Seeking Whom He May Devour (15 page)

At Les Écarts things seemed to be happening in slow motion, the way they do in the run-up to a funeral. Buteil and Soliman seemed like rag dolls as they set about kitting out the lorry. Camille went up to them and dumped her rucksack. Seen close up, the lorry looked more like a livestock pen than anything else. Buteil was training the hose on the floor and panels of the loading platform, making a thick black gunge of straw and animal shit squirt out of the side panels and onto the ground. Soliman was unfolding the lengths of tarpaulin that were intended to make a roof over the loading area. Because the lorry – and Camille only now grasped what this meant
– was going to serve as their sleeping quarters too.

“Don’t worry,” Buteil shouted over the hiss of the water jet. “This lorry’s like Beauty and The Beast, it can metamorphose. I’ll have it turned into a three-star hotel in a couple of hours.”

“Buteil has often taken his family for outings in the lorry,” Soliman explained. “Trust him, you’ll have your own bedroom in no time at all, and all mod cons.”

“If you say so,” Camille said doubtfully.

“But I can’t hide the fact that it does smell a bit. We can’t get rid of the odour completely. It’s ingrained in the wood.”

“I see.”

“And in the metal too.”

“Indeed.”

Suddenly the pressure in the hose died. Soliman looked at his watch. Ten thirty.

“Must get changed,” he said in a quavering voice. “It’s going to be time.”

Sol and Buteil encountered Johnstone driving his motorbike dead slow the other way up the unmade road. He was wearing a dark suit. He put the bike on its kickstand and took Camille in his arms.

“You weren’t at home,” he said. “Is there an emergency at Les Écarts?”

“I’m going with Soliman and Watchee after the funeral. They want to track down Massart, but they haven’t got a licence.”

“I don’t see the connection.” Johnstone stepped back to look at Camille.

“I can drive.”

Johnstone shook his head. “You must have done that on purpose,” he said with stifled emotion. “You got your HGV licence on purpose. Couldn’t resist it, could you?”

Camille shrugged. “It just happened. When the band was on tour in Germany, the road manager didn’t want to drive all day and all night. So he taught me, to help out, as we went along.”

“A trucker, my god, a girl trucker,” Johnstone said as Camille and Camille alone obliged him to remove great chunks from his ideal of womanhood.

“Lorry driving is not beneath one’s dignity,” she said.

“It’s not frightfully refined, either.”

“Can’t deny that.”

“Anyway, what’s all this about chauffeuring Soliman and Watchee? Where are you going to set them down?”

“That is the question, Lawrence. I’m not taking them anywhere in particular. I’m driving them wherever and for as long as it takes for them to lay their hands on Massart.”

“You mean to say those two guys really have decided to look for Massart?” said Johnstone with growing disquiet.

“That’s right.”

“And you’re taking them in a truck? You’re going away?”

“Yes. Not for too long,” she added uncertainly.

Johnstone put his two hands on her shoulders.

“Are you leaving?” he asked again.

Camille raised her eyes. An expression of pain flitted across the trapper’s face. He shook his hair.

“But not straight away,” he said as he gripped Camille’s shoulder tightly. “Stay by me. Stay for tonight.”

“Sol wants to set off straight after the funeral.”

“One night.”

“I’ll be back. I’ll call.”

“It’s senseless,” Johnstone muttered.

“The police aren’t doing anything and the man will kill again. You said so yourself.”

“God! I’m telling you to stay.”

“Neither of them can drive.”

“I want you to stick around,” Johnstone almost commanded.

Camille shook her head slowly. “They’re counting on me,” she said in a whisper.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Johnstone swore as he moved off. “An old man, a boy-child and a girl stalking a man like Massart! Who the hell do you three imagine you are?”

“I don’t imagine anything. I’ll just do the driving.”

“You imagine you’re going to catch Massart!”

“Could happen.”

“Don’t make me laugh. Catching a murderer isn’t like playing tag. You need leads.”

“If he savages any more sheep, we’ll follow his trail.”

“Trailing behind isn’t catching up.”

“We can find things out, find out what car he’s driving. When we’ve got that, we’ll have a chance of spotting him. It could take a few days, perhaps.”

