Dollmaker

by J. Robert Janes

  Ah damn him. ‘Did André partake of them, is this what you are asking?’

  ‘If you wish.’

  Then, yes, he ate them without comment just as he has all the thousands I have had to cook for him. He never said a thing unless it was to find fault. Mother never let it bother her. She was here to be with me and the children.’

  He was not going to say anything about the mushrooms he must have found. She realized this and turned abruptly away. Her shoulders tightened. A fist was clenched, the sweater purposefully folded.

  ‘Madame, at about what time would your mother have reached that little valley?’

  She flinched. ‘What time? Ah … no later than two o’clock, so as to have everything ready.’

  ‘The picnic’

  ‘Yes. The vin paille de Beaulieu always had to be at the temperature of the stream and this took about three-quarters of an hour perhaps, so she would hurry a little to be early if possible. The Château Bonnecoste had to breathe. She liked to warm it in the sun, but not too much.’

  He must go carefully now, she thought. He would sense this in the way she was standing with her back to him. He would know she was thinking of those last few moments.

  When he said nothing further, when he just let her pull away the webs of memory to see herself with maman in years gone by, she bowed her head and tearfully blurted, ‘He was a monster.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The man who killed her.’

  St-Cyr could still hear her screams echoing in that little valley, but even so he cautioned, ‘We are not certain it was a man, madame.’

  She clenched her fists and stamped a foot. ‘No woman would have done such a thing! To use a …’

  She choked. She buried her face in a hand. ‘I … I didn’t mean to say that. You … you must not listen to me. I’m not myself’

  ‘A stone tool?’

  He was right behind her now and if she moved away, she knew he would force her to stand still.

  When she nodded, the Inspector let go of her. He did not take chances, not this one, she told herself. He will force me to tell him everything.

  Taking a deep breath, she wiped her eyes and nose with her hands and fingers. ‘We … that is, maman and I, knew the ancients used such tools to butcher their kills. We talked of it while skinning a rabbit or cleaning a chicken for the pot. Mother was very curious about such things. She experimented — people knew of this, much to my discomfort. She … she showed me how it must have been done and made me do it, Inspector. Me. I was only five years old that first time. Five!’

  She calmed herself and went on, could not keep the sadness from her voice. ‘The flint knife for carefully splitting the skin as the surgeon’s scalpel does, the scraper for removing the fat and flesh from the hide, the handaxe chopper for … for.…’

  St-Cyr leapt. She tried to run from him. She fought to get away and started to scream, to kick, to …

  ‘Stop!’ he said into her ear. ‘Be brave. Please, I am sorry. Let us start back. Your classes … someone will be asking for you.’

  ‘I can’t go in there any more. I can’t! It isn’t fair. Mother butchered like that, me with my bruises and my black eye. I’m going away. I’m leaving this little place. Now that I’m free of her, I’m free of him.’

  Jouvet and family lived in two rooms and the attic of the school. From where he sat at the kitchen table across from the husband, Kohler could see right through the open doorways to the senior students. Girls and boys were segregated, the girls in view. Those directly in line with him could not help but see him if they raised their eyes.

  They didn’t. The oldest was about fourteen. Several silently wept for madame’s sake. Some worked their lips in prayer, others worried their fingernails or simply filled in the time by stolidly waiting. Perhaps twenty students in all and Madame Jouvet teaching both upstairs and downstairs under the critical eye of her husband and run off her feet, what with the household chores, the hunt for food and things, the rationing.

  ‘So, okay,’ he said, deliberately lowering his voice. ‘Let’s go over it again. You went to Sarlat to see about your leg and to find out if your request for a pension had been finally considered.’

  The dark brown eyes faced him as they had faced the Russian winter. Gaunt and empty of all feeling.

  ‘I have nothing to hide.’

  ‘Then don’t be so stubborn. Just give me the names of those who saw you there. Monday, right? Remember it was Monday and you took the gazogène autobus to Carsac-Aillac to catch the train to Sarlat at about what? 11:00 a.m.? Yes, that ought to suit. Bang on for a walk up the tracks and into the woods, my friend, with plenty of time to spare on the return journey and no one the wiser.’

