Bible of the Dead. Tom Knox

and no suspects, so I will try anything. Perhaps you can help us?’ He warmed to his own theme. ‘Ask Madame Annika, maybe, she may know more, you are her friend. She is a difficult woman to prise open, like an oyster. Find the pearl. And now I am talking rubbish, is it not so?’ He laughed, quite cheerily, and reached in the pocket of his smartly dark uniform. Then he produced a card with a debonair flourish. ‘Call me, telephone me. Any time. But now it is late, I go, I must drive a long way home. You live in Mende? You need me to drive you?’

      She declined.

      ‘My apartment is near.’

      ‘D’accord. This is a sad day.’ He glanced up at the weeping sky. ‘And now it is raining. Il pleure dans mon Coeur, Comme il pleut sur la ville.’

      Julia nodded. ‘It rains in my heart like it rains in the city? I know that line . . . Rimbaud?’

      ‘Ah no. It is in Verlaine, in the works of Verlaine.’

      His smile was good natured and sad; it was obvious he really wanted to leave. But she risked one more question. She had so many questions, but there was one question she needed to ask now, she felt it was important, she didn’t know why.

      ‘Monsieur Rouvier –’

      He was actually walking away; but he turned.

      ‘Oui?’

      ‘You said Ghislaine’s grandfather was a famous scientist. What was he famous for?’

      The officer was standing beneath a streetlight; rain tinselled in the glow as he pondered the question. Then he smiled faintly, his face illuminated by an answer:

      ‘I might be wrong, but I think it was breeding. Yes, something audacious. He had a bold theory, about cross-breeding . . . between men and animals? OK, Miss Kerrigan, au revoir.’

      She watched him disappear across the badly lit car park. Then she began the walk to her flat, through the biting cold of the rain. Her own footsteps were a soft backbeat to her thoughts, her deep deep thoughts. Puddles on the grey pavement reflected the Mende streetlights, they reflected her pensive face; and the revelation was the reflection of a sudden moon, emerging from behind the clouds, large and startling.

      In Verlaine, that’s what Rouvier had said. In Verlaine.

      And that’s what Ghislaine had said, in his own way. You’ll find it in Prunier. The same way Rouvier had said in Verlaine.

      You’ll find it in Prunier!

      Could this be the answer? To the puzzle? Was this why she was stymied?

      She had presumed when Ghislaine had said ‘in Prunier’ he meant ‘in Prunier, the village in north Lozère’; and last week she had visited the place, and found nothing.

      But maybe when Ghislaine had spoken that day on the Cham he meant his phrase in the same way an academic might say ‘in Shakespeare’, or ‘in Darwin’. Ghislaine’s meaning must have been: you’ll find it in the works of Prunier the scholar.

      Yes!

      Quickly, she collected her chastened wits. Prunier or Prunieres was a not entirely uncommon surname. It belonged to no scholar she knew, but this was evidently an obscure corner of French science. Maybe a local man? Or someone very dead, from very long ago.

      Ten minutes’ brisk walk to her apartment and two hours in front of her laptop screen, laboriously translating the most obscure and recherché French websites, finally gave her the answer.

      Pierre Barthelemey Prunieres.

      She was right.

      It turned out he was an antiquarian who flourished in the mid nineteenth century. Pierre Barthelemy Prunieres did much research in Lozère; and he came from Marvejols. Long forgotten, he was once, the website said, known for his research in osteo-archaeology: skulls and skeletons he unearthed in the caves and dolmens of his native region, like ‘baumes chaudes’ in the Tarn. And near Saint Pierre de Tripier – in ‘le grotte de l’homme mort’.

      Le grotte de l’homme mort?

      The cave of the dead man.

      She wrote down the phrase in a pad, circled it, stared at it. The name was poetic, but it meant nothing in itself. She circled the name again, then returned to her computer. And ten more minutes on the laptop brought her a much more sincere frisson, a real buzz, a frightening revelation.

      The world pulsed on the screen: trépanation.

      Trepanned.

      It seemed this man Prunieres had unearthed precisely the same kind of remains as Julia. A hundred and fifty years before.

      Trepanned skulls. Horribly wounded; deliberately drilled.

      Julia stood, dry mouthed, and walked to her rain-scribbled window. The grey slate roofs of Mende were framed by the dark hills beyond: the Causses and the Cham, and the wild and empty Margeride.

      Chapter 11

      Rising from the bed Jake slowly approached the door. Hanging from the hook was a terrible thing.

      What was it? A tiny dead monkey? A dried fruit bat? What the fuck was this? A brown leathery mammalian corpse just hanging here? Surely it couldn’t be worse, surely it couldn’t be what he most of all feared?

      His revulsion mixed with his furious curiosity. He walked closer. And then his stomach surged, with the bile, of confirmed disgust.

      This was no monkey. This was unmistakeably not animal.

      It was a human embryo.

      A human foetus, somehow dried or mummified, was hanging by its own umbilical cord from the coathook on the door.

      The foetus stared at him. Its blank open eyes were milky white.

      He heard a scream.

      He stared.

      The scream didn’t register; it was like a distant car alarm, not really meant for him, he was so transfixed by the sight of those eyes, dead eyes rolled back, like his sister, no, don’t think this way, but he couldn’t help it: slowly he pulled on his jeans and a shirt and all the time he kept staring at the baby, the dead foetus, the milky white eyes, like his sister’s, lying in the road; until he realized it was Chemda. Screaming.