Dollmaker

by J. Robert Janes

  ‘Ah, yes. A mid-Acheulian handaxe, three cores which have been made into knives and scrapers but could be further worked as the need arose, and a smaller, more perfect knife with a pressure-flaked, serrated edge. All are of the black flint and bear the patina of great age.’

  ‘The wounds …’ began Louis.

  Vaudable sadly shook his head. ‘Never have I seen such a thing. Passion, yes, but was it only that? To open the victim? To partially disembowel her? To split the breasts — such things took some doing with tools such as those. Her assailant must have straddled her during the butchering. Blood would have covered his hands and arms, his face, chest and thighs — it was a man, wasn’t it? Was he naked? Did he remove his clothes first and then bathe in the stream afterwards? Ah, these things I have to ask myself because his clothes, they would have been ruined.’

  ‘Perhaps it was a man, but,’ said Louis, ‘this we really do not know.’

  ‘The time of death was last Monday, or perhaps the day before it.’

  ‘And the primary blow, was it struck with a tool such as this?’

  Louis picked up the handaxe and, gripping it firmly so that it filled his hand, brought it down broadside and hard only to stop just above the desk. The nodule of flint, the boulder, Hermann, it is worked by striking the edge so that the flint spalls inwards and upwards away from the edge you want. This then causes the spalls to radiate out from a summit near the centre of each side so that you have points there that are useful as a hammerstone.’

  The complete tool, then. Axe, chopper, cutter and hammer all in one. Kohler hefted the thing. It weighed about three-quarters of a kilogram, was perhaps at most twelve centimetres by ten by three in thickness. In some places a crude flaking gave a coarsely serrated edge. Other edges were even more crudely worked but all around the top of the tool, where it would have been gripped, there was unworked original nodule, with a white, calcareous encrustation.

  ‘The wound to the forehead,’ said the coroner. ‘Let us examine it.’

  ‘Louis.…’

  ‘Stay here. Examine the tools. Try to figure out if our assailant knew she planned to poison him.’

  ‘If it was a man.’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course.’

  Deft with the scalpel and tweezers, Vaudable had managed to peel back the skin of the forehead to reveal the bone beneath. ‘Though the fractures radiate from all around the area of impact, some are longer towards the scalp and chin.’

  The smell was terrible but he paid it no mind.

  ‘Was it a handaxe or perhaps the vicious downward slash of a walking stick?’ asked St-Cyr, peering closely at the fractures.

  ‘A walking stick? Ah, no. No. That could have been set aside in any case. No, I think the handaxe just as you have held it. One savage, sudden blow caught her right above the eyes. She fell back. Again she was hit on the head and again. He then fell on her. First the sharp edge of that thing to her throat, then the point of it, the multiple stabbings with the full weight behind them — a right-handed assailant. Material from the dress has been caught in many of the wounds. Then the butchering with other stone tools. Did he have them in a little bag he carried around his loins as a savage might? Did he pause, I ask myself, to select or attempt to select the tool best suited to his purpose? The skin of the left half of the left breast, Jean-Louis, I feel certain a scraper was used to remove the flesh and that is why that portion of the breast hangs only by a flap.’

  Blue-black, green and yellow with tinges of wine red, and suppurating, Madame Ernestine Fillioux lay on her back on the raised stone pallet with the drain at her feet. Maggots had had to be scraped away. Legions of them still fed on her.

  ‘The sexual organs?’ asked St-Cyr — one had to ask.

  ‘Violated with a razor-sharp stone. All of the tenderest of places. Pubic hairs have been scraped away. A savage attack, but as I have said, one, I think, of experimentation. It is as if whoever did this needed to try out the tools. Perhaps she knew of them herself and perhaps he laughed as he used them — the mind seeks answers as it probes for truth.’

  ‘A stonekiller,’ breathed St-Cyr. ‘A film … Moment of Discovery, whose story line follows the life and times of our victim.’

