Into The Fire (60 page)

In spite of herself, she glances down and yes, under the blue silk ropes is a flash of yellowed bone, a femur, perhaps, or a humerus.

Too late, she leans to look, for now Luc appears on the other edge of her eye line, holding a wad of cotton and a match. A great raft of paraffin sails to her on the still air. It clogs her throat, her eyes, her thinking. Don’t panic. Don’t panic.
Don’t
panic.

She says, ‘Patrice will find us. He broke the codes in Iain Holloway’s chip.’

‘I rather imagine he would have been here by now if there was any likelihood at all that he could work out where we might be. Did you know, he threatened to— André! Get up!’

André. The nameless third cousin is André. And he has just fallen flat on his face at Luc’s feet, which might be amusing or irritating or just plain stupid were it not for the fact that the back of his skull has been shot away. Nobody heard the shot, therefore it was suppressed. Therefore, too, there are those in the church whose first care is not for the Bressards.

Blood pools around the dead man’s head, spreading on to Luc’s Guccis. Clean bone shows wetly white in the mess of the dead man’s hair. It’s a paralysing sight, but Picaut has an advantage: she has seen these things often enough that her recovery is swifter.

‘Run!’ Her shout is for Lise, whose hands may be tied, but whose legs are not. Picaut herself is already careening out of the small chapel and into the transept, turning west, for the entrance.

In the dark, she is moving on instinct. There are thirty rows of chairs here, and then another thirty before the doors. Vast gothic ribs tower over her, invisible, stretching to heaven. Behind is the altar, the organ, the statue of the suffering Christ. Even in daylight, the size and scale of this place is intimidating. In the dark, with faint stains of glass and moonlight irregular around her, she could be on the moon. She has to go slowly, feeling her way, bumping into chairs, pillars, possibly people.

She hears voices on both sides: Bressard men. Of course there are more than she knew about. Somebody moved the wood into the chapel while she was down below and that was never Luc; he doesn’t sully his hands with manual labour. On instinct, she crouches down. Scant moments later, she hears a hiccough, feels the hiss of a round pass over her head.

The shooter is behind and to her left. From her right a voice she knows: ‘Capitaine Picaut!’

She veers towards the sound.

Cheb Yasine is crouched amongst the chairs. Stained starlight paints him in muted reds and blues, a semi-automatic in one hand, digital low-light binoculars in the other. He lets go of both for long enough to catch hold of her arm and draw her to safety.

‘Are you hurt?’

‘No. How did you find me?’

‘Patrice called.’ He looks up, takes a shot, ducks down again. ‘And then I spoke with Old René Vivier who said that if I wanted to exact revenge for my cousin, I should follow Landis Bressard and he would lead me, eventually, to a fire.’ He hefts his gun. ‘Evidently, he was right. Look out!’

He catches her shoulder, presses her down. Picaut counts two muzzle flashes before she is too low to see anything. Rounds whine off stone. A man curses, but it is a living curse, not a dying one.

She says, ‘Did you tell Patrice where we were?’

He rolls his eyes. ‘This is personal, Capitaine, and beyond the law. I suggest you leave and let us put a permanent end to your family drama. Your friends are looking, I believe, at one of the Bressard warehouse projects east of the city.’

It’s where she might have looked if she had suspected the Bressards, but it’s too far away. She says, ‘Landis has at least six men. How many have you?’

‘Enough.’ Cheb Yasine has a Bluetooth set in his ear. He speaks into it in a singing language Picaut doesn’t know. Up near the Maid’s chapel, Luc is issuing low, urgent orders; the rise and fall of his voice is a chanted litany. His men spread out among the chairs. Another shot pings off a wall somewhere south of where she hides, but the rest hold their fire; they’re conserving rounds now, waiting for a clear shot.

Cheb Yasine, too, is moving. He lifts Picaut bodily up and pushes her towards the aisle. ‘Get out. We’ll cover you.’

‘I’ll bring help.’

‘No!’ He catches her wrist. His fingers are an iron band. ‘The Bressards killed my cousin. They lit fires in the name of my god. The police shall not interfere.’

The set of his gaze does not promise her safety if she gets in the way of his vengeance.

