Clovenhoof 03 Godsquad Read online

  Em gave him a withering look.

  “You know, you can’t fight an army of dicks if you’re going to be one yourself.”

  At the local Carrefour, Antoine Chevrolet bought several packs of luxury dog food.

  “These are the ones mummy buys, aren’t they?” he asked of little Anna as they loaded up the car.

  “Mummy’s gone,” said little Anna.

  “Just back to work. Important stuff. Computer stuff.” Antoine inspected one of the tins. The dog on the label looked very happy. At those prices, it ought to. “Let’s see if this helps dear Milou get back to her usual perky self,” he said.

  Dear little Milou had been off her food for more than a day. Antoine Chevrolet was certain her encounter with that horrible shaggy beast was to blame.

  “Big doggy,” said little Anna.

  “Yes, it was,” said Antoine. “But it was a wolf.”

  “Big doggy!”

  “No, a wolf.”

  “Big doggy!”

  Before Antoine could open his mouth to correct his daughter once more, the beast bounded onto the bonnet of the car, over the other side and sprinted off towards the south.

  Francis found the Couckuyt gardens and menagerie a thorough delight. Francis, though an advocate of vegetarianism and love towards all living things, respected the natural order of the Almighty’s world. And although Ida and Martijn were, to be blunt, butchers, he regarded their attempts to live close to nature to be quite inspirational.

  Behind the rabbit pens and guinea pig hutches, was Ida’s small but crowded herb garden.

  “It’s not only the meat and vegetables we produce ourselves,” she said. “We have a pair of goats for milk and cheese and here we have all the herbs I use in our cooking.”

  She plucked a sprig of fennel and thrust it under Francis’ nose.

  “The right seasoning transforms food,” she said.

  “Absolutely,” said Francis.

  “And I think matching scents and tastes is really important. It’s like finding the right perfume for a person.”

  She took hold of Francis’ wrist and bent her head to smell it.

  “You see, you’re not a fennel person.”

  “No?”

  She picked a leaf and rubbed it against his wrist.

  “Mmm, yes,” she said. “You’re a rosemary person. Maybe with a touch of mint.”

  “Weally?” said Francis and sniffed at his wrist. “Indeed. Well, best pop me in the pot and serve with potatoes and gween beans,” he laughed.

  Ida led him on.

  “And here is our prize stock,” she said, gesturing to a square enclosure of squat, bristle-covered boars.

  “Wild boar,” said Francis. “Beautiful things.”

  He crouched down and snorted at the one nearest the fence. It trotted over to him and stuck its snout through between the fence slats. Francis got his nose right down to the boar’s and they snuffled at each other, talking and listening.

  “You really do love animals,” said Ida.

  “All my best fwiends are animals,” he replied, thinking about the rat inside his habit and the Wolf of Gubbio, many miles distant and all alone. “You eat these animals?”

  “Yes.”

  “But they don’t know that?”

  Ida frowned at him.

  Francis gave the boar one last snort and, with a squeal, it ran off.

  “I never lie to animals,” he said, standing up. “Animals are honest cweatures. We should be nothing less.”

  “Something we’ve learned,” said Ida, “is that the emotional state of the, er, animal has an effect on the flavour of the meat.”

  “Weally?”

  “Sadness and depression ruins the taste of the meat. And yet…” Ida smiled to herself.

  “Yes?” said Francis.

  “Let me show you,” she said and beckoned him towards a shed with a corrugated iron roof.

  Ida threw the stiff bolt across on the door.

  “My grandfather lived in Mol over to the east, the other side of Antwerp. He used to hunt boar in the woods there.” She opened the door and reached into the shadowed interior for a long bundle in a greased cloth. She unwrapped it to reveal a narrow-barrelled rifle. “He was a great hunter.”

  “That’s a gun, isn’t it?”

  “What else? My grandfather believed that wild boar tasted better when it had died knowing it was being hunted, as though fear were the most vital seasoning.”

  “I see,” said Francis uncomfortably.