  The life and times.… Now what was this? wondered Vaudable but thought better of asking. ‘Ah yes, a film. I am sorry about the need for haste. These days it is difficult to raise an objection. Oh by the way, the muscarine poisoning of the fly agaric is quite different from that of the phalline of the death cap. To choose such two poisons is a puzzle. The fly agaric’s poisoning resembles very closely that of the deadly nightshade. Within one to four hours — not the twelve to twenty-four hours of the death cap — the victim feels ill but cannot quite define the problem. The throat is dry. One has trouble swallowing. It is something they ate, perhaps the mushrooms, but let us wait to see, eh? Then there are the stomach cramps, the vomiting and the diarrhoea, the dilation of the pupils, the fainting, the hallucinations, the rapid acceleration of the pulse, delirium and prostration.’

  ‘Ether should be inhaled. The patient must be kept warm.’

  ‘And given frictions — rubbing to stimulate the circulation. Recovery is often in two days but death can occur.’

  ‘Alcohol must not be consumed because it dissolves the poison.’

  ‘And there was alcohol. A flask of cognac in addition to the wine and champagne.’

  ‘Cognac?’

  ‘Yes. It was found in the underbrush along the stream near the picnic site. Its contents had been consumed, but then the cap had been replaced and the flask washed.’

  ‘Ah merde, after the killing.’

  At 4:00 in the afternoon the heat began to lessen but still the back streets of Domme were silent. Carrying the daughter’s rucksack, St-Cyr walked alone, and when he found her, Madame Jouvet was behind the school. Her light brown hair was pinned up, her skirt hitched into her belt, the flowered print housedress clinging to her thighs and buttocks with dampness.

  Painfully she hung the last of the laundry, but had not yet noticed him for the clothes-lines ran away from the school. ‘Madame …,’ he began. She stiffened. She would not turn to face him. Tugging at the legs of the short pants her son would wear to church tomorrow, she tried to unrumple them. ‘Madame, please, a few more questions. Also I must ask you to identify some things. It’s important.’

  She gripped the clothes-line and waited for the blows of his words to strike her. ‘Madame, the things in your rucksack … the nodules of pyrolusite and the stone mortar, where and when did you get them?’

  She shut her eyes and though he still could not see her face, he would know she was praying. ‘At the cave. I … I went there the … the day before mother’s visit. André … André hated her complaining so much when things went wrong, I … I had to see that the site was all right. A year had passed. I … I was not certain if vandals had visited the cave. I needed to know ahead of time what to expect of her.’

  ‘Last Sunday, the day before she was killed.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Compassion all but overwhelmed him and for a moment he could do nothing more than set the rucksack down. He wished she would turn to look at him but knew she wouldn’t, that he would have to force her to do so.

  ‘And that is when you gathered the lumps of pyrolusite,’ he said more harshly than intended. She dropped her hands, tugged the skirt from her belt and tried to free it from clinging to her thighs.

  ‘The stones for the cave painting, Inspector — you know this is what they were for. Why is it, then, that you demand it of me?’

  She was facing him now and saw him draw in a breath in shock. She tried to smile self-consciously and this split her battered lips and made her wince. Blood trickled down her chin and she wiped it away with the back of a hand. ‘The sooty black dust of another era, Inspector. The children … my students. I was preparing for a little lesson in our history. I thought if I had some of the black, a little of the ochre, some grease — dear
God there is now so little of it here and it is hoarded as never before and always priced too high.’ She stopped herself, touched her hair, felt suddenly at such a loss to appear so poorly, and tucked strands of her hair up under the tight diadem of braids.

  ‘Some oil, yes, or melted fat — foie gras, isn’t it possible that the ancients might also have loved the fat of goose livers?’ she asked. ‘Some clay to mix with the colours if needed. I could let the children see for themselves why Lascaux, it …’ Ah no, why had she said it? she wondered.

  ‘Lascaux?’ he reminded her.

  Her hands fell to her sides in defeat. Yes, the cave paintings everyone still talks of. The Sistine Chapel of the Périgord.’

  And a cave painter, madame, was that it? he wondered but did not ask. She had been badly beaten by her husband. Blood had seeped through to stain the left shoulder of the housedress but she was, as yet, unaware of this. Perhaps five metres separated them. The rabbits slept, the chickens took little interest. The smells of both mingled with that of the vegetables and earth she had watered with the leavings of the laundry.

  ‘How did you find the cave on that Sunday?’ he asked.

