Now, cleverly lit and with pedal-boats for hire to explore the sunken lake, it was a tourist attraction. As well as the entrance fee, the café and souvenir shop and the special concerts, the cave made a steady profit from the stoneware it produced. Rack upon rack of plates, jugs, glasses, vases and every other implement that the managers could think of were left under the places where the water, heavy with particles of limestone, dripped down and slowly calcified the objects beneath. After a year or so in the cave, the items looked as though they had been carved from solid stone, and they were so popular that Marcel could barely keep up with the demand.
Smaller chambers led off from the main space, and the eerie formations of stalagmites and stalactites had been carefully lit to justify the rather fanciful names they had been given, such as the Chapel of Our Lady, after a thick rock that looked like a praying woman in a hood and a long cloak; or Napoleon’s Bedchamber, which resembled a massive four-poster bed with hangings swooping around it and a curious shape that could be interpreted as a giant letter N.
Marcel was the second generation of his family to lease the cave from the Baron, paying him a modest rent and a healthy share of the annual profits. Marcel’s wife and sisters, his sons and cousins all worked in the family business, investing cautiously in improvements. Bruno had heard they were working on a son et lumière show for summer evenings when no concert was booked.
Marcel greeted them at what he called the stage door, a secondary entrance high enough for the musicians’ trailers and wide enough for the pedal-boats. The public entrance around the corner was deliberately low, narrow and dark, so that the visitor’s eventual sight of the majestic scale of the cave would be all the more impressive. Marcel unlocked the double doors of green metal and pulled down the master switch for the lights. The three men walked down for perhaps fifty metres before reaching the cave itself. They were standing on a balcony carved into the side, with a metal railing to prevent them from falling and a long wide ramp leading down to the floor of the cave. Off to one side a storeroom had been found or perhaps carved from the rock. Bruno could see long rows of folding chairs stacked up inside.
‘We haven’t opened yet for the season, but we’ve been doing work all winter,’ Marcel said. ‘For the last few days, we’ve been working outside, so the cave has been locked and sealed.’
There was just one other way in, he explained: the route the first explorer had taken. Customers paid extra to be lowered in a small basket operated by a winch. All three entrances had been securely locked, and the only keys were held by Marcel and his family.
‘And by me, one complete set,’ the Baron added.
‘I came in this morning to check the lighting, because the damp can be a problem with the junction boxes, and I knew something was wrong because one of the boats was missing,’ Marcel continued. ‘It must have been taken under that shelf of rock and through the tunnel that leads to Our Lady’s Chapel. That’s the only place where you could hide a boat in here. So I took another boat and went across and then saw what had been done in the chapel. That’s when I called you,’ he said, addressing the Baron.
‘Have you touched anything in there?’ Bruno asked.
Marcel shook his head. ‘It’s not exactly damage – I think it’s worse.’
Down at the lake, Marcel directed them into another boat which he began to pedal across the still, dark waters. Occasional drops of water plopped from the roof above. When one landed on his hand, Bruno could see the tiny flecks of limestone that had come down with the water. Occasional stumps of stone rose from the surface of the lake where the drops had formed over centuries, perhaps over millennia. They ducked their heads as Marcel pedalled under the shelf of stone and they emerged into a long tunnel, lit with an eerie blue light.
He pulled alongside a low stone wharf, where they could climb out and keep their feet dry, and tied up to an iron ring set into the stone. He led the way from the water’s edge into a wider passage where he opened a small plastic junction box and flicked some switches. At once, the sound of Gregorian chant echoed from the stone walls and a clear light gleamed from the end of the tunnel.
Bruno remembered the chapel and the religious music from his previous visit. It had been the largest of the smaller chambers and shaped liked a triangle, roughly ten metres deep and almost as wide at the entrance, narrowing to two metres wide at the far end where the stone Madonna stood. A large but low boulder with a flat top sat on the floor before her and had inevitably been dubbed the altar. Two church candles, an altar cloth and a small crucifix had been placed on it to complete the tableau. The rest of the chamber was empty except for the artful lights. The effect was of the interior of a church, dimly lit by natural sunlight. But on each of the side walls a projector cast an image of a stained-glass rose window which suffused the space with tones of gold, red and blue. Two small spotlights lit the Madonna, clear white from the left and blue from the right.
But now this Madonna was black. The whole stalagmite had been covered in black paint and the two church candles on the altar had been replaced with black ones. A severed goat’s head stood between them, its horns almost touching the candles and its tongue lolling. A cheap metal cup lay on its side beside the goat’s head, wine dregs drying inside, as if some perverted form of communion had taken place. There was a smell of stale tobacco smoke and something different, perhaps incense. An empty bottle of vodka had rolled to one side of the cave. This time Bruno noted that the brand was Smirnoff. And a large pentagram had been scrawled in black paint, the precise size of the projection of the rose window.
‘That’s the window at Chartres they defaced,’ said Marcel. ‘It’s Rouen cathedral on the other side, but for some reason they left it alone. But you can see why I thought of that dead woman, Bruno. I don’t know about Satanism but this is for sure the devil’s work.’
