Lost Goddess : A Novel (9781101554340)

by Knox, Tom

  “No.”

  “Yes. We have to get across the lake.”

  26

  Quelques spéculations sur les origines de culpabilité et de conscience dans les grottes paléolithiques de France et d’Espagne.

  Sitting in the darkened apartment, Julia thought, deeply. This was the title to Ghislaine’s essay, the essay that was sought by the killer.

  “Some Speculations on the Origins of Guilt and Conscience in the Paleolithic Caves of France and Spain.”

  What did it mean? What did it imply? What was he thinking?

  The origins of guilt?

  The others talked, quietly. She didn’t notice any of this. She didn’t notice Rouvier standing pensively at the window, she didn’t notice Alex murmur a question then disappear into the kitchen—because she was remembering the sensation she had felt by the stones, the Cham des Bondons.

  Guilt. She had felt some kind of guilt. Mournful guilt. And now she had this clue; for all the horrors of her experience in the archives, she possessed a clue. Maybe there was a link between the skulls and the murders—and maybe the cave paintings, too? And if there was a link, it was something deep and serious, it had to be. She could sense the outlines of something, in a tactile way; she was like a blind person touching an abstract bronze sculpture. Art. Bones. Wounded skulls.

  A part of her thrilled at her discovery, even as she shriveled at the memory of the killer. Plunging the knife at her eye.

  Officer Rouvier was nodding again. Light, softly filtered by the half-closed blinds of the Carmichaels’ Marais apartment, was making subtle stripes across his kindly face. Like a man behind horizontal bars.

  Maybe they were all behind metaphorical bars, Julia thought, quite suddenly: they’d been hiding in here for forty-eight hours, barely daring to visit the boulangerie. Policemen had come and gone, interviews had been taken and recorded, but Julia and Alex had been stuck here, in a darkened apartment, together and isolated.

  Alex came into the room from the kitchen, clutching his third mug of tea; he sat on the sofa, saying nothing. Rouvier gestured at the sheet of paper with the essay title carefully written thereon. The essay that had, for some unknown reason, disappeared.

  “Miss Kerrigan. Can you explain it to me, briefly? Recall that I am a humble detective from the farthest provinces. A péquenaud.” He smiled, charmingly. “I may not understand complicated science. How does your new theory connect with this missing article by Quoinelles?” The smile faded. “And all the murders?”

  Julia offered a pinched smile of her own. “As I said, I don’t have a theory. Just ideas. First you have to know a little bit about the evolution of the human mind.”

  “Of course.”

  “Behavioral modernity is a term used by some scientists to express the idea that humans made”—Julia glanced at Alex, then back at Rouvier—“a kind of Great Leap Forward in their cognition and cultural development around forty thousand years ago.”

  Rouvier asked, “Evidenced how?”

  “Well, firstly, the birth of art—the cave paintings. But there are other signs at this time of humans suddenly changing their behavior, signs of advanced and abstract cognition. Hunting becomes much more elaborate and efficient—animals are corralled and herded over cliffs, showing significant forethought. Music and game-playing emerge, refined bone tools are manufactured, barter is seen between tribes; and religious rituals become complex, including proper burials. All these behaviorisms sharply differentiate Homo sapiens from previous hominid forms, such as Homo erectus or Homo neanderthalis. Basically, the idea is that we quite suddenly became fully human around forty thousand years ago.”

  “Why did this change happen?”

  “Two main perspectives. One is a sudden genetic mutation in human DNA, another is an actual change to neural structures of the brain, evolution of the brain itself. Maybe in the frontal cortex! No one is sure.”

  The sounds of the Paris traffic filtered into the quiet apartment.

  “And you believe Professeur Ghislaine was investigating this?”

  “Perhaps yes. Surely, yes. Just look at his essay title. ‘Guilt and Conscience in the Paleolithic Caves of France and Spain.’ We also know he was interested in the trepanned skulls: his very first work, as a student, was done in Lozère, where he probably encountered the theories of Prunières and—and we know Annika was an expert on the cave art of Lascaux and Gargas—”

  Rouvier raised a hand. “You are referring to the skulls you found in your caverns, and the same skulls, and damaged bones, found by Pierre-Barthélemy Prunières a hundred years ago, in the same region?

