Though he could not yet prove it, St-Cyr felt the woman had bathed and then had calmly put on the dress. The pale, light brown hair was loose and it must have fallen to her shoulders but was now matted forward over the back of her head and caked with dried blood through which, among the hairs, there were bits of grass and torn wild flowers. Some yellow, some pale blue among the amber strands of what he felt must surely have been her pride and joy.
The killer had even hacked at the back of her neck — had he tried to saw off her head with that thing? Ah merde, merde, what the weapon been?
‘Both sharp and ragged but pointed too and blunt also,’ he said aloud.
He knew he had to turn her over but had best wait until a photographer could be summoned and then the district coroner. It could and would take ages and time … time was a luxury they did not have.
The Sturmbannführer Walter Boemelburg, Head of the Gestapo in France and Hermann’s Chief, had telegraphed to say he wanted to see them immediately on their return to Paris. Immediately.
A mere stop for boiler water at a small station and they’d been pulled off the train from Bergerac. Two ‘free’ détectives on the run back to Paris with nothing else to do but try to read a train novel — a paperback — or chat up some pretty girl. God did things like that — yanked them out of the doldrums and threw them into the woods without even the benefit of a glass of Vichy water. Ah merde, this Occupation, this blitzkrieg pursuit of crime and its perpetrators. It was no life for Marianne and the boy. There was never enough to eat in Paris and she was always wanting to take Philippe home to her parents’ farm in Brittany. ‘He’ll have milk, Jean-Louis, and meat sometimes. He’ll have bread and potatoes and be warm in winter. Paris is so lonely.’ She had said it with such feeling and so often. ‘I am a stranger. The house, it is too empty.’
This woman would have understood Marianne. Though he felt odd at the thought, instinct told him it was true but had Paris ever figured in the victim’s life? That, too, was a thought, and suddenly, though he still wanted to be alone with her, he wanted to be with Hermann.
‘Find the place where she bathed, mon vieux,’ he whispered. ‘Find her other things but do not touch them until I’ve had a look.’
The valley was secluded and well wooded, and when he had gone up it a few hundred metres, Kohler heard the waterfall in the distance and then he found the cave. It was high up beneath a thick limestone ledge and from its darkened mouth, the sun-drenched slope below glared with the tumbled grey-white rubble of the ages until this progressed into brush and then into trees. He let his eyes linger on the cave. He couldn’t understand why its presence frightened him. Christ, it was just a cave. The Dordogne was riddled with them.
On 12 September 1940, cave paintings far better than any others had been discovered at Lascaux by four boys searching for a lost dog a mère twenty kilometres to the north, which just showed a person what boys could find when hunting for something else. But those paintings were only twenty thousand or so years old, which was long enough to make one wonder why the clergy had taken such an interest in them. Rumour had it that some local abbot was now calling that cave the Sistine Chapel of the Périgord!
Had the abbot found any crosses, any fish symbols among the paintings? A staunch non-believer, not a conscientious doubter like Louis, Kohler had little time or patience for religion, let alone that of the Nazi ideologists who fabricated to suit themselves. But being alone in the shade, and standing on two flat stones in the bed of the nicest stream he had seen in ages, he was deeply troubled by the sight of this cave. He had the sudden thought that he could not possibly know what it might mean to the murder, yet it must mean something. She would have been only too aware of it.
The sound of the waterfall came to him. There was leafy shade along the banks of the stream, now dark and cool, now light and warm. The pungent scent of moss and decaying vegetation reminded him of a graveyard, which was stupid really, but he couldn’t shake the thought. It was that kind of place.
The stream-course took a small bend. There were blocks of light grey to dark grey limestone among the trees, and everywhere there was moss growing green on grey and still, so still. Ferns and King Solomon’s seal, May lilies after their flowering, bluebells too, probably.
High above the little valley a honey buzzard soared against the sun-hammered sky.
