The Mayan Codex

by Mario Reading

  Fuck Milouins. This time around, he’d get the woman back himself.

  21

  Twelve minutes into his pursuit of Picaro’s car, Lemelle’s cell phone started to vibrate. The shock of it nearly launched him out of his seat.

  He glared down at the lighted screen. It was Milouins. Best answer it then. He wasn’t on the strongest ground.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘What the blazes is going on? I heard an engine start up down in the garage.’

  Lemelle ground his teeth together and hammered silently at the steering wheel.

  ‘Lemelle? What’s happening? Out with it.’

  While Lemelle was still debating what to say, the car he was following turned unexpectedly down the track towards Pampelonne beach. Lemelle thought for a moment, and then pulled off the road. He backed the Land Rover just inside a stand of trees and cut the engine.

  ‘Answer me, Lemelle – I know you’re listening.’

  Lemelle made a violent arm gesture at his cell phone. Then he switched it on to hands-free, and threw himself back in his seat. ‘The girl. Lamia. She’s bolted again.’

  ‘I can see that. I’m standing in the library.’

  ‘Listen to this, then. She had help. One man. I was just in time to see them getting into their getaway car. So I borrowed the Land Rover. I’ve been following the two of them ever since they left the house.’

  There was a brief silence. Well thank me, you bastard, thought Lemelle.

  In a pig’s ear.

  ‘Where are they now?’

  ‘The guy must be an idiot. He’s backed himself into a corner. He’s just headed down the cul-de-sac at Pampelonne. You know. The road to the beach. There’s no possible way out but back past me. Because I can’t see that shit-heap of a car of his ploughing off around the point through the sand.’

  ‘Does he know you’re following him?’

  ‘Of course not. I held way back with my lights off. There’s no way he can have seen me.’

  ‘What if he’s simply dropping the girl off?’

  ‘Oh come on. That’s bullshit. Why would he drop her off down there? The place is as good as abandoned this time of year. He’d get the fuck away, that’s what he’d do. He’s made a mistake, that’s all. He’ll be back past here in five minutes. Then I’ll have him.’

  ‘What do you mean, you’ll have him?’

  ‘Just that. I borrowed your shotgun too.’

  Milouins’s voice crackled through the speaker. His tone was urgent. ‘Don’t even think of it, Lemelle. If Lamia is in that car, and she gets hurt …’

  ‘Wait. Wait. I think I can see his headlights coming back. Yes. Yes. I’m sure of it.’ Lemelle broke the connection as fast as he could, a wolfish grin on his face. There were no headlights, of course. But there was also no way he would allow that bastard Milouins to queer his pitch again. This time he would do the job himself. It was still dark. There were no houses around. No one to see what happened. He had the whole fucking place to himself.

  Lemelle eased himself out of the Land Rover and slammed the door. He fed eight cartridges into the Mossberg and then positioned himself behind a nearby tree. He was only ten yards from the road. The bastard who took Lamia would have to pass right by him when he returned from the beach after realizing he’d taken a wrong turn. Lemelle would simply spring out from cover and take the guy’s tyres out – after that he could do over the engine or not, depending on circumstances.

  Lemelle could already taste the crump of lead as it bit into sheet metal – already feel the power the shotgun would give him over the two passengers in the car. Christ, how he’d make them grovel. There was no danger in all that, surely? When it was all over, and he’d had his kicks, he’d head back in triumph to the Domaine with his prisoners.

  ‘I’m returning your daughter to you, Madame la Comtesse. No. No problem at all. Just doing my job.’

  Lemelle’s fantasy world had switched to overtime.

  22

  Jean Picaro was relieved to be rid of the girl. There had been something uncomfortable about the whole affair – as if it were tainted in some way. Devil-struck. It didn’t make sense to leave a woman tied up and doped like that, in a sealed room, stuck up on top of a table. What sort of a maniac would do a thing like that?

  Privately, Picaro had made up his mind that this would be his last ever job. His wife and son were secure, his business, on the surface at least, was legal – or if it wasn’t strictly legal, at least it didn’t involve breaking into people’s houses and kidnapping sex victims.

