Stonekiller (4 page)

In the distance, the same bare escarpment rocks as those beneath his shoes boldly faced the sun to glow a soft yellow-grey under forest cover. Behind them, the wooded hills, valleys and plateaus of the Périgord Noir continued on to Sarlat and eastwards to the site of the murder and well beyond. Mist would cloak that little valley too, even as at the dawn of prehistory.

They had found the victim's daughter on her knees hugging herself and rocking back and forth in grief beside that corpse. They had dragged her from it even as she had fought with them to be left alone until, in compassion only, he had clipped her under the chin and into oblivion.

Juliette Jouvet née Fillioux, born Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne, 3 April 1914, age now twenty-eight, and only child of the victim. Married and with two children of her own, a boy of seven years and a girl of five. A schoolteacher. Husband, a former colleague and now a disabled veteran of the Russian Campaign, one of the LVF, the
Légion des volontaires français contre le bolchévisme.
A sworn enemy of Russia and a member of the PPF, the Parti Populaire Français, violently anti-Communist, anti-de Gaulle, anti-Jewish, anti-everything including the police, and now … why now a very bitter man. Ah yes. The war in Russia had not been kind. Few acknowledged the bravery of the wreckage that had retumed. Most simply ignored him and felt uncomfortable in his presence.

Jouvet had not been co-operative nor had there been one word or gesture of compassion for his wife.

Sedated by the cognac Hermann had forced her to drink and had found God knows where, the woman had slept. Sour on
vin ordinaire
, the husband had retreated into a brooding, surly silence. The children had watched their father in alarm before casting warning glances at each other and retreating to bed.

It was not good. Ah no, it wasn't. Murder and domestic problems so often went hand in hand. Madame Jouvet had had a painful welt and bruise from a fist high on her left cheek — now her lower jaw might well be swollen, a worry. The skin had also been yellow and dark around the half-closed eye, a massive shiner that was at least five days old.

How had she borne the shame of it, a teacher in a little place like this? Had the argument, preceding the death of the mother-in-law, signalled trouble?

Fortunately transport had arrived with two
flics
from Sarlat. They had soon got the woman home and it was then that Hermann and he had discovered what had transpired.

Word had reached Domme that a body had been found but that its identity was still unknown. Abruptly she had left her students without explanation, had run frantically outside to grab her bicycle and pedal the twenty-five or so kilometres. First downhill to the bridge across the river, then on to Vitrac, Montfort and Carsac-Aillac before turning northwards towards Sarlat and then east. Tears, prayers, perhaps exhortations of remorse and then … then the dropping of her bicycle on the railway track, the running through the woods. They had found one of her shoes. She had known exactly where to find her mother.
Exactly.

Longing for his pipe and tobacco, he studied the distant terrain noting every little nuance as his mind probed the murder until a stick whacked a tombstone behind him, a throat was cleared. Spittle darted to one side. ‘Monsieur …?' he began. The set of his lips was grim.

‘It's
Captain
,' spat Jouvet. Hammered by the early-morning light, the veteran stood stock-still in the graveyard. There was a stout walking-stick in his left hand and he leaned heavily on this to relieve the constant pain of the bullet-wasted leg the Russian partisans had given him. Once handsome, now grey with fatigue and unshaven, he wiped his nose with the back of a right hand that was far from good. ‘So, you have some questions. Why not start asking them, eh? She's still sleeping it off but will have to do her duty. No replacement can be found and I cannot be expected to fill in for her. Not yet. We need the money.'

‘The money, ah yes.'

The grey-green trousers the Germans had given the husband in lieu of the promised French Army uniform, were unpatched in places, the wooden sabots and faded blue denim jacket with open-collared dress shirt disrespectful of his former status as a teacher who had once had students to command. An Iron Cross Second-Class clung defiantly to the left breast. A frayed rope had replaced the belt whose buckle would have borne the words
Gott mit uns
, God with us. The black beret was filthy.

He made no move to come closer. The no man's land of the esplanade separated them.

