Into The Fire (12 page)

They ride on down the sward. Fifteen hundred men in full plate. A squadron of heavy cavalry as great as any Tomas has seen. The earth quakes at their passing. His heart soars; he can’t help it. He is a functional rider, but in this company he rises, his horse lifts. It may be that he is flying. And he can hold a lance vertical while doing so, for which he is uncomfortably proud.

‘Ahead!’ La Hire roars like a mastiff. ‘Knights, arm yourselves!’

The Maid reaches out her right hand. He must pass the lance at the canter. He has heard stories of this from childhood, but he has actually seen it done only twice.

He presses his horse with his knees and moves it up close to the snake-headed grey. It occurs to him that if he unbalances and falls, his head will be a smear of bone and blood. He reaches out his left hand, braced against the weight of fourteen feet of solid wood with an iron tip.

Ahead and all around, a forest of painted lances moves and shifts. They are masts at sea, a giant flotilla, as the pass is made.

He makes it! He makes the pass, smooth as you like. He wants to punch the air, but all his attention is on managing his horse, because the squires must slow their mounts and let the knights behind come on and those knights fit themselves into lines with the practice of decades, and somewhere ahead La Hire calls, ‘Couch lances!’ and the forest falls flat.

Flat. So she can couch a lance. It takes two decades of training to do this, and she can do it: he has just seen it happen. Flat and rigid and aimed ready to kill whomsoever she chooses.

Fifteen hundred lances and one of them hers and the greensward ahead, and Fastolf’s men just visible down a slight incline, desperately trying to hammer in the stakes that will murder the French horses, and to the left a hawthorn thicket, quite large and very still, and he has a thought that if he were Fastolf, with a knowledge of the land, this is where he would set his bowmen to—

‘Hallooooooo!’ In English, the soar and call of a huntsman.

And bounding out of the wood, a hart, twelve-pointed, white tail a-flashing, and another call, ‘Halloooo, boys, a stag for the taking!’

Are they completely mad?

He thinks they are not mad, because Bedford would not set madmen against a victorious French army, but they will be hungry and perhaps they are deaf and cannot hear the thunder of the incoming French, or the wind is blowing in the wrong direction, or they just can’t resist the sight of a stag even if it means betraying their position to their enemies … any or all of these, and it doesn’t matter which.

All that matters is that the French now know there are Englishmen hidden in the thicket and if they are hidden they are bowmen, and the thing about bowmen is that if they can’t let loose their arrows they’re dead meat because what can you do with a bow against an iron-tipped lance and an iron-shod horse and an iron-clad man – or girl – with an iron sword who can stick you and pound you and slice you and ride you into the mud?

Which is exactly what happens.

Tomas cannot see the Maid; she is hidden by a screen of horseflesh and arms, but she is there at the fore when France meets England. He feels the moment of impact as a suck on the air, a rebound that presses his eyes into his head and his tongue to the roof of his mouth.

The screaming comes later, delayed, a barbed rack of sound that twists his toes in his new boots. You’d think he was used to this now, but there is something desperate about men on foot ridden down by knights, the inequality of it, and these are knights who know how the bowmen destroyed their fathers, uncles, brothers – even sons – at Agincourt; they are not inclined to mercy.

Down in the open ground Fastolf hasn’t got longbows, he’s got his men using their heavy-headed mauls two-handed, trying to ram in their stakes, but they’re losing concentration somewhat at the sound of their fellows being slaughtered and Fastolf is losing discipline. Even from this far back, you can see that the men are beginning to run.

And so, his plan. Now.

He spins his horse, searching the mass of men behind him. ‘Ogilvy? Patrick Ogilvy? Are you there, man?’

‘Aye?’ By his face, the Scot is not liking the tortured sounds from the thicket any more than anyone else, and he a Scot who loathes the English with a passion that makes French hatred seem like a thin cloud drawn past the moon.

Tomas Rustbeard spreads a wide grin across his face, raises his hammers. ‘We’re not knights. We’ll give them something more equal. Shall we hunt us some English?’

‘Aye!’

Dusk finds them still hunting. They have killed twice. Good, solid kills, setting hammer and blade against men who could, at least in theory, have killed them first.

