The Watchers Read online

  About the Book

  Lausanne, Switzerland.

  In the cathedral tower lives a strange boy with a limp who talks to the bells.

  In a luxury penthouse lives a high-class prostitute who’s in mortal danger.

  And in a low–rent hotel lives a private investigator who has no idea how he got there.

  Jay Harper finds himself in Switzerland on the trail of a missing Olympic athlete. A hard drinker, he can barely remember how he got home last night, let alone why he accepted this job. When he meets the stunning but aloof Katherine in a hotel bar, he quickly realizes that he’s not the only one in town who’s for hire. She’s a high-class hooker who can’t believe her luck. Which is about to change. For the worse.

  In the meantime, Marc Rochat spends his time in the belfry talking to the statues, his cat and the occasional ghost. His job is to watch over Lausanne at night and to wait for the angel his mother told him he’d one day have to save. When he sees Katherine, he thinks his moment has come. Which indeed it has. But not in a good way...

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title page

  Dedication

  Quietus

  Book One: The Forty-Sixth Latitude of Planet Earth

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Book Two: The Place of Broken Angels

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Book Three: The Awakening

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Book Four: The Thing in the Well

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Of a Saturday Evening Three Months Later

  Acknowledgements

  Author's Note

  About the Author

  Also by Jon Steele

  Copyright

  The Watchers

  Jon Steele

  for Afnan

  Construction on the foundations of Lausanne Cathedral began in 1150. Pope Gregory X consecrated the church as La Cathédrale de Notre-Dame de Lausanne on 28 October 1275.

  Le guet is the title of the man who calls the hour from the belfry of Lausanne Cathedral, as has been done each night, without fail, since the cathedral’s consecration. It is pronounced le geh and is derived from the French military term faire le guet: to keep watch or lookout.

  Lac Léman is the proper name of the body of water known to much of the world as Lake Geneva. It is the name used by the Swiss and French peoples living along its shores.

  The Book of Enoch is an apocryphal book of the Hebrew Bible, long discredited until it was discovered as part of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1948. Quotes from the text are used in this story.

  Saint and demon blindly stare

  From the risen stone;

  Brought to a common character

  Neither can stand alone.

  ‘Europe’, Howard Nemerov

  quietus

  At first sight, 50 yards off, he couldn’t tell who it was walking through the rain, only that the slow-moving form emerging from the shattered village of Neuville-Vitasse was a British soldier. He could tell by the Brodie helmet and brown tunic, the puttees on the legs and box respirator hanging across the chest, the Lee Enfield rifle carried as if all battles were over.

  How queer that the soldier should walk so casually through no man’s land, he thought. Even when crossing the lacerated fields where only death lived among the blackened stumps of trees and barbed wire and shell holes filled with bloodstained water, the soldier did not cower.

  And upon reaching the ridge where the soldier’s form was a silhouette against the cloud-ridden sky, there was no regard for the trenches of the Hindenburg Line, nor for the German soldiers within, crouched behind their Maxim water-cooled machine guns. The same guns that laid waste to twenty thousand British lives in a single morning at the Somme.

  A perfect shot.

  But the shot did not come and the soldier disappeared down a far valley.

  It was then he noticed it.

  The quiet.

  Not just from the enemy trenches, but over the entire battlefield.

  And he began to remember.

  Atop this hill in the hour before the dawn of Easter Monday, 1917. Hidden in the hedgerow that was the forward observation post of 244 Siege Battery. Pulling his pocket watch from his tunic and seeing the sweep hand mark zero hour. Then hearing all three thousand guns along the Western Front, from Vimy Ridge to Bullecourt, open fire as one.

  The earth shook beneath his feet.

  And all through the barrage, binoculars to his eyes and spying the flash of return fire, his heart beat wildly. Checking the coordinates on his map and reporting the positions of the German guns to his battery so that those guns could be destroyed. Destroyed before the boys went over the top and marched across no man’s land.

  There was a sound, a furious and rushing sound.

  … incoming …

  Then all was quiet.

  Nothing moved.

  Not the clouds in the sky, not the towering columns of smoke, not the flash of German guns. There were no soldiers rising from their trenches to march across no man’s land, and the rain seemed to hang in the sky on threads of grey light.

