Now it’s just three of us standing on the bridge. The beggar lowers his staff like a spear and walks slowly towards the remaining knight. The knight edges backwards until he comes up against the parapet. He’s got nowhere else to go. He weighs his chances and makes his choice. He jumps in the river.
All this time, I’ve stayed rooted in place. Have I been rescued? The beggar turns towards me.
‘Peter of Camros?’
The voice is familiar, though I don’t know where from. I stare. Now that his cloak has come off, I can see a wine-coloured tunic embroidered with lions. The man who was watching me in the hall.
How did he know my name?
‘I’m Chrétien. Peter is dead.’
‘Not to us.’
Something strikes the side of my head. Like a candle being pinched out, I sink into the darkness.
XXXIX
Ellie wanted to avoid the motorways and drive through the night. Doug resisted and won on both points.
‘They don’t know our car, and they don’t know where we’re going. They can’t put watchers on every bridge in France.’
‘They won’t take long to work out where we’re going. Someone inside Talhouett must know about Mirabeau. The moment they find that person, they’ll be all over it.’ She remembered Saint-Lazare’s private jet. ‘They move quickly.’
‘That’s why we should take the motorway.’
She surrendered. And when, halfway through the night, Doug turned into a service area and parked up at a motel, she didn’t argue. She snuggled up to Doug and was asleep almost before he’d turned out the light.
People who rhapsodised about French cuisine had never eaten a 6 a.m. breakfast at a roadside rest stop. While Doug got the food, Ellie tried the number on Harry’s card from a payphone again. All she got was the voicemail, a recorded epitaph.
They chewed greasy croissants and read over the file they’d taken. Juggernauts thundered past on the motorway, the heavy cavalry of commerce.
The file was in English, though it didn’t help much. Most of it was so impenetrably technical that even Ellie couldn’t get much sense from it. It seemed to be about a huge coal seam near Lyons which Talhouett was mining. There was only one reference to Mirabeau, near the end. Doug found it while Ellie was getting a refill of coffee.
Project Mirabeau: Unconventional Hydrocarbon Exploration
CONFIDENTIAL
Following environmental concerns regarding the hydraulic fracturing process, this project has been terminated.
‘Is that all?’
Doug flipped through a few more pages. ‘There’s an Environmental Impact Assessment.’
They read it together. There was nothing about Mirabeau.
‘What about that?’
Halfway down the page, under the heading ‘Sites of Historic/Cultural Interest’, Ellie read:
Submerged CHAPEL of Saint Donatian, Norman, XII–XIV(?) Century.
Map Ref: D5
Risk: Low
‘At least it’s medieval,’ she said doubtfully. Doug had a strange look on his face. ‘What?’
‘It’s three hundred miles from anywhere the Normans should have been building at the time.’
‘You trust a mining company to know the difference? And what do you suppose it means by “submerged”?’
Doug consulted the map at the front of the file. His finger came to rest on a blue patch near the middle of the page.
‘D5 is in the middle of a lake.’
They turned off the motorway and headed east, a long road winding its way through dark pine forests into the hills. Sometimes they’d come round a bend and glimpse the jagged peaks of the Alps far in the distance, before the hills closed in again. It reminded Ellie how close they were to Saint-Lazare’s castle, not far over the border in Switzerland. She twisted round in her seat and stared out the rear-view mirror. A tremor in her stomach told her Blanchard couldn’t be far away.
‘I think this must be it.’
A chain-link fence had appeared on their left, running along the side of the road, penning in the forest. Strings of razor wire spiked the top of it. At first all they could see behind it was trees, but as the road climbed higher they found themselves looking down a steep escarpment into a bowl between the hills. It must have been a natural dip, but heavy industry had gouged it out to make a black pit, vast terraces sinking into the earth. Heavy trucks ground their way up a track like a scar through the trees.
A black haze hung over the valley. There was no sign of a lake. Ellie checked the map.
‘The site entrance should be at the top of the next ridge. There’ll be a track from there leading down to the lake.’
‘Are we just going to drive in?’
‘Let’s have a look.’
The road took a hairpin bend and climbed towards the ridge. Ellie could see a guard hut, and the red-and-white stripes of a barrier post sticking up beside it.
Doug slowed. The gate was open. A black Mercedes 4x4 sat in the entrance, engine running. It must have just got there, though Ellie hadn’t seen it on the road.
‘Keep going.’
Doug glanced across. She gripped his arm. ‘Just go.’
If anyone was watching, it would have looked so obvious. One moment the car was slowing down; the next it was accelerating away as quickly as the small-bore engine could manage. Had they spotted Doug and Ellie? Had they noticed the car had UK plates? Ellie craned her head round and looked back: she thought she saw a man standing in the road, gesturing after them. Then the car went round a corner and she wasn’t sure if it might just have been a tree.
‘Wrong entrance?’ Doug asked.
‘Bad feeling about that car.’ She thought she’d seen a Swiss flag on its number plate.
Doug checked his mirror. ‘No one behind us yet.’
They crested the ridge and started down the opposite side. The trees grew thicker, hiding whatever might be coming after them. The chain-link fence continued unbroken.
‘Pull in there.’
On the opposite side of the road a forestry track led off into the trees. Doug braked hard and nosed the car in. They couldn’t go far — a rusted gate blocked the way — but it hid them from sight of the road.
‘Let’s get going.’ The fear that had stalked Ellie since the moment she stepped into the vault was beginning to close around her again. ‘If they saw us at the gatehouse, we don’t have much time.’
Doug took the backpack with the box. They jogged down the side of the road where the trees gave them cover, examining the fence for a way in. They hadn’t gone far when the baritone throb of an engine intruded on the silent forest.
‘Get down!’
They lay flat on the ground and waited. Half a minute later a car roared past and vanished round the bend. With her face buried in moss and pine-needles, Ellie couldn’t get a good look at it. They waited until the sound died away, then carried on, faster now.
Ellie quickly became aware that something had changed in the forest. Before, the trees had been an unbroken wall of drab green: now, most of them were brown. Dead needles clung to dead branches; dead trees pulled on their dead roots. Several had succumbed completely and torn themselves out of the ground.
‘There.’
On the far side of the fence, one of the dead trees had toppled over, making a precarious bridge across the razor wire. Doug made a stirrup with his hands and hoisted Ellie up: she hooked her arms around the trunk and hauled herself on. The stumps of broken branches scraped and scratched her. One almost clawed her eye out.