‘Captain, was your mother-in-law to visit with you and your family after first going to that valley?'

‘To the cave, Inspector. Why not say it?'

‘All right, the cave.'

‘Madame Fillioux could well have been on her way here afterwards. I would not have known. Lies … all I get from that wife of mine is lies. I'm not well. I can't get around easily.'

‘Then why bother to convince me of it?'

The smile was crooked, the stick was waved. ‘Only that I could not possibly have killed her.'

There, does that satisfy you? St-Cyr could see this clearly written in the man's expression but he calmed his voice and kept control. ‘Tell me about her then. She was a shopkeeper.'

‘Her papers will have told you that. Why waste my time?'

‘Yes, but what kind of a shop?'

‘An
auberge-épicerie
, what else in a lousy little dump like Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne? With the PTT of course — she couldn't have survived without it. Half our rural shopkeepers couldn't'

The post office, telephone and telegraph exchange. An inn and a grocery shop — tinned and dry goods mainly, and half-empty shelves for there were shortages here, too, in the South. Extreme shortages.

‘She was always bitching about the parcels. Meat stinks after a few days,' taunted Jouvet.

No letters were allowed to cross the Demarcation Line between the Occupied and Unoccupied zones. Only postcards with minimum words now instead of gaps to fill in within the printed message that had had to serve everyone no matter what. But in one of those quirks of Germanic control, parcels had been overlooked in the Defeat of 1940 and postal clerks the country over had simply shrugged and carried on. Forgotten relatives had suddenly been remembered, especially if they had a farm or access to one. Deals had been struck: the tobacco ration every two weeks in exchange for a chicken, a bit of goose liver, some fish perhaps or butter.…

The meat and other perishables often stayed in the post offices for days on end. Months in several cases, for the second-class postal service paled against that of the postcards which wasn't all that good either but could sometimes be very efficient.

St-Cyr crossed the esplanade and went in among the tombstones to face the man and stand in danger of his walking stick.

Disdainfully, Jouvet shook his head at the offer of a cigarette. ‘I've already had mine. I'll wait until noon, if I can stand it. One has to do such things because of people like you.'

To contain oneself was often the supreme test not just of an honest détective in these troubled times, but of a patriot. Everyone questioned those who had something they didn't have. ‘The cave, then, and the site of the murder, Captain? Let us concentrate on them.'

The Sûreté's gaze must be returned measure for measure as with the partisans one had had to question before stringing them up. ‘Each year that stupid woman took her little trip. Always on the same date, a Monday, a Sunday, it did not matter. Always to the same place — you'd think she would have got tired of it. First the mushrooms, then the climb up to that hole in the rock and afterwards, after rooting around in there, the bathe in the buff, the dress — ah, I see that you have discovered it. The size of the dress changed over the years as her weight increased but always it was of the same cloth. The strand of pearls, then the little walk through the forest.'

Ah
nom de Dieu, de Dieu
, why was he enjoying the telling of it so much? The dark brown eyes smouldered under puffy eyelids. A man perhaps a good dozen years senior to his wife. ‘Monsieur …'

‘It's
Captain
, damn you!'

One must remain unruffled. ‘Captain, you had best tell me what you know of this affair. The ritual of its repetition?'

Jouvet stank of urine and the thought of its splashes made the Sûreté glance questioningly at the veteran's right hand and ask himself, Could it have held a stone?

‘A ritual, yes. Call it what you will.' Jouvet tossed the hand for emphasis and clenched it tightly until he winced with pain just to prove he hadn't missed a thing. ‘ if you ask me, that woman was crazy.
Revering
her dead lover like that. Her
lover.
Ah yes, Inspector, you people from Paris, you come here, you ask the questions but you do not stop to dig beneath the pus to clean the wound. You did not know she had spread her legs in the woods and had conceived without a proper marriage.'

‘Pardon?'

Was it so impossible to comprehend? ‘I married a bastard, Inspector. A
bastard.
Everyone thinks it of my wife, no matter what that mother of hers tried to do to cover things up.'

