The Devil's Cave

by Martin Walker

  ‘I have some leads and I’ll be following those up with the Police Nationale.’

  ‘Maybe we can turn this talk of Satanism to our advantage,’ suggested Jérôme. ‘We could get some good publicity from that.’ He turned to Father Sentout. ‘I’m thinking of an exorcism ceremony at the bridge.’

  ‘Ridiculous, we’d be a laughing stock,’ snapped the Mayor. Bruno looked up in surprise. That wasn’t like him. The Mayor was a wily old politician who usually waited to gauge the mood of any meeting before he committed himself. A silence fell.

  ‘It might be a little premature,’ the priest said, smoothing over the sudden tension. ‘There’s no sign that anyone has been possessed. But there is one thing that disturbs me …’

  He paused for effect, and everyone at the council table leaned forward. Bruno smiled to himself. Father Sentout was just as skilled a player as the Mayor.

  ‘It’s the nature of the ritual that intrigues me. Features of this death remind me of one of the classic examples of Satanism. The naked woman with arms outstretched in the rough form of a cross, the pentagram scrawled on the body, the black candles …’

  ‘Go on,’ said the Mayor, as fascinated as the rest of them.

  ‘It has most of the trappings of a classic Black Mass, but not all. In the classic form of this abomination there would be a mockery of Holy Communion. The Host, which in a real Mass becomes the body of Christ, becomes a tool of the devil’s depravity in the Black Mass. It is usually placed in the private parts of the naked woman on whom the Mass is performed.’

  Bruno remembered the item that Dr Gelletreau had taken with his tweezers from the dead woman’s vagina. He’d have to call the pathologist and get him to check.

  ‘There would also be some form of sacrifice,’ the priest went on. ‘A black cockerel was the usual victim, its head cut off and its blood smeared on the naked woman, another mockery of the way that Holy Communion transforms the wine into the blood of Christ.’

  ‘When you say the classic form of the Black Mass, Father, what’s the basis of that?’ Bruno asked. He was curious, and unlike the Mayor he had a soft spot for the plump little priest. He’d enjoyed some magnificent meals at Father Sentout’s home, but also the priest was devoted to the fortunes of the town’s rugby team and to supporting the minimes, the kids’ team that Bruno coached. The priest held a special service for them each year, with the proceeds from the collection box going to the purchase of rugby shirts and the travel budget for away games.

  ‘Most of what we know of the Black Mass comes from the reign of le roi soleil, the Sun King Louis XIV, and the incident known to history as the Affair of the Poisons,’ the priest began, visibly preening at this chance to display his knowledge. ‘It was the great scandal of the age, the seventeenth-century equivalent of the Kennedy assassination. There were pamphlets about it published all over Europe.’

  He reminded them that the king had a famous mistress, the celebrated Madame de Montespan, who came from one of the oldest and noblest families of France. Thanks to her noble blood and her mother’s connections at court, she had been appointed a lady-in-waiting to the King’s wife, Queen Marie-Thérèse of Austria.

  ‘Putain de merde,’ muttered Montsouris, the town’s only Communist councillor. ‘I knew the bloody aristos would be behind all this.’

  At the time, the priest continued, the King already had a mistress, Louise de la Vallière, and Madame de Montespan resolved to replace her. To do so, she resorted to witchcraft. Her first ally was a wise woman or witch, used by several women at the court to abort unwanted pregnancies, named Catherine Monvoisin. She then recruited a renegade priest, Etienne Guibourg, to perform a Black Mass that would produce a love potion to win the King’s heart. The potion was concocted from the desecrated Host that had been placed in Madame de Montespan’s vagina during the Black Mass. The result was a scandal and a trial in which the witch was executed and the priest imprisoned, but with Madame de Montespan securely ensconced in the royal bed.

  ‘How did she get away with it?’ asked the Mayor. Bruno smiled to himself. Father Sentout had seldom had such an avid audience.

  ‘Some say her sensual charms won the king’s devotion and thus her immunity, but I prefer to think it all the work of Satan,’ said the priest. ‘And what we know of the dead woman who floated through our town yesterday replicates very closely the Black Mass performed on the naked body of Madame de Montespan over three centuries ago.’

