‘We’re going to get wet,’ Bertrand said.
Enzo nodded absently. He was staring off thoughtfully across the football pitch in the final glimmer of the day’s light. ‘You know a bit about football, don’t you?’
‘I used to play for an amateur side.’
‘Where does the referee usually stand when he blows for kick-off?’
He heard the young man expel air through his teeth. ‘Well, I don’t think there’s any set place.’ Bertrand thought for a moment. ‘I guess he usually stands somewhere around the centre circle.’
‘That’s a big area to dig up.’
‘What, you mean you think that what you’re looking for is buried somewhere in the centre circle?’
‘I don’t know. I really don’t. I’m clutching at straws here. If we’re in the right place—and I’ve got to believe that we are, since all the clues have led us here—then there has to be a reason for the referee’s whistle.’ Enzo sighed, frustrated, trying to articulate his reasoning. ‘The clues have always been symbolic or representative of something else, Bertrand. So maybe it’s not the whistle itself that’s important, so much as the person who blows it.’
He began walking out across the pitch towards the centre circle. The lines delineating the field of play were faded almost to the point of obscurity. The rain would very soon obliterate any remaining traces. Bertrand followed him to the centre circle, his flashlight trained on the halfway line that led them there.
‘My God,’ Enzo said surveying a diameter of something close to twenty meters. ‘It’s huge. We couldn’t possibly dig up an area this size.’
‘We don’t have to,’ Bertrand said. ‘Wait here.’ And he took off, running back towards the gate before Enzo had the chance to ask him what he was talking about. He stood, then, a solitary figure, in the centre of the football pitch, where generations of breathless kids had chased elusive aspirations in the shape of a leather ball, and when genius had eluded them, gone on to become doctors, lawyers, waiters. For a moment, he felt surrounded by the ghosts of failed ambition, until lightning tore open the sky and he saw that he was completely alone.
All daylight had bled, now, from the evening. The darkness was absolute. Thunder cracked so loudly overhead that it felt like a physical blow. Enzo ducked involuntarily, and as lightning flashed again beneath dangerously low clouds, he saw the lean, fit figure of Bertrand loping back across the pitch, his flashlight in one hand, his metal detector dangling from the other. Bertrand was grinning when he reached him. ‘I knew this would come in useful for something.’
Enzo looked at him for a long moment. Words escaped him. Then finally he said, ‘Well, I hope the damned thing works!’
Bertrand began a first circuit of the centre circle, the metal detector hovering just centimeters above the parched ground as he swept it methodically from side to side. And then the rain began in earnest, almost tropical in its intensity. Within seconds both men were soaked to the skin. Enzo held the flashlight and followed Bertrand’s progress. The hard-baked earth was slow to soak up the rain, and it began lying in ever widening puddles on the surface of the playing field. The metal detector emitted a steady, high-pitched whine, only just audible above the drumming of the rain.
‘Papa…’ Enzo turned as Sophie and Nicole ran into the circle of light, a shared raincoat held over their heads and shoulders.
‘You can’t stay out in this,’ Nicole said.
‘It’s crazy, Papa.’
‘You should have stayed in the van,’ was all he said.
And suddenly the wail of the metal detector rose half an octave. In that moment lightning filled the sky, infusing every single drop of rain with its light so that the world was lost in a brief, blinding mist. But even above the crash of thunder that followed, Enzo could still hear the shriek of the metal detector.
‘There’s something here,’ Bertrand bellowed above the noise of the rain. ‘Right below here!’ He had completed about two thirds of his circuit and stood at ten o’clock on the circle. Gelled spikes had dissolved into streaks of black hair striping vertically on his forehead. Water dripped from his eyebrow piercings and nose and lip studs, and he was grinning like an idiot. ‘We’d better start digging.’
‘We can’t dig in this rain,’ Enzo shouted back. ‘The hole will just fill with water.’
‘I’ve got an old two-man tent in the back of the van. If we put up the outer skin we can cover the hole.’
‘Did you bring the shovels?’
‘Of course.’
‘You’re mad!’ Sophie shouted at them.
But Enzo just turned to the two girls and said, ‘Go and get the tent and the spades.’
