Stonekiller (10 page)

More than fifty years of patient history hit the ground. Any sensible Frenchman would have downed it with pleasure. Deveaux wore the pained expression of the wounded who could say nothing. Pialat was so flabbergasted, he could not pull his gaze from the stained cobblestones.

The glass was refilled by Franz Oelmann. The fingertips continued to curl the hairs at the back of Kohler's head. ‘You smell nice,' he grinned. The Baroness pressed a hip against him and her sea-green eyes came down to look more closely into the faded blue depths of his. The thick, soft mass of strawberry blonde hair floated all around him. Her breath was warm.

‘At the cave we dig, we strip away the layers of the past, Herr Kohler.' Her eyes widened to emphasize this. ‘It is all done very carefully, very correctly. We encounter stone tools quite different from the more recent, we dig deeper … deeper.' Her chest swelled. ‘I find an Eve, the Professor finds an Adam. We see each other as at the very dawn of time. Love blossoms — isn't it so when a woman works alongside a man in such a place? But we are pure, we are driven by a far higher ideal. The discovery.'

Of
what
, precisely? he wondered. Tomfoolery of the highest order, straight from the High Priest of Propaganda himself in Berlin, or.…

She fingered the white, cloth-covered button at the top of her dress. She had nice fingers, nice nails.

‘An amulet of deerhorn,
mein lieber Detektiv.
A species of deer not seen perhaps since time began.'

‘It has beautiful incisions,' offered Franz Oelmann earnestly. ‘The first hole ever drilled, the very first ornament or piece of jewellery but not,' he emphasized, ‘to be worn as frivolous finery but as something far deeper. A divine right.'

Oelmann's steel-blue eyes registered the intensity of his belief in what they had come across.

‘We're talking about the Neanderthals,' said von Strade firmly. ‘Not the Cro-Magnons.'

‘So, I find the piece, the amulet,' said the actress, ‘and I show it to the Herr Doktor Professor and we both kneel on the floor of the cave to gaze up at the paintings on the roof and walls as if in supplication before their god and ours, both one and united over the span of the millennia.'

She really believed it too. Emotion filled her eyes with moisture. She was an absolutely stunning woman. ‘But … but there aren't any paintings in that cave.' he managed. ‘Louis and I didn't …'

A meaty hand fell on his to grip him with the urgency of a film producer who had much to lose and wasn't about to let it go. ‘Oh but there
are
, Herr Kohler. Paintings of such extraordinary import as to be priceless and far beyond the value of those even at Lascaux. Our cave will become an international shrine when we're done with it. People from all over Europe will come to witness what our film has shown them.'

Deveaux's chest rattled as he heaved the sigh of a sous-préfet from whose hands the matter had fallen into those of another. Well, two others: Louis and his partner. Kohler threw him a glance that was ignored as, waistcoat unbuttoned, Deveaux's thumbs were slid behind the broad suspenders and his chest eased a little.

Pialat searched the skies for his pigeons. Franz Oelmann's gaze had lost none of its intensity.

The Baroness smiled excitedly. A hole in the ground … wasn't that what she had said about the caves beneath the town? ‘Willi, it's marvellous what holes in the ground can tell us about history.'

And then, of the breeze down there and with hands perhaps clasped, ‘It's like the bathe I had under that little waterfall. It's delightful.'

Pialat didn't waste time. A bachelor all his life, the mayor had worries of his own now that the visitors had departed. Kohler found him in the turreted sixteenth-century dovecote of the Governor's House. As he went up the tightly spiralled staircase, he realized the tower had been modernized so that now a dark and heavily timbered floor above hid the roof. Formerly the droppings had just collected on the walls and at the bottom as a rich and much coveted source of phosphate for the garden. Now they would still be saved. Ah yes.

When he reached the open trap door, he could hear Pialat's voice among the cooings of his little charges. ‘Oh my pretties, my precious ones, I have warned you. I have pleaded.'

From cage to cage he went with water and feed. Each pan of droppings was scraped into a bucket and then carefully brushed. ‘It was old Vivan again, and that son of his,' said the mayor, grinding his teeth and still unaware of the visitor. ‘The adhesive on the limbs of their cherry trees, the scattered grain and the gossamer of their nets.… Those bastards. Three … is it three or four I have lost to their table this time?'

