Stonekiller (28 page)

They waited for her to continue and at last she said, ‘Inside the cave, this passage, it is about three metres to the north-west of where the ventilation shaft opens. It is narrow, too, but soon it becomes a long chamber whose roof, though not so high as this, wanders in the rock for some distance. Because there were shafts in the floor and some loose rocks, my mother never let me explore it but she and my father did when they first came here. I'm certain of it. Certain, too, that there were then no paintings. Cro-Magnon was not fool enough to have used that chamber.'

‘No paintings, Louis,' said Kohler. ‘A forgery like I told you she said.'

She touched his hand in apology. ‘Please understand that … that I had to find things out first for myself. When I came here on that Sunday just before she died, I crawled into this passage Professor Courtet claims to have discovered but which was, I think, sealed off so as to let him find it. It is not safe in there. It's really very dangerous but … but there are paintings now as … as good as any.'

‘Madame, is there something else you wish to tell us?' asked Louis, causing her to start and hazard, ‘No … no, there is nothing, Inspector.'

Wires led to lights. The set crew had even discreetly mounted switch panels at the entrance to the main chamber and at that of the second.

The storage batteries worked. All at once the cave lit up and, blinking, Kohler saw Juliette standing, ashen, beside Louis.

‘Me first,' she managed, prising off her espadrilles. ‘The bare feet, they are surer, messieurs.'

At once she hoisted herself up into the hole and disappeared from sight.

‘You next, Louis.'

‘The shoes, Hermann. Please tuck them out of sight. The carpet-bag, it must not leave our hands.'

‘And the schoolteacher?'

‘Let us keep a careful eye on her.'

On a white crystalline background of calcite, shaggy black and black-spotted ponies raced amid charging brown-red aurochs and yellowish brown to rusty red reindeer. Antlers and horns were all but interlocked, the figures often overlapping in an endless panorama, some filled in, some only in outline, the colours rich and earthy, the animals startlingly alive but of the distant past and haunting.

‘Ah
mon Dieu
,' breathed St-Cry, ‘they're magnificent.'

‘But they can't be real,' snorted Kohler, ‘unless we say they are.'

As at Lascaux, so also here, the chamber followed the channel of an ancient underground stream and opened upwards to an irregularly arched and pitted roof some three to four metres above them.

‘Here,' said Juliette anxiously. ‘The first of the shafts in the floor. Please be careful.'

The wretched thing plunged straight down into an uncomfortable darkness. The rock was grey nearest the floor and had a velvety texture Kohler didn't like because it crumbled when touched.

Cave bear and cave lion stared down at them from above in outlines of black and yellowish red with dusty spots of black to which sprayed red-ochre handprints had been added beneath the figures. ‘A moment, my friends,' gasped St-Cyr breathlessly. ‘A moment.'

Unrolling the tracing paper, he smoothed it over the handprints while Juliette and Hermann looked on and match was made for match. One set larger, one smaller and then … then.…

‘Your mother, madame, she has shown us that her handprints are not the same as these.'

‘She has made a record of them to prove she had nothing to do with … with any of this. She must have known what was happening to the cave last year when she came to visit us.'

‘A forgery,' sighed Kohler, ‘but is it one Courtet is all too aware of, or was he sucked in just like the rest of them?'

‘Perhaps but then. … It is too early for us to say, Hermann, but could the man's handprints have been made by using a glove?'

‘Made by a woman, then …? Ah
merde
, it's possible,' hazarded Kohler, catching the drift and not liking it. ‘Madame, your hand.… Would you put it over the smaller of these?'

‘The … the scratches on the walls, messieurs,' she stammered, abruptly moving on ahead to deftly point them out. ‘Engraved by a flint burin. They are hardly visible, yes? beneath the salmon here and the head of the bison up there but … but in the beard of the woolly mammoth too, I think. Here … along here, please. No!
Be careful.
That shaft — ah it is so big and deep, messieurs.
Watch out!
'

A stone fell and they didn't hear it hit bottom. Sickened by her refusal to match her handprints with those on the wall and by the gaping hole in the floor, Kohler looked doubtfully up at the roof.

The engravings she had pointed out were very faint and overlain by pigment spray in rusty red, sooty black and ochrous yellow but how the hell did she know so much about them unless she had made them? Ah
merde …

‘The amulet,' sighed St-Cyr, looking at her closely.

‘Ah! I have it here,' she said, avoiding his gaze. ‘I … I have forgotten to return it to its little compartment in the trunk. Professor Courtet, he … he will never forgive me.'

‘Nor us,' muttered Kohler acidly as she dragged the thing from around her neck and handed it to Louis.

‘Incisions have been added to those that were already there,' she said, a whisper. ‘Again, I should have told you but … but what was I really to do?'

A forgery.…

In line for stone-cut line those on the walls and roof were a match to those of the amulet and out of nothing but a jumble of faint scratches came swastikas.

Down through the long irregularities of the chamber there was nothing else to suggest a forgery, so cleverly had the paintings been done.

‘The mortar and the lumps of pyrolusite, madame. Is it that your mother was prepared to let the forgery she had discovered continue so she could poison your father before exposing what he did, or is it that she merely wanted further proof she had had nothing to do with any of this?'

His gaze could not now be avoided and she knew then that he still did not trust her and that she should have matched her hands with those on the walls. But Danielle and I, Inspector, she said to herself, we are of the same size, the same build, so the handprints, they would be the same. Ah yes, the same.

‘Well, madame, can we have your answer?'

