‘Naked still,’ he said. ‘A savage. Ah mon Dieu, mon Dieu, but strong and fleet-footed, capable and able to remain so detached afterwards that the fishing line could be cut, the worms freed and the rick rebuilt.’
Sickened by what lay before him, Kohler silently cursed their luck. Oelmann had doubled back. The son of a bitch had used the woman to lure him into following only to return.
Forgotten in haste, her belt lay among dead leaves. There wasn’t a sound. The woods were too quiet. Was she softly weeping? Was she begging for her life?
The bluff sloped upwards steeply through the trees. Knowing he had no other choice, he started out and when, at last he broke through to the road, the car waited some fifty metres from him. No sign of anyone behind the wheel. No screams of tenor, nothing but the heat of the afternoon and that damned car.
Cutting across the road, he picked his way through the brambles. Sweat beaded on his forehead. Irritably he wiped it away with the back of a hand. Where … where the hell were they?
When he found them, the woman, still with her hands bound behind her back, was awkwardly lying on the ground and the point of fifteen centimetres of razor-sharp chrome-nickel steel had dug itself into the nipple of her left breast. Her chin was up and back, her head half hidden by the brambles. Tears poured from her.
Oelmann had slit open her dress, shift and brassiere so swiftly, she had been too startled to even cry out.
‘Now talk,’ he said softly. ‘Talk!’
Stealthily Kohler started forward only to stop himself when he saw the gun.
‘The … the …,’ she began. ‘The drawer, it is…’
Blood trickled down her breast. ‘Please,’ she begged. ‘Please don’t hurt me. I … I will tell you all I know.’
‘Good. That’s good. The drawer?’
‘It … it is under the armoire. There is a pin you must remove. I … I do not know if the postcards are there.’
‘Why does Courtet want them back?’
The knife was hurting her. ‘I … I really don’t know. Maman, she must have exchanged a few with him. She … she has told me so little, I … I really know nothing, monsieur. Nothing! Ahh, my breast. My breast.’
Laying the knife on her chest so that it pointed at her throat, Oelmann cocked the pistol and looked around.
Ah merde, thought Kohler sadly, he intends not only to kill her if necessary but me as well.
‘Are there postcards from anyone else?’ demanded Oelmann so suddenly her body arched. His voice was hardly audible.
‘The … the parents of my father, since … since maman, she has sent food parcels to them.’ Herr Kohler, she silently begged. Herr Kohler, where are you?
‘Was there anyone else who might have sent them to her?’ asked Oelmann with a finality that shattered her completely.
‘Maman,’ she blurted through her tears. ‘Maman, he is going to kill me!’
He gave her a moment to silence such childish pleas.
‘Mother said only that … that she would deal with them.’
‘When?’
‘When she … she came for her little visit.’
‘To the cave and then to your house?’
‘Yes … Yes! Ahh my ear … my ear …’
‘So, she would take care of them, madame. Who did she mean?’
‘I do not know! “Them”, that is all she said! My … my husband and … and someone else, someone she was going to meet.’
‘At the cave?’
‘In … in that little glade where … where she and my father had … had first made love.’
There it is then, thought Kohler. The mother was definitely going to poison Fillioux and the son-in-law.
‘There … there may be postcards from this other person. I … I was so afraid the detectives would find out what mother intended. I knew about Andre – yes, yes, but I … I did not know about the other one. It… it might have been my father.’
‘He’s dead. He died on the Marne.’
Ah yes, said Kohler to himself, but can the dead not walk again if listed only as missing in action?
* * *
Furious with himself at taking so long, St-Cyr glanced at the sun and then at his watch. The rick had been perfectly rebuilt, a puzzle for it suggested strongly that the killer knew something of farming. ‘The summer holidays perhaps,’ he said, for he, himself, had often done such work not only in his student days but as a boy. But to rearrange the hay so carefully also implied an extreme eye for detail, one every bit as good as his own, and a detachment that was crucial.
Beyond the stone wall, on the opposite side of the field, bushes hid a clearing no more than two meters in diameter. A sandy floor, some dried leaves and sticks, a few paper-thin snail shells and white pebbles were all that readily came to view but through a gap in the leaves, he could just see Auger’s chair in the distance.
‘Ah grace a Dieu,’ he said, ‘someone stood here as I am now standing.’
Two thin dogwood branches had been broken to clear the line of sight and now hung dead with their leaves, forgotten in haste. Soft, shallow dents in the sand had not quite been removed. The bare feet, he told himself and nodded grimly.
Combing the sand with his fingers, he came upon two walnut half-shells. Like ships caught in a storm, they now rode a turbulent sea.
Five scattered, tiny shards of deep cobalt-blue grass and two grains of the same were nearby. Were they merely the remnants of a laudanum or iodine bottle swept downstream years ago?
‘Then why, please, are they not frosted and rounded?’
It wasn’t much to go on but animals sometimes hunted in packs. Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal would have done so. The latter had often resorted to cannibalism, or so some prehistorians maintained.
But had the person who had waited here gone out to stand naked behind the rick until Auger had run towards it? Were the arms then thrown about to frighten the quarry and cause it to change direction thus slowing it down for someone else to kill?
Try as he did, he could find no evidence of this. ‘Has it all been so carefully removed?’ he asked, and stood looking first towards the path, to the bend in the river and the fishing-place, and then back towards the hiding-place. Two assailants, not one. Had the stonekiller, having first gone over the ground, then hidden to remove his clothes and prepare for the hunt?
When he reached the cottage, there was no sign of Hermann and Madame Jouvet who should have been there long ago. When he looked out over the pasture, he realized right away that the mare was gone and the gate wide open.
Having been led up through the woods, the mare now thundered down the lane. Branches swatted at her russet flanks and at her rider. Sweat poured from them both as, wild-eyed and in a lather, she finally broke through to the road to Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne.
‘Come on, my sweet,’ urged Kohler, clinging to her shaggy mane. Her hooves threw up the gravel. Startled peasants gaped. There was no sign of Oelmann yet. None at all. Ah Gott im Himmel, it was hopeless.
Oelmann had taken the woman with him in the car and had left some time ago. By now he would be in that room with the contents of the drawer spread before him. Postcards … postcards, and Madame Jouvet still every bit his prisoner. And never mind the Baroness and the others. They wouldn’t say a thing or lift a finger if they were still around.
A bend in the road drew near. No traffic. Clean as a whistle and not far now. Would Oelmann torture her again or would the drawer give him what he needed – proof of the cave’s authenticity or fraud and if the last, would he say a thing about it? Of course not. He’d simply kill Madame Jouvet to shut her up and then would destroy all evidence even torching the mother’s house.