Stonekiller (30 page)

‘Perhaps, but perhaps not. Ah, it does not matter. It's enough for them to fear such a thing.'

‘And Hen Oelmann?' hazarded Louis.

Deveaux stabbed the air with his cigarette. ‘Found that one's husband in his car and called in the troops.'

‘Louis, you should have asked me before you.…'

‘
Hermann
, be quiet!'

‘It's all your fault.
Verdammt!
a fucking
Sonderkommando.
Oelmann must know the paintings are a forgery.'

Sparks flew as Hermann's chest was stabbed. ‘He's just not taking any chances, my friend. A stonekiller on the loose? The prehistorian Henri-Georges Fillioux? The Professor Courtet, he keeps a loaded revolver in his room — why … why, please, does he do such a thing unless … ah, unless he also knows the paintings are a forgery and that his former colleague and sworn enemy has suddenly decided to come back from the dead without his wings and feathers.'

Deveaux sucked in a breath and tore the top two buttons of his shirt open so as to allow his chest more room to expand. ‘Madame, my condolences. It appears that your father has used a handaxe to rip out the throat of your husband and save the world a whole lot of trouble. One could have wished for something a little more refined but …,' he shrugged, ‘the result, it would be the same. Dead for at least …' he counted the hours off on stumpy fingers, ‘for at least ten or perhaps twelve hours. My men are, of course, out in full force sweeping the countryside at the request of the Baron whose wife, it appears, is missing; the bit-player Toto Lemieux also. Filming is to begin in Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne late this afternoon, so you can understand the urgency of things.'

Kohler thought of the swimming pool at the château. Had the Baroness gone for another deep dive and taken her Toto with her, or had the stonekiller got to them?

‘No one has seen either of them since you three left the château last night but I am certain the Baroness found the body in Herr Oelmann's car. Bloodied fingerprints were smeared on the leather upholstery of the passenger seat next the corpse. Her handkerchief was found on the floor. Blood on it also.'

‘Good,' said Louis with that curt little nod Kohler knew so well, that shaking of the head too.
Shh, idiot! Don't tell him I killed Jouvet. Not yet.

‘
Good?
' exclaimed Deveaux. ‘What's so good about it?'

Odilon was really upset but not without due cause. ‘The Baroness will have gone to the cave with her Toto to have another look at the paintings.'

‘Ah
merde
, Louis … Fillioux may be there.'

‘I will drive you,' said Deveaux. ‘It will be faster, yes? and together we can take him. Leave the bicycles. Someone will steal them, of course, but …,' he shrugged, ‘there is nothing we can do about it.'

‘The bicycles, Louis.…'

‘Madame Jouvet, Hermann.'

‘The carpet-bag. She's got it in her carrier basket'

‘Ah no, madame,' began Deveaux. ‘The chest … the breath. Please, I cannot run after you.'

She reached the top of the next hill to leap off the bicycle and leave it lying in the road as she caught up the carpet-bag and raced for the cover of the nearby woods. ‘Gone,' swore Kohler. ‘Ah
nom de Jésus-Christ!
Louis, she's vanished.'

St-Cyr let go of him and calmed his voice. ‘Follow her. You will see where her trail is. Find her, Hermann, and bring her back for her sake as much as for our own. Odilon will return to meet you here.'

‘And you?' asked Kohler, worrying about him.

‘The cave, I think. The Baroness and her dog.'

An hour … two hours … Had it taken so long? wondered Kohler apprehensively. Downslope of him, moss-covered rectangular slabs and blocks of damp, grey limestone lay among oak and chestnut trees whose trunks were dark in the leafy shade.

There was still no sight of Juliette but he felt he had at last run her to ground. A twisted ankle — an espadrille had lain on a boulder — then the other one had been found and then the impressions of her bare feet in the moss. Limping … really limping.

She would have to hole up. Fillioux? he asked anxiously. Had she been heading for a rendezvous only the two of them knew?

Gingerly he took a step up onto a slab. Now he could catch a glimpse of the stream they had crossed and recrossed so many times. She had been following it, forcing him to struggle through the rubble of the ages.

