The Devil's Cave

by Martin Walker

  Helping Eugénie and her horse the previous evening had made him late for dinner. He’d been looking forward to it, an invitation to Florence’s apartment beside the college where she now worked. They had been six at table: the headmaster Rollo and his wife Mathilde, Serge the sports teacher and one of the stars of the town’s rugby team, and an unusually subdued Fabiola.

  It had been a simple meal. Smoked salmon to begin, roast chicken, a salad with an array of local cheeses followed by an apple tart bought from Fauquet’s. Sensibly, Florence had bought local wines. With the bottle of Pomerol that was Bruno’s contribution and Rollo’s bottle of Chablis, and the table made colourful by the bouquet of daffodils that Fabiola had brought, the evening had been a success.

  Bruno had been pleased for Florence. Not only was it her first dinner party in St Denis but in Rollo she was also hosting her boss. Bruno had known Rollo so long it was a mild shock to think of him that way, but Florence had ever so slightly deferred to him and gone out of her way to include his wife, Mathilde, in the conversation. Inevitably, some of the talk had turned to questions of the college: the shortage of teachers prepared to work in rural areas, the lack of jobs for school-leavers, the curriculum changes. Bruno had taken advantage of the theme to ask if Rollo or Serge remembered Francette Junot.

  ‘She could have been a good athlete, but like a lot of girls she lost interest after reaching puberty,’ Serge had said. Rollo recalled that she’d had a gift for maths, but had never applied herself to schoolwork, as if determined to leave school and start working as soon as she could. The conversation had been about to take another turn when Mathilde said, ‘I didn’t know her well, but she was a deeply unhappy girl.’

  Everyone sat up at that point. Mathilde, who worked part-time in a local accountant’s office, was not known for involving herself much in school affairs.

  ‘A man probably wouldn’t notice, but she never had the right kind of clothes, and the other girls made fun of her. Once I heard them sneer at her for wearing clothes from the Action Catholique, one of the other girls’ cast-offs. Kids can be so cruel at that age. That’s probably why she couldn’t wait to leave school.’

  A silence had fallen until Florence said brightly that with her new job, her own days of getting clothes from the charity shop were now in the past. Bruno was relieved that he had remarked on entering how attractive Florence was looking, and had noticed that her blonde hair had been cut and shaped so that it softened her rather long face.

  A grunt from Antoine and a sudden flurry of movement at the back of the canoe brought Bruno back to the present. Antoine had a bite. The green hills that rose on each side of the river had begun to give way to cliffs of white chalk and grey stone and the bridge at Thonac was just coming into view. Antoine put down his paddle and pulled in his line. Two small trout were wriggling on his hooks.

  ‘That’ll do,’ he said, and pulled a small wooden board and some limes from his bag and took his Laguiole knife from his belt. ‘You keep paddling, Bruno, and we’ll have our cassecroûte before you know it.’

  Bruno kept glancing back to watch Antoine gut the fish and put the slim fillets he had carved into a plastic bag. Then he halved the limes and squeezed their juice into the bag until there was enough to cover the white flesh. He re-baited his hooks and continued to paddle.

  By the time they reached the church of St Léon-sur-Vézère after the first of the long bends, the sun was climbing steadily and Bruno had taken off his shirt. They had looked at three more locked boathouses and some rickety landing-stages with so much moss on them it was plain they had not been used since the previous year. There were two possible sites where the punt could have gone into the river, and Bruno had marked them on his map. Each was a place where canoes were rented out in the summer, and Antoine knew the boatmen and promised to call them and check.

  Just after St Léon the river divided into different channels as it ran between sandbanks covered with pebbles. Antoine beached the canoe on one of these and opened the wine. Bruno halved the baguette as Antoine opened the plastic bag and shared out the strips of fish soaked in lime juice. Bruno relished the sensation, tart but fresh, tasting a thousand times better here on the river with the sounds of water lapping over the shallows.

  ‘My favourite casse-croûte,’ said Antoine. ‘And with any luck we’ll fry up fresh trout for lunch. There’s a place I know just downstream by the old monastery that teems with fish. My dad used to tell me it was centuries of the monks’ latrines seeping into the river.’

