CHAPTER 52
CARCASSONNE
MONDAY 28TH SEPTEMBER
The porter opened the door to the first-class carriage and Victor Constant stepped down to the station platform at Carcassonne.
Un, deux, trois, loup. Like a game of grandmother’s footsteps. Coming to get you, ready or not.
The wind was ferocious. According to the porter, the region was forecast to suffer the worst series of autumn storms for many years. Another, predicted to be even more devastating than those preceding it, was expected to hit Carcassonne perhaps as early as next week.
Constant looked around. Above the railway sidings, the trees were plunging, lunging like unbroken horses. The sky was as grey as steel. Menacing black clouds scudded across the tops of the buildings.
‘This is just the overture,’ he said, then smiled at his own joke.
He glanced along the platform to where his manservant had disembarked with the luggage. In silence, they made their way out through the concourse and Constant waited while his man procured a cab. He watched with little interest as the bargemen on the Canal du Midi lashed their péniches to double moorings, or even to the bases of the lime trees that lined the bank. Water slapped against the brick embankments. In the kiosk selling newspapers, the headline of the Dépêche de Toulouse, the local journal, was talking of a storm that would strike that very evening, with worse to come.
Constant secured lodgings in a narrow side street in the nineteenth-century Bastide Saint-Louis. Then, leaving his man to begin the tedious process of visiting every boarding house, every hotel, every house with private rooms, to show the portrait of Marguerite, Anatole and Léonie Vernier purloined from the apartment in the rue de Berlin, he set out immediately on foot for the old town, the medieval citadel that stood on the opposite bank of the River Aude.
Despite his loathing of Vernier, Constant could not but admire how well he had kicked over the traces. At the same time, he hoped that Vernier’s apparent success in disappearing might lead him to be arrogant, foolish. Constant had paid the concierge in the rue de Berlin handsomely to intercept any communication addressed to the apartment from Carcassonne, relying on the fact that Vernier’s need to remain undiscovered would mean that he did not yet know of his mother’s death. The thought of how the net in Paris was tightening, even while he remained ignorant, gave Constant immense pleasure.
He crossed to the far side via the Pont Vieux. Far below, the Aude swirled black against the sodden banks, and sped over flat rocks and choked river weeds. The water was very high. He adjusted his gloves, attempting to alleviate the discomfort of the soft blistering between the second and third fingers of his left hand.
Carcassonne had changed a great deal since last Constant had set foot in the Cité. Despite the inclement weather, entertainers and men with sandwich boards now handed out tourist brochures, it seemed, on every street corner. He skimmed the tawdry pamphlet, his unforgiving eyes passing over the advertisements for Marseille soaps and La Micheline, a local liqueur, for bicycles and boarding houses.
The text itself was a mixture of civic self-aggrandisement and history rewritten. Constant crumpled the cheap paper in his gloved fist and threw it to the ground.
Constant hated Carcassonne and had good cause to do so. Thirty years ago, his uncle had taken him to the slums of La Cité. He had walked among the ruins, seen the filthy citadins who lived within its crumbling walls. Later that same day, full of plum brandy and opium, in a damask-draped room above a bar in the Place d’Armes, he had had his first experience of a working girl, courtesy of his uncle.
That same uncle was now sequestered in Lamalou-les-Bains, infected by one connasse or another, syphilitic and mad, believing his brain was being sucked out through his nose. Constant did not visit. He had no desire to see how the disease might work, over time, upon him.
She was the first Constant had killed. It was unintentional and the incident had shocked him. Not because he had taken a life, but because it had been so easy to do so. The hand on the throat, the thrill of seeing the fear in the girl’s eyes when she realised that the violence of their coupling was but a precursor to a possession more absolute.
Had it not been for his uncle’s deep pockets and connections in the Mairie, Constant would have had nothing but the galleys or the guillotine to look forward to. As it was, they had left swiftly and without ceremony.
The experience had taught him much, not least that money could rewrite history, amend the ending to any story. There was no such thing as a ‘fact’ when gold was involved. Constant had learned well. He had spent a lifetime binding to him friends and enemies alike, through a combination of obligation, debt and, when that failed, fear. It was only some years later that he understood that all lessons came at a cost. The girl had her revenge after all. She had given him the sickness that was painfully leaching the life from his uncle and would from him. She was beyond his reach, many years below ground, but he had punished others in her place.
As he descended the bridge, he thought again of the pleasure of Marguerite Vernier’s death. A flush of heat shot through him. She had, for a passing moment at least, obliterated the memory of the humiliation he suffered at the hands of her son. The fact remained that, even after so many had passed beneath his depraved hands, the experience was the more pleasurable when the woman was beautiful. It made the game worth the candle.
Stimulated more than he wished by the memory of those hours in the rue de Berlin with Marguerite, Constant loosened his collar at the neck. He could all but smell the intoxicating mix of blood and fear, the distinctive scent of such liaisons. He clenched his fists, remembering the delicious feel of her resistance, the pull and stretch of her unwilling skin.
Breathing fast, Constant stepped down on to the rough cobbles of the rue Trivalle and waited an instant until he again was master of himself. He cast a supercilious eye over the vista before him. The hundreds, thousands of francs spent on the restoration of the thirteenth-century citadel did not seem to have affected the lives of the people of the quartier Trivalle. It was as impoverished and rundown as it had been thirty years ago. Bareheaded, barefoot children sat in filthy doorways. Walls of brick and stone bowed outwards, as if pushed by the broad hand of time. A beggar, swaddled in dirty blankets, her eyes dead and unseeing, held out a grimy hand as he passed by. He paid no heed.
He crossed the Place Saint-Gimer in front of Monsieur Viollet-le-Duc’s ugly new church. A pack of dogs and children were snapping at his heels, calling out for coins, offering their services as guides or messengers. He paid them no heed, until one boy ventured too close. Constant struck him a blow with the metal head of his cane, splitting open his cheek, and the gaggle of urchins backed away.
He arrived at a narrow cul-de-sac on the left, little more than an alleyway, which led up to the base of the ramparts of the Cité. He picked his way up the filthy, slippery street. The surface was coated with a skein of mud the colour of gingerbread. Debris, the flotsam and jetsam of poor lives, covered the streets. Paper wrappings, animal excrement, rotting vegetables too decayed for even the mange-bitten dogs to eat. He was aware of unseen dark eyes watching him from behind slatted shutters.
He stopped before a tiny house in the shadows of the walls and rapped sharply on the door with his walking stick. To find Vernier and his whore, Constant had need of the services of the man who lived within. He could be patient. He was willing to wait for as long as it might take once he had proved to his own satisfaction that the Verniers were in the area.
A wooden hatch shot back.
Two bloodshot eyes widened first in shock, then in fear. The hatch was slammed shut. Then, after the sliding of a bolt and the painful turning of the key in the lock, the door was opened.
Constant stepped inside.
