The Devil's Cave

by Martin Walker

  ‘We’ve got some time,’ Antoine said. ‘Another ten, fifteen minutes before it drifts down here. Want a drink?’ He pointed to the bottle and opened his fridge to pull out a wine bottle filled with chilled water. His eyes squinted against the smoke. He looked an unlikely candidate to sing the role of Jesus, but nobody in St Denis could match his powerful voice.

  ‘Too early for me, thanks,’ said Bruno. ‘But maybe I’ll take an orange juice.’

  ‘Suit yourself,’ said Antoine, adding water to his anis and savouring his first drink of the day. Just as well there were no breathalysers on the river, Bruno thought.

  ‘Did you see that tattoo?’ he asked.

  ‘Is that what it was?’ Antoine shrugged. ‘I couldn’t rightly make it out. Looked like something mathematical, triangles maybe. I only caught a glimpse when that fool sent the punt rocking. I thought for a minute he might have been trying to sink it.’

  ‘I suppose he was just trying to help,’ Bruno said. ‘He looked a bit familiar but I can’t recall where I’ve seen him before.’

  ‘I’d have remembered that girl,’ Antoine said with a wink. ‘Legs all the way up to her shoulders. Nice car, too.’ He finished his drink and led the way to the small beach, past the trailer whose racks were already filled with canoes. He would pile his clients into his battered Renault Espace and then attach the trailer to tow the canoes to Les Eyzies or St Léon or even as far as Montignac, where they could paddle downstream with the current. A row of red canoes had been turned upside down and placed just above the beach. A hose and brush suggested Antoine had been washing away the dust of storage to prepare them for the new season.

  ‘Get that one launched,’ he said, pointing to the largest canoe, one that could easily fit half a dozen people. It was made of a tough and rubberized red plastic that could survive repeated scrapings over the pebbles of the shallows. It looked almost unsinkable, with big flotation chambers at bow and stern and others serving as seats in the middle. ‘I’ll get some rope and a hook to tow the thing in.’

  Bruno took off his boots and socks, his uniform tunic and trousers, put on a life jacket and hauled the canoe down from the beach to the shallows. Motorboats were forbidden on the river and it was too narrow for sailboats, so canoes were the only option. Some fishermen carried battery-driven electric motors for small outboards that could just about take them upstream when the currents weren’t too strong. The sand that Antoine shipped in every spring to cover the mud of his beach was still fresh and felt pleasantly cool under Bruno’s feet, but the river itself was cold. It could not have been a pleasant dip for the young man with the sports car.

  Antoine fixed one end of his rope to a bracket on the bow and Bruno took the rear of the canoe so Antoine could handle the hook. They pushed the canoe knee-deep before clambering in. The current here was quite strong and they had to paddle steadily just to stay near the beach. Antoine dug his paddle deep and set a brisk rhythm to take the canoe upstream, explaining that he’d need some time to fix the tow and didn’t want to drift back. The punt had looked close to sinking anyway. It must have been forty years since anybody had punts on this river, so it would be old wood. Already waterlogged, it could slip beneath the surface at any time.

  As the crow flies, they were no more than a few hundred yards from St Denis. But from Montignac upstream down to Limeuil below them, where their river flowed into the bigger Dordogne, the Vézère took a series of long oxbow bends as it meandered across the fertile valley. These were the water meadows that used to flood each springtime and autumn when the river rose, creating the vast wetlands that had attracted the ducks and geese that had made this region a paradise for hunters and for the foie gras they produced. Now the river had been largely tamed but the waterfowl had stayed. And with each springtime flood, the river carved more deeply into the banks on the outside of each bend so the loops became larger ever year.

  ‘There they are again,’ said Antoine, pointing at the entrance to his campsite where the white sports car was turning in from the road, Dr Gelletreau’s big old Citroën lumbering along behind. The girl waved. ‘Determined bugger, ain’t he? And with that car, I don’t think he’s coming here looking for a place to pitch a tent.’

