The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge (39 page)

The Professor paused, wrapped the gun carefully in a white handkerchief, and handed it to Schweigen. Then he leaned forward slightly and weighed every word.

‘As you have no doubt gathered, I too am a member of the Faith, but I cannot believe in a God who demands the deaths of all who serve Him. And despite the vows of secrecy and obedience I have taken I will not honour that trust. Friedrich Grosz is a man of great faith, he will remain faithful to the last,
but the Guide cannot outlive his people
. He must follow them, even as they have followed him. He has gone to the foot of that great telescope on the Cheshire plain, the place where we first witnessed the tangible presence of the Dark Host. You must find him, and save him if you can. He gave me this. It is for you.’

The Judge tore open the envelope bearing the hotel’s crest. The Composer’s handwriting rose unsteadily towards the edge, each word slithering into the next.
Follow me, Dominique – follow me into the Kingdom
. The Judge stood rooted, frozen, her eyes filled with darkness. Schweigen took the paper from her, read the single inscrutable sentence and then stood still, baffled. The Professor settled back into the golden sofa, as if his part in the business was now over, and looked at them both, an unworried host whose guests seemed unable to relax amidst the opulent furniture.

‘I’m going with you,’ snapped Schweigen and dragged her away from the Professor, who had begun nodding sympathetically, as if everyone had agreed with his recent momentous revelations concerning the nature of God. The door flew open and Marie-Thérèse, clutching four tall glasses and a sweating bottle of champagne, wrapped in a starched white cloth, careered into the room.

‘Here I am. We’ve got a whole chariot of food and more drink coming up behind me. Oh! What’s the matter?’ She took in Schweigen and flinched in shock, her voice rising. ‘What’s happened? Tell me what’s happened. Where’s Friedrich?’

_{*  *  *}

The street lights glowed orange across the map spread out upon the Judge’s knees. It was nearing four in the morning, but the dark had not begun to lift. They had left the M
6
and were lost in a small town called Holmes Chapel. Two roundabouts had returned them to the main street. Jodrell Bank was everywhere signposted and nowhere to be found. At least they had outrun the rain, and beyond the sleeping houses a clear half-moon glimmered over the gently swaying trees. The great oaks and chestnuts, now embracing one another across the roadway, loomed like tents, untethered, dripping, insecure. Schweigen had reached his limit. He could no longer think clearly. He had never driven a left-hand-drive car on the left before, was unable to see anything before overtaking, and remained convinced that his beloved Judge was fatally deranged.

‘You can’t know he’d come here. It’s the middle of nowhere. What if Hamid’s lying? He’s probably gone back to Lübeck. Or Berlin. Or what do I know?’

‘Gone home. Without his daughter? Never.’ Her voice was no longer steady and her face already streaked with tears. ‘André, please listen to me. I know what I’m saying. The people of the Faith have departed. There is no one left. And he has given the Guide to me. He will choose the place that is closest to Almaaz. Hamid is right.’

‘Almaaz is a star, Dominique. It’s billions of light years away.’

The Judge gave up.

‘Try left here.’

They hurtled out into the countryside. The flat plain gave way to a gentle undulation and they passed under a nineteenth-century viaduct. The Judge peered out through the windows. Keep going, don’t leave this road. Another brown sign bearing the image of the radio telescope flashed past.

‘Left, left, left,’ screamed the Judge.

And then they saw the dish, fabulous in the ebbing night, a giant white circle, gently indented, hundreds of feet high, vertical on its moorings, a long proboscis pointing straight outwards into the night sky. Neither Schweigen nor the Judge was able to speak. The huge uncanny structure towered above the trees. No houses or lights disturbed the white presence that lifted its perfect face toward the heavens. As they drove closer they saw that the dish was supported by two massive watch towers, tall as pylons, and a network of iron girders, forming another curved mass beneath the solid, parabolic circle. Far beneath the dish a small herd of black-and-white cows grazed on the dark grass. The gigantic shape loomed over the quiet fields, blanched white as a unicorn in the moonlight, its great horn interrogating the stars.

‘Something’s going on,’ snapped Schweigen, and flung the car through the open gates. Why was there no security? What are those lights? The Judge gripped the dashboard. A policeman wearing a bright-yellow reflecting jacket flagged them down.

‘I’m sorry, sir. You can’t go any further. There’s been an incident.’

Through the green-mesh fence they could still see the flames beneath the trees, as if a bonfire of some magnitude was slowly dying away. As the car’s engine fell silent the Judge heard the same loose flapping rush and crack that she had heard in her garden, and a strange steady hum from the giant circle poised above them. She sat, open-mouthed in horror, beside Schweigen, who was still trying to understand his English colleague.

The Judge staggered out of the car, the tears now streaming down her face. Above her the giant dish slowly moved, a gentle roaring from the engines driving the rails on which it turned, to follow the colossal, ceaseless flood of dancing stars, far, far back in time and moving endlessly away from the green world.

‘I’m afraid someone has set fire to themselves at the foot of the dish. Very strange business. God knows what he used. They saw it from the control room. The body went up like an exploding torch.’

‘Ash and dust,’ howled the Judge. ‘There’ll be nothing left, nothing but ash and dust.’

And then she collapsed, hammering her fists against Schweigen’s chest. He had no idea how to comfort her, and gazed at her wet face, lurid and twisted in uncontrolled wretchedness, awash with tears. The blue flashing glare of the police cars and the fire brigade in the last gusts of night air never disturbed the cows, who continued chewing steadily, their long tails drawn out behind them in the wet grass.

‘She’s not the widow, is she, sir?’ murmured the policeman.

‘Pas vraiment.’ Schweigen hesitated. His English failed him. ‘No, she’s not his wife. She’s his Judge.’