He noticed the visitor. His mouth fell open and for a moment, he couldn't decide what to say. Then he shrugged and reached for a pigeon to calm himself. ‘Those two I mentioned, Inspector, they are always waiting, especially now with the shortages but … ah
grâce à Dieu
, I have not lost more of them this time. Jean-Guy, he was supposed to come and shut them in but … but the boy and his sister, they have not come today.'

‘Jean-Guy …?'

The bird relieved itself into the mayor's hand. Droppings spattered a knee of the black suit. Feathers stuck to the front of the waistcoat and jacket lapels.

Pialat released the bird and let it fly around them until it finally settled on one of the ancient stone roosts above. ‘Yes, the children of Madame Jouvet. Very reliable, very polite — always dutiful. It is a little job I give them from time to time to help the family out.'

Three more pigeons were released and he let their feathers and bird shit damage his best suit. He seemed to need their closeness as they perched on his shoulders and hat, and he fed them little titbits he had scrounged from dinner.

‘Even with such a tragedy, Madame Jouvet would not have kept her son from his duties. She's so conscientious, that one. A husband like that. Who would have thought he would do such a thing? He did it, didn't he?'

‘He says he was in Sarlat'

The hand with the pigeon was automatically lifted. ‘Ah! Sarlat. Of course. It's to be expected. The ironclad alibi while the blood, it still cools. Those friends of his aren't to be trusted. Volunteers for Russia. Hah! they hated their jobs and wanted adventure and they got it. Rape, pillage, murder and wounds to boast about. That poor woman should leave him. I myself would sign the divorce papers and go to Rome to plead with the Pope!'

Pialat handed him the pigeon. ‘She's pretty, isn't she?' Kohler had to ask himself did the mayor mean the actress, the schoolteacher or the pigeon.

‘Beautiful,' he said and only realized, as he gently caressed the head and neck, that Pialat had used it to test him.

‘We are of one mind with such as these, Inspector,' he said, ‘but you did not come here to see my birds.'

Kohler met the steadiness of his gaze. ‘What was the mother worth?'

So that was it, and one might have known. ‘Talk — there is always talk in a little place like this. Some said 500,000 francs, some said no more than 5,000. Certainly there is the shop and post office, the telephone but.…' He took the pigeon from him to kiss it and return it to its cage. ‘But in a little place like Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne, those are nothing. It's a poor village and they don't keep it very clean. The citizens need a better mayor. Always if there is good leadership, pride of place and that sense of community, hard times can be withstood. The well of human endurance is deep and best tapped when brother helps brother with no thought of profit.'

He should have been mayor of Berlin! ‘Tell me about the film people. I gather they have already visited the cave?'

This, too, was something that should have been anticipated. Yes, they were there on the Thursday and the Friday before the killing. Two visits — all of our visitors on the Friday, that actress and her young friend on the.… Why is it, please, that the boy is not in a prisoner-of-war camp with all the others or under the earth?'

Like so many, the mayor had a right to be indignant. More than two million French soldiers languished behind barbed wire in the Reich. ‘Maybe his family didn't want him killed?'

‘And bought his freedom from duty — a pauper? Ah! let us leave the matter to Saint Peter. The actress and her young friend went there on Thursday by themselves. It is the half-holiday.'

The last pigeon was locked up. The mayor waited for him to say something. He even took out a pocket comb and went to work on his walrus moustache just to make sure there wasn't any bird shit in it.

‘You'd best tell me,' said Kohler cautiously. ‘Only the schools get Thursday afternoon off.'

‘Ah! may God forgive me, I had better, hadn't I? Early on that Thursday afternoon Madame Jouvet took her bicycle and left by the Porte del Bos. That husband of hers saw his wife even as I did myself. The rucksack on her back, the kerchief on her head, the haste, Inspector, to get away unseen if possible. She had received an urgent telephone call that morning from her mother.'