  Bruno briefly lifted a paddle in acknowledgement of the girl’s wave as the car disappeared behind the hedge and headed for the parking area. He tried to match Antoine’s experienced strokes as they drove the canoe forward against the river’s flow. On any other occasion, it would have been a pleasant excursion, the sun dappling the water as it filtered through the budding leaves of the trees along each bank. To their left loomed the high white limestone cliffs that dotted the valley with caves. Many were filled with paintings, testaments to the artistic skills of the people who had lived here tens of thousands of years ago. Others still showed traces of the medieval fortifications where men and women had taken refuge against the marauding English.

  ‘There it is,’ called Antoine, not turning round, but kneeling up in the bow and picking up the coil of rope he had prepared. ‘Just keep us going straight and try to bring her alongside.’

  There was little of the punt to be seen as it drifted sluggishly towards them, maybe an inch or two of freeboard above the water. Antoine stretched out an arm as the punt approached, caught hold of the side and muttered, ‘The good Lord preserve us,’ as he looked at the woman within. A bird that had been perched, pecking, inside the punt flew away. When he caught the rusty iron ring at the stern of the punt, he deftly threaded his rope through it and tied a quick knot.

  ‘That’ll do,’ he said. ‘She’s too sodden for a tow, we might drag her under. We’ll just drift down to the beach and guide her in.’

  The woman was almost awash, the water in the punt lapping over her legs, pubis and ears so that only her breasts, face and feet were visible. Her fair hair floated behind her head and her hands trembled in the water, the fingers seeming to move in the eddies of water almost as if she were waving. The bird had been at her left eye. The other stared sightlessly at the sky, but it was evident she had been an attractive woman, with good skin and fine features. Her nose and chin were well shaped and her cheekbones prominent. Bruno caught a whiff of something burned and also something oily, it might have been paraffin. An empty bottle of vodka stirred at her side.

  As they neared the landing beach, Antoine skilfully steered them across the current and climbed out of the canoe when the bank shelved to guide the punt up onto the sand. The young man in white, his trousers still wet, came down to help him haul it up, but Antoine waved him away. Bruno beached the canoe, climbed out to haul it higher and shook Dr Gelletreau’s hand before the doctor moved across to look into the punt. Antoine had tipped it slightly onto its side to let some of the water out, but small streams were dribbling from cracks in the hull. One large black candle, nearly a metre in length, toppled out of the punt and a second one rolled against the gunwale. Bruno had only ever seen candles that size in church, but never in black. At least he now knew what the stumpy mast had been.

  ‘How is she? Is she dead?’ the young man from the sports car asked. Bruno recognized him now from the previous year’s tennis tournament when the girls had flocked around him. He had the arrogant good looks of a model in a glossy magazine. He’d played with someone in the men’s doubles, reaching the semi-finals with an aggressive game of serve-and-volley.

  ‘We’ll wait for the doctor’s verdict,’ Bruno said. ‘Didn’t you hear us yelling at you not to dive in back at the bridge? You must have seen I was a policeman. You might have sunk the boat.’

  ‘I was only trying to help,’ he said pleasantly, with a slightly mocking tilt to his eyebrow. He had an educated voice, an accent that sounded Parisian and a manner that suggested he was used to getting his way. ‘I thought I could stop it crashing into the bridge.’

  ‘What brings you to St Denis?’ Bruno asked.

  ‘We have a business meeting at the Mairie,’ he said. ‘We were crossing the bridge when the crowd t
urned up, climbed out and saw her drifting down and I thought I might be able to reach the boat from the other bank. Sorry, I’m Lionel Foucher.’

  He put out a hand, and Bruno shook it, turning to look at the young woman sitting in the driving seat of what Bruno now saw was a new-looking Jaguar. She was wearing sunglasses and raised her hand in languid greeting. Bruno suddenly remembered he was wearing only his underpants, shirt and a life jacket. He grinned at her and waved back.

  ‘That’s Eugénie, my partner,’ said Foucher. ‘Well, you’ve got her safely ashore. We’ll leave you to it.’

  ‘I’m sure the Mayor won’t mind your wet trousers, not in the circumstances,’ Bruno replied, and turned back to the punt as Foucher climbed into the car and was driven off.

  ‘No name or markings on the punt,’ said Antoine.

  ‘I can’t give you much of a time of death,’ said Gelletreau, rising from beside the punt. He had a pair of tweezers in his hand, holding something that looked like a small circle of wet cardboard. He took a plastic bag from his medical case and put the object inside.

