly, and not feel any ill effects. Each of them had given not so very much. Their actions could certainly be repeated on a weekly basis without any trouble for a healthy individual.
What horror! I thought. What disgust I felt. There was something so sickeningly primitive and yet so cold about this calm, considered, reverent imbibing of our most vital fluid.
And the carving? The female, bloodstained figure? What was the purpose of that? What was the symbolism? Was she supposed to represent fertility? True, the menstruating woman represents a girl who has become old enough to bear children, but there, there lay a paradox, for the flow of monthly blood also demonstrates that the woman is not pregnant, not for another month at least.
Whatever mythology he had created, Verovkin seemed to have drawn in more acolytes than he’d had in Paris, although once again much of this was guesswork.
And there they were, drinking the blood of their lord, worshipping some idol smeared in blood from millennia before. I thought about that, and the words of Leclerc. No crime has been committed here. No, no crime; drinking the literal blood of their blood-smeared idol.
Revolting, hideous. And then a thought hit me. Wasn’t that just what happened in a Catholic Mass, wasn’t that the message of transubstantiation? That the wine literally becomes Christ’s blood? The wine in the cup, which the Lord passes to his disciples, saying this is my blood. Do this in remembrance of me. An
d whenever it was in the Middle Ages that the Catholic Church declared that the wine of the Eucharist is literally Christ’s blood, since that time, surely every Catholic has done just what Verovkin was doing. Drunk the blood of their Lord underneath an image of Christ hanging on the cross, which now I stopped to think about it for one minute I found to be an undeniably horrific and brutal one. Blood flowing from the wound in his side from the spear, blood from the wounds to his head where the crown of thorns cut him. His mouth hangs open, his head lolls on one side, his eyes roll back. The nails through his hands and feet only cause more bleeding, more horror.
Whatever perverted blood-cult Verovkin had created in Avignon, their actions were no more illegal than those of a billion or more Catholics, during each and every Mass in their Church.
I thought of Catherine of Siena, of her lust for blood; I thought of Verovkin; and I thought of Marian, all alone in the ground in Montmartre.
Over the next few days I argued long and hard with Hunter. I asked him what he thought was happening, who this man was, but Hunter wasn’t himself, or rather, he didn’t talk as freely as before. I saw him watching me carefully as I spoke, and he seemed always to hesitate before answering. When I pushed him, he said he supposed that such lunatics might exist, but that I would be better off asking a psychologist about such matters.
‘Come on, Hunter,’ I said. ‘Humour me. Just play along with me. I can’t be the first person ever to think about this.’
Hunter raised an eyebrow.
‘I’m sure you’re not,’ he said, ‘but that doesn’t mean it’s a healthy direction in which to keep thinking.’
‘You know something.’
‘I do not. Not really. I was reminded of a film. M. You know it?’
I shook my head.
‘A Fritz Lang film, about a serial killer. Made in thirty-one, I think. Although Lang always denied it, it was assumed he’d been inspired by a killer known as the Vampire of Düsseldorf.’
I found that my heart was beating fast. I didn’t say anything, because I felt that Hunter was on the verge of going silent on me. One wrong word and he’d clam up, and yet here, for the first time, someone seemed to be giving me reason to believe that Verovkin could really be what I thought he was.
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