Dollmaker (31 page)

The lark's eyes didn't rise to the bait. ‘Vati was only trying to protect her. He still doesn't know I was there.'

Nor did any of the others until now. ‘Then that only leaves you, my friend,' said Kohler.

‘And the Préfet, and the pianist and the woman,' countered the cook, laughing at him. ‘If Kerjean is so sure Vati killed le Trocquer, why not ask yourself, did Kerjean not also want that shopkeeper dead?'

‘Did you see him there?'

Were detectives always so stupid? ‘If I had seen him, I would have said so right away.'

‘Providing you hadn't killed the shopkeeper and were certain you wouldn't be accused of it.'

Baumann interceded. ‘Vati says he and the woman never met in that shed beside the tracks, Herr Kohler, yet there was one of his cigarette packages in it and the woman's handkerchief?'

Kohler spoke his thoughts aloud. ‘The Préfet let my partner and I find them all by ourselves. He denied there were any bicycle tracks yet he must have seen them …'

‘Forty on the Captain? Do I hear forty,' quipped the cook. ‘I think the odds have just gone down to twenty on our Dollmaker, sixty on the Préfet, and ten each on the woman and her husband.'

‘But what about yourself?' asked one of the crew.

‘Yes, what about the doll, Schultzi? Why that doll?' asked another.

‘Yes, why that doll, Death's-head?' asked Kohler. ‘What was there about it that made you keep from the others that you had been there?'

‘Nothing. Vati had been accused. I knew he couldn't possibly have done it. Like him, I merely waited to see what you and your partner would come up with. If Vati was to be convicted, I'd have come forward but admit it, Herr
Detektif
, you and the French judges would only have thought I was lying to protect him.'

The doll … what the hell had there been about that doll to make the cook so evasive and to make Kaestner pick up the pieces and refuse to yield them until certain he could not only do so but that the time was right?

It was Baumann who said, ‘Death's-head, you had better tell us.'

‘Otto, there's nothing to tell. It was just a child's doll. A nothing doll. What else could it possibly have been?'

The look of death perceived sought him out. ‘Then why, please, did le Trocquer take it with him, and why, please, did he give it to the woman when it was the Captain he was going to see?'

Ah yes.

Trapped, Schultz flicked a glance to the right and left. He was near the entrance but perhaps four or five of the men were in the way behind him.

‘Don't even think of it, Death's-head,' said Baumann. ‘When we went after Paulette, you were the first to go for her and the last to rejoin us. You could have gone back to the Club. You could have killed her to shut her up but about what, please? This you had best tell us.'

The cook was a big man but he was going to need help.
Verdammt!

Kohler waited. Schultz tried to grin but succeeded only in wetting his lower lip. He would need a flying wedge to get him through that door, then the legs of a gazelle and the lungs of the damned.

‘I …' stammered the cook. ‘Look, I was only trying to protect Vati. It… it was nothing. Nothing!' he said, his voice breaking.

‘Take his gun,' said Baumann.

It was now or never. Kohler launched himself from the cremation pit and threw himself at the cook, carrying him into the men behind. They fell, they fought. Fists pummelled him. He pushed, he grabbed a leg, an arm, a neck … A burning candle rolled away. They were in the passage … the passage. ‘Run,' he gasped. ‘
God damn it, go while you can!
'

Seized from behind, Kohler was carried forward in a rush as they pelted after the cook. He bucked. He hit the stone walls and tried to stop the men, tried to shake loose of them in the darkness going down the tunnel … down it …

Someone cried out and fell. Others fell on top of the man and soon they were all shouting, all trying to scramble up and he was free and running … running towards the light of day, the light … Fog … was it fog?

Schultz was right behind him. The bastard had darted aside into one of the rooms and had tripped the others. Now the cook reached daylight and they slammed the door shut and threw their weight against it.

Breathlessly Schultz tried to fit the ancient key into the lock before it was too late.

Kohler did it for him.

The cook grinned hugely but he still had the pistol and now it was pointing the wrong way. There was fog everywhere.

‘Let's find the pianist and the woman said,' Death's-head, catching a breath. ‘If they're alive, I'll tell you about the doll. If they're dead, I won't.'

