Martin Walker - The Devil's Cave

‘I have some leads and I’ll be following those up with the Police Nationale .’

‘Maybe we can turn this talk of Satanism to our advantage,’ suggested Jerome. ‘We could get some good publicity from that.’ He turned to Father Sentout. ‘I’m thinking of an exorcism ceremony at the bridge.’

‘Ridiculous, we’d be a laughing stock,’ snapped the Mayor. Bruno looked up in surprise. That wasn’t like him. The Mayor was a wily old politician who usually waited to gauge the mood of any meeting before he committed himself. A silence fell.

‘It might be a little premature,’ the priest said, smoothing over the sudden tension. ‘There’s no sign that anyone has been possessed. But there is one thing that disturbs me …’

He paused for effect, and everyone at the council table leaned forward. Bruno smiled to himself. Father Sentout was just as skilled a player as the Mayor.

‘It’s the nature of the ritual that intrigues me. Features of this death remind me of one of the classic examples of Satanism. The naked woman with arms outstretched in the rough form of a cross, the pentagram scrawled on the body, the black candles …’

‘Go on,’ said the Mayor, as fascinated as the rest of them.

‘It has most of the trappings of a classic Black Mass, but not all. In the classic form of this abomination there would be a mockery of Holy Communion. The Host, which in a real Mass becomes the body of Christ, becomes a tool of the devil’s depravity in the Black Mass. It is usually placed in the private parts of the naked woman on whom the Mass is performed.’

Bruno remembered the item that Dr Gelletreau had taken with his tweezers from the dead woman’s vagina. He’d have to call the pathologist and get him to check.

‘There would also be some form of sacrifice,’ the priest went on. ‘A black cockerel was the usual victim, its head cut off and its blood smeared on the naked woman, another mockery of the way that Holy Communion transforms the wine into the blood of Christ.’

‘When you say the classic form of the Black Mass, Father, what’s the basis of that?’ Bruno asked. He was curious, and unlike the Mayor he had a soft spot for the plump little priest. He’d enjoyed some magnificent meals at Father Sentout’s home, but also the priest was devoted to the fortunes of the town’s rugby team and to supporting the minimes , the kids’ team that Bruno coached. The priest held a special service for them each year, with the proceeds from the collection box going to the purchase of rugby shirts and the travel budget for away games.

‘Most of what we know of the Black Mass comes from the reign of le roi soleil , the Sun King Louis XIV, and the incident known to history as the Affair of the Poisons,’ the priest began, visibly preening at this chance to display his knowledge. ‘It was the great scandal of the age, the seventeenth-century equivalent of the Kennedy assassination. There were pamphlets about it published all over Europe.’

He reminded them that the king had a famous mistress, the celebrated Madame de Montespan, who came from one of the oldest and noblest families of France. Thanks to her noble blood and her mother’s connections at court, she had been appointed a lady-in-waiting to the King’s wife, Queen Marie-Therese of Austria.

‘ Putain de merde ,’ muttered Montsouris, the town’s only Communist councillor. ‘I knew the bloody aristos would be behind all this.’

At the time, the priest continued, the King already had a mistress, Louise de la Valliere, and Madame de Montespan resolved to replace her. To do so, she resorted to witchcraft. Her first ally was a wise woman or witch, used by several women at the court to abort unwanted pregnancies, named Catherine Monvoisin. She then recruited a renegade priest, Etienne Guibourg, to perform a Black Mass that would produce a love potion to win the King’s heart. The potion was concocted from the desecrated Host that had been placed in Madame de Montespan’s vagina during the Black Mass. The result was a scandal and a trial in which the witch was executed and the priest imprisoned, but with Madame de Montespan securely ensconced in the royal bed.

‘How did she get away with it?’ asked the Mayor. Bruno smiled to himself. Father Sentout had seldom had such an avid audience.

‘Some say her sensual charms won the king’s devotion and thus her immunity, but I prefer to think it all the work of Satan,’ said the priest. ‘And what we know of the dead woman who floated through our town yesterday replicates very closely the Black Mass performed on the naked body of Madame de Montespan over three centuries ago.’

Jerome suddenly spoke, a curious, almost greedy light in his eyes. ‘You know, this gives me an idea. We’ve been thinking of expanding the theme park, and this might be just the thing for a new exhibit. Louis XIV, a royal mistress, a Black Mass — it would certainly bring in the punters.’

The Mayor quelled Jerome with a glance. ‘Any such proposal for an expansion would not be welcomed by the Mairie ,’ he said, and glared around the table. ‘Now you know why I’m so cross at all this talk of Satanism. You, Father, should have known better.’

‘I’m aware that some of you may wish to criticize me for the remarks quoted in the newspaper this morning, but the history cannot be gainsaid,’ the priest replied equably. ‘And it is my duty, when I see Satan’s works unfolding, to take up arms in the name of le bon Dieu .’

The priest looked around the table, seeing scepticism replace fascination on several faces. Bruno saw him weighing each one, dismissing those who were known to be devout Catholics since their support was to be expected, and looking for those who occupied that middle ground between mild agnosticism and a vague, traditional loyalty to the teachings of the Church. The priest’s eyes finally alighted on Bruno.

‘You may never have come to confession, Bruno,’ he said. ‘But I know that some of the things that you saw in Bosnia showed you that evil still stalks the world.’

‘The evil was done by men, Father, not by any supernatural being,’ Bruno replied.

‘How are you so sure? You of all people, my dear Bruno, must know that there can be love and kindness in the midst of such horrors. Is that not a proof of the presence of God?’

Bruno wondered how much Father Sentout knew of his time in Bosnia and his tragic, aborted love affair with Katarina, the Bosnian schoolteacher whom his unit had rescued, along with some other women, from the Serbian military brothel where they had been imprisoned and forced into prostitution. It was a deeply private memory, of which he very seldom spoke. But each year when the dampness of autumn came, the ache in his hip where the Serb bullet had knocked him spinning into the snow took him back to that nightmare time in the hills around Sarajevo. He sighed inwardly, thinking how few secrets anyone could keep in a small town.

‘Love is what happens between people, Father,’ he said. ‘I don’t know that we need God to explain it.’

‘It is because, my dear Bruno, some of those same people who committed the greatest evils are also capable of great acts of mercy and gentleness,’ the priest said. ‘They are forever at war within us, God and Satan, and our souls are never in greater danger than when we forget that. Whatever the motives of those who dabble in Satanism, real evil is at work here. We ignore that at our peril, and while my fear is for your immortal souls, you must think of the danger to our town if this wickedness thrives unchecked.’

The priest sat back, slumping as though suddenly exhausted, and then spoke from deep within his chest. ‘This is not the end of it, you mark my words,’ he intoned.