And then, of the breeze down there and with hands perhaps clasped, ‘It’s like the bathe I had under that little waterfall. It’s delightful.’
Pialat didn’t waste time. A bachelor all his life, the mayor had worries of his own now that the visitors had departed. Kohler found him in the turreted sixteenth-century dovecote of the Governor’s House. As he went up the tightly spiralled staircase, he realized the tower had been modernized so that now a dark and heavily timbered floor above hid the roof. Formerly the droppings had just collected on the walls and at the bottom as a rich and much coveted source of phosphate for the garden. Now they would still be saved. Ah yes.
When he reached the open trap door, he could hear Pialat’s voice among the cooings of his little charges. ‘Oh my pretties, my precious ones, I have warned you. I have pleaded.’
From cage to cage he went with water and feed. Each pan of droppings was scraped into a bucket and then carefully brushed. ‘It was old Vivan again, and that son of his,’ said the mayor, grinding his teeth and still unaware of the visitor. ‘The adhesive on the limbs of their cherry trees, the scattered grain and the gossamer of their nets.… Those bastards. Three … is it three or four I have lost to their table this time?’
He noticed the visitor. His mouth fell open and for a moment, he couldn’t decide what to say. Then he shrugged and reached for a pigeon to calm himself. ‘Those two I mentioned, Inspector, they are always waiting, especially now with the shortages but … ah grâce à Dieu, I have not lost more of them this time. Jean-Guy, he was supposed to come and shut them in but … but the boy and his sister, they have not come today.’
‘Jean-Guy …?’
The bird relieved itself into the mayor’s hand. Droppings spattered a knee of the black suit. Feathers stuck to the front of the waistcoat and jacket lapels.
Pialat released the bird and let it fly around them until it finally settled on one of the ancient stone roosts above. ‘Yes, the children of Madame Jouvet. Very reliable, very polite — always dutiful. It is a little job I give them from time to time to help the family out.’
Three more pigeons were released and he let their feathers and bird shit damage his best suit. He seemed to need their closeness as they perched on his shoulders and hat, and he fed them little titbits he had scrounged from dinner.
‘Even with such a tragedy, Madame Jouvet would not have kept her son from his duties. She’s so conscientious, that one. A husband like that. Who would have thought he would do such a thing? He did it, didn’t he?’
‘He says he was in Sarlat’
The hand with the pigeon was automatically lifted. ‘Ah! Sarlat. Of course. It’s to be expected. The ironclad alibi while the blood, it still cools. Those friends of his aren’t to be trusted. Volunteers for Russia. Hah! they hated their jobs and wanted adventure and they got it. Rape, pillage, murder and wounds to boast about. That poor woman should leave him. I myself would sign the divorce papers and go to Rome to plead with the Pope!’
Pialat handed him the pigeon. ‘She’s pretty, isn’t she?’ Kohler had to ask himself did the mayor mean the actress, the schoolteacher or the pigeon.
‘Beautiful,’ he said and only realized, as he gently caressed the head and neck, that Pialat had used it to test him.
‘We are of one mind with such as these, Inspector,’ he said, ‘but you did not come here to see my birds.’
Kohler met the steadiness of his gaze. ‘What was the mother worth?’
So that was it, and one might have known. ‘Talk — there is always talk in a little place like this. Some said 500,000 francs, some said no more than 5,000. Certainly there is the shop and post office, the telephone but.…’ He took the pigeon from him to kiss it and return it to its cage. ‘But in a little place like Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne, those are nothing. It’s a poor village and they don’t keep it very clean. The citizens need a better mayor. Always if there is good leadership, pride of place and that sense of community, hard times can be withstood. The well of human endurance is deep and best tapped when brother helps brother with no thought of profit.’
He should have been mayor of Berlin! ‘Tell me about the film people. I gather they have already visited the cave?’
This, too, was something that should have been anticipated. Yes, they were there on the Thursday and the Friday before the killing. Two visits — all of our visitors on the Friday, that actress and her young friend on the.… Why is it, please, that the boy is not in a prisoner-of-war camp with all the others or under the earth?’
