The Devil's Cave bop-6

by Martin Walker

  ‘Can you find out the names of the various private confessors Madame de la Gorce used? Presumably they’d be the ones who did the baptisms.’

  ‘Usually they would, yes. St Philippon always came under this parish so I have pretty full records. How far back do you want me to go, Bruno?’

  ‘1945, if you can, Father.’

  ‘Goodness, that will mean going through my predecessors’ records. Is this urgent?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’ He paused. ‘By the way, Father, you seemed to be shocked by something as we were in the minibus this morning. Did you recognize someone at that lunch party?’

  ‘No, no, I was just feeling tired after the service,’ the priest replied, rather too quickly.

  Bruno rang off, toying with the thought of Father Sentout having known Beatrice in her professional capacity on some discreet visit to Paris. He found it hard to believe. His housekeepers were renowned for their piety and their homely looks and there was no gossip about the priest. Bruno had never understood the Church’s rule of chastity, but if anyone kept to it he’d have bet it was Father Sentout.

  Resolving to pursue the matter with him in person, he turned to the folder he’d brought from his office with today’s mail and the two faxes he’d been expecting from Isabelle. The folder contained printouts of the photos he’d taken with his phone of the family tree inside the bible at the Red Chateau. Something about the names tickled his memory. Gondrin, Pardaillan, Antin and Mortemart were all family names that recurred in the family tree. When he looked at his notebook he saw that they were also the names of the various companies involved in the Count’s project at Thivion.

  That reminded him. He called France Telecom’s directory inquiries to get the number for the architects in Paris, asking for the office manager. He identified himself and inquired about plans for a sports hall in St Denis.

  ‘I can’t find any record of such a commission,’ said the woman in Paris, after a long pause in which Bruno had heard the clicking of computer keys.

  ‘It would have been commissioned by Cesar de Vexin and it might come under the holiday village project you designed here.’

  ‘Nothing under that name nor under St Denis.’

  ‘Try St Philippon.’

  More clicking. ‘Nothing for that, either.’

  ‘It might have been commissioned by Antin Investments.’

  ‘We have a commission on file for a place called Thivion.’

  ‘That’s the same company,’ he said, and waited again until she came back on the line, her voice suspicious.

  ‘Who did you say you are?’

  He explained, gave her the phone number of the Mairie and suggested she check his credentials and his mobile number.

  ‘It’s not you I’m suspicious of, it’s them,’ she said. ‘We wouldn’t do any more work for them. We’re in litigation because we haven’t been paid yet for the Thivion job. And a sports hall is not something we’ve ever done.’

  ‘The plans for the sports hall they showed us had your stamp on them.’

  ‘That’s fraud,’ she said. ‘Can you send us a copy of the plans showing that? We’ll add it to the lawsuit.’

  Bruno called Michel at the public works office to pass on the news, to learn that Michel had done some sleuthing of his own, starting with the Departement’s own architectural office in Perigueux. They had found the amount of insulation in the plans for the sports hall to be bizarre. They’d put Michel in touch with the school of architecture at Bordeaux University, where he spoke with a young professor who’d done an exchange year at the school of architecture in Quebec.

  ‘It’s a Canadian specification,’ Michel explained. ‘And the guy recognized it, because it was a school project he’d been involved in, designing a sports hall for a town called Jonquiere in northern Quebec where it gets as cold as hell. Because it was a public project, the plans were on the internet. It looks like they simply downloaded them, put the Paris firm’s name on them and gave them to us. The plans didn’t cost them a centime. I was just going to call the Mayor.’

  ‘And tell him what I learned from the Paris architects about the unpaid bill and the lawsuit,’ Bruno said.

  He turned back to his folders. The faxed copies of Beatrice’s arrest records echoed what she had told him in her office but gave him places and dates and the names of the arresting officers. They might be useful. Fabiola’s fax was a copy of two autopsy reports with their conclusions and recommendations. Each case was now classified as a suspicious homicide with ‘indications of death deliberately induced’. That would do. No discreet little pointing of a finger at J-J’s ceiling would derail this inquiry.

