A Season in Hell

He turned and walked off without another word, whistling tunelessly, and Agnès left too, pausing only at the first public telephone she came to, to call the police.

‘Emergency?’ she demanded. ‘I was just walking past the slipway up from Rue de la Croix when I saw what looked like a body in the water.’

‘Name, please,’ the duty officer said, but she had already replaced the receiver and was hurrying away.

The duty officer filled details of the incident on the right form and passed it to the dispatcher. ‘Better send a car.’

‘Do you think it might be a crank?’

The other shook his head. ‘More likely some whore doing the night beat by the river who just doesn’t want to get involved.’

The dispatcher nodded and passed the details on to a patrol car in the area. Not that it mattered, for at that very moment, the gendarme who had spoken to Eric Talbot earlier walked down the slipway for the purposes of nature and discovered the body for himself.

Given the circumstances, the police investigation was understandably perfunctory. The gendarme who had found the body interviewed Marie at La Belle Aurore, but she had long since learned that in her line of business it paid to see and hear nothing. Yes, the young, man had visited the café. He’d asked where he might get a room. He’d seemed ill and asked for a cognac. She’d given him a couple of addresses and he’d left. End of story.

There was the usual postmortem the following morning, and three days later, an inquest at which, in view of the medical evidence, the coroner reached the only possible verdict. Death by drowning while under the influence of alcohol and drugs.

The same afternoon the body of the boy known as Walker was delivered to the public mortuary in the Rue St Martin, a superior name for a very mean street, where appropriate documentation was to be prepared for the British Embassy. Not that such documentation ever arrived, thanks to a cousin of Valentin, an old lady employed as a cleaner and washer of bodies, who intercepted the necessary package before it left the building.

No possible query could be raised the following morning when Jago presented himself, in the guise of a cultural attaché from the British Embassy, with all the necessary documentation. The much respected firm of undertakers, Chabert and Sons, would take charge of the body, providing it with a suitable coffin. The grief-stricken family had arranged for it to be flown by a charter aircraft the following day from a small airfield called Vigny, a few miles out of Paris. From there, the flight plan would take it to Woodchurch in Kent where the remains would be received by the funeral firm of Hartley Brothers. All was in order. The documents were countersigned, the regulation black hearse appeared to bear the body away.

The premises of Chabert and Sons were situated by the river and, by coincidence, not too far away from where Eric Talbot had met his death. The building dated from the turn of the century, a splendid mausoleum of a place, with twenty chapels of rest where relatives could visit the loved one to mourn in some decent privacy before the burial.

As with many such old-established firms in most European capitals, Chabert’s had a night attendant, a row of bells above his head. There was a bell for each chapel of rest, a cord plated between the corpse’s hands against the unlikely event of an unexpected resurrection.

But at ten o’clock that evening, the attendant was snoring loudly in a drunken stupor, thanks to the bottle of cognac thoughtfully left on his desk by some grieving relative. He was long gone when Valentin carefully unlocked the rear door with a duplicate key and entered, followed by Jago. They each carried a canvas holdall.

They paused beside the glass-walled office. Jago nodded at the attendant. ‘He’s well away.’

‘Bloody old drunk,’ Valentin said contemptuously. ‘One sniff of a barmaid’s apron is all he needs.’

They proceeded along the corridor flanked by chapels of rest on either side. There was the smell of flowers everywhere and Jago said in French, ‘Enough to put you off roses for the rest of your life.’

He paused at the door of one chapel and glanced in. The coffin was raised on an incline, the lid half down, a young woman visible, the face touched with unnatural colour by the embalmer.

Jago lit a cigarette with one hand and paused. ‘Like a horror movie,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Dracula or something like that. Any minute now, her eyes will open and she’ll reach for your throat.’

‘For God’s sake, shut up,’ Valentin croaked. ‘You know I hate this part.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Jago told him as they continued along the corridor. ‘I think you’ve done very well. What is this, the seventh?’

‘It doesn’t get any easier,’ the Frenchman said.

‘Intimations of mortality, old stick.’

Valentin frowned. ‘And what in the hell is that supposed to mean?’

‘You’d need an English public-school education to understand.’ Jago paused and glanced in the last chapel on the right. ‘This must be it.’

The coffin was the only one closed. It was constructed in dark mahogany, the handles and studwork of gilded plastic in case cremation was favoured. Normally, international regulations concerning the air freight of corpses required a sealed metallic interior, but this was habitually waived in the case of small aircraft flying at under ten thousand feet.

