Dollmaker (36 page)

Grim at the thought of what must have happened, he stood and, carefully folding a bit of fabric, tucked it away in an envelope, then cleaned the tweezers on some grass.

Fortunately his other jacket pocket, the one with the loose thread that had been carefully coiled and saved at the end of its freely dangling leader, held a pair of ancient rubber gloves.

He put them on and, finding some inner strength of will, turned her over with much difficulty, scattering the flies and finally stepping back to gasp, ‘Ah
nom de Jésus-Christ!
'

She had been partially disembowelled — butchered. Opened to the groin. The oozing, stinking mess of dark, sticky offal was ripe with violet and yellow. The flies … the flies … they descended. They worried. They fought with one another to get at her and dig deeper.

Her throat had been hacked at. The jugular, the carotid arteries, the windpipe.… Her tongue was black. Both breasts had been crudely parted lengthwise down the middle and peeled aside so that now, as he watched, the left half of the left breast slowly slipped away until it hung by a strap of rotting skin.

When he found Hermann, a bottle of champagne, discovered in the stream, was all but gone. ‘I saved the other one for you, Louis. Come and sit a while. You look like you need it'

‘
I told you not to touch a thing!
'

‘Hey, it's a Moët-et-Chandon 1889,
mein Kamerad.
That's definitely not the year of her birth.'

A Moët-et-Chandon, the 1889 … How had she come by it?

They sat with their feet cooling. They didn't say a thing for quite some time. The champagne was absolutely magnificent, a real treat in which they silently toasted the victim at impromptu moments.

‘Jesus, Louis, why the hell does it always have to be us?'

‘Murder doesn't choose. God works in mysterious ways. Frankly, I don't think He has ever forgiven me for having looked up my Cousin Denise's skirts. I was ten at the time and didn't know any better. She was eating the strawberries I had stolen for her and said I could do as I pleased, but my Aunt Sophie thought otherwise.'

Louis was always being called to account for childhood misdemeanours and for others as well, ah yes. ‘Don't worry about Marianne's birthday. Your big Bavarian brother's taken care of everything. Roses, Louis, and if not them, then masses of petunias and ox-eye daisies. I asked a girl I met at Madame Chabot's on the rue Danton to look after things if we didn't get back in time. Giselle will do her best. You can count on her. She's very reliable — I like that in a girl. She'll steal them if she can't find any to buy.'

Ah
merde
, the wife's birthday and theft from the Occupier? Hermann had no scruples about stealing from his confréres, just as he had none when it came to choosing his women. Another prostitute. Marianne would have a fit. You ought to mind your own business!'

‘I am. I have to live with you, right? Admit it, you forgot and a man can't forget things like that. He really can't. Not with a skirt like her. She'll leave you just like the other one did.'

The first wife. ‘Spare me the lecture. Go and talk to that corpse as I have. Hey, from now on I am going to leave the “details” to you.'

‘Not before I give you the grand tour to open your eyes and get the fly-eggs out of them. Come on, relax. Here, have some more. Our woman was really something.'

From the scattered, foraged contents of the picnic hamper, St-Cyr reassembled the menu. ‘
Pâté de foie gras truffé
in a stone crock with a tight seal, alas now broken, radishes and bread.
Confit d'oie
in another stone crock, this time still in one piece. After the
pâté
, the remaining meat of the goose is cooked in its own fat and preserved under it.' He held up the crock. ‘The contents would have been carefully taken out with a dinner-knife and placed on one of the plates to be exclaimed over and admired before being grilled and eaten with a little more of the bread perhaps.' He tossed a hand. ‘The shells of the six eggs the badgers have eaten indicate an unrationed omelette was to follow.' He held up a small copper skillet. ‘A little of the leftover goose fat to cook the eggs and the mushrooms, but did she plan to kill her fellow diner?'

Kohler knew Louis was enjoying himself and let him continue.

The withered remains of some lettuce and endive were plucked from the grass along with those of several green onions and cloves of garlic, only bits of which remained. He found a small bottle of oil, unlabelled, the container saved to be used time and again. ‘
Salade à l'huile de noix
(with walnut oil). Then cheese, probably, with grand jean walnuts — they're very meaty — and fresh, sweet cherries. Afterwards, coffee from her thermos. It's no longer hot but it's real. She has even added a little cognac.'

