The Blasphemer: A Novel (46 page)

‘
Oui?
’ A woman’s voice.

‘Madame Camier?’ Daniel said.

A finger appeared and pointed next door.

When Daniel knocked, an unshaven man in his fifties answered. He was wearing a vest. His fingers were nicotine yellow.

‘
Oui?
’ More a grunt than a word.

‘
Parlez-vous anglais?
’

‘Small.’

‘We are trying to trace a relative of ours. He lived in Nieppe during the Great War.’

‘Here?’

‘No. He lived on the Rue des Chardonnerets. His landlady was called Adilah Camier.We were told a family by the name of Camier live here.’

The man scratched his belly and cocked his head to the other side as he studied the two strangers in his doorway.

‘She was married to Henri Camier.’ The voice was as dry as wood bark. It belonged to an old woman.The man stepped to one side and a stooping figure waved them in. She had a leathery face framed with the grey tendrils of a carelessly assembled bun. ‘He was killed at Verdun. Come in, please.’

Philip and Daniel followed her along a peeling hallway to a small sitting room that smelled of cat food and was dominated by a sunbleached poster of the Virgin Mary. She ushered them to sit down on a green sofa that had springs uncomfortably close to its surface. A cat jumped on to Daniel’s lap. A wind chime sounded in another room. The man in the vest went noisily upstairs and the old lady disappeared and reappeared with two cans of lemon Fanta and a bowl of Twiglets on a tray. ‘After Henri died, Adilah met an Englishman, a soldier. She had a child by him. Please …’ She pulled the ring on one of the cans and handed it to Daniel. ‘You are thirsty, I think.’

The can was sweating condensation and so cold it made Daniel’s hand tingle. As he drank he watched the old lady rummage in first one drawer of a dresser then another. She was slight and wan, as if painted in watercolour rather than oil. A trick of the eye, he concluded – no electric lamps were on and, as the afternoon was overcast, the light that was floating in through the sash windows was soft and grainy. She pulled out a shoebox of small sepia photographs and began to sift through them. After a long minute, she held one up and looked at what was written on the back. It showed a handsome woman with hauntingly pale eyes. She was wearing her hair down around her shoulders and the empty sleeve of one arm pinned up. In the other arm she carried an infant wrapped in a cot blanket. ‘This is her.’

The front door opened, a growl of wind carried through the
house. It swung shut again. Philip looked up briefly; returned his gaze to the photograph. ‘So she was your … ?’

‘Adilah Camier was my aunt. No, my great-aunt. I get confused. My memory.’ The old woman was studying the scarred rump of Philip’s missing ear. ‘It is many years since I have been to England. I used to go there for school trips. I taught English for …’ She trailed off. ‘You are from London?’

‘Yes,’ Philip said. ‘Kew. Daniel here lives in Clapham. I’m sorry, we haven’t introduced ourselves properly. My name is Philip Kennedy. This is my son, Daniel.’

‘My name is Marie Camier.’ The old woman held out a small and liver-spotted hand. Philip took it in his. ‘I have visited Kew. They have a wonderful garden there.’

‘We’re very close to it.’

‘You said you were tracing a relative?’

Philip hesitated. ‘The English soldier you mentioned, he was my grandfather. Andrew Kennedy. He died in the Great War …’ He hesitated again. Handed the photograph of Adilah to Daniel. ‘I think Adilah’s child might have been my father. I never knew him. He was killed, too, fighting the Germans in the Second World War.’ He took a sip of Fanta.

‘What was your father’s name?’

‘William.’

The old lady nodded. She was staring at Philip’s muddy shoes now. ‘Yes, I believe the child was given an English name.’

‘As far as I’ve been able to work out, what happened was this …’ Philip tapped the palm of his left hand with two fingers of his right. ‘Andrew Kennedy, my grandfather, already had a wife in England. Her name was Dorothy. I always assumed that Dorothy was my grandmother because she was the one who raised my father.’

‘On her own?’

‘No, she lived with a man called Will Macintyre. He had been a friend of my grandfather’s.They had both been plumbers in Market Drayton before the First World War and had joined up together and come to France. My father was named after him … What I don’t
understand is how Adilah’s baby, my father, came to be living in England.’

The old woman smiled, exposing discoloured teeth. ‘You know that Adilah died in La Grippe, the great flu epidemic?’

