He wasn’t in his chair.
Christ, Luc thought. Christ.
In one more second he was under the table.
He reached up and felt his hand close around it.
Sara, I’m coming.
He quickly wriggled back to the wall. Bonnet was nowhere to be seen so he boldly rose and sprinted to the next hallway, shoving the manuscript into his shirt.
He opened the first door he came to.
An old couple sweaty and panting.
Then, the second door.
On the bed, was a man with a hairy back and unbuttoned trousers. Jacques was awkwardly trying to peel them off with his free hand. The only part of Sara he could see, hidden underneath the beast, was tan silky hair, cascading onto the pillow.
There was a standing lamp, a heavy iron affair.
He felt a kind of murderous rage he’d never felt before.
It made him grab the lamp, snapping the plug from the wall.
It made him swing it like a pick axe, bringing the base crashing down onto the man’s thoracic spine.
And when Jacques arched his back in pain, raising his head off Sara’s chest and baying like a wounded dog, it made him swing the base of the lamp hard into his skull, crushing it like a walnut, and driving his body halfway off the bed.
Sara was moaning. He held her naked against him and told her she was going to be all right. Her eyes wouldn’t focus. He kept speaking to her, whispering into her ear which felt cold against his lips. And finally he heard a tiny, breathy, ‘Luc.’
There wasn’t time to try to dress her. He pushed Jacques’ corpse off the bed and wrapped her in the blood-splattered bedspread. He was about to lift her when he had a thought. He dug into Jacques’ pockets. The hard edge of Jacques’ mobile felt wonderful against his fingertips. He glanced at it.
No bars. Of course. They were underground.
He pocketed the phone, bundled Sara up and carried her in his arms, pushing the door open with his knee.
The corridor was empty.
He started to run with her, away from the music.
He felt strong and she felt light.
The hallway was darker the further he got from the main hall. He strained to see what was ahead.
Stairs.
Bonnet checked his watch again, lifted his heavy hips out of the chair and plodded back to Odile’s room to see how she was getting on with her paramour.
It had been four years since the birth of a new child in Ruac. They needed to pick up the pace if they wanted to sustain themselves. Odile was too picky for his liking. A women as attractive as her should be pumping out babies like a machine.
But she’d been pregnant only three times in her long life. Once during the First World War, where she lost the baby to a miscarriage. Again, right after the Second World War, a boy sired by a Resistance fighter from Rouen, who’d died of an infant fever. And again in the early sixties to a Parisian lad back-packing through the Périgord, a one-night stand.
This time a girl was born. She grew up young and pretty and carried the hopes of Bonnet and the entire village on her little shoulders. But she died in a freak accident down in the basements. She had been climbing on the old German crates, trying to scramble to the top of the box mountain, when one of the crates toppled and crushed the life out of her.
Odile had sunk into a depression and despite her father’s pleadings, lost interest in the pursuit of men from the outside.
Until the archaeologists came to town.
The only bright spot in a nightmare as far as Bonnet was concerned.
Bonnet opened her door, expecting to see two beautiful people making love, but she was alone, snoring, with a puffy jaw.
‘Jesus Christ!’ he exclaimed.
There wasn’t any need to search the room. There was no place to hide.
He rushed out and ran as fast as his arthritic hips could carry him towards Jacques’ room.
There he found a profoundly worse scene. His son, bashed, bloody and most certainly dead, Sara gone.
‘My God, my God, my God!’ he muttered.
Something had gone terribly wrong.
Where was Simard?
‘Pelay!’ he screamed. ‘Pelay!’
Luc carried Sara up the dark stairs. At the top there was an unlocked door.
They were in a kitchen, an ordinary cottage kitchen.
He carried her through into a hall and a sitting room, dark and unoccupied, the layout similar to Odile’s house. He placed Sara onto a couch and adjusted the sheet to cover her properly.
He parted the curtains.
It was the main street of Ruac.
Isaak’s car was parked across the street in front of Odile’s house.
All the houses were connected. The underground hall was, as he suspected, an excavation under the road.
He quickly checked Jacques’ phone. There was a good signal. He punched up the recent call list.
Father – mobile.
Good, he thought, but no time now.
The keys to Isaak’s car were long gone.
He had a quick rummage; he tried to be as quiet as he could, assuming the occupant of the house was somewhere underground, but he couldn’t be sure of that.
In the hall he found two useful items; a set of car keys and an old single-barrelled shotgun. He broke the gun open. There was a shell in the barrel and a few more rounds in a pouch.
Bonnet waddled through the underground complex, screaming for Pelay. In the clutches of the tea, none of the other men would be functional for a good hour or more. The fate of his village was riding on him.
I’m the mayor, he thought.
So be it.
Then he found Pelay in one of the corridors, slipping out of one of the rooms.
‘Where the hell were you?’ Bonnet screamed.
‘Checking. Watching. Keeping the peace,’ Pelay answered. ‘Like I’m supposed to be doing. What’s the matter?’
Bonnet yelled for Pelay to follow him then told him what had happened through breathless gasps as the two old men began to run.
Bonnet found the light switch for the corridor.
Nothing.
At the next corridor he again switched on the lights.
He pointed. ‘There!’
There was a streak of red marking the floor where Sara’s bloody bedsheet had dragged. The corridor led to the baker’s house. He drew his pistol and both men made for the stairs.
Luc awkwardly bundled Sara into the cramped back seat of the baker’s Peugeot 206 parked in front of the cottage. The car had obligingly chirped and given itself up when Luc pressed the unlock button from inside the sitting room.
He started it, put it in gear and sped off.
In his rear-view mirror he saw Bonnet and Pelay emerging from the baker’s front door. He heard a shot ring out. He shoved the Peugeot into second and floored it.
Bonnet ran back to his café to get his own car keys.
They had to be stopped.
They had to be killed.
He screamed these mandates at Pelay.
Luc was talking fast and loud and pushing the little Peugeot to its limits on the dark empty country road. He was brow-beating a low-level emergency services operator to push his call higher. He needed to speak to Colonel Toucas in Périgueux.
The colonel had to be wakened!
He was Professor Simard from Bordeaux, goddamn it!
He had the Ruac Abbey murderers in sight!
Bonnet had his keys in hand and was about to shut the café door when his mobile rang.
Luc was shouting at him. ‘It’s over, Bonnet. It’s done. The gendarmes are on the way to Ruac. You’re finished.’
Bonnet’s rage spouted like lava. ‘You think it’s done? You think it’s done? It’s done when I say it’s done! Go to hell and say goodbye to your goddamned cave! Come on, try to stop me! Come on! Try!’
Bonnet’s car was at the kerb in front of the café. He folded himself into the driver’s seat and Pelay climbed in beside him as fast as an old man could.
‘My rifle is in the boot,’ Bonnet said.
‘I’m still a good shot,’ Pelay grunted.
Bonnet pulled the car over to the side of the road at a point he knew, closest to the cliffs. Pelay retrieved the rifle and gave it a perfunctory check. It was an M1 carbine with a sniper scope, liberated from a dead US soldier in 1944. Pelay had been there. He remembered the day. He and Bonnet also took the young man’s wallet and boots. It was a good gun that they’d used to kill a lot of boche. Bonnet kept it clean and oiled.