  “Sure, but—”

  “And because this Prunières mentions Cochin China, you believe that, somehow, this ties it all in to the murders … by a Cambodian, a possibly Asian killer. Yes?”

  “Yes.” Julia felt herself blushing. She was slightly angry at herself: she should be advocating her ideas better than this.

  Rouvier sighed. “But. I am still a little unclear. How are they tied together?”

  “I don’t know—but I know they are! They must be! I just haven’t worked it out yet.” She stopped, with a stammer. Why was she almost shouting? Why was she so histrionic?

  The apartment was quiet. Alex was looking at the slatted windows, a faint trace of embarrassment on his English face.

  Julia felt, absurdly, like she had failed Rouvier, the way she had once disappointed her father; but she also felt an injustice. She couldn’t piece together the lost essay just like that, she needed time, and clues, and maybe luck. And given enough time, she might prove she was right. Because she was right. She was energized by this idea: I am right.

  Not only was she right, she was surely just repeating someone else’s excellent analysis. Ghislaine’s. Indeed, she even felt a slight resentment that Ghislaine had got there so long before her: she had thought herself so insightful, that day on the Cham, sensing the guilt in the past, the stones, the bones, yet Ghislaine, it seemed, had been there already—the origins of guilt and conscience?—and he had maybe achieved a much smarter, deeper, older explanation. Something that circuitously led to his death?

  Maybe. But how could she explain this series of hunches and guesses to a sober and practical policeman? She couldn’t.

  Rouvier was standing. He walked to the long windows of the eighteenth-century apartment and pulled down a few slats of the modern gray blinds, looking out at the softly rumbling traffic. He spoke to the window: “I do not know. I am not a Tarot reader of ancient times. It is a fascinating idea but I am not sure how it helps us.”

  Julia subdued the last of her enthusiasm. She felt mortified, almost scorned; Rouvier was just being his normal self: polite, charming, sensitive. Yet it was as if her parents were in the room, pouring kind but skeptical cold water over her teenage dreams of a serious archaeological career. Inside her was the old rage at being patronized.

  “However,” Rouvier added, “there is one aspect … Hmmm … I wonder…”

  “Wonder what?”

  “The fact that this essay disappeared. This is interesting, and maybe relevant.” He turned and faced her directly. “You say that the article is mentioned in, if I have the word, bibliographies—it is referenced and indexed? Correct?”

  Quickly, she answered, “Yep. The essay was only ever published in one magazine, an extremely obscure academic journal. There might only have been a couple hundred copies ever printed. But all these copies have gone! Not in the libraries. Taken and not returned, maybe destroyed. Weird … is that weird?” She was unsure of herself now.

  Rouvier was sitting down again. “No. It is unusual. And, as I say, it possibly relates to something else we have discovered.”

  Alex spoke, for the first time: “What?”

  Rouvier smiled. “Exactly how old was Ghislaine Quoinelles when he wrote this?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  “Oui. And already he was being published in academic journals, no matter how obscure. We know he was buil
ding quite a reputation, a famous radical. And yet, soon after this, his career dwindled. He went to Cambodia, he returned to France, and he promptly disappeared into obscurity, back to where he came from, where he did his student work, the caves of Lozère—and there he stayed. Despite the dazzling promise of his early career, it all dwindled away.”

  “Yep,” Alex interrupted. “And he never told me—or Julia—about any of this. The essay, I mean. And Annika never mentioned it. It’s like he suppressed it, denied its existence. Denied his past. Rather odd.”

  Rouvier hunched forward, his flecks of gray hair almost silver in the fading light. “But maybe not that odd? Or at least not unique.” He reached into his briefcase and lifted out a piece of paper with a photo. Julia recognized it immediately. The same poignant photo of the mission to China and Kampuchea in 1976. That gallery of smiling young faces, in the hot Phnom Penh sun, with the queerly empty boulevards in the background.

