Sacred Sword (Ben Hope 7) (26 page)

Jude fell to one side, the knifeman to the other. Jude hit the floor with his shoulder and rolled. The knifeman hit the floor flat on his back and didn’t move.

Ben whipped around to see one of the two pistol shooters lying twisted on the ground. The other squeezed off a shot that ricocheted off the stone wall. Ben realised he was shooting at the figure who’d appeared in the archway and was half-hidden in swirling white smoke.

A third crashing fiery blast filled the church. The pistol shooter was lifted off his feet and sprawled backwards in the dirt.

By then, Ben had was already running over to Jude, calling his name. He saw the blood soaking Jude’s clothes – then realised that almost all of it was spatter from the dead knifeman. The cut on Jude’s neck was superficial. Ben dropped the MP5 and helped him to his feet.

As quickly as it had kicked off, the fight was over. Three men lay dead on the floor of the church. One killed by Ben, two by the mysterious new arrival, who was still standing near the archway, holding a large revolver. White smoke trickled from its barrel and floated up to join the pall that drifted in the air. It smelled pungently of rotten eggs. Old-fashioned gunpowder, the stench that had filled a million battlefields of days gone by.

Gant, the leader of the men, was on his knees and elbows groaning and bleeding liberally from his smashed nose and teeth. Injured and groggy, but still a threat. Seeing one of the fallen pistols nearby he made a sudden and surprisingly fast lunge for it.

‘Ah, non, non. Pas si vite,’ said the figure in the archway, raising the smoky revolver and deftly cocking the hammer with his thumb. Flame burst from its barrel. The gunshot flattened Gant into the dirt like a crushed beetle.

Ben left Jude standing propped against a stone wall and turned to face the new arrival. ‘Thanks, but I might have wanted to talk to him,’ he said sternly, pointing at Gant’s bleeding body.

The man shrugged. ‘That is no way to greet someone who has just saved your life,’ he said gruffly in French.

Ben peered at him. Where had he seen him before? He was about Ben’s height, ten or a dozen years older, bearded and dark and wearing a chequered work shirt. Then Ben remembered: he’d been one of the group standing at the bar in Saint-Christophe that evening. The guy who’d been doing some kind of business with Moustache and left counting his money.

‘Who are you?’ Ben asked.

‘My name is Jacques Rabier. I knew Fabrice Lalique, and like you, I would like to discover the truth about what happened to him.’ He kicked one of the corpses as if it were a sack of grain. ‘It seems I was not the only person interested in talking to you tonight.’

‘Was it you who called me?’

Rabier shook his head. ‘I think perhaps it was one of your friends here, no? You have walked into a trap,
mon vieux
.’

‘How did you find us?’

‘This is a small village. I knew where you and your son were staying.’

‘He’s not my son,’ Ben replied with a total lack of conviction.

Rabier raised an eyebrow. ‘He looks like you.’

‘What’s he saying?’ Jude groaned in the background, nursing his cut neck. He looked pale and shaky.

‘Nothing,’ Ben told him. ‘Keep talking,’ he said to Rabier in French.

‘I was coming to speak with you when I saw you leaving the hotel in a hurry, and I followed you here. I thought this was a strange place for you to come, so I watched to see what you were doing. Then these men appeared from the trees. I thought that was strange too. Then when I saw them make a grab for the boy there, I thought perhaps it was time for old Jacques to give you some help.’

‘I’m obliged to you, Jacques. One thing, though. If you were just coming to talk to us, why the six-gun?’

Rabier hefted the revolver in his fist and gave a crooked smile. Ben had never seen a weapon like it in action before, the type of old-fashioned cap and ball pistol that harked back to the 1860s and the days before modern cartridges and smokeless gunpowder. In Britain you needed a stack of authorisations to own one; in France they were completely unrestricted. ‘I carry this everywhere with me now,’ Rabier said. ‘It is a precaution I have been taking ever since those men threw Fabrice off the bridge.’

‘That’s what you believe?’

‘You do not?’

Ben took out his pack of Gauloises, offered the Frenchman one, took one for himself and lit them both up with his Zippo. ‘I’m taking it that you’re not the kind of guy to be calling the gendarmerie in such situations,’ he said, motioning at the dead men on the ground.