‘Mother … I think she knew what had happened here and that my father had come back to betray all they had believed in and worked so hard to preserve and record.'

‘Then your father made the forgeries with, as the handprints suggest, the assistance of a woman and there was no need for the use of gloves to give the impression of his having been here?'

Ah damn, he still did not trust her. ‘Yes … Yes, that is how it must have been. Revenge … my father wanted only revenge against Professor Courtet and … and mother must have threatened to tell everyone what he was up to.'

When the lights suddenly went out, both of them heard her gasp, ‘Ah no, my father.…'

For several seconds there was nothing but the hollow sound of quietly moving air and then that of their breathing.

‘HELMUTT, YOU'VE LEFT THE FUCKING LIGHTS ON AGAIN!' came a distant shout, echoing in the chamber. ‘HOW MANY TIMES MUST I TELL YOU THE BATTERIES WILL ONLY BLEED DOWN?'

Down … Down … ‘Messieurs,' called out the Sûreté. ‘This chamber, it is occupied.'

Occupied … Occupied … ‘Detectives,
mein Heir
, on a murder investigation.'

‘And under orders,' sang out Kohler.

There were whispers and then, ‘
Verdammt
, it's those two from Paris, Helmutt. They've got no business being in there. Christ, we ought to leave them to fall through the floor!'

‘Ah, no … no,
mein Herr
, that would be most unwise of you,' said Louis. The paintings are far too precious. Another Sistine Chapel, yes? but far, far better, I think, than Lascaux and exactly as the Baron von Strade has said.'

It was wiser to leave the valley in haste than to hang around and, though they walked the bicycles along the railway line towards Sarlat, the memory of the cave paintings endured but more than this, far more, thought St-Cyr ruefully, was that of the handprints and the holes in the floor, of loose rocks just waiting to collapse from the roof. Whoever had done the paintings had been desperate.

‘The
Amanita phalloides
,' he said, causing the others to pause. ‘The death cap, madame. It's a puzzle, for its symptoms, they are delayed from twelve to twenty-four hours. But why, please, did your mother choose also to use the fly agaric whose symptoms are much more rapid, though the poison is far less dangerous?'

‘Louis.…'

‘Hermann, we are presented with a case whose solution appears quite simple — a straightforward but very brutal and demented killing apparently done by your father, madame, since your husband was in Sarlat on the Monday and could not have done it.'

Juliette hesitated. Though he already knew what her answer must be, she would have to tell him. ‘Mother… mother would have wanted insurance, yes? If the one didn't work, the other would.'

‘And?' asked Louis.

‘She … she would have wanted both my husband and … and my father to suffer a little but then to … to experience relief only to discover later on exactly what she had done to them.'

There, she had said it and now they would see how cruel
maman
could be, how willing to seek revenge herself. ‘Had she not been killed, she would have had the postcards as proof of my father's involvement, also her sketches and the handprints of Danielle — they must be hers, yes? — and his, too, while I … I would have had the stone mortar they had used and … and the lumps of pyrolusite.'

‘The postcards, Louis,' said Hermann.

‘Yes, yes, we will get to them. Madame, a place for us to lie up, please. Somewhere out of the way. Even if hunger and thirst gnaw at us, sleep will be a benefit.'

And you want to read the postcards in private without my seeing them, she said to herself, dismayed that he still did not trust her. ‘The farm, then, of my mother's uncle, Inspector. The place where she and my father stayed in the spring and summer of 1912 and '13.'

‘Louis, is that wise? Fillioux.…'

‘Wise or not, Hermann, even I can see that the last benzedrine you took has failed to work.'

The farmhouse was on a hill where overgrown pasture, now intruded upon by young poplars, had once fed a few cows and an old horse. Half the roof had fallen in and as they entered the cellars where the stables had been, sunlight broke through gaps in the floorboards above. ‘It'll have to do,' said Kohler, finding hay to scatter. Fresh hay.… ‘
Fresh
, Louis?' he managed.

‘My father,' said Juliette. ‘He has lain up here.'

Ah
merde …

The ashes of a cold fire held her as she crouched over them.

‘Sleep,' said Kohler. ‘Louis and you first, then myself.'

She tried to smile and look at him but found she couldn't force herself to do so.

‘Let me take the first watch, Hermann.'

‘You sure?'

‘Yes. It will give me time to think.'

The air was still, the sun too bright, and all about the ruined farmhouse, the swallows held dominion.

A fly stirred. Awakening, St-Cyr shook his head and breathed, ‘Ah
merde … merde
,' when he realized what had happened. Four hours … five … had he been asleep that long?

Driven from the farmhouse by Hermann's snoring, which Madame Jouvet had apparently slept soundly through, the Sûreté's thinker-watchman had succumbed to the heat of a sun which was now well past its zenith.

Scattered postcards revealed the infrequent gropings of guilt-ridden hands and the black-printed words of the past leapt at him from among the tall and sometimes trampled grass.

Danielle Arthaud had thought it best to tell Madame Fillioux the trunk had not only been put up for sale but had been bought by a person the woman would most certainly have hated. A man who had ridiculed her husband's work but now had taken it for his own.

Yet how is it, please, he asked, that Danielle learned who had purchased the trunk? Three days lie between the time Courtet supposedly stumbled upon it in that shop and her postcard. A telephone call from the shop perhaps? The money was needed.… Yes, yes, it is quite possible Danielle was only looking after the matter for the parents — her grandparents — but was that the case? Did she not also tip off Courtet as to the whereabouts of the trunk?

Another card drew his attention — this one from the professor and dated 13 July, 1941.