  Bruno sat back in the seat of his van and pondered how much he should tell Gilles. His story would be published by now, but he hoped that Gilles would follow up the hints he’d dropped about the Red Chateau. They had parted in the morning as amicably as two hungover men could manage after three cups of Bruno’s strongest coffee. Bruno at least had managed a gentle jog through the woods before his shower, but Gilles had not looked markedly better when Bruno had spotted him in the press section of the cave.

  ‘Have you seen the internet?’ Gilles asked as soon as he picked up the phone. ‘The story’s huge, picked up everywhere. Even Le Monde’s putting it on page one. We’re printing an extra hundred thousand copies. Hold on …’

  Bruno heard Gilles muttering excuses to colleagues and walking to somewhere more private. ‘We’re on the track of the daughter and the ex-husband. One of our guys is on his way to their house in Santa Barbara. We thought we’d fly her over for her mother’s funeral. Is it scheduled yet? Will it be at the chateau?’

  ‘I don’t know, but there’s no funeral in prospect. They’re still writing up the autopsy, so the Procureur won’t clear it for burial for a while.’ Bruno didn’t say that after the pathologist’s report it might be some weeks.

  ‘I’ve got to do a piece on the Red Countess,’ Gilles said. ‘We’ve got a lot of old photos and it’s mostly clippings but is there anyone in town who knew her?’

  Bruno gave him the names and numbers for Antoine the riverman and Fouton the old schoolmaster. He added Montsouris, as a loyal Communist. ‘What did you make of the exorcism?’

  ‘Great for TV, not so much for us and now everybody’s trying to prove that the final crash of the basket was faked,’ Gilles said. ‘Do you know if it was?’

  ‘Not for sure, but you might want to track down a guy called Lionel Foucher. I saw him coming down the path from the winch with grease on his hands. He works for the Count as some kind of estate manager, drives a white Jaguar and lives somewhere in the chateau grounds.’

  ‘Thanks, and thanks for dinner,’ said Gilles. ‘It took me a while to recover this morning but once I did I remembered a great evening.’

  ‘We’ll talk later. I’ve got to go,’ Bruno said, seeing the familiar forensic van coming round the corner to the dechetterie.

  Yves was in charge of the team and Bruno had worked with him before. He gave Yves the cardboard box and explained the contents. He then gave Yves the two evidence bags with the threads of waxed cotton, one from the broken crash barrier and the other from the Toyota pickup.

  ‘That’s certainly blood on the plastic,’ said Yves, and asked him to mark the crash site on a map. ‘Have you taken a statement from the guy in charge of this place?’ Bruno said no but told him of the video camera.

  ‘Leave it to us. And thanks for that tip about that disc that was found inside the woman in the boat. It was a host, sure enough. I persuaded our local priest to let us have one of his to make a match. Apparently it’s just another bit of bread until the service. So what was it doing in her vagina? That’s a new one on me.’

  27

  Father Sentout lived beside the church in a house that was far too large for him. It was too large even with his housekeeper and the priests who visited regularly to help him serve his ever-increasing parish as older cures died and were not replaced. Strangers wer
e startled by the sight of children’s toys and tricycles scattered on the path to his house. Bruno wasn’t, knowing that the upper two floors were offered to families that the priest in his old-fashioned way called the deserving poor. Father Sentout was in less than welcoming mood when the housekeeper showed Bruno into his study, but Bruno was not to be put off.

  ‘I saw you looking stunned when you recognized someone in that white car this morning and I need to know who and why,’ he said. ‘I’ve just had a report from the pathologist that suggests we may be investigating a murder, so please don’t prevaricate.’

  ‘Murder? Saints preserve us, I had no idea. But I’m not sure what I can tell you, Bruno.’

  ‘You knew someone from the past. Was it the Count?’

  The priest studied him for a moment. Someone who had heard as many confessions as Father Sentout would hardly be innocent of the ways of the world. Something he had read came into his head, that Andre Malraux had once asked an elderly priest what he had learned of the human race after a lifetime of hearing confessions, and the priest had replied, ‘That there are no grown-ups.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t the Count, it was Foucher,’ Father Sentout said. ‘I knew him from the seminary where I was teaching. But he had to leave, he had no true vocation.’

