The Devil's Cave

by Martin Walker

  ‘Requiem æternam dona eis Domine; et lux perpetua luceat eis. Requiescant in pace,’ intoned Father Sentout, and made the sign of the cross over the two coffins as they were lowered into the adjoining graves. One was covered in wreaths, but the Count’s bore just two: one from his grandmother and the other from Béatrice. ‘Amen.’

  Marie-Françoise helped her great-grandmother to the edge of Athénaïs’s grave and gave her a small handful of soil to toss down before pushing the wheelchair away. She and the Red Countess ignored the second gap in the earth where only Héloïse stayed to mourn. Pamela squeezed his good arm, the one without the bandages from the scraping of the gravel, and they joined the line following the wheelchair into the courtyard of the Red Château to pay their respects to the Countess.

  ‘You do seem to get into extra trouble when I’m not here to keep an eye on you,’ Pamela said.

  ‘That seems like an excellent reason why you should stay.’

  Author’s Note

  This is a work of fiction and all characters and places and events are inventions. The Devil’s Cave does not exist, although some may recognize different features of the Gouffre de Proumeyssac and the Gouffre de Padirac, two magnificent caves in the region. The kindly folk at my local Crédit Agricole would never behave so badly to one of their employees and none of the fine local mayors of the Périgord would induce them to do so. The idea that businessmen in the French defence industry or hedge-fund financiers would ever resort to the exploitation of loose women in pursuit of profit is, of course, as ludicrous as it is outrageous. And the journalists for the splendid regional newspaper Sud-Ouest would never behave as Philippe Delaron does in this novel. My imagination must have run away with me.

  Madame de Montespan did indeed take part in a Black Mass in 1666 to win the affections of King Louis XIV, according to witnesses testifying before the special heresy court, the Chambre Ardente, whose records are preserved in the Archives de la Bastille. The King decided to close down the court soon afterwards. According to Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie, then Lieutenant General of the Paris Police, the royal mistress got away with it because ‘the enormity of the crime proved her safeguard’. The text of exorcism that I use is taken from the 1614 Ritual, and Pope Paul VI did indeed say in 1972, ‘from somewhere or other, the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God.’ Otherwise, the service in the cave is my own invention.

  This novel is dedicated to two very dear friends who first brought our family to the Périgord and have taken loving care of us ever since. Their kindness has been characteristic of the welcome we have received in the Périgord, whose traditions and cuisine, countryside and characters are the real heroes of the Bruno novels. I just hope the welcome stays as warm now that the novels are being published in French.

  As always, I owe particular thanks to my wife, Julia Watson, who checks all my fictional meals and recipes. Readers of her articles in Gourmet magazine and of her food blog eatwashington.com will recognize her expertise. Our elder daughter Kate runs the brunochiefofpolice.com website with great verve and dedication. Our younger daughter, Fanny, who is an eminent poet back in Scotland, brings a supportive but discriminating eye to my first drafts. Along with the much-mourned Bothwell and his successor Benson, our basset hounds, they have shared in the Bruno enterprise from the beginning. Finally, great thanks are owed to the magical editing gifts of Jane and Caroline Wood in Britain, Jonathan Segal in New York, and to my German-speaking family at the Diogenes publishing house. Daniel Keel, the legendary founder of Diogenes, sadly passed away just as I finished this book. One of the great literary figures of Europe, he also enjoyed a good Krimi and I will always be grateful for his kindness to me and his early support for the Bruno series. The books and authors, readers and friends that Daniel leaves behind him are as close as any of us human beings can come to immortality.

  Read on for a taste of Bruno’s next investigation,

  a mystery whose roots lie buried in World War 2

  Prologue

  It was shortly after dawn on a day in late spring that carried all the promise of summer to come. The fresh green leaves were so bright they startled the eye, dew was already steaming from the grass under the first rays of the sun and the woods around the cottage were clamorous with birdsong. Benoît Courrèges, Chef de Police in the small French town of St Denis and known to everyone as Bruno, could identify the different notes of warblers and hoopoes, woodlarks and woodpeckers. But he knew these were just a fraction of the birdlife of the sweet valley of the river Vézère where he made his home.

