He would probably kill his pigeons too. He had that look about him.
St-Cyr tried to open the door to the mill but it wouldn’t budge. He threw a shoulder against it – nearly knocking the wind out of himself. He ran around to the side to gaze up at the gaping hole of a once-glazed window.
Lazily a heavily knotted rope swung from an ancient timber inside. ‘Madame …’ he began, desperate now. ‘Madame, you had nothing to fear from me.’ Thoughts of the two children came. What would they do without their mother? Relatives … would there be someone to take them in?
It was Hermann who hoisted him up and by degrees got him through the window, but Louis paused up there.
Pialat threw Kohler a frantically questioning look.
The Surete’s hand earnestly motioned to them for silence. ‘Leave him,’ croaked Kohler. ‘Let him have a look.’ The cinematographer had taken over. Verdammt another killing!
The rope swung gently, and in the shaft of sunlight from the opposite window, it hung from the centre of the timber and stretched all but to the floor. Mill dust stirred and eddied. The inside of the door had been braced with the heavy cross-timber once used to secure it in earlier times of strife.
There was rubbish – the broken machinery of past times, what could not be reused elsewhere. A few pulley wheels, some old straw … a few of the baskets that had been used to collect walnuts but were now beyond repair.…
Alone in the centre of the floor, at the end of that rope, she sat on a small tier of wooden blocks and every time the rope she gripped so tightly came towards her, she rhythmically sent it back but maintained a tension on it that greatly troubled the detective in him.
If ever a woman had sat in debate over killing herself, it was this one.
‘Madame,’ he said, as gently as he could. ‘There is no need. We are here now and will protect you.’
Somehow she awoke to his presence but said nothing, only gazed up at him as if still not sure there was anyone there. ‘The door, madame. Please open it.’
Pialat called out, ‘Juliette, ma chere, it’s me, Alain. Please, you must open the door and tell them what you know. The children … where are they?’
‘Monsieur le maire …?’ she blurted and searched desperately for words. ‘But… but I know nothing, Monsieur le maire. Nothing.’
‘The children?’ he repeated earnestly.
‘The children,’ she echoed. ‘Ah … Getting clover for the rabbits, I think. Your pigeons … I have forgotten. Forgive me.’
Pialat did not turn away. He shook himself and clenched his fists. Suddenly he gripped his mouth to stop himself from vomiting, shed tears of relief for her and could not help but let them fall.
Verdammt, thought Kohler, what have we here?
4
In the cool half-light of his Grand Salon, Pialat put a glass of cognac into her hands. Gruff with embarrassment, he made excuses so as to leave them but as he went towards the door, she had to say something. ‘Alain, I … I did not know how you felt about me. I should have. Forgive me.’
‘It does not matter.’
‘But it does. You know it does. Perhaps when this is over and they have … have found the killer, we can again speak of such things?’
A compromise. ‘The killer… Of course. Yes. Yes, that would be fine.’
He closed the panelled doors leaving her to face the two detectives all alone. ‘I … I really didn’t realize, Inspectors. It’s stupid to have been so blind but things … things haven’t been good. He’s more than twice my age.’
She shrugged at the futility of it and sat down again in a sofa that was both elegant and of that severe though simple beauty of sixteenth-century Dordogne. A tapestry covered it.
St-Cyr let her take a hesitant sip. Kohler offered one of the mayor’s cigarettes from a carved wooden box that must predate the very use of tobacco.
‘Merci,’ she said, subdued and, trembling, accepted his offer of a light. They would want to know everything, these two from Paris. Why she had thought of killing herself. Why, please, madame?
Why she had gone to that cave not just on the Sunday before the murder but also on the Thursday, ah yes, that Thursday, messieurs.
‘My husband,’ she began. Again there was that shrug. ‘I cannot live with him any more. It’s impossible.’
‘But to take your life is to leave your children in his hands?’ said the one called St-Cyr. He was so earnest. There was compassion in the look he gave.
‘That is why I have not used the rope. An intense inner struggle, yes, which love and duty overcame.’
‘And now?’ asked the one called Kohler. ‘Are we to keep an eye on you always lest you seize the next opportunity?’
They were really very worried about her and not without good reason. Dead, she could tell them nothing.
Instinctively her smile was faint and self-effacing. She lowered her eyes and let the smoke curl up from her cigarette as she whispered, ‘Forgive me. It … it was a moment of weakness. I … I shall try not to succumb.’
Ah merde, thought St-Cyr, is she threatening us with the possibility? ‘Madame,’ he began. Her answered, ‘Yes?’ was much too quick and startled. ‘Madame, a flask was found near the stream. I have it here.’
She waited but he did not hurry. At last she had it in her hands and it was cold and worn and dented but engraved sharply with letters.…
They were both watching her intently. ‘HGF,’ she whispered. ‘Henri-Georges Fillioux … but … but, please, messieurs, what has my father’s flask to do with maman’s murder?’ She set it aside as if afraid to touch it.
Ah nom de Dieu, de Dieu, wondered St-Cyr, has she suddenly realized that she herself may well be in danger?
‘There was some champagne, madame,’ said Kohler gruffly so as to let her know he had had about enough of her evasiveness. ‘A Moet-et-Chandon. The 1889.’
She blanched. ‘The … the 1889? But … but mother never took champagne to the picnic. Always the vin paille de Beaulieu because once my father had said he liked it very much and she never forgot for a moment every word he ever said; the Chateau Bonnecoste also but.…’
‘But, what, madame?’ he insisted, reaching for the flask to remind her of it.
She straightened her back and shoulders. ‘But champagne, that … that was only once and my father brought it. A day in the early summer of 1913. In June. The … the 17th.’
The same date as that of the murder. ‘Two bottles?’ hazarded Kohler.
The faintness of her smile was again instinctively self-effacing. Blood beaded on her battered lips and she tried to hide this but gave it up. ‘They loved each other and I am the result, and yes, my father probably got my mother a little drunk and very receptive to his advances if you wish to look at things that way – I don’t. It … it was a moment of weakness maman refused ever to regret; myself also. Is it so terrible a thing?’
The flask was making her nervous.
‘No, no, of course not,’ muttered St-Cyr uncomfortably. ‘Such things, they happen all the time between those who truly love each other.’
You hypocrite! A girl of seventeen, Inspector, and a man of twenty-six? she said silently, giving them a moment to think of it themselves.
Satisfied, she said, ‘But if the truth were known, Inspectors, they shared each other’s bodies more than once that summer and well into the fall, well past the time of her knowing. At least, this is what I have since come to believe but not,’ she held up a hand, ‘because of the words of my husband who has constantly reminded me of it.’
‘The cave,’ breathed Kohler. ‘The waterfall and that little glade.’