The mossy smell of decay came to him and then the sight of twigs and saplings she had deliberately broken so that he would see them. Ah
merde
, what the hell had she in mind? The place was too still. Not a breath of air stirred, not the sound of a bird came, only the gentle murmuring of the water … the water.

The stream must eventually spill over the edge of the escarpment. Discovery Cave was not far now. A hundred metres, two hundred.… Would the lip of the waterfall be that far, a leap of a hundred metres or so to the rocks below?

She had wanted to kill herself in that abandoned mill at Domme. She had argued with herself, a woman in despair. ‘My children,' she had said. They alone had stopped her.

Some thirty metres downstream, on the other side, a shelf of limestone jutted out. Was she hiding under it, in some cave only she and that mother of hers had found? She and her father too, or was she waiting for this détective at the very edge of the waterfall for a leap together into death?

Gingerly he crossed the stream. Louis would be down there in that little valley. Louis.…

When he saw the shirt she had worn, Kohler shuddered. It was hanging from a limb. There had been stone tools in that carpet-bag, tools the mother had had beside her bed. Tools the daughter had been forced to use to skin and butcher rabbits … Ah
nom de Jésus-Christ!
where the hell was she?

Naked, madame? Is that it, eh? he demanded. Naked and with a handaxe?

The trousers hung on another branch, the carpet-bag lay on the ground and up from them, only the darkened maw of a narrow cave entrance stared at him from the edge of the shelf.

Like a savage, a trapped animal, she had retreated in there to draw him in and kill him.

*  *  *

Louis, he said. Louis … but there was no answer because Louis couldn't hear his silent call and as for Henri-Georges Fillioux, there was as yet no sign of him.

Fillioux, wondered St-Cyr. Everything centred around him. The wife, the daughter — how could any woman force her own flesh and blood to revere a dead father so much, the poor child had had to write letters to a man she had never seen and had no possibility of ever seeing because he was dead to her, dead. Letters he would never read until … until perhaps he'd stolen them from the mother's house during a desperate search for a small handful of postcards.

Fillioux had been married when he had met the sixteen-year-old daughter of a village innkeeper. He had had a daughter, Danielle Arthaud, whose mother had sued for divorce and so had known of the mischief in the Dordogne and that all had not been ‘research' of the prehistoric kind.

That wife must have instilled in Danielle a hatred of the man who had deserted her. His parents had disinherited the child. The inheritance had been clipped by the Germans requisitioning the house in Paris but still, if the parents wished to sell it, the Germans would pay handsomely. A fortune, particularly if invested wisely.

Two daughters, then. The one, a schoolteacher, had not known of the other who had been all too aware of her half-sister's existence. Both schooled in the use of stone tools, the one by her mother, the other from the notebooks and specimens in the trunk of her father and a long-dead abbot, or from the father himself, ah yes, but after a reconciliation of some sort or an agreement.

Two daughters who, had the one not been disinherited, could quite possibly have shared the inheritance equally, a thing Danielle would most certainly not want.

But was the father really dead, or was he alive, and had Juliette really been working with him on the forgery?

Wiping sweat from his brow, he glanced up through the trees past the stagings and towers of a celluloid world to the mouth of the Discovery Cave.

Toto Lemieux and the Baroness had obviously had a picnic beside the stream where she and her ‘prehistorian' would soon be filmed drinking champagne to toast their success. Like many great but temperamental actresses — was she great? He did not know — Marina von Strade had patently ignored the crisis, the time and the necessity for her to be in Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne to shoot the poverty scenes. The others — all the set crew, the cast, the cameramen, the directors and the producer could wait and to hell with them. She had had to come here.

Totally without fear of Fillioux or anyone else, the couple had bathed under the waterfall and had laughed and caressed until, naked still, the Baroness had led her Toto up to the cave.

He started out. By using the hoist rope the crew had strung to one side, he found the climb much easier but even so, his heart was pounding, his sweat blinding.

Darkness soon enveloped him.

