Ruefully the shepherd surveyed the loss and for a moment glared at them in silence. ‘Idiots!’ he shrieked. ‘See what you have made me do.’ Do … do.… ‘A Christian gesture, one of goodness of the heart and you … you … I hope you all bash your shitty heads to pieces and give your blood to the stones.’ The stones.…
Ah merde.… ‘Pay no attention, madame,’ said Kohler gently. ‘That’s a month’s wages. Anyone would have said the same. He didn’t mean it.’
‘He did. He has come to this little valley like that since a boy. It was always his special moment and even then maman and I intruded, though we fed him sometimes and tried to get to know him.’
The honey buzzard was feasting on the eyes and offal, and when they drew near it in their climb, intestines were being dragged out to glisten in the early morning sunlight. Blood red against the grey-white of the stones, the intestines momentarily became still under the fiercely glaring eyes of the hawk whose rights had also been intruded upon, ah yes.
‘It is not good,’ she murmured. ‘It is an omen I must heed even as my ancestors would have done at the dawn of time.’
They were hungry and tired, and she wished the detectives would go to sleep but there was no time. Did they always run on Messerschmitt benzedrine? she wondered. Herr Kohler’s hand shook. Jean-Louis said, ‘This is positively the last time, Hermann. The heart, yes? You cannot go on like this. Crush them up, madame, and sprinkle them on the pate and bread our illustrious Bavarian Gestapo has fortuitously stolen for us from a certain chateau. Then you must show us the second chamber and the paintings.’
‘The paintings, yes,’ she managed. ‘Messieurs, there … there is something I must tell you. When Herr Kohler found me in …’
‘It’s Hermann. Please, it’ll be easier.’
‘Merci. When Hermann, he … he has found me in the Professor’s room, I was going through my father’s journals. I … I was certain then that… that the page where he had described the cave in depth was missing – carefully cut out with a razor blade or flint knife.’
‘By Courtet or by Danielle?’ breathed St-Cyr.
‘Or by my father, yes?’ she said sadly. ‘Like Lascaux and lots of other caves in the Dordogne, there are often chambers with passages between. Here, at the back of this chamber, there are two passages. The one continues out to the east to end on the surface in an entrance big enough only to slither through. This one, the Professor has called a ventilation shaft, a chimney for the fires. The other passage, it … it does not go out to the surface and has troubled me very much, you understand. Mother spoke of it on her visit last year. She asked if I remembered her warning me not to enter it.’
They waited for her to continue and at last she said, ‘Inside the cave, this passage, it is about three metres to the north-west of where the ventilation shaft opens. It is narrow, too, but soon it becomes a long chamber whose roof, though not so high as this, wanders in the rock for some distance. Because there were shafts in the floor and some loose rocks, my mother never let me explore it but she and my father did when they first came here. I’m certain of it. Certain, too, that there were then no paintings. Cro-Magnon was not fool enough to have used that chamber.’
‘No paintings, Louis,’ said Kohler. ‘A forgery like I told you she said.’
She touched his hand in apology. ‘Please understand that … that I had to find things out first for myself. When I came here on that Sunday just before she died, I crawled into this passage Professor Courtet claims to have discovered but which was, I think, sealed off so as to let him find it. It is not safe in there. It’s really very dangerous but … but there are paintings now as … as good as any.’
‘Madame, is there something else you wish to tell us?’ asked Louis, causing her to start and hazard, ‘No … no, there is nothing, Inspector.’
Wires led to lights. The set crew had even discreetly mounted switch panels at the entrance to the main chamber and at that of the second.
The storage batteries worked. All at once the cave lit up and, blinking, Kohler saw Juliette standing, ashen, beside Louis.
‘Me first,’ she managed, prising off her espadrilles. ‘The bare feet, they are surer, messieurs.’
At once she hoisted herself up into the hole and disappeared from sight.
‘You next, Louis.’
‘The shoes, Hermann. Please tuck them out of sight. The carpet-bag, it must not leave our hands.’
‘And the schoolteacher?’
‘Let us keep a careful eye on her.’
On a white crystalline background of calcite, shaggy black and black-spotted ponies raced amid charging brown-red aurochs and yellowish brown to rusty red reindeer. Antlers and horns were all but interlocked, the figures often overlapping in an endless panorama, some filled in, some only in outline, the colours rich and earthy, the animals startlingly alive but of the distant past and haunting.
‘Ah mon Dieu,’ breathed St-Cry, ‘they’re magnificent.’
‘But they can’t be real,’ snorted Kohler, ‘unless we say they are.’
As at Lascaux, so also here, the chamber followed the channel of an ancient underground stream and opened upwards to an irregularly arched and pitted roof some three to four metres above them.
‘Here,’ said Juliette anxiously. ‘The first of the shafts in the floor. Please be careful.’
The wretched thing plunged straight down into an uncomfortable darkness. The rock was grey nearest the floor and had a velvety texture Kohler didn’t like because it crumbled when touched.
Cave bear and cave lion stared down at them from above in outlines of black and yellowish red with dusty spots of black to which sprayed red-ochre handprints had been added beneath the figures. ‘A moment, my friends,’ gasped St-Cyr breathlessly. ‘A moment.’
Unrolling the tracing paper, he smoothed it over the handprints while Juliette and Hermann looked on and match was made for match. One set larger, one smaller and then … then.…
‘Your mother, madame, she has shown us that her handprints are not the same as these.’
‘She has made a record of them to prove she had nothing to do with … with any of this. She must have known what was happening to the cave last year when she came to visit us.’
‘A forgery,’ sighed Kohler, ‘but is it one Courtet is all too aware of, or was he sucked in just like the rest of them?’
‘Perhaps but then. … It is too early for us to say, Hermann, but could the man’s handprints have been made by using a glove?’
‘Made by a woman, then …? Ah merde, it’s possible,’ hazarded Kohler, catching the drift and not liking it. ‘Madame, your hand.… Would you put it over the smaller of these?’
‘The … the scratches on the walls, messieurs,’ she stammered, abruptly moving on ahead to deftly point them out. ‘Engraved by a flint burin. They are hardly visible, yes? beneath the salmon here and the head of the bison up there but … but in the beard of the woolly mammoth too, I think. Here … along here, please. No! Be careful. That shaft – ah it is so big and deep, messieurs. Watch out!’
A stone fell and they didn’t hear it hit bottom. Sickened by her refusal to match her handprints with those on the wall and by the gaping hole in the floor, Kohler looked doubtfully up at the roof.
The engravings she had pointed out were very faint and overlain by pigment spray in rusty red, sooty black and ochrous yellow but how the hell did she know so much about them unless she had made them? Ah merde …
‘The amulet,’ sighed St-Cyr, looking at her closely.
‘Ah! I have it here,’ she said, avoiding his gaze. ‘I … I have forgotten to return it to its little compartment in the trunk. Professor Courtet, he … he will never forgive me.’