The Sixth Key

by Adriana Koulias

  ‘Please, just a few moments. What harm can it do?’ Eva cajoled, smiling.

  The man sighed. ‘Very well, the only veil we have is over there, behind glass. But it’s only a copy.’ He went to the altar, took a candle and gave it to Eva. ‘I must see to some preparations in the sacristy, so you may look until I’m done.’

  La Dame and Eva soon found the framed veil and Rahn, following behind, put a hand to his brow where a cold sweat had gathered and was snaking its way over his face.

  ‘Come see this!’ La Dame called out to him.

  When Rahn joined them he gave another sneeze and it was a moment before he realised they were looking at an engraving hung precariously from a long nail protruding from the stonework. It was too dark in this corner to see it clearly.

  ‘Take it down, La Dame, so we can have a closer look,’ Rahn asked.

  It was an image of a bearded face drawn over a stretched cloth. Below it was written:

  VERA EFFIGIES SACRI VULTUS DOMINI

  NOSTRI JESU CHRISTI QUAE ROMAE

  IN SACROSANCTA BASILICA S.PETRI IN

  VATICANO RELIGIOSISSIME ASSERVATUR

  ET COLITUR

  ‘Veronica’s print of the face of our Lord Jesus Christ, guarded in the Basilica of Saint Peter in the Vatican,’ Rahn translated it under his breath.

  ‘That’s it!’ Eva said. ‘On the way to the crucifixion a woman called Veronica took an impression of the face of Christ on her veil – Veronica’s veil!’

  ‘Veronica must be the goddess the clue is referring to.’ Rahn turned the print around and looked at the back of it. He lifted the backing up a little and gave another sneeze, which bounced off the walls at them. ‘There’s nothing behind it.’ He gave it back to La Dame, who replaced it on its hook.

  ‘Wait!’ Eva said. ‘Beneath is not behind. Maybe it means underneath the print. Maybe on the floor . . . A print can be moved but a mark on the stone is there to stay and can go unnoticed.’

  Rahn took the candle and squatted to look at the flagstone at his feet. He put his hand to it to see if he could feel any marks that may have been covered up by grime or wear. Nothing. But as he was rising something caught his eye on the wall directly below the painting. He found what looked like a plugged-up hole the size of a small walnut in the wall. He gave the candle to La Dame, took out his penknife and carefully inserted the end of it into the hole. It took a moment but he soon teased out the plug and what lay behind it: a narrow glass vial.

  There was the noise of a latch as the sacristy door opened.

  ‘All right! I have to close the church now!’

  Rahn hid the vial in his coat pocket. ‘A wonderful specimen!’ he said to him.

  ‘The veil?’ The thin man came over to them. ‘No, it isn’t so rare. Other churches around these parts have them: Bugarach, Saint-Paul-de-Fenouillet . . . Brenac.’

  ‘Saint-Paul-de-Fenouillet, that’s Abbé Grassaud’s church?’ Rahn said, surprised.

  ‘Yes.’ The man’s face opened into a toothless grin. ‘Do you know him? He grew up in this town. He went to seminary school and was accepted into Saint Sulpice in Paris. He is a doctor of theology now. We are very proud of him!’

  Rahn tried to take this in and wondered if it was coincidence or design. Saint Sulpice! Could Grassaud be a member of Association Angelica?

  They thanked the sacristan and left. Once outside, Rahn felt both relieved to be out of the church and encouraged that they were one step closer in their search. ‘We’ve got it!’ he said.

  ‘We’ve got what, dear Rahn?’ La Dame said, whining. ‘We don’t know what it is yet.’

  ‘Well, I aim to find out. We need light to have a look at this, and besides I think we deserve something to eat and a glass of brandy. What do you say?’

  All were in agreement. They took the road out of the dismal little town and headed back to Granes. But they had only been driving a short time when they came up behind a hearse travelling at a snail’s pace over the mist-laden road.

  ‘What’s a hearse doing about at this hour?’ Rahn said.

  ‘It is rather odd!’ La Dame agreed. ‘Perhaps it’s like the curious incident of the dog in the night time, Rahn!’

  ‘What?’ Eva asked.