‘All right,’ Jago said.

Valentin unscrewed the lid and parted the linen shroud underneath to reveal the body of Eric Talbot. There were two enormous scars running from the chest to the lower stomach, roughly stitched together, relics of the postmortem. Valentin had spent two years as a conscript in the French Army, had served as a medical orderly. He’d seen plenty of corpses in Chad when he was on attachment to the Foreign Legion, but this was something he could never get used to. Sometimes he cursed the day he’d met Jago, but then the money …

He opened one of the holdalls, took out an instrument case, selected a scalpel and started to work on the stitches, pausing only to wipe sweat from his forehead.

‘Get on with it,’ Jago told him impatiently. ‘We haven’t got all night.’

The air was tainted now, the sickly sweet smell of corrupt flesh quite unmistakable. Valentin finally removed the last stitches, paused, then eased the body open. Normally, the internal organs were replaced after the postmortem, but in a case such as this, where the body faced a considerable delay before burial, they were usually destroyed. The chest cavity and abdomen were empty. Valentin paused, hands trembling.

‘A sentimentalist at heart. I always knew it.’ Jago opened the other holdall and took out one plastic bag of heroin after another, passing them across. ‘Come on, hurry up. I’ve got a date.’

Valentin inserted one bag into the chest cavity and reached for another. ‘Boy or girl?’ he said viciously.

‘My goodness, I see I’m going to have to chastise you again, you French ape.’ Jago smiled gently, but the look in his eyes was terrible to see.

Valentin managed a weak laugh. ‘Only joking. Nothing intended.’

‘Of course. Now get the rest of it inside and sew him up again. I want to get out of here.’

Jago lit another cigarette and went out, moving along the corridor to the chapel at the end. There were a few chairs, a sanctuary lamp casting a glow over the small altar and brass crucifix. All very simple, but then, he liked that. Always had done since he was a boy in the family pew in the village church, his father’s tenants sitting respectfully behind. There was a stained-glass window with the family coat of arms dating from the fourteenth century with the family motto: I do my will. It summed up his own philosophy exactly, not that it had got him anywhere in particular. He tipped his chair back against the wall.

‘Where did it all go wrong, old son?’ he asked himself softly.

After all, he’d had every advantage. An ancient and honourable name, not the one he used now, of course, but then one had to preserve the decencies. Public school, Sandhurst, a fine regiment. Captain at twenty-four with a Military Cross for undercover work in Belfast and then that unfortunate Sunday night in South Armagh and four very dead members of the IRA whom Jago hadn’t seen any point in taking in alive, had taken every pleasure in finishing off himself. But then that snivelling rat of a sergeant had turned him in and the British Army, of course, did not operate a shoot-to-kill policy.

It wasn’t so much that he’d minded being quietly cashiered, although it had nearly killed his father. It was the fact that the bastards had taken the Military Cross back. Still, old history now. Long gone.

The Selous Scouts hadn’t been too particular in the closing year in Rhodesia before independence. Glad to get him, as were the South Africans for work with their commandos in Angola. Later, there was the war in Chad where he’d first met Valentin, although he’d been lucky to get out of that one alive.

And then Smith, the mysterious Mr Smith, and three very lucrative years, and the most extraordinary thing was that they had never met, or at least, not as far as Jago knew. He didn’t even know what had put Smith onto him in the first place. Not that it mattered. All that did matter was that now there was almost a million pounds in his Geneva account. He wondered what his father would say to that. He got up and returned to the chapel of rest.

Valentin had carefully restitched the body and was replacing the shroud. Jago said, ‘Five million pounds street value. He’s richer in death than he knows.’

Valentin screwed down the lid again. ‘Six, maybe seven if it was diluted.’

Jago smiled. ‘Now what kind of rat would pull a stroke like that? Come on, let’s get moving.’

They went past the office where the attendant still slept and stepped out into the alley. It was raining and Jago turned up his collar. ‘Okay, you and Agnès be at Vigny tomorrow, one o’clock sharp, for the departure. When the plane takes off, ring the usual number in Kent.’

‘Of course.’ They had reached the end of the alley. Valentin said awkwardly, ‘We were wondering. That is, Agnès was wondering.’

‘Yes?’ Jago said.

‘Things have been going well. We thought a little more money might be in order.’

‘We’ll see,’ Jago said. ‘I’ll mention it to Smith. You’ll hear from me.’