Ice Claw, page 16
“I’m sorry, mate. But this is really serious stuff now, and I don’t mind telling you, I’m scared,” Sayid said by way of apology.
Max had to acknowledge that. “Have another piece of cake. It’ll take your mind off things.”
“I’m not kidding, Max!”
“I know,” he said gently.
Max understood that Sayid had been incredibly brave so far. His friend had put aside his own fear to help. He guessed there was an element of adventure that excited Sayid, but the reality of the danger was getting to him. Max had faced violence before—but it didn’t stop him from being scared. The difference between them was that Max had to see this thing through. It’s what his dad would have done.
Max walked through to the kitchen and the sound of the small portable television set that the comtesse seemed to have on permanently, a slush of words and laughter. The old lady sat at a large wooden farmhouse-style table. A cigarette smoldered between her lips, one of her eyes half closed against the smoke, and a large glass of cheap red wine nestled in partnership with the half-empty bottle.
Piles of diced vegetables sat before her like a gambler’s winnings. Max told her briefly about the unknown enemy waiting at the château for him. She wielded the long-bladed knife with a rhythmic certainty as she listened. Max wondered how she didn’t lose the ends of her fingers. She looked up.
“I’m making soup and, before you ask, I didn’t tell Sophie where you were,” she said without looking up.
“How did you know that’s what I was going to ask?”
“It’s obvious, mon cher. Who knew? There was me, and Robert, and Sayid, of course. Who among us would betray you?”
“Where do you think Bobby is, Comtesse?”
She nodded. “Your question makes sense. He’s your first suspect.”
“No, I’m worried about him. He didn’t answer his phone and the mobile he gave us is flat. So if he is trying to contact us, why hasn’t he phoned here? He was supposed to come back to d’Abbadie’s château for us.”
Ash dropped from the cigarette. She blew it away from the vegetables, then ground out the smelly stub in a curve of potato skin. “Robert is a child of the sea and the mountain. He goes with the wind.”
“He wouldn’t abandon or betray us, Comtesse, I’m certain of it.”
She stopped dicing and indicated with the knife the chair next to her. Max sat down obediently. She swallowed a mouthful of wine and pointed the remote control at the television set, muting the sound.
“Let me tell you about my grandson. He is frightened of failure. His father expects great things from him. He is frightened of his father. He hides in his sport. Perhaps he thought you were involved in something that was too big for him.” She covered his hand with her own. “It is not the first time he has run away. And now he has this Peaches with him. He’s a boy with his girl. Life is easier that way.”
Max nodded. He couldn’t blame Bobby for leaving them in the lurch.
“Sophie asked me where you were. I did not tell her. She was emotional. Though she did not show it. But I saw it. You young people. My God, it’s wonderful to have youth, but the emotions! You can keep them!” She smiled at his blank expression. “You don’t know what I mean?”
“No,” he said.
“You will. But Max, let me tell you, this matter is not finished. Be careful of everyone around you. Especially the girl.”
Was the comtesse confirming Max’s own doubts about Sophie?
“Remember my warning,” the Comtesse said. “I saw it in the cards.”
Yeah. It was a great pity the cards hadn’t told her where Bobby was, or who it was attacking them, and where they might be now. Second-guessing pretty pictures wasn’t exactly an exact science.
Max took the piece of paper with the triangles enclosed by a circle from his pocket. This jigsaw puzzle of a mystery that he had stumbled upon needed all the pieces to make sense, fit neatly and give him the complete picture. The comtesse seemed the only one around who had any inkling about all this weird stuff. Weird but important. But then she would be involved—and at risk. Enormous risk, given what had happened to Max so far.
She seemed to read his thoughts. “I’m an old lady. I get very forgetful. I don’t even know what day of the week it is sometimes. In a way it’s quite nice. Time stops. What is it Bobby says about me? ‘One sandwich short of a picnic’?” She smiled. “I have forgotten more than I ever knew.” She looked at the piece of paper he held. She raised her eyebrows. “More secrets?”
Max unfolded it to reveal the triangles, circle and signs. “Do you know what this is?” He turned it towards her and waited as she gave it barely a glance.
“It’s a birth chart,” she said almost dismissively.
“Which means what?” Max asked.
“Somebody is born at a particular time. Someone who knows how to interpret these things looks to the heavens and the stars and planets, and draws a birth chart.”
Max thought for a moment. “Like a compass? They point to the stars and planets.”
“That is one way of thinking of it, yes. It used to require great skill to do such things. It shows someone’s life, their destiny. It shows events. It shows me nothing. I don’t understand them. I don’t do them. What do I know? I will tell you a secret, Max. It’s too difficult. Like mathematics. I hated it at school. I am intuitive, not scientific. Besides, these days, things like this can be done on computers. Not for me, I think.”
She drained the bottle into the glass and dropped it into a bin full of other empty bottles.
“But this was done years ago. Maybe twenty or thirty years ago. And you can see it’s hand-drawn,” Max said.
“Then the man who did it had the old skills,” she said.
Max gave that a moment’s thought. “Old? You mean, special?”
“I mean whoever did it was skilled in ancient wisdom,” she said as she adjusted the gas flame beneath a pan of simmering water.