‘And what about the Préfet?'

‘What about him, eh? You're the detective. You tell me.'

10

St-Cyr stood still. The woman – he was certain it was her – took another patient, careful step. Only with difficulty did the bog relinquish her foot. It made sucking noises and of these she was very conscious.

He cursed the fog. He asked, God, why must You do this to me, a simple detective?

God only gave him the sucking noises and, over the open water in the middle of the fen somewhere back there behind him, the crying of the gulls and ravens.

A punt, he said. A body. Blood, death and torn flesh had drawn the birds. The woman no longer called out to her husband. She knew what awaited her.

There had been no sign of Kerjean. It was as if the Préfet had vanished from the face of the earth or had been swallowed up by the bog.

She took another step. Sphagnum squished. Water as black as strong tea and stinking of rotten eggs, bubbled up to icily swallow her boots. When she found the spiked and spindly trunk of a blackened spruce rising up from the peat, she ignored the pain in her hands to frantically pull it free – strained at it, tried so hard she had to rest.

She went on and he could not understand her doing so. The tree trunk only made her progress more difficult by catching on things. Twice she fell and stifled her cries by burying her face in the soggy moss. Once she went down so hard, she lay there between the mounds of sphagnum and leatherleaf and he did not see her for some time.

Then she pulled herself up and dragged the trunk free. Her long dark hair was awry with twigs, moss and mud, her face and hands bore smears of peat and blood, the bandages were gone, the coarse black woollen overcoat was soaking wet and very heavy yet she did not shed it.

Quite by accident or design she crossed the path but did not take it. instead, she stood off some distance straining to hear and see all that was around her. The fog swirled. He hid among the scattered cranberry and stunted spruce and saw her only now and then.

Satisfied that she wasn't being followed, she made her way towards the road but always kept the path well to her left.

When she fell to her knees with a cry and cast the only weapon she had aside, he knew something was wrong. Frantically she dragged at the peaty muds. She dug her feet in, sat back and, stiffening her legs, pulled hard at the thing. He heard her gasp. She gave a ragged sob, then said not loudly, ‘Yvon, I never wanted this to happen.'

The bicycle's rear wheel was so bent and twisted, it took all her remaining energy to pull and pry it free until at last, it stood above the surface of the bog.

He waited – everything in him said to go to her, that she needed help and comfort, but he could not do so.

Kerjean had approached from the other direction. He had hardly spent a moment in the bog. He had known the bicycle was there. He had
not
known she would find it.

‘An accident, Hélène,' he said and his voice, muffled by the fog, had a judgemental finality to it that was only reinforced by the eerie crying of the gulls and the deeper, harsher cawing of the ravens. ‘I found it on the road. I thought it best to hide it here since your husband …'

‘Yvon, damn you.
Yvon!
'

‘Since your husband intended to kill himself.'

‘
Why?
' she asked, the word torn from her. Anguish, pain and disbelief were in her voice, hatred too. ‘Yvon had no reason to kill himself, Victor. He had every reason to live for Angélique's sake.'

‘He tried to kill St-Cyr.'

‘You know that is not true. He was only trying to protect Angélique. Yvon didn't even know about that damned doll until Monsieur le Trocquer confronted me with it. My husband didn't want people to find out what his daughter had done to me. He … he was afraid the inspectors and others would see it and he couldn't have that, could he?'

She was desperate. ‘Where is Jean-Louis?' he asked.

‘Nowhere near. There are only the two of us.'

‘You should have taken the cyanide. It would have been better.'

‘Better? Better than what, please? Your hands on my throat? My face in the mud until I can struggle no more? I know too much. You cannot let me continue to live.'

‘Please don't be difficult.'

‘You wanted Yvon to kill himself so you hid the bicycle you had smashed with your car. You let him crawl all the way out there to his boat. Was he badly hurt, Victor? Was he bleeding, damn you?'

Sacré nom de nom
, thought Kerjean, why had Jean-Louis not called out? ‘Hélène, I searched for Yvon. I tried to find him and found the bicycle at the side of the road. I swear it, but I could not have stopped him even if I had found him. He was insane and you know it. He was always hearing the ancients and their whispers. This place was very sacred to them, sacred to himself also. Yes … yes, don't deny it. A relic, he called it, from the Ice Age, from that time of much colder climate. He wanted to be buried here and unless I am very mistaken, we will find him in that little boat of his still clutching the boulder he intended to take to the bottom with him.'

