The detectives were upstairs now, in the auberge where heavy floorboards complained even from beneath carpets that had hidden them for ages. The halls were dark, the ceilings low, the hanging iron lamps extinguished, the rooms shut in by heavy drapes maman had refused to replace. ‘Some day,’ she would say – and Juliette could hear her mother’s voice so clearly – ‘some day these things will be worth a fortune.’ The heavy oak chests and massive armoires, the dressers and canopied beds whose carvings a timid girl had secretively traced when opening a room to a visitor who had looked and searched and inevitably found it wanting.
There had never been many of these visitors. Travelling salesmen and produce buyers mostly, sometimes an estate agent or notary. Often maman had argued with herself about living down here but always the possibility of lodgers had presented a moral and economic dilemma particularly when she, herself, had grown old enough for men to look at in that way men did. Yes, yes, she said, remembering suddenly a heavy door that had closed behind her, an unwanted, terrifying hand and panic … panic like she had never known before.
Maman had called up the stairs to save her. Maman …, Why had she not told her about the food parcels directed to that address in Paris when she had sworn never to send the parents Fillioux a single morsel? “Never, so long as I live!”
Suddenly finding herself alone, Juliette blinked and tried to remember which of the rooms the detectives had just entered. Herr Oelmann was downstairs with the Baroness and the others. Perhaps the film people had gone to look at the river, perhaps they simply waited in silence. With him, as with the detectives, she would never know if she was alone until it was too late, but she had to try or else the one called St-Cyr would only find the secret drawer and take from it the postcards maman would have saved. The postcards …
The room she wanted was behind her, at the head of the stairs. The floorboards sighed. She felt a draught – Herr Kohler? she asked herself but heard only the board as her weight was released.
From the head of the stairs, whose dark railing she had polished countless times, she chanced a look down to the entrance of the shop.
No one was there so that was good. The ancient latch was stiff as always. The armoire was to her left, the bed to the right. Only a small, shuttered window could be opened in this room.
Closing the door behind her, she tried to calm herself but it was no use. The bed was old and high up off the floor and she remembered it so clearly. There were also two heavy armchairs she had never liked, a simple washstand with stone basin, a jug, a mirror, a towel.…
These things were all to one side of the armoire whose severe dark oak was so forbidding she had to remind herself St-Cyr had already opened it in search of Monsieur Auger’s body.
Kneeling on the carpet, she threw a glance behind her as she felt deeply under the right side of the armoire for the little pewter pin one had to pull down before the spring-activated drawer would automatically open.
Maman had chosen to hide her most valuable things in the poorest and least expensive of the rooms, the room in which Henri-Georges Fillioux had first come to stay in the early spring of 1912, the room in which his daughter would now.…
No one walked along the corridor outside, no one called out to her. There was not a sound yet her fingers shook so hard they could not find the pin and she had to ask, Is this not the same armoire, the same room?
The drawer popped open. It slid so easily it was like magic. Relief flooded through her and for a moment she shut her eyes and pressed her forehead against the carpet but then instinct drove her to silently close the drawer and to hesitantly stand with her back to whomever had come so stealthily into the room.
He did not move. He made no sound. She felt her skin begin to crawl. She knew he would make her tell him everything. He’d make her open the secret drawer.
‘Henri-Georges Fillioux,’ muttered St-Cyr, standing in the attic beside the victim’s bed, ‘have you come back from the dead to murder the woman who never stopped loving you or did Jouvet, the husband of that daughter your parents ignored, do it to save himself?’
Like so many such photographs from that other war, this one could not help but evoke poignant memories of fallen comrades. Fillioux wore his captain’s uniform well. The high cheekbones of the daughter were there, the long lashes, wide lips, proud chin and serious gaze. He had even given her the blue eyes – all these things were stamped on her as if by the insistent mallet of the mother.
But what would Fillioux look like today at the age of fifty-five? Almost certainly heavier about the face, with sagging jowls and pouches under the eyes, the skin far less smooth, the cheeks less cleanly-shaven due to that ever-present shadow most men develop with age. Grey-haired too, perhaps, but suave and aristocratic – yes, yes, unless so battered by the war, all such things had become totally meaningless to him.
There’d been no sign of the sous-facteur Auger, no sign of a break-in either. Though he felt the attic had been thoroughly searched, St-Cyr could find no evidence of this. Even so, he used the point of his pocket-knife to open the drawer of the bedside table.
Unlike so many, Madame Fillioux had not kept a rosary beside her at all times. There was no handkerchief, no alarm clock for one who would hear the cock crow anyway. No lurid train novels or books of romantic poetry.
The handaxe was beautiful, the scrapers, knives, burins and awls so perfect on their bed of towelling, they evoked instant images of the cave and that little valley, and he knew then that before she went to sleep each night, she had used these talismans to keep in touch with her dead husband.
‘Ah merde,’ he said of the handaxe, ‘was this used to kill you? Was one of those scrapers used to remove the flesh, that knife to open it?’
The tools were all carefully numbered and he knew she would have a record of the locations where they had been found in the layers of the gisement.
A small, suede-covered book of photographs, patiently picked through with the aid of the knife-point, revealed that the girl of seventeen had learned well how to use a camera. There were several shots of Fillioux, lithe and handsome but so very serious. In one he was removing encrustations of lime from the artefacts, in another, diligently writing up his journal. Some photos recorded their own little moments of discovery – a blade of flint, a knife with a deliberately fashioned place for a forefinger to rest as the tool was held between the thumb and middle finger, a handaxe, a lump of pyrolusite, a mortar, the grinding of pigments of various sorts, the mixing of them with grease and sometimes clay on a rough pallet of stone with a spatula of flint.
A blowing tube of bird bone was being used to spray ochre onto a flat rock – handprints were being recorded. Charcoal had been ground.
Cave art was known in those summers of 1912 and ’13. As the couple had worked at excavating, so had they developed their ideas of the life of those times. Fillioux had been far ahead of the traditionalists, a renegade no doubt among academic circles. A heretic perhaps but he had grasped the truth in the only way one really can, by doing each task as his forebears had.
A pile of flint chips revealed the art of cleaving a usable tool from a nodule by sharply striking the cutting edge one wanted in the finished tool and splitting the larger fragments away from it. Too often his fingers had been cut and she had had to bandage them as best she could. In one photograph the lace of a torn petticoat was inadvertently revealed.
Fillioux seldom smiled but when he looked at the camera, did he see a girl so suited to his needs he wanted her by his side always or did he simply see someone he could use to advance himself?