“I found something else,” he said hesitantly.
She waited.
“It was a painting and it had two Latin words on it,” he said.
“No one speaks Latin anymore. Not even lawyers, damn them,” she muttered.
“But you’ve got books on Latin on your shelves. I saw them.”
“You were nosing around?”
“I was looking for an atlas.”
“You found one?”
“No.”
“So? You’re going somewhere?”
He’d probably said too much already. Better not to ask anything more. He nodded, put the paper back in his pocket and got up from the table. “I’m going back to England. I think I need my dad’s help with this.”
She lit another cigarette, found another half bottle of red wine and topped up her glass. She swallowed a mouthful and turned the television’s sound up. “That is the most sensible thing you have said since you have been here. You need an atlas to find your way home?”
“No, course not.”
“Then you’re looking for something else. What Latin words don’t you understand?”
“Lux Ferre. I mean, I think I know what they mean but I don’t understand why I saw them.”
“At the château?”
He nodded. The strong smell of the rough wine and her smoldering cigarette was mingling unpleasantly with the smell of the boiling vegetables. He wanted to get some air but he had to find the answer to this last question.
“So? They mean what?”
“Something to do with light.”
She nodded. “Lux Ferre was used by ancient Roman astrologers. It means ‘Light Bringer.’ But the words were corrupted, they were joined together—Luxferre. You understand now? It became the word that now represents ominous darkness and evil. It means Lucifer.”
Max was silent. His mind whirled. Lucifer. The last word Zabala had screamed at him. Traces of the name in the château teased him, those words etched on the bookshelf and their meaning something about morning light, and now Lux Ferre—Lucifer.
He wasn’t sure whether it was the steam in the kitchen making him sweat.
“I think you should go home, Max. I do,” she said carefully.
He nodded. He had already decided not to show her the numbers they had found or the other diagram he had drawn quickly from the pendant seen through the telescope. She had identified the man, or the entity, Max didn’t know which, that Zabala feared.
How come Lucifer brought light? He was a force of evil. Or both.
“There is an old atlas in the library,” the Countess said nonchalantly as she peeled another potato.
If a birth chart was like a compass to the stars, then it might also hold a clue to where Max should go next. The comtesse’s library, stuffed with generations of old books, yielded an atlas, its musty pages still etched sharply with names of countries that no longer existed. Everything changes, Max. Empires are gained and lost, the climate falters, our fate is uncertain. So make plans but don’t expect them always to work out. That way you’ll get through.
His dad’s words comforted him as Max fingered the piece of paper in his hands. The drawing he had made from the crystal pendant was a long-sided triangle that reminded him of when he did orienteering. To find where he was on the ground he would take a compass reading of two other visible objects and join the lines up, then this triangulation would give him his location. Max knew it could never be to scale, but he had a good eye and he had drawn the lines accurately. He laid it on the page showing France and some of its old colonies in North Africa. He turned the drawing around, like orienting a compass, but it made no sense, especially not the letters E, S and Q. Then he placed one corner of the triangle on the foothills of the Pyrenees, just about where he was now. The shorter baseline seemed to point in the direction of the French Alps and Switzerland, but it was the longer line of the triangle that held his attention. It pointed towards North Africa. He grabbed a ruler from the table, laid it on the line. Come on! Think! Could this line be a direction? The scale of the atlas wasn’t big enough for him to be that accurate, but there seemed no doubt in his mind that the line went straight into the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. And that was too much of a coincidence to ignore. Sophie lived there. The area on the map looked barren; a world away from the comfort of Europe. How to get there, and what would be waiting for him when he did?
Max, Sayid and Sophie sat around the big table in the main room eating bread and cheese. Max reached out and tore a chunk from a baguette, shoving a wedge of cheese into it.
“We have to leave here, Max. Those men found me in Biarritz and I do not know how they found me. And now Sayid has told me what happened at the château.”
Max felt a twinge of panic. What else had he told her?
“Was there nothing at all there? No clues?” she said.
Sayid looked innocent, filled his mouth with food and turned to Max. A sense of relief. Sayid hadn’t said anything important other than they had been attacked.
“No, there was nothing. I think this whole thing is a wild-goose chase. Sayid and I are going back to England.”
“Great!” Sayid said, a little too enthusiastically. The buzz of the earlier encounter at the château had already left him. England was a refuge from all the crazy people in the world.
Sophie did not react. Max had secretly hoped she would. He told himself that her reaction might have given him a chance to see if she was involved more deeply in all this mess than she had told him.
“I’ll phone the airport for you,” she volunteered.
“No. The comtesse can do that,” he said a little too quickly, realizing that he was still uncertain of her motives. That instinctive sense of survival overrode all other emotions.
Before Sophie could say anything the comtesse scuttled into the room, waving the kitchen knife. “Turn it on! Turn it on!” she cried, gesturing towards the television set.
Sayid was the nearest.
A moment later Max’s face filled the screen.
No one spoke. The French news station showed an old picture of Zabala and Max’s passport photograph. Then scenes intercut between the avalanche area behind Mont la Croix, a body being stretchered away and Zabala’s mountain hut. The newscaster’s voice was hurried but clear enough to understand.
