LITMIR.BIZ

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flinched and gazed down; then she stepped smartly aside, so the dim light of the walkway bulb could shine on the pooling fluid.

      It was vivid and it was scarlet.

      Immediately Jake pushed with a shoulder; the door wasn’t locked, but it was heavy: something was inside, blocking the way. He pushed again, and once more; Chemda assisted, resting a hand on a doorpanel. The door shunted open and they stepped into the bleak, harshly lit hotel room.

      It was empty.

      Where was the blood coming from? Jake followed the trail: the thickening flood of redness emanated from behind the door; the heavy door he had just swung open. Jake pulled the door, so they could see behind.

      Chemda gasped.

      Hanging from the back of the door, by ropes attached to a hook, was a dead man. A small, old Cambodian man, in cotton trousers, bare-chested. But he was hanging upside down, his ankles were roped to the hook, his body was dangling and inverted; his hands trailed on the ground and his head bobbed inches from the blood-smeared concrete floor.

      The man’s throat had been cut: slashed violently open. Blood had obviously poured from his jugular onto the floor: as with the bleeding of halal butchery, he had been hung upside down so the blood would drain out. A smeared knife lay discarded nearby.

      The old man’s hanging hair was just touching the blood. Like the tips of elegant painting brushes, dipped, quite delicately, in a puddle of crimson oil.

      Chapter 4

      The smell of decay was obscure but pungent. This was new. Maybe that rat had died down here, somewhere, in the night. Julia looked around at the shadows, eating into deeper blackness.

      She was crouching in the furthest reach of the Cave of the Swelling with Ghislaine Quoinelles, her team leader. Ghislaine was the sixty-something leader of the archaeology department of northern Languedoc – just one remote branch of the labyrinthine French bureaucracy for archaeology. He was, for this season, her boss.

      ‘Oui oui. Hmm. C’est un peu petite . . .’

      Still no decision. Julia tutted, inwardly: reining in her impatience.

      But it was difficult; because Julia had never really liked Ghislaine. He was a helplessly off-putting guy, supercilious to his inferiors yet obsequious to his superiors. And he drooled. He was drooling now as he crouched on the cave floor and examined the skull, his lower lip was pouting, kissing the air, like a salivating gourmand contemplating a broiled ortolan. Was he intending to eat the skull?

      She had to wait for his verdict. He was the boss. And she needed his approval to make this her project, to secure her rights to her own discovery, to quarantine the cave until she could return next season and investigate further; then she could write a paper and make her name. Or at least, begin to make her name. And this was maybe her best chance.

      And she could so easily have not had the chance! The only reason she was here was an offhand remark by a friend, in her department in London, who had mentioned a dig in the south of France. Not far from the great caves. There was room for an archaeologist from England. For a season. The offer had immediately gripped Julia with that old and giddy excitement. Proper archaeology. Dirt archaeology.

      And so Julia had scraped together her savings and begged a sabbatical from her slightly sneering boss and she had left for France with high hopes and she had spent a summer digging in France – the birthplace of human Art! 30,000 years ago! – and at first she had found nothing, because there was nothing to find any more; and right up until yesterday it had seemed her sabbatical was going to dwindle away into disappointment, like everything else, like her career, like too many relationships.

      But now she had found The Skulls.

      She had achieved something. Hadn’t she?

      ‘What do you think, Ghislaine?’

      ‘Wait. Please. Enough. La patience est amere, mais son fruit est doux . . .’

      Julia obeyed. Bridling, she obeyed.

      Ghislaine was a smart man. He was also a gifted linguist: able to slip between English and French – and German and Chinese – with ease. Julia was thankful for this as she was embarrassed by her possibly hick, certainly poor, Quebecoisinflected French: she and Ghislaine could speak English together.

      She waited, stifling her anxiety and excitement, as Ghislaine poked at the dust. His trousers creaked as he did this.

      His trousers often creaked, because they were often leather.

      Ghislaine Quoinelles dressed thirty or maybe forty years too young. Today’s leather jacket and leather jeans combination was especially risible. His haircut was the normal ludicrous pompadour, obviously dyed.

      Crossing her arms against the cold, Julia wondered if she was being hard on Ghislaine: she knew that Ghislaine had been something important a long time ago, a student revolutionary, a soixante-huitard: an upper-class leader of the leftish student rebels in the socially turbulent Paris of 1968. Indeed, she’d been shown black and white pictures of him – shown them by Annika – grainy shots of a handsome Ghislaine in Paris leading the kids, photos of him in sit-ins, interviews with him in Le Monde, profiles of him alongside Danny the Red and other famous young radicals.

      So he had once been a virile and cerebral young communist in a country that worshipped daring and sexy intellectuals. Once he had been in possession of an exquisite future. Now he was, somewhat mysteriously, an ageing professor in a remote part of France doing a rather obscure job: and perhaps the absurdly young clothes were Ghislaine’s way of holding on to the better part of his life, when he had been halo’d by momentary fame, when his hair wasn’t stupid.

      A hint of pity for Ghislaine stung at Julia. She wanted not to dislike him. She didn’t like disliking people. Such a waste of time. And someone must have loved him, once.

      Still, the leather was ludicrous.

      ‘The skull it is obviously male. Yes yes. But the skeletons . . .’ Ghislaine hesitated, and took out his eyeglass to scrutinize the vertebrae. Then he turned:

      ‘I am finished, Miss Kerrigan.’

      At these words Julia’s hopes ascended – and subsided almost immediately afterwards.

      Something was wrong. Maybe.

      Despite the initial expression of intrigue, and even delight, Ghislaine now seemed less than impressed. With a beckoning signal, he backed away, into the higher, wider part of the cave.

      ‘Yes,’ Ghislaine muttered, ‘quite an interesting discovery, but not so unusual.’

      With his expensive German pen, he pointed down and along, at the wholly disinterred skull. ‘These trephinations are moderately common in this region, and this era, the Gorge of the Tarn, and the grottes in the Causse Mejean, they have yielded similar fruit. We see this quite a lot.’

      ‘But the wounded children, the flints? Surely?’

      ‘Non. They are typique.’

      ‘Typical? Typical?? I’ve never seen anything like this and –’

      Ghislaine frowned – but said nothing; he turned and walked towards the ladder. She watched his leather trousers as he ascended the steel rungs, to the winds and skies of the plateau. Supplicant and pleading, she followed. What exactly was Ghislaine saying? Was she going to get the chance to exploit her find?

      The fresh air was cold and dank, almost colder than the cave. Julia gazed about. The forests of the Cevennes stretched away beneath them, rolling down to the sunlit coast. Down there in Cannes and Nice and Collioure it was still summer, yet up here on the massif it was autumn. A crackle of lightning flashed away to the east; black luftwaffes of clouds were rolling in.

      Ghislaine was on his mobile, chattering away in quick, posh, impenetrably Parisian French. Julia walked a few yards away, tuning out. Waiting nervously for the final verdict. What was wrong? Surely this find was important?

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