  He was too old for the action stuff now. Didn’t crave it. He’d experienced enough of that to last him a lifetime, and he didn’t want any more. His conscience was clean. He could have left the woman behind, but he hadn’t. While that didn’t make him a hero, it didn’t make him a total villain either.

  He saw the stationary Land Rover first. Then he caught a flash of movement from behind the tree. He was already travelling faster than was strictly wise, thanks to his relief at getting away from the flic.

  As a Foreign Legionnaire, Jean Picaro had spent the formative years of his life being trained to look out for – and to counter – ambushes. And he was still hyper-keyed up from the break-in, and angry about the way the woman had been treated, with its revocations of what had happened to the boy at La Santé.

  He didn’t even need to think.

  As the man raised his shotgun, Picaro wrenched the steering wheel over to the left and headed straight for him.

  The man’s mouth dropped open in shock. He didn’t even have time to fire off a single shell.

  Picaro’s car careened off a ridge of earth and struck the man mid-thigh. The man’s face and chest slammed down onto the bonnet, the shotgun skittering off to one side.

  Picaro backed up and made a second pass over the man’s body. No point leaving witnesses. This one wasn’t going to blab to the flics if Picaro could possibly avoid it. There would be no more prison for him.

  Leaving the engine running, Picaro stepped out of the car. He gathered up the Mossberg, checked it for damage, and threw it onto the back seat.

  Then, without so much as a backwards glance at his victim, he got into his car, manhandled it back onto the road, and headed off in the direction of Ramatuelle.

  23

  Milouins arrived at the scene twelve minutes later.

  He saw the Land Rover straight away, and marked its position. No sign of Lemelle, though.

  Milouins hesitated, debating with himself whether to ignore Lemelle entirely and continue on towards the sea, or rope him in as back-up. But the fool was right about one thing. There was only one possible route back from the beach. Lamia and her chance abductor – because there was no conceivable way in Milouins’s mind that her kidnap could have been pre-planned – had no choice but to come back past here, if they hadn’t done so already.

  And this time of morning, who else would be using the beach road? It wouldn’t do to meet them on the narrow road coming back from the beach. Best to wait here and follow them with his lights off – just as Lemelle had done from the house – when they eventually came back on by. Find out where they were heading. Who was behind the whole thing.

  Checking in every direction, Milouins pulled his car off the road, facing back towards St Tropez. Where was that stupid bastard Lemelle hiding himself? He’d have his guts for garters.

  It was then, with the dawn slowly breaking in the eastern sky, that he saw the body.

  ‘Oh, putain.’

  Milouins glanced up and down the road. Nothing was moving. It was five o’clock in the morning, and the holiday season was over. Builders and maintenance men wouldn’t be about for another hour or so at the very least.

  He moved across to Lemelle, his gaze focused away from the body and towards the beach road, watching for traffic.

  He ducked down and pressed a finger against Lemelle’s carotid artery, his gaze still fixed on the road.

  Then he took a deep breath and
looked down.

  Whoever had done Lemelle over had done him good. His head looked as if it had been laid open with a baseball bat. He had bled from the chest cavity, but the blood flow had staunched itself, and strings of coagulated gore lay scattered across his belly, his groin, and the surrounding tussocks of grass. If Milouins had wanted to, he could have reached in past Lemelle’s shattered breastbone and plucked out what remained of his heart.

  Milouins dry-retched. Then he stood up and glanced over at the Land Rover. Only one thing to do.

  Still gagging, he hefted Lemelle in both arms and manhandled him across to the vehicle. The man reeked of shit from his ruptured bowels. Milouins threw open the cat-flap and windmilled Lemelle in over the lower tailgate. Then he hunched down behind the Land Rover and vomited up his supper.

  With Lemelle safely tucked inside the vehicle, Milouins set about covering the body with some sacking and a scattering of loose straw. Then he tidied himself up as best he could with a horseman’s wisp made from the remainder of the straw. When he was done, he refastened the tilt and went to look for his Mossberg.

