The Sixth Key(119)

‘I like this less and less,’ La Dame said.

‘Look, there’s a car behind us!’ Eva put in.

Rahn glanced in the rear-view mirror and realised she was right. His heart did a double somersault. Once again that potholer’s sense of foreboding had been on the mark. Could it be the black Citroën?

‘What are you going to do?’ Eva said.

‘I don’t know!’ he answered tersely. But now he realised that due to a peculiarity in the road he had lost sight of both cars. He saw a turn-off on the right and knew this might be their only opportunity, so he switched off his headlights and took the turn sharply.

This occasioned a cry from La Dame: ‘What are you doing!’

‘Shut up, will you?’ Rahn said, concentrating, his heart in his throat.

He drove the Peugeot only a little way by the faint light of an unseen moon and switched off the engine. ‘We’ll wait here,’ he told them, ‘and for crying out loud, La Dame, don’t light up your cigar. This could be nothing, or it could be something. The car behind us won’t know he’s not following us for a while.’

‘What now then? You do realise that you must be a suspect in five murders and one kidnapping? Not to mention the man at the university!’ La Dame said.

Rahn hadn’t thought about it like that. It was true! There was Abbé Cros, that man in the barn at Arques, Abbé Lucien, and now those two Serbians lying dead in some desolate spot near Campagne-sur-Aude, and if all this weren’t enough there was Deodat’s fate to take into account, whatever that might be! He felt dismal, but there was nothing to be done about it now. He had to concentrate. When he felt it was safe, he turned the key and the lights came on again, illuminating the fog that, like a living thing, had grown to like their company. He reversed the Peugeot back to the juncture with the road to Granes and took to the road again, continuing until he found a shoulder on the left with enough cover to hide behind. He stopped the car and turned the engine off.

‘What now?’ La Dame cried.

‘Look, it’s like this, if that car was following us, whoever is in it will soon figure out we’ve given them the slip and they’ll come back looking for us.’

Sure enough, within moments of Rahn having said this, the car drove past – it was the black Citroën. As soon as he saw those tail-lights disappear, Rahn pulled out again and set off for Granes at full speed, hoping the hearse was long gone.

At Granes they came to a little pension on the Grand Rue that was still open. They parked the car around the back of the building and met the owner of the establishment sitting at the front, smoking a pipe. He was a portly man, with a long moustache and a short disposition. He told them that there were two rooms available and that the kitchen was closed but that his wife could warm up some leftover rabbit stew if this sounded to their liking.

In the poorly lit kitchen, having consumed what was left of a delicious stew, La Dame sipped at his brandy and puffed on a Cuban, looking almost like his old self, except for the split lip. Eva sipped at her tea and Rahn unrolled the little yellowed parchment he had taken out of the vial. It was another encrypted message and it looked similarly constructed to the last:

VITA

XWNSOILSV

YIGSGIVRJQQDZLBEP

‘So, what’s the master word?’ La Dame asked, sitting forward to see.

Rahn took out his Vigenère Square and looked at it.

‘Vita. It’s the only intelligible word and besides, it fits: life and death, vita and mors.’



Rahn wrote ‘vita’ underneath the cipher and used the Vigenère Square again to decipher each letter.‘Coustassa!’ Rahn said.

‘The church of Abbé Gélis! Yes, of course it’s on the list!’

He deciphered the second line:



‘Inside the cross of God . . . You know what this means? We have to go to Coustassa and we’ll have to go there now. You heard what that Serbian said 0about tonight – think of Deodat!’

Despite protestations from La Dame, they left Granes discreetly, and headed north to Coustassa via Campagne-les-Bains, where the Serbians had accosted them. Rahn kept to the back roads, his eye on the rear-view mirror looking out for the Citroën.

He was glad to reach the town of Coustassa without incident.

The village appeared to be worn out and in decline and, like its church, looked for the most part to be sleeping except for a house here and there showing a light at its window. A fine rain fell and all three were wet and trembling by the time they got to the church. Their mood did not improve when they found it locked. Rahn took out his knife, and selected from its assortment of gadgets a suitable device and put it into the lock, moving it around this way and that. It didn’t work. He heard Eva sigh beside him.