The wines included a fine red Château Bonnecoste and the
vin paille de Beaulieu
, in addition to the champagne. There were glasses, plates, cups and cutlery for two with linen napkins. ‘Fantastic china, Hermann. Old like the pearls. Sévres and quite expensive.'

She had thought of everything, even to uncorking the red to let it breathe and sinking the white in the stream to cool, but had she intended to poison the person she had gone to meet?

‘Or did she intend to kill herself as well, Louis, and take down the two of them?'

‘Or merely use the specimens to show someone else what not to collect?' That, too, was often done.

‘Then why collect so many?'

‘Ah yes, that is a problem most certainly.' The poisonous mushrooms were one thing, however, the work gloves that separated them from the others in her basket, quite another.

Gingerly St-Cyr teased the gloves out and prised them open, showering a little rain of fine yellowish sand and tiny shards of black to dark brown flint. ‘These gloves haven't been used in years,' he said.

‘Then where did she find them?'

‘Or why did she bring them?'

‘That cave?' asked Kohler hesitantly.

‘Perhaps, but then …'

‘There's a black powder, a pigment of some sort.'

‘Manganese dioxide — the mineral, pyrolusite. It's quite common in the Dordogne. The ancients used it to.…'

‘To paint their caves,' breathed Kohler.

Both of them knew they would have to make the climb. The cave was nearly seventy metres above the stream. Sweat blurred the vision and stung the eyes. Twice they had to pause for breath. The talus of angular, slab-like blocks of grey-white limestone was difficult to traverse and blinding in its glare. Impatiently St-Cyr yanked at a collar that was too tight. The button, its thread frayed, popped off and he saw it bounce from a rock, blinked and said, ‘Ah no. It has disappeared.'

Such little losses were devastating these days, thought Kohler. Replacements were so difficult to find. ‘Tough luck. I'll tell Boemelburg you lost it in a whorehouse.'

‘You would. Save it for Pharand.'

‘That little fart? He'd love it' Pharand was Louis's boss, a file-mined, officious, insidiously jealous, territorial twit who was dangerous. Very dangerous. Ah yes. ‘That champagne wasn't such a good idea, Louis. I think I'm feeling dizzy.'

Mopping his brow, the Sûreté's little Frog dropped his suit jacket onto a slab of rock and took time out to use his necktie as a bandanna. There, that is better. Now you also.'

They continued on and up beneath the soaring of the honey buzzard, two fly specks in a bleached and broken land to which scattered scrub, a
maquis
of sorts, gave absolutely no comfort. Had they the vision of the hawk, they would have seen a well-treed plateau on high with an oak and chestnut forest and a stream that flowed to the head of a once much larger valley before leaping off its limestone cap to fall in a spray that glistened in the sunlight. They would have seen the railway line, a little to the south of them as it followed the flats along the north bank of the Dordogne. They would have seen that line turn to the north-west towards Sarlat. There was a road and a viaduct, a railway overpass. They had come in from the west. The woman had come in from the east, gathering her mushrooms until, at last, she had reached the valley and gone up it to the waterfall.

‘Louis, I'm going to have a bathe when we get back down there.'

‘Me also, but first, a moment, please, Hermann, for the quiet contemplation of what is now before us.'

The cave entrance was perhaps four metres wide by two in height but it had, originally, been much larger. In medieval times the cave could quite possibly have been used by shepherds to pen their flocks at night. More recently the layered deposits at its entrance, a hard breccia of broken bones, flints, sand, and rocky debris that had fallen from the roof, had been excavated. These dull reddish to pale yellowish deposits — some with sandy layers and some more bouldery — had a depth of about three metres. Down through the ages rubbish had been piled up at the cave mouth. These deposits had been cut into platform benches about a metre and a half high and perhaps three metres in depth and two in width. A trench ran through them to the darker recesses of the cave.

