Foix
A cold wind blew down from the mountains. Humphrey didn’t let that bother him. He was warmly dressed in a heavy woollen coat that reached below his knees. A woollen scarf protected his neck and he wore a beret that he had bought in London some years earlier. The man in the shop told him that the distinctive French headgear was still popular in the Pyrenees even if it had gone out of fashion in other parts of France.
He looked around. It was rush hour. The narrow streets of the small town of Foix were crowded with people on their way to work. None of them wore berets or long coats. Scarfs were in but berets and long coats were definitely out. His aim was to blend in and look like one of the locals. That hadn’t happened. The only person who looked remotely like him was sitting nearby on a park bench beside a crumpled hat containing a solitary banknote and a scattering of coins.
He rubbed his hands to keep them warm. If things had worked out as expected, he would be sitting in the café, across the road, having breakfast and reading the local newspaper. It had not opened yet. That was something else he had misjudged. Common knowledge said that the French were hooked on coffee and croissants and had them for breakfast. The people who owned the café were clearly ignorant of that basic fact.
To his relief he saw Kirstin. She had gone for her usual early-morning walk. He preferred to lie in bed and wake up gradually. Research had shown that most heart attacks occur within an hour of waking. The message was clear: one should not rush the waking process. The body should not be hurried into unnecessary activity.
Kirstin strode towards him. Something about her expression told him that things had not worked out well for her either.
‘I’ve been waiting for you!’
Humphrey was taken aback by her manner.
‘I’ve been waiting for you, Mother.’
‘I told you to go into the café and wait there.’
‘It’s not yet open.’ Humphrey pointed across the street.
‘It’s shut, Humphrey. There’s a sign in the window. That’s why I told you to go to the cafe around the corner.’
She grabbed his arm and led him away. Humphrey wished she wouldn’t do that. He felt like a small boy again. It wasn’t his fault that he was short sighted. He hadn’t seen the sign. Whoever wrote it should have made it bigger.
They entered the café and found a small table by the window. Kirstin ordered coffee and croissants and Humphrey took his computer from its case. Wi-Fi reception was surprisingly good and he had no trouble checking his emails.
There was nothing from Charlie nor from Olaf. His daughter, Lizzie, sent him some photographs of a skiing trip that she had been on in Canada and a Chinese contact had found a possible buyer for one of his Ming vases. Apart from that, there was nothing of interest. He pulled a face and shut the computer.
‘There’s nothing from Olaf.’
‘You messaged him yesterday when we arrived.
‘Yes, Mother. He’s usually so prompt.’
‘Perhaps he’s down a hole somewhere.’
‘A hole?’
‘He’s doing that caving thing … isn’t he?’
‘He’s digitally recording ancient rock art, if that’s what you mean. Some of it goes back over thirty thousand years to when the first of our modern ancestors arrived in this part of the world. There were mammoths, rhinos and bison living here. The Palaeolithic artists recorded them for posterity.’
‘That was before they hunted them to extinction.’
‘We don’t know why the animals became extinct, Mother.’
‘But they had been around for a long time before our ancestors arrived on the scene and started to paint them.’
‘That is true,’ Humphrey conceded.
‘Smoking gun, Humphrey.’
‘They used bows and arrows, Mother.’
‘Very well. They shot them with their arrows. The point is that modern humans arrived and the animals vanished.’
‘I think it more likely that they caught some nasty diseases that modern humans brought with them from Africa.’
‘And the Neanderthals?’
‘They probably caught some nasty diseases too. It would have been like when the Europeans arrived in the Americas. Small pox ravaged communities that had no natural resistance to it.’
‘So we didn’t drive the Neanderthals to extinction by killing them with weapons. We merely introduced them to the odd virus that they’d not met before.’
‘That’s roughly as I see it. However, we didn’t drive the Neanderthals to extinction. They live on.’
‘In a cave near here?’ Kirstin smiled.
‘No, Mother. They live on within us. We interbred with them. The average European is about two percent Neanderthal in those genes that make us human. Some go as high as five percent.’
‘Have you had yourself checked out.’
‘No. But I intend to. That’s something I intend to discuss with Olaf. He’s got involved in DNA analysis. He sees it as yet another way of unravelling the past.’
‘You two are going to have a lot to talk about when you finally meet up. I hope you haven’t forgotten the prime purpose of our mission.’
‘Prime purpose?’
‘We are investigating the disappearance of a plane carrying Richard de Villiers and twenty-three other people. It vanished over mid-Atlantic. We suspect that Olaf Magnusson sabotaged the plane and converted it into a drone that could be flown by an external operator such as himself. The pilot and crew were unable to regain control and could do nothing to prevent the plane from crashing into the sea.’
‘There’s no need to remind me of that.’
‘I do wonder, Humphrey. You have done nothing but talk about Olaf and his brilliant projects for the past three days. You clearly regard him as a genius and want to join him in his work.
‘I want to gain his confidence.’
‘He’s clearly gained yours. Must I remind you, yet again, that he’s already tried to kill you? If Charles hadn’t been in that plane you would be dead. You couldn’t have bailed out by yourself.’
‘If Charlie hadn’t been in the plane, Olaf wouldn’t have been trying to make it crash, Mother. Get your facts right.’
Kirstin decided to change the subject.
‘I’m worried about Charles. His last email was disturbing. He said someone had sabotaged Frank’s dive boat and Frank had gone to talk to some mechanics who said they could fix it. Charles thinks he might have been lured into a trap.’
‘Yes, Mother. I’m well aware of that and there’s nothing we can do about it until we have more information. With so little to go on we could speculate to eternity. We’ll just have to wait until Charlie tells us what’s going on.’