Death Spins the Wheel (The Inspector Littlejohn Mysteries Book 22) by George Bellairs

Author:George Bellairs [Bellairs, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Agora Books
Published: 2018-08-02T04:00:00+00:00

12

Grande Chartreuse

After lunch, Dorange, energetic and impulsive suggested that he and the Archdeacon might make the journey to the Grande Chartreuse to see Father Laurent right away.

‘It’s about two hundred kilometres from here — a little over a hundred and twenty miles. We should manage it there and back, with an hour to spare with Father Laurent.’

‘Arriving back here about midnight, all being well?’

‘Yes.’

‘Right,’ said the Archdeacon.

It was evident that the other three policemen thought they’d gone mad, but they said nothing, wished them bon voyage, and saw them off in a police car.

‘Good luck… And they’ll need it,’ said Floret, knowing something about Dorange’s furious driving. Instead of slackening speed on busy roads, the man from Nice always switched on the siren and left the rest behind.

The arrangement suited Littlejohn very well. He was anxious to get back to the Isle of Man, partly for the sake of Knell, whose condition worried him, and again, he felt that the final curtain would fall there and not in France.

The Archdeacon was eager to visit this remote retreat and to take advantage of the privilege granted to Father Laurent to break his vow of silence, to discuss other things than crime with him. Now, although used to being driven from place to place in the Isle of Man in Teddy Looney’s old rattletrap at between twenty-five and thirty miles an hour, he felt the end justified the means and watched the speedometer of the police car with equanimity.

Dorange, who knew the region well, took short cuts along secondary roads as far as Annecy where they joined the main road to Chambéry through the picturesque and varying countryside and passing Aix-les-Bains and the lake of Le Bourget. At Chambéry they pressed on through Les Echelles by the road along the River Guiers to St. Laurent-du-Pont. There they slackened speed up the gorge of Guiers-Mort and penetrated into the heart of the mountain range, entered the Desert which is a prelude to the domain of the monastery of La Grande Chartreuse, and came into the lovely wooded meadows set among huge peaks, with the Grand-Som dominating them all.

The locality was a natural retreat for the men of the Resistance who held their meetings and camps there in wartime. A closed world, a vast citadel of chalk cliffs with few openings and parallel valleys ending in forests and wilderness.

It was half-past five when they arrived at the monastery and evening was already drawing-in. The austere grey buildings, relieved by six gabled towers, stood in an exquisite valley hemmed-in by mountains. There were a few cars and motor-coaches parked in the outer courtyard and the last of the tourists were busy in the shop buying souvenirs, postcards and bottles of the famous liqueur.

The Archdeacon and Dorange were expected. The Carthusian order is a silent one and visitors are not allowed in the monastery itself. On this occasion Father Laurent had been granted a dispensation and the brother who was expecting them led them to one of the thirty-six cells, each occupied by one of the Fathers.

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