“Is that all they want to do with him?” Johnstone asked suspiciously.

“Soliman was supposed to kill him and Watchee was going to open him up from his neck to his balls, but only when he was dead, as a humanitarian gesture. I told them
I
wouldn’t drive their bloody lorry unless we brought Massart back in one piece.”

“It’s dangerous,” Johnstone said, his temper rising from frustration. “It’s a grotesque and dangerous idea.”

“I know.”

“So why do it?”

Camille paused. “Things just clicked,” was all she said by way of explanation. For the moment she couldn’t think of any better reason.

“That’s bullshit,” Johnstone growled as he approached her again. “You’d better get things to unclick.”

Camille shrugged. “Sometimes things just click for all sorts of lousy reasons, but loads of good reasons just can’t unclick them ever again.”

Johnstone felt quite defeated. “All right,” he said gloomily. “Which truck are you driving?”

“That one,” said Camille, with a nod towards the livestock transporter.

“That object,” Johnstone said professorially, “is a livestock transporter. It is a cattle wagon. It reeks of shit and sheep grease. It is not a truck.”

“Yes it is, apparently. Buteil says that after a good wash and dry behind the ears, with the back kitted out and the ragtop on, it’ll be like a three-star hotel on wheels.”

“It’ll be a stinking hovel and nothing else. Camille, have you really thought this through?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re going to sleep with those two guys in the same small space? Have you thought that through too?”

“Yes. Things went click, that’s all.”

“Have you thought about being spotted by Massart?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, you
should
think about it. That flimsy canvas isn’t going to give you much protection against him in the dark of night, is it?”

“We’ll hear him coming.”

“So what, Camille? What will an old man, a boy-child and a girl do when they hear him coming?”

“I don’t know. Put our heads together, I suppose.”

Johnstone threw his arms wide in a gesture of utter impotence.

XVII

AFTER THE FUNERAL
a wake for Suzanne Rosselin was held at Les Écarts. There was a lot to say. The burial had been a disturbingly plain affair, in accordance with the instructions Suzanne had left with her lawyer four years beforehand, stipulating that she would have no truck “with flowers and gold-plated handles”, that she’d rather “the kid kept her savings so as to go and visit the land of his forefathers”, and lastly that her old ewe Mauricette be laid to rest beside her when her time came – “because though you couldn’t say she was a bright spark Mauricette had been a loving and faithful companion and could the priest please say a word about her in his sermon”. The lawyer pointed out that this last pagan wish stood not the slightest chance of being fulfilled and Suzanne said she did not give a damn for dogma and she’d go and see the damnfool priest herself to sort out the matter of Mauricette.

The priest apparently remembered the earful he had had from Suzanne and did make a clumsy reference to the deceased’s great attachment to her flock.

By four the last car had driven away from Les Écarts. Camille’s head was buzzing as she went back to the lorry where Buteil was still at work. The more she thought about how the transporter was being got ready the more it worried her.

Buteil was sitting on the running board at the back of the lorry, smoking a nostalgic cigarette.

“She’s ready,” he said as he saw Camille approaching.

Camille looked the vehicle over. The tarpaulin was stretched over the roof bars and halfway down the sides. The grey bodywork had been cleaned, up to a point.

Buteil slapped the side panel with the flat of his hand and made the whole rust-bucket resound like a drum, as if he were about to introduce a circus artiste.

“Just twenty years old and in her prime,” he declaimed. “A 508 is a sturdy lass, but she does have a few drawbacks. She has drum brakes, so you do have to stand on them on long downhills; there’s no power steering, so you do have to lean on it hard to get round bends. Apart from which the steering is really soggy. And the pedals have lost their spring. That’s the only thing about the lorry that shows her real age.”

Buteil turned to Camille and looked her up and down with an expert eye. It was an elongated body with thin arms and delicate wrists.

He made a clucking noise with his tongue, and said, “It’s all very well for a woman to have arms like that, but it’s not so fine for a lorry-driver. I don’t know if you’ll be able to control her.”

“I’ve driven things like that before,” Camille said.

“Round here the bends are damn sharp. You have to really spin that wheel.”

“So I’ll spin it.”

“Get in, I’ll show you around. I always set it up like this when I take the kids for a drive.”