  “And then came 1940 and the Nazi invasion and my grandfather hunted a wholly different kind of animal in those woods.” Ida stroked the rifle thoughtfully. “But,” she said with sudden brightness, “if it wasn’t for him, Martijn and I wouldn’t be the people we are today.”

  “My,” said Joan. “There are a lot of clothes here.”

  She sifted quickly but politely through the tops, trousers and skirts on the low shelves in the upstairs room. They were all different sizes and styles but were clean and precisely folded.

  “Ida can’t bear to throw anything away,” said Martijn from the other side of the closed door. “But take what you like.”

  Joan called out her thanks but she could already hear his footsteps tramping down the wooden stairs.

  It was apparent, despite the shopkeeper’s enthusiasm, that she wasn’t going to be taken particularly seriously dressed all in leather. Joan swiftly selected a black top emblazoned with the words, ‘The Clash’, a pair of lace-up boots — she hoped calf length wasn’t as scandalous as thigh length — a pair of lightweight trousers and a cotton jacket with a hood and zipper. As she shrugged into this last item, she felt the weight of objects in the jacket pocket.

  The first item was a small plastic toy, a soft-bodied goblin figure with an enormous shock of pink hair. The weird troll-like thing had large eyes, an idiotic grin on its face and made a squeaky sound when squeezed. The second item was a black rectangle, which she recognised as a phone.

  As she looked at the phone, it began to vibrate in her hand and the screen lit up. Automatically, she lifted it to her ear.

  “Hello?”

  “Mother Mary, is that you?”

  It was a man’s voice, quiet but earnest.

  “Who is this?” said Joan.

  “It is done.”

  “What is? Who are you?”

  “It is Simon. Mother Mary, I have done it.”

  “What have you done?”

  “The first angel sounded his trumpet, and there came hail and fire mixed with blood, and it was hurled down upon the earth. A third of the earth was burned up, a third of the trees were burned up, and all the green grass was burned up.”

  Joan recognised the quotation.

  “Simon, what have you done?”

  There was no reply.

  “Simon? Simon?”

  She looked at the phone. The screen was covered in little pictures, like tiny religious icons. She tapped at them experimentally. The screen changed and something began to flash. She held the phone up again.

  “Simon?” she said.

  “Laila?” said the man’s voice on the other end. This was a different voice. Tired and old and strained.

  “I’m sorry,” said Joan. “I think I…”

  “Is that you? Where are you?”

  “Where am I?” she asked.

  “Please,” said the man, a whine of desperation in his voice.

  Joan wasn’t sure what he wanted.

  “Er, I’m at the Wild Boar Guesthouse near Sint-Jan-something-or-other. In Belgium.”

  “Are you safe? Are you well?”

  Confused and a tad disturbed by the man’s demanding tone, Joan held the phone away and pressed the icons again until his voice stopped.

  Joan put the phone and the troll toy back in her pocket and went downstairs. Maybe Martijn could explain about the man with all the questions, although she imagined she would need to go to a higher authority for answers about the call from S
imon.

  Martijn was neither in the kitchen or the ‘good room’. There was no sign of Ida or Francis either. Joan was on the verge of going outside to search for them, when she saw a line of light outlining a previously unopened door off from the kitchen. The door had a heavy clasp and padlock on it, but the padlock was undone and the clasp thrown back. Joan tried the door. It opened to reveal a flight of concrete steps leading down into a brightly lit cellar. There was the hum of electricity in the air.

  Joan stepped down, slowly, with a trill of guilt at the possible incursion into the Couckuyt’s privacy. At a half turn in the stairs, there was a side door. Joan looked in. Stacked neatly in one corner of the storeroom was a pile of rucksacks, next to them a smaller pile of suitcases and pull-along bags. In another corner was a collection of sleeping bags, blankets and items of camping equipment. Joan might have paid them closer attention had she not then been drawn to a collection of pictures pinned to the wall just inside the door.

