Stonekiller (8 page)

‘Your name?' breathed Kohler, still from behind the wheel of the car. He had the sun above and the world at his feet.

St-Cyr did up his flies. The engine cooled.

‘My name …?
What has that to do with things? Are you so stupid you cannot see what you have done? Those horses — all thirty-six of them — were for the Russian Front!
'

‘Louis, check his licence.'

‘My licence …?'

‘Illegal dealers, a lack of labour, and enforced shipments of produce to the Reich are the curse of French agriculture,' mused the Gestapo whose only proffered identification was a wallet badge that was held up in the palm of a giant's hand. ‘Production has fallen drastically and since there are so few horses left in the
zone occupee
, the farmers there are forced to plough using the wife and kids while here in the South, the Reich employs whatever means it can to get what remains.'

‘But… but you're one of them?'

‘Hermann, we have work to do.'

‘The fact that I'm “one” of them does not matter.' One of the few good things Vichy had tried desperately to do was to save what few horses remained.

Kohler calmed the two horses and from a shabby pocket, found the stray carrot he had picked up in the market — a piece of good fortune, a future snack. ‘We're waiting,' he said, giving each of the horses a half-carrot.

The man winced and tossed the wounded hand of inconsequence. ‘My licence … oh, well certainly, it is …'

‘Not so good, right? Then you're under arrest, my friend. Climb in the back. You can help the boys in blue remove the corpse we found. Maybe they'll let you ride with her.'

‘Hermann,
please.
He will only be an inconvenience. Let us tear up his licence. Let us remove his boots and make him walk down this road as his horses will eventually do.'

There was a nod the Sûreté understood only too well. The man's undershirt and drawers were used to clean the bonnet and windscreen, the tweed cap gave a nice shine. Water was no problem for the river was close and the labour free.

The current caught the jodhpurs and other things. It took the jacket and the bits of an identity card that would be very hard to replace. It took the torn scraps of a dubious licence.

They left the man without a stitch, to bathe his hands and think about breaking the law for profit, no matter for whom.

Hermann had a thing about horses. ‘Those poor old nags wouldn't have come home from Russia, Louis. I had to do it'

‘Of course.'

When they reached the glade, the body had already been removed. The grass and wild flowers had been cut and raked so hard, the place all but looked like a lawn, albeit damp from several washings, and smelling like a brothel sprinkled with cheap perfume. There was no sign of the picnic under the chestnut tree by that little stream, no sign of anyone. Even the empty champagne bottles had been taken, even their corks and wires. It was as if the murder had never happened. Even the honey buzzard had buggered off.

‘Sarlat… they will have taken her there,' managed Louis. It was not far. Perhaps seven kilometres at most.

‘Death caps and fly agaric.'

‘Ah
merde …
'

Nightmare visions of some undernourished
flic
came to them, those of the family also. Seven children perhaps and the wife and both sets of grandparents.

‘With the phalline poisoning of the death cap, Hermann, induced vomiting, even immediately after eating, is often of little use, since the poison, it is so readily absorbed.'

They were moving now — thrashing their way through the underbrush. They could not travel fast enough.

‘Though the symptoms are delayed from twelve to twenty-four hours,' sang out the Sûreté anxiously, ‘they consist of violent pains and burning sensations in the stomach, fainting fits, cramps, unstoppable diarrhoea, bloody stools, vomiting, cold sweats, shivering and an enlarged liver. These things can last up to ten days.
Ten!
'

Breathlessly he finally broke free of the woods to slide down to the railway embankment. Kohler followed and they ran along the track. ‘At the end, the pulse slows, the victim turns yellow, the breathing becomes very laboured. There is collapse and then death.'

A not-so-speedy release. End of mushrooms, end of lecture. ‘Hey, since you know the way, I'm going to let you drive,' said Kohler. ‘Don't hit anything. My nerves won't take it.'

*  *  *

The telephone calls were made, the panic had subsided. Mathieu Vaudable, in his forty-third year as coroner of the Périgord Noir, removed his gold-rimmed pince-nez. He cleared his throat and the sound of this, caught in dank medieval cellars off the rue de Siége in one of the oldest parts of Sarlat, was harsh.