  Bruno wore his old army tracksuit in which he had just taken his morning run through the woods. His eyes were fixed on Napoléon and Joséphine, his two geese. These monarchs of his chicken run paced forward with slow dignity to study the quivering puppy held firmly in Bruno’s grip. Behind the geese, twitching his head from side to side, came Blanco the cockerel, named after a French rugby hero. Blanco was followed by his hens and the two pheasants Bruno had added to his flock because he liked their smaller eggs and the careful way the hen pheasant would hide them in the undergrowth.

  Raising a basset hound to be a hunting dog was slow work, but Bruno was becoming convinced that Balzac was the most intelligent dog he had ever known. Already house-trained, Balzac would even abandon an alluring new scent to obey his master’s summons. Now he was learning that the birds in Bruno’s chicken run were to be treated with courtesy as members of the extended family, and to be protected against all comers. Balzac was eager to bounce forward to play and send the chickens squawking and jumping into the air. So Bruno held him down with one hand and stroked him with the other, speaking in a low and reassuring voice as the two geese advanced to see what new creature Bruno had brought onto their territory this time.

  Bruno had already familiarized Balzac with the deep and sensual scent of truffles and shown him the white oaks in the woods where they were usually to be found. He took the dog on his morning jogs and his dawn and dusk checks of the security of the chicken coop, and thought the time was approaching when Balzac would be able to run alongside when he exercised the horses. Bruno suspected he’d miss the now-familiar feel of the large binoculars case strapped to his chest, where the puppy was currently stowed when his master went riding.

  Napoléon and Joséphine, who had grown familiar with Bruno’s previous basset hound, Gigi, came closer. Blanco flapped his wings and squawked out his morning cocorico, as if to assert that however large the two geese, he was really in charge here. The puppy, accustomed to sleeping in the stables beside Bruno’s horse Hector, was not in the least awed by the size of the geese. He cocked his head to one side to gaze up at them and made an amiable squeak of greeting. The geese cruised on past Bruno and his dog, leaving Blanco to stand on tiptoe and fluff out his feathers to enlarge his size and grandeur. Balzac looked suitably impressed.

  Watching his birds and stroking his hound, Bruno knew he could not imagine a life without animals and birdsong and his garden. He delighted in eating apples plucked straight from his own trees, tomatoes still warm from the sun and salads that had still been growing moments before he dressed them with oil and vinegar. At the back of his mind lurked the question of whether there would one day be a wife and children to share this idyll and enjoy the stately progress of the seasons.

  He turned his head to glance at his cottage, restored from ruin by his own hands and the help of his friends and neighbours in St Denis. Repaired now from the fire damage inflicted by a vengeful criminal, the house had grown. Bruno had used the insurance money and much of his savings to install windows in the roof, lay floorboards and create two new bedrooms in the disused loft. The plan had long been in his mind but the decision to carry it out felt like making a bet on his own future, that in time there would be a family to fill the space.

  On the desk in his study lay the estimate for installing solar panels on the roof, along with the tax rebates he would receive and the terms of the bank loan he had been promised. Bruno had done
his sums and knew it would take him almost ten years to earn back his investment, but he supposed it was a gesture to the environment that he ought to make. Now, gazing at the honey-coloured stone of his house topped with the traditional red tiles of the Périgord, he worried what the panels might do to the look of the place.

  His reverie was interrupted by the vibration of the phone in his pocket. As he extracted it, Balzac squirmed free and began creeping towards the grazing chickens. Bruno reached out to haul him back, missed, dropped his phone and a furious squawking erupted as the puppy bounded forward and the hens half-flew and half-scurried back to the protection of

  their hut.

