You fool, he said. To swim alone in such a place, in darkness, is not wise. Had she things to tell him that demanded such privacy or was she simply trying to seduce him?
‘Both,’ he said but did not grin. ‘Be careful, Baroness. Where one can swim, so can two but the next time the visitor might not be myself.’
The door was of massive oak with iron drift pins and a lock that must be three centuries old. Kohler knocked but there was no answer. He pounded, and the sound of his fist splintered the air. A girl giggled, another too, but the door and walls were far too thick for sounds like that to escape.
When he glanced over a shoulder, he saw two naked teenagers clutching flimsy shawls of silk that webbed their nubile breasts but left the rest exposed. ‘Monsieur, are you joining the party?’ asked one, whose dark red hair brushed loosely over pale white, freckled shoulders.
‘The party?’ he bleated.
‘Yes,’ whispered the other one, a brunette, her breath warm on his lips as she lightly explored them.
‘Ah no, I’ve work to do. Juliette Jouvet, the schoolteacher. …’
Both tossed their heads to indicate the staircase at the far end of the corridor. Both flicked their shawls away to coil their arms about the giant’s neck and whisper, ‘Couchez avec moi, mon grand detective.’ Fuck me.
‘A partouse,’ whispered the redhead. An orgy. ‘There are six of us girls tonight. Toto Lemieux and a few others are coming. In there,’ she said. Tou have only to knock once, yes? It is the signal.’
‘I’ll try to remember.’
They left him then and he stood out in the corridor like the Tin bloody Woodsman gaping through the now open doorway into a haze of tobacco smoke and naked female flesh, wondering if Juliette was still alive.
‘Don’t keep us waiting,’ breathed the brunette, beginning to close the door. ‘One knock, that is all it takes to experience everything.’
‘All urges,’ confided the other one, ‘until they are satisfied even for those who do not wish to participate and come only to watch.’
Ah nom de Dieu, de Dieu, von Strade? he wondered. Von Strade.
When he found Juliette, she was on her knees frantically going through the trunk Courtet had guarded so jealously. The espadrilles were her own. The grey flannel trousers rolled above the ankles, and pin-stripe shirt, indicated she had helped herself to the Professor’s wardrobe. Cast aside was the borrowed dress she would never wear again.
From time to time she irritably brushed a tear away and when, with a frightened gasp, she turned to look up at him, her blue eyes registered fear, not relief. ‘What’s happened?’ he asked.
She swallowed hard. ‘My father’s come back! He’s alive. Everything fits. The death caps, the champagne, that … that flask of his. Her.…’
‘Not suspecting he would harm her.’
‘The blow, the … the slashings, the.…’
Kohler went down on his knees to wrap his arms about her. ‘Hey, easy, eh? Easy.’ She buried her face against his shoulder and wept, ‘That bitch Danielle has indicated to me my father is alive. He’ll kill me, Inspector. I’m next. Don’t you see, she’s right? He must! I’m the only one who can prove those paintings are a forgery.’
A forgery … ah merde, so it was true.
Clumsily he searched his pockets for a handkerchief and, finding none, got up to look in one of the Professor’s dresser drawers and found instead a loaded .455-calibre Mark VI Webley, ex-British Army revolver. ‘Dunkirk,’ he said as if struck.
Through her tears she saw the gun and was sickened because it could only mean the Professor was afraid of her father too. ‘My father despised Courtet who hated him in return. Each was very jealous of the other and many times his student colleague tried to get at the contents of this trunk until now … now, finally, he has it.’
Her agitated fingers hurriedly wiped the tears from her cheeks. A shirt-sleeve was yanked out in which to blow the nose and dry the eyes, then rolled above the elbow. ‘Excuse me,’ she said and tried to smile. ‘I’m a wreck and freely admit it.’
Herr Kohler gave her a few seconds. The emptiness that had so often been in his eyes was not there. He turned to rummage in the top drawer of the dresser and when he had it, emptied a packet of cartridges into a pocket. ‘Mademoiselle Arthaud,’ he said, and she knew by his look that there was more trouble. ‘Danielle was in contact with your mother. A parcel in April to Paris. The sous-facteur Auger’s name was on the return address.’
Ah no, maman, she cried inwardly, what is this he is saying? ‘Mademoiselle Arthaud is not very nice, Inspector. Brilliant perhaps but cruel and demanding and utterly selfish. Andre should have her. They deserve each other. He would be so mentally outclassed, she would kill him with a little something from her bag of stone tools, and if not that, her bitchiness would make him hit her once too often.’
Herr Kohler asked about the stone tools and she told him they were supposedly from the film, and that Andre had probably been secretly meeting Danielle or Henri-Georges. ‘But I have to ask myself, were the tools not also used on my mother?’
‘There’ll be postcards from Mademoiselle Arthaud …,’ he said, his voice trailing off in thought.
‘She has asked for them. When I told her they had been stolen, she was very upset – unreasonably so.’
Still lost in thought, he said, ‘We saw no evidence of there being two assailants at the murder of your mother.’
‘But at that of the sous-facteur Auger, monsieur? Were there not two perhaps? This is what your eyes, they are telling me.’
‘Come on, we’d best leave here while we can.’
She reached out to him. ‘A moment, please. First you must see the journals of my father. It is what I have been after. There is not one mention of the paintings, nor is there a complete description of the cave. That is also missing.’
In page after page and sketch after sketch, Henry-Georges Fillioux had demonstrated not only where the tools had been found among the layers of the gisement, but how each had been made and used.
‘There … there is also not one mention of my mother,’ she said, holding back the tears, ‘It is as if the father I worshipped as a child had done it all – found the cave, seen the light and expounded on the brilliance of his theories when many of his ideas were hers. Hers! He … he has even listed among his accounts the cost of the two bottles of champagne and has marked them down to necessity. A mere forty-five francs? But … but I must ask myself, are these journals not where Mademoiselle Arthaud learned so well how to use the tools?’
‘The Baroness says Courtet may have taught her.’
‘The Professor, ah yes. But Danielle has visited my father’s parents at their house in Paris. She knows all about what has happened to them since the Defeat. Is she not the one who encouraged them to sell the trunk after first learning everything from it, or is it that she did not learn from these journals at all but directly from my father?’
‘And not from Courtet?’
‘No, not from that one. But if you like, I will ask him to fashion for us a stone tool even of the simplest kind. My thought is he cannot do it but we shall see.’
8
Moonlight lit the well-treed grounds of the chateau as St-Cyr heard beyond the symphony of insects, the muted whispers of an urgent love. ‘Come in me, darling. In me now, please.’
Ah nom de Dieu …
‘I can’t find my rubber.’
‘Then shoot the stork in flight before it lands. Jump from the train while it is still in motion. Don’t stop now. Please don’t. Just keep going, Erik. I don’t want to lose it.’