The body of Brother Zabala, a Basque monk, had been found buried beneath a recent avalanche. The postmortem showed he had been shot before the avalanche claimed him, but that he had also suffered a knife wound. An English boy—Max’s passport photograph zoomed up on the screen—Max Gordon, was believed to be involved in the monk’s death. As with all foreign visitors staying in French guesthouses, his passport had been photocopied. The boy had been identified hiking in the mountain passes, approximately three weeks before the man’s death, in the area where the recluse lived. In the Pau hospital the boy had learned the whereabouts of Zabala and was seen by a local farmer running from the monk’s reclusive home on Montagne Noire and—a closeup of Max’s watch filled the screen—this watch was found clasped in the dead man’s hand. The inscription on the back of the watch identified its owner: Max Gordon. Upon further investigation at the mountain hut—more images of police taking out boxes of material from Zabala’s home, police crime scene officers, taped areas, sniffer dogs—evidence that blood found in the hut belonged to the dead man. Samples of skin taken from beneath the dead man’s fingernails indicated a struggle and DNA analysis matched the blood in Zabala’s hut to the English boy.
The motive for the monk’s murder was unclear at this stage, the voice went on, but police were now hunting for this boy to help with their inquiries. Gordon, described as 1.75 meters tall, athletic build, untidily cut fair hair, blue-gray eyes, weighing approximately sixty kilograms, was considered dangerous. The public was warned not to approach him.
Suddenly a reporter, someone called Laurent Messier, appeared on-screen with a microphone. Max immediately recognized the building behind him as the hospital in Pau.
“I am here at the hospital in Pau, where the boy, Max Gordon, was brought following the avalanche at Mont la Croix and where he was examined by neurologist Dr. Fabian Vagnier.”
The microphone moved a few centimeters towards the consultant’s mouth. He appeared appropriately somber, his own desire for recognition bending the truth as he rattled off words too fast and technical for Max to catch, but when the reporter spoke to the camera again, he emphasized words Max did understand: assassin et un sociopath.
Everyone stood in shock. The comtesse killed the sound, then stared at Max. It was Sayid who broke the silence.
“I didn’t get all that. What was that bit at the end?”
Still no one moved.
“A French doctor said he did a brain scan on Max after the avalanche and that he found brain activity which was usually associated with violent behavior,” Sophie said quietly. “A killer’s behavior.”
“Bloody hell,” Sayid said under his breath.
Everyone was looking at Max. He rolled up his sleeve, showing the comtesse and Sophie the faded scratch marks. “I tried to save Zabala. He fell, he scratched my arm and grabbed my father’s watch. I didn’t kill him. But I did see the killer.”
“You recognized him?” Sophie said quickly, barely able to keep the alarm out of her voice.
Max hesitated but kept his eyes locked on hers. “No, they were too far away.”
She nodded and looked down.
Max turned to the comtesse. “I promise you, Comtesse, I did not kill him.”
She had not moved, but the knife in her hand was slightly higher than before, held in a defensive gesture. Then, after a moment, she lowered it and nodded.
“Of course you did not. I believe you. But now you are in very serious trouble.” She looked at the silent screen, and they followed her gaze.
A picture of Max filled the frame and emblazoned below it were the words Recherché pour meurtre.
Max Gordon: Wanted for Murder.
Max had, as always, very little to pack—travel light, travel fast. He weighed his options as he rolled his trousers and T-shirts and stuffed them into the backpack. How best to escape the police hunt and the attacks of whoever wanted him dead? He was beginning to feel like a fish caught in a net. Squirming to breathe, he knew panic was just waiting to smother him, and that was when big mistakes were made. Well, he wouldn’t panic. He’d make a plan.
“You have to tell the police everything, Max,” Sayid said, interrupting his thoughts.
“No. I turn myself in now and we’ll never find the secret. Listen, Sayid, Zabala was murdered for something so important that I can’t let it die with him. The police have got enough evidence to put me away until there’s a trial. This is a setup.”
“What do you mean?” Sophie asked.
Still unable to read her intention, Max held her gaze.
“How did they find Zabala’s body?” Max said.
“There must have been a melt,” she said.
“But there hasn’t been. You saw the news; they went straight to the spot where he fell.”
“Someone told them!” Sayid said.
“That’s right. And who knew?”
“The killer,” Sophie said calmly.
It wasn’t a guess, it was stating the obvious, but why did such a bare fact feel like a challenge? Max wondered. Was it the way she said it—so coolly?
He nodded. “Whoever’s been chasing me needs me in a place where they can get whatever information I have. Setting the French police force onto me is a hell of a way of getting me pinned down, wouldn’t you say?”
“You lied to me. You went to Zabala’s hut to look for something. What?”
“I wanted to find out more about him,” Max told her, still unwilling to let her know too much until he determined how involved she was.
“And that’s why you went to the château?”
“Because I discovered that’s where he once worked.”
“And isn’t it all obvious to you now?” Sophie could barely keep the irritation out of her voice. “It’s the animal smugglers. They’re the ones responsible. You should have told me. You should have trusted me.”
