Into The Fire (44 page)

Nobody has ever asked her this, but the answer comes readily, and not altogether surprisingly.

‘Of course.’ This is why she does this job, because it keeps her at the edge of herself.

‘Well then …’ He makes himself comfortable, sips at his herbal concoction. ‘You are a professional, and this is your job, so it will come as no surprise when I tell you that Iain Holloway has an international reputation as a man who can build a face on to skulls of great age, even those that are incomplete.’

‘And you have Louis XI, who ended the Hundred Years’ War, and next year is the anniversary of Agincourt, that war’s most famous battle. Did he offer to come to you or did you invite him?’

‘Do you know, that is one question you would have to ask the bishop? I only know that he arrived, and I was instructed to render him every service. I was not—’

‘You didn’t know you were dying.’

‘I thought I might not be, which is not quite the same. At any rate, Iain Holloway quite evidently had the artistry, perhaps one might say the compassion, that computer programs lack. We wished him to create for us the face of Louis XI, the king who rebuilt our basilica, who rescued it from desolation and destruction. As you so rightly say, the anniversary of a certain battle is nearly upon us and we are required in these times of austerity to do what we can to attract interest to our church. You are observant. You can see that we would benefit from some … largesse.’

It certainly could. With necessary tact, she says, ‘It’s not quite the cathedral.’

‘Indeed not.’ His smile is soft and sad. ‘So: Iain Holloway came with a reputation for making a success of partial remains, of bodies whose constituent parts may have been mislaid, perhaps mixed up with others of a different …’ He coughs, dryly, and recovering, loses himself in spitting into a handkerchief.

Gently, Picaut says, ‘Dr Holloway can reunite a person with himself?’

‘Indeed. Or herself. It is a singular skill. As I mentioned on your last visit, the tomb that stands behind us is not the original and the bones of the man to whom it is dedicated no longer lie within it.

‘Over the years, they have been moved often to preserve them and each movement took its toll. Bones became separated, skeletons broke apart and were mixed with others of unknown origin. I had done my best ahead of time to gather those parts that I believed all came from the same individual.’

‘They didn’t?’

‘Capitaine Picaut, please let me tell this in my own way. I am endeavouring to tell the truth as you require it while maintaining my oath and this is not entirely easy. I presented him with the pieces I believed should be together – a cranium, a jaw, bits of a spine – and Dr Holloway went to work with an enthusiasm that carried him through the first day. On the second, he ran aground on what we might call aesthetic issues.’

‘The king was not who you wanted him to be? Or the bones weren’t from the king at all?’

‘They were definitely the king, just that …’ He taps his fingers to his lips. ‘They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and in this case a model of a dead king’s head may save you and me time we can both ill afford to waste. Come.’

He leads her back to the small chapel on the left by the main door. At first it looks empty, but there, in the dim space behind the door, is a clutter of discarded boxes, amongst which a drape of black cotton covers something that stands at chest height.

‘This?’

‘Indeed. If you will take off the cover?’

Wide black eyes, polished dome, depth markers dotted about and fleshed with plasticized muscle. The orbits are here, surrounding glass eyes with a wide brown iris, and the firm lines around a mouth, the beginnings of a cheek. For a moment she thinks she’s found another key to the puzzle, but this is not the skull in Iain Holloway’s picture; it’s too clean, too whole, too white.

‘This is the king?’

‘It is.’

He is not an appealing man. Picaut turns him towards the poor light from the windows. The glass eyes are friendly enough, but they are caught beneath an unbecoming frown that is not remotely enhanced by the rings of skinless muscle that surround them. The nose is of unseemly length, and the chin vanishes back into the larynx. He is not finished, by any means, but there is enough to see that Louis XI, the Provident, was not a man of beauty.

Aesthetic issues indeed.

Tentatively, she says, ‘Good looks were clearly not a prerequisite to successful kingship in the Middle Ages.’

