‘Of course, Madame. Everything is copacetic, as the Americans say. I have Sabir under surveillance. I’ve identified the police car following them. The poor fools have even switched number-plates in an effort to throw off any pursuit.’
The woman’s husband was now leaning forward and gesticulating for him to put down his phone.
Peugeot drivers, thought Bale. In England, they would drive Rovers. In America, Chevrolets or Cadillacs. He pretended to lose concentration and allowed his car to drift a little towards the Peugeot.
The husband’s eyes opened wider. He reached across his wife and honked the horn.
Bale glanced into his rear-view mirror. Alone on the road. Might be amusing. Might even buy him a little extra time. ‘So do you want me to continue or not, Madame? Just say the word.’
‘I want you to continue.’
‘Very well.’ Bale snapped the telephone shut. He accelerated forward and cut viciously in front of the Peugeot. Then he slowed down.
The man hooted again.
Bale pulled slowly to a stop.
The Peugeot stopped behind him and the man got out.
Bale watched him in the rear-view mirror. He hunched down a little in his seat. Might as well milk this a little. Enjoy the process.
‘What do you think you are doing? You very nearly caused an accident.’
Bale shrugged. ‘Look. I’m incredibly sorry. My wife is expecting a baby. I’m due at the hospital. I just needed to check up on how to get there.’
‘A baby, you say?’ The man glanced quickly back at his wife. He began visibly to relax. ‘Look. I’m sorry to make such a fuss. But it’s happening all the time, you know. You really should get yourself a hands-off set. Then you can talk in the car as much as you want without being a danger to other road users.’
‘You’re right. I know it.’ Bale watched a Citroen drift past them and curl around the corner. He glanced down at the tracking radar. A kilometre already. He’d have to make this fast. ‘Sorry again.’
The man nodded and started back for his car. He shrugged his shoulders at his wife and then raised his hands placatingly when she scowled at him.
Bale slipped the car into reverse and stamped on the accelerator. There was the hysterical screech of rubber and then the tyres held their traction and the car lurched backwards.
The man turned towards Bale, his mouth agape.
‘Oy ya yoi ya yoi.’ Bale swung open his car door and leapt out. He glanced wildly up and down the road. The woman was screaming. Her husband was entirely hidden between and beneath the two cars and was making no sound.
Bale grabbed the woman’s hair through the open front window of the Peugeot and began to drag her out. One of her shoes caught between the automatic shift and the stowaway compartment dividing the two front seats. Bale yanked even harder and something gave. He dragged the woman around to the nearside rear door, which still had a winding mechanism.
He half wound down the window and pushed the woman’s head into the gap, facing into the car. Then he wound up the window as tightly as he could and slammed the car door shut.
***
‘What have we here?’ Calque reached towards the dashboard and raised himself partly out of his seat. ‘You’d better slow down.’
‘But what about…’
‘Slow down.’
Macron cut his speed
Calque squinted at the scene ahead of them. ‘Call an ambulance. Fast. And the police judiciaire.’
‘But we’re going to lose them.’
‘Get the first-aid kit. And clip on the flasher.’
‘But that’ll identify us.’
Calque had the door open before the vehicle had fully stopped. He ran stiffly to where the man was lying and knelt down beside him. ‘Right, Macron. You can tell the paras that he’s still breathing. Barely. But they’ll need a brace. He may have damaged his neck.’ He moved towards the woman. ‘Madame. Stay still. Don’t struggle.’
The woman moaned.
‘Please. Stay still. You’ve broken your foot.’ Calque tried to unwind the window but the mechanism was damaged. The woman’s face had already turned purple.
It was clear that she was having difficulty breathing. ‘Macron. Bring the hammer. Fast. We’re going to have to break the glass.’
‘What hammer?’
‘The fire extinguisher, then.’ Calque took off his jacket and wrapped it around the woman’s head. ‘It’s all right, Madame. Don’t struggle. We need to break the glass.’
All tension suddenly went out of the woman’s body and she slumped heavily against the car.
‘Quick. She’s stopped breathing.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Smash the window with the extinguisher.’