  Jérôme suddenly spoke, a curious, almost greedy light in his eyes. ‘You know, this gives me an idea. We’ve been thinking of expanding the theme park, and this might be just the thing for a new exhibit. Louis XIV, a royal mistress, a Black Mass – it would certainly bring in the punters.’

  The Mayor quelled Jérôme with a glance. ‘Any such proposal for an expansion would not be welcomed by the Mairie,’ he said, and glared around the table. ‘Now you know why I’m so cross at all this talk of Satanism. You, Father, should have known better.’

  ‘I’m aware that some of you may wish to criticize me for the remarks quoted in the newspaper this morning, but the history cannot be gainsaid,’ the priest replied equably. ‘And it is my duty, when I see Satan’s works unfolding, to take up arms in the name of le bon Dieu.’

  The priest looked around the table, seeing scepticism replace fascination on several faces. Bruno saw him weighing each one, dismissing those who were known to be devout Catholics since their support was to be expected, and looking for those who occupied that middle ground between mild agnosticism and a vague, traditional loyalty to the teachings of the Church. The priest’s eyes finally alighted on Bruno.

  ‘You may never have come to confession, Bruno,’ he said. ‘But I know that some of the things that you saw in Bosnia showed you that evil still stalks the world.’

  ‘The evil was done by men, Father, not by any supernatural being,’ Bruno replied.

  ‘How are you so sure? You of all people, my dear Bruno, must know that there can be love and kindness in the midst of such horrors. Is that not a proof of the presence of God?’

  Bruno wondered how much Father Sentout knew of his time in Bosnia and his tragic, aborted love affair with Katarina, the Bosnian schoolteacher whom his unit had rescued, along with some other women, from the Serbian military brothel where they had been imprisoned and forced into prostitution. It was a deeply private memory, of which he very seldom spoke. But each year when the dampness of autumn came, the ache in his hip where the Serb bullet had knocked him spinning into the snow took him back to that nightmare time in the hills around Sarajevo. He sighed inwardly, thinking how few secrets anyone could keep in a small town.

  ‘Love is what happens between people, Father,’ he said. ‘I don’t know that we need God to explain it.’

  ‘It is because, my dear Bruno, some of those same people who committed the greatest evils are also capable of great acts of mercy and gentleness,’ the priest said. ‘They are forever at war within us, God and Satan, and our souls are never in greater danger than when we forget that. Whatever the motives of those who dabble in Satanism, real evil is at work here. We ignore that at our peril, and while my fear is for your immortal souls, you must think of the danger to our town if this wickedness thrives unchecked.’

  The priest sat back, slumping as though suddenly exhausted, and then spoke from deep within his chest. ‘This is not the end of it, you mark my words,’ he intoned.

  The Mayor cleared his throat. ‘Thank you, Father, for that very interesting historical perspective, but I’m not sure the intrigues of the court of Louis XIV are our particular concern. I think it’s clear that we’re probably dealing with the suicide of an unbalanced woman, and that is the line we should all take, including you, Father, in the event of further inquiries from the media.’

  ‘Just one more thing, Monsieur le Maire,’ said Bruno, and went on to explain the results of his search of the river. ‘We have three likely spots for the launch of the boat and a couple of possibles. I
’ll be visiting each of them from the land side with a detective from the staff of Commissaire Jalipeau of the Police Nationale.’

  Bruno described the lagoon by the Red Château, a busy boathouse and landing dock near Les Eyzies and a small creek with a crumbling landing stage below the Maison-Forte of Reignac.

  ‘The Red Countess,’ said the Mayor, sitting back with a wistful smile on his face. ‘I haven’t heard that name in years. Whatever became of her? She must be well into her eighties.’

  ‘Not dead, that’s for sure,’ said Montsouris. ‘She’d have had a hell of a funeral and I’d have heard about it. The Party loved her. Merde, I’d have gone up to Paris for that and we’d have had mourning on all the trains.’

  ‘De Gaulle called her a heroine of France, you remember?’ said the Mayor. ‘It was after she had that illegitimate child by some dead Resistance hero. Didn’t they make a film about her?’