As the light fails, they are in a wood, north of the battlefield. Far south, early fires clip the darkness, and the skirl of Scottish pipes wrings out the dusk. Here, shadows draw traps on the loam, fit to break a horse’s leg. There is really very little light.

Tomas circles his horse beneath the trees. ‘We should dismount,’ he says, and does. Ogilvy, as always, follows. They draw along the forest’s edge. Oak and beech and thorn hang to their left, enough to trap a horse. Or a man.

‘Did you hear that?’ Tomas cocks his head, his whisper barely voiced.

Ogilvy stops, looks around, puts one hand to his ear. ‘What?’

Tomas points left, behind the oaks, mimes an archer with a pick-maul. He lets go of his reins. His horse drops its head, begins to nip the turf. ‘Hush now, let me try something …’

It’s a while since he spoke English. He has to think of his father, and the men who surrounded him. Clearing his throat, he shouts out, ‘Ho there, we are friends. We come with our hands raised …’

Nobody responds, which is not surprising, but Tomas hefts his hammers, rolls his eyes at Ogilvy, and jerks his chin to the left, round the bole of the grandfather tree.

‘Aye.’ Ogilvy nods, crisply, begins to walk round to the left, as instructed.

Tomas heads to the right in an obvious pincer movement; sometimes the easy things work.

Three steps on, he turns and doubles back. He walks quietly, on the edges of his feet. His new boots are supple: he can feel the footing, roll over fallen wood, slip silently on the leaf mould, the cracked acorn husks that are the leavings of rodents.

Ahead, Patrick Ogilvy of Gairloch has stopped, sensing danger, not seeing it, not hearing it. His red hair is the only colour in the gloaming. A perfect target.

A single hammer blow to the head kills him. After all that’s happened since May, it would be good to make this death last longer, but Tomas has his priorities and a long, leisurely murder is not one of them. Still, killing alone is not enough.

He grabs Ogilvy’s Norse-red hair, smashes his head on the oak trunk, a smash, a smash, a smash; all the tension of the day, of the past months, goes into this. Crack. Eyes snap wide and shut. Crack. A nose pulped. Crack. Bones fragment under his hand. He smashes on until what’s left is barely human.

He slips off his boots with some regret, but this is why he bought them; no chance to stop now. He slips off his colours, argent and gules, barred. Both fit on to the mess that is Patrick Ogilvy, with his bloody hair and matted remnants of a rust-coloured beard.

Ogilvy’s boots are a nightmare. Ogilvy’s colours are sable and argent, so utterly unimaginative that Tomas is ashamed to take them on. He rolls them in a pack and slides them on to Ogilvy’s horse and mounts it, leaving his bulky bay gelding for the French to find in due course; abandoning the best horse he has ever ridden.

Alone, with blood in profusion on his hands and hose, he rides north, towards Paris.

‘…
OUR SINCERE CONDOLENCES
to his family and friends. We will release the body as soon as we have cleared up some of the outstanding questions relating to his death. Thank you.’

Picaut always feels self-conscious speaking English and it isn’t helped by the fact that Éric Masson is listening, who lived and worked in London for three years, and Patrice, who laces his emails with lols and omgs and wtfs as if they were his mother tongue.

She hangs up the phone, staring at her reflection in the glass wall that surrounds her office. She looks exhausted. She is exhausted. Éric Masson’s coffee has long since filtered out of her brain and there is nothing that can give quite the same kick. It’s eleven o’clock on Monday morning and already she’s running on empty.

She faces the room. Garonne, too, is sour from lack of sleep and square-eyed from staring at the CCTV footage from around the hotel. If there were anything useful he’d have told her. Another lead burned before they start.

Rollo, the team’s resident thug, is rough-shaven and looks as if he spent the weekend lifting car engines and hasn’t changed his T-shirt since. He leans against the farther wall, filling and refilling the magazine of his SIG-Sauer. He has a pathological gun fetish, which makes him the one you want beside you when the shooting starts.

The other fully slept team member is Sylvie Ostheimer of the spiked white-blond hair. Sylvie thinks laterally into realms nobody else would dream of entering, which is useful about one per cent of the time. The rest of the time, she’s as computer literate as any normal IT graduate; far less than Patrice but more than the rest of the team put together, which, in today’s world, makes her indispensable.

Picaut looks down at her notes.

