“Usual place, usual time,” said Harry, and closed the door.
Finn started down the stairs, at a loss as to what he’d just done. He’d guarded that secret so carefully for so long and yet he’d just given it up, albeit to someone he could trust—someone he thought, or hoped, he could trust—and all because of a girl he didn’t know, a girl for whom he had also killed a man. But she needed help, it was as simple as that, and those two acts had been the only way he’d seen of giving it. What else could he have done?
Chapter Five
For the last half an hour he’d been thinking about Arnaud Amaury. More specifically, he’d been wondering if he could make a case for Arnaud suffering from Asperger’s. Here was a man who’d struggled to connect with the people, who’d been ridiculed and humiliated but who, when faced with an intractable religious problem, had hit upon a chillingly logical solution without any recourse to human emotion.
The Cathars had been a small but growing heretical minority, dispersed among the wider population, indistinguishable from them. And that wider population had been unwilling to surrender people they’d probably known their whole lives.
That had been Amaury’s problem: how to identify the Cathars. To a man who believed that true Christians had nothing to fear in death, the solution was simple—put the entire city to the sword and let God identify the heretics. Was that an autistic response, or just that of a committed believer in an extreme age?
Realistically, and for a modern readership, it was probably easier to paint him as a psychopath. Finn supposed he could portray Amaury as a magnificent, Kurtz-like character—and Béziers had not been his only atrocity—but that hardly squared with a man who’d also been a figure of fun.
Perhaps he had to accept that there was no humanizing Arnaud, not in the modern understanding of humanity. He would be able to paint the Pope sympathetically enough, and the two fictionalized figures on either side of the Béziers massacre, but not Arnaud.
Finn considered a different approach. He imagined his various human figures, all of them with hopes and fears and preoccupations that would be recognizable to his readers, and all of them engaged in a dance of death around the monstrous enigma of Arnaud Amaury himself—cold, murderous, unknowable.
That was the solution. He scribbled “monstrous enigma” in his notebook. He hesitated for a moment and then wrote another note, instructing himself not to use “dance of death” anywhere in the manuscript—it was too flowery, too clichéd, much too likely to be picked up on and ridiculed by reviewers.
He pushed himself away from his desk and strolled through into the living room. He didn’t bother turning on the lights, but stood looking out over the lake as dusk fell. Lights were already on here and there—a peaceful evening at the end of a peaceful day.
He smiled at the strange trajectory of his thoughts, seeing them as a passive observer might, because his day had hardly been peaceful. The Portmans’ daughter was missing, his own girlfriend had left him, and yet at some level he did feel at peace. He’d enjoyed making inquiries, had enjoyed exploring a mystery that was not of his own making, a reminder in some way of the life that might have been his.
Maybe his enjoyment of that process had encouraged him to see Hailey Portman’s disappearance as something more than it was. He didn’t doubt that she might be in more danger than she’d ever imagined when she’d set out, but it was unlikely there was anything more sinister at play here than the whims and desires of a willful fifteen-year-old girl.
Finn glanced down as someone came into view on the street below, then did a double take because the figure looked familiar. He was wearing a kind of multicolored, felt bobble hat, with flaps hanging down over his ears and ending in tassels. Was it South American in design? He wasn’t sure, but he recognized it and the memories clicked into place now as he realized he had seen Jonas before.
He was on the opposite side of the street, but he was moving about and he came a little closer and then out of sight. Finn opened the door carefully and stepped out onto the balcony, bringing Jonas back into full view. The kid looked agitated, walking up and down as if he expected something to happen.