  ‘Sorry, Father,’ Bruno said as he recovered the phone, having seen that his caller was the local priest, Father Sentout. He picked up Balzac with one hand and headed back to the house.

  ‘Sorry to disturb you so early, Bruno, but there’s been a death. Old Murcoing passed away and there’s something here that I think you ought to see. I’m at his place now, waiting for his daughter to get here.’

  ‘I’ll shower and come straight there,’ Bruno said. ‘How did you learn of his death?’

  ‘I called in to see him yesterday evening and he was fading then, so I sat with him through the night. He died just as the dawn broke.’

  Bruno thanked the priest, filled Balzac’s food and water bowls and headed for the shower, wondering how many towns were fortunate enough to have a priest who took his parochial duties so seriously that he’d sit up all night with a dying man. Murcoing had been one of the group of four or five old cronies who would gather at the cheaper of the town’s cafés. It had a TV for the horse races and off-track betting on the Pari Mutuel and the old men would nurse a petit blanc all morning and tell each other that France and St Denis were going to the dogs. Without knowing the details, Bruno recalled that Murcoing was one of the town’s few remaining Resistance veterans, which could mean a special funeral. If so, he’d be busy. The decision about the solar panels would have to wait.

  1

  As if determined to make it his last sight on earth, the dead man clutched what at first appeared to be a small painting on canvas or parchment. Bruno moved closer and saw that it was no painting, but a large and beautiful banknote, nearly twice the size of the undistinguished but familiar euro notes in his wallet.

  Impeccably engraved in pastel hues stood Mercury with his winged heels before a port teeming with sailing vessels and steamships. Facing him was a bare-chested Vulcan with his forge against a backdrop of a modern factory with tall chimneys belching smoke. It was a Banque de France note for one thousand francs of a kind that Bruno had never seen before. On the quilted counterpane that was tucked up tightly to the corpse’s grizzled chin lay another banknote, of the same style and value. Picking it up, Bruno was startled by its texture, still thick and crinkly as if made more of linen than paper. It was the reverse side of the note the dead man held. Against a cornucopia of fruits and flowers, a proud cockerel and sheaves of wheat, two medallions contained the profiles of a Greek god and goddess. They stared impassively at one another against the engraved signatures of some long-dead bank officials, and above them was printed the date of issue: December 1940.

  His eyebrows rose. For any Frenchman 1940 was a solemn year. It marked the third German invasion in seventy years, and the second French defeat. But it was the first time Paris had fallen to German arms. In 1870, the capital had withstood months of siege before French troops, under the watchful eye of the Kaiser’s armies, stormed the capital to defeat and slaughter the revolutionaries of the Paris Commune. After the invasion of 1914, the Germans had been held and eventually defeated. But in 1940, France had surrendered and signed a humiliating armistice. German soldiers had marched through the Arc de Triomphe and down the Champs-Elysées and launched an occupation that would last for over four years. France under Marshal Pétain’s Vichy regime had retained some shred of sovereignty over a truncated half of the country while the Germans took over Paris, the north and the whole Atlantic coastline. So this was a Vichy banknote, Bruno mused, wondering how long after the war’s end it had remained legal tender.

  There were more notes, all French and for varying amounts, inside a black wooden box that lay open at the dead man’s side. Alongside them were some old photographs. The one on top showed a group of young men and boys, carrying weapons from shotguns and revolvers to elderly submachine guns. They were squatting on the running boards or leaning against a black Citroën traction-avant, one of the most handsome cars France ever made. A French tricolore flag was draped across the bonnet.

  Bruno picked up the photo and turned it over to see the scrawled words Groupe Valmy, le 3 juillet, 1944. Mainly dressed like farmers, some wore berets and two had the old steel helmets from the 1914–1918 war. An older man sported a French officer’s uniform with leather straps across his chest and ammunition pouches. He held up a grenade in each hand. Each of the men had an armband with the letters FFI. Bruno knew it stood for Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur, the name De Gaulle had chosen for the Resistance fighters. The next photo showed the same car and an ancient truck parked beside a train. The doors of a goods wagon were open and men in a human chain were passing sacks from the train to the truck. On the back were the words Neuvic, 26 juillet, 1944.

