Malediction

  Malediction

  Sally Spedding

  The right of Sally Spedding to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved

  © Sparkling Books Ltd 2012

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, organisations or places is entirely coincidental.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted by any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher. Except in the United States of America, this publication may not be hired out, whether for a fee or otherwise, in any cover or binding other than as supplied by the publisher.

  Cover image © Ryan Burke

  1.0

  BIC code: FH

  ISBN: 978-1-907230-43-1

  ISBN of printed edition: 978-1-9078230-41-7

  For more information visit www.sparklingbooks.com

  PRAISE FOR SALLY SPEDDING

  “Malediction is a horrifying parable of poisoned faith. No one does the darker side of noir like Sally Spedding”

  Andrew Taylor, winner of the Crime Writers' Association diamond dagger

  “Her writing is so distinctly unique it will truly chill you to the bone.”

  Sally Meseg for Dreamcatcher

  “Sally Spedding is a font of creepy stories, the kind of tales which wheedle their way back into your mind, hours maybe days and weeks later…”

  Western Mail

  “Spedding knows that before delivering the set-pieces it’s essential to carefully build suspense through both unsettling incident and sense of locale – at both, she’s unquestionably got what it takes.”

  Barry Forshaw, Crime Time

  “Sally Spedding... has been credited with being a latter day Du Maurier...”

  Crime Squad

  “Sally Spedding is the mistress of her craft.”

  Welsh Books Council

  SALLY SPEDDING was born in Wales and studied sculpture at Manchester and at St. Martin’s, London. Having won an international short story competition, she began writing seriously and her work has won many awards including the H.E. Bates Short Story Prize and the Anne Tibble Award for Poetry. She is the author of six acclaimed crime mystery novels and a short story collection. Other short stories have regularly appeared in the Crime Writers Association anthologies. She is a full member of the CWA and Literature Wales for services to literature in Wales, and adjudicates national writing competitions. She finds both Wales and France complex and fascinating countries – full of unfinished business – and has a bolt-hole in the Pyrenees where most of her writing and dreaming is done.

  www.sallyspedding.com

  ALSO BY SALLY SPEDDING

  Cold Remains

  Wringland

  Cloven

  A Night With No Stars

  Prey Silence

  Come and Be Killed

  Strangers Waiting

  To Clare and Basil from Lansac. With Love.

  MALEDICTION

  List of Characters

  Colette Bataille

  mother of Bertrand

  aka Sister Barbara.

  Bertrand Bataille

  her son

  aka Le Bébé.

  Nelly Augot

  her new-found friend

  aka Yveline.

  Guy Baralet

  Director of Medex

  Colette’s boss.

  Lise Baralet

  his wife. A florist.

  Robert Vidal

  Father Jean-Baptiste of La Sainte Vierge in Lanvière-sur-Meuse.

  Colette’s lover.

  Francke Duvivier

  Father André of Ste Trinité in Les Pradels, Provence.

  aka Thibaut/Kommandant/Haupsturmführer.

  Michel Plagnol

  Father Jérôme of Notre-Dame-de-la-Consolation in Drancy, Paris.

  aka The Pigface.

  Éric Cacheux

  Father Christophe de la Bonté of St. Honoré in the Corbières.

  Dominique Mathieu

  Father Xavier-Marie of La Motte Mauron in Perros Guirec.

  Christian Désespoir

  Abbot of Legrange Vivray, founder of Les Pauvres Soeurs de la Souffrance.

  René Martin

  Deacon of Les Bourreux.

  Raôul Boura

  Bishop of Kervecamp.

  Henri Pereire

  Bishop of Beauregard.

  Philippe Toussirot

  Dominican Bishop of Ramonville.

  Georges Déchaux

  General with NATO peace-keeping forces

  aka Hauptsturmbannführer for the ACJ.

  Nina Zeresche

  Police switchboard trainee.

  Antoinette Ruffiac

  aka Claude Lefêbvre. Receptionist at St. Anne’s hostel

  Déchaux’s chauffeur in Paris.

  Christine Souchier

  aka Romy Kirchner/ ‘ma souris rouge.’

  Giselle Subradière

  aka Simone Haubrey/Patrice Sassoule.

  Marie-Claude Huron

  temp at Medex (where Colette worked)

  aka Julie Borel.

  Sister Agnès

  recruiting nun for Les Pauvres Soeurs.

  Sister Marie-Ange

  Sister Superior.

  Sister Cecilia

  the Inquisitor

  aka ‘the Percheron.’

  Sister Rose

  cleaner.

  Yves Jalibert

  ACJ co-ordinator in Paris.

  Marcel Jalibert

  his son.

  Mordecai Fraenkel

  hotelier at the King David Hotel near the Loire.

  Pauline Fraenkel

  his wife.

  Leila Fraenkel

  their daughter. An artist.

  Michèle Bauer-Lutyens

  receptionist at the King David Hotel.

  INTROIT

  Wednesday August 20th 1997

  The wine had gathered in unexpected places, but most, from Raymond Tessier’s mouth, coursed down his cheek, into the clavicle and out again. A blood river, dulling on the sheet below.