  ‘Why did he have to leave?’

  ‘I wasn’t really involved, not directly, but it was quite a scandal, and not long before his scheduled ordination. I believe sex was involved, but that wasn’t the most serious thing. It was bearing false witness. I was told unofficially that he tried to fabricate evidence that would have incriminated another youth and one of his teachers. It almost succeeded, except that he boasted of his success to another seminarian with whom he was in an improper relationship.’

  ‘How well did you know him?’

  ‘Hardly at all, he wasn’t in my class and I was just a visiting teacher and not resident, but I remember his expulsion. And I certainly knew of him, such a good-looking boy, but what a contrast with the person within.’

  ‘Was that when you were teaching exorcism?’

  ‘Oh no, I was teaching the history of heresies and how to recognize them. Arians to Cathars and everything in between. The students used to joke that I taught heresy from A to C.’

  ‘Do you know anything else about him? Where he came from, where he went?’ When the priest shook his head Bruno urged him to find out.

  ‘I haven’t done that list of baptisms for you yet,’ he said.

  ‘I know, I need that too. What if I bring croissants for breakfast in the morning after I’ve done my first patrol at the market, say about eight?’ The priest sighed but agreed.

  Bruno had parked by the Mairie. He was walking back along the Rue de Paris from the priest’s house when Montsouris slapped him on the back and said he was on his way to meet Bruno’s friend from Paris-Match. He brushed aside any excuse and insisted Bruno join them for a quick one.

  ‘I’ve bought every issue of that rag for thirty years and now they want to talk to me about the Red Countess,’ Montsouris said as they turned up the Rue Gambetta to Ivan’s Cafe de la Renaissance. ‘Think I can maybe get a free subscription out of it?’

  Gilles and Antoine were at one of Ivan’s metal tables in front of the cafe, a small digital recorder and glasses of Ricard and an almost empty water jug before them. The ashtray was half-filled with Antoine’s yellow Gitanes. Montsouris joined them in a Ricard and Bruno ordered a beer.

  ‘Antoine was telling me about meeting her when he was a boy and his uncle worked at the chateau as a gardener,’ Gilles said. ‘How about you?’ he asked Montsouris. ‘How did you know her?’

  ‘I never met her to talk to but I saw her at one of the great moments of history,’ Montsouris said proudly. ‘But what’s this about? Why the sudden interest in the Red Countess?’

  Bruno had forgotten how a lifetime in the Party had left Montsouris suspicious of the capitalist press, even of the Paris-Match that he read from cover to cover each week.

  ‘We’re preparing an obituary,’ Gilles said smoothly. ‘You understand that we have to write them in advance, and apparently she’s very ill, bedridden up at the Red Chateau.’

  ‘Putain,’ said Montsouris, wiping his face with a beefy hand. ‘I still think of her as young, but you’re right. She’ll be in her eighties by now. It’ll be a sad day when she goes.’

  ‘So how do you remember her?’ Gilles asked.

  ‘It was May 1968, and I was fifteen, looking forward to leaving school and joining my dad on the railways.’ Montsouris took a long sip of his Ricard. His father was a militant, he explained, a lifelong member of the Communist Party and on the executive committee of the CGT union. When he went up to help organize the general strike he took his son with him, believing that it was the hour of the revolution come at last.

  ‘My dad and I were together with the students on the Left Bank on the Friday night, helping to build barricades on the Rue St Jacques, when they sent the CRS bastards in with tear gas,’ he said. The Compagnies Republicaines de Securite were the feared and ruthless riot police. He and his father had found a small bulldozer on a building site and used it to shovel heaps of sand and bricks to stiffen the barricades. The general strike was on the Monday and it was later that week when the two of them went to the big Renault plant at Boulogne-Billancourt in the Paris suburbs with its forty thousand workers.

  ‘That was when I saw her. My dad was going to be speaking so I was right up there by the stage and this elegant woman, dressed up to the nines and with her daughter beside her, gave the best speech I ever heard,’ he recounted. ‘I’ll never forget it. Forty thousand people and you could have heard a pin drop.