  ‘From a Sherlock Holmes story – “Silver Blaze”’ Rahn informed her.

  ‘What did the dog do?’ Eva said.

  ‘The dog did nothing,’ Rahn replied. ‘Actually, it didn’t bark when it should have and that was the curious incident.’

  ‘In other words,’ La Dame added, ‘if something is odd or curious, there may be a good reason for it.’

  Rahn nodded. La Dame was right. The forest of partially denuded trees stood sombre on either side of the narrow country road and there was no way to pass the hearse safely – if someone came from behind them, they would be trapped. Every now and again they would lose the hearse around a corner, but they could still see the fog glowing from its headlamps. The road narrowed even further and at this point headlights appeared in the opposite direction. The hearse stopped and began to reverse, forcing Rahn to follow until they had reached a point where the oncoming car could squeeze past them.

  ‘I like this less and less,’ La Dame said.

  ‘Look, there’s a car behind us!’ Eva put in.

  Rahn glanced in the rear-view mirror and realised she was right. His heart did a double somersault. Once again that potholer’s sense of foreboding had been on the mark. Could it be the black Citroën?

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Eva said.

  ‘I don’t know!’ he answered tersely. But now he realised that due to a peculiarity in the road he had lost sight of both cars. He saw a turn-off on the right and knew this might be their only opportunity, so he switched off his headlights and took the turn sharply.

  This occasioned a cry from La Dame: ‘What are you doing!’

  ‘Shut up, will you?’ Rahn said, concentrating, his heart in his throat.

  He drove the Peugeot only a little way by the faint light of an unseen moon and switched off the engine. ‘We’ll wait here,’ he told them, ‘and for crying out loud, La Dame, don’t light up your cigar. This could be nothing, or it could be something. The car behind us won’t know he’s not following us for a while.’

  ‘What now then? You do realise that you must be a suspect in five murders and one kidnapping? Not to mention the man at the university!’ La Dame said.

  Rahn hadn’t thought about it like that. It was true! There was Abbé Cros, that man in the barn at Arques, Abbé Lucien, and now those two Serbians lying dead in some desolate spot near Campagne-sur-Aude, and if all this weren’t enough there was Deodat’s fate to take into account, whatever that might be! He felt dismal, but there was nothing to be done about it now. He had to concentrate. When he felt it was safe, he turned the key and the lights came on again, illuminating the fog that, like a living thing, had grown to like their company. He reversed the Peugeot back to the juncture with the road to Granes and took to the road again, continuing until he found a shoulder on the left with enough cover to hide behind. He stopped the car and turned the engine off.

  ‘What now?’ La Dame cried.

  ‘Look, it’s like this, if that car was following us, whoever is in it will soon figure out we’ve given them the slip and they’ll come back looking for us.’

  Sure enough, within moments of Rahn having said this, the car drove past – it was the black Citroën. As soon as he saw those tail-lights disappear, Rahn pulled out again and set off for Granes at full speed, hoping the hearse was long gone.

  At Granes they came to a little pension on the Grand Rue that was still open. They parked the car around the back of the building and met the owner of the establishment sitting at the front, smoking a pipe. He was a portly man, with a long moustache and a short disposition. He told them that there were two rooms available and that the kitchen was closed but that his wife could warm up some leftover rabbit stew if this sounded to their liking.

 
; In the poorly lit kitchen, having consumed what was left of a delicious stew, La Dame sipped at his brandy and puffed on a Cuban, looking almost like his old self, except for the split lip. Eva sipped at her tea and Rahn unrolled the little yellowed parchment he had taken out of the vial. It was another encrypted message and it looked similarly constructed to the last:

  VITA

  XWNSOILSV

  YIGSGIVRJQQDZLBEP

  ‘So, what’s the master word?’ La Dame asked, sitting forward to see.

  Rahn took out his Vigenère Square and looked at it.

  ‘Vita. It’s the only intelligible word and besides, it fits: life and death, vita and mors.’

  Rahn wrote ‘vita’ underneath the cipher and used the Vigenère Square again to decipher each letter.‘Coustassa!’ Rahn said.

  ‘The church of Abbé Gélis! Yes, of course it’s on the list!’

