Ah merde, the wife’s birthday and theft from the Occupier? Hermann had no scruples about stealing from his confreres, just as he had none when it came to choosing his women. Another prostitute. Marianne would have a fit. You ought to mind your own business!’
‘I am. I have to live with you, right? Admit it, you forgot and a man can’t forget things like that. He really can’t. Not with a skirt like her. She’ll leave you just like the other one did.’
The first wife. ‘Spare me the lecture. Go and talk to that corpse as I have. Hey, from now on I am going to leave the “details” to you.’
‘Not before I give you the grand tour to open your eyes and get the fly-eggs out of them. Come on, relax. Here, have some more. Our woman was really something.’
From the scattered, foraged contents of the picnic hamper, St-Cyr reassembled the menu. ‘Pate de foie gras truffe in a stone crock with a tight seal, alas now broken, radishes and bread. Confit d’oie in another stone crock, this time still in one piece. After the pate, the remaining meat of the goose is cooked in its own fat and preserved under it.’ He held up the crock. ‘The contents would have been carefully taken out with a dinner-knife and placed on one of the plates to be exclaimed over and admired before being grilled and eaten with a little more of the bread perhaps.’ He tossed a hand. ‘The shells of the six eggs the badgers have eaten indicate an unrationed omelette was to follow.’ He held up a small copper skillet. ‘A little of the leftover goose fat to cook the eggs and the mushrooms, but did she plan to kill her fellow diner?’
Kohler knew Louis was enjoying himself and let him continue.
The withered remains of some lettuce and endive were plucked from the grass along with those of several green onions and cloves of garlic, only bits of which remained. He found a small bottle of oil, unlabelled, the container saved to be used time and again. ‘Salade a l’huile de noix (with walnut oil). Then cheese, probably, with grand jean walnuts – they’re very meaty – and fresh, sweet cherries. Afterwards, coffee from her thermos. It’s no longer hot but it’s real. She has even added a little cognac.’
The wines included a fine red Chateau Bonnecoste and the vin paille de Beaulieu, in addition to the champagne. There were glasses, plates, cups and cutlery for two with linen napkins. ‘Fantastic china, Hermann. Old like the pearls. Sevres and quite expensive.’
She had thought of everything, even to uncorking the red to let it breathe and sinking the white in the stream to cool, but had she intended to poison the person she had gone to meet?
‘Or did she intend to kill herself as well, Louis, and take down the two of them?’
‘Or merely use the specimens to show someone else what not to collect?’ That, too, was often done.
‘Then why collect so many?’
‘Ah yes, that is a problem most certainly.’ The poisonous mushrooms were one thing, however, the work gloves that separated them from the others in her basket, quite another.
Gingerly St-Cyr teased the gloves out and prised them open, showering a little rain of fine yellowish sand and tiny shards of black to dark brown flint. ‘These gloves haven’t been used in years,’ he said.
‘Then where did she find them?’
‘Or why did she bring them?’
‘That cave?’ asked Kohler hesitantly.
‘Perhaps, but then …’
‘There’s a black powder, a pigment of some sort.’
‘Manganese dioxide – the mineral, pyrolusite. It’s quite common in the Dordogne. The ancients used it to.…’
‘To paint their caves,’ breathed Kohler.
Both of them knew they would have to make the climb. The cave was nearly seventy metres above the stream. Sweat blurred the vision and stung the eyes. Twice they had to pause for breath. The talus of angular, slab-like blocks of grey-white limestone was difficult to traverse and blinding in its glare. Impatiently St-Cyr yanked at a collar that was too tight. The button, its thread frayed, popped off and he saw it bounce from a rock, blinked and said, ‘Ah no. It has disappeared.’
Such little losses were devastating these days, thought Kohler. Replacements were so difficult to find. ‘Tough luck. I’ll tell Boemelburg you lost it in a whorehouse.’
‘You would. Save it for Pharand.’
‘That little fart? He’d love it’ Pharand was Louis’s boss, a file-mined, officious, insidiously jealous, territorial twit who was dangerous. Very dangerous. Ah yes. ‘That champagne wasn’t such a good idea, Louis. I think I’m feeling dizzy.’
Mopping his brow, the Surete’s little Frog dropped his suit jacket onto a slab of rock and took time out to use his necktie as a bandanna. There, that is better. Now you also.’
They continued on and up beneath the soaring of the honey buzzard, two fly specks in a bleached and broken land to which scattered scrub, a maquis of sorts, gave absolutely no comfort. Had they the vision of the hawk, they would have seen a well-treed plateau on high with an oak and chestnut forest and a stream that flowed to the head of a once much larger valley before leaping off its limestone cap to fall in a spray that glistened in the sunlight. They would have seen the railway line, a little to the south of them as it followed the flats along the north bank of the Dordogne. They would have seen that line turn to the north-west towards Sarlat. There was a road and a viaduct, a railway overpass. They had come in from the west. The woman had come in from the east, gathering her mushrooms until, at last, she had reached the valley and gone up it to the waterfall.
‘Louis, I’m going to have a bathe when we get back down there.’
‘Me also, but first, a moment, please, Hermann, for the quiet contemplation of what is now before us.’
The cave entrance was perhaps four metres wide by two in height but it had, originally, been much larger. In medieval times the cave could quite possibly have been used by shepherds to pen their flocks at night. More recently the layered deposits at its entrance, a hard breccia of broken bones, flints, sand, and rocky debris that had fallen from the roof, had been excavated. These dull reddish to pale yellowish deposits – some with sandy layers and some more bouldery – had a depth of about three metres. Down through the ages rubbish had been piled up at the cave mouth. These deposits had been cut into platform benches about a metre and a half high and perhaps three metres in depth and two in width. A trench ran through them to the darker recesses of the cave.
Spoil from the excavations had been thrown to the right and now lay behind a low retaining wall of dry-stone flags that extended out from the cave mouth and a little along that side of the valley. Rusting sardine cans, some so riddled with holes they must have been left before that other war, lay with shattered bits of wine bottle, nails and other trash. ‘Two-legged badgers,’ commented the Surete tartly. ‘Artefact plunderers. Why can’t people show respect and leave places like this to be studied? A prehistorian dug this excavation, Hermann, but that was years ago. They have even pulled the nails he used to mark the layers!’
Across a cleared span of the original cave floor, there was a ladder leaning against the innermost bench. The floor was littered with broken black flints, yellowish to reddish sand, ashes both grey and black, rock from the roof above, and broken, charred animal bones. Bones everywhere.
In one instant, standing at the entrance, how much history could they see? ‘Perhaps a hundred thousand years, Hermann. Perhaps more. From deep within the Pleistocene Ice Age to the present, from the severe cold of a world gripped by continental glaciation whose ice-front lay to the north near London, Rotterdam, Koln and elsewhere through countless cycles of cold and warm, the not-so-cold and not-so-warm, to what we have today. But always there was life here and a place to live. Sometimes permanently frozen ground and tundra vegetation, sometimes fir forests, grasslands or deciduous trees. Many of the flints show signs of having been worked. The bones … the bones are from animals some of which no longer roam these parts or, in some cases, even exist.’