Doctor Death (29 page)

The Commissioner walked around the corner and disappeared.
I sat in the gig, waiting. The pony was apparently happy to have the chance to stand still, because it did not move a muscle and did not even bother to answer when the other horse whinnied again. If only I could be so phlegmatic, I thought. I was not at all calm. I wished the stable door would stop rattling. I wished the Commissioner would return. I wished the unseen horse would stop whinnying in such a lonely manner.

I do not know exactly how much time passed, but the shadows certainly lengthened. And finally I could not stand it any longer. I made sure that the carriage brake was on, looped the reins around the back of the seat, and climbed down. The pony stood with its head hanging, one hind leg tucked up beneath it, and barely flicked an ear as I walked away.

“Commissioner?”

I did not call too loudly, affected as I was by conflicting instincts: I wanted
him
to hear me—but not anyone else.

The garden behind the house was just as neglected as the courtyard. Fallen leaves still covered the lawn in a thick blackish-brown carpet, now half rotted. The perennials had not been cut back—the yellow and brown stalks poked up sadly amid delicate green shoots. Behind me the house squatted, an inelegant boxlike structure with dead and empty windows. The Commissioner was nowhere to be seen, but at the bottom of the garden, between some tall chestnut trees, I could see a stone wall and a garden gate, which stood ajar.

“Commissioner?”

I opened the gate all the way and followed the path into something that must once have been an orchard but was now so overgrown that it seemed more like a jungle. Tall yellow grasses, nettle stalks, and blackberry brambles sprawled under crumbling apple and pear trees, and an irregular growth of willow, poplar, and hornbeam shot up between the rows and veiled the symmetry
that had once reigned here. Only the path itself revealed that someone still came here—the grass had been cut with a scythe and the blackberry brambles trimmed back to allow passage.

Yet another stone wall and yet another gate. And on the other side of the wall the outline of something that looked like an old chapel, with a corbie-step gable, a small bell tower, and a rusty iron cross that caught the last rays of sun at the top of the tower’s pointed profile. Trimmed yew hedges stood like a dark wall against the real forest, which began right behind the chapel.

The door to the chapel was open, but I hesitated to go in. There was something incredibly private about this place. It had been made for solitary worship, not for official demonstrations of piety.

“Commissioner?”

“Madeleine?”

He was there. Some of the uneasiness I had attempted to repress turned into relief. I walked up the worn stone steps and into the small vaulted room.

“It took so long,” I said. “I began to . . .”

I stopped midsentence. He was not alone. He was crouched down next to a child, a boy of perhaps seven or eight years, lying much, much too still on the stone floor.

“He is alive,” he said, “but I did not dare to move him. I don’t know what kind of injuries he has.”

The boy was filthy. His near-black hair was matted to his skull in an unhealthy way, and it looked as if he had wet in his pants multiple times. At the edge of his hairline were the remains of dried blood. I knelt next to them both and felt for the boy’s pulse. His breathing appeared untroubled, but his pulse was fast and pronounced under my index finger, and the pallor under the filth was alarming. His lips were cracked, and at the corner of his mouth clung a crust of dried-up puss from some kind of infection.

I examined his skull cautiously, first around the wound at the
temple, and then proceeded to probe the neck and spine, but I found no clear indication of a fracture.

“The wound is old,” I said. “It has started to heal. I don’t think that is why he is unconscious. But who is he, and what is he doing here?”

“I can’t say with certainty,” said the Commissioner. “But I think this is Louis Charles Napoleon Mercier. Named after two kings and an emperor.”

It was now completely dark in the chapel except for the play of pale moonlight and leafy shadows on the smooth stone floor. The tall, narrow windows were set so high that it was not possible to look out, but then, there would be nothing to look
at
right now, apart from various degrees of darkness.

Being left here alone with the boy had not been pleasant, but someone had to get help, and the Commissioner could do it more quickly and more effectively than I. He would be back soon, I consoled myself, an hour and a half at the most, he had promised, and by now an hour must surely have passed. I was quite safe in here in any event; no one could get in. I myself had locked the door to the chapel from the inside, and I could feel the outlines of the heavy iron key between my breasts. I had not dared to set it down anywhere for fear of not being able to find it again in the dark.

There was no question of turning on a light. I might as well send a lighthouse signal into the darkness: here—here—here . . . An unnecessary risk, in spite of the locked door.

I had folded two of the blankets from the hunting cabin a few times to create a sort of mattress for the boy to lie on, and covered him with the third. I had the Commissioner’s jacket to sit on, but it was not sufficient to prevent the cold from creeping through
my body from below. If it had been a summer evening, the stones beneath us might have released the heat that they had absorbed during the course of the day, but at this time of the year the damp of winter still clung to the stone walls, and the temperature in the room dropped dramatically as soon as the sun went down. It was not good for the boy. His hands and feet felt ice-cold, and my attempts to rub life into them were only partially effective.

“What has he done to you?” I murmured, and was spooked to hear my own voice in the darkened space. It was a lonely and sinister prison in which to place a child, I thought. A chamber pot, a tin plate, and a pitcher of water stood by the door, and someone had given him an illustrated edition of Perrault’s fairy tales to occupy his time. Otherwise nothing had been done to ease his captivity.

