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Chapter 4

The smell of decay was obscure but pungent. This was new. Maybe that rat had died down here, somewhere, in the night. Julia looked around at the shadows, eating into deeper blackness.

She was crouching in the furthest reach of the Cave of the Swelling with Ghislaine Quoinelles, her team leader. Ghislaine was the sixty-something leader of the archaeology department of northern Languedoc – just one remote branch of the labyrinthine French bureaucracy for archaeology. He was, for this season, her boss.

‘Oui oui. Hmm. C’est un peu petite . . .’

Still no decision. Julia tutted, inwardly: reining in her impatience.

But it was difficult; because Julia had never really liked Ghislaine. He was a helplessly off-putting guy, supercilious to his inferiors yet obsequious to his superiors. And he drooled. He was drooling now as he crouched on the cave floor and examined the skull, his lower lip was pouting, kissing the air, like a salivating gourmand contemplating a broiled ortolan. Was he intending to eat the skull?

She had to wait for his verdict. He was the boss. And she needed his approval to make this her project, to secure her rights to her own discovery, to quarantine the cave until she could return next season and investigate further; then she could write a paper and make her name. Or at least, begin to make her name. And this was maybe her best chance.

And she could so easily have not had the chance! The only reason she was here was an offhand remark by a friend, in her department in London, who had mentioned a dig in the south of France. Not far from the great caves. There was room for an archaeologist from England. For a season. The offer had immediately gripped Julia with that old and giddy excitement. Proper archaeology. Dirt archaeology.

And so Julia had scraped together her savings and begged a sabbatical from her slightly sneering boss and she had left for France with high hopes and she had spent a summer digging in France – the birthplace of human Art! 30,000 years ago! – and at first she had found nothing, because there was nothing to find any more; and right up until yesterday it had seemed her sabbatical was going to dwindle away into disappointment, like everything else, like her career, like too many relationships.

But now she had found The Skulls.

She had achieved something. Hadn’t she?

‘What do you think, Ghislaine?’

‘Wait. Please. Enough. La patience est amere, mais son fruit est doux . . .’

Julia obeyed. Bridling, she obeyed.

Ghislaine was a smart man. He was also a gifted linguist: able to slip between English and French – and German and Chinese – with ease. Julia was thankful for this as she was embarrassed by her possibly hick, certainly poor, Quebecoisinflected French: she and Ghislaine could speak English together.

She waited, stifling her anxiety and excitement, as Ghislaine poked at the dust. His trousers creaked as he did this.

His trousers often creaked, because they were often leather.

Ghislaine Quoinelles dressed thirty or maybe forty years too young. Today’s leather jacket and leather jeans combination was especially risible. His haircut was the normal ludicrous pompadour, obviously dyed.

Crossing her arms against the cold, Julia wondered if she was being hard on Ghislaine: she knew that Ghislaine had been something important a long time ago, a student revolutionary, a soixante-huitard: an upper-class leader of the leftish student rebels in the socially turbulent Paris of 1968. Indeed, she’d been shown black and white pictures of him – shown them by Annika – grainy shots of a handsome Ghislaine in Paris leading the kids, photos of him in sit-ins, interviews with him in Le Monde, profiles of him alongside Danny the Red and other famous young radicals.

So he had once been a virile and cerebral young communist in a country that worshipped daring and sexy intellectuals. Once he had been in possession of an exquisite future. Now he was, somewhat mysteriously, an ageing professor in a remote part of France doing a rather obscure job: and perhaps the absurdly young clothes were Ghislaine’s way of holding on to the better part of his life, when he had been halo’d by momentary fame, when his hair wasn’t stupid.

A hint of pity for Ghislaine stung at Julia. She wanted not to dislike him. She didn’t like disliking people. Such a waste of time. And someone must have loved him, once.

Still, the leather was ludicrous.

‘The skull it is obviously male. Yes yes. But the skeletons . . .’ Ghislaine hesitated, and took out his eyeglass to scrutinize the vertebrae. Then he turned:

‘I am finished, Miss Kerrigan.’