‘Ah
merde
, so she was there on Thursday too. The film … the cave paintings.…'

‘Inspector, what has happened to her children? It really is not like her. That old mill.… She might have gone there. The beams in the floor above, they are still sound. There are ropes — I myself keep taking them down for fear the boys who swing from them and climb too high might have an accident but a woman in great distress … a woman who was so close to the mother who directed her life, a mother who would know all about painting caves …?'

‘I'll go there now.'

‘No, I will go with you. If she has hanged herself, I will never forgive myself. I shall resign as mayor and take the blame for not having put a stop to that husband of hers.'

He would probably kill his pigeons too. He had that look about him.

St-Cyr tried to open the door to the mill but it wouldn't budge. He threw a shoulder against it — nearly knocking the wind out of himself. He ran around to the side to gaze up at the gaping hole of a once-glazed window.

Lazily a heavily knotted rope swung from an ancient timber inside. ‘Madame …' he began, desperate now. ‘Madame, you had nothing to fear from me.' Thoughts of the two children came. What would they do without their mother? Relatives … would there be someone to take them in?

It was Hermann who hoisted him up and by degrees got him through the window, but Louis paused up there.

Pialat threw Kohler a frantically questioning look.

The Sûreté's hand earnestly motioned to them for silence. ‘Leave him,' croaked Kohler. ‘Let him have a look.' The cinematographer had taken over.
Verdammt
another killing!

The rope swung gently, and in the shaft of sunlight from the opposite window, it hung from the centre of the timber and stretched all but to the floor. Mill dust stirred and eddied. The inside of the door had been braced with the heavy cross-timber once used to secure it in earlier times of strife.

There was rubbish — the broken machinery of past times, what could not be reused elsewhere. A few pulley wheels, some old straw … a few of the baskets that had been used to collect walnuts but were now beyond repair.…

Alone in the centre of the floor, at the end of that rope, she sat on a small tier of wooden blocks and every time the rope she gripped so tightly came towards her, she rhythmically sent it back but maintained a tension on it that greatly troubled the détective in him.

If ever a woman had sat in debate over killing herself, it was this one.

‘Madame,' he said, as gently as he could. ‘There is no need. We are here now and will protect you.'

Somehow she awoke to his presence but said nothing, only gazed up at him as if still not sure there was anyone there. ‘The door, madame. Please open it.'

Pialat called out, ‘Juliette,
ma chère
, it's me, Alain. Please, you must open the door and tell them what you know. The children … where are they?'

‘Monsieur
le maire
…?' she blurted and searched desperately for words. ‘But… but I know nothing, Monsieur
le maire.
Nothing.'

‘The children?' he repeated earnestly.

‘The children,' she echoed. ‘Ah … Getting clover for the rabbits, I think. Your pigeons … I have forgotten. Forgive me.'

Pialat did not turn away. He shook himself and clenched his fists. Suddenly he gripped his mouth to stop himself from vomiting, shed tears of relief for her and could not help but let them fall.

Verdammt
, thought Kohler, what have we here?

4

I
N THE COOL HALF-LIGHT OF HIS GRAND SALON,
Pialat put a glass of cognac into her hands. Gruff with embarrassment, he made excuses so as to leave them but as he went towards the door, she had to say something. ‘Alain, I … I did not know how you felt about me. I should have. Forgive me.'

‘It does not matter.'

‘But it does. You know it does. Perhaps when this is over and they have … have found the killer, we can again speak of such things?'

A compromise. ‘The killer… Of course. Yes. Yes, that would be fine.'

He closed the panelled doors leaving her to face the two détectives all alone. ‘I … I really didn't realize, Inspectors. It's stupid to have been so blind but things … things haven't been good. He's more than twice my age.'

She shrugged at the futility of it and sat down again in a sofa that was both elegant and of that severe though simple beauty of sixteenth-century Dordogne. A tapestry covered it.

St-Cyr let her take a hesitant sip. Kohler offered one of the mayor's cigarettes from a carved wooden box that must predate the very use of tobacco.

‘
Merci
,' she said, subdued and, trembling, accepted his offer of a light. They would want to know everything, these two from Paris. Why she had thought of killing herself.
Why, please, madame?