  ‘She was our heroine,’ he said. She had spoken of her time in the Resistance and how it had been the workers and the Party who led it and how they’d been betrayed after 1945. She introduced her daughter, who was a student at the Sorbonne, and said the workers ought to be ashamed to leave the students to face the French riot police alone.

  ‘This was our moment, she said, our 1789, our chance to overthrow a corrupt and rotten system, our chance to storm the Bastille …’

  Heads were turning in the cafe and Ivan poked his head around the kitchen door as Montsouris’s voice rose and tears shone in his eyes as he recalled a scene four decades in the past.

  ‘That was the only time you saw the Red Countess?’ Gilles asked gently.

  Montsouris ignored the question. ‘I’d have died for her,’ he said, rose and stomped away, leaving half a glass of Ricard behind him.

  ‘I never heard that story before,’ said Bruno. ‘I’m glad I did.’ He sank his beer, shook hands and got up to leave, checking his watch. Hector and Balzac were waiting.

  ‘The girl in Santa Barbara,’ said Gilles, waving away the coins Bruno was fishing from his pocket. ‘Turns out she’s in college in Montreal. We’re flying a guy in from New York.’

  Bruno nodded an acknowledgement as he left. If he had a murder, or even two, he had no obvious motive for either one. He had some proof and plenty of suspects but no chain of logic to bind them together into any kind of coherent explanation for the deaths of Athenais and Junot, let alone connect them. If Athenais had not committed suicide, had she been a willing participant in some Satanist ceremony that had somehow led to her death? Or had the whole scene in the boat been concocted to cover up her murder?

  He stopped in his tracks just before he reached his van. If the scene had been concocted, how had they obtained the candles? He opened his notebook and thumbed back to the notes he’d taken at the supermarket when first looking for Francette when he’d been given the names of the main distributors of candles. Gallotin was the name of the theatrical costumiers and suppliers in Paris, one of the few places that stocked the big black candles that had been in the punt. Then he leafed forward to the pages of notes he had taken from the family bible in the library of the Red Chateau. When he’d looked at the unopened mail on the table in the great hall he’
d scribbled the words ‘envelope, count, Gallotin, Paris’. He recalled the envelope. It had one of those transparent windows that usually signalled a bill.

  As he climbed into his van and set off for Pamela’s house his phone vibrated. He took it from the pouch to glance at the screen, saw it was Lemontin and pulled over to take the call.

  ‘I managed to dig up something on Antin Investments,’ the banker began. He explained that his new bank branch had a very full file because Antin had taken out a mortgage with the Sarlat office to buy and restore the hotel. Antin was owned by an SCI, a property company, which owned a lot of other property in the region. The mortgage application had been signed by two directors of Antin Investments, Cesar and Heloise de la Gorce, and the monthly payments were up to date.

  ‘It’s all a bit complex,’ Lemontin said. ‘The monthly payments for the Antin mortgage are coming from the parent SCI, in which Heloise de la Gorce is a very minor shareholder and Cesar is no shareholder at all.’

  ‘What is the parent SCI, do you know?’ Bruno asked.

  ‘Societe Civile Immobiliere Chateauroux-Vaillant,’ Lemontin replied. ‘That’s the Red Countess. Chateauroux is the chateau and Vaillant was the name of her mother.’

  ‘How are the monthly payments made, by cheque?’

  ‘No, by bank transfer on a standing order.’

  ‘Who authorized that and when did the payments start?’

  ‘I’ll find out.’

  As he drove on Bruno wondered how a woman with Alzheimer’s could have authorized such a mortgage, and if she had not, what legal standing her sister and great-nephew would have to do so.

  Fabiola opened the door to her house as he pulled into the courtyard. She told him she was just putting on her riding boots and asked him to wait. He didn’t really want company as the various questions nagged at him, but he saddled Hector, settled Balzac into the binocular case and waited until Fabiola came into the stables. She left him to lead Bess and set off briskly toward the shallow part of the river and the bridle track that led to Ste Alvere.