I.
Enzo retreated to the apartment like the wounded stag that he was. The young buck had given him quite a mauling. There was still no one there when he got back. He picked his way into the
séjour
which seemed, if anything, even more cluttered. There were empty cola cans lying around, and pizza crusts in carryout boxes. The air was stale, and the heat stifling. He opened the French windows, only to be hit by a wall of even hotter air. Which was when he noticed that his whiteboard had been cleared of its first set of clues, and a new set of images fixed around its edges. A crude drawing of two skeletal arms; a bottle of Dom Perignon champagne; a photograph of a crucifix with the date April 1st written beside it; a picture of a dog tag with
Utopique
handwritten across it; a diagram of a dog’s skeleton with one of its front legs circled in red; a photograph of a lapel pin, complete with two men on a single horse and the inscription,
sigilum militum xpisti
. And someone had already begun trying to decipher them. There were words written up and circled, with arrows criss-crossing the board.
‘Oh, you’re back.’ Enzo turned to find Nicole standing in the doorway grinning at him. He hadn’t heard her come in. Her long hair tumbled over her shoulders and down her back, and her breasts seemed more prominent than usual in a tight-fitting tee-shirt. Its V-neck exposed a substantial amount of cleavage. Enzo tried not to let his eyes be drawn by it. ‘I didn’t know when you’d be, so I started without you,’ she said.
‘So I see.’ She brushed past him and sat herself at the computer, hitting the spacebar to wake it up. ‘Where did you get the images?’
‘On the internet.’
Enzo looked at the board and frowned. ‘Why the skeleton of a dog?’
‘Ah.’ Nicole beamed with pleasure. ‘Remember the bone that was in the trunk? The one that didn’t seem to go with the arms? It’s a shinbone from a dog’s foreleg.’
Enzo was astonished. ‘How do you know that?’
‘A boy I was at school with is studying zoology at Limoges. It was his professor who was called in by the Toulouse police to try to identify the bone.’ She grinned again, pleased with herself. ‘Word gets around.’
But Enzo was distracted from her self-congratulation by an odd, acrid smell that he noticed wafting into the room for the first time. He screwed up his face. ‘What the hell’s that?’
‘What’s what?’
‘That smell.’
‘Ah…’ Nicole said. ‘That’ll be the ducklings.’
‘Ducklings?’
‘I put them in the bath. I didn’t know where else they should go.’
Enzo looked at her in disbelief. He turned and stalked out into the hall and threw open the bathroom door. The stink hit him like a blow from a baseball bat. Half a dozen tiny ducklings had settled themselves in the bottom of the bath, which was covered with a mixture of grain and shit. ‘Dear God! Is this some kind of a joke?’
Nicole had followed him out, and stretched on tiptoe to look at them over his shoulder. ‘They’re a gift from my father. By way of an apology for the other night.’ She sniffed several times. ‘You get used to the smell.’
Enzo looked at her over his shoulder. ‘I can’t keep ducks in my apartment. They can’t stay here.’
Nicole shrugged. ‘You must know
someone
with a garden. My papa says he’ll slaughter them for you when they’re big enough.’ She turned away into the hall, irritated by the interruption to her flow of explanation. ‘Do you want to know how far I’ve got with these clues or not?’
Enzo raised his eyes to the heavens and closed the door on the problem. He’d worry about the ducklings later.
He followed her back into the
séjour
.
Nicole settled herself in front of the computer again and said, ‘You’ll see I’ve written
dog
up there, and circled it and drawn arrows to it from the dog’s skeleton and the dog tag.’
Enzo looked at the board, still distracted by the smell, and nodded. ‘You’d better tell me why.’
‘Well, it was the guy from the
police scientifique
who said it—about the disk with
Utopique
engraved on it. A name tag for a dog, he said it looked like. And it did. Just the sort of thing you would attach to your dog’s collar. And if it is a name tag, then it’s reasonable to assume that
Utopique
is the name of a dog. We know that the extraneous bone was a dog’s shinbone, so it just seemed kind of obvious that both these clues were pointing towards a dog.’
‘Called
Utopique
.’
‘Exactly.’
‘It’s possible,’ Enzo conceded. He couldn’t argue with the logic. ‘Go on.’
Nicole beamed with pleasure. ‘Okay. The champagne. Moët et Chandon, Dom Perignon 1990. You have to figure that they didn’t choose a 1990 vintage by accident. I’ve no idea why, but the date’s got to be important.’