Macron drew back the fire extinguisher and lashed at the window. The extinguisher bounced off the security glass.
‘Give it to me.’ Calque grabbed the extinguisher. He smashed the butt against the window glass. ‘Now give me your jacket.’ He wrapped the jacket around his hand and punched through the shattered glass. He eased the woman to the ground and laid her head on the jacket. Hunching forwards, he struck her sharply over the heart. He felt with two fingers below her left breast and then began depressing her sternum. ‘Macron. When I tell you, give her two spaced breaths.’
Macron crouched down by the woman’s head.
‘You called the ambulance?’
‘Yes, Sir.’
‘Good lad. We’ll keep this up until they get here. Has she still got her pulse?’
‘Yes, Sir. It’s fl uttering a little, but it’s there.’
Between double-handed strokes, Calque looked into Macron’s eyes. ‘Now do you believe me? About the second man?’
‘I always believed you, Sir. But do you really think he did this?’
‘Two breaths.’
Macron bent forward and gave the woman the kiss of life.
Calque restarted his two-handed strokes. ‘I don’t simply believe it, boy. I know it.’
36
Yola spat the last of her pumpkin seed husks on to the floor of the car. ‘Look. Wild asparagus.’
‘What?’
‘Wild asparagus. We have to stop.’
‘You can’t be serious.’
Yola gave Sabir a sharp tap on the shoulder. ‘Is somebody timing us? Are we being chased? Is there a deadline for this thing?’
‘Well, of course not…’
‘So stop.’
Sabir looked to Alexi for support. ‘You don’t think we should stop, do you?’
‘Of course we should stop. How often do you see wild asparagus growing beside the road? Yola must have her cueillette.’
‘Her what?’ Aware that he was being outvoted, Sabir swung the car around and headed back towards the asparagus clump.
‘Wherever they go, gypsy women conduct what they call a cueillette. That means they never pass by free food – herbs, salad, eggs, grapes, walnuts, Reines Claudes – without stopping to collect it.’
‘What the Hell are Reines Claudes?’
‘Green plums.’
‘Oh. You mean greengages?’
‘Reines Claudes. Yes.’
Sabir glanced back-up the road behind them. A Citroen breasted the corner and thundered guilelessly past. ‘I’m taking us to where we can’t be seen. Just in case a police car comes by.’
‘No one will recognise us, Adam. They’re looking for one man, not two men and a woman. And in a car with different plates.’
‘Still.’
Yola hammered the seat-back in front of her. ‘Look. I can see some more. Over there by the river.’ She rustled about in her rucksack and came up with two knotted plastic bags. ‘You two go and collect the asparagus by the road. I’ll collect the other stuff. I can see dandelions, nettles and marguerites too. You boys are lucky. We’re going to have a feast tonight.’
37
Achor Bale had bought himself forty minutes’ grace. Forty minutes in which to extract all the information he needed. Forty minutes for the police to deal with the scene he had left behind him, liaise with the ambulance service and placate the local back-up.
He slammed his foot on to the accelerator and watched the tracking markers converge. Then he sucked in his breath and slowed down.
Something had changed. Sabir wasn’t moving forward any more. As Bale watched, the marker began slowly retracing its steps towards him. He hesitated, one hand poised over the steering wheel. Now the marker was stationary. It was flashing less than five hundred metres ahead of him.
Bale pulled off the road twenty metres before the apex of the corner. He hesitated before abandoning his car, but then decided that he had neither the time, nor a suitable location, in which to hide it. He’d just have to risk the police driving by and making the somewhat unlikely connection between him and a stationary vehicle.
He hurried over the breast of the hill and down through a small wood. Why had they stopped so soon after the last halt? A picnic? An accident? It could be anything.
The best thing would be if he could get them all together. Then he could concentrate on one whilst the others were forced to watch. That way nearly always worked. Guilt, thought Bale, was the major weakness of the Western world. When people didn’t feel guilt, they built empires. When they began to feel guilt, they lost them. Look at the British.