  “Lie still, damn you.” The younger, dark-haired man pressed down on the other priest’s wrists for his own lips to slide south to the left nipple. Warmer than the rest of that pale flesh, but not enough to alter their bristling as each aureole hardened under his licking tongue.

  “Anges de Dieu,” Tessier sighed. The rapist who would destroy a man’s ambition. His reason to go on living.

  “Leave them out of it,” snorted the other, now busy draining his victim’s navel. Hardly a round goblet which wanteth not liquor, more a ferment of secrets and lies, fucking up his promised release from this Boot Camp near Béziers. Then to the business that pushed itself hard against his chin.

  Poor Tessier wanted comfort. Any comfort, but that teasing mouth stayed wilfully closed. No more wine, and definitely nothing else worth drinking. He had the power. As always. The other man’s foreskin hung like an old Tricolore as he breathed along the purple vein raised in desire. Saw the scrotum bald and red against those sunless thighs, then tightened the cord around them until the man’s screams filled his cell.

  Afterwards, as he ran from the scene, the killer checked his watch. Raymond Tessier had taken precisely two minutes, thirty-five seconds to die.

  Now you shall not offer to the Lord anything with its testes bruised or crushed or torn or cut. Exactly. Thank you, Leviticus, though
the best is yet to come.

  And the next time these gifts will be perfect.

  I

  Thursday August 21st 1997

  Colette Bataille could hear the kids down below in the Rue St. Léger on their way to the new roller-skating rink. Snatches of taunts and chants were scarred by the run of blades on tarmac and the sudden staccato jumps on and off the kerb. “Hades must be like this,” she muttered, reviving her lips with a new lipstick, and enlarging both eyes with a soft crayon. Eyes that in two hours’ time she’d use to search her lover’s face for any trace of his old longing. Father Jean-Baptiste – Robert Vidal – priest and assistant choirmaster of the Église de la Sainte Vierge at Lanvière, who’d been put away for three weeks at the Villerscourt Boot Camp for reasons never fully explained.

  There’d been whispers, of course – the most consistent being that his driving ambition with his young church choir here in Lanvière, had spilled over into obsession. That he’d worked them too hard, too long and issued threats to those who’d been absent. But who had dared betray him?

  Lips had stayed sealed.

  She rinsed her hands then checked her watch before peering round her son Bertrand’s bedroom door, as though this would somehow return him to his refuge. She then left the apartment. Twenty steps of black marble down into the catacomb of post-war design, before the sudden slab of sunlight. She squinted up to her windows – saw the red pelagoniums drifted against the down pipe, and her neighbour Dolina Levy’s withered eyes unmoving. Colette waved, too briefly she knew. But not briefly enough. No time to listen, yet again, to tales of her life in Cracow; of her husband and sister taken at gun-point and her flight into the Vosges disguised as a Red Cross nurse. She was late.

  “Another sheep for Le Pape?” growled the old woman.

  “Safety in numbers.” Colette’s voice was thin and unconvincing. Besides, the Peugeot was boiling and she needed to find its key.

  “No safety for us. Never was.”

  “I’m sorry. Everyone is.”

  “Not everyone, and you’d better believe it. Just listen to them out there. And they’re still children.”

  “It’s shocking, I know.”

  The widow craned over her tiny balcony. Two fur slippers poked through the railings next to her cat, ‘Mitzvah’, corpse-like in the sun.

  “Got to go, really.” Colette stored the bags in the boot. His and hers and a decent picnic, then covered them over with Bertrand’s old baby blanket. “Look, I’ll call in when I’m back. That’s a promise.” She waved again, but her neighbour’s face stayed grimly fearful in her mirror as she turned out into the square.

  ***

  Her radio, always tuned to France Musique, was offering a preview of a newly-commissioned work for the Feast of Saint Bartholemew. Atonal chords over a pulsing drum filled her small space. Hardly saintly for the tanner, or the poor Huguenots, she thought on the roundabout for the The Forêt de Dieulet, but then she wasn’t feeling particularly saintly either.

  Ten past nine. He’d taught her that. Always to keep a note of the time. Whatever. Wherever. She smiled. Three weeks had been a long time without him, and she’d allowed work to take up her evenings, staying late at the office, staring at his church through its blinds imagining him without her. So there was no guilt when she’d asked her boss for two days off to attend the Pope’s Mass at Longchamp – he’d even said the break would do her good.

  Now the sun was high enough over the trees to heat her face, and she saw skin forty-four years old. Not tanned exactly, but the way Robert had always liked it. And a curve of hair, gold as the corn of Limousin, he’d once said, newly shaped for the occasion.

  Her heel touched the floor. There was no other traffic, for this was a weekend route to the deer parks and the walks near Nazairolles. She thought of the modest hotel in Paris she’d booked. Just for the two of them, and her hands trembled as the road ahead melted into the haze between trees where a horse and rider cantered along the dark edge of pines.

  She saw the sign for Pouilly, their agreed rendezvous, and suddenly she slowed down. Something was wrong. Two men when there should have been one, black against black like crows, and Robert’s hand raised as though she was a taxi. Feeling cheated, Colette found a lay-by and swung round to meet them head on.

