CHAPTER 46
Meredith peered through the windshield as Hal edged the car up the last bend in the road.
Set high on the vertiginous hillside above them was a collection of houses and other buildings. There was a painted board welcoming them to Rennes-le-Château.
Son site, ses mystères.
White and purple flowers peeped out from the steep hedgerow at the side of the road, and big blooms, like giant, overblown hyacinths.
‘There are poppies everywhere in the spring,’ Hal said, following the line of her gaze. ‘It’s really something.’
A couple of minutes later, they parked in a dusty lot with views over the entire southern expanse of the Haute Vallée, and got out of the car. Meredith took in the panoramic view of the mountains and the valleys below, then turned around to look at the village itself.
Immediately behind them there was a circular stone water tower that stood in the centre of the dusty parking lot. A square sundial painted on the south-facing curve marked the summer and winter solstices.
At the top, there was an inscription. She shielded her eyes to read it.
Aïci lo tems s’en
Va res l’Eternitat.
Meredith took a photograph.
At the edge of the parking lot was a map mounted on a viewing board. Hal jumped up on to the low wall and began to point things out: the mountain peaks of Bugarach, Soularac and Bézu, the towns of Quillan to the south, Espéraza to the southwest, Arques and Rennes-les-Bains to the east.
Meredith breathed out deeply. The endless sky, the outline of the peaks behind, the distinctive profile of the fir trees, the mountain flowers at the side of the road, the tower in the distance. It was awe-inspiring, reminiscent, she suddenly realised, of the background she remembered on La Fille d’Épées. The Tarot cards could easily have been painted with this landscape in mind.
‘It says here,’ Hal said, ‘that on a clear day in the summer you can see twenty-two villages from this one point.’
He smiled, then jumped down and pointed to a gravel path leading away from the car park.
‘If I remember rightly, the church and museum are down that way.’
‘What’s that?’ asked Meredith, staring at a squat, crenellated tower built overlooking the valley.
‘The Tour Magdala,’ he replied, following the direction of her glance. ‘Saunière built the belvedere, the stone walkway that runs along the south side of his gardens, with this incredible view, at the very end of the renovation programme, 1898, 1899. The tower was to house his library.’
‘The original collection’s not in there, surely?’
‘I doubt it,’ he said. ‘I suspect they’ve done what my dad did at the Domaine de la Cade, put a few replacement volumes in the cases, for atmosphere. He called, really pleased with himself, after he’d managed to buy a whole load of second-hand books from a vide grenier in Quillan.’
Meredith frowned.
‘A second-hand sale,’ he explained.
‘Right.’ She smiled. ‘So, does that mean your father was pretty involved in the day-to-day running of the place?’
Hal’s face clouded over again. ‘Dad was the money, came over from the UK from time to time. It was my uncle’s project. He found the place, persuaded my father to put up the cash, supervised the renovation, made all the decisions.’ He paused. ‘Until this year, that is. Dad retired and changed. For the better, really. Relaxed, enjoying himself. He came over quite a few times in January and February, then moved over for good in May.’
‘How did your uncle feel about that?’
Hal stuck his hands into his pockets and looked at the ground. ‘I’m not sure.’
‘Had your father always intended to retire to France?’
‘I really don’t know,’ he said. Meredith heard the mixture of bitterness and confusion in his voice, and felt a rush of sympathy.
‘You want to piece together the last few months of your father’s life,’ she said gently, understanding all too well.
Hal raised his head. ‘That’s it. It’s not that we were that close. My mother died when I was eight and I was packed off to boarding school. Even when I was home in the holidays, Dad was always working. I can’t say we really knew each other.’ He paused. ‘But we’d been starting to see a little more of each other in the past couple of years. I feel I owe it to him.’
Sensing Hal needed to go at his own pace, Meredith didn’t press him on what he meant by that. Instead she asked a perfectly innocuous question to help him build up to the serious stuff.
‘What kind of business was he in? Before he retired?’
‘Investment banking. With a singular lack of imagination, I followed him into the same firm after I graduated from university.’
‘Another reason you quit your job?’ she asked. ‘Do you inherit your father’s share of the Domaine de la Cade?’
‘An excuse, rather than a reason.’ He paused. ‘My uncle wants to buy me out. Not that he’s said as much, but he does. But I keep thinking that maybe Dad would want me to get involved. Take over where he left off.’