  The detective waved an eloquent hand across the photo.

  “We have now completed our investigations into these people. They were scattered across the world. Yet they share two things, apart from their membership of this mission.”

  “Yes?”

  “Many of the careers, of these men and women, subsided after this Asian adventure. They were very bright young people, of course Marxists”—he said the word with a definite moue of repugnance—“but nonetheless clever. Future stars of science, if the English phrase is suitable? Yet so many of them appear to have deliberately returned to obscurity after 1976. Strange.”

  Alex interjected. “You said they shared two things? What was the other?”

  Rouvier’s sigh was abrupt, yet emotive.

  “It took us several days to follow up their careers and life stories, because of that obscurity, and because they had dispersed so globally. But, the truth is, we are too late.”

  “Sorry?”

  “They are nearly all dead. Already.”

  Julia asked: “You mean … they were murdered? Like Trewin and Annika?”

  Rouvier’s gray eyes met hers.

  “Most of them. Possibly. Yes. The older ones died naturally. Many of them appeared to have committed suicide, but now we think—we estimate—that if we look again at these suicides they might turn out to be murders. And some have just been clearly and plainly butchered. Over the last three years. Therefore, after much investigation, our foremost guess is that the killer has been slowly slaughtering the rest, working her way through a list, probably a list she extracted from Trewin, by torture. She has been taking revenge, gradually, over the last three years.” Another short sigh. “Of course, no one noticed a pattern before, partly because this mission to Cambodia was so secretive that no one knew of the historic links between the victims, and because the murders were subtle, often disguised as self-murder. And anyway, who would associate the suicide of an elderly psychologist in Los Angeles with the tragic death of, say, a sixty-five-year-old archaeologist in Geneva eighteen months later? But now, now we do see the pattern. A vivid pattern.”

  “Is anyone left alive?”

  “We have failed to trace two people. We know, naturally, about Marcel Barnier, the expert in hybridization. He is also apparently in the Far East, or at least he was until recently—we have reports of him in Cambodia itself a few months ago.”

  Rouvier pointed a manicured fingernail at a second figure in the photo. Julia leaned to see a tall, smiling blond face in the back row of the photo, with a ponytail. A Hawaiian shirt. Arrogantly smiling. “This man, Colin Fishwick, may also still be alive. A neurosurgeon from Princeton, he moved to Hong Kong in the 1980s. We don’t know where he is now, but we have no record of his dying.”

  Rouvier sat back. “So there it is. Just two men left. The killer will evidently seek them out. And kill them, too, if she can find them; then her task will assuredly be complete.”

  Alex said, “Why did she kill the archivist? And attack Julia?”

  “A most sensible question. Probably just a reaction, the fear that she had been recognized, a sudden desire to silence a witness. This is a violent killer, very violent: there are elements of extreme cruelty in some of the later killings alongside clever forethought. It is as if the killer is getting angrier as time passes, or maybe she is allowing herself to take more brutal revenge, to use more animal savagery, as she nears the completion of her task.”

  Julia noticed the deliberate phrasing.

  “Animal?”

  Rouvier nodded and smiled, this time rather bleakly. “Ah yes, Miss Kerrigan. Perhaps you have elucidated this for yourself?”

  She shrugged. She knew where this was going, but she didn’t want to articulate it. The idea was too insane.

  Rouvier was less bashful.

  “This may all sound incredible, I know. But given all the other information we now possess, it seems very possible that we are dealing with some experimental form of … hybridization. Or maybe some experiments at a higher anatomical level, maybe even neurological? Hence the simultaneous interest in cranial surgery? How else do we comprehend the links with Ghislaine’s grandfather, the crossbreeding experiments? It all seems too rich to be coincidence.” The suavity returned. “Perhaps I am reading too much science fiction, perhaps my theories are becoming as florid as the novels they sell in Carrefour. Who knows?”

  Rouvier swept up the photo and slid it back into his briefcase. The traffic noise from the street was more noticeable now: rush hour had arrived.

  “La circulation! I must go. Before I depart I can relieve you of some minor burdens.” He glanced at Alex, then at Julia. The room was dark now: a late November twilight was falling swiftly outside. “We have no more need of you, at least for the moment. You are surely not on the killer’s list. You do not need protection. I can also understand if you wish to leave France, after the horrors”—he looked at Julia, piercingly—“all the horrors that you have experienced. If so, the Gendarmerie de France will not resist, though I would like it if you let me know where you go, if you go. We will need you as witnesses at some point. But for now—au revoir.”

  They shook hands. The room was very dark. When the officer was gone Julia turned on a lamp and poured herself and Alex some glasses of dark scotch whiskey, and they sat alone and silent on the sofa for several hours, drinking slowly, occasionally cuddling or kissing, saying nothing.

  But when they went to bed, Julia could not sleep. Instead she lay there, watching the filtered shadows cast by the moving car lights outside, watching them slide quietly across the ceiling. Like the shadows on the wall of a cave, cast by a timid firelight. Fearful shadows, images of animals, frightening shades.

  The next morning was wet and dreary, the sky a true Parisian grisaille. Julia didn’t feel like doing anything or going anywhere. The puzzle wasn’t even half solved. And she felt desolate. Emptied. Unsatisfied. She sat down on the sofa and stared at nothing and didn’t even eat breakfast. Finally, she retreated to her laptop. Research. She had nothing else to do. She was a scientist. She could research.

  But there was almost nothing to go on, just her own hunches and guesswork and wildly ambitious intuitions, and she was frankly bored with them. How about hard facts?

  The one fact she had was this essay title, and the name of the obscure magazine. The Journal of French Anthropogenesis. The magazine was long defunct, and many of its editions had disappeared from this earth—but maybe she could find out more about the magazine itself.

  An hour of furious key-tapping gave her an answer. One of the editors of the journal was mentioned in another obscure journal in the footnotes of a French government website. The trail of connections was flimsy, attenuated, and Julia had the peculiar notion she was grasping at a cobweb, a network of ephemerality that could disappear with a single, too-eager touch. But a network of connections, nonetheless.

  The name of this editor was intriguing. He was called Sergei Yakulovich; and he was apparently a senior editor of the Journal of French Anthropogenesis when Ghisla
ine submitted his essay.

  And who was Sergei Yakulovich? The name was Russian.

  The same website gave her a brief but piercingly relevant biography.

  Sergei Yakulovich: a Soviet primatologist who for many years studied at Lomonosov State University, specializing in the relationship of human brains to primate brains.

  Julia’s eyes were alive with excitement.

  There was more: Since 1979 Sergei Yakulovich has been director of the Center for Primate Research in Abkhazia, Georgia; controversially, the center is best known for its experiments into crossbreeding between primates and Homo sapiens.

  The revelation was a physical sensation, a slap across the face. This guy was running a center that still did research into crossbreeding. Between men and animals. The editor of the magazine that published Ghislaine’s essay was still alive. Still out there. Still working. Still contactable. In Abkhazia, in the insurrectionist wilds on the periphery of the broken Soviet Union, by the Black Sea.

  Julia’s troubled and excited mind flew across the world to this place. She tried to imagine it; she failed. She looked back at the screen. The website even gave an e-mail address for Sergei Yakulovich. In Abkhazia!

  She knew she was going to contact him. As soon as possible. Because: Maybe he had a copy of the essay? Maybe he knew all the answers? And his career—human-primate hybridization—fitted the features of the puzzle too well. It had to be relevant.

  But she also had to be clever. She couldn’t just e-mail and ask this Yakulovich guy straight out. Maybe if she did that, he would say nothing, pull down the shutters, thwart her one viable route through the maze. So maybe she could even go there. To Abkhazia. Why not? She just about had the money and she certainly had the time—and maybe she now had the ambition, even the confidence—after resisting the killer in the archives. And she had nothing else to do—the idea of now going home to London, retreating to teaching and winter and the quotidian pointlessness of her failing career, seemed ludicrous. Not after all this.