  ‘It was called The Red Countess,’ said Louis Fouton, a retired schoolteacher who was the oldest man at the table. ‘I saw it when I was a boy and I remember a lot of misty close-ups and German soldiers shouting “Achtung” and “Donner und Blitzen” as we clever French ran rings round them. An escaped Russian prisoner-of-war played the hero. I remember the photos of the Red Countess in the Kremlin when she went for the Moscow premiere.’

  ‘She used to lead those demonstrations against our war in Indo-China back in the Fifties, and then she supported the Algerian independence movement,’ said the Mayor.

  ‘She never saw a national liberation movement she didn’t like,’ said Fouton, filling his old pipe. In respect for his age, he was the last person allowed to smoke inside the council chamber. ‘And she never saw a handsome man she didn’t appreciate.’

  ‘She’s a descendant, you know, of Madame de Montespan,’ Father Sentout said into the silence as the men around the table searched their memories for half-remembered stories that explained the Countess’s fame.

  ‘The Red Countess?’ scoffed Montsouris. ‘Va t’en foutre.’

  ‘No, she’s descended from Montespan and one of the illegitimate children of Louis XIV,’ the priest insisted. ‘I remember looking into it. The château was one of the gifts from the king after he took her back in defiance of the Church.’

  ‘If she’s still alive, where is she?’ the Mayor asked. ‘If she were living down here, I imagine we’d know about it.’

  ‘She’s mainly lived in Paris. There’s a younger sister who’s here from time to time,’ said Father Sentout. ‘I was called once to say Mass in the private family chapel. It’s an impressive place, a bit run down.’

  ‘I presume there’s a housekeeper, someone to answer the door when I make inquiries,’ Bruno said.

  ‘It’s not in our commune so I don’t know if they pay the taxe d’habitation but we can find out,’ said the Mayor. He stood up, signalling that the meeting was over. ‘And remember, gentlemen, this is a tragic suicide by a disturbed woman, probably under the influence of drugs, and we’ll have no more speculation about devil worship or long-dead royal mistresses, if you please.’

  8

  Bruno usually took Hector on a different route for his evening ride. Today, almost without thinking, he found himself once again cantering into the long straight track through the heart of the forest in the hope of another encounter with the mysterious Eugénie. Even as the thought took shape, a familiar figure on a white horse emerged, silhouetted against the evening light, into the gap between the trees at the far end of the trail. He felt a boyish urge to impress, to gallop towards her and then haul Hector to a magnificent halt, up on his hind legs and neighing like a warhorse, front hoofs pawing at the air. Bruno repressed the temptation, reminding himself that he was not that good a horseman and he’d look ridiculous if he fell off. Instead, he kept the eager Hector to a stately trot, which gave him plenty of time to consider this meeting and his own motives.

  He found Eugénie to be a strikingly attractive woman. He was lonely, he told himself, and feeling bruised. Pamela had been away in Scotland this past month. Isabelle, the fiery police inspector, had such a grip upon him that she could entice him into her arms almost at whim. But she was back in Paris, on her fast-track career on the staff of the Minister of the Interior. A wonderful summer and a love affair that seemed to consume them both had been followed by one truncated weekend together and then one solitary but passionate night.

  Why do I always fall for women who would never be satisfied with the simple life I offer? he asked himself. But Bruno knew his own nature well enough to supply the answer. The problem was not the women; it was him. The women who appealed to him were independent, ambitious and determined to build a life on their own terms. Family life and children were not high on their priorities, although Bruno felt them becoming steadily more important to him.

  ‘Do you always ride this way?’ Eugénie asked when he drew rein. Hector ambled slowly towards the white mare and the two horses nuzzled one another with politeness. She was dressed, he saw with surprise, rather like him, in jeans and a blue denim shirt. He was wearing his police uniform sweater over the shirt against the expected evening chill; she had a dark blue sweater tied around her waist.

  ‘Not always,’ he replied. ‘But Hector tends to turn this way if I let him.’ He had been aware of her eyes on him as he had trotted up the forest ride.

  ‘I see you got your horse shoed,’ he went on.