Rabier let out a short laugh. ‘Bernard, the Chief of Police, is one of my best customers.’ He spat on the ground. ‘But the rest of them are no better than the Nazis who butchered my grandfather and grandmother during the occupation. We have the new Gestapo now, only their masters are in Brussels instead of Berlin.’

Ben didn’t ask in what capacity Bernard was one of Rabier’s best customers, but he had the impression that his new friend was in the illicit booze business. Ben had lived in rural France long enough to know that black market alcohol was a growth industry there.

‘You have no more social engagements planned for this evening?’ Rabier asked.

‘This was it,’ Ben said.

‘Then come back with me to the farm. We can dispose of these
connards
there, and we will talk. You can stay the night.’ Rabier went to fetch his pickup truck from where he’d left it hidden among the trees, and backed it up to the entrance to the church. Jude retreated to the far side of the ruin and didn’t watch as Ben and the Frenchman grabbed each corpse in turn by the collar and ankles and flung them in an undignified heap on the flatbed of the pickup. Rabier seemed quite unperturbed by the grisly work, and puffed happily on his cigarette. ‘You have done this before?’ he asked Ben. That crooked smile again.

‘Funny, I was just about to ask you the same,’ Ben said.

‘The answer is no, but I have often thought about where I would bury any
salopard
who fucks with me,’ Rabier said. He covered the bodies with a tarp, lashed it down at the corners, and the load was secure.

They agreed to drive back in tandem to Saint-Christophe so that Jude could pick up his rucksack from the hotel. ‘Are you all right?’ Ben asked him as they drove towards the village, Rabier’s pickup truck leading the way. Jude had gone very quiet and was holding a handkerchief to his neck. The knifeman’s blood was still dripping off his clothes. The folks at Hertz weren’t going to be overjoyed about the state of their seats.

Jude let out a grim laugh. ‘My parents have been murdered and I can’t go to their funeral. I’m on the run from bad guys who want to kill us because of some stupid sword. I’m covered in the blood of yet another person that’s just been slaughtered in front of me. Is it eight now? I lose count. I’ve stolen cars and smuggled guns and now I’ve had my throat cut. I’m doing just great since I met you.’

The count was ten, Ben thought, but he kept that detail to himself.

Jude pointed through the windscreen at Rabier’s pickup. ‘And you do realise that this guy is insane?’

‘I’ve known worse.’

‘Unfortunately, I can believe that.’

Once they’d retrieved Jude’s things from the Auberge, they rejoined Rabier where he was waiting for them on the edge of the village, and followed him to his place. It was a half-hour drive through the lanes before the pickup truck veered in through a gate and bounced up a track towards a large house and clustered outbuildings. The stonework of the house was badly in need of repair, and one of the window shutters was flapping loose in the breeze.

‘It’s worse than Black Hill Farm,’ Jude said.

‘I don’t think there’s a Madame Rabier,’ Ben said.

Rabier led them inside. Wooden crates were piled high in every corner. Ben decided his guess about Rabier’s occupation had been correct. The Frenchman directed Jude towards a bathroom and offered him a pair of overalls to change into. His clothes were ruined. ‘We will burn them later,’ Rabier said, then turned to Ben. ‘Come. We have some dead rats to bury. Then we will talk.’

After unloading the bodies from the pickup truck, Ben checked all three for any kind of ID and found none. Rabier sloshed the blood out of the back of the truck with a hosepipe, then strode over to a storage shed. A moment later there was a clattering roar and a squeal of caterpillar tracks, and he drove out in a small mechanical digger. The two of them heaved the bodies into the digger’s shovel. Ben climbed on board and Rabier drove him across the farmyard to a sprawling manure heap that was at least ten feet high in places. Rabier yanked a lever and the digger dropped the corpses on the ground like so many garbage sacks before getting to work gouging out a massive hole in the middle of the stinking manure.

Ten minutes later the hole was filled in, with the dead men inside it. ‘After a few seasons they will make excellent fertiliser,’ Rabier yelled over the clatter of the engine as he drove the digger back to its storage shed.

When they returned to the house, Jude had finished cleaning himself up and was changed into a pair of jeans and a bright yellow tracksuit top from his rucksack. He smelled of antiseptic lotion and there was a sticking plaster over the cut on his neck. Looking a little pale, he sat quietly in the kitchen as Rabier slammed three shot glasses down on the table and grabbed an unlabelled bottle containing some clear liquid that Ben suspected wasn’t water. Rabier wrenched the cork from the bottle with his teeth and glugged out three brimming glasses.

