Sacred Ends

by Lisa Appignanesi

  As Marguerite drew closer to the two men she saw that P’tit Ours had put his basket down and was holding a piece of wood remarkably like a cudgel. He dwarfed the inspector.

  ‘Put that down, Molineuf. No funny business.’

  ‘We just want to talk to you, P’tit Ours.’ Marguerite tried a different tack, her voice soft as she held the boy’s eyes. They were round and large and protruded slightly. ‘We wanted to know whether you talked to Martine yesterday. Or saw her?’

  He looked at her blankly, and she repeated, ‘Martine.’

  The youth’s sudden movement made her leap backwards. The inspector stepped in front of her. ‘That’s enough. Talk now or I’m taking you in.’

  The youth started to edge backwards, as if he were planning either to launch himself at them or make a getaway. Only now did it come to Marguerite that the boy might not be clear on Martine’s name. The girl herself had said she thought he mistook her for her sister.

  ‘Did you see Yvette yesterday?’ Marguerite tried again. ‘Do you know where she is?’

  ‘Yvette. Yvette.’ The boy rubbed his squash of a nose, smiled, did a little clumsy dance on his paddle feet. ‘Your house. Your house,’ he repeated.

  ‘Yes, she was at my house,’ Marguerite smiled. ‘But she went away. Did you see her?’

  An excited coil of words rolled off the boy’s thick tongue, too fast for sense. They got trapped in his jagged teeth and splayed lips so that they had to be spat.

  ‘The doctor’s, did you say?’ The inspector had understood better.

  ‘Doctor, doctor,’ P’tit Ours repeated and then looked sad. With the sadness the words grew slow. ‘Yvette gone. Witch gone. Danuta gone. All gone. Into the ground.’

  ‘Into the ground?’ the inspector repeated.

  Marguerite shuddered. Another young woman she had let down.

  The youth repeated it again, like a song: ‘Into the ground.’ He hopped from foot to foot. Picked up a bough again and threw it into the air. This time he let it fall on the ground, forcing them to step away. The inspector growled a threat.

  Marguerite couldn’t tell whether P’tit Ours’s gesture had been one of anger or a kind of desperation. A kind of compassion wouldn’t allow her to believe that the boy was all bad. He had been mistreated, shaped by his drunken masters.

  ‘The witch, you say?’

  ‘Gone gone. All gone.’

  ‘She went away. Like Yvette. Went where?’

  ‘Gone. All gone. P’tit Ours cry. Like Auguste. Auguste cry. Dancer dead. In the ground. The ground.’

  ‘Yes.’ Marguerite looked at the ground. The basket with the twigs rested near them. It had the same weave as the basket Gabriel had come in.

  The inspector put an arm on the youth’s shoulder. ‘You’ll come with us now, young Molineuf.’

  With a sudden heave and a duck, P’tit Ours shook him off, picked up the basket and raced away with his odd hop, weaving through the trees. Durand went straight after him. But despite the youth’s clumsiness, the inspector was no match for speed coupled with knowledge of the fields. P’tit Ours dodged and parried, finally to leap over a low point in the wall in one bound, leaving the inspector to clamber and tail after him.

  ‘There’s no sense to this, Molineuf,’ Durand shouted. But now he was shouting into the void. The giant youth had vanished.

  After a protracted moment, he shrugged and turned back towards Marguerite.

  Suddenly there was a crack from behind him and a stick came whizzing through the air and over the wall. The inspector stepped aside just in time.

  ‘There’s no question of it, the oaf is dangerous.’ He was breathing hard when he reached Marguerite. ‘He’ll have to be locked up. We’ll beat Martine’s whereabouts out of him.’

  ‘He must have shimmied up a tree.’

  Together they examined the distance from where the stick had come minutely. Nothing stirred. Not a branch or leaf. A hush filled the cold air. Even the birds had gone quiet. On a meadow in the valley opposite, some cows grazed in bovine tranquillity. The earth had swallowed P’tit Ours.

  ‘He’s cleverer than we thought.’

  ‘Strength, more than often, stands in for cleverness, Madame. Believe me. Not too many of the murderers we round up have degrees from our leading schools.’