‘Agreed,’ Enzo said. ‘Which is probably why it was in a box, wrapped and protected by the wood wool, so the label would be kept safe from the damp.’
Nicole nodded and moved on. ‘You’ll see I’ve written
Poisson d’Avril
below the date April 1st, beside the crucifix.’
‘April Fool’s Day, we called it in Scotland,’ Enzo said.
Nicole chided him. ‘Don’t you remember when Sophie was little, kids sticking paper fish on each other’s backs?’
Enzo shook his head. ‘No.’
‘Well, it probably happened at school. It’s what you do on April 1st in France. You try and stick a paper fish on other kids’ backs without them knowing. Which is why we call it
Poisson d’Avril
.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ Enzo confessed. He smiled. ‘Maybe it’s a red herring.’
Nicole frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘A red herring. Something that misdirects you from the truth. Isn’t there a French equivalent?’
Nicole looked at him as if he were mad. ‘I don’t think so, Monsieur Macleod.’ She shook her head. ‘Anyway, I searched the internet for things that might have happened on April 1st. And guess what? Another Napoléonic connection. Napoléon Bonaparte married Marie Louise of Austria on April 1st, 1810.’
Enzo looked at the board where Nicole had written and circled
Napoléon
and drawn an arrow to it from the crucifix. He chewed his lip thoughtfully. ‘But what’s the connection with the crucifix? It seems to me that the date and the crucifix are inseparable, and that whatever they point to should have a relevance to both.’ He took a cloth and wiped off the circle and the arrow. ‘Let’s just keep that in mind, and maybe we’ll come back to it.’
‘Oh, okay.’ Nicole was momentarily crestfallen. And then she brightened up. ‘But here’s the real breakthrough. The lapel pin.
Sigilum militum xpisti
. Do you know what that means?’
‘The seal of the army of Christ,’ Enzo said without hesitation.
It was as if he had stuck a pin in her. She was instantly deflated. ‘How do you know that?’
‘I studied Latin at school.’
‘I suppose you also know what it is, then?’
‘I haven’t a clue.’
She brightened up again. ‘Two men on a single horse bearing shields, encircled by the words
sigilum militum xpisti
, is the chosen seal of the Knights Templar.’ Her fingers spidered across the keyboard and she read from the screen. ‘The seal was introduced to the Order in 1168 by its Grand Master in France, Bertrand de Blanchfort.’
Enzo breathed a small jet of air through clenched teeth. Bertrand! It seemed there was no escaping him.
Nicole continued, ‘It is said that fifty years earlier, when the founding Christian knights took a vow of poverty, chastity, and obedience at Jerusalem, they could only afford one horse between two of them. And the depiction of two knights astride a single mount also recalls the passage in the book of Matthew, where Christ says,
Wherever two or more of you are gathered in My name, there am I, in the midst of you
.’
‘Well that seems pretty conclusive,’ Enzo said. ‘Well found.’ And he picked up a marker pen and wrote up
Knights Templar
, and circled it and drew an arrow to it from the lapel pin. ‘I wonder if we can connect April 1st in some way with the Knights Templar. Maybe it’s an important date in the history of the Order.’
‘That’s a thought.’ Nicole called up Google and began a search. But after nearly fifteen minutes, she had found nothing that linked the date with the Order. She grinned to cover her disappointment. ‘Another “red herring.”’
‘What about trying to link the date with the crucifix?’ Enzo felt that he was clutching at straws now. But anything was worth a try.
Nicole tapped in
crucifix
and
April 1st
, and initiated a search. After a moment she let out a tiny yelp of excitement. Enzo crossed the room to take a look. There were three hundred and seventy-eight results. But halfway down the first page of ten was a link headed,
THE FIRST MIRACLE OF FATIMA
—1385, and below it an extract from the page it would take them to—
He died in his cell clutching a crucifix on April 1st, 1431
. Nicole clicked on the link and brought up a lengthy document detailing the canonisation of the Blessed Nuno, whom it described as the last great mediaeval knight. But their initial interest was short lived as they read through a dull account of the man’s life and death. A Portuguese knight, widowed in 1422, he had given away all his worldly wealth and joined a Carmelite monastery in Lisbon. There did not appear to be any connection with the Knights Templar, or with France.
