Peter May - Extraordinary People

‘What about…?’

‘Shhhhh.’ She put a finger over his lips, and slid up to pepper his chest with kisses. ‘It’s my gift to you.’

But he didn’t want it to be just about him. He wanted it to be about her, too. About them. He slipped out from beneath her and turned her over so that she was face up. She seemed so slight and fragile in his hands. He found her neck with his mouth and felt her shiver as he kissed her and dropped down to the rise of her full breasts. He heard her moan as he grazed her nipples with his lips and moved down again, across the soft swell of her belly. A fine fuzz of hair led down to a soft triangle of dark, damp growth, and he breathed in the musky smell of her sex. She gasped aloud as he found her with his tongue and worked it as relentlessly as she had hers with him. She arched and arched against him, until finally she shuddered and called out, and he felt both of her hands clutching his hair and holding him there between her legs.

Her pleasure had aroused him again, and before she had time to recover, he moved up to find her mouth with his and force her legs apart with his knees. Her fingers dug into his back, and then found his hair and pulled on it hard as he slipped inside her. Again she arched herself to meet his thrusting, frantic and fighting and pushing until they both arrived at a shuddering climax and collapsed, exhausted, and perspiring, and wrapped around each other in a tangle of sheets and pillow.

They lay for a long time, breathing hard, exchanging tiny kisses. There was nothing they could say that wouldn’t be an anticlimax. And as he slipped away into a languid, dreamy sleep, Enzo briefly and belatedly wondered if Raffin might have heard them through the wall.

Hautvillers nestled in a cleft of the hillside, surrounded by trees and looking out across endless miles of vineyards. They passed the Moët et Chandon factory at the foot of the hill as they turned off the main road and drove through the early morning sunshine up towards the village.

Charlotte had been gone when Enzo wakened, leaving only her scent, and the impression in the pillow where her head had lain. He found evidence in the bathroom that she had taken a shower before she left. He could not believe that he had slept through it. When he got downstairs, he found Raffin and Charlotte having breakfast. She greeted him with a subdued bonjour and a perfunctory kiss on each cheek. There was not the slightest hint of acknowledgement in her eyes of what had passed between them the previous night. Raffin offered him a cursory handshake, and was reserved all through coffee and croissants. The three of them drove out to Hautvillers in silence.

The village was already filling with tourists, who were arriving by the coach load. Enzo found a parking place just off the Place de la République, and he and Raffin waited while Charlotte went into the tourist office. She emerged with a map and a handful of leaflets. Raffin took the map and led them along the Rue Henri Martin in the direction of the abbey. As they walked, Charlotte flicked through her leaflets. ‘You know, this place is pretty old. The village was founded in the year 658. It’s supposed to be the birthplace of champagne. It says here that the méthode champenoise was invented at the abbey of Hautvillers more than three hundred years ago by the Benedictine monk Dom Perignon.’

‘Actually,’ Enzo said, ‘they’d been making sparkling wine in the south of France for a hundred years before that.’

Raffin glanced at him curiously. ‘How do you know that?’

Enzo raised his shoulders casually. ‘I have a friend who knows these things,’ he said, and felt a twinge of shame. The thought that he had been premature in his judgment of Bertrand had haunted him through all the long drive north.

‘My God….’ Charlotte still had her nose buried in the leaflets. ‘Did you know that all the major champagne houses have their caves down in Épernay? Well, actually, down below Épernay. According to this, over the last three hundred years, they’ve dug a hundred and twenty kilometers of tunnels out of the chalk under the town, and there’s more than two hundred million bottles of champagne stored down there.’ She looked up, her eyes shining. ‘Two hundred million bottles!’

‘That’s a lot of bubbles,’ Enzo said.

Everywhere they looked there were makers and sellers of champagne. Gobillard, Tribaut, Locret-Lachaud, Lopez Martin, Raoul Collet, Bliard. At the Square Beaulieu, they turned into the Rue de l’Église, and climbed the hill, past the walled garden of the priest’s house, to a mosaic path of polished and unpolished granite leading to the back of the nave. The side door of the abbey stood ajar beneath the steeply pitched roof of a stone porch. They had arrived at this holiest of shrines to the God of champagne before the tourists, and as they entered the dark cool of the church, they felt subsumed by its silence, compelled to take soft, careful steps, and to communicate by eye contact and the merest of whispers.

For Enzo, there was a powerful sense of déja vu . Sunlight fell through the three tall windows behind the altar just as it had on the website. The polished black slab inscribed to the memory of Dom Perignon lay side by side with the the tomb of Dom Jean Royer, the last abbé régulier of the monastery, who died in 1527, nearly two hundred years before Dom Perignon. Enzo ran his eyes along the wood panelling which lined each side of the front half of the nave. He supposed it might be possible to somehow hide a body, or parts of a body, behind it. But it would not have been an easy matter to remove and replace pieces of the panelling without leaving obvious traces.

‘Look at this,’ Raffin whispered, and all three of them gathered around a carved and gilded casket which stood on a marble-topped table to one side of the altar. It held the remains of St. Nivard, the archbishop of Reims who founded the abbey in the year 650. The bones of the archbishop were clearly visible through two oval portholes, tied together with ancient ribbon. His skull stared back at them from the shadows. ‘You don’t think…?

Enzo shook his head. ‘There was still flesh on Gaillard’s bones when they hid them. They would have been rather obvious behind glass. And I think someone might have noticed the smell.’

Raffin wrinkled his nose in distaste and turned away. He looked along the length of the nave to the organ pipes rising to the ceiling at the far end. ‘Not easy to hide body bits anywhere in here,’ he said.

Enzo found himself in reluctant agreement. He was not sure what he had expected to find. He had been hoping that something obvious would suggest itself, just as the shell fountain had done in Toulouse. But the naked whitewashed walls, the stark wood panelling, the statues of saints, the paintings of biblical scenes, and the cold, stone floor did nothing to excite the imagination. He walked to the back of the church and inspected a marble memorial to the dead of two wars. Enzo gazed at the names of dead men and wondered if they had any relevance. But somehow he felt that the trail had just gone cold. He glanced back along the length of the church to the stone altar, with its pillars and cross and praying angels, and had no confidence that there was anything of relevance here.

Quite unexpectedly, the church was filled with the sudden, eerie sound of soprano voices echoing back from ancient stone walls. A stereo system on a timer, hidden speakers. The effect was almost chilling, and Enzo felt all the hair stand up on the back of his neck. He also felt depression descend on him like a cloud. He had raised his expectations to a level which made it hard, now, to accept failure. But he had no idea what he was looking for, or where to turn when he couldn’t find it.