  ‘Now you tell me,’ Bruno replied, grinning.

  They pushed off and paddled further into the familiar landscape of limestone cliffs and caves. The cliffs towered above them and the erosion of the river over centuries had carved deep overhangs so that the stone loomed overhead as if ready to topple down upon them. The trees were thick on the inner bank, and without the heat of the sun Bruno shivered in the sudden chill, made all the more eerie by the way the skirls of mist rose from the water.

  Up to his right Bruno now saw emerging high on a cliff a regular formation of stone that looked like the battlements of some giant’s castle. Beneath them ranged a series of cave entrances and then what looked like a gallery carved deep into the rock, the interior lost in shadows.

  ‘This is where they always bite,’ Antoine’s voice broke in. ‘That’s the old monastery up there and the hermits’ cells. Over on the other side you can just see the towers of Château Marzac above the lower ridge …’ He paused. ‘Got one.’

  He pulled in his line to reveal two wriggling trout, each about twenty centimetres long. He detached the hooks and put them in his catch net and dropped it back over the side of the canoe. No sooner had he re-baited his hooks and put the line back into the water than he caught another, and a fourth bit as he began to haul the line back in.

  ‘Told you this was a good spot,’ he said.

  They came to a stretch where the river widened and the sun shone down over a low pebbled island in the middle of the stream. Antoine steered the canoe under some low-hanging boughs that made Bruno duck. Then they were in a small and hidden lagoon with a tiny pebble beach and beside it a tumbledown wooden boathouse.

  ‘Tiens,’ said Antoine. ‘The river’s broken through.’ He pointed with his paddle to a spot beneath overhanging trees where Bruno could see the flow of the main river coming into the lagoon. He took them close to the point where the river gushed in, less than a metre wide, but he and Bruno had to paddle to hold the canoe steady against the strong current.

  ‘How would the river have done that?’ Bruno asked.

  ‘Ecrevisses,’ said Antoine. Crayfish, small freshwater crustaceans that looked like miniature lobsters and tasted even better, had probably nibbled and nibbled away at some long-sunken log that held the dam together even as the river scoured and eroded it from the other side. Then came a strong rain, a flood surge in the river and the dam gave way.

  ‘So if she committed suicide here, she could have expected that her boat would remain inside the lagoon,’ Bruno suggested. ‘She wasn’t to know it was no longer a lagoon, and the new current carried her out to the main stream. Could it have happened like that?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Antoine replied, ‘but only if she wanted to keep her death secret. Remember the toubib’s theory? Gelletreau said she might have wanted the world to see her body, to make a big display.’

  Antoine let the current take them back into the middle of the tree-fringed lagoon and steered them to the small beach where they landed and walked up to the old boathouse. There was no padlock on the door, just a simple wooden latch. Inside was the wreck of an old sailboat, big enough for an adult and a child, its mast worm-eaten. To one side was a space with smears in the dust. Old clothes hung on hooks on the wall alongside loops of ropes of different sizes. He touched some of the hanging clothes and dust rose, except for one dark garment. He took it from the hook and held it up. It was a robe of some kind with a hood, of coarse wool. It carried a faint scent of
something, possibly perfume, possibly the merest hint of woodsmoke. The aroma was elusive, disappearing before Bruno could begin to identify it. But at least it had been used fairly recently.

  ‘I’d say that it was a punt that lay here,’ said Antoine, gesturing at the gap beside the crumbling sailboat. He pointed up to the sagging rafters where two long poles lay across the beams. ‘Those are punt poles.’

  They went outside and looked at the scrape marks from the doors to the water. The earth around them was scuffed, but that could have been the usual markings of ducks, voles and water rats that used the riverbanks.

  ‘A punt could have been launched here, and one was certainly kept there,’ said Antoine. ‘You may have found your spot.’

  The boathouse was part of the land that belonged to the Red Château, Antoine explained, so named because of the owner, the Red Countess. The name rang a very distant bell with Bruno.

  ‘You’re too young to remember,’ Antoine said. ‘But she was famous in her day, an aristocrat in the Communist Party. She was always in the papers, leading demonstrations, making speeches. But the Red Countess was also a celebrity, Cannes film festival and the races at Longchamps, all that sort of thing. Yves Montand was a boyfriend, and Camus before he killed himself. And Malraux, of course.’