  ‘Disturbed. I knew someone had been there very recently to look it over — matches … I have found some burnt ones. Ah, I thought,’ she shrugged and winced and clutched her left shoulder only to drop her bloodied fingers and stare at them in dismay. ‘I … I sensed it, Inspector. Right away I felt the presence of another — yes, yes, that was how it was. It made me uncomfortable. I hesitated to go into the cave but mother was coming and I had to be warned ahead of time of any trouble. I went in only to the gisement, not into the darkest parts behind. I kept my hammer ready.’

  ‘Madame, your shoulder …?’

  ‘It is nothing. It will stop.’

  Damn you, don’t interfere in something that doesn’t concern you! was written all over her. So, okay, he would have to leave the shoulder for a moment. ‘But … but you collected the pyrolusite lumps?’

  She had him now; he could not know the truth. ‘Yes. Mother and I had a cache of them. From time to time when others came to the cave, they uncovered pieces from the gisement but thinking them of no value, left them. These lumps we hid, the little mortar also.’

  ‘And you met no one?’

  ‘No one.’

  Ah merde, why must she be so wary? ‘Did you know of the filming?’

  She blanched. ‘The filming …? Please, what is this?’

  She was lying and he knew it but there was nothing she could do about it, she said to herself. Nothing yet.

  ‘The story of your mother and father, madame. The trunk of artefacts you spoke of, the diary, her finding the cave and leading your father to it, their visits in the spring and summer of 1912 and again in 1913. The beginning of the ritual, madame, that would eventually lead your mother to her death.’

  He gave her a moment. She knew she had betrayed herself by lying.

  ‘Now come, please,’ he said. ‘It’s unforgivable of me to press so hard. There must be a doctor. That shoulder had best be attended to.’

  ‘Then come into the kitchen. Fix it if you must and let me change. I will not walk with you or anyone through this town, not now, not until my lips have healed at least a little.’

  Once bared, the shoulder revealed the skin had been broken in several places. The slash from the walking-stick had left a welt perhaps as long as the width of his hand. He bathed it and changed the dressing she had applied herself. His touch was very tender and all the time he worked, he muttered things to her and to himself. ‘Our attitudes must change. No man has the right to do this to any woman. Sutures … you had best have them.’

  She shook her head. ‘It will heal. I can’t have talk.’ He dabbed at the skin to dry it but did he notice how fine her skin was? Did he think it a shoulder worth caressing, and not of her mother’s but of her father’s family, of wealth and good breeding? Did he wish the dress would drop so that he might see her as she had been under the waterfall on that Sunday? That Sunday.…

  He would have found the towel in her rucksack, would have discovered the change into work clothes but had yet to say anything of them. ‘Where is your partner?’ she asked tightly.

  ‘With the others. Returning the car we borrowed. Asking questions of them.’

  ‘The others?’

  He was noticing the older welts on her back. He would be dropping his eyes slowly down the gap in her dress.

  ‘Yes. An actress, a film producer and a young man of twenty perhaps. He is an assistant on the archaeological dig in the film. Two others also. One from the Propaganda Abteilung at 52 Champs-Elysées, Paris. The other is the sous-préfet of the Périgord Noir.’

  She didn’t say a thing. She only looked at the wall in front of her.

  ‘My partner, madame, he’s very good. He’s from the Gestapo but is not like any of those types. We’re simply Common Crime, the two of us. The Kripo for him, the Sûreté Nationale for me and no Gestapo brutality so do not worry yourself. If you find my fingers gentle, his would also be.’

  We aren’t here to hurt you, we are here to help. This was what he implied, but how could anyone help her now?

  ‘There,’ he said at last and let her pull up the shoulder of her dress. ‘I will wait outside while you change.’

  ‘No … no, it’s all right. I will go upstairs to the attic’

  There was no sign of her two children and he knew she must have sent them off to that old mill perhaps, or to gather clover and dandelions for the rabbits. There was no sign of Jouvet.

  The school was quiet and far hotter than before. He wondered how Hermann was doing. He knew he had to ask her about the champagne and the flask that had been found — the initials HGF engraved in dull grey, dented silver. A flask that had seen some use — how many had he seen himself among the officers of that other war?

