Peter May - Extraordinary People

‘We’re going to get wet,’ Bertrand said.

Enzo nodded absently. He was staring off thoughtfully across the football pitch in the final glimmer of the day’s light. ‘You know a bit about football, don’t you?’

‘I used to play for an amateur side.’

‘Where does the referee usually stand when he blows for kick-off?’

He heard the young man expel air through his teeth. ‘Well, I don’t think there’s any set place.’ Bertrand thought for a moment. ‘I guess he usually stands somewhere around the centre circle.’

‘That’s a big area to dig up.’

‘What, you mean you think that what you’re looking for is buried somewhere in the centre circle?’

‘I don’t know. I really don’t. I’m clutching at straws here. If we’re in the right place — and I’ve got to believe that we are, since all the clues have led us here — then there has to be a reason for the referee’s whistle.’ Enzo sighed, frustrated, trying to articulate his reasoning. ‘The clues have always been symbolic or representative of something else, Bertrand. So maybe it’s not the whistle itself that’s important, so much as the person who blows it.’

He began walking out across the pitch towards the centre circle. The lines delineating the field of play were faded almost to the point of obscurity. The rain would very soon obliterate any remaining traces. Bertrand followed him to the centre circle, his flashlight trained on the halfway line that led them there.

‘My God,’ Enzo said surveying a diameter of something close to twenty meters. ‘It’s huge. We couldn’t possibly dig up an area this size.’

‘We don’t have to,’ Bertrand said. ‘Wait here.’ And he took off, running back towards the gate before Enzo had the chance to ask him what he was talking about. He stood, then, a solitary figure, in the centre of the football pitch, where generations of breathless kids had chased elusive aspirations in the shape of a leather ball, and when genius had eluded them, gone on to become doctors, lawyers, waiters. For a moment, he felt surrounded by the ghosts of failed ambition, until lightning tore open the sky and he saw that he was completely alone.

All daylight had bled, now, from the evening. The darkness was absolute. Thunder cracked so loudly overhead that it felt like a physical blow. Enzo ducked involuntarily, and as lightning flashed again beneath dangerously low clouds, he saw the lean, fit figure of Bertrand loping back across the pitch, his flashlight in one hand, his metal detector dangling from the other. Bertrand was grinning when he reached him. ‘I knew this would come in useful for something.’

Enzo looked at him for a long moment. Words escaped him. Then finally he said, ‘Well, I hope the damned thing works!’

Bertrand began a first circuit of the centre circle, the metal detector hovering just centimeters above the parched ground as he swept it methodically from side to side. And then the rain began in earnest, almost tropical in its intensity. Within seconds both men were soaked to the skin. Enzo held the flashlight and followed Bertrand’s progress. The hard-baked earth was slow to soak up the rain, and it began lying in ever widening puddles on the surface of the playing field. The metal detector emitted a steady, high-pitched whine, only just audible above the drumming of the rain.

‘Papa…’ Enzo turned as Sophie and Nicole ran into the circle of light, a shared raincoat held over their heads and shoulders.

‘You can’t stay out in this,’ Nicole said.

‘It’s crazy, Papa.’

‘You should have stayed in the van,’ was all he said.

And suddenly the wail of the metal detector rose half an octave. In that moment lightning filled the sky, infusing every single drop of rain with its light so that the world was lost in a brief, blinding mist. But even above the crash of thunder that followed, Enzo could still hear the shriek of the metal detector.

‘There’s something here,’ Bertrand bellowed above the noise of the rain. ‘Right below here!’ He had completed about two thirds of his circuit and stood at ten o’clock on the circle. Gelled spikes had dissolved into streaks of black hair striping vertically on his forehead. Water dripped from his eyebrow piercings and nose and lip studs, and he was grinning like an idiot. ‘We’d better start digging.’

‘We can’t dig in this rain,’ Enzo shouted back. ‘The hole will just fill with water.’

‘I’ve got an old two-man tent in the back of the van. If we put up the outer skin we can cover the hole.’

‘Did you bring the shovels?’

‘Of course.’

‘You’re mad!’ Sophie shouted at them.

But Enzo just turned to the two girls and said, ‘Go and get the tent and the spades.’

Within ten minutes they had erected the arched cross-frames of a small igloo tent, stretching its plastic outer skin tightly across it and pegging it into increasingly soft earth. Bertrand began digging first, until he had made enough of a hole to allow Enzo in beside him, and the two men dug furiously by the light of the flashlight, expelling shovel after shovel of mud through the open flap on to the pitch beyond. The rain hammered an unrelenting tattoo on the taut plastic. Sophie and Nicole stood outside, beneath their raincoat, watching the silhouettes of the two men in the tent rise and fall like some distorted shadow theatre playing out on its curving walls.

They were almost a meter down before Enzo’s spade hit metal. It jarred up through his arms and shoulders, but the dull clang of metal on metal was sweet music to accompany the drumming of the rain. In spite of the tent, water was seeping back into the hole. Enzo knew they would have to get the chest out completely, to be sure of keeping its contents dry and free from contamination. It took another fifteen minutes to prise it from the mud suction of its ten-year resting place and lift it carefully up on to the rim of the crater they had made.

The flashlight’s batteries were failing fast, and they both stood panting, and staring at the trunk in the fading yellow light. It was the same military green as all the others. Enzo glanced at Bertrand, and saw that his face was sweat-streaked and covered in mud. They were like clay men, standing ankle deep in liquid earth, breathing hard and filled with anticipation and trepidation.

The girls crouched down at the opening and peered in. ‘Is that it?’ Sophie said.

Enzo nodded. ‘Take a pair of latex gloves from my bag and give me something to dry my hands with.’

Nicole held out a handkerchief for him to wipe the mud from his hands and face, and Sophie handed him a pair of surgeon’s gloves from his bag. He tore them out of their plastic wrapping and snapped them on. Very carefully he unclasped the lid of the trunk and lifted it open. It was stiff, complaining loudly as he forced it back, against the will of rusted hinges. Bertrand shone his flashlight inside.

‘Jesus!’ Enzo heard him whisper.

The skeletal remains of Jacques Gaillard’s torso almost filled the interior. Bleached white bones. Shoulders, ribs, pelvis, spine. Enzo had to reach carefully through a rib cage chipped and scarred by the blades which had killed Gaillard, to remove one, by one, what he knew now to be the final set of clues. A short meat cleaver. A baking tray with twelve cookie moulds in the shape of seashells. A bunch of chopsticks tied together with a piece of string. Even before he counted them, Enzo had guessed how many there might be. Thirteen. Unlucky for some. There was a green glass model of the leaning tower of Pisa, and a key ring replica of the Eiffel Tower. Enzo looked at it closely and saw that it was made in China. Just one more confirmation. The final item was a small rock hammer with a rubberised handle grip.