The Sixth Key(41)

‘What about Eugene, my dear, won’t he need you?’

‘Giselle is here,’ she said, excited or so it seemed, at the prospect.

When she returned, she was dressed in a skirt and loose blouse, a cardigan hanging over her shoulders. On her feet were sensible shoes and on her face she wore the flush of adventure. Deodat sat graciously in the back, letting her have the front seat next to Rahn, who was disconcerted, since he found her perfume and those legs peeking out from beneath that long skirt rather distracting, but not enough to prevent him from noticing, as he pulled out of the driveway, that a black car was parked some way down the road.

He couldn’t remember seeing it on their arrival. It looked like a Citroën but it was impossible to tell at this distance. He kept an eye on it as he drove on in case it pulled out to follow them, but it didn’t.

‘You said the church has no priest and yet it is always open?’ Deodat asked Eva from the back.

‘It’s the tyranny of life in the country, I’m afraid, magistrate,’ she said. ‘The locksmith can’t find the time to come all the way from Carcassonne to Bugarach just to change three or four locks.’

‘Did something happen to the keys?’

‘When my uncle was struck down by his illness the sacristan was given the keys to the church so that he could continue to do the ordinary things: open it, dust and mop and keep the various vessels of the sacrament clean. But the keys went missing.’

‘Was he just careless?’ Rahn asked.

‘It’s actually quite a sad affair,’ she said, with a sigh. ‘The sacristan committed suicide. He threw himself rather dramatically from the Pic de Bugarach. Things like that happen around here from time to time. Perhaps it was boredom or melancholy, who knows? You can’t imagine how difficult it was to find him. There was an exhaustive search that took nearly a week. When the body was found, well, I won’t go into it. It is too ghastly. At any rate, there was no sign of the keys on his person so it was assumed he must have put them away in a safe place before his demise. In the end the villagers nearly tore apart his small house but found nothing. So the church remains open until a new priest comes who can entice the locksmith here.’

The church was squat, old and worn out, with a cemetery and a scattering of ramshackle houses to keep it company. Rahn parked the car in its shadow and they got out. Even outside, he could feel that familiar dread come over him. He spoke now more out of a desire to calm his nerves than out of curiosity.

‘Eighth or ninth century?’

‘The fifth, the time of the Visigoths, actually,’ she said, walking to the main entrance. ‘I see you know your history.’ There was a half smile. Was she mocking him? Her voice had that peculiar tone that left him unable to discern one way or the other.

‘Rahn is a Cathar historian and a philologist,’ Deodat informed her.

‘I see,’ she said. ‘You’ll be interested to know then, that this village was once a Gallo-Celtic fort. You wouldn’t think so now, would you?’ She opened the door with an air of irreverence. ‘The town became a Cathar settlement somewhere along the line.’

Rahn hung back. He couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t felt a morbid fear of Roman churches. As a child, whenever his mother had forced him to go to church it had been a wretched trial. Bargains had been offered and refused, tears had been shed and punishments meted out, but he had remained obdurate. The black cross, the dead, contorted Jesus, the effigies of saints, the sarcophagi – all things that may have inspired another child to pious reverence – generated panic and horror in Rahn. And it had remained so. It was, therefore, with great effort that he entered the cold, damp, silent space whose acrid smell of smoke from the votive candles and whose pungent scent of laurel made him feel ill. He loosened his collar, feeling a cold sweat on his brow, and there was that familiar tremor in his hands. He steeled himself like a man about to go into a field of battle from which no man had ever returned unscathed.

‘The church was dedicated to Stella Maris, Our Lady of the Seas,’ Eva said, walking along the nave, her disembodied voice echoing from the short vaults. ‘But originally it was consecrated to Saint Anthony, the hermit.’

‘Why Saint Anthony?’ Rahn asked, keeping his mind on his feet, moving them one after the other.

‘There’s a hermitage of his not far from here. In Bugarach on Ash Wednesday there’s a procession led by a man dressed like a hermit wearing a horse collar around his neck with bells on it and carrying a cross that has pork sausages hanging from its arms. All rather rustic.’