Spoil from the excavations had been thrown to the right and now lay behind a low retaining wall of dry-stone flags that extended out from the cave mouth and a little along that side of the valley. Rusting sardine cans, some so riddled with holes they must have been left before that other war, lay with shattered bits of wine bottle, nails and other trash. ‘Two-legged badgers,' commented the Sûreté tartly. ‘Artefact plunderers. Why can't people show respect and leave places like this to be studied? A prehistorian dug this excavation, Hermann, but that was years ago. They have even pulled the nails he used to mark the layers!'

Across a cleared span of the original cave floor, there was a ladder leaning against the innermost bench. The floor was littered with broken black flints, yellowish to reddish sand, ashes both grey and black, rock from the roof above, and broken, charred animal bones. Bones everywhere.

In one instant, standing at the entrance, how much history could they see? ‘Perhaps a hundred thousand years, Hermann. Perhaps more. From deep within the Pleistocene Ice Age to the present, from the severe cold of a world gripped by continental glaciation whose ice-front lay to the north near London, Rotterdam, Köln and elsewhere through countless cycles of cold and warm, the not-so-cold and not-so-warm, to what we have today. But always there was life here and a place to live. Sometimes permanently frozen ground and tundra vegetation, sometimes fir forests, grasslands or deciduous trees. Many of the flints show signs of having been worked. The bones … the bones are from animals some of which no longer roam these parts or, in some cases, even exist.'

Kohler stepped into the shade and at once the coolness of the cave beckoned. ‘A broken femur, Louis.'

Wolf, cave bear, Merck's rhinoceros, woolly mammoth, reindeer and wild boar came quickly to mind, a smattering from across the ages.

‘A deer, I think. It's a bit charred,' said Kohler.

‘The red deer, a preferred food, as was the horse of those days, though it looked more like the Mongolian horse of the present or a large and shaggy pony.' Reverently the Sûreté took it from him and ran a finger over its length. ‘Our victim,' he said, and Kohler could detect the sadness in his partner's voice. ‘These three, parallel incisions just above the knuckle.' He held the bone upright with the knuckle down. ‘These are the marks made by a stone chopper as the meat was removed.'

Oh-oh. ‘Was she butchered that way?'

Yes, I think so.'

‘The bone was smashed after a brief roasting, Louis, and … and the marrow sucked out.'

‘But when? Thirty thousand years ago, or one hundred thousand?'

It was only when they began to examine the walls of the innermost benches that they saw that some layers contained worked flints, ashes and bones, while others contained none of these but were of sand that had been blown or washed in or debris that had fallen from the roof of the cave. All of the layers had been cemented by lime that had been deposited from percolating groundwaters.

Beyond the benches, the floor of the cave remained littered with broken bones, flints, ashes, sand and bits of stone but this litter was shallow and lessened as the floor extended into deeper darkness. Lights would be needed to probe it further. Lights and ropes.

The roof was perhaps three or, in places, even four metres high, the walls curved outwards and perhaps ten metres apart. A cave of long but not always continuous habitation then, thought St-Cyr, one that would have formed the home base for several people at a time. Neanderthals first and then, more recently, Cro-Magnons.

They shared a cigarette as they stood in the cool darkness looking out towards the entrance. They began, as they so often did in such instances, a rapid exchange of thoughts. ‘Madame Fillioux leaves Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne by train, Hermann, perhaps four or five days ago. Let us give putrefaction its chance but concede that the heat of summer would have speeded things up.'

‘She gets off at a siding, dressed in everyday clothes and with stout walking shoes, her coat, picnic hamper and basket in hand. She must have been seen by several people yet no one has thought to mention this nor has anyone reported her missing.'

‘Madame Fillioux then walks along the tracks following the departing train but soon turns into the woods and begins to climb. She knows her way — she has done this before many times.'

‘She must have, mustn't she?' The cigarette was passed back.

‘Yes, yes, of course. She collects mushrooms, becomes completely absorbed in the task — ah, some edible morels are deep in the refuse of a rotting stump.'

‘Fly agaric and death cap go into the collecting bag. She feels a sense of what, Louis? Relief at finding them — she'd been so worried there wouldn't be any — guilt, fear, you tell me.'