When he found, in the undergrowth near the blanket, a basket of mushrooms and the worn but razor-sharp paring knife she had used to gather them, he saw she had covered them with a thick layer of once dampened moss. There were puffballs and edible morels – any farmboy, such as he had been, could have identified them. Sweet-chestnut boletus too and parasols, others too. Others.
He removed the moss completely, noting that she had placed a pair of thin cloth work gloves between the mushrooms in a small canvas collecting bag. The gloves were worn through at the thumbs and fingers and stained not by humus as he had thought, but by ochrous fine sand, grey ash and some sort of very black powder.
There were also tiny bits of black flint no longer than a few millimetres at most.
When he opened the collecting bag, he saw very quickly that she had been up to mischief. Death cap and fly agaric lay side by side and there were several specimens of each.
If she had intended to kill someone, she had been prepared to make a damned good job of it. An omelette, monsieur? A little more of the pate or the champignons a la creme?
The French were always killing themselves with such mistakes – there were always warnings posted in prominent places – but this was intent. Why else would she have gathered them, seeing as she damned well knew her mushrooms?
The identity card in her purse gave the name of Madame Ernestine Fillioux, born 15 March 1896 in the village of Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne, upriver a piece.
Her height was 167 centimetres (5?7?). Hair: light brown; eyes: brown; nose: normal; face: oval; complexion: pale; special signs: small brown mole on the right cheekbone; freckles over the bridge of the nose; a three-centimetre scar on the left forehead.
There were the usual two fingerprints, the thumbs, below the 13-franc stamp, and over these and the signatures of herself and a witness, the stamp of the Commissariat de Police in Perigueux. The thing had only recently been renewed and was dated 17 August 1941.
Her occupation was listed as shopkeeper and postmistress, her marital status as war widow.
Kohler searched the photograph for answers but all he found was a forty-six-year-old woman with a proud chin, rather strongly boned, sharply featured face, good firm lips, steadfast eyes, a high forehead and hair that was pulled back into a chignon which did little but add severity to what might otherwise have been attractiveness.
‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘Why the special dress, and why the mushrooms? Why the walk through the woods to that glade when this little valley is so much nicer?’
No matter how hard he tried, he could still see her lying face down in the grass with her arms and legs flung apart and the flies crawling all over her.
Had the blue of them not matched that of her dress?
The seersucker was finely crinkled, the cotton both cool in the heat and so easily crushed it was like a caress. It had the feel of money and class. ‘Paris …’ murmured St-Cyr. ‘The rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore, the avenue de l’Opera.’
Naked beneath it, she would have felt so very good. Proud of herself, yes – what woman wouldn’t have been? He was certain she was from the Dordogne, had felt this all along but could not yet put a finger on the reason. Perhaps Hermann had found something by now.
Gingerly he used a pair of tweezers to pry the collar free of caked blood and read the label with a sigh, ‘Barclay, 18 to 20 avenue de l’Opera, Paris.’
Barclay’s had had shops in Vichy, Nice, Cannes and Deauville, too, before the war but now operated under a name he had deliberately forgotten in protest.
1937 or ’38, he thought. By ‘39 tensions would have been too high for such extravagance and it was extravagance, this dress. ‘A hat from Yvette Delort, madame, to please your lover? Was he the one who did this?’
He was certain she had either gone to Paris to buy the dress before the war or had ordered it especially and had waited the days or weeks until it had arrived.
A woman, then, who had known exactly what she had wanted.
She had not been surprised by her assailant and this made her killing and defilement all the more puzzling. She had apparently come to the glade unaware of any danger and had paused at its edge, among the ferns where Hermann had picked up her trail. She had said, ‘--, is it really you?’ or perhaps, ‘I am so sorry. Am I a little late? My watch … I must have left it where I bathed.’
She had then gone forward to stand facing her assailant who had come to the glade as they had, from the opposite direction – he was certain of this. She could not have known of his or her intentions since she had not run, had not even backed away.
She had stood facing that person, in awe, in tears, perhaps – how could one possibly know now if there had been tears or only soft words of hesitation and relief? She had been struck hard between the eyes. A stone? he wondered. It had split the skin badly. Now stained as if by some horrible accident of birth, the wound’s livid dark plum-violet to greenish-yellow putridness marred her brow forever.
She had fallen back, had tried to get up – one hand had perhaps been placed behind her, the other stretched out towards her assailant, he could see it happening so clearly. She had then been struck at least twice more on the head. After this, while still on her back, she had been stabbed repeatedly and slashed with that thing, then flipped over.
Grim at the thought of what must have happened, he stood and, carefully folding a bit of fabric, tucked it away in an envelope, then cleaned the tweezers on some grass.
Fortunately his other jacket pocket, the one with the loose thread that had been carefully coiled and saved at the end of its freely dangling leader, held a pair of ancient rubber gloves.
He put them on and, finding some inner strength of will, turned her over with much difficulty, scattering the flies and finally stepping back to gasp, ‘Ah nom de Jesus-Christ!’
She had been partially disembowelled – butchered. Opened to the groin. The oozing, stinking mess of dark, sticky offal was ripe with violet and yellow. The flies … the flies … they descended. They worried. They fought with one another to get at her and dig deeper.
Her throat had been hacked at. The jugular, the carotid arteries, the windpipe.… Her tongue was black. Both breasts had been crudely parted lengthwise down the middle and peeled aside so that now, as he watched, the left half of the left breast slowly slipped away until it hung by a strap of rotting skin.
When he found Hermann, a bottle of champagne, discovered in the stream, was all but gone. ‘I saved the other one for you, Louis. Come and sit a while. You look like you need it’
‘I told you not to touch a thing!’
‘Hey, it’s a Moet-et-Chandon 1889, mein Kamerad. That’s definitely not the year of her birth.’
A Moet-et-Chandon, the 1889 … How had she come by it?
They sat with their feet cooling. They didn’t say a thing for quite some time. The champagne was absolutely magnificent, a real treat in which they silently toasted the victim at impromptu moments.
‘Jesus, Louis, why the hell does it always have to be us?’
‘Murder doesn’t choose. God works in mysterious ways. Frankly, I don’t think He has ever forgiven me for having looked up my Cousin Denise’s skirts. I was ten at the time and didn’t know any better. She was eating the strawberries I had stolen for her and said I could do as I pleased, but my Aunt Sophie thought otherwise.’
Louis was always being called to account for childhood misdemeanours and for others as well, ah yes. ‘Don’t worry about Marianne’s birthday. Your big Bavarian brother’s taken care of everything. Roses, Louis, and if not them, then masses of petunias and ox-eye daisies. I asked a girl I met at Madame Chabot’s on the rue Danton to look after things if we didn’t get back in time. Giselle will do her best. You can count on her. She’s very reliable – I like that in a girl. She’ll steal them if she can’t find any to buy.’