Buteil pulled down the tailgate with a clang and clambered up. Inside the transporter the heat was stifling and Camille was overcome by the odour of natural lanolin.

“Smells less when she’s moving,” Buteil explained. “She’s been cooking in the sun all afternoon.”

Camille nodded and Buteil took that as an encouragement to play the major-domo and give a guided tour of the facilities. The loading platform was more than eighteen feet long, so Buteil had set up four camp beds lengthways, two up front and two at the rear, with a canvas curtain separating the two pairs.

“Like that you’ve got two bedrooms, each with natural light, too,” he complimented himself. “If you want to see outside – or if you want to see anything inside, comes to the same thing really – all you have to do is raise the canvas, like a Venetian blind. And when you want to be private, you drop it down again.”

Buteil raised the tarpaulins to demonstrate, and light flooded in through the slats that made up the side-wall, illuminating the whole of the back of the transporter. “And here,” he said as he moved towards the rear and pulled aside a thick canvas curtain, “you have the bathroom.”

Camille inspected the home-made shower assembly with its thirty-gallon water tank made from a recycled boiler.

“Where’s the pump?” she asked.

“Over here,” said Buteil. “You’ll need to fill her up every other day. And there’s the toilet. Same system as on the railways of old, you release as you go. Now at the other end we have the bottle-gas cooker – you’ve got a full bottle, by the way. In the larger box here you’ll find cooking utensils, bed linen, pocket lamps, the whole caboodle. Over there are the folding stools. Under the beds there’s a drawer for your personal belongings. It’s all there. All been thought out. It all works.”

“I believe you,” Camille said.

She sat down on one of the two beds at the rear, the one on the off-side. She let her eyes wander over the 120 square feet of baking-hot interior space that the livestock transporter provided. The white sheets and pillowcases that Buteil had put on the bunks stood out in sharp contrast to the black floor, the peeling paintwork and the shabby canvas. She was slowly becoming accustomed to the smell. She was beginning to make the soggy mattress she was sitting on a thing of her own. She was coming to think of the lorry as hers. Buteil looked at her with pride and concern.

“It all works,” he repeated.

“It’s perfect, Buteil,” she said.

“And don’t worry about the smell. It goes off when you get the old girl moving.”

“And when she’s not moving? When we’re asleep?”

“Well, when you’re asleep you can’t smell a thing. Seeing as you’re asleep.”

“I’m not worried.”

“Do you want to try her out?”

Camille signalled agreement and followed Buteil round to the driver’s door. She climbed the two footholds and settled into the driving seat, adjusted the position, and stretched out her arms to grasp the large, hand-scorching steering wheel. Buteil handed over the key and withdrew. Camille switched on, engaged first gear and steered the hulk slowly down the sheep farm’s unmetalled drive. First gear, full lock, stop; clutch, reverse, reverse lock, go, stop; clutch, first, and back up the drive. Switch off.

“I’ll manage just fine,” she said, climbing down from the cab.

Buteil gave Camille the vehicle papers as if she had just earned them by executing a three-point turn. And at that moment Soliman turned up, dragging his heels, with a drawn expression on his face and bloodshot eyes.

“We’ll be off as soon as you’re ready,” he said to Camille.

“Aren’t we eating before we go?”

“We’ll eat in the lorry. The more time we lose, the further away the vampire gets.”

“I am ready,” Camille said. “Get your things and bring Watchee with you.”

Ten minutes later Camille was smoking a cigarette, sitting beside Buteil at the back of the van, when she saw Soliman return with a rucksack on his back and a dictionary under his arm.

“Your bed is front off-side,” Buteil determined.

“Fine,” said Soliman.

“Sol’s a finicky lad,” said Buteil. “He’ll take an age to sort his drawer.”

“Buteil,” Soliman shouted from inside the truck, “your transporter hasn’t stopped smelling of livestock, you know.”

“So what am I supposed to do about that?” said the major-domo somewhat aggressively. “We don’t grow courgettes, do we now? We raise sheep!”

“Calm down, I was only saying there’s a pong.”

“Apparently it disappears when we’re on the road,” Camille put in.

“Exactly.”

Johnstone was coming towards them with Watchee in tow.