  He thought he should record the strange lull in his notebook, the Walker’s Back-Loop pocketbook bound in pigskin and priced at two shillings. He remembered the day he bought it in England, thinking he would use it to compose more poems. Instead it had become his war diary, and the place of safe keeping for a photograph of his wife.

  Her name was … her name was Helen.

  And he always carried the notebook in the breast pocket of his tunic like a talisman over his heart.

  Wait, he thought, there were some words on the last pages of the notebook. A few unconnected lines, stumbling things, like the tottering legs of a child. He tried to remember the words but they seemed so distant.

  Then he heard the sound of trudging steps through mud and saw the soldier standing at the edge of the hedgerow.

  ‘Hello. You must be Lieutenant Thomas. I was told I’d find you up here.’

  The name sounded unfamiliar till he remembered it was his own name, Edward Thomas. He had yet to grow accustomed to the title of lieutenant.

  ‘Identify yourself.’

  ‘Swain, Corporal Swain.’

  ‘What is the password?’

  ‘The password? Right, the password is Bournemouth.’

  The soldier’s accent was perfect.

  ‘Advance.’

  As the soldier stepped closer, he saw Corporal Swain wasn’t from 244 Siege Battery or Battalion HQ. And it seemed the corporal’s form was the only moving thing in an unmoving world.

 
; ‘Are you a messenger?’

  ‘You could call me that.’

  The soldier rested his rifle against the hedgerow and sat down. He kicked thick mud from his boots. Edward saw splatters of fresh mud on the soldier’s uniform.

  ‘Terrible slog getting here. Cup of tea would go down very well, especially as it’s quiet, yeah?’

  Again, Edward could only think how oddly the soldier was behaving, insubordinately even. As if the battle was truly over and there was no need for protocol in addressing an officer as sir, even if the officer was only a second lieutenant.

  ‘Is it over, is the assault over?’

  ‘No, bit of a lull where we are, that’s all.’

  ‘Yes, a lull. I was going to note it …’

  ‘… just before I arrived.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The soldier removed his helmet and laid it on the ground. He wiped sweat and grime from his brow.

  ‘I’m sure you must be a little confused, lieutenant.’

  ‘It’s the quiet, the look of things. I’m not sure what to do.’

  ‘Nothing to do. Just takes some getting used to.’

  … just takes some getting used to …

  Yes, of course. Only been in the army twenty-one months, only been in France since February. Seen some action at the front, had a few close scrapes with enemy shells but come through them just fine. Mostly spending time at HQ plotting maps or censoring the boys’ letters home. Did see a few planes fall from the sky. Saw one dead German soldier under a bridge, sitting as if hiding from the rain. Perhaps this is what war was genuinely like, he thought, moments of unrestful quiet between seconds of terrible fear. Perhaps it explained the soldier’s casual manner. Corporal … Corporal Swain, yes, that was it … had the look of a man too old for his years, someone who had seen all there was to see in war.

  Edward noticed a hand-written scrawl inside the soldier’s helmet: ‘And men, being destroyed, cried out.’ It read as verse.

  ‘The words in your helmet, are they from a poem?’

  ‘From a lesser known book of the Bible, I’m told. It’s the motto of my company.’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m not a religious man.’

  ‘That’s all right, lieutenant, neither am I.’

  Edward looked over the soldier’s uniform. No insignia on the collar or sleeves. Nothing to identify a battalion or brigade. And under the soldier’s box respirator, tucked in the belt, Edward saw a mud-stained knife. A deadly-looking thing, like the knives of the Gurkha Regiment.

  ‘Not to worry, lieutenant, I’m not a spy sent to kill the forward observers.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking—’

  ‘Of course you are. You were ordered to keep a sharp eye out for them.’

  Edward realized it was what he was thinking. And he wondered why it had taken so long to think it.

  ‘It was your manner. The way you walked through no man’s land.’

  ‘There’s nothing to fear for the moment. I managed to kill what fear there was in this sector.’

  But Edward began to wonder.

  ‘What is your company and battalion, soldier?’

  ‘What’s left of it, you mean. Lost half the company at Deville Wood.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No need, it’s our job. My company isn’t attached to any battalion. At Deville Wood we were with the South Africans. Here we started with the Canadians, now we’re with Brits. We’re more the sneaky-beaky type. We do our work quietly.’

  ‘With knives.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You are an assassin.’

  The soldier smiled.

  ‘I’ve been called worse.’

  ‘Why are you here now?’

