Rather than looking shocked, Fabiola chuckled as she forked up more spaghetti. ‘Serves them all right for being so damn gullible.’
15
Bruno had arranged to meet J-J and Isabelle at Fauquet’s cafe for breakfast. First to arrive, he borrowed Fauquet’s own copy of Sud-Ouest. A photo of the blackened Madonna from inside the cave took up the whole front page. The headline read: The Devil Rides Again in St Denis. Inside were two more pages, with pictures of the goat and the candles. The pentagram defacing the image of the church window had been given a page to itself. Father Sentout had been interviewed again, and quotations from some Satanist website advised following one’s sexual desires, whatever one’s orientation. That seemed little more than an excuse to reprint the photo of the naked woman passing under the bridge.
‘Can I buy that copy from you?’ a stranger asked, as Bruno folded the paper and pushed it back along the counter. ‘In the Maison de la Presse, they’ve sold out. I’ll pay double.’
‘Not mine, it belongs to the cafe,’ he replied. ‘Where are you from?’
‘Limoges,’ came the reply. ‘We heard about it on the radio and came down. Do you think they’ll print some more?’
Bruno shrugged and went out to the terrace to wait for the others, noticing for the first time the unusual number of cars with number pates that did not carry the digits 24, which showed they came from the Departement of the Dordogne.
‘Busier than market day, and it’s not even eight o’clock,’ said Fauquet. He had laid aside his chef’s hat and was putting the summer chairs and tables onto the terrace. Usually he didn’t do that until well into May. ‘Say what you like, Bruno, this Satan stuff is good for business. I’ve got an extra batch of croissants in the oven already.’
Isabelle arrived first, limping slightly with her cane, and demanding to know what Bruno had done with Balzac. He explained that he’d left the puppy in the stables with his new friend Hector. Then J-J appeared in his big Citroen, looking for somewhere to park. He made two tours of the square before leaving it at the kerb with a big Police Nationale card inside the windscreen. They ordered croissants and coffee for Bruno and Isabelle, and the same for J-J plus the full breakfast of tartine and jam and orange juice.
‘I had further to come,’ he explained, after enfolding Isabelle into his bulk and planting smacking kisses on each cheek.
He sat down and studied her, then ordered another croissant for Isabelle, insisting she needed a little more flesh on her bones and a lot more Perigord cooking. J-J was probably one of the few men she’d heed, Bruno thought; it was like watching a father with a favourite daughter. Bruno shifted the empty plates and cups to a neighbouring table that two sets of visitors were squabbling over and spread out the detailed map that ramblers used, a 1:25,000 scale produced by the Institut Geographique National.
‘You can see the sites I’ve marked after the river trip,’ he said. There were four left that he thought worth examining from the land side. Two other sites had been checked by Antoine with the local watermen and pronounced clear.
‘I’d never realized those bends in the river were so big,’ Isabelle said. ‘You don’t get a sense of that on the roads.’
‘The roads can’t follow the river line because of the cliffs,’ said J-J. ‘Remember that case of the kid who drowned up near Montignac, Bruno? Must be seven or eight years ago. We used helicopters as well as boats trying to find him. You couldn’t get down from the roads.’
He reached into his briefcase. ‘By the way, I’ve got the final autopsy report.’ He put it on the table, turning by habit to the final page where the conclusions were listed.
The woman had been very drunk, with 1.9 grams of alcohol per litre of blood, which was more than three times the legal limit for driving. She’d had the equivalent of more than a bottle of wine, Bruno calculated. He’d have to check how much that meant from the vodka bottle. She had evidently taken temazepam, but less than half a gram. This was not usually fatal even when mixed with alcohol. But she’d also been a habitual cocaine user.
‘A busy girl,’ said Isabelle, thumbing through the report to the section on the woman’s sexual activity. Bruno still got slightly embarrassed discussing such matters with a woman, even a former lover. He noticed that J-J stayed silent. He took the report from Isabelle and looked first for the reference to the object Dr Gelletreau had taken from the woman’s vagina. It was listed as ‘unidentified flour-based disc, possibly bread’. He’d have to talk to the pathologist directly. Then he looked for the estimated time of death.