  The Red Countess, thought Bruno. It was one of those names you knew you ought to know, from an era just before his own. Somehow it sparked memories of newsreels he’d seen of another, much older France in the 1950s: Jean-Paul Sartre and a huge Communist Party, Piaf at the Olympia and Jacques Brel and smoky nightclubs on the Left Bank. But the name triggered other associations: the Chant des Partisans and the parade of the heroes of the Resistance at the Arc de Triomphe each year on 18 June, the anniversary of the day de Gaulle had launched the Resistance over the radio from London. He asked if there was a connection, and Antoine nodded.

  ‘She was a courier for the Resistance round here when she was a kid, an upper-class teenage girl on a bike. She always got through the roadblocks. She got medals for it, after the war.’

  ‘She was born here?’ Bruno asked. He’d been in St Denis for more than ten years but there was still a lot of the local history that he didn’t know.

  ‘It’s the family estate and it’s where she grew up. She used to come from time to time but I haven’t heard anything about her for years. My uncle worked for her as a gardener, worshipped her. I even met her once when she came to see my uncle in his shed, sometime in the late Fifties. I’d have been eight, maybe nine. She was a stunner. I’ve still got the book she gave me, about King Arthur and his knights of the round table.’ He paused and laughed. ‘I kept imagining her in it, you know how kids do.’

  Bruno nodded. ‘How far is the château?’ he asked.

  ‘A few hundred metres, but it’s up the slope above the flood level and behind that cliff, in a kind of fold in the hill.’ Antoine looked at his watch. ‘If you want to make some inquiries, you’d better come back another time. We’ve got a lot of river to cover.’

  As they returned to the main stream and rounded the bend that led to the bridge before the Grand Roc, they saw on the far bank a handsome new dock and terrace. Steps of bright new stone and a gravel pathway led upwards to a fold in the hills, with a large terrace and restored building of the local honey-coloured stone just visible. A woman was standing on the dock, shading her eyes. Bruno raised his paddle in salute and she waved back.

  ‘I haven’t seen that dock before, but they were working on this place last year. It’s just down the hill from the old village of St Philippon, the one that was abandoned. You can just see the top of the chapel up on the ridge,’ said Antoine. ‘Better take a look.’

  ‘Welcome to the Auberge St Philippon,’ the woman said once they crossed the river to greet her and introduced themselves. She had the long-limbed look of a tennis player and beautifully cut fair hair. Bruno felt sure her hairdresser was based a long way from St Denis. She told them to call her Béatrice and that she was the manager of the newly restored inn. Bruno guessed she was in her early forties and spending time and effort to look younger. Dressed in a blue and white striped shirt-waist dress, she had a twinkle in her eye, as if to say she found life endlessly delightful. Bruno explained his mission and her face turned grave.

  ‘I’ve seen no dead women floating past here, but you’re welcome to come and ask the staff and guests. And perhaps you’d like a drink. That paddling must be warm work,’ she said. ‘As you can see, we’ve no boathouse yet and no boats for my new dock. You’ll be christening it for me, the first guests to arrive by water.’

  The dock stood a good metre and more above the level of the river. There was as yet no ramp to haul boats ashore and not even the foundations of a boathouse. Bruno had heard of plans for the new hotel but was surprised to learn it was already open. Antoine tied the canoe to the dock and they took off their life jackets and donned their shirts, Bruno conscious of Béatrice casting an eye over his naked torso, and clambered up a wooden ladder. Once on the dock, Bruno realized that looking upward from the canoe he’d misjudged Béatrice’s height. She barely came up to his nose, but somehow her clothes made her look taller. Her watch was a Cartier Tank, a model he recognized because a previous girlfriend had brought a counterfeit back from a trip to China, and worn it even after it stopped working. Bruno felt certain Béatrice was wearing the real thing.

