Tom Knox - Bible of the Dead

He turned and walked sternly to the car, once again. She watched as he strode the path; he didn’t seem at all absurd any more.

Julia stood in the rain. Her own car was the other way. She had to trudge through the drizzle, carrying the weight of her disappointment, her crushing let-down. She wouldn’t be able to call her father, or her mother, and vindicate her decision to go to Europe; she wouldn’t be able to tell her friends, her colleagues, the world, about her discovery. She felt like a teenager disappointed in love, she felt like an idiot.

She had been chucked.

Julia walked. Her bleak route took her past a steel cowshed, a run of barbed wire, and the very loneliest of the standing stones. And there, despite the pelting wet, she paused, and looked around, feeling her anger and anxiety evolve, very slightly: as she surveyed the stones.

Truly, she still loved this place – for all its saturnine moods. It was somehow bewitching. The ruined landscape emptied of people. This place full of legends and megaliths. This place where the werewolves of the Margeride met the elegiac Cham des Bondons.

The rain fell, and still she lingered.

The megalithic complex of the Cham des Bondons was one of the biggest in Europe, only Carnac was bigger, only Stonehenge and Callanish were more imposing – yet it was virtually unknown.

Why was that? She could think of several answers. The remoteness was surely crucial. Plus the fact that many of the stones had been toppled in the nineteenth century – and had only recently been re-erected. But maybe there was something else – maybe the atmosphere of the Bondons had something to do with its lack of fame. The dark, brooding, mournful ambience. The way the stones stared down at the ground.

Like sad soldiers guarding the catafalque of a beloved king, their heads bowed in regret.

A flash of insight illumined her thoughts.

Could it be?

Fat raindrops were falling quickly now. Yet Julia did not feel the cold. This sudden idea was too exciting: it was a long shot, fantastical even, yet sometimes in archaeology you had to make the intuitive connection, the leap of faith, to arrive at the new paradigm.

Hell with Ghislaine. This was still Her Find. She would find a way to investigate, to research, to get at the truth.

She walked briskly to her car, fumbling with her keys. She had an intuitive lead. The stones were troubled. Like the moai , the great and tragic monoliths of Easter Island: huge statues erected by a violent and dying society?

Her mood accelerated. The dating of the Cham des Bondons was late Neolithic . The dating of the skeletons was Neolithic . They came from the same long era of human history. Could there be some link between the Bondons and the strangeness of those bones?

There must be a link between the stones and the bones. And the link was that echoing sense, that chime of insight. The fact that she got from the skeletons underneath her feet, down there in the cave, the very same emotional sense she derived from the stones.

Guilt.

The hours following their discovery of the dead Cambodian, Doctor Samnang, were grisly and exhausting; the hotel manager panicked as soon as he was informed. Innumerable messages were sent, anxious calls were taken. A grey ambulance hurled itself into the hotel car park, lights and sirens wailing, accompanied by doctors and nurses, and followed by half a dozen policemen in two new but very dirty white cars. Tou was searched for, and not found. Eventually Jake collapsed onto a bed in a spare room for a few minutes of sleep.

And then the police returned, just after dawn, to snatch Chemda and Jake and take them to the station – for the questioning.

The interview took place in the Ponsavanh police office, another anonymous yet menacing concrete block in this anonymous yet menacing concrete city. The young Lao officer who had collected them was polite enough. Just enough. He spoke English. He led them through corridors of dusty policework to a stuffy room. His desk loomed large. Handcuffs and truncheons hung from a hook. Jake wondered what tools they had in the basement.

The room was also decorated with a huge red flag adorned by another hammer and sickle. Oppressively boastful. This was, presumably, just in case no one had noticed the three other communist flags hanging at the front of the building.

So many flags? They seemed to imply a rather defensive insecurity. This was a nervous place. The flags said: We are communists, definitely . Ignore the rampant capitalism everywhere. Look instead at all the flags . Jake wondered again how many people were taken to the basement. Such a big concrete building would definitely have a large and chilly basement.

For five hours Jake and Chemda were quizzed by at least four policemen, all working through the one young, distantly smiling English speaking officer. The policemen had guns in shoulder holsters. The smell of male sweat in the hot stuffy room was distinct and intense. The questioning became more aggressive.

Why were Jake and Chemda here? Who was the dead man? Why had Tou disappeared? Why had Tou telephoned them last night? Why would anyone kill a harmless old historian? Why were they looking at the Plain of Jars? Who had given permission? What did they expect to find? What could be interesting about a bunch of old jars? What? When? Where? How? Why were they here?

At a signal, they were both asked to stand. The policemen were separating them. They were going to be questioned individually. Chemda gave Jake a long glance as she was led away, and she reached and subtly grasped Jake’s hand. The touch was like the glance of a mild electric shock. Then she let go.

Jake stared at her. She was turning now, and regarding the smiling, faux-polite cop: her regal Khmer expression was proud, uptilted, daring the police to do their worst.

He admired her stance, her confidence. She was beautiful in her defiance.

The door closed; he was alone with the thinnest cop with the sweatiest shirt of faded blue, and a red-and-gold hammer-and-sickle badge on his lapel. He had a conspicuous shoulder holster. The policeman’s face was thin, everything about him was thin, the nylon on his clothes, the plastic of his shoes, he was thin and angry and fifty and sweating hatred for everything Jake represented: money, the West, youth, privelige, the English language – all the western kids puking on the steps of the temples of Vang Vieng, all of the westerners polluting beautiful ancient Laos. Jake almost wanted to say Sorry.

He said, ‘Sorry?’

The man shook his head angrily, and spat out a question; but he spoke barely any English. He stood and he shouted at Jake, incomprehensibly. What was he shouting? It was all said in Lao. They were alone. Jake tried not to cower in his chair. He got the sense the policeman was a millimetre away from whipping out his gun and slapping it across Jake’s face, breaking his nose like balsa, squirting blood onto the desk. Was that already a blood stain? On the wall?

Jake stayed mute. Staring ahead. Meek and polite – and mute. That’s what he had always been advised. Say nothing . But this was nasty. Jake had heard vague stories of western journalists being flung in jail in Laos, for going where they were not wanted: flung in jail and tortured, by a prickly, defensive, wary communist regime, a cornered country, now surrounded by capitalists. He’d seen men on the terrace of the FCC in Phnom Penh with limps and bruises and lucky-to-be-alive expressions: I just got back from Luang, where the beer is good and the girls are cute, but man oh man …

The door swung open. Chemda stepped through, followed by the policeman who spoke English. The policeman looked half-satisfied. The questions were over? Chemda lifted her cellphone and explained: