There was a shriek from one of the boys. Plunged into darkness, blinded momentarily, Oelmann fired. Flashes stabbed the darkness. The chair went over backwards. He fought to get away from Kohler … Kohler.… The back of his head hit the floor. ‘Once, twice … a third time and out! OUT, YOU SON OF A BITCH!’
The boys wept, the woman held her breath. The stench of urine and cordite filled the room. ‘So, okay, everybody?’ he breathed.
‘Okay, I think,’ hazarded Juliette.
‘Okay,’ said Eisner. ‘Look, I really was only sharing the bath.’
‘Save it for the tribunal back home, eh? Madame please try to find us a light.’
Oelmann lay on the carpet with his head under a table. Eyes shut, mouth open and bleeding. ‘Christ, have I killed him?’
She shook her head and through her tears, saw Herr Kohler grin. ‘It’s been quite a day,’ he said. Tired, are you? Here … Here, wait a minute. I’ve got just the thing. Find us something to drink and we’ll each take three or four of these.’
Her questioning look made him say, ‘Messerschmitt benzedrine. The fighter pilots use it to stay awake and alive.’
They sat Herr Oelmann up and brought him round with brandy and a cold compress. The boys she released with a warning to say nothing. Herr Eisner she told to get dressed.
Then they sat down, the four of them, at one of the tables now cleared of its stone tools and watched over only by the two skeletons. With his black, horn-rimmed glasses, short, crinkly dark brown hair, blue eyes and compressed lips, Herr Eisner looked not like a molester of young boys but the professor in trouble that he was.
‘Ask what you wish and I will tell you what I know.’
Oelmann swore under his breath that he would see justice done. Kohler kept the Webley in his right hand, cocked and pointing at the Propaganda Staffel. The Radom had disappeared into a corner. ‘How did you become involved? Let’s start with that.’
‘Quite unexpectedly. Eugene Courtet discovered the trunk in an antique shop last year and wrote to me of its significance. He had by then already applied for a research grant from the Friends of Culture and, as one of its jurists, I saw that he received a grant of 250,000 marks.’
‘5,000,000 francs,’ said Kohler. It was enough for murder.
The swastika and the amulet, the figurines and my father’s journals,’ said Madame Jouvet, lost in thought only to have Herr Kohler shake his head. It’s not the time – she knew this was what he meant, yet she wanted so much to settle the matter now.
‘Who suggested the film?’
‘I did. I saw its potential and called on the Reichsfuhrer-SS Himmler myself. Herr Himmler was ecstatic and immediately authorized me to go ahead.’
‘So, von Strade and Continentale were brought in and work began on Moment of Discovery. Who suggested the story line?’
‘Courtet … from memory. He told me of his student days with Fillioux and the young prehistorian’s love affair. Fillioux’s parents were adamant, madame, that your father not leave his wife and daughter to take up with your mother. He rebelled. He wrote to her from the battlefields, three letters I believe. Letters she subsequently used to support her claim for a marriage certificate which, incidentally, could then be granted after the divorce and remarriage had gone through.’
Four years it had taken. Four years.
‘So, he went missing in action and the former wife remarried,’ said Oelmann, not taking his eyes from the revolver in Kohler’s hand.
‘And now the one daughter is an actress who has been dispossessed,’ said Juliette sadly, ‘while the other, who did not even know she had a half-sister, has had her mother butchered and the man whom she always called a friend brutally murdered. Why is it, please, that Mademoiselle Arthaud did not tell me we shared a father?’
Eisner looked questioningly to Oelmann and then to Kohler before saying, ‘Perhaps because she knows her father is alive and that the two of them are working together.’
In spite of Jouvet’s shots, no one had come to investigate and now it was again quiet in the stables, the stall its own kind of prison.
The bloodied body of the pigeon lay among the scattered treasures from Madame Fillioux’s little hiding-place and near a superb black flint Mousterian handaxe, one too far away to reach.
The Luger, always steady, was still pointed at St-Cyr. Ah nom de Dieu, de Dieu, where the hell was Hermann?
‘“Am to work on film …”’ muttered Jouvet, reading the postcard. ‘But … but others would know of this? His papers, his carte d’identite and … and the laissez-passer he would have needed to cross the Demarcation Line?’
The shrug must be diffident and helplessly lost so as to augment Jouvet’s worry. ‘It’s what he has said, Captain, but I have to wonder was Henri-Georges Fillioux so badly wounded few would now recognize him? Age would help, of course, but disfigurement also.’
The papers would be false but she’d still have recognized him.’
‘Exactly, but.…’ A diffident hand was tossed.
‘But what, damn you?’ The walking-stick slipped, the gun wavered.
The helpless look, the wince, the shrug were given. ‘But she did not back away, Captain. She knew her killer and though she planned to murder that person, must have smiled forgivingly so as to allay suspicion. Who, please, was your contact with von Strade?’
He would grin widely at this flic from the Paris Surete and then he would kill him. ‘A girl … a woman … very nice, very pretty, and very persuasive but promiscuous, I think.’
‘Danielle Arthaud?’
‘Yes. She said von Strade needed certain information and that he would pay handsomely.’
‘Did she tell you to go to Sarlat on the Monday?’
‘So as to be out of the way?’ snorted Jouvet. ‘Inspector, what do you think?’
Ah merde, the Luger.… ‘Monsieur, a moment, please.’
‘It’s Captain to you.’
‘Does it not trouble you that there is proof that Henri-Georges is out there somewhere? That the day before her mother’s murder, your wife felt someone was watching her as she went into that cave?’
‘Fillioux … Fillioux,’ he said. ‘Why should I care if he’s back?’
The trigger finger tightened, the grip of a wasted hand caused pain to join that of a bullet-shattered leg.
‘FILLIOUX, AH MERDE!’ cried St-Cyr, looking past him as the gun fired and he leapt to grab the bastard’s crippled hand and to crush it … crush it. … They went over. They rolled about and tried to get at each other. Sharp fingernails tore at his eyes, his nose … the gun … the gun … the salty taste of blood … blood.… Must kill him … kill him … NOW … NOW … Smash him … smash him.…
Jouvet’s head went back, the gun went off, his throat came up, the flesh began to tear, to.…
‘Ah, no … No!’
The handaxe was in St-Cyr’s hand. Instinctively he had picked it up in the melee and had used it. ‘Ah nom de Dieu, de Dieu, he gasped, breathlessly straddling the bastard.
Blood trickled from Jouvet’s right temple where now the bone was broken. It beaded from fissures to sweat away among the greasy hairs; it poured from the throat.
Dropping the handaxe in revulsion at what it had betrayed – that primitive, hidden urge to kill that was in everyone – St-Cyr tried to get up but bowed his head. Ah merde … merde, it had happened so quickly. There had been no time to think. Of course he had killed before as a soldier and in self-defence as a detective but this … this was quite different. A moment of passion, one so savagely intense, it had reached far back to primordial instincts and all else had been forgotten.
‘We needed you, damn it. There were things only you could have told us.’