  The day of the murder. The détective was just trying to rattle him. Kohler could know nothing. ‘Our mayor gave the driver of that bus a letter and some papers to deliver to the mayor of Sarlat. Old Pialat will have seen me sitting right up front because of my leg. Why not ask him? He’ll tell you I was on the bus. He’s full of wind, that mayor of ours, but sometimes what he says is true.’

  ‘I will, but first I want to hear from yourself the names of those who can prove you were in Sarlat. That mother-in-law of yours may have known her killer.’

  ‘Known her killer? Oh come now, Inspector. Ernestine did not put up a fight — is this what you are saying?’

  It was.

  The Russian winter returned, causing Kohler to think of his two sons, a pang of worry, was it really so terrible there?

  Jouvet gave a shrug, a toss of his crippled hand. ‘All right, I went to Sarlat for a meeting of the LVF. We are planning to take part in the Bastille Day parade. My comrades in arms, Lieutenant Henri Chevalier and Sergeant Hérve Prunet will vouch for me. They will also tell you I made an enquiry into my pension and found my request had not yet been considered by those bastards in Vichy.’

  ‘Those two would swear to anything. You knew that mother-in-law of yours was coming for a visit.’

  ‘So I buggered off to Sarlat, what of it? Her visits weren’t exactly pleasant.’

  ‘Don’t get smug with me, my friend. You walked up that railway line and went into the woods. Maybe you spied on her bathing in the buff, maybe not. God only knows what kind of a figure she had before you started hacking at her with that.…’

  ‘That stone chopper … is this what I used, Inspector? Come, come, be a little more forthcoming, eh? Don’t stint yourself. The flint handaxe? The stone knife — one can shave with flint. Hah! I should tell you, my fine Detektiv from Paris, me — yes, me — I have shaved the cunt hair of several partisan bitches with flints I had carried in my pockets all that way. I know it works.’

  Ah nom de Jésus-Christ! ‘Find paper and pencil. Set out the times, the names and addresses of everyone you met or who might even have seen you in Sarlat or on that train or at the station. Let it be for your certificat d’études primaires, my sick friend. Now I’m going to dismiss the school. Please maintain silence here while the kids rejoice in the fact I’ve got your number.’

  Kohler got up. He started for the doorway. He knew he ought to ask if the rucksack on the floor was the husband’s. It had the look of the Russian Front. There were things in it. A stone hammer, a pick, a flint knife …?

  Without another word, he went into the classroom and without a sound the students left.

  ‘Monsieur.…’

  ‘It’s Inspector to you.’

  Caught in the doorway, Jouvet looked like death. He wiped his brow with that crippled hand. ‘Please, I did not kill her. Ernestine, she … she always made a circuit of that little valley so as to see if it was free of others. If not, she would wait. Sometimes she would not even unpack the picnic hamper and lay things out or put the wine in the stream to cool and uncork the red to breathe.’

  The man swallowed. Feeling lost at what he was saying, and calling himself an utter fool, Jouvet knew he had trapped himself into continuing. ‘Sometimes there were others in the cave, roo
ting around for things. Usually they left when she told them it was forbidden, though it wasn’t of course. Sometimes they drove her from it and she would come to us in tears saying they were ruining the site, taking everything her husband had wanted so much to record and preserve. Any one of them could have killed her. I … I have thought I should tell you. It could have been a rapist, a.… Well, you know what I mean.’

  Kohler turned away to find the daughter facing him.

  ‘Mother would always be most distressed, Inspector. Before the war she would telephone the Museum of Culture and the Sorbonne, demanding that they listen to her. She would write letters to them, so many letters. They … they thought she was crazy. A shopkeeper, a postmistress from a little place like ours talking about things only they could know about but refusing always to give them the exact location until they agreed to excavate the deposits properly and give credit to my father. Her requests all fell on deaf ears. Money was always too difficult to find, the time too short, the staff too small and overworked, ours but one cave among so many.’