‘Did you ever talk to your father about it?’
‘No. There didn’t seem any rush.’ He turned to Meredith. ‘You know?’
They had been walking slowly while they were talking and were now standing outside an elegant villa giving directly on to the narrow street. Opposite was a pretty, formal garden with a generous stone pond and a café. The wooden shutters were down.
‘I first came here with Dad,’ Hal said, ‘sixteen, seventeen years ago. Way before he and my uncle had ever thought of going into business together.’
Meredith smiled to herself, now understanding why Hal knew so much about Rennes-le-Château when he knew pretty much nothing about the rest of the region. The place was special to him because of the bond it gave him with his father.
‘It’s all been completely done up now, but then it was pretty derelict. The church was open for a couple of hours a day, watched over by a terrifying gardienne dressed all in black, who scared the living daylights out of me. The Villa Béthania here,’ he pointed up at the impressive house they were standing next to, ‘Saunière built for guests rather than for himself. When I came with Dad, it was open to the public, but in a totally haphazard way. You’d wander into one of the rooms and see a waxwork figure of Saunière sitting up in bed.’
Meredith pulled a face. ‘Sounds awful.’
‘All the papers and documents were lying about in unlocked display cases, in damp, unheated rooms beneath the belvedere.’
Meredith grinned. ‘An archivist’s nightmare.’
He gestured through the railings separating the path from the formal gardens.
‘Now, as you can see, the place is a major tourist attraction. The cemetery itself, where Saunière is buried next to his housekeeper, was closed to the public in December 2004, when The Da Vinci Code took off and the number of visitors coming to Rennes-le-Château went through the roof. It’s down here.’
They walked on in silence until they reached the high, solid metal gates protecting the graveyard.
Meredith tilted her head back to read the inscription set in a porcelain pendant above the locked gates.
‘Memento homo quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.’
‘Which means?’ Hal asked.
‘Dust to dust,’ she said. A shiver went down her spine. There was something about the place that made her uncomfortable. A brooding quality in the air, a watchfulness despite the deserted streets. She dug out her notepad and copied down the Latin.
‘Do you write everything down?’
‘Sure do. Occupational hazard.’
She smiled at him and caught the smile he threw back.
Meredith was glad to leave the graveyard behind them. She followed Hal past a stone Calvary, then doubled back up another tiny path to a small statue dedicated to Notre Dame de Lourdes behind wrought-iron railings.
The words PÉNITENCE, PÉNITENCE and MISSION 1891 were carved on the base of the ornate stone pillar.
Meredith stared. There was no getting away from it. That same date kept coming up.
‘This is apparently the actual Visigoth pillar inside which the parchments were found,’ Hal said.
‘Is it hollow?’
He shrugged. ‘I suppose it must be.’
‘Crazy that they would leave it sitting here,’ Meredith said. ‘If this place is such a magnet for conspiracy theorists and treasure-hunters, you’d think the authorities would worry someone would take it.’
Meredith looked attentively at the benign eyes and silent lips of the statue standing on top of the pillar. As she gazed at the stone features, imperceptibly at first, then deeper and more insistent, she saw scratch marks begin to appear on the gentle face. Ridges and furrows, like someone was gouging at the surface with a chisel.
What the hell?
Not trusting the evidence of her own eyes, she stepped forward, stretched out her hand and touched the stone.
‘Meredith?’ said Hal.
The surface was smooth. Quickly, she withdrew her fingers as if she’d been burnt. Nothing. She turned her palms over, as if expecting to see some mark there.
‘Is something wrong?’ he asked.
Only that I’m starting to see things.
‘I’m fine,’ she said firmly. ‘That sun sure is bright.’
Hal looked concerned, which Meredith realised she kind of liked.
‘Anyhow, what happened to the parchments after Saunière found them?’ she asked.
‘He was supposed to have taken them to Paris to have them verified.’
She frowned. ‘That makes no sense. Why would he go to Paris? The logical thing for a Catholic priest would be to head straight to the Vatican.’
He laughed. ‘I can see you don’t read much fiction!’
‘Although playing devil’s advocate for a moment,’ she continued, thinking aloud, ‘the counter-explanation would be, presumably, that he didn’t trust the Church not to destroy the documents.’