  He deciphered the second line:

  ‘Inside the cross of God . . . You know what this means? We have to go to Coustassa and we’ll have to go there now. You heard what that Serbian said 0about tonight – think of Deodat!’

  Despite protestations from La Dame, they left Granes discreetly, and headed north to Coustassa via Campagne-les-Bains, where the Serbians had accosted them. Rahn kept to the back roads, his eye on the rear-view mirror looking out for the Citroën.

  He was glad to reach the town of Coustassa without incident.

  The village appeared to be worn out and in decline and, like its church, looked for the most part to be sleeping except for a house here and there showing a light at its window. A fine rain fell and all three were wet and trembling by the time they got to the church. Their mood did not improve when they found it locked. Rahn took out his knife, and selected from its assortment of gadgets a suitable device and put it into the lock, moving it around this way and that. It didn’t work. He heard Eva sigh beside him.

  ‘Here, let me,’ she said and took the penknife from his hand with an air of authority that was infuriating. ‘A lawyer’s secretary has to learn one or two unconventional skills.’

  She moved the knife deftly until there was an audible click.

  ‘Bravo!’ La Dame whispered.

  Rahn grunted. ‘What kind of lawyers did you work for?’

  ‘The ordinary kind – the kind that don’t always obey the law.’

  Inside, the only light came from the votive candles and the perpetual flame at the altar. Rahn reconciled himself to entering another church even though the thought of it made his every muscle and sinew scream for him to stop. He told himself that Deodat was still alive and that each step closer to the treasure was a step closer to Deodat. Keeping this firmly in his mind, he walked down the short nave, opened the little gate and took the three steps to the sacred space before the altar. Here the rabbit stew came to life, thumping its feet in his stomach as he took himself to the cross. His anxiety made his chest feel like a squeezed lemon.

  Inside the cross of God . . . The cross on the altar looked to be solid and fixed. There was no way of removing it without making noise. Behind the altar there hung a large picture of Christ on his cross, a terrible rendition of His death that had been darkened by centuries of candle smoke. Rahn went to it now and inspected it. As he did so he thought it through:

  Vita was the master word in the second parchment – the word for life in Latin.

  The next clue was, inside the cross of God.

  Could it mean that the clue was hidden inside that painting depicting death? If so, then someone had a sense of humour! He inspected the painting and noted that part of the canvas had been pulled away from the frame at the bottom left-hand corner. His heart sank. It looked like someone had beaten them to it. If there had been a clue here – it was gone.

  ‘I think we’re too late,’ he said.

  ‘Too late for what?’ La Dame asked.

  ‘The clue is missing.’

  ‘But that doesn’t make sense,’ Eva said. ‘Saint-Just-et-le-Bézu was intact and that was the second clue, the second parchment. To find this parchment they would have needed to have found the first and second parchments,’ Eva said.

  ‘I don’t know, maybe it was Gélis?’ Rahn said. ‘Maybe he started tearing apart his own church, like Saunière did. It certainly looks renovated.’

  ‘Then this may not be the original painting,’ Eva pointed out.

  Rahn told La Dame to bring him a candle and in the meantime pulled the painting away from the wall a little. ‘Look at this. The original wall surface is still behind the painting. It must have always been here and they renovated around it. Now, if Gélis did find something hidden in it, he could have sold it to Cros. That would explain the money they found in his presbytery. It would also explain why Saint-Just-et-le-Bézu is intact. Cros could have used the clue in this church to find the clues in the other four churches and it may have been enough to point him in the direction of the treasure.’

  ‘So it’s gone and he has been buried with it,’ Eva said. ‘In that case I was right, Cros had been so secretive about his funeral arrangements because he wanted to hide the treasure in his coffin.’

  Rahn felt the blood drain from his head. ‘This has been for nothing and now Deodat will be killed – or worse!’

  ‘Listen, Rahn,’ La Dame said, ‘something doesn’t add up. If I’d found the treasure I wouldn’t bother to hide the list and guard it so keenly. I’d be sunning myself on the Côte d’Azur, with a bottle of Luis Felipe and affectionate friends to keep me company.’

  Rahn grabbed La Dame by the shoulders then and shook him with delight.

