Jason frowned. ‘Simon used to go up there all the time to talk to Madame du Lac. Did he know about this?’
She shrugged, not wanting to talk about Simon. Or what Simon knew. Not now.
He’d found the mask. He’d hidden it again. He was Ankou now.
No. She couldn’t say that out loud.
‘Look at this.’ She pulled up the modern map and enlarged the area around the Pointe de Castelmeur. The shape was unmistakable. ‘Îlot d’Or was Enez Dor in Breton which means the island of the door. Or the gates. It’s this tiny island here, not much more than a couple of rocks really. So imagine this isn’t a headland’ – she tapped the Pointe de Castelmeur – ‘but a causeway, and turn it this way.’ She twisted the printout of the ancient sketched map around, so it matched the modern map on the laptop, until they lined up, more or less. Where the paper showed a walled island city, the screen was the empty expanse of water. The same expanse where they had found the rocks with the coin and the mask, where the cliffs were crumbling into the sea.
‘How can we prove this is the same place?’
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I’m not sure we can. Not really. Not unless Rafael has more information than we do right now. Or we find something major. There’s nothing much down there, you know that as well as I do. But it’s a theory.’
‘Well, we need to ask him, don’t we? This is his party after all. If he still wants to play.’
He would. She knew that. Now more than ever. Simon…or Ankou…or whatever he was, had confirmed it for her, but Rafael was a believer. He was terrified that the curse was real, and that it would take not just him but his son as well. Rafael would do anything to solve this mystery and break the curse.
Finding Dahut’s mask had somehow called forth Ankou, in the form of her dead fiancé. By hiding it, the mask had transformed Simon himself and Ankou had claimed him.
The phone started ringing and Nico grabbed it, but he didn’t even make it through the normal greetings. ‘What do you mean? Where?’ And his face paled. ‘We’ll be right there. Phone the police. Immediately, do you understand?’
Ari and Jason stared at him as he hung up and leaned on the counter, his arms shaking.
‘That was Alix. She and Milo went down to the cove. They’ve found a…a body.’
Ari’s breath caught in her throat, her heart pounding beneath it, trying to force its way out.
The sea has taken most of the people here. It always will.
That was what Simon had said last night. Dahut, the princess of Ys, who became the Siren of Sainte Sirène, drowned anyone she wanted without mercy.
Isthatwho he meant? Is that who he had written about in his letter? Had he met Dahut?
The one person Dahut wanted more than anyone else was Rafael.
But it couldn’t be. It couldn’t!
Ari had first seen Rafael du Lac down there in the cove, floating in the water, like he was offering himself up. He thought a watery death was inevitable. Or had done. Since yesterday, he had hope again. She was certain of it. He’d as good as told her as much. That she was his hope.
He couldn’t give up. He wanted to save his son. But what if Dahut’s curse took him before he could do anything, before either of them could stop it? Because she was faffing about with the records here, and meeting the ghost of her lost lover in the graveyard… She hadn’t even seen Rafael today. Hadn’t talked to him. She’d just…abandoned him.
‘A what?’ Jason pushed himself up from the chair. Ari couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. ‘What do you mean, a body?’
Nico’s face was horribly grim.
‘It’s Thierry. They found him in the water.’
Ari barely remembered the rush down to the cove, tearing along the narrow paths at the clifftop because it was faster to go by foot than to take the long looping route by road. Bronze-coloured bracken and long trailing brambles tore at them as they passed, trying to hold them back. The yellow dust of the path was like a beacon dragging them forwards. They clambered over the tumbledown drystone walls, and down the steepest section to the cove itself.
There were police cars and a small group of people speaking in hushed tones, all local by the look of them, no sign of Alix or Milo.
Jason’s phone rang again, but he cut it off. Word had already gone around.
A young gendarme at the top of the slip stopped them as they approached. They could see two other uniformed figures further down the beach with Alix and Milo, who stood hunched over, arms around their bodies, heads bowed. Broken by shock and grief.
‘We’re with them,’ Nico said in surprisingly brusque tones. ‘We know him…knew…’
For a moment, the young man paused and then spoke into his radio. ‘Wait over there,’ he said, pointing to the low wall above the beach, not far from the war memorial. ‘The inspector isn’t here yet. They’ll want to talk to you.’