Hal nodded. ‘That’s the most popular theory. Dad made the point that if a parish priest in a far corner of France really had stumbled upon some amazing secret – such as a marriage document or proof of descendants going back to the first century AD – then it would have been simpler for the Church to get rid of him rather than go to all the trouble of paying him off.’
‘Good point.’
Hal paused. ‘Although, he had an entirely different theory. ’
Meredith turned to face him, hearing the catch in his voice. ‘Which was?’
‘That the whole Rennes-le-Château saga was just a cover-up, a deliberate attempt to draw attention away from events going on at the same time in Rennes-les-Bains.’
Meredith felt a kick in her stomach. ‘Covering up what?’
‘Saunière was known to be a friend of the family who owned the Domaine de la Cade. There was a run of unexplained deaths in the region – some kind of wolf, mountain cat most likely – but rumours built up about there being some sort of devil marauding across the countryside.’
Claw marks.
‘Although the cause of the fire that destroyed much of the original house in 1897 was never proved, there’s strong evidence that it was started deliberately. Maybe to rid the area of this devil they believed was being harboured in the grounds of the Domaine de la Cade. There was also something about a deck of Tarot cards associated with the Domaine. Saunière was supposed to have been involved in that too.’
The Bousquet Tarot.
‘All I do know is that my uncle and Dad fell out over it,’ Hal said.
Meredith forced herself to keep her voice steady. ‘Fell out?’
‘At the end of April, just before my dad made the decision to come out here for good. I was staying with him in his London flat. I came into the room to catch the tail-end of the conversation. Argument, really. I didn’t hear much of it: something about the interior of Saunière’s church being a copy of an earlier tomb.’
‘Did you ask your father what he meant?’
‘He didn’t want to talk about it. All he would say was that he’d learnt there was a Visigoth mausoleum within the grounds of the Domaine de la Cade, a sepulchre, which was destroyed at the same time as the house caught fire. All that is left is a few old stones, ruins.’
For a second, Meredith was tempted to confide in Hal. Tell him all about the Tarot reading in Paris, about her nightmare last night, about the cards sitting, right now, at the bottom of her closet. About the real reason she had come to Rennes-les-Bains. But something held her back. Hal was fighting his own demons right now. She frowned, remembering again the four-week delay between the accident and the funeral.
‘What precisely happened to your father, Hal?’ she asked, then stopped, thinking she’d gone too far, too fast. ‘I’m sorry, it was presumptuous of me to …’
Hal traced a pattern on the ground with his foot. ‘No, it’s fine. His car ran off the road, on the bend coming into Rennes-les-Bains. Went over into the river.’ He spoke in a monotone, as if deliberately keeping all emotion from his voice. ‘Police couldn’t understand it. It was a clear night. It wasn’t raining or anything. The worst thing was …’
He broke off.
‘You don’t have to tell me if it’s too difficult,’ she said softly, putting her hand in the small of his back.
‘It happened in the early hours of the morning, so the car wasn’t discovered until some hours later. He had been trying to get out, so the door was half open. But the animals had got to him first. His body and face were very badly scratched.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
Meredith glanced back towards the statue on the path, fighting not to link in her mind a tragic accident in 2007 with the older superstitions that seemed to haunt the region. But the connections were hard to ignore.
All systems of divination, like music itself, work through patterns.
‘The thing is, I could accept the situation if it was an accident. But they said he’d been drinking, Meredith. And that’s the one thing I know he’d never do.’ He dropped his voice. ‘Never. If I knew for sure what had happened, one way or the other, it would be all right. Not all right, but I mean I could deal with it. But it’s the not knowing. Why was he there at all, on that stretch of road, at that time? I just want to know.’
Meredith thought of her birth mother’s tearstained face and the blood under her nails. She thought of the sepia photographs and the piece of music and the hollowness inside that had driven her to this corner of France.
‘I can’t deal with not knowing,’ he repeated. ‘Do you understand?’
She wrapped her arms around him and drew him close. He responded, putting his arms around her and folding her into him. Meredith fitted perfectly beneath his broad shoulders. She could smell his aftershave and soap, the soft wool of his sweater tickling her nose. Could feel the heat of him, his anger, his rage, then the despair behind both.
‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘I understand.’
