But I am hurrying away with my story. Here is your first fact, the first of many I must tell you.
Three years ago, an old academic colleague of Ghislaine’s and mine, an academic named Hector Trewin, was killed in his Oxford college. You may have heard of him, or at least of the case. The murder, I believe, attracted a brief but intense flurry of interest, because Hector had been tortured before he was killed. Electric shocks had been applied to his hands, and his scalp, and, I believe, elsewhere. The homicide was apparently motiveless. No suspects were named or located, Julia. No one was arrested. The unsavory murder soon disappeared from the news.
But, you see, not everyone was quite so mystified.
From the start, Ghislaine and I were suspicious that the killing could have been linked to our trip to Cambodia — Democratic Kampuchea — in 1976.
I have never told you of this. But it is crucial to my sad story.
Decades ago, Hector Trewin, Ghislaine Quoinelles, and me, we were all part of a mission, a kind of mission, a team, an invited party. Most of us were French, there were also some Americans and Britons, myself from Belgium, as well, perhaps a German. I forget precisely, Julia, it was so long ago.
But I remember the basic facts. We were all invited by the Chinese and Cambodian governments to visit Beijing, and Phnom Penh, in Spring 1976. The party comprised biologists, anthropologists, archaeologists — thinkers and scientists. And all of us were committed Marxists, supporters, or at least fellow-travelers, of the Pol Pot regime and the Maoists in China.
What we did there I can barely bring myself to admit. Let me come to that later. What I can tell you now is that the murder of Trewin is, or was, I believe, related to this mission. Because, I mean, of the brutalities, the murder, they were so distinctive. So echoing.
Therefore when Ghislaine and I read of Hector’s death, we thought, as a consequence, that perhaps someone was taking revenge: for our own terrible actions in the 1970s.
Therefore we too began to fear, to indulge our horror of this chilling idea: that the killer was going to come for us, too. And take their revenge. This conviction grew over the following months. Earlier this summer Ghislaine openly speculated that we should flee, leave the country. I rejected his suggestions, and made him stay; perhaps, deep inside, I felt this looming fate was condign? Deserved? Maybe I deserved to be punished. My unadmitted guilt held me back.
But again I am confusing you. Please forgive me. What I am struggling to enunciate is that all this, Julia, explains Ghislaine’s bizarre behavior in the cave, the day you discovered the skulls. He was genuinely concerned for my safety. He thought I was going to be attacked, like Trewin.…All the time he was looking out for me, for us. For himself too of course. He was very afraid he was going to die the same way, someday soon. We were all afraid we were going to die. One by one by one.
Because all those legends were coming back to haunt us. Man reduced to animal to werewolf to beast.
You may think I am going mad? I am not. Not now. Non. The madness was indeed ours: but it happened long ago. In ’76. And this is the truth of the matter, and this is why I need to tell you this. At last. Someone needs to know, and I sense that you, of all people, will understand. My friend. My female friend in the brutal male world of the caves of the skulls.
Please forgive my previous opacity. J’espère I hope that this e-mail will shed the light you need. There is a moth in the lamp. It is trapped.
I wonder if me and Ghislaine we were like the moths. Once and long ago we thought we were pursuing the truth, the great truth, the secret of the Ice Age caves, the secret of the blazing paintings in the darkness of the caverns, Julia, but we were so wrong, we were like moths who sought the moon, by instinct, but flew inside a lampshade and… and we got trapped by our delusion, dying burn singed to death by the deceiving light trapped by a terrible mistake.
And that is why I cannot bear the lies anymore, Julia. I cannot live with myself, and these corruption Les lilas et les roses. Therefore t k t
Julia dropped the printed sheet on the café table.
“That’s where it ends?”
“Yes.”
“And she was about to send this e-mail? To me?”
“Of course. Yes.”
“But how…”
Rouvier set down his absurdly large cup of latte and explained:
“The murderer reached her before she could finish, or even get halfway through, perhaps. However, she was using webmail. The draft message was, therefore, automatically saved. We retrieved it yesterday.”
Julia stared at the table, at her coffee, at nothing. Trying not to reveal her deepening disquiet. But it was impossible. This new revelation destabilized everything.
Ghislaine’s death had been ghastly enough — but she had not been emotionally close to her boss. She was, moreover, able to rationalize that crime: she had pretty much convinced herself his death was a unique, if horrible, atrocity. An ex lover taking mad revenge, maybe. Or just a robbery gone wrong.
But Annika? Julia had cared for the woman; they had been real friends. This murder therefore grieved Julia, very badly; it also forced her into fiercer, more horrifying speculations.
The murders.
The brutal murder of Annika following the brutal murder of Ghislaine, that really did mean a chain, a link, a series of crimes — perhaps interwoven with all these mysterious secrets. And a series of crimes implied there would be more crimes. There would be further killings. She shuddered, inwardly.
Rouvier carefully stirred his coffee.
They were in a suitably discreet corner of the bland and busy coffee shop. Julia had suggested Starbucks, by the Gare du Nord, because Rouvier had said he was en route to London by train. She’d also chosen Starbucks quite deliberately, because it was so ordinary and non-French and it reminded her of Michigan.
This is what she wanted right now. Michigan, college football, meat loaf, Tim Horton’s. And this place was the closest she could get: the sofas, the menus, the vast and oversweet cinnamon buns: they were comforting, so very North American. Insipidly safe. Nursery food for the soul.
Rouvier gazed at her, knowingly, as if he could see her fear.
“Miss Kerrigan, I do not think the killer is after you.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Why not read the e-mail again.”
She snatched up the sheet of paper.
Chère Julia…
Engaging with the puzzle — shunting emotion aside as best she could — Julia deconstructed the information, more slowly this time: trying to grasp the hidden and curtailed meanings; trying not to imagine Annika’s obvious fear and distress. The e-mail spoke of a very troubled mind, struggling to confess. Bewildered, frightened, and almost waiting to die, almost yearning to die. And also confessing. But confessing what? What had happened in Cambodia?
She set down the piece of paper on the table, next to her undrunk cappuccino. For a moment she visualized, helplessly, the ensuing scene in the little cottage on the Cham des Bondons. The killing of her friend, her head smashed against a pillar of rock. Smashed to death. She fought back a surge of near-tears, and said, slowly, “I do know the name. Hector Trewin. He is, or he was, quite old, a Marxist anthropologist at Balliol. Respected. Famous in his time, in the 1960s and ’70s.”
Rouvier nodded. “Yes. I am meeting the English police today to go over such matters. But yes, you are quite right about Trewin. Furthermore, Annika Neuman speaks correctly of their shared connection. Our researches prove this.”