‘Time of death before midnight and no evening meal,’ Bruno said aloud. ‘So the alcohol and drugs would have been more potent.’
He read on, noting that only her prints had been found on the bottle of Smirnoff vodka. She had given birth more than a decade earlier. Her teeth had been capped cosmetically in a resin characteristic of American dentistry; French dentists preferred porcelain. But from the TB vaccination scar on an upper arm, she was almost certainly European by birth; American doctors used a different technique. Her lungs showed she had been a heavy smoker and her liver showed years of alcohol abuse.
‘A suicide, not much question about it,’ said J-J, his tone of voice suggesting he’d been brought on a wild goose chase.
‘I might agree, except for all the other stuff,’ said Bruno. ‘Did she paint that pentagram on herself? Did she set fire to the boat before taking her last slug of vodka? If so, where’s the lighter or the matches? Did she cut the cockerel’s head off? If so, where’s the knife? Where’s the container for the tranquillizers?’
‘It’s not only that,’ Isabelle said, glancing at the nearby tables and keeping her voice down. ‘Where did she leave her clothes? Who were the guys she was having sex with? Did they not notice she suddenly left? Why did they not report her missing? And an evening of sex and drugs is not the usual prelude to a suicide.’
She turned to Bruno. ‘I’m sure you’ll have checked missing persons, but with that dentistry, did you check the American consulate?’
‘Any report from them or any other foreign embassy gets on the missing persons list as a matter of course,’ said J-J.
‘What if she’s not formally missing yet, just some questions raised about where she might be?’ Isabelle said. ‘It’s worth a call.’
‘She was a striking woman,’ said Bruno. ‘It’s not a face that people would be likely to forget.’ He put a photograph on the table. The pathologist had patched up the damage to her eye, cleaned her up and done something deft with cosmetics before taking the picture. She still looked dead, but as if a beautiful woman had died peacefully. Copies would go out to all the Mairies, Gendarmeries and municipal police offices in the Departement, to the fire brigades and medical centres, newspapers and all public offices. Police would be expected to show copies of the photo around the hotels and bars and markets.
The first of Bruno’s targets was a small restaurant with a wide terrace overlooking the river and rowing boats for hire. It had been closed when Bruno and Antoine had taken the canoe trip. Now it was open, but the owner had never heard of anyone owning a punt. The second target was a holiday home, still locked and with all the shutters closed. Dead leaves from the previous autumn were still piled up by the double doors of the boathouse. The windows were thick with dust, but Bruno was able to force the doors apart enough to see that the only contents were two rotting canoes. The third was a small manor house with a stream that flowed into the river. There was no boathouse, but Bruno asked the elderly couple inside if he might check the small garage which was close to the stream. It was already open and contained only their Mercedes, with scant room even for that.
‘That leaves the Red Chateau, the one I’ve been looking forward to,’ said Isabelle. She had printed out the reference in Merimee, the historic monuments website of the Ministry of Culture, and read aloud the details. The castle was first mentioned in archives in the eleventh century, and had changed hands several times before being d
estroyed in the Hundred Years War. It was completely rebuilt at the end of the fifteenth century after the English had been expelled. For fear they might return it had retained the look of a fortress, until softened by some Renaissance windows in the next century. The northern wing, with an open gallery leading into the courtyard and a separate private chapel, dated from the seventeenth century. The whole building had been restored by a local architect in the 1850s.
‘Like most of these old places, it’s been turned into a company, a Societe Civile Immobiliere, to avoid inheritance taxes,’ Bruno said. Taxes to the local commune were paid by the company and the voters’ roll for the Commune listed the only full-time residents as two sisters, Hortense and Heloise.
‘Hortense was the famous one, the Red Countess,’ said J-J. ‘I can’t say I ever heard of the other one. She’ll be at least eighty by now.’