‘Toto … Toto, darling,' came the urgent whisper. ‘
Bitte, liebchen. Bitte.
You enjoyed Danielle, didn't you?'

Danielle … Danielle … her voice echoed.

‘Damn you, Marina, he made me do it.'

‘Willi?' she asked, her voice grating.

Willi … Willi.…

‘You know he did.'

‘But you enjoyed her all the same?' came the accusation, harsh and cruel … so cruel.

Ah
merde
, they were in the second chamber. Like the neck of a funnel, the narrow passage Courtet had found would have revealed the light of their candles. Juliette must have stood here on that Thursday, hearing the sounds of their lovemaking just as he did but knowing the inner chamber to be very dangerous.

She had come to collect the things for her mother but had not been able to enter the cave beyond the
gisement
, she had said.

Not
, madame? he asked as if she was here beside him. And where, please, is this cache only you and your mother knew of?

It had to be in the main chamber and away from the
gisement
, for only here would it have been safe, so why, then, did she have to return on that Sunday when she could so easily have taken the things on that Thursday?

To see the paintings for herself … was that it, then? Or to see that nothing had been done to spoil them?

‘Toto … Toto,' came the earthy demand so softly there was no echo, only shadows on the walls and roof that flickered and fled across the tapestry of animals.

When the Baroness cried out in ecstasy, St-Cry turned away until the couple began to talk earnestly in whispers.

The handaxe was on the ground before Kohler, and Juliette was sitting demurely on a mossy shelf with arms clasped about her knees and her chin resting on them.

‘There,' she said. ‘Now are you convinced I did not want to kill you or anyone else?'

Ah
Gott im Himmel
, she was like a softly tanned forest nymph. ‘You could have told me,' said Kohler earnestly. ‘You scared the hell out of me.'

‘
Good!
'

The cave, such as it was, had soon broken through to ground level above and that is where he had found her.

‘I only wanted to see the postcards of my father because you both were blaming me for everything. Admit it, please. You thought I was the stonekiller! He has named me in those postcards — yes, I can see this. What did he say, that I had helped him? If so, it's a lie. It's all lies, I think. That part of the cave, the paintings, the ages of the figurines the abbe found and this … this,' she said, plucking at the amulet and inadvertently letting him see a breast she quickly hid.

Chin again on her knees and arms, she said, ‘Well, what is it to be, Inspector? The bracelets for my wrists so that Herr Oelmann can perhaps question me again, or yourself as my friend and protector?'

She was putting it right on the line. ‘Where is your father?'

‘My father,' she said. ‘The stonekiller. Perhaps you had best ask my half-sister for I, poor simple thing, do not know. Mother went to meet him, yes. She must have believed firmly that he would be there. She had no fear. Finally after all those years, what she had waited so long for had come true. They would meet again and make love perhaps but this time she would kill him. She didn't tell me anything, Inspector, only that she would take care of them. Of my husband and my father.'

‘I'll get your clothes.'

‘Does the sight of my nakedness offend you so much?'

‘I'm only trying to help.'

‘Then I will get my clothes myself and leave you to pick up the handaxe I did not use to kill you though I could have, couldn't I?'

Ah
merde
, there was not a thing wrong with either of her ankles. Not a thing!

‘Toto … Toto, darling, you must say nothing. Oh for sure you know things, yes? but just keep everyone believing you are simply my stud, my
grand godemiche
whose stiffness lasts for as long as any woman could ever want. With a little help, of course.'

‘Damn you, Marina. What makes you say things like that?'

‘Your cock and the white angel that feeds it. Now listen to me. Willi is in trouble — trouble like he has never had before so we must help him.'

‘Three murders … Fillioux, was it really him, eh, Marina?'

‘I did not hear that, Toto. I really didn't.'

‘Fillioux could be out there somewhere.'

‘
Yes
, that's it exactly! Danielle and her father, they are working together. She was so anxious to visit the cave to see the paintings on the Friday before that woman's death, she led us to them. She behaved
exactly
as she would have had she been here many times before.'

‘They're fakes. They're all fakes.'