Like so many, the mayor had a right to be indignant. More than two million French soldiers languished behind barbed wire in the Reich. ‘Maybe his family didn’t want him killed?’
‘And bought his freedom from duty — a pauper? Ah! let us leave the matter to Saint Peter. The actress and her young friend went there on Thursday by themselves. It is the half-holiday.’
The last pigeon was locked up. The mayor waited for him to say something. He even took out a pocket comb and went to work on his walrus moustache just to make sure there wasn’t any bird shit in it.
‘You’d best tell me,’ said Kohler cautiously. ‘Only the schools get Thursday afternoon off.’
‘Ah! may God forgive me, I had better, hadn’t I? Early on that Thursday afternoon Madame Jouvet took her bicycle and left by the Porte del Bos. That husband of hers saw his wife even as I did myself. The rucksack on her back, the kerchief on her head, the haste, Inspector, to get away unseen if possible. She had received an urgent telephone call that morning from her mother.’
‘Ah merde, so she was there on Thursday too. The film … the cave paintings.…’
‘Inspector, what has happened to her children? It really is not like her. That old mill.… She might have gone there. The beams in the floor above, they are still sound. There are ropes — I myself keep taking them down for fear the boys who swing from them and climb too high might have an accident but a woman in great distress … a woman who was so close to the mother who directed her life, a mother who would know all about painting caves …?’
‘I’ll go there now.’
‘No, I will go with you. If she has hanged herself, I will never forgive myself. I shall resign as mayor and take the blame for not having put a stop to that husband of hers.’
He would probably kill his pigeons too. He had that look about him.
St-Cyr tried to open the door to the mill but it wouldn’t budge. He threw a shoulder against it — nearly knocking the wind out of himself. He ran around to the side to gaze up at the gaping hole of a once-glazed window.
Lazily a heavily knotted rope swung from an ancient timber inside. ‘Madame …’ he began, desperate now. ‘Madame, you had nothing to fear from me.’ Thoughts of the two children came. What would they do without their mother? Relatives … would there be someone to take them in?
It was Hermann who hoisted him up and by degrees got him through the window, but Louis paused up there.
Pialat threw Kohler a frantically questioning look.
The Sûreté’s hand earnestly motioned to them for silence. ‘Leave him,’ croaked Kohler. ‘Let him have a look.’ The cinematographer had taken over. Verdammt another killing!
The rope swung gently, and in the shaft of sunlight from the opposite window, it hung from the centre of the timber and stretched all but to the floor. Mill dust stirred and eddied. The inside of the door had been braced with the heavy cross-timber once used to secure it in earlier times of strife.
There was rubbish — the broken machinery of past times, what could not be reused elsewhere. A few pulley wheels, some old straw … a few of the baskets that had been used to collect walnuts but were now beyond repair.…
Alone in the centre of the floor, at the end of that rope, she sat on a small tier of wooden blocks and every time the rope she gripped so tightly came towards her, she rhythmically sent it back but maintained a tension on it that greatly troubled the détective in him.
If ever a woman h
ad sat in debate over killing herself, it was this one.
‘Madame,’ he said, as gently as he could. ‘There is no need. We are here now and will protect you.’
Somehow she awoke to his presence but said nothing, only gazed up at him as if still not sure there was anyone there. ‘The door, madame. Please open it.’
Pialat called out, ‘Juliette, ma chère, it’s me, Alain. Please, you must open the door and tell them what you know. The children … where are they?’
‘Monsieur le maire …?’ she blurted and searched desperately for words. ‘But… but I know nothing, Monsieur le maire. Nothing.’
‘The children?’ he repeated earnestly.
‘The children,’ she echoed. ‘Ah … Getting clover for the rabbits, I think. Your pigeons … I have forgotten. Forgive me.’
Pialat did not turn away. He shook himself and clenched his fists. Suddenly he gripped his mouth to stop himself from vomiting, shed tears of relief for her and could not help but let them fall.