  Twenty or more square photographs of individual men and women, of all ages although most of them quite young, were arranged in a neat grid on the wall, held in place with brass pins. In fat black pen, names had been written underneath each of them. Arnaud, David, Eva…

  “Laila,” said Joan, touching the picture of a young, fair-haired woman.

  And then she understood.

  “So obvious,” she chided herself.

  Laila had been one of the guests. The Couckuyt’s took photographs of all their guests and Laila must have accidentally left her phone behind, or perhaps the jacket containing her phone, when she moved on.

  Joan looked at the pile of bags and belongings. And maybe these were items other guests had forgotten to take with them.

  “There are a lot of forgetful people in Belgium,” she said.

  Francis petted the alpaca.

  “Twuly beautiful cweatures,” he said to Ida. “Fwiendly. Hard-working. The softest wool.”

  “And they have a rich taste and texture,” said Ida.

  “You eat these too?” said Francis.

  “Absolutely,” said Ida. “All the breeds and species we keep have ended up on our plates at one time or another.”

  “Guinea pigs?”

  “Everything.”

  “The hedgehogs?”

  “Everything.”

  “Even the little fewwets with the cute little noses?” said Francis, moving over to the wire-fronted shed in which the weasel creatures scampered.

  “We are subsistence farmers,” said Ida. “We are pragmatists. But Martijn and I also like to consider ourselves to be culinary explorers.”

  Francis made clicking noises at the ferrets through the wire. Several of them ran over to him.

  “Such intelligent cweatures,” he said.

  “Almost any living thing can be food for us,” said Ida, behind him. “What matters is that, whatever we eat, we source the finest ingredients available. Good eating costs. Look at the scandal there was a few years back when they discovered that all the big supermarkets put illegal horsemeat in their ‘economy’ meals. Martijn and I have eaten horse in our time but at least we know it was the finest grass-fed horse.”

  The ferrets chattered to one another and Francis chattered with them.

  “We are what we eat,” said Ida.

  “Oh, that we are,” Francis agreed.

  “But most people don’t understand that. They feed animals on things that we wouldn’t even contemplate touching and yet those people, in turn, eat those very same animals.”

  The ferrets had become agitated and were bouncing back and forth across their cage.

  “I mean, it’s true,” said Ida philosophically, “that, if we should only feed animals on foodstuffs we would be prepared to eat ourselves, we could argue that we should all become vegetarian, eat those foodstuffs ourselves and cut out the middle man as it were.”

  “A wise position to take,” said Francis.

  “But the thing is,” said Ida, “we just love the taste of meat.”

  There was a metallic click. Francis turned.

  Ida had the rifle pointed at his face and, although he knew very little about the modern ways of earth, he knew he was looking directly into the dangerous end.

  “I imagine you’ve been a clean-living man all your life,” said Ida. “Lots of fruit and vegetables.”

  In fear, Francis clutched at the wire barrier behind him.

  “You eat people?!” he choked.

  Ida took a deep, satisfied breath.

  “Are you surprised? Wasn’t it your lord who said, ‘This is my body. Eat it in memory of me’?”

  In a single moment, Francis found a knot of defiance in his belly, born of the woman’s blasphemy, and also found the latch to the ferret cage beneath his hand. Francis twisted the latch, pulled and threw himself to one side as Ida fired.

  Wim saw that the wolf was back, this time swimming south back across the Westerschelde. Not that he cared. His attention, his whole heart, was focused on getting the detective to listen.

  “I know,” he said, wearily. “I know, I know. But I spoke to her or someone who sounded very much like her. It was her phone.”

  “And what did she say?” asked the detective.

  “Not much,” said Wim. “But she said she was at a place called the Wild Boar Guesthouse. It’s in Belgium. Some nowhere place called Sint-Jan-in-Eremo.”

  “I understand,” said the detective. “We can look into it.”

  Wim recognised that tone of voice.

  “No,” he insisted. “You must do something. Find Laila for me.”

  “I’m just going to put you on hold for a minute,” said the detective.

