Peter May - Extraordinary People

‘Oh, you’re back.’ Enzo turned to find Nicole standing in the doorway grinning at him. He hadn’t heard her come in. Her long hair tumbled over her shoulders and down her back, and her breasts seemed more prominent than usual in a tight-fitting tee-shirt. Its V-neck exposed a substantial amount of cleavage. Enzo tried not to let his eyes be drawn by it. ‘I didn’t know when you’d be, so I started without you,’ she said.

‘So I see.’ She brushed past him and sat herself at the computer, hitting the spacebar to wake it up. ‘Where did you get the images?’

‘On the internet.’

Enzo looked at the board and frowned. ‘Why the skeleton of a dog?’

‘Ah.’ Nicole beamed with pleasure. ‘Remember the bone that was in the trunk? The one that didn’t seem to go with the arms? It’s a shinbone from a dog’s foreleg.’

Enzo was astonished. ‘How do you know that?’

‘A boy I was at school with is studying zoology at Limoges. It was his professor who was called in by the Toulouse police to try to identify the bone.’ She grinned again, pleased with herself. ‘Word gets around.’

But Enzo was distracted from her self-congratulation by an odd, acrid smell that he noticed wafting into the room for the first time. He screwed up his face. ‘What the hell’s that?’

‘What’s what?’

‘That smell.’

‘Ah…’ Nicole said. ‘That’ll be the ducklings.’

‘Ducklings?’

‘I put them in the bath. I didn’t know where else they should go.’

Enzo looked at her in disbelief. He turned and stalked out into the hall and threw open the bathroom door. The stink hit him like a blow from a baseball bat. Half a dozen tiny ducklings had settled themselves in the bottom of the bath, which was covered with a mixture of grain and shit. ‘Dear God! Is this some kind of a joke?’

Nicole had followed him out, and stretched on tiptoe to look at them over his shoulder. ‘They’re a gift from my father. By way of an apology for the other night.’ She sniffed several times. ‘You get used to the smell.’

Enzo looked at her over his shoulder. ‘I can’t keep ducks in my apartment. They can’t stay here.’

Nicole shrugged. ‘You must know someone with a garden. My papa says he’ll slaughter them for you when they’re big enough.’ She turned away into the hall, irritated by the interruption to her flow of explanation. ‘Do you want to know how far I’ve got with these clues or not?’

Enzo raised his eyes to the heavens and closed the door on the problem. He’d worry about the ducklings later.

He followed her back into the séjour .

Nicole settled herself in front of the computer again and said, ‘You’ll see I’ve written dog up there, and circled it and drawn arrows to it from the dog’s skeleton and the dog tag.’

Enzo looked at the board, still distracted by the smell, and nodded. ‘You’d better tell me why.’

‘Well, it was the guy from the police scientifique who said it — about the disk with Utopique engraved on it. A name tag for a dog, he said it looked like. And it did. Just the sort of thing you would attach to your dog’s collar. And if it is a name tag, then it’s reasonable to assume that Utopique is the name of a dog. We know that the extraneous bone was a dog’s shinbone, so it just seemed kind of obvious that both these clues were pointing towards a dog.’

‘Called Utopique .’

‘Exactly.’

‘It’s possible,’ Enzo conceded. He couldn’t argue with the logic. ‘Go on.’

Nicole beamed with pleasure. ‘Okay. The champagne. Moët et Chandon, Dom Perignon 1990. You have to figure that they didn’t choose a 1990 vintage by accident. I’ve no idea why, but the date’s got to be important.’

‘Agreed,’ Enzo said. ‘Which is probably why it was in a box, wrapped and protected by the wood wool, so the label would be kept safe from the damp.’

Nicole nodded and moved on. ‘You’ll see I’ve written Poisson d’Avril below the date April 1st, beside the crucifix.’

‘April Fool’s Day, we called it in Scotland,’ Enzo said.

Nicole chided him. ‘Don’t you remember when Sophie was little, kids sticking paper fish on each other’s backs?’

Enzo shook his head. ‘No.’

‘Well, it probably happened at school. It’s what you do on April 1st in France. You try and stick a paper fish on other kids’ backs without them knowing. Which is why we call it Poisson d’Avril .’

‘I didn’t know that,’ Enzo confessed. He smiled. ‘Maybe it’s a red herring.’

Nicole frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘A red herring. Something that misdirects you from the truth. Isn’t there a French equivalent?’

Nicole looked at him as if he were mad. ‘I don’t think so, Monsieur Macleod.’ She shook her head. ‘Anyway, I searched the internet for things that might have happened on April 1st. And guess what? Another Napoléonic connection. Napoléon Bonaparte married Marie Louise of Austria on April 1st, 1810.’

Enzo looked at the board where Nicole had written and circled Napoléon and drawn an arrow to it from the crucifix. He chewed his lip thoughtfully. ‘But what’s the connection with the crucifix? It seems to me that the date and the crucifix are inseparable, and that whatever they point to should have a relevance to both.’ He took a cloth and wiped off the circle and the arrow. ‘Let’s just keep that in mind, and maybe we’ll come back to it.’

‘Oh, okay.’ Nicole was momentarily crestfallen. And then she brightened up. ‘But here’s the real breakthrough. The lapel pin. Sigilum militum xpisti . Do you know what that means?’

‘The seal of the army of Christ,’ Enzo said without hesitation.

It was as if he had stuck a pin in her. She was instantly deflated. ‘How do you know that?’

‘I studied Latin at school.’

‘I suppose you also know what it is, then?’

‘I haven’t a clue.’

She brightened up again. ‘Two men on a single horse bearing shields, encircled by the words sigilum militum xpisti , is the chosen seal of the Knights Templar.’ Her fingers spidered across the keyboard and she read from the screen. ‘The seal was introduced to the Order in 1168 by its Grand Master in France, Bertrand de Blanchfort.’

Enzo breathed a small jet of air through clenched teeth. Bertrand! It seemed there was no escaping him.

Nicole continued, ‘It is said that fifty years earlier, when the founding Christian knights took a vow of poverty, chastity, and obedience at Jerusalem, they could only afford one horse between two of them. And the depiction of two knights astride a single mount also recalls the passage in the book of Matthew, where Christ says, Wherever two or more of you are gathered in My name, there am I, in the midst of you .’

‘Well that seems pretty conclusive,’ Enzo said. ‘Well found.’ And he picked up a marker pen and wrote up Knights Templar , and circled it and drew an arrow to it from the lapel pin. ‘I wonder if we can connect April 1st in some way with the Knights Templar. Maybe it’s an important date in the history of the Order.’

‘That’s a thought.’ Nicole called up Google and began a search. But after nearly fifteen minutes, she had found nothing that linked the date with the Order. She grinned to cover her disappointment. ‘Another “red herring.”’

‘What about trying to link the date with the crucifix?’ Enzo felt that he was clutching at straws now. But anything was worth a try.

Nicole tapped in crucifix and April 1st , and initiated a search. After a moment she let out a tiny yelp of excitement. Enzo crossed the room to take a look. There were three hundred and seventy-eight results. But halfway down the first page of ten was a link headed, THE FIRST MIRACLE OF FATIMA—1385, and below it an extract from the page it would take them to— He died in his cell clutching a crucifix on April 1st, 1431 . Nicole clicked on the link and brought up a lengthy document detailing the canonisation of the Blessed Nuno, whom it described as the last great mediaeval knight. But their initial interest was short lived as they read through a dull account of the man’s life and death. A Portuguese knight, widowed in 1422, he had given away all his worldly wealth and joined a Carmelite monastery in Lisbon. There did not appear to be any connection with the Knights Templar, or with France.