‘That explains it, then.’
‘But I couldn’t have loved them more if they’d been my real parents,’ she said unnecessarily, as if in response to some unspoken criticism. ‘They’d have done anything for me.’ She was lost for a moment in some other world. ‘And still would.’ She started ladling soup out into deep bowls. ‘I used to love coming here when I was a kid. Playing in the woods, making up my own games. I’m glad I didn’t have any brothers or sisters. I liked being on my own.’ She hesitated. ‘Still do.’
Enzo wondered if that was her way of telling him not to get too close. Yet more mixed messages?
‘They were devastated when I tried to track down my blood parents.’
‘Why did you do that?’
‘I’d just gone to university. I was starting to try to figure out who I was. Or, at least, who the adult me was. It’s funny. There’s always this thing inside you that needs to know where you came from. No matter how happy, or how settled you are.’ She shook her head and took the bowls to the table. ‘Hardly ever works out well.’
‘How did it work out for you?’
‘It didn’t. All I managed to do was hurt my parents. Stupid, thoughtless, selfish….’ Enzo saw, with a slight shock, that she had tears in her eyes, and she turned quickly to get cutlery and wipe them discreetly away.
He didn’t want to embarrass her and focused his attention, then, on the contents of the bookcase. The top shelf was lined with children’s editions of famous books. Reading for the young Charlotte.
La Petite Dorrit
,
Le Tour du Monde en 80 Jours
,
Les Mis
é
rables (Tome II)
. Enzo picked out a book he remembered buying for Sophie when she was young.
Le Père Tranquille
. He opened it up and read the handwritten inscription on the title page. It was a gift for Madeleine on the occasion of her seventh birthday, from Mama and Papa. ‘Who’s Madeleine?’
She sat at the table and put a spoon beside each bowl. ‘Come and get your soup.’
He slipped the book back on the shelf and went to sit opposite her. The soup was a thick vegetable and lentil mix. Comfort food in an uncertain world. He took several mouthfuls, and Charlotte opened a bottle of red wine and poured them each a glass. Enzo took a sip. ‘So who is she?’
‘Who?’
‘Madeleine.’
Charlotte shrugged. ‘No one special.’
Enzo was intrigued by her evasion. ‘Why won’t you tell me?’
She sighed. ‘She’s me. All right? I’m Madeleine. Charlotte’s my middle name. There were two other Madeleines in my class at school, so they called me Charlotte to avoid confusion. The only people who still call me Madeleine are my parents, and….’ She stopped. ‘Well, just my parents.’
‘It’s a nice name,’ Enzo said. ‘Maybe I’ll call you Madeleine.’
‘No!’ she said sharply. Then, more softly, ‘I don’t want to be Madeleine. If you want to call me anything, call me Charly.’ She pronounced it
Sharlee
. ‘It’s what my friends call me.’
‘Is that what Roger calls you?’
Charlotte laughed. ‘Oh, no. Not Roger. That was far too common for him. He always called me Charlotte.’
Enzo liked the way she spoke of him in the past tense.
***
Charlotte cleared away the empty soup bowls and went in search of a cable to connect her laptop to the telephone line. Once connected she pulled the Google search page up on screen, and refilled both their wine glasses. She watched as Enzo wrote
Africa
in the centre of his makeshift whiteboard, circled it and drew an arrow to it from the lion’s head. Neither of them felt tired. There was still adrenaline flowing through their veins from the incident on the
autoroute
, and the soup and wine had infused flagging spirits with new energy.
Enzo stared at the board for a long time. The previous clues had taken him to an uncomfortable place, inside the heads of Gaillard’s killers. He needed to get back there now. To think the way they thought, to follow the same processes. Make the same connections. He heard Charlotte tapping at the keyboard behind him, and he let his gaze drift to the lapel pin. ‘We need to figure out what flag that is,’ he said. ‘There must be something on the net that would make it easier for us to identify it.’
‘I’ll have a look.’
Enzo’s eyes wandered back to the lion’s head. ‘What about Ethiopia? Haile Salassie was known as the Lion of Judah, and he was the last emperor of Ethiopia.’
‘Wasn’t a French colony,’ Charlotte said. ‘Wait a minute. Here’s what you wanted.’ She tapped some more, then read, ‘
Ivan Sarajcic’s flag finder
. This is amazing. You can select from a choice of flag types, colours, and what he calls
devices
—objects that appear on the flag.’