‘Indeed not.’ Father Cinq-Mars smiles thinly. ‘Not a single one of the eye-witness accounts of the time suggests to us that Louis was beautiful by any measure. This is not necessarily a defect; even today, few men are truly beautiful and those in power often least so. But as Iain Holloway brought our late king to life, it seemed to us both that by contemporary standards, where all judgements are made on external signs, Louis was beginning to look at the very least mendacious. He has, as you can see, a long nose and a weak chin and he looks, as Dr Holloway said, like the kind of man who would rip the eyes from your head and sell them back to you for money you no longer had. He asked if I wished him to exert a judicious “sleight of hand” that might restore some sense of dignity to our king, at the expense, perhaps, of verisimilitude.’

‘That doesn’t sound like the man I am coming to know. He wasn’t a liar.’

‘Nevertheless, he had a generous spirit, you must have learned that of him. And he wished us to celebrate the greatness of our past. Louis XI achieved great things, of that, I have no doubt; France came to wholeness under him. After the madness of his grandfather and the craven behaviour of his father, he was a king we could all respect. It is to our regret that the present day is so shallow as to see only the surface. So yes, Iain Holloway offered us a small white lie. A shorter nose, a better chin, a skull not so domed, more generous eyes.’

Enough work has been done that it is possible to picture the improvement. The king will not become another Luc, not even a Patrice, but— Think of something else. Think of Iain Holloway, burned, and why it might have happened?

‘Did you accept his offer?’

The priest pulls a face. ‘It is not within my power to accept such a thing. I told him that I must consult with the bishop.’

‘And the bishop was being made a cardinal at the consistory in Rome?’

‘Not then, no. But he was not immediately available. We found ourselves with time to spare and, as I am sure you already know, the devil finds work for idle hands.’

He pauses.

Picaut has nothing to say. She fails to imagine either this man or Iain Holloway colluding in evil.

The priest continues more slowly now, as if the memory adds to his pain. ‘Dr Holloway, finding this abundance of time on his hands, offered to build the face of Queen Charlotte without charge. We believed, you understand, that her body lay with that of the king, her husband. She was not acclaimed a great beauty, but still, it would have added a feminine touch. It took us some time to find her; the bones of which this church has charge were not all in the same place. If you look down there, to the left of the king’s plinth …’

The box is old and scruffy and has seen use for other things. It smells of mildew and dust. Inside, a second skull rests on an identical square wooden base, but there is no plastic rod holding it aloft, rather a web of fine wires that secure it in place, or perhaps they hold it together. It’s hard to tell which, but either way time has not left to posterity a great deal of Charlotte, queen of France.

Gingerly, Picaut carries the skull down towards the altar. It is barely intact; at some point it has been split through the nose and the left half is largely missing, with only a few teeth remaining in either jaw.

This, too, is emphatically not the one from Iain Holloway’s encoded email. It occurs to Picaut that the priest has lied at least once and she holds the evidence in her hands.

‘You told Monique Susong that you’d burned the bones on which Iain Holloway was working.’

He meets her gaze, wide-eyed. ‘How could I burn such as these? They are our heritage.’

So who did you burn?

He is still not telling all of the truth; Picaut can hear a rush in the valleys of his voice, but over the years she has learned that if she lets those who lie to her go their own way, she learns more than if she tries to force them to follow her own sense of truth. She sets the latest skull on the floor beside the king.

‘Did Iain Holloway say this was the queen of France?’

The priest looks at her aslant. ‘You think perhaps he did not?’

‘If he did, he was a great deal less competent than you believed him to be. This is a man’s skull.’

‘Very good. Very good indeed. Someone has taught you well. Your father, perhaps? Well, anyway, someone good.’ The priest folds his hands. ‘So I will tell you that no, he did not say it was the queen of France. He laughed a little and then was kind and broke to me gently the news that I held in my hands the skull of a man who had died in his dotage, when what we sought was a woman who had died in childbed in her early middle years. To the best of my knowledge, the king and his supposed wife have lain in close proximity for nearly four centuries. I was not proud of this.’

Father Cinq-Mars drains the last of his herbal mixture, swallows against an evident wish to gag, and sets his flask between the two skulls.

