Oelmann’s steel-blue eyes registered the intensity of his belief in what they had come across.
‘We’re talking about the Neanderthals,’ said von Strade firmly. ‘Not the Cro-Magnons.’
‘So, I find the piece, the amulet,’ said the actress, ‘and I show it to the Herr Doktor Professor and we both kneel on the floor of the cave to gaze up at the paintings on the roof and walls as if in supplication before their god and ours, both one and united over the span of the millennia.’
She really believed it too. Emotion filled her eyes with moisture. She was an absolutely stunning woman. ‘But … but there aren’t any paintings in that cave.’ he managed. ‘Louis and I didn’t …’
A meaty hand fell on his to grip him with the urgency of a film producer who had much to lose and wasn’t about to let it go. ‘Oh but there are, Herr Kohler. Paintings of such extraordinary import as to be priceless and far beyond the value of those even at Lascaux. Our cave will become an international shrine when we’re done with it. People from all over Europe will come to witness what our film has shown them.’
Deveaux’s chest rattled as he heaved the sigh of a sous-prefet from whose hands the matter had fallen into those of another. Well, two others: Louis and his partner. Kohler threw him a glance that was ignored as, waistcoat unbuttoned, Deveaux’s thumbs were slid behind the broad suspenders and his chest eased a little.
Pialat searched the skies for his pigeons. Franz Oelmann’s gaze had lost none of its intensity.
The Baroness smiled excitedly. A hole in the ground … wasn’t that what she had said about the caves beneath the town? ‘Willi, it’s marvellous what holes in the ground can tell us about history.’
And then, of the breeze down there and with hands perhaps clasped, ‘It’s like the bathe I had under that little waterfall. It’s delightful.’
Pialat didn’t waste time. A bachelor all his life, the mayor had worries of his own now that the visitors had departed. Kohler found him in the turreted sixteenth-century dovecote of the Governor’s House. As he went up the tightly spiralled staircase, he realized the tower had been modernized so that now a dark and heavily timbered floor above hid the roof. Formerly the droppings had just collected on the walls and at the bottom as a rich and much coveted source of phosphate for the garden. Now they would still be saved. Ah yes.
When he reached the open trap door, he could hear Pialat’s voice among the cooings of his little charges. ‘Oh my pretties, my precious ones, I have warned you. I have pleaded.’
From cage to cage he went with water and feed. Each pan of droppings was scraped into a bucket and then carefully brushed. ‘It was old Vivan again, and that son of his,’ said the mayor, grinding his teeth and still unaware of the visitor. ‘The adhesive on the limbs of their cherry trees, the scattered grain and the gossamer of their nets.… Those bastards. Three … is it three or four I have lost to their table this time?’
He noticed the visitor. His mouth fell open and for a moment, he couldn’t decide what to say. Then he shrugged and reached for a pigeon to calm himself. ‘Those two I mentioned, Inspector, they are always waiting, especially now with the shortages but … ah grace a Dieu, I have not lost more of them this time. Jean-Guy, he was supposed to come and shut them in but … but the boy and his sister, they have not come today.’
‘Jean-Guy …?’
The bird relieved itself into the mayor’s hand. Droppings spattered a knee of the black suit. Feathers stuck to the front of the waistcoat and jacket lapels.
Pialat released the bird and let it fly around them until it finally settled on one of the ancient stone roosts above. ‘Yes, the children of Madame Jouvet. Very reliable, very polite – always dutiful. It is a little job I give them from time to time to help the family out.’
Three more pigeons were released and he let their feathers and bird shit damage his best suit. He seemed to need their closeness as they perched on his shoulders and hat, and he fed them little titbits he had scrounged from dinner.
‘Even with such a tragedy, Madame Jouvet would not have kept her son from his duties. She’s so conscientious, that one. A husband like that. Who would have thought he would do such a thing? He did it, didn’t he?’
‘He says he was in Sarlat’
The hand with the pigeon was automatically lifted. ‘Ah! Sarlat. Of course. It’s to be expected. The ironclad alibi while the blood, it still cools. Those friends of his aren’t to be trusted. Volunteers for Russia. Hah! they hated their jobs and wanted adventure and they got it. Rape, pillage, murder and wounds to boast about. That poor woman should leave him. I myself would sign the divorce papers and go to Rome to plead with the Pope!’
Pialat handed him the pigeon. ‘She’s pretty, isn’t she?’ Kohler had to ask himself did the mayor mean the actress, the schoolteacher or the pigeon.
‘Beautiful,’ he said and only realized, as he gently caressed the head and neck, that Pialat had used it to test him.
‘We are of one mind with such as these, Inspector,’ he said, ‘but you did not come here to see my birds.’
Kohler met the steadiness of his gaze. ‘What was the mother worth?’
So that was it, and one might have known. ‘Talk – there is always talk in a little place like this. Some said 500,000 francs, some said no more than 5,000. Certainly there is the shop and post office, the telephone but.…’ He took the pigeon from him to kiss it and return it to its cage. ‘But in a little place like Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne, those are nothing. It’s a poor village and they don’t keep it very clean. The citizens need a better mayor. Always if there is good leadership, pride of place and that sense of community, hard times can be withstood. The well of human endurance is deep and best tapped when brother helps brother with no thought of profit.’
He should have been mayor of Berlin! ‘Tell me about the film people. I gather they have already visited the cave?’
This, too, was something that should have been anticipated. Yes, they were there on the Thursday and the Friday before the killing. Two visits – all of our visitors on the Friday, that actress and her young friend on the.… Why is it, please, that the boy is not in a prisoner-of-war camp with all the others or under the earth?’
Like so many, the mayor had a right to be indignant. More than two million French soldiers languished behind barbed wire in the Reich. ‘Maybe his family didn’t want him killed?’
‘And bought his freedom from duty – a pauper? Ah! let us leave the matter to Saint Peter. The actress and her young friend went there on Thursday by themselves. It is the half-holiday.’
The last pigeon was locked up. The mayor waited for him to say something. He even took out a pocket comb and went to work on his walrus moustache just to make sure there wasn’t any bird shit in it.
‘You’d best tell me,’ said Kohler cautiously. ‘Only the schools get Thursday afternoon off.’
‘Ah! may God forgive me, I had better, hadn’t I? Early on that Thursday afternoon Madame Jouvet took her bicycle and left by the Porte del Bos. That husband of hers saw his wife even as I did myself. The rucksack on her back, the kerchief on her head, the haste, Inspector, to get away unseen if possible. She had received an urgent telephone call that morning from her mother.’
‘Ah merde, so she was there on Thursday too. The film … the cave paintings.…’
‘Inspector, what has happened to her children? It really is not like her. That old mill.… She might have gone there. The beams in the floor above, they are still sound. There are ropes – I myself keep taking them down for fear the boys who swing from them and climb too high might have an accident but a woman in great distress … a woman who was so close to the mother who directed her life, a mother who would know all about painting caves …?’
‘I’ll go there now.’
‘No, I will go with you. If she has hanged herself, I will never forgive myself. I shall resign as mayor and take the blame for not having put a stop to that husband of hers.’