Jouvet gave a shrug, a toss of his crippled hand. ‘All right, I went to Sarlat for a meeting of the LVF. We are planning to take part in the Bastille Day parade. My comrades in arms, Lieutenant Henri Chevalier and Sergeant Herve Prunet will vouch for me. They will also tell you I made an enquiry into my pension and found my request had not yet been considered by those bastards in Vichy.’
‘Those two would swear to anything. You knew that mother-in-law of yours was coming for a visit.’
‘So I buggered off to Sarlat, what of it? Her visits weren’t exactly pleasant.’
‘Don’t get smug with me, my friend. You walked up that railway line and went into the woods. Maybe you spied on her bathing in the buff, maybe not. God only knows what kind of a figure she had before you started hacking at her with that.…’
‘That stone chopper … is this what I used, Inspector? Come, come, be a little more forthcoming, eh? Don’t stint yourself. The flint handaxe? The stone knife – one can shave with flint. Hah! I should tell you, my fine Detektiv from Paris, me – yes, me – I have shaved the cunt hair of several partisan bitches with flints I had carried in my pockets all that way. I know it works.’
Ah nom de Jesus-Christ! ‘Find paper and pencil. Set out the times, the names and addresses of everyone you met or who might even have seen you in Sarlat or on that train or at the station. Let it be for your certificat d’etudes primaires, my sick friend. Now I’m going to dismiss the school. Please maintain silence here while the kids rejoice in the fact I’ve got your number.’
Kohler got up. He started for the doorway. He knew he ought to ask if the rucksack on the floor was the husband’s. It had the look of the Russian Front. There were things in it. A stone hammer, a pick, a flint knife …?
Without another word, he went into the classroom and without a sound the students left.
‘Monsieur.…’
‘It’s Inspector to you.’
Caught in the doorway, Jouvet looked like death. He wiped his brow with that crippled hand. ‘Please, I did not kill her. Ernestine, she … she always made a circuit of that little valley so as to see if it was free of others. If not, she would wait. Sometimes she would not even unpack the picnic hamper and lay things out or put the wine in the stream to cool and uncork the red to breathe.’
The man swallowed. Feeling lost at what he was saying, and calling himself an utter fool, Jouvet knew he had trapped himself into continuing. ‘Sometimes there were others in the cave, rooting around for things. Usually they left when she told them it was forbidden, though it wasn’t of course. Sometimes they drove her from it and she would come to us in tears saying they were ruining the site, taking everything her husband had wanted so much to record and preserve. Any one of them could have killed her. I … I have thought I should tell you. It could have been a rapist, a.… Well, you know what I mean.’
Kohler turned away to find the daughter facing him.
‘Mother would always be most distressed, Inspector. Before the war she would telephone the Museum of Culture and the Sorbonne, demanding that they listen to her. She would write letters to them, so many letters. They … they thought she was crazy. A shopkeeper, a postmistress from a little place like ours talking about things only they could know about but refusing always to give them the exact location until they agreed to excavate the deposits properly and give credit to my father. Her requests all fell on deaf ears. Money was always too difficult to find, the time too short, the staff too small and overworked, ours but one cave among so many.’
A tow-haired, skinny girl with freckles and reddened blue eyes, peeked uncertainly out at him from under the left arm of her mother. A hank of black hair hung down over the boy’s forehead. He had the dark brown eyes of Jouvet, a steady, searching look that asked, Is he really guilty?
Louis quietly slid in to one side of them to lean against the rear wall and remain as unobtrusive as possible.
‘My father was going to write a series of scientific papers about the site, Inspector.’
‘To startle his colleagues with his discovery. His, Juliette? Tell them that, please,’ demanded the husband.
She must remain calm. ‘Andre, let us be at peace for the moment. Mother is dead and we must help them find her killer. That site, as I have told you, is very special, Inspectors. An almost continuous record exists there from earliest Neanderthal times. A book was to follow and was to contain all his detailed notes and sketches. The discovery was to have been the making of his reputation as a prehistorian, that cave, his life’s work.’
‘And your mother found it for him?’ asked Louis gently.
She would not turn to look at him. She would keep her eyes on Herr Kohler and Andre. ‘Mother found the location in the diary of the Abbe Brule. The ink had run with the dampness. Some of the words, in the dialect of the Perigord, were unfamiliar to my father. Monsieur l’abbe came across the cave in 1856 and found some astounding pieces. Stone figurines, incised bits of bone, an amulet.… These and other artefacts were in the trunk he left in the safekeeping of my grandfather. The artefacts were all carefully labelled as to the levels from which they had come, locations my father was then able to confirm.’
A trunk … all Kohler could think of was the penchant of Paris trunk murderers to send their victims to Lyon with no traceable return address. ‘And this trunk …’ he began only to hear her take a deep breath and give a worried sigh.
‘The trunk had rested in the cellars of my grandfather’s house in Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne for all those years, Inspector. It was covered with mildew when my mother showed it to my father in the early spring of 1912.’
The mother would have just turned sixteen.
‘Father had the trunk shipped to Paris, to the house of his parents. He … he forbade them and my mother to say anything of it because of the amulet and the figurines. Nothing so old had ever been found.’
‘The figurines?’ asked Louis, digging out his pipe and tobacco pouch only to realize he was on harsh rations.
‘Beautiful carvings in the soft yellow stone of these parts. Very primitive. An Adam and Eve, the abbe called them. Exquisitely executed but simplistically so, without details of the faces, the hands or feet.’
‘A bulge for the testicles and penis,’ snorted Jouvet, causing Kohler to turn on him and breathe, ‘Speak only when spoken to.’
It was Louis who quietly said, ‘That cave was not a religious site, madame – at least I do not think it was from the little we have seen. It was an abri, a shelter that was used for daily living and whose layers of refuse had been built up over the millennia.’
This time she turned to face him. ‘An abri, yes, and not a grotte, not a religious site which would seldom contain the refuse layers, the gisement at its entrance.’
She released the children and urged them to have a wash. ‘We will eat in a moment,’ she said. ‘Jean-Guy, help your sister to set the table, please? The special dishes, yes? We … we must make it just as grand-mere would have wished. Please set a place for her, too, so as to remind us.’
Louis gave that nod his partner had come to know so well, but as the boy passed him, Kohler said, ‘Bring me your father’s rucksack. I want to have a look in it.’
Incensed, Jouvet darted into the kitchen and came out with the thing. ‘Then look, idiot! Look! It is not mine. It is hers.’
They took it with them. They promised to return it but a little of her died then, for they would begin to question things now. Ah yes. They would want to know more.
When Andre hit her, she fell back against the stove but did not cry out or try to defend herself.
Blood ran from her battered lips. The children raced upstairs to the attic. Some dishes fell.