The Surete’s gaze must be returned measure for measure as with the partisans one had had to question before stringing them up. ‘Each year that stupid woman took her little trip. Always on the same date, a Monday, a Sunday, it did not matter. Always to the same place – you’d think she would have got tired of it. First the mushrooms, then the climb up to that hole in the rock and afterwards, after rooting around in there, the bathe in the buff, the dress – ah, I see that you have discovered it. The size of the dress changed over the years as her weight increased but always it was of the same cloth. The strand of pearls, then the little walk through the forest.’
Ah nom de Dieu, de Dieu, why was he enjoying the telling of it so much? The dark brown eyes smouldered under puffy eyelids. A man perhaps a good dozen years senior to his wife. ‘Monsieur …’
‘It’s Captain, damn you!’
One must remain unruffled. ‘Captain, you had best tell me what you know of this affair. The ritual of its repetition?’
Jouvet stank of urine and the thought of its splashes made the Surete glance questioningly at the veteran’s right hand and ask himself, Could it have held a stone?
‘A ritual, yes. Call it what you will.’ Jouvet tossed the hand for emphasis and clenched it tightly until he winced with pain just to prove he hadn’t missed a thing. ‘ if you ask me, that woman was crazy. Revering her dead lover like that. Her lover. Ah yes, Inspector, you people from Paris, you come here, you ask the questions but you do not stop to dig beneath the pus to clean the wound. You did not know she had spread her legs in the woods and had conceived without a proper marriage.’
‘Pardon?’
Was it so impossible to comprehend? ‘I married a bastard, Inspector. A bastard. Everyone thinks it of my wife, no matter what that mother of hers tried to do to cover things up.’
‘Now listen, cut the vitriol and tell me things plainly. Each year she made the same visit on exactly the same date?’
Yes! The 17th of June.’
Five days ago, on Monday. ‘Was she planning to meet someone this time?’
The veteran’s eyes swept anxiously over him. ‘Only her dead lover. A captain like myself but from that other war. He died on the Marne with his face deep in the shit probably but she was still able to obtain the marriage in extremis apres deces to make legal the thing she had carried in her belly. After four years of her trying, the authorities finally listened and gave in – who could blame them with a woman like that? She became Madame Fillioux at last!’ He flicked a vindictive glance at his wife who approached.
‘Mother raised me on her own, Inspector. No one helped her – not even the Church. She was a very strong-willed person but I adored her as she adored me. We were very close. My heart is broken.’
Grief was held in check by some fantastic strength of will. The daughter’s feet, shod in rough espadrilles, were firmly planted, her hands jammed into the pockets of a knitted soft yellow cardigan. A kerchief covered the light brown hair. Some flour or clay had been used in an attempt to lessen the severity of the welt. The black eye was looking a little better. A redness lay under her chin but it was not too swollen. Hermann was right behind her.
‘That place.… The cave, Inspector, it’s very old, very precious. The bones and stone tools go back far into the distant past, far beyond the Cro-Magnons and well into the earliest days of the Neanderthals. My father was a prehistorian, an assistant at the Sorbonne while studying for his final degree. He … he spent all of his waking moments patiently excavating the deposits at the mouth of that cave. His hands would always be cut, the skin worn right through – even the gloves maman took to him were never enough. That site was to have been the making of him.’
Louis waited. Kohler knew his partner was giving her time.
‘She … she found the cave for my father, using an old diary from the trunk of artefacts the Abbe Brule had left but … but then my father, he went away like so many, never to return.’
A diary and a collection of stone tools probably gathered in the early 1800s. There’d be time to dig into that. ‘Please, I know this must be very difficult for you, madame, but it was a yearly visit?’
She threw her husband a dark look. ‘The visit was her expression of a love that never left her, Inspector. Though there were many offers to take my father’s place, maman refused all of them. I know. I saw the disappointment in their eyes as they said good-bye to her. She was very pretty and very good with things, very businesslike – she had to be, isn’t that correct? Dependable yet … yet tender when needed. A real catch.’
The walking-stick jerked. ‘Juliette, don’t be so stupid. Control yourself
‘Control? Why should I control anything now that she’s gone? I only did it for her sake, Andre. On my own I would never have married you, not in a thousand years. Mother wanted things to be better for me. A teacher … a teacher married to another and living here in Domme, a step up in the world. Ah yes. God forgive me. I should have listened to my heart!’
‘You bitch!’ The stick threatened.
‘Monsieur,’ began St-Cyr.
‘It’s Captain, damn you!’
‘Please don’t touch her. Please. My partner, he is right behind you now and if I give the nod, he will flatten you or worse still, cram that foul-tempered mouth of yours into the ground!’
Louis seldom lost his composure. A born diplomat. Fumbling in a pocket, Kohler suddenly remembered a cigarette tucked away for a rainy day and, straightening it, offered it to her.
With a quiet calm that only threw its acid into the husband’s face, she accepted and when she inhaled, she stood there looking at Jouvet as if all the bitterness of an unhappy marriage had suddenly been lifted from her.
You’re enjoying his tobacco, aren’t you?’ seethed the husband.
She tossed her head and shrugged. ‘It’s not often I get the chance. Since women are denied a ration, you forced me to steal what little I could or barter for it when your back was turned.’
St-Cyr sucked in his breath impatiently. These two would kill each other if they could. ‘Madame, let us walk a little. Hermann, please accompany this one back to his command post behind his wife’s school. Pry what you can from him and remind him that the Surete and the Gestapo require full and accurate answers.’
Namely, when and where was he on the day of the murder. Kohler knew this was what Louis meant and grinned. But when he had the man alone, he, too, tried to make peace. ‘My two sons are in Russia. They’ve told me how it really is.’
‘Have they? Then did they tell you, please, that it was we of the LVF who were always given the task of guarding the rear and facing the partisans? One could not take a crap or a piss for fear of having his balls shot off or the organ removed with a knife and fed to him as his throat was slit!’
‘I thought it was freezing? I thought it was too cold to … well, wave the wand,’ shrugged Kohler.
‘It was!’
For a man with a bad leg, Jouvet could ignore pain when he wanted. Deft with his stick, and by throwing his right side forward, he adopted a twisting gait that soon took them through the graveyard to ruined walls and beyond. Domme had lots of open spaces, the houses often being situated around irregularly shaped quadrangles, and everywhere behind them there were gardens that had been turned over to sustenance. Pigs, goats, beans, potatoes, artichokes.… Mentally the farmboy in Kohler ticked them off with appreciation, giving credit where due.
Jouvet knew the town well, knew every wall and bolt hole. Each house, most of one storey with attic dormers, was of that same soft honey-coloured limestone but often with steeply pitched roofs that were shingled with lauzes – slabs of flat grey limestone. Where the roofs were far less steep, they were covered with the thick flat reddish tiles so common in the Perigord and the South.