Tigerman by Nick Harkaway

Author:Nick Harkaway [Harkaway, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2014-05-21T23:00:00+00:00

12. Inquiries

THE SERGEANT HAD been going to the Chapelle Sainte Roseline before he saw Tigerman on the news, and there was no reason to change his plans. In fact, there was every reason to stick to them. He mentioned his destination in passing as he bade farewell to Dirac, so that anyone who asked would know Lester Ferris was off on one of his daft detective projects, but the Frenchman was muttering, ‘Parkour? Silat? Ba Gua? Or, how is it called, that Indian stuff?’ and looking things up on what was apparently an achingly slow Internet connection, and might not entirely have heard. That was fine, too. Dirac would remember being told, would know it had been somewhere ridiculous and unrelated.

The Sergeant drove gratefully, letting the shock of the video footage wash away and taking solace in his decision to stick it out. Part of him yammered questions to which he had no answers, but the mountainsides were empty and endless, and the air was surprisingly cold. Whose footage was it? Why had they released it and was there more? Was he the target, or was Pechorin? Or NatProMan? Or the drug lords, assuming these were different people?

Away on the opposite mountainside was a figure, a shepherd or a hunter. Instinct told him it was a woman; something in the movement was female. She seemed at this distance quite unconcerned. Good for you, he thought. Live your way. Live and wander and do whatever you like. He inhaled, tasted pine, woodsmoke and rain, and when he looked again she was gone, she’d ducked into the trees. There was a limit, he had always found, to the number of times you could chase the same worries round your head. If you let them run, they wore themselves out, and then you could make your choices in the quiet. It helped to be a thousand feet higher than everything you were frightened of, alone in a landscape older than empires.

When the road dipped again, he regretfully turned the air conditioner back on, feeling mild claustrophobia.

Sainte Roseline was a proud stone building held in the crook of a small river. The waters rolled and gurgled from the foot of the mountain to the western shore without ever joining the hasty torrent beneath the Iron Bridge, content to take their time. The same patience hung over the old chapel itself, as if time within the cemetery gates was honeyed and heavy. Bees buzzed and flowers grew up tall around cracked old headstones. The graves here were not tended in the formal sense; the Mancreu people who interred their dead here saw no shame in life springing up from the site of burial. They did not mistake the corpse for the person. But the pathways were well trodden and small gifts rested on some of the stones: miniatures of whisky, sweets, and cigarettes. Somewhere there was a groundsman whose job was to wait a respectable time, then come along and see that these bounties were consumed or taken away, lest their continued presence serve as a reminder of decay.

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