Within ten minutes they had erected the arched cross-frames of a small igloo tent, stretching its plastic outer skin tightly across it and pegging it into increasingly soft earth. Bertrand began digging first, until he had made enough of a hole to allow Enzo in beside him, and the two men dug furiously by the light of the flashlight, expelling shovel after shovel of mud through the open flap on to the pitch beyond. The rain hammered an unrelenting tattoo on the taut plastic. Sophie and Nicole stood outside, beneath their raincoat, watching the silhouettes of the two men in the tent rise and fall like some distorted shadow theatre playing out on its curving walls.
They were almost a meter down before Enzo’s spade hit metal. It jarred up through his arms and shoulders, but the dull clang of metal on metal was sweet music to accompany the drumming of the rain. In spite of the tent, water was seeping back into the hole. Enzo knew they would have to get the chest out completely, to be sure of keeping its contents dry and free from contamination. It took another fifteen minutes to prise it from the mud suction of its ten-year resting place and lift it carefully up on to the rim of the crater they had made.
The flashlight’s batteries were failing fast, and they both stood panting, and staring at the trunk in the fading yellow light. It was the same military green as all the others. Enzo glanced at Bertrand, and saw that his face was sweat-streaked and covered in mud. They were like clay men, standing ankle deep in liquid earth, breathing hard and filled with anticipation and trepidation.
The girls crouched down at the opening and peered in. ‘Is that it?’ Sophie said.
Enzo nodded. ‘Take a pair of latex gloves from my bag and give me something to dry my hands with.’
Nicole held out a handkerchief for him to wipe the mud from his hands and face, and Sophie handed him a pair of surgeon’s gloves from his bag. He tore them out of their plastic wrapping and snapped them on. Very carefully he unclasped the lid of the trunk and lifted it open. It was stiff, complaining loudly as he forced it back, against the will of rusted hinges. Bertrand shone his flashlight inside.
‘Jesus!’ Enzo heard him whisper.
The skeletal remains of Jacques Gaillard’s torso almost filled the interior. Bleached white bones. Shoulders, ribs, pelvis, spine. Enzo had to reach carefully through a rib cage chipped and scarred by the blades which had killed Gaillard, to remove one, by one, what he knew now to be the final set of clues. A short meat cleaver. A baking tray with twelve cookie moulds in the shape of seashells. A bunch of chopsticks tied together with a piece of string. Even before he counted them, Enzo had guessed how many there might be. Thirteen. Unlucky for some. There was a green glass model of the leaning tower of Pisa, and a key ring replica of the Eiffel Tower. Enzo looked at it closely and saw that it was made in China. Just one more confirmation. The final item was a small rock hammer with a rubberised handle grip.
He laid them out side by side on the inside of the lid. The only thing he had not yet worked out was the name of the last surviving killer.
‘Give me my camera,’ he said to Sophie, just as Bertrand’s flashlight delivered its final flicker and plunged them into blackness.
Almost at the same instant, they were dazzled by a blinding white light, and the sound of revving motors soared above the storm. As Sophie and Nicole spun around to see what was happening, Enzo saw lightning flash through the tent flap, and the silhouettes of half a dozen vehicles behind a phalanx of lights were thrown into momentary sharp relief as they came hurtling towards them across the football pitch. Then blackness swallowed the sky, and their eyes were filled again only with the light. The vehicles pulled up abruptly, engines still revving, and a dozen or more figures streamed out into the rain-filled glare, automatic rifles clutched across their chests. A voice crackled through a megaphone.
‘Step out into the light. Keep your hands above your heads
.
’
Enzo and Bertrand pulled themselves from the hole and crawled out of the tent into the rain and the light. The girls had abandoned their shared raincoat and stood with their hands high above their heads. The rain streamed down Sophie’s frightened face. Before either man could get to his feet, boots came splashing through the wet, and strong hands forced all four of them face first into the mud. Enzo felt the cold bite of handcuffs around his wrists as they snapped shut.
IV.
Sophie was furious. She paced restlessly around the cell. ‘It’s ridiculous. A complete overreaction. We were digging a hole in a football field, for God’s sake. And they send men with guns?’ She waved her arms in the air. ‘And look at me. Look!’
They all looked. The mud was drying on her now, cracking and flaking. It was stuck in her hair like glue, smeared across her face, and caked on her tee-shirt and jeans. But she was just a mirror image of the rest of them.