  As the path curved uphill, a windsock on a large and flat stretch of grass signalled a helicopter pad and beyond it the auberge began to emerge. Inn seemed too modest a term for the building. He guessed it was eighteenth-century, and expensively restored. It had two main storeys of tall windows with open grey shutters, and smaller semicircular windows in a mansard roof of dark slate. Wide steps led up to a handsome pillared porch with double doors flanked by two weathered stone cupids holding vases filled with daffodils. There was no hotel name that Bruno could see, no brass plate and no porter at the entrance.

  ‘It’s quite a place, Madame,’ said Bruno. ‘You must have earned a great reputation in the hotel business to be appointed manager here. Where did you work before?’

  ‘In Paris, mainly corporate hospitality and private dining,’ she replied smoothly. ‘We expect that to be the main focus here.’

  Béatrice led them to the side of the auberge where tables under umbrellas half-filled the wide stone terrace. Part of it was shaded by a trellis of vines. Some of the tables were set for lunch, and at one Bruno saw two Arabs, who looked like military men in civilian clothes, eating fish while an elegant businessman spoke to them in French. At another table three men were speaking Russian. The table nearest a modern sculpture that was also a fountain was filled with three men enjoying their apéritifs. As they turned to look at the new arrivals, Bruno saw one tall and handsome stranger in middle age and two men he knew. The first was Foucher, the young man in the white Jaguar who had plunged into the river the previous day. The second was Bruno’s friend and tennis partner the Baron, the retired industrialist who was the main landowner of St Denis.

  ‘My dear Bruno, what a pleasure,’ said the Baron, rising and stepping forward to embrace him and then to shake Antoine’s hand. ‘I see you’ve already met the entrancing Béatrice and I gather you’ve met young Foucher here, but let me introduce my new friend César de Vexin, who unlike me is a real aristo with a name that goes far back. He’s a Count as well as being the man behind this new holiday village project, and we’re just talking a little business.’

  ‘Don’t let me interrupt,’ said Bruno, amused to see the appreciative sideways glances the Baron kept casting at Béatrice. ‘Antoine and I have been searching the river, looking for the place where that dead woman could have entered the water. You probably heard of it.’

  ‘Heard of it,’ said Vexin, raising a thick eyebrow and smoothing his rather long and glossy black hair back with a hand that wore a gold signet ring. ‘It’s all over the paper.’

  From a vacant chair he lifted a copy of Sud-Ouest and hel
d up the front page. The main photo had been taken from the bridge at St Denis and showed the woman lying on her back, arms outstretched. Conscious of their family readership, the editors had put black bars over her breasts and pubis, but there was a close-up of the pentagram on her belly and the large headline read: ‘Satanism in St Denis?’

  7

  ‘This is monstrous. Not at all the image of St Denis that we want to present,’ said the Mayor, flinging the copy of SudOuest onto the council table with disdain.

  ‘I’m not sure about that,’ said Jérôme, who ran a small history theme park where Joan of Arc was burned at the stake twice a day. ‘This kind of thing makes us stand out from the crowd; it could be just the kind of publicity we need.’

  ‘We’ve had a rush of bookings this morning,’ added Philippe, who ran the Hôtel St Denis. On the council he usually acted as the spokesman for the town’s businessmen. He pointed down to the town square. ‘The bars and cafés are full already. It may not be the image you want, but it’s certainly attracting visitors.’

  ‘The devil moves in mysterious ways,’ said Father Sentout. No great friend of the Mayor, his presence at this meeting of the town’s elders testified to the Mayor’s unease.

  Bruno leafed through the paper, to a photo of Foucher in mid-air, diving towards the punt and another of Bruno and Antoine standing beside Maurice as he cast his fishing line in vain. The paper seemed to have missed the significance of the black candles and there was no reference to the decapitated cockerel. Bruno would try to keep that to himself.

  ‘The immediate reaction was bound to include some ghoulish interest. But think about the longer term. I really don’t think we want to be known as a town of devil-worshippers,’ the Mayor said. He turned to Bruno. ‘Perhaps you could give us an interim report on the investigation. Do we yet know who this unfortunate woman was?’

  Bruno told them no. She did not appear to be on any lists of missing persons. With no obvious cause of death and no sign on the body of foul play but evidence of heavy cocaine use, the most likely explanation was a suicide.