  A tow-haired, skinny girl with freckles and reddened blue eyes, peeked uncertainly out at him from under the left arm of her mother. A hank of black hair hung down over the boy’s forehead. He had the dark brown eyes of Jouvet, a steady, searching look that asked, Is he really guilty?

  Louis quietly slid in to one side of them to lean against the rear wall and remain as unobtrusive as possible.

  ‘My father was going to write a series of scientific papers about the site, Inspector.’

  ‘To startle his colleagues with his discovery. His, Juliette? Tell them that, please,’ demanded the husband.

  She must remain calm. ‘André, let us be at peace for the moment. Mother is dead and we must help them find her killer. That site, as I have told you, is very special, Inspectors. An almost continuous record exists there from earliest Neanderthal times. A book was to follow and was to contain all his detailed notes and sketches. The discovery was to have been the making of his reputation as a prehistorian, that cave, his life’s work.’

  ‘And your mother found it for him?’ asked Louis gently.

  She would not turn to look at him. She would keep her eyes on Herr Kohler and André. ‘Mother found the location in the diary of the Abbé Brûlé. The ink had run with the dampness. Some of the words, in the dialect of the Périgord, were unfamiliar to my father. Monsieur l’abbe came across the cave in 1856 and found some astounding pieces. Stone figurines, incised bits of bone, an amulet.… These and other artefacts were in the trunk he left in the safekeeping of my grandfather. The artefacts were all carefully labelled as to the levels from which they had come, locations my father was then able to confirm.’

  A trunk … all Kohler could think of was the penchant of Paris trunk murderers to send their victims to Lyon with no traceable return address. ‘And this trunk …’ he began only to hear her take a deep breath and give a worried sigh.

  ‘The trunk had rested in the cellars of my grandfather’s house in Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne for all those years, Inspector. It was covered with mildew when my mother showed it to my father in the early spring of 1912.’

  The mother would have just turned sixteen.

  ‘Father had the trunk shipped to Paris, to the house of his parents. He … he forbade them and my mother to say anything of it because of the amulet and the figurines. Nothing so old had ever been found.’

  ‘The figurines?’ asked Louis, digging out his pipe and tobacco pouch only to realize he was on harsh rations.

  ‘Beautiful carvings in the soft yellow stone of these parts. Very primitive. An Adam and Eve, the abbe called them. Exquisitely executed but simplistically so, without details of the faces, the hands or feet.’

  ‘A bulge for the testicles and penis,’ snorted Jouvet, causing Kohler to turn on him and breathe, ‘Speak only when spoken to.’

  It was Louis who quietly said, ‘That cave was not a religious site, madame — at least I do not think it was from the little we have seen. It was an abri, a shelter that was used for daily living and whose layers of refuse had been built up over the millennia.’

  This time she turned to face him. ‘An abri, yes, and not a grotte, not a religious site which would seldom contain the refuse layers, the gisement at its entrance.’

  She released the children and urged them to have a wash. ‘We will eat in a moment,’ she said. ‘Jean-Guy, help your sister to set the table, please? The special dishes, yes? We … we must make it just as grand-mère would have wished. Please set a place for her, too, so as to remind us.’

  Louis gave that nod his partner had come to know so well, but as the boy passed him, Kohler said, ‘Bring me your father’s rucksack. I want to have a look in it.’

  Incensed, Jouvet darted into the kitchen and came out with the thing. ‘Then look, idiot! Look! It is not mine. It is hers.’

  They took it with them. They promised to return it but a little of her died then, for they would begin to question things now. Ah yes. They would want to know more.

  When André hit her, she fell back against the stove but did not cry out or try to defend herself.

  Blood ran from her battered lips. The children raced upstairs to the attic. Some dishes fell.

  He stood over her with his stick. He let her have one on the shoulder for good measure. ‘Kill me then,’ she spat. ‘Kill me too.’

  ‘Not before you have suffered.’

  From the school to the Porte del Bos was not far, yet they could not make the journey unnoticed. Children whispered to their elders. Some tossed their heads. One boy was brazen enough to point.

  A cartful of manure trundled by, its axle complaining in the noonday heat. Flies rose to worry the tail of the donkey. The driver did not even acknowledge the presence of the two visitors. They had flic written all over them, Paris too. A priest hurried past.