‘These cellars,' he said by way of apology. ‘Jean-Louis, I regret the apprehensions you and Herr Kohler have suffered on account of the mushrooms. I myself was shown the basket and took immediate possession of it.'

In specimen after specimen,
Amanita phalloides
(death cap) and
Amanita muscaria
(fly agaric) lay among the stone tools Vaudable had had sent over from the local museum. He had not yet taken time out for his dinner and probably wouldn't.

He picked up a death cap with his tweezers. ‘The flat but round cap and dirty green shade which fades to brownish-yellow,' he said, ‘but is sometimes pale yellow or bluish, yes? The most deadly of our mushrooms, messieurs.'

There were white gills but on some specimens these had acquired a greenish cast. Each specimen had a swollen base, and a cup that was enclosed in a sheath. The presence of this indicated that the mushrooms had been dug out.

‘The
Amanita muscaria
is not nearly so poisonous. The cap, though similar to its little friend, is a brilliant vermilion to orange red. The gills are white or yellowish and the stem underground is covered with white scales. These specimens have also been dug out by our victim.'

‘And the stone tools?' managed Kohler.

‘Ah, yes. A mid-Acheulian handaxe, three cores which have been made into knives and scrapers but could be further worked as the need arose, and a smaller, more perfect knife with a pressure-flaked, serrated edge. All are of the black flint and bear the patina of great age.'

‘The wounds …' began Louis.

Vaudable sadly shook his head. ‘Never have I seen such a thing. Passion, yes, but was it only that? To open the victim? To partially disembowel her? To split the breasts — such things took some doing with tools such as those. Her assailant must have straddled her during the butchering. Blood would have covered his hands and arms, his face, chest and thighs — it was a man, wasn't it? Was he naked? Did he remove his clothes first and then bathe in the stream afterwards? Ah, these things I have to ask myself because his clothes, they would have been ruined.'

‘Perhaps it was a man, but,' said Louis, ‘this we really do not know.'

‘The time of death was last Monday, or perhaps the day before it.'

‘And the primary blow, was it struck with a tool such as this?'

Louis picked up the handaxe and, gripping it firmly so that it filled his hand, brought it down broadside and hard only to stop just above the desk. The nodule of flint, the boulder, Hermann, it is worked by striking the edge so that the flint spalls inwards and upwards away from the edge you want. This then causes the spalls to radiate out from a summit near the centre of each side so that you have points there that are useful as a hammerstone.'

The complete tool, then. Axe, chopper, cutter and hammer all in one. Kohler hefted the thing. It weighed about three-quarters of a kilogram, was perhaps at most twelve centimetres by ten by three in thickness. In some places a crude flaking gave a coarsely serrated edge. Other edges were even more crudely worked but all around the top of the tool, where it would have been gripped, there was unworked original nodule, with a white, calcareous encrustation.

‘The wound to the forehead,' said the coroner. ‘Let us examine it.'

‘Louis.…'

‘Stay here. Examine the tools. Try to figure out if our assailant knew she planned to poison him.'

‘If it was a man.'

‘Yes, yes, of course.'

Deft with the scalpel and tweezers, Vaudable had managed to peel back the skin of the forehead to reveal the bone beneath. ‘Though the fractures radiate from all around the area of impact, some are longer towards the scalp and chin.'

The smell was terrible but he paid it no mind.

‘Was it a handaxe or perhaps the vicious downward slash of a walking stick?' asked St-Cyr, peering closely at the fractures.

‘A walking stick? Ah, no. No. That could have been set aside in any case. No, I think the handaxe just as you have held it. One savage, sudden blow caught her right above the eyes. She fell back. Again she was hit on the head and again. He then fell on her. First the sharp edge of that thing to her throat, then the point of it, the multiple stabbings with the full weight behind them — a right-handed assailant. Material from the dress has been caught in many of the wounds. Then the butchering with other stone tools. Did he have them in a little bag he carried around his loins as a savage might? Did he pause, I ask myself, to select or attempt to select the tool best suited to his purpose? The skin of the left half of the left breast, Jean-Louis, I feel certain a scraper was used to remove the flesh and that is why that portion of the breast hangs only by a flap.'