Ben took a sip and his tongue was instantly ablaze. Swallowed, and a burning trail ignited violently all the way through his body like a length of high-explosive detonation cord going off. Another sip too soon afterwards would probably be fatal. It was like the moonshine he’d tasted once in Montana, only about double the strength.

‘You make this stuff yourself?’ he asked Rabier when he could speak again.

The Frenchman shrugged. After helping to kill and bury four men tonight in front of Ben and Jude, he didn’t have a lot more to hide. ‘It is my business. Not strictly legal,
naturellement
. But very popular with the after-hours clientèle, when the bars have closed and the fascists are at home in their beds.’

Ben took another sip and decided he could get to like this stuff. ‘Let’s talk about Fabrice. You knew him well?’

‘He was my best friend,’ Rabier said. ‘We grew up together. I knew him like nobody else. Well enough to know that he was no child molester. He loved children, but only in the proper way, and any man who says otherwise is a lying piece of shit.’

‘The night he was killed, he telephoned his colleague in England, my friend, Jude’s father. He left a message saying he was being followed.’

Rabier nodded. ‘This is correct. He was being followed, and in his panic he came here to the farm, hoping to hide from his pursuers.’

Ben was surprised by the confidence of Rabier’s assertion. ‘You saw him?’

‘If I had seen him, he would still be alive now. I was not here.’ Rabier reached into his pocket and drew out a little silver crucifix on a broken chain. He laid it gently on the table. ‘This belonged to Fabrice. It was a gift from his mother when he was nine years old and he had worn it ever since. He would have been buried with it.’ He paused a while, gazing at the tiny cross. ‘That night I had been making my delivery to some of the local bars. To avoid the police, my customers prefer to carry out such business after nightfall, so it was not until late that I returned home and noticed something unusual. Come. I will show you.’

Rabier led them outside and across the yard, towards a large wooden barn that stood behind the house. ‘Here,’ he said, pointing at the ground, ‘I found the tracks of a car. Also in the dirt were the footprints of several men, and some marks made by another man’s shoes as he fought them and was dragged to the car from over here.’ Rabier pointed at the barn. He stepped up to the tall wood-slat doors and pushed them open with a creak, switching on a light as he led Ben and Jude inside.

Rabier pointed at the straw-covered floor of the barn. ‘The same signs of struggle were also in here. And here,’ he said, reaching down and hauling up a trapdoor set into the floor, ‘is where I found Fabrice’s chain.’

Ben stepped to the edge of the trapdoor and looked down at the space below the floor.

‘I have lived on this farm all my life,’ Rabier said, crouching by the square hole. ‘As children, Fabrice and I used to hide down here for many hours; as young men, to smoke and fool around with girls.’ He smiled his crooked smile, which then dropped to a look of sadness. ‘Fabrice returned to the same place to hide from his enemies, but they found him and took him away. There is where I found his cross, on the floor inside the hole. It is as if he had left me a sign.’ Rabier straightened up and closed the trapdoor.

Ben started explaining to Jude. ‘He said he found—’

‘I get the gist,’ Jude said. ‘Why didn’t he call the police?’

Rabier picked up on the word ‘police’. ‘
Le jeune
doesn’t understand,’ he said in French. ‘If these men could murder my friend and make it appear like suicide, what could they do to me? It was not safe to speak a word to anyone. Besides, I cannot afford to have the bastard cops crawling all over my place. They discover my distilling equipment, it’s prison for old Jacques Rabier.’

‘Was Fabrice’s home broken into that night?’ Ben asked as they headed back towards the house.

‘If it was, it was done without leaving a trace,’ Rabier said. ‘You are thinking of the porno? How it found its way onto his computer?’

‘The people who murdered Fabrice are as interested in discrediting their victims as they are in killing them,’ Ben said. ‘Take away a man’s life, questions get asked. Destroy his reputation at the same time, everyone goes quiet. The bigger the scandal, the better the smokescreen.’

‘Putain de salauds,’ Rabier muttered in disgust. ‘What is going on here? What had poor Fabrice got himself mixed up with?’

‘Fabrice was a member of an international group, based in France, England and America and maybe also in Israel. They were working together on some kind of research project, for which they travelled out to the Israeli desert together.’