Enzo came to stand behind her and look at the screen.
‘Flag type. Three stripes vertical.’ She selected a black and white flag with three vertical stripes. The image was highlighted in white. ‘Colours are green, yellow, and red.’ And she selected them from a choice of eleven colours. Again, they were highlighted in white. She moved the cursor to a pull-down menu listing devices that might appear on the flag and scrolled down the choices until she came to
star
. She selected it and moved to a choice of colours, picking green. Then she clicked on a button which read
Find the Flag
. Within seconds, a large scale image of the flag appeared. ‘
Senegal
,’ Charlotte read from the caption. ‘It’s the Senegalese flag.’
‘Was Senegal a French colony?’
‘Yes, it was.’ Charlotte entered
Senegal
into the search engine and came up with a World Factbook site. She read, ‘Senegal. West African state bordering the North Atlantic Ocean between Guinea-Bissau and Mauritania. Gained its independence from France in 1960.’
‘1960,’ Enzo said. ‘That’s the second of the two dates engraved on the salamander.’
‘What about the other date?’
‘1927.’
‘Maybe it’s significant in Senegalese history.’ Charlotte typed
Senegal
and
1927
into the search engine and then groaned. ‘Two hundred and six thousand results. We could be here for a month wading through these.’
But Enzo was still excited. He went back to the board and wrote up
Senegal
, circled it and drew arrows to it from the flag and from
Africa
. ‘Let’s leave the dates for the moment,’ he said. ‘What about the salamander itself? You said it was the emblem of François Premier. Let’s see what we can find out about him.’
Charlotte’s fingers rattled quickly across the keyboard. ‘There’s a mountain of stuff about François.’ She scanned yards of text as she scrolled down the screen. ‘A champion of the Renaissance. His motto was,
I am nourished and I die in fire
, which seems to be why he chose the salamander as his emblem. It’s supposed to be so cold, it will extinguish all fire on contact. Even his hat was fastened with a jewelled salamander.’ She looked up. ‘Just like the one in the trunk.’
Enzo shook his head. ‘It’s not doing anything for me.’
‘Wait a minute.’ Charlotte typed some more. ‘Apparently François Premier was also known as François d’Angoulême.’
Enzo raised an eyebrow. ‘Your home town.’
‘It seems that’s where his family came from. The Valois Angoulême. His son and grandson were the last of the line.’ She looked up. ‘Maybe Angoulême is a clue. Maybe that’s where we should be looking for the rest of the body.’
Enzo looked doubtful. ‘I’m not seeing any connections here. Except…Gaillard’s family came from Angoulême.’ He thought briefly. ‘I’ll write it up for the moment.’ And he turned and wrote
François Premier
(Angoulême)
in a circle and drew an arrow to it from the salamander. He faced Charlotte again. ‘What other symbolic meaning might a salamander have?’
Charlotte initiated another search and came up with an article on salamanders and symbolism. ‘Fire,’ she said simply. ‘There was a fifteenth century Swiss physician who dubbed the salamander as the symbol of fire. And a famous Australian explorer who wrote of the aborigines,
The natives were about burning, burning, ever burning; one would think they were of the fabled salamander race and lived on fire instead of water
.’ She scrolled down more of the article and shook her head. ‘Fire. That’s it. Apparently salamander is derived from an Arab-Persian word meaning,
lives in fire
.’
Enzo wrote the word
fire?
beside the photograph of the salamander brooch, but did not circle it. There were still no connections. For a moment he closed his eyes, and from nowhere a wave of fatigue washed over him. He staggered, and put his hand on the table to steady himself.
‘Are you okay?’ Charlotte stood up, concerned.
‘I’m fine.’ He stepped back and looked at the board again, but it was burning too brightly on his retinas, and he had to screw up his eyes to focus on it. He knew now that he would make no further progress tonight.
‘It’s nearly four o’clock,’ she said. ‘The sun’ll be up in less than an hour.’
He nodded, succumbing to the inevitable. ‘We’d better go to bed, then.’
She put the computer to sleep and took away his empty wine glass. Then she took his hand and led him through to the bedroom at the back of the house. The double bed, with its heavy, carved wooden head and foot boards, took up nearly the whole room. An enormous
armoire
occupied the remainder. Lurid green and pink floral wallpaper covered the walls and the door. A single, naked light bulb cast its cold light around the room. The air was chill in here, and smelled of damp cellars. ‘I should have had it airing,’ Charlotte said. ‘It’s my parents’ room. My room’s in the attic. It would be warmer and drier. But there’s only a single bed up there.’ She opened the windows and threw the shutters wide, then slotted a fly screen into the window frame.