‘No, I didn’t know that. In nineteen nineteen?’

‘
Oui
. This plumber …’

‘Will Macintyre.’

‘I heard about him. He must have been the one who returned to France after the war to help rebuild Ypres. He came here to Nieppe to see Adilah. Then, when she died, he took the baby back with him to England. I always knew …’ The sentence was left unfinished. ‘He came back, you know.’

‘Who did?’

‘The plumber.’

‘Will?’

‘I get confused. It must have been in the nineteen fifties. I met him.’

‘You met Will?’

The old woman touched her head. ‘I mean your grandfather, don’t I? Who was Will? My mind is not what it was.’

Ten minutes later, back at the car, they found a note left under the wiper. It was a complaint that they were blocking someone’s drive. Philip spread his map out on the bonnet. ‘There is a village called Le Bizet five miles away,’ he said, prodding the map. ‘That was where Andrew was taken to be court-martialled after his arrest. He was held in the police station there and executed in the grounds. It’s on the way back so we may as well take a look. I’ll drive if you like.’

Daniel tossed the keys over the roof. Philip missed them. As they were putting on their seat belts, a cloying smell of urine became noticeable. Daniel surreptitiously wound the car window down. He slid his finger along the screen of his iPhone, waited a second and tapped the internet icon. He tapped again and studied a webpage for a minute. ‘There’s a page here on the psychology of firing squads. Says that because no single member of the squad could save the condemned man’s life by not firing, the moral incentive to
disobey the order to shoot was reduced. The phenomenon is known as “diffusion of responsibility”.’

Philip was gritting his teeth.

Daniel stared at him, then back at his screen. ‘In some cases,’ he continued, ‘one member of the squad was issued with a gun containing a blank.The idea was that each member of the squad could hope beforehand that he was the one with the blank. It reduced flinching. It also allowed everyone to believe afterwards that he had not personally fired a fatal shot. Normally they could tell the difference between a blank and a live cartridge because of the recoil, but there was a psychological incentive not to pay attention to the recoil and, over time, to remember it as soft.’

‘I’ve heard that.’

‘Would Andrew have died instantly?’

Philip slowed down as he approached a traffic light. When he stopped he looked across at his son. ‘Bullets fired at the chest boil volatile fats and rupture the heart, large blood vessels and lungs so that the victim dies of haemorrhage and shock. Death is nearly always instantaneous. But …’

‘What?’

‘I can’t quite put my finger on why …’

‘Why what?’

‘Why I think he somehow managed to survive the firing squad. Marie Camier said Will Macintyre had come back here in the fifties, but he died in the thirties. In nineteen thirty-four, as I recall. I have this feeling that … I think it might have been Andrew she met.’

On the floor of his South West London bedsit, Hamdi was on his knees. A few feet away were the flip-flops he had taken off, neatly aligned, up against the wall. He touched his head to the small prayer rug that ensured the cleanliness of his place of prayer.The sajada, as the rug was known, was as much a compass as a threadbare oblong
of embroidered colour, one that orientated him towards the centre of the world, towards the sacred black stone Ka’ba in Mecca. He rocked back on his heels, mumbled an ancient incantation to himself and made a gesture as if using his hands to splash his face with water – the elaborate ‘dry ablution’ ritual of the desert. Next he kissed his copy of the Koran, rolled the rug up and placed it on a chair before walking barefoot to his small bathroom.

He looked in the mirror, picked up a pair of scissors and cut off the beard he had been growing for several weeks – he found it too itchy and distracting.The black hairs lay in the sink like a dead dog, an unclean animal, and he was able to gather them in two clumps and drop them in the pan. He removed his shirt next and squirted shaving foam on to the palm of his hand before dabbing it on to his face and chest. He started with the chest first, shaving upwards with his razor towards his neck, removing the few impure wisps that had grown back there. Next he shaved his cheeks and chin, carefully, turning his jaw on an angle to catch the light and ensure he had not missed any stubble. He splashed cold water on his face, an echo of the earlier gesture, and began again.When he had shaved a second time he squirted foam under his arms and, after removing his trousers and briefs, around his groin. This was a more delicate operation. He was smooth now, no longer corrupted by body hair. He ran a hand down his chest, enjoying the absence of friction.