He saw the girl first, squatting alone near the riverbank. Was she taking a leak? Was that what this was all about? He searched for the men but they were out of sight. Then he saw that she was dissecting clumps of vegetation and stuffing the residue into a series of plastic bags. Jesus Christ. These people weren’t to be believed.
He checked around for the men one final time and then cut down towards the girl. This was simply too good to be true. They must have known he was coming.
Laid it all on in some way.
He hesitated for a moment, when he was about fifteen feet from the girl. She made a pretty picture, squatting there in her long gypsy dress by the river. A perfect picture of innocence. Bale was reminded of something from the long-distant past but he couldn’t quite identify the scene. The sudden lapse disturbed him, like an unexpected current of cold air travelling through a tear in a pair of trousers.
He ran the last few yards, confident that the girl hadn’t heard his approach. At the last possible moment she began to turn around but he was already on top of her, pinning her arms to the ground with his knees. He had expected her to scream and had taken the precaution of pinching shut her nose – it was a method which nearly always worked with women and was far better than risking one’s hand over a panic-stricken person’s mouth – but the girl was strangely silent. It was almost as if she had been expecting him.
‘If you cry out, I shall sever your spinal cord. Just like I did to your brother. Do you understand me?’
She nodded.
He couldn’t see her face properly, as he had her pinioned down from the back, with her body underneath him and her arms stretched out in a cruciform position. He rectified this by angling her head to one side.
‘I’m going to say this once and once only. In ten seconds time I am going to knock you out with my fist. While you are unconscious I am going to raise your skirt, take off your underpants and conduct an exploration inside you with my knife. When I encounter your fallopian tubes I am going to cut them. You will bleed badly but it won’t kill you. The men will probably find you before that happens. But you will never be a mother. Do you understand me? That will be gone. Forever.’
He heard rather than saw her evacuating her bladder. Her eyes turned up in themselves and started fl uttering.
‘Stop that. Wake up.’ He pinched her cheek as hard as he could. Her eyes began to refocus. ‘Now listen. What did you find? Where are you going? Tell me these things and I will leave you alone. Your ten seconds have started.’
Yola began to moan.
‘Eight. Seven. Six.’
‘We’re going to Rocamadour.’
‘Why?’
‘To the Black Virgin. Something is hidden at her feet.’
‘What?’
‘We don’t know. All it said on the bottom of the coffer was that the secret of the verses is at her feet.’
‘The bottom of what coffer?’
‘My mother’s coffer. The one my mother gave me. The one that belonged to the daughter of Nostradamus.’
‘Is that it?’
‘That’s everything. I swear to you.’
Bale took some of the weight off her arms. He glanced back-up the valley. No sign of the men. Kill her? No point really. She was as good as dead already.
He dragged her to the edge of the riverbank and tumbled her in.
38
‘I hope to Hell this is worth all the trouble we’re going to.’
‘What? What are you talking about? The verses?’
‘No. The wild asparagus.’
Alexi circled his fingers. ‘You can bet it will be. Yola cooks good. All we need now is a rabbit.’
‘And how do you propose to catch that?’
‘You can run it over. I’ll tell you if I see one by the roadside. But don’t squash it – you’ve got to time it just right so that you hit its head with the outside of the wheel. The flesh won’t taste as good as one that God Himself kills, but it’ll be the next best thing.’
Sabir nodded wearily. What the Hell had he expected Alexi to say? That they’d go into the next town and buy a shotgun? ‘Can you see Yola? We’d better be going.’
Alexi straightened up. ‘No. She went down by the river. I’ll go and call her.’
Sabir trudged back towards the car, shaking his head. It was an odd thing to admit but he was slowly beginning to enjoy himself. He wasn’t a great deal older than Alexi but there had been times in the past few years when he’d realised that he was starting to lose his zest for life – his sense of the absurd. Now, with the loose artillery of Alexi and Yola acting in counterpoint to the still lurking threat of the police, he suddenly felt all the excitement of the unknown bubbling up again in his stomach.
‘Adam!’ The shout came from just beyond a small stand of trees down near the river.