  ‘Water plays the very devil with body temperature and lividity, all the usual signs. No obvious cause of death so we’ll probably need an autopsy. No jewellery and no sign of any belongings so there’s no indication of identity. Some bruising around the vulva and the anus. I’d say she had indulged in some pretty energetic sexual activity before she died, but there are no bruises on the wrists and shoulders so I doubt it was coerced.’

  ‘So you don’t see it as a suspicious death?’ Bruno asked. The woman’s pubis had been carefully trimmed into the neatest of triangles.

  ‘Obviously it’s mysterious, but suspicious … I don’t know. That item I put away for the pathologists, I found it inside her vagina. I’ve no idea what it is,’ said Gelletreau. ‘Frankly, looking at the vodka bottle my best guess would be suicide, a very demonstrative way to go for a probably disturbed woman. That in itself would not be unusual. People quite often dress up in strange ways or strip naked to commit suicide. We’ll have to see what the toxicology says but I’d be surprised if they don’t find a lot of alcohol and barbiturates …’ He broke off, muttering ‘That reminds me.’ He bent down to rummage in his medical bag and came out with a shiny metal tool that Bruno recognized from ear examinations.

  ‘No needle tracks so I rather discounted drugs,’ the doctor said, bending down over the body. But instead of inserting the device into her ear, he poked it up a nostril and squinted inside.

  ‘Aha,’ he said. He tried but failed to lever his heavy form up again. Bruno gave him a hand and hauled Gelletreau to his feet.

  ‘Signs of very heavy cocaine use. The septum is almost destroyed,’ he said. ‘A pity. She must have been a good-looking woman. I’d put her age at no more than forty.’

  Bruno nodded. There was little sign of wrinkles nor of ageing at her neck. Her legs were long and shapely, with no sag to her thighs or buttocks. Her waist was well defined and the breasts generous.

  ‘Are those stretch marks signs that she had given birth?’ Bruno asked.

  ‘I’d say so, but we’ll need the autopsy to be sure.’

  United in an unspoken sense of sadness and of waste, the three men fell silent as they gazed down at the body, robbed in death of any sexual allure. But the painted shape on her trunk disturbed Bruno.

  ‘What about that marking?’ he asked. He could see now that it was no tattoo, more something that had been daubed on her belly, a vaguely familiar shape.

  ‘It’s a pentagram, some kind of mystic symbol,’ said Gelletreau. ‘And it’s no tattoo, it was drawn with something like a magic marker. It’s waterproof, whatever it was. I don’t know what those two black candles are doing in there. Nor that.’ He pointed to a sodden and shapeless mass in the bottom of the punt.

  ‘It’s a cockerel,’ said Antoine, poking at it with a stick. ‘And there’s its head, over there at the far end of the punt. Somebody must have cut it off.’

  Bruno bent down to look at some charred sticks floating on what little water was left in the boat and sniffed, catching that whiff of paraffin again.

  ‘Do you think somebody tried to light a fire here?’ he asked. ‘And what’s that dark patch down where the water’s almost gone?’

  All three men knelt to peer at the bottom of the punt, just in front of the dead woman’s feet. As the water drained, they saw that the dark patch was simply charred wood and the burning had gone quite deep. There were some more sticks scattered around the bottom of the punt, some of them so thick they were almost logs. Right in the middle of the burnt patch was a long crack where the last of the water was now draining away.

  ‘Somebody tried to light a fire, but the wood was so old it cracked and water came in and put the fire out,’ Bruno said, thinking aloud. ‘That’s why I smelt paraffin.’

  ‘Bloody stupid, setting a fire in a wooden boat and not putting a stone or something underneath,’ said Antoine. ‘It was bound to burn through.’

  ‘Like a Viking funeral that went wrong, only with black candles and a dead cockerel,’ said Gelletreau. ‘Funny stuff, this. I don’t like it at all. The sooner we get a proper autopsy the better.’

  Bruno nodded, went back to where he had left his trousers and used his mobile phone to call J-J, the chief of detectives at national police headquarters in Périgueux. He was told to leave a message and then went through to the switchboard to report a mysterious death, adding that the doctor had requested an autopsy. That would mean taking the dead woman to the pathology lab in Bergerac.

