When he found the shop, it was beneath an archway, half hidden at a corner where the steps led down and up, and the street was no wider than any of the others.
The door was not locked. At once that pungent, dusty smell of ground, powdered herbs and spices met his nostrils. There were liquorice and ginseng roots, dried sponges, glass-stoppered apothecary jars, all with Latin labels. Hieracium pilosella L COMPOSITAE (Mouse-ear Hawk-weed), Hyoscyamus niger L SOLONACEAE (Henbane, a sedative and antispasmodic but also quite poisonous), Iris germanica var. florentina Dykes IRIDACEAE (Orris, the Florentineiris, causes vomiting and may be violently purgative if taken from fresh root-stock). The violet smell was powerful.
There were sacks and bins of dried herbs and flower petals for pot-pourri, a small desk-cum-work table with brass weigh-scale, one chair and beams in the ceiling that must have been three or four hundred years old.
A pictorial chart gave the names of perhaps sixty local herbs and other useful plants. Another gave human organs with their various complaints and treatments. For colds, teas of hyssop and white horehound; bayberry and ginger; or liquorice, elder, meadow sweet, violet and garlic.
There was no sign of Ludo Borel but on the dispensing table there was one bottle of pale grey-green dust. Papaver somniferum L PAPAVERACEAE, the opium poppy, the ground leaves and white flowers probably. Not as narcotic as the milky sap but used in teas and poultices all the same.
Again he had to ask that question that had been bothering him ever since they’d come on the case. Was Borel treating Josianne-Michele? Now he had to ask, Had she really gone into the mountains?
Behind the shop was one long room devoted to storage and the drying of the herbs. Bunch after bunch of fennel, sage, thyme and rosemary, among others, hung from the rafters. There were burlap sacks and wicker panniers of rosehips, others of pungent juniper berries, a much-worn chopping block and small machete – a wicked thing in the right fist. Honed sharp and centuries old.
Even an idiot could see that the Borels had been in business for generations.
There was a grinding mill with nests of screens to sieve out particles of the appropriate size and return the rest to the mill. There was a distillation unit – oil of eucalyptus, essence of lavender. Roasted barley and acorns were ready to be ground into ersatz coffee; metre-long bunches of soapwort for making soap.
Kohler wished his partner was with him. It was eerie, it was uncomfortable. All warehouses had this feel when no one was around.
Tiny pre-war bottles were stored in pre-war boxes and there were hundreds of them. Borel had bought with an eye to the future.
Going quickly back through to the shop, he paused to scan the shelves of tiny bottles, read: oil of anise; oil of savin; oil of the white opium poppy …
Borel didn’t fool around. He had something for everything. Lungwort, henbane and mandrake.
There were even plant dyes and lots of them. Madder and cosmos, walnut and indigo. Goldenrod too.
Out on the street there was still no sign of anyone. As he climbed to the church, he found the village closing in on him. It seemed to say, You are an outsider; you are not wanted here. Beware!
The church was empty and cold. When he reached the last of the houses, the land still climbed. A rough rampart of maquis scrub and angular blocks of stone rose to the ruins of the citadel, stark and vacant yet sharp in the long slant of the sun.
Gott im Himmel, what was he to do? The kid had been sick at her stomach, a mild case of food poisoning probably. But had that vomiting served only to cut him off from Louis and drag him up here? He knew he ought to go back; knew he had to go on.
The streets of the fortress were lined with its broken walls. Everywhere the whitish stones stood out as if the limestone boulders had been burnt to lime and the years had removed whatever blackness the fire had caused. Some walls were higher than others. Rooms lay upon rooms, some like caves, others open to the sky. Portals gaped; rubble lay strewn beneath the snow. Here and there, clumps of maquis and juniper struggled to gain a foothold, green against the vibrant white. Goats had been and gone; donkeys too. In one stable a smoke-blackened ceiling gave evidence of fires past, though no fresh ashes lay beneath and there was still no sign of anyone.
What might once have been the dining hall was now open to the sky and ringed by broken walls and here a room, there a room or passage. And everywhere that same strong, sage-like smell of the hills but also that of wet moss and mould, a graveyard smell.
When he came to a portal at the end of a short passageway, he saw snow-capped mountains in the distance – Italy over there; then the nearer hills with their frugal clumps of scattered pines and solitary cypresses, and finally the drop. Ah Jesus, Jesus, it was steep. About sixty or eighty metres, not the thirty he’d thought from below the village. Rust stained the rocks like vomit and though there was no wind, its chill was there.
The village lay well off to the right and all but out of sight, huddled with its back to the fortress, house piled upon house, rocks lining many of the eaves. Trees and scrub and boulders between it and the cliff, perhaps 300 metres of them. The portal hidden then … all but hidden from the village.
He dropped a stone but heard nothing – had given up listening for it entirely, only to feel its hollow clatter in every bone.
There was a sill across the base of the portal, an arch above it. The thing was just wide enough for two persons to sit, or for one to put his legs up should he have no fear of heights.
Suddenly queasy at the thought, Kohler turned away and began to retrace his steps. There were too many places for an assailant to hide. From any one of several corners a shot could be fired and one would not know whence it had come.
‘Louis,’ he muttered. ‘Louis, I don’t like it.’
When he reached the gap where once there had been a gate, the sea was brilliant in the distance. Cannes spread along the shore, then the hills climbed to the cottage tucked away in its little valley; then the hillside where the murder had happened, the mas of the blind woman, and finally uphill to the village. Olive groves were on the lower slopes; orchards too and fields, but on the road below, the boy Bebert Peretti was holding the Abbe Roussel’s hand. Behind them, in a straggle, were the men of the village. Old … many of them looked too old to be climbing such a hill.
The priest wore black; the rest, a motley collection of unpatched blue denim, brown corduroy or leather, and berets that summed up at once their total indifference to such things and the absolute frugality with which they approached each work-week. Only on Sundays, or for weddings, funerals and fetes would they wear their stovepipe suits of black.
Dedou Fratani was a few paces behind the priest. There was no sign of the herbalist. From a distance of 400 metres they watched him approach and when they turned to evaporate back into their village, he knew Borel would be waiting for him at his shop. Word had somehow travelled up to them from the cottage that Josette-Louise was ill. He’d had no need to go up to the ruins and yet he could not have stopped himself.
He threw a fitful look back at the citadel. Saracen or Roman, what did it matter? Once trapped among those ruins, once the hunting had started, who would care?
Louis … Louis, has Delphane chosen his spot so well?
The cinematographer recorded everything with the camera of his mind. He’d witnessed the first hesitant meeting of two souls, that final rush into each other’s arms. The tears, the half-smiles, the lingering, trembling touch of Josette-Louise Buemondi’s fingertips on the weaver’s cheeks.
Viviane Darnot kept returning to comfort the girl. The shawl Josianne-Michele had loathed to touch, her sister Josette drew tightly around herself, stroking it fondly as though in wonder.