She says, ‘And in the morning?’

‘There will have been a firefight between rival gangs in which men died. We shall all acknowledge that it was most unfortunate. I will have been in a club in Tours all night long. My mobile phone and my credit cards will show this to be true. You, I think, will have escaped under cover of the shooting at around one o’clock. Give me an hour. No one will know.’

He is wrong. The Family will know. And if she is to bring them down, she will have to tell what has happened. But to do any of that she has to get out alive, and nothing is certain. Three shots hiss close together from up near the chapel. She hears a body fall and has no idea who has died. She wants it not to have been Lise.

‘Go!’ Cheb Yasine’s hand shoves hard in the small of her back.

She ducks down, keeping her head below the level of the chairs and begins to weave her way towards the door.

Behind her, pandemonium.

She knew the cathedral was big, but in the nightmare of glass-stained moonlight and gunfire it has grown to fill her universe, and it seems likely that Cheb Yasine may get his wish by default: it could take her another hour simply to reach the door.

She takes shelter behind a pillar. Rounds hiss; double taps and triple taps and pauses while men move.

At least two are dead and one is injured, moaning curses in French which is no help towards knowing who it is; in pain, all men sound the same.

She hears three shots and crawls out from behind her pillar. The floor is tiled in black and white, which is why she doesn’t see the blood until she has put her hand in it.

‘
Fuck!
’

It is warm, but not hot; sticky, not slick. She traces it back to the pillar she was heading for and finds a dead Algerian with a wound in his upper abdomen big enough to take four bunched fingers. So the Bressards are using soft-nosed rounds. Just when she thinks she can’t hate them any more, some new discovery proves her wrong.

She runs her hands over the body. He has a shoulder holster, but it’s empty. She begins a fingertip search of the floor. Eight more shots have been fired from the danger zone up near the chapel by the time she finds a Beretta, the gangster’s gun of choice.

Armed, she feels whole again. Newfound confidence drives her away from the pillar, back into the maze of chairs, inching ever towards the door. Behind her, men shoot and die and call to each other in French or not-French. In this, the Bressards are at a disadvantage: they cannot understand their adversaries, while everything
they
say is heard and understood.

Even so, the not-French voices seem fewer than they were. If she were to pit Cheb Yasine against Landis Bressard, she has no idea whom she would back to win, only whom she hopes will do so. She crawls on.

With three more pillars to go, she is contemplating the risks and benefits of making a run for it when, partway through the next volley, a woman’s voice keens in pain.

‘Lise!’ She may be a Bressard, but she was the only friend in a friendless place, and she did her best to help. Picaut checks the Beretta and doubles back towards the sound.

Retracing her steps to the chapel, and danger, she goes faster than she did coming out, but still it is slow. Flitting from pillar to pillar to chair to pillar, she steps over the human debris of the fight, counting off almost equal numbers of Algerians and Bressards until she reaches the transepts where she finds a huddle of four Algerians, all dead, lured into one place and ambushed. So perhaps Landis does know Algerian, or one of his men does.

‘Fuck.’

Picaut crabs sideways into shadow. Lise could be anywhere and she can’t risk calling out. She could be dead, leaching hot blood on to the tiles. Please, not that.

Arms extended, safety off, finger on the trigger – how light is the touch? – she edges forwards, towards the Maid’s chapel, where someone is breathing, in pain, and it sounds like a woman.

The fire begins when she is perhaps ten metres away. Every breath she takes is saturated with the bitter smell of gunfire, the scent of blood, of fear, of fury. But the last few weeks have rendered her inordinately sensitive to the many and varied scents of smoke and she catches the first sharp-hot-sweetness of it before she sees any flame.

‘Lise?’

She hears a scuffle, an oath. ‘Inès! Go back!’ Lise’s whisper, raw with pain.

She is not alone here. Cheb Yasine hisses at her from somewhere more distant in front and to her left. ‘The Bressards are lighting their pyre. They will have their martyr, even if it is not you. You should leave now, Capitaine. We are here who choose to be. This is not your fight.’

But it is, and not only for Lise. This is her duty. Put it down to the gun in her hand, or the proximity of death, or the weight of understanding of all that the Family plans, but she knows now the depth of the error she made in supporting Luc, and now that she knows it, she has to stop him.