  Marguerite’s hand flew to her mouth. ‘It’s just come to me, Inspector. I’ve worked it out. I know. I know where he’s gone. Come on. I shall have to go home and get some clothes.’

  ‘You think he’ll still be around when we return?’

  ‘Oh yes, Inspector. He’s in the ground.’

  EIGHTEEN

  Marguerite no longer cared what Olivier thought if he saw her. She changed into an old pair of trousers borrowed from a servant and held tight with a leather belt, donned her riding jacket and boots, and tried not to think about anything except what was in front of them. They would need a lamp. That was essential. Her father had always taken a lamp. And warm gloves. She recommended to Durand, who was game, that they leave the carriage at home and ride cross-country to the spot. It would save time.

  The inspector stared at her with an expression that was hardly one of approval, though there was a twinkle in his eye.

  ‘Madame will make me forget that George Sand was never my favourite model of womanhood.’

  ‘We haven’t time for all of that, Inspector. Where we’re going hardly produces the right atmosphere for my best dresses.’

  An hour of hard riding later, the orchard appeared, its trees ranked but bare like an army devoid of uniforms. Scanning the vista, Marguerite suggested they tether the horses near the wall. They would be least visible from there, should anyone approach. The sun’s position was in their favour. Their shadows were obliterated by the ample one cast by the wall, so long as they kept close to it. They reached the hillock she had seen from a distance that morning. She examined its outer hump and noted, with relief, the existence of a partly obscured opening. She had been right. She hadn’t dreamt or imagined it. There was a cave.

  Durand moved aside the fronds of copper beech that had been used to mask the opening. It was narrow, but ample enough for the inspector to ease himself through. She heard a muted thud as his feet touched earth. Not too high a leap, then. She saw the flickering of the lantern he was holding and lowered herself through the hole after him.

  She didn’t quite know what she had expected. Perhaps a corpse half covered with rubble. Or Martine tied up, terrified, next to her the mulatto woman. Instead, in the wavering light, she made out a roundish cave about seven metres in diameter and tall enough for Durand to stand in comfortably. Near the entrance, on the ground, lay some half-burned twigs arranged in the shape of a fire. And by the wall there was a small heap of potatoes and turnips. This was definitely P’tit Ours’s hideaway.

  ‘Look, Madame,’ Durand pointed to an opening in the wall. Then to another. The cave gave way to tunnels, one slightly to the left of their entry place, another almost straight ahead.

  ‘I suggest we start with the one at the back.’ She had lowered her voice to a whisper. Sound funnelled and echoed through the tunnels with eerie amplification.

  She should have considered all this before. Her father had told her years ago about the tunnels that crisscrossed the region, tunnels that led to dungeons, tunnels between one château and another or from a château to the river. Along these tunnels, endangered nobles had been spirited away as long ago as the days of Richard the Lionheart, and throughout the various battles of succession and religion. In revolutionary times, escaping nobles had been joined by clerics in the tunnels that led between cloisters and safe houses and chalky caves. Spies too had used them as recently as the Franco-Prussian War. And now?

  The tunnel space was low, the earth around them as cold and moist as a tomb. A smell of damp and rot, like putrefying eggs, rose from the walls. Her hat scraped the ceiling. Durand took his off and, where the tunnel grew narrower, she did too. She was glad of the lamp, thoug
h the shadows it cast on the grimy walls could all too easily grow into childhood nightmares, magic-lantern magicians with pointed chins and accusing noses hurtling towards her, ogres wearing the face of P’tit Ours and behind it that of the man they called the Old Master, Napoléon Marchand.

  They trudged until her feet were frozen inside her boots. She could see that Durand was stiff with the effort of bending. It was impossible accurately to predict their direction. At one point she had the impression they were moving precipitously downhill. Here the tunnel joined another. They carried straight on, though she had lost her sense of direction. Their path now rose little by little, so that her legs had to work harder.

  ‘Do you know where we might be heading? And for how long?’ Durand whispered. ‘I don’t want the lamp to fail us.’