Afterwards he showered with equal care, working his cracked bar of soap into a lather as the nozzle sipped back the water several times before finding its full pressure. He covered his body with circular motions, across the back of his neck, over his flanks and buttocks, behind his knees, under his testicles. With the plastic shower curtain clinging to his shoulders like an extra layer of skin, he shampooed his hair, dipping his head under the spout and spitting out the soapy water that entered his mouth.

Once he had dried himself on a crusty towel he changed into a suit and tie, opened his front door, hesitated, closed the door again and walked over to a phone on the kitchen table. After a few rings an answering machine cut in. Daniel’s voice. ‘If you would like to
leave a message for either Daniel or Nancy, please do so after the beep.’ The beep was more an electronic whine. ‘Professor Kennedy, it is Hamdi. I have been thinking about our conversation.You asked about angels and I did not give you a very satisfactory explanation. Muslims believe that Allah has created an unseen world, including angels and jinn. I can explain it to you better next time we meet. That is all.’

In another part of London, behind a bank of digital recording and editing equipment, an MI5 operative wearing a headset made a note of this conversation, her fingers a blur of movement across her keyboard. She took a sip from a small plastic bottle of water and spellchecked what she had written.

Before closing the door to his flat, Hamdi felt his jacket pocket for the rattle of car keys. He then stepped out on to his balcony and negotiated the metal stairs of the fire escape, carrying his cello case in front of him. His Mini Cooper, parked in front of the block of flats, did not start first time. On the second attempt it revved raucously. Hamdi indicated, pulled out and drove off. Twenty yards behind him, a green Volvo did the same.

‘Target now leaving,’ the driver of the Volvo said into a microphone.

Le Bizet was not so much a separate village on the border of Belgium and France as a sprawling and anonymous suburb of Armentières. The police station, Philip discovered after asking a postman, was off the main road and was now a private house. It had been renovated quite recently, judging by how freshly painted the outside walls were. Its shutters were a vivid yellow. He knocked on the door. No answer. He looked in the window. Dustsheets on the furniture. ‘I think whoever lives here is away for the summer,’ he said as he walked around the back to an enclosed garden with an immaculate lawn over which time-activated sprinklers were hissing.

‘Should we be doing this, Dad?’ Daniel said. ‘Aren’t we trespassing?’

‘That must have been the wall.’ Philip was looking at a high, moss-covered wall behind a shrubbery. Trees obscured sections of it, but it clearly ran for thirty yards. ‘The post they tied him to would have been in front of it.’

Sunshine was emerging from the clouds and was slanting through the leaves, dappling the garden. ‘I wonder if you can still see bullet holes,’ Daniel said, taking off his sunglasses.

Philip scrambled around the back of a greenhouse and on to a flowerbed. There he let out a cry of pain.

Daniel hurried to his side. ‘You all right, Dad? Did you slip?’

‘I’m fine. I’m fine.’ Philip appeared distracted, talking almost to himself. ‘He’s buried here somewhere; I know it. Unmarked and unknown.’ Using his walking stick, the old man pushed back the branches and found the wall overgrown with ivy and bindweed. Daniel came over and held the weed back while his father felt along the wall with his fingers, as if he were a fireman testing for heat. They progressed in this way for five yards before Philip came to an object that was set in from the wall. Under a dark and tangled knot of roots, its shape was hard to determine. Daniel pulled back the ivy with renewed effort.

It was flat and upright with a curved top covered in slimy green lichen.

‘Portland stone,’ Philip said with a nod. ‘Absorbs everything. Can you fetch that torch from the car? Can you also bring that bucket with the scrubbing brush and the detergent? And try and find some water.’

‘Was wondering what you had brought them for.’

When Daniel returned, Philip was feeling the engraving with his fingers. ‘Letters are worn down,’ he said.

‘Is it Andrew’s?’

‘Don’t think so. Shine the torch.’ Philip was on his knees. ‘Good God! It’s a VC!’

When they finished scrubbing the top half of the stone they
stood back and read the inscription in full:
MAJOR PETER MORRIS VC, MC & BAR, DSO & BAR, DFC, MONS STAR, BWM, VM. 2/RIFLE BRIGADE.
1880–1918.

Daniel pulled weed from the lower half and continued scrubbing. The stone was still green but more words were becoming readable.