LITMIR.BIZ

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professor had finished his phone call. And now, without a word he started marching to his car, parked on the road by an abandoned farmhouse, a kilometre along the cattle path.

      The rain was falling now. Julia pursued her boss. She had to know. Her heartbeat matched her excitement. She stammered:

      ‘Ghislaine, sir, I mean – Monsieur, sir, Monsieur Quoinelles I need to know. Can I do the next season? I can can’t I? The bones, I am sure there is something here. That is OK isn’t it? I have ideas. I know you think this is typical but really really I do have an idea and –’

      He swivelled. There was a look on his face she had never seen before. Contempt. Not the laughable pomposity or the risible vanity of before. Contempt. He snapped:

      ‘The crania will be taken tomorrow, and the skeletons. There are museums which can accommodate them, perfectly. They will find their home in Prunier, naturally.’

      ‘But –’

      ‘You have heard of Prunier? Ah no. Of course not.’ Another contemptuous snort. ‘Miss Kerrigan, I will not need you next season. Your job here is complete.’

      This was stunning. This was a stunning disappointment.

      ‘What?’

      ‘You are relieved, is that how you phrase it? Retired. Finished. I need you no longer.’

      ‘But, Ghislaine, please, this is the best find I have ever made, I know I make mistakes and –’

      ‘Ca suffit!’ He pouted, angrily. ‘Go home, go home now. Go to Canada. They have history there, do they not? Some of your post offices are thirty years old.’

      The rain was heavy, the thunder rumbling. Julia felt the blackness closing in, on all her dreams. Her wild dreams of yesterday. The Find of the Season. The Justification for Everything.

      ‘But this was my find! This is unfair! Ghislaine, you know it is unfair.’

      ‘Pfft. Your discovery is mediocre, and indeed it is shit.’ Ghislaine’s black hair was damped by the rain, his leather trousers were smeared with mud, he made an absurd yet slightly menacing figure.

      And now Julia found herself backing away. She was alone here, in the emptiness, not a farmer for miles, all the villages abandoned: alone with Quoinelles. And she had the horrible sense of physical threat. His angry finger was jabbing the air.

      ‘What do you know? You learn in your American colleges and yet you have not heard of these things? You know nothing. The skulls and skeletons are just typical. Typical shit. Shit. Just shit. I expect you to return your carte d’identite tomorrow.’

      He turned and walked sternly to the car, once again. She watched as he strode the path; he didn’t seem at all absurd any more.

      Julia stood in the rain. Her own car was the other way. She had to trudge through the drizzle, carrying the weight of her disappointment, her crushing let-down. She wouldn’t be able to call her father, or her mother, and vindicate her decision to go to Europe; she wouldn’t be able to tell her friends, her colleagues, the world, about her discovery. She felt like a teenager disappointed in love, she felt like an idiot.

      She had been chucked.

      Julia walked. Her bleak route took her past a steel cowshed, a run of barbed wire, and the very loneliest of the standing stones. And there, despite the pelting wet, she paused, and looked around, feeling her anger and anxiety evolve, very slightly: as she surveyed the stones.

      Truly, she still loved this place – for all its saturnine moods. It was somehow bewitching. The ruined landscape emptied of people. This place full of legends and megaliths. This place where the werewolves of the Margeride met the elegiac Cham des Bondons.

      The rain fell, and still she lingered.

      The megalithic complex of the Cham des Bondons was one of the biggest in Europe, only Carnac was bigger, only Stonehenge and Callanish were more imposing – yet it was virtually unknown.

      Why was that? She could think of several answers. The remoteness was surely crucial. Plus the fact that many of the stones had been toppled in the nineteenth century – and had only recently been re-erected. But maybe there was something else – maybe the atmosphere of the Bondons had something to do with its lack of fame. The dark, brooding, mournful ambience. The way the stones stared down at the ground.

      Like sad soldiers guarding the catafalque of a beloved king, their heads bowed in regret.

      A flash of insight illumined her thoughts.

      Could it be?

      Fat raindrops were falling quickly now. Yet Julia did not feel the cold. This sudden idea was too exciting: it was a long shot, fantastical even, yet sometimes in archaeology you had to make the intuitive connection, the leap of faith, to arrive at the new paradigm.

      Hell with Ghislaine. This was still Her Find. She would find a way to investigate, to research, to get at the truth.

      She walked briskly to her car, fumbling with her keys. She had an intuitive lead. The stones were troubled. Like the moai, the great and tragic monoliths of Easter Island: huge statues erected by a violent and dying society?

      Her mood accelerated. The dating of the Cham des Bondons was late Neolithic. The dating of the skeletons was Neolithic. They came from the same long era of human history. Could there be some link between the Bondons and the strangeness of those bones?

      There must be a link between the stones and the bones. And the link was that echoing sense, that chime of insight. The fact that she got from the skeletons underneath her feet, down there in the cave, the very same emotional sense she derived from the stones.

      Guilt.

      Chapter 5

      The hours following their discovery of the dead Cambodian, Doctor Samnang, were grisly and exhausting; the hotel manager panicked as soon as he was informed. Innumerable messages were sent, anxious calls were taken. A grey ambulance hurled itself into the hotel car park, lights and sirens wailing, accompanied by doctors and nurses, and followed by half a dozen policemen in two new but very dirty white cars. Tou was searched for, and not found. Eventually Jake collapsed onto a bed in a spare room for a few minutes of sleep.

      And then the police returned, just after dawn, to snatch Chemda and Jake and take them to the station – for the questioning.

      The interview took place in the Ponsavanh police office, another anonymous yet menacing concrete block in this anonymous yet menacing concrete city. The young Lao officer who had collected them was polite enough. Just enough. He spoke English. He led them through corridors of dusty policework to a stuffy room. His desk loomed large. Handcuffs and truncheons hung from a hook. Jake wondered what tools they had in the basement.

      The room was also decorated with a huge red flag adorned by another hammer and sickle. Oppressively boastful. This was, presumably, just in case no one had noticed the three other communist flags hanging at the front of the building.

      So many flags? They seemed to imply a rather defensive insecurity. This was a nervous place. The flags said: We are communists, definitely. Ignore the rampant capitalism everywhere. Look instead at all the flags. Jake wondered again how many people were taken to the basement. Such a big concrete building would definitely have a large and chilly basement.

      For five hours Jake and Chemda were quizzed by at least four policemen, all working through the one young, distantly smiling English speaking officer. The policemen had guns in shoulder holsters. The smell of male sweat in the hot stuffy room was distinct and intense. The questioning became more aggressive.

      Why were Jake and Chemda here? Who was the dead man? Why had Tou disappeared? Why had Tou telephoned them last night? Why would anyone kill a harmless old historian? Why were they looking at the Plain of Jars? Who had given permission? What did they expect to find? What could be interesting about a bunch of old jars? What? When? Where? How? Why were they here?

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