  ‘Let’s give it another few minutes, and we’ll try another direction.’ No sooner had she spoken than the tunnel came to a dead end. Stopped abruptly without the opening-out of a cave. There was nothing in front of them. Just an earthen wall.

  Durand crouched for a moment against it so that he could straighten his neck. He looked up at her.

  She shrugged, avoiding his question. As she did so, she noticed a faint shift of light above his shoulder.

  She ran her hand along the wall. Her fingers felt the change before she saw it. Earth had become wood. Between them the tiny crack that had produced a sliver of light.

  Durand leapt up. He placed his hand where hers was, edged forwards. ‘Yes, yes, Madame.’

  She heard the click of a latch. One push and they were through a door into what could only be, judging from the dusty array of rope, bottles and old barrels, a cellar room. Above them a trapdoor stood partly open. Here was the source of the light.

  With a quick glance at her, Durand lowered the ladder tucked into the side of the door. She put a hushing finger to her lips. She half expected to hear a scream from an imprisoned Martine. Half expected the bulk of P’tit Ours to loom before them, cudgel in hand.

  They climbed up, hurrying over the creak of boards. They emerged beside a sack of flour leaning against a wall. Next to it stood another of rice. Jars lined the walls. Marguerite tiptoed towards the door. It opened. They were in a kitchen. Silence echoed around them.

  The room was less than clean, the window dark with accumulated grit. Through it, she could see into an expanse of garden and beyond that the gentle rise and fall of fields. She stood very still for a moment, gazing, then changed position. The change brought everything into focus.

  Durand was at the door and gesturing her behind him. He put down his lamp and peered out slowly with the air of a man who expected to hear a bullet whizzing past him at any moment. When it didn’t come, he tiptoed out.

  They were in a box-like hall now, to its side a dusty, half-furnished drawing room of no particular style, but not poor. A bourgeois house. Marguerite hastened to the windows again, shuttered here, so she had to steal a peek through slats. The sight of the high wall made her certain. They were in the house the children had called the witch’s house. Which meant there was probably no one here. No one alive, in any case. The body she had half feared they would find in the cave might well be somewhere within these rooms.

  She sniffed the air, wondering if there was decomposition mingled with the pervasive dust, and signalled to Durand that she wanted to have a look upstairs while he explored down here. He shook his head and pressed in front of her. The stairs creaked. There were no pictures to examine along their length, only oily wallpaper of an uncertain colour.

  A few endless seconds later, they were in a shuttered bedroom. The bed was tousled, unmade, a nightgown tossed across it. A glass of murky water stood on the night table, an array of abandoned jewellery. Whoever had been here had left in a hurry.

  In an alcove stood a cabin trunk of sea-going size. She hastened to it, read its tag: Amandine Septembre. There was an address, too: Martinique. She almost shouted to Durand, then, remembering, clamped a hand over her mouth. A.S. The initials on the handkerchief found in the pocket of the dead man, along with the card for Villemardi Fils, stonemasons. Had the dead man planned a death for Amandine Septembre, only to suffer one himself first?

  She didn’t have a pencil and pad to jot the address down, and she hailed the inspector. His eyes grew wide as he took it in. He gave her a little smile, then reached for his pad.

  The windows sported two layers of curtain, one heavy, one transparent. It was probably behind these very ones that she had seen the woman pace and listen to the taunts of the children. Amandine Septembre. She knew her full name now.

  She pulled open a wardrobe and was astonished by the collection of gowns and shoes. She was a big woman, and not poor, judging by the fabrics. So why had she ended up in this sorry state, kept prisoner here, perhaps, certainly forced to leave her lodgings in a hurry, taking little with her? Fleeing. Where was she now?

  Marguerite ran a finger across the dressing table and saw the trace in the accumulation of dust. No one had cleaned here for a good week or more.

  She noticed a piece of paper on the table. Something she couldn’t make out in the murky half-light was written on it. She folded it quickly into her pocket and followed Durand into the next room. Another bedroom. Men’s clothes in this wardrobe. She wished they could get the measure of them. No time. Someone could come in at any moment. P’tit Ours. Where was he? The inspector was scanning the desk. She felt as much as saw the small notebook on the bedside table. She put it in her pocket and looked round for a second trunk. None here. Time to go. Quickly. Their luck mightn’t hold. She was already breathing too hard.