  HGF, the letters overlapping. ‘Henri-Georges Fillioux,’ he muttered to himself, seeing any one of the so many plain brown, waxed cardboard boxes that had come back with the last effects, the boots perhaps, the belt and webbing, the tunic and cap, the bloodstains — how heartless of the army. The last letters too.

  Knowing that he had best not confront her with her father’s flask, not just yet, he waited but she did not come down from the attic and he heard himself saying to himself, Hermann … Hermann, I think I need you.

  Kohler wasn’t sure but thought the Auberge de la truffe noire was in what had once been a small monastery. Languidly the Baroness strolled arm in arm with her Toto. And in her white dress she was like a fluid wraith passing through sunlight and shade, tall and graceful along the little paths that fell away from the inn to where the monks had prayed or gone about their humble chores in what had once been a potager. Herbs, vegetables and fruit trees.

  No one was inclined to effort. The meal he had not partaken of had been too large, the wine excellent, the cognac superb.

  Dreamily the Baron Willi von Strade, age sixty if a day, watched his actress-wife of thirty-five hold in close and serious discussion her latest lover, a boy of twenty, one Gérald ‘Toto’ Lemieux of Paris, on contract to the Institut des Filmes Internationales. Did the former boot-black have promise? Was she planning his future or mèrely going over a minor scene to save him from a life of shining shoes or waiting on tables?

  Lemieux was handsome, straight and tall, but no match for the Baron who could, Kohler surmised, simultaneously pluck the eyes and cock from a cobra unharmed. Verdammt, what was he to make of them?

  Franz Oelmann of the Paris Propaganda Staffel was bemused by the little tête-à-tête and the Baron’s apparent complaisance. Perhaps he knew what went on between the Baron’s sheets, perhaps he even watched the fun. Stamped with that blue-eyed, closely trimmed blond print of the Master Race, he would no doubt carry double duty, working both for Goebbels and for Heinrich Himmler. Frankly, he stank of the SS and that only made one uncomfortable since von Strade and his wife would be certain to know of it
while saying nothing and indicating absolute innocence of even such a thought.

  Sous-préfet Odilon Deveaux, his chair tilted well back against the wall, propped by a foot that was jammed against a stone pillar, dozed as he should with half an eye open.

  Only Mayor Pialat seemed anxious. Flustered — florid from too much wine and foie gras — he continually stole little glances at his pocket-watch and muttered about the urgency of things to himself. His pigeons were gone and might now have been plucked and eaten, but he could not leave. After all, the visitors were paying guests and the assistant chief of police was among them. Poor Pialat mopped his brow and wiped his lips, held up the flat of a hand at the refill Kohler offered, and said, ‘Ah no. No, merci, monsieur. A splendid meal. Magnificent. Exactly as in the years before everything was taken from us.’

  Oelmann and the Baron let him say it unchallenged. Embarrassed at the stupidity of his tongue, Pialat tried to tuck the watch away. He couldn’t understand more than three words of German. Exhausted from smiling and nodding, he again retreated into worry. With watery large brown eyes he searched the skies above the line of distant trees until, at last, Deveaux took pity on him to smile reassuringly and shrug as if to say, Les Allemands, my friend, we can do nothing but await their pleasure.

  But all the time things had been going on in the Baron’s cranium beneath the immaculately brushed grey locks whose growing bald spot shone. As if on cue, he spoke. ‘What will it take, Herr Deveaux? 25,000 each to get them off our backs?’ The cops, the two détectives.

  ‘Marks or francs?’ asked Franz Oelmann.

  ‘Marks, of course. Reichskassenscheine, Herr Kohler, because that’s the way it has to be.’

  And they can’t be sent home but must be spent in the occupied country. ‘This is still the Free Zone, isn’t it?’ said the sous-préfet. ‘I merely ask so as to be aware of things.’

  The Baron overlooked the slight. ‘Even so, at twenty to one, that is still 500,000 francs, a substantial sum but worth it.’

  ‘But,’ sighed Deveaux, ‘Herr Kohler is subordinate to Gestapo Boemelburg in Paris who is, himself, subordinate to Gestapo Mueller in Berlin, is this not so? Correct me, please, Baron. If Herr Boemelburg insists, as he has by telephone this morning, that his two détectives continue their investigation with the utmost urgency, who are we to question such as him?’