  ‘Steady on, Rahn! Have you lost your senses?’

  ‘No! The very opposite! I think you’re right, La Dame! Why not just destroy the list? Why was Grassaud after it, if it had no value? And why would Madame Dénarnaud say that the moment Abbé Lucien looked at it he would know what to do?’

  ‘There has to be something that we’ve missed!’ Eva said.

  ‘No, he always wanted someone to find the list, for a reason.’ Rahn took the list from his pocket. ‘After all, he gave us the clue to the tabernacle where it was kept.’ He moved closer to the candles to study it.

  Jean-Louis Verger – Paris 1857 — Penitents

  Antoine Bigou – Rennes-le-Château — 1781 AA

  ~

  A J Grassaud – Saint-Paul-de-Fenouillet 1886

  A C Saunière – Rennes-le-Château 1885

  A K Boudet – Rennes-les-Bains 1885 — AA

  A A Gélis – Coustaussa murdered 1897

  A L Rivière – Espéraza refused last sacrament 1915

  ‘The two names at the top of the list differ from the rest,’ Eva pointed out.

  ‘Yes, they’re separated, as we said before, because those priests weren’t contemporaries of Saunière,’ Rahn reminded her.

  ‘No, there’s something else,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘She’s right!’ La Dame erupted. ‘Look, Rahn, Verger and Bigou both have their first names. The others on the list below only have initials.’ He gave Eva a conspiratorial smile that annoyed Rahn so much that he was hard pressed not to kick him. Even so, he had to admit it was true.

  ‘The A must stand for Abbé because it occurs before every name,’ Eva said, ‘so we’ll ignore that. Now, logic would say that the other initials point to first names. But they don’t, do they?

  ‘Saunière’s first name was Bérenger,’ Rahn said. ‘And that doesn’t match.’

  ‘And what about Abbé Grassaud?’ La Dame said. ‘What was his name?’

  Eva gave Rahn and La Dame a significant look. ‘His name was Eugene.’

  ‘Another mismatch,’ Rahn announced.

  ‘I’ll wager that all the initials are wrong,’ Eva said, finally.

  ‘Yes, it might be another cipher,’ Rahn agreed. ‘Let’s see, if you put all the initials together it makes . . . JCKAL.’

  Eva looked at it. ‘What if it is meant to be jackal, but Cros had to conform to th
e number of priests on the list and so he had to leave one letter out. Is there a connection?’

  ‘Anubis!’ Rahn said, looking at the two of them. ‘Anubis is the jackal-headed Egyptian god . . . the god of the Underworld!’

  ‘That took you long enough to figure!’ said a voice that made them all jump nearly out of their skins. Rahn saw a shape in the darkness. When it came into the light he wanted to faint.

  42

  What did King Dagobert Say to His Hounds?

  ‘The surprise was not all on one side I assure you!’

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles

  The man stepped out from the shadows. ‘The mademoiselle is right. There is a church missing on that list . . . that is why the word JCKAL is not complete.’

  Rahn couldn’t believe his eyes. ‘Deodat! We thought—’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ Deodat looked perfectly calm and not at all tortured, harangued or abused. In fact he looked better than Rahn felt. Rahn had to sit down, and found a pew. He was breathless and feeling faint. The crushing weight of responsibility that he had felt until now lifted from him, leaving him completely unable to speak for a moment. He was thoroughly numbed.

  ‘Come, come, dear Rahn, are you alright? I owe you a thousand apologies!’ Deodat said, making his way to him.

  Rahn stood a moment, looking at his friend’s concerned face. ‘Good gracious! I can hardly believe my eyes. I – I’m in shock!’ Then, ‘I’ve never been more glad to see anyone in all my life!’ He was choked up, and took Deodat’s hand and shook it vigorously, but his joy soon gave way to a sudden vexation. ‘How dare you upset me like that!’ he said, letting go the hand. ‘For Heaven’s sake, Deodat! Where have you been? What have you been doing? We found a note, the house was ransacked, you were gone . . . They nearly killed me!’

  ‘Hold on, Rahn,’ Deodat said, lifting up a hand to stay him. ‘For things to make sense you have to tell me everything from the beginning.’