Verdammt, thought Kohler, what have we here?
4
IN THE COOL HALF-LIGHT OF HIS GRAND SALON, Pialat put a glass of cognac into her hands. Gruff with embarrassment, he made excuses so as to leave them but as he went towards the door, she had to say something. ‘Alain, I … I did not know how you felt about me. I should have. Forgive me.’
‘It does not matter.’
‘But it does. You know it does. Perhaps when this is over and they have … have found the killer, we can again speak of such things?’
A compromise. ‘The killer… Of course. Yes. Yes, that would be fine.’
He closed the panelled doors leaving her to face the two détectives all alone. ‘I … I really didn’t realize, Inspectors. It’s stupid to have been so blind but things … things haven’t been good. He’s more than twice my age.’
She shrugged at the futility of it and sat down again in a sofa that was both elegant and of that severe though simple beauty of sixteenth-century Dordogne. A tapestry covered it.
St-Cyr let her take a hesitant sip. Kohler offered one of the mayor’s cigarettes from a carved wooden box that must predate the very use of tobacco.
‘Merci,’ she said, subdued and, trembling, accepted his offer of a light. They would want to know everything, these two from Paris. Why she had thought of killing herself. Why, please, madame?
Why she had gone to that cave not just on the Sunday before the murder but also on the Thursday, ah yes, that Thursday, messieurs.
‘My husband,’ she began. Again there was that shrug. ‘I cannot live with him any more. It’s impossible.’
‘But to take your life is to leave your children in his hands?’ said the one called St-Cyr. He was so earnest. There was compassion in the look he gave.
‘That is why I have not used the rope. An intense inner struggle, yes, which love and duty overcame.’
‘And now?’ asked the one called Kohler. ‘Are we to keep an eye on you always lest you seize the next opportunity?’
They were really very worried about her and not without good reason. Dead, she could tell them nothing.
Instinctively her smile was faint and self-effacing. She lowered her eyes and let the smoke curl up from her cigarette as she whispered, ‘Forgive me. It … it was a moment of weakness. I … I shall try not to succumb.’
Ah merde, thought St-Cyr, is she threatening us with the possibility? ‘Madame,’ he began. Her answered, ‘Yes?’ was much too quick and startled. ‘Madame, a flask was found near the stream. I have it here.’
She waited but he did not hurry. At last she had it in her hands and it was cold and worn and dented but engraved sharply with letters.…
They were both watching her intently. ‘HGF,’ she whispered. ‘Henri-Georges Fillioux … but … but, please, messieurs, what has my father’s flask to do with maman’s murder?’ She set it aside as if afraid to touch it.
Ah nom de Dieu, de Dieu, wondered St-Cyr, has she suddenly realized that she herself may well be in danger?
‘There was some champagne, madame,’ said Kohler gruffly so as to let her know he had had about enough of her evasiveness. ‘A Moët-et-Chandon. The 1889.’
She blanched. ‘The … the 1889? But … but mother never took champagne to the picnic. Always the vin paille de Beaulieu because once my father had said he liked it very much and she never forgot for a moment every word he ever said; the Château Bonnecoste also but.…’
‘But, what, madame?’ he insisted, reaching for the flask to remind her of it.
She straightened her back and shoulders. ‘But champagne, that … that was only once and my father brought it. A day in the early summer of 1913. In June. The … the 17th.’
The same date as that of the murder. ‘Two bottles?’ hazarded Kohler.
The faintness of her smile was again instinctively self-effacing. Blood beaded on her battered lips and she tried to hide this but gave it up. ‘They loved each other and I am the result, and yes, my father probably got my mother a little drunk and very receptive to his advances if you wish to look at things that way — I don’t. It … it was a moment of weakness maman refused ever to regret; myself also. Is it so terrible a thing?’
The flask was making her nervous.
‘No, no, of course not,’ muttered St-Cyr uncomfortably. ‘Such things, they happen all the time between those who truly love each other.’