When he found her shoes, he found the blanket she had spread under the arms of a giant chestnut tree. There was a picnic hamper lying broken open, its contents scattered by badgers, the leftovers foraged by mice and squirrels. Her clothes were neatly folded to one side of where the hamper must have once rested. A rough beige skirt, serviceable white blouse, pale yellow cardigan, kerchief, raincoat, knee-length stockings with elastic bands, slip and underwear and sturdy shoes … the handbag in which she had brought the dress she had then put on. The truffle hunter had touched nothing.
A sliver of pre-war soap lay on a modest towel. Beside these, there was a pair of glasses in their leather case, a sandpaper board for the nails, a pair of clippers, and a blue velvet-lined box for a strand of pearls.
From the picnic site beside the stream it was but a short walk through the woods to the waterfall, and along the way, in the dark humus and in clean sand, he found faint traces of her footprints. Bare feet, no other prints but hers. She had stripped off at the blanket and had come this way and then had gone back.
There was a small ledge of limestone, a pavement broken by rectilinear cracks. This ledge led to the base of the waterfall, to large rectangular blocks of limestone that, through time, had collapsed from above. Though the water fell among them, some thoughtful soul, 20,000 years ago perhaps, had cleared a place for bathing.
When he found, in the undergrowth near the blanket, a basket of mushrooms and the worn but razor-sharp paring knife she had used to gather them, he saw she had covered them with a thick layer of once dampened moss. There were puffballs and edible morels — any farmboy, such as he had been, could have identified them. Sweet-chestnut boletus too and parasols, others too. Others.
He removed the moss completely, noting that she had placed a pair of thin cloth work gloves between the mushrooms in a small canvas collecting bag. The gloves were worn through at the thumbs and fingers and stained not by humus as he had thought, but by ochrous fine sand, grey ash and some sort of very black powder.
There were also tiny bits of black flint no longer than a few millimetres at most.
When he opened the collecting bag, he saw very quickly that she had been up to mischief. Death cap and fly agaric lay side by side and there were several specimens of each.
If she had intended to kill someone, she had been prepared to make a damned good job of it. An omelette, monsieur? A little more of the pâté or the champignons à la crème?
The French were always killing themselves with such mistakes — there were always warnings posted in prominent places — but this was intent. Why else would she have gathered them, seeing as she damned well knew her mushrooms?
The identity card in her purse gave the name of Madame Ernestine Fillioux, born 15 March 1896 in the village of Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne, upriver a piece.
Her height was 167 centimetres (5′7″). Hair: light brown; eyes: brown; nose: normal; face: oval; complexion: pale; special signs: small brown mole on the right cheekbone; freckles over the bridge of the nose; a three-centimetre scar on the left forehead.
There were the usual two fingerprints, the thumbs, below the 13-franc stamp, and over these and the signatures of herself and a witness, the stamp of the Commissariat de Police in Périgueux. The thing had only recently been renewed and was dated 17 August 1941.
Her occupation was listed as shopkeeper and postmistress, her marital status as war widow.
Kohler searched the photograph for answers but all he found was a forty-six-year-old woman with a proud chin, rather strongly boned, sharply featured face, good firm lips, steadfast eyes, a high forehead and hair that was pulled back into a
chignon which did little but add severity to what might otherwise have been attractiveness.
‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘Why the special dress, and why the mushrooms? Why the walk through the woods to that glade when this little valley is so much nicer?’
No matter how hard he tried, he could still see her lying face down in the grass with her arms and legs flung apart and the flies crawling all over her.
Had the blue of them not matched that of her dress?
The seersucker was finely crinkled, the cotton both cool in the heat and so easily crushed it was like a caress. It had the feel of money and class. ‘Paris …’ murmured St-Cyr. ‘The rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, the avenue de l’Opéra.’
Naked beneath it, she would have felt so very good. Proud of herself, yes — what woman wouldn’t have been? He was certain she was from the Dordogne, had felt this all along but could not yet put a finger on the reason. Perhaps Hermann had found something by now.
Gingerly he used a pair of tweezers to pry the collar free of caked blood and read the label with a sigh, ‘Barclay, 18 to 20 avenue de l’Opéra, Paris.’
