Down through the centuries, travellers have always been offered three days refuge, food, water and shelter.
Ah merde, she could well have told that passeur of hers where they could stop over en route to France, but had that poultice come from there? Had a herbalist monk attended to her and given warnings of septicaemia?
She had definitely known of the spring at l’Abbaye de Vauclair. A diagram, neat and perfect, even with the distances noted, gave its location, along with the notation ‘L’eau potable.’
She hadn’t just been studying for the sake of a licence. She had been plotting the use of these abbeys as way-stops en route to and from France. ‘Pilgrims, was it, mademoiselle? Is that why you found yourself in that van at those ruins? Did you also tell those two of it when you bummed a lift? And what of the others, please? Did they, too, know of it and is that why they then followed? Are we even wrong to have assumed that you bummed a lift? Is there another reason for your walking ahead to that van? Did your passeur know of those two and tell you to leave the truck while you had a chance? Merde, but you engender questions!’
At the last of her notes there was a line that she must have written just before leaving. Though from the Rule of Saint Benedict, she hadn’t quoted directly but had done as Benedict himself, and had gone right back to the primary source, the first epistle to Saint Paul, 1 Corinthians 15:10: ‘But by the grace of God I am what I am.’*
Leaving everything but the key exactly as he had found it, he gave the room a final once-over, noticing only that he had missed the cork from a bottle of Moet et Chandon. It was on the little bedside table and behind the glass she had emptied, rinsed out, dried and left upside down until her return.
Up on the roof, the wind was from the east, the air so clear he paused to draw in a few deep breaths. To the forest of chimney pots he now faced, there was not a single trail of smoke. Beyond the entrance to the stairwell was an apron of flat roof that allowed for rabbit and chicken hutches and rows of bell jars and pots of earth. Leeks, celery, Belgian endive, chicory, lettuces, green onions, chives, basil, too, and marjoram, rosemary, thyme and sage, she had them all. Sampling a few, he fed the rabbits a little, they eagerly expecting more.
‘Two visits home,’ he asked, ‘and all you bring back is a piece of embroidery? The house of your parents, mademoiselle-the home you grew up in and would have come to love. Surely you must have brought something from that first visit. Additionally, you would have hidden it where easily retrievable.’
Wedged by two slats, and up under the roof of the last of the chickens, was a tin box, some twenty-four by twenty and eight centimetres in depth, the irony total. ‘“Chabert et Guillot,” mademoiselle? When I was but a boy of four and behaving myself for a change, Grand-mere decided a reward was necessary. “They make the finest nougat in the whole wide world,” she told me. “Even Napoleon had a passion for it. Lavender honey and grape sugar, and no others but those are first heated. Egg whites are then beaten and stirred in until the consistency is such that you can dip a finger and draw out nothing but the most perfect of trails. Only then are the pistachios, almonds and dried fruit added, the whole beaten until ready to be smoothed out on special paper and cut into squares and cubes.”
‘Until the age of ten it, too, was my passion, but on 3 December 1900, my birthday, I received a tin just such as this and was of course, overwhelmed and warned not to chew too many at a time. Yanking a filling, no fault I assure you of the quality of the nougat and its perfect softness, I lost my passion and found another: the fierce and unbridled terror of dentists that I still harbour, especially since these days, no anaesthetics are available.’
Tucked out of sight behind the rabbits, he opened the box and immediately said, ‘Ah merde, you poor unfortunate.’
It wasn’t a treasure trove, not that he could see. It was, instead, one of utter despair, for the house must have been ransacked, the parents arrested and deported, the neighbours or the Occupier or both having helped themselves, even to smashing up the furniture for badly needed firewood. ‘Exactly the same is happening here,’ he said. ‘Much to our shame, necessity negates decency.’
Trampled, stained and crumpled snapshots gave views of the mother and father. In one, probably taken just after the general strike, the mother, aged forty perhaps, was pensively looking out a window. Tall, willowy and obviously very fair, her lips were tightly drawn at a future she did not want to contemplate, her left hand twisting the pearls about her neck.
Scattered, there were about six of those that Anna-Marie must have gathered.
Another snapshot was of herself at the age of ten at one of the Sunday afternoon antiques fairs in the Nieumarkt, for the Waag, that lovely many-towered building that had been built in 1488 as the southern gateway to Amsterdam, was behind her. She had a teacup she had just found to surprise her mother, the shadow of the father falling just to her right. In yet another, but at the age of twelve, she was with the brand-new Sparta her birthday must have brought. Anticipation of that newfound freedom, love, too, for her parents and that father in particular, simply emanated from her, the bike, though, one that she could never have forced herself to leave behind. Yet another snapshot showed her at the age of nineteen or twenty with the young man who must have become her fiance, for there was an open bottle of champagne in the dune sand behind the couple.
‘Hand in hand, mademoiselle. Those are, I believe, the dunes at Zandvoort on the Noordsee. It’s only about thirty-five kilometres from Amsterdam and a favourite resort to which I once took my Agnes, but you and that boy would not have stayed over. You wouldn’t have wanted to disappoint your parents, not you.’
The crystal stopper of a perfume phial had been recovered, a wooden kitchen spoon and several loose-leaf, handwritten pages from the mother’s recipe book. ‘“Stroop pannekoek, pancakes with syrup; gember pannekoek, those with ginger, and speculaas, especially janhagel, the spiced almond cookies.”’
She had even managed to find one of the wooden moulds she would have helped to fill at a very early age, that of Saint Nicholas.
Again he took up the photo of her and that boy but this time found the cork he had taken from the shattered neck of that bottle in the van. ‘A Moet et Chandon as well, Mademoiselle Annette-Melanie Veroche, lest I forget the name you’re now using, but a bottle that matches exactly the one in this photo and the cork you kept beside your bed so that, instead of one of these photos, you could touch it every night before sleep. Did our killer know that you were engaged? Did he mock you and take that drink when you had finally returned to that passseur’s truck? An informant, mademoiselle?’
Below these there was a gold pocket watch, its chain with a cat’s-eye fob. Obviously the father had had a hiding place she had known of. In Dutch, the inscription read, To Jonas Vermeulen for 25 years of steadfast loyalty and exemplary service, Diamant Meyerhof, Amsterdam 7 June 1932.
Even at the height of the Great Depression, the firm had done this.
Beneath everything were two flattened white cotton bags with ties. Feeling their contents brought only despair, for in the one, all the particles were essentially of the same shape and size until at last, he having opened it, he heard himself saying, ‘Congo cubes, mademoiselle? Who else knows of these and if so, why on earth are they still here?’
Brown, dark grey, clear or yellowish, and even an off-green, all were typically dimpled completely on each surface and cubic in shape, and were of from one to two millimetres to a side. ‘Boart, is collectively diamond that when crushed and ground, and separated as to size by settling in oils of differing specific gravity, yields the gradations of grinding powders modern industry simply can’t do without. Mining for these cubes really only began in earnest in 1939, but by 10 May 1940 and the Blitzkrieg, the Congo was supplying the world with nearly seventy percent of the boart and other industrials needed, those for metal-cutting, wire-drawing, trimming, shaping glass, drilling, too, and cutting slabs of rock, but you’ve a terrible problem on your hands, haven’t you? You’ve a fortune in these alone if sold on the marche noir, but can’t have told a soul, not if planning to get that boy to you via those abbeys.’