At these words Julia’s hopes ascended – and subsided almost immediately afterwards.

Something was wrong. Maybe.

Despite the initial expression of intrigue, and even delight, Ghislaine now seemed less than impressed. With a beckoning signal, he backed away, into the higher, wider part of the cave.

‘Yes,’ Ghislaine muttered, ‘quite an interesting discovery, but not so unusual.’

With his expensive German pen, he pointed down and along, at the wholly disinterred skull. ‘These trephinations are moderately common in this region, and this era, the Gorge of the Tarn, and the grottes in the Causse Mejean, they have yielded similar fruit. We see this quite a lot.’

‘But the wounded children, the flints? Surely?’

‘Non. They are typique.’

‘Typical? Typical?? I’ve never seen anything like this and –’

Ghislaine frowned – but said nothing; he turned and walked towards the ladder. She watched his leather trousers as he ascended the steel rungs, to the winds and skies of the plateau. Supplicant and pleading, she followed. What exactly was Ghislaine saying? Was she going to get the chance to exploit her find?

The fresh air was cold and dank, almost colder than the cave. Julia gazed about. The forests of the Cevennes stretched away beneath them, rolling down to the sunlit coast. Down there in Cannes and Nice and Collioure it was still summer, yet up here on the massif it was autumn. A crackle of lightning flashed away to the east; black luftwaffes of clouds were rolling in.

Ghislaine was on his mobile, chattering away in quick, posh, impenetrably Parisian French. Julia walked a few yards away, tuning out. Waiting nervously for the final verdict. What was wrong? Surely this find was important? Maybe he just needed to be persuaded?

The professor had finished his phone call. And now, without a word he started marching to his car, parked on the road by an abandoned farmhouse, a kilometre along the cattle path.

The rain was falling now. Julia pursued her boss. She had to know. Her heartbeat matched her excitement. She stammered:

‘Ghislaine, sir, I mean – Monsieur, sir, Monsieur Quoinelles I need to know. Can I do the next season? I can can’t I? The bones, I am sure there is something here. That is OK isn’t it? I have ideas. I know you think this is typical but really really I do have an idea and –’

He swivelled. There was a look on his face she had never seen before. Contempt. Not the laughable pomposity or the risible vanity of before. Contempt. He snapped:

‘The crania will be taken tomorrow, and the skeletons. There are museums which can accommodate them, perfectly. They will find their home in Prunier, naturally.’

‘But –’

‘You have heard of Prunier? Ah no. Of course not.’ Another contemptuous snort. ‘Miss Kerrigan, I will not need you next season. Your job here is complete.’

This was stunning. This was a stunning disappointment.

‘What?’

‘You are relieved, is that how you phrase it? Retired. Finished. I need you no longer.’

‘But, Ghislaine, please, this is the best find I have ever made, I know I make mistakes and –’

‘Ca suffit!’ He pouted, angrily. ‘Go home, go home now. Go to Canada. They have history there, do they not? Some of your post offices are thirty years old.’

The rain was heavy, the thunder rumbling. Julia felt the blackness closing in, on all her dreams. Her wild dreams of yesterday. The Find of the Season. The Justification for Everything.

‘But this was my find! This is unfair! Ghislaine, you know it is unfair.’

‘Pfft. Your discovery is mediocre, and indeed it is shit.’ Ghislaine’s black hair was damped by the rain, his leather trousers were smeared with mud, he made an absurd yet slightly menacing figure.

And now Julia found herself backing away. She was alone here, in the emptiness, not a farmer for miles, all the villages abandoned: alone with Quoinelles. And she had the horrible sense of physical threat. His angry finger was jabbing the air.

‘What do you know? You learn in your American colleges and yet you have not heard of these things? You know nothing. The skulls and skeletons are just typical. Typical shit. Shit. Just shit. I expect you to return your carte d’identite tomorrow.’

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.