‘There’s some confusion over her date of birth,’ said Bruno, who had been doing some research by computer. ‘She told different people different things, but the citation when she was made a Compagnon de la Resistance said she began working as a courier at the age of fifteen, even before the Germans took over the Vichy zone in 1942. So she must have been born between 1925 and 1928.’
‘She was a Compagnon?’ said Isabelle.’That’s impressive. They didn’t make many of those.’
‘Just over a thousand, and De Gaulle himself had to approve every one,’ Bruno said. ‘Another sixty-two thousand got the Medaille de la Resistance. Not many, in a nation of fifty million. But she earned it. Not just a courier, she organized parachute drops and hid guns and took part in some of the battles after the Liberation.’
‘Wasn’t there something about an illegitimate child?’ J-J asked.
‘She gave birth to a daughter in early 1945,’ Bruno replied. ‘The father had been a Resistance fighter who was killed, and she never identified him. She just called him her own unknown soldier of the Liberation.’
‘If this chateau is the best bet for your mystery woman, we’d better tread carefully,’ J-J said. ‘Elderly woman, war heroine, aristocrat …’
‘And don’t forget member in good standing of the Communist Party, holder of the Red Partisan medal and Order of the Patriotic War, first class, awarded and pinned onto her proud chest by Stalin himself in the Kremlin,’ said Bruno. ‘There’s a lot about her on the internet.’
‘Quite a woman,’ said Isabelle, as they turned into the long avenue of poplar trees that led down the gravel drive. ‘And quite a chateau.’
Two round towers of grey-gold stone, only partly softened by ivy and topped by conical roofs of black slate, guarded an entrance from which the gates had been removed. The towers were magnificent relics, but far too large for the shrunken chateau that huddled beneath them. The whole structure seemed unbalanced, made to look ungainly by later changes. Off to the southern side stretched a conservatory, and to the north a series of covered arches led the way to the private chapel. What had once been a moat had become a gentle slope of grass and shrubbery.
‘It’s amazing that buildings like this still belong to the old families,’ said Isabelle. ‘I thought the revolution was supposed to change all that.’
‘Don’t forget who owns it,’ said J-J. ‘I half expect to see a red flag flying over the battlements.’
In the courtyard Bruno saw a familiar white Jaguar parked beside a small Peugeot and a Kango van. As they got out of J-J’s car, Bruno donned his official kepi. He was climbing the steps when the arched door opened and a maid in a black dress with a starched white apron and a small white cap bobbed a greeting.
‘Commissaire Jalipeau, Inspecteur Perreau and Chef de Police Courreges, to see the Countess on official business,’ said J-J. ‘But first, have you seen this woman?’
He thrust towards her a copy of the pathologist’s photograph and the maid stepped back, startled. She glanced at the picture, blinked and retreated without a word, leading them into a large hall with a chequerboard floor of dark and light-grey flagstones and old tapestries on the walls. She turned and went through a side door, leaving J-J staring crossly after her. It was much colder inside than it had been in the open air. A grand fireplace, as large as a family car, stood empty except for a single fat log left on the firedogs. As he stepped forward to look at the faded battle scenes on the tapestries, Bruno caught a curious, almost medicinal scent in the air. It reminded him of hospitals.
Double doors opened and Lionel Foucher stepped through. He stopped to nod coolly at Bruno and then raised his eyebrows to look at Isabelle with an imperious gaze that raked her from head to foot and back again. Bruno could feel her stiffen at the intrusion of his stare. Foucher half-smiled and opened the doors wide, then moved to one side to allow an elderly woman, dressed in black silk with a high lace collar, to enter the room.
‘Monsieur le Commissaire, I understand you wish to see my sister. I am afraid she is indisposed. May I be of assistance? I am Heloise de la Gorce.’
She held out her hand, more as if she expected it to be kissed than to be shaken. It seemed to have a ring on each finger, perhaps to conceal the claw-like twists that arthritis had inflicted. Her iron-grey hair looked as if it had been carved from stone. She wore no make-up, but a large red jewel shone from the lace at her throat.
‘Commissaire Jalipeau, Madame,’ said J-J, and introduced the others. He looked at Foucher. ‘Who’s this?’