The bed was cold and damp, and they huddled their naked bodies together for warmth. She fitted perfectly into his foetal curl, and he wrapped an arm around her, cupping one of her breasts, feeling a nipple pressing into his palm, aroused by the cold. But there was no thought of sex. Just comfort. And within minutes of Charlotte turning out the light they were both asleep.
III.
It wasn’t the daylight that wakened him. It had been light for hours. Sunshine streaming through the open window lay hot across the bed. The room smelled of the forest, and the hum of insects filled the air from outside. It must have been the church bell that pricked his consciousness. He heard it ringing distantly in the hilltop village. He had no idea how many times it had rung. Seven, eight, nine times? He lay with his eyes closed, luxuriating in the warmth, listening to see if it would ring again. Sometimes they would ring the hour for a second time after an interval of two or three minutes. Just in case the workers in the fields had miscounted the first time. The bell began again, and this time he counted it all the way up to twelve. It was midday. They had slept for almost eight hours.
He rolled his head to one side and saw that Charlotte was still asleep. Her hair lay tangled beneath her head, smeared across the pillow. Her mouth was slightly open, soft lips almost pouting, blowing out tiny puffs of air. He was seized by an incredible tenderness. He wanted to run his fingers lightly over her lips, and then kiss them softly, so that she would wake to the taste of him. He wanted to make love to her. Not frantically as they had before, but gently, taking their time, losing themselves in a long, slow oblivion.
But he did not want to wake her, so he slid carefully from the bed, lifting his clothes from the floor where last night he had simply let them fall, and tiptoed out to the kitchen. There, he pulled on his cargos and tee-shirt and slipped into his running shoes, dragging his hair out of his face to gather it loosely in a band at the nape of his neck. In the bathroom he slunged his face with water and went back out to the kitchen to make coffee. He opened the window and shutters on either side of the main door to let in light and air, and went out on to the patio. In daylight, he saw that the
terrasse
was shaded by a vine trained across a rusted metal frame. No doubt the family would eat out here on summer evenings, looking out upon their own private view of paradise. He saw, now, tiny villages of honeyed stone nestling in the river valley, or sitting proudly on hilltops, church spires poking out from amongst the trees that marched up every hillside. Ravines and gorges cut through greenery, marking the outer limits of valleys where once huge, fast-flowing rivers carved their way relentlessly through the rock.
It was a wonderful, solitary place. Somewhere to reflect. To be at peace. To be yourself. Enzo saw two magpies chasing each other across a meadow full of summer flowers immediately below the house. He heard the coffee-maker gurgling and spitting inside, and he went in to pour himself a coffee. He found a mug, and a jar of sugar cubes, and made it sweet. He took a long sip, and almost immediately felt the caffeine kick. There was still no sound from Charlotte.
It was curiosity that led him to the staircase behind the curtain. He drew it back, and climbed carefully up into the dark, his coffee still in his hand. At the top of the stairs a low door opened into a tiny bedroom built into the slope of the roof. Sunlight sneaked through the cracks around the edges of a small dormer window. Enzo opened it and unlatched the shutter. Light poured in and filled the intimate space around him. The view across the valley was spectacular. He could imagine the young Charlotte waking to it every summer’s morning, filled with excitement, and an eagerness to be out exploring the world around her, probing the outer limits of her imagination.
He turned back into the room, stooping to avoid the angle of the ceiling. Her bed was pushed against the far wall. He pictured her lying in it, the child in the photographs. Sleeping, dreaming, free to fantasise, before adulthood reined her in to face an altogether less attractive world. More photographs lined themselves up along a wooden dresser, around a bowl and pitcher, carefully arranged on lace doilies. Family groups posed in the garden with the view behind them. A pergola hanging with flowers. He recognised Charlotte’s parents, and an older couple. Perhaps the grandparents he had seen, much younger, in the photograph taken on the beach. Her grandfather still had the same curling moustaches. Only now they were pure white. Charlotte looked radiant, touched by a happiness that sparkled in her dark eyes and glowed in her smile. She was sitting on the knee of an older man. Not as old as her grandfather, but with the same extravagant moustaches, and a head of wild, untamed hair.