Several of last year’s walnuts lay in a bowl in the centre of the table, the large grandjeans still in their shells.…
Down by the river, the grass and wild flowers were tall. The sun was high overhead.
Auger’s lacquered, split-bamboo fishing rod protruded from the ample lawn chair he must have purchased at auction or been given years ago. Solid comfort. Cushions even. A pipe and small tin of tobacco were nearby, some matches – the matches destroyed by the rain on that Sunday … that Sunday.
The fishing line had been cut. No hook, worm, sinker or fly trailed in the water. There was no sign of a body, only the mocking laughter of a river which joyfully tumbled over clean white gravel.
‘Merde, where is he?’ It was not nice, this isolation. Though everyone would have missed the sous-facteur, had none bothered to search?
Looking back towards the cottage, he could just see the crown of its roof above the walnut trees. There was no sign whatsoever of Hermann and Madame Jouvet. It was as if he was all alone.
There were no stones nearby large enough to crush an unsuspecting skull. No hat had tumbled aside. Then why cut the line?’ he asked.
There were no worms in the earth of the bait tin beneath its cover of moss. Deliberately they had been freed from their little prison. ‘Hermann,’ he said. ‘Hermann, we have a problem.’
Kohler didn’t like it. Oelmann could have made a detour down the bluff, but had he seen the two of them step through the shoulder-high bushes into tall grass? Not a lark stirred, not a sparrow. Instinct warned. It was as if a hunter stalked. Everything else had gone to ground. Everything but the bees and butterflies.
‘Stay here. I won’t be a moment,’ he breathed.
‘Ah no, please don’t leave me.’
She was terrified, ‘I have to. I can’t have him getting the jump on us, madame. It’ll be all right. I’m used to this.’
He moved away. The bushes hardly stirred. For a big man, Herr Kohler was quiet but it was not nice, sitting here alone, half hidden by the grass and wild flowers. It made her think of maman in her lovely dress. It made her think of blood rushing up past the blade of a flint knife to wet the fingers and then the chest. The smell of it, the stench, the sound of blowflies.…
‘Ah!…’
Torn from her thoughts, she was grabbed by the hair and mouth and lifted up so suddenly her bladder emptied as she fought to get away… away. Bushes … bushes … she screamed at herself, her face hitting them. My hair … my hair.…
Oelmann rushed her through the brush. He took her far enough, then slammed her down hard on the ground.
Winded, in agony for breath, she tried to move, tried to fight him off.
All but smothering her, he let her pass out. ‘So, gut,’ he caught a breath. ‘Gut. Now we vanish for a while.’
He waited. He looked slowly around. Kohler must have heard them but there was no sign of him. Verdammt, where was he?
Dragging the woman behind a nearby copse, he used it as cover as he hoisted her over a shoulder. Thirty metres later, he re-entered the woods and began to climb to the car but at a point half-way up the slope, in a wooded hollow, he again paused.
Kohler was out there somewhere. The woman lay slackly on the ground. Eyes shut, mouth partly open, she was breathing normally. Could he leave her for a few minutes? Could he circle round and put a stop to Kohler? He had to find out what she was hiding. Nothing must jeopardize the film, not now, not when the Reichsfuhrer-SS Himmler, the Reichsminister Goebbels and the Fuhrer himself were so excited and had placed so much confidence in him.
With her shoelaces, he tied her wrists behind her back. With the belt from her dress, he tied her ankles. Yanked up, her dress was jammed into her mouth.
Kohler heard him leave the hollow. The gun in Oelmann’s hand was a Polish Radom 9-millimetre semiautomatic. Mean, dark and lethal, it was one of the most durable pistols known. But what its presence, and the way it was held, said more than anything else was that Franz Oelmann wasn’t just SS. He was a veteran of the Polish Campaign and of the blitzkrieg in the West.
Ah merde, the Totenkopf, mein herr? The Leibstandart Adolf Hitler, or the Verfugungstruppe, the forerunners of the Waffen-SS?
Brutal, fanatically ruthless and determined to the point of being suicidal, they had more than satisfied the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht that the SS should have their own fighting units in the regular army. Hitler had been pleased. Himmler had said, ‘I told you so, Mein Fuhrer.’ Goebbels, as Minister of Propaganda, had let the world know and must have seen in one or several of the newsreels that had come back from the front, just how useful Herr Oelmann could be. An ObersturmFuhrer-SS, was that it? A lieutenant, wondered Kohler. A Standartenfuhrer? A colonel.
Himmler had teams of prehistorians digging at sites all over the occupied territories – in Poland, the former Czechoslovakia, the Lowlands, Norway, Denmark even, and Russia. Anywhere proof could be found to justify the conquest and historic reclamation of ancient lands by their Aryan, Indo-Germanic former and rightful owners.
It was all bullshit but serious and funded by the Friends of Himmler, the Society for Cultural Exchange – bankers, lawyers, industrialists and businessmen. Never had so many pre-historians from the Reich’s universities had it so good or caved in to warping history so much.
But the Fuhrer must be complaining that all the Reichsfuhrer-SS ever dug up was a lot of old broken pots and rusty ironwork no one would want to look at.
Proof was desperately needed and proof they now had in a cave deep in the heart of France and in the simple story of a sixteen-year-old peasant girl, a musty old trunk, and the young pre-historian who had shown her the light. Never mind that the cave was in the zone libre – such minor details were insignificant. But this time round, the Fuhrer had used his head and had entrusted the matter not just to the prehistorians of Heinrich Himmler, but to the arts of Dr Goebbels himself.
It was all so simple when one was forced to think about it, a real moment of discovery. But Oelmann had vanished. Now only Madame Jouvet lay there with her eyes open at last.
The hay rick was in the centre of a stone-fenced field. A wooden-tined fork and rake leaned against it and, with the sunlight, the scene was like a painting by Monet. But had Auger run out there? wondered St-Cyr. Had he been chased by a fleet-footed stonekiller?
Nothing untoward presented itself. Butterflies sought nectar where stubborn chicory and clover bloomed again. A week … at least a week of new growth. The sides of the rick were perfectly round. Thatch covered its roof. The softness of a breeze was at his back as he started out. A few flies buzzed – just a few. But as he drew nearer, the sound of them increased.
There were hundreds among the hay. They fought with one another, crawling over each other and buzzing … buzzing. Putrid and swollen and crawling with maggots, the corpse became visible. Fluids oozed from the nostrils, mouth and eyes. The top of the sous-facteur’s head had caved in. One blow perhaps. Had he tripped as he had run from his assailant? Had the stonekiller used a boulder?
Naked … had he or she been stark naked as they had run across this field in pursuit of their quarry?
Taking a deep breath, St-Cyr removed more of the hay. There were apparently no other wounds, no stab-marks from a handaxe, no slashes with a flint knife, no experiments with such primitive tools.
Auger’s skull had simply been crushed. ‘But the murder,’ he said, standing back, ‘must have been done on the Sunday, perhaps in the afternoon. If so, the killing was but a prelude to that of Madame Fillioux on the Monday.’
There was no sign of the boulder that must have been used, and he had the thought then that the stonekiller must have carried it well out into the river when he or she had gone there to wash away the blood.