  A ten-minute search produced a grand total of three unused cartridges that had probably been ejected from Lemelle’s pocket when the vehicle – and Milouins now accepted that it had to be a vehicle – had hit him. But no Mossberg.

  So either Lamia and the man who had rescued her had clean escaped, or Milouins’s original hunch still held, and her abductor had dropped Lamia off at a secondary vehicle, fallen foul of Lemelle on the way back out, and driven straight at him.

  Lemelle, being Lemelle, had no doubt brandished the shotgun menacingly at his intended victim before actually getting around to firing it. That’s what the tracks told Milouins, anyway – and Milouins was a man who always believed the evidence of his own eyes.

  Milouins glanced down at his watch – 5.20. And the rapidly stiffening Lemelle was obviously in no hurry to go anywhere.

  Milouins checked back down the road again, one forearm clamped to his nose in a vain effort to obviate the smell that still permeated his clothes. Either Lamia and her St George were long gone, or she was still down there, cash on delivery. What did he have to lose by backing his hunch? He’d either lost them, or he hadn’t. If they came back down the road he would follow them – to hell and back if necessary. If not, he would go back to the Domaine and arrange Lemelle’s secret burial.

  Satisfed that he had cleaned up the area and secured Lemelle’s body, Milouins got back inside his car and settled down to wait.

  24

  Incongruous in his ten-year-old charcoal-grey Le Bon Marché suit, Calque sat in the sand, his knees spread, staring out to sea at the gradually emerging dawn. The woman, covered in a tartan blanket from the back of his car, lay motionless beside him.

  The sudden opening of her eyes had proved to be a false alarm – a purely automatic reaction to the change of light. She was still doped out, her mouth partly open, her hands turned back on themselves as if she were trying to fend off the attentions of an overactive pet.

  Calque lit a cigarette. Scrunching his eyes against the smoke, he fished the tape recorder out of his pocket and reversed the spool. Then he hit the play button and held the recorder up to his ear.

  The recorder was sound-activated – meaning that the moment it identified a sound within a radius of maybe three metres, it would start itself up. The tape would then automatically turn itself over after forty-five minutes, and cut off for good after ninety. Calque noted with satisfaction that the full ninety minutes appeared to have been used.

  The first noise Calque heard was that of a vacuum cleaner. The tape switched itself on and off a dozen or more times as the vacuum cleaner moved in and out of focus. Calque reined in a desire to fast-forward the tape. He had time. No one knew he was here. And the sea was calming in its way.

  Half an hour in, he picked up his first voices. Calque shrugged out of his jacket and draped it over his head, creating a mini echo chamber. Two men were talking. Calque recognized the voice of the butler, Milouins, and someone whom he assumed to be one of the footmen – for it was clear from Milouins’s tone that he was addressing a subordinate. The two men seemed to be preparing the room for a meeting. As Calque listened, Milouins told the footman to lay on the wax polish with a will. A series of bumps followed.

  ‘The bastard is cleaning the table,’ Calque said to himself.

  More bumps.

  ‘He’s moving chairs. The bastard is moving chairs.’

  Another ten minutes went by and the tape auto-reversed. Still cursing, Calque began to fast-forward. Nothing. Just bumping, banging, and the occasional word between Milouins and the footman he was ordering about.

  Calque switched off the tape recorder, replaced it in his jacket, and let the jacket slip down around his shoulders. He threw back his head as if he were about to howl at the moon. Five weeks. Five weeks of waiting and watching, and for what? A ninety-minute tape recording of two men cleaning a room.

  He was past it. That was clear now. He had finally lost the plot. The Service had been right to green-light his early retirement. He was nothing but a liability. A dinosaur.

  He looked down at the woman.

  The dawn was up and her face was clearly visible now. She was watching him, her eyes wide open in shock.

  Calque fought the temptation to plunge his hand back inside his jacket pocket and drag out his purloined badge for the second time. Why aggravate the situation? If the woman decided to prosecute him for kidnap, the fact that he had attempted to masquerade as a serving police officer would doubtless secure him a good two-to-three years’ extra prison time. Think what a field day some of his recidivists would have with him inside. They’d tattoo his eyeballs with a screwdriver.

