St-Cyr heaved a sigh. The view, among the finest in France, was fantastic, yet try as he did, he could not keep from hearing that poor woman’s screams and feel, as he had yesterday, the profoundness of the encompassing silence. Had screams like that echoed in that little valley one hundred thousand years ago?
The mist lay in a whitish-grey gossamer over the deep, dark shadowy blue of the river and the green of ordered fields and poplars. Not a swastika showed, not a Wehrmacht convoy or patrol, not even the open touring car of some SS bigwig or Gestapo ‘trade commissioner’. He was in the Free Zone, in Vichy-controlled territory, yet conditioned by the Occupied Zone in the North, one always had to look for such things, one always had to ask, How long can this last?
In the distance, the same bare escarpment rocks as those beneath his shoes boldly faced the sun to glow a soft yellow-grey under forest cover. Behind them, the wooded hills, valleys and plateaus of the Perigord Noir continued on to Sarlat and eastwards to the site of the murder and well beyond. Mist would cloak that little valley too, even as at the dawn of prehistory.
They had found the victim’s daughter on her knees hugging herself and rocking back and forth in grief beside that corpse. They had dragged her from it even as she had fought with them to be left alone until, in compassion only, he had clipped her under the chin and into oblivion.
Juliette Jouvet nee Fillioux, born Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne, 3 April 1914, age now twenty-eight, and only child of the victim. Married and with two children of her own, a boy of seven years and a girl of five. A schoolteacher. Husband, a former colleague and now a disabled veteran of the Russian Campaign, one of the LVF, the Legion des volontaires francais contre le bolchevisme. A sworn enemy of Russia and a member of the PPF, the Parti Populaire Francais, violently anti-Communist, anti-de Gaulle, anti-Jewish, anti-everything including the police, and now … why now a very bitter man. Ah yes. The war in Russia had not been kind. Few acknowledged the bravery of the wreckage that had retumed. Most simply ignored him and felt uncomfortable in his presence.
Jouvet had not been co-operative nor had there been one word or gesture of compassion for his wife.
Sedated by the cognac Hermann had forced her to drink and had found God knows where, the woman had slept. Sour on vin ordinaire, the husband had retreated into a brooding, surly silence. The children had watched their father in alarm before casting warning glances at each other and retreating to bed.
It was not good. Ah no, it wasn’t. Murder and domestic problems so often went hand in hand. Madame Jouvet had had a painful welt and bruise from a fist high on her left cheek – now her lower jaw might well be swollen, a worry. The skin had also been yellow and dark around the half-closed eye, a massive shiner that was at least five days old.
How had she borne the shame of it, a teacher in a little place like this? Had the argument, preceding the death of the mother-in-law, signalled trouble?
Fortunately transport had arrived with two flics from Sarlat. They had soon got the woman home and it was then that Hermann and he had discovered what had transpired.
Word had reached Domme that a body had been found but that its identity was still unknown. Abruptly she had left her students without explanation, had run frantically outside to grab her bicycle and pedal the twenty-five or so kilometres. First downhill to the bridge across the river, then on to Vitrac, Montfort and Carsac-Aillac before turning northwards towards Sarlat and then east. Tears, prayers, perhaps exhortations of remorse and then … then the dropping of her bicycle on the railway track, the running through the woods. They had found one of her shoes. She had known exactly where to find her mother. Exactly.
Longing for his pipe and tobacco, he studied the distant terrain noting every little nuance as his mind probed the murder until a stick whacked a tombstone behind him, a throat was cleared. Spittle darted to one side. ‘Monsieur …?’ he began. The set of his lips was grim.
‘It’s Captain,’ spat Jouvet. Hammered by the early-morning light, the veteran stood stock-still in the graveyard. There was a stout walking-stick in his left hand and he leaned heavily on this to relieve the constant pain of the bullet-wasted leg the Russian partisans had given him. Once handsome, now grey with fatigue and unshaven, he wiped his nose with the back of a right hand that was far from good. ‘So, you have some questions. Why not start asking them, eh? She’s still sleeping it off but will have to do her duty. No replacement can be found and I cannot be expected to fill in for her. Not yet. We need the money.’
‘The money, ah yes.’
The grey-green trousers the Germans had given the husband in lieu of the promised French Army uniform, were unpatched in places, the wooden sabots and faded blue denim jacket with open-collared dress shirt disrespectful of his former status as a teacher who had once had students to command. An Iron Cross Second-Class clung defiantly to the left breast. A frayed rope had replaced the belt whose buckle would have borne the words Gott mit uns, God with us. The black beret was filthy.
He made no move to come closer. The no man’s land of the esplanade separated them.
‘Captain, was your mother-in-law to visit with you and your family after first going to that valley?’
‘To the cave, Inspector. Why not say it?’
‘All right, the cave.’
‘Madame Fillioux could well have been on her way here afterwards. I would not have known. Lies … all I get from that wife of mine is lies. I’m not well. I can’t get around easily.’
‘Then why bother to convince me of it?’
The smile was crooked, the stick was waved. ‘Only that I could not possibly have killed her.’
There, does that satisfy you? St-Cyr could see this clearly written in the man’s expression but he calmed his voice and kept control. ‘Tell me about her then. She was a shopkeeper.’
‘Her papers will have told you that. Why waste my time?’
‘Yes, but what kind of a shop?’
‘An auberge-epicerie, what else in a lousy little dump like Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne? With the PTT of course – she couldn’t have survived without it. Half our rural shopkeepers couldn’t’
The post office, telephone and telegraph exchange. An inn and a grocery shop – tinned and dry goods mainly, and half-empty shelves for there were shortages here, too, in the South. Extreme shortages.
‘She was always bitching about the parcels. Meat stinks after a few days,’ taunted Jouvet.
No letters were allowed to cross the Demarcation Line between the Occupied and Unoccupied zones. Only postcards with minimum words now instead of gaps to fill in within the printed message that had had to serve everyone no matter what. But in one of those quirks of Germanic control, parcels had been overlooked in the Defeat of 1940 and postal clerks the country over had simply shrugged and carried on. Forgotten relatives had suddenly been remembered, especially if they had a farm or access to one. Deals had been struck: the tobacco ration every two weeks in exchange for a chicken, a bit of goose liver, some fish perhaps or butter.…
The meat and other perishables often stayed in the post offices for days on end. Months in several cases, for the second-class postal service paled against that of the postcards which wasn’t all that good either but could sometimes be very efficient.
St-Cyr crossed the esplanade and went in among the tombstones to face the man and stand in danger of his walking stick.
Disdainfully, Jouvet shook his head at the offer of a cigarette. ‘I’ve already had mine. I’ll wait until noon, if I can stand it. One has to do such things because of people like you.’
To contain oneself was often the supreme test not just of an honest detective in these troubled times, but of a patriot. Everyone questioned those who had something they didn’t have. ‘The cave, then, and the site of the murder, Captain? Let us concentrate on them.’