Barclay’s had had shops in Vichy, Nice, Cannes and Deauville, too, before the war but now operated under a name he had deliberately forgotten in protest.
1937 or ’38, he thought. By ‘39 tensions would have been too high for such extravagance and it was extravagance, this dress. ‘A hat from Yvette Delort, madame, to please your lover? Was he the one who did this?’
He was certain she had either gone to Paris to buy the dress before the war or had ordered it especially and had waited the days or weeks until it had arrived.
A woman, then, who had known exactly what she had wanted.
She had not been surprised by her assailant and this made her killing and defilement all the more puzzling. She had apparently come to the glade unaware of any danger and had paused at its edge, among the ferns where Hermann had picked up her trail. She had said, ‘——, is it really you?’ or perhaps, ‘I am so sorry. Am I a little late? My watch … I must have left it where I bathed.’
She had then gone forward to stand facing her assailant who had come to the glade as they had, from the opposite direction — he was certain of this. She could not have known of his or her intentions since she had not run, had not even backed away.
She had stood facing that person, in awe, in tears, perhaps — how could one possibly know now if there had been tears or only soft words of hesitation and relief? She had been struck hard between the eyes. A stone? he wondered. It had split the skin badly. Now stained as if by some horrible accident of birth, the wound’s livid dark plum-violet to greenish-yellow putridness marred her brow forever.
She had fallen back, had tried to get up — one hand had perhaps been placed behind her, the other stretched out towards her assailant, he could see it happening so clearly. She had then been struck at least twice more on the head. After this, while still on her back, she had been stabbed repeatedly and slashed with that thing, then flipped over.
Grim at the thought of what must have happened, he stood and, carefully folding a bit of fabric, tucked it away in an envelope, then cleaned the tweezers on some grass.
Fortunately his other jacket pocket, the one with the loose thread that had been carefully coiled and saved at the end of its freely dangling leader, held a pair of ancient rubber gloves.
He put them on and, finding some inner strength of will, turned her over with much difficulty, scattering the flies and finally stepping back to gasp, ‘Ah nom de Jésus-Christ!’
She had been partially disembowelled — butchered. Opened to the groin. The oozing, stinking mess of dark, sticky offal was ripe with violet and yellow. The flies … the flies … they descended. They worried. They fought with one another to get at her and dig deeper.
Her throat had been hacked at. The jugular, the carotid arteries, the windpipe.… Her tongue was black. Both breasts had been crudely parted lengthwise down the middle and peeled aside so that now, as he watched, the left half of the left breast slowly slipped away until it hung by a strap of rotting skin.
When he found Hermann, a bottle of champagne, discovered in the stream, was all but gone. ‘I saved the other one for you, Louis. Come and sit a while. You look like you need it’
‘I told you not to touch a thing!’
‘Hey, it’s a Moët-et-Chandon 1889, mein Kamerad. That’s definitely not the year of her birth.’
A Moët-et-Chandon, the 1889 … How had she come by it?
They sat with their feet cooling. They didn’t say a thing for quite some time. The champagne was absolutely magnificent, a real treat in which they silently toasted the victim at impromptu moments.
‘Jesus, Louis, why the hell does it always have to be us?’
‘Murder doesn’t choose. God works in mysterious ways. Frankly, I don’t think He has ever forgiven me for having looked up my Cousin Denise’s skirts. I was ten at the time and didn’t know any better. She was eating the strawberries I had stolen for her and said I could do as I pleased, but my Aunt Sophie thought otherwise.’
Louis was always being called to account for childhood misdemeanours and for others as well, ah yes. ‘Don’t worry about Marianne’s birthday. Your big Bavarian brother’s taken care of everything. Roses, Louis, and if not them, then masses of petunias and ox-eye daisies. I asked a girl I met at Madame Chabot’s on the rue Danton to look after things if we didn’t get back in time. Giselle will do her best. You can count on her. She’s very reliable — I like that in a girl. She’ll steal them if she can’t find any to buy.’
Ah merde, the wife’s birthday and theft from the Occupier? Hermann had no scruples about stealing from his confréres, just as he had none when it came to choosing his women. Another prostitute. Marianne would have a fit. You ought to mind your own business!’