Enzo blew his frustration through pursed lips. ‘April 1st, April 1st, April 1st.’ He repeated it over and over under his breath as he made his way across the room to the open windows. He stood holding the rail and looking out over the treetops in the square. ‘What other significance might April 1st have in the French calendar?’ No sooner had the words left his mouth than he checked himself. ‘Calendar,’ he said. ‘What Saints day falls on April 1st?’
Nicole made a quick internet search. ‘Saint Hugues.’ She looked towards him. ‘Does that mean anything to you?’
Enzo turned back into the room. ‘No.’ He sighed. ‘Try a search of
Saint Hugues
and see what we come up with.’
As Nicole tapped at the keyboard she said, ‘You know, whoever put these clues together ten years ago wouldn’t have had the help of the internet.’
It wasn’t something Enzo had considered before. ‘No, of course they wouldn’t. The internet was still in its infancy in those days.’
‘And most of the stuff we’re digging up wouldn’t even have been on it then.’
‘You’re right.’ Enzo realised that Gaillard’s killers could never, in their wildest dreams, have imagined that ten years on, the information which, then, would have taken days, weeks, even months to find, could be accessed in seconds on the internet.
‘Oh, my God,’ Nicole said suddenly. ‘This is the only problem with the net.’ She was gazing forlornly at the screen. ‘Information overload. There are six thousand, four hundred and forty links to pages containing mentions of Saint Hugues. There seem to be lots of Saint Hugues too. Saint Hugues de Cluny…de Grenoble…de Chartreuse…Do you want me to go on?’
Enzo shook his head. ‘I need a drink.’
Nicole looked at her watch. ‘It’s too early, Monsieur Macleod.’
‘Nicole, it’s never too early.’ Enzo picked his way through to the dining room and opened a fresh bottle of whisky from the drinks cabinet. ‘Do you want something?’
‘A diet Coke. There are bottles in the fridge.’
He poured himself a large measure and took her a bottle of diet Coke. After removing a pizza carryout box from his recliner, he settled himself in the chair. ‘I see you’ve been eating well.’
‘I’m not much of a cook, Monsieur Macleod. My dad really wanted a boy, so I know more about ploughing and shearing and milking than I do about cooking.’
Enzo took a long sip from his glass and closed his eyes as the whisky burned down inside him. Immediately, he sat upright again. ‘We’re missing something here. None of these clues stands alone. I mean, they always connect in some way with one or more of the others.’ He took another slug of whisky and pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, closing his eyes again to try to concentrate. ‘April 1st already has a religious connotation because it’s engraved on the back of a crucifix. So maybe we’re not looking for
Saint
Hugues. Just
Hugues
.’
‘So?’
‘So why don’t we try combining
Hugues
with one of the other clues?’
‘What, like with the Knights Templar?’
‘That, or…Dom Perignon. Or even just champagne.’
Nicole shrugged and typed in
Hugues
and
champagne
and hit the return key. Enzo watched her face closely as her eyes flickered back and forth across the screen. Suddenly they lit up, and she threw her arms in the air. ‘Monsieur Macleod, you’re a genius!’
And the word
genius
was like a finger poking at an open wound.
She told me there was no point in even trying to compete with her genius of a father
, Bertrand had told him.
‘There are links all over the place to an Hugues de Champagne. And you’re not going to believe this—to the Knights Templar as well.’
Enzo stood up. ‘How? What’s the connection?’
‘Wait a minute….’ Her fingers danced across the keyboard, and he went to stand behind her so that he could see what she was pulling up on screen. It was a page headed,
HUGUES DE CHAMPAGNE
1074-1125. Enzo leaned over to read it. Several paragraphs detailed his parentage, his childhood, his marriage, and then his first trip to Palestine in the year 1104. His first marriage in 1093 to Constance, the daughter of King Philip the First of France, was annulled in his absence, and when he returned three years later he was remarried to a young girl called Elisabeth de Varais. Evidently it didn’t take quite as long for the shine to wear off the second union, for seven years later he took off again for Palestine, this time in the company of his vassal, Hugues de Payens, along with Geoffrey de St. Omer, Hugues d’Hautvillers, and five others. There, in Jerusalem, in 1118, they established the Order of the Knights of the Temple, and Champagne’s vassal Hugues de Payens became its first Grand Master.