‘The prospect that we might have lost Charlotte was unconscionable, and so we proceeded to search with some fervour through all the remains in our possession, looking for a woman who died in her thirties, of slight build, brought to bed of many children. If you will now take the lid from the box on the right, I can show you what we found.’

She lifts the lid from the box and looks again for the skull in Iain Holloway’s picture. She does not find it.

She does, though, find the skull of a woman of slight build; her skull has teeth missing, and signs of rodent damage.

‘This is the queen?’ She is back with the priest.

‘Dr Holloway believed so. The age and build are right, so I am told.’

She lays the skull back in the box. Around it is a collection of other bones. Some are fighting men, knights. She knows the thickening of the long bones, the angles of the femoral heads, the specific arthritis of knee and hip that her father taught her in her teens, when she still found his obsession charming. ‘What did Iain Holloway make of these?’

‘He was like a child in a confiserie. Most of the day was taken up with sorting the bones. By the evening, he believed he could identify six distinct individuals, one of which is this woman of slight build who died in her thirties and is, we earnestly believe, Queen Charlotte. Among them, however, was one other woman, and she nearly twice the age Charlotte had attained by her death.’

Picaut looks back into the box. There are three skulls, all of them male. Her palms prickle. ‘She isn’t here?’

‘She is not.’

‘You burned her?’

‘I did.’

‘Why?’

‘The Nuremberg defence, Capitaine Picaut: I was told to. Why, I do not know. If Iain Holloway told me the truth, it is because he believed he had found the mortal remains of Marguerite de Valois, who was—’

‘The woman my father thought was the Maid.’ Her mouth is dry. Blood surfs in her ears. ‘My father sent him here to find them.’

‘But it can’t be …’

‘Obviously. But my father had death threats for simply suggesting she wasn’t a helpless virginal peasant, so … Did someone believe him?’

‘I don’t know. Iain Holloway spent his last morning here – the Friday – taking pictures and measurements and talking to himself. By noon, he demanded to speak to the bishop, who was preparing to leave for Rome. They spoke for an hour. Their voices were raised almost from the start. Whatever you choose to believe, I am not a dishonest man: I did not try to listen, but I could not keep from overhearing the accusations of calumny and destruction and the dishonour of France and the Church, the potential influence on our electoral process.’

‘Who else but the Maid? Even then, the
Front
had taken her as their mascot.’

‘In retrospect, you may be right, but I didn’t know that at the time, I swear it.’

‘What happened?’

‘Iain stormed out of the church. I was summoned immediately by the bishop and told that the relevant bones must be burned and that all “interference” must stop. I was told also that Dr Iain Holloway was leaving to return to his homeland and would not sully France with his presence again.’

‘And you really did burn the bones? For God’s sake, why?’

‘Please, let us not revisit the concept of authority. Some orders I must follow to the letter and this was one of them. Do you really need to ask why that is? You have already pointed out what happened to your father. It is less than a century since she was made a saint, a heroine of France: our greatest, most beloved, most widely known woman. We need her to be who she is. As, of course, do the various political parties who have claimed the Maid as their own. If you are looking for your murderers, there are many beyond the Church who should be your first—’ The priest’s head snaps round. ‘Who is the young lady at the door?’

‘Sylvie. She’s one of mine.’ There’s a rhythm to her footfall that spells urgency and distress. Picaut reaches the doorway, running. Sylvie meets her; panic lights her eyes.

‘Not another fire?’

‘No. Cheb Yasine has disappeared again. And nobody can find Christelle Vivier.’

‘
I’LL FUCKING SKIN
them alive.’

‘Who?’

‘Whoever is leaking everything useful to the fucking press.’

That Picaut had thought the press frenzied before was, she understands now, a measure of her own naivety.

Battling her way through the mob that is blocking her route to the front doors of the police station, she discovers that however scared they may be of the recent developments, they still have deadlines to meet and editors to please and that nothing will keep them at bay now that some idiot has seen fit to leak two facts: first, that Cheb Yasine has slipped his surveillance and his current location is unknown; second, that Christelle Vivier has disappeared and may be about to reclaim her role as the new Maid of Orléans, particularly if she is found dead.