  ‘I’ve never been allowed to see inside his box before,’ said the woman. She eyed the photos but made no move to touch them or the banknotes. Her hands, work-worn and gnarled, remained clenched in her lap. She looked to be in her sixties. Father Sentout had introduced her as Joséphine, one of the dead man’s three daughters. The priest was packing away the breviary and holy oils he had used to give the last rites. A spot of oil gleamed on the dead man’s forehead where the priest had made the last sign of the cross and another on the eyelids.

  ‘Eighty-six,’ the priest said. ‘A good age, a long life and he served France. Your father is with our father in heaven now.’ He put his hand gently on the woman’s arm. She shook it off.

  ‘We could have done with that money when I was growing up,’ she said, staring dry-eyed at the banknotes. ‘They were hard times.’

  ‘It was the banknotes that made me call you,’ said Father Sentout, turning to Bruno. ‘I don’t know what the law says about them, being out of date.’

  ‘They’re part of his estate so they’ll go to his heirs,’ said Bruno. ‘But those photos mean I’ll probably have to plan for a special funeral.’ He turned to Joséphine. ‘Do you know if he had the Resistance medal?’

  She gestured with her head to a small picture frame on the wall above the bed, below the crucifix. Bruno leaned across the bed to look closer. The curtains were open and the sun was shining but only a modest light came from the tiny courtyard. He saw the stone wall of a neighbour’s house barely two metres away. A single light bulb hanging from the ceiling in a dingy parchment lampshade did little to help, but he could make out the small brass circle with its engraved Cross of Lorraine hanging from a black and crimson ribbon. Beneath it in the frame was a faded FFI armband and a photograph of a young Murcoing wearing it and holding a rifle.

  ‘I’ll have to check the official list but it looks like he qualifies for a Resistance funeral with a guard of honour and a flag for the coffin,’ Bruno said. ‘If that’s what you want, I’ll make the arrangements. The state pays for it all. You can either have him buried at the big Resistance cemetery at Chasseneuil or here in St Denis.’

  ‘I was wondering if he’d left enough to pay for cremation,’ she said, looking around the small bedroom with its faded floral wallpaper and a cheap wardrobe that had seen better days. ‘He was waiting for a place in the retirement home so the Mairie stuck him in here.’

  The old man had lived alone in the small apartment formed from the ground floor of a narrow three-storey house in one of the back streets of St Denis. Bruno remembered when the Mairie had bought the building and converted it for social housing. Four families were stuffed into the upstairs apartments and another
from the waiting list would be moved into this place as soon as the old man was buried. The recession had been hard on St Denis.

  ‘Paul should be here by now,’ she said, looking at her watch. ‘His grandson, my sister’s boy. I called him as soon as I called the priest. He’s the only one my dad ever had much time for, the only other man in the family.’ She looked sourly at the corpse in the bed. ‘Three daughters weren’t enough for him.’

  ‘I’ll need your phone number to let you know about the funeral,’ Bruno said, taking out his notebook. ‘Do you know where he kept his papers, if there’s a will?’

  She shrugged and gave her number. ‘Nothing much to leave.’ She looked at her watch again. ‘I have to go. I’ll take whatever food he’s left.’ Through the open door they heard her rummaging in the small fridge and the food cupboard before she stomped down the narrow passage beside the garage that led to the street.

  ‘Not much sign of grief there,’ said Bruno, taking out his phone to call the medical centre. A doctor would have to certify death before Murcoing could be removed to the funeral parlour.

  ‘He didn’t have many visits from his family, except for Paul,’ the priest said. ‘All the sisters live down in Bergerac. Joséphine told me she works as a night nurse, so she probably sees more than enough of the old and sick.’