What was most remarkable, however, was not that the boy was hurt, unconscious, and incarcerated—but that he was alive at all. If it
was
Louis Mercier, and that seemed likely, then the unavoidable inference had to be that the man who had given him the false message for Father Abigore was Antoine Leblanc. Which led to the equally inevitable conclusion that he was the man who had later killed Abigore with a single well-aimed blow of a coal shovel. If a man is so corrupt that he does not hesitate to kill a priest in this way, what prevents him from killing an inconvenient witness he has completely in his power?

“Don’t be afraid,” I whispered to the unconscious boy. “I am here with you, and I won’t leave you.”

My words echoed hollowly in the dark in spite of their sincerity. Outside I could hear an owl hooting, a shrill and lonely sound, and I caught myself listening, not just to the owl and the wind out there but also to my own heartbeat. I had begun to shiver. It is the cold, I said to myself. It is much too cold in here. In an attempt to keep warm, I wrapped Cecile’s faded green dress around my shoulders like a shawl.

The fabric rustled.

Examining the dress once more, I forgot the owl and the cold. Along the hem of the skirt there was one spot where the seam was detectably thicker. The stitches had been partially undone to create a small pocket, and in that pocket my searching fingers found a few folded sheets of paper.

Cecile
had
written something. And hidden it as well as she could.

It was almost unbearable to sit there in the dark with her words on the paper in my hand without being able to read them. There were wax candles by the image of the Madonna, and presumably also matches, but did I dare? I had already made the decision that light would be too dangerous. No, I had to be patient. It could not be long now before the Commissioner returned.

A sound interrupted my deliberations—a faint noise at the door that at first filled me with hope. But instead of the Commissioner’s imperturbable voice, there was a snuffle and a short, sharp bark.

“Iago, here!”

It was Leblanc and his dog.

I unconsciously clutched at the key, which lay cold and heavy against my breast. The thought struck me that we had assumed that it was the only one, and that the locked door offered protection against the man out there. But what if that was not the case?

I heard a muffled scraping of stone against stone. Leblanc was in the process of lifting the brick under which the Commissioner had found the key to the chapel. This was the moment when Leblanc would discover that all was not as he had left it. He turned the door handle and found it locked.

“Imogene?” he called. “Is that you?”

For a wild moment I wondered if I should pretend to be Imogene and ask him to go away. But although people often hear what
they expect to hear, he knew his daughter’s voice too well. I would not be able to mimic it.

Even if I had been able to carry off that deception, I suddenly thought, he would still have been unlikely to leave peacefully. I remembered the fear I had seen in Imogene’s eyes when she thought her father had come to take her away from the convent.

I pushed Cecile’s papers into my bodice next to the key and waited.

“Imogene! Open the door!” He hit the door with a heavy fist. “I know you are in there!”

He hammered on the door and then rattled its handle as if he thought this would make the lock give.

Where was the Commissioner? Where was the help he was supposed to be bringing? An hour and a half at the most. Surely that had passed?

Bang.

He was using something else to hit the door now. Something harder than a fist.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

Oh, God. Was that an axe?

No, I said to myself. There was no sound of splintering.

“Imogene. I am counting to ten. If the door is not open by then, I will shoot out the lock.”

He began to count, slowly but inexorably. I did not know what to do. Would he really use a rifle on the door and risk hitting his own daughter?

“Three. Four. Five . . .”

And the boy. He risked hitting the boy.

“Six. Seven. Eight. Imogene—last chance. Open up or stand aside.”

He was going to do it.

“Nine.”

“Wait!” I shouted.

“Then open up.”

“I do not have the key,” I said. “I
cannot
open it.”

Would he believe me? And would it change anything?

The only warning I got was the sound of a loading gun. I threw myself down on the floor next to the boy just as the shots rang out. Two shots, so close together that the first had not finished echoing between the stone walls before the last blew door, lock, and handle to smithereens.

“Who the hell are you?”

I raised my head slowly and sat up. A few meters from me stood Antoine Leblanc with a lamp in one hand and the hunting rifle held in the crook of his arm.

A few seconds passed before I could speak.

“Monsieur Leblanc?” I said. “How fortunate that you came. I am afraid this poor boy has been badly hurt. I tried to help him as well as I could, but the door was shut on us, and I could not get it open again, someone must have locked it . . .”

Helpless, innocent, ignorant. It was the only defense I could think of.

It actually made him hesitate for a moment.

“Were you locked in?” he asked.

“Until you freed us.”

Behind him stood the dog, large and gray and rough coated as described, growling and with its hackles raised. I tried not to look at it.

“I have seen you before,” he said slowly, and set the lamp down on the floor. “You were at the convent. And at the funeral.”

The funeral? Was he speaking of Cecile’s? That was the only
funeral I had attended recently, but I had not seen him. Or, wait . . . the broad-shouldered man with the carriage, the one who had driven some of Cecile’s friends and teachers. Had that been Leblanc and not just a random coachman?