  Kohler grinned. ‘I like it, Louis. We’re already famous.’

  ‘Let us find some shade.’

  ‘It’s good to be free of those two for a little. Marital strife gets to me.’

  Louis hurried on ahead, tossing a hand. ‘Oh for sure, you ought to know, eh? Your wife Gerda’s going to dump you. You watch, my fine Bavarian papa, she’ll turn to someone else. When was it you last went home?’

  Must Louis remind him? ‘After Holland, I think, and before Paris.’

  The summer of 1940! August perhaps. Had Hermann really been in Holland? He had never said so before. ‘Admit it, you’re on holiday.’

  ‘Ja, ja, some holiday. She’ll just have to understand there’s a war on.’

  ‘And a pretty little whore in your bed.’

  ‘Quit having a guilt complex over your own wife. Stop playing God.’

  ‘It’s God I’m worried about because He’s frowning at us again. Did Madame Jouvet and that mother of hers cook up a little plan to poison that husband of hers, or did our victim plan it all by herself?’

  Louis was really serious. They had stopped in the middle of the street just before the gate.

  ‘Did Madame Jouvet let slip their intentions, Hermann? During a beating perhaps? If so, our veteran would have killed his mother-in-law with relish.’

  ‘And with a stone chopper. He told me he could shave the female partisans with flint. The water must have been ice.’

  Trees crowded the base of the ramparts. A bastide, a fortified town which dated from 1283, Domme had three gates. This one was the most easterly and it was from here that the road Madame Jouvet had ridden her bicycle down took a tight S-bend before continuing eastward along the heights just outside and below the walls.

  There were walnut trees to the left and below the promenade des Remparts, holm oak, chestnut, lime and mulberry. It was lovely in the shade and one had to think how nice it would be to live in a little place like this. Yet could one ever do so after Paris? asked St-Cyr of himself, heaving that sigh not just of a man whose holidays were long overdue — five years at least — but one who recognized his soul belon
ged to the countryside, his heart to the city.

  The pungent scent of walnut leaves came instantly as he broke a leaf and brought it to a nostril. ‘So, bon,’ he said, dropping the leaf before moving into deeper shade. ‘Let’s have a look at her rucksack.’

  Kohler undid the straps and dumped everything on the ground. ‘A towel, no soap, trousers, a work shirt … gloves … a short-handled pick, chisel and hammer, a knife. Eight small lumps of black stone and one flat rock. Pale yellow, Chief. Limestone, I think. The local stuff.’

  ‘A mortar stone, Hermann. No thicker than a normal lauze and a little longer than my hand. Its edges have been worked but not perhaps in twenty thousand years.’

  ‘There’s that sooty black stuff again.’

  ‘Yes, yes. The mortar was used to grind the pyrolusite. Our teacher has been collecting lumps of a mineral her ancient forebears used to paint the walls of their caves.’

  Kohler took up the mortar and ran a thumb over it. The stuff was not slippery like graphite or shiny. ‘So, what’s she been up to? Painting that cave?’

  ‘Hiding something from us. She mentioned the mushrooms but only in memories too dear to lose. The mother always brought them. Always one of the local chefs would be required to cook some under her directions but Madame Fillioux also cooked them herself at the house of the daughter. The husband, along with the rest of the family, ate them.’

  ‘A half of the omelette, eh? and an end to the bastard.’

  ‘Madame Jouvet made no mention of the champagne, Hermann. Surely if it was a part of the ritual, she would have included it.’

  The sound of a well-tuned engine came to them. Cars were so few these days, one had to be curious. Even here in the zone libre, gasoline was all but impossible to obtain.

  The car took the grade easily. Its engine hummed then throbbed as it sped uphill. An open touring car. Grey. A Mercedes-Benz.

  ‘Four men and one woman, Louis. No uniforms.’

  ‘The sous-préfet of the Périgord Noir.’

  ‘Is the woman his mistress?’

  ‘Idiot, you’re slipping.’

  ‘And the other three?’