  Durand tried the front door. It wouldn’t give. It had been locked from the outside. To lock someone in or to keep people out? There were no keys in sight. He waved her towards the back of the house, into the storeroom. Here a large key was looped prominently round a nail. He fitted it into the lock of the back door.

  They were on a small verandah from which steps led down to what must once have been a kitchen garden. A high wall bordered a steep hillock on the other side, beyond which she could see the Tellier House.

  ‘Better this than the tunnel again.’

  ‘We may not be able to scale the wall,’ Marguerite murmured. But she followed him. She had no desire to find herself once more in the tunnel. Though she was already wondering where the other paths led and whether she had condemned Martine to another miserable night in captivity.

  They kept close to the wall she had seen P’tit Ours scale from the tree on its other side. She hoped no one in the Tellier house could see them from the window. If they did, it was unlikely they would be recognised. That was the good thing. The bad thing was that there was no way Marguerite could climb on to that wall and jump down the other side. And if she scrambled on to Durand’s shoulders, he would then be trapped here. No trees like the one P’tit Ours had used were in evidence on this side of the high wall.

  On the horizon, the sun had already disappeared. Dusk would soon give way to dark. When the mound at last emerged from the shadows like some great sleeping beast digesting its prey, it seemed to have grown so large as to be unscalable.

  ‘You wait here, Madame,’ Durand whispered. I’ll wriggle up, get the horse’s reins and throw them down to you to tug you up by.’

  She didn’t protest. She was suddenly weary. Weary with too much fear for those they might still find in ‘the ground’ P’tit Ours had evoked.

  Durand started to worm his way up. Soon he was a mere presence in the gloom of the late afternoon. She could tell by his breathing when he had reached the hump and was over. In the distance, she heard the restless whinny of horses and took a deep breath. Only a few more minutes now.

  A cry burst on the air like cannon fire. A terrible cry followed by a thump and the sound of feet pounding across ground, running, running heavily.

  Then everything was far too still.

  ‘Inspector?’ she ventured to call after a few minutes. She had a terrible presentim
ent. That heavy tread. Those feet hammering the earth. It could only be P’tit Ours.

  Was it the same strange animal tread she had heard in the woods the day she had found Danuta the Dancer? Her legs turned to stone. And now the inspector…

  The ogre of a youth must have found the horses and been lying in wait. He understood more than they all gave him credit for. That’s what had fooled her. She hadn’t liked to think that his strangeness inevitably made him a criminal. So she had been led astray by her own unwillingness to accept what Durand and all the others took for granted. A degenerate. Capable of murder. A murderer. Durand had threatened prison. Durand was not a friend.

  ‘Inspector,’ she called again, more loudly now. Tears rose to her eyes. Durand had been assaulted. Worse. He could be lying dead on the other side of the wall. Or dying. Her fault. She started to scramble up the steep hillock, using her feet to wedge herself where she could, inching along, slipping backwards where the ground had grown wet with the gathering cold. Persisting, despite the tears. At last, her head was over the top. She heaved herself up and slid down the other side, bumping her way to the bottom.

  She walked slowly, her ears alert to any tread. P’tit Ours could still be in the vicinity. Waiting. Waiting for her. She scanned the area for the sign of an attack, for the inspector’s body, if it had been left here.

  A horse snorted. She was almost back at their departure point. So P’tit Ours had left the horses behind.

  When she reached the tethered animals, they responded nervously, whinnying and rearing. Only then did she notice the ungainly bundle draped over one of the saddles.

  ‘Inspector,’ she cried out, then muffled her shout.

  He was strapped to the horse with the very reins he had been going to use to help her climb. She touched his cheek, reached for his pulse. He was still warm, breathing. She took a deep breath herself.

  When his voice came, she was so relieved she started to sob.

  ‘Madame. If you could untie me, please.’

  She pulled at the knots with clumsy fingers.