  ‘You’re free to go, Mademoiselle. I want you to understand that. I’m not coercing you in any way.’

  Lamia raised herself up on her elbows. After staring silently at him for what seemed the better part of sixty seconds, she allowed her eyes to drift away from Calque’s face and off towards the horizon. ‘Where am I?’

  ‘You’re at Pampelonne Beach. Near St Tropez. It’s just after dawn.’

  Lamia sat up, shrugging the blanket away. She stretched her hands out in front of her, as if she still expected to find them tied up. ‘What am I doing here?’ She glanced across at Calque. ‘And who are you?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Calque. ‘You want to know who I am?’ once again he found himself on the cusp of declaring that he was Captain Joris Calque, Police Nationale, 2ème Arrondissement, Paris. Instead, he muttered, ‘If you will forgive me, Mademoiselle, I will withhold my name until the situation we are in establishes itself a little clearer.’

  Lamia began to laugh. ‘Are we really in a situation?’

  Calque shrugged. He felt like digging a hole in the sand, laying himself face down in it, and inviting the woman to fill it in. ‘In a manner of speaking. Yes.’

  The smile stayed on Lamia’s face. ‘Have you kidnapped me? Or have you saved me? Make up your mind, please.’

  Calque unslung his jacket from about his shoulders and replaced it carefully over Lamia’s. ‘It’s cold, Mademoiselle. This is the time of day when the body is at its most fragile.’

  Lamia reached across herself and touched the flap of the jacket. ‘If you’re a kidnapper, you’re not a very good one. You’ve left your gun in your jacket pocket.’

  Calque gave a small bow. It was clear that the woman was inviting him, for the second and last time, to lay his cards on the table. ‘It’s not a gun but a tape recorder, Mademoiselle. A tape recorder that I secreted illegally in your mother’s house some months ago, whilst I was still a serving police officer.’

  Lamia pinched the jacket closer around her shoulders. ‘Ah, yes. The intellectual policeman. I’ve heard all about you. You’re the man my mother says harassed my brother into an early grave.’

  Calque could feel himself bridling. An early grave? A psychopath like Achor Bale? Best place for him. He
stopped marginally short of expressing his feelings in words, however, for he was still trying to second guess the woman’s intentions – just as she was attempting to gauge his.

  He cleared his throat, measuring the level of his tone against the distant sound of the sea. ‘You were tied up and doped when my associate found you. Am I right in assuming that my admission about bugging your mother and your siblings has not distressed you quite as much as it might have done under other circumstances? That you might even …’ and here Calque felt perversely tempted to burst out laughing ‘ …be alienated in some way from the rest of your family?’

  Lamia gave Calque his jacket back. ‘Could we discuss this someplace else, do you think? Over a coffee and a croissant perhaps? I haven’t eaten anything in fifteen hours.’

  Calque shrugged on his jacket. He could smell the woman’s scent on his collar, and it disturbed him. ‘Of course.’

  ‘And my name is Lamia.’

  The sudden volte-face wrong-footed Calque. ‘Lamia? That is certainly an uncommon name.’ He vainly tried to conjure up who or what Lamia had represented in Classical mythology. Had she been the one whose tongue Jupiter had torn out in a fit of pique to prevent her giving the game away to Hera about one of his many affairs? No, that had been Lara. Or was that Laodice? So it was true, then. His brain was definitely going. ‘My name is Calque. Joris Calque. Ex-Captain in the Police Nationale.’

  ‘Well, Ex-Captain Calque, do you have any aspirin on you? I have a splitting headache. And your associate – for you mentioned an associate, didn’t you? – appears to have overlooked my handbag in his headlong rush to kidnap me.’

  25

  Lamia emerged from the unisex washroom at the back of the fisherman’s café near the Pointe de la Pinède. She had scrubbed her face and fluffed out her hair with her fingers, but the corrugations in her slacks were more terminal. She bent down, yanked at the slacks one final time, and then gave up.