  ‘I came back this way in the hope that I’d see you. I wanted to thank you. I called the stables at Meyrals and Victor took care of it, the man you recommended. He’s a sweet old man and he gave me a map of the bridle trails.’ She tapped her pocket.

  A small alarm bell tinkled somewhere at the back of Bruno’s head. If she was staying at a place where horses were already installed, they would have their own arrangements for a farrier. If she had hired a horse herself for the duration of her stay, it would have come from a stables that could take care of matters like shoeing. She should have had no need of his advice.

  ‘Which way are you heading?’ he asked. She paused before replying, much as she had the previous evening, in a calculated way that put him on edge, awaiting her response.

  ‘I was going to ask you for suggestions back to the ford at Mauzac or the bridge above Les Eyzies. I know my way from there.’

  ‘And where have you ridden from today?’ he asked. He found the stillness in her face strangely fascinating.

  ‘From the stables at Meyrals. A friend dropped me off there when Victor called to say my horse was ready.’

  ‘From here there’s a bridle path through the woods to the big cave where all the tourist coaches go, you know the one?’

  ‘You mean the one they call the Devil’s Cave, with the stalagmites and the jazz concerts?’

  He nodded. ‘That’s the old name. We usually call it the Gouffre de Colombac, which the management thought was better for the tourists. After the cave there’s a hunting trail where you can canter that takes you to the quarry at Campagne and to the right of the entrance there’s a bridle path signposted to Les Eyzies. Do you have far to go from there?’

  ‘Not far,’ she said vaguely. She dug her heels into her horse’s sides and set off down the bridle path at a pace slightly too fast for the track and the overhanging branches. He held Hector on a tight rein as he followed, knowing his horse always preferred to take the lead but this trail was too narrow for him to overtake.

  At the cave, not yet open for the tourist season, her pale face was flushed and her eyes shining from the speed of her ride. He pointed across the car park to the path that led to the hunting trail and she took off once more, bending over her horse’s mane to avoid low branches. He followed at a slightly slower pace, aware of Hector’s impatience beneath him. He murmured reassurance to his horse, telling Hector he’d have his chance on the wide hunters’ trail. Bruno assumed Eugénie would stop at the bottom of the trail, uncertain which path to take. But she turned the correct way without hesitation and was twenty
metres ahead by the time Bruno emerged from the trees.

  For Hector, the sight of the other horse in front on the wide track was a challenge and Bruno felt the kick that signalled the animal’s lengthening stride. Hector’s neck stretched out and Bruno felt the landscape flash by as he began to gain steadily on Eugénie. Bruno hadn’t noticed the riding crop until she suddenly began to use it to drive her horse on, determined to turn the ride into a race. If that was what she wanted, thought Bruno, she hadn’t reckoned with Hector’s strength and eagerness to lead. Bruno knew Hector was still running well within himself, easily able to step up into a higher gear if need be.

  Eugénie’s mare was beginning to labour as the track climbed. Specks of foam were flying back behind as Eugénie rose in the saddle to work her crop. His respect for her horsemanship went down a notch. He’d been taught never to treat a horse in such a way.

  The brown gash in the green hillside that was the quarry still lay five hundred metres ahead as Hector drew level and then almost effortlessly stepped up his pace to ease into the lead. With a rhythm so smooth Bruno felt he could carry a full wine glass without spilling a drop, Hector galloped on, his breathing easy and not a fleck of foam at his muzzle. The trees on his right gave way to wooden fences and parkland. A car park and the road loomed ahead. Hector slowed his pace, knowing that his run was ending, and Bruno sat back in the saddle and turned to see Eugénie lumbering up at a heavy canter, at least fifty metres behind. Bruno was patting Hector and telling him what a fine horse he was when she finally drew rein alongside.

  ‘Is that horse of yours for sale?’ she asked.

  ‘Never.’ He shook his head in emphasis.

  ‘Well, thanks for the run anyway, and guiding us up that track.’ She dismounted, took a silk scarf from around her neck and used it to wipe her mare’s muzzle, murmuring to her and stroking her neck to thank her for the ride. She turned and looked up at Bruno. ‘I can find my way back from here.’