‘And you’ve touched nothing?’ Bruno asked again. Marcel shook his head. Bruno looked at him closely, wondering if this was all some clumsy publicity stunt to take advantage of the media interest in the woman from the river.
Bruno walked across to the altar. It was smeared with dried blood from the goat. A long drop of blood hung from its tongue. It was still sticky, so the goat could not have been killed much before the previous evening. He’d check the local butchers and goat farmers. He turned his attention to the candles. These were different from those he had found in the punt. They were the original white church candles, smeared in black paint. The wax had not been a hospitable surface for the paint, which had run and pooled at the foot of each candle.
‘How old were these candles?’ he asked Marcel.
‘New this year and never lit.’
‘Well, they’ve been lit now. How long would you say they burned for?’
Marcel shrugged. ‘Two or three hours, maybe a bit more.’ Bruno turned to the Madonna. Here the black paint seemed different. It hadn’t run. He leaned forward and sniffed, then put the tip of his little finger against the paint. It was slightly sticky and smelt of turpentine, as if it were oil-based. The paint on the candles looked water-based.
There was a jumble of footprints in the dust before the Madonna and what could have been cigarette or cigar ash at her feet. In the passage outside he found one small cigarette stub, or perhaps the end of a cheroot. It was brown. As he lifted it to his nose in his gloved hand he scented that elusive incense again. He bagged it, and told Marcel to keep the place secure until he could persuade J-J, the chief of detectives for the Département, to assign his overworked forensic team to the inquiry. He’d have to stress the link to the dead woman, but since that appeared to be a suicide, it wouldn’t be easy. His only other find was a screwed-up piece of coloured paper in the bottom of the beached pedal-boat, which turned out to be a bubblegum wrapping, most likely left by some tourist the previous year. He bagged it anyway, along with the empty vodka bottle.
‘What do you think, Bruno?’ the Baron asked.
‘The most important thing is there’
s no dead body.’ He didn’t mention his suspicions about the publicity stunt. The Baron was his friend, but he was also a clever businessman with a financial interest in boosting visits to the cave.
‘As for criminal damage, there’s nothing that a few hours of cleaning can’t fix, so there’s not much of a crime here,’ he continued, leading the way down the passage to the boat. ‘It’s curious and it’s troubling, but it won’t be easy to get the Police National to take much of an interest. Looking at that bubblegum wrapper, I’d have said it was most likely kids larking about, except for the goat’s head and the break-in. Even so, I’d start by asking your own kids if they’re behind this. Do they have access to the keys?’
Marcel looked disappointed, and a little angry. ‘I already asked them before they went to school, and all the keys are accounted for. That’s the first thing I checked.’
‘When are you planning to open?’ Bruno asked him.
‘This weekend.’
‘Well, leave the boat and chapel untouched until we can see if I can interest the forensics guys in this. It might be a day or two.’
When they crossed the lake to the inner shore, the Baron asked Marcel to carry on with his work on the café and asked Bruno to stay behind.
‘There’s something you may as well know,’ he said when they were alone. ‘There’s another way in.’
‘And Marcel doesn’t know?’
The Baron shrugged. ‘I never told him but he may have found it. My father showed it to me when I was sixteen. It was something they used in the Resistance, and maybe at other troubled times.’
He led the way past a rack of calcifying crockery and along the passage leading to Napoleon’s Bedchamber to the far side of the cave where stood the display called The Organ, an array of stalagmites of steadily diminishing height and width. Off to one side was a triangle of three gigantic stalagmites known as the Dragon’s Teeth, so close they were almost touching. Another few centuries and they would be. The Baron eased his way into the narrow space between them and the cave wall. There was no room for Bruno to join him, but he peered through a gap to watch the Baron bend down and began brushing thick layers of pebbles and rock dust to one side. A wooden trapdoor with an iron ring appeared and with an effort the Baron levered it open, took a torch from his pocket and turned it on so that Bruno could see stone steps descending steeply.
‘Follow me, and close the trapdoor behind you.’ The Baron descended carefully, facing the steps that had so much space between them it was like descending a ladder rather than a staircase. As Bruno followed, his own torch held between his teeth, he noticed dust thick on the steps. It had been some time since anyone had come this way. The Baron waited for him at the bottom, a circular chamber large enough for both of them to stand, and shone his light into a low tunnel that led uphill into the distance.
‘Nobody’s used this for years,’ the Baron said. ‘The Resistance used to hide guns here in the war.’
‘So anybody from a Resistance family could know about it?’ Bruno asked.
‘Not really. They weren’t fools, they had a need-to-know system, and most of the old Résistants are dead.’
‘Where does this come out?’
‘St Philippon, in the ruined chapel by the old cemetery. There’s another tunnel branching off that used to go down to the Grand Roc near Les Eyzies, but it was closed by a rockfall decades ago. We’d better get back before Marcel wonders what the hell we’re up to.’
‘You mean we’re not going to follow this tunnel all the way?’
‘Not today. Any time you want you can borrow my keys and explore it at your leisure, or try it from the other end. See if you can find the entrance. The Germans never did, nor the Milice,’ the Baron said, referring to the notorious police of the Vichy regime.