  The Dominicans were running.

  “No questions, please.” Robert held the door for his companion and the chassis dropped as the big man plunged on to the seat next to her. She smelt the institution on them. Incense, cabbage, and something else. “Just go.” Her lover slammed his rear door behind him and clicked his seat belt. “I’ll explain when we’re out of here.”

  “Thanks.” She said drily taking first left and in the stifling silence joined the road to Reims.

  “Turn that crap off.”

  And she obeyed.

  “By the way, Thibaut,” his tone changed. “This is Colette. And Colette, this is Thibaut.” Robert’s teeth were shining, but she knew he’d lied, and the breathless tension trapped them like wasps in a glass of warm beer.

  After ten minutes he cleared his throat and Colette glanced in her mirror to see eyes on fire with a torch for the world, but not for her. Oh no, nothing for her. To him she was invisible, while the other passenger’s sideways stare never moved.

  “So, you’re a priest as well?” Her small flattery broke the deadlock.

  “I’ve tried, God knows.”

  “Such modesty.” Vidal smiled. “The hillbillies of Les Pradels are lucky to have sucked from your soul for so long.”

  “What’s left of it.”

  “Well now, that came from the heart.”

  Their collusion excluded her. She tried to gauge how close they’d grown at the Villerscourt Boot Camp and crashed the gears pulling up at lights, attracting the wrong sort of attention. Robert by now was lying flat on the rear seat, almost face down.

  “In six kilometres there’s a sign on the right. Frites, junk-shit, etcetera. Turn in there,” he ordered, his voice muffled.

  “Why are you hiding like this?” she challenged.

  “I said no questions. Just keep going.”

  Through Nazairolles, the last village before the autoroute and still the two men hid below the windows. Vidal’s breath heavy in his throat. A cyclist drew up alongside. Some boy racer, glancing in, his buttocks perched neatly on the saddle. Colette thought of her own son, Bertrand, inseparable from his wheels, and she surged ahead to lose the rider out beyond the straggle of new houses to the lines of poplars and the brow of a hill. Suddenly Robert reared up. His breath in her hair.

  “Here it is.”

  On to rubble and dust. No shade except under the caravan awning. Beaten up, derelict, its stained Miko sign askew and shutters half open to darkness. Colette parked under a dead hawthorn littered with used toilet paper and attendant flies.

  “Got my things?” Robert was already by the boot. His body language nervous and impatient.

  She opened the boot, peeled back Bertrand’s blanket and their hands met. Just a touch, a brief promise until she looked up and gave a little cry. Her other passenger was also waiting, and for the first time she saw him close-up in gruesome technicolour. His left cheek pitted like a sponge and eyes sunk so deep they reflected no light.

  He laughed at her fear, ducked his bulk behind the Peugeot then lifted his soutane over his head. Her lover the same, but he caught her staring and pierced her with a smile she couldn’t return. “Good enough for His Holiness now? What do you think?” Robert asked, his denims tight round his thighs, arms brown below the sleeves from work in the Villerscourt gardens. She wanted him for herself. To lead him to the field at the back and feel him inside her, like old times. But now it would never be even a memory.

  “It’s a Youth Festival for God’s sake, man. Slick your hair back a bit,” Thibaut growled, then the priest whose real name meant ‘of the fish pond,’ slunk off to squat behind the caravan. Robert Vidal glanced up, saw that same cyclist pass by in a r
ush of sound. Then he turned to face her.

  “You’re lovelier than ever, I have to say, Madame Bataille.” His hands around each of her arms.

  “Robert, don’t.”

  But he pulled her to him, his body lean and firm against hers, so the new mobile in his pocket dug into her hip.

  “What’s that for?” she asked, searching his face.

  “So none of us gets lost.”

  “You’ve never bothered before.”

  “Paris is a big place, remember?”

  She looked again at his olive skin, his melting eyes, and something about the day’s strange encounter told her this might be the last time they’d ever be so close.

  “Just five minutes, Robert. Your friend can wait,” she murmured, finding his mouth, but the priest eased away studying with unnerving detachment her oval face and its interrupted lips. He touched her chin then tweaked its errant hook of hair that caught the sun. He’d been looking for a flaw, a way out of his predicament. And this would do.

  ***

  “Best be off,” he said as the older man appeared, zipping up his boots. “Done your bit for nature and for God, I see.” Robert pulled his own shirt from his armpits. Suddenly Duvivier stopped. Fixed him with the same cold disdain he’d shown at the graves in Carpentras. Whitebait eyes. Dead already.

  In that moment, Colette knew the score. This creature was obviously in charge. Le chef de parti. And theirs was no pilgrimage but a sick charade, to what end she wasn’t yet sure.

  “It’ll take three hours with the traffic,” she said, arranging her skirt and setting her sunglasses in place.

  Better to think of Bertrand. Something at least redeeming. I wonder if I’ll spot him in all those crowds. Maybe he’ll pretend not to know me...

  The ex-student had saved up all his dole money since April for this, his first trip away since a final-year visit to the Futuroscope. Now it was Longchamp for World Peace Day and the Pope’s Mass, just a day before, and two weeks from his twenty-fourth birthday.