  Wim sighed as the line went silent. He gazed out of the window but the wolf had gone from sight.

  “Ida?” called a voice from downstairs.

  “No, it’s me, Mr Couckuyt,” said Joan.

  The final steps, with no support banister at the side, overlooked a clean, tiled room. The manacles and chains against one wall reminded Joan of the dungeons at Rouen but she was certain this was no dungeon. This was a workshop of some variety. There was a steel device of sliding blades over there and, above a long bench, various cleavers, skewers and hooks. Martijn stood by a table-shaped machine directly below the stairs. Interlocking lines of sharp-edged screws within covered a funnel beneath that then fed out into a steel pan.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” he said. “Not yet.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Joan. “I didn’t mean to intrude.”

  “You’re here now though.”

  Martijn flicked a switch on the machine and it came to life, the long screws rolling against one another in a continuous slicing action. Joan stared down into its maw from her position on the stairs.

  “The Haarstek Crusher 30. We use this one for doing a whole carcass at once. Sometimes we need to process one in a hurry. It’s a sight to behold, I can tell you. Ida has certain theories regarding the effect that fear has on the taste of the meat.” Martijn held his hands over the grinding screws. “The look in their eyes when they’re fed into it feet first…”

  Joan wasn’t sure she understood. Like most of the conversations she’d had since coming back to Earth, Joan had understood perhaps one word in three. She realised that her hand in her pocket was clutching the phone.

  “I came down to ask you about something,” she said.

  “I imagine that you have plenty of questions right now,” said Martijn and stepped towards her, his rubber-soled boots creaking on the tiles.

  “It’s about these clothes,” she said.

  “Which you won’t be needing any longer.”

  “Sorry? Look.” She pulled the phone from her pocket. The little plastic troll fell out from her pocket as she did so, landing on the edge of the steps.

  “There’s no reception down here,” said Martijn, one foot on the stairs. “Ida will be back any minute and then we can begin.”

  Ida Couckuyt screamed and staggered rou
nd in the garden, arms outstretched, trying to dislodge the half dozen blonde ferrets that clung to her, their sharp teeth embedded in her flesh. She scraped a pair of them off with the rifle she still clutched in her hand. She bashed another off against the guinea pig hutch. She threw herself into a high-speed spin, an uncoordinated pirouette which sent two more flying off her, wheeling end over end and squeaking into the night. She stopped and stumbled dizzily. Her thighs caught the edge of a fence and she tumbled over into the mud on the other side.

  One ferret — the usually placid Erica, she noted with anger and surprise — sat on her face, claws and teeth biting at her cheek. Ida roared, grabbed Erica’s furry little body and ripped her away, crying through the pain as Erica’s teeth pulled apart the flesh of her cheek. She flung the ferret away, back over the fence, and lay on the ground panting and groaning.

  She was bewildered. She hurt but, more than that, she was bewildered. The ferrets had never shown aggressive behaviour like that before.

  What had that weird monk done to them? And where was he now? Had he stirred them up in some way? He had been squeaking and clicking at them just before it happened. But he had also been speaking in his strange little way to the alpaca and the rabbits and the boars…

  There was a snort from the darkness behind her head. Ida rolled over. There were several snorts and snuffles from the darkness, short, sharp sounds of disagreement. She got to her feet with difficulty and peered into the murk.

  Eight squat, hairy boars charged at her from the shadows, snouts glistening, teeth bared. Ida instinctively brought the rifle up to shoot and then saw the barrel was bent out of true.

  “Oh, hell,” she muttered and then it was too late.

  By torchlight, Christopher helped Em transfer the essentials from the crashed campervan to the stolen Volvo. Most of the stuff was Em’s. He and Francis had no personal belongings and Joan’s amounted to a heavy duty plastic bag that contained her armour. He removed her computer tablet as Joan had complained earlier about the battery being dead.

  “You sure you can manage that lot?” said Em, watching him take the armour, a duffel bag of Em’s things and several blankets in one go.