‘I am. I have to live with you, right? Admit it, you forgot and a man can’t forget things like that. He really can’t. Not with a skirt like her. She’ll leave you just like the other one did.’
The first wife. ‘Spare me the lecture. Go and talk to that corpse as I have. Hey, from now on I am going to leave the “details” to you.’
‘Not before I give you the grand tour to open your eyes and get the fly-eggs out of them. Come on, relax. Here, have some more. Our woman was really something.’
From the scattered, foraged contents of the picnic hamper, St-Cyr reassembled the menu. ‘Pâté de foie gras truffé in a stone crock with a tight seal, alas now broken, radishes and bread. Confit d’oie in another stone crock, this time still in one piece. After the pâté, the remaining meat of the goose is cooked in its own fat and preserved under it.’ He held up the crock. ‘The contents would have been carefully taken out with a dinner-knife and placed on one of the plates to be exclaimed over and admired before being grilled and eaten with a little more of the bread perhaps.’ He tossed a hand. ‘The shells of the six eggs the badgers have eaten indicate an unrationed omelette was to follow.’ He held up a small copper skillet. ‘A little of the leftover goose fat to cook the eggs and the mushrooms, but did she plan to kill her fellow diner?’
Kohler knew Louis was enjoying himself and let him continue.
The withered remains of some lettuce and endive were plucked from the grass along with those of several green onions and cloves of garlic, only bits of which remained. He found a small bottle of oil, unlabelled, the container saved to be used time and again. ‘Salade à l’huile de noix (with walnut oil). Then cheese, probably, with grand jean walnuts — they’re very meaty — and fresh, sweet cherries. Afterwards, coffee from her thermos. It’s no longer hot but it’s real. She has even added a little cognac.’
The wines included a fine red Château Bonnecoste and the vin paille de Beaulieu, in addition to the champagne. There were glasses, plates, cups and cutlery for two with linen napkins. ‘Fantastic china, Hermann. Old like the pearls. Sévres and quite expensive.’
She had thought of everything
, even to uncorking the red to let it breathe and sinking the white in the stream to cool, but had she intended to poison the person she had gone to meet?
‘Or did she intend to kill herself as well, Louis, and take down the two of them?’
‘Or merely use the specimens to show someone else what not to collect?’ That, too, was often done.
‘Then why collect so many?’
‘Ah yes, that is a problem most certainly.’ The poisonous mushrooms were one thing, however, the work gloves that separated them from the others in her basket, quite another.
Gingerly St-Cyr teased the gloves out and prised them open, showering a little rain of fine yellowish sand and tiny shards of black to dark brown flint. ‘These gloves haven’t been used in years,’ he said.
‘Then where did she find them?’
‘Or why did she bring them?’
‘That cave?’ asked Kohler hesitantly.
‘Perhaps, but then …’
‘There’s a black powder, a pigment of some sort.’
‘Manganese dioxide — the mineral, pyrolusite. It’s quite common in the Dordogne. The ancients used it to.…’
‘To paint their caves,’ breathed Kohler.
Both of them knew they would have to make the climb. The cave was nearly seventy metres above the stream. Sweat blurred the vision and stung the eyes. Twice they had to pause for breath. The talus of angular, slab-like blocks of grey-white limestone was difficult to traverse and blinding in its glare. Impatiently St-Cyr yanked at a collar that was too tight. The button, its thread frayed, popped off and he saw it bounce from a rock, blinked and said, ‘Ah no. It has disappeared.’
Such little losses were devastating these days, thought Kohler. Replacements were so difficult to find. ‘Tough luck. I’ll tell Boemelburg you lost it in a whorehouse.’
‘You would. Save it for Pharand.’
‘That little fart? He’d love it’ Pharand was Louis’s boss, a file-mined, officious, insidiously jealous, territorial twit who was dangerous. Very dangerous. Ah yes. ‘That champagne wasn’t such a good idea, Louis. I think I’m feeling dizzy.’
Dollmaker Page 27