‘Now listen, cut the vitriol and tell me things plainly. Each year she made the same visit on exactly the same date?'

Yes!
The 17th of June.'

Five days ago, on Monday. ‘Was she planning to meet someone this time?'

The veteran's eyes swept anxiously over him. ‘Only her dead lover. A captain like myself but from that other war. He died on the Marne with his face deep in the shit probably but she was still able to obtain the
marriage in extremis aprés décès
to make legal the thing she had carried in her belly. After four years of her trying, the authorities finally listened and gave in — who could blame them with a woman like that? She became Madame Fillioux at last!' He flicked a vindictive glance at his wife who approached.

‘Mother raised me on her own, Inspector. No one helped her — not even the Church. She was a very strong-willed person but I adored her as she adored me. We were very close. My heart is broken.'

Grief was held in check by some fantastic strength of will. The daughter's feet, shod in rough espadrilles, were firmly planted, her hands jammed into the pockets of a knitted soft yellow cardigan. A kerchief covered the light brown hair. Some flour or clay had been used in an attempt to lessen the severity of the welt. The black eye was looking a little better. A redness lay under her chin but it was not too swollen. Hermann was right behind her.

‘That place.… The cave, Inspector, it's very old, very precious. The bones and stone tools go back far into the distant past, far beyond the Cro-Magnons and well into the earliest days of the Neanderthals. My father was a prehistorian, an assistant at the Sorbonne while studying for his final degree. He … he spent all of his waking moments patiently excavating the deposits at the mouth of that cave. His hands would always be cut, the skin worn right through — even the gloves
maman
took to him were never enough. That site was to have been the making of him.'

Louis waited. Kohler knew his partner was giving her time.

‘She … she found the cave for my father, using an old diary from the trunk of artefacts the Abbé Brûlé had left but … but then my father, he went away like so many, never to return.'

A diary and a collection of stone tools probably gathered in the early 1800s. There'd be time to dig into that. ‘Please, I know this must be very difficult for you, madame, but it was a yearly visit?'

She threw her husband a dark look. ‘The visit was her expression of a love that never left her, Inspector. Though there were many offers to take my father's place,
maman
refused all of them. I know. I saw the disappointment in their eyes as they said good-bye to her. She was very pretty and very good with things, very businesslike — she had to be, isn't that correct? Dependable yet … yet tender when needed. A real catch.'

The walking-stick jerked. ‘Juliette, don't be so stupid. Control yourself

‘Control? Why should I control anything now that she's gone? I only did it for her sake, André. On my own I would never have married you, not in a thousand years. Mother wanted things to be better for me. A teacher … a teacher married to another and living here in Domme, a step up in the world. Ah yes. God forgive me. I should have listened to my heart!'

‘You bitch!' The stick threatened.

‘Monsieur,' began St-Cyr.

‘
It's Captain, damn you!
'

‘Please don't touch her. Please. My partner, he is right behind you now and if I give the nod, he will flatten you or worse still, cram that foul-tempered mouth of yours into the ground!'

Louis seldom lost his composure. A born diplomat. Fumbling in a pocket, Kohler suddenly remembered a cigarette tucked away for a rainy day and, straightening it, offered it to her.

With a quiet calm that only threw its acid into the husband's face, she accepted and when she inhaled, she stood there looking at Jouvet as if all the bitterness of an unhappy marriage had suddenly been lifted from her.

You're enjoying his tobacco, aren't you?' seethed the husband.

She tossed her head and shrugged. ‘It's not often I get the chance. Since women are denied a ration, you forced me to steal what little I could or barter for it when your back was turned.'

St-Cyr sucked in his breath impatiently. These two would kill each other if they could. ‘Madame, let us walk a little. Hermann, please accompany this one back to his command post behind his wife's school. Pry what you can from him and remind him that the Sûreté and the Gestapo require full and accurate answers.'

Namely, when and where was he on the day of the murder. Kohler knew this was what Louis meant and grinned. But when he had the man alone, he, too, tried to make peace. ‘My two sons are in Russia. They've told me how it really is.'