‘Did they look for it?’
‘Oh, yes. One of the prisoners they took knew about it and died under torture without saying a word.’
The Baron turned to climb back up the steps, but Bruno put a restraining hand on his arm. ‘Tell me the truth, mon vieux, is this break-in genuine or is it some publicity stunt?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘You know what I’m asking,’ Bruno said. ‘The point is, if I’m to report this and ask for a forensics team, I’ll have to give Périgueux a good reason to dig into their budget. If it all turns out to be some kids giving you a bit more publicity, we’ll both be in trouble.’
The Baron, his face cast into ghoulish shadows by the upward glow from the torch at his waist, turned back from the steps and looked Bruno in the eye.
‘You know me better than that, Bruno. If I were trying to fool you, I wouldn’t have shown you the secret passage.’ He turned back and began climbing the steps. He spoke, almost to himself. ‘Anyway, that’s my duty done.’
‘You mean that you’ve convinced me nobody used this secret passage to get into the cave?’
‘No.’ The Baron stopped in his climb. ‘It means that I’ve carried out my duty to my father. He made me promise to pass on the secret to somebody I trusted. As he said, you never know when the Germans will come again. Or the English.’
10
Back at the Mairie, Bruno headed for the Mayor’s office to tell him of the break-in and found himself called in to attend a meeting with the regional bank manager from Périgueux. Bankers made courtesy calls every few months to discuss building projects and financing plans for each of the communes in the Département. In the more important towns like St Denis the banker would first visit his local branch and afterwards invite the Mayor to the best lunch in town. But today was not so agreeable. The Mayor had removed the chair from in front of his desk and the banker stood before him like a naughty schoolboy.
‘Ah, Bruno, just the man I want to see,’ said the Mayor. ‘You know Monsieur Valentin from the bank, and you can tell him of the effort you have put into raising funds for a sports hall. Cake sales and vide-greniers, bingo evenings and collection tins, you name it and Bruno here has tried it. And now we’re being offered on a plate the sports hall of Bruno’s dreams.’
‘Get yourself a chair, Bruno. Monsieur Valentin here can remain standing while I explain to him why the commune of St Denis will no longer do any business with his bank.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ The banker’s voice almost choked.
‘You heard me,’ said the Mayor coldly. ‘No loans and no bonds. We’ll be closing the account we use to pay salaries and shifting the pension fund to the Banque Nationale de Paris. Along with my personal account and credit cards, and every other bank account in this town if I have anything to do with it.’
‘I don’t understand …’ The banker looked stunned. He cast his eyes appealingly toward Bruno, seeking some explanation. The Mayor’s voice ground on implacably.
‘I do not deal with my enemies, Monsieur Valentin. Least of all do I let them have access to my money.’
‘Enemies, Monsieur le Maire? We’ve worked together for years, been the banker for St Denis for over a hundred years …’
‘And now you’ve turned against us, deliberately setting out to block one of the most important projects this Département has seen in years, maybe in decades. It’s worth at least twenty-five million in the first phase and probably a hundred million by the time they’re through. Why are you against it?’
‘But I’m not, I haven’t heard … I mean, it sounds like just the thing we’d want to support, since it’s backed by you as one of our most valued clients. Please, I’d like to know more.’
‘And they’re going to throw in Bruno’s sports hall for free, just like that. An asset for our youngsters that we’ve been sweating over for years. The bank, to whom we’ve been loyal for years, is trying to sabotage the whole deal. What can you possibly have to say for yourself?’
The banker swallowed, apparently speechless, and waved his hands uncertainly in the air in appeal to whatever gods bankers worshipped.
‘Well, I suppose we’ll get some sort of explanation
from the chairman of the board in Paris to this letter of complaint I’m writing him. We were at ENA together, you know,’ the Mayor went on, referring to the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, the elite graduate school founded by de Gaulle.
The banker’s face was shiny with sweat and he seemed close to tears.
‘I really don’t understand. Please, tell me what’s wrong.’
With narrowed eyes peering over his spectacles, the Mayor tossed a sheaf of paper onto the desk.
‘Read that,’ he snapped. ‘Just the first page will do.’
Bruno recognized the petition that Gaston Lemontin had drawn up against the plans for the holiday village. He realized that the Mayor was out to make a very public and cruel example. Anyone who opposed one of his pet projects would regret it, a simple lesson in the iron laws of politics that the Mayor felt it necessary to teach every decade or so.
‘What is the first name on that petition against a project that is so important for the future of St Denis?’ the Mayor asked, in the tones of a schoolteacher with a particularly dense pupil.
‘Gaston Lemontin, followed by his wife Madame Lemontin,’ Valentin stammered. ‘I’m terribly sorry, there must be some misunderstanding, I shall take care …’
‘I didn’t ask you for the second name,’ the Mayor interrupted.
Bruno pursed his lips but kept silent at the sight of his mentor behaving so badly. He had understood by now that he had not been invited into this meeting by accident, but because the Mayor wanted him to witness the slow and careful humiliation of a proud man. He wondered whether the Mayor was enjoying this, as he seemed to be, or simply exercising a political muscle that needed to be flexed occasionally.
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