The brakes were hit. The car slewed. The horses, on frayed tethers, bolted heavily into the surrounding fields, dragging their dealer with them.
Dust rose and settled. The smell of burning rubber was unpleasant.
‘I warned you,’ seethed St-Cyr. ‘I have tried to tell you to expect the unexpected on our roads but ah no, no, the Gestapo are invincible. They know everything. They steal a car so as to hurry to a murder scene before everything is removed, and all but kill its only passenger. Grace a Dieu, I have not soiled my trousers. Excuse me, Inspector, while I relieve the bladder.’
Kohler could hear him pissing against a rear tyre, a favourite French trick, since it gave the lie of big, proud, brave dogs in a nation defeated.
The horse-dealer, a member of the nouveau riche, was not so pleasant. Having recaptured two of his nags and burned the skin off both palms, he approached the car in a hurry. ‘Imbecile! Salaud! Did your mother have the syphilis, eh? Did she not obtain the certificat sanitaire before conceiving you?’
There was more. Age, some fifty-six years perhaps, did not interfere. Barnyard bootscrapings were referred to. Horse shit was furiously flung at the car.
At last the dust settled. The nags snorted and tossed their wild-eyed heads. The moon face of the dealer began to lose its colour. The dark brown eyes under that cap and thatch of grey hair, began to worry. The half-smile was crooked.
‘Your name?’ breathed Kohler, still from behind the wheel of the car. He had the sun above and the world at his feet.
St-Cyr did up his flies. The engine cooled.
‘My name …? What has that to do with things? Are you so stupid you cannot see what you have done? Those horses – all thirty-six of them – were for the Russian Front!’
‘Louis, check his licence.’
‘My licence …?’
‘Illegal dealers, a lack of labour, and enforced shipments of produce to the Reich are the curse of French agriculture,’ mused the Gestapo whose only proffered identification was a wallet badge that was held up in the palm of a giant’s hand. ‘Production has fallen drastically and since there are so few horses left in the zone occupee, the farmers there are forced to plough using the wife and kids while here in the South, the Reich employs whatever means it can to get what remains.’
‘But… but you’re one of them?’
‘Hermann, we have work to do.’
‘The fact that I’m “one” of them does not matter.’ One of the few good things Vichy had tried desperately to do was to save what few horses remained.
Kohler calmed the two horses and from a shabby pocket, found the stray carrot he had picked up in the market – a piece of good fortune, a future snack. ‘We’re waiting,’ he said, giving each of the horses a half-carrot.
The man winced and tossed the wounded hand of inconsequence. ‘My licence … oh, well certainly, it is …’
‘Not so good, right? Then you’re under arrest, my friend. Climb in the back. You can help the boys in blue remove the corpse we found. Maybe they’ll let you ride with her.’
‘Hermann, please. He will only be an inconvenience. Let us tear up his licence. Let us remove his boots and make him walk down this road as his horses will eventually do.’
There was a nod the Surete understood only too well. The man’s undershirt and drawers were used to clean the bonnet and windscreen, the tweed cap gave a nice shine. Water was no problem for the river was close and the labour free.
The current caught the jodhpurs and other things. It took the jacket and the bits of an identity card that would be very hard to replace. It took the torn scraps of a dubious licence.
They left the man without a stitch, to bathe his hands and think about breaking the law for profit, no matter for whom.
Hermann had a thing about horses. ‘Those poor old nags wouldn’t have come home from Russia, Louis. I had to do it’
‘Of course.’
When they reached the glade, the body had already been removed. The grass and wild flowers had been cut and raked so hard, the place all but looked like a lawn, albeit damp from several washings, and smelling like a brothel sprinkled with cheap perfume. There was no sign of the picnic under the chestnut tree by that little stream, no sign of anyone. Even the empty champagne bottles had been taken, even their corks and wires. It was as if the murder had never happened. Even the honey buzzard had buggered off.
‘Sarlat… they will have taken her there,’ managed Louis. It was not far. Perhaps seven kilometres at most.
‘Death caps and fly agaric.’
‘Ah merde …’
Nightmare visions of some undernourished flic came to them, those of the family also. Seven children perhaps and the wife and both sets of grandparents.
‘With the phalline poisoning of the death cap, Hermann, induced vomiting, even immediately after eating, is often of little use, since the poison, it is so readily absorbed.’
They were moving now – thrashing their way through the underbrush. They could not travel fast enough.
‘Though the symptoms are delayed from twelve to twenty-four hours,’ sang out the Surete anxiously, ‘they consist of violent pains and burning sensations in the stomach, fainting fits, cramps, unstoppable diarrhoea, bloody stools, vomiting, cold sweats, shivering and an enlarged liver. These things can last up to ten days. Ten!’
Breathlessly he finally broke free of the woods to slide down to the railway embankment. Kohler followed and they ran along the track. ‘At the end, the pulse slows, the victim turns yellow, the breathing becomes very laboured. There is collapse and then death.’
A not-so-speedy release. End of mushrooms, end of lecture. ‘Hey, since you know the way, I’m going to let you drive,’ said Kohler. ‘Don’t hit anything. My nerves won’t take it.’
* * *
The telephone calls were made, the panic had subsided. Mathieu Vaudable, in his forty-third year as coroner of the Perigord Noir, removed his gold-rimmed pince-nez. He cleared his throat and the sound of this, caught in dank medieval cellars off the rue de Siege in one of the oldest parts of Sarlat, was harsh.
‘These cellars,’ he said by way of apology. ‘Jean-Louis, I regret the apprehensions you and Herr Kohler have suffered on account of the mushrooms. I myself was shown the basket and took immediate possession of it.’
In specimen after specimen, Amanita phalloides (death cap) and Amanita muscaria (fly agaric) lay among the stone tools Vaudable had had sent over from the local museum. He had not yet taken time out for his dinner and probably wouldn’t.
He picked up a death cap with his tweezers. ‘The flat but round cap and dirty green shade which fades to brownish-yellow,’ he said, ‘but is sometimes pale yellow or bluish, yes? The most deadly of our mushrooms, messieurs.’
There were white gills but on some specimens these had acquired a greenish cast. Each specimen had a swollen base, and a cup that was enclosed in a sheath. The presence of this indicated that the mushrooms had been dug out.
‘The Amanita muscaria is not nearly so poisonous. The cap, though similar to its little friend, is a brilliant vermilion to orange red. The gills are white or yellowish and the stem underground is covered with white scales. These specimens have also been dug out by our victim.’
‘And the stone tools?’ managed Kohler.
‘Ah, yes. A mid-Acheulian handaxe, three cores which have been made into knives and scrapers but could be further worked as the need arose, and a smaller, more perfect knife with a pressure-flaked, serrated edge. All are of the black flint and bear the patina of great age.’