‘So it goes like this: according to the Glasgow CID, Dr Iain Holloway is – was – thirty-nine years old, divorced, a consultant orthopaedic surgeon at the Western Infirmary in Glasgow, Scotland. His ex-wife lives in Norway with an oil company executive. The divorce was amicable; he pays her no alimony, there are no children. He specialized in the forensic analysis of massed war graves, in the numbering and identification of the victims. He spent a year on sabbatical with the UN in Iraq and then another year seconded to Médecins sans Frontières in Bosnia. They didn’t know he was coming to France, but he had booked three weeks’ holiday, which is what he usually does when he’s working on a war grave.’

She looks around the room. ‘Do we have any war graves in Blois or Orléans? Is there a Gestapo mass burial we don’t know about?’

‘We might have to go back further than that.’ Patrice is sitting on the floor with his laptop balanced on his crossed legs. His kingfisher hair, now that Picaut can see it from above, is apricot pink at the roots. He is wearing a copper bangle on one wrist and a rainbow threaded bracelet on the opposite ankle. He looks like a long-haired, post-modern, techno-grunge Buddha and he is her best hope of an early break.

His fingers flit across the keyboard, drawing secrets from the web. ‘Your man’s got an obsession with the fifteenth century. In the last month, he posted a handful of comments on two Yahoo forums referring to the Battle of Patay, which was the big French victory in the weeks after the relief of Orléans. We captured English commanders and the English knight, Fastolf, was stripped of his Order of the Golden Fleece for letting it happen. It was one of the greatest victories of the Hundred Years War.’

‘What’s that got to do with a Scottish surgeon?’

‘He’s an expert in battlefield forensics. Someone found part of a skull of the right era some way from the battle site, and he was consulting on whether the wounds were right for a war injury and what that said about the accepted location of the battle.’

‘Are you sure it’s our man?’ Picaut says. ‘Just because he can read a battlefield, doesn’t mean he’s— Oh—’

Patrice has swung the laptop round so she can see the man’s face filling the screen; he has long, lean features, somewhat like Éric Masson’s, but with the cheekbones less pronounced.

His hair is dark, greying a little at the temples, allowed to grow to his collar. His eyes are steel grey, and sharp, but with a hint of a smile. It’s not easy to transpose this face on to the charred husk in the path lab, but it’s not impossible.

She says, ‘We need everything you can get on him.’

‘On it.’

Picaut drifts to the place where thinking stops and instinct begins, and soon her mind is empty but for the disparate, shifting pieces of the latest pattern. In the patterns lie the answers, always. Four fires in three weeks. All at night. All claimed by Jaish al Islam. All the property owned by white, French women. But then a death. A man, not French, killed before the fire, and his room emptied. Why him? Why here? Why now?

She is staring at the spinning fragments when Patrice announces that he has tracked down a home address in Glasgow’s West End for a Dr Iain Holloway, who may or may not be the one who has a presence on various Internet forums, who booked a return by train from Glasgow Central to London and then the Eurostar to Paris and an overland train to Blois. There is no record of his having bought a train ticket to Orléans, nor any sign of a hired car.

‘When did he get to Blois?’ Picaut asks.

‘Thursday.’

‘He didn’t book in to the Hôtel Carcassonne until yesterday afternoon. That leaves us three nights unaccounted for. See if you can find his credit card details. A plastic trail is as good as a paper one.’

‘On it.’ Patrice doesn’t even look up.

‘Find out about Monique Susong, too. She’s not telling the truth, but I can’t hold her much longer without a way to prove it. If we can place her and Iain Holloway in the same locations, it would be a start.’

Picaut can feel exhaustion roll in, squeezing her into ever smaller corners of clear thought. She makes herself think from the bottom up; from the hotel to— ‘Garonne, nothing on the CCTV?’

‘Nothing. There are only two cameras, both on five-minute interval stops. Whoever did this knew enough to miss the tracking points.’

‘Great.’ Picaut presses her fingertips to her eyes. ‘First forty-eight hours matter most. We need more than this or the trail goes cold. Éric, have you brought—?’

‘Here.’ Masson produces the USB chip with a conjuror’s flourish. It’s a small thing to have so much power, shorter than the end joint of his thumb and that’s including the loop at one end that will have held it on a key ring. It’s red and looks as if it has recently been softened. It is otherwise utterly unremarkable.