‘Monsieur Foucher helps manage the estate,’ she said. Her eyes swept from Bruno to Isabelle and back to J-J.
‘When you say your sister is indisposed …’
‘She is an invalid and has been for some years. How may I be of assistance?’ she repeated.
J-J showed the photograph and explained. She took it, glanced at it cursorily and handed it to Foucher with an order that it be circulated among the staff.
‘I think the dead deserve a little more respect than that, Madame,’ said Isabelle, stepping forward to intercept Foucher. She took the photograph from him and held it up in front of the old woman’s face. ‘Please look at it more carefully.’
The old woman could hardly avoid doing so.
‘Nobody that I know of,’ she said. ‘That expression, it could be anybody.’
‘We have reason to believe that the boat which carried her down the river came from your boathouse, Madame,’ Bruno said. ‘Please assemble your staff so that we may question them. And perhaps you might explain your sister’s illness.’
The old lady studied him coldly and without turning her head told Foucher to call the staff to the entrance hall. She turned back to Bruno and said, ‘Follow me.’
She crossed the hall and stood by the double doors on the other side, waiting, Bruno realized, for them to be opened for her. He complied, smiling politely, then narrowed his eyes against the sudden glare of light that came from the next room, the conservatory. The scent of medicine became stronger.
‘Here’s my sister,’ said the old lady, striding to a modern hospital bed which was backed by row upon row of machines that Bruno had hitherto seen only in a hospital. An immobile figure with sparse white hair lay upon the bed. She had tubes up her nostrils and an intravenous drip in her arm. ‘I don’t think you’ll get much out of her. She’s had Alzheimer’s for years.’
Beyond the bed stood a figure silhouetted against the sunlight streaming in from the conservatory windows. All Bruno could see was a woman dressed in white, her hair tucked into a nurse’s cap.
‘Isn’t that right, nurse?’ the old lady asked.
‘Indeed, Madame. She’s resting now.’
Bruno was sure he knew the voice. As his eyes adjusted from the gloom of the hall to the brightness of this hospital room, he recognized his occasional riding companion, Eugenie.
‘Bonjour, Monsieur,’ she said, giving no sign that she had met him before.
He replied automatically, glancing around the room. There was a handsome desk and chair and a large sofa with a rotating bookcase beside it. An open laptop sat on the desk.
A small TV on a stand stood opposite the sofa.
‘You spend most of your time in this room, Madame?’ he asked.
‘I’m the resident nurse, and always on call. Other staff watch her when I’m away, but I spend a lot of my time here. Of course, I walk or ride horses when I can, for the exercise.’
‘Does your patient have lucid intervals?’
‘Not as long as I’ve known her, which is some weeks now.’
‘My sister hasn’t had a rational thought or spoken a comprehensible sentence for years,’ said Heloise.
Bruno’s eye was drawn to a large crucifix that hung above the bed and another on the opposite wall, where the invalid could not but see it.
‘I thought your sister was a Marxist,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t that make her an atheist?’
‘I believe she takes comfort from familiar things and we were very religious in our childhood. When she seems up to it, we take her to attend Mass in the chapel. We have a wheelchair.’
‘Do you use local priests for the Mass?’
‘No, my confessor makes regular visits from Paris. And now perhaps we can return to the hall and get this questioning over with. You too, nurse.’
Without another word, she turned and led the way back. Bruno took a last glance at the woman on the bed. Her eyes had opened and for a moment seemed to be staring deliberately at him. He looked again but the eyes were blank and the face immobile.
On an impulse he took one of the photographs of the dead woman from the folder beneath his arm, stepped to the side of the bed and held it in front of the Countess’s face. ‘Do you know this woman?’ he asked. The eyes seemed to quiver and on the sheet a wizened hand stirred and gripped at the smoothly ironed cotton. Was that recognition?
‘Please,’ said Eugenie, coming to his side and gently pushing the photo away. ‘Shocks or surprises upset her. We try to keep everything stable.’
The Devil's Cave bop-6 Page 13