‘Righto, sir. I’ll send someone over to talk to you.’

The officer then stood beside the car, utterly confused.

Schweigen rocked her in his arms. He was an honest man. A piece of truth smouldered in his pocket.

‘Dominique, listen. I don’t understand this any more than you do. But he wasn’t planning to die tonight. He can’t have known that the last of the Faith were bent on organising another departure. You heard what Hamid said –
the Guide cannot outlive his people
. The Composer didn’t choose to die as they did. But he had to follow them. That’s what he believed he had to do. Look. I found these in the hotel. Two tickets for Lübeck on the morning plane. One of them’s in your name. He was going home and he counted on taking you with him.’

The Judge sat up straight, her face garish and macabre in the swivelling blaze from the squad cars.

‘Taking me? I can’t go. What do you mean? I won’t go.’ She raged into his face. She gave no sign that she had understood him.

Schweigen abandoned explanations. The lights contradicted the eerie silence of the great white dish; he heard the birds stirring uneasily in the long, bulbous line of trees. Even the voices surrounding the barrier tapes came to them muffled and hushed. Schweigen tried again and spoke for the Composer, who had left them, discarded and stranded, beneath the great white dish, amidst the gathering dew and the flat English fields.

‘He loved you. He wanted you. He loved you as much as I do.’

_{*  *  *}

On the
12
th of June
2001
the Assemblée Générale ratified the draft legislation that defined a sect in precise philosophical and legal terms. The sects could no longer operate on any French territory, neither within the hexagone, nor overseas. Dominique Carpentier watched over the passage of this law into the architecture of the French state with quiet satisfaction. Under the terms of the Composer’s will she became Marie-T’s legal guardian and spent a good deal of her time at the Domaine Laval, revising philosophy and literature. The final exams loomed over them both. The Judge rediscovered her passion for Racine. They read
Andromaque
together, startled at the emotional excess which emerged from satin corsets and rhyming couplets. The Judge occupied Marie-Cécile Laval’s bedroom whenever she stayed at the Domaine, but she changed nothing in the room. She displaced no objects, altered no wallpaper, bedspreads, ornaments or photographs.

Every two months the Judge flew to London to visit Professor Hamid, who had been released on bail, pending his hearing. The British courts decided that he presented no danger to the general public; the Judge harassed his defence team with documents and suggestions. No one could decide where the preliminary hearings should be held. His extremely detailed declaration described two murders, prior to the mass suicides, one in France and one in Switzerland. But nobody initiated any extradition proceedings. The Judge decided to delay the paperwork, thus giving him time to finish his monograph on the recent discoveries uncovered at the ancient astrological monuments in Nineveh. The Book of the Faith remained under lock and key in the bowels of her office. She never allowed the Book to leave the reinforced steel safe, and in that sense she became its Keeper, and its Guardian.

Afterword

Explanations and acknowledgements are not usually added to a work of fiction, but a few words are necessary here. My French-speaking readers will have noticed that I have anglicised the shortened spelling of Marie-Thérèse. Her name would usually be written in French as Marité, or Marithé. To an English eye, unused to French, this would appear to be an entirely different character in the fiction. I have therefore spelt her name Marie-T throughout, in the interests of clarity.

Thank you to the team that produced this book: my agent Andrew Gordon at David Higham, my editor and publisher, Alexandra Pringle, and her colleagues at Bloomsbury, especially Erica Jarnes and Alexa von Hirschberg. I would like to thank Mary Tomlinson in particular, for her astute attention to the detail of the text.

Novelists need help with their inventions. Thank you to the following friends and colleagues: Monsieur and Madame Agneau, Myriam Buades, Lucie Barthès, Ghyslène Chantre, Simone Chiffre, David Evans, Richard Holmes, Anne Jacobs, Peter Lambert, Jenny Newman, Michèle Roberts, Sandrine Sire, Rose Tremain, and all my neighbours, past and present, in the village of St Martial. Jacqueline Martel created the garden at the Domaine Laval. Françoise Brutzkus-Gélinet, Avocat à la Cour d’Appel de Paris, advised me on French law and I am very grateful to her and her colleagues. Dr Tim O’Brien at Jodrell Bank has been very generous with his time and astronomical expertise, and for sharing his knowledge of Hebrew, I am grateful to Professor Philip Alexander from the department of Religions and Theology at the University of Manchester. My first readers are Janet Thomas and Sheila Duncker, and I thank them for all their critical help, suggestions and encouragement. Janet Thomas is one of the other writers who keep me going when the going gets tough. Claude Chatelard painstakingly corrected my French, and Lisbeth Lambert checked the German, for which I am exceedingly grateful. Needless to say, all the remaining errors are mine alone.

I have taken the usual geographical liberties every writer takes with physical space, so that it will be impossible for anyone to find the Judge’s offices in Montpellier, the Domaine Laval, the house in Lübeck, or the Hôtel Belvédère on the slopes of Sète. So far as I am concerned all the characters and sects I have described are entirely fictitious, but the Dark Host is real, and, by the time you are reading this book, the eclipse will already have begun.

Patricia Duncker

Aberystwyth,
2009

A Note on the Author

Patricia Duncker is the author of four previous novels:
Hallucinating Foucault
(winner of the Dillons First Fiction Award and the McKitterick Prize in
1996
),
The Deadly Space Between
,
James Miranda Barry
and
Miss Webster and Chérif
(shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in
2007
). She has written two books of short fiction,
Monsieur Shoushana’s Lemon Trees
(shortlisted for the Macmillan Silver Pen Award in
1997
) and
Seven Tales of Sex and Death
, and a collection of essays on writing and contemporary literature,
Writing on the Wall
. She is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Manchester.