‘It’s assault!’ she railed. ‘I bet I’m covered in bruises. I’m going to sue them!’ She hammered on the steel door with her fists. ‘I demand to see a doctor! It’s my right to see a doctor!’
She was answered by a resounding silence. Digging a hole in a football field, it seemed, had been enough to deprive them of their rights.
They had been denied their right to a telephone call. They had no means of exercising their right to a thirty-minute private interview with an
avocat
, since no one knew they were there. And now, Sophie claimed, she was being denied her right to be examined by a doctor. Enzo supposed they had been granted their right to silence, since nobody had asked them anything.
They had been bundled into a police van and driven, under armed guard, to the Hôtel de Police in the Boulevard Vaulabelle, less than a kilometer from the Stade Abbé Deschamps. Through a barred window at the back of the van, Enzo had seen the painted dragons and white lions of the Golden Pagoda Chinese restaurant, before they turned into the Rue de Preuilly and through a sliding blue gate into a walled yard. There they had been hustled out through the rain and along a dark corridor before being pushed unceremoniously into this holding cell, its stout steel door slamming resoundingly behind them.
Since then, Enzo supposed, more than two hours must have passed. He had no idea what time it was, since they had taken his watch, along with everything else. Sophie’s fury was intermittent, punctuated by long periods of sullen silence during which indignation simmered and gathered momentum before exploding again in another outburst.
Bertrand had not said a word, sitting silently on the floor, his back to the wall, legs pulled up to his chest. They had made him remove his nose and lip studs, and the shards of metal from his eyebrow. Strangely, Enzo thought, he seemed almost naked without them. Nicole, too, had been unusually quiet, tearstains dried now on her cheeks. Their clothes were still damp beneath the drying mud, and in the chill of their cell, it was all Enzo could do to stop his teeth from chattering. Sophie threw herself down on the single bunk bed and lapsed into another period of brooding silence.
It was Bertrand who broke it. He raised his head suddenly and said to Enzo, ‘You knew what they meant, didn’t you?’
‘What?’ Enzo dragged himself back from a gathering of dark thoughts.
‘The things we found in the trunk. You weren’t surprised by anything.’
Enzo shrugged. ‘They complete the circle, that’s all. They lead us back to the place we started—with the skull under the Place d’Italie.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘The first body part, the skull, and the first five clues were found by accident in a collapsed tunnel beneath the thirteenth
arrondissement
in Paris,’ Enzo explained patiently. ‘Each set of clues led us to the next body part. The ones we found tonight lead us back to the skull.’
‘How?’
‘The Eiffel Tower… What does it symbolise?’
‘Paris,’ Nicole said, emerging suddenly from her cocoon of depression.
Enzo nodded. ‘That’s the first clue to the location. The key ring was made in China. That’s the second. The leaning tower of Pisa. Well, that’s Italy, isn’t it? So now we have Paris, Place d’Italie, and a Chinese connection. We already know that the skull was found beneath the Avenue de Choisy, just off Place d’Italie, right in the heart of Chinatown.’
‘I’ll bet there were thirteen chopsticks,’ Nicole said.
Enzo managed a pale smile. ‘You’re right. Thirteen chopsticks, representing the thirteenth
arrondissement
and Chinatown.’
‘So the rock hammer must symbolise the quarriers.’ Nicole’s interest was fully engaged now.
Enzo nodded again. ‘Who dug out the
catacombes
that run right under the Avenue de Choisy. Had we got that far, I’m sure we would have found some sign down there that would have led us to the trunk. As it was, fate beat us to it.’
‘What about the cleaver and the baking tray?’ Bertrand asked.
Enzo shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Each set of clues provided us with a location, and the name of one of the murderers. Presumably the cleaver and the baking tray will lead us to the name of the final killer. But I haven’t really given it any thought yet.’
‘You don’t have to. It’s easy.’
Enzo, Bertrand and Nicole all turned towards Sophie ,who had hoisted herself up on one elbow on the bunk bed. She looked back at them, wide-eyed.
‘Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?’
‘Is it?’ asked Bertrand.
‘Of course. I mean, who uses a meat cleaver like that?’
‘A Chinese chef,’ Nicole said. ‘And I suppose that would also be another Chinese clue.’