Blue-black, green and yellow with tinges of wine red, and suppurating, Madame Ernestine Fillioux lay on her back on the raised stone pallet with the drain at her feet. Maggots had had to be scraped away. Legions of them still fed on her.

‘The sexual organs?' asked St-Cyr — one had to ask.

‘Violated with a razor-sharp stone. All of the tenderest of places. Pubic hairs have been scraped away. A savage attack, but as I have said, one, I think, of experimentation. It is as if whoever did this needed to try out the tools. Perhaps she knew of them herself and perhaps he laughed as he used them — the mind seeks answers as it probes for truth.'

‘A stonekiller,' breathed St-Cyr. ‘A film …
Moment of Discovery
, whose story line follows the life and times of our victim.'

The life and times.… Now what was this? wondered Vaudable but thought better of asking. ‘Ah yes, a film. I am sorry about the need for haste. These days it is difficult to raise an objection. Oh by the way, the muscarine poisoning of the fly agaric is quite different from that of the phalline of the death cap. To choose such two poisons is a puzzle. The fly agaric's poisoning resembles very closely that of the deadly nightshade. Within one to four hours — not the twelve to twenty-four hours of the death cap — the victim feels ill but cannot quite define the problem. The throat is dry. One has trouble swallowing. It is something they ate, perhaps the mushrooms, but let us wait to see, eh? Then there are the stomach cramps, the vomiting and the diarrhoea, the dilation of the pupils, the fainting, the hallucinations, the rapid acceleration of the pulse, delirium and prostration.'

‘Ether should be inhaled. The patient must be kept warm.'

‘And given frictions — rubbing to stimulate the circulation. Recovery is often in two days but death can occur.'

‘Alcohol must not be consumed because it dissolves the poison.'

‘And there was alcohol. A flask of cognac in addition to the wine and champagne.'

‘Cognac?'

‘Yes. It was found in the underbrush along the stream near the picnic site. Its contents had been consumed, but then the cap had been replaced and the flask washed.'

‘Ah
merde
, after the killing.'

At 4:00 in the afternoon the heat began to lessen but still the back streets of Domme were silent. Carrying the daughter's rucksack, St-Cyr walked alone, and when he found her, Madame Jouvet was behind the school. Her light brown hair was pinned up, her skirt hitched into her belt, the flowered print housedress clinging to her thighs and buttocks with dampness.

Painfully she hung the last of the laundry, but had not yet noticed him for the clothes-lines ran away from the school. ‘Madame …,' he began. She stiffened. She would not turn to face him. Tugging at the legs of the short pants her son would wear to church tomorrow, she tried to unrumple them. ‘Madame, please, a few more questions. Also I must ask you to identify some things. It's important.'

She gripped the clothes-line and waited for the blows of his words to strike her. ‘Madame, the things in your rucksack … the nodules of pyrolusite and the stone mortar, where and when did you get them?'

She shut her eyes and though he still could not see her face, he would know she was praying. ‘At the cave. I … I went there the … the day before mother's visit. André … André hated her complaining so much when things went wrong, I … I had to see that the site was all right. A year had passed. I … I was not certain if vandals had visited the cave. I
needed
to know ahead of time what to expect of her.'

‘Last Sunday, the day before she was killed.'

‘Yes.'

Compassion all but overwhelmed him and for a moment he could do nothing more than set the rucksack down. He wished she would turn to look at him but knew she wouldn't, that he would have to force her to do so.

‘And that is when you gathered the lumps of pyrolusite,' he said more harshly than intended. She dropped her hands, tugged the skirt from her belt and tried to free it from clinging to her thighs.

‘The stones for the cave painting, Inspector — you know this is what they were for. Why is it, then, that you demand it of me?'

She was facing him now and saw him draw in a breath in shock. She tried to smile self-consciously and this split her battered lips and made her wince. Blood trickled down her chin and she wiped it away with the back of a hand. ‘The sooty black dust of another era, Inspector. The children … my students. I was preparing for a little lesson in our history. I thought if I had some of the black, a little of the ochre, some grease — dear God there is now so little of it here and it is hoarded as never before and always priced too high.' She stopped herself, touched her hair, felt suddenly at such a loss to appear so poorly, and tucked strands of her hair up under the tight diadem of braids.