  ‘Told you, I was ordered to find you.’

  ‘To what purpose?’

  ‘To protect you.’

  ‘Who would give such an order?’

  ‘Comes to orders I’m no different than you. No idea where they come from, no choice in carrying them out. But from what I gather, there’s a soldier on the German side who wanted you dead.’

  ‘The entire German Army wants me dead, and you, all of us. Why should I fear one soldier more than the rest?’

  ‘This soldier is different, lieutenant, he’s a devourer of souls. And he’s not the only one in this place, there are thousands of them. Out on the battlefield, while we rest in the quiet, soldiers from both sides of the line are being served up for slaughter. Never mind the civilians caught in the middle. Thirteen million dead so far in this bloody war to end all bloody wars. The more slaughter is mechanized, the more the enemy breeds. And in this bloody place, the enemy has become very good at slaughter.’

  Edward looked into the eyes of the soldier, almost hypnotized by them. The soldier was mad. Edward heard of such things happening in the trenches. The choking terror, the never-ending death strangling all sanity from the mind. He looked at the soldier’s knife and uniform again and felt his own fear bite. What he’d thought were splashes of mud were stains of blackened blood.

  ‘No, lieutenant, odd as you find me, I’m not mad. You must believe what I tell you. I’m on your side, I’ve come with a message.’

  ‘What message?’

  The soldier’s eyes drifted to another place.

  ‘No traveller has rest more blest

  Than this moment brief between

  Two lives, when the night’s first lights

  And shades hide what has never been,

  Things goodlier, lovelier, dearer, than will be or have ever been.’

  Edward saw himself two years earlier. In England, at his writing desk, struggling with the words. His wife sitting at the hearth nearby, reading Keats.

  ‘I don’t understand, those are my words. I remember when I wrote them.’

  ‘Yes, I know all your poems.’

  ‘My poems haven’t been published but for a few and I—’

  ‘—published them under the name Edward Eastaway because you didn’t wish to trade on your name as a writer of prose. But in truth it was because you were afraid they might not be well received. You feared you might be dragged again into that slough of despond you dreaded your entire life.’

  He stared at the soldier who knew the deepest truths of Edward Thomas.

  ‘How can you know such things?’

  ‘The same way I know you couldn’t remember your name till I called to you. The same way I know why it’s all gone quiet and nothing in this place appears to move. The same way I know the words you were trying to remember just before I arrived, the lines you wrote on the last pages of your diary. The same way I know you nearly died in this place yesterday, but I wasn’t ordered to find you because it wasn’t your time.’

  Edward saw himself on the hill.

  Yesterday, Easter Sunday.

  Bright sun, a warm day.

  Positions taking sporadic fire from German guns.

  Setting the battery, arranging matériel for the assault. Village of Achicourt, less than a mile up the line, shelled heavily at midday. Lulls of silence and noticing the return of birds and herbs and flowers to the nightmarish landscape after the snow and the cold rain of winter. In the afternoon, planting pickets at zero line and walking to the forward observation post, guiding three rounds to find the range of the German guns.

  He heard the growl of an incoming shell.

  He saw himself falling to the ground, covering his head and closing his eyes. Feeling the shell plough into the earth, knowing the blast would rip his flesh to shreds … Nothing happened. He uncovered his eyes to see the tail of a German shell poke from the ground like a silly thing. A dud, a great walloping dud of a Boche shell.

  That evening in the officers’ mess, when he was named to man the same forward observation post for the coming assault, there was a huge laugh. They slapped him on his back and offered their congratulations. He remembered someone joking, ‘A fellow as lucky as he would be safe wherever he went.’

  And once more he saw himself atop t
his hill in the hour before the dawn of Easter Monday, 1917. Behind the hedgerow, binoculars at his eyes, searching for the flash of return fire from across no man’s land.

  There was a sound, a furious and rushing sound.

  … incoming …

  Then all was quiet.

  Nothing moved.

  ‘Have I … have I died?’

  ‘You’ve taken your last breath, lieutenant, and you’re beginning to forget this life. You’re trying to remember things so you can hang on. You’re fighting so very hard to hang on, but this life is over for you. You need to let it go, that’s why I’m here.’

  Edward saw himself on the ground. No wounds or blood, no mark of death.

  ‘Perhaps I was only knocked unconscious and this is no more than a dream.’