She pushes on. Three metres … two, and she has a view into the Maid’s chapel, peering in past a line of chairs. Luc’s fire is not a good one: a circle of flamelets dance on the pyre, gathering, growing, but not yet blazing. Smoke weaves up; pale patterns spin in the dark.

Lise Bressard is propped nearby in a patch of blue-shaded starlight. Blood blooms on her left arm, from shoulder to elbow. Her face is a mask of pain. The cable ties have been replaced. Silk ropes bind her at wrist and ankle, their ends left untidy, ravelled like old spaghetti across the skull that Iain Holloway photographed.

And, because the ropes have been moved, Picaut can see the rest of the skeleton: a haphazard collection of leg and arm bones, spinal vertebrae and disarticulated ribs.

And, because she is her father’s daughter, because his obsessions were the backbone of her life and he did not let her grow to adulthood in ignorance, the remains of Marguerite de Valois, shown by DNA evidence to be a close relative of Louis XI, are an open book.

In one glance Picaut estimates gender and age, details the old injuries and marks of wear: arthritis at a hip joint, a break in a collarbone, an old injury to a femur. But it is the density of the bones that is striking. She has seen weight-lifters with slimmer bones than these.

A woman, then. Sturdy. By the angles of her hips, and the arthritis there, a lifelong rider. A woman who has borne much weight from a young age. A woman with broken ribs and injuries to thigh and collarbone, all of which healed long before a good and timely death.

A woman …
that
woman?

How?

‘
MY LADY?
’

‘Tomas?’

They have unchained her legs; Cauchon has found within himself a shred of mercy. She rises smoothly, in the way she used to by the fireside, say, at Jargeau; by the guns at Troyes. She is holding her strength for the morning and he does not know how deep or shallow are the reserves she has left.

She has been allowed to hear Mass, to take the Eucharist, to make confession although not to Tomas, nor to Huguet. They have not been banned, though; the guards have let them through, and the swarthy, grey-haired barber they have brought with the shears to cut her hair, and the nun, for propriety.

She comes to the door, steps back as they push it open. ‘Why are you here?’

‘To make you ready. If you will let us all in?’

Tomas is in. They all are. The door shuts and is locked. The guards leave them; they have been well paid for that, in silver that they think comes from Bedford. In truth it is Bedford’s coin, only he has not sanctioned this, the entry into the Maid’s cell of one nun, two priests and a barber. What harm can they do?

‘I bring you someone.’ Tomas steps aside to let the nun be seen. This was the hardest part, persuading a girl who lives for God that she must wear a habit to which she is not entitled.

It is Hanne’s plan, though, and he has only modified it. She steps past him now, as if she owns this place, and it a palace.

‘Sister. We have come to do our father’s bidding.’

‘Hanne!’ That voice, that name. As he heard it in Rouen, he hears it now, but with a raw pain that is entirely new.

She sways.

Tomas steps forward to catch her, but she rights herself, reaches out her hand, lays it on Hanne’s cheek. The tenderness.

He will weep, who has fought two days against it.

‘My dear, you are so thin!’

‘She will not eat,’ Tomas says. He has not slept in the past two days, has paced, has argued, has turned words inside out, has lifted the bible and set it down again, as if other answers might be discovered beneath it, squirrelled away, where only those on the edge of madness might find them. And he has come to this; they all have.

De Belleville says, ‘Your sister is killing herself, after the manner of Catherine of Siena.’ His voice is rough with pain and his own lack of sleep. ‘She will be made a saint if it slays her.’

Huguet carries their only candle. He lifts it and the light tints de Belleville’s face, his powder-grey hair, his coarse cloth.

‘Oh, Jean …!’

Duc Jean de Belleville, a man for whom women are as sisters, friends, perhaps even great, heart-felt friends, holds the Maid to his chest, in a grip strong enough to stop a horse. Love is there, a deep longstanding love, but even so, her gaze grates past him.

To Hanne, gently, she says, ‘Ma chérie, you must eat.’

Tomas says, ‘She blames herself for all that has befallen you. She threatened to go to Bedford and Cauchon, and tell them they had the wrong woman.’