The bicycle’s rear wheel was so bent and twisted, it took all her remaining energy to pull and pry it free until at last, it stood above the surface of the bog.
He waited — everything in him said to go to her, that she needed help and comfort, but he could not do so.
Kerjean had approached from the other direction. He had hardly spent a moment in the bog. He had known the bicycle was there. He had not known she would find it.
‘An accident, Hélène,’ he said and his voice, muffled by the fog, had a judgemental finality to it that was only reinforced by the eerie crying of the gulls and the deeper, harsher cawing of the ravens. ‘I found it on the road. I thought it best to hide it here since your husband …’
‘Yvon, damn you. Yvon!’
‘Since your husband intended to kill himself.’
‘Why?’ she asked, the word torn from her. Anguish, pain and disbelief were in her voice, hatred too. ‘Yvon had no reason to kill himself, Victor. He had every reason to live for Angélique’s sake.’
‘He tried to kill St-Cyr.’
‘You know that is not true. He was only trying to protect Angélique. Yvon didn’t even know about that damned doll until Monsieur le Trocquer confronted me with it. My husband didn’t want people to find out what his daughter had done to me. He … he was afraid the inspectors and others would see it and he couldn’t have that, could he?’
She was desperate. ‘Where is Jean-Louis?’ he asked.
‘Nowhere near. There are only the two of us.’
‘You should have taken the cyanide. It would have been better.’
‘Better? Better than what, please? Your hands on my throat? My face in the mud until I can struggle no more? I know too much. You cannot let me continue to live.’
‘Please don’t be difficult.’
‘You wanted Yvon to kill himself so you hid the bicycle you had smashed with your car. You let him crawl all the way out there to his boat. Was he badly hurt, Victor? Was he bleeding, damn you?’
Sacré nom de nom, thought Kerjean, why had Jean-Louis not called out? ‘Hélène, I searched for Yvon. I tried to find him and found the bicycle at the side of the road. I swear it, but I could not have stopped him even if I had found him. He was insane and you know it. He was always hearing the ancients and their whispers. This place was very sacred to them, sacred to himself also. Yes … yes, don’t deny it. A relic, he called it, from the Ice Age, from that time of much colder climate. He wanted to be buried here and unless I am very mistaken, we will find him in that little boat of his still clutching the boulder he intended to take to the bottom with him.’
‘Yvon did not kill Monsieur le Trocquer,’ she said harshly and, catching up the blackened tree trunk, wielded it to defend herself.
Kerjean found a cigarette and lit it. He made no move to approach her. He calmed himself and as he did so, the tree trunk was gradually lowered until its end dug itself into the bog beside the bicycle.
She looked like a witch, a hag, as pagan as the rest of the place. He finished the cigarette in silence and when it was done, pushed it well into the peat. Then he took a step towards her and said, ‘Hélène, please let me help you.’ Another step followed and another — the peat was sucking at his boots. It wasn’t any easier for her to move. Frantically she tried to pull the tree trunk free but it wouldn’t come … it wouldn’t.
With a cry that was more of the distant past than of the present, a blurred brown shape rushed out of the fog across the tops of the hummocks to leap at Kerjean and grab him from behind and drag him down … down into the bog. They fought. Something green and sharply pointed was raised up in two fists. A bronze spear point … A …
St-Cyr fired two shots into the air and all at once the gulls began to scream while the ravens went to silence.
‘Yvon …’ she said. ‘Chéri …’ The words were ripped right out of her.
‘Monsieur, please put the weapon down. Please do not force me to shoot you.’
Kerjean was face down. His arms were bent to give purchase. Involuntarily the hands clutched at the peaty mud and it squished between the futile fingers.
‘He thought I had been badly hurt and would surely kill myself,’ said Charbonneau, ‘and I let him think it. I cut up a goat I stole from a nearby farm and made a sacrifice of it to the gods of this place. I knew he would have to come back here and I waited.’
‘Please drop the spear point.’
‘Yvon, do as he asks.’
It was Kerjean who said, ‘Kill me, Yvon. Don’t let the Nazis take me.’
Schultz was not good company. Oh, he grinned and thought it all a great joke locking his buddies up like that, but from the Tumulus of Saint-Michel to the alignments of Kerzerho, a good eight kilometres, the muzzle of the Walther P38 had never wavered. Not for one second, and through the damnedest pea-souper Kohler had ever experienced.
He geared down one more time, put the lorry right into low-low and eased the Freikorps Doenitz’s lumbering old sow among the standing stones.
The megaliths ghosted grey and ancient and a hell of a lot like some witch doctor’s phalluses, and he had to wonder if this wasn’t what the bloody things represented. ‘Not astronomical sight lines but peckers!’ he snorted richly. ‘The fountains of youth to dazzle all the tribe’s females and make the old druids randy!’
It didn’t even get a rise out of Schultz. ‘Cat got your tongue?’ he asked.
‘Just find the house by the sea and find the woman and her husband.’
‘So, tell me about the doll, eh? Give me a break.’
Kohler was just fucking about. ‘Not until we know they’re dead. If they’re not, you can forget it.’
‘Then I’ll never know? That isn’t fair. Hey, how was Paulette? I meant to ask, and bugger that crap about your trying to help the Dollmaker. You had her, Schultz, and you killed her and I’m going to make it stick.’
The shot shattered the side window and nearly put them into one of the larger stones. Kohler jammed on the brakes and shook his head to clear it. ‘I’m deaf, damn it! Deaf, you son of a bitch!’ he roared.
To prove it, Schultz fired again. ‘All right … All right, you win. Was she juicy? Was she just begging for it, eh?’
‘I didn’t kill her and I didn’t kill her mother either. She was already dead when I found her.’
Somehow he had to get that gun away from Schultz. ‘You’re lying. You raped her and then you killed her.’
‘I might have but I didn’t. Now shut up and keep driving. Don’t try to put us off the road. You do and it’ll be the last thing you ever try.’
They started up again. He had to keep him talking. ‘Admit it. You knew that shopkeeper. You’d been working a fiddle with him and trying to get a hand up Paulette’s skirt. When the pianist and Angélique went into the shop, and you saw that doll the kid had — you saw it, my friend — you put two and two together and went to see what would happen. That can only mean you knew well beforehand exactly what le Trocquer was going to do with that doll.’
‘What if I did?’
Kohler brought the lorry to another halt. ‘It makes you an accessory to murder but I happen to think you were there to stop that shopkeeper from ever meeting up with the Captain. I’m right, aren’t I?’
The engine idled — it was a bit rough. Ah damn … Schultz had raised the pistol and taken aim at the Gestapo’s forehead.
‘One neat little hole and no more problems,’ he said. ‘Your dossier and that of your Frog friend tell me few will regret your passing.’
Kohler wet his throat. ‘Look, I … I was only casting about for answers. Doenitz wants this thing solved. Mueller in Berlin is on the line to my chief in Paris all the time. He and Boemelburg are old friends.’
Several seconds passed. The cook was going to kill him. Ach Du lieber Gott, had it come to this?
‘Paulette was a tease, a virgin. She kept it locked up like the Bank of France. Her old man always figured she was up to mischief, but the truth is, Herr Kohler, she was as pure as the new-fallen snow.’