You hypocrite! A girl of seventeen, Inspector, and a man of twenty-six? she said silently, giving them a moment to think of it themselves.
Satisfied, she said, ‘But if the truth were known, Inspectors, they shared each other’s bodies more than once that summer and well into the fall, well past the time of her knowing. At least, this is what I have since come to believe but not,’ she held up a hand, ‘because of the words of my husband who has constantly reminded me of it.’
‘The cave,’ breathed Kohler. ‘The waterfall and that little glade.’
Places André knew only too well — she could see them thinking this. My husband, she said silendy. He … he did it, didn’t he, but why the flask? she asked herself. The flask …?
‘Tell us about that Thursday,’ said St-Cyr. ‘Begin by revealing why you tried to hide this visit from me.’
‘You received an urgent telephone call from your mother that morning, madame,’ said Kohler. ‘You left the school that afternoon — the half-holiday. You were in a hurry and didn’t want to be seen leaving town.’
André must have told them. André … ‘I … All right, I did go to the cave on that Thursday. Mother was very agitated. She spoke of a mortar and some lumps of the black pigment. She wanted me to get them before it … it was too late. They … they were too precious to leave to chance.’
‘Too late for what, please?’ asked Kohler.
‘This … this she did not say.’
‘But how did she know of them,’ asked St-Cyr, ‘if she only went to the cave once a year?’
‘They were in a cache of ours from the years before, as I have already told you. Mother had her reasons. I … I did not question her. One seldom did.’
But you are afraid, madame, thought St-Cyr. Either you have done something you fear we will soon discover, or you are aware that your mother intended to poison your husband perhaps, and someone else, the one she thought she would meet. Your father. ‘And on the Sunday, madame, the day before her death? When you were hanging out the laundry, you said you had removed the things then.’
He would not leave it now. ‘For the lessons in cave painting, yes. That … that part was a lie for which I apologize, but I did remove them then. It … it was not possible on the Thursday afternoon as she had insisted.’
They let her finish the cognac. They let her fiddle with the last of a forgotten cigarette. They would see that her face was flushed beneath the bruises but would not understand the reason for her embarrassment. ‘I … I could not get to the cave on that Thursday afternoon. Others were there and they …’ she shrugged and tos
sed her hands, ‘they interfered. Please, I don’t know who they were. I saw only a couple exploring the cave. Strangers. A boy of twenty and a woman — wealthy … well-off in any case and from Paris, I thought.’
‘And?’ asked the one called Kohler. Were his eyes always so empty of feeling?
‘I … She … They … they made love in the cave. Love and … and I … I listened. There … there, now you know the reason why I could not recover the things nor tell you of it.’
‘What did you hear?’ asked Kohler severely.
‘What do you think?’ she countered hotly.
‘So you went back on the Sunday to get them?’ said St-Cyr, seemingly oblivious to the fuss.
‘Yes!’
‘But … but, madame, you have already told me you thought there was someone else there then?’
‘He … he watched me but … but I could not see him.’
‘Could it have been your husband?’ asked Kohler.
‘André …? This … this I do not know, Inspector.’
Or your father? wondered St-Cyr but did not ask it. ’You went into the cave but only to the gisement. You changed into your work clothes knowing there was someone else around?’
‘I kept my hammer ready.’
‘You bathed afterwards under the waterfall?’
‘Yes, but … but by then I was certain he had left the valley.’
‘A man and not a woman?’
‘Yes, but … but I cannot be sure, of course. It was only a feeling I had. I often got those feelings even as a child. It’s that kind of place.’
And you have now countered all our questions by saying the feeling was common to you. She could see them thinking this. They were silent, these two from Paris. Perhaps they thought she was lying — she really couldn’t tell. Perhaps in their imaginations they saw her naked under the waterfall knowing someone was watching her and that this might also account for her embarrassment since she had done it willingly.
‘Your father’s family, madame,’ said the one from the Sûreté, reaching for the flask. ‘Please tell us what you know of them.’
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