‘Yvon did not kill Monsieur le Trocquer,' she said harshly and, catching up the blackened tree trunk, wielded it to defend herself.

Kerjean found a cigarette and lit it. He made no move to approach her. He calmed himself and as he did so, the tree trunk was gradually lowered until its end dug itself into the bog beside the bicycle.

She looked like a witch, a hag, as pagan as the rest of the place. He finished the cigarette in silence and when it was done, pushed it well into the peat. Then he took a step towards her and said, ‘Hélène, please let me help you.' Another step followed and another – the peat was sucking at his boots. It wasn't any easier for her to move. Frantically she tried to pull the tree trunk free but it wouldn't come … it wouldn't.

With a cry that was more of the distant past than of the present, a blurred brown shape rushed out of the fog across the tops of the hummocks to leap at Kerjean and grab him from behind and drag him down … down into the bog. They fought. Something green and sharply pointed was raised up in two fists. A bronze spear point … A …

St-Cyr fired two shots into the air and all at once the gulls began to scream while the ravens went to silence.

‘Yvon …' she said. ‘
Chéri
…' The words were ripped right out of her.

‘Monsieur, please put the weapon down. Please do not force me to shoot you.'

Kerjean was face down. His arms were bent to give purchase. Involuntarily the hands clutched at the peaty mud and it squished between the futile fingers.

‘He thought I had been badly hurt and would surely kill myself,' said Charbonneau, ‘and I let him think it. I cut up a goat I stole from a nearby farm and made a sacrifice of it to the gods of this place. I knew he would have to come back here and I waited.'

‘Please drop the spear point.'

‘Yvon, do as he asks.'

It was Kerjean who said, ‘Kill me, Yvon. Don't let the Nazis take me.'

Schultz was not good company. Oh, he grinned and thought it all a great joke locking his buddies up like that, but from the Tumulus of Saint-Michel to the alignments of Kerzerho, a good eight kilometres, the muzzle of the Walther P38 had never wavered. Not for one second, and through the damnedest pea-souper Kohler had ever experienced.

He geared down one more time, put the lorry right into low-low and eased the Freikorps Doenitz's lumbering old sow among the standing stones.

The megaliths ghosted grey and ancient and a hell of a lot like some witch doctor's phalluses, and he had to wonder if this wasn't what the bloody things represented. ‘Not astronomical sight lines but peckers!' he snorted richly. ‘The fountains of youth to dazzle all the tribe's females and make the old druids randy!'

It didn't even get a rise out of Schultz. ‘Cat got your tongue?' he asked.

‘Just find the house by the sea and find the woman and her husband.'

‘So, tell me about the doll, eh? Give me a break.'

Kohler was just fucking about. ‘Not until we know they're dead. If they're not, you can forget it.'

‘Then I'll never know? That isn't fair. Hey, how was Paulette? I meant to ask, and bugger that crap about your trying to help the Dollmaker. You had her, Schultz, and you killed her and I'm going to make it stick.'

The shot shattered the side window and nearly put them into one of the larger stones. Kohler jammed on the brakes and shook his head to clear it. ‘I'm deaf, damn it! Deaf, you son of a bitch!' he roared.

To prove it, Schultz fired again. ‘All right … All right, you win. Was she juicy? Was she just begging for it, eh?'

‘I didn't kill her and I didn't kill her mother either. She was already dead when I found her.'

Somehow he had to get that gun away from Schultz. ‘You're lying. You raped her and then you killed her.'

‘I might have but I didn't. Now shut up and keep driving. Don't try to put us off the road. You do and it'll be the last thing you ever try.'

They started up again. He had to keep him talking. ‘Admit it. You knew that shopkeeper. You'd been working a fiddle with him and trying to get a hand up Paulette's skirt. When the pianist and Angélique went into the shop, and you saw that doll the kid had – you saw it, my friend – you put two and two together and went to see what would happen. That can only mean you knew well beforehand exactly what le Trocquer was going to do with that doll.'