  ‘I’d better wait here,’ he said. ‘You two can go about your business, but thanks to both of you. I’ll come to the medical centre later to pick up a copy of the death certificate if you could leave it at the desk.’

  Antoine headed back to his bar and his accounts. Dr Gelletreau turned to his car.

  ‘By the way, Doc,’ Bruno said. ‘I thought Fabiola was on duty today.’

  ‘She said she had something to attend to. I got the impression it was some private patient.’

  ‘That’s not like her,’ Bruno said. ‘She’s always been critical of private practice. Medicine for the people, you know Fabiola.’

  ‘I know, that’s why she likes working at the clinic,’ said Gelletreau. ‘Odd, isn’t it? Maybe she needs the money. She was saying she needed a new car.’

  He stood, looking at Bruno, as if there was more to be said but he didn’t know how to say it. Bruno felt the same way but decided to take the plunge.

  ‘This funny stuff as you call it, the pentagram and black candles,’ Bruno said, still not quite sure how to voice the suspicion in his mind. ‘Does it look like she was dabbling in black magic, some kind of Satanism?’

  ‘Exactly that,’ said Gelletreau, nodding. ‘It’s been on my mind. When I get home I’ve got an old book somewhere on historic legends that refers to it. Maybe you might want to ask Father Sentout about it; Satanism has been an interest of his for years. It makes me wonder whether I ought to join Antoine in a quick Ricard and one of those disgusting cigarettes of his. In fact, as your doctor I’m tempted to prescribe a stiff drink for you as well. If this death has something to do with black magic then I suspect you’re going to need it.’

  3

  Back in his office at the Mairie, Bruno settled down at his desk to study the handwritten letter that had arrived in his mail. All in capitals, it was one of the anonymous denunciations that regularly came to him and many other policemen in France. He’d always blamed the war years of the Vichy regime for encouraging the practice, until he read a book on the history of the French Revolution which quoted extensively from the anonymous letters sent to the Committee of Public Safety in the 1790s that had condemned thousands of people to the guillotine. Most of the ones Bruno received denounced people for sexual immorality, which he ignored, or for tax evasion or working on the black market, which he was obliged to investigate. This one at least was written in black ink, rather than the green or violet that usua
lly recounted sins of adultery. But its tenor was disturbing, denouncing a farmer whom Bruno knew only slightly for beating his wife.

  It was a crime he detested, but one that frequently complicated his life. Most magistrates were reluctant to press charges, even when the medical evidence was clear, because the wives so often refused to testify against their husbands. The old ways were strong in St Denis, particularly on the more remote farms, and Bruno had more than once heard mutterings in the bars and cafés about a nagging wife deserving a clip around the ear. And there’d always be some old codger ready to spout the doggerel:

  ‘A dog, a wife, a walnut tree,

  The more you beat them, the better they’ll be.’

  Bruno’s predecessor, Joe, had a rough and ready way with domestic violence. He’d ignore the occasional slap or punch on a Saturday night after drink had been taken. But if he knew that the beating was a regular occurrence, or above all if the children were also beaten, then Joe would go to the court of public opinion, letting it be known in the bars that a situation was getting out of hand. When a consensus developed, Joe and a couple of his chums from the rugby team would go out to the farm, take the offending husband behind the barn and treat him to some of his own medicine. Bruno gave a wry smile at the recollection that Joe had called it his own version of community policing. He claimed it was very effective. Maybe it was, but it was not the kind of rough justice that policemen could apply these days, and it was not Bruno’s way.

  He turned back to the letter. The farmer, a taciturn and hard-faced man who scraped some kind of living from the poor tract of upland and hillside that he had inherited from his father, was named Louis Junot. His wife came from somewhere in the north, where Junot had met her while doing his military service. They had a daughter, Francette, whom Bruno remembered from his tennis classes. She had been a promising player, fast around the court and with a good eye for the ball, but not a girl to spend much time at practice. Once she entered her teens Francette had spent more time eyeing the boys than working at her tennis. She had begun wearing make-up at an early age, but Bruno remembered seeing her scrub it off when she boarded the bus that took her up the hill towards home. She had left school early and worked at the checkout of the local supermarket and as far as Bruno knew she still lived at home. Perhaps he should start with her.